Fernanda returned to the table, her cheeks pink with pleasure as she dropped into her place.
“Morning, Johnny. What do you think? There was a piece about me in the local paper last week and it apparently set a few people agog. The woman who just called me is a Madame Xenia Katalonos—apparently a lady of some consequence in Rhodes. I’m not sure exactly what she wants, but I think it’s to give me the keys to the city. At least! We’re invited to tea day after tomorrow, Dorcas. Me and my secretary. Whatever she knows about Rhodes is to be placed at my disposal. She’s going to provide introductions, open sesames, and what-have-you.”
Johnny laughed. “You’ll be a surprise to her, I expect.”
His teasing never ruffled Fernanda. She paid no attention. “Katalonos—Katalonos? I wonder why it sounds vaguely familiar?”
“Until our American ears get tuned in, one Greek name sounds just like the next,” Johnny said.
Dorcas, following a thought of her own, spoke it aloud. “If she knows Rhodes well, perhaps I can ask her about Mrs. Dimitriou.”
Fernanda set down her coffee cup. “Mrs. Dimitriou? What do you mean?”
This was something Dorcas had not told Fernanda. But she must explain her plan sooner or later.
“You remember Markos Dimitriou, who worked at the museum at home?” she said carefully. “This is his widow. I understand she came home to Greece after her husband died. I want to find her in order to pay a debt I owe.”
There was rising doubt in Fernanda’s eyes, a flicker of concern. Dorcas knew she was remembering a time when Markos Dimitriou’s name had been often on Dorcas’s lips. It was a name connected with the time of her illness and Fernanda would fear any recurrence.
“You needn’t worry,” she added quickly. “It’s just a small errand I’ve assigned myself. If she’s here, she shouldn’t be hard to find.”
Fernanda did not look reassured, but she let the matter pass.
“What’s our program to be in the old city this morning?” Johnny asked.
“The usual look around,” said Fernanda. “You can drive us over and come along, if you will. We’ll park the car and walk about inside the walls. I want to see the Street of the Knights and the Palace of the Grand Masters among other things.”
“With Italian trimmings,” Johnny said. “I understand Mussolini did the palace over to suit himself when it was restored. I suppose you’ll also make the usual side excursions?”
Fernanda smiled at him. “My voices will speak to me. They always know where the good stories are. Don’t stick to me too closely, you and Dorcas. Things happen better when I’m alone.”
“I know,” Johnny said dryly, and grinned at Dorcas. “Have you ever gone on a story-hunting expedition with Fernanda? You’ll be surprised at what can happen.”
Fernanda wrinkled her nose. “We’ll have a look at the museum, of course. There are several famous treasures there. Besides, it used to be the Hospital of the Knights, so I must see it. Though I can’t do much with museums, as a rule.”
“Too many guards around,” Johnny said. “For real excitement you need a free hand.”
Dorcas listened to his banter with amusement. For all that Johnny teased outrageously, it was clear that a strong affection for Fernanda underlay his words and she suspected that he would give her his solid support in any real pinch. She was beginning to sense something in Johnny Orion that she had not been immediately aware of, because of his easy, casual manner. There was a toughness in him, she suspected. Some basic stubborn tenacity—a sort of dogged strength. It was this, perhaps, that enabled him to work so well with Fernanda. While he made no attempt to manage her, he did not permit her to blow him down and it was clear that she respected this very quality of toughness in him. Sensing this made Dorcas curious, and she wondered what sort of world he had grown up in. Where was he going? What did he want from life?
Yesterday in Athens she had felt the beginning of a first tentative movement between herself and Johnny—a step toward something that might vanish at a breath. She wasn’t sure she wanted this to grow into something stronger. She wasn’t ready yet. But at the same time she regretted the breaking of that tenuous strand.
Fernanda was still talking about the museum they were to visit, sounding as though it was more a chore to go through it than anything else. Dorcas, on the contrary, looked forward to visiting this particular collection. Among other pieces would be the head of the boy with a tear on his cheek that Johnny had mentioned yesterday on the Acropolis. She remembered his finger touching away a tear on her own cheek. The head of the weeping boy was tied up with happy recollections of her own and it would be pleasant to see it in the company of someone like Johnny.
