Decision at Delphi Read online

  “I wanted to tell you—” she began, almost shyly, but her voice was blotted out. There was a wild beating of gongs, a procession of stewards calling their warnings in high Italian fortissimo, raised voices, more gongs echoing down the corridor, a rush, a bustle, a surge of people outside the cabin door, the frenzied excitement of expected departure. The girl laughed and looked at Strang helplessly. The crushing weight of noise lifted. She was about to speak.

  “Second warning bell has gone,” Josephine interrupted. “Kenneth, I didn’t get a minute to talk to you!” She began making up for lost time. Behind her, husband Carl was saying decided good-byes to everyone. He was a hale, explosive type, with prematurely white hair, who had done very well on Madison Avenue with his capacity to make up other people’s minds for them. Now he had decided it was time to get off this ship, and everyone here was going to get off this ship, too; he’d see to that. He thumped Strang’s shoulder. “What a racket you’re in!” he told everyone. “Five months’ vacation, while all the rest of us are chained to the desk! Tell me”—he turned to Lee Preston—“is there really any demand for the kind of stuff Ken does?” He gave a genial nod of dismissal and passed on to say good-bye to Mason Farmer, signalling Josephine to follow.

  Josephine finished her advice about brucellosis, gave a cheek to kiss, a jangle of bracelets as a farewell salute, and then said, “Oh, I nearly forgot—the rest of your luggage came. Carl had it put under your bed, out of the way. He took care of the two stewards.”

  Strang, now shaking Mason Farmer’s hand, looked startled. “Two?”

  “They came separately.” And as he stared at her, she added a little sharply, “Yes—your two cases. The large one and the little one. They’re under your bed. You’ll remember that?”

  Strang looked at his sister’s retreating back, then at Farmer in amazement. But the publisher had his own immediate problem. In his quiet, diffident way, he was saying, “You won’t forget that we’d like very much to see your work when it’s completed? I think you’ll have a book there.”

  “I shan’t forget,” Strang promised, a little dazed by the hint of Farmer’s real interest. Normally, such a moment would have rocketed him through the ceiling, but now he was still half thinking about some fellow passenger’s small suitcase stowed neatly under his bed. Carl’s brisk efficiency was often self-defeating: why hadn’t he looked at the labels to make sure?

  “After our three instalments are published,” Preston was reminding Farmer with professional friendliness.

  “Of course, of course. By the way, Strang, why not take in Asia Minor? There’s a good deal of Greek remains at Pergamum and—”

  “Not this trip,” Preston said firmly. “Ken has enough on his plate as it is. We’re leaving the Greek eastern empire for another year. You’ll just have to plan a two-volume job, Mason.” He enjoyed the worry on his friend’s brow. “Cheer up. If you charge fifteen dollars a volume, you’ll clear all expenses. Time you had a prestige book.”

  “My, my, and is this how it’s done?” Jennifer asked, lining up in turn for her good-bye hug. “You do know how to parlay your talents, brother.” She looked a little triumphantly at her husband. Philip. Of all the family, Jennifer had been the only one not to take a dim view of Kenneth Strang’s change in career. Philip, even with the evidence all around him that his brother-in-law was not exactly destitute, still had regret in his eyes for Maclehose, Mitchem and Moore, the firm of architects where Kenneth’s career would have been so nicely assured. Still, they’d always take Kenneth on again, if he decided to return to architecture once he got these mad ideas out of his system. Too bad Kenneth had not married the Bradley girl; there was nothing like a wife and a first mortgage for keeping a man’s feet firm on his own piece of ground. Then Philip put these thoughts aside and shook hands warmly. He liked his young brother-in-law despite the fact he never quite knew what to talk to him about. He wished him well.

  Then came the others—Jerry Garfield, from Perspective; Judith Robbins, from Maclehose, Mitchem and Moore; Tom Wallis and Matt O’Brien, old friends from Strang’s Navy days.

  O’Brien was saying, “Wouldn’t mind seeing Athens again myself. At least you won’t be dodging machine-gun bullets this time, Ken.”

  “What’s that?” Preston asked quickly. “Machine-gun bullets?”

  “After the Germans cleared out,” Wallis explained, making everything still more bewildering.

