The afternoon dragged on. She could hear the annoying commotion of people milling around the beach and the growl of motors put at sea. The waves beating on the shore were like small detonations, with a dread-filled lull between each explosion. The light declined and eventually she slept as well. When she woke there were flies circling the overhead lamp. He had moved onto his side and thrown a casual arm around her. If she had wanted to remove it, that was her moment to do so, but she left it in place. He woke in turn and they were entwined. She wanted them to be. They found each other’s sleepy eyes, and there was already the certainty and the resignation. So it’s just like that, she thought. She took off his shirt and then hers and they lay very peacefully as the walls turned orange from the sunset. Then she turned toward him more fully and began to kiss him. It happened slowly, and while they were sinking into their confusion, her usual train of thought, which never seemed to stop even in her sleep, finally ground to a halt and she was aware only of the onset of night and the resurrected shrilling of the cicadas from the trees nearby.
Later, as he slept on, she woke and took a shower, wrapped herself in a hotel dressing gown, and went onto the balcony. The resort was so remote that an ancient darkness suffocated it. Only the lights from the open-air restaurant and the main house glowed weakly against the cliffs. She recovered her senses and let her hair dry out. Then she stole back into the room, dressed quietly, and went down alone to the restaurant. She took a table by herself and ordered an extravagant amount of food and a glass of retsina. She ate a few skewers of kebab, downed the wine, and then asked the waitress to wrap the rest to take back to her room. While this was being done, she smoked and steadied herself. Her fingers twitched. It was excitement and aggression within herself, not fear or anxiety. She couldn’t even say why she had made love to him; it had been an impulsion, and one that would repeat itself. Such acts never disturbed her. But she also liked him. His misfortunes made him charismatic, and therefore arousing. It seemed foolish that she could feel this way when she thought it over.
Meanwhile, the Russian men looked over at her and their mouths were turned up in credulous half-smiles. She avoided their gaze and went back up to the room, tapping softly at the door to let him know that she was entering. He had just woken up and was lying in the dark smoking one of her cigarettes. His face was blank, as incredulous as the Russians had seemed credulous. Without turning on the light she laid out the remnants of her restaurant meal on the bed with the sandwiches and let him eat as he wanted. She put a practical tone in her voice.
“I’m going to give you some money. With it you can leave. You can go to the mainland without a problem.”
“Money?”
“It’s the one thing I can give you.”
“It’s a tricky thing, money.”
“Not in an emergency. This is life or death.”
She sounded melodramatic, but melodrama was built into the moment.
“Who said it was life or death?” he said.
“You’re being polite. But you know it is.”
“What if it is? It’s not your life and your death.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, now you are just being polite. I need the money, but I don’t want it.”
Need, she insisted, always trumped want.
“So you’ll go to an ATM?” he protested.
“No. I have another idea. An ATM wouldn’t be enough. And my father would notice.”
She said she had been thinking about it all night.
Jimmie and Phaine were sitting in that villa, surrounded by all their material possessions that they never used. It was a reprehensible—no, a vile—thing, the way they could do that while people like him were starving five miles away. She had been living with her outrage—at home, through her work—for some time but without being able to resolve it, increasingly tainted by her family’s privilege. But now she could do her part to turn the tables on them. It would be the sweetness of a necessary treason. Did he understand? But treason was not an act he could have ever contemplated relative to his own people. Don’t trust her, he thought. But she went on: there was nothing to it. He could rob the house while they were asleep.
“Would you do it?” she went on. “Would you do it if you knew no harm would come to them and that everything you took was insured?”
“I can’t say.”
“Think it over. It’s a victimless petty crime. It’s nothing, nothing at all. You wouldn’t even need to break and enter.”
The maid could leave the door open for him and Naomi would tell her to cooperate. He could take whatever he found there, anything he wanted. He could leave within thirty minutes with enough money to take him anywhere in Europe he needed to go. Enough to live on for years if he was careful. It was his escape door, his deliverance.
“Listen to me,” she insisted.
“I’m not going to listen to you. I’ll get caught. Then I suppose you’ll have another plan?”
“You won’t get caught. You’re invisible—you’re not in the records. They could never catch you. You can’t catch a person who doesn’t exist.”
She explained more of her idea. She hurried her own sentences until they began to fall over each other. It was nonsense, but it was not entirely nonsense. Gradually, he listened more tolerantly and her logic began to appeal to him. He could ask for money up front and be on his way, but he was sure it wouldn’t be very much. It would be money honestly come by, but it wouldn’t be enough to save him. It wouldn’t be enough to launch him into a new life. She was right: it had to be more than what she could take out of an ATM machine. She had it all mapped out, down to the last details. He could slip away to Metochi and take her father’s car and drive out of the country through the seaports to Italy. On those sea routes there was virtually no passport control, since Italy was a fellow Schengen country. If he went north by himself he would run up against the Macedonian border, the worst of borders to try and breach without papers. Driving an expensive car, on the other hand, no one would ask him questions on the ferries from Patras. He would slip through invisibly. Since Jimmie rarely checked on his car it would be probably forty-eight hours before her father realized that it had been taken, and by then Faoud would be out of the country. He could even sell the car on the other side; all the papers were stored inside it. It was easy to sell cars illegally in southern Italy anyway. The vehicle itself was worth many thousands. Or he could keep it and make his own way to wherever he wanted to go. His options would be numerous. Even the tickets for the car ferry were prepaid and in the glove compartment. Her father erred on the side of carefree trust when it came to such things. It was a free passage with only minor risks, easy when compared to anything else he would have to do.
