Swindlers (34 page)

We walked through the Valley of the Temples,
the best preserved Greek ruins anywhere. Starting near the top we
followed the narrow road downward on stones worn smooth over
thousands of years, down past hollowed out tombs of ancient
burials, down past the jagged remains of shrines and tributes to
lesser, local gods. St. James, though far from old, seemed younger
than his age. Instead of plastered down, slick against his round,
well-shaped head, his dyed black hair flowed clean and loose over
his collar; and his eyes, so often sharp and penetrating, full of
calculation or half-shut in boredom, were eager and alive. I had
not noticed it before, but when he talked about ancient things -
like the night he described the route around Sicily, or the day he
spoke about what had happened in the harbor of Syracuse – there was
none of the cynicism, none of the contempt, that you saw on his
face when he talked about money and the people who talked about
nothing else. He might have been a young man in his twenties, a
graduate student in archeology, or even classics, seeing for the
first time – and hungry for all of it – the last remains of the
ancient world he had come to love.

“In America we think ancient history is
anything that happened before we were born, but here…!” He gestured
toward the great temple on the hill just ahead of us. “The Greeks
came here almost three thousand years ago. Syracuse, the first
Greek colony in Sicily, was founded in 745 B.C.,” he said, as proud
that he knew this as if he had been the first to discover it.

He turned his face to the sun, basking in the
warmth of it; and then, remembering something else he had learned,
another fact he was eager to share, he began to describe the
dimensions, the perfect proportions, by which the Greeks had built
such monuments of classic beauty.

“Basic geometry, really; but more than that,
a sense of what….”

A strange, puzzled expression came into his
eyes, and then, clutching his arm, he staggered to a nearby bench.
Danielle started toward him, but he shook his head.

“It’s nothing,” he insisted. But the color
had drained from his face and he suddenly looked years older. His
breath was slow, methodical, and shallow, as if he knew not to
exert himself even in this. “Go ahead. I just need to sit here a
minute. I’ll catch up.”

“His heart,” explained Danielle when we were
far enough away not to be heard. “It isn’t anything serious.” Her
eyes narrowed into a harsh, bitter stare. “Worse luck! If only he’d
just die.”

She started walking faster, the leather soles
of her shoes scraping on the sand-covered stones, as if she were
determined to put as much distance between them as she could.
Suddenly, she stopped, spun on her heel and pointed out to where
the Midnight Sun stood at anchor, a tiny speck on the shimmering
blue surface of an endless sea.

“Look at that! I’ll never be able to go home;
I’ll be a prisoner on that damn boat until the day I die. Or until
the day he dies,” she added with an angry shudder. “Instead of
wishing that I’d killed him, I should just do it!”

She gave me a sharp, questioning glance, and
I knew immediately that it had to do with what they had been
discussing, the two of them, behind closed doors.

“He’s going to kill you, you know. Or rather,
have someone do it for him. He wouldn’t have the guts to do it
himself. That story he told about the Athenians – or whoever they
were – watching while their fate was decided and they couldn’t do
anything about it. That was meant for you! He knows what happened
between us. He wasn’t sure at first,” she said, snapping her head
to show that no one, least of all Nelson St. James, could presume
to pass judgment on anything she had done. “But then I told him,
and not just that we had slept together, but that you had made me
feel things I’d never felt before.”

Her eyes were wild with excitement. She
grabbed my arm.

“He’s jealous – he’s insane! He’s going to
have you killed, if I don’t kill him first!”

“Would you?” I asked, with as much detachment
as if I were putting the question to a witness, or someone I did
not know and did not care to meet.

I turned and started walking, but slowly,
like a tourist who had all day. The question, lethal in its
implications, had been asked with so little hint of moral judgment
that it might have been a question about what color she preferred
or what she thought she might like for dinner. ‘Would you, or would
you not,’ the simple formulation for a choice so finely balanced
that the slightest, the most temporary, whim might be not only
decisive, but all the justification ever needed.

