He nodded, quick to grasp my meaning, but not moving. "No hurry now," he said gently, and, with the two first fingers and thumb of his right hand together, he touched his forehead from right to left in the Orthodox manner. I saw Sonia's face very white in the beam of the torch. She didn't say anything. She knew as well as I did that Zavelas was right- the old man couldn't possibly have survived under the weight of that fall.
"I'm sorry," Holroyd said, and to give him his due I think he meant it. Probably this was something anthropologists feared, an occupational hazard. "I'll move camp up here and we'll start work right away." His eyes strayed towards the rhinoceros and I knew the incentive to dig was not the recovery of my father's body. His gaze shifted to the roof, squinting up at the cracks as though assessing the danger, measuring it against the scientific potentials. "We'll be back here with all our gear in about an hour." And he walked quickly out towards the bright gleam of sunlight beyond the rubble.
Zavelas patted my arm. "We all have to go some time, fella. And that way it is quick." The sympathy in his voice was real. But then he said, "Now I go and tell Kotiadis." And I knew he was relieved, the old man's death solving a problem that had worried him.
I followed him out of the cave, Sonia's hand in mine, her fingers clasping tight. I didn't look at her. I knew if I did she'd burst into tears. "He's right," she whispered as we came down off the rubble into the hot sun. "It must have been very quick." There was a catch in her voice as she added, "He wouldn't have liked to linger. Better to go whilst he was still driving towards something he believed in."
I could feel her nails in the palm of my hand. "You and I, " I said. "We should have been switched at birth. You'd have understood him."
"He'd still have wanted a son," Her voice sounded infinitely sad.
We were halfway across the platform then and I saw Kotiadis down by the tent. He came to meet us, still wearing the same light grey suit, his face impassive behind his dark glasses. He ignored Zavelas's greeting, walked right past him and thrust one of the notebooks at me. "You see this before?"
I nodded, surprised at the violence in his voice.
"Is written in Russian. Connaisez-vous? What for is he writing in Russian, eh?" His voice was literally trembling, so intense was his feeling at this discovery.
It didn't matter to him that the writer of those notes was dead. He didn't believe it, anyway, convinced that my father had disappeared "for convenience" as he put it. As for the suggestion that the notes were written in Russian for reasons of scientific security, he simply ignored it, firing questions at me in a steady stream-about the old man, about where he had been and where we were planning to go. I suppose he was imder pressure, his superiors and the Middle East tension, but I wasn't in the mood to make allowances. To me he was a stupid, bloody-minded bastard, a typical bureaucrat, and I told him so.
"You are under arrest," he shouted at me. "All of you." He pointed up the channel. "You go with the boat to Vathy now. Then I take you to police headquarters at Levkas."
Anger exploded in me then, exploded into violence, my hands reaching out to grip him by the collar and shake some sense into him. Sonia called to me and I hesitated, and in that moment my arms were seized and pinned to my side in a great bear-hug, Zavelas talking over my shoulder, fast and urgent in Greek. Unable to move, I let the torrent of words pour over me. They were both of them shouting now, the violence of their altercation drumming at the rocks, so that it sounded as though they were having a furious row. Then suddenly it was all over and Kotiadis was smiling, holding out his hand to me. "Pardon," he said. "I did not understand. Please to accept my sympathies." Zavelas released me then and Kotiadis added, "Now we must recover Dr. Van der Voort's body." The way he said it, the watchful, wary look in his eyes, I knew the future depended on that-the finding of my father's body.
Sonia's hand touched mine, a gesture of understanding, of sympathy, but I shook her off. I didn't want sympathy. I just wanted the clock turned back, the years in Amsterdam again. Atonement for my own callousness. I felt unutterably depressed. Not so much at the old man's death, but because of the wasted years.
It was in this mood that I took Kotiadis up to the cave and began clearing the loose debris of the new fall, Sonia working beside me, both of us for our own individual reasons endeavouring to lose ourselves in the hard physical work of shifting rock. Holroyd returned, bringing Cartwright, Hans and Vassilios with him. They had tools and a pressure lamp, but no wheelbarrow, so that everything still had to be taken out to the rubble pile by hand. It was hard, back-breaking work, fine rock dust hanging in clouds, clogging our nostrils.
By one-thirty the whole outline of the rhinoceros was clear on the wall again and we had progressed to the point where the cave was almost as deep as when I had surprised my father working in it late that night. We broke for lunch then, Sonia having come back with Florrie and a great pile of sandwiches they had cut on board. Apparently Bert had located a shelf of rock and the boat was moored bows-on to the shore with an anchor out astern. "He's planning a dive this afternoon." Florrie was looking tired and strained.
"Well, tell him to be careful," I said, conscious still of the atmosphere of this place and not wanting another tragedy.
She gave me a wan smile. "You don't have to worry about Bert when it comes to diving. It's something he's really good at.
I knew that. I'd watched him dive in the harbour at Patmos. And then later, under his instructions, I'd gone down myself in shallow water off Leros. I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't had complete confidence in him. But to start diving now. . "It would be more help if he came ashore and gave us a hand."
"He's not thinking of helping you," she said. "It's just to take his mind off things."
It was shortly after the lunch break that Hans uncovered the end of the crowbar. We felt we were near then, but time passed as we worked more carefully at the fact and we found nothing. It was all broken rock and the roof unsafe, the ceiling fractured so that you could pull great chunks of limestone away with your hands. Zavelas had brought three men from Spiglia and by evening we were in a distance of about eight yards. For the last hour Kotiadis had stood watching us. It was not difficult to guess what he was thinking.
We packed it in at sunset and, apart from the crowbar, all we had found was the old man's watch and a tin filled with carbide. They were not more than a foot apart. It would seem that, after refilling his acetylene lamp and lighting it, he had laid the carbide tin down and then, perhaps because he knew he had some hard, jarring work ahead of him with the crowbar, he had removed his watch from his wrist and put it down beside the tin. The watch was a write-off, of course, the face and works completely shattered. It had a stainless steel case and the leather strap was almost black with sweat. Sonia said he had bought it in Russia, but marks on the case showed that it was Swiss-made.
The only man who was satisfied that night was Holroyd. What looked like the head of a deer superimposed on the rump of some larger animal had been uncovered, and on the opposite wall the vague outline of a very complex drawing was just beginning to emerge. He was impatient for the morning when Zavelas had promised to bring more men and also at least one wheelbarrow. With a wheelbarrow the work would go much faster and he was sure that they would break through into an undamaged gallery beyond the fall.