Decision at Delphi Read online

  He watched the cabin cruiser become a little white arrow darting across the water. By comparison, the yacht must be of quite a respectable tonnage. “A very cautious woman,” he remarked, “if she wouldn’t trust that yacht to the Atlantic.”

  “Very cautious. She never travels by air, either.”

  “Is that what makes so much money—caution?”

  “Women don’t make money,” the assistant purser said with a touch of bitterness. “They spend it. It was Etienne Duval who made the fortune. A Frenchman who lived in Syria. He took Syrian nationality to protect his investments. But you must have heard about him. His suicide, two years ago, was in every newspaper. You did not read about it?”

  “I guess I had other things on my mind, two years ago.” Yucatan, for instance, and Mayan tombs.

  “A pity. It was a very strange end to a romantic life. He had a palace in Syria, a villa on Rhodes, a palazzo in Venice, a castle in Spain, a fortress in Casablanca.”

  “Adequate. No chateau in France, I suppose.”

  “None.” The assistant purser caught the joke and explained it. “But of course not. To protect his investments.” He enjoyed it, too. “Ah, well,” he said at last, “I, for one, am glad to see Signora Duval leave.” His lips tightened, his eyes narrowed broodingly.

  “Was there trouble?” Strang asked sympathetically. He could guess the kind of difficulties that someone like Madame Duval could stir up.

  The Italian was silent, but he must have remembered something that had stung his pride, for he looked at the distant yacht and his brown eyes, normally pleasant and gentle, hardened with anger. He said bitterly, “Trouble?” And then, to cover the momentary indiscretion, “Nothing important for anyone—except me.”

  “What on earth did you do?” Strang asked in surprise. Had the handsome young purser slipped past Mr. Private Private, and managed to meet Miss Katherini? If so, it was good to hear the girl had at least a few minutes of pleasure before the prison walls had closed in on her again. “Don’t tell me they caught you kissing the niece’s hand.”

  The assistant purser was horrified. And now he must end such a story before it started. “No, no,” he said urgently. “Nothing such as that, but nothing. It was only the little matter of their names on the passenger list.”

  “You got them wrong, did you?”

  “No. They were correct.”

  “Then why—”

  “Signora Duval did not want them on the list at all.”

  “And she complained about that? Well, some people—”

  “Complained?” The assistant purser gave a short and mirthless laugh. “You should have heard her! You should have seen her face! She is not a woman. She is a tornado.”

  “She actually sent for you?” Strang was incredulous.

  “She sent for the captain. The purser was told to go. He sent me.” The young man sighed deeply.

  Strang said with a smile, “They owe you a medal for facing the old tornado.”

  “She is not old.” The assistant purser had both a literal mind and some professional discretion, for the lady’s age and any other interesting details that her passport must have entrusted to him were held secret. His face even cleared, as if he were a little cheered by the idea that someone thought him worthy of a medal. He said, less mournfully, “But the niece was grateful. She stood behind her aunt, and her eyes thanked me.”

  “For what?”

  “Because I kept silent. What else could a man do? It was the niece, you understand, who had filled out the details for the passenger list and sent them to our office by a steward. Fortunately, I questioned him before I went to see Signora Duval. He had promised the young lady not to betray her. And when I saw her, standing so still, so very frightened, I kept silent. What else could a man do?”

  Strang looked at him. “Good for you,” he said quietly.

  The assistant purser was almost restored to his natural good humour. “Oh, well, there are always strange situations on board ship. One never knows what to expect.” He glanced at his watch, then at his immaculately white uniform; he nicked an impertinent speck of soot from his whiteshoes. “We are due to sail. You will excuse me? Perhaps you will be at the dance tonight? Then we can talk about more pleasant things. Arrivederci!”

  Strang stayed at the rail, now watching the bargaining boats in their last frenzy of raucous effort to make another dollar, now studying the neat rigging of three British naval vessels, austere grey ladies withdrawn behind the long breakwater that sheltered the Gibraltar dockyards from the various hazards of the open bay. Once or twice, in spite of himself, he found his eyes drawn to the large white yacht, with its clean lines, its excellent proportions. Beauty was always worth a long moment of homage.

