“If he escaped,” said the girl. She pulled the loose coat around her and began walking to the door.
“One minute,” Strang said in English. “How did you come here?”
The girl looked puzzled. “I walked,” she said.
“Alone?”
“But of course.” She paused. “I thought I was running away. Leaving my half-dozen fur coats—” she flashed a sharp glance at him—“beginning all over again.” She shrugged her shoulders.
“Who gave you this coat?” He touched the loose sleeve.
“My maid, Maria.”
“She knew you were coming here?”
“She is devoted to me.”
“Did she know you were coming here?”
“Someone had to find out where Erinna Street was. I’m a stranger in Athens. Maria went out this afternoon, and found it. Tonight, when they were all downstairs talking, she unlocked my bedroom door. I slipped down the back stairs and came here.” Katherini Roilos looked at him anxiously. “I can trust Maria. She helped me escape.”
The Cretan was muttering with annoyance at the use of English, his curiosity overreaching his polite patience. Petros began translating roughly.
Strang said, “Why were you locked in your room?”
“I was not told why. When I arrived this afternoon in Athens, my aunt locked me into my room. She had learned about my visit to Perspective, about my putting our names on the passenger list on the liner.” Katherini shivered. She forced herself to go on. “Tonight, there was a meeting of them all. They were discussing me. Maria brought me the news. She guarded me while I went down the back staircase.”
“Two men followed you here.”
“No one followed me. I made sure.”
“Then two men came, afterward. They were waiting when we arrived here.”
The girl’s thin, white face turned toward Cecilia.
“Yes, that’s true,” Cecilia said, and rose a little stiffly. She came over to the girl, and took the slender white hands, so cold and trembling. “It’s all right, we’ll take care of you.” But how on earth, she wondered dismally, do we do that? She exchanged glances with Strang.
The Cretan had risen. “What is this? What is this?”
Petros said, “I’ve just told you. Two men are waiting.”
“What men?” The white eyebrows and moustache bristled..
In slow Greek, Strang described them. The girl’s cold hands tightened, fear spread across her face. “Boris. He is the little man. A Bulgarian.”
“A Bulgarian!” the old man repeated, with contempt and hatred. He spat on the floor and rubbed the mark out with his foot.
“And the tall man?” Strang asked her.
“Nikos.” She stared, at him helplessly.
“Nikos Kladas!” Petros was tight-lipped.
My God, thought Strang, we spoke to him. We actually spoke to him. Here, in Erinna Street... He recovered himself. Quickly, he asked the girl, “Did you tell your maid what house you were looking for in Erinna Street?”
She shook her head.
“Did you tell her you were searching for Petros?” She shook her head.
“You must have given same excuse,” he said in exasperation.
“Only that a cousin of my father lived in Erinna Street.”
“But no mention of Petros?” he insisted. Thank God for that, he thought, as she shook her head again. He glanced at his watch. “How long will they stay, out there?”
“All night, if necessary,” Petros said. He exchanged glances with his brothers. They moved towards the door.
“What?” the old man stopped them sharply. “We sit here for an hour of nothing, the door closed. And then you open the door and rush out to look? No, no. We must think of a better way. We must trick them a little.” The prospect pleased him. Yes, thought Strang, that’s wise: we had better think of what we are going to do before we start doing it. And as the men started thinking in close argument, he turned to Cecilia. “She can’t stay. She can’t leave. We are in one hell of a fix.”
“Well, at least she can sit,” Cecilia said, and led the girl to a chair. “She’s freezing cold.”
In this room, Strang wondered, with its closed high window and heavy door and thick walls? The temperature, with all the excitement, must have reached a communal ninety degrees. “I’ll get her a drink,” he said, a little abstractedly, for he had his own thinking to do. He walked slowly across the room to pick up the wine bottle and a glass. The boy followed him, ready to help, smoothing his badge of office, the undisturbed napkin which he never seemed to unfold, into its correct place over his arm. He looked a little astounded as the cats, one by one, began to emerged from under the table, pausing, stretching, picking their way slowly into the light. A dark, heavily striped tiger reached up, not too steadily, to try out its claws on Cecilia’s coat, lying over the back of a chair. “Damn and blast you,” said Strang, making a grab for the coat. The boy, ever helpful, landed a kick. “They need some air,” Strang said as the boy— he must have seen the saucerless coffee cups—frowned and then looked under the table. He picked up the saucers, smelling them, and broke into a wide smile. He called over his shoulder to the men, and began to laugh as he talked.
A laugh was a strange sound in that room, but it was a good sound. The men stopped their argument, looked surprised, annoyed, and—as they understood—relaxed a little. Strang said, “There’s your excuse to open the door and send someone outside.” He pointed to the cats. Then he concentrated on pouring wine for Katherini.
The old Cretan was quick to see the chance and elaborate on it. “Take the cats out. Leave the door wide open. They will hear voices and music. Play!” he told one of the young men. “And you—” he said to the girl—“go into the kitchen. Keep out of sight. Not you!” he told Cecilia. “Sit there and listen to the music. If anyone is, near this house and looks inside, he will see what should be seen, hear what should be heard.”
