'Very well,' I said.
'About nine? In the meantime, keep this to yourself.'
'Of course,' I said.
'You'll be the loser if you don't.' Mister Bowles nodded significantly and looked intently at me from under the brim of his hat. 'You'll lose everything.' he said.
It was with these words echoing in my mind that I turned away from him, started scrambling up out of the hollow. They are in my mind now. How long I have been sitting here, writing to your Excellency, I don't know. I lose count of time here at my table. Time, in any case, is running out for me, as it is for Mister Bowles, and you too, Excellency, I think. I will never get the money now, never get off this island. I must write everything down before it is too late. Already I know with sadness that things have been missed and lost, impressions, complexities of meaning, significant facts even, that will never now find their way into this report. Inevitable, I suppose. Now all my waking thoughts are devoted to this work of mine. Even when I am with others I am formulating phrases, looking for the significant detail with which to enlighten Your Excellency.
I have forgotten to eat today and now I am hungry, but there is no food here. Mister Bowles mentioned a drink, perhaps food will be included. Nine, he said. I should think it must be six now, perhaps a little later: the sea has assumed its evening softness and depth, the sky is paling. I must rest a little, Excellency.
The sun had set when I awoke. I made coffee – it is here before me now. I rate the coffee bean above the olive among God's gifts to man. My legs and shoulders ache from the exertions of earlier. I look from my window at the luminous after-glow on the sea. The sky a gauze-rose suffusion. I look along the shore to the darkening hills where I stalked Mister Bowles today. As the sky loses light the trees along the sky line lose distinctness, they soften like charred wood. Minutes after this charring of the trees darkness will fall, abruptly, like some dark stuff with scents in its folds, smells of dust and pine and the faint brackish odour of the night-time sea.
Again, as on that first evening, the evening of our meeting, I picture Mister Bowles in his room. He will stand at his window, looking out at the nightfall. How, I wonder, did he become what he is? Natural delinquency or some process of disillusionment? Perhaps he discovered his gift by accident, as I discovered mine. I feel we are kindred spirits. Passionate and fraudulent Mister Bowles. Mon semblable, mon frère. How will he keep his bearings in this sudden descent of night? Here in the Levant, darkness comes too soon for the stranger, comes before he has time to create his night-time being. Will Mister Bowles be caught unawares before there is time for the stiff upper lip? It is not like the gradual English nightfall, Excellency, that I have read of in their poets but never seen, resignation coming with the waning light, the waverings of gnats, the last songs of birds. There the heart is given time to attune itself, to find some form of pensiveness or melancholy, not unpleasing. In England they are schooled in this gentle stoicism, but how does he feel here, with darkness imposed like a gesture almost, gesture of extinction? I see him for these few minutes at the window, overtaken by darkness, with the crooked line of his past behind him and the short straight line in front. He stands there, aware of aspirations disappointed, ambitions unfulfilled. And now just one ambition, simple and immense.
Excellency, I know what terra rossa is. And with that knowledge other things have fallen into place. But I must deal first with Mister Bowles.
I went straight to his room. He was there before me, as I expected, but it could not have been much before, because when he opened his door I saw signs of chaos and confusion behind him, saw it even before entering, clothes on the floor, a chest of drawers with gaping apertures where the drawers should have been. He had not had time to put this in order. Where had he been then, while I had been writing, sleeping, writing? He must have left the site well before dark.
'Yes,' he said, no doubt seeing my eyes widen. 'Someone has been having a jolly good look at my possessions. Come in, anyway. It will not take long to put things to rights.'
I sat on the bed, watched him bundle clothes back into drawers, into the wardrobe. 'Is anything missing?' I said.
'Not as far as I can see. There's nothing much here except for a few clothes. I always travel light, you know.'
'Except for marble heads,' I said.
Mister Bowles paused in his tidying, and looked at me. 'H'm, yes,' he said. 'But that was necessary.' No slightest sign of a smile on his face. He seems almost totally lacking in humour. Perhaps it is just this deficiency that makes him so successful as a trickster. But it is not enough to explain his unnerving air of being always justified. 'They must think I'm an absolute idiot,' he said.
'Why?' At this moment, by a fortunate chance, I leaned forward on the bed and as I did so I glanced down and saw the little notebook with shiny black covers lying just underneath.
'To think I would leave anything valuable lying about in my room,' he said.
He could not yet have realised it was there. Otherwise, I reasoned, he would immediately have retrieved it. Casually I moved a-little along the bed. The diary was now within reach of my foot. 'Probably Izzet, or some of his minions,' I said. 'They will be trying to find out if you have taken anything of value from the site.'
'I suppose so,' he said. 'They stopped me and searched me as I was coming back today. The two soldiers stationed above the site. I don't think they knew what they were looking for. In any case, it is quite absurd. They can't see the site itself, nor a good part of the ground below it. There are a thousand hiding places there.'
'It is more serious than you seem to think,' I said. 'They won't wait much longer. Your life is in danger. Mine too.'
Mister Bowles was crouching at the chest of drawers with his back to me. I extended my foot, kicked the diary towards me, bent down, picked it up. I had no time to do more than slip it behind my back, before Mister Bowles looked round at me. 'I'm a British subject,' he said.
'You are as liable as any other subject to die of a knife between the ribs,' I said. 'Take my advice before it is too late. Let them have the papers back on the terms they have offered.'
He straightened and turned to face me. 'And the statue?' he said. 'You don't understand. I have a responsibility now.'
Excellency, I cannot describe the earnestness, the conviction, with which he said these words. I heard in them the final death-knell of all my hopes. It was at this point, I think, that the idea of betraying Mister Bowles began to germinate in my mind, though it is difficult to be precise about beginnings – the seed had no doubt been dormant there a long time, waiting for the right weather, the right blend of fear and disappointment. 'But our deal,' I said. 'The agreement… what about that? It is all over, then?'
'Not at all,' Mister Bowles said. 'All I need is a day or two longer, that's all. That's where you come in, actually. Look, let me tell you how I came to find the statue, then maybe you'll see…'
'All right,' I said.
'I'm going to have a glass of beer and a sandwich up here in my room,' he said. 'Would you like to join me?'
In accents I took care not to make too delighted, I assented to this. He rang the bell and Biron appeared almost at once. The sandwiches were ordered, salami for me, cheese for Mister Bowles. While this was going on I managed to transfer the diary from the bed behind me to my side pocket. Biron was polite and attentive, but he did not look at me, he did not look into my face, either then or when he returned with the food and drink.
'I have been wanting to talk to someone about it,' Mister Bowles said, as soon as Biron had gone.
Over the beer and the sandwiches, he told me about it, told me in that halting, curiously compelling way of his, with blurts of eloquence and self-revelation. I shall give his own words where they seem particularly vivid or revealing. But for the most part I shall use oratio oblique. In short, Excellency, what follows is Mister Bowles's story transmuted into art. It will help towards the effect, however, if you will try to picture Mister Bowles himself, sitting opposite to me, face dark red from the sun, pale eyes glinting, hair smooth and neat in the lamplight.