“Did you talk to her?” Rygg asked.
Marin shook his head. “She disappeared.”
“What!” Rygg exclaimed.
Lena looked sharply over at Marin. “They kill her?” she asked.
“This is what we thought, me and Sasha,” he said. “We thought she had been murdered. So we were searching, searching, for any mention of a body, of people missing her. Then finally Sasha thought to check flight records. Listen. This is what we discovered: on the morning of the 26th, two days after she spotted the Alpensturm, Ann Devonshire took an airplane flight to Athens. She spent one night in Athens. The next morning, she got on a ferry bound for Paros.”
“Paros? Next to Crete, right?”
“It’s about midways between the mainland and Crete.”
“So she needed a vacation.”
“Well. Perhaps. But there are two interesting factors. Besides that she had only once previously visited outside her country. Listen. Only three weeks before, she had finished her holiday, of two weeks, in Yorkshire.”
“So she needed another break.”
“Maybe. But here is the other information. In one year, as an employee of the British Coast Guard, she is only allowed two weeks for holiday. She has already been on Paros for five days.”
Rygg nodded slowly. “So you think …”
“Yes. I think she has been quickly taken out of the way. To a place where no journalist can reach her.” The corners of his mouth dented, and he cocked his eyebrows slightly.
Lena looked at him. Then she laughed. He patted her thigh and nodded. “Lena may get her holiday after all,” he said.
“So when do we leave?” she asked.
Marin gave his little shrug. “I was thinking after lunch.”
As an afterthought, Rygg was curious about his own involvement. “Will they think anything of me showing up there, or even know? They seem to know everything that is going on.”
“Yes, but it is my hope that your skills will get us what we need before that’s a real concern.”
“Will I have an alias?” Rygg asked, impressed by Marin’s keen attention to detail.
“No, we need you to be just who you are.”
“Be careful what you ask for,” he responded, laughing.
Chapter 8
Paros
May 1
Paros town was a charming collection of whitewashed houses with blue doors. The air was delicious: warm and soft and scented with oregano. After a day and night on the ferry, they had flown in from Athens on a little plane called a ‘mosquito’ and taken a taxi into the town.
They walked along the seafront a little way until they found a restaurant. It was an open-air platform overlooking the marina, with a loosely woven fabric of grapevines overhead. A drunken man ambled down the steps and put his arm around Rygg’s shoulders. He was wearing shorts and a torn T-shirt. Rygg tried to shrug him off, but the man pulled him up the stairs and shoved him into a chair. He kicked other chairs around the table and bowed to Lena. “Princessa!” he said, and she giggled. The drunken waiter uncorked a bottle of white wine and poured their glasses full, then passed menus around. The menus were photocopied sheets of paper, cased in stapled plastic bags.
“Well,” Marin said, raising his glass. “Yiamas!”
Rygg took one sip of his wine, then held the glass at arm’s length and looked at it. “Hva faen?” he asked.
“Retsina,” Marin told him. “The taste is from resin. Originally the wine was kept in barrels of pine, so it took on the flavor. Now they simply add it to white wine.”
Rygg took another sip. It was like swallowing the sun. He nodded. “Strong, but I think I could get used to this.” He looked at the menu. It was incomprehensible. “You’ll have to order for me,” he said.
The food, when it arrived, was wonderful. Kleftiko turned out to be roast lamb with dill and feta cheese. There was a thick slab of moussaka, and an earthenware bowl of a stew with carrots and potatoes that Lena called stamnas. There were also stuffed tomatoes and a platter of chunky golden French fries.
When the coffee arrived, Marin leaned his elbows on the table. He seemed a little embarrassed. “Torgrim,” he said. “Do you like to flet?”
“What?”
“Flet. You know flet? Flet with girls?”
“Flirt, you mean?”
“Yes. Flirt, flirt. Sorry, my pronunciation is not excellent.”
“Do I like to flirt?”
“Yes.”
“Well. I suppose so. More when I was younger.” Rygg was mystified.
“Good. You are a handsome man. Am I wrong?” Marin turned to Lena, and she looked across at Rygg seriously.
