1
The next morning I did not talk to Cosmina about the fiasco over the gondola. What was the point?
Now it was a new cruise, and my attitude was improving. This was my eighth day on Wind Surf. My head was still spinning from all the different places I'd seen. The list was distinguished, but exhausting: Athens to Santorini to Elba to Corsica to Sicily to Rimini to Venice. Today, Corfu. Tomorrow? How 'bout Malta, just to mix things up? It was just too much to see. Suddenly I envied blind old Gertie. And none of that newness was taking into account a new home with new people and a new job.
My helping Cosmina with organizing her crowds went well. There were many shore excursions for an island so large as Corfu, and Cosmina had her hands full. She was too stressed to cause any drama—unrelated to work, that is. Cosmina thought she was decisive and bold, but really she was just hyperactive while things spun out of control. To be fair, during her panics she did move particularly fast, but it looked exceedingly unprofessional. Jitters do not equate efficiency.
But we soon found our balance, wherein I kept a necessarily relaxed commentary running on the microphone while she buzzed ever faster behind the scenes. After two hours of this, the final batch of guests had been safely placed onto their tour bus and Cosmina could wind down. This meant she could snack on cocktail onions—a decidedly strange daily ritual of hers—and suck down half a pack of cigarettes.
Smoking on Surf was one of the strangest aspects to my new home: crew could smoke in guest areas. Surf was a ship with a different attitude—and no space. The crew mess was so tiny that there was simply no room for people, food, and smoke, so the latter was only allowed after hours for the seamen denied guest access. As there was no crew bar, staff wishing to smoke had to mingle with guests. This applied to drinking, as well. Cosmina's preferred smoking location was at a table under the port steps outside the Compass Rose, the stern lounge open to the sea.
"Join me in port?" Cosmina asked after a loving suck of smoke-tainted air. "I know a great restaurant. Overlooks the sea."
"Sounds nice," I said. "But I can't. I'm going out today with Faye."
"Oh, yes, of course," Cosmina said with obvious contempt. "Ms. America."
"Dr. America," I teasingly corrected. "I know it probably sounds lame, but we're both big James Bond fans. They filmed For Your Eyes Only on Corfu. We thought it would be fun to sightsee with a theme."
"So she claimed," Cosmina said dismissively. She tilted her head to the side to light another cigarette. "She asked if I could arrange a car. Couldn't help her."
"A taxi would probably be better anyway," I said. "A local would know the spots. Faye found a list online."
Cosmina reviewed me and inhaled deeply.
"Uh huh," she finally grunted. "James Bond."
"Yes," I said simply.
"They film in any hotel rooms?" she said, smirking.
"Stop," I implored.
It was obvious Cosmina didn't believe me, but all she said was, "You kids have fun."
2
One of my favorite things about James Bond movies is the alluring beauty contained therein; not just in the particularly exotic and beautiful parts of the world, but more so in the particularly exotic and beautiful parts of the women. It didn't start that way, of course. As a wonder-filled youth I couldn't possibly imagine anything more exciting than a car chase in India, unless it was a boat chase in China. After a few more years I couldn't possibly imagine anything more exciting than a Russian secret agent codenamed XXX, unless it was an airplane pilot named Pussy Galore. Oh, yes, how could any teen not be profoundly struck by Dr. Goodhead, or Ms. Onatopp? In all that suave coolness, my favorite film had always been For Your Eyes Only, even as my favorite Bond girl was its Melina Havelock. A drab name, true, but there was nothing mundane about a French model shooting a crossbow.
Each time I watched it, the film always grew more exciting as it progressed. By the end I was overwhelmed with fantasies of exploring sunken shipwrecks in the Ionian Sea, ski slope assassinations in the Alps, pistachio nut smugglers, babes galore, and finally an impossible assault of an enclave perched atop thousand-foot rocks in Metéora.
Faye had different memories of the decades-long series, of course, but they were no less important to her. How we discovered each others' love of the films was quite by accident. Her favorite Bond film had always been Moonraker—for some unfathomable reason—a fact discovered during our return to the ship after the gondola debacle. She had spent the day searching for St. Mark's Piazetta and the Venini glassworks, both of which were featured in the film. I had excitedly shared that I had just recently toured the monasteries at Metéora, where they had filmed the climax of For Your Eyes Only. Both of us expressed frustration that our companions had simply not been cool enough to appropriately geek out. But with Corfu the very next day, problem solved! Faye procured a list from the internet containing all the filming locations across the island.
