Sam decided to say nothing.
“I see,” Faoud murmured. “It’s always better being alone, isn’t it?”
“I dream of that all the time,” Naomi said.
The two women both thought about it, unknown to each other.
Sam thought of a Japanese film she had seen over the winter called Battle Royale. In the film, children are culled from troublesome schools and sent to an island, where they are forced to play a televised game. They are issued different weapons, and explosive collars are fitted around their necks that control them; they are then forced to kill each other one by one, until only one is left alive. The girls seem to be the more vicious and effective killers. Social bonds, amorous crushes, and platonic loves all fall by the wayside the closer death comes. Even the Japanese island looked like Hydra, lacking merely the sirens, the cannons, the ruined military bunkers in which to hide.
She rolled onto her side and let the stones burn a little into her legs. She wondered if the idea was appealing—an island as a killing zone with nowhere to run. What weapon would she choose—a scythe, a hammer, a recurve bow?
Naomi stood, flexed her arms, and without a word to either of them dropped back into the water and swam away.
Faoud turned mildly to Sam. To her, his eyes had the color of black olive tapenade.
“She could be your older sister. Does she boss you around?”
“Not really. But I wouldn’t mind if she did.”
He got up as well, and his downward glance was skeptical.
“You coming?”
“I’ll wait.”
In the end she walked alone over the skerry back to the beach. As she came through the low trees she heard their voices, amused in tone and feckless, the sexual energy unmistakable. For a moment she hung back unseen and watched them lying side by side in the harshness of the sunlight. They seemed unconcerned. They were only a few inches apart and their voices were modulated to complement each other, the ancient dance of words. She crouched and tried to hear what they were saying, but it was carried off by the wind. There was just the beating of her own heart, and the acceleration that betrayed a hatred.
—
The girls walked back, passing nobody on the way down to Palamidas. Faoud watched them diminish, with the backdrop of the sea behind them. He wondered about Naomi. She didn’t seem to have an ulterior motive, apart from the question of attraction. But one had to admit that that last reason was usually sufficient to explain almost everything in the way people behaved. Two people of about the same age, finding themselves in the same place at the same moment, could enter an unexpected charm. He thought she might come back daily and that something might happen between them. As for Sam, it was a different matter. She was ravishingly beautiful but too shy. Yet she also posed a more thorny question, because she seemed to have understood his glances more perfectly than Naomi and with a greater dash of anger. They stopped, turned, and made a sign to him, and in response he raised a hand. It was a little rash on his part, but he couldn’t help it.
He then walked back to the hut, poured out the bowl of water surfaced with shaving foam and made his way to the head of the path that plunged down to the wild shore from where he had come. Everything had changed. The shave, the T-shirt and the sweater, the yogurt and the strawberries, the refreshing swim by the skerry—a darkness had lifted. He went down the path a short way and then rolled a joint, lit it, and sat among the stones smoking. It was difficult to grasp how quickly his luck had changed. But didn’t Omer in Istanbul always say that it did because it always must? He had a hard time believing that it was because of God. Nevertheless, the events of the previous seventy-two hours were beginning to change his mind. Such things, he now thought, could not happen by themselves—not entirely. There had to be a design behind them.
He shaded his eyes and scanned the sea. Nothing came out of it today, no little dinghies struggling against the currents, no cast-off life jackets washing up on Europa. There was no dread. His traces had been perfectly covered through his own diligence, and the police boat that came around the island once a day would find nothing. Even the vagrant himself had found a new home looking down on them, with God watching over him, and the idea of God had suddenly, to his surprise, been resurrected by the simple act of being given a box of strawberries by a woman he didn’t know.
—
The following day Sam and Naomi met at the Sunset in the evening. They were both in high spirits. The American girl had spent the day hiking with her brother and father, after which she had gone for a swim alone below Kamini, lost in her own moods. Naomi ordered a bottle of white wine for them to split and some souvlaki with bread and oil and a plate of cut lemons. A feast for assassins.
