PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS

“Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey … Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —The Denver Post

“Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —The Miami Herald

“Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes, Los Angeles Times

“A joyous and unqualified success.” —The New York Times on Death of an Old Sinner

“An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —Daily Mirror (London) on Death of an Old Sinner

“At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —The New York Times on A Gentleman Called

“Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —Chicago Tribune on A Gentleman Called

“An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —The New Yorker on The Judas Cat

“A book to be long remembered.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch on A Town of Masks

“Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —The New York Times on The Clay Hand

“Ingeniously plotted … A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —The New York Times on A Death in the Life

“Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —Library Journal on The Habit of Fear

“Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and Shock Wave is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —The New York Times Book Review on Shock Wave

Enemy and Brother

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Epilogue

About the Author

TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER,

Alfred Joseph Salisbury

AUTHOR’S NOTE

IF THE C.B.S. CORRESPONDENT George L. Polk had not been murdered during the Greek Civil War in 1948, it is true, I should not have written this book. In the beginning I read what I could find and talked with many people about Polk, and at one time I was almost persuaded to attempt a book of non-fiction on the case. I found the areas of sensitivity very great and the truth of his death, I came to believe, beyond captivity in our times. I am one of a legion, and many of them far better informed than myself, who have turned away in the helpless conviction that, despite the official records, an earnest and open-minded reporter died for reasons we are not to know.

But having turned away, to the best of my knowledge I have left no vestige of resemblance to people or circumstance involved in the Polk case. The Greek guerrilla leader “Markos” is the only actual person who appears in the book, and he is more an idea than a character. I hope I have written entertainment. But because I care deeply for the Greek people, and because I believe all war, all violence, abomination, I would like to think also that my probe has taken me to some little revelation of the wounded hearts of men.

—Dorothy Salisbury Davis

1

FOR ALMOST EIGHTEEN YEARS I had been telling myself that I would go back to Greece, that when the time was right I would return and chance again the jeopardy from which, those lengthening years ago, I had been so ignominiously rescued.

But self-promises are the most delusory of all promises. Too often they are the means by which a man justifies himself in not taking the very action he prepares for. I came to enjoy my study of demotic Greek and to relish the company in which I practiced it, sailors, dish-washers, stonecutters, priests. I liked their wine, I liked their music and I liked their women. Above all, I liked their saying to me, “But you are a Greek!” And when I would return to my far different life than theirs, I would always ask myself: If I had known the language then; if, sitting on the backless bench which was my dock in the Epirus District Courtroom, I had been able to grasp the testimony against me as it passed the lips of my accuser, would my defense have been more adequate? Would it have been sufficient to convince the jury of my innocence? To this day I believe them all to have been honorable men. But they no less than I were pawns in a trial that mocked justice the more for its rigid adherence to the forms of justice.

My life’s work—I suppose I should say the work of my second life—bears further witness to the earnestness of my intentions. I settled into a career as a teacher of literature, but I bent my particular study toward Lord Byron, the British poet whom the Greeks are wont to consider an honorary citizen, legend having made him a hero of their War of Independence. That such study would someday justify the scholar’s journeying to Greece to explore firsthand the Byronic legacy was at the core of motive. I’m sure it was. But as the time for my possible return drew near, I felt myself seeking within the pretext itself further escape. If indeed I succeeded in returning, would not my rooting in the personal past betray my present work and therefore the foundation sponsoring it?

In a way it was Byron’s story which had beguiled me to Greece in 1947, the scene then of civil war. But at the time—I was only twenty-three—I dared not risk the onus such an admission might cast on me in the company I sought to keep, that virile fellowship of foreign correspondents. I would rather have admitted to bigamy than to Byron. Much rather. Which but capped the irony that in returning to Greece I would have to proclaim my Byronic scholarship.

I was, on the eve of the journey I am about to relate, in excellent physical condition. I’m reluctant to be omniscient now about what I was within—not whole, even as I knew too well, but not altogether hollow either. A bachelor—marriage was too risky for a person born at the age of twenty-three as it were—I was a man of affairs not quite so numerous as Byron’s perhaps, but conducted with infinitely more discretion. My students modeled my image to their tastes, my mentors to their needs, the publishing scholar whose presence at the university enhanced their own prestige. I was involved in many things with many people, but in my own mind committed to none.

I must say one more word on my preparation, and it may do me a little of the honor I supposed to have been otherwise lacking. During those years I had also studied every word written by and about the man of whose murder I had been convicted, Alexander Webb. You will remember that name, hearing it. It has become a by-word for American journalism at its best. Does the name Jabez Emory mean anything to you? I doubt it. When the bell tolls for the mighty, the name of the toller is soon forgotten. But I confuse the truth attempting poetry. I did not kill Alexander Webb. Therefore, who did? And why? He did not die for the sordid reasons testified to at my trial. I had come to believe very few people thought he did. And yet no seeker after the truth had ever found it. Would I?

I have been told by historians that he was the soundest chronicler of Balkan politics reporting World War II, its prelude and aftermath. I always asked my informants—as though the information had slipped my mind—what ever happened to him.

“To Webb?” This answer is graven in my mind: “He was murdered during the Greek Civil War. Some say the Communists did it, some say the Greek government had a hand in it. There was an American involved. I’ve forgotten now, but I think he disappeared afterwards behind the Iron Curtain….”

How odd it was to hear those words while sitting in the Faculty Club lounge, smoking a cigar, sipping brandy, and then to walk out into the night across the campus of an American university to my own office. “Suppose,” I was sometimes tempted to say to my informant, “just suppose that American…” but I never said it.

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” So I commenced my journal on the morning I received my American passport in the name of Professor John Eakins.

I had been technically honest in filling out the application: no passport had been previously issued to John Eakins, and the purpose of his journey was to follow Byron’s trail. That once I had carried such a document issued at the Paris Embassy to former Lieutenant Jabez Emory had long since lost relevancy. Emory was dead to everyone except himself. And the United States Department of State had assisted at his demise.

I want to tell this part of the story without bitterness. If I have not married, if I have no roots, if I have never returned to the small Midwestern town where I was born and where my mother died while I was on trial, I consented to the divorcement and thereby acted out a fate it seemed impossible for me to turn. I remember something my court-appointed lawyer said when we were both in despair of my defense: “When your gods forsake you there is no more hope.”

Before going into the army I had wanted to be a writer, so that, obtaining my discharge overseas, I thought the quickest way to try my pen was to dip it in the bloody residue of war and revolution. There had been something lacking in my military career: I had never reached the front. I had never killed an enemy. I remembered Byron seeking his salvation among the warring Greeks. My hometown newspaper provided me with credentials and every week paid my mother my salary, ten dollars, which she deposited to a bank account in my name. I shouldn’t think the account has ever been closed.

The County Citizen got its money’s worth in my weekly dispatch, my mother a moment of pride before disaster. I made my bread and beer in Athens as legman for several of the name correspondents who, to a man, were bored and restive. Somewhere in the country a civil war was being fought and they were corralled like sheep by the Athens government which fed them daily handouts on what was going on. They called me “the kid” and sent me off on rumors—to the palace, to Parliament, to the docksides, to wherever I could go before the military turned me back. For every lead I turned up to a story worth a byline, I got a pocketful of drachmas—three dollars’ worth.

I was a “kid,” younger by far than my years, and, oh, dear God, how innocent. Stupidity would not have sufficed. Only innocence could have rendered me so vulnerable.

One of the questions that will recur throughout this narrative is why Alexander Webb took me along in the first place. At the time, mine wasn’t to reason why: I was too damned glad to be asked to go anywhere with him, under any conditions. And, of course, when we left Athens I did not know where we were going.

It was at Patras that I first met Paul Stephanou, the young Elasite who was to be our guide and translator and who in time became the State’s chief witness against me. I knew by then that we were heading for the northern headquarters of the Greek guerrillas because it was arranged that should we be intercepted by the government, our story was that Markos himself had offered Webb the interview.

We traveled by water and by land, mostly at night, and we were sheltered and fed clandestinely by Andarte sympathizers. Only once, in Prevesa, did we stop in anything that to me approximated civilization. Webb and Stephanou hit it off well together from the start. They did not exclude me: the barrier was my own ignorance. I knew little of modern Greek history and less of Marxism. The very word seemed to stunt my capacity to understand. Occasionally, to draw me out, or perhaps to explain me, Webb would speak of his wife’s regard for me: the young knight errant of the press. He had trouble explaining that to Stephanou whose flashing smile acknowledged both what he understood and what he misunderstood. But for years I believed this to have been his only lead to the charges he later fabricated against me.

It was toward sunset of our tenth day traveling that we halted at the fork of a mountain trail while Stephanou and someone at a distance off exchanged a whistled signal. We proceeded across a mountain ridge to a village abandoned by its people to the rebels. The men who came out of the schoolhouse to meet us seemed much happier to see our mules than ourselves.

Markos was barely civil. His second officer, a Captain Demetrios, had the decency to take us in to the fire and help us off with our coats.

Eventually Webb and I were billeted by ourselves in a hut where the simple wares of its owner still hung on the wall and the sheepskins used as a bed were piled on the floor. Webb paced or watched at the window while I tried to get a fire going in the grate. I do not want to dwell on this right now. He scarcely spoke to me, and when Markos sent for him he went alone. Then I wondered truly what in hell I was doing there.

I got the fire and an oil lamp going, and went over my own notebook. The entries were few, Stephanou having forbidden us to make any mention in our journals of places or of people who had helped us. It was understandable.

I was brought bread and rancid goat’s cheese. My one venture out-of-doors brought a bearded guard to watch over me while I urinated. The night by then was as black as a tar barrel.

By the time Webb returned I was asleep. I woke and saw him looking down at me. He took off his trenchcoat, rubbed what I supposed was dirt from the collar and threw the coat down. He sat by the lamp and began to write.

I conquered my pride and asked: “How did it go?”

He looked around those great hunched shoulders of his and growled: “Like the path of true love.”

I went back to sleep. Sleep is the refuge of wounded pride. I had expected to be included in the interview. When I woke up the fire was out and Webb was gone. He had thrown his coat over me. I had to get up and hold my watch to the lamp to see what time it was. Ten minutes to two. I stepped outside. The darkness was itself a wall until the beam of a flashlight was trained on my face. I pushed it away. The man was Stephanou.

“Where’s Webb?” I asked.

“Not far. Go back inside.”

I was about to obey when I realized from the chimney black that Webb had been gone longer than Stephanou implied. I don’t know what I said but I demanded that he take me to Webb. He shrugged and motioned me to follow. The huts we passed lay as mute as burial mounds in the vast mountain stillness.

We found Webb, even as Stephanou subsequently testified at my trial, intimately engaged with a woman. I was outraged: I did not deny it at the trial. I made something of a commotion, and I probably swore the soldiers’ oaths as Stephanou avowed. But I have never remembered bringing out the name of Margaret Webb that night, although admittedly I thought of her at once. If, as I have intimated, I held Webb in doglike worship, I venerated Margaret. I did not covet her. She might have been not much older than myself, but married to Webb she was… removed. And the kinder she had been to me, the greater the height to which I had exalted her.

I did not see Webb again after Stephanou’s and my intrusion. I returned to the hut, bitter, angry, but with one feeling uppermost: complete and utter loneliness. And, curling in on myself, I slept until Stephanou awakened me and said that the comrade general would see me. Why, God knows. He could have sent the message as easily that Webb would be waiting for me when I left the camp. I breakfasted with Stephanou and the other Andarte, understanding not a word spoken among them. The fear grew steadily in me.

There was great activity in the camp as we left. We walked, sometimes ran at a jog, Stephanou urging me to hurry. We came within sight of the main road at sunrise. We reached the shrine at the crossroads without sight of man or animal. Even the birds were silent. I asked where Webb was supposed to meet me. Stephanou did not know. He pointed to the town of Ioannina in the distance. The Greek government patrol would come up the road soon and I could meet them. He asked me if I was afraid. I said I was. He said that he was too and that it was not safe for him to stay. I asked him if he had a gun. He had and sold it to me for twenty dollars. We shook hands and parted.

But when some time later I saw the armed and uniformed patrol approaching, I panicked. I feared to be found with a gun provided by the guerrillas. I buried it in the dark-red soil near the crossroads shrine, and waited for the patrol with my hands in the air.

I was taken to Ioannina where I told my story to the police in the presence of the American advisers to the Greek military. They disclaimed any knowledge of Webb’s whereabouts. I did not tell of seeing Webb with the whore. But when the information was elicited from me later as a result of Stephanou’s testimony, my reticence seemed a concealment of motive rather than a matter of delicacy.

The next day Webb’s body was found in the ditch a few yards from the shrine. I was asked to make the identification and did so. The gun was found later, but by then the tenor of the interrogation I had undergone so alarmed me that I denied all knowledge of the gun—foolishly, so foolishly: the scrapings of red earth from beneath my fingernails bore immediate witness to the lie.

The doctor examining Webb’s body could not place the time of death within eight hours. The cause was discovered at once, a bullet wound in the heart. There was one bullet missing from the revolver I had buried.

Stephanou accepted the government’s offer of political amnesty in coming in to testify against me, establishing as motive my covetousness of Webb’s wife. Margaret’s testimony was taken by affidavit. Ioannina was too perilously close to guerrilla-held territory to require the presence of secondary witnesses. Nothing in my conduct, she swore, had ever suggested more than a very young man’s infatuation. She stated that she had not known her husband’s destination or his companion until receiving a letter posted in Patras three days after his departure from Athens. The letter was produced in court and the critical sentence read aloud: “I decided to take young Emory with me. I wonder how that will strike you, my dear.” I have wondered my life since. The jury construed its meaning to the prosecution’s pattern.

Nor was the camp woman produced by either defense or prosecution. Since I had admitted her existence it was of indifferent value to the prosecution that she be called. Stephanou swore ignorance of where she might be found. But then, having seen only the flash of her nude body before our hasty retreat, I could not possibly have identified her myself.

I have said that I was found guilty. The sentence was death by shooting. When I asked for them I was given pencil and paper with which to write to my mother. I had not been told that she was dead. I do not know to whom among the Greeks it was known. The American press, I learned later, mentioned it.

An Orthodox priest visited me the night before my scheduled execution. It is ungrateful of me to tell it, but all I remember of him was that he, poor man, smelled worse than the prison drain, and in my giddy state I cried and laughed aloud at what I thought an excellent joke for one about to die. “Take him out,” I kept shouting. “He stinks to high heaven!”

I composed a litany of stenches: Greek justice, Greek lawyers, Greek juries, Greek revolutionaries, Greek reactionaries. Then I started on my own compatriots who, for all their observers and advisers, had turned not a word on my behalf. I surpassed The Man Without a Country in my renunciation.

An English doctor was admitted to give me an injection. He complimented me on my invective. I did not think I slept. Yet I have no recollection of leaving the jail, only the dull sense of walking over rough terrain, stumbling, being helped, half-carried. Nor could I see. Afterwards I knew I had been blindfolded. A jolting ride in some sort of motor transport followed, timeless, then the sickening swell and swoop of a small boat. My first moment of real comprehension came shortly after sunrise. The blindfold was removed. When my eyesight cleared I saw what my nose had already told me: I was then aboard a fishing vessel.

A swarthy, gold-toothed man with eyes that twinkled like his teeth in the sunlight was grinning at me.

“Where you want to go?” The accent was Italian.

“America,” I said.

He laughed heartily. I had not heard laughter in a long time. It sounded good.

“You don’t like the Greeks?” He nodded toward the distant shoreline.

I looked back tentatively, far less confident than Lot’s wife. The whole of rockbound Greece seemed to be sinking into a golden sea. I did not know or care then how much of myself was vanishing with her.

Another seaman sat straddling the prow of the boat, his eyes on the waters ahead, binoculars in hand: the waters were still mine-infested.

My benefactors spoke very little English and I no more Italian, but it was plain in any case that such questions I should ask pertaining to my escape would be answered with a shrug. I had no money, no identification. I assumed I still bore resemblance to existing photographs of myself. And I did have a large brown birthmark on my left arm. Sometimes in the many days at sea that followed, I found myself looking at it as though it were a link to my source as well as a mark of my being, a sort of auxiliary navel.

Four nights and two boats later I was put aboard a freighter, La Stella—I think off Sicily—bound for New York. I asked no questions. I was given a change of clothes, GI suntans included, a toothbrush and a safety razor. The American maker, no doubt with me in mind, had patented it under the brand name Pal.

A U.S. Coast Guard cutter met us where we came into American territorial waters and I was turned over to their officers. If they had any foreknowledge of my identity or my nationality, it was not communicated to me. Very little was. Even when I asked one of the men how the Chicago Cubs were doing, I got no more than a cynical grunt. But then, the Cubs might have been in last place. Slightly ahead of myself.

At the office of the chief immigration inspector I asked for a lawyer. I gave only my name and as port of embarkation “somewhere in Greece.” In those days, so soon after the war, “somewhere” had the ring of geographic validity.

Before the question of whether or not I was to have a lawyer was settled, a Mr. Redmond of the State Department came to interview me. He was a big, affable man whose very presence made me realize I was at last in America. I told him everything I could of my fantastic story. He asked no questions but, from his occasional pulling of a long face, I sensed surprise but never disbelief.

He sat in thoughtful silence for a long moment when I was through. It was a warm day. I began to sweat. I resented the cool immaculacy of the man opposite me.

“And yet,” he said finally, “our every report indicates you had a fair trial. Our people followed every word.”

“But the testimony was false!”

“In plain English, you were framed. Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“What do you think your chances are of proving it?”

“Somewhat more than if I were dead,” I said.

“I wonder.”

I threw up my arms. “Right now I’d have trouble proving I’m Jabez Emory without help.”

He looked at me solicitously. It occurred to me that word of my escape might have been suppressed.

“Oh, we knew you were at large. The story is that you broke jail with the help of Communist sympathizers. Supposedly you were taken into their territory.”

“And what were they supposed to have done with me, converted me?”

“Do you think they converted Webb?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Nothing in your conversations pointed that way?”

“I wouldn’t be the best judge,” I said, and he could not possibly know how much of an understatement that was. “But I’d say no.”

“Would you say his story might have favored them, assuming he had lived to write it?”

My sweat turned cold. It was the leading question again. “I cannot say.”

“It was unfortunate that his notebook could not be produced. You would have told at the trial, of course, if you had any notion where it was.”

“He carried it in the inside pocket of his coat,” I said. “But he did not take his coat when he went out to the woman. It was still in the cottage in the morning. I thought of going back for it to take to him, but I was not permitted to.”

“A pity. Possibly it might have exonerated you.”

“I hope to be exonerated now—at home at least.”

He sighed as though pained at what he now had to say. “Your government is in a very delicate position.”

“So is one of my government’s citizens.”

He smiled. “Something you said a moment ago—about Jabez Emory—let’s talk in possibilities for a moment. Suppose he had actually vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Let me be frank with you—I know quite a lot about him. Good army record, a young man of several talents. In school he was torn between journalism and drama, wasn’t it? Maybe he still is. Maybe he could still go either way. He has no immediate family, no responsibility except to himself….”

It was the nightmare again, the man saying patently false things about me as though I were not present. I shook my head violently, trying to stop the automatic talk.

“My mother!” I shouted. “I’ve got a mother!”

His face became a mask of shock, and to this day I do not know whether his reaction was true or feigned. “My God, man, weren’t you told that? It was in the newspapers. I am sorry….”

I had not seen a newspaper I could read in months and told him so. He then told me what I have already set down in this account, that my mother had died during my trial. I had no way of knowing, or at the time of caring, whether he was honest or calculating in the manner of telling me such news. His job required excellence in dissembling.

Once again I was captive and docile before a fate beyond my power to comprehend. I heard him in blandly sympathetic terms detail the life possible to the man before him, a new life under a new identity. He suggested the possibility of my returning to school, perhaps at his own university where he “might be able to do me some slight service.” He suggested the name Eakins. The American painter of that name had done a portrait of his grandfather which hung in the university he recommended to my consideration.

To acquire a new identity, one must shed an old one, however ghostly the man presenting his papers to the courts. Mr. Redmond was prepared to obtain copies of Jabez Emory’s birth certificate and army discharge papers. And because Emory had served his country as a soldier, a sum of money could be found to support him during what might be called his period of rehabilitation. He supposed I could live a little better on it than I had lived… abroad.

He cleared his throat, saying the word, and asked if he might proceed along the lines he had suggested.

I said he might proceed, and that night, registering at a New York hotel, I first signed the name, John Eakins.

So much is prologue. I have told of Eakins’ progress, of the fellowship to work on a life of Byron and of the passport in hand. I should probably have gone in any case, but an item in the New York Monitor was the final catalyst. It was datelined Athens, and it read:

Paul Stephanou, jailed as an accessory in the murder of the American newspaper correspondent, Alexander Webb, in 1948, will be released next month after serving seventeen years of a life sentence.

2

I ONCE CALCULATED THAT my transport from Greece to New York had taken twenty-three days. I returned in nine hours’ flying time. American emigration and Greek customs officials were excessively polite. People I expected to examine my passport waived the privilege. I was who I said I was to everyone except myself. In the plane I sat next to a wholesale grocer from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I might have been on my way to Chicago to speak before the 19th Century Club.

But at the desk of the Grande-Bretagne Hotel in Athens something extraordinary happened to me. I had filled out the registration card, the porter waiting behind me with my luggage, the desk clerk waiting in front of me, a key as large as an anchor in his hand.

“Your letters will be at the mail desk, Professor Eakins.”

I knew he meant to hurry me, but I checked the card anyway, the habit of one steeped in footnotes. I had signed my name Jabez Emory.

The shock of seeing what I had done froze me. The clerk reached for the card. I only managed to prevent his having it, crumpling it under my hand. I stuffed it into my pocket. “I’m sorry,” I said. “May I have another card?”

Contemptuously he turned his back while I filled out the second card. As I made my way to the mail desk I thought that in all the world I was my only enemy.

The Grande-Bretagne is no scholars’ haven. Its lore is strictly British upper class. The ranking staff, Greek though they may be, are the very models of model major-generals. I wondered if any of them remembered “the kid.” I doubted it. But I remembered some of them. I had done a lot of loitering in my few months in Athens, and most of it at the Grande-Bretagne bar.

My mail consisted of a letter of welcome from Dr. Palandios, the director of English Studies at the university with whom I had corresponded regarding my Byronic studies. He hoped that I would be free to attend a small dinner party at his home that night. Nothing suited me more perfectly, so early a recognition of my legitimate pursuits. I unpacked a few necessities, gave the valet a suit to be pressed and phoned my acceptance.

I went down to the bar and took my first step back into time. The decor had changed, the hotel having been remodeled. Nonetheless, I saw it now as I best remembered it, the heavy furniture, dark and plush in feeling, the cheeriness of crystal and elegant chandeliers, and not enough light anywhere. And I remembered the bartender who now set a whisky and soda before me. He still liked to talk, but now, as then, to somebody else. I watched him for a moment, thinking back on his imitation of a German colonel during the occupation who insisted on inspecting the glass before his drink was poured. The routine included a monocle and I had suspected then that the whole performance came out of an Erich Von Stroheim movie.

I took my glass to a table such as that at which I was sitting scribbling in a notebook when Alexander Webb had come over, set his glass down and eased his great bulk into the chair next to me. He had sat a moment, blinking, as he looked at me. His expression was perpetually sardonic, something else I admired naturally. He breathed like a drinking man.

“How would you like to go on a little journey with me?” He pointed to my notebook. “It might give you something to write about one of these days.”

“I’d go to hell and back with you, sir,” I said with a fervor that might have embarrassed even him.

He grunted. “It might just be that.” Again the breathy silence. That day too the bar was all but deserted. If there had been more people, I should not have had my notebook out. “You’re to tell no one about this,” he said. “Absolutely no one.”

“I understand.”

“Not even Margaret.” He looked at me sharply.

By then I had met Margaret Webb perhaps a dozen times. Sometimes we walked. Mostly we sat and talked in the hotel lobby where she seemed to be forever waiting for her husband. But at a New Year’s ball, with audacity brewed of several drinks and the confidence a waltz gave me, I had asked her to dance. We made an impression on many people that night which had lasted even to a murder trial.

“No, sir,” I said.

“What do you talk about, you and Margaret?”

I knew he was baiting me, albeit good-naturedly, but I could only be earnest, truthful.

“Mostly you,” I said and then amplified: “Well, mostly me, then you, sir.”

He grunted and tapped a stubby finger on my notebook. “Tear out a piece of paper and write what I tell you to.”

I wrote: “I promise to neither write nor relay by word of mouth anything I may see or hear while accompanying Alexander Webb from and to Athens until released by Webb from this promise.”

I signed and gave him the paper.

“I want to be sure I’m not scooped by a cub,” he said. “Where do you come from?”

“Illinois—a small town not far from Springfield, Illinois.”

“You’re a long way from home, young Jabez Emory.”

He gave me the name of a dockside taverna in Piraeus where I was to have my dinner at ten o’clock that night. He might or might not eat with me. I was to wear my army shoes for heavy walking, and to take only such essential articles as I could carry in my trenchcoat. We might be gone for as long as two weeks, and again we might be back much sooner. I was also to wear a sweater.

“Do I need money?”

He grinned with that downward pull of the corners of his mouth. “Do you have money?”

“A little.”

“Is your rent paid?”

“Just till tomorrow.”

“Then pay it so they won’t be looking for you.”

He bought us a drink then, and, after paying for it, put the piece of paper on which I had written my promise into his pocket.

I had almost finished dinner when he joined me at the taverna that night. He sipped brandy and reminisced about his boyhood in Elyria, Ohio. We talked about Sherwood Anderson. He seemed completely relaxed. The bouzouki players never rested. A roaming band of sleek-haired youths danced for a while and then moved on to another bouzoukakia. I had written an article on these waterfront taverna, so popular then with the teen-aged boys. Toward midnight a vendor of herbs came to the table. Webb bought a bunch of sage.

“Sage for wisdom,” he said to me. “We can go now.”

We walked some distance along the water’s edge, Webb peering into the darkness. He stopped. Only then did I see the rowboat, the man waiting at the oars. Webb threw the sage down to him. Then we climbed into the boat. He rowed us out to where a fishing vessel was waiting. It was in Patras three days later that we made contact with our guide, Paul Stephanou.

In the National Library that afternoon I searched three months’ files of the Athens newspapers for mention of Stephanou’s release from prison, impending or actual. I found not a word. While in New York I had looked for it without success in American, British and French publications. If I had not carried the small clipping from the Monitor in my wallet I should have doubted ever having seen it at all.

I went back in the newspaper files to the period covering the trial. How strange to turn the yellowed pages and suddenly confront myself, aged twenty-three, hollow-cheeked, unshaven, my eyes sunken and furtive as any criminal’s. The picture was taken on the day I went to trial. In the next column was a picture of Paul Stephanou. His jaw was out in defiance and he had smiled at the moment the photographer caught him; handsome, his dark hair tousled, he looked as though he had just run off a football field. I learned nothing, reading, that I did not already know by heart.

I left the library and stepped into the late afternoon rush. It was the beginning of June, a few days later in the season than when Webb and I had left Athens. The first heat of summer had come and the first flush of tourists. During my last sojourn there had been no tourist problem, but the restless trafficking of people had been the same. Then it was swarms of advisers, military and civilian, British and American, some hurrying to settle in, others to pack and go home. Churchill had grudgingly passed on the burden of his brother’s keepership. I stopped in my tracks, remembering the phrase. It was Alexander Webb’s.

I was still wondering as I dressed for dinner if the Webb case remained a matter of sensitivity to the Greek government or if it was so well forgotten as to be worth not a line of newsprint.

3

DR. PALANDIOS HAD BEEN a wry and witty correspondent, abreast of his own times as well as the past. And he lived exceedingly well, I realized the moment the apartment door was opened to me. Madame Palandios came at once, a jeweled hand extended. She was past middle-age, superbly groomed and, her dark eyes set off by the crown of white hair, one suspected she was more nearly beautiful now than at any other time in her life. Wealth and taste, I thought, the carpet soft beneath my feet. I promised myself a better look at the paintings later, and followed my hostess through to where the other guests were having drinks on the balcony. To me she spoke English with an accent which was not Greek as I had known it, to the others French. I suspected she would find my Greek common and wonder how I had come to acquire it. I resolved to keep it to myself.

Palandios, a bald gnome of a man in his sixties, shook my hand warmly and introduced me around. It was not until dinner that I came somewhat to know these people, but it was obvious from the start that our hostess had a knack of mixing guests who were not likely to come together otherwise.

Looking down on the city—it seemed like the whole of Athens, the lights of its great avenues strung like pearls, Lykabettos and the Acropolis rising and disappearing with the alternate crescendo and diminuendo of light like magic islands in the sea of night—I complimented my host on his home and its vista.

“Not bad for a pedant, eh?” He pulled me down to where he could speak in mock confidence. “A rich wife. Every scholar should have one.”

“At least one,” I said.

The talk was small and pleasant, the drinks large so that even I went in to dinner with a feeling of companionable ease.

I was seated near our host between a female novelist named Elsa Storme and the wife of the Greek Minister of Education, a cozy, plump little mother who laid her hand on mine every time she spoke. The novelist’s husband, Shepherd Storme—who would be likely to forget that name?—sat across the table and down, an ascetic Englishman whose specialty was seals and signets.

Dr. Palandios himself was an authority on Byron sources. He acquired a dubious fame some years ago for having perpetrated a deliberate hoax: he suggested to a gullible newspaper reporter that the famous Byron autobiography had not been destroyed at all and that he knew where it was. He estimated its value at a million dollars. Shortly after the story was published and before the retraction appeared—attributed to misinterpretation of language: he had meant to say that if the manuscript were extant—three hitherto undisclosed caches of Byron letters became available. I asked him about these letters.

“Every last piece went to where the money is, America.” He snorted his disapproval. What could he have expected with the device he had used to flush them? “But better there than in a mouldy trunk,” he added. “What put you onto him, Eakins?”

“My mother,” I said without hesitation. It was true. One of my most vivid childhood memories was of her nightly reading to me from Childe Harold and Don Juan, the latter of which, I presently realized, she was censoring heavily. The most omnivorous of my adolescent reading was tracking down the omissions.

Palandios raised his eyes to the ceiling. “If I knew you better I should inquire about your father.”

“And if I knew you better, sir, I should tell you.”

He laughed heartily.

At that point Mrs. Storme said, “Do you think Byron was a homosexual?”

It served us right for having talked across her. Her husband lifted his wine glass to the light and studied it.

“Why not? He was everything else,” I said lightly.

“I think it’s important that we know,” she said.

I was defeated, but our host, a mischievous lilt in his voice, said, “Have you ever dreamt of Byron, Mrs. Storme?”

“Good God, no!”

“Ah, but that’s a pity. Many women have, I’m told, and they all know the answer.”

The lady colored. Palandios patted her hand and signaled for more wine.

Her husband, still turning the glass in his hand, said, “It was his money the Greeks wanted, wasn’t it? Money and arms. That’s all they’ve ever wanted from Britain, more’s the pity. When it came to government they turned to the French for their law.”

“Well! Would we not have been the great fools to turn to the French for money?” Palandios said.

At table also were the Minister of Education, who sat to the right of our hostess, a Greek lawyer named Constantin Helmi, and a stunning young actress, Elena Kondylis, who seemed wasted seated between the lawyer and the British antiquarian. The male-dominated conversation drifted to the place of law in Greek life, the paucity of it in the ancient civilizations, and its prevalence under the litigious Romans. The law in Greece was not a subject on which I cared to comment.

I turned to Mrs. Storme and said with what I thought was charming humility, “I’m an ill-read fellow. What kind of novels do you write?”

“Gothic,” she said, and popped a biscuit into her mouth.

The Minister’s wife told me about the classes in needlework she conducted for marriageable young ladies. The Queen had complimented her on the work her girls were doing.

I became aware of a turn in the main conversation, catching Storme’s words: “But America would not allow you to go Communist.” He said it with an air of smugness as though nothing America did could alter the destiny of Britain.

“Which might possibly expedite things for the left,” our host suggested. “The Americans—forgive me, Eakins—are precipitate, not to say paranoiac. They interpret a growl in the belly as an imminent revolution, and set about at once to build up the counterweights. This creates an even greater disturbance in the balance, wouldn’t you say?”

Since he had deferred to me, I ventured, “And yet we saved you from Communism after the war.”

“My dear man,” the Englishman said, “we had a hand in that too. It was our chaps who put them down right here in Athens, standing at the dike as it were until you could get here.”

I began to realize why his wife had gone Gothic.

“There were a few Greeks involved also,” the Minister said dryly.

“There were,” Palandios said, “on both sides. Markos may have been a Communist, but he was first a Greek.”

“One would have thought him a patriot according to some of the press,” Storme said.

I wondered if I dared turn the discussion to focus attention on the Webb case. Was my self-control sufficient? It had to be. I said, “It would be interesting to know how such a bias—if there was one—developed. I am thinking of what happened to the correspondent who did reach Markos.”

“Alexander Webb, you mean?” Palandios said. I nodded. “There was a time my good wife forbade the subject at her dinner table; it never failed to start an argument.”

“I still forbid it,” Madame said, but smiling.

At that point Elsa Storme kept the subject open in probably the only way it could have been sustained over our hostess’s wish, and in a way of startling relevance to me. She said, “We met Webb’s widow a few days ago in Corfu. She’s the mistress of someone socially prominent. I’ve forgotten whom.”

Shepherd Storme cleared his throat.

The actress, who had spoken little until then, said, “I have met her also. She is a friend of the Princess Royal.”

“The German?” said Palandios. “I am not surprised.”

A murmur of disapproval ran round the table, the gist being that it was the Communist line to so refer to the Princess Royal.

“Was Webb’s wife German?” I asked. I knew this was not so, that Margaret was in fact English, but I could think of no other ruse to keep him on the subject.

“No, no. I’m trying to think back.” He appealed to his wife. “Helena, what do you know about her?”

“Only what one sees in the newspapers. She has always been active in charities. A beautiful woman.”

“Wasn’t there gossip at the time about her and the American who went north with her husband?” the Minister’s wife asked.

Palandios brushed it aside: “Gossip, but no one believed it. It wasn’t that.”

I was stunned: my whole prosecution had been based on that theme and he could dismiss it as having been believed by no one.

“Something not generally known,” the Education Minister put in, “but I remember crediting the source at the time, when the boy was on trial—what the devil was his name, the American? It doesn’t matter, but Webb’s wife supposedly went to the royal family on his behalf. Is that what you had in mind, Doctor?”

Palandios shook his head. “Something else, something else.”

“I remember thinking her much younger than her husband on the occasion I met them together,” Madame Palandios went on. “It was at a relief ball sponsored by the foreign press, I think….”

Dear God, I thought, she might next conjure the memory of my dancing that night with Margaret. I drew back in my chair so that the Minister’s wife would obstruct her view of me. But she had not the slightest association. “I am never able to judge the age of Americans,” she added.

Oddly, I had not been able to judge Webb’s age either. Later I knew him to have been fifty-two at the time of his death.

“Mrs. Webb is British,” the novelist said, “and she is still beautiful.” She spoke directly to the actress: “How old do you suppose she is now?”

The actress rocked her pretty head back and forth and puckered her lips; if she knew she would not tell.

“One of the bizarre stories I heard about the case some time ago,” the Minister said, “was that Webb’s death had nothing to do with our troubles at all, that it could be laid to the British Secret Service, something to do with Iranian oil.”

“That’s it!” Palandios cried. “It comes back to me now: Webb’s wife was the daughter of one of the directors of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. She was down there during the Ajerbaijan revolt, taken hostage by the revolutionaries. I’m not sure ‘hostage’ is the word. They alleged her to have been friendly with the German agents before Britain and the Americans occupied Iran. They held her for I don’t know how long, and if I’m not mistaken that’s how she met Webb. He was covering the Ajerbaijan business and became the intermediary in her release.”

He was not mistaken. I had not known this story when I met the Webbs, but I learned it afterwards in reading everything I could find by and about Webb. The collaborationist charge against Margaret had not gained credence in Allied circles, and obviously not with Webb since he subsequently married her, and he was no friend of the Nazis.

“Curious that he, an American, would be chosen as go-between,” the Minister said. “Unlike Greece during our trouble, that part of Iran was occupied by the Russian army. What I mean to say is: Webb would have needed to have some interesting connections, wouldn’t you say?”

“Which is nothing against him,” Palandios, an emphatic liberal, said. “A good reporter needs an open mind. He was critical of both sides in our affair, I recall.”

“But rather more of the government, you must admit, Doctor,” the lawyer Helmi said, entering this phase of the conversation for the first time.

“Who knows what he would have said of the rebels if he had lived to publish? Much was made at the time of a journal he was supposed to have had on him at the time of his death. What happened to it? It was never made clear at the trial.” Palandios took off his glasses and gestured with them for emphasis. “If anything was made clear at that trial.”

I sat, tense and straightened as though confined in a box. Even my scalp felt tight.

“As a lawyer,” Helmi said, “I would not give ten drachmas for the testimony at that trial.”

He waited, enjoying the effect his remark produced: the silent and aggressive attention of all present. That’s a bit of fancy on my part now. The words had such impact on me I am unqualified to say what the effect was on the others. But the fact was everyone did attend him, and it was also a fact that several people present had known enough of the case to remember details with increasing vividness as their memories were primed.

“I’ve had occasion to study it recently,” he went on. “As you know, I’m counsel for the newspaper, Messenger. They proposed to do a series on our troubles. I think you may find my deductions interesting.” He took a cigar from his pocket. To Madame Palandios he said, “May I smoke?”

“Please. Anyone who wishes. We shall have coffee on the terrace.”

Snipping the tip from the cigar, Helmi said, “I should tell you that if anything I say here were to appear in the public press, I would immediately say I had been misquoted.”

“It works splendidly,” Palandios said. “I have used the technique. Excuse me. Please go on, Helmi.”

“You will recall there was a Greek convicted as accessory to the murder. Keep that in mind. Now: There were two… what I shall call ‘escapes’ in the affair that defy all plausibility except in the context of civil war and one which involved forces outside the country on both sides. The first was Webb’s departure from Athens. He chose to seem to escape, taking with him the young American friend of his wife’s, named Emory….” Everyone nodded, remembering finally the name of the convicted murderer. “A curious, curious companion. Now there was no reason Webb should not have left Greece entirely and re-entered in guerrilla-held territory, say via Yugoslavia or Albania. One wonders if he was not proposing to dramatize afterwards the government restraint of the foreign press. In any case, he chose or was persuaded to leave from Athens, later picking up the Greek, Stephanou, as his liaison and guide. Stephanou testified that it was on Markos’ invitation. One wonders. Markos was a totally insular man. Stephanou was later convicted as accessory to the murder. Webb’s departure, I am now convinced, was made with the foreknowledge of our Government Intelligence, and, I believe, British and American Intelligence as well. Stephanou was possibly a double agent, who in the end was abandoned by both sides.”

There was a pause, Helmi lighting his cigar, everyone else evaluating what he said in terms of their own memory of the case. The idea of Stephanou’s having been a double agent seemed very plausible indeed.

Palandios said, “Stephanou went to prison, didn’t he? Is he still alive?”

“After a fashion, I understand,” Helmi said. “I should suppose he has long ago said all he is going to say about the case. A reporter was permitted to visit him at Averoff Prison. Stephanou refused to talk. They say he is like a dead man looking for a grave.”

Averoff: I would remember the name.

Madame Palandios shook her head. “The Greeks are cruel. We learned it from the Turks.”

“I sometimes wonder,” her husband said quietly. “Apt pupils are likely to outstrip their masters. Did these numerous Intelligences know that Webb was going to his death?”

“It is the only explanation, my dear Palandios, that to me satisfactorily accounts for the spectacular escape the night before his scheduled execution of the man convicted of Webb’s murder,” Helmi said.

“Escape to where?” I asked.

“That is the question, isn’t it? My own suspicion is that American Intelligence said, ‘He’s ours, but go ahead and try him since you can make a case. Make a good show of it. Then turn him over to us and we’ll take care of him.’ If I am right, he was an active agent in the whole affair. He walks through the case like a lamb to slaughter—except that he was not slaughtered, don’t you see?”

“I don’t see,” I said and then hastily added, “not that it matters.”

“You are quite right. It must be boring to those of you not familiar with the case.”

“It’s not boring at all,” my novelist friend said imperiously. “I want to hear the rest. I shall not leave this table until I do!”

Palandios patted her hand again and then said carefully to Helmi, “The trial then was a sham, a deliberately staged cover-up?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Not the trial itself. The evidence before being entered was… manipulated, shaven down or blown up. The thing that stands out now was the lack of corroboration. Yet, given the times and circumstances—you must remember that Ioannina was within striking distance by the guerrillas—I believe judges, jury, even the prosecution were convinced of their own fairness.”

“And that they were trying the right man?” I said.

Some of those at the table looked at me blankly and I realized that I should not have said it.

Helmi, relighting his cigar which had gone out, murmured, “Oh, yes. There was no reason to doubt that.”

“That the American murdered Webb?”

He nodded. “Mind, it’s my own deduction entirely.”

“Then it must also be your deduction,” Dr. Palandios said slowly, “that Alexander Webb was an agent—a Soviet agent?”

“It is my deduction that his government thought this was so. Yes.”

“And connived at his murder? Ordered it, in fact?” I said. My emotion was too strong not to show in my face. I probably went white. I’m told I do under stress.

But Helmi laughed and blew a draft of smoke between us, which he fanned away, apologizing to the ladies. “The naïveté of scholars is very amusing. You are shocked, Mr. Eakins?”

Shocked was not the word. His logic could account as nothing else for my “miraculous” escape. But I had not been an agent of my government. Nor did I give a moment’s credence to the possibility that Alexander Webb had been a Soviet agent. “I suppose I am shocked,” I murmured.

“One would want to know a great deal more about Webb before subscribing to your theory,” Palandios said. “But it’s interesting, most interesting. One wonders about that journal of his….”

“If I am right it was probably in the hands of American Intelligence before ever Emory went to trial.”

“If you are right,” Palandios repeated. “I suppose you are, but it’s a pity—I’m such an excellent hand at turning up old manuscripts. But I dare say this is not the same.”

“Not quite,” I said, getting up and holding the chair for Mrs. Storme. Our hostess had signalled our departure from the table.

“A great pity, all the same,” the old man repeated.

A few minutes later, standing with Elsa Storme on the balcony and watching the floodlights come up on Lykabettos, I said, “You haven’t remembered the name of the widow’s lover?”

“It was a foolish thing for me to have said,” she answered. “I tend to blurt things out—to Shepherd’s dismay.”

“It can be refreshing,” I said, and realized how far round I had come in my estimate of this large, gawkish woman who was as direct of eye as she was of speech.

“It comes of being married to a cautious man.”

No, I thought. Of being married to a fool.

“Will you be in Athens long?” she asked.

“In and out. I expect to be in Greece for several months.”

“We go to Knossos in the morning.”

“I’ve never been to Crete,” I said.

“Do come. We shall have a house.”

“Thank you, but I’m afraid Byron never went to Crete either.”

“And to Corfu?” Again the directness.

“He very nearly got there once—by an ill wind at sea. I don’t think I shall follow him in quite that detail.” I offered her a cigarette and lighted it for her, then one for myself.

The lights were dimming on Lykabettos, coming up on the Acropolis across the city.

She inhaled deeply and let the smoke out slowly. “Have you ever had the experience of knowing something was going to happen, and then when there was really no reason for it to happen, it did?”

I said, “I’ve sometimes felt when something was happening that I’d been through the identical thing before.”

“It’s not that, though I’ve had that too. Tonight at the table before the subject of Webb’s murder came up, I knew we were going to talk about it. And there was a moment at the table when, instead of that charming little actress across from me, I saw Mrs. Webb. I don’t suppose it all that remarkable. I did sit opposite her at dinner in Corfu.”

“What does she look like?”

“What royalty should look like but generally doesn’t,” she said without hesitation. “If I were to need to describe a queen, I should remember Margaret Webb—the gold-blonde hair, tinted I suppose, but by God I couldn’t tell—fair complexion, blue, blue eyes and a simply gorgeous neck and throat. She must be over forty. I kept wanting to put my napkin up over half my face, like a Moslem, you know?”

I laughed.

“If you do go to Corfu…”

I shook my head.

She was persistent. “It would be so easy to arrange. The British consul gave us a dinner, and a Byron scholar, oo-la-la. He’s a darling old thing with pots of money. There! I’ve remembered the man with her that night—very dark, a head as round as a bowling ball. Displaced royalty, I’m fairly certain of that. Corfu’s alive with them.”

“If that’s living,” I said. “What is it like when there’s nothing but today?” I’d meant the question to be rhetorical.

“It’s like a Greek dancing,” she said, “and that really isn’t bad.”

I was amused at the image. “I suppose not—for the dancer.”

“Don’t you like to watch them?”

I shrugged. “I’ve spent so long watching and not understanding….”

“A novelist pretends to understand. It sometimes suffices for the real thing.”

I glanced at her and away.

We stood smoking in silence for a long time, hearing the laughter behind us and the city’s noises hollowly below. Then both of us reached out simultaneously to squash out our cigarettes in the same ashtray.

“I hope we meet again, Mrs. Storme,” I said.

She looked at me sharply. “If we do, it will be afterwards,” she said.

I did not know what she meant, but I was afraid to ask. She seemed to know so much. We went inside. A little later I left the party and walked the many blocks back to the hotel. I felt an aching loneliness and was grateful when I became aware of the malaise. You will say it is a terrible thing to be lonely, but I must tell you that the absence of such suffering is much worse than the suffering of absence.

4

THE AVEROFF PRISON LAY just off the road to Marathon, its yellowed walls scored round with barbed wire. As I approached I observed a guard prowling, rifle in hand, a fenced area of rock and scrubby trees, but saw no prisoners. I saw but one sentinel on the prison wall in over an hour’s vigil, and for all the stir or sound from within the bleak building itself, he might have been guarding a tomb. All around it the work-a-day life of a city neighborhood went on. It was as though a grotesque, ancient monument had been left in the midst of modern apartment buildings even more ugly than itself.

I walked and watched and prayed in my fashion that some sign or inspiration would confront me, removing all the walls between myself and the man I sought. A street market trailed off from the back of the prison, its canopied stalls providing everything from overripe garden produce to American detergents in faded orange boxes. I bought three drachmas’ worth of sage and crushed it in my fingers, remembering Webb’s first contact on the Piraeus waterfront.