Corfu was about forty miles long and shaped like a giant backwards comma. Because it floated in the Ionian Sea, rather than the Aegean with its bare, rocky islands like Santorini, Corfu was quite lush. In fact, the entire Ionian coast of Greece was excessively green. Trees of olive, fig, and pomegranate were everywhere, as were grapevines. Oodles of kumquats, too. Thus Corfu's beauty nourished more than just the soul.
Faye and I began with a walking tour of the huge Old Fortress that protected Corfu Town from marauders and pirates. To say it was impressive was an understatement: a solid heap of stone, bulky yet lofty, dominating a rocky peninsula that juts into the sea. Over the last dozen centuries the peninsula had lost all semblance of its natural beginning. The first defensive walls and accompanying Byzantine castle came up in about the 8th century. Later the Venetians took over. When the Turks came knocking, the Venetians thought it was time to up their defensive game. This conclusion came rather late, for the Turks had already conquered most of the island—to the tune of whittling Corfu's population of 100,000 down to 10,000.
Thus in the 16th century the Venetian rulers cut a deep chasm into the rock, separating the fortress from the mainland with a deep moat. Centuries later the British—who had by this time pretty much taken over every rock on Earth worth having—shaved the sides of the peninsula and capped them with smooth stone, providing no purchase whatsoever for any would-be ascent from the sea. The Brits abandoned the area in the 1860's, but not before destroying many of the defensive walls, much to the annoyance of the Greeks. But things were peaceful for a while after that, until WWII came and everything was bombed to hell. But even yet the stone monster lives, slumbering, crumbling with age and shaggy with unchecked growth.
Access to the Old Fortress—the nearby New Fortress being an adolescent 400 years old, by the way—was across Europe's second largest square, the Spianada. Faye and I crossed it without recognizing what it was, for it had long since grown into a park riddled with shaded walks and bristling with sculpture. Originally the Spianada had been clear-cut to allow unobstructed access for cannon fire. Ah, the good old days. We crossed the bridge over the long-since dried moat, and entered the complex.
The whole of it was so huge that it took twenty minutes of winding stone steps and walkways just to access the tower at the top. Every step of the way offered breath-taking views of the sparkling Ionian Sea and the mountains of Albania looming across it. Using Faye's list we identified the various locations of the movie filmed there: the harbor house for the Albanian warehouse action sequence, the underground tunnels where the henchman Locque almost ran over Bond in his Mercedes, and finally at the upper stone gate where Bond shot Locque and pushed his car over a cliff into the sea. What surprised me was how little movie moments were so easy to spot: both of us recognized a particularly long and distinctive set of stone steps that actor Roger Moore had run up, Walther PPK locked and loaded.
But we had other sights to see, and soon headed off into the countryside. Our joy was shared by our taxi driver—at first. He puffed up over our comments on his home's natural beauty and positively beamed at our eagerness to see so much of it. But circling the island's airport we were stopped up short by a surprise red light. Our road passed right by the runway, so close that approaching planes would actually collide with passing cars. Hence the red light. The wait was interminably long, a blow from which his enthusiasm was unable to recover.
Next stop was the famed palace called Achilleion. All the casino scenes had been filmed there, which evoked in me mixed feelings. Having lived in Las Vegas, I was not overly keen on seeing any more casinos. But I need not have worried about boredom: the palace was a marvel.
Built by Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria, the palace was designed with Achilles as the theme and heavily laden with world-class paintings and sculptures. Overlooking the lush garden's awe-inspiring beauty was the gargantuan bronze presence of Achilles himself, splendid in his hoplite uniform and standing defiantly with a spear easily twenty feet long. The centerpiece of the gardens was even more impressive, however, with the famed 19th century marble Dying Achilles. Here the fallen warrior lay prone, gripping the arrow in his ankle, anguished face upturned to implore aid from his divine mother. After perhaps an hour, which culminated in a drink at the eastern square where Bond met with the villain Kristatos, we headed onward.
