Beautiful Animals

by Lawrence Osborne

  “There’s nothing personal about it,” Naomi protested.

  “Maybe not, but personally I think we’re not being told what is really happening. The whole thing is melodrama. It’s a deliberate orchestration, and we’re the dumb fall guys on the receiving end of it. You have to wonder whether Europeans are just too stupid to survive now. We don’t seem to understand obvious things that are staring us in the face.”

  “Then what is staring us in the face?”

  “They’re going under like the Titanic. They’re going under and they’re going to drag us down with them. That’s all there is to it. Or else it’s something deeper. The traffickers sending them here have their reasons, don’t you think?—they don’t just arrive, as the media is trying to tell us.”

  “Then what are the reasons? I want to know what you think.”

  Jimmie leaned back a little and his whole body shifted in an awkward way as his anger came and went and then returned. So they had to disagree, they had to fight. Was that it?

  “I think the issues are obvious,” he blustered on. “If we keep them out it destroys them; if we let them in it destroys us. Do we have the stomach for that dilemma?”

  “It’s not that at all. They’re fleeing from horror. You’re dehumanizing them by thinking like that. You have no idea what’s going through their heads. It’s just tabloid boilerplate.”

  He said it didn’t matter what was going through their heads. She didn’t know what was going through their heads either. She didn’t speak Arabic. Had she lived in an Arab country? He thought not. She knew nothing about them, nothing at all. Less than nothing, she was just romanticizing it. He said that people couldn’t run away from themselves. They brought everything with them, whether they knew it or liked it or not. Then you had to deal with that. But she didn’t even know what it was—she hadn’t thought about it at all. She wanted to be a Samaritan: the easiest job in the world, and perfect for the useless European middle classes.

  “I’m not saying you’re useless, of course. I’m saying you don’t know anything about the Arabs. Nor do I. But my guard is up.”

  “For God’s sake—”

  “They’re coming from a safe haven,” he retorted. “So it’s their choice. It’s blackmail, and they know it at least. It’s a shame you don’t.”

  “They’re helpless and you know it—we know it.”

  “Are they?”

  Then he poured her another glass and relaxed a little, as if his main point had been made and no other was now necessary.

  He said, “Why—have you met any here?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Any ten-year-olds wandering the shore?”

  Repulsive, she thought.

  The sneering certainty coiled around a grain of truth. But she had to give way a little and deflate the animosity between them, because she had only wanted to confirm that he merited his imminent loss of property.

  “You’ll change your tune,” he was saying as a wind-down, “when they start harassing you on the street. What are German women saying now? Confusion. They’re hanging from their own gallows.”

  “Daddy, if you met one I’d like to think you’d give them everything you own, just to prove me wrong. Would you?”

  He laughed. “Yes, I likely would. Just to keep you happy. But I’d probably ask for it back the next day. Reason always gets the better of me for some reason. Reason or neurosis.”

  “Then I’m just as neurotic as you.”

  “We live in a culture, Nobbins, where neurosis is all there is. There’s no escaping it anywhere.”

  After dessert they reminisced about her mother. Naomi had long suspected that he had begun to see Phaine while her mother was dying of cancer. He hadn’t waited. He had been a bit of a playboy back in the day. There was a streak of Porfirio Rubirosa in him. “Sports, girls, adventures, celebrities, these were the only things that interested me,” as that playboy used to say. “In short, life.” That was life for Jimmie, too. The Charles Krafft “Disasterware” he used to collect was just a pastime to make money. He had one of Krafft’s ceramic delft hand grenades and a pottery handgun with two bluebirds painted on the grip that he kept by his bedside as a joke.

  They walked home arm in arm. They dawdled their way through a few late-night bars. At the villa, Carissa opened the door and informed them that Phaine had come back earlier and was already in bed reading. Jimmie asked Carissa if they might have a herbal tea served in their bedroom to send them off to sleep. The maid replied she could make them something Greek her mother used to give her. It usually worked. “That sounds suitably mysterious and potent,” Jimmie said, and turned to go up to his wife, leaving the two young women alone in the salon.

  They went into the kitchen and Carissa set about making the infusion from the packets of plants and herbs that she had bought from the old woman. It included a tiny pinch of the hemlock as well as some spearmint and valerian. While the water boiled they talked aimlessly. Carissa had spent some of her childhood in the Mani, from where she had retained some curious lore. Her grandmother there used to tell her that the woods of the mountains were still haunted by ex-communicated pagan spirits that the villagers called daimonia. When her grandmother was a small girl her own grandmother used to tell her that she saw the god Pan at crossroads in the deep forest. The gods had lived on without anyone knowing. One could become spellbound by these pagan spirits, possessed and enchanted.

  The infusion had turned a pale golden green. For a moment Naomi hesitated, but then she abandoned her precautions and began to relate her plan for the robbery. She laid it out calmly and slowly, so that she would appear convincingly ethical and coolheaded, and she was sure that the maid would sympathize. Carissa for her part stood with her arms folded and listened intently until she understood what was being asked of her.

