“Now that the master and madame are gone, it would feel awkward carrying on there. You don’t need a maid.”
“No, I don’t,” Naomi said.
“So I don’t know about staying on with you. But I have the feeling you’ve made that decision already.”
“I have?”
“I think you have, Naomi. What do you want me to do?”
“I hadn’t thought about it as me wanting you to do something.”
“You want me to disappear, though. It would be better for you.”
“I’m grateful that you did what you did.”
“I’m grateful for the money. But it won’t be enough, I’m afraid. I can go away tomorrow if you like. You see, I want to buy a shop in my home village. I found the place. I figure the master must have been worth several million.”
They were in a narrow alley, the cafe tables pressed hard against the walls. The air was thick with stupefied wasps attracted to the unremoved alcoholic glasses standing on the tables. Naomi lowered her voice and leaned in a little so that absolutely nothing she said would be heard.
“Maybe we should discuss this up at the villa?”
“As you like. I really don’t mind where we discuss it.”
“But you know, Carissa—I didn’t do anything for money. It was all an accident.”
“Yeah, whatever it was. But it came in handy anyway.”
“It’s not really as simple as that, is it?”
“I don’t know how simple it is,” Carissa said. “Why don’t you tell me? For all I know, you wanted them dead.”
They were silent as they climbed up to the house. Once there, Carissa made them tea and they sat on the terrace in the shade.
“If you can pay me tomorrow,” the maid said, “I can just leave right away and go back to my mother. My mother won’t ask any questions. What do you think?”
“It depends how much you want.”
“I’ve been thinking about it. I know the estate won’t be settled for a long time and until your family decides what happened to your father. Maybe they won’t settle it at all. But I’m sure you can access the money.”
“How would I do that?”
“You can do it, Naomi. I know you.”
Naomi held her tongue, because maids always knew more than they let on. They knew everything, in fact.
“It would be pretty dangerous to take out any large sums,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
“You can pay in installments, I don’t mind. There’s no hurry. I was thinking—you could do fifty thousand euros. It’s not too much to ask. I know what the bank balances are and it’s not too much. It wouldn’t be a burden on you.”
“You have it all worked out, don’t you?”
“I didn’t sign up for being an accessory to murder, you know. It’s not fair to me. Not at all. It’s your fault it happened that way.”
“Yes,” Naomi said bitterly, “you’re right. It is. In a way, it is.”
“I know you couldn’t have foreseen it. But it was a stupid plan that was bound to go wrong. Now I’m ruined by it.”
“You’re not ruined.”
“If the police show up, I have to disappear. And I want that shop when I disappear. But I need money to do it.”
“All right, I understand. I’m not an idiot.”
“You’re just selfish. You always were selfish, Naomi. It wasn’t about helping the migrant, it was about you and your father and Phaine. I know, they were cruel to you. It’s not entirely your fault.”
“But I can’t give you fifty grand just like that. If I get you five, will you go back to the mainland? You’ll have to trust me for the rest.”
“No, Naomi, you’ll have to trust me. But I know you’ll send it, because it would be pretty bad if you didn’t.”
Naomi sipped her tea and decided to be as cordial as she could.
“You’re a very good blackmailer,” she said. “I wouldn’t have guessed you had it in you. But I understand. It’s nothing personal, is it?”
“On the contrary. It’s very personal. I wasted seven years of my life here slaving for you. I’m not letting it go to waste. Five thousand and I’ll leave tomorrow.”
“Is that a promise?”
“Of course it’s a promise. Don’t be silly. I don’t want to be here anyway.”
“You’ll go back to your mother’s village?”
“I’d be happier that way. I told you I found the perfect shop to buy.”
Naomi got up and went to the kitchen to look for some honey to spoon into her tea. She found the honey, took out the spool, and dripped a small amount into the center of a saucer. She then opened the rackety utensils drawer and saw her father’s cooking knives laid out in their rows, some of them large and serrated. She picked one out, turned it against the opposing palm. The girl had half turned in her chair on the terrace, gazing out from the shade at the mountains, but her ears twitched with feral intuitions. Naomi replaced the knife and closed the drawer. When she returned to the coffee table she scooped the honey into her cup and her unstable hand immediately caught Carissa’s attention.
