“Well, then we’ll go to the resort,” Rockhold said to the boy.
When they got there the receptionist wanted to know who he was and why he was asking questions. Rockhold said that he was trying to find a young friend, a man who had stayed there with an English girl.
“The man in room 34?”
“I don’t know what room it was.”
He showed them Naomi’s face and it was agreed: room 34.
“When did he leave?”
The girl looked through the book and saw that it had been only ten days earlier.
Rockhold wrote everything down in his notebook. He wanted to go and look at the room. He asked her if the young man had left his ID with them to photocopy. But it had been Naomi who had done so.
“And the young man,” he kept trying, “do you know where he went from here?”
The girl shook her head slowly. “Guests don’t tell us where they are going.”
When he had finished his interview, he gave the boy forty euros and told him to take the boat back to Hydra with the boatman. He wanted to return on foot himself. There was only one path winding its way to the port and it was impossible to get lost on it. In truth, he was relieved to be alone again. Being a great hiker, he was always inclined to hit the road alone.
When he had climbed out of sight of Palamidas he felt more contemplative. He walked slowly, never letting himself get out of breath, and he took the inclines with care. An hour later he was at Kamini. He sat in Kodylenia’s and watched the sea. Something told him that the sea was the key to the mystery with which he was confronted, because the lover had emerged from it and it was likely that he now had to track the lover. Jimmie had left a last message on his phone and it had not been quite “right.” Call me back. It was the kind of message that the irascible and confident millionaire might well leave, but there was something wrong about its timing. The early hours of the morning, Greek time.
Farther along the path he passed a few of the villas with their blue shutters and their porches filled with amphorae. Donkeys in the surrounding fields stood untethered in their own pools of midday shadow, the verges conquered by dark blue flowers. A family sat eating lunch with wind chimes tinkling around them. They looked up; he doffed his hat in his courtly way and one could see why the Codringtons lived here, because despite the new wealth and its trash it was, just under its shiny skin, the old Europe still. A few shreds of manners survived from the old days. He had learned to say “Kalo apogevma” and smile, and at the Bratseras he took a siesta and then swam in the hotel pool with a feeling of detachment from which the traces of religion had not been entirely withdrawn. That feeling was imposed on all living things by a Mycenaean sky and a scent of lemons.
—
At the villa, Naomi had spent several days by herself. She slept in the salon because she couldn’t bear to go upstairs to the bedrooms, and there, like a squatter, she lived on bread, feta, and the robust tomatoes that she bought every morning in the port market. Rudderless, day by day she sunbathed on the terrace and her nightmares came by noon’s terrible light. This left her nights unusually empty and free of worry. She ate at the same table where she used to eat with Jimmie and Phaine. She served herself wine and afterward mixed a cocktail while listening to Jimmie’s jazz. Above the record player there was an old photograph of him sitting inside Ronnie Scott’s in London with a Castro-size cigar, staring out at the unfriendly future that would eventually erase him. She rolled a joint after a few squares of chocolate, and all in all it was not what she had wanted or planned; it was just what had happened.
In the afternoons she sometimes walked down to Mandraki and beyond, taking care not to cross paths with the Haldanes. She lay alone on the hot slopes and waited for the girl in the rowing boat to appear. She was glad to talk to someone in Greek and exchange a few euros for the precious weed. Someone who didn’t know her or Jimmie and Phaine. Dorinda was surely not the girl’s real name, but she was not in any way duplicitous. The girl tethered the boat and they sat together among the burning rocks.
“I see the Turk left and went to the mainland,” Dorinda said.
“He’s not Turkish.”
“He came from there. My boyfriend told me about it.”
“They all come from there.”
“Maybe they do, by God.”
“By God” was lovelier in Greek: apo ton theo.
“I thought it was a shipwreck.”
“Maybe it was, apo ton theo. What do you think?”
“Me?” Naomi said. “I don’t care about anything anymore.”
“It’s a good attitude. Are you staying for the summer?”
“For a while. I always stay for the summer.”
“I have some new clients here—from Athens. If you come this way I’ll be here every day. I’ll be a millionaire by September!”
The weed that Naomi smoked on her terrace was earthy and hard-hitting, and it laid her low for the nights when she couldn’t sleep. On rare occasions, Sam joined her and they played checkers and danced together to Jimmie’s records. The American girl was becoming leaner and more tanned. Her hair had begun to show sun-dried streaks, and Naomi knew that she was hanging out with a boy about whom she never spoke.
“But where is Carissa?” Sam asked. “Isn’t she supposed to be back by now?”
“She comes back tomorrow morning. But I’ve decided to let her go. There’s nothing for her to do now. She’ll be upset, though.”
“She won’t turn on you?”
Naomi had been considering exactly this.
“Anyone can turn on anyone. But she won’t.”
“She’s loyal to the family?”
“Something like that.”
Sam snorted scornfully. “That’s a good one!”
“It’s the way we are here, little Sam.”
They got drunk together on mastika, and in the night’s heat their skin became lustrous. Sam told her that her father had become curious about the whereabouts of the Codringtons, and had asked whether they had left the island for good. She’d told him that for all she knew they had. There was some time yet before they returned to New York, and the nightmare was going to consist in keeping up the lie.
“I know, Sam. But we just have to go on as we are. Everyone leaves the island in September. The place is deserted. At that point we’re home safe. You just have to believe.”
—