Chris recognized her immediately from her helmet and her long white robes — her chiton, just as Wikipedia said. She was Athena, the goddess of wisdom and civilization, of craft and war and justice, the tutelary deity of the island.
For some moments he was so surprised that he couldn’t breathe. He had conjured her back from the underworld where the old gods live, and he had done it by imagining her, through the sheer power of the words in the poem he was writing about her.
She wasn’t a real physical object, he understood that clearly enough. She was some kind of hallucination, a projection of his own mind onto the external world. Of course. But his residency in Skios was justified. His choice of career. His whole life.
He felt in the darkness for pencil and paper. His long-awaited second stanza was already writing itself.
* * *
The confusion at the entrance by this time had grown worse because, just as the cars struggling to get out had begun to free themselves from the wreckage of the bougainvillea and smash their way through the barrier, they came up against the flashing blue lights and howling sirens of the island’s arriving emergency services.
Soon arms and clubs were being waved, first demonstratively and then in earnest, and soon after that the confrontation between police trying to reach the massacre and participants trying to escape from it was complicated by the violent intervention of a woman who loudly wanted the police to arrest someone for some other offense entirely. It was very difficult in the circumstances prevailing for police officers with only limited English to understand who was to be arrested for what — whether it was someone called Wilfred for impersonating someone called Fox, or the other way round; and whether the man whom the woman was propelling so urgently towards them, and from whom she was snatching some kind of typescript to wave in their faces as evidence, was Fox or Wilfred; and where Fox was if this was Wilfred, or Wilfred if this was Fox.
In the end, so as to get on with the job they had been sent to do, they arrested whichever man it was they had to hand, and later, in the calmer conditions of the police station, charged him with attempting to leave the scene of a crime, inciting public disorder, wasting police time, being an accessory in the deaths of a still undetermined number of people, and bringing the Hellenic Republic into disrepute. Annuka Vos, his accuser, or defender, who had attempted to prevent them throwing him into the van by battering the chief of police about the head with her handbag, and who had thereupon been thrown into the van after him, they charged only with attempted murder.
* * *
Among the last of the wounded to be collected was Cedric Chailey, the token Brit. “I knew there was going to be trouble,” he said to Rosamund Chailey, as he lay on one of the tables in the now almost empty agora, with his wounded leg stretched out in front of him and bound up as best she could in a tablecloth. “As soon as they said he was Norman Wilfred. I was in college with Norman Wilfred. That fellow wasn’t Norman Wilfred. If anything should happen to me, you’ll see that control gets this.”
He handed her the mobile phone he had removed from Mr. Skorbatov’s shirt pocket, containing all the great oligarch’s contacts, codes, and passwords.
* * *
By the time Oliver had packed his suitcase — or at any rate Dr. Wilfred’s suitcase — and arrived at the entrance, the counterpoint of sirens from the departing police and ambulances winding their way back through the mountains was becoming fainter. There was no one to be seen, and no limousines or taxis. He tapped on the window of the lodge. Tapped and tapped — banged with his fist — because Elli had her headphones on, oblivious to the world around her.
“Sorry!” she said, when she at last slid back the glass. “I’m talking to my Auntie Soussana in Patras. What tricks those people in Patras do! You never imagine! So in what way my help you?”
“A taxi, if you would.”
“Oh, were you at the lecture? Is it all over? How did it go? No rain? I thought I heard thunder.”
51
On the agora the last few candles guttered out. The moon rode ever higher in the sky, and poured a soft classical peace ever deeper into the ruins. The warm air was sweet with the blossoms of the Mediterranean night. From the hillside where she had emerged from her abductor’s crate, the white goddess looked serenely down upon her little protectorate, and held her guiding hand over it once again as she had held it three thousand years before. She had restored peace and civilization to her island.
Here and there in the moonlight some of the exhausted cooks and waiters, who had only stirred uneasily in their sleep at the noise of gunfire and screaming, opened their eyes and perhaps pecked at a little abandoned baklava or took a restorative swig from a forgotten bottle of brandy. Giorgios, who had settled down at last to smoke his so long awaited and so richly deserved cigarette, only to discover that the pack had fallen out of his pocket during his exertions, located a box of cigars and made do with one of them.
At a moonlit table in one secluded corner Georgie cut Nikki another handful of grapes, and Nikki poured Georgie another glass of wine.
“I really knew,” said Nikki. “From the moment I set eyes on him. In my heart.”
“So did I,” said Georgie. “I always know if they’re duds. Quite easy, actually, because they always are.”
“What was that one at school called?”
“You mean Mr. Wossop?”
“No, the boy you hid in the changing rooms … Mr. Wossop? That awful little man who took us for comparative religion? You didn’t!”
“Not really. Only once, on that retreat thing to the nunnery place.”
“Georgie!”
“You were too busy retreating to notice. You were so ghastly when you were head girl, Nikki!”
“Was I? What, a bit … scrungy?”
“Scrungissimo. I hated you.”
“No, you didn’t. You had some kind of thing about me. Creeping up and peering at me all the time.”
“I didn’t have my lenses then. Oh, Nikki, all that being ghastly of yours, and where’s it got you in the end? She’ll never make you director now!”
“No. Nothing much left to be director of, anyway.”
“Nikki, it’s no good, is it? Suddenly trying not to be ghastly, if ghastly’s what one is.”
They sipped their wine. Nikki refilled their glasses.
“Anyway,” said Georgie, “he seems to have vanished.”
“Norman?”
“Oliver.”
“I still can’t think of him as Oliver.”
“Not that it matters much which. If they shot him.”
“Maybe the cleaning woman got him.”
They laughed. They stopped laughing. They reflected silently for some moments on life and its vicissitudes.
“I like it here,” said Georgie. “We could find somewhere to live. A Greek fisherman’s cottage. With or without Greek fishermen.”
“You mean — together? You and me?”
“Why not? Then if Patrick rings, no problem. You wouldn’t have to invent anything, because there I’d be.”
“So where would Patrick be?”