The heat of day was intense. I took refuge under the awnings of a kafenion across the busy street from the prison entrance and drank an orange gazoza. I became aware of a moderate traffic in and out of the prison of men with briefcases. I supposed them to be lawyers or lawyers’ messengers. I began to study them, to watch for arrivals, to follow departures. One could guess their status by their mode of transportation: two or three came in chauffeured limousines, others in Volkswagens, but the majority came and left by public bus. Watching men who had access to the prison doors, I evolved a plan largely dependent on my evaluation of a man by sight, a fallible gambit for the most experienced observer, which I was not. But a desperate need can rationalize the least likely means. I crossed the street, bought a package of cigarettes at the kiosk near the bus stop, and waited.

He was fair-complexioned and plump and, leaving the bus, he shook out his neatly folded suit coat and put it on, holding his briefcase between his knees. The coat was his Perseus’ Helmet: the moment he put it on he was a man of stature, of capability. A begging child, the first I had seen in Athens, approached him and received a coin which the child then flipped into the air, perhaps to see if the wind would carry it away. But my man rollicked down the street toward the prison, fairly exuding piety and well-being.

I returned to the table at the kafenion and waited, speculating on his practice. Petty thieves and license violators, absconders of lottery bets, short-term offenders. He would collect his fee on the spot. His office would be in his briefcase, his fortune in his pocket.

He came out far less exuberant than he had gone in, therefore no richer. As he crossed the street, having to wait on a rush of traffic—it was going on six o’clock by then—I moved quickly to the fruit stand near the bus stop and then, as he stepped up on the curb, approached him.

“You are an attorney?” I said in Greek.

His response was touching, as though I had at that moment conferred on him the title. Simultaneously with his smile he plunged his hand into his pocket and extracted a card which he offered with practiced grace. It read:

Nikos Spiridos

Attorney-at-law

There was no address, no phone number.

“Will you have a coffee with me?”

“Please,” he said, “it will be my pleasure if you will have one with me.”

We approached the kafenion where I had already spent much of the day. Spiridos clapped his hands for the waiter who acknowledged with a contemptuous shrug.

“Are you an American?” he asked me, standing until I had selected a chair.

“British.”

“Ah, forgive me.” He smiled broadly. “Some of my very good friends are British.” He gave himself up to a moment of silent appraisal of me, something rare in Greeks who are volatile and tactile questioners. Having spent an hour categorizing him, I wondered how he saw me. I was probably a good ten years his senior though I doubted that I looked it.

“So,” he said finally, “you are interested in someone over there?”

I waited, letting him deduce his way to me.

He held up a pudgy hand. “Forgive me, but a man of your position who needs a lawyer does not play roulette to find him at a bus stop. Besides that, you have not given me your name.”

“Jones,” I said, “David Jones.”

“How do you do, Mr. Jones? I am your servant—which cannot be said for the servant of your servant.” He half-rose and again clapped his hands.

The kafenion and its sidewalk tables were filling with men, the talkers, the players of cards and backgammon. The staccato rattle of dice ran through the clinking of cups and glassware: a shield of sound protected our conversation.

“May I ask some questions?” I said.

“Please. I am flattered.”

“Do you have many clients over there?” I said it in a way to imply my doubt that he did.

He smiled. “I have friends, and sometimes from friends come clients.”

“Are your friends in positions of authority?”

“Authority? That is too big a word. It means a fist and I like to do business with a handshake. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“I come every day and bring some little gift.” It was a rare admission on the part of a man trying to make an impression. But it built me up for the fact that I was going to have to pay two fees, his contact’s and his own. No fool, Nikos Spiridos.

He caught the waiter’s eye and ordered the coffee.

I said, “A man who is about to be released from prison—let us say I have a job in which he might be interested.”

Spiridos looked at me reprovingly. “Please. Do not confide in me more than is necessary, Mr. Jones.”

“I don’t intend to,” I said, having created exactly the impression I wanted. “It is far better that you know nothing of what I want with this man. Also, it is better that the man know nothing of me until he is on the outside and I can make contact with him myself.”

“Much better,” the lawyer murmured with open relief.

“It is also important that no one except you know that I am interested in him.”

“I am going to think of you as a humanitarian, interested in the—what is it called?—of former prisoners.”

“Rehabilitation.”

“Exactly.” Spiridos smiled brightly.

When our coffee came, I paid for it, having to call the waiter back in order to do so. When he was gone I took a thousand drachma note from my wallet and handed it to Nikos Spiridos. Without hesitation he tucked it away in splendid isolation in his own wallet.

“I am paying for privacy,” I said, “for the protection of all concerned.”

“Privacy,” Spiridos repeated. “It is a great shame it is so expensive.” He attempted a smile. “Especially among Greeks who expect to know everything for nothing.”

I looked at him coldly. “I thought we understood each other.”

“We do. I am only saying it will cost me more than it should in order to relieve the curiosity of my confidant.” He nodded toward the prison. He lifted the coffee cup delicately to his lips and sipped. “Is it too sweet for you?”

The words sent me on an odd reverie: the taste of vengeance: surely it was not what I was seeking. “I don’t know,” I murmured.

He laughed as though he understood the association.

“The name of the man is Paul Stephanou,” I said. “He has served seventeen years of a life sentence as an accessory to murder.”

Spiridos’ smile grew sickly. He wet his lips with a coffee-yellowed tongue. “The crime of murder is rare in Greece…. Except… I hope he is not political?”

“No,” I said. “You want to know as little as possible. The answer is ‘no.’”

“You are right. I shall not even try to remember the case.” A little spontaneity returned to his smile. “Probably I was too young.”

“Youth has many advantages,” I said sententiously. Then: “I wish to know the day and, if possible, the hour of his release. Will he come out that gate? Or better, where will he go? Find that out for me and I shall ask nothing more.”

Spiridos drank his coffee to the dregs and washed it down with ice water. “You are a trustful man, Mr. … ach, I have forgotten your name.”

“Good. I am no more trustful of you than I have to be, Mr. Spiridos. Nor should you be of me.”

“Only as I would trust a humanitarian,” he said. “Where shall we meet tomorrow—at, say, eleven o’clock?”

“Do you have an office?” I asked.

“Do you have a hotel room?”

We both managed to laugh.

“Let us meet in the market street in back of the prison,” I said.

Shaking hands, we parted.

I was peeling an orange the skin of which seemed as thick as the crust of the earth when I saw Spiridos the next morning. He approached from the opposite direction to that which I had expected, avoiding the prison walls. I offered him a wedge of the orange. He shook his head and rubbed his face down in an already damp handkerchief. The sun would have wilted a cactus and there was no shade.

“What a place to meet,” he said. “It smells like a garbage dump.”

“It’s well on the way,” I said. “Well?”

Spiridos glanced up at me and then looked around to see if we were being observed. I stuffed the remainder of the orange into my mouth and wiped my hands.

“Your friend,” he said finally, “it was a very expensive business to reach him.”

“You saw him?”

“Oh, no. He is a special prisoner.”

“How expensive?”

“I have spent the thousand drachmas. I will need another thousand now for my fee.”

“I am accustomed to pay for service after I have received it,” I said coldly.

“I just wished to make sure you understood my charges,” he said, and pulled a hair from his nostril which he looked at before flicking it away.

“Don’t play cat and mouse with me, Mr. Spiridos. It was not your esteemed legal council I employed. That, I suspect, could be bought for a button. If you have the information I asked for I am willing to pay that amount.”

He cringed a little. Not much. The language might be different but the substance of my abuse had been heaped on him before. “It is possible your friend will be released tomorrow afternoon. And it is possible he will be released next week. Nobody except the Minister himself knows.” He looked at me furtively. “You are wondering if that is worth two thousand drachmas.”

“Is that all?” I said, but at least I knew Stephanou was still in the prison.

“There is something more, but for God’s sake let us get out of this sun,” Spiridos said.

“I will buy you a drink. I will even buy you lunch,” I said in sudden exuberance. I was guilty of an overweening sense of superiority—to my quarry and to the man who had brought me word of him. I started through the market street at a hard-footed pace toward the rented car I had parked two blocks beyond. My companion had to trot to keep up with me. There was a growing savagery in the way I felt about this dapper-coated creature with the crumpled soul inside him. I stopped abruptly and looked down at him. “You will make arrangements, of course, so that you will be able to inform me within an hour of his release. I will see that I am available at all times.”

“That is not possible. It is too dangerous for me.”

“In what way dangerous?”

He gave himself all the dignity he could muster. “A client must be honest with his lawyer, my friend, no matter what his lawyer must be in order to serve him. You were not honest with me when you said he was not political.”

“I was as honest as I knew,” I said. And it was so, I rationalized. The preciseness of truth in the case had never been mine to define. But my arrogance simmered down.

While I unlocked the car door and turned down the windows, Spiridos touched his hand tentatively to the hood of the Vauxhall. It was as though he were approaching an animal he admired but was yet unsure of.

“Do you like fish?” I asked him.

He looked at me, nonplussed. Then: “Ah! You are thinking of luncheon. Very much. I thought you meant something else… you know, to look at?”

Even as I had in my mind likened his approach to the car to a sensuous relationship with an animal, so had he. I was pleased at my perceptivity, not because I liked him at all, but because I had thought such intuition in myself all but dead.

“We shall go to Piraeus.”

“It is a long way,” he said.

Almost twenty years, I thought, watching him remove his coat. He spread it neatly across his knees in the car.

We were not to go to Piraeus that day, however. When we had put two or three miles between us and Averoff Prison, I said, “Now tell me the rest. You said there was something else.”

“I have learned where your friend will live when he comes out. It is a village called Kaléa a few miles from Levadia. Do you know where that is?”

“Approximately.”

“The government is paying someone, I think, to take care of him.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Is he ill?”

Spiridos stared straight ahead. He opened his mouth and shaped words, but I heard nothing.

“What?” I demanded.

“He is blind,” the lawyer blurted out.

The words stunned me as nothing had since the day I was arrested and charged with the murder of Alexander Webb. I had to stop the car and sit for a moment. Spiridos offered me a cigarette and lighted it for me.

I murmured thanks. Beyond that my mind had simply stopped functioning. I realized that Spiridos was talking, and, by way of trying to concentrate on his words, I pulled myself out of the numbness.

“… I wondered at first if I should tell you. But I am an honest man. I did not want you to buy something you could not use….”

As he went on, oozing sympathy and then lacing it with his own righteousness, I wanted nothing so much as to be alone, to be rid of the sweating little lawyer. “I have lost my appetite for lunch,” I said.

“I understand. Also, I have an appointment with a man who is so poor he would have thought it my reason for not coming.” He went on unctuously, “I can afford to help him because of you, my friend.”

I put my hand to my wallet pocket. “What else did you learn about Stephanou?”

“A year ago another prisoner who was cleaning the latrine threw lye in his face. That is all I learned. I did not think you would want to know more yourself.”

“That is all,” I repeated. “How did you know he was political?”

“Because it cost me a thousand drachmas.”

I gave him a crisp new note. Sixty dollars in lawyer’s fee. I added a hundred drachmas. “You had better take a taxi. We have come some distance, and I wish to go on alone.”

“I am sorry,” he said, opening the car door.

“So am I. You can forget now that we ever met.”

“It is a shame, but you are right.” He started to get out and then looked round at me brightly. “Perhaps tonight you would like to meet someone—non-political? A very nice girl?”

I was startled, not so much by the proposal or his unabashed directness as by the sort of spinning search it started in my subconscious. I scowled at him, trying in my mind to catch the association before it was lost entirely.

“Please, it was offered in friendship,” he said. “You are a young man.”

I took the hand he offered, as viable as a wet sponge. “Thank you, but not tonight.”

I had the association the instant before he slammed the car door: Webb and the woman on the night he had been murdered, the unnamed, unquestioned woman.

I thrust the car into motion and through the rearview mirror I saw the lawyer shake out his coat and put it on again. My mind began to swarm with the evil images that had pursued me and compounded themselves since that night. I saw again the flashing candlelit nakedness of the woman, then the grinning face of Stephanou, his eyes shining with malicious glee. And I thought of the women I had taken since, or so had striven to construe the act. Even now I felt the crawl of lust starting out of the association. I drove faster and faster, sighting the sea, fighting the images. I could not put down the memory of a whore to whom I had gone, a woman who truly loved her business because she hated men. The struggle was exquisite but the triumph hers, always. And spent, I would have died each time. Yet I went again and again. It was six or seven years since I had been with her, but still I wakened in the night thinking of her and seeing always in the darkness afterwards the laughing eyes of Stephanou.

But a blind man’s eyes don’t laugh. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. And welcome. That much honor was in me: I would not have wished him blind.

I left the car at the road by the sea and walked to where I could see the water only, and the ships, and the nets of the fishermen spread in the sun. I came on an old woman, stooped and shrouded in black, probing the mesh for snags. I watched her sure and facile fingers plying a craft by ancient rote. I almost spoke, wanting to see her face. Then I ran, fearing that, seeing it, I might discover her to be blind.

5

ACCORDING TO THE MAP, a thread of a road led to Kaléa, a village of unspecified population deep in the hills between The Sacred Way and the Bay of Corinth. I set out to find it early the next morning, loading the car with luggage, papers and books, the whole of my possessions in Greece.

Less than a mile from the main highway the road all but disappeared into a bed of stones that shivered the Vauxhall in its every joint. I braked suddenly and killed the motor. The silence all around was awesome, the desolation of the hills stark. I stepped out of the car for a moment. The only movement anywhere was the swooping flight of hawks overhead and the gentle bowing of poppies in the field. I waited, listening until I might hear some sound other than the wind’s moan and the hawks’ shrill cries. It came in the bleating of sheep. I went on, confident that where there were sheep there were also shepherds though I might see neither.

I drove until I reached a shrine at a sharp turning of the road and again stopped. Before the icon of the Virgin a few shafts of grain had been placed in an old wine bottle. The candle had gone out. I relighted it, observing the little offerings within the shelter: a thimble, a watch chain, a tarnished tie-clip, a gold ring.

I heard voices some distance off and I saw a wisp of smoke trailing up to the sky. A school or church bell rang, the sound sporadically muted by the shifting wind. Afternoon was well advanced. I crossed the road and looked down into the valley. Harvesters were working their way slowly up the hill. It was a scene which could have changed very little from the days men first discovered that the fruit of the fields could be husked and ground, leavened and baked in loaves. A woman in peasant black was scything in long, slow strokes, her back the crescent shape of her scythe. Other women were binding the grain in sheaves while a man gathered the sheaves and fastened them, grain downward, on either side of a donkey. They paused in their work, all but the woman with the scythe, and, shading their eyes, looked up to where I stood.

“Your health!” I called out, and waved.

They waved back except for the woman with the scythe, who did not break the rhythm of her work. I remembered the old one mending nets by the sea who did not lift her head to me, and I was uneasy lest there be an omen in it.

The hillsides were dotted with white-washed huts, more numerous as they converged to form the village below. I drove down the precipitous road which leveled off at a shaded square in the middle of which was a fountain where women were drawing water. I parked in the shade and walked toward the nearest kafenion, aware of the women’s glances and the children gathering on tiptoe to peer into the car after I had left it. There was only one other car in sight, an ancient Chevrolet which I subsequently learned belonged to the butcher. The first shop I came to was that of a blacksmith. Beyond the dark recess I could see a boy fanning coals in the backyard. The blacksmith himself was mending a saddle, hugging the daylight near the entry. He nodded and I stopped. I inquired if there was an inn in the village. He put down his tools and came out into the street with me.

“You are German?” he asked with no great show of hospitality. He was my height, but a bigger man and much older. His face was heavily lined. He was a man who laughed easily, but not with strangers, I thought.

“American,” I said.

He scowled, looking toward the car. I led the way back across the street. The children retreated. The blacksmith stooped to examine the inside of the Vauxhall. The back seat was piled with books which Dr. Palandios had insisted I borrow. My own were boxed and on the floor with my luggage.

“Do you dig?” he asked with appropriate gestures.

“I write,” I said, “and I am a teacher.”

“Ah! A professor! Our professor lives in the next village,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

“I am. And I want a place to live.”

“In Kaléa?” he asked, puzzled as well he might have been. I did not suppose he could have heard of Lord Byron, any more than was Byron likely to have heard of Kaléa.

I nodded, indicating beyond the village. “How far is it to the sea?”

“Twenty kilometers. But there is no road.”

“I am writing about your War of Independence,” I said, which was remotely true.

“Ah-ha.” He took me by the arm to turn me in another direction. “That way is Distoman. Do you know what happened there?” And I now understood the reluctant hospitality which would have been extended to me if I were a German.

“Three hundred hostages were shot there,” I said, “a male from each family.”

His eyes bore home the point. “A child two years old, an ancient of eighty-seven. He could not walk. They carried him. But when he got there he stood up straight. Proud.” He spat in the street, his own show of lingering defiance.

I then explained: “It is the war against the Turks in 1821 that I am going to write about.”

“That one!” he said contemptuously. He took my arm again and led me down the street. He asked my name and, when I told him, repeated it, giving it a slightly guttural sound, close to “Achens,” and so it would be pronounced from then on in Kaléa. “Your father was a Greek?”

Seeing no harm in the pretension, I did not deny it.

“What does he do in America?”

“He is dead,” I said.

“May he be with God.” He stopped and offered his hand.

“I am George Kanakis, and I am president of Kaléa. I am also the blacksmith and I repair the roads.”

“You must be a very busy blacksmith,” I said.

He shrugged, then a moment later, realizing what I had meant, he gave a great “Ha!” and pressed my arm. “In America the roads are better?” He led the way past the post office, pointing to me and calling out to the person inside, “American!” and past the bus station which was closed, explaining to me that the bus came early in the morning and mid-afternoon, past the kafenion where I had intended to make inquiries. Several older men half-rose from their chairs at our approach. My guide propelled me on, saying, “Later, later,” to the habitués. To me he confided, “Old men, only the old ones go there.”

The butcher, a few doors down, came out from his shop to meet us, leaving his one customer to examine a few straggles of ripe meat hanging on hooks behind the block. He shook hands and in so doing turned me to the Chevrolet. It was for hire, he explained, wiping the dust from the fender with his apron which already looked as though he had rubbed down a raw carcass with it. He told me that he drove to Athens twice a week. He had a son in Detroit, America, who worked for General Motors, and three daughters at home, beautiful girls, but what could he do? All the young men left the village as soon as they got shoes on their feet.

“He wants us to kill the shoemaker,” Kanakis said, and eased me on. Out of the butcher’s hearing he elaborated: “He has buried three wives and is now on a fourth. Why should he complain of three daughters?”

I could smell the fresh-baked bread and roasting meat some distance before we reached the restaurant and realized that I had had no food since breakfast.

“Vasso cooks for many people,” the president of Kaléa explained. “Everybody does not have a stove. Why should they, when we have Vasso?”

There was no one at the tables outside and the dining room was bare except for tables and chairs, two huge wine kegs and the pastel-tinted photographs of the King and Queen which hung over the kitchen door. But the kitchen was something else: a great table was stacked with fresh bread. There were baskets of tomatoes and carrots and large flat beans. Mesh bags of garlic and onions hung from a beam along with strings of herbs, the smell of which added pungency to the room. Outside the open back door a lamb was roasting on a spit turned by a boy who was paying far more attention to the book in his other hand.

“Michael, it burns!” Kanakis called out.

The boy dropped the book, dipped his ladle and basted the lamb.

The woman, taking the last of the loaves from the oven, lifted her foot and closed the oven door with her toe. I glimpsed a graceful leg and a fine ankle.

She sprinkled the loaves with flour and then came to us, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She paused, seeing me, a stranger, and then came on, the dark eyes shifting questioningly from me to Kanakis. She was a handsome woman, but not as young as I’d thought judging from the ankle.

“Who is it?” she said to him almost as though I were not present. She is expecting someone else, I thought, or word from someone. Kanakis quickly explained my presence and more convincingly than I should have done under the circumstances. He introduced her simply as Vasso.

“Are you alone?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

“Last summer there were archeologists. They gave employment to some of our people.”

A true matriarch, I thought. “I’m sorry, but I have nothing like that to offer.”

“With God’s help we live,” she said. “Come. You will eat first and I will see what can be arranged.”

Kanakis shook hands with me and went outdoors. Vasso took me to the stove and lifted the lids of one pot, then another, that simmered there, a chunk of lamb previously spitted now steeped in its own juices, flat green beans in basil and oil, spaghetti….

“Some of everything,” I said. “I am very hungry.”

At the dining room door she bade me choose my table and then brought a simple setting and fresh bread. She drew wine in an earthenware jug from one of the kegs and brought it.

“You are a professor also?” she said, Kanakis having listed that among my credentials.

“Yes.”

“My son goes twenty kilometers to the gymnasium. Someday he will go to the university in Athens if God is awake.”

“Do you have other children, Mrs. …? I did not get your other name,” I said apologetically.

“Vasso. I am called Vasso. It is enough. Michael is my only child and I have no husband.” She flung the words at me, not with hostility but as though in a summary that should forestall my asking further questions. I think it amused her to see that I was somewhat flustered. All of which gave me something to ponder while I sipped the good light wine and ate my bread. She wore a red skirt and white shirtwaist, not the widow’s black.

The old men from the kafenion had drifted down the street and taken up chairs outside the restaurant. They twisted around to peer in at me owlishly now and then, while Kanakis stood talking with them, and if they seemed to catch my eyes, they nodded and saluted me.

Kanakis came in presently and said, “You are invited to have coffee with us, Mr. Eakins,” and, at the kitchen door, “Five coffees, Vasso!”

I shall give the names of some of these old gentlemen afterwards. It was some time before I knew them myself, but three of them had been in America and had returned to the village of their birth. They questioned me on my business—where I taught, whether I got paid for writing a book, and how much. One of them complimented me on my Greek, but the eager confirmation of the others made me doubt its excellence. Then each of them told me of his business in America.

“They do us a great honor, coming home to die,” Kanakis said. I was not at all sure it was not sarcasm.

“We come home to live,” he was corrected.

“To live is to plough the soil, reap the grain, it is to make strong sons.”

“We have done all that, Kanakis.”

“And left them in America. You are not Greeks, you are displaced Americans.”

“We pay Greek taxes, Kanakis.”

“Because you can’t run fast enough when the collector comes.”

“And why do you not run, you are so swift? You stay to collect from the collector.”

“I am a paid public official.”

“And we are the public!” One of the old men thumped his fist on the table, shimmering the water in the glasses. “I learned that in America. We are the public.”

This while Vasso’s son had gone and come, bringing back with him a woman in black of an age to be his grandmother. Whatever was said in the kitchen as the old one went out again she bowed and nodded to me, the boy at her heels. The village president left us and the old men had fallen to talking about the government subsidies to farmers. They opposed it, to a man, lest it change the country in their lifetime. The sun was setting when the boy came back and asked if I was ready.

The square had come to life when Michael and I walked back to where I had left the car: wagons and donkeys, men and women returning from the fields. Women carried water in cannisters on their heads, moving with solemn and sure grace over the cobbles in their bare feet. The humped hills to the west were rimmed in gold and the shadows fell through the valley like the descent of enormous bats.

Vasso’s son walked in silence.

“What are you reading, Michael?” I asked.

“A book, sir.”

“What is it about?”

“People.”

“That’s the best subject,” I said, and abandoned the attempt at conversation. He was small for his age and he bore little resemblance to his mother. Both his head and face were round, the features small. I was to remember later thinking that he looked like the child of an old man.

At the seaward edge of the village, he directed me to stop the car. The old woman was waiting outside a freshly whitewashed cottage. As I reached its door she scurried in ahead of me and pulled an electric-light cord. The bulb gave a dismal light but to her it was a triumph. She grinned and waited for my approval.

“Kala,” I said, but I was grateful I had remembered to purchase a strong bulb in Athens.

There was but the one room, large and as sparsely furnished as the requirements I had specified. The shutters were open and the room smelled fresh. The old woman pointed to the icon, a long-faced Virgin, and blessed herself as she watched me.

“Kala,” I said again.

She brought me a small dish of preserved cherries with a silver spoon and a glass of water, and watched solemnly while I ate them.

Michael had vanished. It was the old woman who insisted on helping me bring in my things, choosing to carry the heaviest of them. Gallantry on my part would only have embarrassed her. I unpacked my books.

“Grandmother,” I said, “how many grandchildren do you have?”

She laughed. “Eleven. Seven boys.”

“May they all prosper with God’s help,” I said.

“I have three sons, two of them in Athens and one in Istanbul.”

“And daughters?”

“Only one, thank God, my Vasso.”

“She will provide for herself,” I said.

“Ah.” She wagged her head.

“She is beautiful,” I said.

She glanced at me furtively, but her eyes were tender and, in that deeply lined face, the cheeks shrunken beneath their high bone structure, I could see the daughter’s mother.

I added, “As you were once yourself, grandmother.”

She caught my hand in hers and lifted it briefly to her lips. Then she fled into the twilight.

I felt my hand where the dry lips had brushed it, the touch of them as light as that of a moth’s wing, and I stood, aware that tears had come to my eyes. Why I wanted to weep I did not know except that I had meant what I said and she believed me.

Later, lying in the darkness and staring through the window at the myriad stars, I thought about the blind man coming. I wished in my heart that he too would come a stranger to Kaléa. But I knew, more deeply than the wish to gainsay it, that he was coming home.

6

I HAD ARRIVED IN Kaléa on a Thursday. The next day I walked several miles toward the sea to the point where I could look down on the miles of olive groves which lay, wind-rippled in the sun, like a monstrous green serpent easing up from the sea. I walked back through the bristling gorse from which the sheep cropped a stubborn nourishment. I spoke with a shepherd who had never been out of the hills, and I watched the threshing of grain on a sun-bleached floor, men and women flailing with sticks and then sifting the grain from the chaff. They invited me to share a meal of bread and cheese, and afterwards I divided the two oranges I had in my knapsack.

That night I sat with the old men outside the kafenion and shook hands with people who came, hearing I was there. The priest invited me to his house and promised me the loan of a book on the Siege of Missolonghi, the town where Byron died. He was a little pompous and spoke as though he had been present at the Siege. An old man with a stick, hobbled with arthritis, passed back and forth in front of us, glowering at me with open hostility.

Old Spyro, who had proclaimed himself my friend because we both had once lived in Boston, called out to the lame one, “Modenis, come meet my American comrade.”

“Your comrade,” he muttered and went on.

The old ones around me nudged one another and chuckled over a joke I did not understand.

“Who is he?” I asked.

I didn’t understand the word. Spyro explained: “A mountain fighter, but old, old. He is suspicious of everybody, not just you.”

“Why?”

Spyro, a wizened little man given to twisting and turning in his chair like a bird on a perch, wove his arm through the back rungs. “If he comes you will find out,” he said. “If he does not come, so much the better.”

“Aye, aye,” the others agreed.

I was sure they were talking about Paul Stephanou, but I did not question further.

Toward midnight I saw Vasso turn out the restaurant lights and walk up the street to the cottage next to the one she had rented to me and where she now lived with her mother and the boy. When I passed it later it was in darkness, but I heard the murmur of the women’s voices and I thought I heard the name Modenis. I wondered if the cottage where I lived had been prepared for Stephanou. No one had mentioned his name, but from somewhere I had got the impression that Vasso also was waiting for his return. Perhaps it was the searching look she had given me when we met—as though I might have been the herald of his coming. In Kaléa it was possible to imagine many things.

I went to the restaurant for breakfast in the morning so that Vasso would at the same time prepare a lunch which I could take with me. It was early, but no sooner had I sat down at a table outdoors than the garrulous old ones appeared and gathered around me. There was something different, not in their attitude toward me especially, but among themselves, as though they had something they wanted to tell that had not been told before. I can say this now, looking back: it was not quite so defined then, and I was probably first aware of the change in atmosphere when Constable Rigi, one of the village’s two policemen, came and stood nearby, his arms folded, his legs spread. His perpetual expression was that of a man suppressing a yawn, but his proximity that morning disquieted even those who had sat in camaraderie with him the night before.

I was about to offer coffee around when Spyro nudged the man next to him. They all turned to look in the same direction.

“Modenis,” Spyro said.

He came, rod-backed and steady-paced, dressed in a dark suit, shirt and tie, a straw hat on his head and his shoes so shined that they caught the glitter of sunlight. He was as old as most of the men around me, but by his gait and mien I sensed an iron will bearing him on this appointed journey. I was reminded of an old soldier about to take a last salute. When he was abreast of us I realized that Constable Rigi had moved off down the street. Modenis stood a moment glowering after him and then snorted. Disgust or contempt, I could not tell. I studied his face, searching it for a resemblance to the young Stephanou I remembered, for I knew even before Spyro said:

“Kalí méra, Modenis. So the hero comes home at last.”

A lump rose in my throat.

Modenis turned on us, his dark brows fierce. “Americans, you shut up!” he shouted.

Spyro appealed to his cronies. “What did I say?”

“He is a blind boy and a patriot,” Modenis said. “While you were making Yankee dollars he was fighting Fascists.”

“And for that they put him into prison?”

“Yes! For that they put him into prison!”

“Come, Modenis,” Spyro said, “have coffee with us. Your taxi driver must first butcher a lamb. You do not need to fight his battles, old friend. A blind man has no enemies.”

While two of the men scraped their chairs back from the table, Modenis came a step closer, leaning heavily on his cane. His eyes were on me. “Who are you and what is your business?”

“My name is John Eakins,” I said, getting up.

“Modenis, Modenis, what’s the matter with you? The man is a friend. He is a professor, a writer. We are not savages in Kaléa.”

“What do you write?” Modenis demanded.

“The life of a poet,” I said.

“A poet,” he repeated, the fierce brows slowly relaxing. He sat down, a gnarled, shaking hand steadying itself on the table to support his weight while the other groped for the back of the chair. He had to drop his crippled body into it like an abandoned puppet. He drew a deep breath and looked at me. “A poet?” he said again as though he might not have heard correctly.

I nodded.

“Sit down,” he ordered me. To Spyro: “I will have coffee. And tell Vasso I want to speak to her.” He took off his hat and laid it on the table. His head was as bald as the rock of starvation.

One of the men went to the doorway and clapped his hands.

Modenis touched his chin where he had nicked himself shaving. “A Greek poet?” he asked.

“An Englishman, Lord Byron.”

The old man nodded. “My sister’s son who is coming home today… he has been away for a long time….” His voice trailed off and his eyes strayed around the faces of the cronies, solemn and watchful, men with no cares left in the world save their own comforts. Then he wagged a finger at me. “Do not believe what these old gossips tell you!”

“Is your nephew a poet?”

“Once he was. Now—who knows? except that he is blind. God wither their souls in hell!” He crashed his hands down on the table and bent his head as low as his wracked body would allow, his eyes closed, his jaws clenched.

I thought of the night in a Greek prison when I had myself cursed as bitterly. I said, “Homer was blind, and so was the English poet, Milton.”

Modenis opened his eyes, then nodded his head a little.

Vasso came and set a cup of coffee before him. “Godspeed, Uncle of Paul,” she said.

“I will tell him that you said it, Vasso.”

Old Spyro clapped me on the back. “Tonight, John Eakins, you will learn what a Greek homecoming is like. We will all get drunk and we will laugh and cry, and nobody will talk of politics.”

“Ha!” another man cried.

“He cannot be a Communist any more. And if he is, who will argue with him? I swear by the sweet Virgin Mother I will not say a word.”

“Nor I, nor I,” the others chorused.

I heard the words and did not hear them. I looked at Vasso, the color high in her cheeks, the dark eyes darting from one face to the other and then to me as if to plead the welcome. I could see in her the girl she would have been when Stephanou had left her—for war and revolution. But, oh, dear God, what would she see in him who was coming home—the dead man looking for a grave?

Vasso brought us coffee which the old boys sipped noisily as though to dissipate Modenis’ brooding silence.

The butcher drove up in his Chevrolet. Modenis put on his hat and raised himself from the chair. No one dared to help him, but each man grunted sympathetically. I stood up and moved the chair out of his way.

He extended his hand to me. “I am sorry I was lacking in hospitality.”

“Godspeed,” I said, although the word was bitter in my mouth.

I walked far that day, crossing through the olive groves and climbing to the rocky cliffs above the Bay of Corinth. I was trying to walk off a sudden anger, or at least to understand it. I supposed it lay in the resuscitation of that dread feeling of being used, and of having got myself into a position where I could not avoid it: I was to be part of the welcome—I’d seen it in Vasso’s face—as though she had said, “I am glad you are here, someone of his caliber. You will be useful in his rehabilitation.”

Or was it jealousy that ailed me? Of all the god-damned nonsense! I was jealous of his coming home to Vasso even as I had once been jealous of the relationship between him and Webb as we had gone north together. I thought then of the son who bore Vasso’s maiden name, Panyotis, and felt a satisfaction in the breach I presumed it manifested in her fidelity. Then how I castigated myself for that bit of nastiness! I was incapable of measuring honest sentiment to the depth of a handshake, I thought. I had never loved a woman I had touched or touched a woman whom I had loved. Pitiable if not funny. I had pitied myself too much and had rarely if ever been able to laugh at my own expense. For a flickering instant as I looked down on the dark, night-blue water, I asked myself at what Paul Stephanou was laughing that night when we had looked for Webb, both of us frantic—or so I had thought him as well as myself—for the safety of the man, only to discover him tossing on a sea of bliss.

Christ in heaven! Was that not funny? I could no more laugh now, explaining the joke on myself to myself, than I was able at the time to see it that way. But the loathing I had felt at that instant for Webb and for the laughing Greek had, over the years, shifted its focus… I had come to loathe myself for the victim that moment had made of me.

“The wretch, concentred all in self….” I said the words aloud even as they surfaced unbidden in my mind.

I moved away from the precipice and turned my back on the sea, my mind clinging, much after its usual fashion, to the contemplation of some poet whose words I had plucked with apt timeliness from my subconscious as from a jewel box. Thus did I substitute ornament for truth. There was something in the exchange of correspondence between Scott and Byron I ought to explore, I told myself, a key perhaps to the puritanism behind the sham of the libertine.

It was late afternoon when I returned to a much-changed village. Word had spread of Modenis’ mission, and by now the name of Paul Stephanou was on everybody’s lips. Women were home early from the fields, picking flowers from their gardens, or braiding their hair as they gossiped at the windows. Girls, most of them too young to remember him, were out in fresh frocks. When one of them said something, they would rush together to join in paroxysms of glee. They reminded me of nothing so much as undergraduates on a football Saturday. One had to suppose from this activity that there was a legend to the man returning home.

Children were dispatched to the shrine where the road turned down to Kaléa. Outside the church a close-shaven young man was rehearsing a boys’ chorus in folk songs. I wandered among the men gathered at the kafenia. The talk was politics no less than usual, but the consensus, if I judged it right, was that since Paul was coming home all must be well with the government in Athens: political leniency was the sure sign of stability.

I approached Constable Rigi and remarked on the excitement. He shrugged and said, “People remember what they want to remember. To me it is no great honor to have been in prison. But if I said that now….” He made the gesture of cutting his own throat.

I watched and listened with a kind of horror, not because of my own feeling about Stephanou—who here would believe me if I told of his false testimony? Constable Rigi!—but because I kept remembering the lawyer Helmi’s description of him. I wanted to prepare the people, particularly Vasso. I watched her come from the house to the restaurant, her arm across Michael’s shoulders. She sped him on to join in the children’s vigil.

She smiled as I came up. “You will like the Greeks tonight, Professor Eakins.”

“I do not have to wait for tonight. Have you seen him, Vasso, since he went away?”

She shook her head.

“There are few afflictions worse than blindness,” I said.

“He will have a hundred pairs of eyes.”

I said no more. Going into the cottage, I looked up the correspondence between Byron and Sir Walter Scott.

He came as the first shadows fell upon the valley. I knew it from the ringing of the church bell, then from the sound of the grandmother as she ran past my window. I looked up in time to see her cross herself again and again as she ran. I closed my books and went out. Everyone was gathering in front of the restaurant, the boys’ chorus, the giggling girls. The priest came out from his house, striding in black magnificence, his wife scurrying after him.

The car came down the hill, the dust in its wake veiling the children who ran after it, the flowers still in their arms. That it had not stopped for their gifts was to me the first omen.

As the car drew to a halt, the singing master signalled and began himself to sing, but the boys, far more interested in the passenger than in their director, sang in neither tune nor time. And one long moan went up from the women who had glimpsed the men in the back seat. The butcher’s wife handed her husband a towel in which he wiped his face. Vasso, waiting with towels for the others, could not get the back door open and no one helped her until I pushed through the crowd and, reaching through the front window, unlocked it from the inside and opened it. Paul Stephanou sat like a stone man, his face grey, save for the pinched red lids that concealed the sightless eyes. His closely cropped hair was white and his lips tight, the color and shape of a slashing scar. I would not ever, ever have known him.

Beside him old Modenis sat staring ahead, his fierce dark eyes blinking. He was like a poised eagle.

Vasso held the wet towel close to Paul’s hands and said his name. He pushed her hand from him and said harshly, “Butcher, drive on!”

The priest came up, trying to move Vasso away and himself take over, but she elbowed him back and slammed shut the door of the car. I thought she was going to faint, such was the pallor of her face. I offered my hand and she caught it and held it fiercely as the car moved slowly, jerkily, from the curb. The white towels lay at her feet.

The chorus faded out altogether with the sound of the car’s motor and mercifully did not start up again. Only the moans of disappointment. What in hell had they expected? The return of a laughing boy?

I said one word to Vasso, “Courage!”

Her lips were parted. She nodded a little without looking at me and then, letting go my hand, followed after the car. She walked in the slow march of a ritual to where Modenis had gotten from the car in front of his cottage. He put the small, cheap suitcase on the ground and gave his hand to the blind man who then got out of the car, cane in hand, and permitted his uncle to guide him into the house. Vasso picked up the suitcase and followed them.

The butcher circled back and parked the car, immediately becoming the center of a men’s jabbering council. The children pelted one another with the flowers, the girls went home to put away their pretty dresses and some of the boys from the chorus staggered mockingly into the street, groping the air in a sort of grotesque game of blind-man’s buff.

I walked to the opposite end of the village to the shop where I had myself been given my first welcome to Kaléa just two days before.

7

A MAN CONSPICUOUS BY his absence from Stephanou’s homecoming was George Kanakis, the village president. I sought him out in his shop. He was at the forge, turning the blade of a plow that had been cruelly bent as by a rock. I watched him try to hammer it into shape while he looked at the fading coals and cursed the boy who had deserted the bellows. I volunteered to try my hand at them. I was more a menace than a help, sending up a cascade of sparks with my first attempt.

“It can wait,” Kanakis said, and laid aside the plow.

“I can learn.”

“Why? It is an ancient trade and you are a modern man. What is happening with the return of the hero?” I could not tell: sarcasm or acclaim?

“He is old,” I said. “He would not speak.”

“Not to Vasso?”

“To no one except the butcher, telling him to drive on.”

Kanakis led the way to the front of the shop and offered me one of the two chairs there. At the door he clapped his hands, a signal to the kafenion-keeper two doors away. “You will have a coffee with me,” he said.

“I would be honored. What was he like before he went away?”

“Before he went away. I remember Paul when he was a boy and I was already a man.” He threw up his hands. “I remember when he was born. His mother died, may she be with God. His father was killed in a street demonstration in Athens. He too was a radical, a self-educated man. Modenis, his uncle, brought Paul up like his own son, sent him to school. He was a fine student, very good in languages at the gymnasium. Then before the war he won a scholarship to the university in Athens. Modenis gave a party that night—oh, I tell you, it was beautiful.” He tilted back in his chair, remembering, his toughened face soft with the visions he saw. “Everybody got drunk. A scholar from Kaléa. It was like having a doctor from the village, you know? It was like all of us together were part of him. And we were. We all gave something so that he should live well in Athens, like the son of a merchant or a lawyer. But the war came, and Paul fought in the north with our ragged and heroic army and then afterwards when everything was lost, he came back and the terrible time of the German came on us. He could have gone to Egypt with the government… the flight into Egypt….” Kanakis smiled at the bitter image. “But he chose to stay. He taught school at night—in the cave where a candle burns to this day. Our children were like moles, but they learned to use words, to read and write their own language. He was like a young priest. And later, when he roused us all by his passion—he would tell us in the church while the priest—it was the old priest, not the one here now—watched from the belfry lest the Germans come. He would tell us of our ancient heroes, of our rising amongst the graves defiled by the Turk, and then afterwards our young men and some not so young—I was among them—would follow him in the night and we learned something else—how to kill, how to blast with dynamite; I who turn my back like a woman when the butcher sticks a pig. In this village we were not afraid of the Andarte. In those days we were the Andarte.”

The coffee came, the small cups and the glasses of water were set daintily on a nail keg. The quick darkness of the valley was coming soon. We sipped the coffee in silence. I offered my host a cigarette.

When he had smoked for a moment he said, “But after the war it was something else. When the Germans were gone we were not all for the Andarte any longer. Sometimes I think we are better at fighting ourselves than we are our enemies. And you know, I sometimes blame the church for it. Maybe I should blame our enemies who have always left us our church. Mind, I am a religious man. They have left us our Greekness, leaving the church.

“Could they have taken it away?”

“They could have tried. But they chose to use it, to content us with it, you know? It depends on the point of view. Even the Communists accept, and I suppose, if it had come to it, the church would have accepted the Communists.”

“It’s the way of survival, isn’t it?” I said.

He nodded. I could scarcely see his face now. “But to some men survival is not enough. It was not the old Greece Paul wanted restored. But it has been restored in spite of him. Again, maybe because of him and his kind. Every village was not as blessed in having an underground schoolteacher during the war, and where was he after the war when teachers were needed the most? He was not teaching. I know that.”

Where was he indeed? I thought.

“I am content now with Kaléa as it is, with the old Greece. My children are grown and gone away. They will not change it. And the old ones are right. I am elected president of the village, but I am paid by Athens, by the tax collectors.”

I tried to think of a way I could non-committally ask my question. I thought of the old men baiting Modenis. “Was it for his political views that Stephanou went to prison?”

“Yes. Even I would say so. He gave testimony at a murder trial. The government had him, you see, and otherwise he would have been tried for treason.”

“But to give testimony is not criminal surely.”

“He implicated himself. He saved somebody else.”

“Who?”

“How should I know? I was no longer myself political. I took the oath of allegiance to the government. So it was told and I can believe it. He was no longer important. None of them were, but he did not know it then.”

“Vasso was waiting for him,” I said. “Has she been waiting all the years he was in prison?”

Kanakis glanced at me from under his drawn brows. “If he believes it, it is so.”

“And the boy, Michael?” I persisted.

“He is his mother’s son,” the man said tersely.

As Kanakis got up and turned on the light his apprentice returned.

“So, my ambassador, my lieutenant, my lazy one, what is happening?”

“There is to be a service at the church at eight o’clock. Father Lappas says you are to come, Mr. President. He will say prayers to St. Panteleimon, the patron of the blind. After the procession Vasso has promised a feast.”

“Vasso has promised a feast,” Kanakis repeated, his voice heavy with irony. Then: “Why not? We shall all get drunk again and pretend he had just won the scholarship.”

“Please, my master, with your permission, I am to run to my brother’s house and ask him to come and to bring his mandolin.”

“Run, boy, run!” Kanakis clapped his hands after him.

I am not myself a religious man, having confused my gods among my other confusions, but I was moved that night by the procession that walked in slow stages from the church through the streets of Kaléa to the house where the blind man was. The priest wore white vestments, gold embroidered, and carried a shepherd’s crook. Two boys with naming torches led the way, another bore a pennant of the Virgin, and an acolyte followed with the censer, then two Greek flags, one flashing new and the other soiled and tattered so that I supposed it to have survived the war and occupation. The men followed, Kanakis and members of the village council first, the others in precedence of age, then the boys—some not yet in their teens—and finally the women, all carrying candles which they strove to keep alight. At every pause while the banner was incensed, the women fell to their knees and bent again and again to the ground in abject petition. They were all, I thought, praying for light, and against the day when blindness might themselves confound. Vasso walked midway among the women. If she prayed, she did not move her lips or sink to her knees. Nor did she carry a candle. Her face, framed in a voluminous shawl, showed nothing except endurance. She had not reached him, entering the house, any more than she had at the car window, I thought.

Before the closed door of Modenis’ cottage the priest made the sign of the cross with his crosier, chanting loudly his prayer to St. Panteleimon, the miraculous healer. He swung the censer round the path, sending up clouds of fragrant smoke.

But the door did not open, and there was no light within. The windows themselves were like empty eye sockets.

“Be of greater faith!” the priest cried out. “Open your hearts!”

The women beat the earth with their foreheads and cried out to God and all the saints. The men grew restive and the priest after many exhortations gave up.

“It is God’s will,” he said, and turned from the house.

Vasso’s voice rose over the murmurous lamentation. “There is food prepared. Father, will you come and bless the feast?”

A moment’s silence hung except for the rustle of clothes and the creaking of joints as the women rose from their knees.

“I am reminded of the biblical parable—the wedding feast to which many were invited and none came,” the priest began ponderously.

No one waited to hear more. The procession dissolved on the instant, men, women and children scrambling through the darkness, their candles going out in the wind.

I fell in step with Vasso. “Let me help.”

“In what way will you help, Mr. Eakins?”

“I will find a way. May I come?”

“Come and welcome! You are not the stranger tonight in Kaléa.”

Men were already drawing wine when we reached the restaurant, jug after jug, and, the jugs full, the water pitchers. In the kitchen the butcher had started to carve the first of three lambs, chunking the meat and piling it high on platters. The women were slicing slabs of bread.

Vasso stood a moment in the kitchen doorway, her arms folded. “I am not needed even here,” she said. “Good!” She swung around to the roomful of milling people. “Where are the musicians? They must eat first.”

But no one waited. People ate as they could reach the food, and drank, the wine running from their now laughing mouths. Vasso wheeled through her guests like a dervish, urging them to eat, to drink. The priest, served by Vasso and by his wife, ate as though he had fasted for forty days.

My friend, Spyro, seeing me, raised a chop in the air. “American friend, eat! Vasso, Mr. Eakins has no food!”

I put out my hand and caught her as she leaped in response to Spyro’s command with a desperate willingness. “Vasso, I can wait.”

Her eyes were wild, beautiful in their restlessness. “Never, never wait. Let me tell you, waiting is to die.”

“Sometimes it is to live,” I said.

