The Age of Olympus Page 3

  “And the blonde girl?” said Sophie. Helena’s taller, younger companion looked willowy by comparison, her fair hair braided in thick plaits, reminding Forrester of a statue of the goddess Diana.

  “Ariadne Patrou,” said Atreides. “Helena’s muse. You will see Helena’s portraits of her in the National Gallery one day. When the king reopens it.”

  Suddenly a man in a colonel’s uniform was embracing the two women, his voice booming through the room.

  “The two muses!” he said. “Come down from Olympus to grace us with their presence.”

  “Giorgios,” said Helena Spetsos, firmly trying to disengage herself from the colonel’s arms. “Anyone would think you were asking us to dance.”

  “I am not worthy to dance with two such beauties,” said the colonel. “And besides, I prefer to dance alone.”

  After Forrester had left mainland Greece, Giorgios Stephanides had become Alexandros’s top lieutenant, and after the Thebes massacre, his second in command. But long before he had joined the resistance, Stephanides had established himself as one of Greece’s leading novelists, most famous for Patros, the elemental peasant who, when troubles threatened to overwhelm him, danced alone on the beach to the sound of the bouzouki.

  “Would you like me to show you?” the colonel asked.

  “Not yet, Giorgi,” said Helena. “Perhaps when I have paid my respects to His Beatitude and spoken to Ari.”

  “Alas, dear lady,” said Colonel Stephanides, “you have just missed the General.”

  Helena glanced sharply in the direction of Alexandros’s admiring circle and Forrester, following her look, realised Alexandros had vanished. Suddenly Helena’s eyes flashed with anger and she leant close to Giorgios.

  “Doing your master’s bidding again, Giorgi?” she hissed, for it was now clear Stephanides’s job had been to delay them until Alexandros could leave the room.

  “My dear Helena—” said Giorgios, but she cut him short, and Forrester remembered why Helena had been such a formidable member of the resistance.

  “Ari has been avoiding me,” she said, each word like a hailstone. “But he cannot avoid me forever. Tell him that. Tell him the longer he lets the storm brew, the fiercer it will be when it breaks.”

  And with the beautiful Ariadne in tow, she thrust Stephanides out of the way and sailed towards His Beatitude the Regent of Greece. The crowd parted before her – and His Beatitude, Forrester could have sworn, gave a nervous swallow as she approached.

  He wondered what it was Helena Spetsos needed to speak about so urgently to General Aristotle Alexandros, and why his old friend was so reluctant to confront her.

  3

  TIN FACE

  Forrester and Sophie tried to slip away from the reception, but it proved impossible. Soon after Helena Spetsos’s dramatic arrival and General Alexandros’s hasty departure, Leigh Fermor had introduced them to his mistress, a charmingly short-sighted photographer called Joan Rayner, who had fallen for Paddy when he came back to Egypt with his captured German general and was now working for Osbert Lancaster at the British Embassy. Then the ambassador himself, Sir Clifford Norton, came to speak to Forrester (with much the same message as his press attaché had already conveyed), and Sir Clifford’s clever wife “Peter” arrived to show off her protégés, the painter Lucian Freud and a young British artist called John Craxton, who immediately offered to illustrate Leigh Fermor’s travel book, whenever he got round to writing it.

  Sophie was yawning discreetly and they were about to get away at last when Maurice Bowra, the acerbic Greek scholar and Warden of Wadham College, turned up with Professor Charles Runcorn, a historian specialising in the Crusades, both now working for the British Council. It was clear, Forrester thought, that however exhausted Britain might be after its epic struggle with Hitler, it was bringing its intellectual firepower to bear on the coming battle for freedom in Greece. Apart from being one of the world’s leading authorities on Byzantium, Runcorn was Paddy’s boss at the British Council. Without quite knowing how, Forrester and Sophie found themselves being swept out of the Archbishop’s reception in the midst of a talkative group that included Paddy, Joan, Venables, Beamish, the painter Niko Ghika, Prince Atreides (once again wearing his panama hat) and Jason Michaelaides, the poet who had declaimed over the kouros.

