She said she had been thinking about it all night.
Jimmie and Phaine were sitting in that villa, surrounded by all their material possessions that they never used. It was a reprehensible—no, a vile—thing, the way they could do that while people like him were starving five miles away. She had been living with her outrage—at home, through her work—for some time but without being able to resolve it, increasingly tainted by her family’s privilege. But now she could do her part to turn the tables on them. It would be the sweetness of a necessary treason. Did he understand? But treason was not an act he could have ever contemplated relative to his own people. Don’t trust her, he thought. But she went on: there was nothing to it. He could rob the house while they were asleep.
“Would you do it?” she went on. “Would you do it if you knew no harm would come to them and that everything you took was insured?”
“I can’t say.”
“Think it over. It’s a victimless petty crime. It’s nothing, nothing at all. You wouldn’t even need to break and enter.”
The maid could leave the door open for him and Naomi would tell her to cooperate. He could take whatever he found there, anything he wanted. He could leave within thirty minutes with enough money to take him anywhere in Europe he needed to go. Enough to live on for years if he was careful. It was his escape door, his deliverance.
“Listen to me,” she insisted.
“I’m not going to listen to you. I’ll get caught. Then I suppose you’ll have another plan?”
“You won’t get caught. You’re invisible—you’re not in the records. They could never catch you. You can’t catch a person who doesn’t exist.”
She explained more of her idea. She hurried her own sentences until they began to fall over each other. It was nonsense, but it was not entirely nonsense. Gradually, he listened more tolerantly and her logic began to appeal to him. He could ask for money up front and be on his way, but he was sure it wouldn’t be very much. It would be money honestly come by, but it wouldn’t be enough to save him. It wouldn’t be enough to launch him into a new life. She was right: it had to be more than what she could take out of an ATM machine. She had it all mapped out, down to the last details. He could slip away to Metochi and take her father’s car and drive out of the country through the seaports to Italy. On those sea routes there was virtually no passport control, since Italy was a fellow Schengen country. If he went north by himself he would run up against the Macedonian border, the worst of borders to try and breach without papers. Driving an expensive car, on the other hand, no one would ask him questions on the ferries from Patras. He would slip through invisibly. Since Jimmie rarely checked on his car it would be probably forty-eight hours before her father realized that it had been taken, and by then Faoud would be out of the country. He could even sell the car on the other side; all the papers were stored inside it. It was easy to sell cars illegally in southern Italy anyway. The vehicle itself was worth many thousands. Or he could keep it and make his own way to wherever he wanted to go. His options would be numerous. Even the tickets for the car ferry were prepaid and in the glove compartment. Her father erred on the side of carefree trust when it came to such things. It was a free passage with only minor risks, easy when compared to anything else he would have to do.
“In other words,” he objected almost at once, “I’d be a thief. A thief dependent on another man’s daughter.”
But she held her own. “My father has stolen everything he owns. He’s a master thief. You would be stealing from a thief, and everything is insured. He’ll get a brand-new car out of it and he won’t mind at all. You’ll just have to change the car number plates. You can do that in Italy for a bribe. That’s the easy part.”
“You’re hiring me as a burglar,” he smiled. “But you don’t get to keep the profits.”
“I don’t want any of his filthy money. I’d rather redistribute it. He’ll never know it was me either—I’ll be the perfect actress.”
“No one can be that. Not to your own father.”
“I can. I know exactly what to do. He won’t think anything that bad of me. It’ll just be a burglary like any other. The houses of the rich people here are broken into all the time. It’s not unusual. The police will hardly shrug, trust me.” She was suddenly vehement. “You’d be smart to accept this, Faoud. I’m giving you a new life. It’s as simple as that.”
He went over it in his mind. He didn’t know the details of these routes as well as she did, but he began to feel that she had worked it out well enough. The easiest ways out of the country were the cruise lines to Italy; that he had heard already. Everything would depend on speed and luck. With those two things he could bring it off and no one would be the worse. It would be a way of escaping peacefully and letting life flow on uninterrupted. When he looked at it this way he felt compelled to accept the premise.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, to keep her at bay. “I’ll think about it tonight.”
“There’s not a lot to think about.”
“I disagree. But I’ll know tomorrow.”
“Why don’t you tell me now? It would be easier if you did. But if you can’t, it’s all right. I’ll call you tomorrow and we can talk about it.”
“Don’t have any bad dreams,” he said as she prepared to leave at last. “I don’t want you having any bad dreams because of me.”
She walked back alone to Hydra. On the path the shadows under the olive trees cast by the moon were so dark that she lost the threads of her thoughts as she walked through them. The old people drinking ouzo in their gardens, secretive as smugglers. The island gardens with their hum of moths. They always looked up: a stranger walking by. Harmless, but a stranger all the same. She thought about Faoud. She knew that he would accept her proposition and go along with it, and by the time she reached Hydra she felt elated that she had managed to persuade him. She wondered how long it had been since he had been with a woman. Weeks, maybe months. One could never tell, but it was possible that it had been even longer.
At the port she went for a drink alone and she put in her earphones and listened to some rebetiko music to seal herself off. She drank Aperol Spritzers with bowls of salted peanuts, since it was her time-honored way of obtaining simple bliss. She thought about Sam asleep in her white room with the icons and the iron bed. What did she want with this appealingly impressionable girl? Naomi wasn’t sure herself. It was just an attraction, as her feeling toward Faoud was an attraction. It was a matter of gravity. It was her influence over them that was attractive too, their reluctant malleability. She couldn’t understand why people were like that.