“But . . . allow me to tell you,” Rydal said, and was ashamed of the “allow me” as soon as it was out of his mouth, “that I’m not a police agent.”
“Not a—Then why—?” Chester said.
Rydal didn’t know why. It had been such a fast decision, it was no decision at all. “I’m just an American tourist. You can consider me a friend.” It was odd talking to them; it made him feel very odd. Or was it the blood drops on the pale-green carpet? “You’d better wipe up those blood spots while you can,” he said to the man.
Helpless himself, Chester motioned for Colette to do it.
She went off to the bathroom and returned at once with the sponge Chester had bought for her. “I’ve wiped it all up from the bathroom,” she said. She got down on her hands and knees and began scrubbing away.
Her derrière looked perfectly round under her straight black skirt. Rydal looked at her instead of at the blood spots. Then he moved quickly to the door, opened it cautiously, and looked out into the corridor.
“Hear something?” Chester asked.
“No. I wanted to see if there was any blood in the hall. There probably is, but it doesn’t show on the black carpet. Now,” he said after he had closed the door again, (But now, what? The man was looking at him, blank and expectant.) “the thing to do is get out of this hotel before that fellow’s missed—at his headquarters or whatever.”
“Yes. Or found,” Chester said. “Well, we’re nearly packed and ready, aren’t we, honey?”
“Two more minutes for the stuff in the john,” said Colette. “You get your razor and things, Ches. I’ve practically got this finished. Toss me a towel, will you?”
“A towel?”
“A towel, so I can dry this.”
Colette sounded very practical. She was certainly cool-headed. She looked up and saw Rydal looking at her and smiled at him, then adroitly caught the towel Chester tossed across the room to her. “What a mess,” she said, bending to her work again.
Rydal remembered the papers he had stuffed into his overcoat pocket, and pulled them out. There was a chunky notebook, and he flipped through it. There were many photographs, and he found Chester’s at once. He walked closer to Chester, who was putting things into a suitcase. “This is you?”
Chester looked embarrassed, but he nodded.
The comment, in Greek, said that he was wanted for fraud and embezzlement. There were several different names under the picture, in Greek and English characters. “Which of these names is yours?” asked Rydal.
Chester held the notebook’s edge and looked over the names, looked a little wildly. “None of them. My name’s—I’m Chester MacFarland.” There was no use in hiding it, Chester thought, because the fellow could just ask the hotel desk who was or had been in room six twenty-one.
“Chester MacFarland,” Rydal repeated softly.
Chester gave a nervous smile. “Heard of me?”
“No . . . no.” The Greek agent’s name, Rydal saw, was George M. Papanopolos.
“Uh . . . we were going to Corinth tomorrow. I don’t suppose you know if there’s a train or bus there tonight, do you? We were going to rent a car tomorrow, but—”
“I don’t happen to know, but I can call down and ask the desk to find out,” Rydal said, moving towards the telephone.
“No, wait!” Chester spread his hands. “Your calling—from this room—”
“Well, it just occurred to me,” Rydal said to Chester, and the woman, too, who was now standing in the middle of the room, looking at him, “since nobody saw me come up, I can just as well say I’ve been here with you all afternoon. Or at least a few hours.” The man looked blank still, so Rydal said, “I didn’t take the elevator up. I saw it went to the sixth floor, so I took the stairs up. I don’t think anybody noticed me. I mean, in case that man is found before we get out—I’ll provide an alibi.” The words seemed to come out of him from nowhere. He was offering to perjure himself. And for what? For whom? A man whose look of a gentleman didn’t go very deep, Rydal could see now; a man whose clothes were well cut and tailor made, but whose cuff-links were flashy; a man whose over-all manner looked dishonest, because he was dishonest. “Take your choice. I’m not insisting,” Rydal added. “I mean, whether I call downstairs or not.”
“Yes. Do call. That’s fine,” Chester said. He looked away from Rydal’s eyes.