  “I can’t do it without you,” Naomi said. “Nothing will happen to you afterward—things will just go on as before.” All Carissa had to do was serve Jimmie and Phaine some herbal tea, then leave the front door unlocked and go to bed. She then had to stay in her room and go to sleep as if nothing had happened. If she heard a few noises she would do nothing, just keep on sleeping. They might ask why the door was unlocked, but Naomi would think of something. She even wondered if Carissa could go up afterward and lock it again. She didn’t know yet. For herself, she would sleep at the Haldanes’ that night.

  “This is all to help some migrant?” the maid said.

  “I’d help you too if I could. I think you know that perfectly well. I’ve never held anything back from you—you know I help you whenever I can.”

  “Yes, but you know me. You’ve known me for years. Now you’re doing this for a stranger?”

  “I can’t explain it, but he isn’t a stranger to me. I feel like he’s my responsibility. I know you probably won’t understand that.”

  Carissa flared up for a moment.

  “You’re right, I don’t. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. What if your father finds out? You’re done for.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you’re really done for. He’ll disown you.”

  “Carissa, it’s not a rational thing. I don’t care that it’s not rational. Don’t you see? It’s an emotional thing. Do I really have to explain it on my hands and knees?”

  “Well, it might make it sound less crazy!”

  “No, it would still sound crazy. I want to do it because it’s crazy.”

  “And to hell with the rest of us?”

  “Maybe I could give you something for helping, just in case.” She paused, not quite sure if bribery was the way to go. But she realized it was inevitable. “You know what I mean. Don’t be embarrassed. I’d be happy to and I think it’s only fair. What about five thousand euros?”

  “Twenty.”

  “You’ve thought it through, haven’t you? All right, fifteen.”

  Carissa hesitated for a moment, then said, “I’ll do it if that’s all I have to do. Are
you sure?”

  “Very sure.”

  “Is he safe, this man?”

  “Very safe. He didn’t want to do it at all. I think a part of him still doesn’t want to do it.”

  “I suppose that’s a good sign.”

  She prepared the tea tray with some lemon biscuits, and when it was done they embraced. Carissa went up into the gloom of the first-floor landing and set down the tray to knock on the master-bedroom door. Phaine was already asleep on her side, and Jimmie was reading in bed in his silk pajamas. When she set the tray down beside him he gave her a merry eye and told her that she could go to bed now. She went back down to the kitchen and found that Naomi had disappeared.

  Alone as she always was at night, she poured herself a brandy shot in the salon and went out onto the terrace to think about Naomi’s proposition. Fifteen thousand euros was a lot of money and it was, if she was honest with herself, too much to turn down for something so simple as unlocking a door. She didn’t want to harm the Codringtons fatally, but there was undeniably a question of justice in taking some of their wealth and passing it on to a helpless itinerant. Naomi had told her that it would be a few nights from now, because Jimmie and Phaine would be going to a cocktail party earlier in the evening and would in all probability come home semi-drunk and sleepy. A dose of her homemade herbal tea and they would sleep through the whole thing without a whimper. She considered how likely this was. Jimmie often woke up because of his aging bladder, but he stumbled around in the bathroom half asleep and rarely, if ever, came downstairs. She would make the tea strong enough—a little stronger than usual—and make sure of it and then go to her room and lock the door until the following morning. Fifteen thousand euros was enough to buy a whole new wardrobe or pay some of her mother’s medical bills, or both. And if Jimmie had paid her fairly from the beginning she would not have had to do it.

  She poured herself a second shot of brandy and felt the bitterness of the alcohol reaching down into her stomach. They were filthy Scrooges, the pair of them, except when it came to their social equals, and then, of course, their generosity flowered. But the maid never saw the genuine side of it. All she saw was the hypocrisy and the frugality behind the scenes, a frugality of which she was both executor and victim. You brought it on yourselves, she thought vindictively, and she was certain that she and Naomi had understood the matter simultaneously, without disagreement. Her father in any case had always told her to distrust and hold to account the capitalist class—but how much better it was to rob them on the sly.

  THE

  NIGHT JOURNEY

  TEN

  The three days Faoud spent hiding in the hotel room passed in a blur of room service, TV, and thoughts avoided. But while he waited that last night, the evening felt long and tedious and the chatter from the hotel restaurant came and went like music on a radio being turned up and then turned down. By eleven it was quiet again. He let himself out of the room, leaving the key in the door, and went unnoticed up to the coastal path according to Naomi’s instructions. A lopsided moon lit the first bend where he waited. An hour passed and still Naomi had not come, though she had promised to meet him there. He sat on a wall and considered the possibility that it might be a trap after all. He didn’t know what he would do if it was. Run down to the sea and throw himself into it? It would be an insalubrious drama with which to end a life that had once been so promising. In the end he was forced to trust her, if only because there was no one else to trust. It was said that a friend with an understanding heart is worth no less than a sister. At twelve-thirty, however, she appeared. She had told him to follow her at a fair distance; they were not to talk or greet each other. She was dressed in black, and as soon as she saw him, she turned and began to walk back the way she had come. He followed her, doing as he had been told.

