A “rose,” Fernanda said, that was probably a hibiscus—that most ubiquitous flower of the island, and one the shape in the stone more nearly resembled.
Inside, the halls and salons were old-fashioned and high-ceilinged, giving evidence of an elegant past. The dining room had been divided into two sections, one separate and enclosed, the other open to a terrace that fronted on the sea. Since the day was reasonably balmy, they chose to sit in the open. A head waiter led them to a table which Fernanda promptly rejected, indicating a spot she regarded as choicer. Wisely, the head waiter gave in.
A chair suitable for Beth was brought, and Vanda pinned a napkin around her neck. It was clear that Beth and Vanda were on excellent terms by now, but also that the child was faintly in awe of the Greek woman who had become her nurse.
Just as Vanda was about to seat herself at the round table next to Beth, something strange happened. She hesitated with her hands on the back of her chair, looking toward the dining-room entrance where the head waiter was ushering in a party of three. Suddenly she bent toward Fernanda.
“If you please, madame, I have forgotten something. Something of importance. You will forgive if I do not have luncheon with you now. I will be at the hotel when you return.”
She did not wait for Fernanda’s assent, and she made no apology to Beth’s mother. With her strong, graceful walk, she slipped through the room in the direction of the terrace and disappeared outside.
“My goodness, that was sudden!” Fernanda said.
Dorcas was staring at the two women who had just entered the dining room, accompanied by a man. The head waiter was showing the three considerable attention.
“I think she ran away,” Dorcas said quietly. “I think she didn’t want to be seen by those people who are coming in.”
Fernanda looked around as the three moved toward a table. The man was middle-aged and undistinguished in appearance. One of the women, his wife apparently, was dumpy and without elegance. Once one had noted the third of the party the first two were forgotten. This woman came into the dining room with the air of someone who knew that every eye would be upon her and every deference paid her. She was well into middle age, but still beautiful. Her large dark eyes, so typical among Greek women, were lustrous and flashing as she gazed about the room. Her nose was perfectly sculptured, her mouth strong in its modeling. She carried her dark head high, the long hair wound into a coil in the fashion of old Greece. Her black frock spoke of fashion and wealth, as did her jewels. Large links of heavy gold placed a gold locket upon her decidedly majestic breast. There was a gleam of diamonds in its setting and on her hands. She was a large woman, with the frame to carry her weight.
“Medea,” Johnny murmured softly.
He was right, Dorcas thought. This was a face made for high tragedy in the Greek manner. There was little humor to lighten it.
The woman had paused beside her companions, accepting with accomplished poise the looks turned her way. She swept the room with a glance that missed nothing, bowing gravely here and there to an acquaintance. Fernanda, who always gave her curiosity full rein, remained turned in her chair to watch this grand entrance. The woman’s glance fell upon her and the dark, dramatic eyes lighted with recognition. She gestured her companions toward the table where waiters had sprung to attention. Then she came straight across the room to Fernanda and held out a cordial hand.
“You are Miss Farrar, yes? The picture of you in the paper is very like. I am Madame Katalonos. You will do me the great honor by coming to tea at my house on the day after next.”
“I am delighted, of course,” Fernanda said, and gave Xenia Katalonos her warmest smile. “It is very kind of you.”
She introduced Dorcas and Johnny, who had risen, but the woman seemed hardly aware of them except for a brief acknowledgment. All her attention was for Fernanda, and there was an intensity in her look that seemed out of proportion to the cause.
“I will send my car for you at four o’clock,” Madame Katalonos said. “This will be my great pleasure. You will excuse me now?”
She swept away, and Fernanda turned back to the table. “Now there, if ever I saw one,” she murmured with interest, “is a woman who wants something.”
Johnny nodded as he sat down. “She ought to be good for a whole chapter in her own right.”
A waiter who hovered waiting for their orders promptly offered information with typical Greek informality. “Madame Xenia is famous actress long time back. She marries man who is very rich and it is the loss of Greece that she leaves our theater. Very sad, her life. First husband drowns from yacht in a storm. Now it is supposed second husband is also dead. Very sad.”
