The Whispers of Nemesis (12 page)

‘I'm afraid Santos wasn't always popular in Vrisi, and taking care of his memorial isn't a task many of them would volunteer to do. As for the family, I don't know. They're rarely here to notice, I suppose.'

Behind the statue, across the square, was a pond enclosed by a low wall.

‘Here it is,' said Attis, as they drew close to the water, ‘the spring which gives Vrisi its name.'

They looked over the wall. A trickle of water ran out of the hillside to feed the pond, which drained, at its far end, into a stream which fell steeply down the hillside and was lost between the village's lower houses. At the water's edge, ducks preened on opaque remnants of slow-melting ice.

‘Most picturesque,' said the fat man, politely.

‘Santos told me that the spring used to be sacred to some god, though which one, I don't remember. There used to be swans here, a nesting pair, but I see they're not here now.'

‘Swans are the most beautiful of birds, much admired since ancient times,' said the fat man. ‘You'll no doubt know the myth in which Zeus himself chose its form to pursue the unwilling Leda, and that after their copulation, Leda is said to have given birth to an egg. In a less common version of the story, the goddess Nemesis was the object of Zeus's lust.'

‘Nemesis?' The name raised Attis's interest, but the fat man seemed not to notice, and carried on.

‘When Nemesis became a goose to fly away from him, Zeus turned himself into a swan to follow her. They say it was my namesake Hermes who craftily hid the egg – of hyacinth blue – between Leda's thighs. Other fragments suggest Leda and Nemesis are one and the same, or that Nemesis herself left her egg for Leda to find. The old stories change and grow, until none of us can tell which is the original. Pythagoras, of course, held the view that swans embodied the souls of the great poets when they died. Do you think Volakis has become a swan?'

‘I doubt it,' said Attis. ‘If he were a swan, he'd be here, at Vrisi's spring. The
kafenion
is over here. Shall we?'

The
kafenion
was of unfinished, amateur construction, with the air of a project abandoned long ago. The side entrance had no door, but was boarded over with nailed-on plywood, and the side walls were unrendered, exposing bricks which were not laid level and the mortar which had oozed between them. In warmer weather, the picture window of its frontage would open to give access to the terrace; but today, the outside tables were empty, the chairs tilted forward to rest their backs on the table edges, and the window was open just wide enough to admit an average man. Attis passed through comfortably, whilst the fat man avoided the indignity of a squeeze by sliding the window back several inches further, and once inside, slid it back into position to keep out the cold.

Inside, the smoke of many cigarettes clouded the air. Men dressed for deepest winter – in flannel shirts and quilted jackets, with fur hats and leather gauntlets on their laps – talked over coffee and each other, their conversation travelling between all tables. A stinking paraffin stove gave off fumes but little heat; the window ran with condensation, in which someone had rubbed a viewing hole so the men could keep an eye on those going by – their own wives, or someone else's.

At the counter, the patron – a man with the ruby flush of high blood pressure, and a knitted hat pulled down over his ears – stood behind bottles of ouzo, cheap whisky and domestic brandy; one by one, he picked duck eggs from a wire basket, and wiped mud from their pale-blue shells with a wet rag.

Attis made for a table by the payphone, whose directory was pencilled on the wall: dozens of numbers and names, some arranged in a ladder as a list, most random notes in many hands, with the pencil that had written them dangling from the phone dial, tied with string to the finger-hole for zero.

‘What'll you have?' asked Attis, as the fat man sat down.

‘Greek coffee, no sugar,' said the fat man. ‘Thank you.'

Attis called out their order to the patron.

‘Will you excuse me one moment?' he asked the fat man. ‘I have to make a phone call.'

‘Of course.'

Attis turned his back, and put his shoulder to the wall so that both the phone and the number he was dialling were out of the fat man's view.

The conversation around them had died away, as the village men indulged their interest in the strangers. The fat man smiled cordially around their tables, and wished them
kali mera
; they met his friendliness with silence, and averted faces.

Attis deposited coins in the payphone slot, and began to dial a number from memory. Unseen by Attis, the fat man took a out leather-bound notebook, and pulled a little pencil from its spine, and as Attis dialled – enough digits to make his call long-distance – the fat man seemed to think, then wrote in careful print on one of the notebook's lined pages. When Attis finished dialling, the fat man replaced the pencil in the notebook's spine, and put the book away.