The way she looked at me then, her eyes suddenly softening as with tears, sent a shock of pleasure through me as sweet as youth itself. I let her hand go, but she lingered, our eyes not leaving one another’s until the butcher’s wife, bearing a tray and battering her way with her backside, jostled us apart. I moved back to the wall where I could watch and be apart to wonder at the thing which had just happened to me. Vasso brought me food which I ate only because she had brought it. She turned swiftly from me, nor met my eyes, and called out for the musicians to play before they were too drunk. The mandolin player came, his instrument held high above his head for safety, and, finding no place to put it down while he arranged chairs for himself and the other players, thrust it into my hands.

Having long had a camaraderie with a guitar, I caressed the strings. Spyro and his cronies were on me as instant as genii. They hissed for silence, old Spyro doing a kind of pirouette and snapping his fingers, coaxing me. I could not escape. Nor did I want to, truth be told. I sang in English “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” and the cries of polee orea rang out. There is a melancholy in that old Irish song with which the Greeks immediately identified.

I don’t know what else I sang, two or three songs and the Klephtikos in Greek in which everybody joined. The whole night became a reverie. I remember the old women making a circle sitting on the floor around a space for the dancers, and Vasso’s mother, the toothless one, looking up into my face and laughing, her tongue darting in and out with pleasure. I caught Kanakis watching me. He came to me and asked me for a cigarette. I don’t know what he had in mind, but afterwards I was sure there was some inner symbolism for him in it. He would not let me light it for him, but held it, looking at it for a moment, and then put it in his pocket. He pointed to the priest who was nodding at the table, his hands folded over his belly, his thumbs anchored in his cincture.

“God will wake him when He needs him,” Kanakis said, and moved toward Vasso. Looking at the priest I thought, as though I had been the first to discover a great truth, how men needed gods that they might recognize themselves in the images they worshipped. It seemed a great pity I could not think of a Bacchus among the Christian saints.

Kanakis kissed Vasso on the cheek and, waving to all, went out. I followed him into the street. He lit the cigarette then and we both stood a moment looking toward Modenis’ cottage. There was a light on now and one of the shutters was open. Kanakis took my arm and we walked to the gate. He went to the open window and looked in. I followed, but at a few feet’s distance.

“Paul…”

I could not see the blind man, but Modenis looked round and said to him, “It is George Kanakis.”

“Do you remember the cave where we used to hide, where the children came to you? It was dark there, Paul, until you brought us light. The women keep a candle burning there, for we would not forget.”

For a few seconds there was no response. Then Stephanou demanded, “Who was singing?”

From the way Modenis looked around at him I thought it possible that those were the first words he had spoken in the house.

“Professor Eakins,” Kanakis said. “He is working in the village.”

I moved to where I could see the blind man, but only barely, for he was sitting cross-legged on the ground in a far corner and I wondered if he would grope the floor on all fours for his own beginning again.

“I prophesy another candle in the cave,” Paul said.

“We have need of prophecy as well as light,” Kanakis said. “Goodnight, Paul. Goodnight, Modenis.”

“Kali´níhta,” Modenis said. “Goodnight.”

I followed Kanakis to the street. “What did he mean, another candle in the cave?”

Kanakis shrugged. “Perhaps he too is a little jealous. Goodnight, my friend.”

Of me? I wondered but I would not ask.

We shook hands and parted, I going toward my cottage, he up the street past the restaurant. He did not stop. I watched him out of sight, a man going home alone, and somehow suddenly an old man as I had not thought of him before.

In my bed I lay in the darkness and listened with a throbbing alertness to every sound, the leavetakings, the waking of children as the older ones came home, the mournful crooning of the lately joyous turned melancholic with too much wine, the tinkling of sheep bells, the harsh braying of a donkey. I heard the opening and the closing of the door to the next cottage. I saw the light go on, its reflection faintly spangling my own wall through the shutters. Soon the light went out, and there was stillness everywhere.

The agony of wanting was such that I could have cried out with it. I even thought I might have done so, when I heard my door opening. I saw her figure but briefly before the door closed, and I leaped up to catch her quickly into my arms. We did not speak. Afterwards she wept and then laughed silently at her own weeping and begged me to forgive the tears.

“I am blessed by them,” I said, “and by your coming.”

Here I must fall back again on my poets and say with that greatest and most ancient of the Greeks, she left me with the coming of rosy-fingered dawn.

8

BUT THE LIGHT OF day is something quite different from rosy-fingered dawn.

Spyro and his friends were waiting at the café when I went up in the late morning, a shaggy trio of old crows who missed very little when they were sober, which was almost always, but they had not been sober the night before. They sat blinking their bloodshot eyes, their beads idle in their fingers, for once having nothing to say. I clapped Spyro gently on the shoulder, eliciting a groan. I went inside. The floor had been swept, the debris cleared. Only the swarming flies found traces of the feast. In the kitchen Vasso was scraping the bones of last night’s lamb and chopping the meat into tiny pieces.

“Kali´méra,” I said. It is a word the sound of which I love. But there are many such Greek words.

“Kali´spéra,” Vasso corrected me. “Good evening.” She did not look up from her work, but jerked her head toward the dining room. “I have eggs and a piece of ham for you,” she said.

“Thank you, Vasso,” I said weightily, trying to combine my many gratitudes in one telling.

There was, I thought, amusement in her eyes as she glanced at me and shrugged a little. I was chagrined at my own ponderousness.

“Tell me what I can do to help you,” I blurted out.

And at this she laughed aloud. Finally she said, “Please, Mr. Eakins, go and sit with the old ones and I will bring your breakfast.”

I was hurt and confused, and I sat at a table inside the restaurant alone. When she had brought the food, water and Nescafé, she stood, her arms folded, looking down at me. “Can you bring him back to life?”

“Possibly I can,” I said.

She looked at me, searching my eyes, unsure we had understood each other.

“It is possible that I can,” I said, rephrasing the words so that there could be no misunderstanding. It would have to be done by someone, somehow, before I could pursue my own mission in Kaléa. “But it will not happen immediately.”

“It will happen,” she said and put out her hand as though she would touch me. The softness I had found in her the night before had returned, the flood of it shimmering in her eyes. Through a curtain of tears I could be seen as the image of Paul Stephanou.

“Leave me,” I said, near to choking with resentment, humiliation. “For God’s sake go back to your kitchen and let me have my breakfast in peace.”

But I could not eat. I put the ham between two slices of bread, wrapped it in paper and put it in my pocket. I even tested the bolt on the door of my cottage when I returned and mocked myself as I did it: the Puritan forging his own chains.

Days passed and no one saw Paul Stephanou except Modenis. Vasso’s grandmother and Michael brought water to their door each morning before Michael left for school, and each night. Vasso brought them food which Modenis took at the door. Toward sunset every day the old man himself carried out the slops past his patch of garden and emptied them over the edge of a gulley. He would scratch a few shovelfuls of loose earth and pitch it after the muck. Sometimes, going out, he would leave the door open. And sometimes, then, small boys, who had taken to surreptitiously watching the house, would creep into the yard, trying to see within. Whether or not Stephanou knew they were there, his shadow could be seen briefly before the door slammed violently shut.

I waited at the walk one evening for Modenis to come back, slop bucket in one hand, his cane in the other. I said his name softly, and beckoned to him to come to me.

He put down the bucket and came, his head thrust out of the hunched shoulders as he peered through the twilight to see who it was. It took him a few seconds to remember me. “Ah, yes, the professor, the American,” he said finally. His beacon of a nose stood out in the unshaven face. I thought of the proud, immaculate old man who had gone to fetch Stephanou.

“Come up to my cottage with me and have coffee,” I said. “He can manage an hour without you.”

He started to shake his head.

“You will rot in there together!”

“The sooner the better.”

“Modenis, he is still a young man.”

He stood a moment, uncertain, staring back at the closed door. “He will not eat if I am beside him. I have to go to the other room and call out to him that I am there….”

“Then he is proud,” I said. “He is alive.”

Modenis nodded that this might be so. “I will tell him and come.”

“Come without telling him. Either he will stay and wait your return, or he will come out. And that would be good, wouldn’t it?”

“That would be good, but he will not come out.” He glanced up and down the street. “Is it far?”

“Vasso’s cottage,” I said, “I will have the grandmother bring us coffee.”

Modenis straightened his back once more and walked with me as though he were going someplace he wanted to go. His collarless shirt was filthy at the neck, dappled with stains down the front. I could hear the rasp of his breath as he filled his lungs with the clean, soft air. Men coming in from the fields and women on their way to the pump made way for us, murmured greetings that he left unanswered.

I left him inside my cottage while I stepped next door and asked the old woman to make us coffee. When I returned he was standing at my desk, staring at the books on a shelf I had built above it.

“There are some in Greek,” I said. “You are welcome to borrow them.”

His head bobbed slightly, continuingly, in the way of old men who cannot bring their reflexes into immediate control. He pulled the desk chair round and lowered himself into it. I winced as he dropped his body the last few inches.

“When you were a younger man, Modenis, what work did you do?”

“The post office.”

So, I thought, in that too the lawyer, Spiridos, had been correctly informed: Stephanou’s custodian was a retired civil servant.

“And did you ask that Paul be allowed to come to you?”

“I wrote to the Minister of Justice. After many months when I thought my letter had been lost I received an answer telling me that he was going blind. There had been a prison accident. They said he would be released if I could take care of him.”

“Had you visited him in prison?”

“Every year at Eastertime,” the old man said.

“The time of resurrection.”

Modenis nodded, the motion again continuing, pendulum-like, until it ran itself out.

“Did he consider his sentence just?” I asked. It was what I wanted most now to know about Paul Stephanou.

“He never said that it was not.”

The grandmother came with the coffee and cold water fresh from the well. She muttered and clucked over Modenis and plucked at his shirt as though she would take it from his back and wash it.

“Let him be, grandmother,” I said.

We sipped our coffee, saying little. Modenis begged to be excused for the sucking sound he made. As the sunlight faded I turned on the light above my desk and Modenis raised his face to it, blinking his eyes.

“What do you say to him, Modenis? What do you talk about?”

“I say to him—about his youth and how things were as I best remember them. He grinds his teeth and I tell him, ‘You have teeth, my boy. Thank God for that!’ And he makes mock of me: ‘For that I humbly thank you, God. A tooth for an eye! How about it, God? A mouthful of teeth for an hour of daylight? Go to hell, Uncle.’

“I talk about his mother and then it is better. And last night when I told him how she died, he covered his face with his hands.”

“He is alive,” I said, and remembered having said the words before.

We talked on, sharing the little either of us knew of blind men. A half-hour passed, no more. It was early twilight when we heard the commotion, men’s voices, a clatter and clanging. I went to the window. There were several men at Modenis’ gate, unstrapping something from a donkey’s back. The beast was balking and they were shouting at him, making him balk the more.

“Is it there?” Modenis asked.

“Yes. They’re unloading something from a donkey.”

“For God’s sake, help me up!” he cried.

I set my weight and hoisted him to his feet, then returned to the window. The donkey pawed at the dust. The priest was there, waving his arms as he directed the operation. The clank of metal on stone rang clear. Two men hurried across the street carrying a wash tub. I understood then, the metal clank was a can of water. Another of them was lifted from the donkey and the beast then tethered by the gate. He raised his head and whinnied piercingly. Hard on that sound came the shriek of a man that shivered my backbone.

“God’s curse on them, what are they doing to Paul?” Modenis could not get my door open.

I opened it. “I’ll run ahead if you’re all right.”

“What can I do but beat the wind? Go!”

I ran up the hill but at the gate Kanakis and the priest barred my way. Four men had carried Stephanou from the house into the yard and were stripping off his clothes, he screaming curses at them, spitting, gnashing his teeth like an animal at bay. They hoisted him onto his feet, naked before the tub now filled with water. He careened drunkenly. They steadied him, propped him upright, then gingerly skipped back. Suddenly he was still, in command of his balance, standing in white nakedness like Christ at the pillar.

“Paul!” Modenis’ voice rang out. “Do not be afraid! I’m coming!”

The men—I knew some of them by name; I’d drunk wine with them in the taverna, sung with them—moved in and began to slosh the water over Stephanou. He stood rigid and submissive, his legs spread, his arms stretched overhead—as in surrender—or as about to dance.

Modenis reached my side.

“Stay, Modenis,” the village president said. “It must be done. Father Lappas says it is the only way.”

Modenis, only beginning to understand, screwed up his eyes, the better to see what was happening. One of the men had taken a sponge and, soaping it, rubbed down the body of the rigid Stephanou. Modenis looked slowly around him, down the otherwise deserted street, at the shuttered houses fronting it. Not a woman nor a child was out-of-doors. He looked back at his nephew, whose care he could not manage without the man’s consent. He lifted a crooked finger.

“I remember,” he started to say as to himself, and then called out, “Do you remember, Paul? Alexis used to bathe you at the pump when you were a little boy?”

“Aye, Modenis, aye,” Alexis shouted, and wrung out the sponge, “but in those days he was a grasshopper!” He pulled the blind man’s hand down and thrust the sponge into it.

Stephanou took it, held it for a moment—I thought he might fling it from him—but he washed himself between the legs. I put my arm across Modenis’ shoulders, for he had closed his eyes. I did not watch. Nor did any man, but the blind man could not know it.

“I will go now for the censer,” the priest said when the sloshing of water over the naked body began again.

Modenis’ eyes snapped open. “What’s that he said?”

The priest had gone, lifting his cassock above the dust as he hurried down the street.

“They should do the same for him,” Modenis said, indicating the ablution and the priest.

Alexis worked alone now, rubbing the blind man down with a towel. Stephanou held out his hand and took the towel. He finished the drying of his own body. One man gave him a shirt which he put on, another shorts, another a pair of trousers in which he dressed himself. Someone took away the tub and tipped it at the edge of the parched garden. Stephanou sat upon the ground and put on his canvas shoes as they were put in his hands. The men had begun to talk among themselves of other things, of the darkness that was almost on them, the women waiting.

The priest returned, a long-legged acolyte hurrying after him, trying to button his cassock with one hand while he managed the smoking censer with the other.

“We shall give thanks to God,” the priest said at the gate. I wondered at his need for ceremonial. Why not just a prayer when Stephanou had already shown such hostile withdrawal? Then it occurred to me, the priest, a simple man, was using what tools he could command to reach the blind man’s senses: the incense carried the odor of the church, the fragrance of religious consolation.

“It is a mistake, Father,” Modenis said. “I tell you, it is a mistake.”

The priest moved imperiously into the courtyard and stood before the blind man where he still sat upon the ground but with his cane now in his hands and he leaning forward, his forehead pressed against it. One could sense the quest then going on inside him—or at least I presumed to think I could—the holding of the cane that way, both hands clasped around it and his head bowed into its support: the core of stable peace within himself that would give him anchor, perspective in what must seem to him an amorphous world. This man was not merely prisoner of his blindness: for sixteen years, most of his adult life, he had been bound in by walls, protected, if you like, particularly after the blindness came. His every movement outside familiar corridors must need to breach the unexpected, time and again he must absorb the shock of the uncounted step at the bottom of the stairs.

“I have brought you an icon, Paul,” the priest said. “I had it sent from Athens, St. Panteleimon, the patron of the blind.”

The blind man lifted his head. “Who are you?” His voice had acquired a deep resonance.

“Father Lappas. I will bless it and bless the house.”

“No, Father Lappas,” Stephanou said. “Take it to the church.”

“If that is your wish,” the priest said. “We shall place it just inside the door where you can reach it easily.”

I wondered if he was deliberately misunderstanding. But he went on, beckoning the others closer. “Come, we shall pray together and I will anoint the blind man’s eyes with healing oil.”

The men shuffled forward a little. Modenis pushed hard through them. I followed him.

“No,” Paul said. “Pray where you like, but not over me.” With the tip of his cane he measured a half-circle in the dust before him. “No oils or ointments. I have been once blinded. It is enough. You will not seal the darkness in. And take away the incense pot. It stinks like a bishop.”

“Do not blaspheme!” the priest warned.

“It is the least of my sins. Go! All of you. Modenis, why don’t you speak?”

“What shall I say, my Paul?”

“Tell them to get out!”

“We are your friends, Paul,” the priest said. “I wish only to bring you consolation.”

“I have been consoled by priests before, and I will not submit!” He rose from the ground and steadied himself with the cane.

“You will submit, my son. God’s will can break you if you do not bend. We are His children and must abide in darkness or in day.”

The priest’s words awed me: they had the chill ring of a medievalist’s anathema! I saw men cross themselves as they moved back to let him pass and then followed silently after him. Women had gathered at the gate. They too crossed themselves as the priest and his acolyte passed. Only Kanakis lingered.

“The women have asked to clean your house for you. Modenis. It was their wish to worship the icon after its blessing.”

“Thank them kindly for me,” Modenis said. “But it is best that we go in.”

So much accomplished and then undone, I thought, with the wafting of a little incense. “Modenis,” I said, “come and sit with me for a little while, you and Paul. It is not far. The road is smooth and the air is sweet.”

Modenis looked hard at me. I nodded encouragement.

“Paul,” he said, “I wish you to meet a friend, Professor Eakins.”

“John Eakins,” I said, repeating Modenis’ pronunciation. “I’m spending the summer in Kaléa.”

“An American?” Paul asked.

“Yes.”

“He is writing a life of Lord Byron. I told you but you did not listen.”

“I listened,” Paul said.

“Then give him your hand. He is a friend.”

Slowly the blind man shifted his cane and put out his right hand. And so, after seventeen years, I shook hands again with Paul Stephanou.

With one hand on Modenis’ shoulder and probing the ground before him with the cane, he moved alongside me at a cripple’s pace toward Vasso’s cottage. He said nothing for some moments, concentrating on the road beneath him. Then he stopped and breathed deeply. “It is night now and we are going toward the sea.”

“We are,” I said.

He moved on, starting Modenis with him, shuffling his own feet in the dust. I closed my eyes. For all that it was too dark now to see the ground, there was a vast difference to the utter darkness behind closed eyelids. It was not only that I could not see in those few seconds of experiment, but that I seemed unable to breathe either. When I opened my eyes I saw that I had fallen behind my companions. I remembered, in a sort of accelerated flashback, stumbling after Stephanou down the path from the Andarte camp to the Ioannina crossroads. Was my recollection wrong that he had shouted to me, “You’re as slow as a blind beggar! Come on, you!” Something very like it.

Stephanou played his cane along the row of stones that hedged the way from the street to the cottage where I lived.

“This is Vasso’s house,” he said, stopping.

“I have rented it for the summer.”

“Is she so poor?”

“She is kind,” I said.

“To you also?” His short laugh was harsh.

I turned to the old woman who hovered as usual to answer my slightest need and said, “We shall want another chair, grandmother.”

She wagged her head. “Michael has gone for one.”

By the time we were inside, Michael came, the chair balanced over his head, the arms resting on his shoulders. He had brought it from the restaurant. I took it from him.

“Who has come?” Stephanou wanted to know. He had stationed himself at my desk, half-sitting on it after testing its stability.

“It is Michael, Vasso’s son,” Modenis said.

Stephanou put his cane on the desk. “Come here, boy.”

Michael obeyed. Stephanou gripped the boy’s shoulders, felt the arms for muscle, his waist for girth. Then, with great delicacy, he played the tips of his fingers over the boy’s head, his ears, chin, and then with both thumbs, as might a sculptor, he explored the bone structure of the face. The boy quivered beneath his touch.

I watched while getting a bottle of brandy from the shelf.

“Who is your father, Michael?” the blind man asked.

“You are, sir.”

Stephanou’s head shot up at the words. “How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen,” he repeated, and I think murmured, “I had forgotten.” The sound was gentle. “And what do they call you besides Michael, Vasso’s son?”

“Michael Panyotis.” It was Vasso’s maiden name.

“It is a better name than Stephanou,” Paul said. “You may go, Michael. You shiver like a young colt being put to saddle. Run out and be free.” He listened to the sound of the boy’s retreat until the door closed on it. “Only the young are free—and the dead released to their graves. Uncle, are you free, yoked to a blind man?” Modenis started to speak, but Stephanou, having found his voice and liking the sound of it, spoke on. “Is Vasso free who must tell her bastard I am his father?”

“Only the fool wants to be free entirely,” I said, a true pedant. And I was as fluent in self-pity as was he.

“Ach. I had forgotten my host,” he said. “So there are Americans now even in Kaléa?”

“Only one,” Modenis said.

I added quickly, “Last year there were others—archeologists.”

“Proving that the future of Greece lies in her past,” he said.

“With countries as with men,” I said.

“Why do you say that to me, sir?”

I answered evenly: “Psychiatry has become a great American necessity and that, I should say loosely, is one of its precepts.”

Silence. I stood with the bottle in my hand. Modenis was fumbling his pocket for his beads, the little clacking of them the only sound. The reflex of blinking quickened in Stephanou’s closed eyelids.

“You may speak to me in English,” he said. “I once knew the language well.”

“Is my Greek so poor?”

“It is not precise and I can tell that you think it is.”

I was impressed by the subtlety of this observation. “Did you think in English when you spoke it?”

He blinked, his face now toward me. “I am not sure I thought in any language then—but I felt… in all languages.”

So did I, I thought. So did I when we were very young. Which was not true, I realized at once: the best I could do then was to wish for such a feeling, clinging the while to my rigid nativism.

“During the war?” I asked.

He did not answer me. Turning his head he said, “Uncle, are you here?”

“I am not yet a ghost,” the old man answered.

I returned to the shelf for glasses.

Stephanou put his hand to the desk, groping for his cane, but it came first to an open book. “What book is this?”

“A history of the Siege at Missolonghi,” I said.

He turned it over and felt the embossments on the cover. “The priest who used to be here had such a book.”

“It belongs to Father Lappas. He loaned it to me.”

“It is a terrible book. It is not history. It is melodrama.”

“It is propaganda,” I said. “Will you have a glass of brandy with me?”

“You wish to have me carried into the house as well as out of it?”

The grandmother, having seen me get the bottle, brought a pitcher of water.

“There is a chair to your left, Stephanou,” I said.

He found it and seated himself at the side of the desk. His hands explored the desk for other articles, my pens, a folder of papers, more books.

The old woman whispered something to Modenis. He raised his hand as though to ward her off, but skittering back she grinned at him and beckoned.

“I will have a drink,” Modenis said. “Then, by the kind hospitality of the widow Panyotis, I will take a bath before her hearth.”

“Do, Uncle. You stink. Worse than the priest.”

Again my mind had spun back in time to another place, another priest. I wondered if his association could be the same as mine, the chaplain at the Ioannina jail.

“If you say so then it must be true,” the old man said dryly.

I poured the drinks and gave a glass to Modenis. Stephanou’s I held before him and guided his hand to it with my own. His lips tightened over his teeth, the conquering of pride.

“To your book, Professor,” Modenis said, but the words were meant for Paul. It was his deep hope to reach the blind man through the youth he had been.

I said, “Thank you, Modenis. I drink to the health of all of us, and to greater understanding among men.”

Stephanou thought about it. “Health,” he said, and emptied the glass at one tilt.

9

MODENIS, FORTIFIED BY BRANDY and badgered by the old woman, went to the bath she had prepared for him. We could hear great splashes of water presently, and the old lady’s scolding, Modenis’ howls, part mockery, part righteous indignation, his voice spiraling up into falsetto. They had been children together, the pair of them, in this same village.

Stephanou sat silent, listening. I was determined to endure such silence, waiting for him to come to me. His thoughts, it turned out, had run curiously parallel to my own, for he said finally, “Shakespeare’s ages of man—how many were there?”

“Seven—from the infant, mewling and puking, to second childishness.”

“Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste…” he went on, then stopped.

I finished it: “Sans everything.”

“What age are you, Professor?”

“I must think for a moment,” I said. The lines were familiar but I had to run through from the beginning.

“How old?”

I ignored the direct question. “In fair round belly with good capon lined… full of wise saws and modern instances.” I deliberately pushed the image of myself beyond my years.

“I do not think I understand the idiom,” he said.

“Wise saws and modern instances—bromides and newspaper headlines.”

“Bromides?” he repeated.

“That is an odd one,” I said. “Actually, it’s a chemical compound for putting you to sleep. As I used it, it’s slang, with much the same meaning.” I got up. “Let’s see what the dictionary says.”

When I reached past him to the shelf over the desk, he put out his hand and slapped at my waist. “A fair round belly?”

“It comes and goes,” I said. “I try to keep my weight down.” I laughed nervously. I sounded as though I were passing up dessert at a club luncheon.

“My uncle said you were a young man.”

I took down the dictionary. “He told me the same of you.”

Stephanou snorted, temporarily checked.

I found and read aloud the definition of “bromide,” but neither of us any longer cared.

“How did you come to Kaléa, Professor… Eakins? Spell the name for me, please.”

I spelled it, and by his asking two questions at once I had a little moment to prepare.

“And give me the English pronunciation, please.”

I did.

“It is not a Greek name. My uncle said you were Greek.”

“The men of the village thought so. I did not contradict them.” I did not dare to lie to him in small things. For him to catch me in a lie was to put him on his guard. Not that he was trying to catch me, I told myself; his questions were normal for a Greek. “And as for my coming to Kaléa, I wanted to stay for a while somewhere on the way to Delphi. I shall go on in a little while—following Byron’s trail through Greece.”

“Where?” he asked.

“Delphi, Missolonghi, Prevesa…” I watched his face. “Ioannina.” His mouth opened slightly. He seemed to be waiting, taut. “I would go on to Tepalene in Albania, but my passport will not permit it.”

He moistened his lips. “Not to Zitsa, the monastery where he stayed?”

“Do you know it?” I asked.

“I have been there,” he said, controlling his voice by keeping it low. I could see a pulse beat in his neck.

And something happened to you there, I thought, having naught to do with Byron. Zitsa is a few miles northwest of Ioannina. I did not suppose the AS camp was very far from there though it had been my impression at the time that we were several miles east and further north.

“Tell me about it,” I said evenly. “Byron thought the view from there one of the loveliest in Greece.”

His tension eased off. “It’s wild,” he said, “and lonely, and some distance above the village. It has not been in use for many years—only the old buildings linked to one another, and the smell of centuries. Or that was what it was like almost twenty years ago. Have things changed in Greece in twenty years? You tell me.”

I froze at the words, wondering if they were a literal challenge. My mouth was dry, but I managed: “I shouldn’t think so to hear the old men talking.”

But he said, “I have been in captivity.”

“I know.”

“What do you know?”

“That you have been in prison, that you were a student, a teacher, Modenis thinks a poet, that you were in the Resistance during the war and afterwards an insurgent.”

He smiled, not altogether cynically, and his face became younger: I could almost see in him the handsome boy he had been. It was strange, but I wanted terribly for him to open his eyes.

“It makes a nice fanfare when you put it together like that,” he said.

“You have been well educated,” I said. The use of the word fanfare seemed extraordinary. “You have not wasted the years in prison.”

“I have asked myself since I am home which would I have preferred: to remain in prison with my sight, or to have paid with my eyes for freedom.”

“Was that the alternative?”

He shrugged.

“Did you write while you were confined?”

“I wrote, yes. But what I wrote was taken from me. I wrote too much.”

“About people?”

“It was very funny in a way—when I wrote about Pericles they thought I meant Metaxas, our dictator, you know?”

“Wasn’t it flattering to Metaxas?”

“No. It was critical of Pericles, the war which Athens might have avoided. Oh, I wrote many things—poetry, satire. You would not think I am a humorist, eh? I would lie in the dark and make up the words. My mind was alive with images. I would get up and light the candle. Always I put it out as soon as I wrote something for fear it would burn out too soon. And you know how I got matches? I wrote dirty verses for the guards. And once I wrote a love poem for one of them. He was a pig, but I gave him wings.” He stretched his arms, his neck, turning his head one way then another. I remembered the restlessness of the youth Webb and I traveled north with, one of the things I had blocked out of my mind since, cherishing only recollections that fed my own discontent, my hatred of him… if indeed that was what it was. I remembered him when he discovered that Webb had known the Spanish poet, Lorca, in New York and had seen him in Spain shortly before his death. Stephanou had put his hand on Webb’s and said incredulously, “You shook hands with him?” and I remembered his epithet: “By the maidenhood of Mary, tell me!” And Christ! I had not even known that night who Lorca was.

He was rubbing the stubble of grey beard that had grown since his return to Kaléa.

“Would you allow me to shave you, Stephanou? I should be pleased to do it.”

“You would have to begin with a sickle,” he said, “and that is something I can manage if I wish to. I shall let it grow. It will distract people from my eyes.”

“Do you feel them looking at you?”

“I feel them not looking at me. That’s true, isn’t it? People don’t like to look at a blind man’s face.”

“I suppose it’s so of some people,” I said.

“The boy did not once raise his face to mine.”

“Children are wary of what they don’t know.”

“What do I look like, Professor? Shall I call you Professor?”

“If you like—or Eakins—John—whatever.”

“If you were writing home…” Again he interrupted himself: “Do you have a wife, children?”

“None who acknowledge me,” I said.

He laughed. “And I am acknowledged by someone else’s bastard. Mind, I’m all for bastardy. At best there is one genius in a proper family, at worst a dozen morons. It’s simply that I’m put off in this at having played the Holy Ghost.”

“He’s an interesting little fellow,” I said. “Great solemn eyes that squint sometimes because he reads so much.”

“Does he?” He was pleased to hear it.

“I asked him one day what the book he was reading was about. People, he said, as though I were very stupid to have asked.”

“The proper study of man, eh?”

“You can study a lifetime and know very little. The grandmother Panyotis knows far more about people than I do, and I doubt she has ever read a book.”

This time the smile came in a flash, the strong white teeth gleaming. “So that is why you are in Kaléa!”

“Perhaps it is,” I said. “Quite possibly it is.”

“You were going to tell me, Professor, what I look like to you.”

“Let me say first, it’s quite different now from what it would have been if I’d described you before you came here tonight.”

“I have stayed too long,” he cried, I suspected to try my hospitality.

“You have only arrived,” I said.

“I’m at the mercy of the lame one who I doubt not at this moment is warming his bones in the widow’s bed.”

“She is as old as history,” I said.

“So is bed-warming,” he snapped, and I laughed.

“You are a blind man who sees with his ears, his nose, his hands… and, I should think, with his heart…. A grey beard, hair that is white—but hair, may I remind you—strong white teeth so that when he smiles he looks to be even younger—than what? Forty-five years?”

“Forty-four,” he said.

“A high, pallid forehead, good bone structure, a nose that some day is going to resemble Modenis’ but isn’t too bad just yet… and when you look at him you wish to God—as I did a few minutes ago—that he could open his eyes.”

His chin dropped down on his chest. I had not meant to be that overt, that emotional, I suppose. I was not given to such explicits as I had spurted out since being in Kaléa, since that first moment with the old woman when she caught my hand to her lips. But I had said again something I felt deeply.

“Thank you, my friend,” Stephanou said. He slid his hand along the desk and found his cane. “I would impose on you for a further kindness. Go with me to my uncle’s door. Then I can manage and we shall leave the old one to his pleasure.”

“I’ll take you,” I said, “but you are welcome to stay.”

“It is time to go. I am raw in many places besides where I was scrubbed tonight.”

“I understand,” I said and gave him my hand. “There is nothing between us and the door.”

Outside we stood a moment while he got his bearings. “There are a million stars,” I said, “but no moon.”

All was quiet next door, the shutters drawn, but slivers of light appeared through the slats. I told Stephanou this, speaking softly, close to his ear.

“Go and look in,” he said, and gave my arm a little push.

I demurred.

“A blind man is allowed to spy. Go and tell me.”

Reluctantly I went, looked briefly at the old couple before the fire and returned. “Modenis is wrapped in a blanket in a chair in front of the fire. The old woman is on her knees, feeding him cherries with a silver spoon.”

Stephanou put his arm across my shoulder and leaned on me as he doubled in on himself. I could feel the spasms—of laughter? tears? I did not know until he said, “Oh, little children, love one another!”

And this was the man who had spurned the priest.

He took my arm, his hold upon it ever lighter as he gained the confidence of his step and cane. The women had cleaned Modenis’ cottage and gone, leaving the door open, the one light shining within. It was a room crudely furnished, two chairs and a table with benches, some pots hanging in a row over the small fireplace, a chest and a cupboard. In the room beyond I could see two narrow wooden beds, with white sheets now gleaming in the darkness.

“Shall I light the fire? The women have set logs in the grate.”

“No. I am afraid of fire. Leave me now. I have much to think of and you have your work. It was probably a good thing that happened tonight. Do you agree?”

“If you make it so,” I said.

He did not thank me and I was glad. At the door I asked: “Will you come and see me again—tomorrow?”

“If you will let me see you, yes.”

I said, “Come.”

It was almost nine o’clock. I went into the village without returning to the house. If you will let me see you…. Did it seem to him that I was deliberately concealing myself from him? Or was it simply a form of courtesy, his saying that? It was not in my nature to let people see me or even to let me see myself. Had he sensed that in so brief a time? Surely not if for no other reason than that among so many strangenesses, so much he could not have expected, much less prepared for, his self-concern must have been all-encompassing.

He would ask questions. So be it. I would also ask questions. But slowly, slowly. To learn the facts of my indictment and conviction no longer seemed the greatest imperative. There was a little nagging wish growing in me not to know: I liked Paul Stephanou.

How devious we are! I know now that my real concern, under all its complicated layers of rationale, was that he not discover in me then the same contemptible creature he had thrown to the minions of the Greek judicial ritual.

Reaching Vasso’s deep in my own thoughts, I did not notice at first the failure of the old man’s usual camaraderie with me. Spyro muttered a greeting of sorts, the others nothing as I went past them into the restaurant.

Kanakis and several other men were at a table to the side, a game of dominoes suspended for talk. I sat apart from them. Nor did they call me to join them as had happened before. I did not think much of it: it might have been a meeting on village business. The Greek pipes were skirling from the radio in the kitchen, an interminable lament. Vasso was in the kitchen. Michael brought my knife, fork and glass, and a pitcher of wine.

“How are you, Michael?” I murmured.

“I am well, Professor-sir,” he said with distant formality.

Vasso came finally, bringing me bread.

“So he is alive, Mr. Eakins,” she said with bitter sarcasm. “He can curse the priest and tell us all to go to hell.”

“Only the priest,” I said. “I have talked with him, Vasso. He is not blasphemous, if that’s what they told you.”

“With you, a stranger, he will talk,” she said.

“He is proud among his own,” I said helplessly.

“Does he wish all of us to be blind?”

“He wishes to see, he wishes to serve, not to be served. He is not a man who can live in gratitude, take charity for the sake of charity. They did much for him tonight. He said it himself. It was cruel, but it had to be done and he knows it, Vasso. He will be different now. They will see.”

“Tell them,” she said, with a jerk of her head toward the men.

“I cannot tell if I am not asked,” I said. “I am telling you.”

“Did he speak of me?”

“He would not. I am a stranger. But he knew it was your house into which I took him and he was glad.”

“Because it was you and not I who was in it,” she said.

“What poison have they told you? Sit down.” I pulled out the chair beside me.

“I cannot. They will think… I don’t know what they will think.”

“Since when has that been of such importance to you?”

“Since he came home… and would not have me.”

“Vasso,” I said, “believe me. He did not come home until tonight.”

Slowly, almost carefully, she sat down. The men across the room turned their heads and looked at us. They sat in silence for a moment. Then one of them called out, “Vasso! More wine.”

“Michael will bring it to you,” she said over her shoulder. To me she said, “Tell me.”

“I shall tell you everything that happened as I understand it.” And so I pleaded the blind man’s cause as though it were my own, her dark eyes luminous as they probed mine for the truth of what I told. They welled up with tears when I repeated what he had said to the boy on learning he was called Panyotis: it is a better name than Stephanou. I could not bear to look at her. I wanted her again.

Then she reminded me of what I had already surmised, saying, “I can see him when I look at you, I can see him so long ago, so beautiful….”

“And when you look at him, Vasso?”

“It is a face I do not know, a stone face.”

“Not when he smiles.”

“Does he smile?”

“Once he did.”

“What did you say that made him smile?”

It was too complicated to explain, and I found myself not wanting to in any case: it had been a moment of something’s quickening between Paul and me, the gleeful way he had cried, “So that’s why you’re in Kaléa!” as though he had discovered for himself a motive I might not have been able to convey. “I have forgotten,” I said.

“It does not matter. It would not be the same if I said it.”

“When you go to him, Vasso…”

She stopped me, shaking her head. “I will not go to him again, not until he asks me.” She clasped her hands behind her head and leaned back, her eyes searching the ceiling—her blouse taut across her breasts. “There has been a great fire in me for him all these years,” she said after a moment. “I could not put it out even when I tried—you know?”

“I know,” I said with sadness.

“I am sorry,” she said and put her hand briefly over mine. “A great fire. Now it is just a little flame, but it is still alive.”

“I understand,” I murmured.

“He should not have spoken that way to Father Lappas,” Vasso said, getting up. “I heard my cousin, Stavros—he is at the table there—call him a gypsy. Only the gypsies curse the priest. They are afraid he will take away their magic. It is not a good thing for the people to call him a gypsy.”

“It will be different now—I promise you.”

“Will you tell them, please?” She indicated the men. “It is better now than afterwards.”

I got up and went with her to the table and repeated what I had told her of the change in Stephanou.

Kanakis said, “Until the priest can work miracles, he should not expect miracles.”

And the others seemed to come round to the same point of view.

10

THE NEXT DAY WAS Sunday. I suppose this tells more of me than I could set down here in twenty pages of introspection: I went to church. I was the only man outside the sanctuary over the age of sixteen and under sixty-five. I tried for the impossible, to make myself inconspicuous. The coin I slipped into the candle box hit bottom with a resounding clatter. The shawled woman taking a candle at that moment insisted on giving it to me, lighted, and having it, not knowing what to do with it, I watched the others for a moment and then took it to the nearest shrine where, I realized too late, not a candle had been ensconced: it was the newly hung icon of St. Panteleimon. I fled to the shelter of a nearby pillar. The smaller children instantly flocked round and gazed up at me. I winked and grinned at them. When this exhibition lost its fascination they sat down in the middle of the floor and played with one another’s toes. The women bobbed and prayed in one breath and in the next gossiped with their neighbors while the priest performed the Mass behind the grille. Old Spyro, who might have followed me to the church, scattered the children and came to stand beside me.

“In America I went to church every Sunday,” he said. “My wife was very American, may she be with God.”

“I’ve not been to church in a long time,” I said, as though ashamed at being caught there.

“It can’t do any harm,” he said and went himself to light a candle to the Virgin.

When the priest came out from the sanctuary with his basket of bits of bread and handed it to the people crowding round him, I made my way outside, but I noticed as I passed that two more candles had been lighted to St. Panteleimon.

I paused at Modenis’ gate on my way home. The cottage door was open and I chanced a welcome. Modenis and Paul were sitting at the table when I called out to ask if I might come in.

“Come you in,” the old man said. He swept the crumbs from their morning bread to the floor.

Paul lifted his face. It was clean-shaven and the more pallid for it. “Professor?”

“You should go out in the sun and get some color in your face.”

“Is it true you play the mandolin?” Paul asked. And that was to be the pattern of our meetings thereafter: no greeting, just the launching into something held in mind as though one of us had momentarily left the room.

“A little,” I said. “I have a guitar in the States. I didn’t bring it with me.”

“And you sing?”

“Only when I’m drunk. Or more precisely, when my audience is drunk.”

Modenis had a piece of paper and pencil. He was making what seemed to be a list,

“When will you go north?” Paul said.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“But very soon?”

“Why?”

I should not have asked so directly. I could tell he retreated from what he originally had in mind. A little shrug and then he said, “I was wondering if there was time for you to teach me how to play the mandolin.”

“The blind troubadour,” I said.

“Is that ridiculous?”

“No, but I was thinking I could not teach you in your own idiom. I’m not even sure I could teach you in mine.”

“Then it is simple: I must teach myself, but first we must have the mandolin, Uncle.”

“That has already occurred to me,” the old man said.

“I shall be going into Athens one day soon. I’ll try to find one to be bought cheaply if you like.”

“Where will you look?” Stephanou said with an eagerness that reminded me of a child’s wanting to be told a story.

“First, along Ifestou Street,” I said, wanting to give him the image, a share in the quest. “It is a street where one can buy almost anything.”

“You know Athens!” he cried.

“As a tourist who likes to walk,” I said.

“Oh, Uncle, there is a street for every man,” he said, leaning his elbows on the table. If he had not been blind he might still have looked the way he did, closing tight his eyes to conjure memory. “Or was as I still see it. The Germans took everything, they said. But they were wrong. As soon as the Nazis moved out, the traders came back and people brought them things. Everything! Icons, pots, candelabra, old medicine bottles, pottery. A one-legged man could buy a shoe, a bride a mattress. Now there was a sight! I used to walk in Ifestou—because others walked there. And one day we were watching a young girl—no more than seventeen, I think—counting out the dowry money for the mattress….”

One day we were watching…. I remembered the scene instantly. Margaret Webb and I had stopped, struck by the beauty of the child and the intensity of the transaction. “Because others walked there,” he had said. Stephanou had been following her and me those days in Athens before Webb and I went north.

“She did not have enough money for the mattress and when the merchant would not let her have it, she started to weep and to coax him. Louder and louder until she was wailing. Another shopkeeper came, then another, and they scolded the merchant for his hard-heartedness. Suddenly it was a little war, and in the middle of it the girl tilted the mattress against the wall and arched back so that her rags clung to her body like flowing silk, and she lifted the mattress onto her head. She stood a moment, proud and straight. Everybody made room for her. A woman—an Englishwoman—said, ‘One of the caryatids’—you know, the temple maids on the Acropolis? And that was it: three thousand years of Greekness walked down that crooked street with a mattress on her head.”

He had quoted Margaret Webb. I thought both men must hear my heartbeat in the silence when he finished. I should have known from the beginning that for him to have satisfied the jury in his portrayal of me as the frustrated lover he had needed more than random knowledge of the principals.

He construed the silence to his present need. “So! If poets make pictures, I am qualified to practice, eh?”

“Eminently,” I said.

Modenis sighed. “Why do you need a mandolin?”

“I shall find one,” I said, “and if there is anything else I can do for you, please tell me.”

“Why do you go to Athens?” Paul demanded.

“Actually I’m going to Sunium,” I said, “where Byron went and carved his name upon a rock.” I could not tell him I was going in order to escape briefly the intensity of involvement I felt in Kaléa—to try for perspective.

“And what will that tell you of Lord Byron that you do not already know?”

“If I knew that I should not have to go. Perhaps nothing. I want to see what he saw, to try to imagine what he was thinking about on that particular pilgrimage.”

“To have carved his name, I should say he was thinking about Lord Byron.”

“He did that a great deal of the time,” I said.

“Would you prefer to think about him than about yourself, Professor?”

“No, but it’s easier,” I said with utter frankness.

“Ha! You are an honest man. We look into other lives in the hope of seeing ourselves without looking. But then the only way of understanding what we see is by looking into ourselves. Is it not so?”

“I am afraid it is so,” I said.

“Why are you afraid? Is there something in yourself you do not want to look at?”

I was disconcerted by this bombardment of direct questions. I, who wanted to question him at any peril, was responding as to an inquisitor.

“Yes, there is,” I said with sharpness.

He flashed that smile at me which must have won him every boon he ever sought save freedom. “I am glad,” he said. “What I mean is, it cannot be rubbed out with ointments or covered over by the sweet stink of sanctity. Shakespeare said it, eh? All the perfumes of Arabia…. He said it, not the priests. You know, in prison I read every word, every play, three times over, and some of them many times.”

“In English?”

“In English. It was the only book. Shakespeare and the Reader’s Digest.”

“All the perfumes of Arabia,” I murmured.

He thought about that and laughed. “I was wondering about that Reader’s Digest. That’s very good.”

It was not quite what I had meant although I did have something of the double entendre in mind. I had hoped to bring him back to the original probe, the deed which all the perfumes could not fumigate. But the moment had passed.

“What have you written down there besides the mandolin, Modenis?” I asked, referring to his list.

“Only things the butcher can bring on his next trip.” The old man got up. He was much steadier than when I had coaxed him to my cottage. A great change had come into this house in less than twenty-four hours. “I am going up to Vasso’s. It will no longer be necessary for her to carry our food to us.”

“It is her pleasure,” I said, “but she will welcome you.”

Stephanou ignored our exchange, drumming his fingers impatiently on the table. He turned his head toward the door when Modenis reached it.

“Are you aware of light and dark?” I asked.

He shook his head and plunged the question he had been waiting to ask, “Where were you during the war, Professor?”

“In England. Then in France and Belgium.”

“And afterwards?”

“I went back to school and finished my education.”

“Finished it?”

Damn his impertinent sharpness! “I suppose I should say I began it, but in a way it is right to say that I finished it. I settled into a life from which I have not greatly departed since.”

“Why?”

“I do not understand your question,” I said, although I thought I understood it very well, but I did not propose to give gratuitously without fathoming the source of the inquisition.

“Why did it take you so long to come to Greece?”

Oh, you bastard, I thought. “I have wanted to come for a long time,” I said.

“That is obvious. You do not learn a language—especially a folk language—otherwise. What I meant to ask was what delayed you? Was it the war? Did something happen to you in that experience that made you want to be safe for such a long time?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a coward, do you think?”

It was interesting, the qualification “do you think?” It blunted my rising anger. I answered caustically nonetheless, “I have known greater cowards than myself.”

He sat, his elbows on the table, clicking his thumbnails against his teeth. “Have you gone back to France and Belgium?”

“To the place where I was afraid, is that what you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Not yet.”

“Will you?”

“Possibly.”

“One has to if one is to know,” he said.

“A return to jeopardy?”

“That’s it—to truly exorcise the fear.”

“Paul,” I said, “where is it that you want to go?”

“Into my own heart—where all men face the darkness, Professor. For me it is no longer a matter of geography.”

“Will you go alone?”

He thought about that, and while he thought I squirmed so within myself—for reasons you may fathom: my self-deflating discomfort at intimacy—that I said, “I was thinking of Vasso.”

“Vasso is a woman. She would not understand.”

And still I pursued that cant: “Why will you not accept love without understanding?”

“Because in this case, that love would be pity. Look you: I have not seen Vasso in almost twenty years. Now I shall never see her except as she was then—nineteen years old and my promised bride.”

“Carrying a mattress on her head down Ifestou Street in Athens,” I said with something close to malice which was really directed at myself.

His face puckered up like that of a child about to cry—or a very old man protesting medicine. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!” he cried and pounded his fists on the table.