Our taxi took us on a tour to the northwest corner of the island to an area called Paleokastritsa. The road rose ever higher and passed through numerous ancient villages of quiet distinction. Then the land dropped away into a dramatic jumble of coves and jagged cliffs; the sea particularly blue, the land particularly green, the villas particularly lucky.
We descended a narrow, winding road with hairpin turns through forests of robust olive trees. The taxi driver boasted that they were initially planted by the Venetians a millennium ago. The road, he continued, was built to keep pirates away from the villages uphill. Indeed, the road was so freakishly curvaceous—with quintuple S-curves switchbacked so tightly that straightaways were directly above each other like giant steps—that the Bond filmmakers used it for an elaborate car chase scene featuring Melina Havelock's poor little yellow Citroen 2CV. That scene was meant to simulate Spain, but the olive-harvesting extras had clearly been Greeks.
The beaches at the bottom, however, were mesmerizing and worth every caught breath of the descent. Not wanting to let the moment end, we decided to extend it by hopping onto a small tour boat. Half a dozen of us tourists buzzed around the picturesque inlets and coves, even sailing into the open mouths of caverns. We mostly ignored our driver, who droned on about various gimmicky touristic nonsense, such as calling an almost-cave St. Nicholas because tossing something into the water brings bubbles so fine they look like a snowstorm. He caught our attention, however, when he paused beside a cliff face.
"Though you can barely see it," he said. "There is a cavern in this rock. See at the water's edge? The entrance is only ten centimeters above the water—about three inches—but plenty deep. You can swim inside if you want."
"I'm not missing that for the world!" Faye exclaimed, electric blue eyes flashing. She unbuttoned her blouse and it was turn for my eyes to flash. Seeing my look, she defended, "Why not? Nobody knows us here. Nobody's from the Surf."
"We are," a hesitant voice called from the back of the boat. Two wavering hands rose from an elderly couple.
In the act of dropping her shirt onto the seat, Faye looked back in surprise, but then smiled wryly. "My bra's staying on anyway."
"More's the pity," I teased. Eyeing the thin white blouse, I devilishly suggested, “Perhaps keep the blouse and lose the bra?”
Nobody else made any move to join her. The other tourists just reviewed the trim doctor with surprise and, I daresay, not a little envy at her adventurous spirit. My envy was directly solely to her almost criminal lack of body fat.
"Come on," she ordered brusquely. "I'm not missing a chance to swim into an underwater cavern!"
For an instant her waif-like form poised upon the rail; barefoot, black hair swishing over slender shoulders, white bra and white capri pants radiant against Native American skin. Then she disappeared with a splash.
Before I knew it I, too, was shirtless and shoeless and stroking through dazzling blue after her. The warm water was immensely comfortable, even in clothing, and tiny bubbles tingled as we slid along beneath. We broke the surface inside the cliff face with a gasp, followed by a laugh of delight.
A neon blue glow in the shape of an eye emanated from the subsurface entrance, startlingly similar to Faye's own bright eyes. The cavern was perhaps twenty feet deep and ten feet wide, with every nook and cranny highly visible through the crystal-clear waters. White stripes wavered across the uneven cavern roof, reflected from below. I was surprised at the fresh smell in the air, reminding me of laundry still damp after detergent. Just outside the cave the air had been tinged with salt and fish. We splashed around a few minutes playfully, then returned to the boat. The driver hauled us up, dripping and flopping like the morning's catch.
On the way back to Corfu Town that afternoon we paused in one of the little gorgeous villages. After some quiet wandering we stopped at a café nuzzled in where the winding streets finally winnowed into nothing. Across from a warm wall of old mortar that had been patched and repatched, painted and repainted over the centuries, was an opening in the cobblestoned road. It was too small to be a square, but rather a swelling of open space dwarfed by neighbor buildings bristling with rickety balconies of whitewashed wood probably older than the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. Three tables were shaded comfortably by a cream-colored awning and a thick habitation of grapevines. One would presume there were more tables inside the stone structure—especially considering each was graced with placards numbered 12, 13, and 14—but one would be wrong. Inside was only a tiny kitchen.
Faye and I chose a table beside a towering fern and eased off our tired feet. Within moments a 50-something man with an unshaven, grey-flecked chin bustled towards us, placing upon our table an ashtray and a dish of olives.
