“The Arab was very calm when he came,” Carissa said, with no disequilibrium in her voice as she rolled off the incredible words. Her eyes were unfazed, soldiers ready for combat and the impertinent doubts of others. As she spoke she could sense that her confidence alone defended her but that it was more than enough. “I went to bed as you told me. When I was there, I stayed there. I fell asleep.”
“I don’t understand why Jimmie woke up.” Naomi’s voice cracked and tears burst into her eyes without falling. “How could he?”
The maid remained calm.
“He must have heard a noise.”
“Impossible.”
Naomi sat on the carpet and put her head in her hands. The tears rushed out at last, but they were finite. It was just a question of time. She began talking anyway.
“Now we have to sit down and think and not do anything stupid.”
“Yes,” the maid said.
Sam had sat down as well, and her hand was on her mouth to stop the regurgitation that threatened.
“What time did you come up here?” Naomi went on.
“At seven.”
“You didn’t call me?”
“I called you, but you didn’t answer.”
“Yes, that’s true. I was negligent, I’m sorry. It must have been terrible for you.”
“I’ve been here alone—”
“Thank God you didn’t call anyone else. We have to think.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Carissa said.
“Sam?”
“I’m OK.”
“We have to stay calm,” Naomi insisted.
“I’m calm.”
“Carissa, you’re the only one—”
“Yes. No one called this morning.”
“You definitely didn’t call anyone else?”
“No, miss.”
They were speaking in Greek and Sam couldn’t understand. But she guessed from gestures and intonations that the two other women were not planning to call the police. She protested, but Naomi wouldn’t hear of it. She explained to Sam that Jimmie had surely woken up when he heard a noise and came downstairs in his usual belligerent temper. Seeing a man of non-European hue in his house at three in the morning, he must have flown into one of his rages. Faoud would have panicked. The maid said, “It was the poker from the fire. Look.” She had laid it on the table, uncleaned.
“Why didn’t he just run out?” Sam said. “He didn’t have to do this.”
Naomi shook her head. “Jimmie would have threatened him. You didn’t know him. He must have lost his temper and gone for him.”
“We don’t know that, Naomi.”
“I know it. That’s obviously what happened.”
“Let the police decide.”
Sam said this because she needed to know exactly what had happened. It would be the difference between being guilty or innocent.
“No,” Carissa said in Greek to Naomi. “We can’t do that. The police will think that we were accomplices. They’ll assume it immediately, and they’ll find out that I opened the door for him and that you asked me to do it. I’ll tell them if they ask me.”
Naomi turned to Sam and repeated this to her.
“Then what?” the girl burst out. “We’re just going to fucking leave them like this? Are you serious?”
“I’m going to talk to Carissa in Greek. She knows how the police work here. I think we should do what she says.”
“She’s the maid,” Sam spat at her. “We’re going to do what your maid tells us to? Are you insane?”
“It’s the least insane option.”
Naomi went back to Greek, speaking as softly and calmly as she could though her whole body was trembling.
“Say we don’t call the police,” she said. “I don’t see what we can do.”
“I’ve been thinking all morning. I’ve been thinking it through. I know it sounds like the worst idea—but what if we bury them in the garden?”
The sweat was coursing down Carissa’s face. She waved away the disgusting flies. Suddenly she got up and rushed into the kitchen, returning with an aerosol fly killer. She sprayed the room for a full minute until they were coughing and then sat back down in the same chair while the flies gradually subsided to their deaths. She went on. The garden was tiny, but it was enough. It was even fitting in its way. How many times had the master talked idly about being buried in his own garden? There was nothing wrong with it. In any case, they couldn’t go back to their prior lives, they had to deal with what the present moment had inflicted upon them. Bury them, she said. Just dig the hole and do it. There was nothing to it, and there was nothing else to do. Once it was done they would have time to think again, and—to state the obvious—anything was better than going to prison. She would show them how to do it.
“What a fool Faoud was,” Naomi whispered. “He lost his cool and panicked. We put him in a terrible situation.”
“Maybe not.” The maid’s voice was measured and rational. “He didn’t leave the money behind, did he? He made a choice. You should have realized he would.”
Naomi’s tears broke their dam. The realization was beginning to deepen and the first few minutes of shock had given way to emotion. She had never intended to erase her father from the earth and therefore she had not anticipated the sudden grief that came with the annihilation of a lifetime’s presence. Everything reversed and upended in moments, destroyed in a whirl of dust and madness. Yet there was no time for either gravity or histrionics; they had to act. She couldn’t look at him at first but then she went over and took his head in her hands and rocked it back and forth. She began to lose her breath. “Why did you wake up?” she said to him through gritted teeth. “Why didn’t you sleep after the tea? You had to wake up!”
And then it dawned on her that Phaine must have come downstairs, disturbed by the noise, and that Faoud—surprised and panicking—must have killed her there as well. It might have happened in the space of a few insane seconds, unpremeditated and purely accidental.
“I measured the garden,” the maid went on, as if this were not happening. Time was short and they had to make a decision. “We can dig it ourselves and bury them there. There are spades in the garden shed and plastic sheets. We can lay them next to the olive tree under the wall. Nobody will find them.”
