When I finally had that head in my hands, cradled in my lap—the thing was heavy—and I could see it up close, I knew I was holding a work of art. The head was of a young man, possibly from the second century a.d., and this was all good, because that coincided with the earthquake. The curls were beautifully rendered, almost soft. The eyes, wide set, had a strong brow that gave the appearance of concern, or at least focus. The lips were full, closed but not hard. This was a handsome head. I laughed, but only to myself. I looked up and the workers were standing around me. Tomas had his big camel eyes on me, his head angled as if he were looking around something.
“Very nice,” I said. “This is beautiful.”
“Maybe we have the rest of the day off,” said Tomas.
“No,” I said, “this is just a head.” I held Tomas with my eyes. “Where’s the rest of him?”
Clive leaned in and whispered, “Isn’t it sometimes just a head?”
I nodded. “But Tomas doesn’t know that.”
Clive wanted to go back to the villa to share the good news with everyone, but I hadn’t decided what I wanted to do, so we went back to the café. I had wrapped the head in an old sack and unveiled it ceremoniously.
“What do you think?” I asked Clive.
“Beautiful,” he said,
“Is beauty everything?” I said. “I wish it were.”
“That would make your life very easy, Rupert, but the rest of us have to rely on our wit.”
“And virtue,” I said. I turned the head to better see the profile.
“Aren’t you supposed to be delighted?” said Clive.
“I am.”
“Great,” he said. “And now I hope you’re going to tell me why you’re behaving in such a strange manner.”
I set the head up on the table so that it was standing on its neck. I turned it so that the eyes fell on Clive. The two regarded each other.
“What?” said Clive. “Is it a fake?”
“Doesn’t look fake, does it?” I said.
“So what’s bothering you?”
“It’s not my art background this time, it’s my knowledge of human nature. There are two ways that this head might have made it into the dig. One is serendipity. The other is Tomas.”
“But it looks old,” said Clive, “doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does. It’s been weathered. Look at the curls.”
Clive scratched at one of the curls, and a white powder came off.
“What is that?” asked Clive.
“That is …” I scratched some off myself. It didn’t smell like anything, so I tasted it. “It’s salt.”
“Salt? Would there be salt in the dirt?”
“No. Where do we get salt?” I asked.
“Kitchens?” he said, with some irony.
“No, Clive, not kitchens.” I’d finally figured something out, just a part of the whole but something intriguing. “Before the kitchen.”
“What are you talking about, Rupert?”
“This was weathered in the ocean.” I laughed. “I wonder if Amanda’s in on it.”
“In on what?”
“The head is big and round and heavy.” I put my hands on his shoulders. “It’s been under water, salt water.”
Clive thought for a moment. “This has something to do with Jack?”
“He’s a sculptor. Remember how I said all his work was crap? I was wrong. He’s actually very good.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. But this head …it’s the head of Antinoüs.”
“What, the statue in Delphi?”
“Same person, but this head is a copy of just a head. I think the real one is in Scandinavia somewhere. Except Jack’s changed the nose. It’s a bit narrow through the bridge. Clever, clever, clever.” I scratched off some more salt and tasted it, just to be sure. I looked at Clive. “Feel like a swim?”
When we reached the villa, only Neftali was home. She was with the caretaker, supervising the scrubbing down of the garden furniture. I had been warned by Kostas to keep all important finds to myself, especially if he was supposed to get them out of the country, so I didn’t say anything about the head. I hurried upstairs, holding it against my chest, trying to look casual, but the thing was heavy.
“Rupert,” she called.
“Yes, Neftali?” I tried not to sound guilty.
“Have you seen Olivia’s hat?”
“That old donkey-driver thing?”
“She can’t find it.”
“I’ll get her another one,” I said.
“That’s what I said.” Neftali laughed. “But she said she liked that one.”
I got up to my room and hid the head, still wrapped in the sack, under my bed. I felt like a twelve-year-old, stashing it there. Outside my window, I could hear Clive and Neftali discussing Amanda. Apparently, the villagers had expressed some concern over her behavior.
“It’s really none of their business,” said Clive.
“That’s what I said,” said Neftali. “They are all scandalized, and they are all entertained.”
I pulled on my swim trunks and grabbed a towel. I looked out the window, down at Clive and Neftali. “Come on, Clive,” I said. “Get your trunks on, and don’t forget your snorkel.”