“I am sorry, Stephanou. It was not my intention to upset you.”

“I don’t want to talk any more,” he said.

“I understand. Come and see me when you do.”

He said nothing, sitting erect and unsmiling, much like the stone image in the car on the day of his return to Kaléa. I left him without further word.

Modenis brought their food, and to my knowledge Stephanou did not leave the cottage either that day or the next. Early Tuesday morning I drove back to Athens.

A seemingly small observation I should mention—to say it disturbed me at the time is too strong: I walked through the village late Monday afternoon to have coffee with Kaléa’s president. Without deliberateness but with much the same motivation as I had gone to church, I chose him as my liaison among the people. He was the most sensible of men, and, having admitted to me his compromise with the status quo in Greece, he represented the Greek analogy to myself. On the way to his shop I paused in the square where the women had spread the grain in long trays to sweeten in the sun. They were sifting it through their fingers, picking out the bad kernels. I heard one of the old ones say, “Blind men’s eyes,” and she spat three times as she cast the blackened seed away. The others laughed and, it seemed to me, set more assiduously to work to discover themselves the blighted amongst the grains and cast them out.

11

WHEN I REACHED THE main road and turned toward Thebes I was following Byron’s way for the first time. To be sure I had not yet been to Delphi, and when the time came I would go down from there to the sea whereas Byron had come up from it. I would see more of the ancient places in their ruins today than he would have seen, living before the era of Schliemann and Evans, of massive excavations and daring restorations.

But what changed in a hundred or two hundred years, in a thousand or two? Byron also had paused at The Triple Way to wonder whether, as legend had it, this was where Oedipus killed the man he did not know to be his father. The silence could have been no more awesome in the times of either traveler than it is today. I glanced at the shrine to the Virgin. It was new, the icon mounted in a red brick shelter—an anachronism, the brick, I thought. But Byron might have found an icon there despite the Turkish occupation. I again remembered my conversation with the president of Kaléa: they left us our Greekness, leaving our church.

I thought later, driving down toward the richer lowlands of Boeotia where great fields of cotton were under cultivation here and there by a machine, but mostly by women with hoes, I thought that across these plains had come the invaders of Greece from history’s earliest reckoning—Achaean, Dorian, the Persians, the Romans, the Franks, Turks and the Germans. Nothing in the experience of nations gainsaid its happening again. Man changed his weapons, not his nature. He knows that he must die and yet he kills; to me this seems the paradox of all paradoxes. Byron it troubled not at all: he thought war to be among the most ennobling of experiences. Of course, he had in mind a war of national liberation.

“You must remember that clubfoot,” Dr. Palandios said when, late that morning, I visited him at the university. We were speaking of Byron’s aggressiveness. “And another handicap—to my plebian mind, that is—his aristocracy. And then he was a short man. I’m sure you’ve thought about the little men of history—Caesar, Napoleon—Stalin, Hitler, the Italian buffoon and Churchill, oh yes. Empire! No man ever put down its burden more reluctantly. Beware of men with short legs, I say. They have long arms.”

I grinned. “What about De Gaulle?”

He came and stood beside me at the window where I was looking down at the students. He was himself no higher than my shoulder. “Now, isn’t that curious?” he said. “I’ve always thought of De Gaulle as a man on stilts.”

We watched the students for a moment, talking in high animation, gesturing violently. “Are they always so wrought up?” I asked.

“Not quite. There’s a government crisis brewing. They’ll be in the streets soon, demonstrating for the Prime Minister. He’s testing his strength over a purge in the army. Leftists in the army—I find it hard to credence…. Oh, I have something for you, Eakins.”

He handed me a letter addressed to me in his care. I did not recognize the handwriting. Feminine, but not overweeningly so. The postmark was Crete.

“I should have thought Mrs. Storme would be much taken with you,” Palandios said. He stood on tiptoe to better see what was going on below, but one eye was on my letter.

“I can’t say I was taken by Storme,” I said.

He did not get the pun, which was just as well. “He is a dry old stick, isn’t he?”

“If only he would smile now and then.”

“Oh, my dear Eakins, it’s much better that he doesn’t. I’ve seen him try.”

I pocketed the letter. Palandios did not conceal his shocked disappointment. “I’ll open it at lunch,” I said. “Where shall we go?”

There was a slight bulkiness to the letter suggesting the enclosure of a newspaper clipping. I thought it possible, in the wake of Elsa Storme’s and my conversation, that it might refer to Margaret Webb. By now I had gone over in my mind the advisability of confiding to Dr. Palandios my true identity for I greatly trusted him, but decided that such knowledge might prove an embarrassment to him if nothing worse. I was also lingeringly aware that up to this point I was not committed to any revelation whatsoever. Leaving the building, we edged our way through the students, Dr. Palandios, rather wickedly I thought, raising his fist to encourage their demonstration.

As with the choice of restaurant I left the selection of our luncheon entirely up to Palandios, rightly suspecting it would involve him in a trip to the kitchen. The moment he left the table, his arm linked in that of the maître d’hôtel, I opened the letter from Elsa Storme. Not one but two clippings were enclosed, both from the Athens English-language newspaper. One was the announcement of the impending marriage in Corfu of Margaret Clitheroe Webb—I skipped the biography for the time being—to Michael Antony Braschi, an industrialist of Rome. The couple planned to live in Greece.

The other clipping concerned the Festival of Classic Tragedies to be performed in Dodoni, Epirus, that August. My correspondent had underlined the name Elena Kondylis among the performing artists. She was the actress I had met at the Palandios dinner party. I read the letter quickly and was prepared on Palandios’ return to show him the clipping about the festival and to say that Elsa planned to attend it.

“Shepherded or unshepherded?” He waited shamelessly to make sure I got his pun and then answered himself. “Ridiculous question. She is, of course, hopeful that he will be able to accompany her….”

“Her very words,” I said and put the letter away.

“Elsa is worth cultivating, let me say, should you have any doubts about it. She is in her way every bit as nineteenth century as her husband. Let me see now to whom among our acquaintances back there she is comparable….” He coaxed me with his fingertips to come up with a name, presumably out of the Byron legend.

“Lady Melbourne?” I suggested.

“She’ll do,” he said without enthusiasm.

“He confided or at least hinted his every wickedness to her,” I elaborated by way of justifying my choice.

“The more I read of that correspondence, the more I’m convinced Byron was merely physicking himself. He was a great one for purges of all sorts.”

“We’ve got away from Elsa,” I said.

“Yes. Well. She carries on a voluminous correspondence with all sorts of important people and provokes—though I wouldn’t say for a moment she does it deliberately—the gossip in all of us. I find myself scribbling outrageous chitchat to her. My wife would be furious.”

“Would she?” I murmured. I could not imagine Madame Palandios being discomfited by anything so trivial, but it amused me to suppose that the old boy himself might need to think so.

The salad came, greens, cheese, olives, anchovies, peppers…. Palandios tossed it vigorously. “Salad and a fish, and the good wine of Samos. Will you be satisfied?”

“Eminently,” I said. I glanced at the festival clipping where it lay between us on the table. “Is Miss Kondylis a good actress?”

Palandios covered his mouth with his napkin and laughed. “My boy,” he said, “you are mystical. It was indeed on the subject of Miss Kondylis that I gossiped. Remember Constantin Helmi, the lawyer?”

I nodded. What I remembered particularly was his conversance with the Webb case.

“He is a very wealthy man,” Palandios said, “and a patron of classical theater.”

“So he also will be at Dodoni?”

“It is a very romantic setting.”

“Where in Greece is not?” I said.

He shrugged. “Possibly Knossos—if you are Elsa Storme. What more did she say?”

The wily old fox! As curious as… a Greek!

“Ah, Doctor,” I said at my most dissembling, “nothing it would not be premature to interpret. She is disappointingly proper in her proposals.”

He thought about that for a moment. “In other words, the next move is up to you?”

I nodded and let his interpretation stand.

It was mid-afternoon when finally alone in the hotel room I was able to read Elsa’s letter at leisure:

Dear John Eakins:

A writer, idle, is the most mischievous of creatures. Even Shepherd has suggested that I commence my next book here rather than wait until we return to England. Perhaps I shall. But if so, I propose to take time out to attend the festival at Dodoni, with or without Shepherd who is very if-ish about it. I have a premonition that something extraordinary may happen there this year. You know of course that Dodoni is the oldest of the oracles and Zeus’s own.

It is but an hour’s flight and drive from Corfu, and I learn from my new friend, Elena Kondylis, that it is likely to be the thing for summer Corfiotes to do this season, attend the theater festival.

Which brings me to the other clipping. Isn’t it odd, the seeming coincidences which accumulate as at an appointed time recalling an affair that until that time seemed quite forgotten?

I should suppose it was Signor Braschi whom I met with Mrs. Webb at the consul’s dinner last spring. I’d not have said at the time that he was an Italian. I am sufficiently curious—and idle—to have written home to a friend at the British Museum. I should like to know the gentleman’s genealogy.

Perhaps you will have lost your interest in the widow Webb now that she has dropped anchor. How gauche of me to put it that way. If you read a certain pettiness in it, you are right! I am feeling spiteful and isolated, and painfully aware that the original labyrinth is a stone’s throw from my door. I must get into my book at once. I trust you have gotten into yours.

Sincerely,

Elsa (Storme)

I thought about Elsa’s letter on the bus to Sunium. I had signed on with the French-speaking tour, wanting nothing of tourist talk, but at the same time having had enough of driving for one day. My privacy was observed in true Gallic fashion.

“…the seeming coincidences which accumulate as at an appointed time….” It could not be called coincidence that I was in Greece at the time Stephanou was released from prison.

But it ought to be asked, I told myself, why Margaret Webb’s marriage at this particular time after seventeen years of widowhood? In fact, why sanctify a relationship which had endured some time without benefit of clergy? I wondered how often Margaret’s name had appeared in the newspaper social columns through these years. With some regularity no doubt. It was the actress who had mentioned her as a friend of the Princess Royal. It would not have surprised me to learn of royal strains in her own lineage. Nor would it have impressed me any more than it would have impressed Webb. Margaret I would have called a convert to republicanism during her marriage to Webb. Democracy she would have found as offensive as Byron found it. It would seem she had reverted to old loyalties after Webb’s death.

The questions I was asking were interesting, I decided, but they were the wrong ones. I had always asked the wrong questions where Margaret Webb was concerned. Deliberately.

I had seen her a number of times before we ever actually spoke, and although I did not so flatter myself at the time as to think so, she was more than a little aware of me. Indeed she would sometimes send my blood coursing by frankly meeting my eyes across, say, the barroom of the Grande-Bretagne. She must have asked someone who I was, for it was she who spoke first. Byron had nothing to do with it, but I was in the little park in the Plaka where an inscription memorializes his having lived nearby when she came up to me and offered her hand.

“Your name is Jabez Emory, am I right?”

“Yes, Mrs. Webb.”

“And are you truly a newspaper reporter? Forgive me if that seems insulting.”

“If you can call the Rock County Citizen a newspaper, I am.”

“There seem to be so many reporters, and there is so little to report,” she said.

We had sat in the park smoking. She asked me a great many questions about myself on that and subsequent days when we walked out together, the next time, I clearly remembered, at her suggestion. I had now to look for the design behind this platonic wooing. With Stephanou’s having followed us, the issue with Margaret could no longer be considered random. Only a fool would fail to see in this light that early on in my relationship with Margaret I was being measured to a pattern to which I was admirably adaptable.

What did we talk about, Margaret and I? Webb once had asked me that. And there was no use conjecturing what his attitude had been. For years I had tried to weigh it. Impossible with the scales so out of balance.

What did we talk about?

The legacy of Middletown, America, prairie sunsets, Indian summer, and box suppers after prayer meetings, bittersweet bursting red and yellow in the frost, soup kept warm for after-school, and my mother’s reading Byron by the kitchen stove in winter, the shaking down of the furnace grate at five on winter mornings which was my only memory of my father, but one that halloed at me down the years like the rattle of his bones. He was a railroad man, killed in an accident when I was four. I have another memory of him: the black box with the brass handles and the squeaking of one of his pallbearers’ new shoes. This I told, and more, to Margaret Webb, even as I had told it to a Red Cross worker in England, a nurse in Belgium, and had tried to tell it to a USO canteen worker near Paris except that she couldn’t listen to me because by then I was an officer and she was assigned to the enlisted men.

But Margaret listened to it all. And once she had said, “Alexander comes from Ohio. That’s not far from Illinois. Perhaps we shall visit!” And she had laughed, looking up to see the expression on my face. “Am I really that much of a foreigner, Jabez?”

She made me feel that she was truly interested not so much on my account as that such lore as mine was also Alexander Webb’s and, knowing it, she would know him the better. God save us from the feeling of truth! I felt it then, I felt it in the moment I saw Webb with the Andartes’ whore, I felt it at the trial—and told it there, or tried to. I felt it on the bus to Sounion.

I remembered then her asking me how I came to be named Jabez. It was after a favorite uncle of my mother’s, a New England man, and it was a biblical name, of course.

“Yes, I supposed that,” she said. On this occasion we were resting under a plane tree not far beneath the Acropolis. We watched some workmen repairing a wall which had been damaged by mortar fire during the British campaign against the Communists. “What does it mean? All biblical names have meanings.”

“‘He will cause pain,’” I said. I had looked it up in many places as a child, hoping somewhere to find a different meaning to it.

Margaret’s eyes told the wish that she had not asked. She reached out and briefly laid her hand on mine. “I doubt that very much… but I have fears that he will suffer greatly.”

What, in the name of God, had she known, saying that?

12

“IT’S THE BONE-WHITE COLUMNS of the temple that most impress one, and the blue mists that come up and veil the sun, and of course the sea all round the promontory.”

“I have seen it,” Stephanou said. “It is as you say. And did you find Lord Byron’s name?”

“Among the many.”

“It must have taken him a day or would he have carried a hammer and chisel?”

“He wouldn’t have had a guide calling the fifteen-minute turns on him,” I said. “I do not like to be guided by someone who knows less than I do.”

Paul lifted his head, tilting it a little to the side; it was his way when thinking. He sat at one end of the table, erect as the straight-backed chair. The table had been so angled that he sat directly between the back window overlooking the hills and the door fronting on the street. “It is a fatal journey when the guide is ignorant,” he said. “The blind cannot lead the blind.”

I said nothing, hoping he would elaborate. But he got up and walked to the high window. Without his cane, I noted. The afternoon sun was full in his face and he turned his head this way and that as though he enjoyed it.

“You are becoming ambulatory,” I said.

“And I am becoming restless. What else did you do at Sunium?”

“I sat on the rocks and listened to the wind and waves and thought of Byron’s verse.”

“Which?”

“‘Place me on Sunium’s marble steep,

Where nothing save the waves and I

May hear our mutual murmurs sweep;

There, swan-like, let me sing and die.

A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine—

Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!’”

Stephanou spread his arms against the window frames as though he would push them out. “I thirst,” he said, swinging round. “Oh, God, how I thirst for such as Samian wine! Then what did you do?”

“I swam while the tour went in to a dinner they complained about all the way back to Athens.”

“Do you like to swim, Professor?”

“Yes.”

“So did Byron if I am not mistaken.”

“He did. He swam the Hellispont and boasted unmercifully about it.”

“Will you do that also?”

“I doubt it. But if I did, I would also boast unmercifully—and with much less charm.”

He returned to the chair and sat down with almost the surety of the sighted. “I was afraid you might not come back.”

“Why?”

He shrugged and played his hand along the table until it touched the mandolin I had brought him. He dribbled his fingers over the strings, producing a remarkably discordant sound. He shook his hand as though to rid it of the echo. “Would the gods had made me musical.”

“It is not a perfect instrument,” I said solemnly.

“Nor am I, my friend, nor am I. I am sorry I was rude to you the last time you were in this house.”

“If I had taken offense I should not have returned.” It was a lie of course, but the trivial lie mere politeness might have prompted.

“You will go away soon,” he brooded.

“Not until I have accomplished something,” I said, knowing even as I said it how hard that sentence might be to explain.

But he was suddenly exuberant. “I too have accomplished something. Every day I do the exercises we used to do in the prison. And every night I go out and walk all around the cottage, maybe three or four times. My uncle is in mortal fear: every time I get closer to the precipice.”

I realized then what Modenis had been working at behind the cottage. He was building a hedge of dead olive branches. “He would fence in an eagle,” I said.

Stephanou smiled, the smile that was so beguiling in the tragic face. I was again torn between the old hatred and whatever it was I now felt for him. “Come here beside me,” he said.

I got up from where I was sitting at the other end of the table and went, touching him lightly on the shoulder as I was about to sit on the bench nearer to him. He reached out and caught my hand and held it in a hard grip in both of his. “Thank you, Professor, for more than I can tell you.”

I eased my hand out of his grip, murmuring… I don’t know what. Some inanity.

“I embarrass you. It is a natural love. Prison did not do that to me.”

“I understand.”

“It is not only your books and your brandy… nor this poor dead thing I cannot bring to life….” He brought his hand down on the mandolin. “It is that this poor dead thing—me—has something in him yet to give. I have felt that. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“You see!” he cried. “You have made me feel it. Not the priest, not my uncle… not Vasso.” He paused, thinking. “To Vasso I am an empty cup she would pour herself into to overflowing. It is not the way.”

“You are wrong, Paul. It is she who is the empty cup, as you put it—waiting, yearning to be fulfilled.”

He put his head to the side. “She is still beautiful?”

“She is a strikingly handsome woman.”

A little smile played at the corners of his mouth. “You like handsome women, Professor. I am not sure of the words as you used them, but to strike is strong, to take, to challenge… you know?”

“I know.” Fleetingly I numbered the women I had known and gone to. It was so. “But strong women are often the most gentle. So it would be with Vasso.”

“And how would it be with me, Professor? Can you tell me that?”

“No, and I must go,” I said. “I want to walk before it’s dark.”

“You are ashamed for me, Professor?”

“It is my nature—the Puritan inbred in me.”

I cannot describe it in any other way than to say a shadow passed across his face, a complete change of expression. I remembered that he had used the word to describe Jabez Emory to the jury at Ioannina.

“Is it so with all Americans?” he asked presently.

“It is a characteristic which dies out slowly, having many roots. Nor am I sure it is altogether a bad thing.”

“I do not understand it,” Paul said. “Ah, but I do—up here.” He pointed to his head. “Not here.” His heart. “And what I do not understand here I think is a bad thing. Sit down, sit down. You can walk in the dark if I can.”

I sat down again. I lit a cigarette and offered him one. He shook his head. “Please be careful with the sparks. Now. A Puritan can be easily persecuted, am I right?”

“The consensus against them has always put it the other way: they are the persecutors.”

“Ah, yes, but they judge and those who judge are vulnerable.”

“I’m not sure what you’re driving at, Paul.”

“I am not sure myself. It is something I have thought about. They condemn in others that which they wish to do themselves.”

“Not necessarily. That is a theatrical concept.”

“Exaggerated?”

“And old-fashioned. But so is puritanism itself.”

“Professor, I was a Communist. I don’t know what I am today. It is enough to be blind. Does it shock you that I tell you this?”

“Not in the least.”

“I am glad. I have not known many Americans, you see.”

“And those you knew were Puritans?”

“One of them was. Yes, I think so still. It is not an easy thing for a Greek to understand. A Greek, even if something stinks, he wants to know what makes it stink. This man did not know anything because he did not want to know. It was as though he was afraid to know—as though it would contaminate him.”

I listened to this portrait I knew to be of myself and felt the commencement of a slow, sick anger. I tried to keep it out of my voice. “Is this not judgment, what you are saying, Paul?”

“But of course not! I am trying to understand. I had watched him, you see, when he did not know me, did not know I was watching. It was my duty.” He turned his head toward me. “Professor, do you know why I was in prison?”

I had to decide in that instant how much it was expedient to reveal: I wanted him to tell me the story as he knew it, not adjusting it to fit the pattern already set. But at the same time there were questions I hoped to ask that could not come from a person with no previous knowledge.

“Yes,” I said. “I ought to tell you that while I was in Athens I went to the National Library and read the newspaper accounts at the time.” It might as easily have been the truth.

He sat scowling, his hands wrapped round the cane. For a moment I was afraid he would revert to the sullen silence.

“I was curious,” I said. “I felt … well, let’s leave it at that: I was curious.”

“No. Tell me what you felt,” he demanded.

“I thought if I were to be of any help to you I ought to know the background. I remembered something of the case from the newspapers at home of course….” Christ! I thought, shut up! Stop explaining!

He stomped the cane on the floor and I was silent. Then he smiled. “But you brought me the mandolin.”

“Yes,” I said tentatively.

“To you I am not unclean?”

“If you are not unclean to yourself, Paul, you are not unclean.”

I shall not examine those words now for their soundness or my own in saying them: there was at least the wish behind them for honest measurement. Stephanou seemed to hug them into his breast even as he clutched the knob of the cane against himself. Modenis came in before he spoke again. Paul raised his head and rubbed the back of it as though to ease a stricture there.

“Uncle,” he said, “will you make coffee for my brother and me?”

My brother and me… the words made me a little sick.

To me he said, “We shall talk again at another time.” To Modenis, “You have built me a fence, Uncle. Now I must not go that way.”

“If you do you may break your bones, but it will not be your neck.” The old man could scarcely straighten up after bending to strike the match to the grate.

I said, “Sit down and let me rub your back for you, Modenis. It’s the only thing I was ever good for among the athletes.”

“Pah! You are not a woman.”

“Then we must find a woman, eh, Uncle?”

“Speak for yourself,” Modenis growled. “A woman now would kill me.”

Paul grinned and flung out his hand so that it caught me across the chest. “But what a lovely way to die, Uncle! What a lovely way to die!”

13

TRULY I DO HAVE a diffidence that makes me shy away from overly demonstrative people. I was among a tactile and effusive race, and my whole design, such as it was, depended on Paul Stephanou’s liking of me. Even if he had not been blind, I could not have elicited the truth by the threat of physical action. The very idea is ridiculous. I ought then to have been gratified to have built a relationship in which he called me brother. Instead I was uneasy. Why? I asked myself the question time and again as I walked to the olive groves and back. The answer was simple, really: I doubted his sincerity.

And if he were not sincere in his protestations of affection, what odds? Something which had infuriated me as a boy was my mother’s saying, “So-and-so is taking advantage of you.” I remember shouting at her that I didn’t care. She would have managed nonetheless, and whether it was her intention or not, to spoil the friendship. And in a way she crippled my judgment by trying to strengthen my character.

I laughed aloud at a thought that had never occurred to me quite that way before: she had helped to build me up for the most mammoth advantage-taking since Samson got his hair cut. If Paul Stephanou proposed once more to use me, so be it. And I could hear my mother say to that, “All right, Jabez, just so long as you know.”

Returning to the village the prey of one of those self-denigrating moods which have beset me periodically all my life, I knew where I would have gone at home. I thought of the crumpled little lawyer in Athens and his proposal: “Perhaps tonight you would like to meet someone… a very nice girl?” It was not a very nice girl I wanted. A sadistic whore to prime and drain the lust. I poured myself a half-glass of brandy and drank it. I stripped to the waist and washed in cold water. I put on a clean shirt and the polished shoes Michael had left outside the door. My valet for a drachma a day. I took out the basin of water in which I had washed. It had become a ritual: I looked both ways to be sure the grandmother wouldn’t intercept me. Kanakis had called me a modern man. One of the characteristics then was that I could not submit to the old woman’s intimate services. I tipped the basin into the geranium pots near the walk. So I saw Paul come out of the cottage and along the path, tapping furiously. Modenis followed him, protesting. They had had a quarrel. Good, I thought. One more strike for independence. At the gate Paul turned my way. He was carrying a newspaper.

I went to meet him. Modenis stopped at the gate, shouting after the blind one, “You are a stubborn fool!”

“And you are a grandmother!” Paul shouted back. But doing so he lost his sense of direction. He stood in the road, turning slowly, trying, I thought, by the lift of his head, to catch a scent of the wind that might guide him.

“Paul!” I quickened my step.

“Professor, I want you to read something to me. I have caught the old fart deciding for me what I am to read and what I am not allowed to read.”

“Gently does it, Paul,” I said. “He must have good reason.” I took his arm and led him toward my cottage, saluting Modenis as we turned from him. “Come, we’ll have a brandy and no censorship.”

“For a lifetime I have been censored. I will have no more of it.”

God knows I was as anxious to read what Modenis had tried to censor as he was to hear it, but first I settled both of us as comfortably as Vasso’s furnishings permitted. I gave him a good two ounces of brandy, myself rather less.

“This could become a beautiful habit,” he said, and rolled the liquor in his mouth before swallowing it.

The temper tantrum, I suspected, had been a good act.

“Now, what part of the paper am I to read to you?” I picked up the Eleftheria. The headlines concerned the continuing cabinet crisis. There was a picture of the student demonstrations Palandios had predicted.

“There is a reason,” Paul said. “Turn to the social calendar, whatever you call it, the activities of the upper class.”

I knew then what I was looking for before I turned a page. I opened the newspaper to a picture of Margaret Webb and Count Braschi. She wore a wedding gown and veil and seemed to have changed very little. Her husband was her height, not at all good-looking but having a nice smile, I thought. A man of fifty or so. He wore a sash across his morning coat.

I took in the first paragraph at a glance and said, “I should suppose it is the wedding of Alexander Webb’s widow that you are interested in?”

“It is so. My uncle wants me to forget.”

“Don’t you, Paul?”

“Please read. I will forget what I want to forget.”

I drew a deep breath and read in a voice I tried to keep even, unemotional:

“Mrs. Margaret Clitheroe Webb was married in Corfu this afternoon to Count Michael Antony Braschi, Archbishop Alexandrou Sikelianou presiding at the Orthodox service. Lady Mary Ellington, wife of the British consul, was maid of honor. The Honorable Michael Chaconis, Epirot Deputy to the Greek National Assembly, served as best man.

“The Countess Braschi is the widow of the American newspaper correspondent, Alexander Webb, who was murdered in Northern Greece during the Civil War. She has remained in Greece since and has become well known for her charitable and social activities.

“Count Braschi, a former resident of Rome, is an industrialist with extensive interests in Greece. In recent years he has been responsible for numerous reforestation and conservation projects in Epirus and Macedonia.

“The maid of honor and her husband, Sir Thomas, gave a reception afterwards at which the royal family was represented by Lt. General Aristo Kerenyi and Mme. Karenyi. Also present were Princess Ghita and Prince Olaf of Sweden, the Duke and Duchess of Dorset, His Excellency, Timothy Smollens, the American ambassador, and Mrs. Smollens, the Honorable K. Vourtsis, Deputy Minister of Defense, and Mme. Vourtsis, Col. Alexis Frontis, Miss Elena Kondylis and Mr. El. Mylonas, members of the Greek National Theatre.”

I put the paper down carefully lest he hear the rustle of it as my hand trembled. I finished my brandy. Paul gave a disdainful snort and emptied his glass too.

Then he said, “One wonders if she had to wait seventeen years for that.”

“Did you know her?” It was a natural question.

But an unnatural answer: “I have sometimes thought so.”

For the salvation of my soul I could not frame a question to compel him on. Instead I took refuge in the brandy bottle. Paul declined another drink. “Professor, would you do me the kindness to keep the paper for me? I do not trust my uncle. He would throw it away. Perhaps I shall throw it away also… but not yet. Please, read me the names again of the guests.”

Fortified by the brandy I read again the last paragraph. Then I said, “I have met one of them, by the way—the actress, Elena Kondylis. She will be playing in the festival at Dodoni in August.”

“Where did you meet her?”

I told him about the dinner party at Dr. Palandios’. I thought of going on to repeat the discussion of Webb’s murder, but I wasn’t ready yet. Nor was he—and the line seemed too direct. If I had been going to tell him of it I should have done so when I accounted my knowledge of the case as having come from looking up the old newspaper files.

“And will you attend the festival?” he said.

“It is possible.”

He flashed a smile at me. “Perhaps you will meet the Count and Countess!”

“That too is possible,” I said.

He sat a moment, blinking furiously, his mind, I suspected, racing. He reached for his cane. “I would ask you, Professor, to tear out that page and let me have the rest of the paper for my uncle. It will give him pleasure to read it to me.”

He got up and waited until I put the paper in his hand. “It will not be necessary for you to go with me.”

I let him go alone, but followed several yards behind. He made it faultlessly and, at Modenis’ gate, turned and called back, “You see, it was not necessary, Professor, but I thank you.”

I went on to the shop that served as bus station and news stand, telephone office and agricultural agency headquarters. I bought that day’s Eleftheria myself. I proposed to know from then on what Paul was being read.

The old men rose to meet me when I was halfway to Vasso’s that night, Spyro all but hopping to be the first to tell me that something had happened.

“He walked in like you—coming up the road with his stick!”

“Who?”

“Paul, Paul!” He urged me forward the quicker to show me what was going on. The others crowded behind me at the open door. Inside the restaurant Stephanou and Modenis were sitting at a table which Vasso had covered with a white cloth. Kanakis was there also, but not yet seated. The butcher was drawing wine.

“It’s a miracle, don’t you see? He talks and laughs.”

For a moment, God forgive me, I feared that he had regained his sight.

“Go in,” Spyro said. “He’s waiting for you. You should have seen how he came like a soldier marching, and old Modenis hobbling behind him.”

I went in as Vasso came from the kitchen, a great bowl of salad in her hands. Her eyes flashed as she saw me. “Our Paul has come home! You were right, Mr. Eakins.”

Stephanou lifted his head, his face open with laughter. “The professor is always right.”

“Except when he is wrong,” I said.

“Come and sit beside me, my brother.”

Other men of the village were there as was their custom, sitting off to the side at games of backgammon, munching nuts, sipping coffee. There was not the usual chatter among them that night, however. They spoke softly, the better to listen when the blind man spoke.

And speak he did, the speech stopped within him for years released full flood. “My uncle tells me…” he would start, and repeat a bit of village gossip. Then he would enlarge upon it in the manner of the true raconteur, making good-natured caricature of the principals as though he had known them without interruption from his childhood. Indeed, I thought, he has known them for centuries. And sometimes a story that had started as a bit of bantering nonsense he elaborated into allegory:

“The grandmother Panyotis had a wart beneath her thumb, I understand, which on some days looked like an olive, on others like a cherry, and on yet other days like someone whose name I won’t mention here….”

A cackle of laughter came from the kitchen doorway. The old woman covered her mouth and drew back from sight.

“The hairy doctor came from Lavidia—it’s still the hairy doctor, isn’t it, Uncle? I remember his beard crawling up my neck whenever he looked down my throat. His glasses he wore like a hummingbird perched on the tip of his nose, and his breath was as sweet as charity. But the wart, the wart. The doctor consulted and thought he could snip it, but someone suggested the wart was alive and the priest when called in amen’d it. He rubbed oils and ablutions, said prayers to St. Michael, St. George and, for all I know, to the dragon. The wart stuck to the widow Panyotis. A priest may not win but he never loses. Some men live with lumps all their lives, he exhorted, and to some they may even resemble their wives. He accounted the blisters and boils man was heir to, to say nothing of taxes and gravediggers’ fees. A mere wart, it seemed, was a blessing from God. Content with contenting, he went home to bed.

“The widow, like the nation in this parable, bit off the wart that tortured her, swallowed and digested it, healed the wound with her own tongue, and went on working. Hail, Mother Hellas!”

I have tried to convey the pattern of his tale. In Greek it was more poetic, more idiomatic.

The old lady appeared in the doorway, but reluctantly, her head half-turned and gesturing with her hands that it was all nonsense. Vasso stood, her arms folded, her eyes warm on all present. I became aware then that other people had come, men and women, among them the gleaners I remembered plucking the bad seed from the good and calling them blind men’s eyes. They all wanted to hear more. Paul had filled his mouth with chicken. His face was flushed, his eyelids blinking. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and started again. The stories went on, half-humor, half-sadness, turning always on a nationalistic theme. As I remembered my own grandmother saying once—my father’s mother who had come from Ireland—he could melt the heart of a wheelbarrow. Whenever he paused to eat of the abundance Vasso set before him, the murmur ran round the room of the Paul they all remembered, the scholar, the hero, the martyr.

He washed down the food with a great draft of wine. I was reminded of one of Franz Hals’ laughing boys, possibly the mad one.

He began to beat a rhythm with his hands on the table, vigorous, martial.

“The Klephtikos, the Klephtikos!” several voices urged.

Someone started to sing, Paul joined and soon everyone was singing. The butcher reached across the table and plucked the handkerchief from the pocket of my shirt, saying please and thank you at the same time. He shook it out and moved to the middle of the room, the villagers falling away to make space for him. He waved the handkerchief over his shoulder and others followed him into the dance. He had the grace so many fat men do on the dance floor and, having drawn a circle of dancers in, he detached himself from them and improvised a series of lunges, sword feints, the dance of the Klephts, the mountain warriors. The room shook with his leaps. I leaned over to Stephanou and shouted, “Falstaff!”

He nodded, grinning, and kept on pounding the rhythm, the silver and glassware tingling.

Falstaff tried to pass the handkerchief on, the sweat streaming down his face, but someone shouted, “Hassapikos (the dance of the Butchers)!” and he was pushed to the center again.

He accepted the challenge as though his honor was at stake, pausing only long enough to mop his face in my handkerchief. It is a dance with much pounding of feet. The men circled him, hands on each other’s shoulders, bent their knees, straightened and stretched, pounding their feet in the rhythm, and repeated the motion. Watching, one felt the room to be undulating as on the waves of the sea. Inside the circle the butcher danced, the same forms but counter-clockwise. On and on it went, with such tantalizing pace, the accented beat, the sway and retreat of the dancers who gradually accelerated until it seemed a test of balance and motion. The butcher at last flicked the handkerchief. I thought it a white flag, and Constable Rigi, the officer with the bored expression, took it up.

He was anything but bored now. He took off his uniform jacket as he danced and flung it aside. The dance changed—I think to the Kalamantianos, for the women formed a circle within the men’s, and inside the policeman spiraled and leaped like a dervish, while the slow, swaying grace prevailed among the group.

“The boy scout,” Modenis said of Rigi, and made the gesture of spitting. He was no lover of the constabulary.

The dancing went on, others coming, and there was a moment when I thought Paul about to join it. I’m sure he could have, his arms linked to those of the others. But instead he simply pushed his chair back from the table and beat the rhythms with his cane on the floor.

When at last the circles broke, Vasso offered wine. Many politely chose water. Old Spyro came up and snatched his cap from his head. He pointedly dropped a couple of drachmas in it and held it out to me. I dropped in a twenty drachma piece. Kanakis matched it and round the room Spyro skipped from one to another he knew to have change in their pockets. Everyone with a thirst drank wine and toasted a true homecoming.

Suddenly then, while the wine was passing, Vasso stood apart in an uncrowded place. She raised her hands over her head and began to snap her fingers rhythmically. She wore the flared red skirt and a full-sleeved cotton blouse that showed her fine neck and breastbone and the soft swell of flesh where her bosom began. The first words she sang made the women cry, “Ah!” and “Neh, neh!” Yes! Yes!

“The women of Souli to live must be free….”

I had never heard her sing before but I would have imagined her voice as it was, a deep, vibrant contralto. Soon Paul, everyone joined in singing the “Ballad of the Zalongo” which tells of the Souli women who, their men massacred by the Turks, put on their festival costumes, flung their children from the cliff and one by one, dancing, leaped to their deaths.

It was George Kanakis himself who took the lead in the dance. He was not a dancer. Not every Greek is. But Vasso’s eyes, I thought, had summoned him. He bowed to her and then to Stephanou, and a murmur of—approval, assent, I didn’t know just what—ran through the room. Several men followed him.

Paul demanded, “Who is dancing?”

“Kanakis,” I said.

He seemed to freeze—just for a second—his smile, his cane mid-air, his very breathing. I glanced at Modenis, scowling, watching Paul with apprehension; at Vasso, on whose face at that instant was an expression of the utmost abject petition. Then Paul let out a sound the ring of which to me meant triumph. He beat out the rhythm of the dance more fiercely. More time has been spent in the telling than in the incident itself, but from that moment both Paul and I knew what many others here already knew: that Kanakis was Michael’s father.

The dance quickened. One dancer after another leaped from the circle until Kanakis was alone. He did not attempt the final dramatic leap. He merely stopped dancing. The singing stopped and finally the pounding of Paul’s cane. A hush was on the room.

“Vasso, come to me,” Paul said.

She came with a rush and threw herself at his feet. I moved away from them. Kanakis was gone. The others were pressing in as I strove to get out. Old Spyro, standing on tiptoe, shivered like a wet dog. I looked back and saw Paul lifting her face and playing his fingers softly over it. I had had as much as I could take. The very air reeked of humanity beyond my tolerance of it.

At the door I met Father Lappas and his wife. The priest and I did one of those little dances trying to get around one another and all but colliding. He was beside himself to see what he had been missing. I stood aside and said as though it were the truth, “They’ve been waiting for you, Father.”

I heard Paul call out to me, but I did not go back. Kanakis and I, I thought. I went home and wondered how long Vasso’s cottage would be my home in Kaléa. Because I could concentrate on nothing, I turned to the newspaper. I have never been a newspaper reader though I had subscribed to many, watching always for some reference to the Webb case or to the history of that time. I had read once that Markos was living in the Soviet Union, again that he was in an asylum in Poland. I had studied the Greek Civil War in terms of what subsequently happened in Yugoslavia, Tito’s breakaway from the Soviets. Markos had been replaced after that, and some members of the press, who liked to see history tidied up, I had always thought, connected Webb’s death with the split in the Soviet bloc and the subsequent downgrading of Markos among the Greek Communists. Had I been questioned instead of kangarooed in those dark days in Ioannina, I could have told that Webb anticipated an early end to the rebellion when we went north, but he had already written that in his dispatches. Did he document it for Markos that night?

These thoughts ran through my mind while, almost by rote, I read the affairs of the day’s paper. I put it aside and took up the clipping I had trimmed to save for Paul. I read again the list of distinguished guests he had asked me to repeat. I should not have thought Miss Kondylis belonged there. At the wedding, perhaps, but to have been singled out…. Of course she was appearing at the Epirus festival. That was it probably. Colonel Alexis Frontis: I had seen the name before—or was it in the first reading of this same article? I went back to the paper and found the name also in the front page story. The present government crisis had arisen out of the purge of leftist elements in the army. Colonel Frontis was apparently responsible for the removal of the officers, and, by way of the chain of ministerial authority, he had been sustained by the King himself.

14

I WOKE TO THE clanging of the church bell after a miserable night. I would rather have slept on a bed of nails than where I supposed Vasso would be bringing at last her true lover. I threw open the shutters. The grandmother turned from where she was gossiping at the gate with the butcher’s daughter and the priest’s wife and I don’t know whom else, a cluster of women that broke up when the old woman came running to me.

I did not want to go to the restaurant that morning. She brought me bread and fruit and water for Nescafé, and the news that had been many times told already: Vasso had been to the priest with Paul’s consent and they would be married on Sunday a week. Kanakis would take the bride-to-be from her mother’s house to the church. Why not? She had lived by his providence and love when there was none other for her to live by. Needless to say, I have always loathed weddings. More, if possible, than funerals. But this was one I could not escape. I listened to the old woman’s pratings—about the bridal veil and the wedding cake, and then something I had not expected: Modenis’ cottage was being prepared for Paul and his bride. I felt much better. She made me go to the window and see where even now her own bedtick was being aired, the frame sanded down by Vasso and her friends. It was the bed on which the old woman had given birth to three sons and Vasso, her only daughter. Her eyes filled up as she told how she had waited for this day. I hugged her briefly, one arm about her frail shoulders. Once more she had released me from myself.

She pulled back shyly. “You should have a wife also, Mr. Professor, a good Greek woman to take care of you.”

“Are you tired of the job, grandmother?”

“You know I am not, but like all my sons you too will go away. And who will I take care of then? Modenis.”

The way she said the name made me laugh. She had indeed lifted me out of the depths.

Not long afterwards I heard Paul’s stick tapping the stones along Vasso’s walk. He called out and threw open the door. “Professor?”

“Yes, Paul.”

He stood in the doorway, an image of strength, self-confidence. “I want to talk to you.”

“Come. The chair is here. Congratulations. I hear you’ve set the wedding date.”

“The women set it. What could I do?” He caught my hand. “First of all, I want you to stand up for me at the wedding.”

“I am honored, but I am not of your religion.”

“Neither am I. It is for Vasso, and I have decided that if the priest can be a hypocrite I can also.”

“Right you are,” I said.

He shook my hand and released it. “This is the only place safe from the women in the whole of Kaléa. Of all the ceremonies, matrimony is their favorite. Is it so in America?”

“One must suppose so—considering the number of times a woman will go through it.”

“Why have you not married, Professor?”

“I am fond of women, but not of ceremony.” Then: “There were reasons. Someday perhaps I shall tell you.” I drew up the chair that had come into the house on his first visit, and sat near him.

“When will you go to Athens again?”

That he asked indicated his wish for something there. “Within the week,” I said.

“And will you go to the library again—to where the old newspapers are?”

“I can.”

“There is someone I would like to know about…. Perhaps he is not important enough and he would not be in the newspapers….” He hesitated, trying to select the least he needed to tell, I thought. “He was in the prison with me at Averoff and I have wondered what has happened to him.”

“Could I not simply inquire of the prison authorities?”

“No. Look, Professor, I will tell you. It is the man who blinded me. It was a quarrel, yes, but we had been friends. He was in prison for having stolen money, quite a lot of money. It was the payroll for the army barracks…. Afterwards he was most penitent, he said he would give me money… if we were both released from prison.”

Was Stephanou lying to me? I remembered well his capacity for telling a lie and making it seem the reluctant truth. “Has he been released?” I asked.

“I do not know that. He was moved to another prison—to one of the islands after what happened to me. His name is Stavros Varvaressos. He was a blacksmith by trade. I think he came from the Peloponnese, but he always said he would not go back there. He loved Athens—the city.”

“Was the stolen money recovered?”

“Most of it, I think, but there would have been some that was not. Otherwise, how could he have promised me money?”

I thought for a moment. “And if I find him, Paul, what am I to say to him?”

“Nothing. You are not even to speak to him. You must promise me that or I will beg you to forget the whole matter. Afterwards, I will ask you to write a letter to him for me.”

Afterwards: The implication of confidence. Which could either be withheld or given. Oh, yes! my brother had uses for me.

“Do you need money, Paul—that kind of money?”

“I want to know. That is all. Modenis is too old, and he would not go in any case.”

“Paul, if there was money, don’t you think the police would have watched him in the expectation of his leading them to it?”

He twisted his head and grimaced, an agony of impatience. “It is not the money!” he cried out.

“I hadn’t supposed it was,” I said quietly. “It would be better if you told me the truth.”

“I do not know the truth. I only suspect.”

“That you were deliberately blinded?” I said after a moment.

“It is a possibility. I should like to know.”

“I shall go up tomorrow,” I said. “There is a private collection of papers available to me on weekends. I shall combine missions.”

“Professor, don’t…” He could not find the words. “I do not wish to call attention to myself in this matter.”

“Neither do I,” I said, and took some satisfaction in the concealed irony.

15

WITH THE PRECISION OF a man documenting expenses against the filing of his income tax, in Athens I arranged to see the Pietro Gamba letters written for Byron, in the margins of which were comments in the poet’s hand. Then I set out on my search for Stavros Varvaressos.

The newspaper files yielded information on his arrest and conviction. A civilian employee of the army, aged nineteen, he had stolen, apparently without accomplices, 300,000 drachmas, roughly a $10,000 payroll. He claimed to have been robbed of the money, and was indeed arrested on his job to which he returned after a three-day absence. He was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor in 1955, which left him several years yet to serve.

But two years ago, the entire payroll had been recovered. The story was cryptic: “The police today recovered…” Not a word on where or how or on what advice they had acted.

The entire payroll: surely Paul would have known that. He did, of course. But had Varvaressos actually promised him money? If such a promise had been given, it would have had to be given in the presence of a prison guard at least. The two men would not have been left alone, even in a hospital.

The name of Varvaressos did not again appear in the newspapers.

I thought of Nikos Spiridos and his prison connections. I did not like to go back to him, but decided to look up his phone number while making up my mind. The phone book in hand, I looked up Varvaressos first. There was a Mrs. S. Varvaressos in Piraeus. It was not a common name.

The house was part of a row of what I can best describe as new tenements, three- and four-story buildings put up after the war, but already showing signs of becoming slums, the plaster cracked, the marble stained with rust from bad drainage. A small sign indicated that Mrs. Varvaressos was the proprietress of a sailors’ rooming house. The inside of the building looked immaculate.

I walked to the top of the steep, narrow street. One could see the bay, the funnels of ships anchored there. Her custom would be in merchant seamen, dockworkers. It was a respectable, working class place, I thought, walking past it again. But she catered primarily to transients. There was none of the hallway paraphernalia of children’s toys and carriages common to the other buildings. I crossed the street and entered the taverna a few doors down. A card game was going on in the rear with twice the number of observers to players. I bought a bottle of beer and took it to one of the outside tables. Nobody cared where I took it. I watched the occasional woman climbing the street, stringbag in one hand and almost invariably the other hand at her back. The climb had taken its toll of most of them. I studied each one as she passed in case she should turn in at the rooming house door. None of them did. I thought how like this was to my vigil outside Averoff… which had not come out badly to my purpose. It was a matter of patience and some sort of plan. I did not want to speak to Mrs. Varvaressos, not until I knew something about her.

Two men came up the street, one with his seaman’s bag over his shoulder. The other looked at a piece of paper in his hand and then at the numbers on the houses. They were young, clean-cut men. It was an easy matter to catch up with them. I asked them if they were looking for Mrs. Varvaressos.

“Yes, sir.”

“Three houses up,” I said. “What kind of a place is it, do you know?”

“Cheap and clean.” But I could tell from the way they looked at me they didn’t think it was my style.

“I am looking for a place for some of the men who work for me,” I said, improvising, and realizing as I said it that I could as easily have approached Mrs. Varvaressos myself using that gambit.

“Come along, boss,” one of the youngsters said to me.

The other said, “You must be a very good boss to look for lodging for your men.”

“I want to know where they are,” I said.

I went with them into the building. One of them rang the bell of the first-floor apartment. There was a faint smell of mothballs or disinfectant, I wasn’t sure which, but it was a clean smell.

