Beautiful Animals

by Lawrence Osborne

  Naomi turned over and brushed the girl’s cheek with the back of her hand.

  “I must say, I think you’ve been incredibly courageous to throw your lot in with me on this thing. Thank you. It was a brave and generous thing to do, to keep a secret.”

  “Was it?”

  “Yes. For once good has been done without anyone being hurt.”

  Sam let this sophistry penetrate her and then sink as deep as it could go. But in the end she didn’t believe in the innate weight of Naomi’s sentence. There was a conflation of falsities within it. A robbery was still a harm, people were still damaged by it. Why was Naomi so blithe about it? She talked about it as if it were nothing but a chess game that could be played over and over with no consequences. She seemed to be indifferent to obvious consequences and to equally obvious motives that were not acknowledged.

  When Naomi woke it was still dark. No one had called her. She lay awake for a while, mesmerized by the jangling wind chimes, such a crassly Californian sound in that Greek habitat. Afterward she slept longer. She had a dream that she was flying over the desert observing a long and disorganized caravan below her. It was night, but the far horizons were lit up as if by artillery. It was seven when Sam woke her, and she saw at once a coffeepot and Greek pastries and a bowl filled with sugar cubes. The family were still not around.

  “They went into town for coffee,” Sam said simply, and lay back down next to her. “I told them you were here all night.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Did you sleep all right?”

  “Yes—but I thought I was somewhere else.”

  “I get that all the time.”

  Sam poured the coffee and they shared a single cup, taking turns to sip, relishing the intimacy. The sea had turned into a solar mirror. The olive trees around the house burned with their eternal gray sheen. So what world, she thought, had she returned to from the desert? Across that same sea Faoud had sailed an hour earlier and now he was out of sight, vanished forever. She remembered Sam’s question from the night before—did she want to go and find him?—and she wondered if she had answered it honestly. She had not. She missed him already, but perhaps it was the certainty that their paths were bound and never to cross a second time. They had better not, she thought grimly. Then they attacked the pastries. Neither had eaten in twelve hours or more. They wondered if they should go swimming or voyaging among the isles. Anything to get away from their families. In the event, however, they abandoned the idea of a boat and walked instead up to the old Ghika house above Kamini. It was where the Athenian artist had entertained Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller in the 1940s, but the sprawling villa had burned down a few years later. According to island rumor it had been torched by a disgruntled servant. The ruins with their grand archways and solitary pillars had decayed quite a bit since her last visit, when she was twenty. They climbed over the ramshackle fence and wandered through the cavernous rooms. Coolly detached from the world outside, they rolled a joint from the remains of their original stash and smoked in the last fresh hour of the day. It was just after twelve by the time they returned to the house.

  The Haldanes were at an early lunch on the porch, and Amy made them sit and eat the moussaka the maid had prepared. It was the very dish Jimmie had urged to have made for them. They must have had a stunned and glowing look on their faces, because Christopher looked at them slyly. Jeffrey took off his glasses, though it was not clear why he was wearing them, and pulled out a chair for Naomi.

  “Your phone’s been ringing for the last ten minutes,” he said, giving it to her. She took it and glanced down at the nine calls from the same number. It was Carissa.

  “Oh?”

  “We were going to answer, but Amy said it would be rude. If it’s urgent, don’t mind us—go ahead and call back.”

  Naomi’s face was suddenly hot, and she stood politely and said, “I’ll just go down there so I don’t bother you.”

  She strode trembling into the lethally exposing sunlight and made her way about fifty yards from the house so they would not hear. Carissa picked up at once. Her voice was broken and faint, and she seemed to be gasping. It was early in the afternoon, and the maid had surely been up since six or seven. Nothing could have happened during those intervening hours, and when Carissa told her that things had not gone according to plan she was at a loss to believe it. Though stunned, she refused to give in to the emotion. But it was not what she had expected to feel anyway. It was more like nothingness. She went back up to the Haldanes’ with an excuse.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “the maid has a problem with the house and I have to go up there right away. You know how these things are.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Sam said at once.

