The Two Faces of January (8 page)

“Sir? With bath, did you say?” The clerk had been trying to get his attention.

“Oh, yes. Please. With bath.”

Chester's and Colette's room was 414
on the fourth floor, and Rydal's 408 on the same floor. They all agreed that they would simply clean up and take a nap for the rest of the afternoon.

The bath was delicious to Rydal, the water hot, the tub big and white. Then he put on pajamas, the better to relax and possibly sleep, shaved, and sent his dirty shirt away via the maid to be washed. He got into bed and propped himself up against the pillows and read the newspaper for a while. He re-read the item on Chester. “. . . believed to be still within the country.” But they didn't say where in the country they were looking. Maybe all over it. It occurred to Rydal that it might be wiser if they went to a smaller town in Crete. It would be wiser, too, if Chester and also Colette acquired some cheaper and less fashionable clothes. And it would be wise for him, Rydal thought, to clear out of the MacFarland, now Chamberlain, ensemble while he could. There was probably a boat to Athens tomorrow morning. Rydal had bought a one-way plane ticket. A lot would be wiser, a lot that he wasn't yet doing, he supposed. He put the paper down, closed his eyes, and wriggled farther down into the welcome softness of the bed.

There was a light knock on the door. Rydal lifted his head. He did not know how long he had slept. It seemed about fifteen minutes. He got up, fuzzy-headed, and went to the door. “Who is it?” he said through the door. Then he repeated it in Greek.

“Colette,” came the whispered answer.

Rydal glanced down to see if his pajamas were properly buttoned—he had no robe—then opened the door.

“Oh. I disturbed you,” she said, coming in. She had her mink stole and her hat on, but she took off her hat and tossed it into the armchair. “Chester's snoring away and I didn't want to disturb him, somehow. He needs it, you know.”

“Um-m. Where've you been?” Rydal sat down carefully on the bed, conscious of his bare feet, but Colette wasn't looking at his feet.

“Out for a walk. I had a bath, but I didn't feel like sleeping, so I explored this church next door. You know, the one with the arches and the stained glass?”

Rydal nodded. He vaguely remembered a church to the left of the hotel.

“So.” She smiled at him, then went to a window and looked out. “What an interesting old building. Looks Italian, doesn't it, with those balconies?”

Rydal turned his head. The building's roof came midway up his window. He saw an iron balcony that looked about to fall out of its anchorage in the pink stone. He said nothing.

She sat down on the bed, not beside him, but on the opposite side, half turned towards him. Then she lay back, so her head was near his hip.

“Tired? You should take a nap,” Rydal said somewhat irritably. “In your room,” he added.

Her hand moved down his arm to his wrist, and pulled him towards her. Rydal hesitated—two starts and stops—then he swung his legs up on the bed, embraced her and kissed her. Her arms circled him like a delicious cloud. Her breath was warm and fragrant with American toothpaste, probably Colgate's, and trembling with passion which inflamed him, too; but even as he felt it, he was thinking, pay no attention, it's only because it's been quite a while—a month? two months?—since you've had a girl, and this is only a continuation of last night, the kiss she was leading up to last night that you never took.

“Rydal!” she whispered, as if she had just discovered him.

He drew back from her, smiling a little, his heart pounding. It was over.

“Come back,” she said, her arms out again.

And as she kicked off her shoes and pushed herself back towards the pillows, Rydal fell on her again. They lay side by side, tight and close, kissing, their eyes closed. It was like it had been with Agnes, always, with Agnes. The wild, blissful kisses like this ten times a day in the house, stolen, and then at night Agnes waiting for him in her bed, waiting for more than kisses. His body remembered. So did his mind. This is MacFarland's wife, you ass.

She was opening her blouse with her free hand. Her other hand pressed the back of his head, holding his lips against hers. Well, the blouse was all right, he supposed, but not the skirt, not the rest of it. His hand hurried for her warm breast, then caressed it slowly. She took his hand and pushed his fingers inside her brassière. After a few seconds of this, Rydal withdrew his hand, and pressed himself up with his right arm, lifting her part way with him.

“What's the matter?” she asked. Her lips looked even fuller now, with her lipstick gone.

Rydal wiped his own lips with the back of his hand. “Thought I'd better stop,” he said.

She smiled, amused, the lavender eyes narrowed. “Come on-n. We're young. We're both only twenty-five,” she said softly. “We want to. Why not?” She was unfastening the top of her skirt, her eyes still half closed.

Rydal watched her. Why not? His door had an automatic lock and it was locked now. Chester would sleep a long time, probably. Why not? Now. Then Rydal realized he was looking at her with dazed, wide eyes, like a man drunk—which in a way he was. He blinked and said, “No. Thanks.”

