Sam let this sophistry penetrate her and then sink as deep as it could go. But in the end she didn’t believe in the innate weight of Naomi’s sentence. There was a conflation of falsities within it. A robbery was still a harm, people were still damaged by it. Why was Naomi so blithe about it? She talked about it as if it were nothing but a chess game that could be played over and over with no consequences. She seemed to be indifferent to obvious consequences and to equally obvious motives that were not acknowledged.
When Naomi woke it was still dark. No one had called her. She lay awake for a while, mesmerized by the jangling wind chimes, such a crassly Californian sound in that Greek habitat. Afterward she slept longer. She had a dream that she was flying over the desert observing a long and disorganized caravan below her. It was night, but the far horizons were lit up as if by artillery. It was seven when Sam woke her, and she saw at once a coffeepot and Greek pastries and a bowl filled with sugar cubes. The family were still not around.
“They went into town for coffee,” Sam said simply, and lay back down next to her. “I told them you were here all night.”
“That’s good.”
“Did you sleep all right?”
“Yes—but I thought I was somewhere else.”
“I get that all the time.”
Sam poured the coffee and they shared a single cup, taking turns to sip, relishing the intimacy. The sea had turned into a solar mirror. The olive trees around the house burned with their eternal gray sheen. So what world, she thought, had she returned to from the desert? Across that same sea Faoud had sailed an hour earlier and now he was out of sight, vanished forever. She remembered Sam’s question from the night before—did she want to go and find him?—and she wondered if she had answered it honestly. She had not. She missed him already, but perhaps it was the certainty that their paths were bound and never to cross a second time. They had better not, she thought grimly. Then they attacked the pastries. Neither had eaten in twelve hours or more. They wondered if they should go swimming or voyaging among the isles. Anything to get away from their families. In the event, however, they abandoned the idea of a boat and walked instead up to the old Ghika house above Kamini. It was where the Athenian artist had entertained Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller in the 1940s, but the sprawling villa had burned down a few years later. According to island rumor it had been torched by a disgruntled servant. The ruins with their grand archways and solitary pillars had decayed quite a bit since her last visit, when she was twenty. They climbed over the ramshackle fence and wandered through the cavernous rooms. Coolly detached from the world outside, they rolled a joint from the remains of their original stash and smoked in the last fresh hour of the day. It was just after twelve by the time they returned to the house.
The Haldanes were at an early lunch on the porch, and Amy made them sit and eat the moussaka the maid had prepared. It was the very dish Jimmie had urged to have made for them. They must have had a stunned and glowing look on their faces, because Christopher looked at them slyly. Jeffrey took off his glasses, though it was not clear why he was wearing them, and pulled out a chair for Naomi.
“Your phone’s been ringing for the last ten minutes,” he said, giving it to her. She took it and glanced down at the nine calls from the same number. It was Carissa.
“Oh?”
“We were going to answer, but Amy said it would be rude. If it’s urgent, don’t mind us—go ahead and call back.”
Naomi’s face was suddenly hot, and she stood politely and said, “I’ll just go down there so I don’t bother you.”
She strode trembling into the lethally exposing sunlight and made her way about fifty yards from the house so they would not hear. Carissa picked up at once. Her voice was broken and faint, and she seemed to be gasping. It was early in the afternoon, and the maid had surely been up since six or seven. Nothing could have happened during those intervening hours, and when Carissa told her that things had not gone according to plan she was at a loss to believe it. Though stunned, she refused to give in to the emotion. But it was not what she had expected to feel anyway. It was more like nothingness. She went back up to the Haldanes’ with an excuse.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “the maid has a problem with the house and I have to go up there right away. You know how these things are.”
“I’ll go with you,” Sam said at once.
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I can’t see how either of us can really help her. She probably just wants money and Jimmie and Phaine are out somewhere.”
It was remarkable how easily her coolness came to her.
But she had to avert her eyes from the panic in Sam’s face. The girl grew adamant. If Naomi grew adamant in turn, it would look suspicious; she had to be offhand and relaxed. Unfortunately, Sam had already risen, and her decision to go with Naomi produced a flicker of alarm between the parents, who didn’t understand why she needed to do it.
“Is there a problem?” Amy asked.
“No,” Naomi said, “really, don’t worry. This happens all the time with our maid. Sam, you really don’t have to come.”
“I’m coming. Mom, don’t worry about it, I’ll be right back.”
“Why don’t you call when you get there?” her mother said.
They set off in a bad mood. Naomi explained everything in short, exhausted sentences. It was difficult to believe. Carissa had found the bodies in the morning and that was all. It had gone wrong, she didn’t know how or why, and they couldn’t change it now.
“What went wrong, then?” Sam kept asking. She was too numb to think of anything else to say.
“Or she’s lying,” Naomi said in confusion.
At the villa’s outer door they stopped for a moment and caught their breath. Naomi stared around her with a wild emptiness, as if she had lost her bearings and her sense. Sweat dripped off her knuckles and made little dark spots around her feet. She opened the door with her own key, turning to give Sam a curious look, and they went inside.
She called softly for the maid. Even in the hall it was clear that the interior was unusually dark and that the blinds of the terrace windows had been drawn down to the floor. There was a vague sense of disorder that their eyes couldn’t yet see. The salon was alive with flies, and there the maid was sitting alone on one of Jimmie’s British Raj horsehair armchairs with the phone in one hand and her eyes turned silently toward the hall and the two girls. The bodies lay where they had fallen during the night, composed and peaceful, and the flies swarmed around them and around the furniture, which perhaps would never be used again. The most curious thing, however, was that Carissa was not hysterical; she merely appeared surprised to see the American girl, as if that was the more significant calamity.
TWELVE