by Buffa, D. W.
The next day, he told us, after we passed through the Straits of Messina and turned south past Taormina and Catania, we were going to stop at the harbor in Syracuse, or Siracusa as it was properly called, where one of the great battles of the ancient world had taken place. St. James was intrigued. He leaned on his elbows, his eyes glistening, as he explained that it was not just that the Athenian fleet had been destroyed, and with it the hope that Athens might triumph over Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, that had struck his imagination so forcibly, but that the battle had been watched by an Athenian army that knew that without ships to carry them back they would never see home again.
“Some of them did, of course – a few managed to get back to Athens alive – but most of them perished in an agonizing captivity. But I’ve often thought, since I was first told about it, that worse than dying was watching while your fate was decided by others.” Folding his hands together, he studied me in the way of someone reasoning from an analogy, finding in some event from the distant past an example that might be repeated. “Imagine thinking one moment that you are going to win, and then, a moment later, knowing for certain that you are going to lose.” His gaze drifted down to his hands, and then he sat back. “On the other hand, I suppose it isn’t so unusual to have your life in the hands of someone else,” he said in a tone with a different significance. He glanced at Danielle and then looked back at me. “We’re all dependent, at some time or other, on what other people do. It’s all in knowing who you can trust; that, and what they’re really capable of. Don’t you agree?”
Despite the strange fascination the story of the abandoned Athenians seemed to have for St. James, we stopped the next afternoon not at Syracuse, where he had said we were going, but at Taormina. He said it was nothing more than a slight change of plans, a pleasant diversion, and a chance for Danielle to get off the yacht. Taormina had the best shopping in Sicily, and Danielle was always looking for something new.
“That was a lie,” said Danielle. She reached into her purse for a cigarette. She tapped the end of it against the back of her hand and snapped open a gold lighter. “He wanted you off the boat. Someone is coming and he doesn’t want them to see you.”
We were sitting at a table at an outdoor café. The plaza was crowded with tourists - Germans and Scandinavians, mainly, from the blonde, blue-eyed look of them – standing along the stone balustrade from which, high above the narrow Strait of Messina, they could see across to Italy on the farther shore. Danielle looked around as she took a long drag. Wearing dark glasses and a green silk scarf wrapped around her head, she drew constant, puzzled stares from passersby who thought she must be famous, an actress, a movie star, but could not quite place her. I sipped on a glass of red Sicilian wine and pretended not to notice.
“I imagine Niccolo Orsini has many guests,” I remarked. Bending the half-filled glass to the side I watched the way the sunlight danced on the surface and changed the color. “Though I imagine whoever he has coming today will be disappointed not to see his wife, the beautiful and mysterious Gabriella.”
Danielle took a quick, hard drag on the cigarette and then stamped it out.
“You really despise me, don’t you? You think I’m lying when I tell you that I only slept with you because I wanted to; you think I’m lying when I tell you I was falling in love with you.”
There were people all around, bunched together at tables with barely room to move between them. Danielle bent closer. Pulling her white blouse a little to the side, she exposed a deep purple bruise at the base of her throat.
“The other night, the night you showed up at the hotel, the night you took me out on the dance floor – this is what he did when we got back, this and a few of his more twisted perversions!”
She fumbled in her purse for another cigarette; but then, as she started to light it, she changed her mind.
“I slept with you because I wanted to. You don’t believe me, but Nelson knows, or thinks he knows, and he’s furious.” She shook her head in disgust. “I meant what I said. I should have killed him instead of doing what I did.”
“Leave him!” I took her wrist and held it tight. “Leave him – right now! We’ll get up from this table and walk out of here and never look back. Come with me. There’s nothing that can stop us.”
A wistful smile floated over her lovely mouth.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to think that we could?”
I did not understand at first what that smile really meant. And then I did, and my heart went cold. I let go of her wrist and looked at the face of a stranger, a beautiful woman I did not know.
“I’ve put too much into this,” she was saying, trying to explain. “I’ve spent too many years, too much has happened. I’ve….”
But I was not listening. I had heard all I needed to hear.
CHAPTER Twenty One
“They stood right there,” said St. James, gesturing toward the vacant hills of Syracuse that circled the harbor. The evening sun had slipped down from the sky and left behind a brilliant scarlet glow. “Thousands of Athenian troops, come to conquer Sicily, forced to watch as their navy lost the battle and Sparta won the war. The Athenian fleet tried to break the blockade – probably over there,” he said, pointing toward the narrow strait that led to the smaller, inner harbor. “It was 406 B.C. and none of it should have happened. The Athenians would have won, if they had been willing to do everything they needed to do to win.”
He turned and looked at me, standing with my back to the railing a few feet away. He expected me to ask what he meant. I jiggled the ice that was left in my glass and took another drink.
“Because they recalled Alcibiades and left Nicias in charge?” I said indifferently when I finished swallowing.
St. James was surprised. His mind worked in categories and he had me down as a lawyer; and lawyers, in his experience, knew nothing outside the narrow confines of their craft. He was surprised, but not disappointed. It made what he had to say easier. His eyes lit up with anticipation.