Colette stopped what she was doing with her skirt. She looked at him with her eyes open now. “Dar-rling—”

That was for Chester, Rydal thought, that word.

“I didn't really mean go to bed. I just meant lie down with me. Come back.” She held out her arms.

And he started to, but of what use was any more of that? He stood up and walked to the window, then turned around and looked at her. She hadn't moved, except that her head was turned to him, her arms down at her sides. There was a soft curve below the waist of her black skirt. Her body was rather like Agnes's, he had to admit, with the minor differences that would have to exist between the body of a fifteen-year-old girl and a twenty-five-year-old woman. Colette was waiting for him to make the next move. And she was tense, Rydal saw.

“You didn't mean go to bed with me?” he asked, moving towards her. He sat down and took her by the shoulders. “Why not?”

“Rydal, don't,” she said, smiling, but now she wanted free.

Rydal had had no plan when he recrossed the room, but suddenly he wanted her. “All right. Take off the skirt,” he said, zipping it down.

She slid up, away from him, and caught her right shoulder as if he had hurt it. “No, I
didn't
mean that,” she whispered, smiling, enunciating it clearly. “I really didn't.”

Rydal gave it up. But now he wanted her. Now he would have. He stood looking down at her as she put her blouse back on, and he knew that she knew it, too.

She put lipstick on again, and chatted with him as if nothing had happened. Rydal replied to what she said, she stayed perhaps five minutes more, and then she was gone, and he hadn't any idea of what they had said in the last minutes to each other. It was as if someone had taken his head and with a twist of the hand started it spinning. It was still spinning. He flung himself on the bed and closed his eyes. Her scent was on his pillow.

She'd finally refused. Thus did dreary life repeat what had already taken place in his imagination, and not surprise him at all.

7

Rydal awakened
at 7 p.m., dressed, and went down for the papers. He found a street vendor some four blocks away, an old man stooped on his heels and huddled under a cape beside his newspaper stacks. Rydal bought, besides the Cretan evening paper, an Athens
Daily Post
of yesterday in English. The
Post
he could have skipped: there was nothing about the Greek agent's death in it. The Iraklion evening paper, however, reproduced Chester's photograph again, and gave a description of him as well as his wife—“. . . his young, attractive, blue-eyed and blonde wife, exquisitely attired, who appeared barely in her twenties . . .” The MacFarlands, said the paper, were known to have stayed at the Hotel Dardanelles in Athens on Tuesday night, 9 January, the night of the murder. Their movements after 9 the next morning were unknown.

“. . . They may have taken a plane to Corfu, Rhodes or Crete, authorities speculated. The frontiers of Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Turkey have been on the alert since Wednesday morning, and it is doubtful if they have crossed the border, unless they were able to obtain false passports in the short time.”

Things were becoming a bit hot, Rydal supposed. The police speculating about Crete, and now the MacFarlands were stopping at the main hotel in the main city of the island. Rydal moistened his lips, seeing suddenly the police tapping Chester on the shoulder in the lobby of the Astir, questioning him, Chester summoning him to tell the police they'd been travelling together for days, had been inseparable for days, and they were talking to the wrong man, anyway. Did they want to see his passport? (You bet they did.) Rydal couldn't imagine Chester answering their questions coolly, producing his passport coolly, unless he were at a certain point of drunkenness, a precise degree of drunkenness. Rydal did not fancy perjuring himself now. He felt he was losing his nerve. It didn't seem as simple and easy as it had yesterday, or the evening of the murder when he'd arranged for the passports with Niko.

He paused for a cold bottle of grape soda at a little sweets shop, and drank it standing up at the counter, listening to the staccato voice of a news reporter on the proprietor's static-filled radio. The voice hurried through the news of a London conference, a fiscal measure France was contemplating, the outlook for the weather, and then—slam, bang, bing and tinkle—back to Greek folk music again. Rydal put his empty bottle down and left.

The telephone was ringing when he entered his room, and he felt a start of fear, then realized it was probably Colette or Chester. It was Colette.

“Did you sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Chester wants to know if you would like to come in for a drink before we go out to dinner.”

Rydal went down the hall to their door with his newspapers, and knocked.

“Come in!” Chester's baritone voice called heartily, but as the door was locked, he had to come and open it. Chester was in a foulard dressing-gown and trousers.

Rydal noticed that Chester's beard—the one he had suggested, low along the jawline—was already beginning to show. “Good evening,” he said to them both. Colette had changed her clothes since he had seen her. Now she wore a light grey, nearly white, tweed dress, and she stood by the long, low chest of drawers, one hand on her hip.