I had a cigarette with Neftali while I waited for him.
She said, “Is it true that you are thinking of asking Olivia to marry you?”
“Don’t you start,” I chided her.
“Nathan is worried,” she said.
“Then Nathan can talk to me,” I said.
Neftali made a disapproving face. “Don’t be like that, Rupert.”
“What do you mean?”
“With the wind blowing you here and there,” she said. “Be strong.”
“All right, Neftali.” I patted her hand, but I could tell she wasn’t finished with me.
“Why doesn’t Amanda want to come back here?”
“Why should I know?”
“You were with her that night,” she said.
“I really don’t know,” I said. Then Clive rescued me, appearing on the steps to the house with two masks and two snorkels.
“Look,” he said. “One each. I forgot that Nathan had this stuff. He never uses it.”
We took the Vespa into Faros and parked it in a small alley off the main street. Clive was worried someone would see it and know where we were. Of course, I argued this point with him. Who would see us? Who would care? We were just going for a swim to explore some local caves. Remarkably, neither of us had thought to bring wine.
The water was calm. From the shore I could see where the ledges of rock cut through the sand. I waded in with my mask around my neck, the snorkel in my hand. Clive was still on the beach. He was looking up at the rise, at the path we had descended to get to the water.
“What are you looking at?” I said.
“Just making sure we weren’t followed,” he said.
I put the snorkel in my mouth and lay on the surface of the water. All sound disappeared except for the slow draw and release of my breath. I kicked a little and spread my arms out. I looked at the floor of the ocean, maybe ten feet down, and watched a flounder skim the sandy bottom. Its eyes peered straight up into mine. I could have floated there all day, but suddenly Clive was swimming beneath me. I was startled and pulled my head out of the water.
“What are you doing, Rupert?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Snorkeling.”
“Let’s go,” he said. “What if someone shows up?”
Of course, the real secret wasn’t hidden in the caves. The caves weren’t the treasure trove of antiques, false or real, that Clive hoped for. He wanted us to be the Hardy Boys and wasn’t very convincing when he tried to make this desire sound ironic. I knew he saw gold heaped in clinking, spilling mountains, chests with strings of pearls, fist-sized rubies, and probably a skeleton grinning beneath the rim of a tricorne hat. Even if he hadn’t articulated this notion to himself, I could read it in his eagerness and knew that only disappointment awaited him. I, on the other hand, was looking to solve the mystery of Jack. Jack was now complicated and I was intrigued.
Of the two of us, I was the better swimmer and reached the caves first. Clive had suggested that we race and at some point I had been tempted to let him win. Clive brought out a side in me that few people did. But I got tired of swimming so slowly. I was momentarily concerned that all Clive’s hand-rolled cigarettes had rendered his lungs useless, but he powered along in a sort of alternating freestyle, breast-stroke, dog paddle, and who cared what it looked like as long as he wasn’t drowning? The waves by the mouth of the cave hadn’t looked like much from shore, but here, up close, they were enough to smash us against the rocks. It took me quite a few tries to scramble onto one of them, where I perched like a seal waiting for Clive. I was wondering, of course, how he was going to make it back to shore. When he finally reached the cave—I helped him up and he sat—because there was not enough room for him to lie down—breathing wildly, the first words out of his mouth were, “I could use a cigarette.”
Much is made of caves and entering them. A part of me would like to say that there, at the threshold, something of our innocence was still intact; that we did not know; and that our not-knowing had somehow kept us pure. But I wasn’t Wordsworth paddling along full speed in his barque, and Clive—well, if anyone had blown his innocence it was Tomas, who had let Clive believe in a deeper friendship. Not that this sort of friendship wasn’t possible, it was that anything was possible as long as Tomas could get off Aspros. Behind those unblinking black eyes and heavy lashes was a calculating mind, an aware individual who knew that his only currency was his good looks and a canny intelligence capable of making the quick decisions needed to advance himself in the world.
“Let’s go in,” I suggested.
The water was cold in the cave, and paddling around I suddenly remembered the moray eels that were sometimes speared as they prowled beneath the jetties of Faros. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloom, but then I saw a rock ledge, narrow but mostly dry, and I pulled myself up and out. There was a candle with a small square of folded oilskin alongside it. When I unfolded it, I found a dry box of matches. I lit the candle and the cave was dimly illuminated.