The woman who opened the door was well into her sixties, neat, tight-lipped and hard. Her back was slightly bent. She had known work in her time.

“We are looking for rooms, my friend and I,” one of the seamen said. “The gentleman must speak for himself.”

“I have men working for me who need rooms,” I said.

“What kind of work?” She had not allowed us entrance to or even a view of her apartment. I could see only a heavily upholstered chair and a calendar on the wall behind it.

“Construction,” I said.

“No,” she said, “they are too dirty.”

“I pay them well,” I said.

“Then what do they need of my house? No.”

And that was that. I muttered a sarcastic “thank you,” and retreated, the seamen going into her parlor with her. It was my appearance, my very presence, of course, that had made her suspicious. Which only suggested that she had had such visitors as myself before, prying men perhaps connected with the police.

On the stoop an old unshaven man was fingering his beads. He grinned at me, bowing a little again and again.

“Kali´spera,” I said. He reeked of onion and beer.

“Kali´spera. You would like to buy me a bottle of Fix?”

“Do you know Mrs. Varvaressos?”

“I know, I know,” he said and rolled his eyes.

“I’d be happy to buy you a bottle of Fix.” I indicated the taverna where I had been before.

He shook his head and led the way into a cellar apartment a few doors down the street, running a skip and a jump ahead of me. The place was as bare as a jail cell which was in itself a blessing, an uncovered mattress on the floor, a table and two chairs, a few bits of crockery on the table.

He held out his hand for money. “You will wait here and I will bring the beer. One hundred drachmas, please.”

Three dollars was a lot of money for a couple of bottles of beer. I assumed it included the price of what he wanted to sell and gave it to him.

I stood at the window and watched him trot across the street to the taverna and back with the two bottles. He uncapped one of them and handed it to me. A shaft of sunlight hit the wall behind him where he sat cross-legged on the mattress, the image of an evil genie. I wondered how often he had performed this ritual.

“Now,” I said, “what do you want to tell me?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you can tell me about Mrs. Varvaressos.”

“She is a very hard woman. She does not talk to anybody. She is not like us. She comes from the Peloponnese. A peasant.”

The man Stephanou was looking for had also come from the Peloponnese. He was thirty or so and, if related, probably the woman’s son. “Where—do you know?”

“A village called Skandi.”

“How do you know that?”

“I went through some rubbish the day after she came—the stub of a bus ticket.”

“When did she come?”

He screwed up his eyes as though trying to remember something I suspected he knew by rote. “Eight, nine months ago. She was a peasant, you know? Now… she wears a corset, very elegant.”

“Does she have any family?”

“No. That is to say, I have never seen anyone like that. Six months ago she began to wear the heavy veil, black, you know? And she burns a candle for the dead.”

“Six months ago?” I repeated.

“It would be,” he said, “and it was then she paid for the house. The man who owns this one, he owns them all except hers. He is a very rich man. I used to work for him. I had a nice apartment in her house for my daughter. She put us out, may the evil eye look on her.”

The reason occurred to me, but it was not my affair.

“She is a beautiful girl,” he said and grinned in attempted ingratiation. He was speaking of his daughter, I realized.

“Have there been other people inquiring about Mrs. Varvaressos?’

“The police at first. Now every month they come to see her. I think she pays them money… I paid them money too. Much good it did me.” He spat three times.

I supposed I had learned all I was likely to of Mrs. Varvaressos from this source, and I certainly wanted to know no more of my informant’s personal affairs. I got up, thanked him and told him gravely that I would hold his information in confidence.

He said, “You are not the police. You are perhaps a lawyer?”

“I am an insurance appraiser,” I said.

When a Greek woman leaves the village of her birth she will be better remembered than were she to have died. It is not a proverb, but it might be.

I drove to Corinth in the morning and thence to Skandi, arriving in time for church. Mass over, I spoke to the sexton. He had not only known Mrs. Varvaressos, he had grown up a few doors from her father’s house. He was close to her age.

“What went wrong with her son?” I said, hoping to reach the heart of the matter quickly.

“My friend, only God can say that. And he is in God’s hands now.” He crossed himself.

“How did he die?”

“He was shot trying to escape the island.”

“It would have been hard for the family,” I said. “I suppose that’s why she moved away.”

He looked at me and said nothing. I realized that he knew I was pretending to more knowledge than I had. I also suspected that he knew more than he was likely to tell me unless I was more frank with him. I saw no other way. So I said, “He did an evil thing to a friend of mine in prison. One wonders why.”

The sexton snorted. “Money.”

“Do you know that for a fact?”

“For a fact, no.” He stroked the back of one hand with the other. His wife brought us coffee and, going out, closed the parlor door. “For a fact, perhaps the answer is yes. We are not an ignorant people in this village. People from all over the world pass through every day of our lives on their way to the ancient shrines. When Stavros went to prison we were not surprised. He had been in trouble before. But we did not blame his mother. He was a boy in arms when his father was taken by the Andarte. He never came back. The boy had much hate in him. But he loved his mother. All the while he was in prison, she lived by scratch and charity, and the promises he wrote to her.

“Then one day last summer, without a word to anyone, she packed two boxes—one of his things and one of her own—and got on the bus to Athens.

“The first question was where did she get the money for the bus fare? It was a thousand drachma note out of which she bought her ticket. Her own family did not know. They have never heard from her since. They opened the letter to her telling her that Stavros was dead. But they could do nothing with the letter then except turn it over to the police. Our own Inspector has told them that she has been informed. She is living in Piraeus, the proprietor of a hotel.”

“It’s only a rooming house,” I said. “But she is said to own the building.”

“The postmistress told how she had received two very special letters last year, envelopes of a certain thickness and heavy paper. It may be assumed from this observation that no matter how she tried, the postmistress could not at the time see what was inside the envelopes.”

“Last year,” I repeated. I would have liked to place the dates of those letters relative to Stephanou’s blinding.

“Would you wish to speak to the postmistress?”

“I think not,” I said. “I would rather let the matter of my visit end with us.”

“It would not have been the money from the payroll, you see. That had all been recovered. The police used to come regularly and question his mother. They had searched her house, board by board, and then one day they came and they found the money where he had finally told them it would be, under the floor of the blacksmith shop where he had worked as a boy.”

I sipped my coffee. Reaching the dregs, I said, “Did he blame the Andarte for his father’s death?”

“In this village we blamed the Andarte for many things, my friend, and they gave us reason, taking our young men by force, and then burning us to the ground.”

16

“WE WERE NEVER FRIENDS, Professor. I should not have told you that. In such a prison friends are very rare. I did not know about his father. I can see now how it was possible for him to hate me enough.”

“Did he offer you money, Paul?”

“No. I never saw him again after the incident. But he said to me, ‘Andarte!’ and threw the bucketful of this terrible burning stuff. It was all very natural.”

Paul ran his hand along my desk as a sighted man might, cleaning the dust from it. Indeed he felt the dust in his fingers afterwards. “Grandmother Panyotis has other things to think of these days besides her professor.”

“Why was it necessary for you to lie to me about the money?”

He shrugged. “It seemed easier to tell you that, and I was afraid you would not find out everything if it was just the matter of a man hating a Communist.”

“You underestimate me. I do not call myself a scholar, but I have some of the characteristics. I will not settle for less than it is possible for me to learn.”

“It is so. I know it now—and I will not lie to you again. Probably it will not be possible. You made me tell you it was not the money. Did you not?”

“But the fact remains, Paul. He was given money—or his mother given it to keep for him. By whom?”

“That is the question, isn’t it? And why was it necessary for me to be blind?”

I said quietly, “Does it go back to the Webb case?”

“I should like to know,” he said. “Professor, I want to go to Ioannina with you. When you are ready I shall be ready.”

I had not been prepared for that, not at that moment. “I hadn’t planned to go there directly,” I said, trying to keep the dismay out of my voice.

“I know. You will be going first to Missolonghi, Prevesa…. So much the better. We shall learn how to be independent of each other. I do not wish to be a burden to you. I want only to know that you are there. Is it too much to ask?”

“I must know why you want to go, Paul.”

He banged his fist on my desk. “I do not know myself or I would not need to go. If I knew I would not have been in prison. I would not have been blind today.”

“I see,” I said.

“What is the price I must pay so that you will take me to Ioannina? It is not money, I know. I shall take enough to provide for myself from Vasso’s dowry, but I know it is not that. You are not afraid for yourself, are you? Or are you ashamed to be seen with a blind man who has been in prison?”

“You know it isn’t that. But if I am to be the eyes of this pursuit of yours, I need to know what or whom we are pursuing.”

He sat for a moment drumming his fingers on the desk. Then he got up. “It is all right. I did not realize how much I was asking. If a blind man trusts it is because he must trust. I know that. A man who sees must see everything. I shall find another way of going to Ioannina, Professor. Now we must try to pretend the issue did not come up between us, that I did not even ask. We must not be embarrassed, you and I.”

So it was to be on his terms all the way. Like hell the blind couldn’t lead the blind!

“We shall leave on the Wednesday after the wedding,” I said. “Can you be ready by then?”

“Yes, I can be ready.” He smiled and reached out until he found my shoulder. He clapped it gently. “I have been preparing for a long time—perhaps from the day I last started out to Ioannina.” He made sure the chair was steady and sat down again. “What you read in the old newspapers… everything was not always the way I told it at that trial….”

I could have cried out, hearing such an admission from him. And suddenly I realized something about him now that he might not have known about himself: he tested the temper, the credulity of his confidant; then, having a commitment on terms he had himself set down, he proceeded to the confidence. It was much as he had himself described, more characteristic of the affliction than of the man Stephanou.

He chose his words carefully: “General Markos did not invite Alexander Webb to visit him. Markos did not believe in any American. He did not believe his cause would ever gain sympathy in the capitalist countries. It was, as I understood it, Webb’s own idea that he should go north if the contact could be made. It was made through our sympathizers in Athens when I reached there. I could not tell this at the trial without jeopardizing our Athens people. But I was party to the decision to take him north with me. I took Webb to his death.”

“And the man charged with his murder?” I said.

“Him also.”

“To his death?”

“That is possible. After the trial he escaped from prison. I was in that same prison. Early on the night of his escape I was removed to another part of the building. It is possible that those who rescued him, if that is the word, intended to have taken me. It is to me the only explanation.”

How strange this conviction of his, I thought. I have remarked elsewhere here on the “feeling of truth” and its power to deceive the believer. I could tell that over the years Stephanou had come to feel absolutely the truth of this theory, starting perhaps with the need to feel that his comrades would not have abandoned him. And of course the calculated rumor had spread that I had escaped behind the Iron Curtain. The irony of the moment was that it made understandable his complete acceptance of “John Eakins” even as the time drew rapidly near when I should have to reveal to him who I was or had been.

I asked him then, “What would have happened to him when the Andarte discovered their mistake?”

“He would have been shot in any case.”

“Rest in peace,” I murmured.

Stephanou turned his head toward me. “You do not believe he deserved to die. Why?”

“What was he doing there in the first place?”

“Ah, I see. Alexander Webb would not go without him.”

“Why? I know enough about newspaper men and the value they put on an exclusive story.”

“I will tell you what I believed at the time. It was Webb’s explanation: he wanted a witness, a collaborator—no, the word is corroborator. There is a difference! He wanted an all-American witness who was not likely to be called a Communist sympathizer. He wanted someone who would write the same story, but in his own way.”

This was as close to the truth as I had come myself: Webb had proposed that I could write my head off—after he had filed his story and released me. But why then had he excluded me from the critical interview with the guerrilla leaders? Something had happened in the interim, on the journey, in his first meeting with Markos. I tell it in some detail now, but all that really flashed through my mind at that moment was that Stephanou was telling the truth as I knew it.

I said, “So Webb chose to take his wife’s lover.”

“Or did he choose Webb? That is what I wondered many times.”

“I do not understand,” I said.

“I do not know if I can make you understand what this man was like. He was too innocent—that is not the word. He was… false. Pretending, that is better. It was my duty in Athens, when I knew Webb wanted to take him, to find out everything I could about him. He ingratiated himself with Webb’s wife. Where she went, he was there also, following like a worshipful dog. She was a lonely woman—married to a man much older than herself. They talked a great deal about Webb, about his work, his ideas. I am convinced this was part of Emory’s game. I have thought it was Mrs. Webb who persuaded her husband to take him, and that was what Emory wanted of her all the time.”

“You didn’t like him, Paul.”

“That is the truth, and after a while I became afraid of him.”

“Afraid of him?” I repeated, truly incredulous.

He nodded. “But by then it was already too late. We had been five days on our journey. We traveled mostly by night, sometimes by boat, sometimes by land. We had to avoid the towns and I had to be sure not to endanger the people who helped us. We were in government territory. And then when I became afraid, it was for these people as well. But let me tell you: one night in Prevesa—we shall be going there, shall we not?”

“Yes.”

“Being on the seacoast it was the only town we stopped in. This night Webb and I were talking. I had come to like him. He wanted to know everything deeply, you know? How I had come to be a Marxist. It had started in my student days in Athens and then during the occupation. But that is not important now. He knew a great deal about Marxism. More than I did. And more than the companion he had brought along. At first it was almost as though our conversation would contaminate him.

“Emory began to talk about the importance of the individual—human personality, that what a man earned by his own sweat he appreciated. As though a Greek would not know that, eh? And liberty. In Greece we had liberty under Metaxas, eh? Under Hitler, the King’s friend. And America was giving us liberty—the monarchy again. It was returned by vote of the people, he said. I looked at Webb. He had a way of smiling upside-down. He said, ‘Now you see why I invited Mr. Emory to accompany us.’ Mr. Emory did not talk any more. But he was listening. And once I looked at his face. I studied the way his jaw was set and I thought, I have seen this face before. I tried to remember. I had seen some pictures in a book, paintings of people—in Iowa, I think. The cold blue eyes, the mouths like ribbons of steel….”

“Grant Wood,” I said. “American Gothic.”

“That is so. And I thought, Greeks are better. America needs Greeks more than Greeks need Americans. I explained this to Alexander Webb and he understood. The other one, nothing. He understood what he wanted to understand.

“Later that night—I had left them sleeping in a loft over the restaurant—I went up and Emory was not there. When he did not come back in ten minutes I wakened Webb. It was decided I should look for him. Two of us would be conspicuous. I walked—searching the town at one o’clock in the morning. Suddenly I realized I was being followed. I did not dare go back—to lead the police to the house that sheltered me? I made up my mind what I would have to do: I would have to kill whoever it was that followed me.”

“But it was Emory,” I said, remembering well the circumstances I shall set down in time.

“Yes. I shortened the distance between us and turned back suddenly and confronted him. He had been unable to sleep and had gone for a walk and got lost. Mother of God!”

The motives were more complicated but the explanation I had given him was essentially the truth. I had suffered my own panic that night.

“Foolish of him,” I murmured.

“Foolish! Don’t you see, he was following me? It was my practice each night to do my real work among our people. The word would pass when I arrived, and after my companions were settled for the night, I would go to where our sympathizers were waiting. It was the only communication, a few men like me, in the whole of Greece.”

“Did Emory know that?”

“If he did not, he was a fool. But he knew it. Webb knew it. And in the morning, when Emory was doing what he always did alone, I said to Webb, ‘What do you know of him, what do you really know of him?’ ‘Not much, actually,’ he said. ‘My wife vouches for him and she is an excellent judge of character.’ ‘I have watched your wife with him,’ I told him, ‘and she was not judging his character.’ Webb burst out laughing. But I said to him, ‘It is very important to both of us: do you think he could be an agent for your government?’ He did not laugh any more, but he said, ‘No, I do not think it is possible.’ But from then on he was as much guarded as I was.”

Merciful God, I thought. Was this the reason Webb had excluded me from the Markos meeting? Much more intolerable to think of then: had he died believing this of me? I could not sit so near the blind man any longer feeling the need within me to cry out my protest. I got up and went to the door and opened it. In the midst of all my turmoil at that moment, I remember thinking, that a Communist should accuse a Puritan of a closed mind! How bloody appropriate.

“Professor?”

“Yes, Paul.” I saw Vasso leave his cottage and start down the street in my direction. “Vasso is looking for you,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, “I have promised to go with her to the priest. You must come also. It will not take long.”

I realized what was ahead of me: to stand before the altar of God and wish this man happiness—peace—the blessings of this earth and children to inherit them.

He had risen and now came toward me.

“Paul,” I said, “do you always distrust men with blue eyes?”

He stood a moment, I supposed nonplussed. Then he smiled. “Do you have blue eyes, Professor?”

“Yes, and I dare say some people would call them cold.”

“This I do not believe. And now I know a man with blue eyes whom I do not distrust.” He put his arm around me and propelled me toward the door.

Vasso, seeing us thus, fairly flew toward us and embraced us both.

17

THEY WERE MARRIED THE following Sunday and there was great feasting. It was small wonder the people of Kaléa rejoiced with the blind man’s return home, three feasts in six weeks. Old Spyro said, with a sad shaking of his head, “It will soon be the festival of our patron saint—but we shall have to pay for that ourselves.” I heard over and over the phrase, “It is like before the Germans came,” followed by the spit and curse on them as though the blindness of Kaléa’s golden warrior were attributable to them. Remotely, perhaps, it was.

Late afternoon of the wedding day I left the village and drove forty kilometers to Delphi, having promised Stephanou to return for him on Tuesday night. I did not think he had yet told Vasso that he was going north with me.

How I welcomed the awesome stillness of that most solemn of all the ancient shrines. It was swarming with tourists but to me they were no more than ants crowding the edge of infinity. A friend once sent me a postcard: “See Delphi and die.” I thought about that, looking down on the sacred plains where a vast wash of olive trees goes darkly to the sea I drank the waters of the Castalian Spring and from the sanctuary of Apollo gazed up toward Parnassus and the height from which Aesop was said to have been flung to his death—for pilfering a golden cup. Not for pilfering, I thought. There would have been more to it than that. And yet, the legend surviving, the modicum of truth in it had contented many at the time… if, of course, there ever lived such a person as Aesop!

The oracle thoughtful men consult today in Delphi is themselves. The measurement one takes contemplating the world’s navel is one’s own mortality, one’s fallibility, the dwarf in each of us. It was there that I decided on the place and manner of my telling Stephanou who I was.

On Tuesday night, having returned to Kaléa, I was packing my things when Vasso came to the cottage. “You will not come again,” she said, taking in what I was doing.

“I intend to,” I said, “but I need these things for my work.”

“Everything?”

“There’s not much, really.” I realized how much it must seem. The Greek home is sparsely furnished.

“You will not return,” she said again. “I wonder if Paul shall. You gave him to me and you are taking him away.”

“Vasso, I did not give him to you. He gave himself when he was ready. No more could I take him away if I wanted to.”

She thought about that. I was not sure I had said precisely what I intended.

“Mr. Eakins… John…” It was the first time she had used my Christian name. She came and stood beside me looking down at the bed where I had spread papers, my clothes to be folded. “I am not sorry for the night we were together here. If I had known Paul would want me, I would not have come. You must understand I love Paul, but I am glad I did not know.”

I took her hands in mine for a moment. “Thank you, Vasso. You are very dear to me.”

“Leave something as a token of your return, something you will not want to leave forever,” she said.

I had nothing. There was nothing I owned anywhere which I would not willingly have given. I looked about the room. “You choose, Vasso. Take anything you see and you may keep it for me.”

She smiled as a child might and decided immediately on a small framed print of Byron in his Albanian costume which Dr. Palandios had given me.

“It is yours,” I said. She began to protest. “Listen to me, Vasso. When I return I shall borrow it from you, and then someday when I have made a copy for my book, I will send it back.”

“To Paul and me and to Michael. He will be a scholar like you.”

“To him I shall send the book,” I said.

“You will take care of Paul for me? You will not let him do any madness? The Epirots are wild, you know. Like the Turks.”

It was as though we were going into another land, I thought, and it occurred to me that it had not been until 1913 that the Turks were expelled from Epirus and the province reunited with Greece after centuries of occupation. Its Greekness was still suspect to the southern peasant.

“We shall take care of each other,” I said, quite as though I knew a peril to be waiting us that was not of our making for each other.

18

IT WAS A WEEK later, having gone down to the sea at Nafpaktos, known in Byron’s day as Lepanto, across to Patras and back to Missolonghi, that we reached Prevesa. In those days together we talked of older wars and occupations. He delighted in quoting to me whole passages from Shakespeare’s Caesar and Cleopatra. I would not have said that Paul’s was a Marxist view of history. I ventured to remark on this one night. “I was educated to action, not in dialectics,” he said. And on another occasion: “A Greek makes an unhappy Communist. Even if he is an unhappy Greek. It is not our kind of logic.”

We spent very little of the daytime together except when driving. At the Byron sites, I would leave him in a town square or at a kafenion near the marketplace. The pallor of the prison had long since left his face, and with his smile and the Greeks’ universal disposition to talk, he was engaged from morning to night in conversation. Nor did he have any great trouble in getting from one place to another. If he were gone from where I had left him, I would find him at our lodgings. He would share the day’s discoveries with me, the anecdotes and attitudes. And once I wrote down for him a few lines he had composed. He called it “A Blind Man Comes to the Sea.” I can remember just one line now and I shall translate it badly: “I know the moon in the tide’s turning and the sunrise in the sand’s quick song.”

They were days I think we both cherished. If he suffered any tension in anticipation of Ioannina, he did not show it, and for my part I almost succeeded in suspending belief in the evil he had once done me.

But on the road from Arta to Prevesa things changed between us. I felt my own nerves tensing. What my instinct craved, of course, was to prolong things as they were, to await his revelations to the friend he trusted. My dislike for myself in this role grew apace as the moment for confrontation approached. We had to know each other for what we were before Ioannina, where to share his company would be advertising both of us. We were silent until I parked the car alongside the quay. There was no shade anywhere. Numerous small fishing boats lay idle, rigged but unattended.

“What place is this?” Paul demanded,

“It’s the only decent-looking restaurant in Prevesa,” I said. I had thought I would remember it, but the searing light of day can be as deceptive as night’s shadows. It was not until we had gone inside and I saw the open kitchen doorway and the stove beyond that I was sure it was where we had stayed on the way north. A tour occupied several tables near the windows. I led Paul past them and seated him, his back to the only other table then occupied: men of the town, fishermen, I surmised. They viewed us with an indifferent curiosity.

I left him, going back to wash my hands and to see what fish was available in the kitchen. I left him also for the purpose of observing him, alone there. Ordinarily he would have swung his chair around to where he might soon have involved himself with the local patrons. He made no move at all and when I returned he was in the same position as I had left him.

“Why did you bring me to this place?” he said.

“It’s the only place I saw to stop for a meal. It’s one o’clock.”

He ate very little. I offered to bone the fish for him but he preferred to pick it up in his fingers. He drank a little wine. The men behind him were talking about the falling price of fish, associating it with the government crisis. The cook came from the kitchen, a tall, gaunt man I thought I remembered as the one receiving us that night. He sat with the fishermen and, catching the gist of their talk, said, “Then dump the fish back into the sea. Put up your nets for a week. You make me sick—complaining when you don’t know your own strength.”

Stephanou bowed his head and smiled. He too had recognized the man. Then he said, “Why are you silent, Professor? We must talk. I do not wish to be more conspicuous here than necessary. I will tell you afterwards.”

I said, “This afternoon I am going to the ruins of the Venetian walls along the edge of the sea. Will you come with me?”

“To what purpose?”

“It will be cool there and you have just said you do not wish to be more conspicuous than necessary.”

I discovered a sadistic pleasure in turning his own words back on him. It too was part of my self-girding.

No one was on the street when we went out. The sun was scorching hot, the car almost unbearable. Stephanou was submissive as I had not known him. We passed a family in a flat wagon drawn by a team of cows. I waved when the children called out. I described them to him. His smile was fleeting. The low swamplands as we approached the sea were covered with a purple bloom. I asked him if he knew what flower it might be. He did not.

The great walls, miles of them I should say, built by the Venetians in the sixteenth century, are crumbling in places, but nonetheless remain an ominous-looking bulwark between land and sea. Here and there to the leeward side, shepherds had built thatched shelters against them. But down to the sea’s edge for miles I could see no one as I led Stephanou through a break in the wall. The breeze was soft and cool. We found a shady place and sat upon the ground. A few yards of scrubby land sloped down to a rocky embankment from beneath which we could hear the wash of the sea.

“It must be beautiful,” he said.

The moment had come.

“You have been in Prevesa before and so have I, Paul—in that same restaurant. The ladder stands now at the side of the kitchen door. I don’t suppose they need to hide it behind the stove any more.”

I waited. He sat hunched forward, his mouth a little open. Then, a command: “Say on!”

“I will tell you what happened to me the last time I was in Prevesa,” I started quietly. “It was the loneliest time of my life. No. There were worse ones ahead but I didn’t know it then. I did not know where I was going except that it was north and into territory forbidden the news correspondents by the Athens government. I had an almost religious faith in Alexander Webb, the kind of faith that surpasses reason. My esteem for his wife contributed to that faith. She had been kind and helpful to me, a young ex-soldier very much out of his depth who wanted to see Greece before he went home to Illinois—not Iowa. She recommended some things I had written to her husband. One night and one night only I held her in my arms—dancing in a ballroom full of people in the National Hotel in Athens. Beyond that I don’t think we so much as shook hands….”

His face was taut, the scar tissue about his eyes glistening.

I went on: “Because I trusted Alexander Webb, I also trusted the young Greek who picked us up at Patras and became our guide and translator. He and Webb had many things to say to one another from the outset, things I wanted to understand but couldn’t always. And it was not that they excluded me. My ignorance took care of that. I was a little jealous. Only a little. What appalled me was my own inadequacy. I who thought myself a student of literature, for example, had never heard of the Spanish poet, Lorca. I defended myself by defending what I knew. Silence might have made me more eloquent. As the days of our companionship lengthened and good people along the way, people who were warm to us in spite of their fear—and that kind of fear I had never known—gave us shelter and food their own bellies craved, I began to think of this young Greek as a man of courage. I had never known a Communist to my knowledge, and I found him human.

“I lay in the loft above the restaurant that night thinking of something Webb had said to me before he fell asleep. He said he thought that probably the worst lot of a Communist in a non-Communist society would be his estrangement from the people among whom he lived: love and fear make restless bedfellows. He said he felt sorry for this boy who thought he loved his people. ‘Or else, I feel sorry for his revolution,’ he said, ‘and for those like him who will be stranded when it’s over. It’s possible we shall be in on the end of it, Emory,’ he said, ‘and that will give us both something to write about.’ I asked him if he was afraid. ‘Not yet,’ he said and went to sleep.

“I could not sleep. There was no air in the loft. I thought I was going to suffocate and I could hear the water lapping just across the quay. All else was stillness. I dropped myself down from the loft, checked to make sure the ladder was behind the stove, and went outdoors. But outdoors it was cold and I no longer longed to swim in the water. Webb had talked intimately to me for the first time: it should have bolstered my ego; instead it pointed up in my own mind my utter dependence on him.

“There were no lights in the town, no people awake that I could see anywhere. I began to walk quietly, at first to see if I could walk quietly. I listened in doorways to men coughing, to a child’s crying, language I did understand. A dog growled, then came after me. I tried to freeze the fear out of myself that he not smell it and attack me. I stood where I was, my hand out to him. He stopped growling, sniffed my hand, shied away and went back to where he had come from. I went on with a better feeling for myself than I had had for days. There is nothing like the conquering of one’s own weakness.

“The trouble was that in my exhilaration I lost myself wandering in the twisted streets of the old town. The rest you know: I saw you though I did not know it was you and followed, hoping that whoever it was would lead me out of the maze. It took as much courage to stand my ground when you turned back as it took for you to confront me, more perhaps, since I was not prepared to kill.”

I waited.

“Nor was I,” he said finally. “Not Emory.”

“Not by false testimony, convicting him of a murder he did not commit?”

He cried out, “I do not believe you are that man!” Then with resignation, “But you are. I know you are. You defended what you knew.” He thought about those words, repeating them. “That was it. It is the truth you have told me.”

“If it weren’t I would not be here.”

“That is so… and all these years you have been in America?”

“Yes.”

“Not in prison.”

“No.”

“Then you were believed in the end—as I was not.”

“I told the truth. You did not.”

“The truth was never less relevant,” he said and covered his face with his hands, but in the instant before he concealed them I saw the tears ooze from beneath the shriveled eyelids.

“Now I must know it all, Paul. We are neither of us what we were then. I am John Eakins to everyone I know except you as of now, and I have been since the day I returned to America. It was not your friends who rescued me from the Ioannina jail. I was removed, I should suppose, at the instigation of the Greek government with the consent and cooperation of my own country after the sham trial to which you were a party.”

He took his hands away and, getting a handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “You were not an agent of your government?”

“I was not.”

He sat silent for a long time, then said, “I think Webb believed as I did. Otherwise he would not have abandoned you to die.”

“To die?”

“It is so. The gun I sold to you was given me by Captain Demetrios in the presence of Markos, and I was instructed to leave you at the crossroads—dead.”

I remembered then his coming for me to take me down after Markos had sent for him, his harshness, and what I took to be a sullen anger.

“Why did you not do it if you believe me to be a spy?”

He shook his head. “It was not you…” he murmured and left the rest unsaid.

“What, then?” I persisted. “Webb was already dead—of a bullet wound from the same gun. If he abandoned me to die, was it to save himself?”

“I would not believe that of him,” Stephanou said.

Nor would I.

“Did you kill him, Paul?”

“No. It was as I told it at the trial. When you and I went down together that morning, I did not know that Webb was dead.”

“Where did you think he was?”

“I did not know. I was afraid he might be waiting for us.”

“Afraid?”

“It is so. I was afraid—for myself. You see, my loyalty was to one man, our General. And he had not allowed me to be present when he spoke with Webb. Yet I was the only Greek with fluent English. It meant, I thought, that he no longer trusted me. And why assign a man you do not trust to kill—unless you expect him to be killed also?”

“You were not present at the Markos-Webb interview?”

“I was never called.”

“Then how did they communicate?”

“In French, I believe, with Captain Demetrios as translator.”

It was not easy for me to adjust to this information after all the years of “felt” truth.

“His name did not even come up at the trial,” I said.

He ignored the remark and went on: “I will tell you everything I know of what happened that night, but I should like to know, Professor, how you became… you.”

I told him of my removal from the prison and interview with the representative of the United States State Department much as I set it down at the beginning of this account.

“Isn’t it extraordinary,” he said with a kind of wryness, “how different our careers have been?”

I let it pass.

“I want to ask you something,” he said then, “you who sit here with me now: have all these days we spent together, and before—my wedding, bringing me the mandolin, the errand on Varvaressos—have they all been for you a mockery?”

“Only if they are now so proven,” I said.

19

“I HAD FOUGHT IN the north, you must remember. I was with the army that pushed the Fascists off our soil, and I was in the great retreat when the Nazis took over. I remind you of this only so you will understand I knew the country, the terrain, and sometimes the people. You will remember how after we got the horses that last night out, I made contact one place after another to find out finally where Markos was encamped.

“You remember Captain Demetrios as the man with Markos when we reached the camp?”

I remembered him as the only one showing us the slightest cordiality. I said this now to Stephanou.

“It is so. Did Webb speak to you about him?”

“No.”

“One of the things I have asked myself many times since—would Demetrios have been there if he had known Webb was coming with me? Or was he there because he knew it? Do you understand?”

“I understand what you are saying—but how would he have known that if Markos did not?”

“I was told by the men afterwards in their quarters that he had come across the Albanian border two days before. He was our liaison among our friends to the north. I had heard of him but I had not met him before. During the war he had been interned by the Germans. He was a cultured man, one of the few, shall I say, aristocrats in the movement. Demetrios was his party name. He was said to come from a prominent family. But those things were often exaggerated. It improved the morale of our bourgeois converts.

“What do you remember of him, Professor?— I shall call you Professor always. It is best in any case.”

“I remember him leading the way into the schoolhouse where there was a fire to get warm by, that he helped Webb off with his coat and told you to do the same for me. At least I think that was what he said.”

Stephanou smiled a little. “You remember that also—as though I were a schoolboy—or a cadet who had forgot my manners. What else, Professor?”

“Nothing. After you left us in the schoolhouse I did not see him again. His name did not come up at the trial even, but I said that a moment ago.”

“I will tell you now I brought it up in my pre-trial questioning. I told them he was the only man present when Webb saw Markos. But that was much later.

“You will remember that after a little talk we left you and Webb to warm yourselves, and I was taken to be questioned in privacy. Markos was furious with those he called our politicians and with me, for bringing Webb. Captain Demetrios was a more sophisticated man. He took my side. Why not talk to Webb? He was an internationally known man who had done an excellent story on Tito of Yugoslavia with which even Comrade Tito could not find fault, who was a man of greater vanity than Markos.

“It was, I think, at this point Markos began to see some value in it. He wanted to know then about you. I did not dare tell him my own suspicions, not then. All I could do was to repeat what Webb had said: he wanted someone along who could not be accused of a Communist bias. I told him also that we had trailed you night and day for a week in Athens to see what contacts you made there, and Webb’s wife seemed to be your only friend.

“Markos wanted to know what nationality she was. I said English, and that did not help. Again it was Captain Demetrios who allayed the Commander’s suspicions. I should tell you, he did not allay mine. I did not like Margaret Webb any more than I liked you, and of her I still have not put away my suspicions. But we shall come to that.

“I do not remember in what order these things came up. Markos wanted to know how you and Webb were to be returned to Athens. Not to Athens, I explained. When the time came I would take you down to the Ioannina crossroads and leave you. The government patrol would meet you. It would coincide with when we were breaking camp, and even if they pursued us—which they would not do without reinforcements—we should by then be far away.

“I reminded him that this had been my last trip south. It was no longer safe for me. Besides, I was scheduled to work on the Free Greek radio—then operating in Macedonia.

“It took longer than telling you takes now, but he gave orders that Webb and you were to be billeted, and dismissed me. I thought it likely he would see Webb, and I waited to be called in as translator. That call never came. Instead he called for Demetrios. I was going over my intelligence with the captain when Markos sent for him, and by then I had confided to Demetrios my suspicions of you. He did not say whether he thought I was right or not, but commended me on my vigilance. He wanted to know how much I knew about Mrs. Webb. I told him of the times I had seen you together, what I had picked up of your conversations together. He asked me if I thought you were her lover. I said—forgive me, my friend, but you want the truth—I said I thought it was likely only if she was the seducer. He laughed and said she would not be the first Englishwoman who had found it necessary to take the initiative.”

Stephanou paused. “I am trying to remember all these things now. There was a time I made myself forget them for fear the constant thinking of them would drive me mad. I remember going outdoors and walking past the Commander’s billet. I was impatient not to have been called to translate. I saw Markos and Demetrios and Webb eating a meal which the woman, Maria, served them, and I knew then that I would not be called.”

“The same woman as afterwards?” I said.

“The same woman, a good woman.”

“Who was not produced at the trial.”

He said nothing for a moment, his mouth tightly closed. I lit a cigarette. “Do you know where any of these people are now?”

He laughed dryly. “We both know where Margaret Webb is, don’t we?”

“Is that why you want to go to Ioannina, in the hope of seeing her?”

“No. I have thought about that. And it occurred to me that Professor John Eakins might be able to arrange it. He is a friend of Dr. Palandios and other important people. But I doubt that the former Mrs. Webb would consent willingly to see me. And I am not certain what I would say to her although there is one thing I would like to know, Professor. If the allegations I made at the trial about you and her were so remote from the truth, why was she not more emphatic in her denial of them?”

“I too would like to ask her that question,” I said.

“Will you?”

“I doubt she would be any more anxious to see Jabez Emory than to see Paul Stephanou,” I said.

“You have a passport?”

“Of course. But it is made out to John Eakins. It was routinely issued by the State Department. I have achieved a modest esteem as a scholar, remote from all politics. No one questioned my right to travel. But if I made a wrong move now I think the wheels could grind exceedingly fast.”

“It is so. You have a great deal more to lose than I, my friend.”

“All the same,” I said, “I propose to chance it. I would like very much to have Margaret Webb tell me her understanding of the affair.”

“She will tell you what she wants to tell you, what she wants you to believe,” he said with harshness.

I thought about that for a moment. “Is that what you are doing, Paul, telling me what you want me to believe?”

“When you told me who you were, Professor, I thought: I am his prisoner. Now I am thinking you are much more mine. I have paid my debt to society. You are still under indebtedness to the people of Greece, according to the strict letter of the law. Would it not be ironic if in the end, like Shylock, they were forced to extract their pound of flesh?”

“Your Shakespeare has stood you in good stead,” I said dryly.

“As Byron you,” he snapped. “I am telling you what I know. If it is not true that is because I do not know the truth.”

“All right, Paul. Recriminations are of little use to either of us, but I would remind you that I am the one who was innocent in this bloody affair.”

“If you equate innocence with ignorance, yes.”

“I concede,” I said, though I bitterly resented his righteousness.

I waited while I supposed him to be plying the strands of memory for where to begin again, and I remembered that he had not directly answered a question I had asked. I asked it again in another way: “Do you know where any of the men who were in the camp that night are today?”

“How many were there in all? Eighteen or twenty at that outpost, I should say, Markos’ own, all committed to him till death or victory. He was afterwards removed from the command. I have heard he is in the Soviet Union and I know in my heart he would rather be in Greece. Those men I would suppose to have gone over the border also for life if they did not subsequently die in the fighting. As for Captain Demetrios, I do not know. Perhaps he was the first to go. Or perhaps he remained to become adviser to Markos’ replacement. In the light of history… ach, what do I know in the light of history?”

“Is it possible that he is still in Greece?”

“It would be exceedingly interesting—especially considering that I was blinded before I should be released from prison.”

For the first time since my return to Greece I experienced the chill of fear. If Paul was blind, I was not, though for the life of me at that moment I could not remember what Demetrios had looked like.

Paul wiped the perspiration from his forehead, groped for the wall and leaned back against it. “Since I do not believe either of us to be a fountain of certainty, Professor, let us try to take things as they came upon us then. Let us go back to the interview. I do not know how long they were together….”

“Three hours or so,” I said. “Remember, I too was frustrated. I had expected to go with Webb.”

“That is so,” Stephanou said. “How were you going to write the story if you were not present when Markos told it? Did Webb give you an explanation?”

“None. I took for granted I was to go along until you or whoever it was came for him. He said, ‘I am going alone.’ That was all.”

“Do you remember what time it was then?”

“It was almost dark. I lit the lamp after he was gone.”

“Perhaps we must remember that,” Stephanou said. “It was already very dark when Markos sent for the captain. When Webb returned, what did he say?”

“He asked me if I had been brought food. Then he said to go back to sleep. He took off his trenchcoat, threw it down on the floor and sat by the lamp for a few minutes, thinking, I suppose. Then he got up and got his notebook from the coat pocket. He examined the coat for a moment, the collar, I think; I remember him rubbing it as though there was a dirty spot. Then he sat down and began to write. I have always thought since that he was writing against time. His concentration was absolute.”

“And he told you nothing of what he was writing?”

“Nothing.”

“One would give a great deal to know for a certainty why he did not confide—and what became of that notebook. His passport, everything else was on his body when it was found. Is that not so?”

“So it was claimed. I identified his person. I did not see his effects.”

“In other words, the notebook could have been taken by the government. It could have been in their hands and those of their American advisers. It could have been the basis for everything that happened afterwards.”

“I thought everything that happened afterwards was based on your testimony,” I said.

“I hope that it is not so,” Stephanou said, ignoring my direct thrust. “I want to tell you now, as exactly as I can remember it, what happened to me. When Demetrios was sent for, I ate a meal with my comrades, the same meal as was brought to you. Their morale was very low. Some of their wives were in camp in Yugoslavia. A Greek wants his family in Greece. Some had left their family behind, and already they had fears of never seeing them again.

“There were rumors that Markos was at odds with the political committee. And of course they all wanted to know what intelligence I had brought. I think what they really wanted to know was if I thought they could ever go home again. I knew that I could not unless we won. Or unless I made myself useful to the King’s government. That was the first time anything like that crossed my mind. It frightened me that I should even think of it, but it was in my mind when the General sent for me toward midnight, and not having sent for me before.

“He was alone—except for the woman. She was eating the food that was left from their meal, and putting some of it in her pockets to take with her. He sent her away when I came. I had never seen him look so old, so tired. He told me to sit down.

“‘You brought me a friend, my young comrade Paul,’ he said to me. ‘And true friends in our profession are very rare.’ He was a simple man. He spoke in simple words. And it would not have been in irony. You must understand this, Professor. He believed deeply in the revolution. He made me go over for him what had happened in Athens, who had made the decision that Webb should be brought north. I could not tell him with whom Webb had first made contact. I cannot tell to this day. I could only tell of my part in the decision which was little more than to say I thought I could get him safely through… and that from then on I became the only contact with Alexander Webb.

“Markos asked me, ‘What would have happened if the Monarchists had intercepted you? How many lives would you have jeopardized?’ I told him again of the agreement among us: the story would always be that Markos had invited Webb and sent me to Athens to be the intermediary and guide.

“Markos said—and it was meant in mockery—‘I suppose that can be called another political decision.’”

“When was it decided, Paul, that I should be a party to the trip?”

“By us? When Webb insisted upon it. At my second meeting with him, he pointed out that if we were intercepted and it was told that Markos had invited him, it would look bad for him—as though the Communists thought they had him in their pockets. I remember particularly because he had to explain the idiom. He agreed to the story only on condition that we take a third party with us, a man of his choice.”

“And yet you thought I was there by my own intrigue?”

“I came to think that, yes. If you say it was not so, I believe you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “It was not so.”

Again he ignored my sarcasm. “What Markos believed of you—that is what I wish I could say. Demetrios had told him what I thought. Markos did not always trust the people in Athens—the politicals, as he called them, who wanted him to fight as though he had the striking force of the Red Army. And I have a feeling, but it is only a feeling, that he identified them with Demetrios… I suppose it was because he thought him an educated man. But let me go back to things as they happened.

“Markos gave me an assignment I was to share with no one: I was to keep watch on you throughout the night. You were not to leave the cottage, not even to pass water unless I was with you. And I was to bring you to him at dawn. I asked him if I was also to watch Webb. ‘If that was my wish I would have said so. Obey my orders.’ I did.

“It was a cold night, I can tell you. Bitter cold, and we had come from the south. There were wolves howling and the snow was white on the mountain peaks. It was about half-past one o’clock when Webb left your cottage. He went immediately round to the back of it. He was not wearing his trenchcoat so I did not think much of it at first. But he did not return. I looked into the cottage to make sure you were there. Then I went in back. I did not see him. I did not hear him. For just a second in the darkness I thought I saw a light—which is how I knew where to go afterwards with you.

“I was determined to follow my orders to the letter. But how can I tell you now what went on in my mind the next few minutes? It does not matter, but I don’t need to tell you how relieved I was when you came out and demanded that we find Alexander Webb, and then when we found him with a woman! It was to me such a funny solution I wanted to laugh aloud. Maybe I did. But not you, my friend. You did not find it funny.”

“No, I did not find it funny,” I said quietly. And I thought how all these years I had hated the gleaming mirth in the eyes that night of Paul Stephanou.

“You kept saying all the way back to your billet, ‘The son of a bitch, the son of a bitch.’”

To return at a moment while I sat with the blind man before the vast, clear span of the Ionian Sea to the darkness of that night and its agony of lonely fear had the charged contrast of an electric shock. “The son of a bitch,” I repeated, and I knew I had said it that night.

I have told that I was more shocked than enraged. I so believed myself. But it was sheer fury that I first experienced. Where Stephanou had exploded his relief in mirth, mine was in instant anger. It was an anger I could understand now to have been compounded of my own isolation, my desperate fear of being separated from Webb, and the anti-climax of finding him with a woman. Then came the savage, righteous wrath, the Puritan’s judgment on adultery, the romantic’s iconization—if I may coin the word—of the wife betrayed.

My behavior had probably been quite as Paul Stephanou had described it in court.

“You will tell me now, my friend, if what I remember is not so,” Paul went on. “I tried to persuade you to be quiet. I do not mean you were shouting. But in that stillness every sound wakened another. A dog barked, I think. I know a donkey brayed and it was like an air-raid siren in the night. There was a change in the camp guard and the man going off duty asked me what had happened. I told him. And he said, ‘That woman should not be allowed to come.’

“I asked you if I might come in and get warm, and with charming hospitality you told me to go to hell. I think I said something like, ‘In that case let us enjoy it together,’ but you were not disposed at that moment to enjoy my humor. No more could I appreciate your piety. I went into the cottage with you anyway. You may remember, I warmed my hands at the lamp globe. Then I cleaned the globe with an old newspaper. You will remember the smudges of lamp-black on the gun. And you will also remember there was no trace of lamp-black on the trigger.”

I remembered. My defense had tried to develop a counterattack by charging that Stephanou had actually killed Webb. It was shown that the traces of lamp-black were to be found on the barrel and the handle of the revolver, but none was on the trigger. My credibility was further weakened by the collapse of the charge.

Paul went on: “But let us go back to you and me when, I am quite sure, we both expected the return of Alexander Webb within the hour. You denied in court talking about Margaret Webb. But you did talk about her, and in a way that angered me. I do not hold you to account now, my friend. You are right: this is not the time between us for recriminations. But the distinction I got from you, if I may call it that, was the contrast between a virtuous Anglo-Saxon lady and a Greek peasant whore.

“Do I exaggerate, Professor? Tell me now if you are an honest man.”

I sat in silence, stunned. For how many years had I examined my own conscience in this matter? The best I could say to him was, “It is not far from the truth as I now know it, Paul.”

“We must make do with that,” he said, “if we are to go on together. That night I thought, it would be easy for me to kill this man. He is the true enemy. I went out and left you. It was to me—you will forgive me—cleaner outdoors. But it was also fiercely cold so I went in again with you. You were sleeping like a baby, curled up underneath your coat and Webb’s coat. I took Webb’s coat without disturbing you, and I examined it. Socks, a pair of shorts, his shaving things, a bar of soap. His toothbrush was gone, his passport and his billfold, his notebook, some of the things I knew he kept in the inside pocket of the trenchcoat. He was not coming back. He had not intended to come back when he went to the woman.

“My instructions in Athens had been explicit: I was to bring you and Webb north for an interview with Markos and afterwards I was to see you returned safely to the Athens government. As a member of the political wing of the movement, I owed my first obedience to that command. Webb knew these instructions to me. So did Markos. What could I do? It was three hours before dawn, three very long hours. And I was exhausted. I had not slept that night at all.

