Levkas Man (11 page)

‘He wasn't interested in politics.'

‘No? Then why does he return to the islands? He is there all last September. What is his particular interest in Levkas?' He was staring at me again, ignoring the road, so that we touched the verge.

‘I tell you, I don't know.'

‘You know nothing about him.' He hit the steering wheel angrily. ‘But all the time you say he is not any more a Communist.'

‘Yes.'

‘How can you be sure? He is like a stranger to you.' By then his patience was wearing thin. ‘Why did he attack this Cartwright?'

‘I don't know.'

‘And to draw attention to himself by disappearing—he is either a very stupid man … What do you think?' And when I didn't say anything, he turned his head, staring at me angrily. ‘You are not being co-operative.'

‘I can only tell you what I know. I was never interested in his expeditions.'

‘But you come to Greece. Why? Why you come now?'

He had put this question to me before. He seemed to sense that this was the weak point, and it worried me. ‘I tell you, to find out what's happened to him.' I closed my eyes wearily. It was hot in the car, the smell of his Greek cigarettes strong and acrid.

The road swung away from Arta, and a few kilometres further on we came to a reservoir with the arched remains of an old aqueduct at the far end. He slowed the car where a dirt track turned off to the right. ‘That is the road to Ayios Giorgios—what you call St George. See the hole in the hill up there?' He pointed to a natural bridge spanning a rock outcrop high on the hillside. Blue sky showed through the gap. ‘Here is one of many places in the Eastern Mediterranean where St George is supposed to slay the dragon; that is the hole his lance makes.' And as we gathered speed again, he said, ‘Now, if last year he comes to Ayios Giorgios to examine the Roman ruins of that aqueduct I would understand, for it is a part of history. At the entrance to the Gulf of Amvrakikos, at Aktion, close by Preveza, is where Caesar Augustus defeated Anthony and Cleopatra. To celebrate his victory he built the city of Nikopolis and to provide water for Nikopolis he builds that aqueduct. It is a very long aqueduct, nearly fifty kilometres.'

We were into the valley now, a river flowing fast below us and high rocky slopes enclosing us in. The valley was cool and green, trees growing by the water, and the grass of the hills not yet seared by the sun's heat. There was peace and a timeless quality, and for a moment I forgot about Kotiadis and the future.

‘Do you know when Dr Van der Voort first come to Greece?'

‘Last year you said.'

‘Óhi óhi.' He shook his head violently. ‘When he
first
come is what I ask.'

I tried to remember whether Gilmore had said anything about previous visits, but my mind was a blank.

‘You do not know?'

‘No.'

He seemed resigned to my inability to help him, for he gave a little shrug. ‘My information is that he is here in 1965—you think that is possible?'

I remembered then that Holroyd had said something about a visit in 1965. ‘Since his new theories involved the Central Mediterranean it's highly likely,' I said. ‘But I was at sea then and we were out of touch.'

‘You never write letters to your father?'

‘No.'

He sighed and offered me one of his evil-smelling cigarettes. ‘Perhaps when you have talked with Cartwright …' He flicked his lighter and after that he filled me in on what had happened after the old man had gone off in the Land-Rover, talking and driving with the cigarette in his mouth and his eyes half-closed against the smoke.

Cartwright had gone into Jannina the following morning on the village bus accompanied by Hans Winters, and in searching for a doctor, they had stumbled on the Land-Rover. As soon as he had had his wrist strapped up, Cartwright had airmailed a report to Holroyd, and they had then driven round the town, questioning bus drivers, garages, hotels and tavernas without success. The next day they had stayed in camp and it was not until the morning of March 17 that they had informed the police in Jannina. They were then very short of petrol and by the time London had cabled them additional funds, the security police had taken over. ‘That is when I go to Despotiko to interrogate them. Maybe it is true that they don't know where Van der Voort is. But I don't want any more archæologists disappearing, so I confine them to the area of their camp with a guard to see that they stay there.'

‘You got nothing out of Cartwright?'

‘No. Nothing that interested me.' And after that he drove in silence as we passed through Jannina, still heading north. And now that we were nearing the end of our journey, I wondered whether I would do any better, whether Cartwright would give me some sort of explanation.

