Decision at Delphi (2 page)

“Perhaps. Greeks are keen businessmen. I was prepared for that,” Preston said.

“Then what weren’t you prepared for?”

“A young woman who came to the office this morning, saying that she had something urgent to tell me about Steve Kladas, that she had only a few minutes... Miss Taylor believed her, and got me out from an editorial meeting. The girl was terribly
upset. No doubt about it. And frightened. But her words were quick and clear, as if she had been rehearsing what she had to tell me, as if she did indeed have only a few minutes. She said she couldn’t telephone Kladas. But he had to be warned. He must cancel his visit to Greece. Or postpone it. For two months, at least. And then, as I stared at her, she looked at the clock on my desk, said, ‘Oh!’ and ran out. Ran! Miss Taylor, in the office outside, followed her. She didn’t wait for the elevator—she kept on running down the stairs.”

“What was she like?”

“Small, slender, expensively dressed. But no coat, no hat or gloves. A chiffon scarf over her head. Miss Taylor said her hair was in pins under the scarf.”

“In pins?” Strang restrained an impulse to laugh.

“The kind of torture females endure in a beauty parlour.”

“Oh!” Strang thought over the strange array of little facts. No coat in early March, pin curls. “Is there a hair-dressing place in your building?”

“Two floors below.”

“Oh!” Strang said again.

“Miss Taylor agrees with you. She went downstairs, made some excuse to get into the beauty salon, or whatever fancy name the damn thing is called. No luck, though. About twenty cubicles, some with curtains drawn across them. But she did notice there was a back entrance to the place beside the washroom. The staircase is just outside the back entrance. You follow me?”

Strang nodded.

“What do you make of it?”

Strang thought for a moment. “You’ve got a very efficient secretary.”

“That’s all we’ll ever know about this whole thing,” Preston agreed gloomily. “I had Miss Taylor send off a letter to Kladas, telling him someone seemed very much against his trip. If there was any real reason for the girl coming to worry us like that, I thought Kladas could fill in the details for himself.”

“But you took the girl seriously enough to write Kladas. Where?”

“At the first address on his itinerary. Naples. But you know Kladas,” Preston added fatalistically. “He probably won’t even go there. Probably, he’ll decide to stay at Sorrento, or someplace...”

“Perhaps you’d have done better to hire Johnnie Kupheimer or C. L. Hillard, after all,” Strang said dryly. The truth was that Kladas and Preston had respect for each other’s talent but little liking for each other’s personality. It was a case of complete emotional incompatibility, and Strang began to wish he had never even tried to act as the hinge between a door and a wall that were off-angled.

“He is the best man for the job,” Preston said generously.

“And he speaks Greek,” Strang said with a grin. “That’s no small accomplishment, let me tell you. After my struggles with the language this winter, I begin to think that all Greek two-year-olds are geniuses.”

“How is your own Greek coming along?”

“A little more bite in the consonants and rasp in the vowels, and I’ll make the eighth grade.” So, Strang thought, as he watched Preston’s tight lips relax, we end our little talk with smiles all around. That was much better. “And there is sister Jennifer with the last bottle of champagne,” he added. Jennifer was really a very good girl in many ways. She had, for instance,
timed the end of their conversation quite neatly. Now, she was detaching the dark-haired girl from Wallis and O’Brien, no mean accomplishment. Strang said to Preston, “Your Miss Hillard is attractive. Any relation to C. L. Hillard?”

“She
is
C. L. Hillard.” Unashamedly, he enjoyed the jaw-dropped look on Strang’s face. “And she is not mine, I am sorry to say. We were lunching together—discussing an assignment for her in Mexico, this April—and I thought it might be amusing to bring her along to the ship.”

“Amusing for whom?” Strang asked wryly. His idea of C. L. Hillard had been—and why did men jump to conclusions about successful women they had never seen?—one of those tremendously capable battle-axes who chopped their way to success. From the tantalising distance of fifteen feet or so, partially blocked by other people’s heads and annoyingly screened by other people’s voices, Miss Hillard had looked young, serenely beautiful, quietly elegant. Within handshaking distance, she still was young, serenely beautiful, quietly elegant. But now were added the sudden warmth of her wide-set dark-blue eyes, the smile on her lips. Weeks later, he still couldn’t remember what he said to her as they shook hands.