“So we’re friends with the refugee,” Sam said. “It feels weirdly normal, but I don’t know why. My father says—”
But Naomi ignored the evocation of Jeffrey Haldane. In the end, she found him just as Sam had described: boring.
“Friends is a big word,” she said. “But since he’s from an affluent family over there it doesn’t surprise me that we get on. He’s educated and secular.”
“Over where?”
“From Syria. But his family might be from many places.”
“My father says—”
“Let’s keep your father out of it, shall we? He doesn’t speak a word of Greek. The people here have been talking about this secretly for months. It’s an open secret. I think there have been others before Faoud—the locals helped them to get to the mainland illegally before, and maybe they’re still doing it. But now the police are here.”
It’s a shame your father and his wife are so hostile to you. They might have helped, Sam thought to herself.
“But,” Naomi went on, “I think we can do it by ourselves. I just don’t know how yet.”
“Put him on the ferry?” Sam said.
“There has to be more to it than that. Maybe we should go with him?”
“And if they catch him—”
“We’ll be criminals too. I don’t really care. I could talk my way out of that. But I’m not sure you could. I wish Jimmie and Phaine would just go away—I could invite him to my place and hide him there. It would solve everything.”
Sam seemed to bristle at something. A sudden venom came into her voice.
“Why don’t you suggest that they go on a trip? They could go to the Peloponnese for a week.”
“Phaine would never buy it. She’s paranoid about me being in the house alone. She doesn’t seem to accept that one day it’ll be mine whether she likes it or not. She certainly won’t agree to go off for a week knowing that I suggested it. She’d suspect at once.”
“Obviously you should just kill them.”
Naomi laughed, and the waiters looked over, startled by the sound. Naomi admitted that it was an original idea, the only one that Sam had come up with yet. But it would be hard to explain to the relatives. Sam laughed as well, more because she was surprised at the towering absurdity of the things she was saying. Just as there was automatic writing, there seemed to be automatic speaking as well.
“Depends on who would do it,” she added.
“Do you think about killing your parents, Sam?”
They made the “Death to death” toast—a popular one in Greek—and the glasses touched so hard they almost cracked.
“Not regularly, no.”
“Me, yes,” Naomi said. “I don’t know why.”
“Really?”
“More when I was younger. Now, I’d just be worried about the lawsuits.”
Sam sensed an opening and became more insolent.
“You could do it to Phaine, though, couldn’t you?”
“What makes you say that?”
Sam sipped at her glass, and her eyes positioned over the rim were filled with havoc and hurly-burly.
“I don’t know. You obviously hate her.”
“It’s not a subtle dislike, I’ll grant you that. Did your parents notice as well?
I’m sorry if they did. We seem to be incapable of keeping our feuds to ourselves, or at least disguising them. It’s wretched.”
“I didn’t ask them, to be honest.”
Naomi said there was something that didn’t work between them. Even just between herself and her father. They never did get along—it was something fundamental. Her real mother used to say it was because they were too alike.
“I know you’re going to say he spoils me, but he only does that because deep down he hates me. I mean, he hates me in a certain way. It’s just a visceral dislike. Parents can dislike their children, we’re just brainwashed into assuming that they can’t. If I was killed in a boating accident, let’s say, Jimmie would be distraught but he would get over it surprisingly quickly. Trust me. He really would.”
She took out a cigarette and lit it. She felt that the girl was beginning to believe her, and that both of them were beginning to be swayed into entering the orbit of a calamitous idea.
“You think there’s unconditional love, but there isn’t. The conditions are everything.”
