The waiter brought fresh drinks. Mrs Pargeter was still only half-way down her initial half-litre bottle of retsina, and placed the full one beside it. Joyce, who had drained her first ouzo, fell on the second with disturbing enthusiasm. Larry Lambeth had ordered a glass of Greek brandy. This would have been against the advice of the late Mr Pargeter, who, having sampled it when they were on Crete, had expressed the opinion that, though Greek brandy might well be an excellent rust-removing agent, it had no place in the human digestive system. Larry Lambeth, however, sipped at his drink with apparent fervour, before continuing his explanation.
“No, fact is, Truffler rang me last week, Mrs P. Tipped me off, like, said you was on your way, asked me to look after you, you know, see if there was anything you needed, generally help you out. And of course I said yes. I mean, it would have been a pleasure to help, anyway. I’d have done it without asking, but Mr P. – your husband, that is – he specifically asked me to keep an eye out for you, you know, if there ever was a time I could be of any assistance.”
Mrs Pargeter smiled fondly. It was always heartwarming to find out the careful provisions the late Mr Pargeter had made for her before his death. Not every widow had the benefit of such assiduous long-term protection.
“He was the best,” Larry Lambeth asserted. “The very best, a real prince.”
“Yes,” Mrs Pargeter agreed, a trifle mistily.
♦
The coach drew up once again outside the taverna, having distributed luggage to the various villas of Agios Nikitas. Ginnie, a clipboard and a mess of papers clutched to her bosom, leapt lithely off the vehicle, calling out some pleasantry in Greek. The driver laughed at this parting shot, and drove off in a scream of metal. Mrs Pargeter decided that the previous noisy gear changes had not been dictated solely by the corkscrew roads; they were just part of his driving style.
At the sight of Ginnie, Mr Safari Suit, seated over pork chops with Mrs Safari Suit, called something out, but she resolutely pretended not to hear and strode towards the interior of the taverna. In her haste, she did not notice a couple of papers dislodge themselves from the bundle in her arms and float to the ground.
Mrs Pargeter picked them up, stopping Larry Lambeth who made to rise. “Don’t worry, I’ll give them to her,” she said and followed the rep into the stone building.
The atmosphere inside the taverna was markedly different to that outside. It was dark and, in an indefinable way, primitive. This impression did not derive from the facilities. The gleaming aluminium refrigerated counter, through whose glass front slabs of meat, fish and lobsters could be seen; the CD-player with its attendant racks of boxed CDs; these, and the spotlessness of the marble floor, attested to the taverna’s recent creation or refurbishment. In corners of the mirrored bar were tucked overflashed snapshots of giggling tourists dancing with Spiro and his waiters.
It was the faces inside that gave the primitive feeling. Through a hatch to the kitchen a black-eyed woman looked up at the newcomer’s entrance with an expression of studied vacancy.
The men whose small table by the bar Ginnie had joined also turned their eyes on Mrs Pargeter. There were three sitting there with glasses of ouzo in front of them – Spiro, another, balding man with blue eyes but unmistakably Greek features, and a third dressed in uniform.
Mrs Pargeter’s first impression was that he was the Customs officer who had stopped Joyce at Corfu Airport. The likeness was striking, but a closer look showed differences. The uniform was not the same, either; this man was dressed in light grey. His moustache formed a perfect black isosceles triangle over his mouth, and an upturned peaked cap lay on the table by his glass.
The ancient, slightly deterrent, curiosity in the men’s eyes was echoed in the expression of a photograph over the bar. Though their owner looked old and ill, the dark eyes in the faded picture seemed to dominate the scene like some household god. The photograph’s central position and lavish frame gave the impression of some kind of shrine, and the family likeness left no doubt that its subject was Spiro’s father.
Mrs Pargeter was only allowed to feel like an intruder for a millisecond before Spiro’s customary smile reappeared. He rose to his feet and spread his arms expansively. “Can I help you?”
Mrs Pargeter proffered the dropped papers, which had turned out to be car-hire agreement counterfoils. “You dropped these, Ginnie.”
“Oh, thank you so much.”
She must still have been looking at the photograph, because Spiro confirmed her conjecture. “My father. It was taken just before he died – thirty years ago – but still he keeps an eye on his taverna. Spiro brings good luck to Spiro. The photograph keeps away the Evil Eye.”
The two other men chuckled, as if this had been rather a good joke. Mrs Pargeter gave a little grin and said, “Oh, isn’t that nice?”
The whole episode had taken less than a minute, and she couldn’t explain the feeling it had given her. She had felt a frisson, not exactly of fear, but of sudden awareness of new complexities, of the difference between the tourist surface and reality of Corfu.
At the door she looked back into the room, hoping to recapture and perhaps further define the impression. But all she saw was joviality, the flash of friendly teeth from the men. Only in the proud defiance of the photograph, and the guarded eyes of the woman in the kitchen, could she still feel the depths to the brink of which she had stumbled.
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Package ∧
Five
When she got back to the table, their food had arrived. Joyce was toying with a lamb kebab on rice and in front of Mrs Pargeter’s place was a crisply grilled fish with garnish of a few chips. Between them on the table was a bowl of Greek salad, topped with feta cheese. Joyce was working her way through yet another ouzo.
Mrs Pargeter attacked her fish with relish, while Larry Lambeth further defined his relationship with her late husband.
“Fact is, I worked with him a great deal. I mean, I was never one of the big boys, but I done kind of little jobs for him.”
“Ah.”
A look of modest pride came across his face. “I was involved in, er… Welwyn Garden City.”
Mrs Pargeter looked suitably impressed. “And now you’re living out here, are you?”
“Yeah, well, I always said I’d come back to Greece. I am Greek, you see. My parents was Greek, but I was brought up in London. Lambeth, actually. Where I got the name from.”
“Really?”
“Well, growing up in London, like I did, you had to make a decision. You know, when you go into business, do you play on the ethnic bit or do you just gloss it over? I had to ask myself – do I want to spend the rest of my life known as Nick the Greek? And I decided I didn’t, so I made up Larry Lambeth. Reckoned it was less conspicuous, and the sort of work I do, you don’t want to draw attention to yourself too much.”
“Ah, no, I see.”
“So, you know, at home I was Greek, spoke Greek with the parents and all, but professionally I was, well, just London. So long as I done my work all right, nobody was that interested in where I come from.”
“Right. And now you’ve retired, have you?”
“Yeah, well, in a manner of speaking. Fact is, I always did fancy coming out to Greece at some stage… you know, roots and that. And, not to put too fine a point on it, there was a moment when staying in London suddenly didn’t seem too brilliant an idea.” He leant towards her confidentially. “Fact is, Mrs Pargeter, I got mixed up with a rather dubious bunch. This was after your husband died, of course. I mean, Mr P. was always a great organiser, you run no risks working for him – well, no risks other than the ones naturally associated with our line of work – but after he’d gone, I got mixed up with a real bunch of villains. And, fact is, the moment come when either I had to get out of London sharpish or I might not be able to get out of anywhere for a few years… if you catch my drift?”