Once inside the walls, she found her way easily to the Street of the Knights. All her moves were assured, and she held both fear and anger in check. If she thought about Beth now it might weaken her. She must be fully braced for the encounter that was to come.
It was easy to see how Vanda had given her the slip that other time. There were back entrances to some of these courtyards. Vanda could have turned up an alleyway with Beth and then slipped back through a second entrance, losing a follower completely. But today Dorcas knew where she was going.
The cat, Cleobulus, dreamed beneath the bougainvillaea vine, but Dorcas did not go into the courtyard. Instead, she mounted worn stone steps and climbed beneath the stone arch to the second level. There she found herself in a passageway above the entry, with doors opening off it here and there. Behind one of the nearby doors music was playing. A record player, perhaps. She had heard it before. It should have spoken to her that other time—he always liked music about him. She went to the door and raised her hand to knock. Then she stood motionless for a moment, fighting back her physical fear of what might lie beyond this door.
When the battle was partially won and her hand steady enough, she rapped sharply upon the wood.
He came at once to open the door and stood looking at her without surprise. “I wondered how long it would take you,” he said.
The dark flash she remembered was in his eyes. His smile was the same, giving him that deceptive, disarming look of youth that so charmed Fernanda. And had once charmed Dorcas Brandt.
He stepped back to let her in, and she walked into the small stone room that he had made into his home for reasons known only to himself. There was no sign of Beth, no sign that a child had been here. Faced by reality, she was finding in herself a strength she had not known before. The shock of last night was over. Perhaps all along, from the very beginning at home, this was the thing she had most dreaded and would not face. Now the truth was in the open and nothing mattered except Beth.
She looked about in cool detachment. It was not an unattractive room. Gino Nikkaris had always displayed more sensitivity toward things than toward people. Things could be possessed and held more surely than people. A dark red Turkish carpet of intricate design covered the boards of the floor. A shawl of Greek embroidery hung against the whitewashed wall. There was a stand to hold the record player, and a small bookcase. On the bookcase stood an alabaster vase, simple of line and undoubtedly valuable. Leaning against a nearby wall were several paintings—Gino’s efforts to sustain the fiction that he was a working artist. Yes, it was here that Fernanda had come on their first visit to the old city.
He switched off the music and turned toward her with the same disarming smile. “What a temptation you offered me last night, bellisima. A young woman alone in the darkness. Alone after the redheaded American went away. I had to let you know that you are not free.”
“Wasn’t that a risk for you?” she asked. His smile could no longer reach her, terrify her. She saw it as if from a distance.
He shrugged and brought a chair with a rush seat for her to sit on. When she sat down, he took his place on the room’s narrow cot and reached for a packet of cigarettes. She watched as the match flared, lighting his dark aquiline face, striking highlights for an instant in his thick dark hair. When the cigarette was lighted, she spoke.
“Where is Beth? Where have you made Fernanda send her?”
His laughter always had a musical sound, even when it set the teeth unpleasantly on edge. “She’s in a good enough place, my small daughter. A safe and rather amusing place. All things considered. Fernanda says you are behaving badly again. It’s better if you don’t see Beth for a time.”
She could not remain coolly remote. She clasped her hands in her lap, trying to contain her rising fury. Rage could be as self-destructive as fear. If he could not terrify her, he would like to make her angry.
“You have the marble head,” she told him. “You don’t need my daughter now. I can see how you’ve used Fernanda. But I’m not so foolish as I used to be. If Beth isn’t returned to the hotel today, I’ll go to the police.”
He paused with the cigarette halfway to his lips and she saw by the arrested movement that she had startled him.
“I have the what?” he demanded.
“You struck Johnny Orion down on Philerimos today and took the head of the weeping boy. You might have killed Johnny.”
Gino was across the room, moving with the lithe speed that had always been his. He caught her wrist in a twisting grip she remembered.
“What are you talking about? I haven’t been to Philerimos since I returned to Rhodes. What do you mean about the head? Tell me quickly!” This was no pretense, but genuine consternation.
“I’ll tell you nothing,” she said.
He dropped her wrist in disgust and went back to the cot to draw furiously on his cigarette.
“What a fool you are! To hold the head in your hands and then let it slip through your fingers. You and the American!”
“Then it must have been Constantine,” she said. “It must have been Constantine Katalonos. Someone has been watching the hotel, following me.”
His laughter was both angry and derisive. “Again you prove yourself less than brilliant, bellisima. Constantine is very dead. I suppose I owe him my life, in a way, since he was on the plane for San Francisco in my place. What a blow it must have been for you to find yourself without warning a widow.”
She stared at him. Constantine on the plane? “Then why didn’t you come home, if you weren’t harmed?”
“I saw a chance for a better plan, a bigger gamble. Things were not going so well at home—and you, bellisima, were becoming something of a danger, a threat to my safety. You would not stay convinced of your own madness, for all the trouble I took to convince you of it. Constantine arrived from Greece and met me at the airport that day as we had planned. He had completed his assignment of removing the head from the museum and thought it well to be absent for a time. He laughed about his own cleverness when he told me—how he dressed as a workman and went to work with other workmen who were renovating rooms of the museum. In a wheelbarrow filled with sand for cement he brought in the forgery and took away the real head.”
