She echoed that line too.
"That leaves drugs then, doesn't it? Because you are trading in something, aren't you? Only drugs aren't my scene either, to be frank. Long Al makes me carry his hash for him when we go through Customs and I'm a mess for days afterwards just from the nerves." No answer. "It's higher, is it? Nobler? A different plane entirely?" She reached out and switched off the radio. "How about your just stopping the car, actually? You needn't take me anywhere. You can go back to Mykonos tomorrow if you like and collect my understudy."
"And leave you in the middle of nowhere? Don't be utterly absurd."
"Do it now!' she screamed."Stop the bloody car!"
They had jumped a set of traffic lights and swung left, so violently that her seat belt locked and punched the breath out of her. She made a lunge for the wheel but his forearm was there long before she was. He swung left a second time, through a white gateway into a private drive lined with azaleas and hibiscus. The drive made a curve and they flew round it, ploughing to a halt in a gravel sweep ringed with white-painted stones. The second car was pulling up behind them, blocking the way out. She heard footsteps on the gravel. The house was an old villa covered in red flowers. In the beam of the headlamps the flowers looked like patches of fresh blood. One pale light burned in the porch. Joseph switched off the engine and pocketed the ignition key. Leaning across Charlie, he shoved open her door for her, admitting her to the rancid smell of hydrangeas and the familiar chatter of cicadas. He got out but Charlie stayed in her seat. There was no breeze, no other sensation of fresh air, no sound but the delicate shuffle of young light-footed people gathering round the car. Dimitri, the ten-year-old driver with the buckwheat smile. Raoul,the flaxen Jesus-freak who rode in taxis and had a rich Swedish daddy. Two girls in jeans and jackets, the same pair who had followed them up the Acropolis and--now that she saw them more clearly--the same pair she had seen slouching around Mykonos a couple of times when she had gone window-shopping. Hearing the thud of someone unloading luggage from the boot, she leapt furiously from the car. "My guitar!" she shouted. "You leave that alone, you--
But Raoul already held it under his arm, and her shoulder bag was in the charge of Dimitri. She was about to spring for it when the two girls each took hold of a wrist and elbow, and without effort led her towards the front porch.
"Where's that bastard Joseph?" she yelled.
But the bastard Joseph, his mission accomplished, was already halfway up the steps and not looking back, like someone escaping from an accident. Passing the car, Charlie saw by the porch light the markings on the rear licence plate. It was not a Greek registration at all. It was Arab, with Hollywood-style writing round the number, and a plastic "CD" for "Corps Diplomatique" stuck on the lid of the boot just to the left of the Mercedes emblem.
six
The two girls had shown her to the lavatory and stayed with her unembarrassed while she used it. One blonde, one brunette, both scruffy, both under orders to show kindness to the new girl. They wore soft-soled shoes, their shirts hung loose of their jeans, they had twice subdued her effortlessly when she flew at them, and when she cursed them they had smiled at her with the distant sweetness of the deaf.
"I'm Rachel," the brunette confided breathlessly, during a brief truce. "This one's Rose. Rachel--Rose, got it? We're the two ‘R's."
Rachel was the comely one. She had a pert North Country accent and merry eyes, and it was Rachel's backside that had stopped Yanuka on the border. Rose was tall and wiry with crinkled fair hair and the trimness of an athlete, but when she opened her hands, her palms were like axe heads on her thin wrists.
"You'll be all right, Charlie, don't you worry," Rose assured her, in a dried-out accent that could have been South African.
"I was all right before," said Charlie as she took another vain heave at them.
From the lavatory they led her to a ground-floor bedroom and gave her a comb and hair brush and a glass of slimming tea, no milk, and she sat on the bed sipping it and blaspheming in a tremulous fury while she tried to get her breathing right. "'penniless actress held,' " she muttered. "What's the ransom, girls? My overdraft?" But they only smiled at her more fondly, hovering to either side of her with their arms loose, waiting to walk her up the big staircase. Arriving at the first landing, she lashed out at them again, this time with her clenched fist, in a swinging furious sweep of the whole arm, only to find herself laid gently on her back gazing upward at the stained-glass canopy of the stairwell, which caught the moonlight like a prism and broke it into a mosaic of pale gold and pink. "I just wanted to bust your nose for you," she explained to Rachel, but Rachel's response was a gaze of radiant understanding.
The house was ancient and smelt of cat and her bloody mother. It was crammed with bad Greek furniture in the Empire style and hung with faded velvet curtains and brass chandeliers. But if it had been clean as a Swiss hospital or sloping like a ship's deck, it would only have been a different madness, not a better or worse one. On the second landing a cracked jardinière reminded her yet again of her mother: she saw herself as a small child seated at her mother's side wearing corduroy dungarees and shelling peas in a conservatory overhung with monkey-puzzle trees. Yet for the life of her she couldn't remember then or afterwards a house possessed of a conservatory, unless it was the first they ever had, in Branksome, near Bournemouth, when Charlie was aged three.
They approached a double door, Rachel pushed it and stood aside and a cavernous upper room was opened to her. At the centre of it sat two figures at a table, one broad and big, one stooping and very thin, both dressed in cloudy browns and greys, and from that distance phantoms. On the table she saw papers strewn, to which a downlight from the centre of the ceiling gave disproportionate prominence, and already from some way off they looked to her like press cuttings. Rose and Rachel had fallen back as if unworthy. Rachel gave her a shove on the rump and said, "On you go then," and Charlie found herself making the last twenty feet alone, feeling like an ugly clockwork mouse that has been wound up and set to run by itself. Throw a fit, she thought. Clutch my stomach, fake appendicitis. Scream. Her entrance was the cue for the two men to bound simultaneously to their feet. The thin man remained standing at the table, but the big man strode boldly up to her and his right hand curved in on her in a crab-like gesture, seizing her own and shaking it before she could prevent him.
"Charlie, we are surely glad to have you safely here among us!" Kurtz exclaimed in a swift congratulatory flow, as if she had risked fire and flood to get to them. "Charlie,my name"--her hand was still in his powerful grasp, and the intimacy of their two skins was contrary to everything she had expected--"my name for want of a better is Marty and when God finished making me there were a couple of spare pieces left around so He put together Mike here as an afterthought, so say hullo to Mike. Mr. Richthoven over there, to use his flag of convenience--Joseph, as you call him--well, I guess you practically christened him yourself anyway, didn't you?"
He must have entered the room without her noticing. Peering round, she found him on the point of arranging some papers on a small folding table set apart from everyone. On the table stood a personal reading lamp, of which the candle-like glow touched his face as he leaned across it.