"My kind of place," Faye commented, pushing the ashtray away with a long finger and then snapping a photo of the olives. They were elongated and fat, brownish-purple skin glistening with a fresh pour of olive oil and green with a cascade of oregano. Faye popped one in her mouth and her eyes widened at the intense burst of briny goodness. "I love little quaint places like this. You can't get olives like this at Olive Garden!"
"From my home," boasted the proprietor. "I also recommend the kumquat liqueur: also from my garden."
"You can juice a kumquat?" I asked. "Does it get mad? Bring us a couple while I try to think of a joke using the word kumquat. Might take me awhile, but I know there's one in there somewhere."
The kumquat liqueur came and we enjoyed the experience, if not the drink. It was dense and syrupy, like Coca Cola from a broken fountain that didn't add enough carbonated water. Perhaps inspired by this, we sipped on a bottle of sparkling water.
"I'm so enjoying this, you know," Faye said. "It's so fun to travel with someone like-minded. I hear you never really know somebody until you travel with them. Of course, that really pertains to sharing a hotel room."
“Well, if you insist…” I joked with a profound roll of my eyes to signify that she was putting me out.
"Which we're not doing," Faye quickly added.
"At least I saw you in your bra," I replied, grinning.
"For what little that's worth," she grumbled good-naturedly.
But I quite agreed with Faye's sentiment. I was sick of traveling alone. My first overseas traveling had been with Bianca. The experience had been so sublime that I had followed her to ships in the hopes of keeping it going. Through sheer effort we made a go of it, but the initial excitement of wild international travel had succumbed to logistical fatigue, the sizzle to cold steak.
"It's so important to share these experiences with someone," Faye continued, as if reading my thoughts. "Life is about people, after all, not places. But when you're with another, even if you can't make a personal connection with where you're traveling, you still have that connection with the person you're with. You're sure to bring something back."
"Interesting," I said. "I hadn't really thought about travel in regards to a personal connection. I always thought it was about keeping yourself out of it as much as possible, so you can be open to the ways of the others you're visiting."
"How can you keep yourself out of it?" Faye asked. "You are seeing things through your eyes and remembering them with your brain. But it's more than that. As a ship doctor I've volunteered on dozens of ships and seen dozens of countries. Most are nothing at all like Oklahoma. But my family and friends are there. How else can I share with them—they, who've been nowhere and seen nothing—the joys of travel? If I don't make a connection when I'm in that far off place that is so different, how can they? The best way to let my family share the experience is to live it, even if only a moment, through me. Bringing back a T-shirt is a meaningless gesture."
"To play devil's advocate," I countered lightly. "A T-shirt is proof you're thinking of them while you're away. That's not meaningless."
"I disagree," Faye said, shaking her head. "If I'm in Greece, I don't want to be pining for the plains of Oklahoma. I'm only here for a short time, so why waste it? My family knows I love them. I don't need to prove it with a trinket. If my bringing back a thing is that important to them, they're being selfish. Traveling is my chance to grow and I shouldn't waste such a wonderful and rare opportunity gathering stuff to prove my love. That's not how you prove love anyway."
"Interesting," I said again. "I quite agree that traveling is an opportunity to grow. But here we are, focusing not on Greek culture—other than these orgasmic olives!—but finding the spots where they filmed an English movie twenty-five years ago. The personal connection I understand: I'll think of this every time I see a James Bond movie, past or future. I'll have this joyful memory popping up the rest of my life and, unfortunately for those around me, I'll tell the story again and again, ad nauseum. But I don't see how it has made me grow."
"Self-awareness is an important manner of growth," Faye offered.
I snorted. "Yeah, I'm now more aware than ever that I am not the stuff of James Bond."
"Like I'm a Bond girl?" Faye rebutted. "Maybe we're not, but you have learned that you are a quest taker. You create new and intellectually stimulating challenges for yourself, and aren't afraid to undertake them."
"At least today," I agreed, pleased with Faye's take on things.
3
"How was your date with the Witch Doctor?" Cosmina asked through a cloud of cigarette smoke. She exhaled upwards, billowing it towards the awning above our table.
"Witch Doctor?" I chided lightly.
"Fine," she retorted. "Dr. Faye, Medicine Woman."