“What do you drink, Rydal?” Colette asked. “We have ouzo tonight, too.”

“Yes. Just sent down for a bottle,” said Chester.

“All right,” Rydal said. “Ouzo. Thanks.”

They also had ice in an ice bucket.

“I see you've got the papers,” Chester said.

Rydal had taken off his overcoat and dropped it across a straight chair. He picked up the Greek paper, then put it down, remembering Chester couldn't read it. “They're speculating—saying you're probably still within the borders,” Rydal said, dropping his voice. “They're concentrating on Corfu, Rhodes and Crete.”

Chester listened attentively. “Concentrating?”

“Well, it doesn't say what they're doing. Looking, I suppose.” Rydal was uncomfortable. He glanced at Colette. She was fixing his ouzo with ice and water, but she had glanced at him at the same time. She looked cheerful and quite at ease. “I don't know what your plans are,” Rydal said to Chester, “but I think it might not be a bad idea to go to some smaller town in Crete. Or—you could try to get out of the country right away on those passports. For that, you'd have to go back to Athens, you know, because no plane from here goes out of Greece. At least not at this time of year.”

“Yes.” Chester looked seriously down at the floor. He already had a drink in his hand. He felt his jaw with his fingertips.

“The beard will help,” Rydal said. “Too bad a beard takes so long.”

“Oh, mine won't take too long,” Chester said, chuckling but not very mirthfully. “I'm one of those people has to shave twice a day.”

“Good. In Athens, you might have the passport photo touched up with a beard. You can get that done through Niko.”

“Yes, yes, I thought of that,” said Chester.

“I detest beards,” Colette said, coming towards Rydal with his drink. “Too bad, isn't it?”

Chester only glanced at her, evidently thinking of something else. “Well—”

Colette's fingers brushed the length of Rydal's hand after he had taken his glass. Rydal did not look at her.

“If I don't look too much like a tramp who needs a shave, we might catch that afternoon plane tomorrow back to Athens, eh, Colette? What do you think?”

Colette looked at him. She did not seem in a mood for thinking.

Rydal pushed his palm across his forehead. “I was considering that plane, too. I'd like to see Knossos tomorrow morning, then take the afternoon plane.” His tone was dismissive, final, or at least he wanted it to be.

“Um-m. So was I thinking of Knossos tomorrow. It's only thirty or forty minutes from here by bus, according to the hotel. I asked about it a few minutes ago. We could go out there around ten, spend an hour or so—” Chester looked at his wife. “Does that appeal to you, honey?”

“What's Knossos? I've forgotten.”

“Where the Labyrinth is,” Rydal said. “It's the Palace of King Minos.” He could have gone on. He still knew the rigmarole about the Palace of Knossos his father had made him learn when he was a kid. Rydal drank his ouzo.

“The Labyrinth? I thought that was a myth,” Colette said, sitting on the edge of one of the twin beds. She swung her light Scotch highball in circles, making the ice click.

Rydal kept his mouth shut.

“No, this one's not a myth. The myth grew up around this particular palace,” Chester told her. “You should read the guide book on it.” Chester moved towards the bathroom. “Well, I'll put a shirt on.” He went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Colette looked at Rydal, unsmiling now, yet it was an intimate, questioning look. What does she expect me to do, Rydal thought, steal a kiss while Chester's out of the room? He lit a cigarette. Colette walked to him and stood on tiptoe, and before Rydal could step back she caught his shoulder and kissed him, on the side of the mouth. Frowning, Rydal went to the mirror over the low chest of drawers. He bent close, wiping, but he didn't see any lipstick. He turned around.

“Don't do silly things like that,” he said, frowning.

Colette opened her arms in a shrug. “I like you,” she said in a high, barely audible voice, a voice like a little mouse's.

Chester came back, sliding his tie knot into place. He looked at himself in the mirror. “Sit down, Rydal. Say, you're about ready for another, aren't you?”

They decided to go for dinner to the place where they had spent most of last night, the big nightclub-restaurant by the sea. It was Colette's idea. She probably wanted to dance, Rydal thought.

The waiter recommended the shish-kebab, and they all ordered it. There was wine, more ouzo, and Scotch for Chester. Chester danced with Colette on the small, again remote dance floor, where hefty girls in low-cut peasant blouses danced with undernourished-looking young men in dark suits. Then Rydal danced with Colette, submitted to her close hold on the back of his neck, out of the range of Chester's eyes, and finally enjoyed her closeness, thinking that after tomorrow, by this time tomorrow night, he'd be free and on his own again. In the great city of Athens, he could disappear at once, rejoin his friends in the tavernas, go back to his old room at the Hotel Melchior Condylis, if he wished. The old Condylis suddenly had the attractions of home for Rydal. When the orchestra stopped, Rydal moved to leave the floor, but Colette kept hold of his hand.