  It was a long walk. The world of the Greeks was something new: domestic and peaceful, self-regulating. It was made fresh, not degraded, by its great age. So there were no cars and motorbikes on this island. Everything was on foot. There were slivers of land in the sea, single lights. After an hour they passed above the Sunset, where a few couples lingered at the tables. The path then curved downward into the port and into the thickets of luxury yachts and cafe terraces, but the people had dispersed. It was a weeknight and the bars had closed.

  They went through the village and began to climb up the steps. Naomi turned once and, with a single motion of the hand, encouraged him. He knew that she was leading him to her father’s house, and he was curious as to what kind of place it was. He saw that it stood at the very top of the steps, the last house before the wilderness took over, and that around it lay only one other house, a villa almost of the same size and with a similar white wall surrounding it. The girl came to the somber wood door of her own house and rested there for a moment. There were two lamps hung on either side of the door, but above the wall the house was dark. She then came back down the steps, and soon they were face-to-face in the glare of the lamps and she put a finger in front of her lips. She whispered close to his ear a “Good luck” and kissed his cheek, and then looked back up at the door, which was not open. “Move,” she said then, “don’t look back.” As she did this, she slipped something into his hand. It was small change for a ticket to Metochi for the following morning and a set of car keys. He had wanted to say something, but before he could she moved off, skipping down the steps as if she was going back to the port to look for a nightcap. How much better it would be if he could just go with her.

  Instead, he loped up to the door and stood before it, not knowing who would open it. In seconds, Naomi disappeared, the door clicked open, and Carissa peered out. She was young, about twenty-five to his eye. She seemed suddenly taken aback by his own appearance. She stepped away from the door and let him in, then closed it soundlessly behind him.

  On the ground floor of the villa there was only one light on. It was in the main room, and it was turned low. She made him take off his sandals and they walked barefoot into the salon, over the rugs and under the static chandelier. There was a large bag open on the floor and she motioned to it; it was for him to fill. She mimed her way through a strange explanation. She had already piled certain things in the bag, he saw. They were things that she must have removed from the bedroom upstairs. Money, documents, and a ring of keys for the house in Italy that Naomi had invited him to use. The money was the most reassuring. It would save him time and it would save him making a blunder upstairs. Then she held up Jimmie Codrington’s passport, which she laid inside the bag, and a small slip of paper upon which were written the PIN numbers for Jimmie’s credit cards.

  It took her a minute to do all this, and then she looked at him cautiously and backed away toward the stairs that led down to her room. When he was alone, he went quickly around the room, scanning it for objects that were small enough to take with him. There were some silver knives and spoons that he pocketed, a ceremonial dagger from the War of Independence that might sell for something. But he felt unclean taking such things. They were better left in their place, talismans he didn’t understand and that would bring him bad luck. Theft was bad enough. He closed the bag and listened. The maid had probably gone directly to sleep as promised. He straightened himself and lifted the bag onto his shoulder, even though it didn’t contain much.

  As he did so he heard a noise at the top of the stairs leading directly down to him. He was only two or three strides from the door, but it was already too late. The voice had boomed down from the stairs, in Greek, words he didn’t understand, and the feet were descending, heavily but slowly, the fear in them all too evident. Jimmie had woken up from a drunken sleep when he heard a few noises coming from the ground floor. Because fear came naturally to him, he reached out for the ceramic pistol and hand grenade and went to the stairs in his pajamas. He was not prepared for anything, but confusion and fear and rage had suddenly overwhelmed him, and he held the ceramic pistol as if it might mean something in the world of real burglars and thieves. All
he could see without his glasses was a man holding a bag making for the front door.

  ELEVEN

  After leaving Faoud at the door, Naomi arrived at the Haldanes’. Sam was waiting for her on the porch with an oil lamp and a pot of mint tea. She had grown increasingly anxious as the hours passed, and when she finally saw Naomi she picked up the lamp, scattering little rectangles of light around her, and came to the steps to light them. Here by Vlychos it was more blustery and the darkness of the path was total.

  “What happened?” the American girl hissed at her as Naomi came up the steps.

  “Nothing. Let’s go inside.”

  “I told my parents you were going to spend the night. I’ll tell them you got here an hour ago. They’re all asleep anyway.”

  They went up to the porch and lay down together on the long sofa with its numerous cotton cushions. The tea was still hot and the mint leaves floated on its surface. Naomi related everything that had happened, and she seemed, Sam thought, very pleased with herself. How could it have gone so smoothly? Of course, Sam pointed out, Naomi didn’t know that Faoud had done as she’d asked.

  “No, but if anything had gone wrong I would’ve had a call from Jimmie, that’s for sure. So nothing went wrong. I’ll stay up another hour just in case.”

  They lay side by side listening to the sea, wondering in different ways if this alibi would hold if it came to a crunch. Naomi thought it would; Sam was doubtful, though she would stick to their story.

  “It’s incredible to think—” she began.

  “That he’s in the house,” Naomi finished for her.

  “You don’t want to go find him afterward?”

  “How would I find him anyway? He would have to find me, and he won’t. If he’s got any sense he won’t.”

  “Maybe you should go back to London. It’ll be so boring here after it gets out. Everyone’ll be talking about it for weeks. I don’t think I’ll be able to stand it myself.”