The Circe Plot

This story is set in Greece during the Colonels’ regime, 1967-1974
*
“And now what will become of us without the barbarians? Those people were one solution” – C. P. Cavafy

But tell me, Circe, who is to guide me on the way? No one has ever sailed a black ship into Hell” – Homer
*

I
“There is something peculiarly delightful in passing through the streets of a foreign city without understanding a word that anybody says” – John Ruskin

It was hard to understand why Longbottom thought we couldn’t talk there. Who could have bugged the Colosseum? Surely not the woman who stood a few tiers away, I couldn’t see her face but from her brassy hair and the flesh on display looked like a local hooker on the prowl for tourist dollars. My orders were superfluous; nothing imposes anonymity more than a large ancient monument. I went through the rigmarole of acting the part of a ‘typical’ American , brandishing Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day, one of the best pieces of literary nostalgia I know; it was appropriate that Mrs Frommer’s first name was Hope.

I was in a sour mood. Longbottom was twenty minutes late. I grudged every extra second grilling in the heat of a Roman July. Longbottom was always late. He called it an extra security precaution. I pretended to focus my Zeiss Ikon-Voigtlander and aimed it at the arena. If it came out, I would have a good shot of a handsome boy in a Columbia University T-Shirt explaining something to a very brown girl in a white dress. She was gazing at him adoringly as though he was the last word in everything. Maybe he was. I wondered whether she had acquired the dress to go with her travel-poster tan or the tan to go with the dress. Or the boy to go with both.

The sun was clawing at the haunted stones as though trying to burn out the ghosts. A man with a seven o’clock shadow that was several hours early came up optimistically with a tray of postcards and guide books and tried to sell me a dozen colour pictures of what I was looking at. I refused in English. When he persisted, I said something unpleasant in Italian, He said something much more unpleasant in English. We were just beginning to enjoy ourselves in a bilingual slanging match when a tourist policeman started to walk importantly towards us. The man slouched away, giving me something between a wink and a leer. The policeman looked disappointed until a fluffy little girl wearing a mini-skirt that some Carnaby Street designer had knocked up from a spare inch of material ran over and asked him how to get to the Baths of Caracalla. He managed to spin out his directions for a good five minutes. The girl trotted back to her friends, rewarding him with a panorama of thighs and a swing of her buttocks. I heard her say triumphantly, “I told you them weren’t the ones near that railway station.”
Longbottom appeared from the crude public lavatory near the entrance which leads out to confront the Arch of Constantine. Maybe he had just finished taping a message for another contact on the inside of one of the bowls. His muscular frame was uneasily encased by a cream alpaca jacket and very light trousers. His orange and yellow striped tie attempted to restore some of the dignity taken away by a pair of badly scuffed suede shoes. This traditional uniform of the Brit in search of the sun was surmounted by a large head shaped in an irregular way that suggested a prize-winning potato. A straggly moustache fought for existence along the upper lip as though intimidated by the high puce colour of the surrounding cheeks. He looked the type of ex-officer who can explain all foreign policy in terms of Kipling.

He approached me in what he imagined to be the diffident manner of the monoglot tourist in trouble. “Excuse me, do you speak English?” We had worked together on and off for four years, but still had to go through the routine of introducing ourselves to each other.

I took my cue patiently. “Sure. What’s the problem?”

“Ah, what a piece of luck. I’m afraid my Italian doesn’t run much further than prego and grazie.”

“Not even as far as ciao?”

“I thought that was a loan word from the Americans.” Longbottom hadn’t been President of the Oxford Union for nothing. “Do you happen to know the best way of reaching the top tier of this place?”

“I was just trying to work up the energy to go up there myself. Why don’t we try it together right now?”

He arranged his features into stage gratitude. “That’s awfully good of you. I don’t think I would have bothered, except for my son. He’d never forgive me if I went back without some snaps of the Colosseum. He’s at that age when they get bitten by the archaeology bug.”

“What age is that? I thought you could vaccinate them against everything these days.”

“He’s just turned fourteen. Of course, they pick a lot of it up from television.”

I led the way. Longbottom observed that it was hot, footnoting this by a mop of his forehead with a massive handkerchief. A few other people were drifting along to pay their penance to history. Somebody was loudly proclaiming that the cross which Pope Something the Something had put up was just a load of propaganda. Nero couldn’t have thrown any Christians in the lion caferia here because the damn thing wasn’t built until after his time. The speaker’s companion chipped in with some statistics on the Houston Astrodome and I enjoyed the pained expression that came over Longbottom’s face. To cheer him up, I let him tell me about the man who had been conned into paying a deposit of twenty million lire on the Colosseum in 1966 for a scheme to turn the top storey into a restaurant.

We halted at the foot of the steps that take you to the top. Longbottom gave me a sharp glance. I squatted down and simulated strap trouble with one of my sandals. The others toiled on out of earshot. I got up to receive a smile that made me feel like a student who had just managed to tell his professor the right date of Julius Caesar’s death.

“We can’t talk here.”

I bent back down to fix a genuine problem with my other sandal.

“Those things are surely too big for you.”

“I have funny-shaped feet. There’s no right size for them. Better to wear a size too big than too small.”

“Well, we can’t talk here.”

Leaving the Colosseum and its spectral memories, we dodged across the Via Labdicana between the modern gladiatorial combats of the hooting buses and green Fiat cabs and up through the park on the Oppian Hill. Longbottom drew on his repertoire of lecturettes. “It’s been estimated that the Colosseum could seat forty-five thousand spectators at the games. Can you imagine…?”

“Yes.”

He wasn’t deflected by my flat tone. “I’m always rather moved by the place. Byron, you may recall, called it a noble wreck in ruinous perfection.”

“I believe some people said the same about Byron.”

“Men and beasts dying in the midday sun to make a Roman holiday and all that…”

“It’s that and all that which bothers me.”

“The symbol of a vanished glory.”

“You’re an Englishman. I guess you’re familiar with vanished glories.”

We had come into a pretty little garden which was far too good for the mass of dark stones trying to tower over us. One of Rome’s thousands of cats gave us a sleepy inspection before settling down again in the flowers.

Longbottom explained some of the blooms. “This is not at all a badly kept garden, when you consider.”

“Consider what?”

“How untypical of Italy a good garden is. Only sixteen per cent of Italians have a garden and only one per cent owns a lawn mower.”

“That must be a real pain if you’re in the lawnmower business. What is this place?” I already knew, but wanted to keep Longbottom goaded by my ignorance while I arranged my dialogue for the real business ahead.

The puce cheeks deepened their hue. He said with careful emphasis, “The Golden House. The famous palace of Nero…”

To curtail another seminar, I looked around with obtruded boredom. Two old women in heavy black veils were going into what appeared to be a small church at the far end of the garden. Near to us was a hut with a window in the middle. A sign in Italian and English said that parties were escorted through the ruins every forty-five minutes.

Longbottom produced a crumpled five hundred lire note. “Go in and buy a couple of tickets. Tell them we’re archaeologists and want to wander about by ourselves. Give them the whole five hundred if they make any trouble. Not that they will. Italian guides are the laziest in the world. They’ll be delighted to take your money without doing anything for it.”

Two men in shirtsleeves were communing in the hut over a copy of L’Espresso, that most flamboyant of Italian left-wing weeklies; a third sat at a table sorting out the morning’s takings. They looked up at me briefly. One pointed to a display of postcards and brochures. I repeated Longbottom’s instructions. They made me go through the script three times. Finally I was given two tickets and no change. The man at the table got up and moved languidly to the door. He shouted something in a thick Roman accent which conjured up a small boy wearing only a pair of shorts. The man threw a key at him and pointed to me.

The boy led us to an iron gate which he unlocked. He hung around us, flexing his incipient brown pectorals. I figured that like most Italian men he would graduate with honours in narcissism. I gave him a hundred lire, getting nothing back by way of thanks. We went down into the damp cool of a gloomy chamber as the gate was slammed and locked behind us.

“Do they think we’re about to steal the place?”

‘They wouldn’t care if we could, except that it would put them out of an easy job. That boy simply has the idea he will get another tip out of you for unlocking the gate.”
There isn’t much gold in the Golden House. An occasional shaft of light from above emphasised the loneliness of the corridors and chambers, not to mention my own, despite or because of Longbottom pointing out this patch of red mosaic or that faded group of flowers or creatures he said were hippocamps dancing on the wet walls. “Hardly one of the stately homes of Italy, is it? Nero never actually finished it off, though he got a good way along if we can believe Suetonius. There was a dining-room with a revolving ceiling and a huge statue of himself in the main entrance hall, a hundred feet or more high. Nero would hav made a good Texan, I always think. The story was that when he moved in he just said Now At Last I Can Begin To Live Like A Man…”

He went on making Nero sound like Citizen Kane in a toga. Before, I’d been hot and tired; now I was clammy and tired. It had been a long flight from Montreal to Rome. Alitalia run a good airline but they couldn’t do anything about my body’s reaction to the time change. And the first thing waiting for me at the hotel was a message in a code I’d hardly ever used before.
We turned into a small alcove which Longbottom said might have been an apodyterium, whatever that was, and sat down on some kind of bench. The stone was cold to my backside. I got up and put my Frommer on it.

Longbottom adjusted his tie which did not need adjusting and came to the point. Once he sloughed off his fussy concern with the poetics of security and his extension course lectures on Roman history, you understood why he was the top man in the British section.
“Tell me how much they told you about this business.”

II
“There is nothing a European dislikes so much as an expert from overseas” – the President of IBM

Wellington Street is by the standard of the New World a slice of ancient history. It dates back to 1826, when Ottawa was called Bytown, and its ninety-nine foot width sweeps grandly west from Confederation Square for eight blocks until a bay of the Ottawa River pushes it south-west into a shotgun marriage with Sparks Street where the ultra-modern shopping mall does its best to make you forget the politicians of Parliament Hill.

On the south side of Wellington, at number eighty-four, stands the Rideau Club. An emotional transplant from London’s St. James; a stool, if not a seat, of empire.
I was led to a corner table for two which had been reserved for Mr Blair and friend. Naturally, it was at least ten minutes after the scheduled time before Mr Blair materialised, a giant in his late thirties who wore his executive blue suit with an air of impatience that suggested he would have been happier in a pair of bathing trunks. For once, I sympathised with him. It was one of those humid days which make you feel almost nostalgic for the bone-chilling cold of an Ottawa winter. Even the smiles on the faces of the Club waiters were meltng as they uttered elegant servilities around a party of Parliamentary under-secretaries who were competing in inscrutability with the Japanese businessmen they were entertaining.
Blair was my immediate superior. Although I could respect any man at that level of importance who only kept one phone on his desk, there were many reasons for my dislike and, more to the point, distrust. Least or most, depending on my mood, was the memory of his groping me at the end of my interview for the service. It wasn’t so much the act itself. I am not groped that often, and when I am I never want to take it in any positive direction, but to be groped is never bad for one’s self-confidence. What riled was his disinterested manner, especially as he had got closer to the target than any other hopeful.

We ate our way through a good if unoriginal lunch, ordered for us both without consultation by Blair. Jellied consommé, trout meunière, tossed green salad, and Bavarian cream, washed down by a Canadian white wine which the books, not to mention Longbottom, would have written off as”frivolous” if they’d heard of it. Blair chose his glass of iced water for a Bon Voyage toast.

“She’s got a ticket to ride…Where to, this time?”

“To sunny Italy, and then, if you’re lucky, or maybe unlucky, to sunnier Greece. How’s your conscience these days?”

“I take it I needn’t pack my scruples for the trip.”

“Not unless your ideas have changed a good deal since your last outing.”

I burped gently. “They haven’t.”

“Neither have mine. What if they had? The guys upstairs say we don’t have political opinions.”

“Why don’t you turn on that used-car salesman charm of yours and tell me at least ten per cent of what I’m buying?”

Blair waited for a waiter to remove an ashtray that I had desecrated with a single match. “I can give you the gist, but no details. You’ll get those in Rome. You know things work on the Not Need To Know principle.”

I re-possessed the wine bottle. The undersecretaries and the Japanese were talking about the ethics of international trade agreements, which probably meant that each side was trying to screw the other. “The gist is usually enough to be going on with.”

“We had a telex in yesterday from London. Short and bitter, in the best British tradition. More plots against the regime in Athens. We stop them.”

I felt carefully for a bilious reply. “So, I dreamed that I saved Western fascism in my Maidenform bra. I’d like to see that whole gang of Ruritanian thugs wiped out. I’ve got some good friends in Athens. They used to write me regularly, but I haven’t heard from them in a year. One of them was close to Theodorakis. He’s probably rotting in that torture chamber on Bouboulinas Street right now.”

“We know all about your friends. Dossiers are read. Those Greek names play hell with the typists. Your friends are the reason you have this job.”

At least Blair called a spade a spade and a job a job. None of those quasi-religious euphemisms about going out on a mission. He gave me the sort of luck that must have scared the cleats off the opposition when he played football for the University of Toronto.

“Am I my brothers’ murderers’ keeper? OK, I see why I get it. But how come WE get it? Correct me if I’m wrong, our service was set up as a Commonwealth security measure with each country helping the other and exchanging agents so that nobody operated in their own country, so as to fool the opposition and probably ourselves as well. Like that time I went to Sydney to help the Aussies weed out that gang of Neo-Nazis. I don’t remember Greece ever joining the Commonwealth. Who decided that we go into private enterprise and promote ourselves as a Rent-A-Spy outfit?”

Blair’s smile, as usual, didn’t match the chips that passed for his eyes. “There are two explanations; there always are. As you know, the service was created very discreetly during one of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conferences in London. It was a good idea. All its old ideals are gone, but the Commonwealth still covers a lot of the map. We set up branches everywhere. The Pacific, a good deal of Africa, apart from our Canadian section and central control in London. A regular Thomas Cook espionage network. No expense spared setting it up.”

“Which is why we don’t see much when putting in our expense accounts. They once haggled for a month over my claim for bus fares two years back.”

Water off a duck’s back. “One advantage was that it brought in a lot of countries that aren’t associated with secret services. Gives the opposition some new headaches. The Russians and the Americans have got each other pretty well taped by now. They say Dulles and Kruschev weren’t altogether joking when they talked about pooling resources. And the Brits seem to be putting more effort into writing novels about spies than actually doing anything.”

“I’m no great fan of the British, but I wouldn’t underrate them that much.”

“Why not? The British do it all the time.” Blair gave me one of his repertoire of opaque looks. “The other explanation is that we simply obey orders. Whic h reminds me, there was some business in the telex about possible links with Greeks in Canada. You can spend a few days in Toronto and Montreal poking around their neighbourhoods. See if you can pick up any whispers in their ethnic papers and what have you. No great sweat; just gorge yourself on moussaka and keep your ears open.”

He looked at his watch, a commendably low-key affair, and groaned. “Jesus Wept! There’s a meeting at two-thirty with the Immigration Minister. Here’s your stuff.” He reached inside his jacket and produced a large manilla envelope like an illusionist on the Ed Sullivan Show.

“Is this my birth control literature?”

“A wad of documentese on the colonels. Stuff the émigré groups keep churning out, plus the official bullshit we get from the Greek Embassy down on Elgin Street. Just the thing for putting you to sleep on the flight. Your ticket from Montreal to Rome…”

“Single or Return?”

“Open return. That covers anything and everything. Two passports: one Canadian, one American. Hope you like the names we gave you. The American one’s supposed to be for emergencies only…”

“How do I distinguish between emergency and crisis?”

“Just don’t go selling it to help out your expenses. It took a lot of pushing to get one of those out of the State Department.”

I put the envelope away and asked who would be my contact in Rome.

“It’s all there in the magic folder. Got to get out of this gilded mausoleum right now. The Minister needs to hear some interesting little stories about a certain student from Cambodia who wants to come here to do graduate work at Carleton.”

Outside, the fifty-three bells of the Peace Tower carillon were chiming. With great self-control, I did not quote John Donne. “You’re going off at the right time. There’s a new psychiatrist coming in next week to collate and classify our libidos. Somebody upstairs has been reading another of those CIA doodahs.”

“One of these neo-Freudians who thinks the future of society lies in the orgasm?”

“Something like that. If he’s right, I guess there’s probably not much future for you. Send me a Wish You Were Here card from Athens. Only don’t forget not to sign it.”

III

“From the man I trust may God defend me. From the man I trust not I will defend myself” – graffito scratched on a dungeon wall in the Doge’s Palace, Venice

There was a noise above our heads, probably a bat. “Did you find anything in Toronto or Montreal?”

“Only some bad moussaka. Was I expected to?”

“You never know. One of our functions is to look for needles in haystacks and hope we don’t get pricked too badly by them.”

I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, wondering why Italian matches are so absurdly flimsy. Something to do with national character, maybe; hell, I was starting to think like Longbottom. I said something about the Toronto demonstration against the colonels on April 21st. Longbottom asked if I knew that April 21st was also the anniversary of the founding of Rome; I let that one pass.
“Officially, our governments are becoming more and more critical of the regime. Wilson talks in the House about the restoration of democratic liberties, and so on. And the State Department is supposed to be putting pressure on them to hand over to a civilian government.”

“A right-wing one, naturally. When the colonels made their coup in 1967, the Sixth Fleet was stationed in Phaleron Bay. On October 21st, 1968, the United States resumed shipping arms to Greece. What other fairy stories do you know?”

Longbottom’s turn to let one pass by. “There was some talk about cutting off economic aid. That might achieve something. You’ve worked in Greece, you know what it’s like. Take their emigration figures. In 1966 alone, over forty-six thousand Greeks went to Germany. In Australia, they make up six per cent of the migrant population. Over ten per cent of all Greek scientists and engineers left annually for the U.S. I expect the figures have gone down a bit since the regime started to tighten the screws.”

“Greeks have been emigrating since Homer’s day. What about traffic the other way?”

“Tourism is down a fair bit, as far as one can judge. They must be feeling the pinch. Of course, these boycott campaigns work two ways. The poorest people also get hurt. Look at South Africa. And people’s consciences are very selective. Boycott Greece and go to Spain instead. What do they find to admire in Franco, I wonder?”

“Franco is ancient history now. Just an old guy in a comic uniform who wants to convert the Barbary Apes to the Spanish way of life. And Spain is pretty much as cheap as Greece for a vacation.”

Longbottom awarded me a thin smile. He was sparing with them, which made you believe one that came your way. “Exactly. Nowadays you have to be as wary of do-gooders as do-badders. The truth is, all these public disavowals and protestations are so much talk. The only countries really putting the pressure on are places like Denmark and they’re so small they can be sincere without having to do anything about it. But our big league boys are frankly not all that unhappy to see a professionally anti-communist military dictatorship running Greece.

You can see their point. Especially after what the Russians did to Czechoslovakia last year. Who are Greece’s neighbours? Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia. Communists all; with differences, of course. Albania fell for the Peking line about peddling revolution. If I were Enver Hoxha, I’d have kept my eggs in a Soviet basket. What does Mao care about Albania? To him, it’s just a piece of proxy wish-fulfillment on a map. The Bulgarians and Greeks hate each other: they go to war at the drop of a hat. Then there’s Turkey. Hardly a model of stability. Turkish and Greek governments keep alive on their national feuds. I don’t need to remind a Canadian about Cyprus. And remember how close the communists came to taking over Greece after the War? No, Hellas may be a poor country, but she occupies a damned useful spot on the map.”

“I don’t disagree, but it doesn’t explain why we are suddenly playing nanny to the junta.”

Longbottom played his ace impassively. “Greece obviously is not in the Commonwealth. But she is in NATO. Contributing a potential defence strength of one hundred and sixty-one thousand men to the alliance, according to figures compiled by the Institute for Strategic Studies. That’s nearly sixty thousand more than your country puts in. Given that, you may better understand why we have volunteered our services to Athens. Or, rather, why our superiors did it for us.”

I said nothing; a good policy when you’ve nothing to say.”

