The Two Faces of January Read online

  “’Otel Iraklion! Cheap! ’Ot warter!” said a dirty-looking fellow, whose only badge of authority was a worn-out visored cap that said Hotel Iraklion on its band.

  “No,” said Rydal, who was attempting to corral their luggage. All the luggage was being unloaded haphazardly from the top of the bus.

  “’Otel Corona! Two blocks up! Thees way!”

  “’Otel Astir! Best in town!” A young dark-haired chap in a beige bellboy uniform saluted Chester, and started to pick up two pieces of luggage near Chester’s feet.

  “That’s not mine!” Chester said quickly, and walked towards Colette and Rydal. A strong breeze was blowing from the sea. The sunshine was bright, glassy-bright and cold also. “What do we do now?” Chester asked, but, seeing that Rydal was occupied with identifying their seven pieces of luggage plus his own, Chester began helping him.

  “Let’s let this crowd clear away,” Rydal said. “Then we’ll get a taxi—oh, down to the waterfront, I suppose.”

  The crowd was thinning out. Taxis were puffing up, taking people and luggage away. Successful bellhops were tottering off under mountains of suitcases, their possessors straggling behind them.

  “Got a hotel in mind?” asked Chester.

  Rydal lifted his head and looked towards the sea, his profile pale and sharp against the blue sky. He fitted a cigarette between his lips. “Our problem is that we can’t go to a hotel,” he murmured. “No passports, you know.” He glanced at Colette.

  “How wonderful!” she said, swinging her arms out. “We’ll just walk around the rest of the day. And tonight!” she added, with enthusiasm.

  Rydal shook his head thoughtfully, still looking towards the port. Then he looked the other way, up the street of pinkish and cream-colored three- and four-story buildings. A booted man was flogging a donkey before him. On either side of the donkey baby goats in slings sat upright and gazed with serene eyes at them, snug as papooses on a mother’s back.

  “Aren’t they dar-rling!” Colette said, starting towards them.

  “Colette!” Rydal lifted his hand.

  She came back.

  “There’ll be more,” Rydal said. He turned to Chester. “I don’t know anybody here we might stay with. We’ll just have to sit it out tonight. So the best thing to do is save your energy, I’d say. And, number one, let’s get rid of the suitcases.”

  “No use you suffering,” Chester said. “You’ve got a passport you can show at any hotel.”

  “Yes,” Rydal said vaguely. “Let’s see if we can check the luggage in some restaurant down by the water.” He crossed the street and spoke to the driver of a taxi parked at the opposite curb, a taxi that had been left behind by the mainstream and had been waiting for them to make up their minds what they would do.

  They all piled into the taxi, luggage at their feet, on their laps and on the taxi roof. The trip was very short, down to the sea, and Rydal stopped the driver after they had gone a few yards to the left: there was a restaurant with a sign in the shape of a fish hanging in front of the door. Rydal came out a moment later, and said the proprietor would be glad to check their suitcases.

  “I think we ought to have something here,” Rydal said. “Lunch or a drink, anyway.”

  They stayed in the place more than two hours, drinking ouzo and eating tiny plates of radishes, horseradish and onions first, then a lunch of broiled fish and underdone homefried potatoes with which they had a couple of bottles of sharp-tasting white wine. But they tipped well, and the proprietor by this time was willing to keep their luggage overnight. Rydal told Chester that he had given the man a story about all of them spending tonight with a friend in town, a friend with whom they had been staying, and about their having missed the plane back to Athens today, and about not wanting to burden their friend by dragging all the suitcases back to his house in the hills. Chester would carry the duffel bag out, that was all. They would pick up the luggage tomorrow afternoon around 1. Then they wandered up the main street, the street on which the airport bus had stopped.

  The Iraklion Museum of Antiquities was open. Here they killed another hour or so, gazing at statuary and amphorae and jewelry, and while Colette went to powder her nose, Rydal told Chester what he had heard on the radio.

  “Well, George Papanopolos’s death was due to a fractured skull. Very brief announcement. They didn’t mention your name, but they told the name of the hotel and how long the man had been dead. About twelve hours.”

