The Shortest Way to Hades (24 page)

It could not be supposed that such a miracle would be repeated. Unless Constantine were able to make the necessary runs during the next over, the Artists would be assured of victory: it was merely a question—since his partner was clearly in no condition to participate in any running between the wickets—of ensuring that the ball never reached the boundary. The Artists accordingly set a defensive field.

Constantine, with Homeric calm, prepared to receive the bowling, looking carefully about him for any vulnerable space between the fieldsmen. The first four deliveries, however, all rather wide outside the leg stump, gave him no opportunity for any scoring stroke. It seemed to me—I suppose this cannot actually have occurred—but it seemed to me that all those in the Liston held their breath as he waited for the fifth ball of the over. It was slightly short of a length, and he took two majestic paces down the wicket to meet it. The sunlight gleamed on his bat as he drove the ball high over deep mid-on.

I heard a cry and a crash of breaking glass; I felt rather than saw a massive figure hurtling towards me; and I was enveloped in darkness.

I looked up into eyes the color of lapis lazuli.“My dear Professor Tamar,” said Leonidas Demetriou, “I do hope you haven’t hurt yourself.”

“I feel,” I said, “no pain.” I feared this might signify that my injuries were unusually grave; but I accepted the boy’s assistance in rising from the undignified position in which I found myself. “Would you,” I continued, “be kind enough to tell me what has happened? Was I struck by the cricket ball?”

“Oh no,” said Leonidas, with his slightly malicious Byzantine smile. “Oh no, Professor Tamar, the ball was going far too high to have hit you. It went through the window of the cafe over there. The man who owns the cafe was rather put out about it—my parents are busy saying soothing things to him. But the lunatic fielding at mid-on thought it might be a catch—idiotic of him really, it was six all the way. He was running so hard to get to it, and not looking where he was going, that he went straight into your table and knocked your canopy down on top of you. And he’s quite a big chap, I’m afraid. I’m really extremely sorry.”

I considered his explanation and found it consistent with the evidence.

“Well,” I said, “I am glad at any rate that the Writers have been victorious. You are not, as it happens, my only acquaintance in the side. Sebastian Verity—”

“Oh yes, of course, Sebastian is a colleague of yours, isn’t he? And Selena—Miss Jardine—who is also a friend of yours, is here with him. Have you seen them yet? Do they know you’re here?”

“No,” I said. “My coming to Corfu was a matter of impulse and will be a surprise to them.” I looked towards the place where Selena and Sebastian had been sitting; but they were no longer there, nor could I see them elsewhere in the Liston. Indeed, although it could hardly have been for more than a minute or two that I had lain dazed and helpless under the wreckage of the canopy, the whole Demetriou family, with the exception of Leonidas himself, had somehow managed in that time to disappear from view. “I was meaning,” I went on, “to have a word with them when the match was over, but I seem to have lost sight of them. Do you know where they might have gone?”

“They’ve gone up to the Citadel,” said Leonidas. “My father said it was unthinkable for them to leave Corfu without seeing the view from the eastern summit, so they had to promise to go straight up there as soon as the match was finished. Do you want to follow them, or would you rather wait to see them when they come down again?”

My uneasiness returned. I did not imagine, certainly, that the Citadel would be deserted: on a fine evening in the height of summer, it would be surprising if my friends ever found themselves out of sight and earshot of at least half a dozen fellow tourists engaged on a similar exploration. Thinking, however, of its precipitous battlements; of the massive blocks of stonework poised above its narrow pathways; and of the inscriptions which one finds there commemorative of destruction and violent death—thinking of these things, and the apprehensions which had brought me to Corfu—

“I think I should prefer,” I said, “to follow them up to the Citadel.”

The boy appeared to assume that he should come with me. Reflecting that it was some time since I had last visited the Citadel and that unguided I might not strike on the most direct route to the eastern summit, I was not displeased to have his company. We set forth together across the Esplanade.

A narrow, steep-sided channel, deep enough for small sailing-boats to bob about in it, divides the town of Corfu from the projection of rock which by some irony of Nature makes the gentlest of islands one of the most powerful naval strongholds in the Mediterranean, impregnable save by guile for almost a millennium. The Citadel, I remembered, had not always been completely encircled by sea; but in the sixteenth century, perceiving the slender connecting isthmus as a weak point in the defenses, the Venetians had slit it as neatly and efficiently as if it had been the throat of some inconvenient diplomat.