As they were finishing breakfast Mrs. Petrus arrived. She waited by the desk at the far end of the lobby while a boy came to summon Fernanda.
“Let me talk to her first,” Fernanda said to Dorcas. “I’ll call you over in a moment.”
From the distance of her table Dorcas watched the woman who was to care for Beth. She was past her youth, probably in her mid-forties, and leanly built. The bones showed beneath the strong framework of her body. Her dark eyes were set deeply in their sockets, and heavy-lidded. Short-cropped black hair grew close and curly about her head. She was neatly dressed in a dark sweater and dark green skirt with black walking shoes on her feet.
Fernanda bore down upon her with outstretched hand and her usual hearty greeting. Mrs. Petrus allowed her hand to be grasped and shaken, but her response was clearly more restrained. A somber-looking woman, Dorcas thought. Too serious, perhaps? Too stern for the care of a child?
Fernanda spoke with her animatedly for a few moments and then beckoned Dorcas and Beth. Johnny lifted Beth down from her chair and the little girl ran across the lobby to Aunt Fern. Dorcas moved more slowly, watching to see what would happen. Her own peace of mind during their stay in Rhodes would depend a great deal on this woman.
The child ran to Fernanda and clung to her hand, holding back shyly from Mrs. Petrus. She returned the child’s stare as if she, too, measured, judged, and waited to be convinced. Then, surprisingly, she went down on her knees to meet Beth at her own level and took something from her handbag and held it out to the little girl.
For a moment longer Beth hesitated, then reached for the toy. Dorcas, coming to her side, saw that it was a carved wooden donkey with olive barrels panniered across his back. Beth held it up to her mother.
“Look, Mommy—a horse! The lady gave me a horse.”
“Not horse,” Mrs. Petrus corrected gravely. “This is a Greek donkey. A boy in my village makes it for me to bring to the American little girl.”
Beth fondled the wooden toy. “I like it. Can I keep it for me?”
“Is for you,” Mrs. Petrus said.
Beth smiled at her shyly and for the first time the woman’s eyes brightened and lips accustomed to severity softened. Still on her knees, she put a hand lightly on Beth’s shoulder.
“We will be friends, I think.”
“This is Beth’s mother,” Fernanda said. “Mrs. Brandt.”
Vanda Petrus rose, the softening that was almost a smile gone from her face. The deep-set eyes, reminding Dorcas of clouded jet, turned upon her, and there was antagonism in the look. This woman did not like her, Dorcas thought, startled. As quickly as that she had judged and rejected Beth’s mother.
“Mrs. Petrus says we may call her Vanda,” Fernanda went on. “All our arrangements seem to be satisfactory and she’s ready to go to work at once. Why not take her upstairs and show her Beth’s things? Then we can be ready to leave in a half-hour or so. I’ll check her into the room on the other side of yours.”
It was exasperatingly like Fernanda to settle matters without consulting anyone. Dorcas would have liked to delay, to find some logical objection. But there was none that she could reasonably offer, so she gave in and led the way upstairs.
On the steps the woman gave her hand to Beth. With the tie of the wooden do
nkey between them, the little girl accepted it with confidence.
She must stop being suspicious and uneasy about everyone who came near Beth, Dorcas told herself firmly. Fernanda was right in making these arrangements. At least this somber-faced woman had made friends with Beth and that was all that was really important for the moment.
In their room Dorcas showed Vanda Petrus Beth’s suitcase, her canvas tote bag of toys, and explained that she was to drink only a mixture made from the dried milk Dorcas had brought with her from home. The woman listened mutely, watching the child rather than Dorcas. Now and then she nodded understanding, but she had no questions, no remarks of her own to offer.
A hotel boy came upstairs to unlock the door between Dorcas’s room and the next one. Vanda glanced without interest into the room that was to be hers. She would bring her things later in the day, she said. Perhaps she could take Beth with her to the room she occupied in town. It was only a short walk, and she had little to carry.