This would explain the mark of tragedy in the woman’s face, in her eyes. That she had been an actress came as no surprise—her very manner of crossing a room betrayed the fact. The question still remained as to why Vanda Petrus had fled when Madame Katalonos entered the dining room, All through lunch the question remained at the back of Dorcas’s mind. It might be interesting to pursue a few questions of her own where Mrs. Petrus was concerned—and when Fernanda was not present to discount them.
During lunch Fernanda bubbled over to Dorcas about her visit that morning to the Palace of the Grand Master. It might be that the restoration was not in the best of taste, and one suspected that the knights would have lived more simply. But it was certainly gorgeous, from the handsome floors to the elaborate hangings and furniture.
“The structure itself is magnificent,” she said. “And what a view of the town from its windows! It might make quite a story if someone got locked into the place after dark and had to spend the night with all those ghosts.”
Johnny shook his head. “They’d be recent Italian ghosts. The notion isn’t up to your usual standards, Fernanda.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Fernanda admitted. “I’ll undoubtedly think of something better.”
When they returned to the hotel, Dorcas, Beth, and Fernanda went upstairs together. Dorcas suggested transcribing Fernanda’s notes and putting down a record of the morning’s experiences while they were still fresh in her mind.
“I’m pretty good at dictation,” she told Fernanda. “If you want to talk a bit about the Palace or anything else, perhaps I can help by getting down your impressions.”
Fernanda shook her head. “Let it wait till tomorrow, dear. I know you need to rest and recover your strength. You were pretty upset this morning and I don’t want to tax you needlessly.”
“I’d rather get to work,” Dorcas said. “I’m reserving judgment about Mrs. Petrus, but that has nothing to do with my working.”
They had reached the third-floor hall and Fernanda stopped before her door. “Thank you, my dear, but I’m going to do as the Greeks do and have a long nap. I’m sure that’s the way they manage to keep such late hours. I advise you to do the same. Johnny’s going to drive me downtown later this afternoon for an official appointment. So the afternoon is yours.”
She went into her room and Dorcas opened her own door, suppressing a slight irritation. She had behaved badly and Fernanda’s attitude was understandable to some extent, but still she didn’t want to be pampered.
In the room Vanda awaited them calmly. She offered no explanation for her precipitate flight, and whether she had managed to have lunch or not she did not state. The closed look on her face did not encourage questioning. Nevertheless, Dorcas meant to ask questions when the opportunity offered. A plan was beginning to form in her mind.
It was not, after all, hard to accept the period of rest. Beth and she fell asleep quickly in the quiet, shadowed room. Whether or not Vanda slept in her adjoining room beyond the closed door there was no knowing. She was very quiet. Dorcas could imagine her sitting there in silence, guarded and alert—waiting. The picture was not a reassuring one.
Beth awakened first, and when she called to her mother, Dorcas got up feeling fresh and rested. She dressed quickly and then helped Beth into corduroy overalls and sweater.
Vanda heard them moving and tapped at the door. “Miss Farrar tells me I am to take Beth for the rest of the afternoon. So that you may rest.”
“I don’t need to rest any longer,” Dorcas said. She wanted to make it clear that she and Beth were not governed solely by Fernanda. “I’d like to go for a walk. Perhaps you can show us something of the neighborhood. Is there a park nearby?”
The woman considered. “There is a place. I will show you.”
Dorcas opened her handbag to make sure of passport and money, then swung the strap over her shoulder. It was good to feel the firm slap of the bag against her hip as they went downstairs. The letter was there. No one had touched it while she slept.
Outside, Vanda took Beth’s hand as a matter of course. They turned into one of the narrow streets that wound irregularly through this “new” part of Rhodes. While this was not the “old city,” it was no longer as young as the word “new” implied. The houses were large and old-fashioned, unlike the bright little cube houses of modern Rhodes, whose white exteriors were inset with splashes of color. Such houses had spread out upon the hillsides and into suburbs along the sea. But here there were old gardens and the pleasant insistence of flowers that one felt everywhere in Greece. A woman with a bouquet in her arms passed them on the sidewalk. A young gardener worked beyond a low wall with a red blossom stuck jauntily behind one ear.
