3

Chester had been reassured on his third day in Athens by a letter that came from his man in Milwaukee, Bob Gambardella. It said, in part:

Dear Mac,

No news is good news and that’s the way it is. Seven new subscribers this week and the proceeds as usual deposited, less my commission. Shall be expecting your dividend instructions shortly on Canadian Star’s semi-annual. . . .

It meant that Bob had had no trouble as yet from the police. This was the second letter from Bob, and he’d had one in Paris from Vic, his salesman in Dallas. The police hadn’t come around to Vic or Bob asking them if they knew a Howard Cheever or a William S. Haight or, thank God, a Chester MacFarland. Wm S. Haight was the name Chester stamped on his dividend checks as Treasurer of the Canadian Star Company, Inc. Seven new subscribers was quite good, Chester thought, considering he had written Bob last month not to make any effort to get new people until further notice. Bob might have taken in fifty thousand dollars from the seven people, perhaps more. Certificates were issued to the stock buyers, dividends were paid in modest but regular amounts, and if the stock never did quite get on the Canadian exchange in the newspapers, so long as the stockholders got their dividends, why should they complain? Bob and Vic, when talking a prospect into buying, always said they were letting him in on a new thing that was going to be listed in a few months, when the stock would certainly start skyrocketing. So it went, too, with Unimex, Valco-Tech, Universal Key—sometimes Chester could not remember them all. Once in a while, if a stockholder asked too many questions in his letters, Chester would instruct one of his representatives in Dallas, St. Louis or San Francisco to get on the telephone to the man and offer to buy his stock for more than he paid for it, and to give a pitch for some new stock. Nine times out of ten, the suspicious people would hang on to their old stock and buy the new also. Physically, the land on which the Canadian Star stock was founded did exist, it was simply worth very little, and very probably had no uranium in it. It was up in northern Canada—Chester or his boiler-room men could tell the customers just where to look for it on the map—and they made it sound as if uranium was going to come pouring out as soon as the engineers made a few more calculations as to where to dig. Actually, on the back of the stock contract, some very fine print near the bottom stated that the land was “being explored at present”, and it did not say for what. And the stock company could not be prosecuted for its intentions or hopes, which were certainly to find uranium.

The Unimex Company was a non-existent offshore oil concern around the Texas and Mexico border. It had brought in over a million dollars on stock Chester offered over the counter at eight dollars per share. Chester had certified financial statements showing Unimex’s assets to be worth six million dollars, and he had even had New York brokers sent to inspect certain sites in the Gulf of Mexico, which, however, were owned by other people. Chester had bought a very small abandoned site, but he laid claim to a hundred square miles around it. Unimex and Canadian Star were now Chester’s chief sources of income.

After a few days in Greece, Chester found that he breathed more easily. He enjoyed the strange meals at tavernas, the little oily dishes of this and that, washed down with ouzo or a bottle of wine that usually neither of them liked, though Chester always finished it. Colette bought five pairs of shoes, and Chester had a suit made of English tweed in a fraction of the time and for less than half what it would have cost him in the States. Still, it was a habit, a nervous habit, for him to glance around the hotel lobby to see if there were anyone who looked like a police agent. He doubted if they would send a man over for him, but the F.B.I. had representatives abroad, he supposed. All they would need was a photograph, the collected testimony of a few swindled people, and, by checking with the passport authorities, they could discover his name.

In their six days in Athens, Chester and Colette had gone twice to the Acropolis with their Guide Bleu, had taken a bus to see the sunset at Sounion and Byron’s famous signature in one of the marble columns of the ruined temple there, had done the main museums, gone once to the theatre—just to go, because they hadn’t understood a thing about the play—and had made their plans for the rest of the country. The Peloponnesus was next, with Mycenae and Corinth, for which they planned to rent a car, and then Crete and Rhodes. Then back by plane to Paris for another week or so before going home. They were apartmentless in New York now, did not want to live in Manhattan again, and they planned to buy a house either in Connecticut or northern Pennsylvania.

Around six o’clock of the evening before their departure for Corinth and Mycenae, Chester went out of the hotel for a few minutes to buy a bottle of Dewar’s. When he walked back into the lobby, he noticed a dark man, in a grey overcoat and hat, standing with his hands in his overcoat pockets near one of the cream-colored columns that supported the ceiling. The man had thick black eyebrows, and Chester could not be sure the man looked at him, but he thought so. Chester looked away, glanced around him quickly, and noticed the young man in the dark overcoat he had twice seen before, standing now near the door and smoking a cigarette. Agents, Chester thought. His eyes had been drawn to the man in the grey overcoat as a result of conditioning, he knew; though because he had felt so secure the last couple of days, his habit of glancing around the lobby had left him. He’d suspected that the younger man was an agent, and now he was sure. Chester went casually over to the hotel desk and gave the message he had intended to give when he came in:

“We’ll be leaving tomorrow pretty early. Can you make up our bill so we can settle it tonight? That’s MacFarland in six twenty-one.” His voice lowered involuntarily, but only a little, on “MacFarland”.

