Decision at Delphi

  She nodded. “But you mustn’t change your own plans for me. I mean—” She stopped in confusion as she saw the expression in his eyes. She rose quickly, slipping the book into her handbag. “It will be safe there,” she told him, as they started toward the Grande Bretagne. She held out her hand. “Let me take the camera. It’s a nuisance.”

  “Then why should you take it?”

  She thought about that, with a new surprise. Her insistence faded. “You really have your hands full as it is.”

  Indeed I have, he thought. How am I going to persuade her to change her plans about Nauplion. (“Tell her?” he had asked, doubtfully. “Certainly,” the Colonel had said.)

  “Besides,” she was saying, “I am so used to clutching a camera—”

  “Independent, aren’t you?” That silenced her. “You aren’t the type,” he told her.

  “C. L. Hillard has to be.”

  “C. L. Hillard is strictly for the world of Mr. Lee Preston.”

  “Lee Preston—oh, heavens! I ought to have cabled him.”

  “Why?”

  “To let him know I’m here and we’ve met, and—” She began to laugh. “He can stop worrying: everything is completely on schedule, all going according to plan.”

  That amused Strang, too. “I’d have taken a bet against that,” he told her. “This is one morning I never expected to end with a real laugh.”

  She looked at him quickly, her blue eyes grave. “As bad as that?”

  “No, no,” he reassured her, covering up his blunder. “Not altogether. Some good news. Things are more under control than I thought. There are a lot of bright boys on this job. That’s the feeling I got, at least.”

  And there’s some very bad news, too, she thought; that is why he has been worried and tense. No use pestering him with questions. If he tells me anything at all, he will tell it in his own way, in his own good time. Probably, he is going to let me enjoy lunch, have my first visit to the Acropolis in peace, and then he’ll bring up the bad news gently, sideways, trying not to alarm me. Is that the way it is? She hoped, somehow, it was. For a girl who had spent six years practising hard to stand on her own two feet, it was surprising how quickly she had been learning to lean on a man’s arm. Careful, she told herself, careful... The arm is taken away, and then what? You remember. You’ve been through all that, once before. If you are an intelligent, sensible girl, you’ll never risk all that pain again. Never. Once was enough in any lifetime.

  She glanced at him. But how did you stop yourself from falling in love? Think of jade ear-rings. Who cares about even real jade ear-rings? All right, think of his faults. You can’t? Then concentrate on your own: you’re good at running away; it has always been the easy solution. “Tomorrow,” she said, looking at the cars being loaded with baggage in front of the hotel entrance, “just about this time, I’ll be leaving for Nauplion.”

  He looked down at her with a strange expression on his face. “We’ll have to talk about that,” he said. Then they were separated by one of the sponge sellers who seemed to have permanent rights on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. The sponges, strung together, covering him in a cloak of monstrous growth, bobbed and floated as he turned towards them hopefully, only his face and his feet clearly visible at either end of the swaying cocoon. “Not today,” Strang said.

  “Now, if he ever got caught in a heavy downpour—” Cecilia completed the vision in her own mind.

  Strang’s glance had paused, and hardened, just for a brief second, somewhere behind her. In the distance, walking briskly toward the hotel, was Alexander Christophorou. He hadn’t see them yet, but he would. Very soon. At his pace, they’d all meet on the doorstep of the Grande Bretagne. Strang looked at the sponges. “Choose one,” he told Cecilia.

  “Very good sponges,” the man assured her, sensing a sale, calculating how much could be charged. The breeze whisked them up, like a bulbous ruff, around his ears.

  “But I’ve no room in my—”

  “Pick one out,” Strang said urgently.

  She glanced at him, asked whether she ought to poke or probe, was it colour or size or what? She examined the nearest one, at least eighteen inches in diameter. “How do you pack such an object when it is wet? Or perhaps you don’t take a bath on the day you are travelling?” And how long, do I keep talking? she wondered. And must I really choose one of these objects? The man decided for her, by unlooping a monster and thrusting it into her arm.