“No, don’t do that,” Dorcas said sharply, and bit her lip at her tone of voice. With an effort she contradicted her own words. “Of course you must get your things. But if you wait till later, Mr. Orion can drive you over and bring them back.”
Although the woman acquiesced with a lowering of her eyes, Dorcas knew that the sharpness of her tone had been noted. Mrs. Petrus could hardly help but resent it.
“Perhaps you can take Beth for a walk after we leave this morning,” Dorcas said, trying to make up for her words. “But just near the hotel. She tires easily if you walk her too far.”
Again there was agreement, but no warming on the part of this dark-browed, silent woman.
Beth ran into the next room to explore and Vanda followed her. Through the open door Dorcas could hear the two of them talking, apparently quickly at home with each other.
Dorcas put on brown loafers for walking and a yellow sweater with her pleated brown skirt. A look in the mirror showed her that her fair hair was still drawn neatly into its coil except for a wisp or two, quickly tucked in. But her eyes had the worried look that was growing familiar, and Dorcas smoothed the crease of frown lines from between her brows deliberately. She must not worry so. Basically, Fernanda was a perfectly sound and practical person, for all her flights of fancy. She adored Beth and she would take no chances when it came to the little girl’s care. It was just that Beth seemed to be suddenly taken out of her mother’s hands without the slightest opportunity for Dorcas to object or resist what was being done.
She kissed Beth and told her to mind Vanda and have fun. When she met the woman’s eyes again she had the same awareness of an instinctive disliking. It seemed to be mutual. She did not like Vanda and the woman did not like her.
“Thank you for coming to take care of Beth,” she said stiffly. “I hope this will work out well.”
The woman made her gesture of acquiescence with bowed head, but she did not speak. Dorcas went downstairs with a sense of uneasiness following her like a shadow she could not escape.
Fernanda and Johnny were outside near the car, discussing the workings of Fernanda’s camera. Fernanda took pictures constantly, but not with the avid enthusiasm of the usual sight-seer. Her purpose was to make visual records that would recall details at a later date when she sat down to her typewriter to bring the scene to life for her readers.
Waiting for the other two, Dorcas glanced up at the long, low façade of the hotel, not sure which stretch of third-floor balcony was hers. Neither Beth nor Vanda Petrus was in sight. The palm trees down the middle of the street whipped shaggy heads in the breeze and the sound of the sea reached her clearly.
The car was a medium-sized English model that made three in the front seat a crush, so Dorcas got into the back. Determinedly she thrust away all uncertainties and gave her attention to this first real look at the town of Rhodes.
Winding streets led past the greenery of gardens and there were flowers everywhere. Scarlet hibiscus blossoms challenged the eye and rich purple-red bougainvillaea spilled over stone walls, while jasmine warmed sweetly in early-morning sunshine.
In a few blocks they reached Mandraki, a wide promenade along the water front. Here there were modern buildings of concrete, often decorated with Turkish design and with overhanging Turkish balconies and latticework.
No one paid the slightest attention to automobiles in the downtown streets. Johnny stopped for bicycles and for donkeys. He slowed to a crawl for pedestrians. Everyone walked leisurely in the middle of the road and stepped out from curbs without warning. Gesticulating gentlemen argued on the pavement, unwilling to interrupt their discussions for the importunity of a horn. The Greeks were a wonderfully gregarious and friendly people. They liked one another’s company and they welcomed the company of the stranger. But Rhodes had been here long before the automobile, and a man had a right to the roadway he had set down for his own convenience.
As the car inched along the plan of the town grew clear. From Mandraki Harbor and the water-front drive Rhodes climbed its gentle hills to a summit that Johnny said was called by the unlikely name of Monte Smith. Up there were the ruins of what had once been the acropolis of Rhodes.
On their left, as they drove toward the huge masonry of walls and towers, was the famous harbor—a small harbor, nearly enclosed by two slender arms of land that all but met at the entry. Out there, facing each other, stood a bronze stag and a doe, symbolizing the deer that had once roamed forested mountains. The medieval fortress of Saint Nicholas guarded the entrance, squat and low, and on the opposite wedge of land three windmills turned arms covered with heavy cloth, like the sails of a ship.