“Unless he has climbed up to look in the window,” Strang told Petros.
Petros shook his head. “First, he would have to climb into our yard. The wall has spikes. And then there is also a dog.”
“Stop talking in that foolish tongue,” the old man said, “and tell your girl she’s to stay here.” For Cecilia was trying to follow Katherini into the kitchen, and the old man was holding her back by her wrist. “If she has so much strength, this one, why didn’t she kick the cats out of her way? Wasting good wine... Tell her that, too.”
“Oh!” Cecilia said, and sat down again, as Strang explained.
“I thought she was a woman without nerves,” the old man went on, as he signalled to Petros. The door was opened wide, and the cold sharp air streamed in. The cats ran out. The boy followed, shouting. The old man stood, looking down at Cecilia. “All evening, she sat. Very still. The cats at her feet. I said to myself, There’s a woman with great calm. But I now see she’s just a woman, with all the little tricks.” He was enjoying himself immensely.
“He is talking about me, isn’t he?” Cecilia was even forgetting she sat in full view of the open door.
Strang told her, amused by the expression on her face.
“You mean he actually noticed me this evening?”
“Probably counted every cigarette you smoked, and pitied Americans who have chimneys instead of women.” And so now the three of them were amused, quite naturally. Anyone looking in from the street through the door would find this harmless scene a little difficult to fit into any suspicions. One of the young men had picked up a strange-looking instrument with a single string, and was plucking a slow, lamenting accompaniment to his song. The others listened, eyes half closed. The woman had let her head scarf fall back over her shoulders. It was, thought Strang, a picture he would never shake out of his memory.
The boy stood at the threshold. “About time, too,” the old man said crossly. “It is cold. Shut that door!”
Indeed it was. Cecilia had gathered her coat round her shoulders. T
he door closed. And they all looked at the boy.
“Well?” asked his father.
“There was one man outside.”
“Which one?”
“He was my height.”
“Where?”
“Just across from this door. He hid behind the big tree.”
Petros said, “And you stared at him?”
“No, I didn’t.” The boy was hurt.
“He did well, Petros,” the old man said. “You could have done no better.”
“But where has Nikos gone?” Petros wanted to know.
“That is not our problem at this moment.” The old man looked at Strang and Cecilia. “You must leave together. You must be seen, walking away just as you walked in.”
“And the girl?”
“She can stay here—” The old man glanced at his wife, but there was neither approval nor objection from her. “They can wait and watch, outside, but it will do them no good. She can stay here for months, as Stefanos once did.”
“But no one knew Stefanos was here. These men know she came to the street. There will be danger.”
The old man looked at his son, his stepson, his brother-in-law. “We are enough,” he said.
“The girl has information she ought to tell.”
“She has told us all that is needed.”
“But there is more than Stefanos to think of,” Strange said desperately.
“What is more than Stefanos?” the old man asked sombrely. He looked around, sharply, as the girl came quietly to the kitchen doorway. “You stay here,” he told her. “No one will get near you.”
She looked past him at Strang. “I know what you mean,” she told him. “But I will not go to the police with my story. There would be scandal, newspapers. My aunt does not deserve that.”
“Not to the police,” he said. “There are others—”
“Counter-intelligence? Military intelligence? My aunt would be branded as a traitor. Our family is too much hated already. Would you never have our name free of that?”
“You could free it.”
“By being a traitor to my aunt? No. All I have done is to try to save the life of Stefanos Kladas. That is all I will do.”
“And you do not care if other people lose their lives?”
“Who?” She was angry, defiant.
“You know quite well,” he told her sharply. In English, he added, “You know what a political conspiracy means to ordinary people, the people you saw in the street today when you came to Athens, the people in your village. You were only four, you said, when your village was burned. By whom? Did the people rejoice? Or was it only a few men, like your father, who were glad? Surely, even someone four years old could remember flames and screams of terror and, afterward—yes, afterward, what did you hear? Or were the survivors scattered in the hills so you couldn’t hear them weep?”
My God, he thought, taking a deep breath, where did that all come from?
She stared at the ground and said nothing. But, at least, the anger and defiance had gone.
He said, very quietly, “Money is like all weapons: it can be used for good or for evil. I could think of a hundred ways in which your aunt’s fortune could be spent to bring good to Greece. Instead, she spends it in the one way that is bound to bring suffering. Does she hate Greece so much?”
The girl looked up at him. Her eyes dilated.
“No one is forcing her to spend her money this way. She made her own choice, didn’t she?”
“She has suffered—you don’t know what she has suffered. You hear their side of the story,” she gestured to the others. “She has her story, too, just as terrible as theirs.”
“I know,” he said. “Every side in politics has its own reasons. But we are not arguing about rights and wrongs in politics. We are talking of something more honest than that. We are talking of suffering.”
“Suffering changes people. It makes them different,” she said haltingly. “My aunt has suffered much.”
“It doesn’t change. It strips them down to what they really are. It only shows them naked. It shows what lay hidden inside them.” He paused. “For God’s sake, can’t you see that?”