“Quite a shock, eh? I felt the same when the idea was imposed upon me. I suppose it should come as a relief to know that one can still be shocked in this game. But, shock is a luxury we are hardly entitled to. Nobody forced us to join. Can’t go around flaunting our consciences like characters in a Le Carré novel.”

“Not even outside office hours?”

Longbottom wrinkled his face. “The colonels are getting the wind up more and more. Not very surprising. Somebody nearly got Papadopoulos last year near Athens. Before that, Pattakos had a near miss on Crete. He was especially lucky. The Cretans are a tough lot. They’re not all Zorba the Greek types. I think Pattakos is one himself. Significant they should go for one of their own. They usually reserve their hate for mainlanders. Crete has always been the best spot to go to ground in if you’re out of favour in Athens.”
This lecture on Crete was reviving memories: the Palace of Knossos where I had had my picture taken by a dark-eyed island boy who might have stepped out of one of the frescoes; the snooty British archaeologist who infomed me with acid pleasure that Sir Arthur Evans’ reconstructions were a fine piece of historical fiction; the little waitress at the hotel whose name had turned out to be Ariadne.

Longbottom was waxing more and more didactic. “There may well have been other attempts that were hushed up to prevent the exile groups from making publicity out of them. The colonels are in a cleft stick. Their Security Police, the Asphaleia, are efficient enough at arresting people and their Intelligence boys, the KYP, were trained partly under CIA auspices. But every time they arrest somebody, even if there is a genuine plot, most people automatically assume the charges are trumped up. As the Roman emperor Domitian put it: No one believes in plots against you until you are actually killed.”

“What happened to Domitian?”

“Assassinated in his own palace,” Longbottom answered with dry relish. No, what they need is some outside organisation to act as watchdog, sniff out the next plot, and unmask it under conditions of extreme publicity. They are saved again, they get their enemies delivered on a plate, and they can claim to the world that they have foreign friends. A nice triple bonus.”
“How did we get volunteered? Did somebody run an ad in the personal column of the Times?”

“It’s a complex situation, obviously, and it’s been kept simmering for months. The regime can’t officially admit it is putting out tenders for protection. Hints have been dropped and seeds sown on the Diplomatic and Embassy circuits. London and Washington have been keeping tabs through their regulat agencies. Trouble is, no regular service could afford to touch the job. Too embarrassing for governments if anything leaked out. Whitehall doesn’t want to get its hands dirty. There’s an influential group of Labour MPs who are against the regime. It invited Andreas Papandreou to meetings at the House of Commons. Wilson is in enough trouble as it is without upsetting the troops with something like this. Same goes for Washington. Most people think the CIA had somethig to do with the coup in the first place. I expect Blair gave you a copy of Rousseas’ Greece and the American Conscience; it’s all in there.”

“I haven’t had much time lately for a quiet evening at home with a good book.”

“After the storm over them hiring Maurice Fraser Associates in London to do PA boosting of their image, the colonels became desperate enough for anything. There was a series of top-level meetings in London to set the operation up. One of our chaps was sent to Athens to make contact with Greek Intelligence. His cover was worked out to the last detail. He was set up as an ex-leader of one of those Mercenary outfits that used to operate in the Congo. You know the type…”

“Hemingways Synonymous, all brawn without the gloss of art.”

“More or less. One of the London Sunday papers printed a series of dummy memoirs for us with his name and photograph splashed over them. We faked some shots of jungle action in a film studio; rather an Oscar-winning performance all round. He looks the part and can act it up when he has to. He laid the groundbait well. He and his group were working unofficially for a number of Western governments. The dummy memoirs has been spiced with vague references to Foreign Office and British Intelligence connections, support in right-wing circles, and so on. Nothing specific enough to cause any trouble if the thing backfires. But our man had to go much further. More or less had to tell them everything about our organisation. Athens plays these games hard. They agreed to all our conditions, but all we have so far is a collection of dossiers on this émigré group in Rome and a packet of promises.”

Longbottom didn’t expand on these. Instead, I heard why I had been given the job, who my immediate contact would be, what I was to do. It was all as fascinating as I had feared.
Footsteps sounded along the stone corridors. A powerful flashlight shone up and then down into our faces. It was one of the guides from the hut. He kept the beam running up and down me as though he wished it were a laser. They should have closed ten minutes ago. Longbottom said nothing, my cue to tell the man we had been making a study of the dimensions of the larger chambers and had forgotten the time. I waved my arms to show how sincere we were. The guide had heard it all before. He looked old enough to have yawned his way through Mussolini’s speeches as well.

It was hotter than ever. The tourists would be huddling around the Trevi Fountain competing for the cool spray and trying to persuade themselves it was as beautiful as they were supposed to think. We walked towards the Metropolitana, Rome’s subway. “Sorry to have left all the talking to you in there,” Longbottom said approvingly, “Got to keep practising not speaking Italian. I must say you’ve learned the trade well. That outfit you have on is just the thing. Do they really wear trousers like that in Canada?”
“Yes. We buy them in London in the King’s Road.”

“Really. I’ve never believed in Modesty Blaise but I’m not sorry now we took women into the service. Got your side to thank for that. I dare say you can imagine how the idea first went down in Whitehall.”

He walked off without another word and flagged down one of the prowling Fiat cabs. A cool customer for a man who twenty minutes earlier had given me the job of betraying the one man for whom I’d ever really cared.

IV

“I can’t stand a Rome full of Greeks” – Juvenal

The Colosseo station was nearly deserted. A group of teenagers on the opposite platform were flicking at each other with beach towels and shouting in an accent that sounded Florentine. I guessed they were going to the Lido. Their towels and large plastic bottles of Ambre Solaire suggested they had expected to be bored by historic stones. One of them was carrying the inevitable transistor which was blaring out the kind of song about Il Sole that takes first prize at the San Remo festival.

I had to wait nearly ten minutes for a train. It was still less wearing than being flung about in a Roman cab with the driver going full blast on his horn with both hands and trying to flirt with me when he remembered. I flicked through a few more pages of Frommer and read about a quaint little restaurant where you could eat the best abbachio alla Romana in town.

The train came. No one got off. I sat down in a corner seat, enjoying the stares of an old woman who looked with obtruded horror at my yellow trousers with the sequinned bell-bottoms. We clattered up towards the Termini station. I sucked a hard lemon-flavoured candy and smiled at the old woman who glared back as though defying me to ask where one got off for the Via Veneto.
She beat me to the door at the Termini. The main concourse was the usual bedlam. Long lines outside all the telephone booths. Groups of Italian men arguing obscurely. Porters in the livery of the expensive hotels that cluster around the station like limpets on a rock were wheeling mountains of luggage to and from the Deposito. A well-dressed woman with an air of tragic bravery that smacked of Vivien Leigh in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone was copying down train departure times.

My hotel was at the top of the Via Cavour. It required no more than three doormen to give me a chorus of greetings and see me through the swing doors. I asked at the desk for my key, adding the room number for the benefit of the desk clerk who then asked for my room number.

I paused to look at the tank of fish outside the main restaurant; they gazed back at me wisely. I ignored the elevator attendant, who looked relieved at not having to ride up three floors. My room was blessedly cool. The air-conditioning hummed gently as though conscious that it was one of the things that gave the hotel the right to first-class status and the prices that went with it. I guessed Blair had run roughshod over the protests of the accountants by insisting that a place like this was far more safely anonymous than some cheap pensione. My tourist uniform went on to a chair and I walked naked into the small black-tiled bathroom. I looked at myself in the full-length mirror built into the door and decided that my breasts were nearly as good as a man in Amsterdam had once claimed without ever seeing them.

The maid had arranged my cosmetics along the shelf over the wash basin. Among them was the large false soap container that only opened when you peeled back the gummed-on label from the middle of the lid and inserted a tiny key. She must have been surprised by its weight; I don’t suppose she had handled many soap containers that carried a .38 Special Centennial Airweight revolver. I only carry it when I’m certain I’ll need to use it. Otherwise, I rely on my karate training and the sharp, perfectly balanced knife made by Wilkinson of London which I carry strapped to the side of my right thigh.

The gun was safe enough. If anyone searches your room, they do it in a hurry and go straight for your suitcases. A maid might sneak a few drops of perfume or the odd lace handkerchief, but she isn’t likely to make off with a soap container she can’t open.

I ran a long hot bath. They relax me in even the hottest weather and I don’t go in for those ice-cold shower routines you read about in he-man thrillers. I padded out and cautiously hung the trilingual Do Not Disturb sign on the outside doorknob, something I should have done when I first came in. What the hell? I wasn’t taking an exam in secret agenting. LIke most hotel baths, this one was a bit short for me. I put my feet up on its end and watched my skin react to the water. My legs needed a shave.

So, our services were certainly on sale for a rich mess of pottage. Facilities for establishing ourselves in Greece: a full-blown station in Athens with maximum co-operation from the highest local authorities. A special wave band set aside for our exclusive use in communications. It was a chance to set up shop in one of the world’s most vital areas. With America on the defensive in South-East Asia and Russia having her problems in Europe and Britain ready to roll up the imperial carpet East of Suez and all of the powers finding it impossible to understand either China or most of the African continent, the prospect of a foothold on the very fringe of Eastern Europe was portentously attractive.

Longbottom’s explanation of how the deal had been set up was as full of holes as the continuity in a Warhol movie. But it was unlikely that he knew all the details, in spite of his position. The entire system of intelligence is based on the principle of relative strata of ignorance. I had objected that it was all a complete gamble. What would happen if the colonels were ousted in the next year or so? A successor government wasn’t likely to honour such commitments. Especially not Andreas Papandreou, who would almost certainly be the new Prime Minister.
“Of course it’s a gamble. Gambling is one of the oldest ideologies. The junta might fall tomorrow; or they might last ten years. Who knows? Greece isn’t the only country on the brink of the unknown. What will happen in France after De Gaulle? Or Spain after Franco? Old autocrats are one of the biggest curses of politics.

I finished my bath and enveloped myself on one of the big hotel towels. A couple of sprays from the Guerlain talc which I had bought mainly because I liked the container it came in helped me to dry off. I put on bra and panties and lay down on the double bed with a sheaf of the papers Blair had given me in Ottawa. As Longbottom had said, the Greek resistance movement was more complicated than a crowd of people in Trafalgar Square listening to Melina Mercouri explaining how much she loved life and how much life loved her.

The three main resistance groups were The Panhellenic Liberation Front (PAK), The Patriotic Front (PAM), and Democratic Defence (DA). They had apparently come together in a loose coalition, according to a joint communiqué issued from Stockholm on April 2, 1969. PAK was the most prestigious. It was headed by Papandreou, who had been popping up all over Europe before going to Canada as an Economics professor at York University. All three groups seemed to have connections in Rome. An obvious base. Constantine was living here; Rome has always been a favourite stamping ground for exiled royalty. The Italians had thrown out their own king but absorbed those of other countries as a sort of regal substitute. I remembered old newspaper stories about Farouk.

We were interested in the smaller more radical groups coming to the surface. A newspaper had appeared in Paris calling for violent revolution in Greece. It represented a mysterious movement known as Andistasi or Resistance. Nobody knew much about it, a tribute either to its efficiency or lack of importance. Longbottom thought it might be attracting some of the energies of the yong Maoist students frustrated by De Gaulle’s victory in the 1968 upheavals in France.

We knew even less about the one I was going to infiltrate and destroy. It was supposed to be calling itself Eleutheria or Freedom, which wasn’t going to win any prizes for originality. It wasn’t competing for headlines, but somehow Athens had got wind of it. Longbottom hadn’t got to the names of its two leaders when I asked, “Just why did they elect me Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spy?”

“You know Greece well, you worked in Athens for three years at the Canadian Embassy, you speak Greek perfectly, and you are a woman, which is an advantage.”

“Not always.”

He said patiently, “Look at it this way. You’ll be infiltrating a bunch of Greeks. They’ve been patient and smart in building up their little group, I’ve no doubt, but they are basically amateurs. Probably a group of young men with one or two old guard leftists trying to run the show. Two classic types of naivety combined. They’ll roll out the red carpet for any foreigner who wants to join in. The average Greek wouldn’t dream of connecting a woman with any sort of undercover stuff. Most of them will be surprised at you showing any interest in politics at all. They’ll put it down to your being from one of those odd countries where women aren’t content to carry baskets on their heads.”

“All very neat, but your argument works two ways. I might make myself desirable to them here in Rome, especially if I appear willing to put some dollars into their revolutionary piggy-bank. Or am I going to play the eager girl reporter who can give them their headline story when they want it? Either way, I don’t see them dragging me off to Greece with them. What would I do? Keep their bombs polished or something?”

“What would you say if I told you that one of the men in the group is called Andreas Konstantopoulos?”

I couldn’t match him in the insouciance stakes. “Not Andreas…”

“A rather special friend of yours.”

“Of course he is. Or was. I haven’t seen him since I quit the Embassy job to join the service. But…”

“But how do I know you know him? Forgive the melodrama, but we have our ways. There are two large dossiers on you in Ottawa and London. One covers you up to the time you werr recruited by us, the other from then on. I expect London has at least three on me.”

I got up impatiently off the bed and paced about the room. Not a long journey, despite its cost. I heard footsteps and the rattle of glasses in the corridor. Room service answering a call for drinks.

So, Andreas had sold out to integrity. I picked up the telephone and failed to persuade them to understand what rye was, so compromised on a gin and tonic with lots of ice. The waiter was knocking at the door not much more than half an hour later. I put on my bathrobe and let him in. He pointed the tray at me as though he was carrying John the Baptist’s head. I signed the chit and gave him a tip even though they’d forgotten the ice.

V

“You will usually find that the enemy has three courses open to him; of these, he will adopt the fourth” – Von Molkte

It’s rarely a good idea to have dinner in hotel restaurants in Europe. The food tends to be uninspired under its ‘International’ label, the prices exorbitant, the waiters selected on the basis of their xenophobia. But I didn’t feel up to shopping around the city for anything better. I had no friends back home to dazzle with an account of how I discovered a little back-street trattoria where the cannelloni is out of this world.

The meal was adequate, though I wasn’t expecting to get the liquor elements by the accountants in Ottawa without a fight. They had once challenged the three martinis I bought for a contact in Singapore who turned out to be on the other side and who almost succeeded in strangling me later that night in the Raffles Hotel.

I strolled through the Piazza della Republica, dodging the traffic and admiring the Fountain of the Naiads which I think is the best in Rome. A cut-price Caruso was belting it out from one of the crowded open-air cafes; the audience was really suffering for his art.

Continuing down the Street of the Airline Offices, officially known as the Via Barberini, I crossed to the lower part of the Via Vittorio Veneto. It was a sultry night and I was sweating inside my blue silk blouse and white skirt. The Via Veneto is a slice of Italian Theatre of the Absurd, invented by Fellini for La Dolce Vita but now fading into a bad joke. Deluxe hotels like the Excelsior where everyone who is nobody goes to gape at everyone who is somebody. An astonishing amount of newsstands selling foreign pornography and local sports papers. Sidewalk cafes where people try to sit all night over a one-dollar coffee. Longbottom had told me that Andreas had been seen here several times at night. It made sense, you could plot the overthrow of the Italian government over loud speakers on the Via Veneto without getting arrested. On this street, you are your only audience.

I got a seat right in on the sidewalk, ordered a coffee, lit a cigarette, acknowledged the whistles from a pair of young Italian sailors with a deep-freeze smile, and settled back to enjoy the show. The biggest collection of egotists in Europe was on hand for my entertainment. They spend their days at Cinecittà doing bit parts in costume epics and art house Italian westerns and their nights bumming drinks and explaining how close they are to landing the next leading role that comes up to acquaintances who are bursting to interrupt and tell how they are bound to get the same part.

At the next table, a tall man with a mass of creamy curls and puffy face was struggling to captivate a group of girls and two fiercely-dressed men who could have been either critics or pimps.

“I would have had that part in Enrico’s film if I’d played my cards right. It was just the thing for me, one of those sex-in-a-toga Superscope affairs with lions eating Christians and all that. But this Enrico has got himself a pretty boy. You know what I mean? To get a part from him, you have to give a certain part of yourself to him first, eh?”

“Damn right we know what you mean,” said one of the girls tonelessly. “These queers have really loused up the business. It’s the same back home. In the good old days a girl could always get something if she put out for the right guy. Not any more. You couldn’t get a lay if you wanted one.”

“Maybe you should go Lesbian,” one of the fiercely-dressed men said.

“Maybe I should. But there aren’t any Lesbian directors.”

“Why don’t you try making it with the tit magazines?” asked one of the other girls. She had an expensive British accent and breasts that must have been cantilevered. She pulled a magazine out of her Mary Quant shoulder bag and spread it over the table. I caught a glimpse of a double-page spread of her posing nude on a giant Union Jack. “Look at this. Some symbolism, don’t you think? I made enough out of it to pay my rent for a month.”

No one seemed very impressed.

I sipped away at my tepid coffee and broke into a new pack of Rothmans. People I had already seen half a dozen times were toiling up and down the same block. It was like Paris is supposed to have been in the Twenties and Thirties. I remembered Orwell’s essay on Henry Miller.

It was past midnight when I saw Andreas pushing through the crowd. I’d long ago succumbed to the waiter’s hostile looks and bought a Scotch con seltz to placate him and keep myself awake. Andreas came in line with my table. He was talking to an older man in a black jacket and white denims and it was easy for me to stretch out my leg and trip him up.

He clutched at my table and went down with it. The Greek curses caressed my memories. I had jumped up and was well into my prepared apologies when he recognised me.

“Is it really you?”

The waiter was flapping around the broken glass and cup, estimating how much extra he could safely add to my bill for the damage. The other tables had gone back to their conversational dagger thrusts. I diverted Andreas’ attempt at a full-scale Greek kiss with a quick peck to his cheek and a hand on his shoulder. His face had hardened out in a way that added challenge and menace to the charm of his smile. The mark on his right cheek still showed but did nothing to spoil his looks. His sleeveless shirt was grey with a high turtleneck that showed off his sunburned arms and swimmer’s figure to maximum advantage. Several women were watching him with predatory interest.

He introduced me to the man with him, a vulpine Greek by the name of Stylianos who tried to be polite to me in English and looked relieved when I switched into Greek. He spoke to Andreas, excused himself to me and left. I guess he thought he was being tactful.

Andreas had already sat down and ordered drinks. In the past, he would never buy me anything before checking to see what I wanted. “So. First Athens, now Rome. Are you working here now? Still looking into other people’s history?”

“No and yes. I’m not working here. Well, only on visits. The history I do get involved in from time to time.”

“You do not work for the Canadian Embassy now?”

“No. I quit soon after I was posted back from Athens. I was sick of the job. Too many masters. I decided to go into partnership with myself.”

“Doing what?”

“Feature writing. Travel articles, mainly. How to live on five cents a day, that sort of stuff. They lap it up in North America. Then I get some commission work. I sleep in hotels and report on washroom facilities for airlines and travel agencies.”

Andreas played with his drink. “So you are pimping for Europe.”

I pretended to be a little huffy. “I guess Europe can use the dollars as much as I can.”

“And have you sung the praises of Greece?”

“Not recently. I did a piece on Athens for Holiday magazine last year. Americans are fighting a bit shy of Greece at the moment.”

“That is good. But I wish they were a bit less shy of fighting.”

A lecture on the wickedness of the junta was imminent. I was feeling my way carefully through this low-key dialogue. Andreas still didn’t strike me as the master conspirator. Not that that meant anything; it was my job not to strike him as the master spy.

He spat. It wasn’t a success, the sputum flopped down his shirt. Those murdering bastards. “Do you remember Jannis?”

I did. Jannis had been one of Andreas’ closest friends and a student at the university. I recalled his perpetual chuckle, his exotic English, his fund of stories about priests and goats in weird physical situations.

Jannis had tried to launch a propaganda campaign against the colonels. He painted slogans on taverna walls and wrote sulphurous pamphlets under various pseudonyms. One of these was Dighenis, a typical piece of cheek with its overtones of Grivas in Cyprus. Andreas had done him some English translations of these and told him to be careful. Jannis was promptly arrested while passing these out to tourists at the airport.