About twenty minutes later we turned right on to a dirt road that was signposted Despotiko. The village was on the shoulder of a hill, a huddle of nondescript buildings round a central square with the tiled roofs of older houses sloping into the valley below. We stopped beside an army truck parked outside the taverna and Kotiadis got out to have a word with two young soldiers sitting on a bench in the sun drinking Coca-Cola.

‘Cartwright and Winters have gone up to the cave,' he said as he got back into the driving seat. ‘It is about one kilometre beyond the camp.' And he added, ‘His sister has arrived here.'

‘Whose sister?' I asked, but I could guess the answer.

‘The Dutch boy's,' he said and started the engine.

We took a cobbled alleyway that ran out into bare rock as the houses thinned, the Renault in low gear and lurching on the steep slope, scattering hens from its path. The track led down to a stream and finished at a communal wash-house where women were busy slapping and kneading clothes on flat rocks at the water's edge. Two donkeys stood with dripping wooden water casks strapped to their backs, while a boy filled the last cask from a natural fountain gushing from a rock. There was a Land-Rover parked where the track narrowed to a path, and as we drew up beside it, two pigs, long and russet-coloured like wild boars, eyed us from the edge of the stream where they lay wallowing in the sun.

The chatter of the women died as we got out of the car. Kotiadis said something to them in Greek and the music of their laughter mingled with the tinkling noise of water running over stones. ‘Now we walk.' And he led the way along the path, which followed the stream. Old olive trees twined gnarled branches over our heads, their trunks dark against the green of close-cropped grass, the white of cyclamens. In the distance, goat bells tinkled, and in a clearing ahead, a glint of orange marked the camp.

There were three small sleeping tents, all orange, and one blue mess tent. Some clothes hung on a line and smoke drifted up from a stone fireplace with a blackened iron pot on it. It was such a beautiful, peaceful place, with the sun dappling the grass through the grey leaves of the olives and the cool sound of the water, that it was difficult to imagine two men coming to blows here. I thought I saw a movement in the mess tent, a figure standing in the shadows. But Kotiadis went straight past the camp and I followed him, wondering why she was here, what her brother would have told her.

The olive trees ceased and we could see the valley then with the hills on either side running back to a blue vista of distant peaks. We were walking on a carpet of thyme, oleanders by the water and the slope above us patched with a bright pattern of early spring flowers. The air was full of an unbelievable scent.

Kotiadis pointed to a gaping brown wound in the hillside ahead. ‘That is where they dig.' He halted suddenly. I thought it was to get his breath, but then he said, ‘Why does a man attack his assistant when they are already together almost one whole month? Have you thought of that? Why not the day before, or the week before?' He was staring up at the brown gash. ‘I tell you why.' He turned and faced me. ‘Because that night Cartwright is telephoning to Athens from the taverna.'

‘What about?'

He shrugged. ‘That is for you to discover. Some friend of his, an archæologist. That is what he says. Myself, I think it is then he discovered that Dr Van der Voort is a Communist.'

If his long face hadn't looked so serious I would have thought he was joking. ‘You've got Communism on the brain,' I said angrily. I was thinking of all he had told me, how the old man had walked this area of Greece alone, going out to the island of Levkas again and again. And before that in the Sicilian islands, in Pantelleria and North Africa. For four years since 1965, he had been searching, desperately searching, using up every penny he possessed, and all Kotiadis could think of was Communism. ‘If he were a Communist, why the hell do you think he'd want to bury himself up here in this lonely valley?'

He turned on me then. ‘What sort of a world are you living in?' He caught hold of my arm and swung me round. ‘Regardez! There is Albánia.' He flung out his arm in a broad gesture. ‘That one is Mao-Communist. And there is Yugoslavia.' He pointed to the north. ‘Tito-Communist. A third frontier is with the Bulgars—Russian puppets.' He almost spat. ‘We are ringed with Communist enemies. Their armies are on our north-eastern frontier, their fleet among our islands, and beyond the Aegean we are face-en-face with Turkey. The smell of war is in the air and you wonder we are sensitive?'

And when I reminded him again that this was just an anthropological dig, he said, ‘That is good cover for a man who wishes to travel the villages of my country.'

