The Officer and the Spy, page 5
‘Who was that playing the cello last night?’ he asked, at the door.
‘Me,’ said Marianne. ‘I hope I didn’t disturb you.’
He turned his heavy eyes on her.
‘You disturbed me a great deal,’ he said.
Then went.
Marianne grimaced. ‘Oh… ’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Otto.
‘He’ll be gone to Thessaloniki tomorrow,’ said Krista. ‘Now come on, let’s get going too, before Papa comes and insists that we stay with Lotte.’
Otto drove. He was the only one who knew how. He saw Lotte through the motor’s rear mirror as he shifted into gear. She was at her window, staring down at them. She could have been six again, watching longingly from the edge of the icy lake.
Frowning, flooring the gas, Otto accelerated away.
It was evening by the time they reached Chania.
The day had turned into a surprisingly good one, the three of them speeding along the rutted island roads, pulling up at various beaches, swimming in the cerulean sea. But they’d long since run out of water and were now intent on finding somewhere, anywhere, that was open on a Sunday, to have a drink.
Leaving the motor in a tree-lined square, they set off through the town’s shuttered alleyways, eventually coming to the harbour, where, to their relief, they discovered one kafeteria open for business, at the very end of the long, sleepy quayside – past the fishing boats bobbing at anchor, the pelicans that stood on bollards, observing the bruising horizon – its tables bustling, a gramophone blaring out Fred Astaire.
Krista and Marianne made a beeline for it, selecting one of the few vacant tables. It was next to a noisy group who, with their Anglo-Saxon features, could only be tourists too. There were lots of Greek customers besides, mostly men, all drinking coffee.
Then, a girl in white shorts and a lemon blouse, dancing with a dark man in shirt sleeves by the water’s edge. Otto noticed them, and Nikos watching them both from the back of the café, in sequence. He was taken aback to see Nikos. He drew breath to call hello, but then the girl reclaimed his attention, exclaiming as her dance partner spun her around. She clutched her ankle, spoke in rapid Greek, and laughingly pushed her partner towards the café door.
The man grinned, unchastised, and retreated inside.
Otto didn’t watch him go. He was too busy looking at the girl.
Realizing who she was.
I have nothing to do with her, Nikos had said.
Why then had he been watching her so closely?
And where had he gone? Otto glanced back at his table, but it was empty.
Bemused, but actually not caring about Nikos, and ignoring Krista calling for him to sit, he turned again to Eleni. She filled her cheeks with air, seeming to catch her breath. Her hair – gold to Lotte’s white – escaped from its ponytail in waves, sticking, damp, to her skin. She ran her fingers around the back of her neck, looking down as, gingerly, she pressed on her ankle.
She had red nail polish on her toes.
Slowly, as though sensing the weight of his attention, she looked up, towards him.
He watched her do it.
Saw her eyes – such a deep blue that they appeared almost black – widen in surprise, just as they had in the water.
Only this time, she didn’t remain silent.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said, in the most perfect, cut-glass English; it was impossible not to laugh.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘You speak English?’
‘Yes,’ he said. His mother had spoken it to him from the crib. ‘I can manage.’
She smiled.
What a smile.
‘I think you must be Otto Linder,’ she said.
Chapter Four
I think you must be Otto Linder.
She cursed inwardly, hearing her own words back, realizing how readily she’d given away that she knew his name. Play hard-to-get, the dog-eared magazines back in the hotel staff room had always advised. There are few things so alluring as disinterest.
Had she put him off?
He didn’t seem put off.
He laughed again, pushing his hand through hair that was salt-matted, and messy, and would have had Timothy sending him straight for a crew cut, and somehow she – who absolutely shouldn’t be letting him off so easily for the fright he’d given her in the sea – was laughing with him, unable to help herself.
He really was the last person she’d been expecting to see.
She’d looked for him again earlier, driving past his gate on the way to Halepa, but that had been hours before. In the time since, she’d swam at Maria and Spiros’s bay, eaten slow-baked lamb in their courtyard, talked of a hundred different things, but never once of a stranger from Berlin. She’d come to the quayside that evening thinking only of assuring Dimitri that she wanted his job for the summer, at which news he’d been unsurprised (‘Eleni, who you could work with, but me?’) and much less interested in discussing her hours (‘We’ll do the same as last year, no problem’) than in showing off his new gramophone, then dancing with her to ‘Cheek to Cheek’.
‘Come, Eleni. Let’s be in heaven… ’
‘This is heaven?’ she’d said, as he’d turned her painfully on her ankle. ‘I had higher hopes… ’
The recording was still playing. Fred’s voice carried above the café’s buzzy chatter…
… My heart beats so that I can barely speak…
Eleni had some sympathy.
Otto made to join her, passing two girls at a table. One pulled at his arm, and he said something to her. Hang on, maybe. Hazily, Eleni registered their exchange. Much more vividly, she was conscious of Otto leaving the girls, closing the short distance between himself and her, until there was none left.
‘I think you,’ he said, ‘must be Eleni Adams.’
‘You know my name too,’ she said.
(She probably shouldn’t have said that.)
‘I do,’ he agreed.