“Are you upset?” she asked Naomi.
“No. I’m just trying to think everything out. I can’t sleep at night, too—you should give me some of your hemlock tea.”
“But I left it here for you.”
Naomi blinked, and a faint redness appeared at the tops of her cheeks.
“I didn’t notice. But speaking of that, I did want to ask you something. I can’t understand how he could have woken up like he did. After you gave him the tea—”
“It can happen.”
“Maybe it can. But did you give them the full dose?”
“What are you saying?”
“I mean, did you give them the full dose, Carissa?”
“I told you I did.”
“Then he couldn’t have woken up.”
Carissa’s fingers had dug into the arms of her chair and her teeth had set. There was a short tussle of words, the mutual anger rose, and then Naomi gave up on it and said that in the end it didn’t matter. What was done was done. But now, regardless, she didn’t believe that Carissa had given them a full dose. The girl had employed a considerable cunning to get her way.
“He could have woken up,” the girl said quietly, “believe me. They had been drinking all night. The alcohol interfered.”
During the afternoon Carissa slept in her old room and Naomi went down to the port to shop for her. The old friend of her father’s, meanwhile, was leaving messages every hour, asking for dinner, and sooner or later she would have to accommodate him. It was better to do it once and get it over and done with, since avoidance on her part would merely serve to make her look suspicious.
When she had returned to the house she answered the last message from Rockhold and told him that she would meet him at the Sunset for dinner at eight. She had prepared her story meticulously over the previous days, and she felt confident she could pull off a credible performance for a seventy-year-old still open, she thought, to the charm of women.
EIGHTEEN
“In those days we were quite different, your father and I. Jimmie was all for jaunts to Malaga and even Tangiers. He had energy. He was friends with David Beaufort, even then. He went all over the Med in his Spanish beret and this wonderful red necktie he had. We used to call him Tally-ho. It was the Hemingway thing. You wouldn’t understand. I was rather in awe of him then. He was a splendid pilot too—it takes something special to be a pilot that good.”
“He never talked about being a pilot.”
Rockhold held up a shrimp by its tail and shook it slightly as if it was still alive and something could be shaken out of it.
“The thing is, one gets tired of one’s own stories. It happens by the time you turn fifty. You’ve heard them all a thousand times, and they get worse with each retelling. Finally, they become nauseating.”
“Maybe he was ashamed of something.”
“Shame? That wou
ld be a big emotion for Jimmie. I think not. Fatigue, more likely. He was a terrible gambler too.”
Naomi didn’t even raise her carefully tended eyebrows.
“Did he break the bank at Monte Carlo too?”
“I’m sure it was on his CV somewhere. I always wondered about him being a father, though. Did he ever take you on holiday aside from coming here?”
“Never. He was a terrible dad.”
Neither of them was quite serious: summers on Hydra were hardly negligible as holidays.
“I’m sorry to hear it. I rather gathered—”
“Terrible dads always lie about being terrible dads. It’s the icing on the cake of being a terrible dad.”
“You mean, he is a terrible dad.”
“Childhood’s always in the past tense, Mr. Rockhold.”
Rockhold’s head slipped to one side and his smile was off-center, too. The daughter was prickly. It was better to tread carefully.
“Do you think they’ve driven back to Italy?” she asked.
“Well, it looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“Do you know they did?”
“I do have to come clean a bit, Naomi. I look after some of your father’s business interests. Not all of them all the time. But some of his financial and security concerns. We are normally in close contact. While he does sometimes go off on a spree with Funny, it’s unusual for him to be gone more than a few days. On the way over I took the trouble to stop in at the car park at Metochi where they keep their car. It’s not there.”
“You know about Metochi?”
“Jimmie thought of it as a secretive little place.”
“So they did take the car?”
“I don’t know. As I say, it rather looks that way.”
“That was very sly of them.”
