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May 1973
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I DIDN’T SEE Arcas again for almost a month. I sent Nancy a get-well card, care of St. Michael’s Hospital, then went on with my life. I stopped at Kosmos Bakery most mornings for my regular breakfast of a Greek biscotti and black coffee, but I never ran into the young baker with gorgeous hair. While I can’t say that I never thought of him, I didn’t think of him often. A rash of four-color jobs was keeping everyone at Abbot’s Printing hopping, and I was enjoying the work, surprisingly happy to be supporting myself by the dint of my own labor.
Spring is a busy time in the printing business as the world gears up for the season of craft shows, sailing regattas, golf opens, and county fairs. Our customers arrived breathless, panicked, and precariously close to deadlines we couldn’t control. Canadian civility aside, they were universally disinterested in the fact that there were other customers ahead of them and, no matter how much they whined and carried on, their jobs would still take however long they’d take.
It was Tom, not Arcas, who showed up at the print shop one Friday afternoon in late May. He was wearing the same black T-shirt he’d worn the night we’d met at the taverna, but he’d gotten a haircut and trimmed his beard. Who’d have guessed there was a nice-looking man under all that hair? He no longer resembled a goat, in fact he looked more sheepish, embarrassed to run into me. He’d clearly forgotten that this is where I worked. Frankly, I was surprised he recognized me at all.
I smiled brightly, greeting him as I would any customer coming through our door. “Hello, Tom, what a nice surprise, seeing you again.”
“Hi, yeah, nice to see you too, sorry, I don’t remember your name.”
“It’s Amy, don’t apologize, we only met the one time, although it was certainly a memorable evening. That car probably knocked my name right out of your head.”
“Yeah, I remember now. You were with Arcas that night. Sorry if I was acting like an ass. I’m not a good drinker and I was upset about my thesis proposal. The good news is they’re saying they’ll accept it now with just a few changes, so I’m okay again.”
“Great, that’s lucky.”
“You two were the lucky ones, that car didn’t even touch you.”
“No kidding, it missed us by inches.” I looked around to see if Mrs. Klein or one of the guys was eavesdropping, but they were all in the back. “How’s Nancy? I tried visiting her at the hospital, but they wouldn’t let me in. They have some kind of family only rule.”
“I know, they wouldn’t let me in either, at least not until she woke up and started asking for me. She’s still at St. Mike’s, but they’ve moved her to a regular room. You could visit her if you wanted. She might like that.”
“Maybe I’ll stop by after work one day this week.” In reality, I doubted that I’d bother. Nancy had seemed nice enough, but she wasn’t a friend. It had taken me weeks to recover from the shock of seeing her struck down in the street and I had no interest in reviving those memories. “That was sure one freaky accident. It happened so fast, one minute we were having a nice evening out, just walking to your car and then, boom. Did they ever find the guy who did it?”
“The police don’t have a clue, but we have our suspicions.”
I remembered my conversation with Arcas and wondered if there was anything to his story. “If you have information, you should tell the police. Someone needs to pull that guy’s driver’s license. He’s going to kill someone.”
“That might have been his plan.”
“Are you saying he meant to hit Nancy?”
“No, but he might have meant to hit me or Arcas.”
“Wow.” I took a step backward. “Arcas told me something like that, but it sounded crazy. I didn’t really believe him.” I could imagine someone being drunk and reckless behind the wheel of a car, but deliberately pointing two tons of speeding metal at a helpless pedestrian? That didn’t happen in my world. At least it had never happened in my old life.
“Well, take anything Arcas says with a grain of salt, but in this case . . .” Tom handed me a large brown envelope. “Look, just forget it. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m being paranoid. Anyway, I didn’t come here to talk about the accident. I wanted to know if you could make some posters for us. We need two hundred copies by Wednesday at the latest. It’s for a rally in a couple weeks.”
I walked over to the counter, slipped the original artwork from the envelope, and laid it on the illuminated glass. It showed a group of people marching and waving their fists beneath an image of a Greek flag. Superimposed over the image was a block of Greek text so dense that, even if it had been in English, I couldn’t have read it without a magnifying glass. It wasn’t a poster, it was a manifesto. Whatever it said, I’d never seen such terrible design.
Tom must have seen the chagrin on my face because he looked worried and a bit belligerent. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings. I see that someone spent a lot of time on this, but it’s too hard to read. A poster needs to grab your attention with a strong image and just a couple words. The message has to jump out at you.”
“It’s a complicated subject. You can’t explain it in just a couple of sentences.”
“You do your explaining at the rally. A poster’s job is just to get people to show up.” Tom looked annoyed, but then as he studied the poster his face fell, and irritation was replaced by panic. I felt a pang of pity for him. “I could rework this for you, but there’s normally a charge for design.”
“It’s a student organization. We don’t have money.”
I looked around; my boss and the rest of the staff were still in the back. I lowered my voice. “That’s OK, I’ll rework it for free if you help me with the Greek, but my boss can’t know. There’s a Fran’s Restaurant around the corner. Could you meet me there at six? I promise, it won’t cost you a penny.”
“Sure, OK, thanks. I’ll see you at six. That’s nice of you. I appreciate it.” His eyes softened and for the first time I had an inkling of what Nancy saw in the man.
