Enemy and Brother (17 page)

“I do not know the truth. I only suspect.”

“That you were deliberately blinded?” I said after a moment.

“It is a possibility. I should like to know.”

“I shall go up tomorrow,” I said. “There is a private collection of papers available to me on weekends. I shall combine missions.”

“Professor, don’t…” He could not find the words. “I do not wish to call attention to myself in this matter.”

“Neither do I,” I said, and took some satisfaction in the concealed irony.

W
ITH THE PRECISION OF
a man documenting expenses against the filing of his income tax, in Athens I arranged to see the Pietro Gamba letters written for Byron, in the margins of which were comments in the poet’s hand. Then I set out on my search for Stavros Varvaressos.

The newspaper files yielded information on his arrest and conviction. A civilian employee of the army, aged nineteen, he had stolen, apparently without accomplices, 300,000 drachmas, roughly a $10,000 payroll. He claimed to have been robbed of the money, and was indeed arrested on his job to which he returned after a three-day absence. He was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor in 1955, which left him several years yet to serve.

But two years ago, the entire payroll had been recovered. The story was cryptic: “The police today recovered…” Not a word on where or how or on what advice they had acted.

The
entire
payroll: surely Paul would have known that. He did, of course. But had Varvaressos actually promised him money? If such a promise had been given, it would have had to be given in the presence of a prison guard at least. The two men would not have been left alone, even in a hospital.

The name of Varvaressos did not again appear in the newspapers.

I thought of Nikos Spiridos and his prison connections. I did not like to go back to him, but decided to look up his phone number while making up my mind. The phone book in hand, I looked up Varvaressos first. There was a Mrs. S. Varvaressos in Piraeus. It was not a common name.

The house was part of a row of what I can best describe as new tenements, three- and four-story buildings put up after the war, but already showing signs of becoming slums, the plaster cracked, the marble stained with rust from bad drainage. A small sign indicated that Mrs. Varvaressos was the proprietress of a sailors’ rooming house. The inside of the building looked immaculate.

I walked to the top of the steep, narrow street. One could see the bay, the funnels of ships anchored there. Her custom would be in merchant seamen, dockworkers. It was a respectable, working class place, I thought, walking past it again. But she catered primarily to transients. There was none of the hallway paraphernalia of children’s toys and carriages common to the other buildings. I crossed the street and entered the
taverna
a few doors down. A card game was going on in the rear with twice the number of observers to players. I bought a bottle of beer and took it to one of the outside tables. Nobody cared where I took it. I watched the occasional woman climbing the street, stringbag in one hand and almost invariably the other hand at her back. The climb had taken its toll of most of them. I studied each one as she passed in case she should turn in at the rooming house door. None of them did. I thought how like this was to my vigil outside Averoff… which had not come out badly to my purpose. It was a matter of patience and some sort of plan. I did not want to speak to Mrs. Varvaressos, not until I knew something about her.

Two men came up the street, one with his seaman’s bag over his shoulder. The other looked at a piece of paper in his hand and then at the numbers on the houses. They were young, clean-cut men. It was an easy matter to catch up with them. I asked them if they were looking for Mrs. Varvaressos.

“Yes, sir.”

“Three houses up,” I said. “What kind of a place is it, do you know?”

“Cheap and clean.” But I could tell from the way they looked at me they didn’t think it was my style.

“I am looking for a place for some of the men who work for me,” I said, improvising, and realizing as I said it that I could as easily have approached Mrs. Varvaressos myself using that gambit.

“Come along, boss,” one of the youngsters said to me.

The other said, “You must be a very good boss to look for lodging for your men.”

“I want to know where they are,” I said.

I went with them into the building. One of them rang the bell of the first-floor apartment. There was a faint smell of mothballs or disinfectant, I wasn’t sure which, but it was a clean smell.

The woman who opened the door was well into her sixties, neat, tight-lipped and hard. Her back was slightly bent. She had known work in her time.