“Very handsome,” she said, with not the slightest trace of irony.
“Okay,” Rygg said, raising both hands. “I’m flattered. Now what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Ann Devonshire is a single woman, Torgrim, you see. She is, she is not pretty, but …”
“Hold on a moment. You want me to – to flirt …”
“Yes. Miss Devonshire is here to have a good time. We want her to have a good time, you see. With a big, handsome, very rich Norwegian oil executive.”
Rygg had to lean back and chuckle for a couple seconds. “Why me?” he said. “Why don’t you do it?”
“I am small.”
“Fuck you!” Rygg said. “I signed up on this adventure because of my combat skills, not because of my looks.”
“Torgrim,” Marin said. “We need you now. Will you help us?”
The courtship of Ann Devonshire began that very evening. She was staying at the Aphrodite, which, Marin informed Rygg, was the plushest hotel on the island. It had a lobed pool surrounded by masses of magenta flowers, tennis courts, a nine-hole golf course out back, and opened onto its own private beach. They checked in that afternoon, taking separate taxis. Marin and Lena had a room on the first floor. Rygg was on the third floor, just two doors down from Miss Devonshire.
Marin had given Rygg a little briefing over their coffee. As far as Rygg was concerned, Marin and Lena were just two more guests at the hotel. Rygg was here on vacation, straight from meetings in Hamburg, looking for a little fun, maybe a little companionship. After all, it was the type of place that lent credibility to promises of romance.
Rygg took a shower and spruced himself up. They had gone on a little shopping expedition in Paros town, during which he’d acquired a couple flowered shirts, a swimsuit, a white golfer’s cap, and cologne. Marin handed him a package just before they parted, telling Rygg to open it in his room. It turned out to be a Scrabble set. Rygg had forgotten how to play, and as he sipped a brandy on the balcony, he read through the rulebook. Didn’t seem that hard. He picked up a Scrabble piece and turned it over. J – 8 points. “What the fuck am I doing?” he muttered. “I’m a soldier, not a fucking Scrabble-playing gigolo.” But then he thought about the office and the scrolling numbers. He could be doing worse things with his time.
He looked down at the pool. His quarry was a pink smear on a blue-striped beach chair, with three yellow triangles of cloth dabbed over her boiled flesh.
He took Anna Karenina, which he’d bought in Athens, down to dinner, arriving forty-five minutes after it had started, as Marin had instructed. Marin and Lena were bending toward each other over a bottle of wine and paid him no attention. Ann Devonshire was sitting by herself at a round table near the window. She had a book flattened facedown beside her plate, but was looking out the window when he came in. Sitting at the table next to hers, he leveled a gaze in her direction, caught her attention, and her eyes bounced around the room in panic. Terrified, she turned the book up and pretended to read. She wasn’t a pretty girl. Her dishwater hair was bound back with a pink ribbon that precisely matched the boiled hue of her face. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and seemed lashless, and she had no chin: below her mouth, her face rippled smoothly into her throat. Her plump, pouty lips trembled slightly when he glanced at her again over the top o
f the menu.
Rygg ordered extravagantly – Remember, you are extremely wealthy, Marin had told him – and chose the most expensive wine from the list, a 1970 Château Pavie. Faen heller. Fuck it, he thought. If he was going to play this game, he might as well enjoy himself. The maitre d’ hovered anxiously while Rygg swirled the wine in the glass, peered at it through the light, and took a couple sips. He nodded, said, “It’ll do, thanks,” and opened Anna Karenina, holding the book up between him and Ann Devonshire, so that she would be able to note the title and peek at him without the embarrassment of eye contact. The wine was excellent, though he wished he could have ordered the retsina – he could still taste that rough sourness, which seemed distilled from the sun and the sea. But under the circumstances, the Bordeaux was necessary.
When the soup came, he set the book down and ate slowly. After a while, he leaned over to Miss Devonshire and said, in rather a loud voice, “What are you reading there, if I might ask?”