“What is she saying?” Sam said close to Naomi’s ear.
“She says we have to bury them in the garden.”
Sam stood up and swayed a little.
“Not me. I’m not doing that.”
Naomi stood with her and faced her angrily. Her superior will suddenly imposed itself.
“You have to help. I need you, there’s no backing out. You’re with us.”
“I can do whatever I want. I can leave right now.”
“No, you can’t.”
“If you’re not with us,” the maid said laconically in Greek, “I’m not going to cover for you when the police come. If they ask me, and they will, I’ll say you were involved.”
Naomi translated: it was mutually assured destruction then. Sam was about to fly into a rage. Her face reddened and she took a step backward, but it was Naomi who gripped her wrist and tried to pull her out of her coming impulsiveness.
“Think a little,” she said gently. “Think it through. There’s no way out for you. You’re already in it with us. It’s better just to go through with it.”
The girl calmed and the first signs of resignation floated into her face.
“It won’t last long,” Naomi said, “and then we’ll be back to normal.”
“Normal?”
“Something like normal. I promise.”
“I can’t see what you can promise now. You really fucked this one up—why should I believe you of all people?”
“Because you have no choice,” Naomi said. “Now pull yourself together.”
It was two in the afternoon. In the garden the shade from the old wall reached as far as the center where the olive tree stood. It was tired grass which a gardener mowed twice a month and with the rainless days it had lost its color. The soil was dry and loose underneath it. They found it easy to scoop up with the brand-new spades as they created a large pit.
By four, having excavated the grave, they sat in the shade and tried to recover; they were relieved that no one had called their phones and no one had rung the outer doorbell.
Sam thought about how her future might look now. It had suddenly disintegrated before her. Everything that is solid, she thought, melts into air.
Then she looked down at her arms and saw clusters of ants clinging to the backs of her hands. She uttered a cry of disgust and shook them off. But they swarmed around her feet. She stamped them out, shuddering with a touch of theatricality.
“What is it?” Naomi asked her.
“They’re everywhere. Can’t you see them?”
But Naomi saw nothing.
Sam said, “They’re on my arms.”
She threw her hands into the air again to shake off the little vermin.
“Calm down,” Naomi said.
She gripped Sam’s hands and stopped her flustering. To distract them Carissa made them some mint tea. They went inside and drank it, then laid the two bodies flat and wrapped them in plastic sheeting. They carried Jimmie out first and arranged him gently at the bottom of the cavity. Phaine they positioned alongside him, and then they sat by the edge of the grave and wondered what to do next. “Should I say something?” Naomi said in Greek to Carissa.
“You can say it to yourself, love.”
“I can’t think of anything,” Naomi went on. “I can’t think of anything to think, let alone say.”
“Then don’t say anything.”
The quicker the better, the Greek girl was thinking.
Naomi flinched, stood up, and picked up the spade.
“This wasn’t my intention,” she said, still in Greek, and to Carissa. “You know that.”
“It wasn’t my intention either,” Carissa retorted.
And yet what did intentions matter? No one took them seriously anyway. Naomi threw the first spadeful of soil onto the bodies and then she began the long task mechanically, indifferent to their efforts.
It took them an hour to refill the grave. By the time they had finished, the garden was flooded with sunlight. They patted down the soil and then awkwardly replaced the torn grass, since they had kept the clumps intact and laid them carefully to one side. When they had finished the garden looked almost as it had before, but not quite. They beat down the grass with the backs of their spades and, at the end, they sat together under the olive tree.
In the late afternoon this part of the port enjoyed the silence of the small mountains. Filled with crows, the sky became an echo chamber for their calls, and at the horizon the haze of the sea had turned violet. Carissa went into the kitchen and brought out a pitcher of cold lemonade, and they drank it from the jug, spilling it everywhere. The bobbing ice cubes rubbing their front teeth revived them and soon a form of peace returned. The maid got up and said, with her simple pragmatism, “We have to clean the house. And we have to clean it well.”
They worked into the evening, washing down the floors and then the walls. Everything in the bedroom and the salon was put back in its place, the poker assiduously cleaned, the minute displacements caused by a violent moment rectified. There were things missing, but no one who was not family would ever notice them unless they were specifically looking for them. The passports were gone, the personal effects. The simple version of the story they were going to tell was that Jimmie and Phaine had left for a trip. Perhaps they had even decided to drive back to London—no one knew.
But people don’t just disappear, Naomi had been thinking all along. The enormity of this problem was as great as the problem of not concealing their bodies. She would have to make it up as she went along.
After all, it wasn’t true that people don’t disappear. They disappear all the time. Any insurance agent could tell you that, and they often did if you asked them.
At nine Sam went back down to the port, leaving Naomi and Carissa in the house. At Kamini she stopped for a beer at Kordylenia’s, overlooking the rocks and the moonstone sea, and calmed herself in readiness for the family evening meal. They would ask her where she had been and she would say she had been with Naomi wandering the backstreets of the port. There was nothing more to it than that. She looked down at her hands and the sight of them filled her with revulsion, even though she had scrubbed them so clean that they looked whiter than usual. Yet she was now so tired that she wouldn’t be able to act suspiciously even if her nervousness betrayed her. She would eat quickly and then go to bed and see if it had been a bad dream after all. If her mother started asking questions she would cut her short: Amy was eternally suspicious of the alarming possibility of a Greek boyfriend. Sam would have to disarm her.
