They were still tipsy from the afternoon’s gin, and Sam was the tipsier of the two.
“My parents never take me anywhere like this,” she said. “Is this for real?” She examined the gold rims on the plates.
It was clear that the waiters had known Naomi since she was a little girl. They brought out a Ktima Chardonnay from Pendeli, Mister Jimmie’s favorite juice. The food came when they were halfway through the bottle: “Parmesan” with girolles, puff pastry with Brillat-Savarin, and then a plate of olive oil from Hania. The waiter at their table told them that there was once a cult of Dionysus at Pendeli. The waiters always told the same story when they ordered the Ktima. Ancient wine, then, ancient apart from the Chardonnay, that is. They took a second bottle of it.
“Did you really come here when you were a kid?” Sam asked.
“My parents used to bring me here to civilize me, I think. It was much nicer back then—the city, I mean. Everything. We can come here every week if you like.”
“I wish we could live at the Grande Bretagne for the rest of the summer. I’m sick of the island.”
“It’ll be all right. I have some news. The English guy is leaving for Italy. He got a call from his office—”
“He’s leaving?”
Naomi lowered her voice and leaned in.
“The credit card was used over there. It means Jimmie and Phaine are still alive and kicking. Isn’t that wild?”
“So there are ghosts after all.”
“There are. And they like buying expensive things. Apparently, it was a pair of shoes.”
“Sick.”
“He’s leaving today, I think.”
“But what will he find over there?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea. I guess he’ll hunt down Faoud and not find him. I hope Faoud has the sense to ditch the car and disappear. They’ll put out a search on the number plates.”
“But what if they catch him?”
“Then we’re in the chocolate, as the French say. Dans le chocolat.”
“In the shit?”
“Way in it. But they won’t find him. I wouldn’t have done it if I thought he was stupid. He’s not stupid.”
“He may not be stupid, but he might get greedy.”
“I don’t think he’ll be stupid enough to be greedy,” Naomi said with a degree of finality. “Let’s have the chocolate parfait, shall we? It’s more important than worrying about an English bloodhound. We’re going to be safe.”
The parfait came with a mango sorbet and they had a serving of Spondi’s specialty coffee from Giovanni Erbisti in Verona. They went afterward into the garden to drink their digestifs, sit under the trees, and talk. Sam noticed that Naomi had already found her groove after the death of her father and stepmother. She was mapping out her next phase of life with a formidable composure. It was, now that the younger woman saw it up close, quite unsettling and unnatural in some way. At first she had thought it was high spirits, or else discipline, an ability to overcome grief. But suddenly in the garden of Spondi she began to think that it was something else altogether. The way Naomi had stepped quietly from one life into another revealed a certain degree of premeditation. Naomi, she thought, had been thinking about this liberation for years, and when it had come—albeit accidentally and unexpectedly—she had opened the door offered and walked through it without hesitation. But also without fuss. It was as if she had planned everything down to the last detail and was therefore unsurprised when things did not fail to go according to plan. Imperturbably cold and clairvoyant. She was maybe much more like her father than either of them had ever been able to admit.
When they were finally back in the suite upstairs at the Grande Bretagne, Sam opened the windows and glanced down at Syntagma Square and the parliament opposite it. She suddenly wanted to be alone for a few minutes. A few anarchists, a few fires in drums, and by the steps leading up to the parliament a line of soldiers standing under the lamps, an insufficient line to hold a riot. She turned and saw Naomi already between the sheets in her T-shirt. They smiled at each other, and the older girl blew a strand of hair out of her own face and said, “There’s going to be a very silly revolution tomorrow.”
Sam came to the bed and sat at its far end, uncertain where she was going to lay her head. Things were not quite clear between them yet. The earlier conversation had not been laid to rest entirely, and Sam still felt that she harbored within herself the wariness of the hunted.
“It would be better,” she said.
“It would, wouldn’t it? It’s always better to get it over and done with.”
“Naomi, do you think—” she paused—“is it possible that Faoud killed your father and stepmother on purpose?”
Naomi took this in her stride, with her usual nonchalance.
“Anything’s possible.”
“That’s what I thought. Pretty much anything.”
“And what if he did? What does that change?”
“Nothing.”
‘That’s right. When I was small my father had a horrible toast. He used to say, when he lifted his glass and touched yours, ‘Here’s to killing marmots.’ I never knew what it meant, but now I think I do.”
“I don’t understand that at all,” Sam said.
“It’s a British thing, I guess. But as I said, I didn’t understand it either. It just made me laugh.”
“But why?” Sam said earnestly. “You mean the world is violent anyway?”
“Maybe.”
Naomi reached out and touched Sam’s cheek with the back of her hand, then keeled over slowly until she was lying next to her.
“But not us.”
“What are we, then?”
“We’re the noble ones. We’re undoing the violence of others.”
Sam’s eyes were wide open, and she stared straight up at the ceiling where shadows merged. A part of her mind had split off.
“What have we undone, then? We’re profiting from it.”
“That’s just an accident.”
Naomi blew the strands of hair out of Sam’s face now.
“One has to learn how to improvise. It’s all a war, in the end. It’s a war we have to win.”
“Did we win yet?”
“Not yet. But we will.”
We’re drunk, Sam thought, and just babbling.
Nevertheless, it could be said that she had won something. She had won her independence.
“I feel like a bank robber,” she said weakly, her eyes finally closing. “Running and running. But sort of happy.”
“It’s the running that’s fun.”
“But I have to go back to New York. Then I don’t know.”