Rydal picked up the telephone and, without thinking, began to speak in Greek, asking about trains and buses to Corinth. The woman, after closing a couple of suitcases, returned to staring at him curiously, unself-conscious, apparently, as a child. Rydal hung up and said, “The last bus left at six. No train until tomorrow. You could perhaps rent a car at this hour, but it’s an odd time to be starting off for Corinth. The view along the sea is considered the best part of the trip. Kinetta Beach, you know.”
“Hm-m. Yes. Kinetta Beach,” said Chester. He looked at his wife.
“You’re very kind,” Colette said to Rydal. “Kind to endanger yourself for us.”
Rydal had no reply. He noticed the bulge of the gun in Chester’s jacket pocket for the first time. It occurred to him that the MacFarlands were going to need different passports at once. By tomorrow, anyway. Niko was the man for that.
“What about Crete?” Chester asked. “We did want to go to Crete.”
“That I happen to know about,” Rydal said. “There’s a plane out every morning and a boat a little earlier every morning, but nothing at this hour.”
“Are you part Greek?” Colette asked Rydal.
Rydal smiled. “No.” He was trying to think, and he was thinking only that he was very bad at this kind of thinking. His mind should be working like lightning, conjuring up the exactly right, brilliant thing for them to do. Niko’s place as a hideout? Rydal somehow didn’t want them there. But why not? Get Colette and Chester into a taxi with their luggage and drive to Niko’s. Niko’s wife Anna would be there now, and would be agreeable to anything. But their apartment was so unspeakably sordid, and they’d all have to be in one room. “Anyway, the thing to do is get out of here right away. Are you ready for a porter?”
“Yes, but where do we go?” Chester asked.
“To another hotel in Athens. I know one. The Dardanelles, about ten or fifteen streets from here. It’s medium-sized and sort of out of the way. Just for tonight. Then tomorrow—I’d suggest Crete rather than the Peloponnesus, because it’s bigger and farther away.”
“Oh, wonderful! Crete!” said Colette, as if it were a bright and unexpected spot on a holiday tour.
“Just tell the driver—Hotel Dardanelles?” Chester asked.
“Yes. Well, if the bellboys from this hotel are listening, tell the driver the railroad station, then switch it after you take off. You’d better tell the hotel here that you’re taking a night train to—to Yugoslavia, something like that.”
“I get you, I get you,” Chester said, embarrassed that he hadn’t grasped the point a little more quickly. Chester frowned. “You really think that’s best, another hotel in Athens?”
“I do, definitely. With luck, the Greek agent won’t be discovered until early tomorrow morning, when the help start their cleaning. If the hotel here thinks you’ve taken a train, the police’ll check the trains and the borders before they check the hotels in the city.”
“Yes. You’re right,” Chester said. Then his lips bared over his set teeth. “Oh, my God, the passports! The God-damned passports!”
“Yes, I thought of that,” Rydal said, moving towards the door. “I think I know how something can be arranged.”
“How?” Chester asked.
“If I can see you tonight, I’ll explain it. I shouldn’t take up any more of your time now. I’ll call on you tonight at the Dardanelles around ten. How is that?”
Chester hesitated, then said, ?
??All right.”
“Oh, it’s so exciting!” Colette said, rising on her toes, her hands clasped under her chin. She pursed her lips as if to throw Rydal a kiss.
“Till tonight,” Rydal said, and went out.
Alone, Chester and Colette stared at each other, he frightened and blank, she smiling dazedly.
“I’ll call for a porter,” Chester said, and went to the telephone.
Colette watched him as he spoke. Now she was frowning a little, biting her underlip as she did when she thought hard about something. After he had hung up, she said, “Ches, what did he mean about that Greek agent not being found till tomorrow morning? When he comes to, isn’t he going to—”
“Honey, I think that guy’s dead,” Chester said in a low voice. He saw Colette’s lavender eyes widen.
“Really? Do you know?”
“I think he is. There really wasn’t any time to make sure,” Chester said, frowning.
“And does . . . does this fellow know it?”
“Yes,” said Chester firmly.
“My God.”