Sounding like a guide, Fernanda gestured toward the fortress. “They say the Colossus of Rhodes stood out there at the entrance to the harbor. Poor sun-god! An earthquake shook him down. He lay there in broken chunks for centuries until an enterprising merchant bought him and carried the pieces away on nine hundred camels. Or so the story goes.”
Dorcas hardly listened, her attention focused upon the walls of the Crusaders’ city running close beside them now. At intervals the great enclosure of stone was broken by huge towers that guarded every entrance. The whole was Gothic and medieval, ruled over by the great palace up the hill, its towers and castled ramparts visible almost anywhere in the town of Rhodes.
Fernanda ceased to talk and began scribbling hasty notes in the plump, loose-leaf notebook that was always at hand. Once she glanced around at Dorcas.
“Remember what you see, dear. Make notes when anything strikes you. I’ll be counting on you to take off my hands the chore of summarizing everything and getting a record down at the end of the day. It’s hard to catch details at first because the whole thing seems overwhelming. But you’ll learn to look for them, and the ones you see may be different from the ones that catch my eye.”
“What detail strikes you most now?” Johnny asked Dorcas.
She spoke her thought aloud. “From a distance all that stone looks dull and gray. But when you get close it’s not gray at all, though I’m not sure why.”
“It’s partly the stone itself,” Johnny said. “There’s an apricot touch in the sandstone of Rhodes. It always seems alive and warm. The sun helps, of course—the light from sky and water. It can go gray enough when you see it in the shadow.”
They drove slowly beside the high wall until Fernanda called to Johnny to stop. Along the water a stone wall, low on the land side, dropped steeply to a rocky beach below. Scattered among stones and big boulders were curious stone balls, some of them as large as a man’s head, some of them smaller. All had been shaped and rounded by the hand of man.
“What can they be?” Fernanda puzzled. “They don’t look like cannon balls—they’re too big.”
Johnny knew the answer. “Rhodes was a city often besieged in the old days. Those balls were thrown by catapult when Turks and Saracens and pirates tried to breech the walls. I suppose the Knights of Saint John used them, too, in defense. You’ll see them everywhere around t
he town. Out there in the harbor a good many lie where they must have fallen and no one bothers about them.”
“Fascinating,” Fernanda said thoughtfully, tapping a tooth with the end of her silver pencil.
Johnny laughed and spoke over his shoulder to Dorcas. “We have to watch her when she sounds like that. It means she’s cooking something up. If we don’t watch her, she’ll try to take one of those balls home for a pocket piece.”
The stone catapult balls, perhaps more than anything else, Dorcas thought, gave a sense of the past as it hung over Rhodes. Down on the beach the stones shone in the sun, wet and brown and pock marked from long weathering, lying where they had fallen short of the wall they were intended to breech. She could almost hear an echo of the crashing and the tumult.
The car had reached two massively rounded towers with a deep, arched gateway between, offering entry, into the walled town. Above the gate still hung the marble buckler of a knight. As they drove through with other traffic, the great masses of stone dwarfed the car.
Once inside, Johnny found an open square where they could park and they got out to walk over ancient cobblestones. Stone buildings two or three stories high closed around them, almost every window bearing the mark of a cross in wood strips that separated the panes. For all that the town within the walls offered shops to draw the tourists, it was a town in its own right. People lived here in houses that were not greatly different from what they had been in the days of the knights.
As they crossed the square, Dorcas was again reminded of Beth’s absence. There was no small hand tugging at her own, no demands made upon her attention. She hoped all was going well back at the hotel. She must not worry.
Consulting her map, Fernanda located the Hospital of the Knights, which was now a museum. Again there was a deeply arched doorway set into the face of a great stone building. They went through it to pay the small entry fee and were at once in a medieval world. An intricacy of stone arches ran foursquare about a large, stone-flagged court, open to the sky and the galleries that surrounded the upper floor. Across this stone expanse the figure of a rather improbable lion reclined on a pedestal, watching them with hollow eyes. Nearby were piled more of the rough stone balls.
Seven Tears for Apollo Page 6