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I can’t see how either of us can really help her. She probably just wants money and Jimmie and Phaine are out somewhere.”

  It was remarkable how easily her coolness came to her.

  But she had to avert her eyes from the panic in Sam’s face. The girl grew adamant. If Naomi grew adamant in turn, it would look suspicious; she had to be offhand and relaxed. Unfortunately, Sam had already risen, and her decision to go with Naomi produced a flicker of alarm between the parents, who didn’t understand why she needed to do it.

  “Is there a problem?” Amy asked.

  “No,” Naomi said, “really, don’t worry. This happens all the time with our maid. Sam, you really don’t have to come.”

  “I’m coming. Mom, don’t worry about it, I’ll be right back.”

  “Why don’t you call when you get there?” her mother said.

  They set off in a bad mood. Naomi explained everything in short, exhausted sentences. It was difficult to believe. Carissa had found the bodies in the morning and that was all. It had gone wrong, she didn’t know how or why, and they couldn’t change it now.

  “What went wrong, then?” Sam kept asking. She was too numb to think of anything else to say.

  “Or she’s lying,” Naomi said in confusion.

  At the villa’s outer door they stopped for a moment and caught their breath. Naomi stared around her with a wild emptiness, as if she had lost her bearings and her sense. Sweat dripped off her knuckles and made little dark spots around her feet. She opened the door with her own key, turning to give Sam a curious look, and they went inside.

  She called softly for the maid. Even in the hall it was clear that the interior was unusually dark and that the blinds of the terrace windows had been drawn down to the floor. There was a vague sense of disorder that their eyes couldn’t yet see. The salon was alive with flies, and there the maid was sitting alone on one of Jimmie’s British Raj horsehair armchairs with the phone in one hand and her eyes turned silently toward the hall and the two girls. The bodies lay where they had fallen during the night, composed and peaceful, and the flies swarmed around them and around the furniture, which perhaps would never be used again. The most curious thing, however, was that Carissa was not hysterical; she merely appeared surprised to see the American girl, as if that was the more significant calamity.

  TWELVE

  A few young tourists were already at the port when Faoud arrived there at five in the morning. One of the cafes was slowly opening for them. He ordered a coffee and sat inconspicuously among the crowd until the darkness began to break up across the sea and the ferry gates opened. It was a wait of an hour. During that time he listened to the chatter of the travelers while watching the quay for police. Most of the former, as far as he could gather, were headed for the airport in Athens. He listened, but his mind was in pieces and the disassembled fragments whirled around according to the laws of disintegration. His father had always warned him to keep to himself and not to talk to people too offhandedly, and now more than ever, it seemed like good advice, which suggested that his father knew the ways of the world better than Faoud had realized. He kept to himself and counted down the minutes while trying to forget the event that had just happened,
ten or fifteen seconds of violence that he had never foreseen and which had happened so unexpectedly that when it was finished all he was able to do was close the door and run.

  So the crisis had come. But it had left him cold and lethargically calm. The terror will come later, he thought. He recalled a few words from the sura of Al-Isra, though he couldn’t say why they mattered to him or why he remembered them now. They were about the journey that the Prophet had taken from the Kaba after he had fallen asleep there—the journey to Jerusalem, where he had prayed with the other prophets and glimpsed the Lotus of the Utmost Boundary. It was the moment when the Prophet had received the tenets of the faith, if he had not misunderstood it. It was the Angel Gabriel who had taken him to Jerusalem and then back to Mecca, after lifting him beyond space and time. And he saw the Garden of Abode as well, encircling the Lotus.

  At six-thirty the small boat from Metochi arrived. Only he got on it. When they pulled out from Hydra, he turned once and looked behind him at the other passengers on the quay who were waiting for the larger Athens ferry. But all was normal and no one, apparently, had noticed him. Thus it was both fate and Allah’s will, and about those it was absurd to have an opinion.

