Bond smiled. 'No. I sometimes think I never will be. What will you have?'
'Ouzo and ice,' said the girl, glancing up at the waiter. 'Not that Sans Rival stuff you serve all the time. Have you Boutari?'
'Certainly, madam. And for you, sir?'
'The same. Plenty of ice.'
'You know ouzo?' The girl looked at Bond consideringly. 'You know Greece well?'
'Greece I know a little and love what I know. Ouzo I know much better: a Greek version of Pernod with a much more sinister smell but similar effects. Love would be too starry-eyed a word to use there.'
'That's a slander. And not accurate. The French took it from us and flavoured it with aniseed and dyed it green. Horrible! My name is Ariadne Alexandrou.'
'Mine is Bond, James Bond. How did you know just now that I spoke English?'
The girl laughed again. 'Most people do. And you look English, Mr Bond. Nobody could mistake you, not even for an American.'
'As a matter of fact I'm not strictly English at all. Half Scottish, half Swiss.'
'The English have swallowed you, then. What are you doing in Athens? Business or pleasure?'
'Business, but I hope to get some pleasure in while I'm here.'
Ariadne Alexandrou returned Bond's gaze for a moment without reacting to it, then turned away to observe critically as the two small tumblers of cloudy drink - the cloudiness curling whitely outwards from the ice-cubes like liquid smoke - were set in front of them and as much again of water added. Bond watched her lovely profile, very Greek yet totally unlike the overrated, beaky, 'classical' look one associates with old coins, a carefully-finished sculpture overlaid with the softest tints of tan and white and olive and rose. The effect was set off by earrings in an ancient style, small thick hoops of beaten gold.
No doubt it was for her splendid appearance and obvious quickness of mind that she had been picked by the enemy - of whose presence behind the events of the past five minutes Bond was no longer in the smallest doubt. All the girl's apparent confidence and warmth had not been able to disguise the patness and predictability of the way she had established acquaintance with him. He guessed that, left to herself, she would have stage-managed things with more imagination. Some plodding middle-echelon spymaster had come up with that amorous-Turk routine. Encouraging: the other side were getting lazy. Bond brushed aside the thought that they could afford to.
The girl Ariadne had raised her glass and was looking at him with a kind of down-turning smile that might have been ugly on anyone else, but in her case only emphasized the marvellously delicate yet firm lines of her lips.
'I know the sort of thing you expect me to say now.' The smile turned upward. ' "In Greece, when we drink to someone, we say _ees iyían__, your health, or colloquially _yássou__." Well, sometimes we do, but half the time it's "cheers" and "here's looking at you" these days.' The smile faded. 'Greece isn't very Greek any more. Every year less. I'm being a little conservative and sentimental just by asking for ouzo. The newest people want vodkatini, or Scotch and soda. Are you free for dinner, Mr Bond? Shall we go out somewhere together?'
Despite himself, Bond smiled in his turn. He was beginning to enjoy the girl's tactic of wandering away from the point and then jumping back to it with a direct question. But the other half of his mind was cursing. Why hadn't he taken the simple, obvious precaution of getting something under his belt before allowing the enemy to make contact? He could visualize, as clearly as if it had already happened, the deserted street where she would lead him, the men closing in, the car, the long drive to and across the Bulgarian frontier, and then.... Bad enough on a full stomach, he thought wryly. Was there another way?
Bond sipped the deceptively mild drink, its flavour reminding him as always of the paregoric cough-sweets he had sucked as a child, before he answered. 'Splendid, I'd love to do that. But why don't we eat in the hotel? I've done a lot of travelling today and- '
'Oh, but nobody dines at the Grande Bretagne unless they have to. It's not exciting. I'll take you somewhere where they have real Greek food. You like that?'
'Yes.' Perhaps he should come part-way into the open. 'It's just that I should hate to be prevented from getting to grips with it. I've never liked being sent to bed without any supper.'
A flicker of alarm showed in the light-brown eyes, to be instantly followed by blankness. 'I don't know what you mean. All the good restaurants stay open late. What they have they will give you. The Greeks have the oldest tradition of hospitality in Europe. And that's not tourist-bureau talk. You'll see.'
The hell with it, thought Bond savagely - what could he do but play along? It was far too early to start trying to capture the initiative. He decided to give in gracefully.
'Forgive me,' he said. 'I'm too used to England, where you have to choose between dining early and reasonably well, and late and badly - if at all. I'm in your hands,' he added. And meant it.
Three minutes later they stood on the steps of the hotel between the Ionic columns. Constitution Square was ablaze with light: the BEA offices, Olympic Airlines, TWA on the far side beyond the rows of trees, American Express to the right, the gentler illumination of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to the left. What Ariadne Alexandrou had said about the decreasing Greekness of Greece came to Bond's mind. In thirty years, he reflected, perhaps sooner, there would be one vast undifferentiated culture, one complex of superhighways, hot-dog stands and neon, interrupted only by the Atlantic, stretching from Los Angeles to Jerusalem; possibly, by then, as far as Calcutta, three-quarters of the way round the world. Where there had been Americans and British and French and Italians and Greeks and the rest, there would be only citizens of the West, uniformly affluent, uniformly ridden by guilt and neurosis, uniformly alcoholic and suicidal, uniformly everything. But was that prospect so hopelessly bad? Bond asked himself. Even at the worst, not as bad as all that was offered by the East, where conformity did not simply arise as if by accident, but was consciously imposed to the hilt by the unopposed power of the State. There were still two sides: a doubtfully, conditionally right and an unconditionally, unchangeably wrong.
The grey-uniformed commissionaire blew his whistle and a taxi, to all appearance innocently cruising, swung in to the kerb. Bond laid his fingers on Ariadne's upper arm as he walked her over. The flesh was firm and the skin deliciously cool. She spoke briefly to the driver, an elderly, paunchy type who, again, looked the soul of innocence, and they were away.
Ariadne studied Bond's profile. As always, her employers' instructions had been confined to essentials. She had been told only to induce the Englishman to go with her to a designated area where fellow-workers would take over the operation from her. What would happen to him afterwards was no concern of hers - officially. But, more and more, the question bothered her as a woman, a woman who had learnt to recognize on sight the kind of man who knew how to love. Bond was such a man. She was certain, too, that he found her desirable. She had always been a loyal servant of her cause, and not for a moment did she seriously contemplate disobeying orders, allowing Bond to take her home after dinner and do with her whatever he wanted. Ariadne only wished, passionately, that it had been possible. That mouth was made to give her brutal kisses, not to become distorted in a grimace of agony; those hands existed to caress her body, not to be stamped on by the torturer's boot. These images were so painfully vivid that she could find almost nothing to say as the taxi approached the slopes of the Acropolis.