“We didn’t see him for three months. The papers said he had been arrested for insulting the Greek People. One night he limped in to the taverna in the Plaka where we used to go. They had released him under one of their so-called amnesties. He wouldn’t say anything about what they did to him. We eventually stopped pressing him and drank to his return. When we came out of the taverna, six men jumped out of a black car parked across the street. They had Asphaleia written all over them. We ran, we had to drag Jannis along with us, and we got away. It’s not hard to vanish in the Plaka. Look how you were lost that time when we first met. Jannis mumbled something to me and fainted. It was obvious why they had let him go. They wanted to see the first people he would look for. We took him to my room. The old woman who lived in the house had gone to some village in Attica for a family funeral. We laid him on my bed and undressed him. Then we saw why he limped. His feet were covered in scars from the Falanga torture they are so fond of, and he had no toe-nails left. His pubic hair had been torn out and there were deep burns on his genitals.

He came to and swore he’d be all right. We didn’t dare fetch a doctor. I said I would sleep on the floor beside the bed. The others left. In the morning I found him in the old woman’s kitchen. He had cut his throat with her bread knife. There was a note. It said that if they took him again, he would not be able to keep silent. He had finished the note with one of his jokes about the priest and the goat; the priest had been changed to colonel.”

Andreas’ voice was passionately controlled. “It seems you are fated to hear my autobiography again. Maybe I should ask for a fee since you are now a journalist. I closed his eyes and left him there. I wasn’t going to give them a chance to get me at the Bouboulinas in his place. I went down to Piraeus. I was lucky. There was a tourist boat about to sail for Italy. Half the crew hadn’t come back from a drinking bout and the captain was desperate. He took me without any papers. I put on a white coat and a smile and became steward. At Brindisi I jumped the boat.”

It was time to ask a question. “How did you get past the Italian authorities without any papers?”

“Fear lends wings to the imagination as well as the feet. I watched the cabins until I saw one of the Italian porters from the dock go into one to fetch some luggage. I went in and hit him on the back of the head, put his uniform on over my clothes, slipped the lock to from the inside, and carried the luggage out to where the taxis wait. I dumped it down near a big pile of suitcases and simply walked off towards the town. It was easy. Who takes any notice of porters? I found a quiet alley and threw away the uniform. There were about ten thousand lire in his pocket. I had a meal, bought a pair of sun glasses, and wandered around like a tourist until evening. Eventually, I found a car that had been left with the keys in. A Volkswagen. I was lucky twice over; the tank was full. I drove inland to Foggia, left the car in a parking lot and got a local train across to Naples.

I knew where I could get some more money. There’s an arcade which I’d read about. The tourists go there to drink Espresso; the local pickpockets think it’s one of the best places in the city. I managed to steal a handbag from an American woman who was alone and drunk. It was stuffed full with lire. I bought some cheap clothes and a small suitcase and took a train to Rome.”
Andreas looked rather like a priest who has just told a risqué story. He asked if I thought he had the makings of a great criminal. I smiled ambiguously and let him carry on about what he had done since arriving in Rome. There were details in his story that didn’t ring true but he certainly gave good value to the listener. I believed the Jannis part, the rest hardly mattered one way or the other.

It was five after three. “Andreas, I’m folding. Let me pay for the drinks and call it a night.”

“How long do you stay in Rome? I must see you tomorrow.”

I told him I was tied up with appintments until Wednesday night.

“Kala! On Wednesday night I must meet with some friends. You shall have dinner with me first and then come with me to meet them. They are more Greeks whose opinions are not welcome at home. Now, I will see to this bill, of course, and escort you back to your hotel.”

I let him think he was organising me. There was no reason why he shouldn’t know where I was staying. If anything came of our meeting, I didn’t want to risk being caught with a false address. I’d have to give my real name to hotel reception as that of a friend who I was expecting in a few days and tell them to put any call or message for her through to me.

He got us a taxi. The driver was ready to call it a night, so didn’t bother trying to take us by a roundabout way. We exchanged a few banalities about my supposed journalism. Andreas didn’t tell me where he was living. Significant, maybe, but I didn’t let myself get carried away; his silence might only be concealing a girl friend.

He paid off the driver and just squeezd my arm as we said goodnight, which absolved me from giving him a Judas kiss. I didn’t stand around to watch him walk into the street to hail another cab. Sherlock Holmes might have been able to deduce something from the way he moved; not me.

In bed, I began to review the details of the evening with what the Field Psychology Instructor calls the all-head-no-heart approach. It beats hell out of counting sheep for closing your eyes.

VI

“The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray” – Oscar Wilde

It had been an impatient morning in the embassy on Vassilissis Sofias Street. The thermometer was out of sight in the high nineties. Two of the regular receptionists were away, probably because of the wine festival at Daphne, and I had been let in for a session at the desk. I soon worked up some nostalgia for my own little office and half-finished report on low-budget hotels which we were doing for Canadian Pacific. To make my day, I had to make an overseas call to Ottawa,which meant an hour’s struggle with the purgatory of the Greek telephone system.
I escaped about one, wishing I could go down to some place like Vougliameni for a swim. Instead, I was doomed to dragging about the Plaka to look for an old unversity acquaintance whom I’d bumped into the day before, here in Athens for a year while he worked on some research at the American School. I wasn’t very keen on seeing him at all. In our final year at Toronto, he’d wasted a large amount of money on a dinner designed to get me into bed. I figured this lunch signalled a renewal of the campaign. But I’d fallen for his line about being new to Athens and not knowing anyone, so I’d agreed to see him and show him around. He’d just have to accept right away that the sights were not going to include my body.

As a guide, I had a great future behind me; I got lost. The Plaka is the oldest quarter of Athens, a regular rabbit warren of streets and alleys, and pretty dead at that time of day. There aren’t many people about except for a few tourists. In fact, I had to stop and draw a rough map on a piece of Embassy paper of the quickest way to the theatre of Herodes Atticus for a pair of Swedish girls. She saved others, herself she could not save.

It was then, as they probably still say in pulp romances, that Andreas Konstantopoulos came into my life. I saw two men lifting baskets of bread from a truck and carrying them into a taverna. I did a quick rundown on my still limited Greek and went up to them: “Parakalo, xerete pou einai hodos Kekropos…?”

One of the men, who looked old enough to be a survivor from Marathon, cut into my question with a flood of directions. I wasn’t up to the Athenian average of four hundred words a minute and looked blank. The other man, a boy really, in a grubby white singlet and pants to match, smiled and said in good English, “Yes, I know very well where that is. I will show you.”

It wasn’t a seducer’s gambit. Greeks will walk miles out of their way to take a stranger somewhere and they hardly wait to be thanked at the end of it. Still, I said, “If you could just tell me where it is…”

“But it is no trouble. I was tired of bread. Petros here can finish.” He put his basket down and said something to the old man who managed to shrug and cackle at the same time. I caught up with him as he set off down the street, almost tripping over my floppy sandals. One of these days I was going to have to break down and give my freak-show feet a made-to-measure treat before they were the death of me. He was on the tall side and moved fast in a leisurely sort of way. I guessed his age at eighteen or so. His face was soft as though he didn’t have to shave much. A blueish-red mark on his right cheek gave him an obscure touch of distinction: either an old scar or a fading birthmark.

“Are you from America?”

“No, Canada.”

“Canada? Do you know the city of Toronto?”

I knew what was coming. “Yes, I was born there.”

“I have a cousin in Toronto. He drives a taxi and is making a lot of money. Next year he comes home to marry a girl from our village.”

Every Greek you meet has a relative in Toronto. Unless you happen to be American or Australian. Then they have a relative in New York or Sydney. This relative will be either a cab driver or waiter, is making a fortune, and is coming home next year to marry a girl from the village.

I said that was very interesting. It was a nice surprise when he didn’t follow up by telling me the cousin’s name and asking me if I knew him. But then, from his tone of voice and impish grin, I realised that he was pulling my leg.

“Of course, that is the great Greek dream. To go abroad to make enough money to come home again. I suppose you think it is silly. Here we are at Kekropos Street. I suppose that you look for a friend? There is little in the Plaka until all the tavernas open for dinner. Then it will be bouzouki music and Never On Sunday and people will think they have seen the real Greece.”

The edge in his voice intrigued me. I told him the number I was looking for. It was like all the others. A house with faded shutters and a cat sleeping on the window ledge. He pulled aside a curtain that hung across the doorway and motioned for me to go in.

A very old woman looked up from the floor where she was squatting over a bowl of soup. The boy spoke to her. She hobbled across to a shattered armchair and took a piece of paper from behind a cushion, passing it to the boy who relayed it to me.

It seemed that my putative seducer had suddenly decided to fly up to Saloniki for a conference on Balkan history. No word on when he would be back, no promise to call me, no apology. I was pretty sure the whole business had been a revenge stunt for his Toronto fiasco.

“Your friend is not here?”

I crumpled the note up. The old woman had returned to her soup. I went over and offered her some loose change, giving and receiving a few sentences of elaborate thanks.

“You speak good Greek.”

“Mono liga,” I replied, showing off modestly. “Well, no point in hanging around here.” At least I wasn’t going to be bothered by the guy any more. I wondered if I could give the boy a tip without insulting him.

We didn’t get to the insult stage. “My name is Andreas Konstantopoulos. I would be honoured if you would agree to take lunch with me.” He saw me fail to conceal a smile at his formality and hastened on. “Do not misunderstand. It is not what I believe the English call an inivtation to view etchings. There is a taverna near here that stays open all day for the men who deliver bread and wine to the Plaka. It is small and noisy, but very cheap and you will have a good lunch.”

We walked a block or so to Sothiros Street. Andreas asked me my name and how long I had been in Greece. We spoke Greek at my request. He was very patient, gently correcting my grammar and apologising for it being so difficult a language. He was one of those boys who can smile with their eyes. But I remembered that sharp tone from earlier. There was more to Andreas Konstanopoulos than a smile and a helping hand for the damsel in distress.

The taverna had no pseudo-classical name, and instead of a tired bouzouki player there was a pregnant-looking jukebox blasting out an early Beatles number. Athenian hit parades tend to be as ancient as the buildings. Andreas miraculously found two seats in the pullulating room. He seemed to know everybody and everybody seemed to know him, which is not always the same thing. I drew a number of curious looks and felt that Andreas was rather proud to be seen as the escort of a foreign woman.

He had the sense to realise that my Greek wouldn’t be up to the shouting match which would be the only way of getting through a conversation in the tumult. “I hope this will not be too unpleasantly noisy for you?”

I shook my head. “Is there a menu?”

“No. The proprietor never knows just when he will get his supplies delivered. You either discuss it with the waiter or simply go into the kitchen and point out what you want. Perhaps I could order for us? Or is there something special you would like?”

I told him to go ahead. He stood up and shouted across the room. A grinning waiter seeped over with the two ritual glasses of water. They held a colloquy in machine-gun Greek. The waiter ambled off into the kitchen. Another one appeared with a bottle of ouzo.

“I hope you like our national drink?”

“I tried not to at first. There are spectacular stories about what it can do to you. But, yes, I do.”

“Bravo! Then we drink. Ees iyian!

We drank. The food came. First, Bourekakia: thin strips of savoury pastry bursting with chicken and feta cheese and enough spinach to make Popeye drool. Then a large salad with anchovies and sardines playing peek-a-boo between the tomatoes and the olives. I was going to pass up dessert until I saw the dish of cinnamon-coated puff pastries dripping with honey syrup. “What are these called?”

“Loucomades,” said the waiter. “They are special here.”

I ate four. They deserved to be special. When it came to coffee, I went all tourist and aked for Nescafé. Greek coffee is an acquired taste I’d long ago stopped trying to acquire. “I see you don’t like our coffee. Let me tell you a very old story. You remember the Spartans? They were the most warlike people in Greece. An Athenian was once visiting Sparta. At dinner they served him with a bowl of Spartan black broth. It was famous all over the country, but no one outside of Sparta knew the recipe. The Athenian took one mouthful and nearly choked. It was horrible. He turned to his host and said that he now understood why no Spartan was afraid to die in battle.”

The taverna gradually emptied and we were able to talk in almost normal tones. Andreas told me his life story without embarrassment or rhetoric, sticking to English to make sure I didn’t miss anything. He came from Patmos, the loveliest island of the Dodecanese where St. John heard the voice of God and dictated his Revelations. He was the younger of two brothers. There had been a sister who had died in infancy at a time when the fishing was bad and the money scarcer than usual. The father had been a fisherman whose income and temper depended upon his daily catch. One day, when Andreas was seven, the father did not come back. His friends found the wrecked boat; several days later a swollen body was picked up by one of the navy patrol boats.

Tragedy is never far from a Greek fishing family. It meant that the mother now had three jobs instead of two. Andreas and his brother mourned their father, but were secretly proud of becoming the men of the house. They ran errands for one of the town’s hotels, sold postcards at the harbour, and followed the mules that ferry the visitors up to the old monastery on the Chora.
One of the monks took a fancy to Andreas and offered to teach him English in return for the boy doing odd jobs and fetching him cigarettes and diverting groups of tourists to him for guided tours around the monastery. Greek monks are the worldliest of all. This one persuaded Andreas that a knowledge of English would enable him to make better tips at the harbour.

Andreas was a good pupil and soon became fairly fluent. The monk had an odd collection of English books ranging from theological tomes to some battered Raymond Chandlers. The boy grew up thinking that America was one gigantic Los Angeles, a delusion not restricted to Greeks. It had been a shock when the elder brother announced his emigration there. The mother wept and prayed to the Virgin Mary to keep her son at home. He went anyway, and the mother was soon proudly inviting her friends to come and hear Andreas read his letters aloud to them all.
Patmos seemed a very small world now. His brother’s letters and the monk’s books unsettled Andreas. He couldn’t bring himself to declare straightout that he was leaving home, so he quietly saved up all his tips and slipped away on a boat for Kos. He left a note for his mother. She couldn’t read but he knew she would run weeping with it up to the monk who would gruffly persuade her that it was for the best.

From Kos he took a boat for Piraeus where it was easy to lose himself in the teeming red-light area along Merarhias Street. This was a world more in tune with Chandler than Patmos. He did a bit of casual pimping for some of the girls until a huge Armenian put a knife to his throat one night and advised him to stop poaching on other people’s territory. He took the hint and moved up to Athens where he got a room with an old widow who asked no questions in return for a welcome few drachmas a week rent.

“That Armenian did me a favour. If I’d stayed in Piraeus I would have drifted into the rackets and that would have been that. A hired knife or a corpse in the water like my father.”

I lit a Delos filter. Andreas didn’t smoke. “Did you ever write to your mother?”

“I sent a few to the monk to read to her. He could not reply because I never gave him an address. The same with my brother It is enough for them to know I am alive. I suppose that will sound cruel to you?”

He was on the defensive. I said I hadn’t seen or heard anything of my family in years.

“Yes, but it is different for you. The Greek family is so much more of a unit. It is common for three generations to live in the same house and…”

I attempted to calm him down with some bromide about tradition. “Tradition? I think that I hate tradition more than anything else. You are so forrtunate to come from where you do. Isn’t there an English saying, Happy Is The Nation That Has No History?”

“That’s why we all come over to Europe to look at other people’s.”

“En daxei! And we are all trying to go the other way. There are many times when I wish the Turks and Venetians had made a proper job of blowing up that accursed Parthenon. Those columns squatting up there, they do nothing but mock us. I spit on the glory that was Greece. What would I have become on Patmos? A fisherman like my father, wait for my mother to find me a girl with enough blankets and cooking pots for a respectable dowry, go to the kafeneion every night and listen to the old men talk about their wars. Better to be dead than that…” He pushed a smile on to his face. “Come, I will pay this bill.”

I saw a lot of Andreas in the next two years. He knew a lot of students from the university, which was unusual considering the tightly stratified class nature of Greek education. Only about one per cent come from the working class. We went bathing at the cheapest beaches and I listened to them solving the world’s problems over plates of moussaka and bottles of resinated wine or Fix beer. Out of politeness, they occasionally asked what I thought, but never waited for an answer.

They were all violently left-wing, though not communist. The Iron Curtain hung too close to Greece for that. And the old Party leaders are afraid of radical students. A familiar pattern. The Party functionary sees his own disappointments reflected in the new breed of sceptical youth that has sprung up over Europe in the last ten years.

Andreas and his friends were good for me. I got away from the Embassy crowd. My Greek became perfect and I brought Andreas’ English up to date. The old monk on Patmos had taught him some expressions that were out of the ark. His face was a picture when I laughed at his description of the King of the Hellenes as a “top-hole rotter.”

Whether I was good for Andreas is another matter. I did wonder, though it was a relief that he didn’t, why he never made a serious pass at me. He wasn’t homosexual, though some of his friends were. He knew other girls and I guess he slept with some of them. Maybe he was a bit afraid of a foreign woman’s reactions.

He cried when I told him I was leaving. There was nothing maudlin about his tears. Crying was as natural to him as laughing. They all came to the airport to see me off. They each gave me a kiss. Andreas’ seemed no different from the others. When my flight was called, I walked quickly away to where a ground hostess in the trim Olympic Airways uniform was handing out boarding passes. We had been friends, we had had pleasure together, now I was leaving. Perhaps I understood how the Greeks can use their word xenos for both host and guest.

VII

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please” – Mark Twain

The cafe near the American Express at the Piazza di Spagna was full of people opening letters from home and discovering that their table companions also came from Iowa or Idaho. I went through the routine of being approached for directions by Longbottom and drifting out into the street as though to point him the right way. Anyone following either him or me would already be wise to us. Longbottom wasn’t stupid. Maybe there was enough of the schoolboy left in him to enjoy these games.

He listened to my account without once interrupting. That was one of the reasons why I preferred to work with him of all the service chiefs. In Ottawa, though I admit Blair wasn’t too bad, they can hardly let you get through a sentence without demanding an interpretation of the psychological basis of your contact’s reaction patterns.

“So, you feel we may have a bite?”

“Maybe a nibble. Too early to be sure. I have a hunch he’s got things to hide.”

“Is that your female intuition working? Whenever Longbottom came out with a line like that, he was too deadpan for me to be sure if he was being serious or having a quiet moment of fun.
“Some of his story doesn’t hold up. For one thing, he seems to have plenty of money. I saw his wallet twice; once when he paid the check and again when he did the cab. He had a wad of big bills and he wasn’t mean with his hand-outs. Italy may be as tip-happy as New York, but you don’t have to throw lire around the way he was doing. It wasn’t as though I were a pick-up he was trying to impress. Yet the way he tells it, he just has the standard nothing jobs. And if he got into Italy the way he described, he must have got a set of papers from somewhere. You can hardly turn around in this country without falling over bureaucrats and their red tape. That whole bit about how he got from Athens to Rome came out too pat. I had the feeling he’d told the story twenty times before.”

“Perhaps he has. It could still be true.”

“Does it matter? If your information is right, we don’t have to waste time proving that he’s mixed up in something?”

“True, but it is not a waste of time to look at the story he decided to tell you. Just conceivably he might have suspected that your version of how you happened to be in Rome was a little too pat as well. And it is not totally impossible that Athens could be wrong about him.”

“Well, he never used to make any secret about being left-wing. They could have tied him in with Jannis. I think we can believe that part of the story. I do know Andreas pretty well and he was convincing.”

“All right, it’s your pigeon and I’ll accept what you say. Have you ever heard him mention Varthis?”

Varthis was the other name we had from Athens. “Tell me more about him.”

Longbottom took a newspaper clipping from a brown pigskin wallet and passed it over to me. It was the usual press photograph, though the blurs didn’t spoil his expansive smile and rather good eyes. He must have been a big man if his head was in proportion.