As Chester walked on to the elevator, the older man moved, following him. The elevator arrived and the door slid open, and, being closest, Chester went into the elevator first. The man followed, removing his hat. Chester kept his on.

“Six, please,” said Chester.

The boy running the elevator glanced at the man.

“Seex,” said the man.

A Greek, Chester thought. He felt perhaps one degree better. The man had a thick, somewhat Semitic nose, black and grey hair, and his face was pock-marked. Chester got out at the sixth floor and the man followed him. Chester was just raising his hand to knock on his door, when the man said:

“Pardon me. You are, I think, Richard Donlevy?”

The name meant Atlanta to Chester. The Suwannee Club. “No,” said Chester blankly.

“Or—Louis Ferguson?”

That was Miami. Chester shook his head. “No. Sorry.”

“You are travelling with your wife, yes? May I have a few words with you in your room, sir?”

“Why? What’s all this about?”

“Perhaps nothing,” the man said with a smile. “I represent the Greek police. I should like to ask you a few questions.”

Chester looked down at the billfold the man had opened. In a window of it was an authentic-looking card covered with Greek print and signatures, and, in heavy black letters in the middle of it, GREEK NATIONAL POLICE. If he refused to talk to him, Chester thought, it might make matters worse. “All right,” Chester said indifferently, and knocked.

The door opened at once, but only a crack. Colette was in her dressing-gown.

“Excuse me, dear,” Chester said. “I’m with a gentleman who wants to talk to me a moment. May we come in?”

“Why, of course,” said Colette, but her face had gone a little pale.

They went in. Colette wrapped her dressing-gown closer about her, and stepped back near the chest of drawers.

The Greek agent bowed to her. “Madam. Forgive my intrusion.” He turned to Chester. “May I ask under what name you are registered here?”

Chester drew himself up and frowned. “What’s this about? What right have you to ask me that?”

The man pulled from his overcoat pocket a small looseleaf notebook, opened it to a certain page and extended it to Chester. “This is not you?”

Chester’s heart stumbled. It was a photograph of himself, fuzzy from enlargement but still recognizable, laughing, with a highball glass in his hand. It was from a group photograph of the dinner guests at the Suwannee Club maybe three years ago, when he’d been Richard Donlevy, with more hair and no moustache then, and he’d been selling some kind of stock. Selling what? He’d forgotten. Chester shook his head. “That’s not me. I see some resemblance, but . . . I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

“It is in regard to various—how do you say—investment matters in the United States,” said the agent, still calm and pleasant. “I have not the details with me, and it is not my place to say them now, if I knew. I am only working in cooperation with the American authorities, who suspected you were in Europe.”

A chill of panic passed over Chester and did not quite leave him. They were on to him in the States. Someone had tried to put up his stocks as collateral or something like that, and had been told they were phony. Or perhaps it was even the Walkie Kar. He looked at Colette and saw his own fear leap to her face for an instant, then she controlled herself and gave him a quick smile. “But you’re looking for somebody with another name, you told me,” Chester said.

“Various names. It does not much matter. You will please to come with me, anyway, to answer some questions, will you?” the man asked with an air of being very sure that Chester was going to come with him.

“No. Why should I? It’s your mistake,” said Chester, taking off his overcoat.

Colette came forward, lifted the notebook in the agent’s hand, studied the picture, and said, “Why, that’s not my husband.”

“Madam, under what name are you both registered here? It is the easiest thing in the world for me to find out. I shall simply call down and ask who is in room six twenty-one.”

Colette looked at him, and said in her high, young voice, “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“I would like you to know that I am armed. I should not like to have to take you away at gun-point.” The Greek agent’s black eyebrows came down in a puzzled way as he looked at Chester.

Chester shrugged, not moving from where he stood. He was glancing around the room, however, as if he might find a weapon in some corner with which to defend himself.

The Greek walked quickly towards the telephone.

Chester darted for the bathroom.

“Stop!” the agent said. “I have a gun!”

Chester glanced behind him, saw the man running towards him with a gun pointed, and calculated that he wouldn’t use it. He leapt to the tub edge and yanked the window up. It was sticky and moved only about eight inches.

