‘How shall we make ourselves known to the gentleman?’ he asked Samways. ‘Perhaps you might be able to arrange a letter of introduction?’
‘No need for that, old man. There’s a reception in the embassy the day after tomorrow. For some rich merchant we want to butter up. Rallis will be there. Why don’t you both come along and I’ll introduce you to him there.’
‘That would be most kind of you, Samways.’
‘Don’t mention it, old chap. Always glad to give people like yourselves the benefit of my knowledge. Anyway, must dash now. Don’t want to miss that boat to Aegina.’
Waving his arm in farewell, the diplomat almost ran from the building. Adam and the professor followed him into the sunshine.
‘We will meet this fellow Rallis,’ Fields said, as they watched Samways climb into a carriage standing outside. ‘If even that insufferable little pup recommends him, he must be a man of some consequence.’
Fields paused and stared gloomily about the square.
‘Unless, of course, he turns out to be as big a damned fool as the man who’s recommending him,’ he said.
‘That would be difficult, would it not?’
‘It would be very nearly an impossibility that one city the size of Athens should include two men of such idiocy,’ the professor acknowledged. ‘But I doubt that Samways has come to an opinion about Rallis alone. Others at the embassy must think highly of him.’
‘And, as a rule, they think little of most Greeks,’ Adam remarked. ‘If there is one subject on which all the foreign residents of Athens agree, it is the rascality of the natives. French, Italians, English, Germans, Americans — they seem to argue about everything else, but there they speak with one voice.’
‘That is true. It is rare to find a Greek they admire. So we shall come to this reception on Friday and we shall talk to Mr Rallis.’
‘The parliament building was begun more than ten years ago.’
Adam and Fields were sitting outside a café at the junction of two roads. One led back towards the Angleterre. The other, which they faced, provided them with a view of the Acropolis and the Parthenon silhouetted against the horizon. The professor had embarked upon one of his favourite topics of conversation — the decadence of the modern Greek when compared with his ancient ancestors.
‘They talk of its opening next year but will it do so?’ he continued, picking up his cup and looking at its contents dubiously. ‘This is Athens. The home of idleness and procrastination. Who knows?’
Fields sipped at his coffee. Adam, who knew better than to engage his companion in debate on this particular subject, stretched back in his seat and clasped his hands behind his head. He gazed at the distant temple to Athena on its hill and thought idly of the history it had witnessed over the centuries. The sound of the professor lecturing became no more than a background buzz requiring only the occasional, random interjection in reply. The dust rose and the Athenian traffic, its carts and carriages and pedestrians and animals, continued to thunder past them but Adam felt himself tempted towards sleep. He closed his eyes.
‘Be off with you!’
Adam opened his eyes again in surprise. An ugly dark-haired woman and a child were standing by the table, hands outstretched. The professor was waving them away with a theatrical gesture, like a father in a Drury Lane melodrama dismissing his erring daughter from his sight. Carver offered a ten-lepta coin to the girl who was barefoot, filthy and dressed in torn clothing. She snatched it and the two grubby figures moved on.
‘You should not encourage them, my boy. They will batten upon your weakness and you will never see the back of them.’
‘I can see the back of them now, sir,’ Adam remarked mildly, watching as the beggar-woman and her daughter walked away.
‘Ah, you may be flippant but, mark my words, they will return. Or others will do so. Give but once to these Athenian mendicants and you will be pestered throughout the rest of our time here.’
The young man doubted Fields was correct. He had given freely to the city’s destitute since they had arrived and he had never seen the same beggar twice. He gazed down the narrow street ahead of them. A sad procession of emaciated horses, a dozen or more of them, was being led down it. Their destination, he thought, was almost certainly the knacker’s yard. The horses, with the man lead-
ing them, turned to the left. The traffic, which earlier had been so busy, had almost disappeared. The road ahead was clear for the best part of a hundred yards. The only vehicle that could be seen was a wooden cart, drawn by a sturdy-looking chestnut horse, which was trundling steadily towards them. Adam turned in his seat and peered through the window behind them into the gloom of the café.
‘I suppose we should pay mine host and return to the hotel.’
‘I shall not accompany you back to the Angleterre, my boy. I shall visit my friends at the National Library again.’
‘I do not believe the waiter plans to venture outside again for the rest of the day.’ Adam stood. ‘I shall beard him in his den.’
He brushed aside the curtain that hung across the café door and entered. Almost blinded by the change from light to darkness, he squinted into the interior. There were several rickety tables inside but only one was occupied. Two middle-aged men in shabby suits, wreathed in the smoke from their cigarettes, stared expressionlessly at Adam. As his eyes adjusted to the shadows, an older man emerged from the innermost depths of the building, smiling and nodding. Adam paid him for the drinks and turned to leave. He glanced through the window. The professor was standing with his back to the street. He was patting the pockets of his jacket as if he suspected that the beggar-woman who had importuned them might also have been a pickpocket and he was in danger of having lost his wallet.
‘Antio sas.’ Adam tipped his hat in farewell at the two shabbily dressed men at their table. They made no reply but continued to draw impassively on their cigarettes. He pushed aside the flimsy drape that separated the darkness of the café interior from the morning sunshine. As he did so, he heard a rumbling like distant thunder. It was so like thunder, he later remembered, that he was about to look up to the heavens in search of the clouds that must have materialised so suddenly. Instead, he could only stare in horror at what was racing towards them. Fields was still lost in his own world, his back to the street. Behind him, and approaching at tremendous speed, were the chestnut horse and its wooden cart. In the short time Adam had spent paying the café owner, something must have disturbed the beast and sent it careering across the junction of the two roads. Realising that it was charging towards a collision, the horse suddenly veered leftwards but, as it did so, the barrow it was pulling spun round in the direction of the café front. There were yells of warning from passers-by but the professor, still oblivious to the uproar behind him, made no movement.
Adam acted without thought or hesitation. Instinct replaced reasoning and he hurled himself towards Fields, like a swimmer diving full-length into a river. His outstretched arms struck the professor in his midriff. Both of them were propelled sideways just as the cart crashed into the table where they had been sitting. Momentum drove it on and clean through the window of the café with a terrific noise of shattering glass and splintering wood until finally the vehicle came to a halt. Adam, now sprawled across the professor’s body, felt a waterfall of tiny shards of glass shower down upon them both. He continued to lie there, aware now of the frantic whinnying of the chestnut horse and a hubbub of voices in the background. To his relief, he could sense Fields breathing heavily beneath his weight. He moved his arms and legs gingerly. Miraculously, there seemed to be no great damage. The café owner had emerged from the wreckage of his business together with his two customers, apparently unhurt and shocked, not into silence, but into voluble complaint and indignation. All three men roared and yelled. Picking himself up, Adam could hear loud demands that the owner of the horse and cart should make himself known to them. They were also threatening such retribution that he doubted anyone would step forward from the crowd that had gathered. Indeed, the driver of the cart had vanished. His vehicle was scarcely worth claiming. It had all but disintegrated in the impact. The chestnut horse had bolted up the street.