“Demetrios Varthis. Athens calls him a communist, which is a lie unless he’s changed a good deal. By a stroke of luck we have some sort of dossier of our own on him. He was in London for a year or so. Got himself arrested in that big demonstration we had against Queen Frederika. The usual charges: offensive behaviour, obstructing a policeman in the execution of his duty. He made quite a speech in court and got into the newspapers. Apparently he’d been something of a Resistance hero in the war. More to the point, he was also very much against the communists when they tried to take over afterwards. He’s always been leftish but never strayed near the Party line.

He got off with a ten pound fine and appeared on a television interview programme the same night. According to the Registered Aliens file, he left England a couple of months later. I checked up on his file as soon as I heard his name. The Foreign Office keeps a variety of Greek newspapers in its library. Varthis had written quite a few articles before 1967. Standard stuff: attacks on government corruption, criticisms of the Royal Family for interfering in politics, and some trumpet blasts against what he called fascist elements in the army.”

“Another prophet without honour.”

“A natural enemy of the present regime. He was associated with EDA, the United Democratic Left, for a short time, but joined the Centre Union, EK, when George Papandreou founded it in 1961. More his style. There may have been some connection with the Aspida Report in 1966 which got twenty-eight army officers court-martialled for treason. You’re quite sure Konstantopoulos has never mentioned him?”

“Sure I’m sure. Is this a private plot or can anyone join in? Why all this double-checking? Athens must have had men over here for ages.”

“Naturally. I spent most of last night with their number one man. A nasty piece of work. Tried to convince me we ought to have the right to torture political suspcts in England. But one can’t be fussy with one’s allies, these days. He’s actually doing a good job according to his lights. Found out where Varthis is living. The address will be at your hotel when you get back. If it tallies with where Konstantopoulos is taking you to, we’re on to something. Though I suppose they may have the sense to meet at different places.”

Outside, the hippies on the Spanish Steps were tuning their guitars amid a clutter of rucksacks and pallid girl followers. A poor replacement for the native Pappagalli who used to hang around the area pinching bottoms until the Roman police chased them off to protect the victims who actually liked the pinches. I saw a brassy mop of hair in the crowds that might have belonged to the Colosseum hopeful, and mentally wished her good hunting as one woman for sale to another.

Longbottom was going to pay a visit to Varthis that night. He had an old gambit for sniffing around the prey. Knock on the door. Occupant opens it. You register surprise and ask where old Charlie Smiles is. Occupant explains with a welter of detail the impossibility of old Charlie Smiles ever having been there. You apologise at length: a mutual friend had given you this address and you just wanted to look up old Charlie Smiles who you haven’t seen since the year dot. Occupant will feel guilty at not being Charlie Smiles and you leave with an earful of regrets, an eyeful of occupant, and maybe a glimpse of the inside of his house or apartment.

There was a parcel at the hotel. It contained a card which I decoded into Varthis’ address and a mass of documents to add to the ones Blair had given me. Cuttings from Stratiotika Nea, a Greek Army weekly paper, copies of The Greek Observer full of fire and brimstone against the colonels which was published in London, and a pamphlet put out by something called The Committee of Young Scientists of Piraeus denouncing Andreas Papandreou in eccentric English for every crime under the sun.

I had dinner sent up to my room. Cold chicken in gelatine with a salad, some fresh fruit, and a bottle of beer. Music to commune by dripped from the radio. By half past ten I’d exhausted a pack of cigarettes and a ton of patience. Neither side was capable of making a point without a dozen abusive epithets; I was starting to lose track of which unspeakable swine was which.
The phone rang just as I had settled down reflectively on the toilet to try and make some sense of it all. I struggled out feeling like Dagwood in one of his unluckier moments. Three minutes later I was putting my gun into my bag. A voice telling me to come at once to Varthis’ place, a choking sound, and a noise that might have been a body falling over a table were equal incentives to action.

What impressed me most was that the receiver had been replaced after the crash. It seemed that Mr Demetrios Varthis’ apartment might be the scene of some highly exclusive entertainment.

VIII

“Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled” – Samuel Johnson

One advantage of staying near the centre of Rome’s thriving prostitute industry is that everybody wants to be anonymous and assumes you do as well. The other is that it’s a gold mine for cab drivers, hence there’s never a shortage of prowling cabs. It was sheer habit that I let three go by before waving down a fourth.

Varthis was living out in the area around the great stadium the city had built for the 1960 Olympics. My driver was an old-timer and didn’t want to talk. I cradled my bag and revived my lavatorial thoughts. Athens certainly wanted to make the most of things. They were quite capable of liquidating Varthis and company in Rome, but that wouldn’t suit their book. I had to infiltrate the group, find out what it was up to, and stay with it right up the last, then find a spoke to push in and hand them over. Everybody had been conveniently vague about the nature of the spoke.

The cab decanted me outside a giant glass-and-concrete cube of Modernismus. There was probably time to go by the book and get out six blocks away then walk back, but I couldn’t be sure. I walked through the foyer where the combination of piped music and a cheap statue of the late Pope John was as good a comment on the place as anything I could have thought up.

Varthis lived in apartment 472. At least it wasn’t on the twentieth floor; we’re not supposed to use the elevator in such situations. I trotted up the stairs until I came to a door that indicated numbers 463-478. I pulled it open with textbook discretion and peeked through. The empty corridor jeered silently. My feet made no sound on the thick beige broadloom. Thin slivers of light were visible beneath some of the doors but there was no noise apart from some enthusiastic laughing in 468.

The door to 472 was closed. At least they were taking me seriously. I’d have felt insulted if it had been ajar. The fact that the name on the door wasn’t Varthis also made me feel fairly sure that Longbottom and I hadn’t been wasting our time.

I took out my gun. The door didn’t move until I turned the handle as gently as I could. There hadn’t been anything to see through the large keyhole. I edged into a small entrance hall that obviously led through to the living area. The lights were all on. I was more interested in who or what might be behind the closed door immediately to my right. Probably the bathroom. Definitely the place for someone to be hiding in.

There was someone in there all right, but he wasn’t hiding. Corpses don’t have to hide. That’s one advantage of being dead; I can’t think of many others. The head was covered by a large piece of white cloth drawn tight and knotted under the chin. It was soaked with water that had been directed from the hand shower hanging over the side of the bath. A simple and usually effective way of extracting information. The French were supposed to have done wonders with it in Algeria. A scene from Godard’s Le Petit Soldat flashed across my mind.

The large body was clad in a dark woollen shirt and white slacks. Big bare feet, the toes crushed and bloody as though they had been repeatedly stamped on. I left it looking sadly out of place amid the orange towels and cut-glass jar of bath salts and walked through to the bedroom. Nothing there.

The living room was done out in remorseless Scandinavian. It had everything the modern apartment is supposed to have, including a pair of plastic chairs designed for people with no buttocks. Antiseptic comfort on to which the tenant had made no attempt to impose his human fallibility.

Longbottom lay sprawled over a white rug. His tie had gathered a new tone: blood. There was a lot more forming a crimson halo about his head. His face and body were unmarked but I knew what the back of his head would be like.

I looked around for the phone. There was no sign of any struggle, no table or chair on the floor to indicate the crash I had heard. Somebody had been tidying up.

I’d seen more violent deaths, not always in the line of duty. The worst had been the woman who’d fallen under the subway train at Union Station in Toronto. I remembered the policeman who had managed to look bored as they collected the pieces from the track.

Things became more interesting when I felt an arm fasten around my neck in a rear stranglehold.

IX

“Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken” – Bertrand Russell

Raymond Chandler once said, “When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” An arm around the neck qualifies as a case of life over-compensating for art. I dropped my own gun and grabbed for his left hand which he had at my head. I forced his arm up and forward until it came over my shoulder. He was fool enough not to let go. My other hand whipped across and started to press down on his arm. I heard a squeal which wasn’t surprising since I was well on the way to breaking his arm at the shoulder. He screamed again. I let go abruptly, and stamped on his instep. I only had a pair of light sandals on and the result wasn’t that sensational, but it gave him something extra to cope with.

I spun round. He was my height and wore a red sweater and black corduroy slacks. Young-looking. Very slim. Dark pain-filled eyes looked incredulously into mine and spittle flecked his Mick Jagger lips. He stumbled back and shot a quick envious look at my gun on the floor. I put out my leg and covered it with my foot, keeping what I hoped was a cool stare. He whimpered a little, then turned and made for the door.

I let him go. Shooting his would have been noisy and useless. Maybe I could have made him talk with the time and the facilities. I was more concerned with finding the organ grinder than questioning the monkey.

An inventory of Longbottom’s wallet produced some traveller’s cheques in the name of James Henderson. I flicked through his pockets and looked at his body with unprofessional grief before getting up to do an instant replay requiem for the body in the bath. I peeled off the cloth, met Demetrios Varthis for the first and last time, and replaced it.

The corpses were already haunting the apartment with their ultimate meaninglessness. I stepped through the hall and peered out. Nothing. I eased into the corridor, closing the door. They were still laughing in 468.

At two o’clock the next afternoon I was in one of those ancient Customs offices at London airport talking to a notably shabby little man whose importance was in inverse proportion to his appearance. He had a face like a relief map of Scotland and fussed in the euphemisms and circumlocutions used by senior British Civil Servants to mask their intelligence.

“Your news comes as a grave shock. Poor old Longbottom. Another two years and he’d have had his gold watch and perhaps a discreet gong from the Palace. Well, it comes to us all, I suppose…”
My head was heavy with the Seconal I’d taken to get to sleep the previous night. I’ve never paid much attention to the rule forbidding us to carry drugs of any kind. And if we’d had any rubbish about carrying cyanide capsules in coat buttons or bra straps, I’d have ignored that as well.

The London man was bent on treating me like a promising student. “I’m impressed that you waited until you arrived before contacting us. Cables and overseas telephone calls can be as lethal as a bullet to an agent. They keep records of that type of thing which can be checked. Of course, you Canadians have learned our craft very well. We have had several of your top RCMP men over here for special training.”

“And their dogs as well?”

“Dogs?”

“Didn’t we send some of our dogs over to be trained by your wonderful English police dogs?”

He gave me a low-voltage smile. “I like that. Yes, very good indeed. It would seem from your dossier that you are well regarded in Ottawa.”

“I’ve been allowed to look at the red NORAD hot-line phone to Washington in the Prime Minister’s office, if that’s what you mean.”

Exit a smile, pursued by a glare. “Your plane back to Rome leaves in exactly one hour,” he said without looking at his watch. “Shall we hear your report.”

It wasn’t a question. I told him everything. Except for the guy with whom I’d had the scuffle. I didn’t want to get saddled with theories and orders about him; I had my own ideas.
When I’d finished laying out the facts like pieces on a chessboard, he asked me what I thought of it all. Instead of telling him, I said, “I think Varthis was killed by the men from Athens. They jumped the gun on Longbottom. Could be that their boss, the one Longbottom talked with, had a personal score to settle.”

“But that would be in total violation of their orders and it makes a nonsense of the entire operation.”

“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

“What was that?”

“A piece of Latin Longbottom quoted to me. I fear the Greeks, especially when they come with gifts. Virgil, isn’t it?”

“Ah, yes. I know the line, of course. Didn’t catch it at first. Your accent, I suppose.”

I let this go. We had enough problems without Virgil.

“I don’t imagine there’s any chance Varthis’ death could be unconnected with this business? Robbery or anything?”

An unsubtle trick question. “Not a chance. Whoever tortured Varthis was an expert. An ordinary thug would have beaten him up or used a lighted cigarette or something like that. Amateurs don’t know much about the really effective ways of making somebody talk. It’s Longbottom’s death that doesn’t make sense, unless I’m right about their leader.”

“What if he turned up there and surprised them? Killed him out of panic.”

I squashed him as elegantly as I could. “Professionals don’t kill out of panic. And I told you about the crash I heard over the phone. I didn’t find anything out of place when I got there. The phone was back on the hook.”

“Longbottom didn’t make that call, then.”

“It never did sound like his voice in the first place. So who did? And why?”

“To get you there and kill you. But they didn’t, did they?” He looked at me reflectively.

There was a knock on the door. An exquisite young man who looked as though he would be very familar with full-length mirrors sidled in and told me my plane was boarding.

“Well, it looks as if your cover may be shot. Can’t be helped. Go back to Rome and carry on. We shan’t contact Athens. Don’t want them to think we’re getting windy, especially if somebody is trying to put one over us. And we shan’t be sending anyone to replace Longbottom. His death has knocked the department out of shape here. We had a quick parley with your man Blair before I came out to meet you. He appears to have complete confidence in you.”

He stood up and granted me a stiff goodbye; we didn’t shake hands.

X

“If every man were straightforward in his opinions, there would be no conversation” – Disraeli

The hotel said that a gentleman who refused to give his name had been calling all morning. No, there was no number to call back. Would I kindly wait in my room after I came in?
It didn’t take long. The voice sounded jovial and menacing at the same time. “You are the friend of Mr James Henderson? Yes? At last. I have been calling for a considerable period. You were out on business, you say? Well, now you should know that your business is my business.”

I turned my head away and smiled at a muddy reproduction of Michelangelo’s Christ Bearing The Cross that hung over my bed. A mysterious voice saying “Your business is my business” appeals to what is left of the romantic in an agent.

“In exactly one hour you will be outside your hotel. There will be a white Alfa-Romeo 1300 Spyder with Naples registration plates waiting at the entrance. The driver will be a young man in a red sweater. You will get in the car.”

“And be taken away for a brain operation, I suppose.”

“In exactly one hour.” Mystery Man rang off abruptly.

It was getting more and more like a Hitchcock movie. The only ingredients missing were the Orient Express and a haggard-looking aristocrat in a dinner jacket.

I was outside five minutes early, walking across the street to stand in the entrance of the Mediterraneo Hotel. If somebody had fancy ideas about presenting me with a bouquet of bullets, I had a vested interest in spoiling their fun.

The Alfa-Romeo swung into view from the Via Principe Amedeo and pulled up. They were punctual if nothing else. I waited to let a black Volkswagen go by, crossed over, and tapped the driver’s shoulder. He spun round with a satisfactory start. He didn’t say anything but he looked a lot, which was reasonable since he was the youth I’d had the wrestling bout with in Varthis’ apartment.

The man in the back told me to get in. The car slid away gracefully like they do in TV commercials. “You are a careful young woman.” He was fat enough to have run Orson Welles a good second for Falstaff’s part. A lightweight suit of almost mustard yellow struggled gamely to hide an expanse that would strain the diplomacy of any tailor. His intense eyes and sardonic smile would have disillusioned me if I’d been naive enough to believe that all fat men are funny.

“Do careful young women get into cars with strange men?”

“It has been known.” He folded his arms impassively. I lit a cigarette and willed myself to gaze out of the window.

“We shall not beat about bushes. Your friend Mr Henderson is dead.”

“I know. And you know that I know. Your driver is a young man of parts. I’m disappointed he can drive after that little dance we had together. I must be losing my touch. What about you? Are you going to carry on being the man of mystery?”

He chuckled, inclining his great head slightly. “Not at all. I am Chrestos. A representative not without importance of the Greek government. Mr Henderson doubtless gave you an unfavourable account of me.”

“He did his best but I don’t think anybody would be equal to that task. I do recall him saying that Chrestos was a common name for slaves in ancient Rome. I congratulate your parents.”

“If you are hoping to provoke me, you are wasting your time. I am not the excitable Greek of Anglo-Saxon fancy. Also, Chrestos was a common variant of the spelling for Christ.”

“Nor am I the stupid heroine of adventure stories. Now that we’ve established how original we both are, shall we pull up and have some grown-ups talk?”

“A mobile rendezvous is always the most confidential. In any case, we have a little interest in shaking off the black Volkswagen which is very clumsily trying to follow us.” He smirked as I glanced through the back window. “However, we will let him amuse himself for a little longer. Now I shall ask a question. Who killed our friends Varthis and Henderson?”

“I’d wager a few drachmas you could answer yourself right back.”

Chrestos chuckled again. It sounded like a Vincent Price horror movie just before he carries the girl off up to the tower of the castle on the hill. “My dear young lady, you almost disappoint me. Of course we did not kill them. I concede that our plans for Varthis were not dissimilar, but it was to have been a pleasure deferred. And Mr Henderson, of course, was going to be of great assistance in smoking out this nest of vipers. As you are going to be.”

I blew some smoke in his face. “I’m a pawn in the same game. So are you. Get on with it.”

“Let us be calm. Pawns are only allowed to move forward one square at a time. Lefakis here, who is driving this car so efficiently, was on duty outside the building where Varthis was living. He saw two men who are both known to us as traitors drive up in a taxi and enter the building. He telephoned to me. I knew Mr Henderson was going to make his visit to Varthis that night.Later, he rang again to report that Mr Henderson had arrived. Soon after that, I was informed that the two men were leaving. Finally, your own appearance was announced. The rest you know better than I.”

“What a busy little puppy you have. How did he know I was coming to Varthis?”

Chrestos picked devotedly at a tooth. “We have some very nice pictures of you. Mr Henderson omitted to tell me who his fellow-worker in Rome was. A prudent man. However, we Greeks are not quite the amateurs he assumed us to be. Even Mr Henderson did not know everything. Do you remember having a little debate with a postcard seller in the Colosseum? He told me you have an excellent command of demotic Italian.” Chrestos was enjoying himself. “He took an efficient picture of you with a mini-camera after he saw you meet Mr Henderson. I have another of you both near the Piazza di Spagna and a third of you and a certain Andreas Konstantopoulos on the Via Veneto. You are most photogenic.”

So much for the Longbottom security system. Chrestos said to Lefakis without leaning forward, “I have grown tired of our friend in the Volkswagen,”

We were driving along the Corso for the second or third time. Lefakis slowed down abruptly. The Volkswagen came up close. Lefakis stamped on the brake and went into reverse. As the Volkswagen swerved, a glancing blow from the Alfa-Romeo produced an impact that forced the car over the sidewalk and into a shop window. Lefakis changed gear and drove off, his lips parting in a damp smile as he glanced back for approval.

“The Alfa-Romeo is an excellent car.”

“Do you have any idea who the driver was?”

“Of course. It was one of Varthis’ misguided followers. We had a file on him. An unimportant person called Stylianos. He has been following us for some days. He can do us no harm and is no match for Lefakis, as you have seen.”

I’d recognised Stylianos earlier when the black Volkswagen drove by me outside the hotel. Chrestos’ indifferent confirmation might or might not have been a show put on for my benefit.
“I hate to spoil your self-satisfaction, but don’t you think he might just have seen me get into this car?”

Chrestos beamed. “I hope that you were seen by him, yes.”

“When Stylianos reports that he saw me with the opposition, don’t I say goodbye to my chances of getting into their group?”

“On the contrary. When we have finished preparing you, they will be quite disposed to welcome you into their little fold.”

He waited happily for me to say, “Preparing me?”

“Yes. You must look the part. We shall beat you about the face and body. Not too badly. Enough to inflame the natural sympathy Konstanopoulos already has for you. Lefakis will see to that side of things. He is not without experience and the pain you caused him will encourage him to do his best. But there is time enough for that. I am sure you have some more questions to which you already know the answers with which to prolong the wait.”

I lit another cigarette to show Chrestos that my hands weren’t trembling, but my heart wasn’t in it.

XI

“The wisest prophets make sure of the event first” – Horace Walpole

They ushered me into a stifling room over an antique shop somewhere in the Trastevere. The sun cast mocking bars of light through the drooping venetian blind over the furniture, most of which looked as though it had come from the shop beneath. Chrestos spoke cheerfully to Lefakis who pushed me down without particular force into a high-backed chair at the cluttered table. I silently admired his skill with knots as he tied my arms behind it.

“It would be a convenience if you would remove your blouse, A pity to spoil a Bellini.”

How many Greek thugs were so up on fashion? “Blouses like this spoil the first time you wear them.”

“No matter.” Chrestos was looking through my bag and spoke to me as though I were a child needing to be told why ice cream was bad for it. I removed the blouse and signed to Lefakis to hang it carefully on one of three hooks that had been driven into the scarred brown door.