“You know about this – good. Then perhaps you’ll see the point I’m trying to make. The Athenians loved Alcibiades, but they could never quite trust him: he was too brilliant, too much better than the rest of them. They knew he was the one who could conquer Sicily, but at the last minute they held back, decided they had to send someone along more cautious – more respectable, if you will. So they sent Nicias, old, God-fearing Nicias. Even with that joint command, they might still have won; but then they charged Alcibiades with impiety, with desecrating the statues of the gods, and sent a ship to bring him back to stand trial -”
“But instead of going,” I interjected, irritated at the way in which with his smattering of passed on knowledge he tried to make himself sound important, “he went over to the Spartans and helped them in the war. Is that your point? – That you’re like Alcibiades because he refused to go back and stand trial?” I gave him a cold, dismissive look. “But no one chose you to lead anything; and if your tour guide didn’t bother to mention it, the story didn’t end with what happened here in Syracuse. Alcibiades eventually went back to Athens, helped give it the best government it ever had, and almost won the war.”
A smile full of danger creased St. James’ mouth. His eyes became hard and unforgiving.
“My point isn’t just that Alcibiades reminded me of my own situation, but that he reminded me of yours. I can’t go home again, but neither can you.”
He moved away from the railing and pulled up a deck chair. He sat there, rubbing his upper arm, though more from habit than from any pain he might be experiencing, and for a long time did not say anything, considering, as it seemed, what he was going to do.
“Can’t go home,” he said, almost as I was not there and he was thinking out loud. “We’ve gone to too much trouble; there’s too much at stake….” He paused, a puzzled expression in his eyes. “It was a stupid thing to do, Morrison. For the life of me, I don’t know why you did it. What did you think was going to happen whe
n you found her? She left – right after the trial ended. Didn’t that tell you…? You thought you were in love with her; that much I can understand – But you couldn’t have thought she was in love with you; at least not after she left.” Suddenly, he understood, or thought he did. “Yes, of course: You couldn’t help yourself, could you? Couldn’t let go of it, couldn’t forget her; couldn’t get her out of your mind?”
He made a slight abrupt motion of his head, confirming the devastating effect she could have on anyone too reckless, or too foolish, not to keep their distance. Narrowing his eyes, his gaze drew in on itself in the way of someone nursing a grudge, or rather, as in this case, a deep resentment at his own weakness. He was in love with her, and he hated her for that, because he knew that she could never feel the same way. She was too beautiful, too perfect, to need anyone else to make her feel whole. She was a changeling, always eager to see, and to hide behind, another side of herself. You went running after her, but she was too elusive to ever let you get close to knowing who she really was. Even in the act of submission, when she let you have her, you never knew, as I had discovered, if she was really there; whether she was not, in her imagination, making love with someone else. It must have made St. James every bit as crazy as it made me, and he was married to her. I think he would have divorced her, if he had not gotten in trouble and decided to fake his own death. Better to get rid of her, and do it all at once, than to lose day by day a little more of your self-respect, knowing that the last thing the woman you had to have ever thought about was you.
St. James slowly rose from the deck chair. He put his hand on my arm, but looked past me toward the far horizon, marked now by a single narrow band of light, a scarlet remnant of the vanished sun.
“You think that if it were just the two of you, everything would be perfect, that nothing would ever change.”
I was not sure at first if he was saying this about my assumption, or his experience; but I suspect he meant both, and something even more than that.
“But then, after a while, you begin to get the strange feeling that, without quite knowing how it happened, you have disappeared, that you’re not anything anymore except what at any given moment she wants you to be. That is the mistake everyone makes. You can’t change Danielle; she changes you. And you do it, become whatever she wants, because you think it’s the only way that she might still want you. You know the story of Medusa – a face so awful, so terrifying, that it drives men mad. The same thing happens when it’s the face of a woman you can’t resist.”
We left Syracuse and its ancient memories the next morning, sailing around the southeastern corner of the Sicilian triangle and then west along the southern shore. That day, and the day after, while I was free to roam the ship, I was left alone, without contact with anyone. I did not see St. James again, and I did not see Danielle. Something was going on, I could feel it; the two of them, sequestered in their own, private part of the yacht, eating their meals in their cabin, while I sat by myself in that elegantly appointed dining room served by a single, silent waiter. Several times I thought I heard loud voices, but whether raised in anger or to emphasize a point I could not tell. I was almost certain they were talking about me, but that did not answer anything. The question, the only one that mattered, was how my sudden and unexpected appearance would either end their marriage or begin a new, and final, conspiracy in which the object would be a real murder instead of fraud.
I did not see St. James or Danielle and I began to wonder if I would. For two days we sailed west, following the sun, in no great hurry to get anywhere, until we reached Agrigento and word was sent that Mr. and Mrs. Orsini wanted me to join them on a tour of the Greek ruins in the Valley of the Temples. They were waiting for me when I stepped into the motor launch, Danielle radiant in a pale green summer dress, and St. James, dressed in casual clothes, relaxed and full of easy confidence. He chatted amiably about nothing in particular as we headed toward the shore and the sand colored columns that marked the shape of what had once been a place of ancient worship. Danielle seemed distant, distracted, her mind on other things. She smiled at me once, but without significance. I was not even sure she had been aware she was doing it.