“I wanted to tell you—” she began, almost shyly, but her voice was blotted out. There was a wild beating of gongs, a procession of stewards calling their warnings in high Italian fortissimo, raised voices, more gongs echoing down the corridor, a rush, a bustle, a surge of people outside the cabin door, the frenzied excitement of expected departure. The girl laughed and looked at Strang helplessly. The crushing weight of noise lifted. She was about to speak.

“Second warning bell has gone,” Josephine interrupted. “Kenneth, I didn’t get a minute to talk to you!” She began making up for lost time. Behind her, husband Carl was saying decided good-byes to everyone. He was a hale, explosive type, with prematurely white hair, who had done very well on Madison Avenue with his capacity to make up other people’s minds for them. Now he had decided it was time to get off this ship, and everyone here was going to get off this ship, too; he’d see to that. He thumped Strang’s shoulder. “What a racket you’re in!” he told everyone. “Five months’ vacation, while all the rest of us are chained to the desk! Tell me”—he turned to Lee Preston—“is there really any demand for the kind of stuff Ken does?” He gave a genial nod of dismissal and passed on to say good-bye to Mason Farmer, signalling Josephine to follow.

Josephine finished her advice about brucellosis, gave a cheek to kiss, a jangle of bracelets as a farewell salute, and then said, “Oh, I nearly forgot—the rest of your luggage came. Carl had it put under your bed, out of the way. He took care of the two stewards.”

Strang, now shaking Mason Farmer’s hand, looked startled. “Two?”

“They came separately.” And as he stared at her, she added a little sharply, “Yes—your two cases. The large one and the little one. They’re under your bed. You’ll remember that?”

Strang looked at his sister’s retreating back, then at Farmer in amazement. But the publisher had his own immediate problem. In his quiet, diffident way, he was saying, “You won’t forget that we’d like very much to see your work when it’s completed? I think you’ll have a book there.”

“I shan’t forget,” Strang promised, a little dazed by the hint of Farmer’s real interest. Normally, such a moment would have
rocketed him through the ceiling, but now he was still half thinking about some fellow passenger’s small suitcase stowed neatly under his bed. Carl’s brisk efficiency was often self-defeating: why hadn’t he looked at the labels to make sure?

“After
our three instalments are published,” Preston was reminding Farmer with professional friendliness.

“Of course, of course. By the way, Strang, why not take in Asia Minor? There’s a good deal of Greek remains at Pergamum and—”

“Not this trip,” Preston said firmly. “Ken has enough on his plate as it is. We’re leaving the Greek eastern empire for another year. You’ll just have to plan a two-volume job, Mason.” He enjoyed the worry on his friend’s brow. “Cheer up. If you charge fifteen dollars a volume, you’ll clear all expenses. Time you had a prestige book.”

“My, my, and is this how it’s done?” Jennifer asked, lining up in turn for her good-bye hug. “You do know how to parlay your talents, brother.” She looked a little triumphantly at her husband. Philip. Of all the family, Jennifer had been the only one not to take a dim view of Kenneth Strang’s change in career. Philip, even with the evidence all around him that his brother-in-law was not exactly destitute, still had regret in his eyes for Maclehose, Mitchem and Moore, the firm of architects where Kenneth’s career would have been so nicely assured. Still, they’d always take Kenneth on again, if he decided to return to architecture once he got these mad ideas out of his system. Too bad Kenneth had not married the Bradley girl; there was nothing like a wife and a first mortgage for keeping a man’s feet firm on his own piece of ground. Then Philip put these thoughts aside and shook hands warmly. He liked his young
brother-in-law despite the fact he never quite knew what to talk to him about. He wished him well.

Then came the others—Jerry Garfield, from
Perspective;
Judith Robbins, from Maclehose, Mitchem and Moore; Tom Wallis and Matt O’Brien, old friends from Strang’s Navy days.

O’Brien was saying, “Wouldn’t mind seeing Athens again myself. At least you won’t be dodging machine-gun bullets this time, Ken.”

“What’s that?” Preston asked quickly. “Machine-gun bullets?”

“After the Germans cleared out,” Wallis explained, making everything still more bewildering.

“December, 1944,” added O’Brien. “Boy, what a Christmas that was! Everyone starving and shooting each other.” He shook his head, remembering his introduction to power politics in action. “And the British caught in the middle—trying to chase the Communists back into the mountains without blowing Athens or the Athenians to pieces.”