“It occurs to me,” I said, when we had crossed the bridge over the channel and were approaching the great gateway, “that you were not surprised to find me beside the Esplanade.”

“My brother and sister told me you were here. They didn’t remember who you were, of course, but I recognized the description. What
have
you been saying to them, Professor Tamar? They’re off buying crucifixes at this very moment in case they meet you again.”

“That,” I said, “is most gratifying. But I fear that you, my dear boy, are less easily impressed.”

“I don’t think,” he said, with the same malicious and satirical smile, “that I believe in necromancy. But you do find things out, don’t you? Things that one wouldn’t expect.”

“It is by way,” I said, not ungratified, “of being my profession. The Scholar is dedicated to the pursuit of Truth, most of all when she is hidden and elusive.”

“Isn’t the pursuit sometimes fruitless?”

“Where nothing at all is known, even Scholarship is helpless; but even a small amount of information, perhaps of little apparent relevance, will enable the Scholar to detect the minute inconsistencies which betray the boundary between truth and falsehood. It is logically impossible, you see, for a lie to be perfectly consistent with truth: in order to tell an undetectable lie, it would be necessary to invent an alternative universe.”

Having passed through the barbican, the visitor appears to be presented with a choice of three routes by which to explore the Citadel. The choice, however, is to some extent illusory. The broad, even-surfaced roadway to the right is no more than a digression, affording a closer look at the Doric facade of St. George’s Church before winding back though the pine trees to rejoin the central pathway on its ascent to the plateau known nowadays as the Square of Heroes. Turning to the left, the visitor may follow the outer line of battlements along the base of the western summit and round the eastern, but is eventually obliged, if wishing to explore further, to undertake the climb up to the plateau. From there, there is only one way up to the eastern summit. The western, having been appropriated to the purposes of local government or television or something of that sort, is not open to the public.

Despite its less inviting gradient, we took the route which leads most directly to the plateau, a marble-flagged roadway wide enough even to allow the passage of a small motor vehicle. I rather hoped, since I could not suppose that Selena and Sebastian were more than a few minutes ahead of us, that with haste we might overtake them by the time they reached the plateau.

“I should not have thought,” said Leonidas, as we continued on our upward path, “that the activities of my brother and sister were a very likely subject of scholarly investigation—how did you come to know about them?”

“For various reasons,” I said, “I have felt for some time a certain curiosity about the affairs of your family.”

“I thought perhaps you had. It did occur to me, after you came to Godmansworth, that you had shown a more flattering interest in my conversation than it quite deserved.”

“My dear boy,” I said, “you are too modest.”

“Thank you, Professor Tamar—people don’t often say so.”

The Square of Heroes is dominated by the barracks which the British built there in the nineteenth century—an unprepossessing building and now derelict. From the open space in front of it there is admittedly a very fine view across to the island of Vido; and part of the area has been at some time laid out as a formal garden, shaded by trelliswork, with an ornamental pond and two circular stone dance-floors: I could imagine it having once been a charming setting for women in evening dress and officers in brightly colored uniforms to drink champagne and eat water-ices; but there seemed to me now to be something melancholy about the place. Selena and Sebastian were nowhere to be seen.

“They must already be at the top,” said Leonidas. “Never mind, Professor Tamar, it isn’t far.”

I resigned myself to climbing the haphazard and irregular steps, providing an often treacherous foothold, which rise in a steep diagonal from the northeastern comer of the Square: the evening was still too warm for such an exertion to be pleasurably undertaken. Moreover, it seemed when accomplished to have been undertaken in vain: arriving at the entrance to the stairway which leads upwards through solid rock to the top of the eastern summit, we were confronted with a notice announcing in Greek and English that excavations were in progress and entrance was forbidden.

“Oh,” said Leonidas, “don’t worry about that. Millie was saying at tea-time that some idiot had put a ‘No Entry’ notice up here, but it’s a mistake or a joke or something. All the excavations are down by the main gateway.”