She felt that she was holding him at bay quite well, and she began to feel more confident.
He said, “May I ask, were they having rows lately?”
Seeing an opening, Naomi took some trouble to appear surprised.
“Come to think of it,” she said, “they had been fighting more than usual. Not that that’s any of my business. I don’t know what goes on between them.”
“It had occurred to me that they went off to solve some romantic problem. Couples do that, I hear.”
“Do they?”
“Seems rather exaggerated to me.”
“So the car is gone.” She sighed.
“A bit rum, that.” Rockhold poured wine into her glass. “Maybe they went on a tour of classical sites.”
“Extraordinarily unlikely.”
“I always thought he was an Ancient Greece buff. Maybe I misunderstood.”
“They had a few arguments about the houses,” Naomi went on, not wanting to get onto the subject of Ancient Greece. “But I never listened in on them. I think Phaine wanted to sell the place in Italy. But Daddy is very fond of that house.”
“So they might have gone there?”
“I really can’t say. It’s possible.”
They talked on for a while, Rockhold ordering one bottle after another. He did most of the drinking, and it seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever. It was a different generation, and they drank in a way that was now incomprehensible to younger people. For them it was like showering or taking out the dog.
“About that maid,” he said eventually. “Is she here or did she leave as well? Maybe Jimmie gave her some time off since they would be gone.”
“Carissa?”
“That’s her name, isn’t it?”
“She’s not at the house. So she must have gone home for a while.”
He asked her what she looked like, and for the first time Naomi stumbled over her words as she tried to think them out. She tried to be vague, to mislead a little.
“Either way, I think she might be of help,” Rockhold said affably.
“I doubt it, Mr. Rockhold. She’s a bit dim and she doesn’t know anything about Jimmie and Phaine. My father keeps her on out of loyalty.”
“That’s very decent of him.”
“It’s very stingy of him, actually.”
“Do you have a number for her?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t. It’s my stepmother who deals with that sort of thing.”
He accepted this and let it go. Should they move on to whiskey? She declined, and he ordered for himself. He remarked that it was a special spot, this Sunset, and that the toy cannons put him at ease. He asked about her childhood on the island. Did she have many Greek friends from those days? The ex-pats seemed to be a tightly knit group, as such people always were. The island English were bookish, socially privileged, keenly interested in the culture around them. But lately, the Russians and the Emirati seemed to be displacing them. He had met quite a few of the English in the few days he’d been there. They were uniformly delightful. They all had good things to say about Jimmie and Phaine.
At that moment his phone began ringing and, glancing down at the incoming number, he told Naomi that this was a call he could not ignore. He got up and walked to the path above the restaurant. The call was from his assistant in London, a woman called Susan who was also on the Codrington payroll, though Jimmie barely knew of her existence. His own wife barely knew of her existence. Susan tracked credit-card transactions and the various movements of Jimmie’s operatives. She was calling him about some new transactions in Italy.
“Mr. Codrington used his card a short while ago in a town called Fasano. It’s in southern Italy.”
“Fasano?”
“At a shoe shop.”
“He bought some shoes?”
“Apparently.”
“Where is this Fasano?”
“I’ll send you a map.”
“What kind of shoes?”
“Expensive shoes.”
Well, I’ll be damned, he thought.
“He wouldn’t buy cheap ones,” he said.
He went back to the table, and instead of dissimulating he told Naomi exactly what he had just heard.
“Italy?” she blurted out.
“So it seems. He bought a pair of shoes in a place called Fasano.”
She thought for a moment. Would Faoud buy a pair of shoes with Jimmie’s credit card? He must have. He didn’t have any shoes, but he could have used cash: it was a mistake.
“I’m rather surprised,” she lied. “They left without saying anything to me. It’s quite rude.”
“Maybe something came up?”
“Came up? I doubt it.”
She was put out, and he took note. But there was no way of saying what it meant. He treated her with care from then on, steering the conversation away from her father and stepmother so that she would be put at ease. He let it be known that he was satisfied that they were on the road in Italy and that he would, perhaps, leave the island soon and go to Italy to find them himself. There was now no reason to persist with his inquiries on Hydra.
