Forth into Light Page 6

  “I talk about the dope. It is expensive. Where do they all get the money?”

  “Are you suggesting that Jeff takes dope?”

  “Not just Jeff. If the police they come for me, I must tell all I know. Jeff. Your friends, many of them. If money is stolen, it is for dope.”

  Leighton couldn’t speak for a moment, sickened with himself and Costa. They had exchanged their threats, defined the area in which each could hurt the other, banished friendship. For what? For money. Shaken by being included in a blanket condemnation of the foreigners, he was tempted to put his hand out and touch Costa’s shoulder in a gesture of conciliation but he checked himself. He was just beginning to digest the clear hint of blackmail in what Costa had said: if George made trouble about the money, Costa would make trouble for Jeff. All his carefully suppressed suspicions came rushing to the surface. Why had only Costa seen the bulge in his pocket? Very convenient. He didn’t want to go to the police, but he wouldn’t allow his right to do so to be challenged. He couldn’t afford the luxury of conciliation. He had to get his money back.

  “You don’t leave me much choice,” he said, drawing on all his strength to meet Costa on his own terms. “I think this had better be cleared up. I’ll go to the police at six this evening. If you can help me get my money back in the meantime, meet me there. That’ll be the end of it. Otherwise——” He shrugged away the shreds of his scruples.

  “Yes. Sure. What is Costa next to Mr. Yorgo? The foreigner speak and—hup.” Costa joined his wrists together as if they were manacled. Because the gesture illustrated an ugly truth, George was swept by anger. He wanted to seize Costa and shake him until the money dropped out of him and bring an end to this nasty incident. Instead, he turned abruptly and went back to his table. Peter and Martha had joined it. He pulled his chair around so that he could sit beside them.

  In his sweet solicitous way, Peter was the first of George’s friends to make him feel that his loss mattered. “This is a hell of a thing, George,” he said, his clear, extraordinarily direct blue eyes full of concern. “I’ve just heard about it. What lousy luck. I just want to say, don’t hesitate, if you know what I mean.”

  “Thanks, friend. I may have to take you up on that.” George put a hand on Peter’s bare arm and gave it a squeeze. He had never been one for such intimate contacts, but he was aware that he liked to touch Peter. He was so completely pleasing physically. He supposed that in some obscure bisexual corner of himself, he was a bit in love with him. He removed his hand.

  “Henry says you’re going to the police,” Martha said. “Have you anything to go on?”

  “I don’t know what Henry knows about it. I hadn’t intended going to the police, but I’ve just had a very peculiar talk with Costa.”

  “He’s not involved in this,” Peter asserted as firmly as George had earlier. Costa was a friend and a semi-employee of the Mills-Martins; they had an arrangement whereby his boat was always at their disposal when they were here.

  “I don’t know, Peter,” George said, running his hand agitatedly through his hair. “He as much as said that if I go to the police, he’ll bust open the drug trade here and implicate Jeff. Why would he say a thing like that unless maybe he did take my money?”

  Peter frowned. “That doesn’t sound like him. Can you tell me how he put it? His English sometimes goes a bit haywire.”

  “He said, ‘I warn you. I warned you before.’ And then a lot about Jeff, and Dimitri at the bar, and all the people who use dope here.” George saw Sid Coleman’s powerful leonine profile swing toward him and he was struck by his urgency when he leaned forward to speak through the buzz of conversation around them.

  “Hey, now wait a minute. Now listen, George. Don’t talk so loud. And don’t start something you won’t want to finish. Jeff’s clean. You can take my word for it. I happen to know these things. Don’t fool around with Dimitri. Dimitri’s all right.”

  “Blast Dimitri,” George said heatedly. “I don’t give a damn about him. Costa brought him up. Costa’s acting damn suspiciously.”

  “Just remember,” Peter interjected, “if you go to the police, they’re going to insist on your accusing somebody. That’s the way they operate.”