“Yes.” Chester stuffed his fingers into his hip pockets and walked forward between the beds, then made a lunge for his Scotch bottle, whose neck was sticking up out of an antelope duffel bag. “Yes, and we’ll pay for it. We’ll pay plenty.”
“What do you mean?”
Chester was getting the second, unbroken glass from the bathroom. “I mean he’ll want some money for keeping quiet. Wait and see. Fortunately, we’ve got it. It just mustn’t go too far.”
“Oh, do you think he’s really like that?” she asked, still breathless with the shock of death. “He looks—Well, he doesn’t look like a crook. He’s an American.”
“And not too well-heeled. Wait and see, wait and see. Why else do you think he came in here like this? I’d go to some other hotel, except he’s probably downstairs on the street ready to follow us.” Chester waved his glass, then drank it off, half Scotch and half water. “Why else do you think he came in here like this?”
4
Rydal walked from Niko’s apartment to the Hotel Dardanelles in Aeolou Street, walked slowly, but even so he was early, and he lit a cigarette and lingered a block from the hotel, staring into the window of a closed and unlighted pharmacy. The marquee of the Dardanelles had only half its lights on. The street was unusually quiet, Rydal thought. It was a quiet that gave him the feeling something had already happened, was finished, rather than that something was going to happen. A skinny, reddish dog went trotting by, its taut, pointed face thrust anxiously ahead, as if it were fleeing from something. Rydal knew what could have happened. The Greek’s body could have been found hours ago, say just before seven, the trains and buses out of Athens—certainly no more than two or three of each—could have been checked, no MacFarlands found aboard them; the hotels could have been checked and the MacFarlands picked up. The police might be in the hotel this minute, talking to the MacFarlands, getting an admission from Chester that he killed the Greek, because whatever his coolness might be in defrauding, murder seemed to unnerve him. And he, for no particular reason, was going to walk right in on it. Chester would be glad to see him, if the police were there. Chester would say, “Oh! Why, here’s the young man who was with us all afternoon,” and would that reverse Chester’s story of a few minutes before? With a sudden sink in his heart, Rydal realized that, if Chester chose, he could say that he, Rydal Keener, had been tugging the corpse along the hall when Chester came out into the hall and saw him, and that Rydal Keener, knowing the Greek agent was after Chester, had forced Chester to keep silent about his murder. His motive? They couldn’t possibly pin any on Rydal. No, don’t worry about fantasies, Rydal thought. He threw his cigarette down. It was one minute to ten by his Hamilton pocket watch, which was more reliable than his wristwatch.
Rydal glanced around in the lobby of the Dardanelles for anyone who looked like a police type. Besides the young man behind the desk, there was only one other person in the lobby, a fiftyish woman in a black fur-trimmed coat and hat who looked like a German. “Would you call up Mr. MacFarland? I’m expected,” Rydal said, and watched the young man’s face. It was calm.
The young man plugged a pin into the switchboard and said with a heavy Greek accent, “A gentleman to see you, sir.”
Chester’s deep, brisk voice buzzed back over the wire.
“You can go up. Room thirty-one, sir,” said the young man.
There was an elevator, but Rydal took the black-and-white tile stairs. Room 31 was evidently on the second floor, as Rydal saw 28 on a door as soon as he reached the landing. The old floor carpet was vaguely green, the single light tiny and yellowish. It was shabbier than the Melchior Condylis. Rydal knocked on 31.
After a few seconds the door was quickly but only partly opened by Chester.
“Good evening,” Rydal said.
Chester blinked. “You’re alone?”
“Yes.” Rydal saw the fear ebb from Chester’s face. Chester had thought he might arrive with the police, Rydal realized, or perhaps with a friend who would back him up with physical force, if necessary, in order to extort some money.
“Come in,” Chester said.
Rydal went in. “Good evening,” he said to Colette, who was sitting in an armchair, her arms relaxed on the chair’s arms, her legs crossed. A pose of deliberate calm, Rydal felt. “So, no trouble leaving the hotel?” Rydal said to Chester.
“No, no.” Chester rubbed his moustache with a forefinger, and looked at his wife.