Clive stood unsteadily on the rock at the mouth of the cave. “Is there anything in there?” he asked.
“Are you scared, Clive?”
“Yes, frankly,” he said.
“Don’t worry about the eels,” I said. I peered into the water.
“What eels?”
“The ones that aren’t here.” I shone the candle around. I couldn’t see anything that struck me as out of place, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. Clive paddled quickly across the cave and pulled himself out of the water.
“My foot touched something,” he said.
“What was it?”
“I think it was a net. Maybe they’ve set a trap.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. I held the candle up toward the mouth of the cave. An iron hook was driven into the wall and from it hung a net, very taut, holding something that was hidden beneath the surface of the water.
I swam over to the hook, leaving Clive to hold the candle. I put my feet on a submerged rock, and tried to pull the net up. It was too heavy. I swam down with my mask and made out some roughly round objects—heads?—that were being weathered beneath the surface of the water. I resurfaced.
“Clive, I need a hand,” I said.
Clive put down the candle and gingerly paddled over to me. We pulled at the net and, with both of us straining at it, the objects started to rise. I saw a marble face begin to break the surface of the water.
I am not exactly sure what happened after that. I know Clive saw Thanasi rowing up to the mouth of the cave and shouted something, and this startled me so that I dropped the net. Thanasi began to row away, but then Clive was screaming and I realized his hand had somehow gotten pinned between the taut ropes of the net and the cold stone of the cave. His knuckles were grazed but I knew, from looking at them, that there was no serious damage. Trying to convince Clive of this was not so easy.
“You need to get a boat to get me back to shore.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “I can’t swim.”
“All right,” I said. “I will swim to shore. That will take at least twenty minutes. Then I will walk to Faros. That will take at least fifteen minutes. Then I will find a fisherman who is willing to part with his boat, or maybe I’ll steal one.…”
Clive really didn’t want to stay in the cave by himself. We took to the water. Luckily the tide was going in. Finally, with me swimming circles around him, Clive made it to shore.
He collapsed on the beach, lying there as if he were Robinson Crusoe.
“I’m never going anywhere with you again,” he said. But he was already making plans. He wanted to come back with a boat so we could take whatever was in the net. I told him that was stealing, and he said it wasn’t, because the heads were fakes. I told him taking the heads would be dangerous regardless of their authenticity. People who made fakes were probably fairly sensitive when it came to keeping track of their merchandise.
Clive moaned in an aggressive, frightening way the entire ride back to Stavri, but he was very happy when Neftali made a big fuss over his hand, and not terribly pleased with me. Neftali walked Clive into the house cooing and making sounds of disapproval. She said she would clean his knuckles well and make sure that there was no possibility of infection. Clive was of the opinion that his knuckles might already be infected, but the wound had had a good half-hour soak in salt water as he’d floundered to shore, and the possibility of infection existed only in his mind.
Nathan had a glass of something and rattled the ice cubes festively. “Neftali says the two of you have been acting very suspiciously today,” he said. “What are you up to?”
“We’re solving a mystery,” I said. I waggled my eyebrows. “What are you drinking?”
“Vodka,” said Nathan. He offered me the glass and I took a sip.
“That might hit the spot,” I said. “How’s Olivia been today?”
“Olivia looked all over but didn’t find Amanda. Then she talked to some woman rumored to be Tomas’s grandmother, and the woman shouted something at her.”
“Actually, she hissed at me,” said Olivia, who had walked up to us. “She hissed, and maybe she even cursed me.”
“What on earth did you do?” I asked.
“I sort of did this.” Here Olivia waved her hands over her head like a snake charmer. “I don’t know why, but it was very effective.”
“But no Amanda?”
“No,” said Olivia. She sighed.
“I don’t know why she’s acting so bizarrely,” I said. “Blame it on me all you want, but I didn’t do anything to her, and I don’t find this pseudo-coyness very funny anymore.”
“I don’t blame you,” said Nathan.
“Did it ever occur to either of you that she might be embarrassed? That she might be avoiding us?” Olivia was sincere.
I saw Nathan process this for a moment of polite concern, and then he said, “No.”
I laughed. But it was time to head for the ferry to go get Nikos. Clive had fought me for the privilege, but I reminded him that he was recently invalided and, along with gaining all the extra attention, he had lost his autonomy.