“In other words,” he objected almost at once, “I’d be a thief. A thief dependent on another man’s daughter.”
But she held her own. “My father has stolen everything he owns. He’s a master thief. You would be stealing from a thief, and everything is insured. He’ll get a brand-new car out of it and he won’t mind at all. You’ll just have to change the car number plates. You can do that in Italy for a bribe. That’s the easy part.”
“You’re hiring me as a burglar,” he smiled. “But you don’t get to keep the profits.”
“I don’t want any of his filthy money. I’d rather redistribute it. He’ll never know it was me either—I’ll be the perfect actress.”
“No one can be that. Not to your own father.”
“I can. I know exactly what to do. He won’t think anything that bad of me. It’ll just be a burglary like any other. The houses of the rich people here are broken into all the time. It’s not unusual. The police will hardly shrug, trust me.” She was suddenly vehement. “You’d be smart to accept this, Faoud. I’m giving you a new life. It’s as simple as that.”
He went over it in his mind. He didn’t know the details of these routes as well as she did, but he began to feel that she had worked it out well enough. The eas
iest ways out of the country were the cruise lines to Italy; that he had heard already. Everything would depend on speed and luck. With those two things he could bring it off and no one would be the worse. It would be a way of escaping peacefully and letting life flow on uninterrupted. When he looked at it this way he felt compelled to accept the premise.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, to keep her at bay. “I’ll think about it tonight.”
“There’s not a lot to think about.”
“I disagree. But I’ll know tomorrow.”
“Why don’t you tell me now? It would be easier if you did. But if you can’t, it’s all right. I’ll call you tomorrow and we can talk about it.”
“Don’t have any bad dreams,” he said as she prepared to leave at last. “I don’t want you having any bad dreams because of me.”
She walked back alone to Hydra. On the path the shadows under the olive trees cast by the moon were so dark that she lost the threads of her thoughts as she walked through them. The old people drinking ouzo in their gardens, secretive as smugglers. The island gardens with their hum of moths. They always looked up: a stranger walking by. Harmless, but a stranger all the same. She thought about Faoud. She knew that he would accept her proposition and go along with it, and by the time she reached Hydra she felt elated that she had managed to persuade him. She wondered how long it had been since he had been with a woman. Weeks, maybe months. One could never tell, but it was possible that it had been even longer.
At the port she went for a drink alone and she put in her earphones and listened to some rebetiko music to seal herself off. She drank Aperol Spritzers with bowls of salted peanuts, since it was her time-honored way of obtaining simple bliss. She thought about Sam asleep in her white room with the icons and the iron bed. What did she want with this appealingly impressionable girl? Naomi wasn’t sure herself. It was just an attraction, as her feeling toward Faoud was an attraction. It was a matter of gravity. It was her influence over them that was attractive too, their reluctant malleability. She couldn’t understand why people were like that.
—
When she got home her father was still up smoking his before-bed cigar with a large cup of herbal tea, a soporific that she suspected Carissa knew how to prepare with a dab of numbing hemlock. He was alone on the terrace, listening to Dean Martin with his feet up in his leather slippers. She went out to kiss him goodnight, and he took her hand for a moment as she stood next to him, asked her if she wanted to come to an art party the following night. It would do them both good, would it not?
“I don’t think so, Daddy. I can’t take any more of those, honestly. Why don’t we have dinner at Manolis? Just like old times.”
“All right,” he said mildly, too weary to disagree about anything now. “I can’t stand Manolis, but I’ll do it for you. It’s time we had a tête-à-tête, you and I. Without Funny, I mean.”
“I’d like that too, Daddy. Really I would.”
Jimmie then put down his cigar and expelled the last of the smoke. His voice was slightly strained.
“Did you see the Haldanes today?”
She shook her head and let go of his hand.
“I’ll see them tomorrow,” she said.
“Then where have you been all day? Funny says you’re smuggling drugs. I said it seemed improbable—but only mildly so.”
“I went for a long swim in a beautiful place.”
“I see. But that doesn’t really mean anything, does it?”
They smiled, and the long-standing ice suddenly broke between them.
“No, Daddy. It doesn’t. But you know what I mean.”
“I suppose I do. I’m fond of long swims myself. It’s why I have a house here, after all.”