“Chester!” Colette cried.

The man pulled at Chester’s jacket tail, and Chester looked over his shoulder, raised his left foot and kicked backward, catching the fellow in the pit of the stomach. He got down from the tub edge, and, before the man could straighten up, Chester hit him on the back of the neck. The man’s forehead banged against the rim of the basin. Chester swung him up again, hit him on the jaw and knocked him into the tub. He started to pull him up for another blow, and realized he was out cold.

Chester stood with his fists clenched, panting.

“My God!” Colette was standing in the bathroom doorway. “You’re all right, darling?”

Chester nodded. He picked up the agent’s gun, which had fallen on the bathroom floor. A drinking glass had been knocked down, and there were pieces of glass on the tiles. Chester kicked one nervously with the side of his shoe.

“I’ll clean that up,” Colette said.

“Got to get him out of here,” Chester murmured, “before that other agent—there’s another one downstairs.”

“Really?” Colette gasped. “Let’s see. The balcony?”

There was a balcony outside their windows that ran the length of the hotel. “No. He’s going to come to in a couple of minutes. I’ll think of something. Start packing us up, will you, honey? We’ve got to get out of here tonight.”

Colette hurried out of her dressing-gown, pushed it into a suit-case and grabbed the skirt of a dark suit that was hanging over a chair.

“I’ve got it!” Chester said, and took one of the man’s limp arms.

“What?”

“There’s a store-room down the hall.” Chester heaved the man across his shoulder. “Red light over it. Saw it one night when I was looking for a loo and you were in the tub. Uff! Guy’s heavy.” Chester staggered across the room with him. “Take a look in the hall. See if there’s—”

Colette nodded and quickly opened the door an inch or two. “Someone at the elevator.”

“Damn,” Chester said, and tightened his hold on the man’s wrists. “He’s going to come to before I can—” But that tub was hard, Chester realized, and so was the basin. In fact, the fellow could be dead. With this thought, Chester’s strength ebbed, and he let the man down gently to the carpet. He was about to say something to Colette about feeling for a pulse, when Colette said:

“It’s okay now. Nobody in sight.”

Chester summoned his strength and hoisted him again. Dead or not, he thought, the store-room was the best place for him. If he were dead—Well, Chester had never seen him before. Someone else had killed him. The man had never knocked on his door, never said a word to him. Chester went on towards the door with the little red light over it, praying it would be open as it had been before.

Then, from around the corridor corner in front of him, the other agent appeared, and stopped short in surprise. Chester stared at him, paralyzed. The young man’s mouth had opened slightly, and Chester saw the start of a faint smile—of satisfaction, sarcasm? Chester expected him to pull a gun. His right hand hung empty, his left carried a newspaper. The young man advanced.

“Where’re you taking him?” Rydal asked, with a quick glance up and down the corridor.

“I was—” Chester went suddenly limp, and the dead weight slipped to the floor. “That room,” Chester said, motioning weakly to the door with the red light over it.

The young man dropped his newspaper, bent quickly and took the Greek under the shoulders and began to drag him towards the store-room.

Chester stared.

“Didn’t he have a hat?” Rydal asked, and, at Chester’s frightened nod, “Better get it.”

Chester opened the store-room door—it was unlocked—then ran back to his room. Colette had unlatched the door and was standing right behind it. “Honey, get me his hat. It’s there by the telephone.”

Colette got the hat from the telephone table and handed it to him.

Chester trotted up the hall with it. The door under the red light was half open, and he heard a clatter of buckets. “Here.” He handed the hat to the young man.

“The man’s dead?” asked Rydal.

“I don’t know.”

“I think he is.” Rydal, with rather shaky hands, pulled out quickly the contents of the man’s inside pockets, and the billfold that was buttoned into his hip pocket, and stuffed them into his own. “Was there a gun? He’s got a holster here.”

“I’ve got it,” Chester said. Dead, he thought, his hands twitching. He watched the young man shove the feet farther in, so the door would close, and then the door shut on the first man he had ever killed, a man with a lolling, bleeding head, seated among buckets and mops and dirty grey rags.

Rydal pulled Chester by the arm, back towards his room, and scooped up his newspaper as they passed it.

Chester drummed on the door with his fingertips. It was a strange way for an agent to behave, he thought. Did he want to protect the hotel patrons from the sight of a corpse?

Colette opened the door and drew in her breath.

Chester went in quickly.

Rydal followed him, automatically giving a little bow of greeting to the woman. He did not care for the sight of blood, and he was beginning to feel a bit airy in the head. “My name . . . my name is Rydal Keener,” Rydal said to both of them. “How do you do?”