I drove the Vespa dangerously fast to the port town, inordinately pleased to be seeing Nikos again. I had a lot to tell him, both gossip and real news, and this gave me a sense of purpose, which, for me, was rare. In an unlikely turn of events, the ferry had arrived early, and when I rode up to the pier, Nikos was already walking along with his bag. I parked and ran up to him; I grabbed his shoulders and shook him.
“Nikos, Nikos, Nikos,” I said.
“Hello, Rupert,” he said. He smiled a big smile, then stepped back to light a cigarette. “You have sun on your face. What have you been doing without me?”
“I have a lot to tell you. I don’t know where to start,” I said. “I’m so glad you’re back.”
I refused to let Nikos leave the port town before sharing a private drink with me. There was so much he didn’t know. There was the head. There was the cave and Jack and Thanasi. There was strategizing over how to get the head—which certainly looked authentic—to New York. And I had to break it to him that Amanda had gone off with Tomas. I was honest with the particulars of the night she’d disappeared, and Nikos took it all with a few fatalistic shrugs in some of the more sensational places. When I was done with all my telling, he nodded to himself.
“This thing with Amanda had to end, but this with Tomas—it isn’t good.”
“Are you surprised?”
“I want to say no, because then I am cool.” He raised his eyebrows to assess whether he was using the correct word, and I nodded. “I know she sleeps with many people. But Tomas … I am surprised.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because Amanda is always thinking about her place in society.” Nikos seemed to feel bad about divulging that. “She thought marrying Jack would make her rich,” he said. “She said he works and works all the time but never has much to show for it. They are always short on cash.”
“Why was she telling you this?” I asked.
“What is that word in English I can never remember? It means making excuses.”
“Justification,” I said.
“Yes. Because she felt bad.”
“Well, she did take good care of him. I mean, running off to Hydra because he was on a drunken tear.”
Nikos nodded. “And there was the art.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The pieces for the gallery in New York. Amanda had found a new agent for Jack, and he was supposed to pack up whatever he had in his studio and ship it all to the States. That’s why Jack went back to Hydra.”
“I thought he went back because the muse had whispered in his ear.”
“Well, maybe.” Nikos shrugged.
“But it was money that made him leave,” I said, as though I’d suspected as much all along.
“Amanda,” said Nikos, “was not calling Jack all the time. Sometimes it was to this person in New York.” Nikos stubbed out his cigarette thoughtfully. He looked at me, smiling with his eyes.
“What are you thinking?” I said.
“Amanda has an obsession with the rich, but her family doesn’t have any money.”
“She went to Smith.”
“Scholarship.”
“So what about it?” I said.
“If she was poor, she would fuck Tomas because she was poor. If she was rich, she would fuck Tomas because she wouldn’t care. But there, in the middle, clinging to all of us by her teeth …it’s hard for me to believe.”
It wasn’t hard to talk Nikos into having another drink, and another. Then we climbed onto the Vespa and made our way back to Stavri. The garden was filled with music, a Louis Armstrong song, loud and happy. I remembered the first time I’d walked to the house like this, side by side with Nikos, and had heard the bellowing Victrola. I pushed the gate open and we went in. Nikos was instantly mobbed, but I saw Amanda standing alone, shadowed by a tree. I wondered where Olivia was. Amanda caught me looking at her and I went over because I had no choice.
“Hello, Amanda,” I said.
“Hello, Rupert,” she said.
“What have you been up to?”
“Don’t start,” she said. “Does Nikos hate me?”
“No,” I said, “but I think it’s safe to say it’s over between the two of you.”
“You know,” Amanda said, looking at me, “I wouldn’t think that honesty was your strong suit, but you always tell me the truth.”
“I would think that was an admirable trait.”
Amanda laughed. “You hate me,” she said. “I bet you hated your wife.”
“That’s really none of your business.”
“Do you know why Olivia is your ideal woman?”
“You have an opinion?”
“Because she’s going to die. You can make peace with a memory, but an actual living, breathing, smelling woman scares you to death.”
“You know,” I said, “you are beginning to remind me of my ex-wife.” Amanda was swaying a little and I knew she’d had quite a bit to drink. I thought I’d earned the right to leave, but she grabbed my arm and clung to me.
“Don’t be so hard on me,” she said. “I only want a few things from life. How can you begrudge me that?”