  With a rattle of chains, a tremble of engines, a blast of siren, the liner swept round in a half-circle to point into the Straits once more. This manœuvre brought them closer to the yacht. Strang could see her flag quite clearly. He stared at it in amazement. It was not the blue-and-white flag of Greece.

  “What’s that flag? Do you know?” a woman’s voice asked beside him. She was a nice, motherly creature with a pleasant face.

  “Yes.” He remembered the flag of the freighters he had sometimes seen from a destroyer’s deck, miserable hulks, rust-streaked, as if they carried deckloads of dysentery patients like the hospital ships he had read about in that long-ago campaign of Gallipoli. “That’s a Liberian flag.”

  “So it’s a Liberian boat? My, isn’t it pretty!”

  “Very few ships flying the Liberian flag are Liberian.” And as the round, pink-cheeked face looked at him blankly, he added, “The flag only means the yacht is registered there.” And a damned mean trick that was, too, to escape Greek taxes.

  “Medea,” the woman read carefully just before the liner’s course carried them out of eye range of the yacht’s prow. “Now that’s a pretty name. Medea. What does it mean? Do you know?”

  “She was a woman who killed her two children.”

  The round cheeks blanched under their pink rouge. “Whatever for?”

  “Revenge on their father.”

  She obviously didn’t believe him. Such things didn’t happen in Larchmont. She gave a nervous smile, and edged away.

  Strang noted the changing colour of the water. The soft white clouds had increased and become shadowed with grey; darker clouds were blowing from the rain sky to the east. We are running into the Mediterranean and a sizeable squall, he thought. He wondered if he should advise, the pink-cheeked lady to eat only dry crackers and an apple for lunch, but he decided against it. She had received enough shocks for one morning: he couldn’t destroy her beliefs in the blue Mediterranean, too.

  So he went below, settled himself on his bed, and picked up his notes on the history of Paestum. There was nothing like a dose of solid work to keep one’s mind off the Mediterranean’s sudden treacheries. Besides, time limits were fixed on this assignment; he had to read and think himself into the picture before he arrived at each chosen place. Paestum, south of Naples, was his first stop. Next, over to Sicily for the four “musts”; Segesta, Agrigentum, Syracuse, Selinunte—although what he could do with that jumble of broken pillars and smashed pediments was something that terrified him even from this distance. Taormina, although it did possess a Greek theatre adulterated with Roman additions, had been chosen rather as a delightful place to finish his Sicilian sketches. When your travels were defined for you, you might as well make them as comfortable as possible.

  He thought of the next five months, a neatly planned stretch of his life which lay before him most invitingly. Odd, in a way, that he would be living almost entirely in a world created by men between two and three thousand years ago; odd, and—considering the state of the present-day world—not unattractive.

  3

  The arrival in Naples was not, in any way, according to plan. Kenneth Strang, if only he had been clairvoyant, would have seen it as symbolic and taken it as an omen for the rest of hi
s trip. But he only felt annoyance when a force-eight wind, for almost two hours, kept the liner circling the water-lashed bay— Capri hidden behind a black curtain of rain, Vesuvius lost in the low dark sky—before the pilot boat could risk coming out to take her safely into harbour.

  When they docked at last, Strang’s annoyance sharpened. According to plan, he could have walked off the ship, carrying his suitcase, brief case, and portfolio. But there was also the small case Steve Kladas had sent him. The total load was impossible in the high wind that raked the long, exposed pier. So he had to depend on a porter to help him, after all. It was the usual slow and tedious business, waiting in the giant customs shed for his suitcase to arrive. Portfolio and brief case he had carried, and Steve’s small case. He spent this patch of interminable dreariness watching his fellow passengers freezing (now that the excitement of the little adventure in the Bay of Naples was over) in their thin suits and light coats. Spring, and the Mediterranean—what dreams had it roused, aided and abetted by the enchanting travel advertisements? The addition of an advisory “but” was needed after the ecstatic eulogy.