“You have a most pleasing body. Do not be afraid. There will be no permanent damage done to it. He closed my bag with a snap and placed it on the table with the precise economy of effort that accompanied everything he had said and done so far. “A most interesting bag. Only a very unusual woman would carry such an impersonal one. There is nothing in it to indicate which particular false name you are using at the moment.” He produced a briar pipe and a pouch of what I assumed would be very strong Greek tobacco. “You are now to endure a certain amount of pain. As a human being, I do not say as a woman, you will struggle against it and if you do you will suffer more needless discomfort. Lefakis, you may begin. Hit her once every five minutes until I tell you to stop. The intervals spent expecting the next blow will contribute their own quota of woe. Alternate between the face and the body. Avoid the eyes and the bridge of the nose. Use your trick with the coin if you think fit.”

My mind began to adjust its patterns to cope with what was coming. Chrestos got his pipe going and settled back in a broken-springed armchair. He gave the impression that it was an effort to keep his eyes open. I was determined not to ask what the trick with the coin might be.

Lefakis studied me for a few moments before ramming his knuckles into my right cheek. Apart from a slight parting of his lips, there was no hint of expression. He checked his watch each time before delivering the next hit.

“Shall we resume our conversation?” Chrestos asked gently. “It will save time.”

“Not before Torquemada here lights me a cigarette.”

Lefakis looked over to Chrestos who pointed to my bag. The cigarette was thrust into my mouth. I rolled it over to one corner; George Raft couldn’t have done better. In silent counterpoint, Chrestos removed his pipe and sent his fingers on a scouting mission for strands of tobacco around his lips. “We were discussing the deaths of Mr Henderson and Varthis, were we not?”

“Talking around them would be more accurate. Who were those two men Lefakis saw?”

“Their names are Gerakaris and Kollas. Known communists.”

“Meaning they do not like your masters.”

“Meaning what I say. We began to assemble information on them after the bomb attempt on the Prime Minister. But they were not to be found then and we had heard nothing of them until now.”

Lefakis punched me below the right breast, causing the half-finished cigarette to fall from my lips. “Am I supposed to believe they killed Varthis and Henderson?”

Chrestos reached out to the table where a bottle of Sardinian Vernaccia wine sat waiting for action. Lefakis went like a trained robot to a cupboard and brought two glasses. “Some wine?” No? As you wish.” He waited for Lefakis to hand him a corkscrew, opening the bottle with the absence of flourish that marks the real expert. Lefakis showed no surprise at not being invited to drink. Chrestos sipped at his glass. “Undistinguished, but what can you expect from Sardinians?”

I said I’d never expected anything from Sardinians.

“Why should Gerakaris and Kollas not have killed them. These groups of so-called patriots hate each other more than they hate us. They are forever quarrelling like rats over the last piece of rubbish. I venture to think that it is the same within your own organisation.”

Lefakis smacked me across the mouth right on schedule.

“My dear, as an experienced member of our profession you must know that the irrational is the key to understanding human behaviour. We are not living in the pages of a novel in which the pieces always fit together. I am convinced about Gerakaris and Kollas. Whether you agree or not is immaterial. And it will be no great tragedy if I am wrong.”

“I’ll give you one thing, Chrestos. You’re the first megalomaniac I ever met who could conceive of himself as being wrong.”

He inclined his head. “Thank you, but I am no more than a humble micromaniac.”

Lefakis deployed his blows with surgical precision. Once, he used his nails to draw blood from my left cheek. My face and body were playing an aching draw. It might have been easier to take if he’d shown any emotion. Or it might not. Pain is pain, whatever the motive for its infliction. As Winston Smith agonised in the torture chambers of 1984: Of pain, there is only one thing to wish; that it should stop.

Chrestos could have been right about who killed our Cock Robins. I’d have to wait for Andreas’ version before I could start comparing improbabilities. It would explain Longbottom’s death. But not the telephone call. I let that go. I wasn’t going to cut Chrestos into all my few secrets if he really didn’t know anything about it.

“What was the point of that little exercise between Lefakis and me?”

“Ah, that was a final little test to see if you really were Mr Henderson’s colleague. I have always prided myself on my thoroughness. It is a pre-condition for retaining my present position.”

“I take it I got A for effort.”

“Oh, yes. Lefakis was in considerable distress when he came back. You are a very capable young lady.”

“How did Stylianos know you were in Rome?”

“Because we are quite fallible persons. He and Konstantopoulos happened to notice Lefakis following them on the Via Veneto one night. Lefakis is not the finest of stalkers; it was the classic phenomenon of the hunter hunted. Stylianos followed him back to the hotel on the Via Volturno where we were then staying. Until today we have allowed him to follow us around in his little car. Now we have moved from our hotel to this not very illustrious but discreet accommodation, he will have to find another way to spend his days. We shall, of course, be leaving these premises after returning you to yours, should you entertain any similar ideas.”

There seemed no way of breaking Chrestos’ tranquillity. I asked for and got another cigarette. “Doesn’t it bother you that they know you’re in Rome?”

“Why should it? They appreciate that I have no authority to arrest them here, and the Italians are increasingly unsympathetic to us. They are more concerned with what they plan to do on their return to Greece. We cannot secure that information, which is why we are relying on your services. Lefakis, You may untie her hands now.”

I got up unsteadily and started to rub my wrists to set the circulation going. Lefakis brought me my blouse and helped me put it on. I leaned against the table and asked Chrestos how he thought I was going to infiltrate Andreas’ group.

“It is very simple. Remember the shrewd observation of Mr Henry Wotton, that English diplomat and poet of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Tell the truth, and so puzzle and confound your enemies. You will tell Konstantopoulos the truth about your position in your organisation, with one editorial change. You will represent your mission as one of support for whatever schemes he may have. I leave the details to yourself. Mr Henderson no doubt provided you with some instructions which along with your relationship with him will serve to convince Konstantopoulos.”

He poured himself another drink. I refused his offer again, out of pride; I wanted a drink very badly. The silence played with itself while Chrestos sipped his wine and Lefakis gazed solidly at me. Chrestos made more sense than Longbottom with his romantic belief that Andreas would break down and tell all just because we were old friends. I thought again of Longbottom crumpled up in Varthis’ apartment. “How do I contact you?”

“When you have something to tell, write to me care of the main post office in the Piazza San Silvestro.” Chrestos rose easily from his armchair and searched for paper and pencil on the table. He scribbled a few words and handed it to me. “This is my current name. We do not waste time with codes and the like, but it is expedient to vary one’s identity from time to time. I do not think the Italian authorities would take kindly to my official presence here. I shall contact you by telephone at ten o’clock in the evening on the day after I receive your letter. Now, I trust you are recovered enough for Lefakis to take you back. I regret that all this was necessary, but it will assist Konstantopoulos of your good faith. Bruises on the face of a beautiful woman lend eloquence to her words.”
As I left the room, he was lowering himself back into the armchair. Lefakis again steered the Alfa-Romeo expertly through the lunacy of Rome’s traffic. He was a man of no words; the few remarks I tried out on him were wasted. He dropped me six blocks from the hotel, allowing himself the hint of a self-satisfied smile at this demonstration of his professionalism. I just managed not to break down and ask about the trick with the coin; he’d probably not have answered, anyway.

XII

“And look how many Grecian tents do stand upon this plain, so many hollow factions. When that the general is not like the hive, to whom the foreigners shall all repair, what honey is expected?” – Shakespeare

The hotel staff expressed polite concern over my appearance, clearly relieved that it had not happened on their premises. I let them send out for some liniment which it was claimed had almost miraculous powers of healing. I stretched out in a hot bath for over an hour. It dulled the aches in my body and the liniment did in fact help to soothe the effects of Lefakis’ ministrations enough for me to dry myself and stand in front of the mirror feeling healthily belligerent. My face was a tinted wonder of red blotches with advanced ecchymosis under both eyes.

By nine that night I was drinking Stregas at one of the outdoor tables of the Da Pancrazio restaurant in the Piazza del Biscione. They say it’s on the site of Pompey’s theatre near where Julius Caesar was liquidated by the honourable Brutus and other false friends; that seemed appropriate. The weather had been cooled down by the Ponentino breeze from the sea and I was glad I had brought a sweater to pull on over my black pant suit.

Andreas was twenty minutes late. His look made it a good bet that they knew about the events in Varthis’ apartment. I called out to him and watched narrowly as the smile he tried to stitch on to his face collapsed when he came close enough to see mine. “You’re late.” Stating the obvious was as good a way as any to begin a treacherous conversation. He launched into a routine about missed busses and traffic jams. I was impressed by his remembering to speak English; he hadn’t been so meticulous on the Via Veneto. Two people rattling away in Greek might have attracted some attention even in such a tourist trap as this. He waved away a waiter who was scuttling over and stood over me. “I am sorry to be so late,” he said in a low tone, “there has been some trouble for me. But what has happened to you? Your face…”

“I had an argument with a door at the hotel; it won.” His eyes contracted slightly as he accepted the lie. I wondered exactly what Stylianos had told him. “Never mind my face. What’s all this about trouble?”

“We can’t talk here.” My eyes prickled at this reminder of meeting with Longbottom at the Colosseum. “Would you mind if we did not stay to have dinner. My friends are waiting for us.”
“Whatever you like. It won’t do me any harm to skip a meal. I’m six pounds overweight, and this Italian food doesn’t help.”

He looked remote and said we would eat with his friends. I paid for my drinks while he found a cab. It wasn’t long before we were outside a house in the labyrinth of winding streets around the Pantheon. The door opened to his three short knocks and I looked Stylianos with the large piece of sticking plaster across his forehead firmly in the eye. We went through a darkened hallway into a comfortably old-fashioned living room.

The four men sitting at the wooden table jumped up quickly and appraised me like Walt Disney wolves. There was a portable typewriter encircled by a litter of pamphlets and Greek newspapers squatting in the middle of the table. A cheaply upholstered chesterfield in one corner was obviously being used as a bed. Stylianos began to explain very loudly that I was the one he had seen with Chrestos and Lefakis. It was already an old story here and the others looked relieved when Andreas told him to shut up. One of them motioned for me to take his chair.
Andreas wasted no time. “These are the friends I told you about. Stylianos, of course, you have seen before. There is one missing. We found him in his apartment. He was dead.”

“Dead?

“Yes, dead.” The word is effective in any language. Andreas slid out the Greek nekros with soft venom. “Murdered by the two men Stylianos here saw you getting into a white Alfa-Romeo with.

“A white Alfa-Romeo with Naples licence plates,” Stylianos added proudly.

Andreas again told him to keep quiet and contined bleakly. “Not only dead, but tortured first. And that is not all. There was another man in the apartment. He too was dead. We do not know who he was. Somebody had taken away the contents of his wallet and his pockets were empty.”

That was true. I had sent Longbottom’s things in a registered parcel to the British Consulate from where they would go to London in the diplomatic bag. “What was the name of your friend?”
“Demetrios Varthis. A fine and noble man. He will not go unavenged.” Andreas’ quiet voice stripped his words of their theatrical colour.

“And the men in the Alfa-Romeo?

“The big man is Chrestos. A top man in the Asphaleia. The other is a piece of scum called Lefakis. Why do you ask what you already know?”

“I had to be sure you would give me the right names. Now listen to me.” I gave them the story Chrestos had edited for me, changing a few details such as Longbottom’s names. He came out in my version as Watson; I don’t know why. It was all a far cry from his ideas on my infiltration. I was working for Chrestos now, though Longbottom might still have a ghostly last laugh. A completely straightforward story could still have been dangerous, so I undotted a few I’s and uncrossed some T’s.

One of the other men spoke for the first time. “Did you know it was Stylianos who was following you in the Fiat?”

I hid a smile at his weak trump lead. “You mean black Volkswagen. No. It dawned on me we were being followed when Lefakis started to drive up and down the streets. For all I knew, it could have been Watson. Wishful thinking, I guess. After the crash in the Corso, Lefakis drove us over the river. Chrestos asked me who was behind Watson and myself. He didn’t wait for me to say I’d no idea what he was talking about, just started to slap me around in the car. Lefakis stopped in an alley. Chrestos kept hitting and punching me. He told Lefakis to turn around and drive to their place. Just as Lefakis was starting to turn the car round, I dived for the door. I guess Chrestos thought I was pretty stupid to have come at all. He was right. Anyway, he hadn’t locked the door. I was off and running before they realised what was going on.”

I hoped my blend of resourcefulness and fallibility was getting across. A Mary Marvel image wasn’t going to go down with them. Andreas asked sharply, “Did you leave anything behind?”
“My bag. But there was nothing in it to say who I was. I ran out of the alley and through some back streets until I came to a bar. I was lucky, there was a cab just setting some people down. I grabbed it and had the driver take me back to the hotel.”

“How did you pay the driver if you had left your bag behind?”

I would have to remember to junk that bag and buy another. “I got the desk clerk to pay him and put it on my bill. He didn’t mind; I guessed he’d bump it up a bit. I told him I’d been knocked down by a motor scooter.”

“It will be dangerous for you at that hotel now,” said the man who’d tried to catch me with his question about the Fiat.

“It would be, except that I packed my bag, paid the bill, and checked out. I paid by credit card. I’d left all my papers and stuff like that in my room to be on the safe side.”

Andreas came over and put his arm around my shoulders. Stylianos was cursing Chrestos in complicated anatomical terms. The others muttered among themselves like the elders of Troy in Homer chattering like cicadas on the walls of Ilion. I asked Andreas about their finding Varthis and Watson; I nearly said Longbottom.

“It had been arranged that I telephone him. He didn’t answer. I knew he wouldn’t have forgotten and gone out. I went to find out what was wrong. We were not supposed to go there in the daytime, of course, but I had to. When I got there, well, you know what I found…”

“Are the bodies still there?”

“No. I rang the others here and told them to go out and buy two large trunks and bring them to Demetrios’ apartment. It was taking a risk, but the place had no more secrets to hide from Chrestos. We took all of Demetrios’ things and put the bodies in the trunks. Stylianos stole a big car for the day; the Volkswagen would not have made a good hearse. We found a quiet spot, removed all their clothes, and dropped the bodies in the Tiber.The car was left in a back street and I came to find you at the Da Pancrazio. The others returned here.”

Shelving my other questions, I asked flatly, “What now?”

After a pause, Andreas said, “First of all, I will introduce you to my friends.” There was an orgy of embraces and kisses on the cheek, led by Stylianos who was determined to be introduced to me again. Stamatidis, the Fiat one, had highly baked features and almost no hair. Vovolinis looked the oldest with his white thatch and bushy eyebrows to match. Kominos clicked a smile through a pair of badly fitting dentures. Lizardos had a black moustache and twinkling eyes that were right out of one of those goats-and-wine movies about rape and vendetta under blue Aegean skies. It was notable how they looked to Andreas for their cues: youth is traditionally held in no respect among Greeks.

Andreas said I must be starving and he would go and see what there was in the kitchen. He was right, but I replied that I’d get something back at the hotel. “Tomorrow, I will meet you at ten in the morning in the old part of the Protestant Cemetery by the grave of John Keats. There I will tell you what we shall do. We will leave this house tomorrow and take rooms in separate hotels. Just to be on the safe side.”

On the safe side of whom? I left without saying where I’d moved to. I told myself it was a good sign they were playing it so close to the chest and hoped they’d think the same about me. I thought I’d bring both my gun and my knife to back up my smiles. Keats had travelled much in the realms of gold. And had died young.

XIII

“In their parts of the city they are played on by diverse forces. How do I know? Oh, I know well enough. For them there is something afoot. As for me, I had over-prepared the event” – Ezra Pound

Every day at 1.30 pm a Rapido express train glides out of Rome and, with the obscure efficiency that lurks beneath the surface of Italian chaos, usually achieves its mission, which is to arrive at Brindisi eight hours later in order to decant the latest clutch of tourists for the ferry service to Corfu, Igoumenitsa, and Patras. The Italians on board watch with satisfaction as the foreigners compete for porters and taxis, then settle down to enjoy the last lap of their journey to Lecce, further South in the heel of Italy. Benito Mussolini takes the credit for making his country’s trains run on time, but they get along very well without him.

I was sitting defiantly in a corner seat of a first-class compartment while a dozen or more fellow-passengers tried to prove to each other that they had a right to the four remaining ones. Two Italians who appealed to me for support turned away in operatic disgust when I shrugged my shoulders to mime ignorance of their language. The issue was finally settled by a hulking steward who awarded the seats to three small boys and their mother, a Roman matron built on the lines of the Venus of Willendorf. I took her right elbow in my ribs and a heavy dose of garlic in the face as she turned to give me an elaborate apology.

The train sped south. I gazed out of the window at the rich Campanian countryside and, the North American in me coming out, wondered why so many Italians seem to while away their lives in poverty without doing very much about it. When we turned east and started to pierce the barren interior, I understood why in 1968 the communists could still win thirty-nine per cent of the popular vote.

I’m no child lover, but had to admit that the three small boys were astonishingly well behaved. I chatted with their mother about how much I liked Italy, she told me in detail how much she hated it, and we got on well together on that basis. After she had nodded off, I ate my way through one of the delicious packed lunches Italian railway stations sell, drank the small bottle of rough Chianti that came with it, and smoked over the Rome Daily American.

By the time we got to Benevento, near where the Romans had fought against KIng Pyrrhus and his elephants, I was just about dozing off myself. My body was well on the mend, though my face still reflected some impressive hues. I surrendered to the sun beating through the window, the Chianti warming my stomach, and my thoughts.

Andreas was already there when I arrived at the Protestant Cementery. He was studying the inscription on Keats’ grave with the intent look of a doctoral student who knows all about the real meaning of Endymion. He was wearing a simple white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and barathea slacks which tapered narrowly down to a pair of dark suede shoes. I checked discreetly for any tell-tale bulge in his pockets. He removed his sun glasses and gave me one of his deep smiles from the eyes as he asked how I was feeling.

Thinking I should lay it on thickly, I said, “My body is a walking anthology of aches and pains, I’m hot and tired, and my head is every which way.”

This got me a shake of his own head and a brief arm around the waist before he pointed to the grave. “Do you know this epitaph?”

“No, I don’t.” I did, but wanted to get him into as expansive a mood as possible. Andreas declaimed: “This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone: Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ In Water.”

I levelled my camera. “That might make a good slogan for us some day. Let me get a picture of you with it.”

“No, something like this is better without people.” He moved smoothly out of range. I took my picture. “I had a long talk with my friends last night.

“And…?”

“We have a plan. We had one before, of course. It is the same one now, except that it includes you. Stamatiadis was not keen at first, but we persuaded him. He tends to misogyny. Stylianos made some inspired comments on the matter. He is a good fellow. Still embarrassed by his mishap with the Volkswagen. But enough of that. You will take the train to Brindisi. There you will board the Appia for Kerkyra. You were there once, I think.”

Kerkyra is the regular Greek name for Corfu. “Twice.”

“When you arrive, go to one of the tourist agents. It does not matter which. Hermes at the Old Harbour is reliable enough, or there is Corfu Travel on Capodistriou Street. Lizardos mentioned those. He is from Kerkyra. Tell them you wish to rent a villa for a month. They will fall over themselves to please you. Greece is more desperate than ever for tourist dollars this year. Why else would the government order a twenty per cent reduction in hotel prices? Ask for a small villa at Paleocastritsa. It is about twenty-five kilometres from the town, on the west coast.”

“I know. Full of expensive lobsters and cheap romances about Odysseus. Why there?”

“It is out of the way. Full of tourists in the day, but there is no real community. The nearest village is Lakones up on the hill. The Country Police check the restaurants once a week to see that they are not charging more than the legal prices. That is all. No proper office, no Asphaleia. Specify that you do not want a maid. Pay for the villa. I have brought plenty of lire with me, along with the train and ferry arrangements, in this envelope. You can change the lire into traveller’s cheques before you leave. When you have settled into your villa and have had your first swim, send a postcard with your address on it to A. Pagonis care of the main post office here in Rome.”

“I assume you are A. Pagonis.”

