Decision at Delphi (63 page)

Strang lifted Cecilia out of the car. Beaumont was saying, “Well, well! For once, I don’t have to worry about reservations. It looks as if we were expected.” Around them, five sets of bright smiles had materialised, five pairs of sympathetic eyes and helpful hands. And at the corner of the building, there were two spruce and observant Greeks waiting along with old friend Costas. They made a most comforting trio, against a background of lonely, darkening hillside and far, black mountains.

Strang said, listening to the faint gentle sounds coming from the hillside, “What’s that? Bells?”

“Sheep bells,” Cecilia told him. “I’m an authority on them now.” And she laughed. “Oh, Ken, it’s good to get back to our own life again!”

He held one of her hands against his lips for a moment. “Tomorrow—” he began, and then stopped, and then thought: two hours ago, there was no tomorrow; two hours ago, I came blankly up against the minute where I was drawing breath; and everything beyond that was covered in thicker, colder mist than Mount Parnassos.

“Tomorrow will be a heavenly day,” Cecilia said, looking at the last glowing embers of a dying sunset. The bells had drifted away. The falling hills, the valley far below, lay silent and still.

Strang nodded. But some of us were not so lucky; and he thought of George Ottway.

Next morning Strang awoke from the best night of sleep he had had in a week. He went out on the little balcony of his room to say good morning to the valley. One sight of the view, and he stood paralysed. I suppose I saw scenery yesterday, he thought, but then I wasn’t particularly receptive: every prospect pleased and only man was vile. Now—he looked over the folding, rising, falling hills above the deep valley that led to the sea— now, I’m even juggling around quotations again. It had been a long time since a line of verse had bobbed up in his head. A good idea, after all, he decided, to come here and sleep and awaken in such peace.

On a distant pasture a shepherd was surrounded by a gentle sway of small bells; on the rough road, leading to nowhere nameable, ambling as leisurely down the hillside as that donkey with its side-saddle load, was a long-skirted woman walking back toward the village; on the stone terrace beneath this small
row of balconies, two men were sitting in the sunlight, talking quietly. Strang leaned over to make sure who they were: Costas and a friend. He relaxed as quickly as he had tensed up. Every prospect pleased, and not even man was vile.

The windows on the next balcony had all their blinds tightly drawn down. Cecilia was asleep. She was well guarded. She was safe. He took a deep breath of thankfulness, and went back to dress and order breakfast.

He slipped out of his room before the food arrived to check on the corridor of this small, low wing of the hotel. He found the second of Costas’s friends sitting on a chair beside Cecilia’s door, talking in a low murmur with one of the pink-cheeked, dark-eyed maids.

“How is—” he began, and then hesitated to use Cecilia’s name. He had been too tired to remember, last night, what name had been used for Cecilia’s safety. Smith? Brown? Something like that...

The maid opened Cecilia’s door cautiously, glanced in, gestured to him to see for himself. He entered quietly, stood for a moment in the darkened room. Yes, she was asleep. She was well guarded. She was safe. He could give the maid as broad a smile as she gave him, when he closed the door slowly behind him.
“Poly kala!”
he said softly to the man and the woman. Fine,
va bene,
okay. Indeed it was.

Indeed, everything was. Even his appetite had come back. He ordered a second helping of scrambled eggs and two more pots of coffee. And now the sun was high enough to dull the cool edge of the mountain air; he sat over several last cups of coffee on the little balcony outside his room, enjoying the pleasures of waiting without worry. He was high on a sloping
hillside with one of nature’s most startling views unrolled, mile on mile, before him: blue-shadowed mountains beyond red-flowered fields; a narrow wooded valley plunging deep between steep-sided hills toward a distant glimpse of sea. That, he remembered as he looked long at the far tongue of blue water, was how the ancient Greeks used to come to Delphi. They landed from ships, in the bay down there, and walked the miles up the valley toward Delphi, perched above them on its hillside. When Cecilia and I start work here, he thought, I’ll get down to that valley and catch the first glimpse of white columns as they rise, high above the olive groves, against their background of rock.

We’re in business again, he told himself. It was a good, a good and wonderful feeling. Before yesterday, before those last four or five days, had he ever really known how lucky he was? He lit another cigarette, poured the last few drops of coffee into his cup, and surrendered his body to the gentle sun, his mind to the spell woven by shapes and colours. This was an hour of complete and absolute peace.