He was telling her too much, Dorcas thought uneasily, making his revelations too readily. What ace did he hold in this game that he should have so little concern about putting information in her hands?
He went on, and she listened warily.
“For a time Constantine kept the head hidden in his studio, while I waited at home, impatient to know what had happened. Then the copy was discovered at the museum sooner than he planned and the original became too hot to keep. So he made one of his idiotically whimsical moves in hiding it. I should never have taken on such a partner. Yet he had a genius in his hands. When he could not create he could copy. And the copy would be so perfect that few would guess. Together we might have made an excellent team.”
“How could he bear to do such a thing?” Dorcas asked. “He was a Greek and an artist.”
“He also had a consuming wish to be free of his wife,” Gino said scornfully. “The fortune the head would bring could have freed us both to live as we pleased. How he hated that possessive woman. He knew it would injure her to have anything happen to the museum she was devoted to. He blamed her for ruining him, though nobody forced him to marry her, as I told him many times. What I don’t understand is how the copy was discovered so quickly. He boasted of the excellent job he had done.”
“It would have been discovered because of the tear,” Dorcas said. “The tear was on the wrong cheek of the boy.”
Gino stared at her for a moment and then ground out his cigarette. “What a stupendous fool! He bragged to me that the copy was so good that it might have stayed there forever—which he did not wish. He had some sort of conceit, I think, about having it recognized eventually as his own work. He told me he had made one small mistake that someone would eventually discover.
A small mistake! He had too much impudence, that one, too much scorn for the intelligence of others. He played too many jokes. The trick of the note was another.”
“It was you who kept trying to get the letter from me, wasn’t it?” Dorcas said.
“Of course. Both here and through my friends at home. Constantine tried to play with me that day at the airport. He would not tell me where the head was hidden. Later, he said, when we were sure of our buyer, he would inform me. Not until he found he was pushing me too far did he tell me that the information was safely on its way to me in a letter that was to be mailed from Greece. I could force nothing more than that from him. So I changed my plans. I decided to send him in my place on the plane to San Francisco to transact my business there. I would return home and wait for the letter to make sure he spoke the truth.”
“And the plane crashed with Constantine on it,” Dorcas said.
Gino nodded. “Instead of me. A great disappointment for you, I’m afraid. I had not yet left the airport when the news went through the place. I went outside and saw the wreckage burning. There was no need after that to share with a partner. This gave me a fine idea. Under cover of my own death I could acquire a new identity and do as I pleased, thus escaping certain sticky matters that were ripening in the States. There was only one thing I needed—that letter from the Owl. And you, bellisima, were the one who stood in my way. It was I who searched our apartment the first time. I believed I knew all the places in which to look.”
“Then you drew the chalk circles? It was you!”
He looked pleased. “That was no more than a whim the first time—to suggest to you what I searched for, the thing you must surrender. But when Fernanda told me what had happened and of how the chalk marks upset you, I decided to carry them further. Fernanda, to do her justice, did not approve, but she could do nothing. For my sake, she could only conceal and deny.”
“It was you on the balcony also—that night here in Rhodes?”
He nodded, his eyes bright. “You did not guess, did you? Yes, it was I who came to your balcony that night and looked at my daughter as she slept. And at her mother. Your head was turned upon the pillow, your throat very white in the darkness. I had no love for you then.”
Dorcas pressed her fingers together lest they move involuntarily to her throat.
“I meant to search, but you turned in your sleep and I went back to the balcony and waited. When you left your bed, I made my escape through Fernanda’s room.”
“The chalk smudges on the balcony rail that first night, the soap marks on the mirror later—you managed those, too, of course. But why? It seems a childish game.”
“It was you who were the impressionable, easily frightened child,” he said quickly. “So easily swayed in your emotions, so unsure of yourself. I didn’t think it would be difficult to push you over the line into madness. You were coming very close.”
She sickened, hearing him. It was part of his nature to delight in such tormenting. But thanks to Johnny he could not touch her now.
He watched her with an odd intentness, as if she puzzled him a little. “What has happened to you, bellisima?”
She did not reply, but continued her probing for answers he seemed all too ready to give.
“You got Fernanda to send Beth here that day, didn’t you? So you could see her again?”
“At least I did not let her see me,” Gino said. “It was a nice touch to have my landlady give the child the coin for you. Though I had to part with a treasure to frighten you with that little reminder of the Owl. Fernanda was annoyed with me, I’m afraid. She felt I went too far. And she tried to recover the coin for me.”
“You’ve used her all along, cheating her, deceiving her,” Dorcas said.
“I had no choice. I had to bring you here to Rhodes. I had to find out what you knew, whether you held the information. Although I could not tell her about the note, or what it was I searched for. My darling Fernanda has a curious sense of morality at times. In her eyes all my motives are honorable and I prefer to keep it that way. You have yourself helped me to convince her that you are incompetent to care for Beth—as indeed you are, bellisima. With Constantine dead, there was no way to find the head except through you. Now through you it has been found and lost again. There are scores between us to settle.”
