Decision at Delphi (15 page)

In his own suitcase, he had some extra film for his own use, not much, only half a dozen boxes jammed into the odd corners. (He believed in practical, rather than elegant packing.) He added Steve’s three boxes, mixing them with his. The envelope he took over to his brief-case, inserted it among his own envelopes and folders. Then he rearranged the boxes of film in Steve’s case and locked it. Only one lock would answer to the key; the knife, or the caviar, hadn’t agreed with the other. It didn’t matter now, anyway.

He replaced his luggage exactly as it had been. Quickly, he washed his hands, brushed his hair, checked the money in his wallet. He left, thinking only about the remains of the night ahead of him. Life had become almost normal again.

Athens welcomed Strang with a frown and a smile. Rain clouds had blown in from the bay just as he was arriving at Phaleron airport, turning the stretch of small dancing waves from a sheet of rippling gold into a matted blanket of sullen grey. The rain moved northward and covered the city and all its vast sprawl of light-coloured houses. The Acropolis, with its marble temples, became a shadow island, raised high into a dark-tempered sky. The bare, yellow hills behind the city were blotted out. And then—as he was being driven up the long stretch of highway, past the new houses and apartment buildings thrown up by the city’s spreading tide—the rain ended, the clouds thinned and scattered, the sun threw a quilt of clear light and sharp shadow over the hills and slopes of Athens.

People jammed the sidewalks. The shops (now open after the three- or four-hour lunch period) were filled with women. The coffeehouses were filled with men. The streets themselves
were a torrent of traffic. And new buildings were going up everywhere. The sound of drill and hammer reminded Strang of New York: noise and noise, every variety of man-made noise. He looked at a placid woman clothed peasant-style, long black dress, long black headscarf, standing beside her daughter in silk frock and high-heeled shoes: what did she make of it all?

The change in Athens since he had last seen it was fantastic. But it was pleasant to be startled in this way. For this is how a city should be, he thought. Not with shattered walls and windows, bullet holes and barricades. Not with people huddled in unheated houses, shivering in their last remnants of worn clothes, starving; not with shops bare and boarded up; not with desolate streets given over to armoured cars and patrols, to armed bands and snipers. My God, he thought as his taxi drew up at the front of his hotel in a line of other two-tone latest models from Detroit, what a bloody mess it all had been.

The contrast followed him into the busy lobby of the Grande Bretagne. For a moment, he stood quite still under its bright chandeliers, remembering how it had once been. He shook himself free from the old memories. But he wondered how a Greek like Alexander Christophorou must feel every time he entered here.

He took his place in line at the reception desk. In front of him were a French businessman and his smart wife, behind him a German professor talking to two archaeologists about Olympia. Two Egyptians watched. An American dramatist was making conversation with a Greek-American couple, returned to show their three restless sons the old country. Two very tall men were speaking Dutch. A Texas oilman was finding his plane schedules inaccurate. Three Vassar girls were worrying about bus reservations for Delphi. Greek women in flowered hats
and elderly men in grey suits walked slowly through the lobby, talking their way towards some reception. A black-skirted priest, his long black hair knotted and pinned in place under his high black hat, stalked in silence, followed by his black-clothed wife at the proper, respectful distance. Americans, Greeks, Indians, French, Israelis, English, Swedes—Strang made his guesses by their clothes and voices. If all queues offered this kind of entertainment, he would have little objection to waiting. The hotel lobby seemed to be a general meeting room. At least half of the people here were not even hotel guests: they were simply casual visitors come to meet their friends, or old Athenian hands walking through the lobby to the bar as confidently as if they were in their own private club.

As Strang waited for his reservation to be confirmed, a small man in a shabby but neatly pressed grey suit came hurrying towards him. Like so many Greeks, he was dark of hair, moustache, and eye. Breathlessly, either from hurry or nervousness, or both, he identified himself as Yorghis, a representative of the Spyridon Makres Travel Agency. Strang restrained himself from asking bluntly where the hell Yorghis had been at the airport, when some fluent Greek would have eased the way through the usual exhaustions of arrival; instead, he made a short reply to Yorghis’s perceptive comments on the weather. Then Yorghis, relieved that no excuses were necessary—after all, his charge (marked
Highest attention
on the files) had arrived safely with luggage intact, so what was over was over—turned on the reception clerk with an authoritative voice and sharp words. The clerk, an elegant figure, distinguished of face, quiet in manner (more elegant and distinguished and quiet than most of the people in the lobby),
raised a cold eyebrow and replied with unexpected vehemence. Another three minutes of this, Strang thought, and I’ll end up in an attic bedroom.