She leaned down to plant a kiss on his pugnacious forehead. He was smelling more and more of perfume, she had noticed. Was there something wrong?
“It keeps you fit,” she said.
A dry sadness lasted for the rest of the conscious part of the night. She called Sam and told her everything that had happened at the hotel, including the sexual part, though she offered no details. The American girl went quiet for a while. Then Naomi told her what she had told Faoud. She asked if Sam would be willing to help them.
“It’s for a good cause,” she said several times.
But Sam was surly. “That sounds incredibly stupid.”
“It’s not stupid at all.”
“Stupid and dangerous. Don’t do it, don’t even think about it.”
But Naomi was not at the stage where anything could be discussed, let alone refuted.
“I’m asking you,” she said impatiently. “Just don’t say no. I know there’s nothing in it for you—but it’ll be a blow for justice. There’s no way you can refuse to do this for him. You’ll feel like a criminal if you don’t.”
“I feel like one now. Is that what you wanted? I think it is.”
NINE
Eighteen hours later Jimmie dressed in front of his full-length mirror—cream suit, buttonhole, pink plaid Borelli shirt—and set off alone for the house of Spiro Mistakidis, a wealthy art dealer who also had his summer house on the hillsides above the port. Phaine had gone to dinner with other friends and he was free for a few hours. Not free enough, and not for enough hours, but sufficiently free to flirt a little and talk with his old male friends without reserve. The bare hills rising up into a tender dusk always filled him with a vague yearning and a sadness for times past. He had a well-rehearsed line of Homer at hand to capture it, one that had rolled inside his mind for years, Telemachus pining for Ithaca: “Goat, not stallion land, but it means the world to me.”
He picked his way down the steps with his rosewood cane and stopped from time to time to listen to the starlings and take in the twilit white walls. He had never ceased loving this little island and was proud of his loyalty to it. But times were changing. In reality, he was already thinking of selling the house and moving its contents to the Italian one. It was the social life here that was so strenuous. At the Mistakidis house that night there were fifty people and he knew almost all of them. One had to navigate among them, keeping up the banter, and the small amount of freedom he had carved out went nowhere but to hours of such banter. He was introduced to some Turkish collectors and then stood on a terrace in the full moonlight with a silly drink in one hand while torrents of absurd words flowed uncontrollably out of his mouth. Who knew how. Dinner with his daughter proved to be a more attractive proposition, especially as he got to Manolis early and enjoyed a glass of wine by himself, the cane resting against his legs and his shirt unbuttoned. The heat and babble had sapped him, but he revived. Things were rather swell in the larger scheme of things; he had made a few million that year with sales of art pieces to Moscow and Taipei, and with his rainbow of shares. It was the family problems that multiplied and became intractable.
When Naomi arrived she was prim with him, which he liked. They ordered a bottle of white and some skorpina fish. How many of their problems, he thought, could have been resolved instantly by just having dinner together at Manolis? He had been a bit of a stubborn fool about it, and now it was almost too late.
“You look tremendous,” he said as soon as she sat down, and he meant it. “Those long swims have been doing you good. Your color has come back.”
She said she was feeling better the last few days. The heat agreed with her, made her less grumpy.
“Ah,” he said, raising his eyebrows and glancing down into the cold wine settled into his glass. “It’s always good to feel less grumpy.”
“I’ve been exploring the far side of the island,” she went on. “You remember how we used to go there with the Saplamideses? Maybe I’m feeling nostalgic.”
“Yes, your mother loved it there.”
“I found a life jacket there a few days ago. What do you suppose it means? I know what everyone is saying.”
He had the feeling—it teased at him like a draft from a badly closed door—that she was testing hi
m in some way. She wanted to sound out his morality about one of the dark issues of the day. It was childish, but if she wanted to do that he wasn’t willing to back down.
“You think they’re reaching even here now?” he said. “Let’s say they are. I would say one would have to contact the police and let them deal with it. Of course, you can’t let people drown—”
“I didn’t see anyone,” she added slowly. “But I wanted to know what you thought about it. I mean, do you think we have an obligation to take them in—as Christians?”
“I’m not exactly a Christian, Naomi. And you’re an atheist. There are no obligations one way or the other.”
“So you’d deport them back to Turkey?”
“I was under the impression that they had a safe haven there. They’re fed, clothed, housed. No one is threatening their lives. Apparently they have other reasons for throwing themselves into the sea. They seem to like what we have. But what do we have that they like, do you think?”
“I don’t think it’s that at all. It’s just survival.”
“No, it’s not survival. You don’t have to go to Sweden to survive. They are surviving in Turkey, as I just said.”
“Barely.”
“Well, that’s the Turks for you. It’s funny how their fellow Muslims are quite happy to treat them like cockroaches or close their borders altogether. That’s what they do; but we have to be Christians, whatever that means. I hear Frau Merkel is a devout Christian too. Personally—”
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