16

Rydal had taken a nap in mid-afternoon, after Niko had returned from his 1 o’clock meeting with Chester and reported what Chester wanted from him—a passport and an assassin. Rydal knew Andreou slightly. He had come to Niko’s apartment one evening in December. Andreou was a florist. He had greenhouses at his home on the western fringe of the city, and he brought in fresh flowers every morning to his shop on Leoharos Street. His wife tended the shop. Rydal was glad that Andreou and his wife, honest and hardworking people, were going to get Chester’s five thousand dollars. So after Niko had come and gone a little after 2, Rydal had slept on the three-quarter-sized couch near the simmering iron pot. He had slept for about an hour, and awakened, wonderfully refreshed, to find Anna seated across the room stringing green beans into a pot on her lap, a band of sunlight stretching from the narrow horizontal window behind her and striking her shoulders and her neck. She was like a Vermeer.

“You sleep well? That is good for you,” Anna said.

She had turned off the radio, he noticed, no doubt out of courtesy to him. She fixed him a cup of tea. He lay drowsily on the couch, sipping it, slowly coming awake. He thought of Andreou and his meeting Chester at 5 o’clock. Niko said he had told Andreou to look very tough and to say the minimum. Andreou had worked for a while in the Greek Merchant Marine, and had picked up some English in his travels. Rydal thought Andreou would do all right. And besides, Chester had not much choice. It was this that reassured Rydal, that Chester’s field of possibilities was so circumscribed. Who else but Niko could he ask for an assassin? Chester would know very well that he was either staying with Niko or that Niko knew where he was. But Chester would not tell the police to question Niko, or to follow him to see where he lived. Chester would not even mention Niko, because Chester didn’t really want him, Rydal, to be spoken to by the police. Rydal felt quite safe at Niko and Anna Kalfros’s. But he did not think it safe to go outdoors, so when Anna said she had to go out for butter at 4 o’clock, Rydal did not offer to get it for her, and he told her why. Anna understood. She approved greatly of Andreou collecting money for a crime he would not commit. It appealed both to her sense of justice and her sense of humor.

Niko came in just before 7. He said that he had spoken to Andreou around 3, and that he had agreed to meet Chester at 5 p.m. in a restaurant near his florist shop. “Andreou said he would come by tonight to say hello to you,” Niko said, smiling.

“Oh? Around what time?” Rydal was wondering if Andreou would be followed, if Chester had been spoken to by the police—say, at some time that afternoon—and if Chester had been followed to the restaurant.

“After work,” said Niko vaguely. He was dropping his strings of sponges carefully and methodically on to the floor in a corner of the room. “He work till about eight tonight.”

“You talked to him after he saw Chester?” Rydal asked.

“Naw. Don’t talk to him since three o’clock.” Niko kept on practicing his English—it was a small way of showing off in front of his wife, who didn’t understand much or any of it—though Rydal was speaking to him in Greek, mainly because he wanted to be sure that Niko understood what he was saying.

“I hope the police weren’t following Chester,” Rydal said.

“The police?”

“If they were following Chester, they’ll question Andreou. He might not be able to explain why he had an appointment with Chester.” Rydal picked up the newspaper Niko had brought in. The Knossos story was on the second page now, a three-inch-long item: the police were still pursuing clues to the identity of “the young woman with red hair”, but they had made no progress to date. The police were looking for Rydal Keener, the young man with dark hair described by Perikles Goulandris, the ticket-seller. Keener was believed to be hiding in Athens.

And if they had his name, Rydal thought, they had the Chamberlains’, because they came from the same place, a hotel register, and whom did they think they were fooling? The public, perhaps, but not him. Rydal put the paper down.

“Um-m. I read it, too,” said Niko. He was pouring three glasses of retsina.

“I don’t believe that,” Rydal said, half to himself.

“What?” asked Niko.

“That they haven’t identified Colette. Anna, what’s the best station for Greek news?”

Anna happily went over to her radio and tuned in on an Athens station.