  —

  At Metochi inlets and coves appeared half-lit in the first sun; there were fields of reeds with the water luminous around them. Three people waited at the jetty, lone figures in seemingly open countryside. He came down the gangplank onto the quay and saw at once that there was no security in such a lonely place and that the paid parking lot lay only a short walk from the boat. He went into it without hurrying or drawing attention to himself and went down the rows of cars until he had found the navy-blue Peugeot with a sunscreen drawn across its rear window. The ticket touts for the Hydra boats were not even open yet and the fields echoed with collared doves. A perfect blue sky.

  He pressed the button on the key ring to open the doors and the car’s lights flashed and the locks slid open with a quiet shuffle. He opened a back door and threw in the bag, then thought better of it and removed it to the trunk, which was almost empty except for a toolkit and the spare tire.

  In the confusion his temples burned, his mouth had gone dry and sticky, and yet he had to resist the hysteria and assert the calm that his elders had always admired in him even as a boy. He took a while to compose himself, therefore, and to look through the glove compartment. The car was not yet hot, but even so, his fingers slipped in their own sweat. There were road maps, the Patras ferry ticket for two persons and the car. There was a bound notebook with Jimmie’s emergency details printed out on a single sheet inserted into the fly. He would read it later. There was also the parking coupon, which was prepaid.

  He opened the map first and looked at the roads flung across Greece. He found Patras and saw that once he got to the isthmus the road from Corinth was more or less direct. He measured it: three or four hours, maybe. He had to go onward, second by second, minute by minute. He pushed his panicked thoughts to the side of his mind and forced himself to think about the distances again: how long would it take? One could never tell from a map, and he intended to drive as slowly as he could. No stops by the highway police, no exuberance. The road from Metochi went up to Ermioni and from there inland up to Epidavros. A road through sleepy villages, and at Nea Epidavros it touched the sea again. It was not a difficult route.

  He drove along the sea road to Thermisia. It was very different from Hydra. Few tavernas, only the farmhouses and their quiet orchards. By the road stood red signs for a thing called Silk Oil. He went past the arrows for Ermioni and saw for a moment that marine village’s flat-roofed houses scattered across a hill. Soon thereafter the road rose steeply, and the sea was below him when he stopped to recover his senses and to reclaim his calm among fragrant macquis and the tinkling of goat bells in the ravines. It was a terraced land filled with crooked trees and a subtle sense of relation to a sea that was just out of sight. From under the trees came a menacing drone of bees. Farther on the land became drier and more vast. After only an hour the horror which he had been unexpectedly sucked into was no longer fresh. On this ever-curling road it suddenly seemed more distant than it actually was, and a numbing absence of fear had returned.

  An hour and a half after leaving Metochi the road swung over another sea, but so high up that he had to look down at it from afar. The signs in English said Nea Epidavros and he could see it below as well, an arc of red tiles and white around a bay. The sun was high enough to enfold the land by the time he reached a mountainside bar called Stork, whose wide terraces overlooked the same town and the forested peninsulas around it. Inside it was sleek and hip; a place for the local well-heeled. He took an outside table and ordered coffee and orange juice, and waited for something inside himself to catch up with the luminosity around him. As he sipped his orange juice, two priests, black as ravens in tall hats, came and sat a table away from him. Groomed and suave men with dandy beards. Faoud glanced away from them, but they noticed him and appeared disdainful. Little birds began to swarm around them.

  —

  Improbable though it seemed, he finally felt that he had entered the European bloodstream; along its arteries and veins he could now move like any other corpuscle. Surely, then, his passage had been preordained. It had been made possible by a higher power to whom thanks were owed. As he sucked on his straw, however, the nightmare of the previous night came back to him and he had to keep his hands in place on the table. “It wasn’t my fault,” he kept repeating to himself under his breath. It had been forced upon him by the mad old man. The man whom Naomi had described several times as a fascist. Well, a fascist then. It mattered less if he was a fascist.