  A cool chill ran down Chester. This was fact. It had been on the radio. Thousands of people had heard it. “It’ll certainly be in the papers today, though.”

  “Yes, in Athens,” Rydal said. “The papers probably come here by boat, a day late. Oh, it may be in the Crete papers this evening. I suppose they’ve got an evening paper. In that case, your name might be mentioned. I mean MacFarland.”

  Chester nodded and swallowed. MacFarland. Something to hide from. He’d feared it since the minute he filled out the application for his passport in New York. Why hadn’t he finagled a phony birth certificate? Chester MacFarland. It was he. It was awful.

  “Then, of course, Crete has a radio,” Rydal went on. “The news is probably coming in now, all right, maybe with a description of you.”

  “Well—” Chester had another spasm of fear. “The photograph that agent had is years old. Doesn’t look much like me now. I’m heavier now, with a moustache. Maybe I ought to shave it off,” he added.

  Rydal’s dark eyelashes blinked calmly. “Here comes your wife. They’ll ask the hotel personnel for a description of you. Don’t shave your moustache off. You might grow a beard. That might change you more than shaving off the moustache.”

  They had tea and inedible pastries at a large, cheap café opposite the museum. They braced themselves in its warmth for a walk along the mole in the harbor at sundown. There it became too cold for them to wait for the sundown, and anyway the mole, paved with loose stones, was not suited for Colette’s high-heeled pumps. At the cocktail hour, they tried the Hotel Astir’s restaurant. There was no bar proper, and they were served cocktails in the restaurant, where a field of white-clothed tables flowed out from theirs and disappeared in three unilluminated corners, empty miles away from them. Chester was growing tired. He had slept badly last night. He ordered two drinks more than Colette or Rydal had. The conversation of Rydal and Colette bored him and also annoyed him. Silly chatter. Colette was talking about Louisiana, about her trips twice a year there while she had been going to boarding school in Virginia, about holiday parties and her attempt to organize a dramatic society in Biloxi for three years running, only to have it fail for lack of popular interest. Rydal commiserated. Rydal answered her questions about Massachusetts, said his school had been Yale, but he was not elaborating on any of his answers, Chester noticed. Then Rydal excused himself, saying that he wanted to go out and find an evening paper, and that he would be right back.

  “I’m not sure if I can stay up all night,” Chester said.

  “Oh, darling! Drink some coffee. Don’t have Scotch if you want to stay up all night. Look at me. One drink and I’ve just ordered coffee, too. I think it might be exciting to stay up all night in Crete, don’t you? Our first night here?”

  Chester rubbed his fingertips along his jaw. The stubble made a scraping sound. Should he grow a beard? What about the passport picture, his current very good one? What good would a beard do? Was Rydal giving him a bum steer? “I think I’d like another Scotch.”

  “Oh, darling,” Colette said, disapproving.

  “If I don’t—Well, never mind, I’ve got the flask right here. Better Scotch and a lot cheaper,” he added petulantly. He spiked his nearly empty glass of Scotch highball.

  Rydal was back with a newspaper, and Chester started to ask him to let him see it, then saw it was in Greek. With a serious, confident air, Rydal sat down, folde
d the paper so that he could see an item on the front page, and began reading. “It goes like this.” He glanced over his shoulder—his back was to the room—then read in a quiet voice: “The body of George Papanopolos, thirty-eight, was found this morning in the . . . the cleaning room of the King’s Palace Hotel by Stefanie Triochos, twenty-three, a girl of cleaning in the employ of the hotel. Papanopolos, a detective of the National Police Force, was found to have died from a fracture of the skull. It is suspected that he was the victim of Chester Crighton MacFarland, forty-two, an American wanted for um-m . . . embezzlement of investments, investment funds,” Rydal corrected himself, “and that he had been on the quest of MacFarland when he entered the hotel. MacFarland had been occupying a room down the corridor from the closet of cleaning utensils in which the body of the detective was found. Traces of blood were found on the bathroom floor and the carpet of the room in which MacFarland and his wife Elizabeth . . . Elizabeth?” He looked at Colette, who nodded nervously, “—had stayed and also on the carpet of the hall leading to the closet of cleaning utensils.” Rydal paused and took a sip of water without looking at his attentive listeners. “MacFarland checked out of the hotel shortly after 7 p.m. last evening,” Rydal continued in a quiet, impersonal voice, “saying to one of the hotel personnel that he was catching a night train in the direction of Italy. A . . . an official investigation of trains and buses and airplanes failed to reveal . . . to reveal that you were on them,” Rydal finished, looking across the table at Chester, then at Colette.