The news came in almost at once. It was 7. Midway in the newscast was a short sentence: “The police of Iraklion are continuing their efforts to determine the identity of the young woman found dead in the Palace of Knossos, but thus far without success.”

“They are withholding it,” Rydal said.

“Why?” from Anna.

Rydal explained. He said that the police were bound to know by now that the woman found dead was Mrs. William Chamberlain. It was very simple for the police to look for a William Chamberlain registered at one of the hotels in Athens. Chester would not mind being found and questioned by the police, because it would give him a chance to tell them that Rydal Keener killed his wife. “The police are probably keeping it out of the papers,” Rydal said, “because they—if they believe Chester—they’ll think I might make an attempt to kill Chester before he talks to the police.” It seemed quite simple to him, and the likeliest thing also.

“Ah, how horrible,” Anna said with a sigh. “That they would think you would kill a man, Rydal.”

Rydal smiled. “After all, that’s what Chester’s trying to do to me. Why, if I had any red blood in my veins, certainly I’d try to kill Chester.” He flexed his arms. He felt nervous, not like himself at all, as if he were playing some part on a stage that he was not at all comfortable in.

But Niko laughed appreciatively, like someone watching a play that he was enjoying.

“But—” Rydal went on, sipping his retsina now, “I’m not even interested in knowing what hotel Chester’s staying at. I’ll wager it’s either the Acropole or the El Greco. He’ll stay until he gets his passport day after tomorrow. That’s when he’ll get it, isn’t that right, Niko?”

“Is correct. I gave Frank the photo this afternoon.”

“And then he’ll try to get out of the country,” Rydal said.

Anna and Niko looked at him quietly for a moment. Then Anna pushed closer towards Rydal the plate of radishes and little onions and chunks of white cheese that they were nibbling with their retsina.

“And then what will you do, Rydal?” she asked. “I hope let him go. He is an evil man.”

Rydal knew she was right. That he should let him go. His common sense told him that, too. But Rydal did not think it would work out that way. He smiled at Anna. “I’ll know his new name on his new passport. If he escapes the police, Anna? Gets to another country?” Rydal frowned. “He may well, you know, with a new passport. An evil man shouldn’t be allowed to go free, do you think?”

On her face came a slow but unstruggling comprehension. To possess a false passport, she had heard so much about them, was no great misdemeanour. It was as if she had never realized that a false passport invariably concealed a crook of some kind. “You mean, you’ll tell the police his new name,” she said.

That was not in Rydal’s mind at all, but he nodded. “I’ll think about it. I may.”

Niko’s laugh bubbled up in his throat, and he rubbed his hands. “Good! Then he’ll send to me for another passport. More business for Frank and me.”

Anna looked at him sideways. “Hm-m. No. Let someone else do it. If this man is caught, he’ll tell the police where he got the false passports from, eh? What about that?” She pushed her husband affectionately in the shoulder as she got up to stir the pot.

Andreou arrived as they were finishing their Greek style pot-au-feu. Andreou was quietly, cautiously radiant. One look at his repressed smile and his glowing black eyes, and they knew his transaction with Chester had been successful. He said that he had got the five thousand dollars. He reached in his pocket.

“My wife is alone in the shop. There might be a hold-up,” he said jokingly. “I didn’t want to leave the money with her, so I brought it along.”

And he brought it along also to show it, Rydal thought. Rydal looked at the new five-hundred-dollar bills on the wooden table beside the soiled soup plates. For a few seconds they all stared at the money, Niko and Andreou grinning, Anna and Rydal smiling. And each of them, looking at the same thing, had quite different thoughts in his head. For Niko and Anna, such a sum might be a house in the country. For Andreou, perhaps a trip to America with his wife. His own thoughts were, there lies my life, my death, my life and death combined, in a handful of green-colored paper.

Then Andreou laughed aloud.

“What’re you going to do with it, Andreou?” asked Rydal.

“Oh, I think Helen and I will go to America in the summer.” He pointed a finger at Rydal gaily. “Maybe we’ll see you there!”