I wanted to ask her what she was talking about and, regardless of what it was, why she needed my approval. But I didn’t have a chance. Clive came over, his hand dramatically bandaged, and asked if I was interested in going into Stavri for some food. I went upstairs to wash my face and comb my hair. I also managed to sneak up on Olivia and give her a scare as she put on her lipstick. I was surprised to see Amanda still with us as we began to walk down the path into town. Olivia held my elbow and I was feeling rather proud—proud because we were a fairly dysfunctional group and my particular pairing was actually one of the more successful. Nathan and Clive were together up ahead, Clive was singing, and Nathan was enjoying it. Neftali and Nikos followed them, involved in a rapid-paced Greek explication, which, from Neftali’s frequent glances back over her shoulder, must have been about Amanda. Amanda, bringing up the rear alone, seemed lost—more lost than drunk—and I thought I saw her push a tear away with the back of her hand.
I leaned down to Olivia. “Maybe you should walk with Amanda.”
“That’s very kind of you,” she said.
“Find out what happened to Tomas,” I added. Olivia shook her head in indulgent disapproval and then dropped back.
I decided to walk with Neftali and Nikos, who politely switched languages and subjects to include me. But I begged them not to bother. I liked hearing their Greek. What could be better than having such fine company and not having to converse? I had other things on my mind anyway. I had yet to show Nikos the head. Though I was convinced it was a fake, I was also convinced that Uncle William would love it. The provenance would hold up under scrutiny—at least his—and since the thing had been planted in the field, we hadn’t had to pay extra. Serendipity. Maybe it was not the kind of serendipity that put the Venus de Milo into a farmer’s field, but Tomas’s desperation paired with Jack’s extracurricular activities created a serendipity all its own. I would have to clear this with Nikos, but I knew he would accept my judgment. He was a pragmatic person from a pragmatic nation. Nothing romantic, nothing flowery. This was why Greece had been capable of such art: art that held up under scrutiny. Art one could look at and enjoy with the intellect, not the heart, not the surge and surge of boiling blood but rather the sublime process of reason.
“What’s the word?” said Nikos. Neftali looked over her shoulder expectantly.
“Justification,” I said. “The word is justification.”
Neftali ordered a fish for dinner and the thing was a leviathan. As the cook set it down, we all cheered. There were a couple of guys with bazoukis singing away, and the wine was light as spring water yet strong enough to numb the tongue. And this is one of my most often visited memories. The candles are flickering, throwing shadows up on everyone’s faces. Olivia, across from me, looks dazzling and young. In this light, you can’t see the dark circles, the graying of her skin. Her eyes are brilliant and her face full of expression. Someone’s telling a joke, not her, but she’s listening actively; she smiles waiting for the punch line, small smile, big smile, eyebrows up, a moment of disbelief; then she bursts out laughing. She says, “I’m cutting you off, Clive. That was disgusting.” Then she takes a sip from her glass and says, “Wait a minute. Give the boy some more wine.” She fixes me with an admonishing gaze, the I’m-not-dead-yet look. And I raise my glass, because where we are is just a moment moving over our lives, something to hold in the mind, and the present is just a point of reference. It doesn’t exist, and thank God for that, because if I believed in the present—actual experience tied to a moving instant—as I believe in the past and future, I would never survive.
Everyone kept saying that Olivia was very sick, Olivia was not supposed to make it through the next twelve months, but I had never really understood it. I had accepted it as part of my identity: I was a man in love with a dying woman. This was, strangely enough, a place where I felt comfortable. But a part of me always believed that no one is dead until they are dead, and although Olivia had no appetite, had lost some weight, and perhaps was not as lively as she might have been, it was hard to look at her—sitting in bed, reading the back of a pill bottle—and think about death except in the most abstract of ways. When I tried to remind myself that she was very ill—which I did, because, along with Nikos and Neftali, I doubted my capacity to make decisions—I kept seeing her tombstone superimposed over her face. Or even more ridiculous, partner to Alastair Sim, flying over London, introducing him to his past. This was recalled from a film version of A Christmas Carol, which had made about ten years of childhood bedtimes a torture of darkness tinged with the promise of spectral visitation.
I had gotten out of bed to pour myself another glass of whiskey, and she was lying there with the covers pulled up to her neck.