—
The sea had gone dark; the cannons inset into the plastered wall of the restaurant pointed out toward a void that the fishing boats and their lights didn’t humanize. Waves dissolved violently on the rocks below. The Aegean was a dangerous and untrustworthy sea, swept by sudden malevolent moods. It was nothing like the sea of tourist legend. Hundreds of people drowned here every decade, and the sand at its bottom was nothing more than a graveyard of bones and ships. Naomi thought back to nights she had spent here over the years. The bitter lonely nights, but also more tender ones filled with narcotic parties and beautiful faces. Evenings spent sitting in this very spot during holidays when she was still at school in England, troubled and failed in all things academic until she had decided to turn it around and get a degree. The Sunset had been a crucial refuge. But the people she had once hung out with there had all dispersed to the four corners of the world. “There is only sea, there is only weather.” A quote from somewhere came back into her mind, lingering there unwanted, and she wondered what it would be like to be alone in the world with all the money she needed, free of the need to work or endure a boss. Since her father had packed her off to an expensive school early on she had grown used to being separated from the rest of the human race and, she might have added, she had grown used to being without him. But being separated from the father was not the same as being fatherless. Yet she could imagine living in the house on the mountainside alone, living in the house in London alone, passing months alone in the villa in Sorano. Who would notice that she was now solitary and not encumbered with a father and a stepmother? People could not disappear from the face of the earth, naturally, but that was a different problem altogether.
“I used to have that fantasy all the time—that I was solitary and I could choose a different name every day. But the downside—well, your parents would have to die in a nuclear war or the plague. The cons would outweigh the pros.”
“Surely they would.”
They ordered another bottle, but neither of them felt drunk.
“I wonder if Faoud has any family left,” Sam said. “They’re probably dead, if things are as bad as they say.”
Another two hours, lost in rambling conversations. Above them bats swooped in parabolas above the restaurant lights, maddened by something the women couldn’t understand. Yet Naomi talked on. She said she had realized that day what the problem with her life was. A person who has nothing, she said, who is living like an animal surrounded by men with shotguns—she had thought to herself, what does it have to do with me? An observer could say that everything about herself was frivolous, that she was truly born of frivolity. Frivolity had raised her and made her. All of it was worthless, or nearly worthless. You could not at first believe that your whole upbringing, the way that you lived and thought and felt, was worthless from top to bottom. It’s impossible to think like that. But suddenly that afternoon she had, and there was no coming back from it. She knew it was true and it came from the way Faoud had looked at her. He saw right through her effortlessly. It was like being stabbed cleanly with a knife. No one ever looks at you like that. No one ever dares. It was as if he was looking at shit and marvelling at its complexity. Marveling that it even existed and was so unaware of itself. So she had been thinking—why was that so, and what made it so? Was it something she could change?
“I wouldn’t say you were shit,” Sam said.
“Nor would he, but it’s not the point. It’s a perception—a moment of revelation. No one has an agenda for having it. It just happens and then you can’t go back. You’re undone.”
“Then you go forward,” Sam muttered.
“Sure, forward. Whatever that means. Forward to what? If your past is shit, what do you go forward to?”
When they finished the second bottle they looked up to find the restaurant deserted. Naomi picked up the bill. They walked a little unsteadily up to the path and the tower that loomed over it and agreed to part ways for the night. They kissed and hugged, and the helter-skelter laughter of the earlier part of the evening was still inside them. They were now officially a secret society of two, with a third honorable member who didn’t yet know that he belonged to it. Naomi ran a hand through the other girl’s thick and tangled hair and there was a sensual agreement between them that was too reticent to break the surface of gestures. They felt superior to their surroundings when they were together, no matter who was present.
“Sleep in tomorrow,” Naomi said. “Maybe we’ll go for a boat ride with the savage in the afternoon.”