Fran’s is always crowded in the early evening. There are young professionals stopping in for drinks after work, golden agers who come for the early-bird specials and the singles who’ve made it their venue of choice for noncommittal first dates. Tom was sitting at a booth in the back, and to my surprise, Arcas was sitting across from him.
I threw my purse and a bag of art supplies on the floor and slid into the empty seat beside Arcas, trying not to show how unnerved I felt by his sudden reappearance. “Hey, I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“I just got back. I wanted to see you again, so when Tom said he was meeting you I decided to come along.”
“Back? Back from where?”
“Greece, my village, to see my father. He had a stroke, so I had to go home to help my mother.”
“I’m so sorry, is he alright?”
“He’s getting better, but he can’t work. My mother wants me to move back to our village and run the farm. What do you think, should I go home and be a shepherd?”
“I have no idea—” I began.
“If you go home now, you won’t be a shepherd you’ll be a target,” Tom said in a low voice so that no eavesdroppers could overhear him. “They know who belongs to the PAK. I wouldn’t go back until the colonels are gone. It’s too dangerous.”
“I was making a joke. I’m here, aren’t I? Let’s talk about something else. We have a nice American lady here. She doesn’t want to hear about these things.” He draped his arm around my shoulder. How long had it been since a man had touched me? Too long apparently, but this wasn’t the time.
“Right, we’re supposed to be working on your poster. Let’s see what we can do with that.” I pulled away, glad for an excuse to create some distance before I found my head nestled into the neck of this virtual stranger. I pulled out a sketch pad, a straight rule, and some colored markers and laid them on the table. “OK, now let’s see that copy you brought to the office.”
As soon as Tom laid his artwork on the table, Arcas threw up his hands and said something in Greek that made Tom turn red. A moment later the two were embroiled in a heated exchange in spitfire Greek that left me feeling awkward and invisible.
Arcas suddenly turned to me and asked, “What do you think? Do we support the junta and abolish the king or stand with the monarchists and spit in the face of the colonels? You can’t have it both ways.”
He’d asked the question in English, but as far as I was concerned he was still speaking Greek. I had no idea what he was talking about.
Tom, seeing the bewildered look on my face, tried to explain. “There’s going to be a vote on whether or not Greece will continue to be a monarchy. It seems our beloved king handed the country to Papadopoulos and his military junta, and now the junta wants to thank him by eliminating his job.”
“I thought the king flew off to Italy. Why even bother with a referendum if he’s already gone?” I thought I was being reasonable, but both men rolled their eyes. Apparently, I was being stupid.
“Planes fly both ways. Without the referendum, he’ll just come back when things calm down,” Tom said softly, but vehemently.
“Of course, he’ll come back, and we’ll deal with him then, but right now the most important thing is getting rid of the colonels and most of the military are royalists.” Arcas rose to his feet and towered over Tom. “Do you want to thumb your nose at the crew of the Battleship Velos? Those men may be fighting the junta out of loyalty to the king, but they’re still fighting. They’re still on our side.”
Tom stood up and spit out his words as they leaned into each other, eye to eye. “If Constantine was a real king, if he was a real man, he would have stood up to the colonels. They wouldn’t even be there now.” They glared at each other, grim and unblinking.
“I could use another beer.” I raised my empty glass to demonstrate the gravity of the situation.
Tom turned toward the waitress and motioned her over. “We need another beer over here.” He looked at Arcas. “How about you? Should I get a pitcher?”
An hour later the pitcher was empty, my head was swimming, and they were still arguing, but the mood had lightened considerably. Finally, Tom put an end to the debate.
“It doesn’t matter what we think, Andreas wants the bastard gone so we hold the rally. Let’s just get this poster finished.” Tom turned to me. “Design something that will bring every Greek in Toronto to the event. Expats can’t vote, but a huge crowd will send a message of support.”
I opened my pad of drawing paper, without remembering that I’d been working on a sketch of Joanie. She stared up at me from the open tablet with a look of surprise.
“What’s that, a self-portrait? It looks just like you.” I tore off the sheet and buried it beneath the pad.
Arcas made a move to retrieve the drawing, but I swatted his hand away. “Sorry, that’s private. How about this?” I began sketching with a set of colored pencils. Since the king had fled the country in his private plane, I drew a plane bearing the king’s name and a little crown flying off into a blue sky. “How do you say, ‘wave good-bye’ in Greek, or how about ‘and don’t come back?”
Arcas took my pencil and wrote, Και μην επιστρέψετε, Greek for and don’t come back. I carefully copied the unfamiliar letters at the top of the page.
“And what’s the name of your organization?”
“Panhellenic Liberation Movement, but you can just write PAK.”
I wrote PAK at the bottom of the page in simple block letters along with the time and location of the rally. Even Arcas admitted the poster looked good even though he was still upset about being overruled. I promised to do a final mock-up at home and have something ready to print the next day.
Tom picked up the check and headed toward the register while Arcas and I finished our drinks.
“You know, I thought of you all the time I was gone,” Arcas said, as soon as Tom was out of earshot.
“Then you should have sent me a postcard.” I was inexplicably miffed over his unexplained departure. It wasn’t as though he owed me anything. It wasn’t as though I was in any condition to get involved with a man.
“I don’t know your address. I don’t even know your phone number.”
My hands were shaking. I couldn’t even look him in the eye, but I tore off a corner of the placemat as though I were just a normal girl accustomed to casual flirtations. “Well,” I said, scribbling down my number, “now you have no excuse.”