Sometimes she talked to them for hours.
And she telephoned America all the time as if it were next door!
Callas, for all her fame, was always grateful for very little. Some attention, some financial advice, a few furs, a few jewels. In every way she was a woman who barely interfered. She was as she should be, under Ari’s control.
Like most of Ari’s Greek friends, Nikos far preferred her. Ever since she had been ejected from Onassis-land they spoke often on the telephone. Callas knew her old lover’s every move through contacts like him.
Callas was a realist. She knew that like most men Onassis had created very clear classifications of infidelity for himself. Over the years, in her quest for honesty both ex-lovers and male confidants had admitted their adherence to similar rigid codes that covered all aspects of being unfaithful.
It seemed that if the male did not undertake or initiate sexual activity, if he was simply on the receiving end of sexual attention, it didn’t count. In their eyes, taking responsibility for passive acquiescence, however enjoyable, seemed ludicrous.
The diva reasoned since he had not wanted to trust himself alone with her in her flat in Paris, the only sex with her that would appeal to him would have to be guilt free. She needed some regular contact with his office in America. Ever since “the widow” had lured him to her side he spent more time there than anywhere else.
A year after their split she telephoned him and told him that she still missed him and his ardent lovemaking.
She also revealed her heartbreak and made him swear that from now on he would never, ever come and see her perform. Fighting the most famous woman in the world with the only thing she had, the voice that she knew he loved, she hoped that if she banned him from hearing her sing, he might come looking for her.
“If I look out at the audience, any audience who I will cry with or smile with…well…if I ever thought you might be out there, my voice would stop working. I would not be able to carry on,” she had sobbed to him.
When he was silent she raised her game.
“In fact, I don’t think I could bear it if I simply saw you by accident in the street,” she had continued in a theatrical way. “Supposing it was the day of a performance or even the day before. I would be so tense, so unhappy, that I would not be able to sing. My voice would die. My career would be over.”
In his haste to get off the phone Ari promised that in addition to the million dollars he had given her the year before, he would throw in a quarter of a million and keep out of her way. He agreed that if she let his office know her schedule in advance he would see to it that they were never in the same town.
Every month she would handwrite a letter to him. Each missive followed the same form. She would ensure that the letterhead was as impressive as possible. Then she would begin with a description of the men she had been seeing in the hope of making him jealous.
She would go on to include this or that snippet to try to impress him either intellectually or with her business acumen. Finally, she would spend at least a page inquiring into his health, suggesting various tisanes and infusions. Attached would be a list of her engagements.
After the first one arrived he arranged for his personal secretary to telephone her each time to confirm that the message had been received. The secretary, although totally discreet, felt she could not be rude to the famous former girlfriend so that often these chats went on for some time. Unintentionally, this gave the songbird encouragement. Callas had no idea that Onassis did not see the letters, which was why he never felt he needed to tell his wife about them.
In the late spring of 1970 the songbird had her most successful season in New York. Hailed as the best soprano in the world, Callas attributed it to her even slimmer figure.
She had found no one to replace the Greek. What was the point of applause when she lacked the man she wished to share it with?
Quite deliberately, the diva decided to remain in the city until she knew her old lover was back.
Part of the pattern of the former First Lady’s life in New York was to go to the house in New Jersey to ride every Friday. It was no secret that Onassis would leave the city later to join her.
Callas decided that this would have to be the way that she would insert herself into his world again. Her success had been based on discipline and patience. She put her trust in them once again. Like every other woman, she had learned to make herself look different in “Jackie O” style, using big sunglasses and a headscarf. Wearing these, she hid, sitting low in the back seat of her limousine behind her driver, as she watched for Ari outside his office.
Three Fridays went by with no appearance from Ari. In desperation, the next Friday morning she rang his friendly secretary and explained that she had a crisis, that her driver was sick and she needed a lift to stay with friends out in the countryside right near the Onassis home in New Jersey this afternoon.
The soprano trilled that she was hoping and praying that the
Greek (“her Greek,” as she still privately thought of him) was going that same way.
Onassis didn’t stand a chance; as he exited the building he discovered the songbird in the corner of his car. From below her long eyelashes she gazed up at him and with a tiny gesture raised her cashmere wrap as if to envelop him in its warmth.
The journey to the country took little more than an hour and a half.
After she raised the privacy board between themselves and the chauffeur, Onassis was treated to an incredible crescendo of passion. His old flame had learned more extraordinary tricks with her lips than the ticket-paying customers at La Scala had any idea about.
