Improbable though it seemed, he finally felt that he had entered the European bloodstream; along its arteries and veins he could now move like any other corpuscle. Surely, then, his passage had been preordained. It had been made possible by a higher power to whom thanks were owed. As he sucked on his straw, however, the nightmare of the previous night came back to him and he had to keep his hands in place on the table. “It wasn’t my fault,” he kept repeating to himself under his breath. It had been forced upon him by the mad old man. The man whom Naomi had described several times as a fascist. Well, a fascist then. It mattered less if he was a fascist.
The sophistry didn’t work, but it would tide him over until some kind of atonement and shock could take over, and indeed it was the atonement he dreaded, rather than the coming shock.
—
The office of the ferry company in Patras was empty, and the boats were equally so; it was a matter of minutes to book a berth on the next sailing at 5 p.m. It was a sixteen-hour voyage to Brindisi on the Grimaldi line arriving at nine the following morning, and naturally the Codringtons had booked a first-class private cabin. Was his wife joining him on this leg? No, she was indisposed. No other questions were asked; he was given his tickets for the Euroferry Olympia.
It was a long wait and he went back to the car, lay down in the backseat, and slept. When he revived the other cars were boarding. The time had passed easily, God be praised. As he entered the ship a man in uniform asked him for his ticket and then, unexpectedly, his passport. He had not prepared for this, and scrambled to pull out Codrington’s passport, which would condemn him as soon as it was opened. But it was not a passport control. As soon as the man saw the cover of the British document he waved him in and the trial was over. He locked the car, took the heavy bag out of the trunk, and went into the slightly run-down interior of the Olympia.
He came into a lobby with a circular upholstered sofa and a bronze statue at its center, with slot machines to one side and a depressing restaurant with white plastic tables and nautical themes. It wasn’t worth a detour. He went straight up to his cabin, now suddenly exhausted all over again, locked the door behind him, and snapped shut the curtains of its single window. For the first time in days he felt reasonably safe. He stripped off, showered for a long time, filled with dread at the thought of another man’s dried blood on his skin. He had to be purified from head to toe, like a man coming home at night from a slaughterhouse.
Then he lay unthinking and passive on one of the two beds with the lights off, waiting for the ship’s first shuddering motions at 5 p.m. Only when they were out at sea in the middle of a sparkling ocean dusk did he reopen the curtains and let the dying light into the cabin. He groomed himself in front of the bathroom mirror, shaved using the complimentary razor, and slicked back his wetted hair with the plastic comb. He tried on the different shirts and jackets that he had stolen from the master bedroom at the house—Jimmie’s Savile Row finery—until he found a combination that pleased him, then matched them with a pair of white pants that did not fit him, but which would pass. He took two hundred-euro notes from the bag and went up to the restaurant to eat.
Night had fallen and the dining room pitched gently from side to side. He ordered five dishes since hunger gnawed at him; he also ordered a Peroni beer, but when it came he changed his mind and sent it back. It was precisely these small sins that he had overlooked until now, but the moment had finally come to set them right. Water, two halved lemons. He ate lustily, however, and his spirits picked up. He added ice cream and coffee, and then walked around the ship to observe the other travelers.
They were mostly Italian couples, as far as he could understand, with a forlorn child here and there, and the odd single woman wrapped up in herself. It seemed an eccentric cast to be returning from a holiday in Greece. Perhaps the land of the Greeks was no longer as popular as it had once been in his father’s time, when all the rich boys from Beirut spent their summers on the islands in their boats. It was safer than Beirut and there were more roumi girls. But everyone falls on hard times eventually. Now the Beirut parasites went to Dubai and Bangkok instead. He went out onto the deck and took in the partially moonlit sea. There was no land to be seen, there were no other ships. God had seen to him, plucked him out of misery and set him on his way: it was, if he wanted to see it that way, a call to arms, a rejuvenation. He was sure that his dead father had something to do with it.
But as he stood at the prow, buffeted by the wind, he became aware of someone looking at him. He turned quickly and saw a dark-haired boy of about twelve standing by one of the funnels in a T-shirt and shorts. The boy seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, and his parents were not present. He leaned against the funnel lightly and looked at the stranger in his blue linen jacket intently, as if he knew him. A voice floated up from the far reaches of the deck: “Giorgio!” Faoud was sure that he had seen him before somewhere. The boy smiled and raised a finger to his lips, as if he were hiding from his exasperated mother, and Faoud did the same. Then the boy slipped away.
Where had he seen him before? In Damascus, in Beirut, in Istanbul—his three cities, where thousands of such boys darkened the sidewalks. It was striking how boys of that age all possessed the same gaze. They were like messengers from another world. It was surely another sign that had been sent to him. Thanks be to God, then. But another thought came to him. The boy was the soul of the old Codrington which had appeared in its childhood form. It was her father as a boy, staring at his killer.
The sea calmed, the ship stopped pitching. There is a time for many words, and there is a time for sleep. So he slept for eleven hours with no dreams and the Adriatic gave him solace. How many had sailed across it before him. How many had drowned in it over the centuries. All he heard in his sleep were the bursars clanging their way down the metal corridors, inconsiderate to the last man, and the water pipes laid along his wall. But neither was enough to rouse him out of that sweetness. It was strange, he thought later when he was awake in the dining room having his coffee, because of all the creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than humankind.
—
In the hour before he arrived at Brindisi he pored over the road map, on which Jimmie long ago had penciled their yearly route back and forth from Rome. At first he had thought to just drive north as fast as he could and get to the French frontier. But as he perused the Michelin map he began to change his mind. If uproar had ensued in Hydra then the borders would be perilous to cross. Far better to lie low in Italy itself for a while. Then it occurred to him that he had at his disposal the house which Jimmie and Phaine maintained north of Rome, as Naomi had explained to him when she first suggested her plan. It would be the last place that anyone would think to look for him. For a week, two weeks, or a few days, it would shelter him and make him invisible. He would make his way there slowly, and monitor events from afar as best he could. A new plan every day. Often the best strategy is to play the part and not stick out, to fill the shoes that you happen to be wearing.