Vanda led the way toward a gate that opened into a park-like area where thick clumps of rhododendron grew, and an even deeper thicket of blooming oleanders. Beyond, a wide empty space of earth and sparse grass opened beneath tall eucalyptus trees. Nearby was a small enclosure of headstones.
“This place is Turkish cemetery,” Vanda said. “They do not mind if we come inside. Is very old, very quiet.”
The narrow headstones tipped crazily now, though once they had all faced neatly toward Mecca. They were set close together and each was topped with a marble turban. It was indeed quiet here beside the stones, with only the faint crunching of leaves beneath their feet to break the afternoon stillness. Vanda spoke softly as she showed Beth that the shape and size of each turban indicated the importance of the man who was buried there.
As she stood listening, Dorcas could hear the sound of waves rolling in on a stony beach not far away—the rush and the sucking back, the rush again, endlessly. Overhead a constant wind blew through the treetops and sent leaves, like neatly turned new moons, drifting down upon them. There was peace here as well as quiet, the sounds of living all gently removed from this grove. She wanted to give herself to the enveloping peace, to think of nothing that would disturb or distress. But she had come with Vanda for a reason and she could not yet relax her watchfulness.
Beth ran about contentedly, picking up small stones and leaves, busy with her own make-believe. Dorcas sat cross-legged on the grassy earth and thought of the questions she wanted to ask Vanda. Leaning against the gray, peeling trunk of a eucalyptus, the woman waited in silence as though she sensed purpose in their being here.
When the first question came, Dorcas gave it no preliminary softening. “Why did you run away from the hotel dining room today?” she asked bluntly.
The words and movements of Vanda Petrus were always deliberate. Even when she had fled from the Hotel des Roses, she had moved with smooth certainty. Now her face was as somber and aloof in its expression as ever and she did not answer quickly. When she spoke, her tone was unhurried, cool.
“There is a woman I do not like. When she comes into the dining room—I go. She does not like me. It is better if we do not meet.”
“Madame Katalonos?” Dorcas asked.
There was a hint of surprise in Vanda’s eyes. “You know this woman?”
“She came to our table and introduced herself to Miss Farrar,” Dorcas said. “We are to have tea with her day after tomorrow.”
Vanda absorbed this information, considering it well before she spoke. “She wishes something if she does this,” she said finally. “It is better that you watch.”
“She’s interested in what Miss Farrar will write about Rhodes,” Dorcas explained. “She has offered to help in any way she can.”
Vanda said nothing.
“Was she really a famous actress? That’s what the waiter at the hotel told us.”
“She is a woman of Rhodes, and Rhodians are proud of their own,” said Vanda with a shrug. “She is more famous after she marries rich husband.”
“Was her second husband rich, too?” Dorcas asked.
The faintest animation stirred in Vanda’s face. She held out strong, hard-working hands. “Constantine Katalonos is rich—he has these. Only these. But that can be enough—if Madame Xenia does not swallow him up to feed her own ambition.”
“Does not?” Dorcas echoed. “I understand that he is dead.”
Vanda’s eyes flashed sudden startling scorn. “This is what Madame tells to all. She does not want to tell that her husband runs away. She puts about him chains and walls. She says, ‘Do this, do that.’ She tells that it is for the glory of Greece, for her beloved Rhodes. Through Constantine she will bring back the great art of Greece. She eats him—his talent dies.”
“What is his talent?” Dorcas asked.
Vanda made a motion of modeling with her strong hands, as if she shaped clay in the air. “He is greatest sculptor in Greece. But no one knows because she swallows him whole. She kills what is in him to do.” Vanda’s hands came together sharply, flattening the air between them. “One time he makes a head of me. He would pay for me to come to model, but I do this for nothing because he is very great man. Madame Xenia does not like what he does. This head she does not permit to be shown in Athens exhibit. He marries her for freedom to work. She gives him only prison.”