“I’ve called them at the house in Sorano,” Naomi said, “but they never pick up. Do you think something could have happened to them?”
“Not if Jimmie is buying fancy shoes.”
“What will you do in Italy, then?”
Rockhold wasn’t sure himself.
“Find them, I suppose. I can’t imagine why they’re hiding from us. It’s extraordinarily childish.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“By the way, are you staying here all summer? Or going back to London?”
She looked at him steadily, and she held her whole body erect and poised. He was a man, she now realized, who had to be fended off with a light touch. She didn’t feel that he was entirely suspicious of her, but his half-suspicion, his invisibly alert animal antennae, were attuned to the slightest muscular reaction on her part. He was a bloodhound, and his nose was refined. It didn’t matter that he called her “dear” and paid the bill.
“I’m not going anywhere, Mr. Rockhold. In fact, I’m thinking about moving here. It’s my summer home, after a
ll.”
“What a delightful idea.”
“Of course, I have to ask Jimmie and Phaine first.”
He looked at her and his eyes seemed to separate; she reconsidered what she had thought before, that one of them was glass. But there was no way of asking.
He walked back to the Bratseras alone. In the little area by the port there was a jazz concert without a stage, the musicians playing with their backs to the water and the lit-up yachts. He sat at one of the cafes and got himself a Pernod. He called Susan back and asked her to book a ticket to Bari on a flight out of Athens, and then lost himself in reverie. His eye was itching and he couldn’t wait to get it out for the night, but the evening was too enjoyable to abandon. He thought about Naomi instead. Her father had always said she was a tremendously gifted liar, and he wondered if he had just been treated to a perfect demonstration of this talent? He had noticed her heels, the earrings and the lipstick. It was too much for an hour or two at the Sunset with an old man. She had gone a little too far. There was a fracture just below her surface which made her seem decentered, and yet she herself was not aware of it. She was lying, but he could only detect this falsity with the part of his consciousness that was unconscious.
—
Left at the table, Naomi called Sam and made a suggestion. Why didn’t they go to Athens the following day and escape the claustrophobia of the island? She had to go into the city to take out the money for Carissa, but it was a boring trip if she did it alone. Sam not only agreed, but jumped at the idea. She said she had spent a painfully dull day swimming by herself and she asked if they could do something different in Athens.
“Different in what way?”
“Can we go to a fancy restaurant? Can we get drunk? Blow off some steam?”
“It’s about time,” Naomi said. “And it’s my treat.”
She returned to the villa and found Carissa awake and enjoying Jimmie’s brandy. It was shameless now, and her expression was openly insolent, but Naomi let it slide in the interest of peace. Instead, she went to her room and waited for the maid to do the same.
It took a long time. Carissa sang to herself in the salon and played the radio; it was close to midnight before she went down to the basement and closed her door. When quiet had returned Naomi went back down to the salon and saw that the maid had left everything on the table where she had eaten. Her soiled wineglass, plates with cheese rinds, serviettes. She had left everything on purpose. Naomi went around the room making sure she hadn’t stolen anything, then scooped out Phaine’s heritage silver spoons from the service drawers and took the two silver candlesticks that stood on the mantelpiece, bracketing pictures of Jimmie and Phaine caught as if unawares in various corners of the world. She rolled them all into a tablecloth and took them upstairs to pack into a sports bag. Then she returned to the salon, turned off the lights, and locked the doors. Perhaps it was the final night of being with another human being in the Villa Belle Air. She wrote a note for Carissa explaining that she was going to Athens in the morning and would be back in the evening the following day with the money. She wanted to spend a night in Athens just to be sure. She hadn’t wanted to tell her to her face; Carissa would have grown suspicious and she would probably have objected. She left it on the dining table and went out into the garden, where the tree’s upper branches were bathed in silver light and long-domiciled cicadas sang in the walls around it. It was not a cemetery, but a hushed sanctuary filled with bones, and this simplicity made it more beautiful than it had been before.
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