Giorgios shrugged and waved Oliver in.
“Let’s hope we meet again!” said Chuck Friendly to Oliver. “I have a number of ideas about the possibility of creating something out of nothing that are remarkably consonant with yours, and I greatly look forward to exploring them with you!”
He raised his arm to wave good-bye, and Oliver couldn’t help noticing the gleam of the handcuffs that connected him to one of his companions.
* * *
The young woman behind the screen inside the lodge finished the phone call she had been making and looked at the passport and the lecture that the security man was holding.
“Dr. Wilfred!” she said. “It’s you! You’re here! Hi! I’m so happy! We talk, talk, talk on the phone, but I never see you! Where you been? You get lost again? You get eaten from goats? Nikki’s going crazy! I call her.” She dialed as she talked. “You just got time to change! You know where to find your room? No, you don’t! You’re going to get lost again! You’re going to phone me—‘Where am I?’
“Wait — I get you a buggy … Nikki! He’s here!”
38
“Dr. Wilfred!” cried Mrs. Comax. Oliver was trying to slip past the Temple of Athena unobserved, since he was no longer Dr. Wilfred, but merely Oliver Fox on his way to recover his passport and go. Everyone, though, was just at that moment beginning to emerge from the temple to move on to the agora for dinner, and now that Mrs. Comax had spotted him he was caught and surrounded.
“Oh, Dr. Wilfred!” The name pressed in upon him from all sides. “We’ve all been looking for you, Dr. Wilfred! We thought you’d despaired of us poor simpletons, Dr. Wilfred, and abandoned us!”
Oliver wondered whether to confess the truth to them, now that the game was over, but no one had believed him when he had tried before, and it scarcely seemed worth the effort of trying again, or the social disruption it would entail, since as soon as he had fetched his passport he would have vanished from their lives. And since, after all, at any moment the real Dr. Wilfred would almost certainly show up and do the job for him.
* * *
There was a young man just coming out of Parmenides as Dr. Wilfred approached it. He was wearing three-quarter-length orange skateboarding trousers and a plum-colored T-shirt that bulged obsequiously at Dr. Wilfred as he passed. All thought of him went out of Dr. Wilfred’s mind, though, when he opened the door of the guest suite. Another guest was obviously already in occupation. There were clothes scattered everywhere — shirts, trousers, underwear. On the luggage rack a suitcase lay open, with more clothes tumbling from it like fruit from a cornucopia, so profusely that it took Dr. Wilfred a moment to see that it had a red leather address tag.
He stood stock-still for a moment, then put his passport and the text of his lecture carefully down on the desk and opened the flap of the luggage tag. “Dr. Norman Wilfred,” it said. The name smiled up at him like a reflection in a mirror. It was his suitcase. He picked up a handful of the scattered shirts and underpants. The patterns on the shirts were old friends. They were his shirts. The underpants were pure silk. They were his underpants. He and his lost luggage had been reunited. It was not some other guest who was occupying the room. It was himself.
Presumably the airline had somehow found the address and sent the suitcase on. But why was it open? Why had the contents been taken out and thrown around? Someone must have come in and opened it. He looked at the padlock. Yes, it had been forced. That unsavory-looking young man who had been leaving as he approached … He had been ransacking the room when he had heard the buggy outside …
Never mind. The important thing was that he had clean clothes to change into. His evening lecturing trousers. Yes, crumpled, but still with creases in them. His clean soft silk underpants. He rubbed them between finger and thumb, and sniffed their cleanness. He pressed them affectionately against his cheek to feel their softness. The silk snagged against the unshaven whiskers on his cheek. Yes — first, a shave.
Where was his razor, though? And his toothbrush, for that matter, and all the rest of the stuff in his toilet bag? Where was the toilet bag?
He pushed open the bathroom door. And there it all was, scattered around the basin. There was a chef’s toque of lather on the shaving brush. Someone had been using his shaving things! The cap was off the toothpaste. They had even used his toothbrush!
That young man with the obsequious stomach. He hadn’t been stealing Dr. Wilfred’s things — he had been using them. He had been living in the room!
Dr. Wilfred felt the lather on the shaving brush. It was dry. The toothpaste spilling from the open tube was caked hard. The young man had been here all day. He looked at the bed. The man had slept here. He must have arrived the night before. In fact he must have been on the same plane as Dr. Wilfred, since he had stolen his bag from the carousel. And then been met by whoever was meeting Dr. Wilfred. And persuaded them he was Dr. Wilfred!
Everything was at last becoming clear.
And if the man had been shown to Dr. Wilfred’s room … if he had been allowed to remain in it all day … he must have continued to pass himself off as Dr. Wilfred … Was presumably still doing so.
He had taken over Dr. Wilfred’s identity. He had stolen his life.
And where was he now? He was out there somewhere having predinner drinks, being introduced to scholars and millionaires. As Dr. Norman Wilfred. Some young delinquent in skateboarding trousers!
It suddenly came into Dr. Wilfred’s head what the impostor was intending to do. He was going to give the Fred Toppler Lecture.
No — not possible! Dr. Wilfred had the lecture here, on the desk in front of him. He picked it up and glanced through it. “… the challenges facing us today … the hopes and fears of mankind…” He put his arms round it and pressed it against his chest. How right he had been never to let it out of his sight!
But perhaps the fake lecturer had a fake lecture? Perhaps he was planning to deliver a text of his own invention? Some thesis that blithely ignored the challenges, that mocked and derided the hopes and fears?
No, it was ridiculous. He was simply having one of those moments of panic that you laugh at afterward. In any case, the imposture was now over, since he himself, the real Dr. Wilfred, had arrived.
Perhaps he should quickly shave and change, then get out there and make absolutely sure that everyone understood that it was he who was he. No, not even shave and change. He could do that later. Even unshaven and unchanged he was who he was.
* * *
“Oliver Fox,” said Eric Felt for the tenth time, as if repetition might somehow tease a little more meaning out of the name. “And he told everyone! That’s the ridiculous thing! I was there! I heard him! ‘I’m Oliver Fox,’ he said. But he said it in a kind of funny way, so everyone thought it was a joke. I knew it wasn’t. That’s why I went and searched his room.”
He and Christian were sitting in the shuttered darkness of Empedocles, with the passport that Eric had found in Dr. Norman Wilfred’s room lying on the low table between them. Christian was bent over it, trying to catch what little light there was from the tiny sanctuary lamps, almost concealing it behind his drizzle of lank gray hair. Dr. Norman Wilfred gazed back at him from under his own blond mop. But the face was not the property of Dr. Norman Wilfred. It belonged to someone called Oliver Fox.