  “Leigh Fermor looked very decorative in the British Council offices,” Runcorn was telling Forrester, “but none of us could think how to get any work out of him. He never seemed to do anything except entertain a procession of exuberant Cretans and make the office girls fall in love with him.”

  “He was always borrowing money from them,” said Maurice Bowra, “and rarely paying it back. I disapproved of that.”

  Forrester liked Maurice Bowra: the don had helped him to get into Oxford when he had come up from Hull for his interview, despite his thick East Yorkshire accent and lack of social standing, and had indeed been the one who had steered him towards the classics. Not many trawlermen’s sons from Hull got into Oxford in those days, and Forrester credited Bowra with the fact that he was one of them.

  Bowra had served in the trenches in the First World War and had always tried to assist ex-servicemen seeking a university education, famously telling one former soldier who lacked the necessary qualifications that “war service counts as Latin”. He had also been at the foreground of the anti-appeasement movement during the 1930s, and the only reason he had not been given a proper job during the last war was that he was homosexual. “However,” he was said to have remarked philosophically when taking up a post as an air raid warden, “buggers can’t be choosers.”

  “It was my idea to get Leigh Fermor out of the office and lecturing to the Greeks,” Bowra confided with some satisfaction.

  “Which has worked rather well,” said Runcorn. “Because it keeps him out of everybody’s hair.”

  “Oh, you’re just jealous, Charles,” said Jason Michaelaides, “because Paddy knows more royals than you do, and therefore more royal gossip.”

  “Royal gossip is very good,” said the historian judiciously, “and political gossip is even better, but according to my friend Steven Runciman, who should know, nothing beats Vatican gossip.”

  They were walking along the street called Leoforos Vasilissis Amalias as he said this, and as they laughed something moved in Forrester’s peripheral vision in the gloom of the National Garden. It was a patch of white about the size of a man’s face, but not as wide. The half-face vanished almost as soon as it appeared – and then reappeared briefly twenty yards further on, in a clump of trees.

  Forrester felt the chill at the base of his neck that was so familiar from his war years – and the almost comforting surge of adrenalin that always followed it. But he was not alone now: Sophie was with him, and his first responsibility was to her. Should they slip away from the crowd that made them so conspicuous, or stay with it to take advantage of numbers? If he had been alone he would have been tempted to walk right into the garden and confront his stalker but he was not alone.

  On the other hand, every time the cheerful, chattering party walked under a streetlight, he and Sophie were a perfect target for whatever enemy was lurking out in the bushes. And Forrester knew, in his bones, it was an enemy. He found himself counting the steps through the unlit parts of the street until the next light would expose them to a pistol shot. He glanced up at the Acropolis, silhouetted now high above him against the stars: would it be for him, as for Socrates, the last sight he would see?

  If so, he thought, there were worse, and he let his mind relax, weighing up all the options. “On his way to Thebes,” Jason Michaelaides was saying, “Oedipus encountered the Sphinx, which asked him this riddle: What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening? His answer of course was Man, in his infancy, maturity and senescence. That simple word destroyed the monster. We have many monsters to destroy. Let us think, as we seek to slay them, of the answer given by Oedipus.”

 
“And never forget what happened to Oedipus,” said David Venables, and there was a general laugh. “How much better it would have been for him if he had never answered the riddle.” They began to cross the street towards the maze of steep alleys leading into the district known as Anafiotika, immediately beneath the Acropolis. Forrester made sure he stayed a pace behind Sophie: if a bullet was to come whistling out of the dark, it would hit him first. And then he thought what a bloody fool he was being: it would probably kill both of them.

  No bullet came. They were in Dedalou Street now, climbing steeply upwards, the houses around them simple whitewashed stone, many nestling right into the bedrock, with stone urns on balconies spilling cascades of bougainvillea and old petrol cans on rooftops brimming with geraniums and marigolds. For some reason, Greeks had a real fondness for using brightly painted, slightly rusting old tins in their garden decor, and the fact always gave Forrester an obscure satisfaction, perhaps because it was in such contrast to the prevailing aesthetic of Humberside.