  Colette was silent, her hand tense on the table, her red nails digging into one red thumbnail. Her eyes, when she looked at Chester, were frightened, and a little reproachful, he thought.

  “There’s more,” Rydal said. “Authorities therefore believe MacFarland is still within Grecian borders and that . . . he may have tried to assume another identity. George Papanopolos leaves behind him, et cetera.”

  Colette looked at Rydal. “Go on. Leaves behind him?”

  Rydal cleared his throat and read, “A wife Lydia, thirty-five, a son George, fifteen, a daughter Doria, twelve, two brothers Philip and Christopher Papanopolos both of Lamia, and a sister Mrs. Eugenia Milous of Athens.” Rydal laid the paper down.

  Chester met Rydal’s eyes, but he felt he met them dumbly, that his spark was gone. He sat up a little in his chair.

  “Not bad news,” Rydal said. “They didn’t mention a lead on Crete, and they didn’t even give a description of you. It’s really as good as it could possibly be, under the circumstances.”

  “But he’s dead,” Colette said. She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips.

  Chester poured another drink for himself, then tipped the flask upside down and let it all run out. He wanted to get high, even a bit drunk. Why not? What was he supposed to do, sit up all night mulling over the mess he was in, all night long awake without even the temporary oblivion of sleep? “If it’s good, let’s have a drink on it.”

  Rydal declined at first, then accepted his offer.

  Eleven o’clock found them in a huge barn of a restaurant which seemed to be also a nightclub of a simple sort, right on the seafront. Chester did not know how he had got there. Some time, hours before, he thought they had had dinner somewhere, but he wasn’t sure. Now Colette and Rydal were dancing on the tiny dance floor that looked half a mile away from where he sat, though the orchestra was so loud, and so rotten, it hurt his ears. Chester stared sullenly at a near-by table, a large round table at which a whole family of Greeks sat, papa and mama and grandma and all the kiddies. The kiddies were in their party best, and several minutes ago Chester had staggered over and chucked one of the little girls under the chin (it had been on his way back from the men’s room, a filthy hole), and he had been rewarded with a cold, uncomprehending stare. Then Chester had realized he was in Greece and not in America, not in some pizzeria on Third Avenue in Manhattan, and that the little girl had not understood a word he said, and that her family, which had glared at him, had probably thought he said something terrible to her. Chester fell asleep.

  He was awakened by a tapping on his shoulder. Rydal stood beside him in his overcoat, alert and smiling, saying, “They’re closing. Got to take off.”

  Worst of all, there wasn’t a taxi. Chester walked between Rydal and Colette, partially supported by both of them, needing their support and feeling ashamed of it.

  “It’s the worst hour,” Rydal was saying. “It’s rough.”

  Chester heard them discussing him for a few seconds, discussing what would be “best for him”, and, though he didn’t like it, he thought why not let them worry over him, because wasn’t it he who had the God-damned load on his shoulders, he who’d gotten into trouble trying to protect his wife as well as himself? And who’d asked Ryburn—what was his name?—to come along, anyway? A hard, brutally hard bench, a hard, cold stone bench jolted him awake. He was sitting on it. He looked to his left and saw Colette beside him, snuggling her head against Rydal’s shoulder, getting ready to fall asleep. Rydal smoked, looking straight ahead, the duffel bag between his feet. Chester thought they were in the little square by the Iraklion Museum, where they had been that afternoon, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe that dark café across the way was where they’d had tea. The dawn was showing signs of coming, showing signs. It was the worst hour, as the fellow had said. Nothing was open, that was plain. Damn them all, damn everybody for not being open! Chester thought, and was too tired to say it. Colette was holding hands with Rydal, Chester saw. He smiled a little, superiorly. Nobody could take Colette away from him. Just let them try, see how far they’d get. Chester closed his eyes.

