“Hello.”
“Meester Ouf.” It was the night porter. “There is telephone for you.”
There was a clicketing.
“Hello?”
“Oh. Is that Mr. Urfe?” It was a man’s voice I didn’t recognize. Greek, but with a good accent.
“Speaking. Who are you?”
“Would you look out of your window, please?”
Click. Silence. I rattled the hook down, with no result. The man had hung up. I snatched my dressing gown off the bed, switched out the light, and raced to the window.
My third-floor room looked out on a side street.
There was a yellow taxi parked on the opposite side with its back to me, a little down the hill. That was normal. Taxis for the hotel waited there. A man in a white shirt appeared and walked quickly up the far side of the street, past the taxi. He crossed the road just below me. There was nothing strange about him. Deserted pavements, street lights, closed shops and darkened offices, the one taxi. The man disappeared. Only then was there a movement.
Directly opposite and beneath my window was a streetlight fixed on the wall over the entrance to an arcade of shops. Because of the angle I could not see to the back of the arcade.
A girl came out.
The taxi engine broke into life.
She knew where I was. She came out to the edge of the pavement, small, unchanged yet changed, and stared straight up at my window. The light shone down on her brown arms, but her face was in shadow. A black dress, black shoes, a small black evening handbag in her left hand. She came forward from the shadows as a prostitute might have done; as Robert Foulkes had done. No expression, simply the stare up and across at me. No duration. It was all over in fifteen seconds. The taxi suddenly reversed up the road to in front of her. Someone opened a door, and she got quickly in. The taxi jerked off very fast. Its wheels squealed scaldingly at the end of the street.
A crystal lay shattered.
And all betrayed.
67
At the last moment I had angrily cried her name. I thought at first that they had found some fantastic double; but no one could have imitated that walk. The way of standing.
I leapt back to the phone and got the night porter.
“That call—can you trace it?” He didn’t understand “trace.” “Do you know where it came from?”
No, he didn’t know.
Had anyone strange been in the hotel lobby during the last hour? Anyone waiting for some time?
No, Meester Ouf, nobody.
I turned off the shower, tore back into my clothes and went out into Constitution Square. I went round all the cafés, peered into all the taxis, went back to Zonar’s, to Tom’s, to Zaporiti’s, to all the fashionable places in the area; unable to think, unable to do anything but say her name and crush it savagely between my teeth.
Alison. Alison. Alison.
I understood, how I understood. Once I had accepted, and I had to accept, the first incredible fact: that she must have agreed to join the masque.
But how could she? And why? Again and again: why.
I went back to the hotel.
Conchis would have discovered about the quarrel, perhaps even overheard it; if he used cameras, he could use microphones and tape recorders. Contacted her during the night, or early the next morning. Perhaps through Lily. Those messages in the Earth: Hirondelle. The people in the Piraeus hotel, watching me try to get her to let me back into her room.
As soon as I mentioned Alison, Conchis must have pricked up his ears. As soon as he knew she was coming to Athens he must have started to envisage new complications in his action; sized up the situation; stepped in and used it; had us followed from the moment we met; then persuaded her, all his charm, probably half deceiving her, as everyone on the fringes was deceived.
That Sunday he had suddenly gone to Nauplia was the same day the opened telegram from Alison had arrived. Even then? Hadn’t he forced me to meet her by canceling—without warning—that next, half-term weekend? Gone to Nauplia to plan? And Lily had really begun to throw her web round me, that same strange Sunday. All must have changed course, that day.
The lies I had told the next weekend. To Lily-Julie. I felt my face go red. The day she had worn light blue, dark blue; to echo Alison. I growled out loud.
I saw a meeting of all of them: I saw them overwhelming her with their sick logic, their madness, their ease, their money. And the great secret: why they had chosen me.
I recalled something that had occurred to me in the Earth—how little use had been made of Rose. All her costumes had been there. Before Alison’s “entry,” she would have been going to play a much fuller role, and that first meeting with her had been the beginning of it (and a sneer at my inconstancy). At only one week from his first approach to Alison Conchis had probably not been quite sure of her, so Rose’s role that weekend was an insurance against Alison’s failing to cooperate. Very soon after Alison must have agreed; so Rose withdrew. That was why Lily’s character and role had changed and why she had to enter—and so rapidly—the present. First she had been acting “against” Rose; then “against” Alison.
The sedan-coffin. It had not been empty. The mercilessness of it; the endless exposure.
The triaclass="underline" my “preying on young women”; Alison must have told them that. And the suicide—”hysterical suicide”; she would have told them that as well. All their knowledge of my past.
I was mad with anger. I thought of that genuine and atrocious wave of sadness I had felt when the news about Alison came. All the time she would have been in Athens; perhaps in the house in the village, or over at Bourani. Watching me, even. Playing an invisible Maria to Lily’s Olivia and my Malvolio—always these echoes of Shakespearean situations.
I walked up and down my room, imagining scenes where I had Alison at my mercy. Beating her black and blue, making her weep with remorse.
And then again, it all went back to Conchis, to the mystery of his power, his ability to mould and wield girls as intelligent as Lily; as independent as Alison. As if he had some secret that he revealed to them, that put them under his orders; and once again I was the man in the dark, the excluded, the eternal butt.
Malvolio. Not a Hamlet mourning Ophelia. But Malvolio.
I couldn’t sleep. I had to do something. I went down to the hall and telephoned Ellenikon again. I knew there were staging flights through at all hours, and there might be someone on the desk. I was lucky: there was. Even luckier, it was an English hostess who had just come off duty, and chanced to pick up the phone on her way to bed.
Yes, she knew about Alison.
“Look, I know this sounds pretty extraordinary, but I’m an old friend of hers and I think I’ve just seen her.”
There was a silence. “But she’s dead.”
“Yes, I know. I know she’s meant to be dead.”
“But it was in the papers.”
“You saw it?”
“I know lots of people who did.”
“Actually in the papers? Or just cuttings they’d been sent?”
Her patience began to break. “I’m terribly sorry but—”
“Do you know anyone who went to the funeral?”
She said, “Are you sure you’re all right?”
I wished her good night then; it was useless to go on. I could guess what they had done. Alison would have failed to report for duty one day in London, pleaded ill health or something. A week or two later, the same cuttings would have been sent out, the same forged letters from Ann Taylor.