Danielle took hold of my arm and made me
stop.

“And I could, too – couldn’t I? I’ve already
been tried for his murder; they couldn’t try me again. Double
jeopardy – isn’t that what it’s called?”

I pulled free and, ignoring her question,
began to remark on the tumbled wreckage of some columns lying
haphazard in an open field. She grabbed my arm again, harder than
before.

“It’s true, isn’t it? Once you’ve been
acquitted, they can’t try you again – can they?”

She had learned it all from the movies. But
double-jeopardy was not a license to kill. Time was always one of
the provable elements of a crime. She had been acquitted of a
murder committed a year ago; the fact she killed the same man she
was supposed to have killed before would not stop a prosecution for
murder a year later. She was interested in whether she could get
away with it; I wanted to know if she would really do it.

I kicked at a pebble on the ground, not hard,
but enough to start it rolling down a thick, time-worn stone.

“There would still be the question of your
conscience. Could you live with that: the knowledge that you had
killed someone in cold blood?”

I waited for an answer, but she kept her
answer to herself. Smiling at the ease with which things could be
set in motion, I kicked at another pebble and watched it bounce
onto the next stone and roll a little after that.

“The man you married, the father of your
child?” I continued. “You could do that: murder a man who was
father to your child?”

Again there was no answer, just that same
deathlike silence. I looked up and found her waiting, her eyes
cold, dismissive, and impatient.

“Once you’re acquitted, they can’t try you
again – can they?”

It was nearly word for word, as if it were
the only question that could possibly matter: not whether murder
was wrong, but could she get away with it.

“Double jeopardy – That’s what you want to
know?”

She pressed her lips together and raised her
chin in an attitude so imperious, so superior to what the world in
its simplicity called morality, that it fairly took my breath away.
She had told me one lie after another, she had been guilty of every
kind of deception, but I had not until now understood how utterly
amoral she really was. She was all instinct, and the instincts were
those of a child: selfish and immediate, without any thought of the
consequences. And, like a child, almost blameless because of it. I
say almost, because of course she did not have the excuse of her
age. But she had something else that made it even more tragic. She
had the power, often seen in children, to make others want to give
her what she wanted; the power to make you believe that what in
someone older would have been nothing short of criminal had in her
case all the charm of innocence. It had taken me a long time to
realize my mistake, to understand that behind those bright, eager
eyes that made you feel so wanted, so alive, there was nothing
real; that what you saw was only a mirror made to reflect your own
private hopes and secret dreams.

“Why would you want to kill him?” I asked
finally. “You’re both so much alike.”

But nothing could stop her. I could have
screamed at her and it would have made no difference. She had to
have an answer; she had to know.

“They can’t, can they?”

I was just about to tell
her the truth, that not only could they try her again, but, given
what she had done before – made a travesty of the solemn
proceedings of a court of law – would come after her like a pack of
jackals, when, suddenly, my eyes moved past her. St. James was
coming toward us, moving slowly through the crowd, every step a
burden. Sweat glistened on his forehead and there was a troubled,
dangerous expression on his face. He grabbed Danielle, digging his
fingers into her arms, demanding to know why she had tried to run
off. She pulled hard, trying to get away, but she could not break
his grip.

“Let me go! What do you think you’re doing?
Are you crazy!” she cried as she continued to struggle. “I wasn’t
running anywhere!”

He held her in both hands and began to shake
her. His face was all twisted up, demented and full of rage, as he
screamed at her.

“You think I don’t know what you’re doing,
what you’d like to do – run off with him! You were sleeping with
him – Goddamn you, you admitted it!”

Flushed, breathing hard, he shut his eyes and
shoved with all his strength. She stumbled backward and nearly
fell.

“Go ahead – leave! You think I give a damn
what you do!”