After dropping the opera star off, he felt a tiny stab of guilt when he saw Jackie, but later that week, when he confided the story to Nikos, he explained, “I’m in the hands of a professional. What can I do?”
Urged on by one or two intimates in Ari’s coterie, Callas continued her seduction. As the weeks went by and the opera star repeatedly turned up for her “lift,” he started to look forward to it. After all, he reckoned as he eyed the soprano, making little moans while on her knees, he exchanged no telephone conversations with the songbird, engaged in no plots to meet her, never discussed love or emotion with her.
Truth to tell, he was doing nothing. The active partner was Callas.
With her teeth, her tongue, the tips of her fingers and tendrils of her hair, she nuzzled up to those erogenous zones he knew about, and some he didn’t.
When Jackie occasionally suggested spending the weekend in the city, his insistence on spending Friday night in the country thrilled her. Naively she thought that after all the wonderful places he had introduced her to, she had been able to reciprocate with one at least.
But as suddenly as Callas had appeared, she vanished.
Onassis had become an addict. He missed his little treat too
much. Casually he asked his secretary for the latest letter from the diva. She was at the opera in Paris. By the next night so too was Jackie’s second husband.
After her week’s performance, both on the stage and in Ari’s bed, the diva telephoned her ally, Nikos.
“So where do you think your boss has been all week?” she asked him.
“Paris, I’m sure Paris,” was the answer.
“Yes, but what you didn’t know was that he works at Olympic by day and has been gold-medal-sporting in my bed every night,” she purred.
Nikos was delighted. Now how to let “the widow” know.
Callas told him it was too early.
She was about to vanish again. She wanted to make sure that her hold over this man was as strong as ever.
G
uy was depressed because he had found nothing.
While the Mediterranean sweltered he had hunted around Patras but could find no one who looked like George. He tried some taverna owners near where the man had last been spotted but only one admitted to remembering him. Guy knew that spies used all sorts of guises to go about their business. Perhaps George had favored keeping himself to himself. The local who did recall the man explained that he hadn’t been around for at least a year.
Worse, he couldn’t even find Dimitri, the agency’s long-term collaborator. All the usual methods had failed. Both his home and boatyard had the look of longtime stagnation.
Dressed as if he were a visiting American university professor, Guy had thought his deliberately well-heeled appearance would have been enough for someone to cough up some information.
His story, that he was looking for the man because he was a friend of a long-lost relative, was supposed to act as an additional incentive. Guy knew that family members in the Old Country loved finding out that they had some access to those in the New World.
Guy was sure that Dimitri himself would have been very happy to reward someone who brought him this good news.
So Guy had flashed around Dimitri’s picture too. The agency had smudged it up to look like a local, amateur job. The Greeks near his home recognized him but they all said that while he had been around until recently, they believed that he had gone to see a girl near Athens.
After several days of getting nowhere Guy telephoned Harry.
“This thing gets stranger by the minute,” he confessed to the older man.
“You bet,” said Harry. “We’re still receiving stuff from Dimitri, nothing to write home about but solid background stuff. He’s been sending it as always, on a monthly basis. Maybe he has chased off after some woman, but why didn’t he tell us? After all, we can’t insist he stay in Patras,” he continued.
“Do you have any other leads?” asked Guy.
“I’ve discovered that we don’t send the payments to him at his home or the boatyard. We send it to general delivery in the next village. If I give you the address why don’t you go there?”
Retaining his cover, Guy headed there in a taxi.
He had used this ruse many times. Often a cab driver would tell you more than other locals. Before his journey Guy made sure he had plenty of packs of cigarettes and a few Greek beers stashed in his professorial carryall.
All he could find out from the driver was that Dimitri was a very good mender of boats. He was not married and he did not get on well with his two older brothers who had been enthusiastic fighters in the civil war.
“Big Communisti, big, big,” was how the driver described them.
After their father died last spring and left the boatyard and the family home entirely to Dimitri, they had vanished.
Guy wasn’t sure that he wanted everyone in the village to connect him with the man looking for Dimitri and George, so after he bade farewell to his driver he went into the cubicle of a bar’s toilet
and speedily changed his appearance. A floppy, dirty white hat with long stringy brown curls attached covered his naturally pale blond hair. The specs were removed and hard brown contact lenses inserted to hide his vivid blue eyes. The smart shirt was whipped off and a T-shirt, very worn and ever so slightly dirty, replaced it. To make doubly sure he watched out of the toilet window until the taxi moved off with his next fare.
