Aphrodite's Smile

by Stuart Harrison

  When I finished my coffee I left some money on the table and started back to where I’d parked the Jeep. I decided to go back to the house and pack, and then spend a few hours at the beach. I paused outside a bookshop, wondering if I should get something to read to distract myself. The rack outside was filled with English and European novels, and next to it was another rack containing translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad. They brought my father to mind amid a jumble of confused emotions. I changed my mind about buying a book.

  When I went back to the Jeep I found myself driving towards the house where Alex was staying. I parked at the end of the street behind an old Toyota. I rehearsed the things I might say to her in my mind, but none of them made much sense even to me. In my imaginings I started off appealing to her and ended up accusing her. I must have been there for nearly forty-five minutes when I heard a scooter start. Alex appeared at the gate a few moments later wearing a bright red shirt and blue shorts. For a second I thought she would come my way, but then she turned and rode off in the opposite direction. I stayed rooted to the spot in an agony of indecision for perhaps a minute and then I started the engine and went after her.

  Alex took the road north out of town and as I followed, I spotted her now and then as she rounded a distant curve. By the time I reached the end of the long, straight causeway at Molos Bay, I was stuck behind a truck laden with rocks. The road had become too narrow and steep to get past and I had to wait until the driver finally waved me by at the top of the hill. By then Alex was out of sight. Twenty minutes later when I reached Stavros I pulled over in the square, wondering which of the several possible routes she had taken. Acting on a hunch, I followed the road down to Polis Bay, past the place where her scooter had broken down almost a week before. The beach was deserted, though there were a few cars parked in the shade of the olive trees near the bar, and a schooner rode serenely at anchor in the bay.

  I pulled over. There was a scooter under the trees, but I didn’t know if it was the one I’d seen Alex riding. I asked a girl at the bar, and when she finally understood my question her face lit up.

  ‘Ah, the bike, yes?’

  ‘Yes. Do you know whose it is? Have you seen a girl here?’

  ‘This bike is mine.’

  I thanked her and went back to the Jeep. Across the bay I could see the village of Exoghi high on the hill and I was suddenly sure that was where Alex had gone. By then she was almost a half-hour ahead of me. I thought about waiting for her to come back as there was only the one road, but in the end I decided I didn’t have the patience.

  A few minutes later I was negotiating the steep road up the hill. I changed down into first gear, hauling the Jeep around hairpin bends, inches from a sheer drop to the rocks hundreds of feet below. I had gone about two thirds of the distance when I heard the sound of an approaching car and, even as I looked for a space to pull over, it appeared around a bend ahead of me. I saw right away that it was travelling too fast and instinctively I yanked on the wheel to avoid a collision. The other car swerved the opposite way and passed me in a cloud of dust. I had time only to register that it was small and dark before I realised that I was headed towards the edge of the cliff. Empty sky loomed beyond the bonnet. I stamped on the brake and felt the wheels begin to slide on the loose rock. For an instant I felt as if my insides had been sucked out of me. I knew that I was seconds away from plunging over the edge.

  A series of images from my life flashed in my mind. It was like rapidly flicking through the photographs in an album. I saw my parents in Oxford before they were divorced and then the gates of the boarding school as I was driven through them for the first time; my father on the Swallow, dripping water as he shrugged off a scuba tank; Alicia frozen in time, and then Alex as she lay in bed sleeping while I looked on from the chair in the corner. I doubt if the entire sequence lasted even a second, but it was almost long enough to distract me from my own imminent demise. Then suddenly self-preservation kicked in and I jerked myself back to reality.

  I remembered the old instruction that in a skid the thing to do is accelerate. It is a difficult thing to do when you are sliding towards oblivion. It goes against all natural instinct. But in desperation I put my foot on the accelerator and pulled hard on the steering wheel. The tyres bit the ground and the Jeep swerved and shot across the road. It bumped violently as it travelled up the hillside and then lost momentum. There was a brief fragment of time where it teetered on the brink, and then somehow the bonnet was pointing towards the road again and the Jeep crashed down with bone-shuddering impact and came to a stop.

  The engine had stalled. Very faintly I could hear the sound of the other car receding, and then there was silence save for the ticking of hot metal and the thunder of my heartbeat. I rested my head against the steering wheel. My hands shook, slick with perspiration.

  It was some time before I could start the engine and put the Jeep in gear again. I drove the rest of the way cautiously. When I reached the village I found Alex’s scooter outside the church of Agia Marina where we had parked the week before. The keys were in the ignition, so I took them out and put them in my pocket. There was no sign of Alex. The village appeared to be as deserted as it had been the last time I was there, enveloped in an almost eerie silence. Even the normally ever-present cicadas were absent. The ground absorbed the heat of the sun and exhaled it back into the air, causing the buildings and trees to shimmer in waves.

  I started up the road past shuttered houses. A goat bell clanked, its distinctive flat tone clear in the pristine air. A small flock of animals grazed in the shade of an olive grove higher on the hill. I found the overgrown path that led to the ruined cottage where Alex’s grandmother had grown up and once again I stood in the gloomy shade of the gnarled and blackened trees. The cottage with its crumbling walls and empty windows looked no different but, when I walked around the back, I visualised the young German Hauptmann sitting at a table in the shade, and I could almost see a young girl emerge from the trees on the hillside.