She smiled again. She didn’t try to contain the urge. It was already too late.
Besides, did it really matter?
He, after all, was smiling with her.
She liked his smile. Liked his accent, so much subtler than she’d heard on any newsreel. Liked his face, no longer hidden by the night. His features had a Slavic slant to them; all firm lines, save for a dent to the bridge of his nose, which looked as though it had once been broken. She lingered on it, wondering how it had happened. Unquestioningly, she decided she’d have guessed just by seeing him that he was German. Or, at least, that he wasn’t British. He had none of the soft edges of the sailors around Gosport; her classmates’ brothers. There wasn’t a trace of schoolboy ruddiness in his sun-drenched skin.
He didn’t look like a boy at all.
Her eyes snagged on his – no Aryan blue, but green, near grey, in the mellowing dusk, and alight with amusement. He’d noticed she’d been taking the measure of him.
There are few things so alluring as disinterest.
Smile spreading, cheeks flushing, she said, ‘Tell me, do you make a habit of startling lone women in the sea?’
‘Only on Fridays,’ he replied, without missing a beat, making her laugh again.
He was fun.
She liked that, too.
‘How’s your ankle?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ she replied, which it almost was.
‘You don’t need to sit?’
‘No.’
‘All right,’ he said, and made no move to sit, or go, either.
He wants to stay, she thought, he wants to stay with me.
And wanting – very much, suddenly – for him to go on doing that, she combed her mind for something else to ask him, settling, with another glance at his hair, on whether he’d come from a beach.
‘I’ve come from a few,’ he said. Then, as she drew breath to ask which, ‘I have no idea.’
‘No?’ she said, smiling more, because he’d read her mind. ‘How is that possible?’
‘Our map was in Greek.’
‘How inconvenient.’
‘I know.’
‘But you still managed to find some good ones?’
‘We found some beautiful ones.’
‘Well, there’s no shortage of those.’
‘So I’m discovering.’
‘And you can’t have got too lost,’ she went on, the words coming to her as she spoke. ‘You made it here—’ she kept her expression level ‘—to Rethymno.’
He stared.
Valiantly, she fought another smile.
‘Damn,’ he said, all seriousness, ‘we were aiming for Heraklion.’
And she let her smile go, loving that he’d played along.
Beside them, a table of customers got up. They moved, letting them pass, then immediately stepped back together again.
Inside the café, the recording crackled to an end, then, after a moment’s pause, restarted.
‘I am sorry about Friday night,’ Otto said, apropos of nothing, letting Eleni know he was still thinking about it too. ‘I didn’t mean to shock you… ’
‘Good.’
‘I would have talked to you sooner, if I’d known you spoke English.’
‘Really?’ It was a nice thought. ‘And what would you have said?’
‘Hello, probably.’
She considered it. ‘Is that so different in German?’
‘Not to English. But to Greek—’ he broke off. ‘You tell me.’
‘I suppose it is a little different.’
‘Just a little?’
‘Yes, a little.’
He gave her a long look.
She widened her eyes. ‘What?’
‘I don’t think I believe you.’
‘I don’t think I believe you came all the way to Greece not knowing how to say hello,’ she riposted.
It was his turn to fight a smile. ‘Fine, so tell me how.’
‘You really don’t know?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘It’s yassas,’ she said, relenting. ‘Yiassou, with someone you know.’
‘Ha,’ he said, vindicated, ‘so pretty different.’
‘Pretty different,’ she conceded.
‘So, I’m forgiven?’
‘I suppose you are.’
‘Well, thank God,’ he said, teasing, she knew, but… maybe he meant it too.
They fell silent.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
Heaven. I’m in heaven…
‘Would you…?’ he began.
‘Eleni,’ came the call, making them both turn.
‘Oh no,’ Eleni breathed, her heart (that had once again been beating so that she could barely speak) sinking as she caught sight of Yorgos, who she’d left waiting round the corner in the motor, striding along the waterfront in his Sunday three-piece, swinging his worry beads, face stern, impervious to the charms of Fred’s voice, and the gradually sinking sun.
‘I see you see me,’ he shouted to her, in Greek. ‘You said five minutes.’
‘I’m coming,’ she called back, also in Greek.
‘Walk, then.’
‘Your grandfather?’ Otto asked.
‘Yes.’
‘He looks nice.’
She laughed.
‘Eleni Juliet Adams… ’
She stopped laughing.
‘I’m coming,’ she called to Yorgos again. Then, in English, to Otto, conscious, so conscious, of how much she wanted to stay, ‘I’d better go. He’s not in the best mood.’
‘Why?’
‘My shorts.’ He hated them, predictably enough. He’d almost refused to leave the house with her that morning, adamant that Maria and Spiros would be as appalled by them as he. But Spiros had been impartial (what do I know?), and Maria, who Eleni had known would be on her side, had told Yorgos to not be so stuffy. If I was as young as I feel, I’d wear them too. He was still sulking. ‘He wants me to burn them.’
‘That’s drastic.’
‘Isn’t it though?’
‘Eleni.’ Yorgos again. He was getting close. ‘Who is that boy you’re talking to…?’