“I must say this is a picturesque hotel you sent us to,” Colette said, smiling.
Rydal glanced around the room. It was dingy, the furniture cheap, and that was that. “I suppose it’s only for tonight. I came here to talk to you about passports. I can get two for you by tomorrow noon, I think. I’ve just spoken to a friend.” He meant to sound polite and businesslike, but Chester seemed taken aback at his blurting.
“Oh. Well—Wouldn’t you like to have a seat?” Chester asked, pulling up a straight chair. “Want me to take your coat?”
Rydal started to remove it, then said, “No, that’s all right, thank you.” He unbuttoned his overcoat, and sat down in the chair.
“Considering the heat situation here,” Colette said, “we all ought to be sitting around in our coats. Darling, could you get me my mohair?”
“Certainly, dear.” Chester went to the closet, which had shelves in it, and brought Colette a large black and white mohair stole.
Rydal watched her drape it gracefully and quickly around her shoulders and tuck her hands under it, out of sight.
“You were talking about passports,” Chester said, sitting down in another straight chair. From somewhere he had picked up a half-finished highball. “How about a drink?”
“Not just now, thank you,” Rydal said. He took one of his own cigarettes and lit it. “I can get two passports by tomorrow noon for five thousand dollars apiece. That’s not expensive. The man who is arranging it will expect—say, another thousand. The ten thousand goes to the man who’d obtain them and who can fix them.”
Chester glanced at Colette, then looked back at Rydal. He seemed about to speak, but he took a slow draught of his glass instead.
“I’m not trying to sell you these passports unless you want them,” Rydal said, beginning to feel uncomfortable under Chester’s obvious suspicion of him. “But by tomorrow morning, it seems to me, the police are going to be looking for Chester MacFarland. Even though your name wasn’t on the picture in the agent’s notebook, they’ll have copies of that picture. Someone may know the agent was specifically looking for you this afternoon. You were on the sixth floor of that hotel and so is the agent’s body. They’ll just ask the hotel employees which man on the sixth floor resembled any of the pictures in the agent’s notebook. Then the fact you checked out when you did—”
“Um-m.” Chester leaned forward, took out a pocket handkerchief, and blew his nose.
“It does sound as if he’s right, Ches,” Colette said. “You were saying something about our getting out tonight, but imagine being stopped on the Yugoslav border, for instance, and asked to show our passports, and being told the police want to see us.” She gestured with her left hand as she spoke, and Rydal noticed her diamond, a good big one in an engagement ring, whose value seemed guaranteed by the platinum wedding ring behind it.
Was Chester MacFarland hesitating over the money, Rydal wondered? Five thousand for an American passport was ridiculously cheap, even though Niko’s friend’s work on it would probably be pretty sloppy, too. Rydal glanced at his watch.
“In a hurry?” asked Chester.
“No. Well, yes, I have an appointment at ten-thirty. My friend will wait, but I didn’t want to make him wait too long. It’s Niko, the one who can arrange to get the passports.” Rydal was sitting on the edge of his seat now. He passed his hand over his forehead. He was beginning to feel angry. He could have made a speech to the effect he wasn’t going to get a cent out of the deal, and that he wanted Chester to know that, but something kept him from it. “The purpose of my meeting Niko tonight is to give him the photographs out of your present passports so he can pass them on to his friend. The photos and a first installment on the price, which I think ought to be five thousand. But that’s entirely up to you.” Rydal stood up and crossed the room to an ashtray, an ugly, standing ashtray beside Colette’s armchair.
“Chester, darling—don’t you see his point?” Colette looked up at Rydal. “I do.”
Rydal turned quickly away from her. He looked at Chester, impatient and frowning now, then looked at the door and thought that in five more seconds he’d walk through it and never see them again, speak to Niko and tell him it was all off, and pay out of his own pocket for Niko’s long-distance calls to Nauplion, where his friend Frank was.
“Yes. I guess I do,” Chester said. “We need passports and that’s that.” He was like a man cornered into a bad bargain, cornered and resigned.