  “Free my right hand, will you? Thanks.” Strang searched for his wallet.

  She waited, hugging the slipping load of books and magazines under one arm, holding the sponge in the other, her hair whipped by the breeze from the open square over her eyes, her skirts flaring around her knees. “Help!” she said faintly, and laughed.

  “With very great pleasure,” Alexander Christophorou said, coming forward, freeing her arm of the books. “Hullo, Kenneth! You look as if you had been enjoying your morning.” He glanced at the backs of the books. “The Peloponnese? Is that where you start?”

  “I’ve got to get down to work sometime.” The sponge seller was floating away. There was no more excuse for delay.

  “Are you having luncheon here?” Christophorou was asking Cecilia. “Then why don’t we all—”

  “Not today,” Strang said. He tried to keep everything easy and natural. He held out his hand. “I’ll take the books.”

  Cecilia said quickly, “We have to talk over our plans, Mr. Christophorou. I’m leaving tomorrow for Nauplion, and Ken has to brief me. You know...”

  Christophorou looked at her for a long moment. “I don’t. But I can imagine why my friend, here, enjoys his work so much.” They began to walk, all three of them, into the hotel lobby, brilliantly lit, filled with sound and movement. “When will you return?” Christophorou asked Cecilia.

  “Next week. Probably.”

  “Then perhaps—if I can get you away from your camera or from Kenneth—you’ll have dinner with me?”

  “Why—yes.”

  “I look forward to that.” Christophorou glanced at Kenneth Strang. “Good-bye.” He shook hands with each of them, most formally. “I shall leave a note for you,” he told Cecilia. He held her hand just a fraction of a second more than necessary. Then he left and went into the bar.

  “One thing’s for damned sure,” Strang said, very quietly, “we don’t eat here.” He looked at her. “You aren’t going to have dinner with him. Are you?”

  “What else could I say?”

  “You could have said no.”

  “And made him wonder why?”

  “Why should he wonder why?”

  “Because he’s a most attractive man.”

  “You think that?” Strang stared at her. He was tight-lipped.

  “He knows that. Ken,” she added, looking at him in dismay, “I was only trying to help you out. You looked so— so grim.”

  “I don’t look half as grim as I felt.” He looked at their armloads. “Let’s dump this. And get the hell out.” He started toward the porter’s desk.

  “We shan’t heed to,” Cecilia said. “He has changed his mind. He is leaving.” He even gave them a wave of his hand and a self-mocking explanation. “No rest for a journalist!” he told them as he passed by. But his eyes, Strang noticed, weren’t smiling.

  “Here is your bath sponge,” Cecilia said.

  “Not mine. Yours.”

  “Oh, heavens! I mean, thank you. What original presents you do choose... Cleanliness is next to poetry?”

  “That’s right. Mens sana...”

  “I had better leave this where it looks more natural.” She turned toward the elevator, holding the enormous bath sponge nonchalantly, as if she were quite accustomed to wandering around hotel lobbies looking like an absent-minded Aphrodite with a solid piece of foam still clinging to her. “See you in ten minutes?”

  “Right. I’ll wait for you in the bar.” He watched the elevator door close behind her.

  At his elbow
, a man said, “A pretty girl can carry off anything, eh?”

  Strang ignored that, and went into the bar. He had always disliked people who ended sentences with “eh?” But as he ordered a Scotch and soda, and glanced around the crowd, he admitted his nerve ends were raw. If he could worry in peace, he might be less on edge. All this pretence of everything being quite normal—that was what really wore a man down. He was relieved to see no one he knew in the bar. No more pretence, meanwhile. Just some plain worrying. One thing was certain, the Colonel might murmur “Discretion!” warningly, but Cecilia would have to be told enough to put her on her guard. “To Nauplion,” she had said so innocently. And Christophorou had looked at her searchingly, perhaps trying to calculate some hidden purpose, a threat or an ill-timed little joke. Then he wondered what signal Christophorou had received in this bar, or piece of information (a note concealed in a handshake: that was a speciality of his, wasn’t it?) which had sent him away so quickly with that grim look in his eyes? I wish to God, Strang thought, that Colonel Zafiris would pick him up right now, and finish all this waiting. The Colonel had certainly much more information than he told me, and probably much more proof. The Greeks were never simple; they were like icebergs, one tenth showing, nine tenths hidden. What was the Colonel waiting for? I know one thing for certain: he doesn’t wait without some purpose. Oh, blast them all, Strang thought bitterly, why do they make life so complicated?