“The woman was trusted by the General. If Webb had left the camp it was probably with his knowledge. My vigil was meant to keep you from following… such thoughts went over and over in my mind, and there was no answer. The lamp ran out of fuel. I sat in the dark.

“As you know I woke you when the light of day was commencing. We went to the General’s quarters. You would not have understood me, but I told him that Webb had gone to the woman and had not returned; It did not seem to disturb him. He said, ‘I am glad he availed himself of our hospitality.’ He was in a good mood. I asked him what I should tell you. He said I could tell you Webb was safe. He said that I was to take you to the mess and have breakfast. He would send for me.

“I had a few minutes then in a fool’s paradise. I ate my biscuit and cheese in confidence that for me everything would be fine. Markos trusted me. It even crossed my mind that the reason the interview was not conducted in English was so that you could be excluded, not me. After all, my function was only to be that of translator.

“You will remember Captain Demetrios came for me himself. When we went in, Markos was warming his hands at a fire he was feeding with papers. They were about to break camp. It was Demetrios who gave me orders to take you to the crossroads.

“‘And Webb, Comrade Captain?’ I asked.

“‘He is a man capable of taking care of himself and no longer your responsibility.’ Markos came from the fire then. Demetrios said, ‘At the crossroads you will leave Emory with a bullet in his head.’

“I could not believe. I looked at Markos. He nodded it was to be done. ‘Respectfully, Comrade General and Comrade Captain, my orders from my political superior were to return both men safely to Monarchist lines.’

“Markos said, ‘In the field, Comrade, I am your commander.’

“Demetrios laid the revolver on the table. When I reached for it he said, ‘My God, don’t you ever wash your hands?’ I was given two hours of measured time in which to accomplish my mission and return. Markos went back to burning his papers. I never saw him or Demetrios again. I did not permit you to go back to the cottage. You wanted to take Webb’s coat to him. It would have been funny if it had not been so tragic, the orders I had been given.

“So we went down in the blue light before the sun was up. I thought of you: if only he would attack me I would have to shoot him, but you followed me like a lamb the butcher. And I thought, Webb knows that I must do this thing: if the General is satisfied, Webb knows. And I cursed him better than you had the night before. Then I thought about the woman Maria again. How briefly we had seen them, man upon woman, and her thighs naked. Oh, yes, I had seen that much. But how better to deceive the intruder? Maria a camp woman. Who would not have gone back to his bed and thought no more of it than to envy Webb his pleasure? When the camp was still again, Maria would have guided him—she knew well all the trails—to where he was to go. And Markos had known. I had believed that from the moment I looked and saw that Webb was gone.

“But now we know what neither of us knew then, that by the time we went down in the morning Webb was already dead, his body rolled down the parapet near the crossroads. Did Markos know it? That I do not believe to this day.

“The sun was up and there was no one to be seen from any direction at the crossroads. It had taken us an hour and ten minutes. It would take me longer to return, uphill all the way. They did not expect me back in time.

“You begged me not to leave you—little knowing how I had been instructed to leave you. I said it was not safe for me to stay. I told you what I believed, that the woman had brought Webb down, and that he had purposely left his coat to deceive you. I think you believed me.”

“I had no choice,” I said, “and I knew that I had to go on alone. I asked you if you had a gun and I offered you twenty dollars for it.”

Stephanou nodded. Running his hand along the ground beside him, he found a bit of root and pulled it out, and then began to work the loosened soil between his fingers. “I thought about my orders: Webb was out of my hands, but it was still in my power to return you safely. The sun was warm on our backs, you may remember, as we rested near the shrine. I looked down on the plains. People had worked there recently, the peasant tillers of the earth, my good and beloved people. I thought of Kaléa and Vasso whom I loved then as I am no longer able to love her, and I knew that I was through as an Andarte. I felt only a kind of contemptuous sorrow for you at that moment, that you felt you needed a gun. It was easy for me to give it to you, and I took the twenty dollars though I did not know what I was going to do with it.

“Where I was going I did not know except someplace to hide and sleep the day. I thought I would go to the woman, Maria. I had known the mountain cottage where she lived and her whole family until the Germans came. After that she lived alone.”

“Did you find her?” I said. He seemed reluctant to go on.

“I found her, but hers is a story it is going to be harder for me to tell.”

20

THE SUN HAD PASSED to where there was virtually no shade on either side of the wall. I could feel the sweat rolling down my back and Stephanou’s blue shirt was soaked beneath the armpits. We both needed to move in any case. My own tension hung like an iron yoke at the base of my neck. I suggested that we go back to the car and find a place to stay for the night. He threw off my hand when I put it beneath his arm to help him: he had acquired a fine independence. But he stumbled, getting up, and caught the toe of his shoe beneath a root so that he pitched forward. I leaped to catch him but his weight was more than I could hold, off-balance.

With shocking suddenness both of us went crashing down the embankment. The sandy soil and small stones scuttled beneath me while I clutched at roots, the scrub pines, anything, trying to stay myself. I gradually slowed my momentum, but Paul, with no more self-control than a sack of potatoes, tumbled and hurtled on. I braked myself, reaching the rocky ledge. He had disappeared. I scrambled to the edge and looked down—into the out-running sea some twenty or thirty feet below. A whorled pattern shaped like a moving target from the point at which he had struck the water. I pulled off my shoes while I watched. The moment I saw his head come up, I dived, shouting out to him.

The water was petrifyingly cold. I touched the scaly rocks at the bottom with my hands before twisting and spiraling up. He was still afloat when I broke the surface. “Tread water!” I shouted. “Just stay afloat!”

He was trying without success to roll over on his back. I thought of the heavy, crepe-soled shoes he wore.

I reached him and caught his collar, trying the while to get my land bearings. The face of the cliff rose sheer and perpendicular. So strong was the current it gave me no choice of direction. “Roll on your back!” I cried. It crossed my mind the strength of will it must have taken him not to clutch at me when I had reached him.

“Keep me up till I kick off my shoes!”

The pull while he worked at them, one foot against the other, felt like an undertow. I needed desperately to get into motion, to work the numbness out of my body.

“Now.” He rolled over on his back.

From then on the sea and I towed him downward toward the bay. How far I don’t know. The cliff fell away into marshes, but I dared not go inland to tangle in the reeds before I was sure of safe depth. I saw a boat in the distance, its masthead like those I had seen in the quay, a fisherman going out to sea. He was beyond hailing distance, but I reasoned he was likely to have come from a dock, possibly deep in the marshes ahead. The current tended from near that point on to carry us out, not in. I had to swim against it, and I didn’t know how long my strength would last. Paul, sensing the change, tread water. It helped. At my first brush with the marsh grass I ducked my head under water. I could see the bottom. A few yards farther and I could touch it. Then I saw the pier, a thin bridge of timber with an old boat tied alongside. Not a living being was in sight.

We tried the bottom when the water was shoulder high. The sand gave only a little, then mercifully grew firm beneath our feet; it might have been muck that would have sucked us down. We went inland dragging one foot after the other, I holding his arm to guide him. This time he gave me no resistance. The dock at its terminal was waist high. We pulled ourselves up and lay on the rough warm boards. Paul, after a minute or two, groped his way to the edge and vomited back to the sea its own waters. He just lay there, on his stomach, his head on his arm.

After a while, my strength returned with the rush of vitality one feels in salvation. I said, “It’s a fine bit of aftersight, but I should never have taken you there.”

His first words: “It was fated. And you finally got your god-damn swim in Prevesa.”

I laughed and embraced the sky with my eyes. A flight of egrets rose from the marshes, their white wings, black-tipped, flashing in the sun. My shirt was already drying on my back. I felt my pocket for the car keys. They were still there. I had locked my wallet and passport in the glove compartment. And it was true, my watch did resist water. I told these things to Paul.

“America the beautiful,” he said without irony.

It was after four when we followed the pier through the tall tasseled reeds to the road. The dust was powdery soft beneath our feet. We waited. I waved at the first car on the road, a small truck hauling empty tomato crates. The driver stopped. His wife gave us a gold-toothed smile as though there were nothing strange in two grown men walking the road in their bare feet. Paul and I rode as I had when a boy, our legs dangling from the back of the truck.

I saw the Vauxhall as we passed the path I had turned up to the Venetian walls, and shouted to the driver to put us down. As I thanked him, he pointed to his own eyes, then to Paul.

“Sand,” I said. “We fell into the water.” It didn’t make much sense, but it seemed to satisfy him. The words were not premeditated. It was my instinct now to avoid attracting undue attention. We stood at the side of the road until the truck had driven off before I took Paul’s arm.

“It is something I had not thought about,” Paul said as I unlocked the car door. “The two of us together have a certain identity. That is why you told me who you were before we got to Ioannina.”

“There would have come the time in any case,” I said. “Wait in the car. I’m going to see if I can retrieve your cane and my shoes.”

I found the cane halfway down the embankment and my shoes where I had dropped them on the ledge above the sea. I stretched out on my belly for safety and looked over the ledge. The tide had fallen perhaps a foot or more and the scabrous rocks protruded like alligators’ backs. Here and there the water bubbled over those not yet emerged. It was very nearly a miracle that we had found a safe depth among them.

“Once more you might have died,” Paul said when I got back to the car and told him.

“We might both have died, and wouldn’t the authorities have had a hell of a time figuring that out?”

“It would perhaps have made for the quickest enlightenment of all,” he said.

“Of all except the two principals.”

He thought about that. “You want very much to know, Professor?”

I said, I think with wryness, “It wasn’t only to attend your wedding that I returned to Greece.”

We found lodgings near the ruins of Nikopolis, once a great city. It was built by the Roman Emperor Octavius to commemorate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra in 31 B.C. While we were changing clothes, I reminded Stephanou that his name saint, Paul, had preached there.

We sat in the dappled shade of a Cyprus tree while the proprietress brought us tea and a sweet pastry. Neither of us had stomach for the pastry. I asked her to save it for our dinner.

“We are almost there,” I said. “Tomorrow if we are ready.”

“Then I must finish the story of my betrayal—is that what we should call my testimony against you?”

“How can you betray an enemy?”

“It is so,” he said. “It was my very reasoning, and I was in grave danger then of betraying my friends.

“When I left you at the crossroads—and you see, to have properly completed my assignment where you were concerned I should have watched until I could actually say you were in the hands of the military patrol. I did not watch. Perhaps I did not want to see—so that I wound up fulfilling neither Markos’ command nor that of my political superiors—I went back into the hills and found a place where I could see the campsite. It was already evacuated. What I wanted to do was to wait for the people to come back to the village as was their custom after the Andarte had moved out. I camouflaged myself beneath some pine boughs and dead leaves. The sunlight filtered through and felt on my body much like the warmth of a woman. I slept the sun across the sky.

“When I woke, no villagers had come yet. Nor did they come. I did not know it then but the government was evacuating them entirely into Ioannina, creating a no-man’s land between them and the guerrilla forces. Finally, for I was very hungry, I went into the abandoned village looking for what food might have been left. I found the dregs of milk curd in a pot and ate it. There was nothing more. I went to the cottage, remembering Webb’s trenchcoat which I much admired, but it was gone. If the wilderness is desolate, a village with no people in it is much worse. I took a trail, following the sun toward Zitsa. It was the direction in which Maria lived.”

“Byron’s monastery,” I said, remembering Stephanou’s first reaction when I mentioned it as one of my destinations.

“It is so. But I had to cross the highway and when I got near it I saw what was happening: people moving under armed escort toward Ioannina in jeeps and trucks, by donkey. I wondered there were donkeys left them by the Andarte who needed them so desperately. They were carrying pieces of bedding, clothes and children, their wonder-working icons. I thought, it is like the Nazis coming all over again, only there are no bombers in the sky.

“When the road was empty and I went down, I found a posting such as I was to see everywhere there was a post to nail it to. It ordered the evacuation and warned that those who did not obey would be considered sympathetic to the Communists and dealt with accordingly. I wondered if it would be possible for me to pass among the refugees,

“I knew that it would not. I went on toward Zitsa, but Maria’s was no longer my destination. Only for food perhaps. If I could reach the river and follow it toward the sea. You may remember that our last night before making contact with Markos was spent in the valley. We rode from there on the mules Markos was waiting for. It does not matter now. I did not get back….”

I glanced at him when he stopped there. His jaw was hard, his mouth taut.

“I found Maria’s hut,” he said, then, tumbling out the words, “and I found Maria. Her tongue had been split like a parrot’s. The parts of it had swollen—horrible, protruding from her mouth. Her eyes wild, and blood everywhere. She was mad at times, I think, rolling on the floor with the pain. What could I do? I made warm water and salt and tried to bathe the wound. I will not describe her any more to you. She could not talk—she would not talk, ever. And she had not learned to read or write.

“I tried to make her go to the road where they would find her and she would be taken to a doctor. She would not. I asked her if she knew me. She nodded. I asked her who had done that to her, the American? She nodded. But I do not think she understood. It was because of the American it happened: I am sure that that was what she meant, for then I asked her where it happened, and she traced the shape of a cross with her finger. At the crossroads? It was so. I asked her if the American was there. No. Was it the Monarcho-Fascists? No. Was it our people? No. The only answer I could be sure she understood was the making of the crossroads sign. I stayed with her that raving night. I spooned water with a little sugar down her throat. But she was gagging in the morning, gasping, she could not breathe. I put wool on a piece of stick, wet it, and cleaned out her nostrils. I had to sit astride her like a beast to hold her down.

“I prayed that night—as only an atheist can pray—challenging God to manifest himself and prove me wrong. No such proof was forthcoming. I made a kind of harness out of a blanket and tried to make her understand that I would carry her to a doctor. She ran outdoors and began digging in the earth beneath the cottage as though she would hide there. I have seen wounded animals crawl into darkness. I did the only thing I could do then: I came up behind her and with the edge of my flat hand struck her hard at the base of the skull. She crumbled into a blessed silence. I carried her on my back to the road and then along its no-man’s land. It was a nightmare such as makes brief what I have suffered since. From the hill above the crossroads I could see much activity there, many people, motorcycles and jeeps. I laid her on the side of the road. She was beginning to moan again. I cupped my hands round my mouth and raised my voice as loud as I could cry. To this day I can hear the echo of my own voice and feel how the cry tore at my throat. Someone down there waved. I waved back, then dropped to the ground out of sight, and behind the shield of the hill I ran. I made it that night to a village where once I had been given shelter. I was given it again but it was dangerous. The evacuation order had not yet been enforced but people were preparing to leave their homes. Patrols came through every two hours. The villagers had been enumerated.

“It was there I learned that Alexander Webb’s body had been found that morning at the crossroads, shot through the heart. When I had cried out for help for Maria it was to people who had come there concerned with the discovery. Webb dead and Maria mutilated. Something had gone very wrong. I was accustomed to violence, but I usually knew its meaning.

“I was almost caught that night. It would have meant death to those who sheltered me. They asked me to leave before the next patrol came through. And so it would have been everywhere until someone killed me to protect his own family.

“A man on the run is not a hero. The minute he turns back everything inside him goes into reverse, starting with his self-respect. A little of it goes forever when a man, for whatever reason, deserts a cause he once believed in with all his heart. It is the utmost in humiliation to think only of one’s own safety.”

“It is also our first instinct,” I said, though I had not thought myself about to give him solace.

“I do not consider instinct the measure of a man. But… it was my measure then. You are right. Word came that you had been arrested and I thought, thank God, thank God. The gun had been found buried near where Webb’s body had been rolled down the embankment into the long grass. Had you confessed? That was not clear. If not, you would accuse me, of course. The gun had come from me. You would already have accused me.

“If Webb had died of a bullet wound from that gun either you had killed him or Captain Demetrios had: of this fact only I felt certain. But I did not think it would be Demetrios whom you would accuse—or against whom a case could be made by anyone in a government court. They would not want a suspect in absentia at a time like that. If you saved yourself at all, I knew, it would be by accusing me.

“Word was broadcast over the radio that night that political amnesty would be granted to any Andarte who could give evidence in the murder of Alexander Webb. And if I were captured, having refused the amnesty, God help me. It would be far better for me to go in voluntarily and give what evidence I could against you.

“I spent the night hiding beneath the skirts of God—under the altar in the village chapel. In the morning a notice was nailed on the door of the very church where I was hiding: it confirmed the promise of political amnesty. I took the paper in my hands and surrendered to the next patrol.

“In Ioannina I was questioned by the police in the presence of the military and their American advisers. I was questioned in Greek naturally, but it was strange to hear—someone else translated for the Americans, and one of them said to the other, speaking of Webb’s death, ‘The son of a bitch had it coming to him.’ It was a point on which they all—Greeks and Americans—agreed.

“I was questioned many times. I told a simple story in the beginning and never changed it—how I had been sent by Markos to invite Alexander Webb to the north in the hope of his telling the true story of the revolution. I told—what I told at the trial. I did not mention Demetrios except as the translator of the interview. You had told them I was the translator.”

“So I believed.”

“They did not question me about him—which in a way frightened me.”

“Why should they? You had not told them of his orders concerning me.”

“I would not have been believed in that: you were alive. I simply said the gun was mine—and waited for something to happen where I might have been compelled. They knew about the woman in the camp—we had both told that and I had told that I thought Webb left the camp with her—and they must have known by then that a woman had been mutilated. Yet neither of us was asked to identify her—or her to identify us.” He groped for his cup and sipped the last of the now cold tea.

I said, “I did not know about the mutilation—not until today. I was persuaded by the lawyers that unless I could positively identify the woman I had seen with Webb, it would be useless to seek her—and cruel to any woman so much as summoned for questioning.”

“Cruel,” Stephanou repeated with bitterness. “Their silence frightened me. I was their tool. It was proposed that there was no substantial proof of political motive in the case so far—unless I had information which I was concealing. Was it not true, as the government intelligence had learned, that Markos was at odds with his political comrades on the conduct of the war, that he in fact now felt that armed revolt had been premature and that the continued guerrilla war would prove disastrous? Or did I think it was possible that Markos had given Webb a message for the legal government of Greece, setting down the terms of his own surrender?

“In my heart I may have feared that this was so. I was very easily convinced that the case could be tried in criminal court—outside the jurisdiction of the military.

“In confessing myself an accessory I strengthened the prosecution’s case. I said that in giving you the gun I was aware of the purpose for which you might want it, that I assumed although you had not said so, that given the chance you might kill Webb.”

“And you believed this?”

Stephanou moistened his lips. He was holding the arms of the chair so tightly the bones of his hands shone white through the skin. “No. I did not believe it. But by then I believed something else that made it imperative that I survive and someday go free. I believed that Captain Demetrios killed Webb and mutilated the woman, the latter of which to me was the greater crime.”

I had often wondered how I would feel if ever the day came when I would hear Paul Stephanou admit to falsely testifying. I felt nothing. If personal vindication had been my goal, I felt in no way vindicated. I said, “Your freedom was a long time coming.”

“A long time,” he repeated.

“And you convicted a man of a murder he had not committed.”

“I might have killed you as I had been commanded,” he said angrily. “And you were less than dirt to me. You tried to accuse me. You had your chance to match your story against mine. That you are here today is proof that you were believed where I was not, for all the jury’s pious deliberation. That trial was a mockery and you and I were feathers on the winds of its oratory.”

“But why, Paul? Why?”

“Because the good Greek government and its American advisers hated Alexander Webb as much as they did the Communists. According to them he should not have been there. I am sure it has been said before: in time of war truth is the first casualty.”

We sat in silence for a moment or two. I had turned in my chair so that I could watch the sun’s setting. I remembered its rising the morning I was being churned away from Greece on a fishing boat in the care of a gold-toothed man I took to be Italian.

I said again, “The name of Demetrios never came up at all.”

“They did not want it to come up.”

“You are convinced of that?” I am.

“You have been convinced of other things and proved wrong—for example, that I was rescued from the jailhouse by your sympathizers.”

He sat for a moment, saying nothing. Somewhere off a bird was singing his heart out.

“What you are saying, Professor, is: I believe only that which I want to believe.”

“Something like that,” I murmured.

“Then I must be converted,” he said almost brightly. “I proclaim my mind open to any and all truth.”

“You and the birds,” I said, for the songbird persisted in its own blithe gospel.

“What?”

“Nothing really.” I got up. “I’m going to ask for some hot tea. Will you have a cup?”

“You wish to be alone,” he said. “I understand. I will be all right here, and if I call someone will come.”

“For a little while,” I said.

“Professor?”

I turned back.

“Will you see the former Margaret Webb?”

“Probably, if she is in Ioannina, and I rather think she may be for the theater festival. Going there, I might not be able to avoid it even if I wanted to.”

“You will be traveling among the same people, in the same class.”

I did not like his tone, faintly ironic.

“We may have acquaintances in common,” I said coldly.

“Perhaps she will be able to tell us where Demetrios is,” he said.

I did not realize at first why the words more angered than surprised me: it was their implicit admission of a prejudice no less than that of which he accused me in my judgment of the woman of the camp. But sudden insight can be as blinding momentarily as the long darkness it illuminates. I said, “Now I understand how it was possible for you to testify against me.” And I left him.

21

I HAVE REMARKED HERE before on my faculty—let me call it cowardly: it is close to that—for diverting myself short of the real issue by the contemplation of something remotely associable. When I left Stephanou I walked out and along the road proposing to think about “the man of culture,” Demetrios, and wound up thinking about Byron, the aristocrat, plunging himself and his fortune into the Greek struggle for independence. The problem that had plagued him most was which of the Greek revolutionaries was the most trustworthy, which could be counted on to put the cause ahead of personal ambition, indeed, in one case, of vanity. That Byron should have had to cope with another man’s vanity added a certain piquancy.

I left the road and hiked across the open country, through grazing land and past the rubble of long-abandoned habitations. I let my mind wander with as little aim. The issues might be clearer when it found its own way back to them.

I came on a cemetery and a soldiers’ monument at the bottom of which lay a withered wreath. Beyond was a church much of which seemed to have sunk into the ground. There was thereabouts, I knew, a sixth-century church, and I supposed I had happened on it. The door no longer fit properly, the hinges loose and awry, but it was padlocked. The windows were boarded. Slants of daylight shone through the rotting boards. The door’s large keyhole afforded me a view of the iconostasis and the altar on which a faded cloth still hung, scarred with mould and dust. Several candles drooped obscenely in ancient candelabra. I got up from my squat position, about to leave, and thought how often I had been content with what I could see through a keyhole. Proximity, involvement had always tortured me. “It was as though he was afraid to know—as though it might contaminate him”—Paul’s first indictment of Jabez Emory.

I was clear now of the charge of murder, assuming Paul Stephanou would repeat his admission before a proper witness. Which, I realized at once, was an unwarranted assumption. He could revert to the silence of stone.

Demetrios. My mind simply could not cope: the memory was too fragmentary. It was like trying to understand physics without mathematics. I thought how vivid my recollection of Paul Stephanou had been over all the years, conjured always from that moment of hatred. Such would be his memory of Demetrios, but prisoned forever behind the iron curtain of blindness. Blindness calculated and achieved. It took more than a little daring to accomplish that. Power and money and access.

I saw then, as in a kaleidoscope, the connection between past and present, and I could almost see why Alexander Webb had died, but it came to the solution I would not credit. Therefore I would not tolerate even the fragments of it in my mind until piece by piece they were forced upon me, tested and documented.

I went back to Paul both fearful and resolute. I found him where I had left him; someone had brought him his coat. It hung over his shoulders. The sun had set. I got my sweater from the car and came back to the chair beside him.

“Paul, do you think Demetrios is in Ioannina?”

“It is possible. Professor, we must not be angry with each other. I want to tell you—it is about Varvaressos again. In prison he was questioned many times concerning the money he had stolen. It was an army payroll. He was questioned by the military. I know how they can question, and the night they broke him down, he cried. It was terrible to hear and he was taken away to be confined by himself, but that is not what is now important to us. The military would have used every persuasion. Therefore, they would have known all there was to know about his father.

“I will tell you now I believe Demetrios to have been an agent of the Greek government in Markos’ camp….”

This was one of the fragments: it had become implicit to me that there had to have been such an agent.

“And I believe it is an inescapable conclusion that this same man is now a ranking officer in the Greek army.”

Even as I had concluded.

“I have wondered,” Paul went on, “if my blindness could be arranged, why not my death? I have always believed the prison authorities to have been entirely innocent of any complicity. For me to have been murdered, the investigation would have been much deeper and more public. As it was—the act of temper, vengeance—and my blindness was not immediate—it was a matter for prison discipline, not public investigation. And it was sufficient to this man’s need that I simply must not recognize him. Which is peculiar. He would not know I had seen the woman, Maria—or felt as I did about it. Even so—a man in his position could say, ‘Yes, I was in the Andarte camp when Webb came, I was there under instructions from the Greek government.’ And who would believe it if I said now, ‘You murdered Webb?’ Or if they believed it and he said, ‘I had to kill him. He was a Soviet agent,’ who would not justify him?”

This was the piece on which I had turned back. I said nothing.

“Professor?”

“Yes.”

“You do not believe it, I know. But it is something you and I will have to discover if it is not so.”

I held to the logic, piece by piece: “Go on, Paul, to the reason you were blinded.”

“It can only be that he is now engaged in some enterprise where the merest association with the Webb death would be—more than awkward—perhaps fatal to it.”

I took a deep breath. “And so we come to the presence at Margaret Webb’s wedding of one Colonel Alexis Frontis who happens also to be in charge of the left-wing purge of the army.”

“It is so.”

“And so, as my students would say, we are going where the action is.”

“What you say is expressive,” Paul said, “and it may be so.”

“At this point it is of considerable relevance to me to ask what Demetrios thinks became of Jabez Emory.”

“To me also, my brother. And we must not assume that what we think is actually so—if you understand me.”

“I do. The same answers are available to him if I were to identify him. Except that, unlike you, I would not have been able to accuse him. I could only say that he was there. And if in time he had been informed of my return to the United States and my change of identity…. But, Paul, why were you instructed to kill me that morning? Webb was dead. What was to be the purpose of my death?”

“And why did Markos consent to it? We do not know as much as for a time it seemed we knew…. Professor, I was watching your cottage that night, a vigil set by Markos himself. Whatever Webb wrote down in that hour or so before he went to the woman—Demetrios would not have known he was writing. He would have thought that Webb might have told you, confided in you what transpired between Markos, Webb and him. Remember Markos said to me of Webb that night, ‘You have brought me a friend.’”

“Then I would have been killed for the same reason as Webb.”

“I should think it likely.”

I enjoyed a brief, very brief, moment of personal satisfaction, for Paul went on: “It is to be wondered what would have happened to Webb—and to you—if Webb had not gone down with the woman. But we must not even think of that. He did go with her.”

Which led me to ask, “Would Demetrios have suspected he was going? Did he precede or follow Webb to the crossroads?”

“He would have had to follow, I think,” Paul said. “He was not himself a man familiar with the trails. And of course, the little alarm we raised. Remember, the watch of the night asked me and I told him Webb was with the woman. For him to have said that to Demetrios, Demetrios would have then known the true meaning of their having been found together.”

So that for all my righteous pretext of innocence in Webb’s death, it was my moral judgment—my willing, hasty and selfish judgment—that informed the killer on his prey. Small wonder fate had permitted the image of that instant to have haunted me down the years.

Paul let out a cry that was half-pain, half-triumph. It turned toward us the eyes of the woman who had come out with a tablecloth to the small patio.

I said, “There is someone near us, Paul.”

“God is near us,” he said fervently. “Is it all right to talk?”

“Yes. It is only the woman setting the table.”

“I told you of going through the pockets of Webb’s coat. I had not thought about it for years, but while you left me here I was going over and over in my mind the things I found there. You will remember the long walk—it does not matter where—the blister on your foot? And Webb, the great roll of adhesive tape? You said he was a walking pharmacy?”

“Yes.”

“There was no tape in his pockets—soap, yes, and other things, but the tape was gone. Why would he have taken that? Oh, my friend, I think I know. The woman was naked. And as I have said, I came to think he had flung her down and thrown himself upon her to deceive us at the door. He was making sure that if he died the document he wrote would survive him and his killer. Why else should he have written unless to document what he would not live to tell? He taped it to her body—and told her what to do with it if they were ambushed.”

“And what would she have done with it?”

“One does not know, for she was mad. Perhaps they took it from her in the Ioannina infirmary. But I will tell you, Professor, if she is alive today in Epirus, I will find her.”

22

WE ATE OUR DINNER early and alone on the terrace. It had been our practice throughout the journey to avoid the classified hotels, to stay wherever possible in homes that ordinarily might have been recommended by the tourist police when other accommodations were filled up. So it was that night. The woman in whose house we stayed served us an excellent soup and chicken potted with vegetables. The wine was light and tangy, on the edge of effervescence. We were both, I think, suppressing the urge to pursue our separate memories, and we both knew now that there was much we were simply not aware of knowing. We spoke with a kind of inquiring hesitancy as though the slightest, most mundane comment might prime something of stunning relevance. I remember vividly the kind of tingling expectancy I felt throughout the meal.

Paul said that it was a very good meal, not Vasso’s, but very good for a woman who was not Vasso.

I spoke of the wine. “To have tasted it with my eyes closed,” I said, “I’d have thought it Italian.”

“There is much Italian influence,” Paul said. “It is not only the proximity, but during the war this part of Greece was occupied by the Italians. Indeed, much of the Andarte arms were Italian, you know, abandoned to us when Italy surrendered to the Allies. And you will remember—or perhaps you won’t—but the Garibaldi volunteers fought for Greek recovery of Epirus from the Turks in 1915. There is a monument to them in Ioannina.”

I was only half-listening to him. “Paul, would the woman, Maria, have spoken Italian?”

“It is very probable,” he said slowly, weighing the implications as he went on. “Most of the peasants do a little—from the occupation.”

“Then I think it was Maria who came for Webb when Markos sent for him that night. I did not see who it was. I assumed it was you. I was at the fireplace and Webb spoke a few words…. I couldn’t really hear, but the fleeting impression was of another language. I’m reasonably sure Webb knew Italian as well as French.”

Paul sat, his hands cupped tightly, and rocked a little while he thought. “They would of course have had to communicate. Markos could not have instructed her in every detail.”

“It isn’t that, Paul. Now we know how Webb and Markos communicated without Demetrios as translator.”

“Of course, of course! You have said it was daylight when Webb went to him and it was pitch dark, I know, when Demetrios was sent for. And I know for a fact, Maria came for him.”

“So we must assume Webb recognized Demetrios from a previous meeting,” I said.

“It is so. It is probably so. And there was a moment in the schoolhouse when Webb told me to say to Markos, he wanted to speak to him, Markos, alone, with only a translator. I had always thought, you see, that he was excluding you. But Demetrios was in the hall, and he was the one most importantly to be excluded.” He leaned back and rubbed his neck with his hands. “Oh, my brother, are we ever to know the truth entirely?”

“With luck—and if we have courage,” I said.

Paul gave a little laugh. “I am remembering something we said very early in our acquaintance—in Kaléa. We are both going back to where we were afraid. We are going together, but we must not be seen together. I will listen—and you will see. Let us talk about the festival. There will be a bus. I may attend. I have never been to the theater, you know.”

“Not even as a student?”

“Not the classical theater. It was the future of Greece I was then concerned with. We have said this before, you and I.” After a moment he added, “In prison I used to make up imaginary conversations.”

“With me?”

“No.” He smiled. “We would never have had very much to say to one another, I thought.”

“With Captain Demetrios?”

The smile vanished. “To him I had but one word to say: Die, Fascist.”

Two words, but I said nothing. I filled his wine glass. He tilted his head a little, listening to the sound. When the glass was full he played his hand across the table until he touched the stem. There was grace in the way he used his hands—a sculptor or a doctor—what might not this man have been?

“So,” he said, punctuating his own thoughts. “When we pass the road to Dodoni you will put me down as you would a beggar to whom you had given a ride.”

“That’s not necessary,” I said.

“Ah, but it is, Professor. You told me once that I was a blind man who could see with my ears, my nose, my hands. It is so. And to judge what I see, I must perceive it with my own faculties.”

“Where will you stay?”

“In the old town. It will have changed the least. I shouldn’t think too far from Lord Byron Street.” He reached into his coat pocket and took out his wallet.

“I have a money belt I’ll lend you,” I said.

“Thank you,” but he handed me the wallet open to the plastic identification window. “Read that to me, please.”

I took it and read: “Michael Panyotis, Kaléa, Boeotia.”

“The president of Kaléa prepared it for me. Now I too have another identity. I do not think my son would mind.”

“Do you know how much money you have?” I gave him back the wallet.

“Yes, but I would like to rehearse the coins with you again. It is the little things that change and give one difficulties. You will not worry about me, Professor.” He turned the sudden smile my way. “I promise not to go near the water.”

In the morning we drove up one of the best highways in Greece through a witches’ lair of crags and great dark pine trees into a fertile valley where the waters of the river moved swiftly. Women washed their clothes at its banks and spread them on the rocks to dry. When we reached the road to Dodoni I saw the signs advertising the festival. It would open that weekend with The Trojan Women.

I stopped the car. “I have promised Vasso to bring you safely back to Kaléa.”

“If you go back. She is not confident of that.”

“Are you?”

“Yes, my brother, I am.”

We shook hands. I reminded him that I would be at the Xenia Hotel. “God be with you,” I said as he got out.

“If there is a God, He will be with us this time.”

I drove on and watched him through the rearview mirror. His dufflebag in one hand, his cane in the other, his canvas hat perched far back on his head. For the first few yards the farther I got from him the younger he looked. I kept looking from the road to the mirror until, passing the crest of a hill, I could no longer see him. Before me lay the town of Ioannina, the two white minarets, red-turreted, gracefully rising above the walls like rockets suspended in take-off. The lake shimmered in the sun, and beyond it rose the ominous brown-backed ranges of the Pindos Mountains.

It was going into another world, stepping into the hotel lobby. The building itself was modern. So were the visitors thronging in for the festival. Passengers on the morning flight from Athens had just arrived. The women crowded a display of Epirot costumes and rugs, a glass case of exquisite silver work. In my few minutes’ wait to check in I heard French, German, Scandinavian, English. Cosmopolites and money, I thought, the other Greece, where even the Greeks speak French or a high-Greek which neither the peasant nor I could readily understand, just possibly because we didn’t want to. It gave me a certain pleasure to move among these people and no longer feel, as I would have felt a few weeks before, that I was among my own.

Having arranged for my room and seen to my luggage, I stepped out for a moment on the dining room terrace which overlooked the lake in the distance. Between was the gradual descent of red-tiled rooftops and the green of the abundant plane trees. There were children playing in the hotel garden, a uniformed governess overseeing them. A stork flew overhead and then another, the largest birds I have ever seen in flight. I asked a passing waitress if they still nested in the chimneys. “Oh, yes,” she said, “they come every spring,” and taking me to the end of the terrace she pointed to a nest on a nearby building.

I went down the terrace steps, around the building and out to Vassileos Georgiu B’, the main street, and that on which I had come in from Dodoni. I walked toward the town watching every car, truck and cart that passed, hoping to see Stephanou. I was opposite the university when a convoy of army trucks went by. They seemed like boys to me, the soldiers, their sleeves rolled up, their berets angled as only youth can angle headgear. They shouted at the girls grouped outside the university gate. The girls in turn waved back with a smartness that seemed almost like a salute. They all seemed very gay… the girls equal in a way to the boy-soldiers: that was what gave me pause, the modernness of the women. I could have been standing at the main gate of my own campus.

I was thinking about this when, aboard a donkey cart loaded with melons, Paul rode into town beside the driver. The driver cracked his whip, moving the beast to a trot, and Stephanou grinned, his head thrown back, with the air of one who owned the wagon and the earth beneath it. When they were slowed down by the clog of traffic at the intersection, I almost came abreast of them again, walking quickly. Then, given the right of way, they soon pulled far ahead of me. I lost sight of them as they passed the tower clock in the main square, headed for the market place.

I followed in the same direction, and in the square for the first time actually remembered the town. I had had one brief day of liberty there. The streets were crowded with both tourists and native Epirots. In the park were clusters of men, some in the black breeches of the countryman, some in tradesmen’s aprons, soldiers… as busy in talk as crows at grain in the reaper’s wake. The Greek was rarely a recluse. I stood a moment opposite the Army Headquarters building. It was being draped with bunting. I wondered for a moment if I should inquire of the guard there if Colonel Frontis might have an office there. I did not even know, of course, whether he was with the northern army. I decided against both inquiries and vigils for the present, and walked on to where Averoff Street narrowed. I thought, Averoff Street in Ioannina and Averoff Prison in Athens: they would have been named after the same man.

With the street’s narrowing the congestion became fierce and marvelous, modern cars among the wagons and carts, with carriages not unlike those in New York’s Central Park jogging the tourists over the cobbles. Pedestrians folded in and out of the street in the wake of the wheeled traffic, and now and then a bus of high-chassised and ancient elegance, which reminded me of a dowager lifting her skirts, prodded all other traffic out of its way.

I made my way to the street market along the ramparts of the old city, a wild bazaar of crafts in silver and weaving, garden produce, live chickens hung in clusters by their legs. The hawking of merchandise, the babble of bargaining: history stands still in every marketplace. I spotted Stephanou perched now under an umbrella atop the melon cart. The owner unhitched the donkey and led it to the shade near the wall. While I watched, a woman went up to the wagon, selected a melon and handed it to Paul. With the savoir-faire of an expert, he shook it, smelt it for ripeness, felt it for weight and gave it back to her. She put it in her stringbag and gave him the money he had asked for. He fingered the coin, put it in a box, and raised his voice in a melodic chant: “Buy a melon, oh! The ripe, sweet melons of the Grecian sun!”

Paul, I thought, could take care of Paul for now.

I proposed on my way back to the hotel to have a look at the old prison but, cutting through the maze of narrow streets, I found myself on Lord Byron Street. I walked on until I saw the house over the doorway of which a plaque bore the legend that Lord Byron had stayed there. I looked up at the second story—there was a tailor shop below. Like most of the old buildings the upper story protruded in a bay effect, a bulge rather like an old man’s paunch. The windows had been newly washed. A woman came out with one of the short-handled brooms which in Greece spare neither dust nor the backs of the sweepers. She swept the step beneath the plaque. We spoke, and I told her I was working on a life of Byron. She invited me to see the house where she, her husband and her daughter now lived. While she served me cherries in the parlor, she told me of her son who attended an American university. It was a solemn room, immaculate and sparsely furnished, all its richness in the deep-blue rug upon the floor. I thought again as she smiled and questioned me about my own work of how rarely the Greeks collect “things.” They keep that which is useful and decorate their lives with conversation.

We talked for well over an hour—of the festival, and the fact that the Princess Royal would attend it; of the new university, and the number of women now going on to higher education; of Epirot culture and its mixed feelings about Ali Pasha, who in Byron’s times had made Ioannina his capital when he rebelled against the Sultan. She was, I thought, a deeply caring patriot.

She showed me the narrow room which had been Byron’s during his brief sojourn, a bedroom now. A man’s raincoat hung on one of the clothes pegs on the wall. I walked across the room almost as though bidden by an unseen guide. I was remembering Webb as we were about to leave the schoolhouse, Stephanou waiting to show us where we were to be billeted. We took our coats from pegs such as these, and Webb, about to put his on, stopped and went over it, the pockets, the belt, the collar. I think I asked him if he had lost something. “Nothing I’m likely to need,” he said and motioned me out ahead of him.

The woman came up and told me that the coat belonged to her husband. I apologized for my curiosity and said I had one like it. I looked out the low window. The traffic was thinner and across the way a shopkeeper was drawing his shades. It was almost time for the afternoon closing. I asked her if she thought the scene had changed much since Byron’s time.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “The Turks are gone.”

“And his Albanians? Byron always called them his Albanians.”

“We call them Northern Epirots,” she said, a remark I was to remember.

On the streets once more I found only the walls of the old jail. The building had been torn down and the ground leveled. I did not feel deprived. The wall remained because it supported the houses and shops which had been built against it, most of them a century or more before. In one of the shops a butcher was asleep, curled up on his block, his stockinged feet like bagged hams.

I walked back toward the hotel trying to probe my mind for more associations such as I had experienced seeing the raincoat. What I wanted most desperately, of course, was to conjure a picture of Captain Demetrios. Markos I could remember quite clearly. I wondered if Demetrios would have as much trouble remembering my face. Again my mind, my memory, was flitting maddeningly close to something…. I had thought him the only civilized man in the camp. Why? The little act of courtesy, the matter of helping a man off with his coat? Ah, but Webb’s examination of his coat: it could be said now that he was suspicious of Demetrios from the moment of meeting him, and that the suspicion must have come from prior knowledge of the man, probably from a previous meeting.

Why would neither of them have acknowledged it? I was quite sure they hadn’t, but I needed to question Paul more closely now on those first moments. I remembered Paul trying to explain our presence to Markos, and Webb’s intervention. Where was Demetrios then? Markos had wanted to know that too. Then he came in, saying something that made—Stephanou, was it?—laugh. It had to have been he or Markos. Demetrios had spoken in Greek. But we all understood: he pulled down his jacket with one hand and checked his fly with the other. Christ! I could see his hand at his fly, but I couldn’t remember his face!

Even the policeman’s box was empty at the main intersection. The idle carriages stood in the shade in the square, the horses flicking their tails at the flies. Two policemen were reading the front pages of the newspapers where they hung on a glass-encased board outside the Acropolis Hotel. I glanced at one of the headlines: it concerned the festival and the Princess Royal’s arrival. The world was not collapsing if the headlines could go to a theater festival.

The two policemen, a corporal and a sergeant, were talking about the parade, apparently a preliminary to the festival. The sergeant was smoking a cigarette. The corporal wanted to know the order of precedence in terms of authority, the local constabulary or the security police. I did not hear the answer. The sergeant became aware of me and stiffened as to attention. I nodded gravely. The corporal too now came to attention.

“It will be a large crowd,” I said, speaking in English.

“Yes, sir.” One hand behind his back, the sergeant dropped his cigarette. “We are prepared.”

I could think of nothing more to say except “good day.” I moved on, virtually alone in the sun-scorched street. I wondered if every tourist drew that reaction. It did not seem likely. They had taken me for someone important, someone to whom one might have supposed they felt answerable. But to whom, an American? I had no answer.

Entering the hotel lobby I came face to face with Constantin Helmi. He offered his hand but I could see he was searching his memory for name and place.

“John Eakins,” I said. “We met at Dr. Palandios’.”

“Of course, of course, Madame Storme’s friend.”

I did not contradict him.

“How splendid we are to have a reunion. I understand Madame Storme comes in the morning. My poor Elena, she is all nerves as though it were her debut.”

“I understand the Princess Royal will be present.”

“And the Count and Countess Braschi—you know, Alexander Webb’s widow.”

I nodded. “I remember our conversation that night.”

“Then you will also remember that I was not to be quoted in the matter,” Helmi said.

“To whom would I quote you?” I asked blandly.

He smiled broadly. “You are right. Now, you will forgive me, dear sir. I am due at the airport. I shall be back tomorrow. There will be a reception after theater. You must have an invitation….” He had taken a notebook and small gold pencil from his pocket. “Professor, isn’t it?”

I spelled my name to save him the embarrassment of having to admit he had again forgotten it.

Not wanting to face the crowded dining room, I had soup and fruit sent to my room. I had not unpacked, and I felt undisposed to, but if I were to attend the reception I should have to have my dinner clothes pressed. And I proposed to attend it, once more to meet Margaret. My nerves reacted badly. I dug out a bottle of brandy along with my dinner jacket… and then put the bottle away again. I phoned the desk for the valet and presently opened the door to the chambermaid. Before taking the clothes she drew the drapes against the heat where I had opened them. When she was gone I opened them again, and the glass-paneled door besides. I stepped out on the balcony. I could hear the rattle of cutlery and dishes, the hum of conversation from the dining room below. I had not arranged a theater reservation. I decided to leave it to Elsa Storme. If she were coming in the morning she would probably be on the regular flight from Athens.

The telephone rang. It was Paul. He identified himself at what sounded like the top of his voice: “Michael, Michael Panyotis.”

“You don’t have to shout,” I said. “How many melons did you sell?”

“The whole cartload!” He shouted nonetheless. “There will be a special military exercise in the barracks grounds at six o’clock. I have a friend taking part in it, you know?”

“I shall be there,” I said.

“I myself am going to sit at the lakefront and set my face to the monastery of St. Panteleimon. Bring the car.”

He hung up with the abruptness of one totally unaccustomed to the use of the telephone. Which, I realized, was the case.

I had hoped to park the car along the wall where I had seen the market vendors tether their donkeys. Beyond the wall was the army grounds. There were cars there but no room for mine, and one gendarme after another directed me away. People were crowding through the wall entry. I finally left the car in back of the museum, having had to circle the entire area. I was on the edge then of the old town where until the war Ioannina’s large Jewish population had lived. Cleared out by the Germans, the cottages were afterwards taken over by refugees during the civil war. I thought of the woman, Maria, and wondered if she too had settled there. If so, Stephanou would find her. The walled gardens were rich with bloom; that much I glimpsed before cutting across an open field, intending to reach the army parade ground that way. I was halfway across the field when I saw several soldiers gesturing me away. I went on, afraid of missing whatever event was about to take place. A jeep came to meet me. I climbed in beside the sergeant. “It is not allowed,” he said.

“Then put me down where I am allowed,” I said.

He circled back and let me out at the edge of a small crowd of people who had poured in through the market gate. Some of the men among them cheered, I supposed for me and my little sideshow. For someone not wanting to attract attention to himself I had given a hell of a performance. An M.P. helped me force my way into the crowd. I was at its mercy for the moment, for just then two jeep-loads of officers came through the gate, followed by a limousine, the first Cadillac I had seen in Ioannina. I eased myself round to get a better view of what everyone else was straining to see. I never did see the passengers in the rear. When the car was no more than five feet from me, the officer riding beside the driver acknowledged the salute of the M.P. beside me, the flick of his hand attracting my eye.

I had thought I would not recognize him, but it was not so. I was absolutely certain that the officer was the man I had known as Captain Demetrios.

When the car had passed and the M.P. stood at ease, I said to him with exaggerated courtesy, “Excuse me, sir. Who is the officer in the limousine?”

“Colonel Frontis.”

Colonel Frontis. Even as we had surmised. I eased my way through the watchers and out the gate when the military pipes and drums began to play.