“For this purpose, yes; a Pagonis was once a football hero of mine. Be sure to send it from the post office in Mantzarou Street. The country post is not reliable. It might be a week before they find the energy to send it. Be sure to be at the villa at the night specified in the envelope. Stylianos and I will come to you there.”

The train ground into the pleasant little Apulian seaport town of Barletta. I looked at my watch. We were one minute ahead of schedule. The three little boys were asleep. The Venus of Willendorf was eating a Salami roll. She caught my glance and offered me one. The price I paid was an exhaustive account of how she had nearly decided to go to Sorrento rather than Lecce. The salami was almost worth her recital.

Andreas and Stylianos were coming alone. Strength in lack of numbers from the security angle. Lizardos couldn’t risk it, anyway, as a native of the island, and the others were going to carry on with their pamphlet industry in Rome. Andreas said impressively that they might try to do something about Chrestos. I wasn’t going to mention this part of our conversation to Chrestos himself, but we were both wasting our time. Andreas and his friends were far better than Longbottom and I had thought possible, but they weren’t in the same league as Chrestos; was I?
I asked Andreas how they were proposing to get to Corfu. He gave me a vague rigmarole about boats and bribed captains. I was again impressed by his unwillingness to explain everything. They could well have detected some of the edited gaps in what I had told them. Mutual lack of trust is often the best working basis for collaboration.

“What do we do after you get to my dream villa?”

“All in good season. Rest and enjoy yourself until we arrive. Remember the saying: Ignorance is Bliss.”

That was the nearest Andreas had ever come to sneering at me. I took his envelope. We parted with token kisses. I sent my letter to Chrestos as instructed, indulging in a little spite by not putting a stamp on it. He rang me right on schedule. The silky voice was as controlled as before. “So, my dear, you thought fit to change your hotel. A precaution against whom?”

“Everybody.”

“No matter. I presume you failed to stamp the envelope on purpose. No offence has been taken, but it could have delayed its arrival. The Italian postal system can be as interesting as our own.”

“You can always deduct the cost of the postage from Lefakis’ pay.”

The telephone crackled with his laughter. “Our invaluable Lefakis hopes that you are feeling better. Incidentally, we have surrendered the Alfa-Romeo. It was but the latest in a series of cars we have borrowed from unknown benefactors for our little escapades. I mention this lest anyone should waste his or her time looking for it.”

Abruptly switching off his synthetic charm, he told me to go to the Garitsa police station after Andreas and Stylianos had arrived, specifying the day and time. “You can arrange your kitchen so as to run short of food by then. A shopping trip to Corfu town will arouse no suspicion. After two days with those two, you should be in a position to give me an interesting talk.

“What if anyone sees you on Corfu? Or me near a police station for that matter?”

“My dear, the good William Inge once observed that worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due. I shall arrive at Corfu by sea in a hired boat, whose captain will find a watery grave by the courtesy of Lefakis. Then, I shall be driven to Garitsa in a closed van, and set up a little home there. My material wants are few and I am not interested in improving my sun tan. In truth, I doubt that anyone on the island would recognise me. Your two guests will not stir far. In the unlikely event of your having to explain why you were visiting Garitsa, it was to inspect the cenotaph of Menelaus which reposes in the garden.”

In Roman times, when it was Brundisium, Brindisi was a regular escape route for politicians and generals of the losing side. Pompey the Great embarked from there after Caesar crossed the Rubicon and launched a civil war and a cliché. Perhaps the last time it made news was when Phileas Fogg sailed from it in the India Mail in Round The World In Eighty Days. I grabbed my suitcase from the rack, exchanged Ciaos with the Venus of Willendorf, and elbowed and swore my way through the opposition into a taxi.

Down at the docks, the authorities were working on the theory that one bad-tempered Italian who speaks no English is enough to cope with over seven hundred passengers in fifty minutes. He sat behind a miniscule window, leisurely relaying passports over to a lesser colleague who sat in shirtsleeves pecking away with two fingers at a period piece typewriter.

I joined forces with a girl who wore a man’s jacket and looked a little like Humphrey Bogart. We squirmed up to the window together and handed over our passports. I was using the American one which Blair had given me. It had been back-dated three years and credited me with a visit to Morocco and the equally fictitious name of Patricia Raven. Up to now, I’d been using the Canadian one which claimed me as Karen Wood and had a much better photograph.

“What a system,” said the girl. “You been here before.”

“No. How about you?”

“Half a dozen times, at least.Mind you, if you think this is bad, try Turkey. Going all the way to Athens?” The man rapped at his window, sparing me having to choose a lie, and wordlessly thrust my passport back at me.

The M/S Appia is a one-class floating pleasure palace that’s been dubbed of the Queens of the Ionian Sea. It was a sleek motor vessel of eight thousand and twenty-five tons and just over four hundred feet long with two three thousand horse power Fiat diesel engines giving it a cruising speed of seventeen knots. Or so the brochure said. Judging by the way it was rolling in dock, we seemed destined to find out just how efficient were the Denny Brown stabilisers they were so proud of.

I put my case on one of the adjustable recling armchairs in the huge lounge and wandered around. People were already lining up outside the duty-free gift shop which wouldn’t open until the boat sailed. There was an empty swimming pool, restaurant, several bars, and a number of giant television sets. A crowd of Italians huddled around one of them watching a girlie movie with loud comments on the attributes of each participant. Some very old British people were already in possession of the best tables, drinking coffee to show they knew they were abroad while in retreat behind two-day old copies of the Daily Express.

I ate a fried egg on cold toast and irrigated my throat with a bottle of gassy beer. By mindnight the engines were settling down in a steady tempo and we were leaving the shore lights behind. The Adriatic was in a sour mood and the deck was almost empty. The Bogart girl joined me at the rail. Her face more than ever resembled emery paper in the dim light. She offered me a cigarette, lighting it with a mammoth Ronson that had a flame like the Olympic Torch. A fugitive sense of menace passed through me.

“Man’s lighter, but what the hell? Got it for a buck in Aden. Look at all that bloody water. You know what the little old lady from Pasadena said when she pissed in the Pacific?” I wasn’t dying to find out, but didn’t mind a few minutes’ company. Rome with its whirligig of car rides, assignations, treacheries, and death had taken a toll of my mind. I felt like a plague rat scuttling from cage to cage while its captors made notes on its performance and calculated its rate of expendability. The loneliness of power often can’t compare with that of not having it.

“Every little helps,” said the girl without any obvious satisfaction. She looked at me. “Feel like screwing tonight?”

An approach like that deserved a good foil. “With you?”

“Christ, no. I can’t stand women, not in that way. You know the one about the man who said he didn’t mind girly girls but couldn’t stand boily boys? I’m the other way. There are two guys back in there. International bum set. Long hair, rucksacks, the whole shitty bit. I came down from Florence with them. We were talking in there just now. One of them digs you. He goes for the Ice Queen type. No offence, you do look like the sort that breeds snow in the armpits.”

The girl seemed incapable of achieving any inflection. I said nothing. She flicked her cigarette over the rail. “I get the message. Just trying to do my good deed for the day. You looked kind of alone.”

“Alone isn’t a synonym for lonely.”

Again, I had that strange notion of danger, and tensed myself in spite of feeling ridiculous, but the girl merely drifted down the deck without a backward glance. I went back and settled down in my armchair. People who had been too late to get one were stretching out on improvised beds on the floor. A steward came by and asked a boy in a pair of pink pants to put his guitar away. The atmsophere suggested one of those movies about the London Blitz where everyone spends the night in a subway station, an image that brought Longbottom back into my mind.

XIV

“Women should be beaten like an olive tree; but in Corfu neither the women nor the olive trees are beaten, because of the terrible laziness of everyone” – Corfu proverb

The Appia glided through the narrow channel between the island and the Albanian coast where at one point only a mile or so divorce that forbidding old-fashioned communist stronghold from the Ionian capital of the old-guard anti-communist colonels. About the same distance as their mentalities. I stamped around to get some of the stiffness out of my body, then went out on deck to greet the sun slithering through the early morning mist over the toppling fusc buildings crowded between the two Venetian forts. As the Appia swung into the dock, I could pick out the rows of drying clothes with which Southern Europe greets its visitors.

Three thousand years of history leered at us. Almost everybody has had a go at Corfu. Most people like to think it was the site of Homer’s Scheria where that most daunting of guests, Odysseus, fell in with Nausicaa who must be the only princess in legend democratic enough the superintend the palace laundry. Jason and Medea called in, but the island’s charms didn’t help them solve their marriage problems. Then in successive waves came the Corinthians, the Romans, the Venetians, and a Napoleonic interlude which gave way to fifty years of British suzerainty. The lion of St. Mark retreated from a new culture of ginger beer and cricket. In 1864, Corfu and the rest of the Ionian Heptanisos were given back to Greece, possibly as conscience money for the Elgin marbles. Now the island basks in the sun, hugs its three million olive trees to itself, and endures those kindlier visitors who bring weapons no more terrible than cameras and curious tongues.
I disembarked without any fuss, ignored the porters, and managed to let a last look from the girl bounce off me into the harbour. A short bargaining session with the driver of one of the horse-drawn cabs and I was clattering along the meandering waterfront into the town, looking every inch the tourist. Memories of my last visit jostled with prospects of what was waiting.
On Capodistriou Street I parted company with horse and driver, the latter accepting his tip with a smile matched only by that of the horse when I patted his head which was decorated by a straw hat and rosette in the national colours of blue and white. The brightly painted sign of the Medusa Travel and Estate Agency had caught my eye. It was not one mentioned by Andreas. A large poster in the window invited me to go to Epidauros for the Festival of Greek Tragedy.

Inside, two fans were churning the heavy air around a genial man in a double-breasted blue who rose to greet me with a dazzling smile, introducing himself in competent English as Nicolaos Savvakis. I intensified my Canadian accent to encourage his perception of me as a simple tourist with money in her bag. Yes, he had just what I wanted. A small villa at Palaeocastritsa was unexpectedly vacant because of a sudden cancellation. It was completely secluded and had a small private beach on one of the bays. A maid? No? Then I might have it for a very special price. He would write me a receipt there and then and would be honoured to drive me out to it himself. Loyal to my role, I said I needed to take a look at it before deciding anything. Mr Savvakis quite understood.

We drove out of the town through the villages of Kontokali and Gouvia. The road was less theoretical than when I was last on Corfu, but the automobile was still expected to defer to old women in black robes who spring up every mile or so with an attendant donkey weighed down with panniers of fruits and vegetables. Mr Savvakis piloted his Morris Minor in the approved Corfiote style with concerto of horn at every corner, patiently answering my questions about how safe was the water to drink and where was the local American Express office.
Palaeocastritsa crashed into my vision as we rounded a particularly memorable corner in a cloud of dust that settled over a little boy who stood out in the road holding a basket of something or other up to us with a frail arm. A patchwork of turquoise bays lay beneath us, their timeless calm disturbed by fishing boats bobbing at intervals in quiet protest against the occasional intrusion of a motor boat leaving sharp lines of spray in its wake. Gardens of olives and fig trees fell steeply down to where jagged stone walls divided them off from tiny beaches. Up on the hilltop beyond the three main bays perched the Byzantine monastery where I had once seen a remarkable collection of giant whale bones.

“That’s really beautiful,” I said to Mr Savvakis, who had been given the impression that this was my first time on the island.

“You have chosen well in coming to Palaeocastritsa. I have lived on Kerkyra for all my life and still my heart turns over whenever I see this. Here you will bathe and eat the lobsters and watch the children running down to the beach at Alpia to meet their fathers returning with their boats. Best of all, perhaps, you should go to the Library in the Old Palace in the town and obtain a copy of the Odyssey. They have many English versions. Sit in your garden and read the story of Odysseus and Nausicaa with the wine-dark sea in front of you. It is said that Homer was blind, but I think that if he was, he went blind because there was too much beauty for a man with a soul to understand.”

“Let’s see this villa of yours first.” It was an effort to resume the right hard-boiled image, and I was in complete sympathy with the shadow of contempt that made his cheeks tighten for a moment. He pulled up at a corner where an irregular series of stone steps limped down through a dense garden. They ran a gauntlet of sagging wire fences on each side, A chipped sign nailed to a post anounced that this was the Villa Medusa. More wire fencing straggled along the roadside up to a point where it curved down the length of the garden and apparently died in a cluster of tree stumps.

Mr Savvakis picked up my suitcase. “Look, down by the beach beyond the fig trees. You can see how private it is.” The Villa Medusa played up well to his travelogue charm. We approached it from the back and walked around to the front past an old well and patches of red flowers that I couldn’t put a name to. The building was pink and white with an almost flat roof. It looked like a birthday cake with the top bitten off. Vines ran out along a surrealist trellis propped up on rusty iron supports to make a bower against the sun. The front garden was a tangle of grass that managed to look parched and luxuriant at the same time. At the bottom corner of this private jungle another flight of stone steps led down to a rocky beach. Over the tops of the trees to the right, I could see a tiered garden puffing its way up to a gaunt three-storied house.

“Who lives up there?”

“A fisherman and his family. They will not bother you. The man keeps his boat further down at one of the public beaches. I am sorry about the grass but there are always problems with Greek gardeners…” His voice trailed off in cosmic despair. I snapped that I hadn’t come here to study lawns. Mr Savvakis unlocked the door and implored me to come in. I stepped into a large cool room, removing my sun glasses and blinking. He hurried past me to open the flowered drapes hanging over the window, doing his best to ignore the light fall-out of dust by launching into an ingenious eulogy of the green formica-topped dining table, the tubular steel chairs arranged about it in glum symmetry, the chesterfield bursting out of its yellow covers, two armchairs, a chest of drawers supporting a drunken bookcase, and any number of large pot plants squatting on miniature tables and long shelves which had been fitted into the walls on no obvious principle. He watched me anxiously as I strolled over the cool bare floor to inspect the rest of the place. There was a kitchen designed for occupation by a gourmet dwarf containing a gas stove with two burners, an overhead cupboard crammed with odd pieces of glassware and plastic crockery, a sink of curious odours and a tap that had probably been dripping since Homer’s days, and an incongruously modern refrigerator.

The bathroom was clean enough, and the lavatory reacted confidently to my experimental pull of the chain. The larger of the two bedrooms looked out over the front garden to the sea. It contained a double bed, a wardrobe, and two unmatched dressing tables. The other one contented itself with three single beds of which only one was made up, and a built-in cupboard with several shelves and a rail with a choice selection of wood and wire hangers which evoked that scene with Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate.
“As you can see,, the villa has all amenities. Both gas and electricity, which is rare outside of the town on Greek islands, a good water supply, and a refrigerator new this year. The furniture is perhaps not the most luxurious but look at the view you have from your windows…”

I made poor Mr Savvakis sweat through his nylon shirt while I mimed a few moments of silent indecision. “I’ll take it, but not at your price.” naming one of my own, low enough to give me the victory my persona demanded but not so low as to humiliate him. Good bargainers know when not to bargain. He gave me the full impact of his teeth, conjured up lease forms and receipt books from his pcokets, counted the bills I handed over as tactfully as he could, and gave me two keys. I again impressed it upon him that I did not want a maid. He warned me about the almost non-existent bus service into the town, told me the best place to rent a car, and laid out the extraordinary range of tours available from the Medusa Travel Agency.

After he had finally bowed himself out, I unpacked my case, put my soap-dish holster in the bathroom and my knife among the resident cutlery, changed into the two uncharacteristically thin strips I’d let the sales clerk at Modasport in Rome talk me into, and walked down to the beach. Stone and rock outnumbered the sand by about five billion to one. I danced swearingly over the sharp hot surface and paddled through the shallows until it was deep enough to swim in the tepid water.

I carved myself a private idyll out of that day. Swimming, sunbathing, a walk down to the Tourist Pavilion where I splurged on a lobster dinner, stocked up with Papastratos cigarettes, ambled back , had one last smoke in front of the bedroom window listening to the water breaking gently over the rocks, and was in bed by ten. The sea and sun had induced a vaguely sensual atmosphere in my limbs, but the feeling soon died away as always.

Next morning I was up early to catch the only bus of the day to Corfu town. It left at the very Greek time of seven o’clock and I got it to stop by walking out into the road at the top of the garden and holding up both my arms in mock supplication. The Manessis brothers is Alexandra Avenue were delighted to rent me a Fiat 500 Sunroof. I used my Canadian passport and told them I was staying at the Club Mediterranée near Dassia. With my blue silk top over yellow stretch pants and exaggerated accent, I looked a plausible member. Anyway, it was the kind of credential no one would bother to check.

I shopped, drove around the island all day, and went to see the sun go down at Pelekas. I sent off my card to A. Pagonis in Rome and spent a chunk of the evening moving from bar to bar under the arcades of the Liston which does service as the centre of Corfu night life.

Perhaps more than any other country, Greece engenders a feeling of unreality. In spite of the polite chatter about it being the home of Democracy and so on, it’s hard to feel the place is part of Europe. I was trying to gauge the impact of the colonels. They hadn’t had much obvious effect on Corfu apart from the ritual public references to the glorious revolution of April 21 which sprouted everywhere from hoardings to match boxes. There were still plenty of pictures of Constantine and his Danish queen on display. British and American newspapers were on open sale. That didn’t prove much. Illiteracy is high in Greece and they had nothing to fear about the peasantry being contaminated by foreign criticism. The Athens papers were on a tight leash, full of pictures of Papadopoulos and Pattakos and texts of rambling speeches about morality. The smiling waiters in their crisp white jackets and the young Corfiots talking sport and girls over glasses of ouzo were hard to relate to stories about the prison camps of Yaros and Leros.

But no regime has ever abolished smiling, and when Andreas came cautiously through the garden of the Villa Medusa two nights later, he brought a full dose of renewed reality with him.

XV

Philanthropists may easily imagine there is a skilful method of disarming and overcoming the enemy without great bloodshed, and that this is the proper tendency of the Art of War. That is an error which must be extirpated” – Clausewitz

I had cooked an obscure Greek version of bouillabaisse which Andreas said was called Kakavia. My method was to assemble a mound of fish and vegetables, butcher them with a sharp knife, and commit them to ordeal by boiling water seasoned with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Simplicity comes naturally when you have to work with only one saucepan. Andreas made polite noises, but most of it was thrown out after washing down what we could with a bottle of Theotoki white wine. We washed up, then continued this domestic scene by sitting down to discuss the details of assassinating Major Gonatas.

Andreas looked lean and hard above a pair of attenuated shorts, though his face was drawn and tired from a rough journey over the Adriatic and a night and morning of telling and re-telling how Stylianos had been knocked down and killed on the Via Nazionale by a hit-and-run driver in a car that wasn’t a white Alfa-Romeo with Naples registration plates.

Stylianos had been crossing the street to meet Lizardos when it happened. He was dead before they put him in the ambulance. One witness had thought the driver might have been a woman, but Andreas swore that it must have been Lefakis. Maybe he was right. Killing Stylianos would be the sort of thing to make Lefakis’ day; Chrestos didn’t have to know anything about it. On the other hand, given Roman drivers’ disregard for pedestrian rights, it could have been a genuine accident.

“I am a realist,” Andreas said in a tone that suggested he was the only one in the world. ” It is impossible for any of us to go back to Athens. Even if we did, what can we do that would achieve anything? There are too many Asphaleia everywhere. Look at the fiasco with poor Panagoulis and his bomb.”

We had a file of press clippings and sketchy reports from our embassies on the Panagoulis affair. Longbottom had talked about it with me. “Tell me more about that.”

Panagoulis had been landed by a motor boat and had placed a bomb at the thirty-first kilometre point on the highway from Sounion to Athens. He fixd a detonator to the bomb by wire and tried to set it off from about fifty metres away. Apparently he had lost his nerve and exploded it too late. The Prime Minister’s car had already gone over it. Whoever else was in the motor boat took off when they saw the security men all over Panagoulis.

I asked if he knew anything about this Panagoulis. “No. He was supposed to have been in Rome, but we never heard his name. Of course, he could have been using a false one. After all, no one has heard of A. Pagonis. The Athens press naturally abuses him as a hired killer and all the rest of it. What is interesting, if it is true, is that he was supposed to have had nine hundred dollars and over forty thousand drachmas in his possession. That is a lot of money.”

