his natural talent for speed and his coordination brought him out high
in the finishing order and he had an offer to drive on the works team of
a new and struggling company that was building and fielding a production
team of Formula racing machines. Of course, the salary was starvation,
and it was a measure of his desperation that he came close to signing a
contract for the season, but at the last moment he changed his mind and
went on.
In Athens he spent a week hanging around the yacht basins of Piraeus and
Glyfada. He was investigating the prospects of buying a motor yacht and
running it out on charter to the islands. The prospect of sun and sea
and pretty girls seemed appealing and the craft themselves were
beautiful in their snowy paint and varnished teakwork. In one week he
learned that charter work was merely running a sea-going boarding house
for a bunch of bored, sunburned and seasick tourists.
On the seventh day the American Sixth Fleet dropped anchor in the bay of
Athens. David sat at a table of one of the beach-front cafes and drank
ouzo in the sun, while he studied the anchored aircraft carriers through
his binoculars. On the great flat tops the rows of Crusaders and
Phantoms were grouped with their wings folded.
Watching them he felt a consuming hunger, a need that was almost
spiritual. He had searched the earth, it seemed, and there was nothing
for him upon its face.
He laid the binoculars aside, and he looked up into the sky. The clouds
were high, a brilliant silver against the blue.
He picked up the glass of milky ouzo that the sun had warmed and rolled
its sweet liquorice taste about his tongue.
East, west, home is best.
He spoke aloud, and had a mental image of Paul Morgan sitting in his
high office of glass and steel. Like a patient fisherman he tended his
lines laid across the world. Right now the one to Athens was beginning
to twitch. He could imagine the quiet satisfaction as he began to reel
it in, drawing David struggling feebly back to the centre. What the
hell, I could still fly Impalas as a reserve officer, he thought, and
there was always the Lear, if he could get it away from Barney.
David drained the glass and stood up abruptly, feeling the fading glow
of his defiance. He flagged a cab and was driven back to his room at
the Grande Bretagne on Syndagma Square.
His defiance was dying so swiftly that one of his companions for dinner
that night was John Dinopoulos, Morgan Group's agent for Greece, a slim
elegant sophisticate with an unlined sun-tanned face, silver wings in
his hair and an elegantly casual way of dressing.
John had selected for David's table companion the female star of a
number of Italian spaghetti westerns. A young lady of ample bosom and
dark flashing eye whose breathing and bosom had become so agitated when
John introduced David as a diamond millionaire from Africa.
Diamonds were the most glamorous, although not the most significant of
Morgan Group's interests.
They sat upon the terrace of Dionysius, for the evening was mild. The
restaurant was carved into the living rock of the hill-top of
Lycabettus, under the church of St. Paul.