No parking was allowed along the promenade where the great plane trees line the waterfront, and are themselves in shadow from the mountainous rockbed on the top of which Ali Pasha had built his castle. I drove slowly toward where Paul sat alone, his white cane marking him in the distance.

He turned his head the better to hear if the car would stop and, when it did, got up at once. I got out to help him but it was scarcely necessary. He had found the car door by the time I reached him.

“You could get in with a stranger for all your independence,” I said.

“No, Professor. There is a cricket in the Vauxhall’s motor. Don’t you hear it? Clickety-click-click….”

I heard it, but only then.

“Well?” he said, as I got in beside him.

“I have seen Demetrios,” I said. “We were right.”

He pressed his strong white teeth for a moment on his lip. “I have been praying to St. Panteleimon for enlightenment. I told him I would not ask for sight. Drive the road north, Professor, toward Kalpaki. I have been listening to the boats go to and from the island. There are many tourists and they all wish to see where Ali lost his head. The people of Ioannina care not a damn for Ali… and some of them I am not sure care any more for Greece. They are Epirots to the core. You know, Professor, it is very curious—it is like a country being born.”

“You’ve had a good day’s listening,” I said.

“Adversity has its own uses,” he said. “And you?”

“I shall be invited tomorrow night to the reception for the Princess Royal and the Count and Countess Braschi.”

“It is too soon,” he said, “too soon. Can you drive no faster? What is the time and where is the sunlight?”

“It’s almost seven and the sun will set within the hour.”

His smile flashed briefly. “It is a great pity you also cannot see in the dark.” Then, soberly, “We are going to try to find Maria. I do not think she would have remained in the town.”

“It is eighteen years, Paul. Or do you know that she is still alive?”

“The Greek peasant is strong.”

We had reached the tree-arched highway. On either side were vast stretches of fertile land, one of the great irrigation projects in Greece. The peasants worked in gangs, harvesting the late bean crop. Their donkeys were tethered, or in some cases hobbled at the side of the road. Paul, his face to the open window, was breathing deeply, catching the scent in the air.

“What do you smell?” I asked.

“The chill of the mountains coming down. I have never been so cold as I was that night.”

We passed the road to Igoumenitsa, where the ferry from Corfu crosses to the mainland. It was through that valley we had come the last day before reaching the Andarte camp. I told Paul of my recollection in the Byron house, of Webb examining his coat in the hallway, and of Demetrios earlier hurrying in, apologizing—I presumed—for having to take time to relieve himself.

“It is so,” Paul said. “He made a rude joke.”

I said, “What was Webb carrying concealed on his person that Demetrios might have intercepted?”

“Communication from Athens? Intelligence?… Is it possible, Professor, that he would not have known that he was carrying it, that seeing Demetrios he first suspected it?”

“Very possible.”

“Then I would remind you, my friend, of the only likely person to have access to a man’s coat—his wife.”

“It is so,” I said, using Paul’s phrase. “I should think it is fairly safe to assume a lingering… what word shall I use?… affinity between Margaret Webb and Colonel Frontis.”

“One would like to know at what point the name Demetrios died,” Paul said.

We were approaching the crossroads, the fatal site. I slowed down and told him where we were.

“Drive on!” he said as though to forestall my dwelling on what had happened there. “And mark now ten kilometers.”

I was slow to pick up speed, looking at the great shadows spreading through the valley.

“What do you feel?” Paul demanded.

“Nothing. A sort of numbness—as though it had all been a dream.”

“You are not afraid?”

“No. Are you?”

“No,” Paul said. “Only in the city am I afraid.”

“It was not evident to see you selling melons on that cart.”

“It was an exercise in boldness. One must be bold.”

“But not too bold,” I said. We accelerated, going downhill. “All this distance you carried the woman on your back?”

“She was not heavy. But she stank of blood, poor creature, and I have never been able to get the stench of it out of my soul.”

I had to turn on the dashboard light to read the speedometer.

“It will be a long twilight, please God,” I said. The sun had set.

“Are there dwellings?”

“Some. Stone and plaster with slate roofs. The people look up when we pass. The countryside is becoming desolate again. The sheep are the color of the soil—tinged with red. I remember the scrapings of the dark-red loam they took from under my fingernails to prove I had buried the gun.”

“It is so.”

“We have not passed a car since the road to Igoumenitsa.”

“The road will go nowhere after Kalpaki with the border closed.”

An army truck approached, the driver turning on his lights and then turning them off again. I did the same. We drove in silence until I said, “It is ten kilometers now, Paul.”

“You must watch to the left then for a shrine. It will be to St. George, for it was not far from here we turned back the Fascist invaders.”

I pondered his conviction that all would have remained as he remembered it, and, as though he sensed my thought, he said, “Men live and die. Our saints have become eternal.”

I drove slowly and soon the white-washed shrine appeared, at first like a will-o’-the-wisp in the twilight. As I drew alongside I saw the flicker of candlelight within the shelter.

“There is a candle burning,” I told him.

“Pray God Maria lit it,” he said. “Is there a road? We must stop at the shrine in any case.”

I got out of the car. The overgrowth of weeds and wild wheat had all but covered the tracks, but once there had been a road of sorts. I went round to Paul’s door. “There was a road. It’s overgrown.”

“Take me to the shrine.”

I guided him around the car. He explored the frame of the shrine with his hands, then moved from the front to the back of it and got down on his knees. The stillness seemed as vast as the sky which was an unclouded wash of pink and gold, blue-tinted and darkening at the far edge of the earth. Paul scooped the silted dirt away from the base. “Once there was a metal box under here where we left messages,” he said.

I felt the leap of my heart.

“It is the remotest possibility.” He dug on until his fingernails scraped against metal.

I drew out the box for him and pried open the lid. “Something,” I said. “I’ll have to take it to the light.”

“Sometimes we left money.”

And by the headlights I saw that that was what it was, a dozen or so faded bank notes of different denominations. I took the box back to where he waited and told him.

“It is bad,” he said. “If she returned afterwards and needed money, she would have known.”

“She might have been afraid,” I said, but heavy myself with disappointment. “And, Paul, there is a candle burning. Someone may know.”

“We must go on in any case,” he said. I put the box, money and all, back where he had found it and filled in the earth again at the base of the shrine. “It is better that we walk, but put the car where it cannot be seen from the road.”

We drove a few yards in, bending the wild grain before us. A three-quarters moon was rising, reddened by the dust of August. Paul held my arm. I gave him the path, such as there was, and therefore stumbled as often as he did, hooking my toes in the rough. We went on, I do not know how far—for a long enough time that the moon had whitened and the sky had grown dark, letting out the stars. We stopped, I think because I heard a sound from him that made me stop. His hand groped up to my shoulder, and the shudder that ran through him also ran through me.

“I am lost,” he said, his voice cracking on the words. “I have been fighting the fear, the feeling. But it is like walking back and forth in the prison cell. I am waiting to smash into the wall!”

I did not attempt in any way to comfort him. “We shall go on as long as I can see or until we must lie down in the dark and wait for dawn. There has to be someone living near for the candle to have been lighted.”

“But I do not know how far we have come.”

“How far was Maria’s house from the main road?”

“It was not far to a sighted man, a kilometer or so.”

I looked back. There was a light here and there in the distance where the hills rose to the east of the road we had come north on. I saw what in silhouette looked to be a tree stump a few feet from us. Paul dug his cane into the ground and anchored himself to wait while I climbed up on the stump and scanned the landscape around us. There were several lights now, and one perhaps half the distance we had come and somewhat off the path. We retraced our steps. This time I watched carefully, leaving Paul every few yards to climb to the nearest rise.

As we moved in, finding by my careful watch a donkey path, a goat or sheep bleated, then another and another, and I saw the cottage: there could be but one room. I told Paul and we went on. A hunched man came to the open doorway, his shepherd’s cloak around his shoulders.

To Paul I said, “There is a man with a hump on his back.” I called out, “Kali´spéra!”

The man turned back into the house and then brought his oil lamp out and held it to our faces. He was an old man, not unfriendly, but squinting to see who would have made their way to his far cottage. Seeing Paul, he grinned at me toothlessly, and pointed to his own eyes. I nodded. He murmured all the while: most of the words I could not make out except that he was old and lived alone and had nothing save a few sheep.

Paul was holding out his hand and at last the old one took it. “Who attends the shrine of St. George, old neighbor?” Paul asked.

“That would be the women of the Kontos family.”

“And the Zervos family?” Paul said.

“They are all dead. The Germans.” He spat. “And then the Communists.” He spat again. He looked at me with what I shall now call an expression of cunning mournfulness. “Come. It is a poor refuge, but I am not a barbarian, only a shepherd with ancient family pride.”

Paul stopped on the threshold. He put both hands to the door frame, I thought measuring the width of it, then with the rubber tip of his cane he sought and found the one window. He again touched the sides of the doorway with both hands. He stepped inside. I followed him, and the old man after me. Paul had made sure of the direction he faced. There was but a low couch, a cabinet and one small table in the room. He tapped his way across the bare floor to the wall and there, piece by piece, he touched the articles hanging above and alongside the small, protruding fireplace, the icon with its ornate silver frame and hinged doors, the copper pots, now black as the soot in the grate below. If this were Maria’s cottage, and I now supposed it was, he had spent a night of horror with her here: his memory would be seared with every detail of the room in which he would have sought desperately for distraction. The old man watched him, open-mouthed.

Paul turned. “Was Maria the last of the family?”

“I am a cousin,” the old man said and rubbed his hands together. “Please, my guests, honor me by sitting in my house and taking a small refreshment.” He gestured me to the low couch which was covered with a red and black rug.

“My brother?” Paul beckoned me to come for him.

I led him to the couch where he sat, cross-legged. Our host dusted two small silver dishes with his sleeve and spooned a few cherries into each from a crock he took from the cabinet.

We sat in silence and ate the conserve, the sugar in which had crystallized.

Paul said then, “We are looking for Maria. She once did me a small kindness—before her affliction.”

“Ah, then you know about…” He rolled his eyes toward me and touched the tip of his tongue with his finger.

“I know,” Paul said. “Where is she?”

“Gone, gone,” the old one said, and drew his cloak about him as though to shield himself from such a fate.

From that moment Paul became imperious. “Is she dead? It will pay you to tell us the truth.”

“Why should I tell otherwise? I would have kept her—she would have kept me….”

“She is alive!” Paul cried.

“No, my blind one, she is not alive. She was given to the care of the Sisters in the north hills, a convent on the way to Konitsa. She could weave such beautiful things, you know?” He bent down to pat the rug on which we sat.

So sharp were all Paul’s senses save his sight, he sensed the old one’s nearness and caught his arm. “Tell everything.”

“I tell only what I know.” But borne down by Paul, he seated himself at our feet. “There are only old ones in the convent. Our young girls today, even if they do not have husbands, they make of the home a convent.” He tried, poor man, to make a little joke: “Sometimes even if they do have husbands.”

“When did she die?”

“I have a letter—a year ago, two…. Time has no meaning, only winter and summer, to an old shepherd. They sent me the robe on which you are sitting.”

“Nothing else?”

“I swear it to be so,” the old one said.

“Professor, give him money—three hundred drachmas. Do you have a spade, old man? A trowel?”

“I have a spade.”

Paul spoke to me in English: “We must dig, my brother. Remember what I told you of Maria when I could not get her to leave the house to seek a doctor? Like a wounded animal, she wanted to dig beneath the house. It has occurred to me—she may have buried the journal.”

I gave the shepherd the money. Paul instructed him to bring the spade and the lamp. He did not question, but first put the money into a jar in the cupboard. I heard the tinkle of coins and thought it would be a lowly sum to which we had added.

Outdoors, while the old man held the lamp, I began to loosen and lift away the stones. Paul explained to the old one that Maria had kept something for him, something of no value except to himself. The old one stopped my digging and led the way into the house again. From the bottom shelf of his cupboard he drew out a tarnished box.

I told Paul what he was doing. “Give us the box, old uncle. Let us look at your treasure for ourselves.”

“It is a valuable box,” the old one whined. “Many times I have thought to sell it, but it is such a long way to go.”

“My brother will pay you if it is worth buying.”

I took the box from him and opened it. There was a yellowed wedding certificate, a letter postmarked Konitsa, and a soiled, folded piece of notebook paper.

“God in heaven,” I said.

“You have the journal?” Paul asked.

“No.” The paper broke apart as I opened it, but I knew what it was even before I saw my own handwriting. “It’s the promise I wrote out for Webb before we left Athens.”

“Where did you get it, uncle?” Paul demanded.

“It was in the hole under the house. After Maria went to the Sisters, I wanted to fill up the hole, but first I looked to see underneath.”

“What else was there?”

“Nothing. I swear by the Virgin.”

On the paper I could see the rusty mark left by a paper clip. “It would have dropped out of the notebook, Paul. She might not even have known, but now we can be certain that Maria was once in possession of Webb’s journal.”

I picked up the letter which was also in the silver box. It was postmarked “Konitsa.”

“That is my letter!” the old one cried.

“Read it anyway,” Paul said to me.

I took it out of the envelope. The script was fine, delicately fine, but while I could understand most of the characters, some of the words had no meaning for me. “I can’t read it, Paul. It’s not Greek as I know it.”

“Oh, Christ! It is in Vlak. Is it, uncle?”

“Yes.”

“Read it to us, uncle. I will understand.”

The old one shook his head. “I cannot read.”

Paul put his hand to his eyes. “God’s curse on Demetrios!”

The old one cringed and drew away. “I am nothing and you abuse me. I know nothing and you beat me. God will punish you.”

“God has already punished me.”

“And me,” the old one said, rocking beneath his hump, “for being born I am punished a lifetime.”

“He is old and frightened and deformed,” I said. “Be kind to him, Paul.”

“To kill him would be a kindness.” But to the old one he said more gently, “You know what is in the letter, uncle. Tell us.”

“The priest from Kalpaki who took Maria to the Sisters brought it to me—with the blanket. It was from the Sisters. They said she had gone mad and thrown herself into the river. It was better, she was now at peace with God.”

“Peace!” Paul said contemptuously.

“The priest told me I could stay here and if I gave six lambs to the church every spring, he would be responsible for me to the tax collector.”

“Let us have the letter, uncle. A thousand drachmas and you may also keep the box.”

“A thousand drachmas,” the old one repeated, his withered lips quivering. “They will say I stole it.”

Paul gave me his wallet. “I have older money than you, Professor. Count it out for him in the smallest denominations.”

Between Paul’s funds and mine I was able to give him ten fifty-drachma notes, a hundred in coins and four one-hundred-drachma notes. Fingering the money, the old one agreed.

“Do you have the letter?” Paul asked me.

“Yes.” I also kept my note to Alexander Webb, preserving it carefully in my passport case.

“Tell no one we were here,” Paul said, “and we shall tell no one.”

“Do you think, my blind friend, the sheep will be interested? But do you know, now I am going to have a dog. I am going to have a dog of my own.”

“Do that, uncle. A good dog.”

“A very good dog, and I will name him after the priest in Kalpaki.” The old one wheezed with laughter.

“I once had friends in Kalpaki,” Paul said. “But the priest was not my friend either.”

23

IT WAS TEN-THIRTY BY the time Paul and I got back to the car. We had not spoken. There is this about a solemn stillness: one senses listeners everywhere, the night itself has ears. So much for poetic nuance. The practicality was that his walking and my guidance of it took all our concentration. It always did. To speak of anything else we had to stop, and neither of us then wanted to.

Whatever prompted the precaution, having put him in the car, and going round, I stepped up on the back bumper and looked over the crest beyond the shrine to the road up which we had come from Ioannina. A twinkle of light shone from a cottage here and there, but not a car was on the road south. There was one coming from the north, however, at what looked even from a distance to be high speed. I called to Paul that I would be back in a moment and ran to a place of vantage where I could yet remain beyond the scope of the car’s headlights. I lay down behind a shield of grass, parting it only so that I could see. The car’s sudden slowdown as it approached the shrine stiffened me, but it was only caution on the part of the driver approaching the top of the hill. A long, black limousine, a Cadillac I was fairly sure, passed and sped on. I had seen only one like it in Ioannina, which was not to say there were not more, especially with the festival, but it seemed unlikely that one should come from the north and at this hour of the night.

I returned to the car and told Paul.

“I could smell him!” he cried. “As sure as hell reeks of brimstone!”

“Then perhaps you can also catch the scent of where he came from,” I said with sarcasm.

“I will think about it.”

I maneuvered the Vauxhall out onto the road.

“Go north,” Paul said. Then: “For me it is possible to hate as it is not possible for you. We are most unlikely men to be brothers.”

“The word was yours,” I said.

“Unlikely, but so, nonetheless.”

“Where are we going, Paul?”

“To Kalpaki and beyond, unless there are impediments.”

We drove on, the road like a black marker in the moonlight. I slowed down very shortly as we approached a sign, and read aloud: “Kalpaki, one kilometer.”

“There is a road to the left?”

“Yes.”

“And no soldiers, no traffic?”

“None.”

“Drive that way.”

A few kilometers on I saw something that raised a lump in my throat: shining plainly in the moonlight and of such dimension as to cover the entire hillside was the placement of many rocks to form the numerals 1940.

“Paul…” I told him what I saw.

“It is so. Here we turned the Fascists back, and for a little while there was glory in modern Greece. Now we must watch for a cave on the left. There will undoubtedly be a memorial marker. If there is a guard, tell me and I will pretend to be asleep and you will stop and ask the road to the village as though we had missed the sign back there.” He shoved his white cane under the front seat. “If there are questions, let us say we are to join a party of fishermen in the morning. It is believable.”

It might have been believable, but I was grateful not to have to tell the story. I found the cave entrance by the widening of the road at that point. I pulled off into the dusty siding and stopped. There was no one anywhere to be seen. An iron gate closed the mouth of the cave.

“It was the army headquarters during the war,” Paul said. “We do not have a flashlight, do we?”

“The moonlight is very bright.”

“One would like to know what the ground could tell you. A limousine such as you describe would leave distinctive tracks, would you not say? And if they went inside, I think there would be fresh markings from their feet.”

“I’ll look in any case,” I said, opening the car door.

“Put my hand on the button to the car lights. I shall listen for a car and signal. The story will be the same. You are looking for a sign, having lost your way.”

I got out, cursing myself for failing to have a flashlight. We had not driven at night and I kept forgetting to buy one. I went slowly, acclimating myself to the moonlight and staying on the road surface. Almost immediately Paul signalled with the lights. I went back to the car.

“Professor, there is a singing of electric wires. Perhaps there is a light switch.”

I looked up. A line ran from the roadside pole to a pole near the cave and, now looking for it, I saw the floodlight over the entrance. “You are right. There will be a switch box.”

I got one of the tire tools from the trunk and walked to the cave, circling the area where the car might have parked. I could see what looked to be fresh tire tracks. The padlock hasp on the switch box was easily pried loose. I looked back to be sure Paul was not signalling and then threw one of the two switches. A light went on, perhaps a series of them—I could see only one—within the cave. I could see nothing except the passageway beyond the gate and that soon curved into an area beyond sight. I threw the other switch. The spotlight went on, flooding the entranceway with light as sharp as day. I at least had had the presence not to look into the face of the light when it came on. The dust of the parking area was loose, the tire marks ending in a skid. But to that point, they were quite clear, the tread sharply defined. A large-gauge tire. I could have photographed them: I had equipment for detail photography in the car but there seemed little point to it. After all, I had not seen the limousine sufficiently close to identify it. I traced the tracks to and from the road. There were older tracks also, but silted with dust. Only those of one large car were clear. And there were footmarks from where the car had stopped near the mouth of the cave. At the gate I could see a cluster of footprints where two or more men would have waited while another unlocked the gate. They had all gone inside and into the passageway, then back. What I did have in my pocket was a small magnifying glass. I carried it for the study of manuscripts. I got down on my knees and examined the shoeprints. One man had worn pointed toes, which to me suggested an Italian-made shoe: I did not permit my imagination to pursue its possible significance; many a Greek might wear an Italian shoe. One set of heels had borne a trademark: I was a moment figuring it out—the letters were backwards, of course—Goodyear, an American-made shoe, or at least heeled with an American product. An expert would have been able to tell more, the prints were so clear. There was not a boot among them, and all save the American make were new shoes, I thought, from the evenness of the heels. I took the shoestring from my own shoe and measured all the prints in the area by the gate. It came to only three pairs of shoes. Three men: Demetrios-Frontis? Braschi, the titled husband of Margaret Webb? One dared not make that leap, I thought, and yet…. And the other? A man with a preference for American moderate-priced gear. Odd, I did not sanction for a minute the possibility of the Colonel’s wearing Goodyear soles.

The sound of the car horn startled me. Paul was flashing the lights off and on. I ran to the fuse box and threw off both lights, shut the box, and ran back to the car.

“Turn back quickly,” he said, “and the same story if we are stopped.”

We had just managed to swing into the road and to pick up a little speed when we closed onto two sets of headlights. I brightened and dimmed mine. An army truck did the same, and then another, the soldiers in the back calling out, “Yassos!” They did not stop.

“The military?” Paul asked.

“Yes.”

“They will be part of the border guard,” he said.

“How far is it?”

“Twenty kilometers. Well? What did you find?”

I told him of the tire tracks and footprints and my own conjecture.

“Twenty kilometers from the Albanian border,” he murmured.

“We call them Northern Epirots,” I said, remembering the woman at Byron’s house.

“What?”

I told him what she had said when I mentioned Byron’s Albanians.

“We are onto something, Professor. I have felt it from the moment I rode into Ioannina.”

I lit a cigarette. It cut its way inside me. I said, “I’ve not had a bite of food since two o’clock. My belly is rubbing my backbone.”

I caught the flash of his teeth. “In Kalpaki there may be a taverna.”

“We’d better go back to Ioannina, Paul. In so small a place we could not help attracting attention.”

“When are we to see the priest about Maria?”

“I don’t know that we should see the priest unless we have to. The fewer people we need to question the better.”

“You are right. Priests are gossips and they are paid by the government.”

“Tomorrow we’ll find the convent. But first I want to know as much as I can about the nature of our enemy. If we do find the journal, then I know I shall be afraid.”

“I understand,” Paul said. “Very well I understand.”

I was remembering the deference shown me, an American, by the two policemen in Ioannina. “Paul, if it is as I conjectured and the third man was an American, who would it be?”

“You ask because you have an answer,” he said.

“I am wondering if it might not be a member of the CIA.”

“American Intelligence?” he said after a moment.

“Yes. Roughly comparable to the OSS during the war.”

“Is it true they foment revolutions?”

I answered indirectly. “They would not disapprove a change of government in Albania.”

“And they would have money?”

“Yes.” And then, not because I cherished the Albanian ideology—I have long since declared myself here to be non-political and that by necessity as well as choice—but because I saw the bloodshed and the maiming which once I had been wistful at not having seen, and I saw Demetrios the hero—I blurted out despairingly, “Yes! They would have money. It seems to be what we have most.”

We were both silent for some miles after that. Then Paul said, “How will you find out more about the nature of our enemy?”

“As you said before, we ought to know when Demetrios reverted into Colonel Frontis. I have told you about the people I met at Dr. Palandios’, particularly the woman, Elsa Storme.”

“Ah, yes, the one with the mummified husband.”

I had not put it that way, but it would do. I went on, “She arrives for the festival in the morning. She has a way of finding out things. And I would trust her.”

“And the husband?”

“He will not be here.”

“A most trustworthy man,” he said solemnly.

I glanced at him. His head back, he was grinning broadly. “What in hell has put you in such high spirits?”

“I am alive!” he cried. “I am a functioning, contributing human being. I have survived, and if I die tomorrow I will have started on the road to a good eternity.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I am going to try to keep us both on this side of it for some time longer.”

Paul could not repress his mood of exaltation. “If we are visiting the nuns tomorrow—I have never seen a convent. They are rare in Greece. Will they admit two stallions like us?”

“Perhaps we shall take Elsa with us.”

“Is she one of your strong women, Professor?”

“She is not an Amazon,” I said somewhat sourly.

Paul laughed and began to sing. It was the ballad of the Souli women which Vasso had sung the night he made his own way to the restaurant. He broke off the song and said, “Vasso will be proud of me, and I shall be master in our house.”

And lover? I wanted to know but would not ask. Had it been the other way round the question would have tripped off his tongue. I wanted most deeply for him to love her, probably because in my sense of fitness my own and lonely guilt would be assuaged.

I told him when the lights of Ioannina came into view. We arranged to meet at the lakefront at one o’clock the next day. He felt it was important for him to “see” the parade.

“Leave me now at Lord Byron Street,” he said. “It is a few doors from there, the place where I am staying. There will be singing tonight. Perhaps I shall listen.”

“It’s almost midnight,” I said, holding my watch to the dashboard.

“That, my brother, is the best hour for listening.”

24

THE TWIN ENGINE COMET put down from Athens at eight-thirty in the morning. I was waiting. The moment Elsa saw me her pace quickened and she came toward me faster and faster until she was almost running. I held out both my hands to her. To see us one might have thought we had been lovers long before and cherished a lingering if quieter affinity. Yet I had met her but the once and had wondered while I waited if I would remember her face. It was a good face, rather too long but delicately molded and dominated by the frank grey eyes. The lines crinkled round them when she smiled.

“How splendid, John! You don’t mind my not calling you Professor?”

“I’m ten years younger for it,” I said, holding her hands until she drew them away.

“Too young, too young,” she said.

“Do you have baggage?”

“A sensible amount.”

“I’d counted on that. Let me have the ticket.”

In the car as we drove into town she said, “And has it been Lord Byron all the way?”

“Not all the way,” I said.

“I shouldn’t have thought so. The sky of Greece and all its lovely people—what a shame not to see them for turning stones and sifting bones.”

“I have a friend I want you to meet presently,” I said, for her words reminded me of Paul.

“Man or woman?”

I glanced at her: she was beautifully dressed, a grey silk suit, blue gloves and purse.

“I’m being gauche again,” she said, but smiling, at ease with me as I was with her.

“No. I was admiring you. You look lovely.”

She inclined her head to the compliment. “Then it’s a man.”

“Yes. Quite an extraordinary one.”

She waited but I was not ready yet to tell her about Paul. She said then, “I dined again with the Palandioses last night. They send their love. He wagered you would be here. And I have a bit of information which may or may not interest you. Remember I said I was writing a friend at the British Museum, a genealogist, about Count Braschi—you know of whom I’m speaking?”

I nodded.

“He is a descendent of Scanderbeg, the fifteenth-century Albanian nationalist. Are you interested?”

“Yes.”

“I assumed you were,” she said. “And it’s not simply curiosity about the former Mrs. Webb, is it?”

“No, Elsa. It’s something quite more.” I looked at her and smiled. I had no wish to alarm her or to involve her before it was necessary. “It’s not all that ominous. And I’ll tell you… in time.”

“I expect you to,” she said, forthright as ever. “What more about Braschi? Steel and shipping today. The social lot, of course. He’s forty-seven, not previously married, which is curious. Scanderbeg, I should guess, is as close as the Albanians come to a national hero. Unless there’s someone up there now whom we don’t know about. Perhaps someday we shall discover Mao Tse-tung to have been a secret Albanian.”

“Of that I’m doubtful.”

“Have you seen the countess yet?”

“No.”

“There will be a grand affair tonight. I trust you’ve been invited?”

“By messenger this morning—at Mr. Helmi’s suggestion. Elsa, I need your help.”

She looked at me in that frank way of hers that had at first disconcerted me. “I have felt that you would say that too,” she said. “And hoped so.”

“There is a Colonel Frontis about whose career I should like to know… what can be discreetly found out.” I told her of his prominence in the army purge of leftists and his presence at the Braschi wedding.

She said at once, “And Braschi and the Albanians. Is that it?”

“Part of it… and therefore terribly delicate, particularly for me.”

She thought for a moment. “Is delicate another word for dangerous?”

“Yes.”

She asked no more. “I should suppose the easiest way might be through Elena—and Helmi. He seems to know everything,” she said after a moment.

“Yes, but it’s better for the time being that I not be the one to ask.”

“Right,” she said, and then as we turned past the main intersection: “My God, look at this place!”

The main square was thronging with people. Every shop was festooned with bunting.

“There’s a parade at ten this morning in honor of the Princess Royal.”

“But I wanted to see the town, to talk… you know?”

I glanced down at her shoes. “Let’s do it now, then. You’re wearing sensible shoes.”

“Everything about me is so bloody sensible, except what I write. That’s utter nonsense.”

“I shall decide that someday for myself,” I said, parking and locking the car.

We toured the old town as I had the morning before. The crowd was much greater and the streets were made narrower by the barricades set out for the parade. Our talk was light, only gently probing now and then to sound one another’s depths. Her first mention of her husband was while we were looking in the window of one of the silver shops. I had not even inquired about him.

“It’s a sad admission,” she said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever bought Shepherd a gift he’s actually liked. I don’t seem able to be practical and aesthetic at once.”

“I have an idea,” I said, “if you will permit me?”

We went into the shop and I asked the proprietor if he had a magnifying glass. Having one in my own pocket reminded me of it. I spoke in Greek and realized that Elsa was looking at me. The man opened the cabinet behind him and drew out a tray. He showed us a small glass beautifully done round in delicate silver filigree, and with a small ivory stem. It folded into a leather case.

“Poh-so eh-kee? How much is it?” Elsa said, straight out of the book.

I laughed. “One upmanship.”

She bought the glass and we went on. “Are you always so ingenious?”

I looked at her. “I was feeling rather corrupt, you know….”

She put her hand lightly through my arm. “The marriage of true minds. So was I.”

Which brought my thoughts back to Paul from whom they rarely strayed for long these days. I maneuvered us toward the marketplace. Elsa would want to see it in any case. I did not propose to speak to him. I merely wanted to see him, to know where he was. The market was crowded. But so it had been the day before and I had spotted him almost at once. Now I saw him nowhere. The melon vendor’s cart was in the same place, the man himself hawking the fruit. I asked him where the blind man was. He had not seen him. He remembered him: good for business, a blind peddler, but he had not seen him since yesterday.

I shrugged and passed it off as not mattering: I’d found him interesting to talk to. I returned to Elsa and led the way back toward Lord Byron Street. I had left Paul at the corner there the night before. He had a room in one of the cheap courtyard hotels under the name Michael Panyotis. I walked us slowly up one side of the street and down the other, pointing out this and that within the yards, the architecture in one, the common pump within another, children playing. The children’s presence somewhat alleviated my uneasiness. I had to content myself with that and go on.

It was Elsa who observed the conspicuous number of men in business suits on the street who did not seem to be going anywhere, and each of them alone. She pressed my arm. “Secret police?”

“Are there such in Greece?”

“I should suppose there would be with the ceremonies today, the Princess and all. The curious thing is they seem to be the same everywhere. I’ve seen such men in Britain and in the States… you know, at Embassy affairs and such. It gives one a feeling of security, recognizing them.”

“If they are what you think they are,” I said.

Elsa glanced at me. “I’ve never known an American intellectual who wasn’t suspicious—if that’s the word, it’s close to it—of the FBI.”

“There’s an obvious answer which is only partly true—but there is truth in it. It’s because the FBI is suspicious of the American intellectual.”

What might have been said to me at that moment I had to say to myself: under those circumstances, what are you doing here? But to that the answer was: John Eakins has never been political.

Elsa said, “It gives one pause. That should be characteristic only of what we call a closed society. And America’s not that.”

“No,” I said, “America’s not that.”

“What about the CIA?” There was a touch of mischief in her eye. “I understand it’s virtually staffed by intellectuals.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Also, I’d require a definition of intellectual. For example, I don’t consider myself…”

She interrupted. It wasn’t rudeness. I was mumbling as I’m apt to, dragging out my own condition by way of illustration. “You wouldn’t tell me if it were so, but I shall ask anyway: are you a CIA man?”

I smiled, sadly I think, not that she should have the notion, but that no matter what I said it would not entirely satisfy her on the point. “No. I assure you I am not.”

“I shouldn’t have minded really.” And after a moment: “Actually I may be a little disappointed.”

We narrowly missed being sucked into the mainstream of traffic heading back toward Averoff Street. Shops were closing. The children were running, hand in hand so as not to be separated, to their appointed places. They wore the short blue tunics, boys and girls, with high puffy bloomers underneath. Women were coming into the streets in the Epirot costume, the heavily brocaded skirts of red and black, the tight bodices with loose-flowing sleeves of lace and the ornate silver buckles at the waist.

“I love the costumes, but I hate parades,” Elsa said. We saw the soldiers, standing now at ease, but their ranks extending as far as eye could see. “Especially military parades.”

We turned back and started toward the lake. It was a long way round, but the most interesting. In all the side streets little organizational groups of native cultural origins were forming. Many of them were singing to bide the time. It was the singing, I think, that made me look at them more closely. I think I knew before I saw him: there was Paul in the midst of a chorus and clad in the costume common to all the group: the black-belted tunic coming to above his knees, the white, narrow-legginged breeches, a small round cap atop his head. My brother, I thought, was Everyman.

It was after twelve o’clock when we got back to the car and drove the few blocks to the hotel. People were returning from the parade by then. We met Helmi in the lobby, pacing and waiting, I supposed, for Elena.

He kissed Elsa on either cheek. “Have you seen my little Cassandra?” he asked with unabashed sentimentality. “She is like a child about parades. Well! Shall we have a drink and allow her to find us?”

We proceeded to the terrace. Poor Elsa, I thought, she was never going to get settled in properly. But she caught my hand as I offered it to guide her down the step, and squeezed it reassuringly.

Helmi left us briefly to instruct the hall porter on where Elena might find him. Elsa said, “This Colonel Frontis, is he a handsome man? I meant to ask you.”

“Rather. What some people would call an aristocratic face.”

“Whatever in God’s name that is,” she said, but lifted her head and smiled as Helmi rejoined us. “Elena is playing Cassandra! She will be lovely.”

He was immaculately dressed in white linen. The ring on his finger glittered as he offered his cigarette case. “Tell her that, Elsa. From you it will mean something special.”

And when Elena joined us—a wisp of beauty, I thought, her long hair flowing—I could not keep my straight-laced mind from judging: Helmi would be twice her age. Elsa repeated the compliment to the actress.

“You are so sweet,” she said, and then with a kind of limpid melancholy: “Ah, but it is not Hecuba I am playing.”

Helmi made a little noise of reproval. She put her hand on his.

I said somewhat sonorously, “What is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?”

Everyone laughed and before our drinks came we were talking of the parade, the spirit of the Epirots whom Helmi called more Greek than Greeks. Paul, I remembered, had said just the opposite of some of them.

Elena ordered luncheon, having to go to dress rehearsal shortly. I was myself beginning to get uneasy about the time. I suggested that we all have lunch.

“It is so very exciting,” Elena said, “and I simply must not think about it. Really, I don’t want to see you or you until tonight.” She looked from Helmi to me, and was at least half-serious. “Only my friend Elsa.”

“You are behaving like a bride,” Helmi said.

Elena blushed. It had the makings of an awkward moment, but Elsa leaped in: “You were at the wedding on Corfu, Elena.”

“Oh, yes. Everyone was there. I mean, well—I was so pleased, you see, to have been included. Constantin could not attend, poor man. He was in court that week.”

The lawyer stirred uneasily. He turned his empty glass and peremptorily signalled the waiter.

“I am grateful to you for tonight’s invitation,” I said, not helping Elsa in the least.

He murmured that it had been his pleasure, and gave the waiter his order. I demurred at a second drink. Meanwhile Elsa had spoken to Elena, so that it was the actress who said:

“He is so elegant—and so tragic. Constantin, you told once the story of Colonel Frontis.”

“I shouldn’t call him tragic today,” Helmi said. He seemed relieved to have gotten off the subject of the Braschi marriage. “He’s one of the most influential men in the army.”

“I’ve seen his name,” I said. “In some way he’s associated with the government crisis, isn’t he?”

“Remotely, you might say. It was his Intelligence that precipitated things.”

“But do tell his story,” Elena persisted.

The faintest smile of satisfaction glanced Elsa’s lips. She did not look at me.

Helmi lit a cigarette. “He was a junior officer at the time of the Italo-Albanian invasion, and I’ve been told one of the brilliant young field officers—with too much daring, as it turned out. He and a small platoon of men were cut off from our army, and taken prisoner. The Germans at that point were about to move. Frontis was turned over to them. Eventually he was interned at Auschwitz, where he remained throughout the war. Auschwitz, you will remember, was liberated by the Russians—who did not, however, liberate Frontis. He was charged with collaborating with the Nazis in Auschwitz and shipped to a labor camp—as though five years in Auschwitz were not enough for any man, eh?

“Our government made numerous representations—through the U.N.—through every possible intermediary. Finally—in what year? 1951, I believe; I know our troubles had finally been settled—he was repatriated….”

Nineteen fifty-one. I was a moment comprehending the significance. Then it struck me! While Frontis was supposedly in a Russian labor camp, Demetrios was Soviet liaison to the Greek Communists. Mother of God! Was he still with them? But of course! This was the real significance of the blinding of Paul Stephanou. It was not that Webb’s murder could be attributed to Frontis-Demetrios, but that Stephanou could name him as a traitor to Greece, a Soviet agent.

I forced my concentration back to what Helmi was telling of the repatriation, then the rehabilitation process.

“… There was the necessity of an international body taking testimony on the collaborationist charges. He was, needless to say, completely exonerated. He was restored to his army rank, promoted, and I would suppose given some choice in his assignment.”

“He would, of course, be a ruthless hunter of Communists,” I said.

“Understandably, wouldn’t you say?”

The waitress was waiting for our luncheon order. To this day I don’t know what I ordered or what I ate. When she was gone, I said with an affected detachment I should not have immediately managed: “It’s interesting, thinking back to our talk that night at Dr. Palandios’: wasn’t the same charge of Nazi collaboration made against Webb’s wife—in Iran, was it? It was how they met, Webb’s acting as intermediary for her release.”

Helmi said, “Professor Eakins, if you will permit me, I would recommend that you forget the Webb case. It is closed, but there is nothing the Communists would like better today than to see it reopened.”

He believed what he said: it rang with the feeling of truth, and so would believe an entire strata of Greeks, honest patriots all. Who in Greece knew otherwise? That was the question now. Who knew Frontis for what he was?

I had murmured that he was probably right.

But Elsa said with a blithe persistence, “It is fascinating, you must admit, Mr. Helmi, that Count Braschi is a descendant of Scanderbeg.”

He had been about to take a drink. He put the glass down carefully, his eyes following it all the way. Then he looked at Elsa and at me. “Yes, it is fascinating,” he said, “and of course, it is so.”

She had, I was sure, put things in a new perspective for him, and one that for the moment at least disturbed him.

“Who is Scanderbeg?” Elena asked.

He smiled at her, a disarming, paternal smile. “It is another story I shall tell you, my darling. But not now. You have a mad scene to play tonight—and madness is a matter of concentration—all kinds of madness.”

“But I do not want to concentrate. I do not want to think until rehearsal. What time is it now?” He laughed at her abrupt concern for that about which she did not want to think. “He is a kind man,” she said then, a seeming non sequitur until she added, “What I meant to say: after so many years in a concentration camp, you would think…. I don’t know what you’d think, but in the parade this morning—he was taking the salutes, you know? He stepped out to speak to a blind man who was singing in a choral group. It was very touching.”

God in heaven! Fear for Paul rose like vomit in my throat. I wanted to run, but I didn’t. To run and search and call attention? He would have answered to a question, those blind eyes blinking: “My name is Michael Panyotis and I sing the glory of Greece!”

Luncheon was served. I forced myself to eat. No one spoke very much. Elsa told a little of Shepherd’s work in Knossos. I remembered that he was an expert in seals and signets. Mercifully, Elena announced against dessert. The driver would be waiting for her. Even I managed to wish her luck. I thought I would be able to get away then too and signalled for the luncheon check, but Helmi said:

“I wish to speak to you, Eakins. I’ll be right back. In the garden, perhaps, if you will excuse us, Elsa.”

Elsa gave my arm a comforting squeeze and went finally to check in at the desk.

Helmi took Elena to the car. It was one-fifteen. Paul would be waiting for me at the lake if… if. Helmi returned. He protested my having signed the luncheon check, took my arm and led me down the steps. The dining room and terrace now were crowded. We found a shaded bench. The sprinklers were on, the sunlight making rainbows of the watery arches.

“It is a rare experience to anticipate a pattern of history,” he said. “I should suppose the possibility has occurred to you also. I wonder if it is so?”

“One sees the pattern. It can be changed.”

“Ah, but can it? That is the question. And should it be? I wish before God my trust was greater in the personal integrity of certain people—the Deputy Chaconis, for example, who is our host tonight. He is a passionate nationalist. He is a wealthy man who is also a politician. There is no end to which he would not go to unite the two Epirots. What it is necessary to know: by whom is he being used—if indeed there is anything to what we are talking about except in our imaginations.”

“The people of Epirus are excited,” I said. “Someone is spreading the gospel.”

“I have noticed that, but it is not yet at a height sufficient. You do not know the Greeks!”

I said, “Suppose… just suppose there is a plan, a pattern set for—shall we be bold and call it the overthrow of the present regime in Albania: how would it start, and when?”

“It is what I have thought about during luncheon: it would be a matter of a border incident perhaps. But first the preparation, certain people on either side of the border—they are one race, one blood, and sometimes one religion. They have in common hundreds of years of Turkish domination. The incident, whatever it is, would perhaps occur on the twenty-first of February, the anniversary of Epirot independence.”

“Could Colonel Frontis command the loyalty of the Greek army?”

“It would not be necessary. Perhaps he might be doing the preparatory work now—it is a possible explanation of the army purges—but if an incident occurred, it would be perfectly in order for certain of our troops to move for the protection of the border. And the people: among them it would be spontaneous—and perhaps magnificent. That is what one wishes to know. One of the things I have been told and can now believe—your CIA is very active among us today. But one cannot forget, you will forgive me, Professor Eakins—the Bay of Pigs.”

“That was memorable,” I said.

“And then there would be the calculated risk on what the Russians and their uneasy satellites would do. … I dare say a little change above our northwest border would not distress them.” He could not restrain his enthusiasm. “It could be magnificent!”

I wondered how magnificent he would think it if I told him Frontis was a Communist. But I said, “Mr. Helmi, surely you and I cannot be the only intelligent people to suspect what is going on?”

“Certainly not,” he said, and the words rang ominously.

“If the King himself were aware, would he sanction it?”

“He would not and he could not. My dear man, Greece is a member of the United Nations, and we abide by international treaty.”

“Then this scheme, if it exists, is subversive.”

“Subversive of what? The status quo? Perhaps. But is it subversive of a people who have been sealed off from their brothers, their culture, their God? I think not. I do not believe history would call it subversive. This disturbs me not at all. I am disturbed only by the personal motives of the instigators. I do not trust a woman seeking power. And I prefer to see Greek history made by Greeks.”

“Which sends me about Lord Byron’s business,” I said, “who was also a meddler in Greek history.” I offered my hand, hoping to get away the more quickly.

“What we have said—is it not all fantasy—illusion, like the rainbow in the water?” His smile was forced.

“I should also like to think so,” I said.

We shook hands and I went round to the car while he went up the steps. I found Elsa waiting for me at the car door.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked.

“There is,” I said. “I desperately need a cottage or a house—somewhere I can hide a blind man—if I find him—and feel that he is safe.”

“In Ioannina?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know, John, but isn’t it possible that the safest place would be right here?”

I thought about it.

“I have a twin-bedded room,” she added. “I shouldn’t mind exchanging with you—and if it’s safer for him, we need tell no one of the change.”

“Bless you again, Elsa. I shall call you when I find him.”

“No need. I’ll be here,” she said. “Room 309. Just come back safely.”

I hesitated, about to turn on the ignition. “I shouldn’t really involve you….”

“Involvement suits me,” she said.

“Then you had better know now: I am the man who was convicted of Alexander Webb’s murder.”

She inclined her head ever so slightly at the information. Then: “Again, I feel we’ve said these very things before. Is the blind man your accessory?”

I looked hard at her, forcing her eyes to hold on mine. “Elsa, where would you say I should look for him if he is not at the place where we agreed to meet?”

Unhesitatingly she said, “Wherever you would have gone together if you had met.”

Paul was not on the bench at the lake’s edge, and the couple sitting there of whom I inquired had not seen the blind man.

I drove back toward Lord Byron Street and remembered the men Elsa and I had seen in that vicinity that morning, assuming them to be security police. I did not care, but there was none of them in sight anyway. Recklessly, I inquired of Paul at one after another of the courtyard hotels until a man beckoned me to follow him to one of the rooms. He put his hand through an open window and unlocked the door from the inside. Paul’s jacket was hung on the back of the chair, his slacks hung over the iron railing of the bed, his dufflebag on the chair.

“Where is he?”

He shrugged and described the costume he had been wearing. “The taverna?” he suggested.

“Where did he get the costume?”

“Ah,” the man said, “that would be the folk chorus from Kalpaki. Last night they were all singing and dancing. Nobody wanted to go home. Everybody got drunk—and this morning they brought an extra costume with nobody in it, and they came looking for him. He can sing, your blind friend.”

“But after the parade?” I persisted.

“He did not come back. It would be perhaps that he stayed with them. Tonight they will sing again for the Princess Royal.”

“Where?”

“After the festival—at the home of Mr. Chaconis. It is a great honor for your friend.”

“A very great honor,” I agreed. I paid for Paul’s room and took his things with me.

Driving north I thought that if I had taken Elsa’s advice, I would have saved a half-hour. It gave me some small comfort to know that she had been right, and that she was waiting my return with Paul.

25

KALPAKI WAS ASLEEP WHEN I reached there, even to the dog in the middle of the street who lifted his head when I drove around him and then put it down again between his paws. I could think of no one in the village to go to for help except the priest. Paul had said he once had friends in Kalpaki, but who were they, and whose friends were they now?

I parked in front of the church and went inside, hoping to find a sexton or someone who could tell me where the priest lived. There was no one but when I went outdoors again, the priest himself was climbing the stony walk. He was a tall, slightly stooped man who by his determined gait and scrutinous dark eyes reminded me of Modenis. I offered my hand and told him my name. He said that he was Father Zachos. We went inside the church where it was cool. I saw that he looked up and down the street before closing the door behind us.