"So she's from Oklahoma," I defended with lessening patience. "And has some Native American in her. What's your problem? You're from Romania: should I call you a gypsy?"
That shut her up. There's nothing Romanians hate more than being called a gypsy—unless they were one, that is.
I sighed inwardly and looked away. We sat upon a long terrace on the edge of a thirty-foot seawall. Twilight was soon to pass into night, and numerous points of light popped up in anticipation, some wavering at the tops of masts of ships hidden in the gathering gloom, others steady but blinking across the distance to the Albanian coast opposite. I was surprised at how black and menacing the Ionian Sea looked at night, a total disparity with its inviting tropical blue of day. We were at a restaurant tucked behind the St. George's Gate in Corfu Town, located in a dingy five-story apartment building at a noteworthy bend in the road down to the Old Harbor.
"Anyway," Cosmina said into her glass of white wine. "I asked you all here so I could apologize for last night's... mix-up."
I made an overt motion to point out there were only two of us at the table. "Yet only I am present."
"Barney's on watch," she said simply.
"And Faye?"
"Apparently your Bond girl can't read directions. I'm not waiting for her to get her shit together."
"Yeah, physicians frequently have trouble following directions," I sniped back, intentionally tweaking Cosmina's jealousy over station. "I hope there wasn't a medical emergency or anything."
"Hmm," Cosmina said blandly, stamping out her cigarette butt. I marveled that the neighboring tables didn't mind the stink while they were eating. Then again, most of them had a cigarette burning in the ashtray while they tackled food themselves.
"And what about Susie?" I asked. "She's the one who's upset."
Cosmina answered by tilting her head to light another cigarette.
We waited a bit longer, no doubt so Cosmina could keep up appearances, then ordered dinner. We both had Greek salads, which were utterly unlike salads in America. There was no lettuce of any kind, but rather chunks of meaty tomatoes and snappy cucumber, copious rings of red onions, and plentiful juicy kalamata olives. Atop the large bowl were several thick triangles of feta cheese upon which olive oil was dumped and oregano tossed. The flavors were brilliant and bold.
"So tomorrow," Cosmina said, "I take you to Valletta."
"Who's that?"
"It's the capital of Malta," she said, giving me a look that clearly indicated only idiots didn't know that.
"Okay," I said, feeling more embarrassed than perhaps I should have. "What's in Malta?"
"Damien," she said. "He owns the biggest tour company in Malta. Also ones in Sicily and Libya. He wants to meet you."
"Me?" I said, blinking in confusion. "What do you mean?"
"He wants to create a ghosts of Malta tour."
My jaw dropped and I stared at Cosmina, dumbfounded. "How did...? I never told anyone here I wrote a book about ghosts."
"Real ghost stories of an Old West ghost town," she said with a proud wiggle, like a parent boasting of her child's accomplishment. "With maps and history of each haunted building."
"You... you Googled me!" I suddenly realized.
To her credit, Cosmina did not bother denying it. Instead she just continued, "Damien was excited when I told him about your book. He is extremely important. Trust me, you don't want to miss this. You'll see."
"Sure, sure," I said, anything but sure of being ready to head out into port with Cosmina again. But she did have me intrigued.
Taking a swig of my local beer, Mythos, I gathered the courage to say what I felt needed to be said.
"If we're going into port together again," I began cautiously, "Well, I just want to make it clear that it's all business."
Cosmina looked up at me, face pinched in innocent confusion.
"You know I used to date a Romanian," I explained. "That's over. Not just with Bianca, I mean—and I do not want to talk about it yet—but with foreign women in general. It's too soon and it's too complicated."
Cosmina grunted while reaching across the table to spear the last hunk of feta from my salad.
"I'm serious," I said decisively. "I just broke off a three year relationship with Bianca very suddenly."
"Yoyo said you proposed to her," Cosmina prodded. Then with a gleeful flippancy she asked, "That not work the way you planned?"
"Actually it did," I snapped, suddenly irate. "Coming to Wind Surf didn't work the way I planned. It's... whatever. I'm just done with women for a while, leave it at that. Certainly I'm done with Romanian women. D-U-N, done."
"Sure," she said with a slight shrug. I was not at all reassured. Tomorrow, I sensed, was another trap.