It was no good arguing with him, and we walked on, climbing the final slope to the cave. A young corporal in olive-green uniform came to meet us and Kotiadis talked with him for a moment. Then we had reached the dig, where Cartwright waited for us, stripped to the waist and wearing a pair of over-long khaki shorts. Behind him, Hans Winters was standing in the trench they had dug. He reminded me of Sonia, the same features, but rounder and heavier. He, too, was stripped to the waist, and his long fair hair, bleached almost white by the sun, hung over his eyes, limp with sweat.

They already knew Kotiadis. It was I who was the stranger, and their eyes fastened on me, waiting to know who I was—and Kotiadis let them wait, watching them both, a cigarette in his mouth, his sleepy-lidded eyes half closed.

My gaze had fastened on Cartwright. He was about my own age, tall and thin, his ribs showing through the tight-stretched skin of his torso, his stomach flat and hard with muscle. But the shoulders were sloped, the head small. He had a little sandy moustache and high colouring; and the round steel spectacles he wore gave him a studious, rather than an athletic appearance. His left arm was in a sling.

He blinked when I told him who I was. ‘I didn't expect you'd …' He hesitated. ‘He never m-mentioned you.' He was on the defensive, his nervousness showing in a slight stutter. His eyes shifted to Kotiadis, owl-like behind the thick lenses. ‘Any news of Dr Van der Voort?'

‘Óhi.' Kotiadis shook his head.

He was glad. I sensed it immediately; it probably gave him a glow of importance to have the dig to himself. ‘I suppose you're in charge here now?'

‘Yes.'

I looked beyond him, along the line of the trench into the shadowed interior of the cave. It wasn't really a cave at all, more of a scooped-out hollow in the hillside, as though a great piece of it had been prised out and let fall into the valley below. And it was large. Even where we stood the overhang protruded above our heads. The height of it must have been a good 50 feet, and the cave itself about 80 feet wide and 40 feet deep. Stones had been piled on the far side, and at the back, where they had erected a little blue Terylene shelter on an aluminium frame, the curve of the rock wall was black, and so smooth it might have been glazed. ‘How old is this cave?' I asked him. He hadn't expected that, and I was thinking of the letter from Gilmore lying on the desk in the house in Amsterdam: ‘Does it go back thirty-five thousand years?'

‘I've no idea.'

‘But it's important?' It had to be important, otherwise there was no sense in the old man's behaviour.

‘It's a cave-shelter,' he said. ‘But how long it's been a cave-shelter …' He gave a shrug. ‘That we'll only know when we've dug down through the layers.'

‘But you must have some idea what you're going to find. You're not digging here just for the fun of it.'

‘It's worth a try. That's all one can say at the moment.'

‘But what did my father think?'

‘Dr Van der Voort?'

‘Yes, what did he say about it?'

He hesitated. ‘You've got to remember we'd been walking steadily, mostly in bitter cold, all the way down through Macedonia and a bit of Montenegro—about two hundred miles of territory we'd covered—and apart from a few artefacts, all quite recent, we'd found nothing.' And he added, ‘Everything's relative on an expedition like this. In the end, you've got to justify it somehow. Our finances limit us to three months' work.'

‘In other words, it's a shot in the dark?'

‘If you like.'

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that the old man would have gone out in winter with such desperate urgency to work on something he didn't believe in. ‘You hadn't much confidence in him, had you?'

‘I didn't disagree with him, if that's what you mean?'

‘That's not what I mean at all,' I answered. ‘It's just that I want to know how this fits in to the pattern of his discoveries.'

‘The pattern?' He seemed puzzled.

‘You must have realized that he was working to some sort of an overall pattern—a framework if you like. You know very well he was out here last year, that he covered the whole area from here to the coast and out to the islands. Didn't he tell you? Didn't anybody tell you what he was aiming at?'

His manner, his whole attitude to the dig, annoyed me. I had expected enthusiasm, a sense of excitement, something that would enable me to understand what it was my father was searching for. Instead, he was making it all seem dull and ordinary, like those students you read about digging around in the foundations of old hill forts in Britain. ‘You haven't been in charge of a dig before, have you?'