No more than Andreas and his friends seemed to have. I let him go on. “They are less interested in him than in trying to link every attempt with Papandreou. They made much play with the claim that Panagoulis met with Papandreou in Paris. Maybe he did. It doesn’t prove anything.”

“Did you ever meet Papandreou?”

“I heard him speak once.” Andreas’ eyes glowed with the memory, but he restrained himself from going off into a bout of hero-worship. “Poor Panagoulis would have said anything eventually. Remember Jannis. Chrestos and Gonatas have nothing to learn about perusading people to tell them what their masters want to hear.”

“I know more than enough about Chrestos, but I’ve never heard of this Gonatas.”

“Major Gonatas is a creature superior even to Chrestos. He is in charge of all security in Greece. The papers began to mention him very occasionally after the failure of the King’s attempted coup.” Andreas laughed unpleasantly. “Our poor ridiculous little King. He got himself some dogs and found they did not bite.”

“Why is Gonatas coming to Corfu?”

“There was a discreet newspaper story in To Vima. Gonatas is to make a tour of the mainland and the islands. He will inspect military installations and address the people in the name of the Prime Minister. His real purpose is probably to inspect the local police forces in each area and to make sure that the civilian officials are singng the colonels’ songs loudly enough. In spite of their so-called victory in their stage-managed referendum, they know how hollow their position really is.

Gonatas will be here about four days. It is a natural time for him to pollute Corfu. He coincides with one of the most important festival days of Saint Spyridon. People will come from all over the island to see their saint carried round the town. There will be a lot of tourists there as well. Good for us, not so much for them.”

Through the window I could see a water-skier showing off for the benefit of the rocks. “Surely the town will be swarming with police on a day like that? Just how do you propose to kill Gonatas? Booby-trap Spyridon’s silver casket?”

“There is a theory that Greeks are very religious people who could not conceive of doing such a thing on so sacred an occasion. On this day, we shall break that illusion. I have not come with some infallible device of the sort I have read about in your adventure stories. I cannot even work out the precise details until I know more about Gonatas’ movements. The newspapers and the island radio will supply those. It is certain that he will make some kind of public appearance in the town during the Spyridon festivities. Somehow I shall contrive to shoot him.”

“Where do I come in?”

“You came in from the moment you took this villa. I shall have to stay inside. You will go into town to buy food and newspapers and observe any preparations they are making for the day. As soon as we know where Gonatas will be, you can spy out the area for me. Meanwhile, you must take care to be seen outside. My countrymen are curious people and the cafe owners and waiters here will know where you are staying. If you are not seen, someone will sooon be here to see if you are all right. It would also be a good idea if you were to call in at the agency where you rented the villa. Act as a normal tourist would.”

The Maistros wind blew up and made the next two days cool and overcast. It kept the water skiers and snorkel enthusiasts down; we hardly saw a boat. I gathered more material for my One Saucepan Cookbook and Andreas talked at length about the 1967 coup and how their own movement got started.

Varthis had been out of the country when the colonels struck. He was in Geneva covering a conference on International Cultural Exchange for a magazine. He soon realised that there was going to be no uprising at home and settled down to a long patient road of organising overseas. There was a strong love of leadership in him which made him keep aloof of the other groups of exiles mushrooming in Rome, Paris, and Stockholm. His first action was to buy a Round The World air ticket on a Fly Now Pay Later scheme and go to Australia. A smart move. Australia is one of the easiest countries to get in, unless you have a black or yellow skin, and it is a country with little understanding of European factional politics. From time to time Ukrainian neo-fascists throw bombs at each other in Sydney and Italians knife each other for control of the Melbourne fruit market. Otherwise, Australia tends to see European passions only in the context of trouble at soccer matches.

There are large Greek communities in the big cities, with their own newspapers and radio stations. It wasn’t difficult to start inserting propaganda into these. Varthis spent about a year in Sydney. He extracted a good deal of money from sympathetic fellow-countrymen. Those who had not heard from parents or friends back home were easily persuaded that they were probably in one of the camps for political prisoners.

With the money raised he bought a new ticket and flew to San Francisco. He entered the States on a tourist visa, knowing he could hide indefinitely in one of the ethnic ghettos when this expired. When he was ready, he got a Canadian passport which, before Ottawa hastily changed the regulations, were notoriously easy to obtain as James Earl Ray proved. He came to Rome, found an apartment, and patiently assembled his group. The trouble was, Greeks find it hard to take secrecy too seriously. Athens had got wind of his activities. Maybe an intercepted letter home had said too much about overseas hopes.

I lay awake a long time mulling over all this. Andreas’ involvement was a logical extension of his old ideas. He was older now, convinced of what his country needed, cynical about foreign attitudes. His feelings for me didn’t sem to have altered either way. We had embraced before going to bed, but neither of us felt a need to lock their bedroom door.

XVI

“And Joshua the son of Nun sent the two men secretly from Shittim as spies, saying ‘Go, view the land, especially Jericho.’ And they went, and came into the house of a harlot whose name was Rehab, and lodged there” – Joshua 2. 1

Four times a year Saint Spyridon leaves his church with the red-domed clock tower to inspect his island fortress and accept the prayers of his Corfiot votaries who swarm around his mummified feet to beg his intercession in their poor affairs. He came here in 1460 and has more than earned his keep and the honour of having every other male named after him. He has warded off the Turks, the plague, famine, and provided sanctuary against the German and Italian shells of 1944. A versatile saint who deserves his outings.

I went through all those little chores the successful assassination demands. From two separate travel agencies I booked return airtickets to Athens and a single for the ferry to Patras. A small gas station near Gouvia was overjoyed to rent me an ancient Peugeot. I left this parked in a back street where it would be inconspicuous. The bus took me back to Palaeocastritsa.

Andreas kept to the villa, listening to the dimunitive transistor radio I bought for us and pouirng over all the newspaper references to Major Gonatas’ visit. Our plan, if you could call it that, was hardly complex. Gonatas was scheduled to address a mass rally in the public square between the Liston and the Royal Palace. Andreas would be at the front of the crowd dressed in the woman’s clothes I had hunted out in the town. He would be carrying a large floppy straw hat in the crown of which I had cut a hole just large enough to accommodate the nose of an old Luger which he had fitted with a crude silencer. It looked like something ot of pulp fiction. I wasn’t happy with it. Silencers play hell with the accuracy of a gun and there was no evidence that Andreas was an expert shot, or any kind of shot at all.

The rally was going to begin with a mass prayer for Greece and the regime led by a bishop from Athens who was accompanying Gonatas’ tour. It was timed to begin at 2.05 and last for about eight minutes. At 2.10, if we were lucky, the time-bomb rigged up in the Peugeot would go off. Just before it did, Andreas was going to shoot Gonatas through the cover of the hat. He would then start screaming and set the people nearest him heading in the direction of the explosion. It shouldn’t be too hard for him to drift gradually away from the chaos through the Liston arcades and into the street behind where I would be waiting in the Fiat. Then hide somewhere until the next morning when he would use my ferry ticket for Patras. The security police would be watching flights and boats out of Greece; they wouldn’t have the imagination to think that the assassin would go the other way to the mainland. At least, that’s how I put it to Andreas, and he seemed to agree.

We had some fun out of my coaching him in the role of female impersonator. The home-made bomb was a weird affair. Varthis had shown him how to make one. I know next to nothing about that aspect of our technological civilisation, and we puzzled over the pieces and the sketches he had from Varthis like two children with their first Meccano set.
What I best enjoyed was telephoning the Garitsa police station and telling Chrestos I couldn’t make it as arranged. I had to savour this by proxy. The voice on the phone assured me in an accent I had to strain to understand that there was no one there by that name. I told the voice very slowly and clearly when I would be in the bar of the Corfu Palace Hotel.
You couldn’t ruffle Chrestos even by proxy. I sat for over an hour and got nothing except a mild stomach ache from drinking too many Kum Kwat liqueurs. An urchin eventually sidled over and shyly placed a blank envelope in my hand. There was a ragged piece of paper inside with a single typed line in English telling me when to report to Garitsa. I asked the urchin who had given him the message, but he was too shy or too obedient to someone else to do anything but seize my drachmas and run away.

I got there on time, not looking at the Cenotaph of Menelaus. The station was deserted. I rapped at the counter in the outer office. My knuckles were just getting down to the seond layer of subcutaneous fat when the door in the far corner beyond the counter eased open and Chrestos followed his stomach over its threshold.

“Do come in, my dear. How very well you look. Greece agrees with you. But why so elusive? You were quite reliable in Rome. Perhaps you have fallen victim to the local malady of Avrio, or Mañana as our Spanish friends say?”

He was wearing a heavy dark uniform, there wasn’t even a fan going in the tiny office where he followed me, but he looked cool enough to make an ice cube sweat. Once inside, he waited for me to sit down on one of the two austere wooden chairs before taking the other.

“I had nothing to tell you last time. Unless it’s news to you that Stylianos was killed in Rome, which I very much doubt.”

“It would not have been news, but your deduction is amiss. Lefakis had nothing to do with that. By one account, it was a lady driver who did not stop. Forgive me if I say that is all too likely. At all events, as you say, I do not look gift horses in the mouth.”

He lit his pipe with ceremony, a sign that we were to get down to business. I puffed away on second fiddle at a Papastratos cigarette. “Why didn’t you come to the Corfu Palace? I waited over an hour before your little messenger showed up.”

“Waiting is the least conspicuous thing you can do in Greece. I had no elaborate motive for detaining you so long. It was a simple reprisal for your own failure to appear for our previous appointment.” He carrried on with unwavering calm in his pedantic tone. “Now that we are at last together, I am more than ready for your news.”

“The plan is to assassinate Major Gonatas on Wednesday night.”

“Indeed?” Chrestos opened a drawer and extracted a folder. A foolscap sheet of paper convered with spidery Greek fell out as he shook it. He read carefully down it, using the stem of his pipe to check each line. “Major Gonatas is planning to spend a relaxing evening on Wednesday amid the roulette wheels of the casino at the Achilleion Palace. How very sentimental your friend is. That is the anniversary of last year’s bomb attempt on the Prime Minister. He is also rather alarmingly well informed. Major Gonatas’ detailed itinerary is far from being a public document. The press knows nothing about his plans for Wednesday evening.”

“Neither did we until a moment ago.” Chrestos’ fingers tightened on his pipe. It was the only sign of emotion he betrayed, I went on airily, ” Gonatas is actually to be killed on the Wednesday morning on his tour of the island.”

“I hope you have devised an interesting plan. Major Gonatas is quite well known to me. He will find this episode most diverting.”

I gazed at the wall behind his rotund head and blew a ring of smoke towards an old picture of the King and Queen which had been stuck up very lopsidedly. He listened as I described how Gonatas’ car was going to be waylaid with the aid of a couple of borowed donkeys that would be immobilised on the road. My details drew heavily on reports of previous assassination attempts. I’d spent a lot of time developing the tale and it seemed to entertain Chrestos as much as it did me. He made a few notes and nodded approvingly from time to time, as though he were interviewing me for the post of private secretary.

“A simple scheme. It would probably have succeeded. Simplicity is usually the key to success, do you not think? No?” He scratched his right ear. “Wednesday will be an interesting and profitable day for us both. You will cover yourself with glory by arresting Konstanonopoulos and I shall earn the golden opinions of Major Gonatas and our superiors in Athens. Questions?”
“Only why I am doing this? Can you answer that one for me?”

“My dear, you remarked to me in Rome that we were both pawns in the same game. I cannot improve on that for an answer. We are both serving the interests of our countries. Old-fashioned, but there it is.”

“It’s just as old-fashioned for me to hate the idea that my country’s interests are served by keeping your torture-happy gang in power.”

Chrestos looked pleased at the prospect of a debate. “Do not be too quick to play the parrot to Papandreou and Konstantopoulos. I may observe that the importation of parrots into Greece is strictly forbidden. There are many types of revolution. Ours was achieved without bloodshed. Why, we even allowed Papandreou to leave the country. The King is free to return. His position is guaranteed by the Constitution approved last year by the people. Was it such a crime to save our country from the Communists? They were not gentle after the War, as you must know. Prime Minister Papadopoulos’ father was schoolmaster in the village of Elaiohorio, a tiny place where less than three hundred live. The Communists killed the village doctor and tortured the mayor and many other men. The mayor was a relative of our present Prime Minister. It was a common story in those days. Do not make the mistake of thinking Athens is the whole of Greece. Our leaders are men of the countryside. They understand what the people want. Stability above all. Between 1963 and our intervention in 1967, there were ten governments and eight different Prime Ministers. Can you genuinely regret the passing of such a situation? We offer stability, honour, and morality. The people completely support the measures we have taken to restore the old virtues.”

“How many Greek men are really gung-ho for your bans on beards and mini-skirts? Jack the Ripper was also against immorality. Do these virtues of yours cover the arrest of men without trial and the Falanga?”

“More parroting. All those stories about what we are supposed to do to the traitors within our midst. Yet the International Red Cross and a committee of members of the English Parliament deny that such things occur. Atrocity stories are like religion: what you believe or disbelieve is entirely a matter of faith or prejudice.” Chrestos rapped on his desk, I kept my face frozen in a sneer; we were competing in self-control. “In your country you elect your governments and your opposition without violence, and your opposition parties outdo the goverment in their claims to be loyal to your constitution and monarch. In my country the opposition parties are defeated armies. You also assume that democracy, a word you have appropriated from us without examining what it really means, is a mysterious source of virtue. But on this very island, in the fifth century before Christ, in the great civil war between Athens and Sparta, the democrats committed such massacres as made even the blood of the historian Thucydides run cold. You should read the third book of his History some day. I am a patriotic man who has studied the history of his country and who knows just what this famous democracy is capable of.”

“The Frenchman Sartre defined history as a cruel joke played by the present on the past. I could produce just as many shock stories from the other side. X is bad and Y is bad. What does that prove?”

“Nothing; which was precisely my point. You are like your late friend Mr Henderson, or should I say Mr Longbottom? Every time we meet, your face and attitude exhibits scorn and hatred for me. But what are you? A mercenary who works for a salary and an expense account.”

“We were invited by you, if you remember.”

“And you accepted. The debate ends.”

I’m not cut out for that sort of Graham Greene theology. “I’ll see myself out. By the way, you keep a very exclusive police station. Where are all your little boys?”

“I sent them all home for the siesta. You will appreciate that I do not want you to be seen by anybody here. A precaution that will do you no harm and perhaps some good. One can never be completely sure about these people.”

He left me an opening there. I didn’t take it.There was something in what he said. Longbottom had warned against the flaunting of consciences. I’d made my decision. Chrestos had pronounced that belief was a question of faith and prejudice. Had I thought of it in time, I might have answered that prejudice is simply faith run riot.

We didn’t talk much that evening. I did more improvising with fish in saucepan. Now that I’d made up my mind, I didn’t have the private purgatory of feeling I was sitting through a Last Supper. We washed up companionably, to the chirping of cicadas and the occasional polyphonic bray of a donkey. About ten, Andreas said goodnight and went into his room. I set my alarm and coaxed myself to sleep.

It was very dark when I woke up. Andreas was already pottering about. I called out and he looked in and said he was going down for a quick swim. It must have been an hour later when I woke up to the clock and realised he hadn’t come back.

He was at the bottom of the steps on the beach. His face was twisted with lines of pain. He’d heard an early boat coming in close and thought it might be the fisherman from the house up at the top of the garden near the villa. He’d run up the steps, slipped on the last but one, and fallen all the way down. HIs legs were all right, but his right ankle was gone and by the way he was catching his breath he’d cracked a rib or two.

I got him back to the villa and on to his bed. He definitely wasn’t in any condition to go out killing anybody. “Don’t worry,” I said, blending platitude with idle flippancy, “I’ll fly solo. You stay here and pray. I’m sure you’re better at that than I am.” I had no suggestions for what he might do if I didn’t get back.

XVII

“It is not the job of generals to bump off political leaders; if it ought to be done, it is best done by the politicians themselves” – Montgomery of Alamein

One thirty-five. I’d been standing nearly two hours on the square to make sure I would be at the front of the crowd. The sun felt particularly malevolent, largely the fault of the thick black robes and veil I was wearing over my own clothes. I was losing points for placidity and resignation to the donkey which I had persuaded into standing sideways in front of me. He flicked his ears and looked at me in pardonable bewilderment, the first time he’d been borrowed by a crazy foreign woman who was trying to keep a Luger hidden and balanced at the same time under a piece of sacking draped over his pannier of fruit and vegetables.

In the centre of the square, a number of technicians were shouting importantly at each other as they assembled a battery of microphones and trailing wires in front of the improvised podium. The Greek flag hung limply over a knot of security men who stood tapping their leather holsters and gazing nowhere in particular with a magnificent air of boredom that I knew was contrived. Apart from three or four parties of school children who were being arranged into lines of flag-waving infant sycophancy, the square was playing a poor second to the arcade cafes on the far side of the trees behind me. I tried to keep at bay a clammy feeling at the thought of how I was planning to add to those children’s education before the afternoon was over.
The morning had been a wonder of improvisation. I’d left Andreas on his bed. Unconscious. That was my doing. He’d shouted and struggled so much to prevent me from going that I’d brought the debate to an end by chopping him sharply at the back of the neck in the appoved style. I gave him a meaningful tap on the head with the butt of the Luger to make sure; waking up would be no fun.

I drove into town in the Fiat. The Luger was in the glove compartment, my knife in its sheath at my thigh, my head in a whirl. I wished I had my own gun, but it wouldn’t take a silencer. Without Andreas, the bomb had to be jettisoned. We’d had trouble understanding how to assemble it, and I wasn’t going to lengthen the odds against myself by fumbling with it alone. As it turned out, we couldn’t have got the Peugeot anywhere near the square. The Asphaleia were very bomb-conscious and had cleared all the surrounding streets of traffic, both moving and parked.
I left the Fiat about a mile from the square, put the Luger in the straw shopping bag I’d brought with me, and took a taxi back along the road to Kontokali about four miles out of the town. He put me down at the youth hostel. When he was out of sight, I began walking north along the road. Luckily, it only took about twenty minutes to find what I was looking for. An old peasant woman was trudging across the fields towards the road with a donkey. I waited until two cars and a bus had gone by, then pulled a silk scarf across my face and vaulted over a narrow dry ditch into the fields. I came up to the old woman and hit her under the chin before she had done more than look up at me a couple of times without much interest. Quickly pulling her behind the donkey who stopped and began to nibble at my arm, I got her robes and veil off and put them on after tying her hands and feet with some strong string I had ready in the bag, adding my scarf to her mouth. I crouched down while a motor scooter zipped past. Then I heaved her on to the donkey’s back, went across the field to the corner farthest from the road, and laid her down in a clump of bushes. For the second time that morning, I issued a Luger bang on the head before covering her with two empty sacks which were on top of the donkey’s pannier.
The walk back into town was hot and painful. I’d left my sandals in the car along with my wristwatch. My feet soon began to complain about what I was doing to them. By the time I got back, I wasn’t having to stretch my acting abilities to put on the hobbling bent walk of an old toil-crushed peasant woman.

I had one glimpse of Spyridon as he passed by under the shadow of the Metropolis Cathedral which houses the headless body of his rival, Saint Theodora. I tottered forward to join the genuflecting crowd and whined a few fragments of Greek prayers, the sincerest I’d uttered since childhood.

Almost two o’clock. I knew the time from the enormous watch sported on the arm of a German tourist standing on my left. I lost that assistance when the donkey started to defecate with an air of quiet content. The German wrinkled his nose at such an affront to Teutonic hygiene and moved away.

The square was almost full. The crowd away to my right started to break ranks before the onslaught of an uneasily harmonising brass band which led the offical party to the podium. The police sprang to attention and saluted as a tall figure resplendent with medals and silver climbed up and stood waiting for a chorus of officials in dark suits and an episcopal figure in formidable robes with a sky-scraping mitre to gather round him. This was obviously Major Gonatas. I strained my eyes for Chrestos. No sign of that distinguished paunch anywhere. I guessed he was exercising his authority somewhere in the background.