‘God, I have to go,’ Eleni repeated, only this time – propelled by Yorgos’s rapid advance, her desperation to avoid the awkwardness of introductions – she went.
‘Wait,’ Otto called after her.
‘Yes?’ she said, looking back over her shoulder.
The sun’s last rays reached out, bathing him, everyone at the tables, in its last drops of heat.
‘Promise me something.’
‘What?’
He grinned. ‘Please don’t burn those shorts.’
She kept smiling, hearing those words over, all through the evening that followed: on the drive home, scooping Tipota up at the porch (Tips, she decided, for short), feeding him Maria’s leftover lamb, helping Yorgos prepare their own supper, playing backgammon with him on the terrace (winning, as though he wasn’t sulking enough). She kept smiling about all of it, half of her back at the harbour, reliving each moment, recalling fresh details every time. How Otto had pronounced her name, I-leni, with his accent that she’d liked. The way he’d dropped his head when he’d laughed, then raised his gaze to hers again. That question he’d begun, yet failed to finish.
Would you…?
Have a drink with him?
Is that what he’d been going to ask?
She had to bite her lip, just at the possibility, lest Yorgos see and ask what it was she kept smiling about.
Perhaps that would have stopped, eventually.
Perhaps, given time, the elation of those heady minutes at the harbour would have faded in her mind.
Perhaps Otto might have.
But there was no chance for that to happen. She saw him again so soon.
She saw him that very night.
It was past eleven. She was in the kitchen, ironing, Tips winding around her feet. Otto was swimming, away from his villa; those clean, precise strokes. She caught his movement through the open window, felt the stillness of recognition; smiled again without knowing it.
Setting the iron down, she stepped to the window.
It really was late for him to be out swimming.
Did the others in his villa know he was gone?
Would that girl who’d called for him before come again?
Eleni had been thinking of her too, these past hours. She hadn’t done that at all at the café, swept up, entirely, in the moment. But, ever since, she’d found herself picturing her again, in her willowy white gown, picturing those girls at the harbour too, becoming increasingly certain, the more she had, that neither of the pair had been her; they’d looked too casual, too relaxed. She’d become curious about them as well: who they were, why the girl in white hadn’t been with them; frustrated with her own guessing games…
She pushed the window wider. He was swimming so far. He’d almost reached that boat at anchor.
‘The iron’s going to scald,’ said Yorgos, appearing from the terrace with an empty brandy glass. ‘Are those things beneath it?’
‘They’re called shorts.’
‘Is that a yes?’
‘A no. It’s a dress.’
‘I’d rather it was those things.’
She laughed, but didn’t move to attend to the iron. She kept her eyes on Otto. Waiting, although she wasn’t entirely sure why.
He reached the boat, stopped.
For a few seconds, he didn’t move.
Then he turned in the water, looked directly up at her at the lit window, waved.
And she realized what she’d been waiting for.
Everything felt changed somehow, when she woke the next morning. In the space of a night, the summer ahead, so predictable, had… pixelated, into unknowns: the endless possibilities of when or where she might run into him next.
It wasn’t comfortable.
Yet, she, pulling off her nightdress, reaching for her bathing costume, couldn’t for a second wish it another way.
Was that normal?
She had no idea.
She had no experience to tell her. Really, none. The only interactions she’d had with the opposite sex – beyond her family, customers at the café and hotel – had been fleeting civilities with her father’s subordinates, all of whom were too scared of a disciplinary charge to do more than tip their caps at her in greeting. There were her classmates’ brothers too, she supposed; she’d danced with some of them at the year’s spate of eighteenth birthday parties. She wasn’t sure such clumsy fumblings counted as experience, though. Certainly not the kind she wished to repeat. Those clammy fingers creeping south of her waist, the damp puddles of hot breath on her forehead, had all left her feeling… queasy. Desperate to be home in her bedroom. And a bit worried that there was something wrong with her, because wasn’t one meant to feel palpitations and happiness in such circumstances?
She’d felt happy with Otto.
She was pretty sure she’d felt palpitations. (It was all a bit of a blur.)
She definitely felt them now, grabbing her towel and heading to the cove, where there was at least a working chance he’d be swimming again.
The Monday dawn – the last of June – was already warm; her warmest yet since returning. It would happen like this now, the heat building until September, the long days and short nights cooled only by the whim of the Meltemi winds that whipped from island to island through July and August. The breaking rays made the chill sea much easier to wade into than it had been on her first night. The light was pure, sharp, beating with a lucidity she’d experienced nowhere outside of Greece. She stood, waist-deep in the translucent water, momentarily mesmerised by the snakes of sunlight on the pebbles at her feet. Then, closing her eyes, she dived, kicking, swimming on, determinedly not glancing back over her shoulder, superstitious enough to believe he’d be more likely to come if she didn’t check.
She kept going, to as far out as he’d been the night before, maybe further; the boat had disappeared, doubtless taken by its owner in search of squid and snapper. It was only when her arms began to tremble, her legs to shake, that she finally swivelled, searching the glassy expanse she’d crossed, and exhaled a sigh.
It was all emptiness.
Nikos Kalantis’s villa remained shuttered and silent.