  He knew that in classical times no one had lived on these steep slopes below the great temple because the Delphic oracle had said it was sacred ground, but when Athens was expanding in the nineteenth century, stonemasons had been recruited from the island of Anafi to create monstrosities like the Archbishop’s residence. These workers had provided accommodation for themselves and a heritage for their children by taking advantage of the Ottoman law that if you could put up a house between sunset and sunrise, it was yours. Which meant their homes, unlike the ones they were building for the rich, had a rugged simplicity and charming eccentricity no architect would have dared essay.

  Forrester’s eye roamed above, behind and ahead as the noisy, chattering party wound up the cobbled street where ancient vines arched across the street, windows were hidden by peeling shutters and doorways were set deep in crooked walls. He turned sharply as a pair of eyes gleamed from the darkness of an alley – and then realised they belonged to a cat. In fact Forrester was almost certain that there was no one following them along the street up which they were walking but he was vividly aware that on either side of them was a labyrinth of alleys, with outside staircases allowing access to ledges and rooftops from which—

  And there he was. It had to be the man Leigh Fermor had warned him about, the Dutchman with the tin face.

  Leigh Fermor had not mentioned the one thing about Cornelius Brandt’s mask that only a close encounter could reveal: it was a thing of horror. Not just the thought of what tangle of mutilated flesh lay beneath it, but the unnatural stillness of the mask, the unwinking painted eye, the red gash of the crudely painted mouth. Whoever wore such a thing, whoever had painted this caricature of a face, proclaimed himself not just as a wounded man but as one who had set himself apart from the human race.

  But Brandt’s appearance, so close at hand – the balcony of a Turkish-looking house where he stood on could be no more than thirty feet above them – was the opportunity Forrester had been waiting for. “Stay with the others, I’ll find you,” he whispered to Sophie, and dropped behind as the chattering crowd flowed on up the street.

  As they disappeared, he stayed where he was, looking up at the observer.

  It was not so foolhardy as it seemed. Even at this distance Forrester could tell from the man’s stance that he wasn’t aiming a weapon at him – yet. And if a weapon came out, Forrester had time to step back into the shadows. Instead, the man simply stared at him, his head unmoving, as if drinking him in. And then he vanished.

  It was like a disappearing trick: there was no movement, he simply wasn’t there any more, as if a dark curtain had been drawn across the balcony. For a moment Forrester felt a stab of superstitious fear, as if Brandt was a spectre, the last lingering embodiment of one of the many men he had had to kill in so many different ways during the war: the reproachful shade of a life he had snuffed out in order to fulfil a mission.

  And then he pulled himself together, put such morbid imaginings out of his mind (with almost exactly those words of admonition) and swung himself up onto the wall below the balcony. Balancing on the top he edged along it until he came to a shed that lay beneath another balcony and hauled himself up to the balustrade. Seconds later he was standing on the spot where Brandt had been moments before and realised that the curtain of darkness that had hidden the tin-faced man was not an illusion, but simply a dark blanket hanging on a washing line which the Dutchman must have tugged across to hide himself. And as Forrester smiled, a little ruefully at the realisation of how he had been fooled, he heard the scrape of boots on the tiles above him.

  Brandt was on the roof directly over his head.

  A beat, as the options raced through his mind. The obvious one was to swing himself up again, over the edge of the roof, but perhaps that was exactly what Brandt wanted him to do. As he came over the edge he would be at the point of maximum vulnerability, and all the Dutchman had to do – if Leigh Fermor was right and the man did indeed have some sort of score to settle – was kick him off the edge and send him flailing down into the street below.

  On the other hand, if he stayed where he was, Brandt could vanish into the darkness, and suddenly Forrester felt a visceral need to confront this spectre, to bring him out of the shadows and ask him who he was and why he was stalking him. He glanced across to the house next door and saw that it was separated from this one by a narrow ravine, with a little stream running down it. He calculated the gap as about eight feet, and leapt.