  “December, 1944,” added O’Brien. “Boy, what a Christmas that was! Everyone starving and shooting each other.” He shook his head, remembering his introduction to power politics in action. “And the British caught in the middle—trying to chase the Communists back into the mountains without blowing Athens or the Athenians to pieces.”

  “Wonder if that Greek is still alive?” Wallis speculated. He ignored the worried steward who had suddenly appeared at the cabin door. “The one who smuggled us through the street-fighting back to the ship. What was his name again? Chris— Chris something—”

  “Christophorou,” Strang said. “Alexander Christophorou.”

  “All visitors must leave, all visitors ashore!” the steward announced loudly. “All—”

  “That’s it! Christophorou,” said Wallis. “Quite a guy. As crazy as they come. Took Ken right up to the Acropolis walls to let him get a close look at the Parthenon by moonlight. We could have wrung both their necks.”

  “Not so much by moonlight,” Strang said, giving the steward a reassuring signal. “It was more by the rocket’s red glare. Just coming, steward.”

  But the man was crossing, much perturbed, to close the opened porthole. He kept saying, “It is not permitted. Vietato—”

  “I know, I know,” Strang said in Italian, “but this lady fainted, and so...” He shrugged helplessly. The steward eyed Miss Hillard doubtfully, and she restrained the beginning of a laugh. Did she understand Italian? Strang wondered, and was caught off balance. He turned quickly back to the steward. “There is a small case under the bed. It isn’t mine. Take it to the right cabin, will you?” And then he was finishing the last good-byes. “I’ll walk to the gangplank with you,” he told Lee Preston and Miss Hillard. I’ll have that one small chance to talk with her, he thought, to watch these incredible eyes.

  But, as they all left the cabin, the steward called to him urgently. “Signore Strang! Signore Strang!” The man was bending over the small case he had pulled out from under the bed. “This is your case, signore.”

  Strang halted at the door. “Can’t be. I know what I packed,” he told Miss Hillard. Then, as the steward pointed at the label, he came back into the cabin. The label, in heavy block letters, all too clear, said KENNETH C. STRANG. It was the regulation label for the Italian Line, first class, main deck, with the correct cabin number most definitely marked. “All right, all right,” he said, completely defeated. “I’ll straighten this out later. Thanks.” He turned back to the door. The others had gone.

  Preston was waiting outside in the corridor. Miss Hillard was far away, escorted by Wallis and O’Brien. Too late now, Strang thought: Wallis and O’Brien would not give her up so easily. There’s a general conspiracy, he told himself, to keep me from talking to that girl.

  “Don’t forget, Ken, to tell Kladas about my strange visitor,” Preston was saying as they reached the promenade deck, where the covered gangplank was secured. “And when you see the temple at Segesta, give it a salute from me, will you? It’s a beauty, almost intact in spite of the Carthaginians. Been standing there for twenty-five hundred years and still—” He stopped shaking Strang’s hand, looked past him. “By God,” he said in a startled voice, “she’s sailing!”

  “Who?”

  From above their heads, the siren’s blast seared every eardrum, even set the deck tingling under their feet.

  Preston waited, frowning, impatient. “The profile,” he could say at last. “The girl who was frightened. The girl in my office. Don’t look now, you damn fool, she’s got her duenna right
at her elbow.”

  “Did she recognise you?”

  “Sure. She froze. No pin curls now, but plenty of mink. Platinum, at that! Yes, yes, officer, I’m just leaving.” He waved and ran, barely reaching the pier before the gangway was being swung off. His exit, thought Strang, was scarcely what Preston had planned. The final bon mot about Segesta was for ever silenced. The siren gave a last and triumphant blast, overwhelming the babel of voices on the pier, the shouts, the laughter. He couldn’t see Preston, any more. Where were the others? His eyes searched the mass of faces and waving handkerchiefs. Was he expected to stay and wave? Possibly. Before beginning that duty, he turned to light a cigarette. Now he could look at the girl in the platinum mink coat. Yes, that profile would be hard to forget. Standing beside her, a small squat woman, in sombre black, was speaking in a torrent of sharp syllables.

