The Two Faces of January (6 page)

Chester was vaguely piqued, and not able to say anything for a moment.

“If they're looking for you now,” Rydal went on, “on planes, for instance, they'll be looking for a man with his wife. I thought it might be a slight advantage this way, that's all.”

Chester nodded. It made sense, and the flight was only a two-hour affair. “Okay. That's fine,” said Chester.

“Looks like the bus is loading now. Did you check your luggage over there?”

Chester went off and claimed his and Colette's luggage.

Then they boarded the bus, and, as it happened, all had to sit separately. The long bus tooled smoothly past the National Gardens and made a curve around the tumbled and standing columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, where Chester had taken snapshots of Colette, and an Italian stranger had taken snapshots of both of them with Chester's camera only yesterday morning. The film was still in Chester's Rolleiflex, and he supposed he would get it developed in Iraklion, leaving them in a name he did not yet know. The back of the seat in front of him pressed against his knees. He looked down at something rolling under his shoe, and found a pale, flesh-colored, cheap-looking fountain pen. A ball-point. Made in Germany, it said on the barrel. Trying it on the back of his hand, he saw that it wrote, in blue ink. Maybe it was a little sign of good luck.

At the airport they had time for an espresso at the small bar which also served liquor. Chester ordered a brandy with his coffee. He was nervous. The loud speaker kept bawling things out in Greek, French and English, plane departures and arrivals and weather conditions and calls for people, and he was half expecting an announcement of the discovery of the body in the Hotel King's Palace. Rydal left his coffee to go and buy a newspaper. It was all very confused and noisy. Only Colette looked calm, sitting with her legs neatly crossed on the high stool at the bar counter, looking about at the people seated in the deep leather chairs among tall potted plants, behind newspapers, behind thin screens of cigarette smoke. Rydal came back, scanning a Greek paper as he walked, bumping into one or two people.

He shook his head at Chester and smiled slightly, offered Colette a cigarette, which she declined, then finished his coffee.

They boarded the plane, Rydal and Colette going ahead, Chester following, with four or five people between them. Immediately upon leaving Athens they were over water, and then over a woolly, level field of clouds, the blue sky lost. Chester thumbed through his
Guide Bleu,
trying to concentrate on the pages on Crete. The maps of Knossos looked undecipherable and uninteresting today. Behind him, he heard over the roar of the plane's engine a man and women laughing and talking in Greek. Farther behind him and across the aisle, Rydal sat with Colette. He wondered what they were talking about. Pleasantries, probably. Colette had her moods. He had never seen her so disturbed as last night, yet it had passed in a matter of minutes.
Murder.
Well, that was certainly a bad thing, and it was really a wonder she hadn't been more upset than she was. It was a second-degree murder, Chester reminded himself, even merely manslaughter. Certainly. Unpremeditated and an accident. No, they couldn't give him a life sentence for that! What disturbed him was that they were on his trail at all, and that the death of the Greek agent hadn't solved anything, had only made the situation worse, had gained them only a few hours' time, nothing more.

Chester took his flask, which he had providently filled, from the duffel bag between his feet, pocketed it, and went to the men's room at the back of the plane. Colette sat with her head back against the white-aproned pad on the back of her seat, her eyes closed. Rydal stared out the window.

The passengers had barely finished a snack of cold cuts, when they landed. The Iraklion airport presented a simple, barren picture: a flat field along the water, a building like a long, low box, a few empty American Air Force buses and a handful of blue-uniformed American Air Force men standing about. All the passengers were soon on a rather shabby bus heading, presumably, for the city. There were one or two stops at what Chester took to be villages or farm communities, and then, at a spot that looked no bigger or more important, all the passengers started to get off. They stepped out into a dusty, creamy-pink street which sloped down towards the white-capped sea, three or four streets away.

“'Otel Iraklion! Cheap! 'Ot warter!” said a dirty-looking fellow, whose only badge of authority was a worn-out visored cap that said Hotel Iraklion on its band.

“No,” said Rydal, who was attempting to corral their luggage. All the luggage was being unloaded haphazardly from the top of the bus.