“We are looking for rooms, my friend and I,” one of the seamen said. “The gentleman must speak for himself.”

“I have men working for me who need rooms,” I said.

“What kind of work?” She had not allowed us entrance to or even a view of her apartment. I could see only a heavily upholstered chair and a calendar on the wall behind it.

“Construction,” I said.

“No,” she said, “they are too dirty.”

“I pay them well,” I said.

“Then what do they need of my house? No.”

And that was that. I muttered a sarcastic “thank you,” and retreated, the seamen going into her parlor with her. It was my appearance, my very presence, of course, that had made her suspicious. Which only suggested that she had had such visitors as myself before, prying men perhaps connected with the police.

On the stoop an old unshaven man was fingering his beads. He grinned at me, bowing a little again and again.

“
Kali´spera
,” I said. He reeked of onion and beer.

“
Kali´spera.
You would like to buy me a bottle of Fix?”

“Do you know Mrs. Varvaressos?”

“I know, I know,” he said and rolled his eyes.

“I’d be happy to buy you a bottle of Fix.” I indicated the
taverna
where I had been before.

He shook his head and led the way into a cellar apartment a few doors down the street, running a skip and a jump ahead of me. The place was as bare as a jail cell which was in itself a blessing, an uncovered mattress on the floor, a table and two chairs, a few bits of crockery on the table.

He held out his hand for money. “You will wait here and I will bring the beer. One hundred drachmas, please.”

Three dollars was a lot of money for a couple of bottles of beer. I assumed it included the price of what he wanted to sell and gave it to him.

I stood at the window and watched him trot across the street to the
taverna
and back with the two bottles. He uncapped one of them and handed it to me. A shaft of sunlight hit the wall behind him where he sat cross-legged on the mattress, the image of an evil genie. I wondered how often he had performed this ritual.

“Now,” I said, “what do you want to tell me?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you can tell me about Mrs. Varvaressos.”

“She is a very hard woman. She does not talk to anybody. She is not like us. She comes from the Peloponnese. A peasant.”

The man Stephanou was looking for had also come from the Peloponnese. He was thirty or so and, if related, probably the woman’s son. “Where—do you know?”

“A village called Skandi.”

“How do you know that?”

“I went through some rubbish the day after she came—the stub of a bus ticket.”

“When did she come?”

He screwed up his eyes as though trying to remember something I suspected he knew by rote. “Eight, nine months ago. She was a peasant, you know? Now… she wears a corset, very elegant.”

“Does she have any family?”

“No. That is to say, I have never seen anyone like that. Six months ago she began to wear the heavy veil, black, you know? And she burns a candle for the dead.”

“Six months ago?” I repeated.

“It would be,” he said, “and it was then she paid for the house. The man who owns this one, he owns them all except hers. He is a very rich man. I used to work for him. I had a nice apartment in her house for my daughter. She put us out, may the evil eye look on her.”

The reason occurred to me, but it was not my affair.

“She is a beautiful girl,” he said and grinned in attempted ingratiation. He was speaking of his daughter, I realized.

“Have there been other people inquiring about Mrs. Varvaressos?’

“The police at first. Now every month they come to see her. I think she pays them money… I paid them money too. Much good it did me.” He spat three times.

I supposed I had learned all I was likely to of Mrs. Varvaressos from this source, and I certainly wanted to know no more of my informant’s personal affairs. I got up, thanked him and told him gravely that I would hold his information in confidence.

He said, “You are not the police. You are perhaps a lawyer?”

“I am an insurance appraiser,” I said.

When a Greek woman leaves the village of her birth she will be better remembered than were she to have died. It is not a proverb, but it might be.

I drove to Corinth in the morning and thence to Skandi, arriving in time for church. Mass over, I spoke to the sexton. He had not only known Mrs. Varvaressos, he had grown up a few doors from her father’s house. He was close to her age.

