‘Some idiot formality. We find out.’ He grinned: ‘Nice taxi, huh!’
They turned into a square, past a brown Byzantine church with a humped brick dome where an old man was selling lemons under the wall. The two Greeks rode in silence.
‘This isn’t any formality,’ said Neil, ‘the Greek police don’t arrest tourists unless it’s something serious.’
‘O.K., they think we are dangerous gangsters. It is a joke for us.’
Neil sat back and said nothing. It was too early for him to have a sense of humour. He needed a shave, and his mouth felt black and dried up after the retsina of the night before. The car drummed over cobbles, past trams sparking along the waterfront into Athens. In the seat in front, the driver’s neck bulged over his collar like a swollen lead pipe.
‘Perhaps they find something wrong with our papers,’ Van Loon added, lighting up his meerschaum.
‘There’s nothing wrong with our papers,’ said Neil. He was becoming irritated now with the Dutchman’s complacency.
They drove past banks and shipping offices and down dusty treeless avenues into Constitution Square, lined with concrete pillars and the blue shields and white cross of the Hellenic Kingdom. The Ford pulled up in front of the King George Hotel. The policeman who had been driving stayed behind the wheel, while a doorman bowed the other three through the revolving doors. Van Loon, rucksack on his back and pipe between his teeth, grinned ecstatically at the marble and chandeliers, his roughshod feet sinking half an inch into the carpets over to the lifts.
‘Perhaps they send us up champagne and dancing girls!’ he cried, as the lift doors hissed shut and they rose, as gently as mercury in a barometer, to the top floor. A door at the end of the passage was opened by a small neat man with a nut-brown head. The plainclothes Greek handed him the two passports, and Neil and Van Loon were shown into a suite with bars of sunlight across a wine-red carpet.
In front of the French windows sat an enormously fat man. His head was the shape of an egg, with a sharp little beard and a lick of hair pasted across his brow in a kiss curl. He looked to Neil like a French professor out of some nineteenth-century farce.
The nut-brown man waved a hand at two armchairs in the centre of the floor. ‘Asseyez-vous!’ he said, strutting over to a table near the wall. The plainclothes man had taken up his place beside the door.
The nut-brown man stood looking down at Neil and Van Loon, thumping his thick fingers on the two passports: ‘Messieurs, I am Captain Spyros of the Athens police.’ He spoke French with a strong accent.
Neil interrupted, in English: ‘Just a minute. We’re not French. I’m English and my friend here is Dutch. And we’d like to know what all this is about.’
Captain Spyros held up his hand and continued, in French: ‘Please, my colleague here, Monsieur Charles Pol’ — he nodded towards the fat man — ‘speaks only French. You are both familiar with the French language? Exactly! So we will proceed.’ He opened the two passports.
All this time the fat man, M. Pol, had been watching them with an amused expression which rather unsettled Neil. His moist red lips were parted like two cherries, showing a pair of glistening front teeth.
Captain Spyros looked at the passports. ‘You have both been on Athos, I see? You applied for permission in Salonika three weeks ago?’
Neil nodded.
‘Which of the monasteries did you visit, please?’
Neil told him the names of the ones he could remember, then added, ‘I think we’re still entitled to know what all this is about.’
The Greek raised his hand again: ‘Please, first we must determine certain facts. Why did you visit Athos?’
Neil shrugged. ‘To see the monasteries. Tourism.’
‘Tourism?’ said Captain Spyros, fixing Neil with small black eyes. ‘You did not perhaps have business to do on Athos?’
‘Business? What sort of business would I have there?’ Neil glanced round at M. Pol, who sat passively watching him with his cherry-lipped smile.
Captain Spyros was looking again at Neil’s passport. ‘It says here that you are a journalist. Perhaps you visited Athos in order to interview someone?’
‘No, I told you, I went as a tourist.’
At that moment M. Pol leant out and whispered something to Captain Spyros, who handed him Neil’s passport. The Greek now turned to Van Loon: ‘It says here you are a sailor by profession?’
‘Oh, I am many things in my life,’ said Van Loon, shaking his head slowly like some mystic.
‘What were you doing on Athos?’
‘Escaping from a girl.’
Monsieur Pol looked up and gave a small peal of laughter, shrill, almost a woman’s laugh.
Captain Spyros frowned and adjusted his cuffs. ‘You have known each other how long?’ he said, with stiff dignity.
‘We met on the bus to Ierrissou three weeks ago,’ said Van Loon.
The Greek nodded with a look of disappointment, laid the passport back on the desk, and turned again to Neil: ‘Did you meet any other tourists while you were on Athos?’
Neil hesitated. Monsieur Pol had leant forward, his chair giving a little crack under his weight. ‘Yes, there was a Frenchman we met,’ said Neil, ‘a Monsieur Martel. He said he was a retired professor.’
‘What did this man look like?’ It was Pol who spoke, in a rich melodious voice like a tenor.
‘Tall — white-haired — about fifty.’
The fat man leant out and picked a folder off the table in front of Captain Spyros. He opened it and handed it to Neil. Inside lay two photographs. They were both of M. Martel; one showed him in a dark suit with the ribbon of the