“Yorghis—” Strang said, putting out his hand with a couple of dollar bills hidden in the palm, “everything is under control now. Thank you. Good-bye.”

Yorghis looked at him, made sure there was no criticism in Strang’s face, shook hands politely, and then nodded delightedly.

The clerk’s sardonic eye watched the small, hurrying figure of Yorghis leave. Then he looked at Strang quite impassively. “A bedroom and bathroom, and a sitting-room attached. One of our nicer suites. With a balcony. Would that be suitable?”

“Very suitable.” A sitting-room would give him plenty of space to work.

“Did you hire a taxi to come here?” the clerk asked as he completed the register. “Then be sure to deduct, from your account with the Spyridon Makres Agency, the cost of the Cadillac that they supplied.” He gave almost a smile in the direction of the door, as if administering his own particular last word to Yorghis.

The sitting-room was small, with a charm of faded pink brocade and rose velvet which Strang could have done without. It was lit—it had no windows—by delicate silk tulips spaced on panelled walls. The bedroom was larger, with a massive double bed draped in pink again. All he needed was a wife to complete the décor. The french windows in the bedroom opened on to a balcony over the main street. From there, he had an oblique view of Constitution Square and the Old Palace. Evzones, in their stiffly pleated white
skirts and long white stockings, stood at attention in front of two sentry-boxes. He retreated from the motor horns and screeching brakes, and walked back into the sitting room.

“I’ll need a large table, two good lamps, and a solid chair,” he told the young woman who had conducted him with polite conversation and a light rustle of silk to his suite. She was a little distressed as she looked round the room’s small elegance and visualised its ruin. “For my work,” Strang explained, opening his brief case and piling its heavy books on the little Louis XXII coffee table. He opened his portfolio, too.

She said, dismayed, “This room is so pretty, just as it is. You don’t like it? Another room might be difficult to find.”

“Oh, this is splendid.” Very splendid, he thought, Louis XXIII chairs and all. And he could always sleep sideways on the bed: that would give him a whole new perspective on his dreams. “I just need a desk, lights, and a chair that I can tilt myself back in.” He showed her what he meant. “See?”

She saw at once. “I shall speak to the reception clerk,” she said, leaving hurriedly. “I am sure there will be another room...”

There was always, Strang thought, an S.O.P. for every situation. Find that Standard Operating Procedure, and life was simple. He settled himself carefully in the delicate-legged chair and began to open the mail which had been gathering for his arrival. A letter from Jennifer, another from Josephine, an invitation to buy Greek scarves in the hotel gift shop, a cleaner’s bill for four dollars and thirty-five cents from New York, and a small note in hotel script telling him that Mr. Lee Preston of New York had tried to reach him twice today; would he call the New York operator as soon as he arrived? Her number was given most clearly, making everything sound so simple.

It was after six. Not yet lunchtime in New York. He thought of the bar downstairs where all sensible folk were gathering, and picked up the receiver.

Eventually, he reached New York. But not before complications were compounded: the polite and pleasing person with the rustling petticoat (taffeta?) came to lead him to his new room through several stretches of carpeted corridor. The new room was worth the walk. It was large, white-walled, light. There was a tweed-covered couch which became a bed, big arm-chairs, solid tables, movable floor-lamps, a desk that didn’t shake, a full wall of windows with a door on to a balcony; plenty of space too, and less noise from the street below. “This is fine,” he told her. It was, indeed.

“The chair at the desk tilts very nicely,” she said, with a suspicion of a smile. “So I shall have the rest of your luggage sent here?”

“As soon as possible,” he said urgently, suddenly remembering the cases, still standing downstairs among the incoming quantity of luggage in the lobby. He mastered the short spasm of worry. “I’ll have to change before I go downstairs to the bar,” he added more calmly. “And I’m very thirsty.”

She nodded sympathetically and left. The sympathy was real. Within a few minutes by Greek time, his luggage was all intact in his room. He was unlocking his suitcase to check it when his call to New York summoned him to the telephone.