  He woke up from the cold, he didn’t know how much later, but the dawn hadn’t made much progress. Now both Colette and Rydal were asleep, holding hands, their heads tipped towards each other, bracing each other. Chester stomped up and down the pavement, his teeth chattering, every muscle rigid with chill and trembling. For hours, it seemed, he watched the progress, watched cynically and bitterly the progress of the opening of the café across the street. First the opener or the proprietor arrived on a bicycle, started to unlock the padlock on the door and didn’t, got into a long conversation with the milk-deliverer, also on a bicycle, shared a mutual cigarette with him, swapped several jokes, slapped the milk-deliverer’s back, took off one shoe and stood in a stockinged foot while he explained something apparently of great interest about the sole, put the shoe back on again, and then the milk-deliverer propped his foot up on the handlebars and began to discourse on his own shoe. It was 6:17.

  At 6:32, when the doors of the café at last opened, Chester shook Rydal awake roughly and with pleasure, saying that the café across the way was open and that they could now get some hot coffee.

  6

  Of all man’s capacities, Rydal was thinking as he rode on the airlines bus towards the airport, memory was the most eerie, pleasant, painful, no doubt at times the most deceptive. All night, awake, dozing, or sleepwalking, he had been half in the present, half in the past. Dancing with Colette had stirred the old desire that he had felt for Agnes, that he had not really felt since. And yet Colette was not like Agnes, not at all. Colette was shallower, he thought—in a way. No, that wasn’t right. Who could have been shallower, more flippant and unfeeling than Agnes when she said good-bye to him? There was an example of memory being deceptive again, simply because ten years ago he had attributed to Agnes all the depth a woman’s soul could possibly contain. Last night the memory of Agnes had been sweet. Colette didn’t even look like Agnes. But she flirted rather like her, there was no doubt about that!

  Rydal stared into the blazing disc of the sun until he could stand it no longer and had to set his teeth and close his eyes.

  Colette was merely playing, enjoying making him feel desire for her, playing for want of anything better to do in the long night without a warm bed to sleep in, to share with her husband, who had passed out. Go a littl
e farther with her, take her up on it, and she’d say no. “Of course not, silly boy. Do you think I’d do that to Chester?” Rydal could hear her.

  He smiled, thinking of Chester this morning, his teeth chattering against the thick rim of his coffee cup in the café. Chester had huddled by the wood-burning stove in the place, chafing his hands and stomping, but neither the stove nor the coffee had seemed to do much good. Chester was chilled through, chilled by the sea wind and the after-effects of all the Scotch and ouzo he’d drunk, and it would probably take all day to get him back to normal. He had been funny to look at, but Colette hadn’t laughed, Rydal noticed. She had been tender and serious and concerned, warming Chester’s muffler over the stove, bringing it back to wrap close about his neck. Yes, Colette was a good wife. She’d be an angel to Chester if he got sick.

  They were getting to the airport. Rydal glanced around at the six or eight people in the bus who were bound for Athens on the three-thirty plane. Half of them looked downright poor, the other half lower middle class, economically speaking. None was American. None looked like a plainclothes man. Rydal twisted the newspaper gently in both his hands. In this morning’s paper there had been a description of Chester MacFarland, with the moustache, though the photograph reproduced had been the moustacheless one of the agent’s notebook. Rydal had torn the notebook’s sheets out, torn them up and dropped them into three different rubbish bins in Athens yesterday evening before calling on the MacFarlands. He could have sold the Greek’s credentials to Niko for a couple of hundred dollars, no doubt, but Rydal hadn’t had the heart, somehow, to do it. It would have been like selling pieces of the man’s flesh after he had died. He’d only been doing his job, an honest man’s job, and he hadn’t deserved to die. Rydal had thrown the credentials away, torn up, and the billfold also, but he had taken the man’s drachmas, a mere two hundred and eighty.