“How d’y’do?” Chester mumbled.

“My husband hit the man in self-defense,” Colette said quickly, looking straight at Rydal. “I saw the whole thing happen.”

“Don’t say anything, Colette,” Chester said.

“But . . . allow me to tell you,” Rydal said, and was ashamed of the “allow me” as soon as it was out of his mouth, “that I’m not a police agent.”

“Not a—Then why—?” Chester said.

Rydal didn’t know why. It had been such a fast decision, it was no decision at all. “I’m just an American tourist. You can consider me a friend.” It was odd talking to them; it made him feel very odd. Or was it the blood drops on the pale-green carpet? “You’d better wipe up those blood spots while you can,” he said to the man.

Helpless himself, Chester motioned for Colette to do it.

She went off to the bathroom and returned at once with the sponge Chester had bought for her. “I’ve wiped it all up from the bathroom,” she said. She got down on her hands and knees and began scrubbing away.

Her derrière looked perfectly round under her straight black skirt. Rydal looked at her instead of at the blood spots. Then he moved quickly to the door, opened it cautiously, and looked out into the corridor.

“Hear something?” Chester asked.

“No. I wanted to see if there was any blood in the hall. There probably is, but it doesn’t show on the black carpet. Now,” he said after he had closed the door again, (But now, what? The man was looking at him, blank and expectant.) “the thing to do is get out of this hotel before that fellow’s missed—at his headquarters or whatever.”

“Yes. Or found,” Chester said. “Well, we’re nearly packed and ready, aren’t we, honey?”

“Two more minutes for the stuff in the john,” said Colette. “You get your razor and things, Ches. I’ve practically got this finished. Toss me a towel, will you?”

“A towel?”

“A towel, so I can dry this.”

Colette sounded very practical. She was certainly cool-headed. She looked up and saw Rydal looking at her and smiled at him, then adroitly caught the towel Chester tossed across the room to her. “What a mess,” she said, bending to her work again.

Rydal remembered the papers he had stuffed into his overcoat pocket, and pulled them out. There was a chunky notebook, and he flipped through it. There were many photographs, and he found Chester’s at once. He walked closer to Chester, who was putting things into a suitcase. “This is you?”

Chester looked embarrassed, but he nodded.

The comment, in Greek, said that he was wanted for fraud and embezzlement. There were several different names under the picture, in Greek and English characters. “Which of these names is yours?” asked Rydal.

Chester held the notebook’s edge and looked over the names, looked a little wildly. “None of them. My name’s—I’m Chester MacFarland.” There was no use in hiding it, Chester thought, because the fellow could just ask the hotel desk who was or had been in room six twenty-one.

“Chester MacFarland,” Rydal repeated softly.

Chester gave a nervous smile. “Heard of me?”

“No . . . no.” The Greek agent’s name, Rydal saw, was George M. Papanopolos.

“Uh . . . we were going to Corinth tomorrow. I don’t suppose you know if there’s a train or bus there tonight, do you? We were going to rent a car tomorrow, but—”

“I don’t happen to know, but I can call down and ask the desk to find out,” Rydal said, moving towards the telephone.

“No, wait!” Chester spread his hands. “Your calling—from this room—”

“Well, it just occurred to me,” Rydal said to Chester, and the woman, too, who was now standing in the middle of the room, looking at him, “since nobody saw me come up, I can just as well say I’ve been here with you all afternoon. Or at least a few hours.” The man looked blank still, so Rydal said, “I didn’t take the elevator up. I saw it went to the sixth floor, so I took the stairs up. I don’t think anybody noticed me. I mean, in case that man is found before we get out—I’ll provide an alibi.” The words seemed to come out of him from nowhere. He was offering to perjure himself. And for what? For whom? A man whose look of a gentleman didn’t go very deep, Rydal could see now; a man whose clothes were well cut and tailor made, but whose cuff-links were flashy; a man whose over-all manner looked dishonest, because he was dishonest. “Take your choice. I’m not insisting,” Rydal added. “I mean, whether I call downstairs or not.”

“Yes. Do call. That’s fine,” Chester said. He looked away from Rydal’s eyes.

Rydal picked up the telephone and, without thinking, began to speak in Greek, asking about trains and buses to Corinth. The woman, after closing a couple of suitcases, returned to staring at him curiously, unself-conscious, apparently, as a child. Rydal hung up and said, “The last bus left at six. No train until tomorrow. You could perhaps rent a car at this hour, but it’s an odd time to be starting off for Corinth. The view along the sea is considered the best part of the trip. Kinetta Beach, you know.”