She turned her startled, sunburned eyes to him, and mutely held up the book: a Penguin Classics edition of The Mill on the Floss. He’d never heard of it. “I read a lot of the classics myself,” he told her. “The Russians, you know. Chekhov, Tolstoy.”
“I see,” she said primly, and returned to her salad. Keep pushing it, he thought.
“Just arrived on the island today,” he continued. “Flew in from Germany.”
She just didn’t know what to do with this information, and placed a palm on her book, then positioned both hands in her lap and stared at her plate.
“Hamburg,” he went on. He was enjoying her embarrassment. “I was giving a presentation there. I’m in oil, you know. Where are you from?”
She sighed, and he watched her try and fail to find a way out of answering. “I’m from Dover, in England,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“English, huh? I spent a few years in London, but I’m from across the channel. Norway. My name’s Torgrim. Torgrim Rygg.” He set down his soup spoon and reached across the gap between their tables and she was forced to take his hand. Hers was plump and limp and slightly oily. “What’s your name?” he inquired. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Ann.” She was going to give him as little information as she could get away with.
“And how long are you here for, Ann?” he asked. “On the enchanting isle of Paros.” Easy there, he told himself.
“I – I’m not sure. Several days.”
“Well, nice to meet you, Ann. Enjoy your book.”
She nodded in obvious relief.
His prawns arrived and he set to work dismantling them. After a while he looked up. Marin and Lena were just leaving, arm in arm. They didn’t glance back as they walked out the door.
May 2
He didn’t make his move until the next day, late morning. He had strolled on the beach for a while, picking up flat stones and flicking them across the waves. He passed Lena where she was laying on a towel, her hair almost the color of the sand, but she didn’t even wink. As he was returning to the hotel, he spotted Ann Devonshire sitting with her back to an olive tree, still immersed in The Mill on the Floss. She was wearing a filmy beach dress splashed with purple stars. Ovals of sieved sunlight swam on her skin. He flopped down on the sand beside her.
“Do you play Scrabble?” he asked, looking out at the green surf. On the horizon, he could see a couple more islands, like a thickening of the oxygen.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, Scrabble, yes I do, actually. I love Scrabble.”
“Hey, that’s excellent. I’ve got a set with me. You want to get together after lunch and play a game?”
“Well, I don’t know, Mr… .”
“Torgrim’s the name. Call me Torgrim. Come on, one game. I’m sure you’ll beat me.”
“Well, I suppose that would be all right.”
“After lunch then, yes?” And he was off, taking it slow, doing the John Wayne amble in case she was watching.
But at lunch, he slid into the chair across from her at her round table. “You don’t mind, do you, Ann?” he asked, very serious, laying a hand on hers.
She said, “Yes, I mean no, of course not,” and her cheeks deepened to plum.
She had already ordered a glass of wine, but when it came, Rygg seized the waiter’s shoulder and asked him to take it back and bring a bottle of what he’d had last night.
“Life is too short, Ann,” he told her, shaking his head sorrowfully. “Life is too short to drink house wine. And this wine, this Bordeaux, it’s the real thing, let me tell you. There are some areas where I’m deficient. I’m a terrible Scrabble player, for example, as you will find out. But I do know about wine.”
When the wine came, he started talking about Hamburg, then described his job, transforming his screen and scrolling numbers into magic. “I love it!” he exclaimed. “I make mountains of money. I get to influence world affairs. Finance ministers call me up. ‘Torgrim,’ they say, ‘what do you think of Venezuela? What do you think of the oil sands of Alberta?’ And I have the information. I can tell them what they need to know.” This fabrication was based on one occasion on which an elegant gentleman from the Singapore Ministry of Finance had sought his opinion on a stock purchase. “And then I get to travel all over, meet interesting people. Like yourself.” Her blushes came and went like rosy shadows; her eyes didn’t seem quite so red today. “So Ann, tell me about yourself, what do you do?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m nothing, actually,” she said, looking down at her wine. “I work for the British Coast Guard.”
“Are you married?”
She clutched at her napkin for support. “No,” she said.
“I must say, I find that surprising.”
“Really? Why?” There was a naked eagerness in her glance.