“I am looking for a blind man, Father, who may have come back from Ioannina with the folk chorus.” He gave no sign of knowing the man or the chorus. I went on: “Both he and I were coming to see you today in any case… to ask you about the woman whose tongue had been mutilated.” He fingered the heavy cross on his breast and stared at me, acknowledging nothing. I drew a deep breath and said, “I had better tell you about the blind man. When the woman was mutilated almost eighteen years ago, he took care of her that night and carried her on his back from her cottage to where she could get medical help. The man who probably mutilated her is responsible also for the blind man’s sightlessness. I took him to the cottage the night before last, and the old shepherd told us you had helped her.”

Finally the priest spoke: “And who are you?”

“I am the friend of both of them, and I was in Markos’ camp… when the tragedy began.”

He had held up his hand at the name Markos. He said, “Tell me no more.”

“Then you tell me, Father. It is a matter of both honor and necessity.” I had almost won his confidence. I could feel it: one more word, if it were the right one, would persuade him. “Peace or war. If you would have these hills run red with blood again, Father, then I have come to the wrong man for help.”

“Peace,” he said. “I will tell you about Maria.” The priest and I walked slowly round and round in the nave of the church while he spoke.

“After our troubles she lived alone for many years, then with the cousin who came down to her from the mountain. Sometimes she came here to the village to church. It was perhaps a year ago and there were soldiers—but I did not know that at first. I found her hiding here. She would not leave. She would not leave the church, and she kept showing me her mouth—where the tongue was gone. It was after many questions that I drew from her the information that she had seen the one responsible, who had done such a thing to her. But who? It was a soldier and she knew his name. She kept crossing herself. Finally I got my book of the saints and began alphabetically to name them. It was not long…” He glanced at me as though for a moment doubting he should say the name.

I said it for him: “Demetrios.”

He nodded assent. “I did not know him. I do not know him. I went to my friend, the elder councilman of the village, and asked him if he knew a soldier, Demetrios. A soldier, no, but Demetrios was the name his sons revered as some men do their saints. It was the name synonymous with glory, with Epirot nationalism. The man, he did not think they knew, or if they did, it was in very secret council.

“It was for Maria’s safety—and perhaps my own, I will confess my weakness—that I removed her to the convent in the hills. Some of the young men came afterwards. They wanted to see the woman who knew Demetrios. Word, as I feared, had spread from the councilman’s house. They asked me where she was and, looking God in the eye, I told them she was dead.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully wiped his lips as though the trace of the lie might still be there.

“But she is not dead, Father?”

“In a year much can happen. But when I rode my donkey up and dictated the letter for the nuns to write, and which they did, the woman was with them.”

“You will tell me how to get there, Father, but first I must find the blind man.”

“About him I can tell you this: when the bus came back from Ioannina at noon, he was taken from it and into a car.”

“Where?”

“They drove north. That is all I can tell you, except that it was one of the elder councilman’s sons who drove the car.”

North. To the cave? The national shrine which Demetrios was desecrating? “And the convent, Father?”

“By a difficult road it is not far. By a better road it is longer and there are soldiers.”

“I will take the difficult road,” I said, and he told me how to reach it.

At the church door I shook hands with him and said, “Father, Maria was once in possession of a very important document….”

Again he stayed me with the raising of his hand. “She tried to give it to me on our journey. I could only read the numerals, 1948, and I was grateful God had not made me either educated or curious. Nineteen forty-eight was not a year I wish to remember.”

No more would Maria, I thought, but even as the rest of us were involved, she was going to have to remember it so that its like would not recur in her lifetime.

Two off-duty constables in Ioannina had prepared me for the gambit I now proposed to follow. A single military guard stood at attention when I drove up to the cave’s entrance. I returned his salute and got out of the car. I used as few words in Greek as possible, identifying myself as a member of the CIA. I showed him my wallet open to a membership card in the International Society for Cultural Studies.

“Colonel Frontis permits me to question the prisoner,” I said. “The blind man speaks English.”

The young soldier asked me to repeat what I had said. He seemed very stupid. I made it a little clearer, at the same time screwing up my eyes to demonstrate the condition of the prisoner.

The sentry said in Greek, for he had no English at all, that when his relief came at four o’clock, he would communicate with his superiors for instructions. It was then twenty minutes past three.

I feigned misunderstanding. How would he communicate?

By radio. The patrol car was equipped.

I asked if there was no other way. There was none. I felt it fairly safe then to assume that there was no one on duty inside the cave. He was such a nice, clean-cut youngster, college age at most, and probably strong. But I had the advantage of surprise. I asked again the time his relief was due, and in order to illustrate he put his rifle between his knees and showed me four fingers, then pointing to his watch. I lifted him from his feet with an uppercut that split open the skin on my knuckles. I did not dare look closely at him where he fell and lay quite still. I dragged him to the iron gate. It was locked. I shouted Paul’s name. Only my own voice echoed back.

The keys hung on a ring snapped to the sentry’s belt by a leather strap. I unlocked the gate and dragged the boy inside. I had to go back to the light-switch box, the hasp of which had been repaired. I turned on the inside lights. When I returned, a little trickle of blood was seeping from the boy’s mouth. Christ!

I ran down the fiercely cold passage only to find that it divided into two chambers. I shouted. This time Paul answered, a muffled cry, but he pounded his fists against the door. I had to go back to where I had left the keys in the gate. The sentry lay where I had left him. I got the keys and followed Paul’s voice to the door on which he continued to pound until he heard the key in the lock.

He was covered with dirt from where he had been trying to dig his way under the door. He was shivering with cold and yet the sweat stood out on his face. He was still wearing the white breeches, now filthy, and the tunic. I led him out, my arm around him.

“My cane, my cane!”

I went back for it, stepping over the hole he had dug. Briefly then, I glimpsed the conference table and chairs. An old wooden chest with a heavy padlock stood near the sweating walls. That men met here on midnight business I already knew, and my only concern for that business had been thrust upon me, and with it an act of violence which I abhorred. I glanced at my bleeding knuckles and returned to Paul.

“I had faith in you, my brother,” he said when I caught his icy hand and led him as fast as possible toward daylight.

“I may have killed a man,” I said. “How can I leave him here?”

“If he is dead it will not matter,” Paul said.

But the boy was breathing. He would live to identify me, but that did not matter now either. I dragged him outside again where he would be found more quickly, locked the gate and kept the keys. It would take them longer to make sure that Paul was gone.

Getting Paul safely into the car, I picked up the sentry’s rifle and flung it spiraling into the brush. We passed none but donkey traffic between there and the point at which we turned off the main road and began the rugged climb up the rutted trail to the mountain convent.

“I made a mistake,” Paul said. “I believed about Demetrios what I wanted to believe. I am not sure now he was ever a Monarchist agent.”

“He was and is a Communist all the way.” I told him about the repatriation of Alexis Frontis.

“And today he is their hero. They deserve the viper in their breasts!”

“And those to whom Demetrios is hero?”

“It is the same,” Paul said. “It should not be somehow, but it is the same.”

“You must have been singing loudly for him to have noticed you,” I said dryly.

“That chorus is his pride,” Paul said. “He loves music. He is a very cultured man. It is a great pity.”

“What did you expect to happen to you?”

He flashed that damned smile of his. “I expected you to come.” It made me furious with him.

“Any number of things might have prevented that.”

“Then when Demetrios came I might have killed him,” Paul said with cold serenity. “I thought: if he shakes hands with me… and he will come alone to a blind man. He will not be proud of having arranged that….”

I cut him off and asked, “When did you expect him?”

“He would not have come until morning. I was given food and water. By then I might have escaped myself.”

“With the sentry on guard?”

“A sentry?” Paul repeated.

“There was a young soldier on duty at the entrance. I knocked him unconscious but his relief comes on at four o’clock.”

“Ah, but you see, Professor, I should not think I was taken there by the entrance you explored. It was a long walk from the car, one such as you and I took finding Maria’s house.”

“I see,” I said, but all that I could see was that the young sentry had had no idea of what I had been talking about. At that entrance to the cave, I had not been able to hear Paul’s shouts. I had said that Colonel Frontis sent me. But would he remember? Would he be able to speak? Of one thing I was reasonably certain: that young soldier and probably his superiors were in no way involved with Paul’s captivity unless I had now involved them. If luck were on our side it might be hours before Demetrios-Frontis knew that Paul was not his prisoner.

I stopped the car on a precipice an eagle might have happily called home. Beyond lay the village and beyond that on the side of another mountain was the convent of St. Sophia. I could see the white wall like a chalk line in the cliff. I helped Paul change into his own clothes and told him of my conversation with the priest in Kalpaki, Father Zachos.

26

THE LAST MILE OF the ascent to the convent of St. Sophia was to be made only by donkey or by foot. Such retreats for women are rare in Greece. I am aware of one other, among the fourteenth-century pinnacled monasteries of the Meteora.

In the village I hired a donkey for Paul and, as it turned out, for two small kegs of wine and a cannister of coffee which the people of the village sent up with us, as with every pilgrim, as gifts to the nuns.

It was an eerie journey, our climbing higher and higher over what gradually became, with the great pine and oak trees intervening, a green wilderness of vast and timeless proportions. An occasional rabbit skittered briefly into sight and the grey-breasted crows seemed to pass their vigil over us, one flight to another. We did not stop often since it became more and more difficult to get the animal to start again, and we did not talk because the donkey took it as a signal to halt.

We reached the cloister gate just after six. The garden within the court was planted with vegetables and flowers. I could hear the mournful murmur of voices in what I supposed to be the vespers office. Inside the gate I rang a bell that hung there. The chapel was directly opposite the gate, the doors closed, and off the cloisters round were numerous doors, some open—I saw a tool shed, a wood room, a huge grinding stone—and some closed. A lay woman came running, her long grey braids tossing behind her. I thought at once it must be Maria, and prepared Paul.

“Kali´spéra,” I said, and Paul said after me, but from then on, as we had arranged, he became our spokesman.

Before us was a skeletonous little woman who had once had beauty and a tongue and now had only a fleeting smile over broken, parted teeth with a hollow behind them, and dark, wild eyes. She made a sound, a kind of welcome.

“We should like to speak to the Mistress Superior,” Paul said. “We have brought gifts from the village.”

She saw then that he was blind. She looked from him to me and pointed from her eyes to her mouth, shaking her head.

“She is showing us that as you are blind, she cannot speak.” I spoke in Greek.

She ran to the gate and looked out to where I had tethered the donkey in the shade. She went out and herself brought in the two kegs of wine. I offered to take one, but she pulled it from me. She set them down and returned for the other gift.

“She will not have recognized me,” Paul said, “and it is better that first we speak to the head of the house.”

Having made sure the gifts were inside the gate, she led us to a room near the chapel and left us. It was bare, save for two long benches along either wall and the icon to the Virgin, a very old-looking one indeed. The one window overlooked the river gorge, hundreds of feet below.

I heard first the shuffle of feet, then six or seven sandaled, black-garbed women passed the open door without looking in. I wondered if it were the entire community. I went to the door for a brief, surreptitious glance. They were, one and all, observing the gifts. I told Paul.

“How terrible if we had come empty-handed,” I said.

“We should have been as welcome.”

Paul had taken the letter from his pocket, the one given to the shepherd to tell of Maria’s death. When the woman I shall call the Mother Prioress entered, Paul spoke to her as Mother, and I followed his example. She was an elderly woman, but of a high and serene bearing, and her face was of great refinement. If she was ill at ease in our presence there was no sign of it.

“We are privileged to be visited,” she said, and thanked us for the gifts.

“They are from the people of the village,” I demurred.

“But you have brought them.”

“We have come after talking with Father Zachos,” Paul said, “the priest in Kalpaki.”

“He is a friend,” she said, but with rather more reserve. “Please be seated if you wish. Maria will bring you a small repast.”

“Thank you, Mother,” Paul said. “We wish your permission to speak with Maria.”

“You will know that she cannot speak, blind one.”

“She has not recognized me, but it was I who tried to help her, who stayed with her the night after the terrible thing was done to her.”

“I know nothing,” the nun said. “I wish to know nothing.”

Paul offered her the letter. “You will have written this, Mother, and for reasons of the woman’s safety as Father Zachos has told us. It is not to harm her we have come. I am blinded by the same hand.”

“The letter was written by one of the others who knows the shepherd’s language, but I know its message. You do not need my permission, but I will tell you there are moments when a madness overcomes her and she must be locked away from this side of the cloisters lest she jump from the windows. If it is not necessary, I would ask that you not make her relive whatever obscene thing befell her.”

“It is necessary,” Paul said brusquely.

I said, “But you will please stay with us, Mother?”

“If you wish. But let us go from here. Perhaps the garden. Our community will be in the refectory.”

We sat beneath an arbor where Maria brought a tray with bread and cheese and preserves. When the prioress tried to detain her, she went through some extraordinary grimaces which the nun interpreted: “It is the donkey—she wishes to take water to it.”

“It is very kind,” I said.

While she was gone, Paul and I ate the preserve. The bread was fresh and delicious, the cheese, to me, rancid. The nun explained the community routine. They wove and prayed and grew most of the food they needed. At one time they had painted icons after the ancient masters but, on discovery that their work was being sold as antiques, discontinued the practice. Now they worked entirely on native costumes for which there was a market.

Maria returned. The nun told her that the blind man wished to talk with her.

“Come and give me your hand,” Paul said. “I am a friend. I am Paul Stephanou.”

The woman approached him very slowly, step after lingering step, but she did not take her eyes from his face from the moment he said his name. Nor did she take the hand outstretched to her. Instead she touched his face, his eyelids, ever so gently with her fingers.

Paul lifted his face. “I too have known Demetrios,” he said.

Maria, with utter indifference to the presence of the nun and me, bent over him and put her lips to one eye, then the other. Paul caught her face and held it until his lips had touched her mouth.

I clamped my own mouth shut to keep from crying out. I did not look at the nun.

Maria dropped to her knees at Paul’s feet, and sat back on her haunches. He took her hand in his and said, “You will press my hand once for yes, twice for no, to the questions I am going to ask you. Do you understand?”

He then spoke to me: “Professor? You will come close to me also.”

I sat on the ground beside his chair. The nun remained in her chair.

Paul said, “This man was with me, Maria. He was Mr. Webb’s friend. Do you remember?”

I saw the single pressure of her hand on his.

“First of all, do you have the book Mr. Webb gave you that night?”

Yes. She turned and pointed to the nun.

“We have kept a book handwritten in English for her,” the nun said.

“It is well,” Paul said. Then to Maria: “Hold my hand. Did you speak in Italian with Mr. Webb?”

Yes.

“And then told the General what he said?”

Yes.

“I want to ask these questions right. Help me, Professor.”

“Did they talk about Demetrios?” I prompted.

Yes.

“And Mr. Webb’s wife, did they speak of her?”

Yes.

“After we see the journal, Paul, we may not need to ask Maria any more questions on the subject.”

“It is so,” he said. “Maria, did the General ask you to guide Mr. Webb down from the camp?”

Yes. Without his asking it, she drew a crossroads in the dust beside her, forgetting perhaps that he could not see it.

“To the crossroads,” I said. “She has drawn the sign.”

“Did you see Demetrios kill Mr. Webb?”

No.

It was the first “no,” and the only one where “yes” was imperative. Paul repeated the question. The answer was the same. Maria was pointing frantically at her ears.

“You heard the shot?” I said.

Yes.

“And ran away?”

Yes. She again made the grimaces and the terrible breathy noise of inarticulation.

I could not think of the word in Greek for “scream,” “shout.” I said it in English and Paul translated.

Yes.

“Did you go back then?”

Yes.

“And then you saw Demetrios?”

No. She pointed to the sun and shook her head. Darkness.

“There was darkness,” I said.

Again the grimace of screaming, the motion of finding Webb’s prone body. By a terrible series of trial and error pantomimes and questions we learned that she had herself been caught from behind as she bent over Webb, and then thrust upon the ground. Finally, while the thumbs were on her throat forcing open her mouth and the protrusion of her tongue, she had seen the face of her assailant, and had recognized him. Demetrios.

There was only one more question I wished to ask, at least until we had seen the journal, but how to ask it? I said to Paul, “We must know to whom Webb instructed her to give the book, and why she did not do it.”

The answer was very simple: to me, Jabez Emory. If anything had happened to Webb, she was to find me when I reached Ioannina and give the book to me. She had not been allowed to return to her cottage for many months and it was there she had buried the notebook, I think as a symbol of the evil that had befallen her.

A few minutes later the nun, with Maria nodding consent, gave the notebook into my hands.

There were pages of notes on Webb’s earlier observations in a shorthand of his own. I give here a paraphrase of what I read to Paul since I cannot remember it verbatim. It commenced:

Dear Emory,

You sleep there like a child. I look at you and ask by what right such innocence? It is not enough to say you are an American. I hope you will never read this, but if you do I am counting on you to place its information—where? You must decide. Then you will not be a child any more.

I have been sent here to my death, I do believe. I carried the instructions on my own person, neatly sewn in the collar of my coat by a loving and treacherous wife. Knowing this I hope to escape. My reluctant host has provided a guide to whom I am confiding this notebook, and which I shall take back if I am safely delivered.

I met Margaret two years ago in Iran. Several foreign nationals were being held by the Iranian Communists and their Soviet advisers, charged with cooperation with the Germans before the Allies moved in. For a reason then obscure to me the Soviets named me as a satisfactory intermediary between them and the British-American authorities seeking the return of one of these prisoners, Margaret Clitheroe. My own government urged me to serve, an irony I hope will not be lost if this is to be my epitaph.

Among the other “prisoners” was a Greek army captain, Alexis Frontis, whom we have met today under the name Demetrios. These prisoners, I am now convinced, were one and all trained Soviet agents. Their Iranian captivity was their training period. I can think of no other reason for Demetrios to have been in Iran.

It was sheer chance that I met him. I had come to the internment camp (actually a converted resort-hotel) for a preliminary interview with Margaret herself. A guard was present. The Greek walked in on us. He apologized, but lingered at the door. The guard did not order him out. Margaret introduced him, a man liberated from Auschwitz, but not at liberty. The Russians had charges against him. Margaret told me afterwards that he had been permitted to teach her Greek. I remarked on the leniency of her jailors. She said that all the prisoners were people of some distinction. She was herself the daughter of an Anglo-Persian Oil official, and she believed herself to be more a hostage than a prisoner, held to the Russian purpose of achieving political concessions in exchange for her release. This did prove to be the case—on the face of things. I now remember wondering when I met him if there was a personal relationship between Margaret and the Greek, for him to have been curious about me. Still unanswered.

There were several lines crossed out here, Webb uncertain of the order in which to place the incidents. One of them I include now in brackets although he did not restore it:

[I should say that when I reached Athens I reported to the government having seen Alexis Frontis, and vouching to them that he was a Russian prisoner.]

Margaret was released after several weeks of negotiation. We had become friends. In the early days of her freedom we became lovers. Meanwhile I had been ordered to Athens by my newspaper. We were married at the British Embassy the day before I left, Margaret following me a week later. I remember her comment on how fortunate it was that she had learned a little Greek.

I will not condemn my wife. I have loved her and I thought that she loved me, a man twenty-seven years her senior, and one of obvious conceit to have assumed her love. If I return to Athens I shall—what shall I do? I was about to say I would take her back to America and protect her even from herself. But that will not be possible, her boldness in espionage having brought me to this turn. To protect her I shall stand myself accused of being a Soviet agent. If I knew why she serves them I would tell it here. I hope it is conviction. That would not be so bad. I had thought I was making a liberal of her, converting her from the Right! I should have known in our own relationship that a woman of her pride could be humble only by an act of will. And once she told me she could not bear the company of fools unless they crowned her Folly. There is not time, but I would feel better, knowing.

I must set down the beginning of the present situation. I have been aware for several weeks that I was under surveillance of both Greek and American Intelligence. Are you one of them, Emory? I no longer think so. But I did at the time we left Athens. I had thought so from the beginning of your knightly attentions to my wife. I was hoping that you were, for I could think of no better way to lay the ghost of suspicion than to take with me one of the suspicious. If you are an agent, then you and your superiors have been no less deceived than have I. To me it no longer matters. My colleagues have been questioned, my mail has been delayed, numerous things, but nothing in the open. I told Margaret I thought I was under security observation. She then confessed to having herself been interrogated about me by British Intelligence. I was furious. As always under attack I wanted to counterattack. I was fed up also with playing puppet to the Athens regime, manufacturing stories to the pattern of their propaganda. I said there ought to be some way of covering the rebel cause, and if I could find it I would blast my way out of Athens. Something like that. I spoke of leaving and re-entering Greece by way of Yugoslavia. Margaret begged me not to do anything precipitous. She said the government’s attitude toward the foreign press was likely to change. She had it from very close to the horse’s mouth. Like most people of her class, Margaret was not long in Athens before drifting into the social set. The family connections—hell, the money connections, were already made. I said it was a long way from the horse’s mouth to a horse’s ass like me. It was our first good quarrel, and, like most quarrels, I thought afterwards, it had been argued for the wrong reasons. It was also our last quarrel. Within a week Paul Stephanou approached me and said he understood I wished to interview the ELAS leader. I had made no secret of it. Other correspondents felt the same. I was honored to be chosen. A good reporter must have entry everywhere. But when I saw Demetrios waiting for us tonight, the whole sickening picture came clear, and I knew I had walked into a trap. I was not meant to leave alive. I have been such a successful cover, such a magnificent one. And if I die, her guilt will be buried with me in my grave, if you so choose. When I was trying to figure out why I was under surveillance Margaret even suggested that it might be due to my having been the intermediary in Iran. And I thought it might be so. My God, I am on the point of admiring her!

My first thought on recognizing Demetrios was that my only chance lay with Markos himself. I demanded through Stephanou, when Demetrios left the room, to speak to Markos alone with only the translator present. Markos did not want us there at all. He made that plain enough. I was not sure I was going to get to see him until the woman, Maria, came for me and asked if I spoke Italian. I knew then that Markos was not himself entirely sure of Demetrios.

And by then I also knew that I had been used as an actual carrier. I suspected it when Demetrios remained out of the room so long. I later discovered the neat slit in my coat collar.

One thing has saved me if I am saved—and for what am I saved? To accuse my wife? Or to be silent, myself accused? One thing. It was I who told Markos that I had carried, without my knowledge, some information to his camp. This was some two hours after we had arrived. Demetrios had made no mention of such information to him. I told Markos the circumstances under which I had previously met Demetrios—and my wife. Markos had not expected Demetrios when he arrived two days ago. He came on Soviet instructions. I think Markos is still waiting to learn why he is here. I have told him what I believe, that if I die, a presumed Soviet agent, Margaret is clear, and that Demetrios had probably come on instructions passed through diplomatic pouch. Markos said he would confront Demetrios in my presence, and if what I said were true the woman would be waiting for me in the fourth cottage from ours at one-thirty in the morning. You will remain in camp until morning. No one is to know how I have left here. If I am alive I will be watching for you at the Ioannina road when Stephanou brings you down.

While we were eating, Markos asked Demetrios if it were true that he had found me a useful carrier of information. Demetrios denied it at first, I suppose protesting such discussion in my presence. Then he produced the three strips of binding cloth containing the neatly coded intelligence. The code was in French which the General did not like either. Demetrios went for his code book. Through the woman Markos said to me, “He will tell me also no more than he thinks I have to know.” I am sure he believes there is a conspiracy against him. He does not trust the Soviet promises, but he does not dare to offend them and Demetrios is their man.

Demetrios returned and worked out the code while Markos and I sat silent. I am not sure, but I believe the intelligence to be almost entirely political. It was not translated for my benefit. If the woman is waiting it will not be because Markos is sentimental about me. He will believe himself betrayed also. History must write it if it is so, but my last dispatch before leaving Athens gives my belief that the civil war is almost over. Markos knows that Stalin will not stand by the Greeks. No more than if he had the choice would Markos stand by Stalin.

It is ten past one.

Of all countries, this troubled land is the one I wanted foremost to write truly and deeply about. I suppose it was arrogant of me to think I alone could do it, and that is what brought me here. I would have told the story—not of Markos or those who will supplant him—but of young Paul Stephanou who will either be tried for treason or will live in exile from the land, the people he loves dearer than life. And writing this I would be called a Communist anyway, and I do not think you, friend Emory, would gainsay it. Which is as sad as anything I can think of now.

I have one last thought to put down here and no time to examine it first. If I am going to my death, and that is what I am writing against, it is probably under an inner compulsion to do so. Sometimes men die when and because they want to. I have said I hoped you would not read this. I am not even sure of that.

Sleep well. I started out with you thinking you were doing a dirty job. Now there is a far dirtier one to be done. As the boys say up there in the sky, Over!

[Alexander Webb]

I sat in silence, the notebook in my hand.

From deep within the cloister came the sound of the scraping of plates, then the murmur of prayer. The nuns lived by oil or candlelight. There were no light or communication wires. The sky when I looked up into it was the lucid mixture of pearl and gold that deepens in luster as the sun nears its setting.

Maria, sitting at Paul’s feet, still held fast to his hand.

“Are you happy here, Maria?” I asked her.

Paul passed along her response. No and yes.

He asked her, “Would you like to go home?”

Yes!

I wondered why, but I said, “In a few days, Maria, perhaps the priest from Kalpaki will come for you.”

Paul said, “Professor, I wish to accuse him tonight. I will put on the costume again, and when all the other singers have gone in, I will arrive late and be admitted.”

I thought of Elsa and the hotel room arrangement. By the time we returned to Ioannina everyone would be at the festival. With Elsa’s help later it might work. And I had my own moment of confrontation before me. This had to be the night. There might not be another.

“Of what will you accuse him, Paul?”

“Of the greatest crime, a Greek’s betrayal of a friend of Greece. And, Professor! I want to take Maria with us to bear witness.”

I thought of all the reasons not to take her, the delay, the danger—suppose we should break down on the road near Kalpaki, suppose the military should be on the lookout for me—I thought of them all, but I said, “Tell her, and if she wishes to go, we shall go together.”

27

AT ELEVEN, AS ELSA had promised in a note left for me with the key to her room, she returned to the hotel from the festival before going on to the reception. I don’t know what she had expected, knocking and opening the room door, but the three of us waited: Maria, scrubbed and combed but dark as a gypsy, her black eyes glowing with wonder, excitement and a childlike love for Paul. She wore a bodice of virgin white, gold-embroidered by the nuns, and the long full skirt of interwoven black and red. Paul sat in the mountain costume from which I had brushed most of the dirt. As I solemnly introduced them, explaining that the woman had no tongue and Paul no sight, Paul rose smiling and said, “But I have speech and your own language, Madame Elsa, and I thank you for your kindness, which is presumptuous of me, but I thank you all the same.”

Elsa bit her lip, seeing them, took both their hands briefly in hers and turned to me.

“You are beautiful tonight,” I said. She wore a long dress of gold lamé.

“So are you,” she said, distinctly embarrassed. I wore my dinner clothes, white jacket.

“Were all our friends at the festival?” I asked.

“All,” she said, and directly to the point: “Colonel Frontis is out of uniform. Helmi pointed him out to me. He’s wearing a dinner jacket, and he walks always near the Princess, as though about to anticipate her slightest need.”

I gave Elsa a package. I had wrapped Webb’s journal in white paper. “I’m going to ask you to keep this for me, Elsa, until I ask for it. If by any chance things go wrong, read it afterwards. It’s Alexander Webb’s journal.”

She was carrying a beaded purse, one that dangled pouchlike from a golden chain. Folded, the package fit, protruding a little at the top. It would do.

“You will be late arriving, Elsa,” I said, “later even than me. Can you drive a Vauxhall?”

“It was made in England. So was I,” she said.

“Thank God for that. It will seem odd, your driving up dressed like that, but when your passengers get out with you, it will be distraction enough.”

I had driven past and around the Chaconis residence, returning to Ioannina. It was one of the few great houses left from Byron’s time. The party would be in the garden which was hung with lanterns, the reception of guests first on the balcony to which there were two outside stairways in the Epirot style.

“We shall go in a few minutes now,” I went on. “We’ll find a place for you to wait in the car with Maria and Paul. I must go in directly and choose my time to reintroduce myself to the former Mrs. Webb.

“The entertainers are due at midnight. You will see them entering the gate, but you will wait and listen. When the singing commences, drive up to the gate. Someone will take the car, I’m sure. Otherwise just leave it. Maria will lead Paul in and find him a place near the singers….” Maria was holding Paul’s hand.

“Yes,” Paul said. “It is understood.”

“And I will come to you, Elsa, as quickly as I can.”

“And God be with us all,” Elsa said.

The limousines were still arriving when we neared the Chaconis house. A policeman waved us on. I hadn’t counted on that, foolishly, nor on the security men we could spot stationed around the block

“They’re parking cars in the schoolyard,” Elsa said. “It’s only eleven-thirty. We had better drive in with the rest and choose our own place. If Maria and Paul can wait, I’ll go in with you and come back to them when the entertainers arrive.”

Paul agreed. Waiting in the front seat, Elsa might have attracted attention.

No one paid us the slightest heed. I parked the Vauxhall near the street between two cars so that there was no room on either side for another. We sat in silence, listening, when I cut the motor. The murmur of voices, talk and laughter, carried across the street, even the tinkle of glassware. Singing would be clearly audible.

Paul said, “Perhaps, Madame Elsa, you will not need to come for us at all.”

“I shall come just to make sure you are admitted. I have command if I need to use it.”

“Paul,” I said, my last council, “be brief.”

“Brief—and eloquent. But who will understand me? I shall be speaking the language of the people.”

“You will be understood,” I said. “It is the language also of poets and you are not the only poet in modern Greece. I can say this because we are as brothers, but it is also the truth.”

I clapped my hand on his, and then, touching my fingers to my lips, I reached back and touched them to Maria’s. As Vasso’s mother had done that long ago day of my arrival in Kaléa, Maria caught my hand and kissed it.

The garden was crowded with people, clustered in little groups in that post-theater animation where everyone wants to talk at once. Jewelry sparkled, as did the lips of the women. People coming down the steps from the balcony were met by the waiters with trays of champagne. Helmi and Elena were on the stairs before us, among those waiting to be received. There was the fragrance of sage in the air, and smoke from the open spit where, at the far end of the garden, white-capped cooks were broiling racks of lamb chops.

I could not make conversation. Elsa understood. She kept looking at her watch, her eyes always going from it to the gate.

“Everything will be a little behind schedule,” I said. But I too kept thinking of the companions in the car, Paul’s asking questions of Maria and the only answers, the silent pressure, yes or no. “Was Cassandra good?” I asked by a kind of desperate effort.

“Remarkably. But then everyone was. And there never was an anti-war play like The Trojan Women.”

“A curious choice,” I murmured.

“There was a controversy, I understand. A part of the committee wanted Andromache. One wonders why.”

“There’s a reference in it to the kings of Epirus.”

“Oh.”

Step by agonizing step, we drew nearer to our host and his distinguished guests. I could feel the sweat on my back and little beads of perspiration glistened on Elsa’s upper lip. She fumbled in her purse, groping round the folded package for her handkerchief.

Then, on the next step, standing to the side, I was able to see the Princess, and beyond her as she turned to meet the approaching guest, Margaret came within full compass of my gaze. Her head was high on that beautifully arched neck, and crowned by the golden hair. Had time stood still for her that she had lost none of her beauty, none of that unassailable serenity of mien? She seemed to look no different from the night I had danced with her in Athens.

I felt myself grinding my teeth. I still could not believe her evil.

Elsa moved before me, the line quickening. She presented both herself and me to Deputy Chaconis and Madame Chaconis, who shook our hands and presented us to the Princess. That gracious lady asked me if I were the Byronic scholar she had been told would be present tonight.

“I am a student of Byron, yes, Your Highness.” And all the while I felt Margaret’s eyes upon me.

“Perhaps you will visit us and tell us of your work.”

“Thank you, Your Highness.” I bowed with painful awkwardness and turned as Elsa said, surely a test of her own metal, “Countess Braschi, may I present Professor John Eakins?”

“Professor John Eakins,” Margaret repeated, her eyes and mine meeting and holding as she gave me her hand. There was no question but that she had recognized me instantly, and if she was in any way disconcerted it showed only in the briefest moistening of her lips. “May I present my husband, Signor Braschi?”

Braschi, small, dark and elegant, gave me a firm handshake. It somehow steadied me, the brief thought flitting through my mind that he too had been beguiled.

Margaret said, “Is this your first visit to Greece, Professor?”

“In my pursuit of Byron, yes.”

“And will you be here long?”

“Alas, only until tomorrow.”

“Then we must talk—perhaps when the line is finished. Byron was one of my earliest enchantments.”

The official receiving line ended with the Braschis, but a few feet on, as Elsa and I proceeded toward the stairs, two men were talking, their backs to us. As we approached they turned and bowed, both clicking their heels.

“Colonel Alexis Frontis,” the shorter of them said in self-introduction, his hand extended. His face had the fineness and the coldness of a newly minted coin despite the smile he shot at us. I shook his hand and murmured my name and Elsa’s. Frontis introduced us to the commanding general of the Northern Greek forces. Nothing in Frontis’ eyes gave any sign of recognition. The line had been long and we were late. If he had not recognized me, the next few minutes of my life were in Margaret’s keeping.

At the bottom of the steps Elsa and I accepted champagne, touched glasses and smiled at the trembling of one another’s hands. I moved with her through the guests to where we could see both the garden entrance and the balcony. Musicians were arriving, but not yet the singers. When the last of the guests had passed beyond the steps, I too returned to the balcony. The Princess had gone indoors. Others were talking in small groups. Colonel Frontis was with the Braschi group. Margaret saw me at once, I thought. I lit a cigarette and stood near the railing where I could see her while seeming to look down on the festive garden. She and another woman withdrew together, probably on Margaret’s suggestion that they attend their makeup.

At the door Margaret stood aside for the woman to precede her, and then, half-turning to close the door, nodded to me. After a moment I followed. Her companion had gone on. We found a drawing room unoccupied and off it a small balcony which protruded over the side street.

Margaret’s first words were, “It must have taken great courage to return to Ioannina.”

“Byron came here. I’m simply following his trail.”

“Is that all, truly?”

“One can’t help remembering,” I said.

“I can and have,” she said. “I have tried to live a useful life in Greece.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“And you also, I should gather—a scholar and professor. Have you married?”

“No. One wants to have his own identity to marry.”

“And you’ve come back to find it?”

“I am content now not to marry.”

“As was I,” she said, “not to remarry for a long time.”

I watched an ancient bus turn into the street. It came toward us.

“I supposed you to be in America,” she said. “I might even have written you—except that I did not know to whom to write.” She tested the balcony rail, then leaned on it, her back to the street.

The bus passed below us. I recognized the costumes of the singers from Kalpaki.

“What would you have written?”

“That I was sorry for what had happened to you…. I shouldn’t have written it. I only say so now having sometimes thought I might.”

“You knew I hadn’t killed your husband?”

Her face was in the shadow until she lifted it to look at me. “I never believed you had.”

“Your sworn testimony was not precisely clear on that point,” I said dryly.

She looked at me and put her hand on my arm to turn me to where she could see my face in the light. “Have you waited all these years, Jabez Emory, to say that to me?” It carried a sort of melancholic reproach.

“I have waited all these years to ask you what you believed to be the truth in your husband’s death.”

“You have made the proper distinctions… ‘what I believed.’” She drew a deep breath. In spite of myself my eyes dropped to her bosom. She wore a sapphire set round by diamond chips and pearls. It lay nested just where the swell of her breasts commenced. As soon as she spoke I looked at her eyes. They had something of the color of the sapphire, the light from the drawing room shining in them.

“I am going to assume that when you have heard what I say now you will wish no more than I to have the matter publicly reopened. It was a burden neither of us deserved, you the least….” Again the deep breath. “I am quite sure Alexander Webb was a Communist agent. I had known him to be a sympathizer when we were married. In those days it did not appall me. It was alien but not beyond my understanding. I must be honest and say that shortly before I met him—in Iran—I had been indiscreet enough to associate with certain Germans. I won’t go into this now. It is relevant only in that while I didn’t think precisely in those terms, there was something of the quest for exoneration in my marriage to him.”

Did ever a man hear anything more plausible, even to the use of circumstance?

She went on: “One of the questions that was always asked during the endless speculation following his death was why he had chosen so difficult a route to reach the north of Greece when, they said, he might simply have flown from Athens to Yugoslavia and re-entered Greece across the Yugoslav or Albanian border. He could not. The American authorities would not have permitted it. He was already under surveillance. It was hoped that he would lead them to his Communist contacts in Athens. I did not know this at the time. I only knew that he was under surveillance. In leaving as he did, he escaped them. Going north, he did not intend to return to Athens, or to me, or to the United States. He was on his way behind the Iron Curtain.”

“But he turned back,” I said.

“Did he? I don’t know that, Jabez. Perhaps you do. I only know that his body was found on the road to Ioannina.”

I ran my hand across my eyes, trying to remember, to reorient myself once more. “The letter he mailed to you from Patras, Margaret: in it he said, ‘I am taking young Jabez Emory with me. What do you think of that, my dear?’ What did that mean to you?”

“We had questioned, he and I, the possibility of your being an American agent,” she said.

An echo chamber could have given back the words of Webb’s journal no more accurately.

“And did you show that letter to the American authorities?”

“My dear Jabez, it came to me only after they had intercepted it.”

“Then one question, Margaret: why were you silent during the trial?”

“I did not testify against you. I simply told the truth of what I believed to be the rather touching friendship between you and me.”

“But concerning Webb,” I said.

“You seem to forget what I thought once was amply clear to you: I loved Alexander Webb. He believed in what he was doing. And this I said to the American inquisitors who questioned me many times and then chose, for reasons of their own, to remain as silent as myself.”

I realized how convincing she would have sounded to those inquisitors. She went on: “It was only after the trial when I approached the King through friends to ask clemency for you that I was given to understand that clemency had already been arranged. Then I knew the meaning of your so-called escape.”

“Who killed him, Margaret?”

“Do you know? Does anyone know?”

“Yes.”

She waited, her brows arched a little.

“He will be accused tonight,” I said.

“Not tonight surely, Jabez.” Then: “Do I know him?”

I said nothing.

“To spare the Princess—to spare all of us this harsh thing, surely tomorrow is time enough? After all these years, Jabez?”

“No,” I said quietly, avoiding her eyes.

“You must realize I could call out now and accuse you as the convicted killer of Alexander Webb.”

“It would not matter.”

“And you know I would not do it. But tell me who he is at least.”

As if far, far away—or on a turned-down radio—I could hear the singing of the chorus from Kalpaki.

“I should be with the Princess,” Margaret said, “and with my husband. They will be looking for me.”

“Then you must go and join them,” I said, and indicated the way for her to precede me.

“Do I deserve this cruelty from you? Who will thank you for your belated intelligence that will destroy so gentle and felicitous an occasion?”

“Is that all it will destroy, Margaret?”

“Ah, I see,” she said slowly, and, moving into the house, “One wonders then who sent you here.”

God in heaven, was there no way to break her? If I had not read Webb’s journal with my own eyes…. She must realize that I had recognized Demetrios, that he would be named Webb’s killer. But of course! The moment she saw me she became divorced from the association. Demetrios, accused, would stand alone.

I watched her run down the balcony steps and slip into the chair beside the Princess, before whom the chorus was now performing. Maria and Paul were slowly making their way toward them through the scattered guests.

Demetrios-Frontis was standing behind the Princess. He held Margaret’s chair until she was seated. Then he turned and, putting on his glasses, stared up at me. I think it was in that instant that he realized where he had seen me before.

I ran down the other steps and found Elsa not far from the gate. Behind her were two men of the sort she claimed to be able to recognize instantly as Secret Service. As she moved forward, so did they, and I suspected she had somehow recruited them to our side. Which, after all, was the Princess’ own.

The chorus was singing one of the interminable Epirot ballads. As I reached Elsa’s side, the two men moved in close. Elsa signalled to them. They stood at ease. She did indeed have command when she needed it. Frontis began to edge along the back of the chairs. The gate was behind us. Elsa I heard say to one of the men as Frontis neared us, “He must stay.” Whether they understood her words, her gesture was emphatic. Both men moved into Frontis’ path, and one of them, politely, indicated that the gentleman must go back to his place. Frontis squared his shoulders, but like a soldier he returned to his place behind the Princess. I took Webb’s diary from Elsa and when the song was ended moved quickly to Paul’s side. I had not come too soon for Maria. Her eyes were wild. I saw with what difficulty Paul was holding her hand. She had seen Demetrios.

The applause had not altogether died out when Paul raised his voice. He sang a phrase of the Greek National Anthem, his rich deep baritone silencing the movement of guests and the uncertain clamor that had arisen among the singers when they saw him. One of the chorus came toward him—I should suppose the man responsible to Demetrios for Paul’s captivity. I stepped between them and said, even as Elsa’s friend had said to Demetrios, “Go back to your place.” He obeyed me.

“Your Royal Highness and gracious guests,” Paul started, “grant this poor minstrel a moment’s listening. You will see that I am blind as was Homer to whom I crave no further comparison save that as he was a Greek, I am a Greek.

“Homer sang of glory, but I must sing of infamy. I come here not because I would have chosen to interrupt your feast, your music—but because if I had not come tonight, I might not have lived to name this evil who is among you.

“I will leave to your own conscience what knowledge you may have of him today and what in your hearts you have expected of him, but let me tell you, you are deceived. He pretends to be all things to all men. He, the ruthless hunter of Communists, is by the Communists revered. I and they know him as Demetrios….”

Little sounds of shock staccatoed through the garden: there would be those, aside from some of the chorus members, who had heard the name. It was his presence that shocked them.

“To most of you,” Paul’s voice rang out, “he is Colonel Alexis Frontis, and it is he we have come to accuse….”

I watched only Margaret. I saw her reach for her husband’s hand and clasp it tightly. She did not look at him or anyone else. It was now a matter of facing up, of the long beginning again, as she would be reckoning it, the simulation of shock, the consolement of Braschi, whom I suspected to be a man of honor. In a way, I thought, it was a pity to have to use Webb’s diary. To leave her as she now supposed herself, seemingly deceived and having to play it out, perhaps for years, would be a kind of punishment for a woman who had tuned her beauty and her talent to their perfect pitch. She was like a singer about to come onstage only to find the orchestra putting away its instruments and going home.

Paul stood like a rock until the murmurous shock subsided. And Frontis stood, his arms folded, a little smile on his lips.

“By command of Demetrios, whom you know as Frontis, I was blinded. By his own hand was this unfortunate deprived of the tongue God gave her….” He pushed Maria forward and she, poor simple one, opened her mouth and did a macabre little step and bow so that women moaned to see her, and the Princess’ hand went to her own mouth in horror.

“Our crime was the danger of our bearing witness against him.

“His crime, the murder of a friend of Greece: it is of this I would accuse him now. I will leave treason to those who understand it.

“As neither the woman nor I could have testified without him, there is another who was present and is with us here. I have no wish to prolong this confrontation longer than I need to convince you of the necessity to apprehend the murderer now, Your Highness, and to safeguard us, the people’s humble witnesses.

“By his military record Colonel Frontis was taken prisoner of war by the Nazis, interned in Auschwitz, charged by the Soviets with Nazi collaboration, and held until 1951. But, Your Highness, we, your witnesses, know him, as Demetrios, to have been with the insurgent leader, Markos, not many miles from here in 1948.

“And the man of whose murder we accuse him left documentation of this dual identity which we now give into Your Highness’ hands.”

I gave the package to Maria to give to the Princess and took Paul’s arm as well as hers. There was, Elsa told me afterwards, a considerable clamor and moving forward, as though with the three of us, of the now murmurous people who suddenly seemed to have felt all along that there was in Frontis a hidden perfidy. Elsa thought the growing temper dangerous. I would not have known. My concentration on getting the business over with was too intense. It was a long walk, those few steps, and there was at the end of it such a beautiful irony: Maria tried to give Webb’s journal to Margaret, who finally took it in her hand and passed it to the Princess.

The Princess did not open it. She spoke to the man beside her, the General to whom Frontis had introduced Elsa and myself. He got up and taking Frontis by the arm moved quickly to the gate, several of the security police falling in behind them.

“We shall investigate,” the Princess said, looking at me. She was pale and severe, but utterly composed. “And before you leave this house, we shall provide what protection may be necessary.”

We drew back, Maria and Paul on either side of me. I did not look at Margaret. I feared to see an ancient face to have replaced the mask of beauty.

Epilogue

I WRITE THIS IN my office at the university, having finally put away the Byron book which I am not able to write. I hope to go back to Kaléa this summer, and perhaps there take it up again. I have been home for several months.

The trial of Alexis Frontis was brief, as brief as my own, although its preparation took somewhat longer. He was tried for treason by military court martial, convicted and shot.

No charges have been made against Margaret. There is no evidence save Webb’s letter to me and that, by legal measure, is insufficient without corroboration. Frontis denied the connection, admitting only that they had met in Iran as Webb alleged, when both were Russian internees. He also denied having killed Webb, and defied the court to call the tongueless woman whose sometime madness even the nuns admitted. He denied giving Paul the gun… and bade the court examine the trial records at the time of Webb’s death.

So in the end he was convicted by my testimony to his presence in Markos’ camp in 1948.

I have said I hope to go back to Kaléa. Shall I be admitted to the Kingdom of Greece? I wonder.

I have letters from Paul written in Michael’s hand. Maria returned to the nuns, but that was even before Frontis went to trial. Paul speaks of when we shall visit her.

Elsa will be here this spring for the publication of her latest novel. Shepherd is again “iffish” about making the trip so that I am looking forward to her coming.

The twenty-first of February, the anniversary of Epirot independence, has come and passed in joyous peace.

I have been sitting here tonight wondering if I should return the money to the American foundation sponsoring my Byron research. I have decided against it. They have had their money’s worth. How I came to realize it: several weeks ago when I was working on this—shall I call it novelized journal?—I remembered something Margaret said that night as we were going in from the balcony. She said, “One wonders then who sent you here.” I have since queried my sponsors and the chancellor of the university, and I have made a belated discovery which you will perhaps have anticipated: my grant was government-approved.

About the Author

Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. The author of seventeen crime novels, including the Mrs. Norris Series and the Julie Hayes Series; three historical novels; and numerous short stories; she has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and is a founder of Sisters in Crime.

Born in Chicago in 1916, she grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Illinois and graduated from college into the Great Depression. She found employment as a magic-show promoter, which took her to small towns all over the country, and subsequently worked on the WPA Writers Project in advertising and industrial relations. During World War II, she directed the benefits program of a major meatpacking company for its more than eighty thousand employees in military service. She was married for forty-seven years to the late Harry Davis, an actor, with whom she traveled abroad extensively. She currently lives in Palisades, New York.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1966 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

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