“'Otel Corona! Two blocks up! Thees way!”

“'Otel Astir! Best in town!” A young dark-haired chap in a beige bellboy uniform saluted Chester, and started to pick up two pieces of luggage near Chester's feet.

“That's not mine!” Chester said quickly, and walked towards Colette and Rydal. A strong breeze was blowing from the sea. The sunshine was bright, glassy-bright and cold also. “What do we do now?” Chester asked, but, seeing that Rydal was occupied with identifying their seven pieces of luggage plus his own, Chester began helping him.

“Let's let this crowd clear away,” Rydal said. “Then we'll get a taxi—oh, down to the waterfront, I suppose.”

The crowd was thinning out. Taxis were puffing up, taking people and luggage away. Successful bellhops were tottering off under mountains of suitcases, their possessors straggling behind them.

“Got a hotel in mind?” asked Chester.

Rydal lifted his head and looked towards the sea, his profile pale and sharp against the blue sky. He fitted a cigarette between his lips. “Our problem is that we can't go to a hotel,” he murmured. “No passports, you know.” He glanced at Colette.

“How wonderful!” she said, swinging her arms out. “We'll just walk around the rest of the day. And tonight!” she added, with enthusiasm.

Rydal shook his head thoughtfully, still looking towards the port. Then he looked the other way, up the street of pinkish and cream-colored three- and four-story buildings. A booted man was flogging a donkey before him. On either side of the donkey baby goats in slings sat upright and gazed with serene eyes at them, snug as papooses on a mother's back.

“Aren't they
dar-rling
!” Colette said, starting towards them.

“Colette!” Rydal lifted his hand.

She came back.

“There'll be more,” Rydal said. He turned to Chester. “I don't know anybody here we might stay with. We'll just have to sit it out tonight. So the best thing to do is save your energy, I'd say. And, number one, let's get rid of the suitcases.”

“No use you suffering,” Chester said. “You've got a passport you can show at any hotel.”

“Yes,” Rydal said vaguely. “Let's see if we can check the luggage in some restaurant down by the water.” He crossed the street and spoke to the driver of a taxi parked at the opposite curb, a taxi that had been left behind by the mainstream and had been waiting for them to make up their minds what they would do.

They all piled into the taxi, luggage at their feet, on their laps and on the taxi roof. The trip was very short, down to the sea, and Rydal stopped the driver after they had gone a few yards to the left: there was a restaurant with a sign in the shape of a fish hanging in front of the door. Rydal came out a moment later, and said the proprietor would be glad to check their suitcases.

“I think we ought to have something here,” Rydal said. “Lunch or a drink, anyway.”

They stayed in the place more than two hours, drinking ouzo and eating tiny plates of radishes, horseradish and onions first, then a lunch of broiled fish and underdone homefried potatoes with which they had a couple of bottles of sharp-tasting white wine. But they tipped well, and the proprietor by this time was willing to keep their luggage overnight. Rydal told Chester that he had given the man a story about all of them spending tonight with a friend in town, a friend with whom they had been staying, and about their having missed the plane back to Athens today, and about not wanting to burden their friend by dragging all the suitcases back to his house in the hills. Chester would carry the duffel bag out, that was all. They would pick up the luggage tomorrow afternoon around 1. Then they wandered up the main street, the street on which the airport bus had stopped.

The Iraklion Museum of Antiquities was open. Here they killed another hour or so, gazing at statuary and amphorae and jewelry, and while Colette went to powder her nose, Rydal told Chester what he had heard on the radio.

“Well, George Papanopolos's death was due to a fractured skull. Very brief announcement. They didn't mention your name, but they told the name of the hotel and how long the man had been dead. About twelve hours.”

A cool chill ran down Chester. This was fact. It had been on the radio. Thousands of people had heard it. “It'll certainly be in the papers today, though.”

“Yes, in Athens,” Rydal said. “The papers probably come here by boat, a day late. Oh, it may be in the Crete papers this evening. I suppose they've got an evening paper. In that case, your name might be mentioned. I mean MacFarland.”