In this instance general delivery was a very junior version of a post office, no more than a large broom closet at the back of the mayor’s office. Guy decided to try it straight and ask for Dimitri Papas, but the bearded, bad-tempered man looking after the place irritably waved him away. Guy ignored his behavior and spoke up louder. “When he next comes in to collect his post tell him his uncle Yannis from Chicago called and said he has a lot of stuff from the
Queen Mary
to show him.”
Guy then wrote out the same message in Greek and left it in an envelope.
He was not disappointed. Within minutes the man had closed up and moved swiftly up the road, away from the village. His dark hair was spliced with gray but for a man of his age he moved fast.
From a distance Guy watched as the man entered a house on the edge of a small vineyard.
With the foresight of an experienced observer Guy had stuffed a bottle of water and a hunk of bread and cheese into his pockets. He settled down out of sight to wait.
Over an hour later, when the man returned to his work, Guy approached the farm house and looked through a ground-floor window. On a makeshift bed in the small front room lay a figure. He looked very like Dimitri.
Waiting for some time to check that no one else was in the house, Guy could not decide whether to knock on the door or creep in. Old habits die hard. Eventually he hauled himself up through a window in the back and climbed in.
Approaching the sick man, Guy could see fear in his eyes. Quickly
he explained who he was and asked the man what he knew about George.
“Look in my back pocket. I thought even if I am killed the pictures in the back of my trousers will explain.”
Turning slowly as if in great pain, he shifted enough for Guy to fish out two photographs. After extricating them from multiple layers of protective plastic, he found they were both of George. The first was a copy of the one that Harry had given Guy; the other, in exactly the same pose, was the same shot, but it was obvious in the second picture that George was dead.
“They fixed it,” explained Dimitri.
“My father died this year and left the boatyard to me alone. He didn’t get along with my brothers and so he chose to give it to me. There was no dissuading him. My brothers threatened me that if I didn’t give them the profits, they would simply put me out of service, injure me, and take it over by force.”
He winced in pain and continued. “I ignored them, tried to talk them out of it. The boatyard makes very little.
“They both want to be in politics, they are always trying to stir up trouble. I thought as long as I gave them food they would be satisfied. But they got impatient when I said that there was no money, we had to enlarge the boatyard, to do repairs to motorboats, speedboats. They saw that I had some money—money I had earned through working with you. But they became enraged and thought that my father had left me money as well.
“So they planned to give me a going-over, but unfortunately on the night they did I had arranged a meeting with George. George was bringing a new man over to meet me, a new CIA officer for me to work with.
“My brothers are big believers in Communism. They listened to us and became furious when they realized that I’d been helping the Americans. There was a fight; I am left like this and they killed George. My middle brother has always been very strong. I think he meant to break his neck. He’s an animal.
“It all happened so quickly, we were taken by surprise. Philippos took as much of the money as he could before Costas, the eldest, stopped him.
“My oldest brother is much smarter. I didn’t know but he is still very close with Communists. He thought he could get more money out of the Americans if we pretended that George was still alive and I continued sending intelligence. He knew someone would eventually come for George if he arranged a picture of him to look alive. His ‘comrades’—Russian educated”—Guy noticed Dimitri’s curled lip—“took two weeks to make it. When it was finished, see, the eyes look as if he is smiling, the lips too. They sent the picture anonymously to Athens, to the U.S. embassy. When someone did come looking for George, Costas knew he would be senior, he would be a handler, he would have money. He would extract as much as he could from him and then…” Guy did not need Dimitri to paint a picture. He thought for a moment; the Soviets were brilliant at doctoring photographs. They had been doing it ever since Lenin had taken power. Even now, when their leaders stood watching their annual march on November 7 they would move any of the leaders out of the photograph if their face no longer fit.
“Tell me, how did you find me?” asked Dimitri.
When Guy explained about going to general delivery Dimitri became really nervous.
“That bearded man is my cousin Andreas. He took the job because he and my brothers want to know everything that is going on in the villages around here. He tries to read everyone’s letters.
“What did you say to him this morning?”
When Guy told him, Dimitri suggested that he leave immediately.
“He will know that you have come looking for George. He knows about code, about big boats. He made me tell him,” said Dimitri sadly, “I had no choice. I have tried to walk, tried to move, they have seriously harmed my back, I think.”