“What went wrong with her son?” I said, hoping to reach the heart of the matter quickly.

“My friend, only God can say that. And he is in God’s hands now.” He crossed himself.

“How did he die?”

“He was shot trying to escape the island.”

“It would have been hard for the family,” I said. “I suppose that’s why she moved away.”

He looked at me and said nothing. I realized that he knew I was pretending to more knowledge than I had. I also suspected that he knew more than he was likely to tell me unless I was more frank with him. I saw no other way. So I said, “He did an evil thing to a friend of mine in prison. One wonders why.”

The sexton snorted. “Money.”

“Do you know that for a fact?”

“For a fact, no.” He stroked the back of one hand with the other. His wife brought us coffee and, going out, closed the parlor door. “For a fact, perhaps the answer is yes. We are not an ignorant people in this village. People from all over the world pass through every day of our lives on their way to the ancient shrines. When Stavros went to prison we were not surprised. He had been in trouble before. But we did not blame his mother. He was a boy in arms when his father was taken by the
Andarte.
He never came back. The boy had much hate in him. But he loved his mother. All the while he was in prison, she lived by scratch and charity, and the promises he wrote to her.

“Then one day last summer, without a word to anyone, she packed two boxes—one of his things and one of her own—and got on the bus to Athens.

“The first question was where did she get the money for the bus fare? It was a thousand drachma note out of which she bought her ticket. Her own family did not know. They have never heard from her since. They opened the letter to her telling her that Stavros was dead. But they could do nothing with the letter then except turn it over to the police. Our own Inspector has told them that she has been informed. She is living in Piraeus, the proprietor of a hotel.”

“It’s only a rooming house,” I said. “But she is said to own the building.”

“The postmistress told how she had received two very special letters last year, envelopes of a certain thickness and heavy paper. It may be assumed from this observation that no matter how she tried, the postmistress could not at the time see what was inside the envelopes.”

“Last year,” I repeated. I would have liked to place the dates of those letters relative to Stephanou’s blinding.

“Would you wish to speak to the postmistress?”

“I think not,” I said. “I would rather let the matter of my visit end with us.”

“It would not have been the money from the payroll, you see. That had all been recovered. The police used to come regularly and question his mother. They had searched her house, board by board, and then one day they came and they found the money where he had finally told them it would be, under the floor of the blacksmith shop where he had worked as a boy.”

I sipped my coffee. Reaching the dregs, I said, “Did he blame the
Andarte
for his father’s death?”

“In this village we blamed the
Andarte
for many things, my friend, and they gave us reason, taking our young men by force, and then burning us to the ground.”

“W
E WERE NEVER FRIENDS,
Professor. I should not have told you that. In such a prison friends are very rare. I did not know about his father. I can see now how it was possible for him to hate me enough.”

“
Did
he offer you money, Paul?”

“No. I never saw him again after the incident. But he said to me, ‘
Andarte
!’ and threw the bucketful of this terrible burning stuff. It was all very natural.”

Paul ran his hand along my desk as a sighted man might, cleaning the dust from it. Indeed he felt the dust in his fingers afterwards. “Grandmother Panyotis has other things to think of these days besides her professor.”

“Why was it necessary for you to lie to me about the money?”

He shrugged. “It seemed easier to tell you that, and I was afraid you would not find out everything if it was just the matter of a man hating a Communist.”

“You underestimate me. I do not call myself a scholar, but I have some of the characteristics. I will not settle for less than it is possible for me to learn.”

“It is so. I know it now—and I will not lie to you again. Probably it will not be possible. You made me tell you it was not the money. Did you not?”

“But the fact remains, Paul. He was given money—or his mother given it to keep for him. By whom?”

“That is the question, isn’t it? And why was it necessary for me to be blind?”

I said quietly, “Does it go back to the Webb case?”

“I should like to know,” he said. “Professor, I want to go to Ioannina with you. When you are ready I shall be ready.”