Rydal had a funny sense of déjà vu, or perhaps it was a feeling of foreknowledge. It depressed him.

Niko was touching the money lovingly, vaguely stroking it, as one might stroke a small animal. He had washed his hands at the sink, but his nails were still dirty.

Anna poured coffee for Andreou. He said he was going to eat later with Helen.

“You’re sure you were not followed, Andreou?” Rydal said.

“Sure,” Andreou said seriously. “I looked.”

“In the restaurant you didn’t see anyone watching you?”

“No. I was just on time. Mr. Chamberlain was already there.”

Rydal asked how long they were there, who left first, whether Chester had appeared very nervous. Andreou thought not.

“He wanted to give me only half,” Andreou said, smiling, “but I asked for the whole thing.”

“So you have no more meetings with him? No date?” Rydal asked.

“No.”

“Good.” Rydal sat back in his chair, relieved. But a bumping sound just then in the cement corridor made him start.

“The kids,” Anna said, gesturing. “They kick the door sometimes.”

Rydal had been touching the roll of bills in his left-hand trousers pocket. He pulled them out impulsively, smiling at Andreou, and said, “I’ll trade you.”

“What’s that?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“Five thousand?” Andreou’s eyes widened.

Niko and Anna had fairly gasped also, and were leaning forward to look at it.

“Same as yours. Count it. I’ll trade you,” Rydal said, handing his money to Andreou.

Patiently, smiling with pleasure at what he was doing, Andreou counted Rydal’s bills one by one, laying them down on the table. “Ten!” he announced. He looked from one stack to the other, two or three times, as if he were trying to find a difference between them, then said to Rydal, “Why do you want to trade?”

“Because I don’t like this money. I’d rather have the money that was paid for my death.”

“Where you get that?” Niko asked in English.

“From the same place. For keeping my mouth shut. Mr. Chamberlain insisted.”

“Okay, we trade,” said Andreou, and put Rydal’s money into his pocket.

Rydal picked up Andreou’s money. He put it into the same pocket the other money had been in. Niko was watching him with fascination. “Mr. Chamberlain insisted,” Rydal repeated.

Andreou looked at him fondly, his eyes glazed with his dreams.

“Andreou, I have another request,” Rydal said. “For a favor for which I’ll pay—say, a thousand.”

“Dollars?” asked Andreou.

“Yes. I have to cross the border. Into Yugoslavia. I thought you might know someone who is going by truck.”

“What is this? Why Yugoslavia?” Niko asked.

And Rydal suddenly knew he was going to be defeated on it, that his idea was dangerous, uncomfortable, slow, and carried several strikes against its success. “I want to follow Mr. Chamberlain,” Rydal said.

Andreou and Niko looked at him blankly for a moment.

“You need a passport,” said Niko.

“Passports are your panacea!” said Rydal, but he laughed.

“Mr. Chamberlain will fly on his passport, no?” asked Niko.

“Probably,” Rydal said.

Niko exchanged a slow look with Andreou. “I’ll speak to Frank about a passport. What kind do you want?”

Rydal sat down in the straight chair he had been sitting on before. “Italian, perhaps. I can’t afford an American.”

“I will speak to Frank tonight.” Niko looked seriously at his wristwatch, an enormous thing of false gold. “By eleven I will try to call him. You have a photograph? I will see that he gets it tonight.”

Rydal had a photograph.

When Andreou left, Rydal went with him to the front door at the end of the corridor. Rydal felt a compulsion to see for himself if there were anyone loitering on the street, waiting for Andreou, watching the house. He saw a young man walking away on the opposite pavement, but no one loitering. He said good-bye to Andreou with a firm handshake. A real, bona-fide handshake, Rydal felt.

“My regard to your wife,” Rydal said to him.

Andreou laughed. “Thank you. And eternal blessings to you!”

Niko asked Rydal some more questions about the five thousand dollars that he had received from Chester. Was it just for keeping his mouth shut? Had Rydal had to threaten Chester in order to get it? Rydal tried to explain that Chester was the sort of man who felt more comfortable after binding people, or trying to, with money.

