Obediently, he ate a grapefruit alone by the hotel pool. He dressed up even for this humble occasion, because military habits die hard, especially when they have been acquired over many years and at considerable psychological expense. In this respect he was unlike Jimmie. The panama laid to one side, the plump linens, the suede drivers easy on his feet. I shall grow old, I shall grow old, went his mantra, I shall smoke my cigarettes rolled. All the worst expectations had come brilliantly true, as they always must.
The wealthy foreigners staying at the Bratseras got up later than he did and so he had an hour by himself next to the ripening lemon trees with only the Russian waitress to talk to. He read his e-mails, emptied his mind of the night’s unpleasant dreams, and went over the notes he had made the evening before over a lonely dinner. Days had gone by with no word from Jimmie. It was an unprecedented aberration. He had explained it to Minnie, because he was showing signs of insomnia and anxiety about Jimmie’s disappearance and she had noticed. Finally, she had suggested that he take a plane down to Athens and sort it out on the ground. It was the only way to resolve something difficult, and with that he had wholeheartedly agreed. His old friend paid him, and paid him handsomely, to look over his shoulder and ward off the dangers, the inconveniences and the sudden disasters that are always waiting to happen to a man like Jimmie Codrington. He was “the sword,” as Jimmie had called him, the old man who sorted out the young ones. There was a great and secretive bond between them, formed by a long friendship, that had ended by being a form of patronage when Rockhold had fallen on hard times. Jimmie’s business dealings were far-flung and lacking in all transparence; he dabbled in things that attracted him because they were dangerous. Rockhold was like the bodyguard one never sees or hears, though his function was not a physical one most of the time. He was too old for that. “You’re my eyes and ears,” Jimmie often said to him to reassure him that he was always needed, and he would add, “My intuitions and hunches, too.” They talked every day, or almost. When his friend didn’t answer his phones for days, Rockhold knew that it was time to move and search and resolve.
He had only been to Greece once before, many years earlier. It was an unfamiliar theater of operations. He decided not to jump to any conclusions nor to panic, and so he took it one day at a time, with an open mind. But the situation was baffling. It was eccentric, for one thing, for Jimmie and Funny to not even be on the island; the girl was as distant and remote as her father had often portrayed her. Though a “quisling”? That was a little too sharp. She was just a smooth actor, though a smooth actor is certainly not to be underrated. He went down to the port after his breakfast and ambled slowly among the idle yachts to see if he could “pocket” any early risers on the decks or the quays, mariners manning small boats who might recognize the photograph he carried of Naomi. Day after day he did this, until he found the old Greek who had rented her the boat in which she had gone to Palamidas.
It was understood that Naomi had paid for his silence, but he gave this precious silence up for a slightly greater sum. His English was fragmentary, but it was enough. Rockhold got the word “Palamidas” out of him.
He went back to the hotel and asked the two middle-aged ladies manning the desk if he could hire a translator for the week. One of them had a nephew who would be glad to make a few euros, and he was at the hotel within an hour. It was a boy of about sixteen whose English was good enough, and they went together back to the port and rented the boat. Since neither of them knew how to use it, they rented the owner as well.
Through the boy, Rockhold asked him to take them to where he had taken Naomi. It was an easy request to fulfill. The sail to Palamidas passed along the coastline that Rockhold had heard about many times from Jimmie. The villas, the steps, the burned-dry hills. But it didn’t impress him as much as he had expected. The odor of foreign wealth lay upon it. At Palamidas they left the boatman at the shore, and Rockhold and the boy climbed up the hillside where the boatman said the girl had gone many times. Surely, he added, to Episkopi. They reached it at about ten o’clock.
To Rockhold’s eye it looked to be a different world from the villas of the coast. It was abandoned and windswept, and he liked it better. A thoroughly miserable place, but miserable precisely because it was beautiful—and vice versa. The south, he thought. They knocked at some houses.
Before long they saw two men smoking pipes and reclining at their ease on a grass slope. The old shepherds had turned intransigent gazes upon the newcomers, but they made no motion of acknowledgment or welcome. Rockhold and the boy struggled up to them and the boy made the first greeting.
“This gentleman is looking for a girl,” he said to them. They glanced up at the strangers with a cool, even flagrant, disregard. “Here is her photograph.”
The picture of Naomi brought a quick snort to one of the men.
“Ah, that one!”
The boy translated, but Rockhold betrayed no feeling.
“He recognizes her?”
After the translation the man said, “She was up here to see her lover. I rented him the shack.”
“Which shack?”
“Up there.” The man flicked a hand toward a run-down hovel higher up.
“Lover?” Rockhold said.
“Eh, she had an Arab in there. He was there a few nights. It’s against the law, but I didn’t say anything.”
“What was his name?” Rockhold asked.
“How should I know? I didn’t invite him round to tea.”
“How do you know he was an Arab?”
“I can tell them a mile off. I saw his boat arrive. They dropped him off, then left. That was unusual.”
“You didn’t tell the police?”
The men looked away finally, and the pipes absorbed them.
“She must have paid them,” the boy said quietly to Rockhold in English.
So that’s how it works here, the Englishman thought.
You paid a man off, he held his tongue, and secrets went to ground.
“Can you ask him if she did?” he persisted.
But the boy shook his head. Such questions were extremely impolite.
Rockhold asked if he could go up and have a look at the hut, and the man agreed without visible reluctance.
“I haven’t touched it since he left,” he said to the boy.
Rockhold went up there alone. The hut was a shambles, but there was nothing in it that betrayed the presence of a stranger. He went through it quickly and then came back out into the sun. So Naomi had had a lover up here. Had she told Jimmie and Phaine?
When he went back down, the Greeks were laughing all together. He had the feeling, unconfirmed, that they were laughing at him. Undeniably, he was no longer a dashing figure, but he was annoyed that the boy had apparently joined them in their mockery. He took out his notebook by way of retaliation.
“When did Naomi last come up here?”
Predictably, the man was vague.
“A few weeks ago. I can’t remember. They left together.”
“She and the lover?”
“They went down to the resort. My cousin says they checked in there together.”
“And she never came back?”
“Why would she? She wasn’t coming to see us.”