The girls walked back, passing nobody on the way down to Palamidas. Faoud watched them diminish, with the backdrop of the sea behind them. He wondered about Naomi. She didn’t seem to have an ulterior motive, apart from the question of attraction. But one had to admit that that last reason was usually sufficient to explain almost everything in the way people behaved. Two people of about the same age, finding themselves in the same place at the same moment, could enter an unexpected charm. He thought she might come back daily and that something might happen between them. As for Sam, it was a different matter. She was ravishingly beautiful but too shy. Yet she also posed a more thorny question, because she seemed to have understood his glances more perfectly than Naomi and with a greater dash of anger. They stopped, turned, and made a sign to him, and in response he raised a hand. It was a little rash on his part, but he couldn’t help it.
He then walked back to the hut, poured out the bowl of water surfaced with shaving foam and made his way to the head of the path that plunged down to the wild shore from where he had come. Everything had changed. The shave, the T-shirt and the sweater, the yogurt and the strawberries, the refreshing swim by the skerry—a darkness had lifted. He went down the path a short way and then rolled a joint, lit it, and sat among the stones smoking. It was difficult to grasp how quickly his luck had changed. But didn’t Omer in Istanbul always say that it did because it always must? He had a hard time believing that it was because of God. Nevertheless, the events of the previous seventy-two hours were beginning to change his mind. Such things, he now thought, could not happen by themselves—not entirely. There had to be a design behind them.
He shaded his eyes and scanned the sea. Nothing came out of it today, no little dinghies struggling against the currents, no cast-off life jackets washing up on Europa. There was no dread. His traces had been perfectly covered through his own diligence, and the police boat that came around the island once a day would find nothing. Even the vagrant himself had found a new home looking down on them, with God watching over him, and the idea of God had suddenly, to his surprise, been resurrected by the simple act of being given a box of strawberries by a woman he didn’t know.
—
The following day Sam and Naomi met at the Sunset in the evening. They were both in high spirits. The American girl had spent the day hiking with her brother and father, after which she had gone for a swim alone below Kamini, lost in her own moods. Naomi ordered a bottle of white wine for them to split and some souvlaki with bread and oil and a plate of cut lemons. A feast for assassins.
“So we’re friends with the refugee,” Sam said. “It feels weirdly normal, but I don’t know why. My father says—”
But Naomi ignored the evocation of Jeffrey Haldane. In the end, she found him just as Sam had described: boring.
“Friends is a big word,” she said. “But since he’s from an affluent family over there it doesn’t surprise me that we get on. He’s educated and secular.”
“Over where?”
“From Syria. But his family might be from many places.”
“My father says—”
“Let’s keep your father out of it, shall we? He doesn’t speak a word of Greek. The people here have been talking about this secretly for months. It’s an open secret. I think there have been others before Faoud—the locals helped them to get to the mainland illegally before, and maybe they’re still doing it. But now the police are here.”
It’s a shame your father and his wife are so hostile to you. They might have helped, Sam thought to herself.
“But,” Naomi went on, “I think we can do it by ourselves. I just don’t know how yet.”
“Put him on the ferry?” Sam said.
“There has to be more to it than that. Maybe we should go with him?”
“And if they catch him—”
“We’ll be criminals too. I don’t really care. I could talk my way out of that. But I’m not sure you could. I wish Jimmie and Phaine would just go away—I could invite him to my place and hide him there. It would solve everything.”
Sam seemed to bristle at something. A sudden venom came into her voice.
“Why don’t you suggest that they go on a trip? They could go to the Peloponnese for a week.”
“Phaine would never buy it. She’s paranoid about me being in the house alone. She doesn’t seem to accept that one day it’ll be mine whether she likes it or not. She certainly won’t agree to go off for a week knowing that I suggested it. She’d suspect at once.”
“Obviously you should just kill them.”
Naomi laughed, and the waiters looked over, startled by the sound. Naomi admitted that it was an original idea, the only one that Sam had come up with yet. But it would be hard to explain to the relatives. Sam laughed as well, more because she was surprised at the towering absurdity of the things she was saying. Just as there was automatic writing, there seemed to be automatic speaking as well.
“Depends on who would do it,” she added.
“Do you think about killing your parents, Sam?”
They made the “Death to death” toast—a popular one in Greek—and the glasses touched so hard they almost cracked.
“Not regularly, no.”
“Me, yes,” Naomi said. “I don’t know why.”
“Really?”
“More when I was younger. Now, I’d just be worried about the lawsuits.”
Sam sensed an opening and became more insolent.
“You could do it to Phaine, though, couldn’t you?”
“What makes you say that?”
Sam sipped at her glass, and her eyes positioned over the rim were filled with havoc and hurly-burly.
“I don’t know. You obviously hate her.”
“It’s not a subtle dislike, I’ll grant you that. Did your parents notice as well? I’m sorry if they did. We seem to be incapable of keeping our feuds to ourselves, or at least disguising them. It’s wretched.”
“I didn’t ask them, to be honest.”
Naomi said there was something that didn’t work between them. Even just between herself and her father. They never did get along—it was something fundamental. Her real mother used to say it was because they were too alike.
“I know you’re going to say he spoils me, but he only does that because deep down he hates me. I mean, he hates me in a certain way. It’s just a visceral dislike. Parents can dislike their children, we’re just brainwashed into assuming that they can’t. If I was killed in a boating accident, let’s say, Jimmie would be distraught but he would get over it surprisingly quickly. Trust me. He really would.”
She took out a cigarette and lit it. She felt that the girl was beginning to believe her, and that both of them were beginning to be swayed into entering the orbit of a calamitous idea.
“You think there’s unconditional love, but there isn’t. The conditions are everything.”