“At one point, I threw it back at him,” Rydal said. “The money fell on the floor. His wife picked it up and handed it back to me.” Rydal shrugged. He had the feeling Niko didn’t believe this story, either, that he thought it merely an added dramatic touch. Rydal smiled. Niko’s absolute bluntness in discussing money was rather refreshing. Rydal could see the wheels turning in Niko’s brain. Perhaps he was wondering, for instance, if he could keep the five thousand for Chester’s new passport without giving him the passport, and without involving Frank? But it was rather late now. Niko had given the photograph to Frank, he said. “Oh, if you continue to know Chester, he’ll probably need a little service here and there from you,” Rydal said.

“He’s got a lot of mazuma, eh?” Niko asked dreamily.

“Lots,” said Rydal. “Keeps it in a suitcase lining.”

“You ever see it?”

“No. Just the suitcase.”

“You think—fifty thousand maybe?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

The childlike conversation continued. Anna was washing up the dishes.

“Too bad, if the police catch him with all that,” Niko said, shaking his head. “They’ll just take it, won’t they?”

“Yes. If they find out he’s the embezzler named Chester MacFarland.”

Niko’s eyes began slowly to glow with his new idea.

Rydal smiled at him. “You don’t know what hotel he is at, do you?”

“I can find out.”

“You would have to have someone else do it for you. You can’t threaten Chester, because he can threaten to tell about you and Frank and the passport business.”

“Um-m. Yes. But there are ways.”

“Oh, yes. Ways—Don’t ask Andreou to do it.”

“Why not?”

“He’s done enough. He’s happy. You wouldn’t want to see him get caught, after gaining five thousand dollars, would you?”

“No. No.” Niko shook his head, agreeing emphatically.

“Think of some other needy countryman.”

Niko grinned. “I think of plenty,” he said in English.

At 10:30, Niko went out with Rydal’s photograph and fifteen hundred dollars of Rydal’s money as an advance payment against a possible price of two thousand for an Italian passport. Before twelve he returned, saying Frank could do it.

The next morning the newspapers did not even mention the Knossos affair. Rydal had sent Anna out for the Daily Post as well as the Greek language papers.

If the police had spoken to Chester, Rydal thought, and he was sure they had, they would probably speak to him a second time, maybe a third time, trying to get more details from him, or find a hole in his story, perhaps. He thought of the moustached, beardless photograph in Chester’s passport. Chester had been going to get it retouched in Athens, have a beard put on it. He surely wouldn’t now. Rydal wondered if the police would see a resemblance between the photograph and the one of Chester MacFarland, alias whatever it was, as a young man, in the Greek agent’s assignment book? And why didn’t America come through with Chester’s passport photograph which was on record as that of Chester MacFarland? Was there some reason for the delay? Rydal could only suppose that it was a result of America’s slow gathering of evidence on Chester’s frauds and embezzlements. They were probably collecting all they could from everywhere, and not saying anything about it until they had everything. And MacFarland was still not connected with Chamberlain of the Knossos tragedy. Rydal was tempted to go outside to a telephone—Niko and Anna had none—and see if Chester was at the Acropole or the El Greco. But he restrained himself and stayed indoors.

He wanted to call up Geneviève Schumann. He was very bored and restless that day. He had nothing with him to read, and Niko and Anna had nothing in the house but a few popular magazines and a Greek Bible.

“Why don’t you call up Geneviève?” Anna asked him.

Rydal smiled. “Because I’m afraid to stick my head out the door.”

“Would you like me to call her for you?”

It was a quarter past two.

He shrugged, not knowing where to begin. “And then you explain to her—her Greek’s not so good. You explain to her for ten minutes that I didn’t kill the woman found at Knossos? Meanwhile a servant’s listening on a telephone in the house? You say I’m at your house and would she possibly come and visit me? Something like that?”

Anna giggled. That was probably exactly what she had been thinking of.