He stooped to go through the low doorway and I followed him with misgiving. The first few steps of the stairway were lit, though dimly so, by the fight from the doorway; after that there was total darkness. Proceeding cautiously up the worn and uneven stairs, I drew some comfort from the prospect of a reunion with friends. Sebastian, I supposed, would be taking the opportunity to explain to Selena that the Citadel had been the scene of events which changed the history of the world—it may fairly be claimed that if the Turkish siege of 1537 had been successful, Western Europe would have become part of the Ottoman Empire. I hoped he would remember that it was the western summit, not the eastern, which was so heroically and momentously defended—the Venetians had grudged the expense of fortifying the latter.

We emerged at last into daylight to stand on the crest of the eastern summit. The fortifications which Venice was at last persuaded to build there have crumbled again into ruin, and broom and wild sage grow rife among the stones; but the view of the island northwards and southwards and across the sea to the jagged mountains of Epirus remains commanding and majestic. It had deservedly been recommended by Constantine to the admiration of Selena and Sebastian—who were, however, notable by their absence.

“I know,” said Leonidas. “They must be down in the catacomb. I’ll go and find them and tell them you’re here.”

Paying no heed to my suggestion that we might simply call out and see if they answered, he scrambled with great agility down an opening very similar to the one from which we had just emerged, but enclosing a staircase in an even more alarming state of dilapidation. It led, I recalled, to a tunnel-shaped chamber, hollowed out of the rock, and having no other means of entry or exit. Two embrasures—one at the eastern end, beside the staircase, the other at the center of the south-facing wall, each high enough and deep enough for a tall man to stand or lie full-length without discomfort there—opened on to an almost sheer cliff-face and looked down to the rocks some hundreds of feet below. The boy was quite wrong, of course, in referring to it as a catacomb; but the thought crossed my mind that it must be curiously similar in size and shape to the sacrificial chamber in the Temple of the Dead, where Sebastian had stumbled and grazed his wrist. I called out to inquire of Leonidas whether Sebastian and Selena were indeed there.

“No.” His voice was blurred by its own echo. “No, they’re not here—I can’t think where they are. But I’ve found something rather extraordinary—do come down and see, Professor Tamar.”

Looking at the dilapidated staircase, I asked if he could not come above ground again, bringing with him whatever it was he thought might engage my interest.

“No, Professor Tamar, I can’t do that—it’s sort of attached. It isn’t really difficult to get down here, you know—if you sit on the edge, you have your feet on quite a solid bit of the stairway, and after that it’s all right.”

There are few hardships, as I have written elsewhere, which the Scholar is unwilling to endure in pursuit of knowledge. Following his advice, I managed to lower myself without misadventure into the underground chamber; but wondered, as I tried to accustom my eyes to the gloom, whether the ascent would be equally straightforward. The boy stood in the dark angle between the wall and the staircase with something in his hand which seemed to glitter in the remnants of light penetrating the embrasures: I drew closer, intending to study it.

“I’m really very sorry about this, Professor Tamar,” said Leonidas, holding me by the shoulder and the knife against my throat.

By declining the duties of examiner I had hoped to avoid this sort of treatment on the part of the young. I now saw that I had, on the contrary, deprived myself of the specialized experience required to deal with such contingencies. I also saw how much better it would have been to allow Timothy to come to Corfu in my stead.

“My dear boy,” I said, “you are making a grave mistake.”

“No,” said Leonidas, “no, Professor Tamar, I don’t think so. I understand now what you meant when you said you didn’t believe that Deirdre had killed herself. I was never quite sure that you meant you thought she had died by accident—and now I know you didn’t.” The blade of the knife seemed to draw even closer to my throat.

There appeared to be some misunderstanding. I had long discarded the notion of Leonidas having any responsibility for his cousin’s death; and if the view I now held were well-founded, nothing could be more absurd than any attempt on his part to protect the person culpable. The prospect, however, of having one’s throat cut has a remarkably stimulating effect on the mental processes: after only an instant or two of bewilderment, there came to me some notion of what was troubling him. He had thought again about the events of Boat Race Day; and he
knew
there had not been time for Dolly to have left the roof before Deirdre fell or was thrown from it.