Marine diesel spares … Still attached to the small crane that had presumably swung them ashore. From which of the boats, though? From Why Worry, of Dubrovnik? Lady Luck, of Istanbul? Ciaou Ciaou, of Brindisi? Their chrome fittings flashed in the sun. Their spotless white paintwork gleamed. None of them looked like the kind of vessel that might be shipping crates of marine diesel spares around the Mediterranean.
Giorgios smiled. He had a pretty good idea what was in that comfortably placed crate, and it wasn’t marine diesel spares. It was cash. Used banknotes from all over the eastern Mediterranean. Everyone knew that the function of the Fred Toppler Foundation for Mr. Papadopoulou was to launder the proceeds from some of his other enterprises. Giorgios had no idea what money laundering involved, but he liked the feeling that something useful was going on here, some clean and wholesome operation that made the world a better place.
He leaned back against the solid comfort of all that money and lit a cigarette. He had scarcely taken his first long, consoling drag, though, when the world fell to pieces around him. He was sprawling on his back, his support gone. The currency had collapsed! It was flying in the sky above his head. He struggled to sit up. The crate was swinging away out over the water, and the crane it was swinging from was being operated by Reg Bolt, the director of security. Giorgios threw his cigarette into the water and scrambled to his bare wet feet.
Reg Bolt, though, was gazing at him as if it was not Giorgios but he himself who had been caught napping. He was offering some kind of explanation, but since it was in English Giorgios had no idea what he was saying, only that it referred to the crate, which was now heading away from the dockside on the deck of a trim white launch. The marine diesel spares were not imports, they were exports, and the launch was heading for the biggest of all the yachts out there—Rusalka of Sevastopol.
After Reg Bolt had gone, and Giorgios was left to drag his socks up over his wet feet, he couldn’t help wondering what it was that the Fred Toppler Foundation could be exporting to Sevastopol, in the personal transport of one of Russia’s great oligarchs. Perhaps it was the finished products of the laundry operation. What was laundered money like? Perhaps it wasn’t just figures written in a bank account, or zeroes on the screen of a computer, as Giorgios had vaguely supposed. Perhaps it was banknotes going back out again, hundredweights of them, crates of them, freshly pressed and starched, wrapped in soft tissue paper, to be laid out by Mr. Skorbatov’s valet for his personal use.
* * *
Nikki hurriedly blindly from one final check, one last-minute problem, to the next. Eric Felt appeared out of nowhere, bulging accusingly at her, and holding up a small gray object. “A toe,” he said. “I found it near the new swimming pool. One of your people has obviously bashed into something. I shall have to report this to Christian. He’s going to be very upset.”
“Superglue,” said Nikki. But what she was thinking about was how Dr. Wilfred had told her he had once been older than he was now.
“Salt-free onion-free,” said Yannis, when she went into the kitchens, showing her a single portion of mushrooms à la grecque in its own skillet. “And it’s also kosher veggie, because hey, what the hell?”
“Brilliant,” she said. “Not that it matters anymore.”
“Not matter?” said Yannis. “If he’s allergic? If he’s gonna swell up and get red spots and choke to death?”
“Not anymore, he isn’t,” she said. “Unfortunately.” But all she could see were the wet footprints outside her window.
And no sign of him anywhere. Not that she knew what she was going to say to him when she found him. Or what she was going to do about it.
She was angry, though. Angry with him for making her ridiculous. Angry with herself for letting him. He had looked around — and picked her out to be his victim. He had destroyed her professional credibility and all her hopes for the future.
What kind of lecture was he going to give, anyway? Had he somehow got hold of the real Dr. Wilfred’s text? Or was he going to invent some lecture of his own? A mockery of a lecture? A hoax lecture, in the spirit of the masquerade he had been — was still — performing? Or would it be no lecture at all? Perhaps, when the moment came for him to stand up, he would remain sitting. Or stand up and say nothing. Or prove to have slipped away into the darkness a moment earlier.
But where was he?
And where was the real Dr. Wilfred?
And which of them was going to be standing up to give the Fred Toppler Lecture in two hours’ time?
And if neither of them was, then?
The first thing she had to do, obviously, was to tell Mrs. Toppler what had happened. And to do it before she read out the eulogious introduction that Nikki had written for her to someone who wasn’t Dr. Norman Wilfred at all. Or even to someone who was, supposing he should suddenly turn up, if Mrs. Toppler thought he wasn’t. Or to no one at all.
But how could she tell her, when it would finish her career? Not that she wanted to become director of the Fred Toppler Foundation just at the moment. Or to remain there in any capacity.
Or to be anywhere else on this earth.
* * *
Behind the screens around the new swimming pool the contractors were still working, apparently oblivious of any aspect of European civilization but the financial penalties for failure to complete on schedule. They were contributing to the intellectual life of the community, however, because Chris Binns, the foundation’s writer in residence, gazing out of the window of his room in Epictetus watching the dump trucks emerging from behind the screens, had at last had the idea for a poem.
He had been struggling to find a subject for some time. He obviously had to write something while he was here. If you went to be writer in residence somewhere you had to come back with more than just a suntan and a jar of the local honey. You were supposed to have written a poem, or preferably a whole sequence of poems. Something that alluded to the local landscape, certainly. But not, obviously, just saying how blue the sky was, and how nice the bougainvillea looked. It had to be something that crept up on the place obliquely. Obscurely. Ironically. Something that referenced bits of the place’s history and mythology that no one else knew about. That needed footnotes, and that would provide material for the thesis that a PhD candidate somewhere would one day be writing about you. He could see the thesis more clearly than he could see the poem. “This haunting and elusive work was written during a summer that Binns spent on the island of Skios, and interweaves the crisis of creative barrenness and existential purposelessness from which he was at that time suffering with the vibrant local resonances of…”
Of what, though? This was the problem. Of blue seas and purple bougainvillea? Of all the vibrant local resonances that had already been interwoven with his predecessors’ spiritual crises each year since this place had been open?
Now, however, he seemed to have cracked it. The poem was going to revolve around the figure of Athena. His idea was that the contractors digging out the new swimming pool had hit upon the site of the temple that was supposed to have been dedicated to her, and in some kind of half-hinted, largely incomprehensible way disturbed the goddess’s spirit. Since, as he had discovered from his researches on the Internet, she was the goddess not only of wisdom but of civilization, which was what the foundation was dedicated to, he could see considerable ironic possibilities opening up here. Wearing her helmet and chiton (whatever a chiton was — he could look it up later), carrying her shield, and accompanied by her traditional attendance of serpents, she would emerge from behind the screens and join in the life of the foundation. She might go to a class on Greek mythology. Take off her chiton and sunbathe. Come to one of Chris’s creative writing classes and read him some little epic or tragedy she had written.