“Hm-m. Yes. Kinetta Beach,” said Chester. He looked at his wife.

“You’re very kind,” Colette said to Rydal. “Kind to endanger yourself for us.”

Rydal had no reply. He noticed the bulge of the gun in Chester’s jacket pocket for the first time. It occurred to him that the MacFarlands were going to need different passports at once. By tomorrow, anyway. Niko was the man for that.

“What about Crete?” Chester asked. “We did want to go to Crete.”

“That I happen to know about,” Rydal said. “There’s a plane out every morning and a boat a little earlier every morning, but nothing at this hour.”

“Are you part Greek?” Colette asked Rydal.

Rydal smiled. “No.” He was trying to think, and he was thinking only that he was very bad at this kind of thinking. His mind should be working like lightning, conjuring up the exactly right, brilliant thing for them to do. Niko’s place as a hideout? Rydal somehow didn’t want them there. But why not? Get Colette and Chester into a taxi with their luggage and drive to Niko’s. Niko’s wife Anna would be there now, and would be agreeable to anything. But their apartment was so unspeakably sordid, and they’d all have to be in one room. “Anyway, the thing to do is get out of here right away. Are you ready for a porter?”

“Yes, but where do we go?” Chester asked.

“To another hotel in Athens. I know one. The Dardanelles, about ten or fifteen streets from here. It’s medium-sized and sort of out of the way. Just for tonight. Then tomorrow—I’d suggest Crete rather than the Peloponnesus, because it’s bigger and farther away.”

“Oh, wonderful! Crete!” said Colette, as if it were a bright and unexpected spot on a holiday tour.

“Just tell the driver—Hotel Dardanelles?” Chester asked.

“Yes. Well, if the bellboys from this hotel are listening, tell the driver the railroad station, then switch it after you take off. You’d better tell the hotel here that you’re taking a night train to—to Yugoslavia, something like that.”

“I get you, I get you,” Chester said, embarrassed that he hadn’t grasped the point a little more quickly. Chester frowned. “You really think that’s best, another hotel in Athens?”

“I do, definitely. With luck, the Greek agent won’t be discovered until early tomorrow morning, when the help start their cleaning. If the hotel here thinks you’ve taken a train, the police’ll check the trains and the borders before they check the hotels in the city.”

“Yes. You’re right,” Chester said. Then his lips bared over his set teeth. “Oh, my God, the passports! The God-damned passports!”

“Yes, I thought of that,” Rydal said, moving towards the door. “I think I know how something can be arranged.”

“How?” Chester asked.

“If I can see you tonight, I’ll explain it. I shouldn’t take up any more of your time now. I’ll call on you tonight at the Dardanelles around ten. How is that?”

Chester hesitated, then said, “All right.”

“Oh, it’s so exciting!” Colette said, rising on her toes, her hands clasped under her chin. She pursed her lips as if to throw Rydal a kiss.

“Till tonight,” Rydal said, and went out.

Alone, Chester and Colette stared at each other, he frightened and blank, she smiling dazedly.

“I’ll call for a porter,” Chester said, and went to the telephone.

Colette watched him as he spoke. Now she was frowning a little, biting her underlip as she did when she thought hard about something. After he had hung up, she said, “Ches, what did he mean about that Greek agent not being found till tomorrow morning? When he comes to, isn’t he going to—”

“Honey, I think that guy’s dead,” Chester said in a low voice. He saw Colette’s lavender eyes widen.

“Really? Do you know?”

“I think he is. There really wasn’t any time to make sure,” Chester said, frowning.

“And does . . . does this fellow know it?”

“Yes,” said Chester firmly.

“My God.”

“Yes.” Chester stuffed his fingers into his hip pockets and walked forward between the beds, then made a lunge for his Scotch bottle, whose neck was sticking up out of an antelope duffel bag. “Yes, and we’ll pay for it. We’ll pay plenty.”

“What do you mean?”

Chester was getting the second, unbroken glass from the bathroom. “I mean he’ll want some money for keeping quiet. Wait and see. Fortunately, we’ve got it. It just mustn’t go too far.”

“Oh, do you think he’s really like that?” she asked, still breathless with the shock of death. “He looks—Well, he doesn’t look like a crook. He’s an American.”

“And not too well-heeled. Wait and see, wait and see. Why else do you think he came in here like this? I’d go to some other hotel, except he’s probably downstairs on the street ready to follow us.” Chester waved his glass, then drank it off, half Scotch and half water. “Why else do you think he came in here like this?”