Dorcas listened in some astonishment. She had suspected that there might be banked fires behind Vanda Petrus’s careful lack of expression. She had not expected to find them burning so angrily hot, but now that she had sensed this heat, she wanted to keep the woman talking.
“Then you believe he’s not dead, but has only run away?”
Vanda let her hands fall back against the tree trunk. Her guard was up again. She pushed herself from the tree and went to Beth.
“No—this you do not eat,” she said, and withdrew the eucalyptus leaf Beth was nibbling experimentally.
The chance to probe further was gone. All Vanda’s attention was now for Beth and it seemed affectionate, as if she had already given something of herself to the child. She looked up from wiping Beth’s mouth and hands and saw Dorcas watching her. Her gaze did not fall, and there was in it a smoldering of anger.
“Once I have daughter—small like this. It is in time of war. We live in the north, where my husband works our small farm. Petrus is not a Greek name, but my husband’s mother was Greek and he grew up a Greek. The bandits take my babies—my son, my daughter. They take across border into Bulgaria. My husband they shoot.”
She spoke almost defiantly, and Dorcas heard her in shocked dismay. She knew of the thousands of Greeks who had lost their children to the Communists and had never seen them again, but this angry revelation brought home the sharp horror of that massive kidnaping.
“I can feel what you tell me,” Dorcas said sorrowfully, touching a hand to her heart. “I can feel it inside me here.”
“I do not ask others to suffer for me,” Vanda said coldly. “This is not yours to suffer. You have husband. You have child.”
“I have no husband,” Dorcas said. “Didn’t Miss Farrar tell you that I am a widow?”
“She tells me—yes,” said Vanda. “Your husband is dead only two months. You are not like the widows of Greece.”
She was not like any other widow, Dorcas thought. How could she pretend to grieve for Gino? There was no answer she could make this woman in the face of her veiled contempt.
She stood up and brushed leaves and earth from her skirt “Let’s go back to the hotel. Perhaps Miss Farrar will want me when she returns fro
m her appointment. I’m glad you told me about Madame Katalonos. This may be helpful when we go to see her.”
Vanda held out a hand to Beth, who came readily to take it. As they walked through the quiet, shaded grounds of the old cemetery, Vanda returned voluntarily to the subject that seemed to interest her most—Constantine Katalonos.
“You will see a painting of Madame Katalonos’s husband in that house. It is very much like him. Always he laughs. He likes to be happy, to be gay. But that woman—she spoils all this. She makes it so he cannot laugh.”
Expressively Vanda drew down her dark brows, drew down the corners of her mouth to show how Constantine’s wife chose to look. It was the mask of tragedy to perfection, and Dorcas smiled.
“Yes, she looked like that today at the Roses. Very dramatic and—and overwhelming. I can imagine that she might be good at smothering those around her.”
For once Vanda was in agreement with something Dorcas had said. She appeared to like the word “smothering” and muttered it once or twice as they walked along. Just before they reached the hotel, Dorcas remembered the unsatisfactory answer she’d had from the desk clerk on the subject of her search. Vanda might know more than he did.
“Tell me,” she said, “do you know of a woman—a Greek woman—who has come here from America within the last year? Her name is Mrs. Markos Dimitriou.”
Vanda seemed to deliberate guardedly. “There are many called by that name. I do not know. You are looking for her?”
“Yes,” Dorcas said, “I’m looking for a woman by that name. It’s very important that I find her.”
“I will ask,” said Vanda.
They reached the hotel just as Fernanda’s car drew up to the curb. Johnny was nowhere in sight and Fernanda sat at the wheel. She beckoned to Dorcas with a conspirator’s air. Vanda took Beth up the steps and Dorcas went to the car door.
“From the moment I saw them, I knew I had to take one home!” Fernanda announced triumphantly. “I sent Johnny on an errand to get him out of the way because I was afraid he’d try to stop me. And I went into your room from our balcony and borrowed that canvas bag you use for Beth’s toys. I hope you don’t mind.”
Seven Tears for Apollo Page 9