He came suddenly close to her and for an instant she thought he might strike her across the face in anger, as he had done more than once in the past. She held very still without wincing, and she did not look away.
“I saw Mrs. Dimitriou in the village yesterday,” she told him.
Her words stopped him. The flash in his eyes was cold as winter steel. He waited.
“She told me what I wanted to know,” Dorcas went on. “She confirmed what I already knew.”
He wheeled away from her. “We’re wasting time. What does any of this matter?”
“Perhaps the police will think a good deal of it matters,” Dorcas said.
“I have never liked to be threatened. You should know that by now. Besides, you are in no position to threaten me.”
His anger died in the abrupt way that was possible when he thought of something that pleased him.
“I will find the head, of course. It is out in the open now. And I know where Beth is. So the cards lie in my hands.”
She was more alarmed than when he had seemed to threaten her physically. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll leave the country, of course, as soon as I have the head. Perhaps I will take them both with me—the marble treasure and my daughter. In that case you will never hear of us again. Of course if you should be so foolish as to go to the police, it is possible that I would let the head wait and take my daughter away first. You are no longer a child, bellisima, as you were when I married you. It is necessary that you think of these things.”
The old sickness of terror was ready to rise within her and she held herself very still.
“It’s true,” he went on pleasantly, “that you may be left in a most unfortunate position. It will not be possible to divorce a man who is dead. Yet you will not be able to prove that I am alive. A difficult quandary, I’m afraid. Especially now that you are casting eyes at this American with the red hair. For me, this is amusing.”
She could not remain longer in this room. He would not touch her now—not when he could torment her in more subtle ways.
“You won’t be able to get away with any of this,” she told him, and left her chair. Quite steadily she walked across the Turkish carpet and he sprang to open the door for her with a derisively gallant gesture.
“What a pity,” he said. “What a woman you might have been. Tell me—do you still weep for Apollo?”
His fingers moved toward her in the old caress and she struck his hand away and went from him down the steps. She could hear him laughing as she ran through the archway below. Out upon the Street of the Knights pedestrians moved about their everyday affairs and tourists looked endlessly into the finders of their cameras.
She no longer belonged to this pattern of the normal and commonplace. A darker world had drawn her into its being. She hurried to the gate and out into the newer town. There was a cab waiting at the stand and she got into it. When the driver looked about for the address, she hesitated. Not the hotel. No help waited for her there. Not with Johnny injured and Fernanda an enemy. There was only one person to whom she could turn in her need—one person who might help her. She gave the driver the name of the street on which Constantine Katalonos had lived.
15
The thing that happened to her during the brief taxi ride was strange. It was as if in her extremity of despair she began to get a second wind. Perhaps with good reason. She had stood up to Gino. She had not crumpled as she used to do. She had answered him and she had turned her back on him and walked out of the room. Perhaps Johnny Orion had given her a little of his own tough resilience. When there was pressure, you stretched—you didn’t snap in two. You kept going as she was doin
g now. Not hysterically and in terror, but with quiet determination. Johnny would have helped her if he could. But Johnny had been temporarily put out of the picture and she had relied on herself. She had not been beaten and she would not be. Beth and all the future were the stakes for which she played.
The very look of her small daughter was hurtfully in her mind. The way Beth looked when she laughed, the look of her asleep. Her own hands could remember the soft warmth of that small, trusting body, and her loss was an aching within her.
In front of the Katalonos house the cab pulled up behind another car—Fernanda’s car. Dorcas had no wish to face Fernanda now, but she braced herself for the meeting.
The Greek maid admitted her and at least she was not unprepared when she walked into the drawing room and found Fernanda standing before the portrait of Constantine Katalonos.
Fernanda looked around with no evidence of rancor. “Well, this is a surprise. I wondered where you’d gone.”
“I went to see Gino,” Dorcas said bluntly.
Fernanda blinked, but she did not pursue the subject. She went to a corner of the room where a huge Turkish mangal stood—a brass brazier of the sort that was used to warm old-fashioned Turkish houses in cold weather. Its brass sides curved upward like the open petals of a lotus, handsomely embossed.
“A fine piece, don’t you think?” Fernanda said. “I’d like to find one of those to send home for my living room.”
Dorcas watched her in wonderment Fernanda’s talent for detachment was always amazing.
She got heavily down upon her knees and busied herself with a bundle of cloth inside the brazier. “I’m the curious sort. I couldn’t resist looking. Do come and see what I’ve found, Dorcas.”
She spread back the soft wrappings and Dorcas looked down upon the face of the marble boy. It was the real head, she saw—the one she and Johnny had found at Philerimos that morning.
“You see?” said Fernanda triumphantly. “I knew it couldn’t be Gino behind that attack upon Johnny today. Such a wild story you told, my dear. These goings on won’t do, you know.” She re-covered the head and moved innocently away from the brazier.
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