It was almost half past ten—angrily, he glanced at his watch—when the drone of a truck, of several cars shattered the stillness around him. They were coming from the village, on the road that lay behind the hotel. He rose, waiting at the edge of the balcony, looking along the hillside until they’d come into sight, praying that they would continue on their way to vanish behind the far arm of the hill. It was a truck filled with soldiers, only one car following it. The others must have stopped at the hotel. And now—barely three hundred yards away—the truck and the car stopped, too. The soldiers spilled out, spreading into a long thin line, fencing in the hillside above them.

He moved quickly through his room into the corridor. The man outside Cecilia’s room looked up in surprise at his sudden appearance. Strang opened her door. She was still asleep. Everything was all right. He nodded to the man as he closed the door and went to the next room. This was Pringle’s. Strang glanced at his watch again. Pringle must be awake by this time. He knocked.

“Who is it?” Pringle asked sharply.

“Strang.”

The door was opened by Elias.

“Good morning,” Strang said cheerfully, but his heart sank. Whenever he saw Elias, there was always some blow to be expected. That was the way things seemed to work out, with Elias. “You are looking much better,” he told Pringle, who was sitting on his bed, his wounded leg stretched out in front of him.

“You look good yourself,” Pringle said. “How’s Cecilia?”

“Asleep.”

“That’s fine.”

“Yes.” Strang looked at him pointedly. “And what’s the news?”

Pringle rubbed his knee thoughtfully. “Mixed,” he admitted frankly. Elias had walked over to the window and was looking at the balcony outside.

“Christophorou is on the loose?”

“I am assured,” said Pringle, a thin smile playing around his lips, “that he is just about to be caught.”

“That’s comforting.” Strang’s voice was tight. “Have you any cigarettes left, Bob?”

“You take the news better than I did,” Pringle said. “Why doesn’t Christophorou admit that he has lost completely and blow his brains out? That would save everyone a lot of bother.”

Strang raised an eyebrow, and lit one of Pringle’s cigarettes. Elias, tired and troubled, looked around and nodded his agreement to that.

“All right, all right,” Pringle said—he was, if anything, a gentle-minded man—“but the bastard tried to have me killed. This damned leg keeps reminding me of that. And of Ottway—”

“And of Cecilia,” Strang completed for him grimly. “And of Steve. And of Myrrha Kladas. And of Katherini Roilos.” Christophorou had chalked up quite a personal account. The total ran high. Much too high. “So,” Strang asked Elias, “he is running free, somewhere out on that hillside?”

Elias was so exhausted, so weary, that his English had almost deserted him. “He is running hard. Very hard. Last night—” He looked at Pringle. Perhaps the situation had started to spin wild and there was no longer any pattern for Elias’s mind to put together. He raised his hands in complete frustration. “You tell him,” he said in Greek. So Pringle told the story.

Yesterday evening, when Zafiris had reached the house on the road to Delphi, Christophorou had already left. There were signs of a hasty departure. A fire was still burning in one room; food was on the table. (“You break my heart,” Strang said.)

From behind the house there were several trails leading to the hill. These had been followed. The shepherd Levadi had taken Elias and a search party to a climber’s hut, high on one of those trails. Again, Christophorou had been on his guard; he had slipped into the darkness as the squad of men approached. Later that night, the dogs from the meadows to the east had given tongue. Levadi had said that the dogs would keep Christophorou to the western side of the meadows. He wouldn’t risk crossing them when the shepherds and their
dogs were on the alert. (“That,” said Strang, “isn’t hard to believe.”)

By dawn, there were several search parties circling around the area. Christophorou had actually been seen once. More important, he had seen them. He could guess, now, the extent of the search. (“And give himself up?” asked Strang bitterly. “That’s a sweet hope. Nihilists expend everything and everyone except themselves. They are the indispensable men, without whom the world might try to live almost happily. Besides, think of their superior brains! They can outwit all of us, can’t they?”)

Pringle looked at him. “You’re a deceptive kind of a guy, Ken. I believe you hate him even more than I do.”

“I am not competing,” Strang said harshly. “All I want is some peace to live my own life again.” He remembered the troops deploying along the road behind the hotel. He said to Elias, “So he is somewhere near Delphi?”