He glared at her; and then, as if he were
seeing her for the first time and did not like what he saw, shook
his head with disgust. Slowly, but with an unmistakable air of
finality, he turned and left.

Danielle stood there, watching, angry and
defiant. It was over; she was done with him, now free to do what
she wished. I started toward her to tell her that nothing mattered
but us. The anger, the defiance, all the bitterness which just
moments earlier had led her to utter dark words of hatred and
murder, vanished from her eyes. She was ready for a new life, ready
to give up everything and go away with me. The reservations, the
doubt that she was capable of thinking of anyone but herself, had
no chance against that hope. I could see it in her eyes, an
instant’s intuition that she was going to tell me she loved me and
would go anywhere I wanted.

The next moment, faced with the reality of
it, that he was leaving her, leaving her without anything except
the clothes on her back, leaving her without any way to get even
what she would have had in a divorce, she was seized by panic.
Without a word of explanation, without a word of any kind, she went
running after him.

“I told you what happened,” I heard her say
as she caught up with St. James and walked alongside him. “I told
you it was a mistake. If I’d wanted to run off with him, why would
I have come back? Everything we planned has worked perfectly. Don’t
ruin it all because one night I got too lonely and did something I
wish I hadn’t.”

One night! I could not hear the rest of their
conversation, I don’t know what else she might have told him,
except that, whatever it was, it was not the truth; not the whole
truth, anyway. That was the really remarkable thing about her, even
more than the way she looked – this ability she had to make you
want to believe her no matter how many times she had lied to you
before. There was a certain intimacy in that, the knowledge that if
she lied to you it was only because she still wanted you to think
well of her. St. James knew that about her, and so did I, but we
both wanted her too much for it to make any difference.

It was crazy; I admit it. I have asked myself
why I did not put a stop to things; why I did not just check into a
hotel and the next day fly home. I did not have to keep following
them; I certainly did not have to go back to the yacht. St. James
may or may not have been planning to get rid of me, but he was too
upset, too distracted, to worry about anything except how to work
out some manageable arrangement with his wife. He would not have
noticed I was gone. The only answer I can come up with is that I
was trapped in a spell of uncertainty. I did not know what was real
and what was not, whether Danielle loved me or whether even that
had been a lie. It all seemed too unfinished, and I had to see it
through to a conclusion, though I knew, with a kind of terrible
certainty, that however it ended, it would end badly. Call it a
premonition, call it fear, but it assumed an importance – a test,
if you will, of what I was made of – that I could not resist
without admitting to cowardice, a refusal to see things for what
they were. It was stupid, irresponsible, and I know it; but it did
not feel that way. I had crossed a boundary, stepped over a line; I
had become almost as instinctive, as free or restraint, as
Danielle.

Two more days went by in which I did not see
either of them. We had left the coast of Sicily and started sailing
toward Algeria, though why we were headed there instead of
continuing around the island I was not told. The weather changed,
hot as blazes in the day and still hot at night, the wind from
Africa warm on my face in the evening, the air clean and good to
breathe.

It was close to midnight on the second day
that I was summoned up on deck. I had not been told who wanted to
see me, but I did not need to ask. I had always known, I think,
that it was going to happen. Nelson was waiting for me. He had been
drinking, drinking quite a lot. He was not drunk, but his face had
a reddish tinge and instead of looking straight at me, the way he
usually did, his eyes darted back and forth with a strange,
inexplicable excitement. Then I saw Danielle.

Two days they had been together, two more
days in which, whatever else they had talked about, they had talked
about me. Something had been decided, I was certain of that; I was
not quite so certain what it was, except that it was final, and
none of it good. Danielle was standing just a few feet away, the
third point, if you will, of the triangle we formed. I had never
seen her look like this: nervous, intense, her face drawn and
almost rigid, something wild and half-crazy about her eyes. I was
so struck by how different, how almost deranged, she appeared, that
at first I did not notice the revolver, pointed downward toward the
deck, that she was holding in her hand.