“You drink too much,” she said.
“Yes, I do,” I replied. “Are you going to try to stop me?” I made it sound like an invitation.
“I have my own battles, thank you,” she said.
“I think we should get married in the Highlands,” I said. “Get some crazy minister in a kilt, some pipers, a person banging a drum, and a yak.”
“Why a yak?”
“Don’t they have yaks in Scotland?” I seemed to remember having seen a picture of a particularly small one that was indigenous to the Scottish Highlands.
“You’re out of your mind,” said Olivia, laughing. “We’re not getting married. I really don’t know you.”
“Marriage, Livvy,” I said, “it’s the best way to know people. Trust me.”
“Just stop,” she said. She managed a brave and unattractive smile. “I came here to escape feeling sick, but you are a constant reminder.”
“Me?”
“I’ve stopped the radiotherapy and the chemicals. It wasn’t working. And they’ve removed just about everything south of my rib cage.” She smiled again in a challenging way. “I thought you’d want to hear it from me, because marriage is out of the question and I’m tired of arguing with you. It’s depressing.”
I realized I was holding my breath. “I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”
“Thank you.”
“I do love you,” I said. I came to sit on the side of the bed. I knew she was feeling sorry for me, and I felt sorry for myself.
“Rupert,” said Olivia, “are you all right?”
“No,” I said, “of course not.” I sighed. I suppose the general mood was intimate and Olivia, clever girl, was wondering what undiscussable thing she should try on me.
“Why do you call your father Uncle William?” she said finally.
“I’ll tell you if you want,” I said, “but to be honest it doesn’t bother me much. In fact, I actually see the wisdom in it.”
“You do surprise me,” she said.
“Oh, yes. Handsome, damaged, and surprising.” I took a sip of the whiskey. “My mother wanted to put me up for adoption, but Uncle William wouldn’t hear of it. But he wasn’t ready to be a father. Anyone who knew him knew I was his child. He doesn’t have any siblings.” Here I laughed. It had taken me years to find this funny, but I now found it hilarious. “He took my rather maudlin circumstances and cast them in a romantic light. People wanted to know who my mother was, and of course Uncle William always traveled a lot. Maybe I was royalty. Maybe my mother couldn’t marry a commoner, but he loved her. He could not claim paternity so as not to expose their relationship. He would have to say I was adopted.”
“People really believed that?”
“Yes. Some still do,” I said. “I did until I was eleven.” I reached for the cigarettes off the nightstand and lit one. “And then there was the possibility that he really was my uncle. Did he have a mystery sister living abroad? Some people even claimed to have known this sister when she was young.” I shook my head.
“But didn’t the news of who your mother really was get around?”
“Of course it did,” I said. “But the circumstances aren’t that interesting, and who wants to believe that? And of course Uncle William denied everything, and he’d had a lot of affairs, and my mother was shipped off to relatives somewhere when her situation became obvious.”
“Well, that’s quite a story,” said Olivia.
“I made up my own stories too,” I said. “I always wanted to believe that the relationship Uncle William had with my mother was special. True love. The one that mattered. But it wasn’t.” I was momentarily thoughtful; I blew a series of smoke rings up at the ceiling. “My Uncle William is a terrible father but he is an exceptional uncle. The best. And not only that, he loves me very much.”
“Happy ending,” said Olivia.
I nodded, because I was still open to the possibility, but both of us knew that it wasn’t over yet.
I was just getting ready to head back to the front room, to my little twin bed, when I heard someone banging on the door downstairs. My first thought was that Jack had shown up. I stayed at the railing, and the knocking continued, and someone yelled something in Greek. Amanda was nowhere to be seen. I felt Olivia’s small hands grasp my elbow. Clive had clearly been sound asleep, but Nathan was holding a book, keeping his place with his index finger. And Neftali was there, masked in green face goo. Then Nikos came out.
“Why don’t you open it?” he said, addressing us all.
Nikos walked right down the stairs. He opened the door, and there was a moment of suspense. Then he stepped back, swinging the door open so we could see our visitor, a bemused look on his face. Of course I recognized who it was immediately, but what was he doing on Aspros? What was he doing here in the dim light of the hallway, his cigarette hanging out of his mouth, his fingers raking through his hair, which even in the darkness gave off a burnished glow?
It was all very strange, because our visitor was Steve Kelly.