She ate a plate of fried sardines and doubled down on the Mythos beers. You couldn’t resist a beer called Mythos. She held her tears back and finally they ceased pressurizing her eyes. It would be all right, she told herself. Time would smooth it over like the grass on their shoddy graves. She turned to look at the interior of the small restaurant, and she noticed that the men sitting there playing backgammon were looking her way. It was as if there was something odd about her now, a stigmata that she couldn’t see herself. She wanted to yell a “Fuck you” at them, or at least a “Skatofatsa.” But instead she raised a hand and called over a waiter.
“May I have some bread? Toasted?”
When it came she ate it with oil, oblivious to the gluten. Somehow she no longer cared about it. She went home afterward, suddenly quickened and emboldened. On the porch the Haldanes were at the table with John Coltrane on the stereo, and in the event she saw at once that they had suspected nothing at all. The faces were open, essentially oblivious.
In fact, her father said as she appeared, “Chris and I spent the whole day fishing. We didn’t catch a damned thing.”
Her mother was gentle toward her, the maternal eyes curiously empty of their normal anxiety. “How was your day, baby?”
Sam sat wearily and helped herself to some of the feta salad which had been set on the table in a large ceramic bowl.
“It was nice, I guess. Naomi and I explored the port up by the mountain. The Codringtons have all these friends up there.”
“Old bohemians, eh?” her father chimed in.
“Yeah, old bohemians. We didn’t see any, though.”
“They all came because of Leonard Cohen, and now they’re stranded.”
Sam turned and looked her brother in the eye. He was the only one among them with a devious turn of mind. Now his gaze was mocking and disbelieving.
“The whole day exploring?” he said.
“It’s better than fishing.”
“Does Mr. Codrington know Leonard Cohen?”
“Probably. He didn’t say.”
“I bet Dad’s jealous,” Chris said.
“Did you have lunch with the family up there?” Amy then asked.
“No, her father and stepmother weren’t there. I’m not sure they’re even on the island right now.”
“That’s funny,” Jeffrey said. “I was sure I saw them last night in the port. I didn’t go up and say hello because I had the feeling they don’t like me. But I’m sure I saw them.”
“Maybe they left this morning, then.”
“Maybe they did. But last night, anyway, they were living it up at the Pirate. I’m pretty sure it was them.”
Sam went up to her room, lying with the lights off for a long time. She let the tears flow as copiously as they wanted, and eventually they dried up of their own accord as well and she became lucid again. She felt betrayed, but not in a way that she could quite explain.
Of course, it was she herself who had insisted on coming with Naomi to her house. But Naomi had let Sam be drawn into the events, as she had all along, but without telling her why she needed her. It was because Naomi wanted an accomplice for the times ahead when things might get unpleasant. She needed a foil of some kind—it was not clear for what.
Ahead of them stretched the rest of the summer, now in ruins. As it evolved she would have to play more and more of a game to keep herself above suspicion. The only solution would be to get off the island and go home, or go anywhere away from Greece. But her parents had already paid for the house in advance, and there was no way they would let her leave by herself. She was cornered, and Naomi held the keys to her delectable open-air prison. It was a reason to wonder if she had misjudged her new friend. But she would wait and see what Naomi said to her from then on. It was possible that she was too upset to understand on the first night of a catastrophe.
As soon as Sam had gone, Naomi and Carissa went back out into the nocturnal garden and smoked some cigarettes. They stared at the uneven ground, and horror blossomed inside them silently to which words couldn’t be matched.
“What now?” Carissa said in the end.
“I don’t know. We’ll wait and see what happens. I don’t think they had a busy social schedule this month, did they?”
“They told me they were going to have drinks with the Korders tomorrow night. Other than that—”
“Damn. I’ll call them tomorrow and say they’re indisposed.”
“Indisposed? You know how gossip works here.”
“I’ll say they went to the mainland for a few days. The Korders won’t think twice about it.”
Carissa nodded, half convinced, because it was lame, but it would have to do.
“We’ll have to improvise,” Naomi went on. “What else can we do but improvise?”
She went into the house and came back with an envelope with the money she’d promised. She asked Carissa to count it, and when she did she found that it was twenty thousand euros instead of fifteen. Naomi immediately put a hand on her arm.
“Don’t say anything. It’s for you. I feel terrible for putting you in this situation, so just take it. It’s the least I can do.”
The maid said nothing and accepted the gift. For her, it was a stupendous amount.
They went inside and made sandwiches and ate them with brandy from Jimmie’s stash. They played some jazz and lay on the sofas, smoking in order to banish through a trivial defilement the onset of guilt. The somberness of their mood, however, was soon reflected by the pall of smoke that formed around the dingy old chandelier that Phaine had bought in Kifissia an age ago when Mitsotakis was still prime minister. But Naomi resolved to herself to think only of the future from then on.