  “Well, I can’t accuse anybody. Joe and Henry say they’re sure it’s Costa, but I’m not sure of anything. He just told me he saw the money in my pocket when I left last night. I’ll check that when I go home. If a wad of paper doesn’t show in the trousers I was wearing, I really will suspect him.”

  “He’s been to jail before, you know,” Peter persisted.

  “I’ve heard some story. What was it all about?”

  “He tells various versions. You know the way he is. I think all it amounts to is that when he was a kid just after the war he took to stealing to stay alive and got caught. The point is, the law here is tough on second offenders. He’s told me himself he could get ten years with only a token trial.”

  George nodded. “Point taken. What would you do if you were in my position?”

  They looked at each other for a moment with affectionate concern. George was only a few years older, but Peter looked almost young enough to be his son. Nevertheless, he had an air of authority that commanded George’s respect. George waited for an answer, prepared to be guided by it.

  “It’s a tough one, George. I understand that. Try the test with your trousers. It’s too much money for anybody but a real crook to take. That’s what bothers me. I’d better have a talk with Costa.” Peter glanced over toward the admiral’s statue where he had seen him with George. He wasn’t there.

  “I wish you would,” George was saying. “You know I hate having anything to do with the police. In a reasonable society——” He paused, aware that the man from the telegraph office was hovering behind him, and looked up.

  “Here you are Mr. Yorgo,” the man said. “I think I have something for you.” He fumbled with his pouch and began to go painstakingly through its contents. Eventually, he extracted a telegram and presented his book for signature. Christ, now what? George thought. His mother? His father? Signing, he had difficulty controlling the trembling of his hand. He took the telegram and tore it open savagely.

  ARRIVING TOMORROW FOR DAY WITH LEIGHTON ARRANGE BOOKISH RECEPTION TRAVELING INCOGNITO NO PRESS PLEASE COCHRAN

  George stared at this odd communication for some seconds before his mind grasped it. Cochran. Mike Cochran. Could it possibly be? The rich, the successful, the celebrated Michael Cochran? He knew no other Cochran. Old Mike, his classmate and bosom pal, turned playwright, screen writer, the familiar of presidents, princes, and the big guns of international celebrity. With the caution of experience, he hastily checked the date on the message. The seventeenth. He looked up at the assembly around the table.

  “Does anybody know the date today?” he asked.

  “It’s the sixteenth, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s later than that. The eighteenth, I think.”

  “Isn’t today Thursday?”

  “That’s not a date, you cretin.”

  “I can tell you exactly,” Peter said after a moment’s thought. “Sunday was the fifteenth. It’s Wednesday, the eighteenth.”

  Naturally, George thought. Why shouldn’t a telegram take twenty-four hours to travel forty miles? Then “tomorrow” was today and Mike would be here in less than an hour. He couldn’t believe it. Jesus Christ, after all these years. His mind tried to fix a picture of his friend as he had been when they had last seen each other—twelve years ago?—but he caught only a glimpse of a presence adorned with a few physical details—a lank lock of hair, a tough farm boy’s frame, a tone of voice, witty and sardonic. He experimented with amendments dictated by the passage of time—the lock thin and graying?—the frame padded out with paunch?—but it was as unconvincing as mustaches scrawled on the picture of a pretty girl in the subway. There was success, big sustained worldly success, as well as time to reckon with—success and money. He folded the telegram and put it in a
pocket.

  “I think Mike Cochran’s coming on the morning boat,” he announced.

  “Michael Cochran!” Varnum exclaimed. “Crickey. The island’s coming up in the world. I read he was in Athens on some cultural thing.”

  “Really? That explains it.” George beamed happily in a way that had become so unfamiliar that it made his face feel uncomfortable. Mike would take his mind off his money for a while; there was nothing he could do about it till evening, anyway.

  Everybody was apparently glad to forget the money. Mike’s name was picked up and passed around the table to the accompaniment of generally irreverent comments. Peter turned to Martha. “You remember? He was married to Charlie’s actress wife for a little while.” Peter’s eyes strayed and he threw his head back and uttered his infectious laughter. “Oh, my God.”