“Well, an attractive, cultured woman like you … something must have happened. I’m divorced, myself,” he grimaced.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” She seemed thrilled.
He shrugged. “It happens. She had her own career. No kids, thankfully.” He felt a little twinge at doing away with his daughter so deftly. “So, the British Coast Guard, eh? Sounds exciting. Tell me about it. Do you go on search teams?”
“No, no. Nothing that thrilling, I’m afraid.”
She told him a little about her job, perched above the Dover cliffs in a glassed chamber, with her headphones on, scanning the sea. “It’s frightfully boring, actually, I mean, most people might find it boring, but I adore it. I adore cycling out there every morning, through the grass, and hearing the seagulls. And I like listening to the voices from the ships, and typing in the codes. It makes me feel I’m part of something larger.”
“Fascinating.” Don’t seem too interested, he told himself. Let her come to you. “So what have you seen on Paros?”
“Oh, nothing at all, I’m afraid. I went into the town one morning.”
“So you haven’t visited the famous butterflies?”
“What butterflies are those?”
“The Valley of the Butterflies? Apparently people come to Paros just to see it.”
“The Valley of the Butterflies …” Her voice had a faraway tone.
“Hey, let’s go. After our Scrabble game, of course.”
“Yes. After Scrabble …”
He had brought the Scrabble set with him. After lunch, she ordered tea and he had coffee and they played. She was a magnificent player. All her quivery indecisiveness vanished once she started clicking the little square tablets onto the board. She came up with words he’d never heard of: tig, jottle, aa, qat.
“Qat!” he exclaimed, genuinely bemused, and irked because the q had landed on a triple letter score. “Qat? Now that can’t be a word. There’s always a u after a q, isn’t there?”
“Qat,” she informed him, serious, but with a little triumphant crinkle at the corners of her mouth, “is a mildly narcotic herb. They chew the stems in some countries. Yemen, I believe.”
“Aha
. Khat! You learn something new every day,” he said, putting down ‘shirt’ for a score of six. “Have you chewed this qat stuff? I don’t think you’re allowed to use names of narcotic herbs unless you’ve actually sampled them.”
“Your English is very good, Torgrim. For a foreigner, I mean.”
After she’d trounced him 619 to 84, Rygg called the waiter over and asked him about the Valley of the Butterflies.
“Petaloudes,” he nodded.
“Petaloudes. Is that ‘butterfly’ in Greek?”
The waiter nodded.
“Petal!” Ann exclaimed.
The waiter looked blank. “I can a taxi arrange,” he said. “But to get to petaloudes, you must then ride gaidaros.”
“Gaidaros?”
“Gaidaros. Is like horse, but—” he patted the air to indicate that it was smaller.
Rygg looked at Ann. “Well, I guess we’ll find out what that is,” he said.
A gaidaros turned out to be a mule. The taxi dropped them by the edge of the road and the driver said he’d be back in a couple hours. From a boy sprawled beneath a tree, they hired a pair of mules. Rygg helped Ann onto her steed with cupped hands under her heel, and she shrieked as the mule started trotting off. Rygg mounted his mule, praying that its spindly ankles would support his bulk, and clicked his tongue to start it after her. The mules seemed to know exactly where they were going. They wound down a narrow track, through olive groves, past twisted fences. Ann’s quivering rump engulfed her mule’s spine.
The Valley of the Butterflies turned out to be a bit of a misnomer. For one thing, it wasn’t exactly a valley, more of a brownish clearing at the base of a hill. And the lone occupant of the valley, an ancient man in a marvelous waistcoat, informed them, once he’d laid down his wooden flute that the butterflies were, in fact, moths. Rygg had imagined a flower-spangled dell filled with rainbow-colored, flitting fragments, but there were no moths in sight. Only when they moved into the clearing did they see that the brown on the leaves and branches was in fact thousands of winged creatures, clustered so densely that they looked like textured bark. As they moved among them, they wafted up here and there, revealing orange undersides to their wings, so they looked like drifting sparks.
Chasing the Storm Page 9