“Yes. He is waiting.”

“For what? For darkness?”

“For Colonel Zafiris to promise him a safe-conduct out of Greece.”

“That’s rich, isn’t it?” Pringle asked. “And in exchange, Christophorou will have Miss Hillard released and returned safely to Colonel Zafiris. Isn’t that magnanimous?”

Elias said in a surge of anger, “He lies. And he knows that he lies. He could not set Miss Hillard free once she was delivered to the outlaws. They take, they do not give back. They obey no God, no laws, no man. He knows that! He lies!” It was the first violent outburst from Elias that Strang had seen. Then the Greek took tight control over his emotions once more. “He sent the message two hours ago. He gave it to a boy who was herding goats on a hillside near the stadium of Delphi.”

“The ancient stadium?” Strang was incredulous. “Just above the Greek theatre?”

“As near as that,” Pringle said. “I think he rather enjoyed that touch. He must have looked down over the theatre, and the temple below it, and all the sanctuaries below that, right down the Sacred Way to the road, where he could see the patrol passing along. At least, he told the boy to take his note down to the soldiers.”

Elias said, “So now he waits. Hidden. There are many hiding places above Delphi. He waits until noon for our answer.” His lips tightened at the impudence of such an ultimatum.

“And how do we give that?” Strang asked.

“We have brought in more troops. We have encircled this whole area. We shall go in after him.”

Strang almost smiled. That was certainly one good answer. “I meant—what did Christophorou suggest?” After all, Christophorou thought he was calling the tune.

But Elias had, obviously, no more interest in any of Christophorou’s suggestions than he would have in considering the rights of a smallpox virus to live. So Pringle said, “He expects to see Colonel Zafiris climbing up the Sacred Way to the Temple of Apollo. Zafiris is to stand by the columns for five minutes—”

“In prayer and meditation?” Strang suggested.

“—and then return to the road. This will be the sign to Christophorou that his proposal has been accepted. Zafiris will also, at noon, call off all search parties, send the troops away. By sunset, Cecilia will come walking, free and unharmed, down from the hillside above Delphi into the theatre.” He
looked at Strang, and laughed. “Imagine him expecting us to swallow such nonsense!”

Strang wondered if they might not have been forced to swallow it if Cecilia had not escaped. If they had been desperate, they would have clutched at every faint hope, persuaded themselves that probabilities were possible, that gambles were necessary risks. Besides, the time element was clever: Christophorou had only asked from noon until sunset to make good his escape. If he had stretched his request until tomorrow, set Cecilia’s reappearance at dawn or at noon, questions might have arisen in the minds of even the most wishful thinkers. “Six hours— where could he get out of Greece in six hours?” Strang asked. “He must walk, mustn’t he? He hasn’t any car, I hope.”

Elias looked at him quickly. “We found both cars at his house. There is only one way he can leave. By the sea. To the south is the Gulf of Corinth, a walk of two hours. Less than that for a man who is running hard.”

“So that’s why the troops are strung along this road?” Elias nodded.

“I suppose he will wait to see if Colonel Zafiris makes his little pilgrimage?”

“I doubt,” Pringle said, “if Christophorou would miss that.”

“I wonder if he has a rifle and a telescopic sight?”

Elias said, “When seen, he had no rifle. But he will have a revolver.”

“He won’t be close enough to use that.” Colonel Zafiris wasn’t to be shot at then. Just humiliated. A Greek would prefer a bullet. “If he can see Zafiris clearly on the east side of the Temple of Apollo, he must be lying somewhere up on the twin precipices to that side of the amphitheatre. How does he get down from there?”

“By the gorge between them. It leads to the road. There will be many tourists there between twelve and one o’clock.”

Pringle said, “The buses from Athens will be parked all along that road. Once he is across it, he just keeps climbing down through thick groves of olive trees into the valley below. No, no! You’ll have to do more than station men at the bottom of the gorge, Elias. You’ll have to go up and gouge him out.”

“Yes,” Elias said gloomily. He was thinking of the tourists, of Saturday at Delphi. “There will be shooting.” And Delphi was a holy place. Even if pagans had built it and worshipped there three thousand years ago, it was a place where man had brought his fears, his worries, and had gone away comforted. “Shooting...in Delphi,” he said slowly, heavily.