“They're starting again. Look.”

It was true. The clarinet was tootling a few practice notes, the bass viol tuning up. The orchestra was terrible. They danced through four more numbers, including a slurring, drunk-sounding “Mean to Me”. A collision with one of the hefty girls' behinds could be quite jolting, Rydal discovered.

“Will I see you in Athens?” Colette breathed in his ear.

“Well—I expect to go back to the States in a couple of days.”

Silence.

Rydal's eyes sought Chester's grey suit in the distance, and then he stopped dancing. “Come on. Let's go back.”

“What's the matter?”

“
Somebody's talking to Chester.” Two men were talking to him,
and, even from far away, Rydal had seen Chester's agitation. “Go slow. Take it easy.” Rydal slowed his own walk.

One was a shirt-sleeved fellow of about thirty, a little the worse for drink, and the other a bigger, blondish man with a hanging underlip, better dressed and soberer. Chester managed a chuckle as Rydal and Colette came up.

“Don't know what they're trying to tell me,” Chester said. “It's all Greek. Maybe you can figure it out.”

“What do you want to say to him?” Rydal asked them pleasantly, sitting down as Colette did.

“This man,” said the drunker fellow, pointing. “He looks like the guy Mac-Far-land,” he said, accenting each syllable equally. “My friend thinks so, too. So we asked him his name.”

“This is Bill,” Rydal said, smiling, slapping Chester's shoulder, and pretending to be a little high himself. “Bill Chamberlain. His wife—Mary Ellen. How do you do? What's your name?”

The two strangers looked at each other. Then the drunker one stared at Colette, and said to his friend, “A blonde wife, too.”

“A redhead,” said the man with the hanging underlip.

The drunk fellow shrugged. His big hands were planted on the table.

“So what's your trouble?” asked Rydal.

“How come you speak Greek? You look American,” said the fellow with his hands on the table.

Rydal was glad they were shifting the attack. “I've been living here a few months. I'm a student here.”

“Here? In Crete?”

“Well, I happen to be in Crete now. At least I think so.”

The two strangers murmured together, and Rydal couldn't hear what they said for the din of voices and music around them. Then the big fellow said, “Ask him, ask him.”

“You got any identification, mister?” the shirt-sleeved man asked Chester.

“He wants to see identification,” Rydal said to Chester, smiling indulgently, as if urging Chester to humor the intruders. “Got your passport? If they're so insistent, let them take a look.”

“I've got it.” Chester, with a bored glance at the two, pulled his passport from his inside pocket, opened it to his photograph, and held it out for them to see. The blondish fellow started to take it from Chester, and Chester pulled it back out of his reach. “My name,” said Chester, pointing to the preceding page, where
william james chamberlain
was written plain enough for them to see. Chester chuckled triumphantly.

The shirt-sleeved fellow nodded. “Okay.” He gave a half salute, half wave, and withdrew.

His companion also walked off. “Watch out. You look like a killer,” he said facetiously.

Chester, who couldn't have understood it, gave an appropriate “Hah!” Then he stared at the table, his shoulders hunched, as if he wanted to shrink to a point of invisibility. Beads of sweat stood on his forehead.

“You did that very well,” said Rydal. He had glanced around. Fortunately, the conversation hadn't attracted any attention. It was an informal place with a good deal of circulation among tables.

“I need another drink,” Chester said, and his voice shook.

“Sure. You deserve one,” Rydal said cheerfully, but he could see Chester was really all gone. He clapped his hands for a waiter.

Colette's face looked worried.

“Everybody had better cheer up,” Rydal said. “Those two might still be watching. I don't know where they are, but don't look around for them.” Rydal said to the waiter, “Another Scotch. A double Scotch. Dewar's.”

“It's all right, darling,” Colette said when the waiter was gone. “There's nothing to worry about.”

Rydal studied her through his cloud of cigarette smoke. Did she really care? Or was she only bolstering Chester, because she wanted to take care of her meal ticket? He'd probably never understand Colette. There wouldn't be enough time to understand her. She could probably like or love several people at once, he thought. A many-chambered heart.
I am the chambered naughty-lust .
. . Rydal wanted to hum a tune, but he didn't. He felt oddly cheerful. He looked at Chester.

Chester glanced at him, furtively. “Just think what might have happened, if you hadn't been here, been here to speak Greek to them.”

“Nonsense,” Rydal said. “The same thing would have happened. You knew they were asking your name, didn't you? You'd have shown them your passport.”