Die Rich Die Happy

delighted. The brandy was an Armagnac, and very special. He'd chosen it himself, and he knew it was good, but Craig drank it out of pleasure, not for need. Loomis looked positively benign.

'You can keep the photograph,' he said, 'and I'll let you have a copy of his dossier. There's just one snag. He may have gone to Zurich recently. For a facelift. Probably got the burn scars fixed too. They do you a very good plastic surgery job in Zurich.'

'You bastard,' said Craig, then threw back his head and laughed aloud. 'No wonder you wanted me for this job, Loomis. I'm the only one daft enough to take it.'

Loomis looked coy, and summoned more brandy.

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Naxos's yacht, the Philippa, put into Piraeus two days later. It was a converted destroyer, built on the Tyne and transformed on the Clyde into the kind of floating pleasure dome that perhaps twelve men in the world can afford to own, and three of them are Greek. It was painted the obligatory, dazzling white, its brasswork glittered like sunbeams, its ropework was pipe-clayed to the snowy virginity of a detergent ad. It carried a helicopter, a swimming pool, three powerboats, a five-piece band, a cordon bleu chef, three Canalettos, nine Picassos, a Memling, a third-century B.C. statue of Aphrodite, a doctor, and a scaled-down version of a Cunarder's catering staff. Its officers were Englishmen and a Scot, who had left the service of a famous passenger line because Naxos offered them more money. All the rest of the crew were relatives of the bosun, a gigantic Hydriote Islander who preserved a discipline that would have terrified Captain Bligh. It cost Naxos a fortune, and he loved it. It belonged to his wife.

Craig sat outside a waterfront cafe watching the

Philippa come into harbor, her whiteness so pure in the sunlight that the eye ached to see it. The Philippa was beautiful, the swift elegance of her fighting ship's fines miraculously preserved, though she was now no more than the most expensive toy ever built. Good for thirty knots at least, and strong enough to face a North Atlantic gale in February. As she came to rest at last and the anchor cable roared through the hawseholes, Craig remembered that the Philippa had been built five miles from where he was born, and the thought gave him pleasure.

The waiter stood beside him and looked at the ship.

'The Naxos boat,' he said. 'Beautiful, eh?'

'Beautiful,' said Craig.

'A palace,' said the waiter. 'A king could live there and not feel ashamed. And for Naxos it's only a setting for one jewel.'

'Yes?' said Craig.

'His wife. A solitaire diamond for Naxos, the only one in the world. So he builds a boat for her—white on white. And I'll tell you something—it works.'

'You've seen her?' said Craig.

'She passed by here once,' said the waiter. 'That's when I started talking like a poet.'

A flotilla of small boats put out for the yacht.

'Beautiful,' said the waiter. 'When Naxos comes to town, everyone goes to him. Look! Health Authority, Customs, newspapers, government, they all want to visit the palace, to see the queen.'

'And the money,' said Craig.

'Without money, how can there be queens?' said the waiter severely.

At dusk a motorboat put off from the yacht and raced for the harbor, its cox'n using the twin screws with great skill to bring her to rest by the cafe. A white-clad sailor leaped ashore, and Craig stood up.

'Mr. Craig?' said the sailor.

Craig nodded, and the sailor exploded into a salute, then raced to pick up Craig's luggage.

'You know her?' asked the waiter. 'No. Him. Naxos,' said Craig.

'Hephaistos and Aphrodite,' said the waiter. 'Remember Hephaistos had a net. We should all be netted like that—just once in our lives.

Craig went aboard the boat and it roared into life. Behind him Piraeus faded into purple shadow, and one by one the lights came on, looping the bay in soft blobs of gold. The Philippa was dressed overall, and her whiteness gleamed like silver now under her deck lights. The powerboat slowed, stopped by the companion way, twin screws chopping the water into flashes like gems. The Aegean was dark now, and tranquil as sleep. Craig went up on deck, to where the band was playing a cha-cha, and mess stewards served long drinks, ice cubes clinking a counterrhythm to the bongos and maracas. Suddenly a voice split the music like an ax.

'John,' it roared. 'Where the hell ya been this last ten years? Welcome aboard.'

Craig turned to face his host, his problem.

Aristides Naxos was a squat barrel of a man with an immense breadth of shoulder that even so seemed only just wide enough to sustain the weight of his head. The head was vast, yet not unsightly, with a great weight of white hair, a nose like a ship's prow, a rich, sensitive mouth and wide gray eyes that had never told anybody anything. The whole effect was of a crude but tremendous power that was beginning to tire. Naxos had had the force, the will, and the strength to achieve almost anything he wanted, and he'd done so. Now he looked ready for rest.

Before the war he'd been a sailor. His grandmother had died and left him a caique. Inside a year he owned three. In five years he had a couple of tramp steamers. When the war came he sailed them into convoy, picked up another convoy in Britain, and reached America. He mortgaged them there and bought more ships. He went to South America and got into oil. He bought real estate in Florida. And more ships. Always more ships. If the Germans sunk them he got compensation; if they survived the cargo rates were enormous. By the end of the war he'd been a millionaire many times over, and he'd come back to Europe to ransack the Middle East. Arbrit Oil had swallowed almost the whole of his fortune at first, but in the end it had paid off, leaving him with 5 percent of whatever Zaarb, the ramshackle, sun-dried little sheikhdom off the Red Sea coast produced. And what came out was oil, a thick, black river that swept Naxos's personal fortune to that of a small nation. And trouble. When it went Red Naxos was the most hated man in Zaarb, but as long as he had his 5 percent he could vote for British troops to stay there. Naxos hired a private army of bodyguards, and voted for the status quo.

It didn't seem to worry him too much. Despite his weariness he looked fit enough to go five rounds with a heavyweight champion, his skin was bronzed and firm, and his handshake hard, yet Craig knew he was fifty at least. In a white sharkskin dinner jacket, black trousers, cherry-colored cummerbund, he looked grotesque, but he looked grotesque in any clothes. After a while the sheer strength of his personality made you forget how he looked. The only thing that would do him justice would be a suit of armor, thought Craig. Then he'd look like a king.

'Where the hell ya been?' Naxos said again.

'Back in England,' said Craig. 'Making money.'

'Selling cigars?'

'That was a personal service—just for you,' said Craig. 'I got fed up with smuggling and went into nuts and bolts for a while, then I retired.'

'You made enough, huh?'

'I had a good offer,' said Craig. 'And I like traveling. It was nice of you to ask me here.'

'As soon as I knew you were in Greece,' Naxos bawled. 'Philippa's crazy to meet you. She'll be along soon. Come and meet the others.'

He took Craig's arm and dragged him over to the people on deck, men and women who were there simply because they belonged to a group that was always available, always around, in Cannes and Corfu and Sun Valley and Ig-gls. People who could ski a bit and swim a bit and drink a great deal. Naxos bought them as he bought pictures, to plug the holes in his background. Craig said hello to a French count and an Italian starlet and an English Honorable, and nodded to a dozen more. Naxos went away and came back with a glass of Scotch on the rocks, put it in Craig's hand. The other guests reacted to the personal service as a spider reacts to a tremor in the web. Craig was in. It would be necessary to be nice to him.

'You remembered my drink,' he said.

'I don't forget essentials,' said Naxos, and looked anxiously at the companionway. 'Women take a hell of a time to dress.'

'The suspense is part of the treat,' said Craig.