Chester nodded and swallowed. MacFarland. Something to hide from. He'd feared it since the minute he filled out the application for his passport in New York. Why hadn't he finagled a phony birth certificate?
Chester MacFarland.
It was he. It was awful.

“Then, of course, Crete has a radio,” Rydal went on. “The news is probably coming in now, all right, maybe with a description of you.”

“Well—” Chester had another spasm of fear. “The photograph that agent had is years old. Doesn't look much like me now. I'm heavier now, with a moustache. Maybe I ought to shave it off,” he added.

Rydal's dark eyelashes blinked calmly. “Here comes your wife. They'll ask the hotel personnel for a description of you. Don't shave your moustache off. You might grow a beard. That might change you more than shaving off the moustache.”

They had tea and inedible pastries at a large, cheap café opposite the museum. They braced themselves in its warmth for a walk along the mole in the harbor at sun
down. There it became too cold for them to wait for the sundown, and anyway the mole, paved with loose stones, was not suited for Colette's high-heeled pumps. At the cocktail hour, they tried the Hotel Astir's restaurant. There was no bar proper, and they were served cocktails in the restaurant, where a field of white-clothed tables flowed out from theirs and disappeared in three unilluminated corners, empty miles away from them. Chester was growing tired. He had slept badly last night. He ordered two drinks more than Colette or Rydal had. The conversation of Rydal and Colette bored him and also annoyed him. Silly chatter. Colette was talking about Louisiana, about her trips twice a year there while she had been going to boarding school in Virginia, about holiday par
ties and her attempt to organize a dramatic society in Biloxi for three years running, only to have it fail for lack of popular interest. Rydal commiserated. Rydal answered her questions about Massachusetts, said his school had been Yale, but he was not elaborating on any of his answers, Chester noticed. Then Rydal excused himself, saying that he wanted to go out and find an evening paper, and that he would be right back.

“I'm not sure if I can stay up all night,” Chester said.

“Oh, darling! Drink some coffee. Don't have Scotch if you want to stay up all night. Look at me. One drink and I've just ordered coffee, too. I think it might be exciting to stay up all night in Crete, don't you? Our first night here?”

Chester rubbed his fingertips along his jaw. The stubble made a scraping sound. Should he grow a beard? What about the passport picture, his current very good one? What good would a beard do? Was Rydal giving him a bum steer? “I think I'd like another Scotch.”

“Oh, darling,” Colette said, disapproving.

“If I don't—Well, never mind, I've got the flask right here. Better Scotch and a lot cheaper,” he added petulantly. He spiked his nearly empty glass of Scotch highball.

Rydal was back with a newspaper, and Chester started to ask him to let him see it, then saw it was in Greek. With a serious, confident air, Rydal sat down, folded the paper so that he could see an item on the front page, and began reading. “It goes like this.” He glanced over his shoulder—his back was to the room—then read in a quiet voice: “The body of George Papanopolos, thirty-eight, was found this morning in the . . . the cleaning room of the King's Palace Hotel by Stefanie Triochos, twenty-three, a girl of cleaning in the employ of the hotel. Papanopolos, a detective of the National Police Force, was found to have died from a fracture of the skull. It is suspected that he was the victim of Chester Crighton MacFarland, forty-two, an American wanted for um-m . . . embezzlement of investments, investment funds,” Rydal corrected himself, “and that he had been on the quest of MacFarland when he entered the hotel. MacFarland had been occupying a room down the corridor from the closet of cleaning utensils in which the body of the detective was found. Traces of blood were found on the bathroom floor and the carpet of the room in which MacFarland and his wife Elizabeth . . . Elizabeth?” He looked at Colette, who nodded nervously, “—had stayed and also on the carpet of the hall leading to the closet of cleaning utensils.” Rydal paused and took a sip of water without looking at his attentive listeners. “MacFarland checked out of the hotel shortly after 7 p.m. last evening,” Rydal continued in a quiet, impersonal voice, “saying to one of the hotel personnel that he was catching a night train in the direction of Italy. A . . . an official investigation of trains and buses and airplanes failed to reveal . . . to reveal that you were on them,” Rydal finished, looking across the table at Chester, then at Colette.