You can’t rely on Greek schedules for precision exercise in assassination. Instead of the advertised prayer session, the band blew and clashed its way through what must have been a good quarter hour of some military march before trailing off into merciful silence. One of the dark-suited men stepped forward, waved away the still-gibbering technicians, and gave the crowd a brief harangue on the glories of the Revolution, before giving way to Gonatas who was looking commendably impatient. I casually reached inside the sacking and felt the Luger. The donkey didn’t stir. He’d listened to diatribes all his life and couldn’t care less about the glorious revolution.

Gonatas spoke in a crisp voice. keeping his homily at a simple level. For bored looks in the crowd, there was little to choose between the tourists who couldn’t understand what he was saying and the locals who could. We heard about the economic growth of the country, the rising rate of foreign investment, and the need not to listen to the communist-inspired slanders emanating from elsewhere. Within the limits of his vested interests, it wasn’t a bad speech. From time to time he was interrupted by pockets of applause, happily nowhere near me; their regularity smacked of organised spontaneity.

He ended with the mandatory Long Live The Twenty-First Of April Nineteen Sixty-Seven. To my relief, he remained at the front of the stand as the bishop came forward and told us to join in the Lord’s Prayer. Most of the locals knelt down where space permitted, the tourists bowed their heads, I did an elaborate squat behind the donkey. I gripped the gun and steadied it. The nose stayed just within the hole I had made in the sacking. I had hollowed out a precarious gully in the fruit to push the gun down into as soon as I fired. My head and heart pounded in unison. It was hardly the same as shooting at a cardboard man on the practice range. Gonatas had his head bowed and I coudn’t see much of his expression, which helped. The communal chant reached the part about not being led into temptation. I added some words of my own and squeezed the trigger. No rules of the Geneva Convention. The bullet I put into Major Gonatas had been cut and filed into a dum-dum. He jerked and staggered backwards like the dirt-farmer Jack Palance shoots in Shane.

Most people wouldn’t recognise a normal gun shot at any time. I don’t suppose anyone in the crowd knew what had happened until the bishop stopped chanting. His gasping shout echoed through the microphone over the square. Everybody on the podium was pushing to get close to Gonatas. Nicely enough, it was the security men who helped me get away. They tugged at their guns and rushed at the crowd, firing blindly. People began screaming and fighting to get off the square. I got off some high-decibel shrieks and let myself be battered towards the line of trees along the Esplanade. The becalmed donkey brayed and reared once before going down. I figured no one was going to stop and check panniers of fruit.

I got into the streets behind the Liston. A convenient alley took me into a patch of waste ground. I looked around. It was clear. I dived behind a phalanx of oil drums and outdid Houdini in ripping off the robes and veil. Feet and instinct got me to the Fiat. Still clear. I scrambled in and drove away, steeling myself to keep a leisurely pace until I got to the outskirts of the town. I slowed down a couple of times to ask one or two people who were standing in a puzzled manner outside their houses what was going on; they just shrugged.

Once outside the town, I put my foot down and drove like the proverbial bat out of hell. As soon as Chrestos knew what had happened, the Villa Medusa was going to be the prime target for a lot of unpleasant men. Getting there was the least of my problems. Making an escape with a limping Andreas was destined to be an award-winning exercise in initiative. I thought of the old peasant woman, frightened and broiling in the field. And what about Major Gonatas? Even if he were guilty of all the crimes Andreas accused him of, where did I stand in the moral scale? He gave orders, I obeyed them. But shooting him had been a piece of private enterprise.

I ran down through the garden, almost tripping over my eternally-flapping sandals which I’d pushed on very loosely while driving. Chrestos loomed comfortably from behind the opening door, the smile on his face counterpointed by the gun in his hand. “Welcome home, my dear. I trust you were successful in shooting Major Gonatas for me?

XVIII

“Not everything that history offers us has actually happened, and what has actually happened has not happened the way it is presented, and what we know to have happened is only a very small part of what actually happened” – Goethe

I sat on the chesterfield across from Chrestos who positioned himself carefully on a chair placed between me and the door which he’d locked as soon as we were inside. On the table, arranged with mocking precision, were my passports, air and ferry tickets, and my own gun on top of its false soap container; I was impressed by his lock-picking talent.

“I think the circumstances justify my searching the property of a lady,” Chrestos said with his permanent bland satisfaction. He was dressed in civilian comfort, nothing to indicate his authority. He held his gun very firm and straight and his eyes didn’t follow mine to Andreas’ body, his head at an unnatural angle, the swellings on neck and throat testifying to Chrestos’ strength and expertise as a strangler.

“He had served his purpose. Please sit still. Killing you is not on my agenda, but I am quite prepared to inflict a serious wound on you if necessary. A shot in the right knee, for example, would cause you great pain and permanent damage without unduly taxing my marksmanship. Talking of which, what of Major Gonatas? You seemed so suprised by my being here to greet you that you did not answer my question.”

“I put one bullet in his heart, if he had one. A nice nasty dum-dum. I’m saving the silver on with the cross on it for you.”

“Splendid. Despite its silencer, the Luger is a sound weapon for assassination purposes. I said as much to Konstantopoulos here when I gave it to him. Incidentally, I thought your trick soap box very ingenious. Had I not been prompted by my long vigil for you, I might not have been so curious as to investigate your toiletries.”

“Any chance of a cigarette?”

“Alas, I am afraid not. You are such a resourceful young woman that I fear you might try some unusual trick with it to try and escape.”

“Fat chance. I suppose you have a posse hidden behind every olive tree in the garden.” I stretched my left leg, recoiling quickly when my foot struck Andreas’ head.

“Oh, no, I am quite alone. I parked my inconspicuous little card down at the Tourist Pavilion and walked back. No one knows who I am or that I am here. I wonder how they ae faring in the town? What uproar there must be. Who killed Gonatas? Where is Chrestos?”

He was priming himself to explain his genius. I sat back and closed my eyes, trying to pretend I was listening to Mystery at Midnight on the radio. “Just get on with it.”

“The story is reasonably simple and not too long. As I have already indicated, Konstantopoulos was working for me. Since I am aware of your history with him, I must hasten to add that his co-operation was given under great duress. He had no wish to connive at your misfortune. I simply presented him with two unpleasant alternatives and hoped that his decision would accord with my interests. A grave risk throughout, and I do not flatter myself that I have been more than lucky to achieve my success. Indeed, judging by what I found here, I might have been cheated at the last moment. That curious and rather optimistic bomb was not part of the luggage we prepared for him in Rome. No matter; it is the time for answers, not more questions.

We begin in Athens. A good deal of what I have to tell you will accord with what you learned from Mr Henderson, as we may as well keep calling him. So I shall not weary you with small details of chronology. It will be enough if I apprise you of the more personal elements in the tale.

It was Major Gonatas and I who arranged the original bargain between our goverment and your service. However, we on our side began on a deceitful note. Gonatas and I are not well liked at home. He will not be mourned by many, nor should I be. Indeed, we did not care for each other. There was never any question of me standing on the podium to share his limelight. But we decided to turn the situation to our mutual advantage. Our superiors were kept ignorant of the transaction. It is true that Mr Henderson’s representative thought he had an interview with the Prime Minister. In fact, he spoke with an actor who specialises in the impersonation of him. He has occasionally performed the task of standing in at public functions when we deemed it too hazardous for the real one to appear. What you might loosely term a stunt man. Alas, his career is over. He is somewhere at the bottom of Piraeus harbour.

Gonatas and I saw many possibilities in our arrangement with your people. The unmasking of any conspiracy would improve our standing at home. It was Gonatas who decided that Varthis and his associates should be our target. They were known to each other in terms of mutual dislike over many years. Some old army rivalries, accentuated by political differences. He had been keeping a close eye on Varthis’ movements for a long time. We have agents and sympathisers in Greek communities all over the world. And, of course, many men in Rome since the King took up his residence there.

That was the position until my first interview with Mr Hennderson. We had ascertained where Varthis was living and who his associates were. But when Mr Henderson told me all about you and why you had been selected to assist us, I was seized with inspiration. I do not deny that I was at first concerned that our enterprise should depend upon a woman. I am a patriot, as I have explained to you before, but it must be admitted that on one definition patriotism is essentially a collection of prejudices. I have always shared the view that women have no place in politics or public life. An old Greek principle: it dates back at least to Pericles. Again, I would suggest that you read Thucydides. I will have a copy placed in your prison cell when we arrive in Athens.
Although a patriot, my beliefs have always been tempered by self-interest. I was already advised that Major Gonatas was to be the object of Varthis’ intrigues. This information had been relayed to me by a member of his group already placed in Rome to be recruited by them. You know him as Stylianos. I reflected for some time after Mr Henderson left. Why should I not have the best of all worlds? If I could arrange for the plot to succeed and then apprehend the assassin, then I would take all the credit for myself and an important promotion. I was second only to Major Gonatas in our organisation.

My first step was to interview Konstantopoulos. The admirable Lefakis did what was required. We had a long discussion. I eventually stimulated adequate feelings of fear and revenge in him. On the one hand, I explained that I would be very unpleasant to his mother, a certain monk on Patmos, and his brother who had come back to Greece to marry the girl to whom he was long bethrothed. On the other, I put an edge on the feelings I had thus created, I told him that it was Major Gonatas who had been responsible for the misfortunes of his friend Jannis.
The rest of the story concerns a series of charades. The object was to sharpen your natural sympathies against your mission and womanly emotions to the point where you would change sides and assist Konstantopoulos to kill Gonatas. First, we disposed of Varthis and Mr Henderson. Lefakis and a colleague whom you did not meet saw to that. They made it seem as though Varthis had been tortured to create a sense of terror amongst his followers. They would be more receptive to anything proposed by Konstantopoulos if they thought Varthis might have betrayed them to us. Mr Henderson was killed for the sake of the effect his death would have on you. Of course, you did not accept my story about the mysterious Gerakaris and Kollas. It was Lefakis who made the telephone call to you. He does not speak English, but can be coached to repeat phases. The play with the crash and the replacing of the receiver was again designed to create extra concern in your mind. Lefakis waited for you to arrive in the apartment of his colleague. Number 468, if I remember correctly. It had luckily just fallen vacant and he moved in at a time when he knew Varthis was out. Lefakis watched for you to appear through the keyhole, which had been enlarged for the purpose.

The little encounter between you and Lefakis was well staged by him. Not that I intend to belittle your own skills. If you saw him there, and then again with me, your feelings towards me would be intensified. I confess that fortune smiled on us there. Had you taken the risk of shooting him, my scheme would have been impaired. Likewise, the little farce enacted between the Alfa-Romeo and the Volkswagen had the purpose of making you further concentrate on hating me rather than wondering on whose orders Stylianos had just happened to be there to observe our rendezvous.

That is almost everything. Lefakis disposed of Konstanopoulos’ allies after he departed Rome for here. I myself killed Lefakis and his colleague before I left as an extra precaution for the future. The final touch was Konstantopoulos’ little accident this morning. By so nobly injuring himself and by begging you not to go after Gonatas alone, he pushed you finally over the edge.”
Chrestos’ litany was done. “What did you tell Andreas would happen to him when this was all over?”

“Complete pardon for his original involvement with Varthis. A promise that his family and friends would not be harmed. Safe passage back to Rome. I was tempted to honour my word. But I decided not to risk that. His feelings for you had not been destroyed; he might well have lapsed into heroism and tried to rescue you. Moreover, how could I leave alive one who knew so much of my activities?”

“Leaving me. Unless I’m not to be left either.”

“Your side will, as is traditional in such matters, deny all knowledge of you, and it would not be easy for us to prove that your organisation even exists. Enough that we establish your individual guilt as the assassin of Gonatas for the world at large. Some will call you heroine, others communist, others a madwoman. My government cannot lose anything, they will at least have proved that foreign plots against them do exist. My chief concern is the credit I shall acquire for apprehending you so speedily. You have been led into your position by your virtues, I by my vices. The way of the world, if I may conclude on so trite a note. Now I think it is time we were going. I will come back later to tidy up here. A dead man in your villa, your gun which I have unloaded so there is no need for you to consider trying to reach it, your choice collection of passports and names, and that poor little bomb will all embellish the story when I release it to the press.”
He eased himself out of the chair. I got up very slowly, tensed my leg muscles as though they were cramped, and suddenly kicked out viciously. The loose sandal on my right foot shot off and flew at his face. He instinctively ducked aside, which was what I wanted. I was banking on his need to take me in alive. It’s harder to wound a moving prey if you’re concerned not to kill it. His shot went wide as I dived across at his legs and brought him down. He was far too heavy for me to try any of my advanced karate tricks. I rolled forward, grabbed at the chair he’d been sitting in, and brought it down on his head. As he twisted around, I mustered all the spit I could and let him have it in the face. He jerked away automatically. I fell with the weight of my body across his gun hand. My hand went up my skirt, I dragged out my knife, and drove it into him blindly. He cursed comprehensively. I pulled it out, rammed my knee into his testicles, forced myself up into a kneeling position, and smashed the knife down into his body as near to the heart as I could guess. He convulsed. I stabbed him twice more in the heart region but not before once between the navel and the genitals, the spot that Homer says is the most painful for a man.

XIX

“We are all of us failures, at least the best of us are” – James Barrie

“So, your freaky feet finally came in useful.”

Blair and I looked warily at each other across the desk that somehow always managed to have the in-trays empty. A framed picture of the Queen in her Coronation regalia sent a sober smile towards a personality poster of Prime Minister Trudeau on the opposite wall. “I told you there was always more than one explanation. How much of what Chrestos said do you believe?”

“Amost everything Chrestos ever said had some truth in it, from his quotations to his jokes.”

“But you were always suspicious?”

“Of everyone and everything. There were even one or two mad moments when I started wondering about Longbottom.”

“And just when did you rewrite the script to include shooting friend Gonatas?”

He allowed me a considerate interval to frame my reply. “I was in two minds right down to pulling the trigger. The idea was that we might somehow manage to pin it on to Chrestos by feeding the right story back to Athens. They’d have lost Gonatas, but giving them Chrestos ought to have brought us our goodies, considering how much wind his double-dealing would have put up them. If he’d simply wanted to pull in Andreas, why didn’t he just arrange for a raid on the Villa Medusa? He’d have had all his evidence there. But I just ended up putting it down to Greek dramatics and his damned self-confidence.”

The telephone rang. Blair watched it play a solo before subsiding. “I told them not to put any calls through. Give me the bit about your salvage operation again. I need to be word perfect upstairs.”

“I stripped off Chrestos and Andreas. I pulled their bodies together and took four or five photographs of them. Chrestos’ face got the close-ups. I left my knife between them and put the Luger under one of the mattresses. I packed my case, drove into town, and took a plane to Athens. As I told Andreas, the security police would be concentrating on anybody trying to leave the country. They had no idea who I was, and even if they’d had a top-to-toe description, I doubt they would have tumbled to my touristy gear and dye-job hair. I flew to Athens, bivouacked in our Embassy for a few days until the dust had settled, gave them a sob story about having been robbed of all my money and my passport. There was plenty of time to send a coded telegram to London and the negatives by registered airnail. They’ll be printed and sent out with a story to the world press. All that, and losing their top two security men, should keep the colonels awake at night. They should fall for your next offer like a ton of bricks.”

“If there is one. There’s been a regular civil war going on upstairs since you left. To begin with, there was already a fair amount of opposition to the whole idea. Not from principle, of course. Some simply pushed your own line: the way Greece was going, the colonels might soon be out on their ears, and Papandreou who’d be certain to take over wouldn’t be honouring any of their old promises. We’d be left with several layers of egg on our face, and it would stick awhile.”

“And the other side?”

“Thestory that will be pitched to Athens is that you’d tumbled to Chrestos and the original plan was scuppered, so you would take a pot shot at Gonatas to prove there really was a plot without meaning to kill him, but he moved at the last minute. They may swallow that, they may not. Either way, there won’t be too many tears. Gonatas had his enemies within, not just Chrestos, men in his position always do, look at Yagoda and Beria and company in Russia. Of course, upstairs there would have been some dry eyes if anything had happened to you. The ones who pushed the scheme through didn’t want you on the job. They know how you felt about the regime. And about Konstantopoulos. You might louse it up. But they’d no answer to my stressing that we’d nobody else with your knowlege of Greek and Greece. Also, Longbottom wanted you, and that carried the day. So, they finally gave in, provided they got to choose your back-up?”

“My back-up?”

“There’s always back-up. Especially when there are any doubts about the first choice. This one was on your plane from Montreal to Rome. A very different proposition from you, except she’s also a whizz in the make-up department. Can look like anything from a hooker to Humphrey Bogart. She had instructions to check out how you seemed and if she had any doubts, you were going over the ferry rail, which would also have suited the ones who had developed cold feet about the whole business. I got wind of that from one of my few buddies upstairs and stamped on it pretty damn quick. She was sent on to Athens where she’s hanging around with an ear cocked to what’s being said and done there. Doesn’t have your Greek, but she’s better with men, and knows most of her other onions. Did a good job of tailing you and everybody else around Rome. It was her who bumped off that Stylianos guy.”

“So Chrestos was telling the truth on that one. I figured it could have been a genuine accident or that Andreas had rumbled him, otherwise why would Chrestos leave him off his bragging list? You said bumped off. What was she up to?”

“A bit of private initiative. She saw that business with the Alfa-Romeo and the Volkswagen, thought it looked too pat. So she put Stylianos on her priority list, and happened to spot him on a street corner with Lefakis. Of course, she didn’t know who he was betraying to whom, so decided it would discombobulate both sides if he was to go down in a hit-and-run.”

She hadn’t shortened Stylianos’ life by much. He’d just about outlived his usefulness after Andreas left Rome, and would have been part of Chrestos’ mopping-up operation. I had no idea what Andreas would have done if he’d stumbled on what was going on. “How many brownie points will that get her upstairs?”

“Depends who wins the war.” He looked at me in a different way. “How do you feel about Konstantopoulos now?”

“The same as I always did. He had to think of his family first. Remember what E.M. Forster said about choices like that? The professional part of me might like to think that I’d have turned him over in the name of duty. It’s been a long time since I dealt exclusively in human terms. But there’s one thing Chrestos couldn’t take from me.”

“Which is?” Blair glanced at his watch as discreetly as he could.

“Those last moments when he was begging me not to go. Maybe it was part of the act, but if I hadn’t knocked him out, he might have broken down and told me what was really happening. I’m going to stay with that possibility.”

Blair didn’t need to spoil it by pointing out that this didn’t fit with what I’d said about putting family first; I would have plenty of time to spoil it for myself in private. I stood up. “I’m out of here. Going somewhere to consider my position, as Longbottom would have said.”

“I’d sleep long and hard before you decide on anything, if I were you. This isn’t some shop girl’s job you can just walk out of. Nor is it any kind of a reward for me, all the times I’ve gone to bat for you. Anyway, you’re a trained agent. What else can you do?”

“Correction, What else would I want to do? Almost anything. For starters, I could get this story into circulation. Screw both the bastards in Athens and the bastards here.”

“Apart from the memorandum you signed agreeing never to spill a word about your work with the organization, I wouldn’t take it for granted that the boys upstairs will all agree to leave you available to the highest bidder. Listen, go away and rest your mind as well as your body for a spell. You can borrow my cottage in Algonquin if you like. No one will think to look for you there. I’ll do what I can while you’re away. That is, if I’m still in a position to do anything for anyone. Like I said, it all depends who wins the war up there.”

“I’ll take a rain check on that.” It was one I wasn’t intending to pick up. Whichever side won, I couldn’t be sure where Blair would be left standing. It might be decided that I knew too much about too much. There might be a school of thought that agreed with extreme sanction “pour encourager les autres,” as Voltaire said. An opinion with which Blair, either still in or jobless and pensionless, might well agree.