  As he drank his Scotch, he looked at the camera lying on the bar before him. Now what could a camera be used for, with its insides ripped out, some of these fancy new explosives expertly stuffed inside, a detonation triggered to the release? Only Yorghis wouldn’t get very near any dictator to take a pretty picture with a borrowed camera; and Yorghis was not the type to blow himself up, along with fifty other people, for the sake of The Cause. Besides, preparations had been long made in Yugoslavia: a camera brought in, at this stage? Not likely. And why should a camera be borrowed and used if it was going to be blown to pieces? The serial number, the sure lead to identification, would have to stay intact. A British camera... In Yugoslavia? No. No purpose there. Now a camera traced to a Greek owner—that would have had some point. What if that camera never went to Yugoslavia at all? Yorghis borrowed it, Yorghis handed it over for use elsewhere.

  Or perhaps I’m all wrong, he thought, perhaps I’ve got conspiracy and plots on the brain. Perhaps Yorghis for once, acted quite honestly. He wanted a camera to take snapshots of pretty girls in swim suits.

  Strang looked at Cecilia’s camera. A revolver, he thought, could be used in a camera, and the identification not destroyed. But a revolver, when guards were around, might have only one chance of hitting its target. Guards weren’t supposed to allow more than that. No, he decided again, a revolver is too chancy for the sure thing that Drakon has been planning. He would want something with more coverage than one bullet, something more certain and more spectacular.

  Good God, he thought as he noticed his reflection in the glass behind the bar, what a lot of pretty little speculations you’re churning around behind that completely calm and normal face! His face, indeed, was so normal that he was shocked. What our brave-new-world scientists ought to be inventing was a thought ray, revealing everything going on inside the inhuman head. That would take care of a lot of crookery. Honest men might be able to sleep better.

  A camera, used in an assassination, identifiable as belonging to the wife of an English attaché... Where would that stir up some really nasty trouble, setting people at one another’s throats? There was no lack of places like that today, in this happy, happy world. Cyprus was one of them. And Ottway was on his way there, suddenly, unexpectedly, after a session with the Colonel this morning.

  Now, if I were Drakon, how would I arrange that little operation? A batch of Greek resistance heroes and Cypriot patriots blown to pieces by a Turk in the pay of the perfidious English. Camera and Turk, of course, intact. You couldn’t destroy evidence after arranging it so carefully. But what would you use in the camera? Or would you just use it as a carrying case, something from which you could extract a high-powered grenade and throw it? Strang felt cold sweat edge his brow at the idea he had conjured up. No, he decided, I wouldn’t really make a very good Drakon. I haven’t a strong-enough stomach. He paid for his drink, looked at his watch. She was two minutes late. He picked up the camera and started toward the door. In his haste he almost ran smack into Tommy, benign and ruddy as ever even after a late late night, but with a worried glint in his blue eyes.

  “I was hoping to see Ottway here,” Tommy kept his voice low as he looked around the room. “Tried to speak with him this morning several times. I’m sorry, Strang. I don’t seem much help to you. I just can’t get him on the telephone.”

  “I think we can stop worrying about him. He didn’t need any prodding.”