“No, Anna, it can’t be done.”

“You could write her a letter. I would deliver it.”

Like the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Rydal thought. “I don’t want her or anybody else to know that you know where I am.” He sat down on the limp couch.

Anna went back to the sink. She was washing some shirts for Niko.

Rydal considered writing Geneviève a letter. He imagined writing the whole story out for her. But why? She was an intelligent girl, imaginative, too, but also very practical. She would say, “But why did you get yourself into such a mess in the first place? Why did you help this man hide the body in the King’s Palace Hotel? What possessed you, Rydal?” Her opinion of him would go down. He could try to explain it, but it wouldn’t satisfy her, he knew. He felt a depressing distance between himself and Geneviève. What the distance said to him was that Geneviève didn’t matter. That was the simple truth.

He stood up and went over to Anna. “Anna, I don’t want you trying to take any message to Geneviève. Understand? It’s too dangerous. My name was in the paper yesterday morning.” Rydal gave a laugh. “Which is proof the police are talking to Chester. I can just hear his story. Unfortunately, he’s a good liar.” He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked away. His fingers closed over the roll of money. Three thousand five hundred dollars.

At a little after 5, there was a knock on the front door. Rydal stood up. Anna was not expecting anyone, he knew. She had said that she had told one of her neighbors, who often came in the afternoon for a cup of tea, that she was going to visit her old aunt on the north side of town this afternoon.

“Don’t worry,” Anna whispered as she slipped out of the door into the corridor. “It’s maybe Mouriades.”

“Who?”

“Mouriades. An old man. Father of Dina.”

A neighbor, Rydal supposed. He looked around the room. The place was a cul-de-sac. Outside the narrow windows was a slit of a space between this house and the next, with no exit to it without a grappling iron and a rope to climb a twenty-foot high brick wall. Rydal had looked. Anna was talking to someone. Rydal put his ear at the partly opened door and listened.

It was Pan.

Rydal relaxed, and gave a tense sigh of regret. Anna was putting him off. No, Rydal was not here, no indeed. Anna was doing a good job of it. Pan was a friend. Pan would understand and wouldn’t talk. Rydal was tempted to run down the corridor and say hello and ask him to come in. But better he didn’t.

Anna came back. She closed the apartment door. “Pan.”

“I know. Thanks, Anna. You were very good.”

“I don’t like that Pan,” Anna said with a troubled frown, shaking her head. “I don’t trust him.”

“Oh, he—” Rydal stopped. He had started to say she was wrong, that Pan could be trusted. But it was better left the way it was. Pan just might have remarked to a friend of his that he knew where Rydal was, the friend might blab it still more.

“You trust Pan?” asked Anna.

She didn’t know him well. He had brought Pan here perhaps twice for a glass of wine. “Oh, I think he’s all right,” Rydal said.

At just the time they were expecting Niko home, there was another knock at the door. Anna went down the corridor again.

“But he is not here,” Anna’s voice said in a protesting tone. “Ah!” in an exasperated tone. “All right, all right, but it’s useless. . . . All right. . . . Well, do you think I know any better than you?”

The front door slammed.

Anna came in with a mischievous, delighted smile on her face. She had a pale blue envelope in her hand. “From Geneviève! That was a messenger!” She pushed the envelope into his hand.

Rydal opened it, with a small pain at his heart, a fear of the worst, a sense of embarrassment—the mingled emotions he nearly always felt when he opened a letter from one of his family. The letter was in French.

Thursday 5 p.m.

My dear Rydal,

I am thinking you might be at Niko’s. Or is it Pan’s? I am sure you didn’t kill the woman at Knossos. Is it really you they are talking about? Why did you not tell me you were going to Crete? It is as if you were kidnapped and a crime pinned on you. At least you seem to be alive, as the papers say you were on the boat from Iraklion to Piraeus yesterday morning. Why are you hiding? I feel you may not get this. I miss you so and I am so worried. [The last word—soucieuse—underlined three times.] If you do get this, come to us for help. Papa has said he will help you. You know how much he likes you. Don’t be [an untranslatable phrase, one of her and Rydal’s private phrases meaning a meaninglessly rebellious and stubborn person]. I love you and I pray for you. Are you all right? Wounded? Sick? Please answer if you get this. Get somebody to deliver a note from you.