“Wonder if that Greek is still alive?” Wallis speculated. He ignored the worried steward who had suddenly appeared at the cabin door. “The one who smuggled us through the street-fighting back to the ship. What was his name again? Chris— Chris something—”

“Christophorou,” Strang said. “Alexander Christophorou.”

“All visitors must leave, all visitors ashore!” the steward announced loudly. “All—”

“That’s it! Christophorou,” said Wallis. “Quite a guy. As crazy as they come. Took Ken right up to the Acropolis walls to let him get a close look at the Parthenon by moonlight. We could have wrung both their necks.”

“Not so much by moonlight,” Strang said, giving the steward a reassuring signal. “It was more by the rocket’s red glare. Just coming, steward.”

But the man was crossing, much perturbed, to close the opened porthole. He kept saying, “It is not permitted.
Vietato
—”

“I know, I know,” Strang said in Italian, “but this lady fainted, and so...” He shrugged helplessly. The steward eyed Miss Hillard doubtfully, and she restrained the beginning of a laugh. Did she understand Italian? Strang wondered, and was caught off balance. He turned quickly back to the steward. “There is a small case under the bed. It isn’t mine. Take it to the right cabin, will you?” And then he was finishing the last good-byes. “I’ll walk to the gangplank with you,” he told Lee Preston and Miss Hillard. I’ll have that one small chance to talk with her, he thought, to watch these incredible eyes.

But, as they all left the cabin, the steward called to him urgently. “Signore Strang! Signore Strang!” The man was bending over the small case he had pulled out from under the bed. “This is your case, signore.”

Strang halted at the door. “Can’t be. I know what I packed,” he told Miss Hillard. Then, as the steward pointed at the label, he came back into the cabin. The label, in heavy block letters, all too clear, said
KENNETH C. STRANG
. It was the regulation label for the Italian Line, first class, main deck, with the correct cabin number most definitely marked. “All right, all right,” he said, completely defeated. “I’ll straighten this out later. Thanks.” He turned back to the door. The others had gone.

Preston was waiting outside in the corridor. Miss Hillard was far away, escorted by Wallis and O’Brien. Too late now, Strang thought: Wallis and O’Brien would not give her up so
easily. There’s a general conspiracy, he told himself, to keep me from talking to that girl.

“Don’t forget, Ken, to tell Kladas about my strange visitor,” Preston was saying as they reached the promenade deck, where the covered gangplank was secured. “And when you see the temple at Segesta, give it a salute from me, will you? It’s a beauty, almost intact in spite of the Carthaginians. Been standing there for twenty-five hundred years and still—” He stopped shaking Strang’s hand, looked past him. “By God,” he said in a startled voice, “she’s sailing!”

“Who?”

From above their heads, the siren’s blast seared every eardrum, even set the deck tingling under their feet.

Preston waited, frowning, impatient. “The profile,” he could say at last. “The girl who was frightened. The girl in my office. Don’t look now, you damn fool, she’s got her duenna right at her elbow.”

“Did she recognise you?”

“Sure. She froze. No pin curls now, but plenty of mink. Platinum, at that! Yes, yes, officer, I’m just leaving.” He waved and ran, barely reaching the pier before the gangway was being swung off. His exit, thought Strang, was scarcely what Preston had planned. The final bon mot about Segesta was for ever silenced. The siren gave a last and triumphant blast, overwhelming the babel of voices on the pier, the shouts, the laughter. He couldn’t see Preston, any more. Where were the others? His eyes searched the mass of faces and waving handkerchiefs. Was he expected to stay and wave? Possibly. Before beginning that duty, he turned to light a cigarette. Now he could look at the girl in the platinum mink coat. Yes, that
profile would be hard to forget. Standing beside her, a small squat woman, in sombre black, was speaking in a torrent of sharp syllables.

“That is all that is to be seen,” the woman was saying in Greek. “You will catch cold, and your aunt will blame me. Come!” She stumped away on her sensible, black leather shoes. “Katherini!” she called over her shoulder. And the girl, who had been looking at the laughing crowd below, her with an expression of—yes, it had been sadness—turned obediently and followed. She passed two feet away from Strang. She glanced at him for a brief moment. Her eyes flickered as if she had identified him, known who he was. Suddenly they were blank again. Her face had become a cold, impersonal mask. She was very young, he saw, probably no more than twenty; much too young to need any mask on that bale, dark-eyed face.