We walked through the Valley of the Temples, the best preserved Greek ruins anywhere. Starting near the top we followed the narrow road downward on stones worn smooth over thousands of years, down past hollowed out tombs of ancient burials, down past the jagged remains of shrines and tributes to lesser, local gods. St. James, though far from old, seemed younger than his age. Instead of plastered down, slick against his round, well-shaped head, his dyed black hair flowed clean and loose over his collar; and his eyes, so often sharp and penetrating, full of calculation or half-shut in boredom, were eager and alive. I had not noticed it before, but when he talked about ancient things - like the night he described the route around Sicily, or the day he spoke about what had happened in the harbor of Syracuse – there was none of the cynicism, none of the contempt, that you saw on his face when he talked about money and the people who talked about nothing else. He might have been a young man in his twenties, a graduate student in archeology, or even classics, seeing for the first time – and hungry for all of it – the last remains of the ancient world he had come to love.
“In America we think ancient history is anything that happened before we were born, but here…!” He gestured toward the great temple on the hill just ahead of us. “The Greeks came here almost three thousand years ago. Syracuse, the first Greek colony in Sicily, was founded in 745 B.C.,” he said, as proud that he knew this as if he had been the first to discover it.
He turned his face to the sun, basking in the warmth of it; and then, remembering something else he had learned, another fact he was eager to share, he began to describe the dimensions, the perfect proportions, by which the Greeks had built such monuments of classic beauty.
“Basic geometry, really; but more than that, a sense of what….”
A strange, puzzled expression came into his eyes, and then, clutching his arm, he staggered to a nearby bench. Danielle started toward him, but he shook his head.
“It’s nothing,” he insisted. But the color had drained from his face and he suddenly looked years older. His breath was slow, methodical, and shallow, as if he knew not to exert himself even in this. “Go ahead. I just need to sit here a minute. I’ll catch up.”
“His heart,” explained Danielle when we were far enough away not to be heard. “It isn’t anything serious.” Her eyes narrowed into a harsh, bitter stare. “Worse luck! If only he’d just die.”
She started walking faster, the leather soles of her shoes scraping on the sand-covered stones, as if she were determined to put as much distance between them as she could. Suddenly, she stopped, spun on her heel and pointed out to where the Midnight Sun stood at anchor, a tiny speck on the shimmering blue surface of an endless sea.
“Look at that! I’ll never be able to go home; I’ll be a prisoner on that damn boat until the day I die. Or until the day he dies,” she added with an angry shudder. “Instead of wishing that I’d killed him, I should just do it!”
She gave me a sharp, questioning glance, and I knew immediately that it had to do with what they had been discussing, the two of them, behind closed doors.
“He’s going to kill you, you know. Or rather, have someone do it for him. He wouldn’t have the guts to do it himself. That story he told about the Athenians – or whoever they were – watching while their fate was decided and they couldn’t do anything about it. That was meant for you! He knows what happened between us. He wasn’t sure at first,” she said, snapping her head to show that no one, least of all Nelson St. James, could presume to pass judgment on anything she had done. “But then I told him, and not just that we had slept together, but that you had made me feel things I’d never felt before.”
Her eyes were wild with excitement. She grabbed my arm.
“He’s jealous – he’s insane! He’s going to have you ki
lled, if I don’t kill him first!”
“Would you?” I asked, with as much detachment as if I were putting the question to a witness, or someone I did not know and did not care to meet.
I turned and started walking, but slowly, like a tourist who had all day. The question, lethal in its implications, had been asked with so little hint of moral judgment that it might have been a question about what color she preferred or what she thought she might like for dinner. ‘Would you, or would you not,’ the simple formulation for a choice so finely balanced that the slightest, the most temporary, whim might be not only decisive, but all the justification ever needed.
Danielle took hold of my arm and made me stop.
“And I could, too – couldn’t I? I’ve already been tried for his murder; they couldn’t try me again. Double jeopardy – isn’t that what it’s called?”
I pulled free and, ignoring her question, began to remark on the tumbled wreckage of some columns lying haphazard in an open field. She grabbed my arm again, harder than before.
“It’s true, isn’t it? Once you’ve been acquitted, they can’t try you again – can they?”
She had learned it all from the movies. But double-jeopardy was not a license to kill. Time was always one of the provable elements of a crime. She had been acquitted of a murder committed a year ago; the fact she killed the same man she was supposed to have killed before would not stop a prosecution for murder a year later. She was interested in whether she could get away with it; I wanted to know if she would really do it.
I kicked at a pebble on the ground, not hard, but enough to start it rolling down a thick, time-worn stone.
“There would still be the question of your conscience. Could you live with that: the knowledge that you had killed someone in cold blood?”