“Don’t worry, I understand. I’ll get you out of here. I’ll do everything I can to help you,” Guy promised.
As he went back he kept checking that he wasn’t being watched.
When he returned to the room he had taken in a guest house, Guy changed out of his sloppy appearance. He did not want to bump into Andreas looking the way he had this morning.
As he ate his lunch he tried to think. He had to help Dimitri, but how? He needed more manpower. It would be too difficult to get the injured man out alone.
“The trouble is Dimitri is a brave man but in a lot of pain and can’t walk,” Guy told Harry at Langley over the phone. “His brother won’t let a doctor near but just gives him painkillers bought over the counter. What help can you get me and how soon?” asked Guy.
“Give us twenty-four hours,” said Harry reassuringly.
The CIA response was instantaneous. Another CIA officer based in the capital was on his way, but in a small motorboat that had to hug the coast. A small U.S. Navy vessel was also making full speed toward the area.
“If you can get Dimitri to the boat, it will all be smooth sailing,” Harry said confidently.
“Just watch out for yourself.”
Early next morning Guy returned to Dimitri’s home to assure him that help was on its way.
He waited until Andreas had gone. Guy was worried that there would be someone on the lookout for him now that Andreas knew that he knew the code and was looking for Dimitri. He spent some time checking out the vineyard until finally he crept in.
The couch was empty. The young Greek was on the floor. Guy looked for signs of life, but Dimitri was dead.
He turned the body over and extricated the two photos of George from the dead man’s pockets. Andreas would know that he, or someone else, had taken them, but now that they were both dead it was too late to worry about that. He was about to leave when he sensed breathing from behind.
Guy was quick but there were three of them. Strong arms grabbed him and pushed him to the floor. Swiftly and expertly, he was tied to a chair.
Recalling Dimitri’s story about their keen interest in money, Guy decided to gamble on their greed and ignorance. He told his attackers that if they let him walk he could get them a lot of money from the Americans. Except for one of them, an ardent anti-American who would have liked to string him up there and then, he sensed that the others were swayed by the promise of wealth.
To Andreas he said: “If you come with me to the local bank I will give you more money than you will ever possess.”
The three had guns, old revolvers that they now used mainly to shoot small animals and birds. They assured Guy that if he ran they would shoot to kill.
They looked like they were no strangers to exercise. Guy guessed that although they were probably very fit, all of them were about ten years older than Dimitri.
If he got the chance Guy knew that he could outrun and out-swim them.
His jailers began to argue. They disagreed about what to do with him. By nightfall, still disagreeing, they put him in the cellar.
The rough twine, tightly drawn around his wrists and his ankles, chafed and dug into his skin, making sleep impossible. As he listened to them bellowing upstairs he tried to work out how he could escape.
Jackie too wanted to make a getaway from Skorpios. Her problem was she didn’t know where.
In yesterday’s newspaper, delivered that morning, there was an item about Ari seeing Maria Callas in Paris.
The piece was short, just a paragraph referring to her husband and the diva being at a party at Maxim’s abutting a picture of them walking out of the restaurant with others. In the piece there was no inference that they were attending as a couple but Jackie’s high-strung instincts yelled
cheat, cheat
in her ear.
This was insupportable.
It was not the first time since she married Ari that he and Callas had been mentioned together, but she knew that before the stories had not been true. Now there were ugly rumors about her private life. Not again.
Without stopping to think, she took the offending newspaper to her room and flew to the phone.
Being told that “Mr. Onassis is in a very important meeting and cannot be disturbed” did nothing to calm her.
“Tell Mr. Onassis this is urgent,” she snapped.
Even though stressed and angry, Jackie was not going to be too hysterical or reveal anything to his staff. She knew that her demands had already made her unpopular with some of them.
She began to pack some things in an overnight bag. She would travel light, shop when she got there. If he was not on the telephone in ten minutes she would fly to Paris and disturb him in person.
Angrily, as she hunted for a new lightweight Courrèges coat, she thought, I will not put up with these stories about him and Callas, not after Jack, not after the last time. She repeated this like a mantra as she located a necklace and asked for her passport to be brought to her. She was ready. As she was about to order the boat and the plane to be prepared for her immediate departure, he rang.
“My darling,” he began.
“I am not your darling,” she shouted.
“What is wrong, I am so looking forward to seeing you—”
“Have you seen the papers this morning? The London papers. There are pictures of you and that woman, the one you told me you never see. How could you? How could you!” she screamed.