  As I had the last time I’d been there, I felt there was an atmosphere about the place. The stillness seemed to gather in the shadows. The past almost a physical presence. I sensed passions once more aroused, coiled and waiting.

  There was no sign of Alex.

  As I went back to the Jeep I imagined that she was watching me from some hidden vantage spot. Far below, a small boat drew a line of white across the blue of the bay as it left the beach. When I looked again ten minutes later, the yacht I’d seen earlier was heading for open water, her mainsail rising and fluttering in the breeze.

  Eventually I wandered to the church and tried the door but it was locked. A pathway led through a graveyard of bristling crosses to a stone wall, and from there some steps carved out of the rock led up the hillside and vanished among the cypresses. As I started up them I heard a sound from the church, and when I looked back a priest emerged dressed in long black robes. We observed one another and, as I turned to go back, I called out.

  ‘Hello. Yassas. Do you speak English?’

  He had dark eyes and a long beard, and his expression was stern, somehow disapproving. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked in heavily accented English.

  ‘I’m looking for somebody. A young woman. I wondered if you’d seen her.’

  ‘I have seen nobody. Except you.’

  ‘Where does that path go?’ I gestured to the steps cut in the rock.

  ‘Along the cliff.’

  I wondered if Alex might have gone that way. I thanked the priest and retraced my steps.

  ‘Be careful,’ he called out. ‘The path can be dangerous if you do not know your way.’

  I thanked him for the warning. He remained outside the church watching me until I was out of sight. At the top of the steps the path passed between the cypresses where it was shadowed and cool. I walked beneath a kind of silken roof formed by dozens of spiders’ webs spun between the trees, one after the other, their fat black owners waiting patiently for their next mea
l. As I passed underneath, they quivered in the breeze and I was afraid a spider would drop onto my head. I shuddered at the prospect and was relieved when the path emerged into the open again.

  A little further on two giant slabs of rock, which some long ago tremor had split apart like a nut, flanked the path. A few straggly bushes had found a tenuous hold at the top and there were fissures and ledges masked by shadows. I wondered if this was the place which Irene had described where all those years ago Metkas’s men had gathered to ambush Hassel. Further on, the oak and olives gave way to dry grass and scrub, the soil too thin to support much more. The priest had been right about it being dangerous. Occasionally the path became so steep that it was little more than a goat track and the slope ended abruptly in a fringe of the ubiquitous wild oak growing at the edge of the cliff.

  I had walked perhaps half a mile. From somewhere higher up came the sound of a goat bell. The land ahead tapered to a grassy headland which jutted out toward the open sea and the hills of Kephalonia. The channel between the islands was flecked with the sails of cruising yachts. Something startlingly red caught my eye, fluttering in the breeze, a piece of cloth caught on a bush at the edge of the cliff. I went cautiously down and plucked it free. It was clean, ripped along one edge and in an instant of recall I pictured the red shirt Alex had been wearing.

  Beyond the bushes a vertical drop ended on the rocks far below. Vertigo made my head spin. In the open space in front of me the sky and the sea merged. I sucked in my breath and staggered backwards.

  The priest allowed me to use the phone in the house beside the church. He stayed with me while I waited for the police, his expression somehow accusing, until eventually I mumbled some excuse and went outside.

  When Captain Theonas eventually arrived he brought two uniformed officers with him. I explained what had happened and led them along the cliff. While his men began to comb the area, Theonas asked me if I was certain that the scooter parked by the church was the one Alex had been riding.

  ‘I think so. When I saw her, she was wearing a red shirt.’ I gestured to the scrap of cloth in his hand.

  ‘You say that you followed her here?’

  ‘Yes. In a way.’

  ‘But you did not see her actually arrive?’

  ‘No. I got stuck behind a truck,’ I told him. ‘But I guessed she might have come to Exoghi. We came here last week.’

  ‘Then she did not tell you that she was coming here?’

  ‘No.’

  I watched his men walking back and forth through the thin grass and I wondered what they expected to find. From the edge of the cliff it was impossible to look directly down to the rocks far below because of the contours of the cliff face, but the beach was visible and the road running alongside it. I realised that Alex might have stood there and watched me drive past the bay. An image flashed in my mind of the night I had seen her on the wharf as she slipped forward into the darkness, and a hollow dread opened up within me.

  ‘Mr French,’ Theonas said. ‘Mr French?’

  I came to. I felt light-headed, as if the blood had drained from my brain.

  ‘Is something wrong? Is there something else you have thought of?’

  ‘I think she might have jumped.’

  ‘Jumped?’ Theonas seemed taken aback by the idea.

  ‘It’s possible.’ I could hardly believe it, but the more I thought about it the more sense it made. I took an involuntary step closer to the cliff edge, but Theonas grabbed my arm in alarm.

  ‘It is dangerous.’ Theonas scrutinised me, his eyes and thoughts hidden behind the blank lenses of his sunglasses. ‘Are you all right, Mr French?’