The Cretan and his family were standing quite still, listening intently, although only Petros and perhaps the boy could have understood anything that had been said. The old man hadn’t even blustered for an immediate translation, as if the emotion in the two voices demanded the respect of silence.
Strang made his last appeal to the girl. “These people here have no reason to like you, yet they’ve offered you shelter. Your aunt loves you, yet what does she offer you now? There’s a difference in the kind of people they are and the kind of woman your aunt is. If you think she is as human as they are, why don’t you walk out of that door and put your little hand right into the Bulgarian’s? Ask him to take you back to all those dear sweet people who are only twisted by what they’ve suffered?”
The girl flinched, then became angry with herself for the instinctive gesture, and, in turn, translated the anger on to him. “What do Americans know about suffering?” she demanded, facing him.
Strang’s lips closed tightly, stopped his quick comment that her time might have been better spent in reading some American history than on choosing the minks for her coats, if only to keep herself from being as stupid as she sounded. He said, very quietly, making his sarcasm twice as bitter, “That’s right: we fought our civil war with rose petals.”
She turned away from him. She turned away from the others, too, as if she didn’t want to be reminded that people could suffer and still remain human beings. She looked at Cecilia.
Cecilia’s voice was gentle. “Who killed your father and brother, Katherini?”
Katherini stared at her. “It was not my aunt. She was angry when she heard.”
“But she knew their murderer.”
“Yes.”
“Did she have him arrested?”
“No.” For a moment, the girl seemed almost scornful at the American’s naïveté about police. As if they could solve anything like this!
“She never saw him again—she cut him out of her life—she said how evil he was—” Cecilia ran out of suggestions. But she had given enough, it seemed.
“No,” the girl said slowly;
“So, if she was angry, it wasn’t with him.”
“But—” the girl began, and fell silent.
“Perhaps she was angry because the murders were badly planned. Perhaps they did not look like suicide or an accident?”
The girl stared at her.
“After all,” Cecilia said, getting up from the table, “who pays the murderer? I mean—what does he live on? How does he earn his money for food and clothes? Someone employs him. Or has he been discharged? Is he out of favour?”
The girl’s eyes widened still more.
Cecilia took her arm. “Then what are we arguing about?”
Katherini Roilos didn’t pull her arm away. Instead, her hand suddenly gripped Cecilia’s. It was still ice-cold. “If only,” Cecilia said to Strang, “we could get a good hot meal inside her, put her in a comfortable bed, let her sleep, with friends sitting near.”
Strang nodded. But where could they find all that? Not only food and a bed, but complete safety, too. Where? And then he knew. He said to the girl, “Will you come with us?”
“You want me to tell—everything?” Katherini Roilos asked.
“I think you ought to. But it’s your choice.”
“Perhaps,” she said slowly, “perhaps it is the only choice.” She looked at Cecilia. “Yes,” she said softly. “I’ll go with you. But how?” She looked at the door to the street. “How?”
“Petros,” Strang called over to the group of talking men, “we need your help.”
14
“Good night,” the boy said solemnly, smoothing the folded napkin over his arm, ducking his small round head in a little bow. Overhead, the naked bulb shone down from the edge of the rippled roof and ca
st a net of light over the boy and the two men beside him.
“Good night,” said the Cretan. He was a massive and imposing figure, standing erect before the doorway of his house, his feet planted securely on the earth road, his wide breeches tucked into his long heavy boots, his waistcoat now buttoned and a handkerchief twisted around his head, low on his brow, against the night air.
“Good night,” said one of the stepsons, and flashed a smile.
“Good night,” said Cecilia and Strang, and turned from the little group to walk down Erinna Street. Halfway, Cecilia turned to wave back to them: three still figures under the roof’s hard light; to one side of them, the tree with its spread of shadow; behind them, the steep face of rough rock.
“At least,” she said lightly, “I did get one view of the Acropolis tonight.” She was more tired than she would allow, though. Her weight was beginning to rest on Strang’s arm.
“We don’t have much chance of finding a taxi at this hour. Not here,” he said worriedly, as they reached the corner and found the street deserted. “Can you walk three or four blocks?”
I’ll have to, she thought. “Of course.” She dropped her voice. “Did you see the Bulgarian anywhere?”
“He was under the tree as I opened the door. He drew behind its trunk.”
“What’s the plan?” she asked. “You were all talking Greek so busily that no one had time to translate anything.”
“Petros will smuggle Katherini out by the yard, and through some other yards that stretch along under the Acropolis wall. He is borrowing a light truck he almost shares with one of his neighbours—I couldn’t get that part quite straight; it was all very digressive. Seemingly, he drives a truck in winter, a bus in the summer. In any case, he can get hold of some kind of transportation. He will bring the girl to the corner of Dimocritos Street, and that’s only a block from Pringle’s doorstep.”
“Pringle?”
“An attaché at the embassy. Married. Katherini will be safe there. In the morning, she can see some people. And if she will only tell them what she knows—” He shook his head, remembering his defeat. “Without you, she would have told nothing. Or as little as possible. Or much too late to do any good.”