Preston’s voice came through with a sudden boom and sizzle. “Ken, is that you?”

“Hooray for us! We made it. Only forty minutes down the drain.”

“Ken, is that you?” Telephones always made Preston sound
querulous. “What’s all this about Kladas?”

I wish I knew, Strang thought wearily. “What?” he asked cautiously.

“He is not going on with the job. Got a letter from Syracuse, this morning. He’s quitting. Just like that.”

“Did he give any reason?”

“But don’t you know? Didn’t he talk with you in Taormina?”

“I didn’t see him there.”

There was a silence that throbbed with anger.

“Don’t get too upset, Lee,” Strang said. “He isn’t enjoying this any more than we are.”

“Then why did he—”

“Your little friend with the profile could answer that, possibly.”

There was a shorter silence, completely blank this time.

“At least,” Strang went on, “he did finish the Sicilian pictures. He sent you the prints and negatives.”

“By sea mail,” was the glum reply. “I’ll know in two or three weeks whether they are any good.”

Strang shook his head over Steve’s thrift. “You don’t have to worry about them. They’ll knock your eye out. He sent some copies to my hotel at Taormina. They are the best thing he has ever done.”

“They are?” Then Lee Preston’s delight changed to gloom. “And what good will that do us? We shall have to find another photographer for the whole job.”

“You could find a photographer for Greece, and keep Steve’s pictures of Sicily.”

“Not so easy.”

“Why not?
Perspective
carries a lot of weight. Kudos. Cash. Offer the new man top billing, if he starts turning prima donna.”

“Whom would you like, Ken?”

“Well—there’s Johnnie Kupheimer; there’s Bradley Summers; there’s Sean O’Malley.”

“What about C. L. Hillard?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“What’s your prejudice against women?”

“I’m all for them,” Strang said with a laugh.

“She’s every bit as good as Kladas.”

“I know that. But pleasure doesn’t mix with business.”

“When she’s on a job, she doesn’t let pleasure interfere with work, Ken.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” He had won a real laugh from Preston, at least. “Try Kupheimer, et cetera,” he said, “and let me concentrate on my drawings.”

“How is your own work coming along?”

“It’s coming,” he admitted.

“It is?” Preston sounded relieved, delighted. “That’s fine, that’s just fine. I’ll try to get a photographer over there at once. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Do that. Good-bye, Lee.”

“Take care of yourself. Good-bye, Ken.”

Strang put down the receiver and went over to check his suitcase, but he was still thinking about C. L. Hillard. He hadn’t altogether been joking to Preston: she was much too disturbing. When I meet a girl like that, he thought, I don’t want any work, or worry about Steve, to keep me from concentrating. It would be worth concentrating hard on that girl.

His suitcase was in good order: Steve’s three small boxes of film were still safely tucked away among shoes and socks. He looked at them thoughtfully, remembering that short, but unpleasant, spasm of worry. Then he knew how to deal with this little problem: a sealed envelope in the safe downstairs in the manager’s office would be the simplest solution. He could leave the envelope there during his field trip out of Athens, even forget about it until Steve came asking for his possessions.

When Strang reached the bar, twenty minutes later, he had the receipt for his sealed envelope hiding, most comfortingly, behind his driver’s licence. The cure for worry was simply to feel you had done all you could have done; and then forget it.

The bar had its usual quota of journalists, attachés, and businessmen. The rest of the room (large and square and high-ceilinged, with mirrored walls, long white curtains billowing over dark windows, solid little tables and chairs set on thick carpeting, brightly lighted) was given over to a mixture of Athenians and foreigners, both men and women, who all shared one thing in common—a polite and carefully concealed interest in all newcomers. For the place was more than a bar: it was an institution with its own various ways of after-six-o’clock life. In one remote corner, around a table of polite tea cups and sweet cakes, were grouped the Athenian ladies with their flowered hats, formal dresses, and heavy
maquillage
over ageing faces. Near them, at another swollen table, were their husbands and friends in grey elegance, drinking little, discussing much. The visiting scholars and businessmen and pilgrims of all conditions, from plain tourist to guest musician, were gathered around
the rest of the tables. Their women, hatless, more casual in dress, sat with them and tried to make their cocktails last. It was almost half past seven now, but no dining-room would open for another hour, and no proper Athenian would think of sitting down to dinner before ten o’clock.