  Eulogies were fine, very fine, full of upbeat and uplift. But let’s keep a balance, boys. Let’s advertise: “Come to Jolly Old England, but not when April’s there unless you bring wool underwear and a coat to wear indoors.” Or: “Come to Romantic Brittany, but bring a sweater for sun-tanning on the beach.” Or: “Come to Subtropical Heaven, fanned by summer breezes, but these three-inch things with wings to fly when they get tired running over the floor or crawling into your bureau drawers are only roaches. Ladies, short skirts for dancing on the terrace are preferable, so that land crabs won’t cling and climb. Gentlemen, your job is to empty out all shoes each morning.” Or: “Come to the Sunny Riviera, but hire a pneumatic mattress for lazing on the pebbles.” Or—no, this game could go on for ever, and the suitcase was now being trundled past him under a pile of many people’s luggage.

  He had a brief battle of wills with the porter, who wanted to trundle to some distant section of the shed, but he won it by yanking his possession clear. “All ready,” he told one of the waiting men behind the low wooden counter marked “S.” He lined up his luggage not without a sense of achievement, produced passport and camera, took out his keys and began unlocking. Customs officers who had had their siestas interrupted for a ship’s afternoon arrival, and then had to stand in a cold shed for nearly three hours, might be less patient than usual.

  “Nothing open until all here,” one hard-eyed man said, and kept his hands in his overcoat pockets. He was both angry and bored with tourists’ stupidities.

  “It is all here,” Strang said.

  The expression did not change, but the examination was thorough though brief. Strangely, it was the portfolio that caused the customs officer most doubt. He was so interested in it that he accepted the small case of camera film without a second glance. He went over to confer with the colleague who had taken Strang’s passport and was now studying it with great intensity. That’s right, Strang thought as the passport man looked down at the little green book and then up at the American and then down again, then up: this is Kenneth Clark Strang. Height: 5 ft. 11 in. Hair: brown. Eyes: grey. No visible marks. Born: Princeton, New Jersey, on February 7, 1925. Occupation architect. Address; 124a East 54th Street, New York City. Yes, indeed, that is I, as my more refined friends would say.

  “You are arquitetto?” the officer asked suspiciously.

  Strang nodded. “An architect,” he assured the man.

  “But this is for a pittore—a paint—” He looked most dubiously at the opened portfolio, lifted a tube of colour as if the Hope diamond had decided to cross the Atlantic in gamboge.

  “I am an architect who draws buildings.” That didn’t appear to be helpful. Desperately, he said, “Paestum. I go to draw the temples at Paestum.”

  “There are only ruins at Paestum.”

  “I shall draw ruins.”

  The two men looked at each other. At this moment, they reminded him of his two brothers-in-law.

  “Ah,” said one, dawn breaking at the end of a cloudy night, “it is a little thing to amuse oneself?”

  Strang grappled with that. “A hobby?” My God, perhaps they are my brothers-in-law in disguise. But he nodded gravely: it was the easiest way out. And all was well. With many understanding nods, the opened cases were commanded to be closed and carried away. That was more difficult to do than giving a commanding wave. The crowd along the counter had reached the desperate stage of elbowing and pressing. He locked the cases with a struggle, could find no porter who wasn’t already trundling (there must have been a law against carrying, in Naples), and chose to battle his way to the exit barrier with a precarious but painful hold on his luggage. Listing slightly to starboard as the heavy brief case in his right hand and the portfolio slipping from under his right arm outmatched the two cases on his left side, he headed grimly for a door that might lead to the street. A voice said, “Hi, Ken! You look like a man who could use a third hand.” It was Steve Kladas.