  Martha and others saw what he had seen and laughed with him. A small figure under a straw hat had adopted an unmistakable stance down on the edge of the quai and was aiming a glistening arc of water into the port. Peter rose and crossed the quai just as the jet ended. Little Petey looked up as his father joined him and his face broke into a beam of guilty joy.

  “You caught me with my pee-pee out,” he announced.

  Peter laughed. “I sure did.” He squatted down to the child’s level and began to help him get his buttons into the right holes. He was constantly amazed and delighted that paternal love could arouse him sexually. The toy materialized briefly in the uncomfortable confines of his shorts as he breathed the sweet smell of the little boy. “There’s nothing wrong with your pee-pee,” he said. “I mean, it’s no big secret. It’s just considered sort of private. That’s why we wear pants. Anyway, you’re not supposed to pee in the port, so don’t.”

  “It was fun, Daddy,” Petey chortled.

  “Good. You’ve had your fun. Not again, right? What if everybody used the port to pee in?” He hugged his son and kissed him on the cheek.

  Petey looked at him, performing solemnity. “All right, Daddy. I won’t. Ever, ever again.”

  Peter laughed at the little fraud and stood and led him to the table with his hand on the back of his neck. He heard George arranging to meet Joe that evening in front of the police station. Joe was looking solemn and self-important, obviously pleased with his central role in the drama.

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” George asked Peter. “Don’t. I want Mike to meet you.”

  Peter glanced at Martha. “Not now, George. Bring him up to the house. If he’s staying, we’ll have a dinner for him. We’ll arrange something when you know.”

  “I’d better get cracking myself. I have to round up Sarah and do something about lunch. Anybody seen her?”

  The latest arrival, Dorothy, Sid Coleman’s American painter girlfriend, turned to him. “Sarah? She’s down on the rocks swimming.”

  “Christ. I do have to run. Be seeing you, everybody.” George sprang up with a wave of his hand and hurried off toward the western promontory and the road leading out to the swimming rocks. Peter and Martha exchanged another glance.

  Sid reached across the table and clutched Peter’s wrist. “Hey, listen, man. Why is Costa talking about Dimitri? What’s the connection? Is something going on between Dimitri and Jeff?”

  “I don’t know. I’m seeing Jeff after lunch. I’ll try to find out.” Peter signaled to Martha that he was ready to go. Petey, who had been making the rounds of the table tasting everybody’s drinks, moved to their sides as they rose. He gave them each a hand and they smiled and nodded their farewells to the assembled company as they circled the table and went to the door of the shop, where Peter called out a message for Costa to the Lambraikis family. They set off with Petey between them for the other side of the port.

  “What a lot of excitement,” Martha said. “What do you make of it?”

  “Sid’s worried about his supply of pot. Everybody knows he gets it from Dimitri. That silly little bastard. I wouldn’t mind seeing him get arrested. What it has to do with George’s money and Costa, I haven’t the faintest idea. Maybe Costa was really trying to warn him about something and George took it as a threat. We shall see.” He kept his eyes out for Costa at every small grouping of tavern tables they passed. As they approached one that was frequented almost exclusively by locals, his eye was caught by an extraordinarily beautiful girl sitting at a table. He did a little double take as he focused on her. Dark hair swept back from an exquisite profile, her nose tilted deliciously, her mouth looked as if it were about to open in a kiss. Peter quickened his pace in his eagerness to see her full-face. He saw her straighten and then lean forward with her head cocked slightly in an attitude of intense, generous absorption. The muscles of his stomach contracted as if he had been struck. His arms and legs tingled with it. He felt that if she looked at him like that, he would faint dead away at her feet.

  “What?” Martha said. “Did you say something?”

  “Daddy, you stepped on me,” Petey protested.

  Peter laughed as he tore his eyes away from the girl. “Sorry. A slight distraction. Did you see that incredibly beautiful girl?”

  “So that’s what it was.” Martha laughed with him. “You men.”

  They were past her before Peter realized that his eyes had been so fixed on the girl that he hadn’t seen who had been the recipient of her electrifying look.