  “That is all that is to be seen,” the woman was saying in Greek. “You will catch cold, and your aunt will blame me. Come!” She stumped away on her sensible, black leather shoes. “Katherini!” she called over her shoulder. And the girl, who had been looking at the laughing crowd below, her with an expression of—yes, it had been sadness—turned obediently and followed. She passed two feet away from Strang. She glanced at him for a brief moment. Her eyes flickered as if she had identified him, known who he was. Suddenly they were blank again. Her face had become a cold, impersonal mask. She was very young, he saw, probably no more than twenty; much too young to need any mask on that bale, dark-eyed face.

  So she is Greek, he thought, as he took his position at the rail. Lee Preston had not guessed that; her English accent must be good. Well educated, travelled, mink, pearls, expensive gloves holding a large crocodile handbag, a vague perfume of roses. The very best roses. Her father must own three shipping lines, at least.

  Strang couldn’t find any face he could recognise on the pier below him. Hundreds were pressing forward from under the roof of the shed, to see and be seen; but there was no one he knew. Then, just as, unexpectedly, he felt a chill of loneliness among all the warmth of emotion sweeping around him, he saw O’Brien’s red hair and Wallis’s semaphoric arm. And, between them, he saw the Hillard girl. He gave a shout and waved wildly. Suddenly, she was waving too. It was very pleasant, after all, to have someone to whom you could wave.

  The bustling tugs hauled and pushed and prodded the towering ship, until its prow pointed down the Hudson toward the ocean. Then, with chests proudly out and heads held high, they gave a piercing hoot of farewell before they sped, skirts gathered up and around them, back to the long row of piers on the Manhattan shore. From Jersey, the late-afternoon sun turned the high windows of the tall buildings into flaming gold. Strang stood, collar turned up against the cold Hudson wind, watching the midtown sky-scrapers, shadow behind shadow, wheel and recede into a world that was both a dream and a reality.

  He went back to his cabin for his overcoat. The steward had worked a miracle—the place had been cleared of glasses and bottles and cigarette stubs. The telegrams were stacked neatly on his dressing table beside the penknife Jennifer had used. It smelled of caviar, the one witness left to the noise and confusion of an hour ago. Oh, yes, there was that damned suitcase, too. He stood looking at it, the intruding stranger sitting so calmly on his floor with his name tied round its neck. He’d see about that. He rang for the steward.

  The man came, bringing three more telegrams and a special-delivery letter with a receipt to sign for the purser’s office. The letter was addressed to him in Steve Kladas’s handwriting. It felt as if something solid were enclosed. He slit the envelope with his knife. Yes, there was a key inside, a very small key which would fit the lock of a small suitcase. And a sheet of cheap yellow paper filled with Steve’s large letters. “Knew you were travelling light,” Steve had scrawled. “I’m weighed down with more excess baggage than usual. Can you help me out? The extra film is necessary, or I wouldn’t bother you. Be seeing you. Stefanos.”

  “Everything all right, signore? “the steward asked anxiously. Strang nodded, and began opening the last telegrams. The steward hesitated. The small suitcase no longer seemed to trouble the American. Signore Strang must have made a mistake; it was understandable—all that champagne, and scarcely a half-bottle left.

  But when the man had gone, Strang dropped the telegrams, took the key, and opened Steve’s small case. It was packed with rolls of colour film, each in its sealed yellow box. They were the type he could use in his own Stereorealist camera. For that he was thankful. Otherwise, how was he going to explain them through customs? So he locked the small case—it was the size of an overnight bag, easy to handle, and for that he was thankful, too—pushed it back under the bed with his foot, attached its key to his own ring, tore up the letter, found his coat, remembered to remove his camera from its pocket, and went upstairs again. He’d get some exercise and air until the three-mile limit was passed. This might be an interesting sea voyage, after all. It shouldn’t be too difficult on this ship to find an excuse to talk to Miss Katherine (how would a Greek say that?—oh, yes. Despoinis Katherini) and find out why she was so frightened. After all, duennas did not dance.

  2

  Duennas did not dance. But neither did Katherini. Nor did she sit and read in any of the deck chairs around the pool. Nor play shuffleboard, nor write letters, nor take the air, nor go to the movies, nor visit the library. Nor did she eat: not once did she, or the duenna, or the aunt, appear in the dining-room for meals. And not even the romantic moment of sailing among the islands of the Azores in a strange effect of cloudburst and sunset—where one huge mountaintop, rising blackly from dark waters, was almost blotted out by rain while the island opposite, across a short stretch of sea, lay golden and placid under flame-tinged skies, with whitewashed houses scattered on green hillsides—brought any of the three women into view.