Naomi walked slowly by herself back down to the port and looked in at the Pirate Cove to see if any pleasant scoundrels were there to buy her a drink. Finding none, she went to the ATM instead and took out three hundred euros. With a foreign card she could surpass the withdrawal limits imposed on Greeks by their own government. She ascended to the villa in the silence of the late night, the cats scattering around her as she crossed the squares. At the villa everyone was asleep, and she let herself in with a feeling of relief. She made herself tea in the kitchen and then sat on the terrace, watching clouds race across a star-rich sky, and in her head she made an inventory of everything that was in the house. There was a considerable haul of jewelry accumulated by her vain and possessive stepmother. There were the credit cards in Jimmie’s single, voluminous wallet. There was cash in their bedroom that Carissa had once told her about—they kept it in the wardrobe in an unlocked box, a strikingly fearless gesture on their part. There were the paintings and the artworks, which were difficult to remove but which represented a considerable asset. There were expensive clothes, a few shirts worth thousands of euros, the wine collection, and the cigars. All of it, she thought, belonged to her anyway.
It was her inheritance, but if Jimmie ever had a sudden accident it would be taken away from her by the salope. There was a way to prevent that from happening. She did the math and sipped her tea until everything was clearer. It wasn’t that complicated when seen from above. She was beginning to form an idea so extreme that it had nowhere to go but forward. But in the larger scheme of human suffering, it was not as extreme as she had first imagined. In the moral sense, it was simple and straightforward.
EIGHT
In the morning Naomi went alone to Vlychos and took a room at the Four Seasons there, then walked up to Palamidas. There was no one in Episkopi, but she could feel mineral eyes watching her, the old men with their dogs and their silver stubble, which was never shaved or allowed to grow. She went up to the hut in a high sea wind to fetch Faoud, and there she explained everything to him. He was to come down with her to the resort and take the key to the room, which was paid for under her name and with her passport. No one would ask any questions there. Faoud didn’t believe her, but she calmed him down. He was to just walk at her side calmly, as if he was her friend. They set off immediately. It was good to get away from the claustrophobic suspicion of the place, to walk down thr
ough the summer flowers with the sea burning their senses as they came closer to it. Faoud was lighthearted and playful. He must have slept well. He said that all night he had heard the bells strung around the necks of donkeys and goats and had dreamt of Beirut.
“I went to the American University there,” he explained in his soft and careless way. “A few years ago. But I dream about it a lot. Did you go to university?”
“In London. I wasn’t very good.”
“I don’t believe you at all. You have a nice way of speaking.”
Before they arrived at the dock and the path that turned toward Molos she had divulged more about her family background. A fuller picture of her father, the houses, the stepmother, the disagreements, the miseries. She rarely spoke frankly to others about these things, but she suddenly felt quite at ease confessing everything to him, if it was even a confession. He took it mildly as she presented herself as the heroine of her family dramas. It was selfish of her, but once she had started she couldn’t stop. She wanted him to know how ashamed she was of being rich. That was the important thing, though she forgot that he himself was from a wealthy family.
“I can’t thank you enough,” he said eventually, but not turning to her. “For everything. The food, the hotel. I don’t know why you are doing it. You must be a pure person.”
“That’s the last thing I am.”
“No, I think you are. It makes no sense otherwise. Very few people are like that—”
“I’m the most impure person, actually. But you can think what you want.”
“I’d do that anyway,” he said.
They came to the resort. In the shade of the hotel restaurant the Russians were at their lunches. No one noticed them making their way up to the room. The corridors were hushed in midday stupor. They went into the room, where the windows had been left open to the sea air and where it was surprisingly fresh. She locked the door behind them and, slightly stunned, they lay on the bed to recover from the hot walk. The two fans blew them dry. Then he slept and she made sandwiches from the groceries she had brought, serving them with pickles on the hotel plates. She lay back down next to him and waited for him to awaken, but he slept on. She couldn’t imagine how exhausted he must be. It was a vast fatigue that was integral to persecution, to being hunted and loathed. It was curious that their proximity and their slight physical distance in a hotel room didn’t feel awkward. She supposed that, speaking for herself, she had been mentally preparing for it for days and it was, she imagined, the way people evolved: they gravitated toward the most pleasing and dangerous idea.
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