  Strang said slowly, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Steve grinned happily. His blunt-featured, rugged face, olive-complexioned, looked as if a ravine of white rock had suddenly split the furrowed surface of light-brown earth. His thick black hair, usually carefully combed, was ruffled by the wind. His raincoat glistened. But his fine dark eyes, almost as black as his hair, sparkled with delight. Surprises were his speciality. “That’s a nice way to welcome a friend.” His voice and manner were completely American, which was not surprising, since he had been born in Philadelphia, and had lived there for the first twelve years of his life, until his family had decided to return to Greece. “Hand over!” he said, and took a firm hold of his own case, and—almost as an afterthought—the brief case. “What’s in here?” he asked. “Rocks?” He pretended to stagger and then brushed aside a porter, who, no longer needed, had suddenly appeared, with a short flow of ungrammatical but understandable Italian. He told Strang, “It’s only a few steps down to the street.” He wasn’t tall, a full head shorter than Strang, but he used his shoulders—he had become fairly thick-set in the last few years—to push his way through the groups of small, thin men loitering around the door. “No,” he snapped at one whispering character with the usual furtive hand holding out three fountain pens, “we don’t want anything. Go away!” The effect of that last simple phrase was magic. “At first I tried a few Italian curses. That just made these guys all the more eager. Then a waiter told me to say ‘Go away!’ That’s all. And boy, do they go away! It’s the final insult. Can you figure that out?” He gave his short, deep-chested laugh, and then went on talking in his usual torrent of words. “Got your nose sun-stripped, I see. Don’t tell me you found any warm weather on that damned Atlantic.”

  “It could have been worse. In fact, there were a couple of days when we could even go swimming.” But Steve wasn’t really listening. They had come out on to a street that was almost dark—perhaps dusk came early to Naples at this time of year, or maybe the black clouds were swallowing up the city— with the shimmers of scattered street lights reflected on the soaked pavement. Gusts of wind ripped off hats while tourists and short-order porters searched for taxis.

  “There’s one thing I won’t do,” Strang said firmly, remembering Steve’s sometimes irritating sense of economy. “I am not going to walk to the hotel.”

  “Now, now,” said Steve, “I’ve got a cab waiting, just across the street. Cost me two good American dollars.” He led the way at a half-run. “If he’s gone, I’ll spend tomorrow morning searching for the son of a bitch.”

  And he would, Strang had little doubt. “Why not tomorrow afternoon, too?” he asked with a grin as he followed Steve over the hard surface of stone blocks, slippery with rain.

  “Because I leave for Taormina then,” Steve said crisply. “There he is!” His cabdriver was yelling at them to run, while he struggled to keep his taxi door closed against the stro
ng pull of a porter’s right arm. “Sorry, lady, the cab is taken. This gentleman has urgent business at the American Consulate,” Steve said to a tourist who had been standing hopefully behind the porter, and settled the question of who was going to open the door by dropping the brief case smartly down on the porter’s arm. “In!” he told Strang. Strang had recognised the dismayed round face of the pink-cheeked lady, now retreating. “Just a minute, Steve—”

  “In!” Steve gave a shove with his shoulders, and Strang was in. Steve followed, slammed the door, just missing the porter’s fingers. “Do you know how long it took me to find a cab that would wait? Listen, Ken—for a man who fancies himself as a hard-boiled bachelor, you’re as easy to cut into as a poached egg on toast.” His annoyance wore off. “I’ve often wondered how you ever did stay free. You’re just the type to be caught by a sweet-faced widow, with five children, and two of them crippled. Now don’t get sore! All I’m saying is that you’re a romantic. And I’m a realist. It’s a good thing you’ve got me around, this trip.” He settled himself in the seat of the high-walled taxi, smoothed his hair back from his brow, and gave one of his broad grins. “If that had been a man, back there,” he said, “you’d have told him to get the hell out. But what’s the difference? Women got the vote, didn’t they? They’re equal, aren’t they? That’s what they wanted. So they’ve got it, and we’re all happy. Or aren’t we?” He broke into Italian. “Not that way! Take the direct route. To your right! By God,” he said to Strang, “you would think I was a newly arrived tourist, too.”

  In the large, carefully appointed hotel overlooking the sea front, Strang was given a room with a small balcony and a large-scale view of the bay. That pleased him. And the room itself would be a good place to finish his sketches of Paestum— plenty of light from the wall of window, plenty of air from the glass door that led to the balcony, grey tiled floor, white walls, simple furniture, a desk that was steady to the touch, an adequate lamp.