Bébises,

Geneviève

“What does she say?” Anna had not taken her eyes from his face.

“She wishes me well.”

“Ah, and what else?”

“It’s a very short note,” Rydal said evasively.

“But what else? Doesn’t she want to see you?”

“Now, Anna!—She says her father has offered to help me, if I need it.”

“Her father? The professor of archaeology?”

“Yes.”

“Well—let him help you. Can he help you?”

“No,” Rydal said.

“But you—you need somebody to speak for you. You can’t go on hiding all your life.”

“No, Anna. Just till tomorrow, I think. I’ll be off tomorrow.”

“Oh, not that you’re not welcome to stay here as long as you like, Rydal. You are our friend.”

The conversation irked him. He lit a cigarette, and stood looking at the dusty rectangular window. One could hardly see the red-brick wall three feet beyond it.

“Doesn’t she want you to answer her?” asked Anna.

“Yes.”

“Good, then, answer her! Do you want a pen and paper?”

“No, I have them, thanks.” Rydal looked at her. “Can you get someone to deliver it?”

“Certainly. I myself can—”

“Not you, Anna. Do you know a boy in the neighborhood you can ask? Tell him it’s about some laundry or something?” Rydal remembered that Anna sometimes took in laundry.

“Ah, trust me.”

Rydal wrote in French:

My dear Geneviève,

Your note received a moment ago. I wonder did you send one to Pan also? So you know where I am from that question. Please do not tell your father. I am grateful indeed for his offer of help, but I don’t need it, I should say better, I cannot use it just now. You are right I am not guilty of the mess on Crete. It is difficult if not impossible to explain why I am in the predicament I am in, but it is in the nature of an experiment, one which I must see through, one which isn’t finished yet. How I wish, a month from now, we could sit at a table at the Alexandre in Paris and have dinner and I should tell you all about it. Shall we make a date for February 18th, a month from today, at the Alexandre? At 7 p.m.?

I am grateful for your belief in me. You are in a distinct minority at the moment. But “public opinion does not concern me at all”, I say, remembering the words, more or less, of the trouserless man in the National Gardens in December! In answer to your question, I am not wounded. Not trouserless either.

My love to you and with a loud à bientôt!

He left it unsigned.

Anna went out to find a messenger for it, as soon as Niko came in. Niko had no news. No one, and no policeman, had asked him any questions. Frank was going to have Chester’s new passport ready for him by tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow morning.

“I want to know the name on it as soon as possible,” Rydal said.

“Oh, I told Frank that,” Niko said.

“Can’t you reach him now? I thought you would know it by now.” Rydal frowned, anxious.

Niko looked thoughtful for a moment. “Frank has no telephone where he is. But I have an idea. There is a taverna near Frank.”

When Anna came back, Niko went out to make a telephone call. Rydal had pressed a pencil and a piece of paper on him. He wanted the name down accurately.

Niko came back after thirty-five minutes. Chester’s new name was to be Philip Jeffries Wedekind. Frank was having the passport delivered in a shoe box to Chester’s hotel, the El Greco, tomorrow morning at 9:30. The messenger was going to ask a bellboy to put the shoe box in Mr. Chamberlain’s room, in case he wasn’t there, by Mr. Chamberlain’s request. Rydal’s Italian passport was to be ready at the same time tomorrow morning, and would be delivered to Niko on the street.

“Bring it home right away!” Rydal said, clapping his hands. “Before lunch.”

“Before lunch. Okay.” Niko rubbed his nose and looked at Rydal, smiling.

“Two thousand dollars. Very reasonable. You deserve some thanks also, Niko.”

Niko put up his broad, dirty palms. “Ah, no. We are friend, you and I. When I am in America . . .”