  Apart from an entry in the passenger list that might possibly refer to the invisible travellers (“Signora Euphrosyne Duval, of Athens; and niece, Signorina Katherini Roilos, of Athens”), and a second glimpse of the girl herself one evening, when everyone was crowding into the cocktail bars or dressing for dinner, the women might have been only something he had dreamed up to break the monotony of the interminable, grey Atlantic.

  Strang had worked dutifully that afternoon, and at six o’clock had come up to the emptying decks for a brisk walk. Eight times around the ship, or some such nonsense, made a mile, it was said. But that gave him a feeling of imitating a phonograph needle, and so he preferred to climb stairs as he came on them and twist his way vertically through the layers of decks. He had reached the topmost stretch of scrubbed white wood, where the suites of rooms had doors that opened out on to the deck itself, as private a veranda as one could have on a public carrier. He might not have noticed the girl, so still was she standing at the rail’s edge in the shelter of a lifeboat, had the blue chiffon scarf round her head not streamed wildly out in the wind. It escaped her hands and blew toward him. She turned quickly—this time she was wearing a voluminous dark fur coat, no doubt one of the little old minks she kept for horizongazing—and saw him.

  The scarf had whipped round the line on the davits of the lifeboat near him. By standing on the lower bar of the open rail, holding on to the lacings of the tarpaulin covering the lifeboat, Strang could just reach the fluttering tip of the scarf. He played it free slowly, bracing, his thighs against the upper bar of the rail, telling himself he’d look a damn fool bobbing around in the white froth of cut waves far below him. He stepped back on to the solid deck with admitted relief. The girl had vanished. A round small man in a long dark overcoat, hands in pockets, was standing at the side of the lifeboat with a look of sardonic amusement on his sallow-skinned face. Now where had this particular little goblin, with the sharp black eyes, well-oiled black hair, and thin black moustache, been hiding? Strang wondered. Probably something that crawled out from under the tarpaulin.

  The man took one small hand from his pocket and held it out for
the scarf. The smile under the thin moustache grew more irritating. Strang stretched out his arm politely, and just as the man was about to grasp the scarf, he let it go. The wind was a perfect ally: it caught the transparent piece of silk and blew it high and around and over and higher and away. It ended its flight on a taut rope, high on the rigging above the swimming pool. “Too bad,” Strang said. “Now it’s your turn, I think.” He resumed his steady pace along the empty deck:

  “Private. Private,” the man said, pattering after Strang on quick, small feet. His pointed shoes were as light and thin as his high-pitched voice.

  “Who says so?”

  “Private, private,” the little man repeated. He spoke the word with excessive care, in an accent Strang couldn’t place.

  “This is getting monotonous,” Strang told him, as the magic word was repeated twice again. “Is that all the English you know? Never mind, you’ve learned it well. I’ll give you a big E for effort. Now go away. Stop dancing at my heels. Where’s your hair net?” For emotion, or the wind, was raising long strands of oiled-together hair. Strang kept his voice easy, his pace steady. He had passed three doorways to private suites of rooms, a series of real windows heavily curtained. The pattering footsteps stopped, as if reassured. Strang kept walking until he reached the short flight of stairs that led to the radio room. Now this is really private private, he told himself, but the little gate saying Vietato l’ingresso could easily be stepped over.

  Before he entered the narrow doorway leading to the radio room, Strang gave his first glance back at the little man, still watching. He looked uncertain, baffled, drooping. Either his unsuccessful struggle with the English language or his overlong coat weighed heavily on his shoulders. Strang gave him a cheerful wave and stepped out of the wind.

  The radio operator was having a cosy little chat with a Portuguese freighter. He looked more annoyed at the interruption than startled by such an abrupt entrance. “I want to send a cablegram,” the American told him. “This way?” He was already walking into the passage toward the cable room before the radio operator could answer. “Sorry,” he told his Portuguese friend, “just another passenger lost at sea.” But later, he wondered about the American with the broad smile— what had entertained him so much? He even looked out of his door, checked the locked gate, and noted that the rich woman’s chauffeur was still standing his watch on the windswept deck. So there was nothing to report. There could have been, he thought with some disappointment; for why did anyone travel with so much security unless she expected trouble?