  “He took action by himself?” The old eyes were relieved. “We should have expected that,” Tommy said, a little severely. He bowed to a table nearby. “Come and let me introduce you to Madame Kontos. Delightful woman. Widow of a poet. Interested in music. Most knowledgeable. She holds the most absorbing salon every Sunday afternoon. You simply must see that side of Athens, my dear fellow. Come along.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t. I’m meeting Cecilia for lunch. Another time? And thank you again for last night. I’m sorry we gave you so much trouble.”

  “Not at all, not at all.” The genial face was clouded. “It’s a very bad show, a very bad show, indeed, indeed. All around.” Tommy hesitated. “I had a very odd visitor this morning.”

  “Oh?”

  Tommy drew Strang to one side of the doorway, manœuvred him against a corner free from traffic, dropped his voice still more. “Asking questions about Aleco,” he whispered.

  “About that ring?”

  Tommy stared for a moment, perhaps even a little disappointed. “Yes.”

  “Do you remember it?”

  “Never saw it in my life.” Then he studied Strang’s tense face. “Is it so important to you?” he asked in surprise.

  “Yes,” Strang said. “And to Miss Hillard.”

  Tommy was worried now, embarrassed. “There was such a ring,” he said slowly. “I’ve just come from seeing Aleco’s father. That young man who visited me was leaving as I arrived. Aleco’s father—well, I have never seen him so distressed. This may kill him, you know.”

  “He identified the ring?”

  “What else could he do? Tell a lie about it?” asked Tommy angrily.

  Strang shook his head. So now I know, he was thinking; no doubts, small hopes, or explanations left. Alexander Christophorou is Odysseus.

  Tommy touched his arm. “This goes, of course, no farther?”

  “No farther.” And you and I, he was thinking, are now charter members of The Great Deceived.

  “There must be some explanation, don’t you think?”

  Strang nodded. But not the explanation that either of us wanted.

  “Ah, well—” Tommy said, leaving the incomprehensible, turning to the immediate, as he took a step away. “You will remember to bring Miss Hillard to tea some day?” he asked in a normal tone of voice, nodded to a passing friend, and moved toward the most knowledgeable Madame Kontos.

  Strang stepped into the lobby. He was late, but Cecilia was later. He looked at his watch again, checked it with the clock. He had a moment of real panic, standing there in the lobby, normal faces and voices all around him, everyone safely assured, with only thoughts of food or drink or pleasant expeditions in their well-groomed heads. But just then, she appeared, coming down the last steps of the staircase that the baggage porters used.

  “The elevators were packed,” she said. “They kept passing my floor. So at last I gave up, and walked. Am I late?”

  20

  It was too early, Greek time, for the huge dining-room to be busy. So luncheon was fairly quick, with several waiters in full evening dress to serve them lamb chops and coffee. “You’ll need more than th
at,” Cecilia said, looking at Strang’s plate.

  “I guess that drink I had in the bar ruined my appetite.”

  “Or something.” She looked at him.

  So he had to smile cheerfully and pretend he could taste the food. “About this Nauplion trip,” he began, tactfully enough, once everything was eaten except the bones in little paper frills. “You’re not really serious about it, are you?”

  “Why not? I have to start work sometime.”

  “That’s a good idea,” he agreed. “But not Nauplion. Not for a few days, at least. Give your eye time to get accustomed to Greek light, all that sort of thing.”

  She didn’t seem much impressed.

  “You might as well wait until I can go there with you.”

  “But I thought you liked to work on your own. You and Steve—”

  “Steve was different,” he told her. “I had worked with him before. We had time to talk over our plans in New York. I knew his ideas, he knew mine. We could work alone. See?”

  “I see.” But there was a slight curve on a well-marked eyebrow. “If we could talk over plans, this evening, wouldn’t that be enough?”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t want you wandering alone around the Peloponnese, at this time, Cecilia. Have you got that? Not alone.”

  His face was so set, so serious that she stopped objecting. “Yes,” she said.

  He took a deep breath of relief. It had been easier than he had expected, after all.

  “Then,” she asked, “where can I wander around alone? In Athens?”

  “That was the idea, this morning. But now—”

  “Now?” she wondered.