  Shaved and sweating, George Leighton stood under the awning of the café at the boat landing. In only a matter of minutes, Mike would actually be here. George had found Sarah sitting down on the rocks with Pavlo, the new body boy. He had swept her off to shop. Briefly they had captured their old high spirits as they discussed lunch and ran up bills for a fish and a few bottles of good wine and negotiated with the butcher for an edible piece of beef for dinner. They hurried home, as excited and responsive to each other as they had been in the old days when some unexpected treat turned up. He had left her there to dress and deal with Chloë, who was not a maid so much as a friend they paid to help around the house, and had hurried back to be sure to be here for the boat. He hoped she would make it in time. He wanted everything to look right for Mike.

  This reunion was acquiring a significance for him that went beyond the renewal of an old friendship. Their lives could serve as illustrations of conflicting philosophies. It was almost too pat. They had started off together, they had both achieved success, George earlier than Mike. Mike had courted it, acquiring wealth and celebrity and numerous wives. George had sought a more enduring reality, careless of money and fame. He had even managed to be broke for Mike’s arrival.

  Yet there was no basis for real confrontation. George Leighton’s reputation was secure and distinguished, quite independent of popular or material success, although he had had that too for a while. Mike, whose youthful ambition had been so great, would be the last to claim any high literary merit for his bright Broadway comedies. No conflict there. It had been said that George Leighton was losing touch, but losing touch with what? Certainly not, God knows, with the suffering which lay at the core of human experience. With his country? There was a respectable literary tradition for expatriation. No, there was no need for apologies, nothing to hide. Except the impending ruin of his life.

  He wondered what price Mike had paid. He wondered, too, why Mike was coming. If business had brought him to Athens, it would seem natural to look up a friend so near at hand, except that there had been other occasions when they could have arranged for their paths to cross. Had the President appointed him to confer on George Leighton an exalted honor? Or, prompted by some residue of the competitive spirit of their youth, was he coming to assure himself that George Leighton was a wreck and a has-been? George lifted his chin and squared his shoulders. He was confident that nothing showed.

  A band of ragged longshoremen was moving down to the edge of the landing area. This was a recent improvement; small boats no longer rowed passengers ashore. The white-uniformed harbor patrol had already taken its stations within the railed enclosure. The
idlers who daily constituted themselves a welcoming committee were spreading out along it. He noted again the dead gray look of the sea. The heat was more than oppressive—it felt dangerous, as if its pressure would shatter the atmosphere.

  He had almost given up hoping for Sarah when he caught sight of her and waved.

  “You look almost cool,” he remarked admiringly as she joined him.

  “The sea helped.”

  “Mike’ll probably want to go later.”

  “Yes, you should take him down after lunch. You can sit in the sea and talk your heads off. It’s too hot for naps anyway.”

  “I hope to God we all recognize each other,” he said with a chuckle. “Twelve years is a long time, except that suddenly it doesn’t seem like anything at all.”

  She looked up at him in quick scrutiny and smiled. “You haven’t changed much. More distinguished. Of course, we’re both black as niggers which may confuse him.”

  He took her arm and led her out into the crushing sun and over to a place at the barricade. A dark hungry-eyed boy darted up to them, roughly shoving a smaller boy out of his way as he came.

  “Will you need me?” he demanded, looking as if he would attack anybody who refused his aid.

  “Yes, my child,” George said with a slight smile. “You have your animal? Wait for us. There will probably be baggage.”

  This was the way he hoped Mike’s visit would go—people springing eagerly to serve them, everything working smoothly, all the flaws and fissures with which they had to contend in daily living neatly covered over for this occasion. “I told Chloë to plan for lunch at one-thirty. Does that check with you? I didn’t think we’d want to prolong the drinking hour.”

  “Oh, good,” she said. “That means I’ll—I mean, that means you’ll probably be ready to take Mike for a swim by about three.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. She was really determined to get him into the water. Did she think he was going to need sobering up? He wiped sweat from his forehead and out of his eyes. He felt as if the sun were beating him into the ground.