Still this poor broken specimen was silent.
“Come on!” she said. “Wake up! Make an effort! This little rat has stolen your life!”
God, the effort one always had to make with men! It should have been the other way round! It should have been him struggling to persuade her!
“You’re not worrying about your starving lady friend, are you? I’ll tell you where she is by this time. At the dinner! With him! Eating her head off!”
He seemed to have forgotten about her, though. She had blown into his life by some sequence of mistakes and coincidences. Now, by some further sequence of mistakes and coincidences, she had blown out of it again.
“I’ve had a rather difficult day, one way and another,” he said. “I think what I should really like to do is go back to the villa, if that’s all right with you. We could finish the canapés. Get an early night, perhaps.”
She looked at him. He wasn’t beginning to nourish any illusions about her, was he? It would be typical, of course. A bird in the hand — just what Oliver could never resist.
Yes. Well. Nevertheless. She modified her approach a little.
“We’re going to be doing this together,” she said softly, and kept her eyes fixed on him until he felt the pressure of her gaze, and glanced round at her. She smiled. He looked away, then looked at her again. She switched on the interior light, so that perhaps he could see, in her wide-open dark Latin eyes, the tawny splash of Baltic amber in the pupils.
She had plainly unsettled him a little. She had unsettled herself a little, too, she realized, now that she was looking at him so hard. He wasn’t quite as old and broken as she had supposed. In the dim light of the taxi, with the red baldness of his head and the scruffiness of his clothes hidden in the shadows, he was, well, not so insignificant, after all. Some lingering traces remained of the importance that he had described to her over the canapés. He wasn’t remotely the man she knew in her heart that she really deserved, that quiet, laughing, considerate giant, who would be romping with the children when she came back from an exhausting day of negotiations with her fellow bankers in Zurich — and who would break off to throw his arms round her and whirl her around until he and she and all six children collapsed laughing on the hearth rug in front of the crackling log fire. He was obviously something of a figure in the world, though. In demand to speak at international conferences and festivals. She saw heads turning and cameras flashing as he and she arrived in Montreal or Montevideo for their joint presentation …
An absurd thought. All the same, she made sure that when he looked round at her again he found her still softly gazing at him. He smiled. A little ruefully, perhaps, a little awkwardly, but resignedly.
So — they were going to do it. They were going to finish Mr. Oliver Fox once and for all. Slay the dragon at last that had wrought such havoc up and down the land.
She leaned towards the driver.
“Step on it, will you, Stavros? It is Stavros, isn’t it?”
“Spiros,” said Spiros.
Instead of going faster, though, he was slowing down. The taxi was plowing through some sort of obstruction. It appeared in the headlights to be a broken suitcase that someone had abandoned in the middle of the road, with a long trail of dusty shoes and clothes spilling out of it.
“Disgusting, what some people do with their rubbish,” said Annuka Vos.
Dr. Wilfred said nothing.
* * *
Still Nikki stood in Parmenides, holding Dr. Norman Wilfred’s passport. So where was he? The real Dr. Norman Wilfred?
In London, perhaps. Had missed the flight. No, he’d caught the flight — she’d spoken to his PA. And the flight had arrived. She’d been at the airport to meet it. So he had reached Skios. And yet somehow, on the spur of the same moment in which Oliver Fox had appointed himself to be Dr. Norman Wilfred, he had come into possession of Dr. Norman Wilfred’s passport.
So he had somehow made the real Dr. Norman Wilfred vanish. Had abducted him. Kidnapped him.
How, though? He could scarcely have done it on his own. Particularly since he had been with her all the time, enjoying himself by watching her become ever more hopelessly entangled in the web he had spun. He must have had people working with him. They would have had to do it, not on the spur of the moment at all, but according to a careful plan made long in advance. They would have had weapons and safe houses.
So perhaps this wasn’t a joke, after all. It was something quite different. Into her mind came the picture of Mrs. Toppler talking to Oliver Fox, her hand on his arm, telling him everything. And then of Oliver Fox turning to talk to Mrs. Skorbatova. And of Mrs. Skorbatova suddenly able to understand English.
And of Mr. Skorbatov cutting the grapes with those tiny silver scissors. She thought about the way he had been holding them, the surgical ruthlessness with which he had used them, and then how each grape had vanished into his mouth, snap, like a fly into the mouth of a lizard …
45
Behind the bougainvillea that screened the car park the fat limousines and four-by-fours purred as contentedly as well-fed cats, while the chauffeurs tipped their seats back and settled to an hour or two of air-conditioned sleep.
In the lodge Elli yawned and phoned her mother in Ioannina.
At the barrier in front of the lodge Giorgios had taken over while the rest of the security staff had their supper break. There was nothing for him to do. All the guests had arrived long since. He sat down in the darkness under an oleander and lit a cigarette. He had scarcely taken his first consoling drag, however, when the lights of an approaching car appeared. He got himself wearily to his feet and stubbed the cigarette out. This job had certain perks, it was true, but there was even less chance for the occasional relaxing smoke than he would have had looking for gas leaks.
The familiar 
. Spiros or Stavros? Stavros. Giorgios wandered over and shook hands while Stavros’s passenger, a woman wearing an evening dress made of complex folds and swags of tulle, got out of the back. Giorgios and Stavros had quite a lot to talk about. Stavros’s mother was a cousin of Giorgios’s aunt, and they hadn’t seen each other since Uncle Panagiotis had run off with the girl from the ice cream bar.
“Hey!” interrupted Stavros suddenly. He jumped out of the taxi and looked round. His passenger was just disappearing under the barrier, into the darkness inside the foundation, her tulle hoisted up around her.
“Invitation!” shouted Giorgios, and ran after her.
“Thirty-two euros!” shouted Stavros, and ran after Giorgios.
* * *
There was another slight disturbance occurring in the harbor. An incoming yacht, Happy Days, registered in Izmir, had just collided with something large and solid in the darkness.
“Sorry about that,” said the man at the helm, in an expensively educated English voice. “Only paintwork, though.”
“Patrick’s arseholed again!” said a second matching voice. “Someone else take the wheel!”
“Trouble is,” said a third voice likewise, “all the rest of us are arseholeder than Patrick.”
“Look at it, though!” said a fourth voice. “Is that what we hit? It’s the size of an aircraft carrier!”
Heads had appeared over the rail above their heads, shouting in a foreign language.
“Oh my God!” said the third voice on Happy Days. “Russians! And they’re waving things at us!”