  He was out of practice. The months of tutoring undergraduates and dining not wisely but too well at Barnard College’s excellent High Table had increased his weight, slackened his muscles and slowed his reactions. He hit the balcony railing awkwardly, pulled himself noisily over it, and knocked over a stool in the process. A dog began to bark in the yard below and a voice called sleepily from inside, “Poios eínai aftós?” Who’s that?

  Feeling slightly foolish, Forrester looked back at the roof of the house he had just left. Sure enough, there was Brandt, watching him. Only the tin half of his face was visible, the living part in shadow, but Forrester could have sworn that the painted mouth was smiling.

  On the other hand, there was still no sign of a gun. As whoever was inside the house began to unlock the shutters to confront the intruder, Forrester grasped the edge of the guttering of the roof above and swung himself onto it, the tiles smooth and cool beneath his fingers.

  As he rose to his feet he saw Brandt turn and walk unhurriedly up to the roof-crest of the house on his side of the ravine, and vanish down the other side. In parallel, Forrester did the same thing on his side – but by the time he reached his roof-crest, Brandt had already made a leisurely jump to the roof of the next building. Forrester did likewise. Still separated by the narrow slot in the hillside, with every yard they covered they were coming nearer to the black cliffs that led up to the Acropolis.

  “Mijnheer Brandt, I presume,” Forrester called out. The man kept on moving. “My name is Forrester. I gather you’ve been asking after me.” No reply. Forrester kept on moving in parallel. “Is that correct? Do you want to speak to me?”

  Still walking, the man glanced across at Forrester, continued for another few yards, and then stopped. Brandt was on a flat roof now, a kind of terrace, flanked by huge amphorae filled with geraniums. The roof Forrester stood on was steeply sloped and covered with semi-cylindrical tiles: a much more awkward place to stand upright. The Dutchman came close to the edge; he was only a yard or two away now.

  “What do you want?” asked Forrester. Brandt stared at him, as though drinking him in, and Forrester began to feel a strange sense of unease. It was not fear, exactly, but the sensation of a door opening: a door he wanted to remain closed.

  Forrester had left Oxford to join the Special Operations Executive early in the war, and had been on missions in most of occupied Europe and much of the Mediterranean right up to the moment when the Germans had signed the surrender document on Lüneburg Heath. The memories, not just of the
dangers he had run, but of the things he had had to do to survive, sometimes rose up to overwhelm him, blotting out the present and plunging him back into a world of terror and violence he wanted only to put behind him. As he looked at the silent, grotesque figure a few yards away on the opposite rooftop, he felt the demons beginning to stir once more. He had to make a conscious effort to keep his voice calm. “Do you want to talk to me about something?”

  There was no reply, and without warning Forrester’s head began to swim. He tried to breathe deeply; it would be foolish to fall down now, and he knew that, as the memories came flooding back, it could happen all too easily. And then, so fast it was almost impossible to see, the man’s hand moved as if he were skimming a stone across a pond, and he flung something at Forrester’s head.

  Forrester jumped sideways to avoid it and as he did so realised Brandt had not stopped at random: he had waited until his enemy was on the edge of the steepest drop they had yet passed. All he had done was throw a tile – Forrester heard it smash on the roof behind him – but he had timed it perfectly.

  In avoiding it, Forrester missed his footing, fell and found himself sliding helplessly backwards down towards the edge of the roof. He was aware of Brandt watching him with almost scientific curiosity as he scrabbled for something to hold on to, failed, and went over the drop.

  At the last second his fingers clenched over the sharp edges of the tiles and he hung there, trying to see what lay beneath him. Fifty feet of air, he realised, and a fall that would either kill or cripple him, and then as he looked over he saw the tin face tilt itself into its grim, artificial smile.

  In a leisurely way, the Dutchman reached down and picked up another tile. This time there was no way Forrester could avoid it: it was going to hit him full in the face. He felt not fear, but fury at his own foolishness. An unarmed man had outmanoeuvred him – and was about to kill him.

  As Brandt’s arm went back for the throw, Forrester took a deep breath, and let go of the edge of the roof.