Then this, said Joseph, in the same practical tone, was what he suggested. Whether he had prepared his plan in advance or simply had that kind of mind, she couldn't tell. Either way she was grateful for his precision, though afterwards she realised that she had counted on it.
"You go with your friends by boat as far as Piraeus. The boat docks in late afternoon, but this week it is liable to be delayed by industrial action. Shortly before the boat enters harbour, you will tell them that you propose to wander alone round the mainland for a few days. An impulsive decision, the sort you are famous for. Don't tell them too early or they will spend the boat trip trying to argue you out of it. Don't tell them too much, it is the sign of an uneasy conscience," he added, with the authority of somebody who possessed one.
"Suppose I'm broke," she said before she'd had time to think,
for Alastair as usual had been through her cash as well as his own. All the same, she could have bitten her tongue off, and if he had offered her money at that moment she'd have flung it in his face. But he seemed to sense that.
"Do they know you are broke?"
"Of course they don't."
"Then your cover story is intact, I would say." And as if that clinched the matter, he dropped her air ticket into an inside pocket of his jacket.
Hey, give that back!she screamed in sudden alarm. But not--though there was just a hair's breadth in it--not aloud.
"Once clear of your friends, take a taxi to the Kolokotroni Square." He spelt it for her. "The fare should cost you around two hundred drachmas." He waited to hear whether this might be a problem, but it was not; she had eight hundred left, though she didn't tell him. He repeated the name again, and checked that she had remembered it. There was pleasure in submitting to his military efficiency. Just off the square, he said, was a pavement restaurant. He told her the name--Diogenes--and permitted himself a detour for humour: a beautiful name, he said, one of the best in history, the world needed more of him and fewer Alexanders. He would be waiting at the Diogenes. Not on the pavement but inside the restaurant where it was cool and private. Repeat, Charlie:Diogenes. Absurdly, passively, she did.
"Next door to the Diogenes is the Hotel Paris. If by any chance I am held up, I will leave a message for you with the concierge at the hotel. Ask for Mr. Larkos. He is a good friend of mine. If you require anything, money or whatever it may be, show him this and he will give it to you." He handed her a card. "Can you remember all that? Of course you can, you're an actress. You can remember words, gestures, numbers, colours, everything."
Richthoven Enterprises,she read,Export, followed by a post office box number in Vienna.
Passing a kiosk, feeling wonderfully, dangerously alive, she bought her bloody mother a crochet-work tablecloth and for her poisonous nephew Kevin a tasselled Greek cap. When she had done that, she chose a dozen postcards most of which she addressed to old Ned Quilley, her useless agent back in London, with facetious messages intended to embarrass him in front of the prim ladies who comprised his office staff. "Ned, Ned," she wrote on one, "keep all your parts for me." And on another, "Ned, Ned, can a fallen woman sink?" But on yet another of them she chose to write soberly, telling him of the mainland. "It's time our Chas topped up her culture levels, Ned," she explained, ignoring Joseph's stricture not to tell too much. About to cross the road and post them. Charlie had a feeling of being observed, but when she swung round, pretending to herself she was going to meet Joseph, all she saw was the flaxen hippy boy again, the one who liked to stalk the family and had presided over Alastair's departure. He was goofing along the pavement behind her with his arms trailing like an ape. Catching sight of her, he slowly raised his right hand in a Christ-like gesture. She waved back to him, laughing. Crazy devil's had a bad trip and can't come down, she thought indulgently as she dropped the cards into the box one by one. Maybe I should do something about him.
The last card of all was to Alastair, full of faked sentiment, but she didn't read it through. Sometimes, particularly in moments of uncertainty or change or when she was about to do a dare, it suited her to believe that her darling, hopeless, bibulous Ned Quilley, aged a hundred and forty next birthday, was the only man she'd ever truly loved.
four
Kurtz and Litvak called on Ned Quilley at his Soho offices on a misty, soaking Friday at midday--a social call with business as its aim--as soon as they heard that the Joseph-Charlie show was safely running. They were in near despair since the Leyden bomb, Gavron's croaking breath was on their necks every hour of the day; they could hear nothing in their minds but the remorseless ticking of Kurtz's battered watch. Yet on the surface, they were just two more respectful, well-contrasted mid-European Americans in dripping new Burberrys, the one stocky with a forceful rolling walk and a bit of a sea captain to him, the other gangly and young and rather insinuating, with a private academic smile. They gave their names as Gold and Karman of the firm of GK Creations, Incorporated, and their letter paper, hastily run up, sported a blue-and-gold monogram like a thirties tie-pin to prove it. They had made the appointment from the Embassy but ostensibly from New York, personally with one of Ned Quilley's ladies, and they kept it to the minute like the eager show-business citizens they weren't.
"We're Gold and Karman," said Kurtz to Quilley's senile receptionist, Mrs. Longmore, at two minutes to twelve exactly, striding straight in on her from the street. "We have a date with Mr. Quilley twelve o'clock. Thank you--no, dear, we'll stand. Was it you we spoke with by any chance, dear?"
It was not, said Mrs. Longmore, in the tone of one humouring a pair of lunatics. Appointments were the province of Mrs. Ellis, a different person entirely.
"Sure, dear," said Kurtz, undaunted.
And that was how they operated in these cases: officially somehow, with broad Kurtz beating the rhythm and slender Litvak piping softly behind him with his smouldering private smile.
The stairs to Ned Quilley's offices were steep and uncarpeted, and most American gentlemen, in Mrs. Longmore's fifty years' experience of her post, liked to comment on them wryly and pause for breath at the turn. But not Gold; not Karman either. These two, when she watched them through her window, skipped up the stairs and clean out of sight as if they had never seen an elevator. It must be the jogging, she thought, as she went back to her knitting at four pounds an hour. Wasn't that what they were all doing in New York these days? Running round Central Park, poor things, avoiding the perverts and the dogs? She had heard that a lot died of it.
"Sir, we're Gold and Karman," said Kurtz a second time as little Ned Quilley cheerily opened the door to them. "I'm Gold."
And his big right hand had landed in poor old Ned's before he even had a chance to draw. "Mr. Quilley, sir--Ned--we are surely honoured to meet you. You have a fine, fine reputation in the profession."
"And I'm Karman,sir," Litvak privately explained, just as respectfully, peering over Kurtz's shoulder. But Litvak was not in the handshaking class: Kurtz had done it for both of them.