  ‘Yes. Yes I think so. A bit dazed.’

  His men found nothing and eventually we returned to the church. It was mid-afternoon by then. I had a little over an hour to make the ferry to Kephalonia if I was to catch my plane, but I had already abandoned my earlier plans. Theonas ordered one of his men to stay with Alex’s scooter while the other got in behind the wheel of the police car. ‘Please follow us, Mr French,’ he said to me.

  We drove down the hill to the bay where the three of us made our way along the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. I dreaded what we would find. I half expected to come across her bloodied corpse at every step and I followed along with a kind of numb resignation. Eventually, however, it became clear that Alex wasn’t there. We began to search the waterline. In places it was deep and shadowed. Occasionally Theonas consulted with the other officer and they examined the cliff above us. It was often vertical, but there were areas where trees and bushes grew among the rocks, creating hollows and shelves where it was conceivable that a person who fell from the top might come to rest. Even so, it was almost impossible that anyone could survive such a fall. I cupped my hands to my mouth and called her name.

  ‘ALEX.’

  I shouted again but there was no answer. Theonas removed his glasses and regarded me with what might have been a trace of sympathy. We kept searching all the way out to the headland. All the time the sea lapped at the rocks, the waves getting stronger the further out we went. I don’t know how long we were there before I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘I am afraid it is no use,’ Theonas said. ‘In the morning I will arrange for a boat.’

  I stared at him. My initial shock had begun to wear off, to be replaced by an awful, gnawing guilt. I told myself that I should have known. If Alex had killed herself, it was my fault.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Theonas said. ‘Come. I will drive you back to Vathy.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Theonas arrived at the house early the following morning. As he got out of his car I watched from the terrace where I’d spent the last couple of hours, having eventually abandoned any possibility of sleep. I might have dozed for an hour or two, but that was about it. Every time I closed my eyes I saw that piece of red cloth fluttering in the breeze, and then the dizzying view of the rocks far below the cliff. An image of the rocks rushed towards me, filling my mind’s eye. I was falling, plunging through space. My world shrank from sea and sky to a single black rock which rapidly expanded, getting bigger and bigger until it took on gargantuan proportions. And then abruptly there was nothing. Blackness. I would open my eyes with a start, my body damp with sweat, my heart thudding in my chest.

  Theonas looked up at me. There were dark circles beneath his eyes and I had the feeling that he too had not slept much, though something about his expression caused me a prickle of unease. The sympathy which I had detected in his manner the day before, now seemed absent.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer my question. Instead he gestured towards the waiting car. ‘Please, Mr French.’

  It seemed less of an invitation than an order. As I went down, Irene appeared.

  ‘I am coming too,’ she informed Theonas who, though he nodded his assent, seemed reluctant.

  We drove to Polis Bay, where a party made up of police officers and local volunteers was assembled ready to begin another search along both the top and bottom of the cliff. I saw men with ropes who would be lowered from the top to examine the shelves and hollows where Alex might have come to rest. Though I wanted to help, Theonas instructed me to wait on the road above the beach.

  ‘It is better that you remain here.’

  A young officer was left to linger not very discreetly nearby. When Irene threw Theonas a questioning look, he avoided her eye.

  As a group of searchers made their way down from the road I saw Dimitri among them. When he saw me he stopped and stared angrily. I thought for a moment that he would come over, but Theonas stepped between us and, speaking quietly, took his arm and firmly led him away, though Dimitri kept looking back at me over his shoulder.

  As the search continued throughout the morning I looked on with growing dread. I was certain that it was only a matter of time before Alex’s body was found. I blamed myself for what had happened. I saw her actions on the night I’d pulled her from the harbour in a di
fferent light. I had put it down to the effects of alcohol and sleeping pills, but now I realised how emotionally unbalanced Alex was. I couldn’t escape the thought that I had driven her to this.

  It was evident long before the searchers gave up that any hope of finding her alive was futile. Several fishing boats had been enlisted to help, and they trawled back and forth across the bay. Each time one of them hauled in its net I held my breath, expecting a shout to ring out across the water, but each time nothing happened. I became increasingly perplexed.

  When Theonas eventually returned, he told me what I already knew. ‘We have found no trace of Alex. She is not here.’

  ‘Then where is she? She can’t have simply vanished.’

  ‘It is possible that her body may have been carried out of the bay by the currents. I have arranged for a boat to search the coast.’

  As the last group of searchers returned, one broke away from the others. It was Dimitri. Theonas spoke quickly to the young officer nearby who intercepted him and issued a curt instruction, placing one hand firmly against Dimitri’s chest.

  Dimitri thrust an accusing finger at me. ‘Where is Alex, you bastard? What have you done with her? If you have hurt her, I swear that I will kill you!’

  Theonas barked an order to the young officer who took Dimitri’s arm and led him away, though he continued to shout accusations and threats over his shoulder.

  ‘What is he talking about?’ Irene asked. ‘How can he think that Robert would do anything to hurt Alex?’

  Theonas didn’t answer her. Instead he said to me, ‘This morning my men spoke to the people in Exoghi to see if any of them saw Alex yesterday.’