  The sophistry didn’t work, but it would tide him over until some kind of atonement and shock could take over, and indeed it was the atonement he dreaded, rather than the coming shock.

  —

  The office of the ferry company in Patras was empty, and the boats were equally so; it was a matter of minutes to book a berth on the next sailing at 5 p.m. It was a sixteen-hour voyage to Brindisi on the Grimaldi line arriving at nine the following morning, and naturally the Codringtons had booked a first-class private cabin. Was his wife joining him on this leg? No, she was indisposed. No other questions were asked; he was given his tickets for the Euroferry Olympia.

  It was a long wait and he went back to the car, lay down in the backseat, and slept. When he revived the other cars were boarding. The time had passed easily, God be praised. As he entered the ship a man in uniform asked him for his ticket and then, unexpectedly, his passport. He had not prepared for this, and scrambled to pull out Codrington’s passport, which would condemn him as soon as it was opened. But it was not a passport control. As soon as the man saw the cover of the British document he waved him in and the trial was over. He locked the car, took the heavy bag out of the trunk, and went into the slightly run-down interior of the Olympia.

  He came into a lobby with a circular upholstered sofa and a bronze statue at its center, with slot machines to one side and a depressing restaurant with white plastic tables and nautical themes. It wasn’t worth a detour. He went straight up to his cabin, now suddenly exhausted all over again, locked the door behind him, and snapped shut the curtains of its single window. For the first time in days he felt reasonably safe. He stripped off, showered for a long time, filled with dread at the thought of another man’s dried blood on his skin. He had to be purified from head to toe, like a man coming home at night from a slaughterhouse.

  Then he lay unthinking and passive on one of the two beds with the lights off, waiting for the ship’s first shuddering motions at 5 p.m. Only when they were out at sea in the middle of a sparkling ocean dusk did he reopen the curtains and let the dying light into the cabin. He groomed himself in front of the bathroom mirror, shaved using the complimentary razor, and slicked back his wetted hair with the plastic comb. He tried on the different shirts and jackets that he had stolen from the master bedroom at the house—Jimmie’s Savil
e Row finery—until he found a combination that pleased him, then matched them with a pair of white pants that did not fit him, but which would pass. He took two hundred-euro notes from the bag and went up to the restaurant to eat.

  Night had fallen and the dining room pitched gently from side to side. He ordered five dishes since hunger gnawed at him; he also ordered a Peroni beer, but when it came he changed his mind and sent it back. It was precisely these small sins that he had overlooked until now, but the moment had finally come to set them right. Water, two halved lemons. He ate lustily, however, and his spirits picked up. He added ice cream and coffee, and then walked around the ship to observe the other travelers.

  They were mostly Italian couples, as far as he could understand, with a forlorn child here and there, and the odd single woman wrapped up in herself. It seemed an eccentric cast to be returning from a holiday in Greece. Perhaps the land of the Greeks was no longer as popular as it had once been in his father’s time, when all the rich boys from Beirut spent their summers on the islands in their boats. It was safer than Beirut and there were more roumi girls. But everyone falls on hard times eventually. Now the Beirut parasites went to Dubai and Bangkok instead. He went out onto the deck and took in the partially moonlit sea. There was no land to be seen, there were no other ships. God had seen to him, plucked him out of misery and set him on his way: it was, if he wanted to see it that way, a call to arms, a rejuvenation. He was sure that his dead father had something to do with it.

  But as he stood at the prow, buffeted by the wind, he became aware of someone looking at him. He turned quickly and saw a dark-haired boy of about twelve standing by one of the funnels in a T-shirt and shorts. The boy seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, and his parents were not present. He leaned against the funnel lightly and looked at the stranger in his blue linen jacket intently, as if he knew him. A voice floated up from the far reaches of the deck: “Giorgio!” Faoud was sure that he had seen him before somewhere. The boy smiled and raised a finger to his lips, as if he were hiding from his exasperated mother, and Faoud did the same. Then the boy slipped away.