Attis waited for his call to be connected. The men around them fell back into conversation, talking of snow, and of impassable roads to the north. When Attis's call was answered, the line, it seemed, was bad; he raised his voice to speak, and blocked his free ear with a finger to hear what was being said.

‘Yorgas! It's me, Attis. How are you,
pedi mou
, how are you . . . ? Cold, very cold, we'll be snowed in if I don't get out today . . . Listen, I want you to be the first to know. I've found something very special at the house . . .' He laughed. ‘Yes, very good news, very good . . . I think you'll be very pleased . . . I don't know. Here, let me have a look . . .'

Holding the receiver between chin and shoulder, he reached inside his jacket for the envelope from Santos's study. With a glance around the room – where the coffee drinkers were discussing the council's incompetence, and the fat man seemed interested in the patron's coffee-making – he lifted the envelope's flap and half-withdrew several folded sheets, typewritten but with the ink-marks of hand corrections. He slipped the envelope back into his pocket.

‘I don't know yet,' he said, into the phone. ‘I haven't had chance to look. Under the circumstances, it's tricky. My best guess is twenty, twenty-four. And a brilliant title –
The Odes to Nemesis.
Listen, with luck I'll be back in town by nightfall. Why don't you meet me at Georgio's, and we'll take a look together, see what we've got . . . 9 o'clock is fine . . . Of course. My regards to your good lady . . . We'll speak later.'

He hung up the phone, and remained for a moment leaning against the wall. As he sat down opposite the fat man, he composed his face to disguise a self-satisfied smile.

‘So,' he said, ‘now we can get down to business.' He looked around at their company, aware that, in spite of seeming absorbed in their own banter, the village men would eavesdrop if they could. ‘Where should we start?'

‘You were going to tell me . . .' began the fat man; but the patron was approaching with a tray. The fat man stopped speaking, and he and Attis sat silent as the patron placed coffee and glasses of water before them. When the patron moved away, the fat man, too, seemed conscious of others' interest in their talk. When he spoke again, he kept his voice low.

‘You were going to explain to me the nature of your relationship with Santos Volakis,' he said. ‘I don't understand what is involved in being his literary agent.'

Attis sipped at his coffee, and replaced the cup on its saucer.

‘In principle, it's simple,' he said. ‘I'm a businessman; Santos was an artist, a creative. I handled his business affairs – dealing with publishers, in the main, often his publicity too, requests for public appearances, commissions, interviews. My job was to sell his work, and get it out to the widest possible audience. Which was not always easy, I have to say; the market for poetry has always been quite limited. My fee was 15 per cent of his earnings, which was not, believe me, a great amount for the effort I put in.'

‘And had you worked together a long time?'

‘I was the only agent he ever had; his first, and his last. I'm one of the best in the business,
Kyrie
Diaktoros, though I say it myself; the solidity of my reputation gives the stamp of quality to my clients. Santos never had reason to go anywhere else.'

‘And was that the extent of your relationship – a professional one?'

Attis did not answer immediately, but took another sip of his coffee. Allowing him time to consider his response, the fat man reached into the pocket of his overcoat, and took out matches and a pack of cigarettes – an old-fashioned box, whose lift-up lid bore the head of a 1940s starlet. He slid the cover from the matchbox; but instead of taking out a match, he looked inside, then tipped from it into the palm of his hand an object of yellowing ivory.

‘I don't wish to interrupt your thoughts,' he said, ‘but I had quite forgotten I had brought this with me. It's a novelty which is, in my experience, unique. I acquired it very recently in Crete, as a gift from an elderly gentleman who wanted it protected from his daughter's zealous house clearance once he is gone.' He held up the object between his thumb and fingertip. Small, and discoloured with age, it was plainly the tooth of some creature, serrated on its edge and pointed like a fang.

Attis looked at the object with little interest at first; but recognising the uniqueness of its features, he leaned forward to inspect it more closely.

‘What in heaven and earth is it?' he asked.

‘Well,' said the fat man, offering the object to Attis, ‘I couldn't vouch for its authenticity; but I am told it is that great rarity, a hen's tooth.'

Attis was about to take the object, but withdrew his hand.

‘A hen's tooth?' he asked. ‘How could it possibly be a hen's tooth?'

The fat man smiled, and dropped the ivory back into the matchbox. He held out his cigarettes to Attis, who shook his head to decline; choosing one for himself, he produced a slim, gold lighter, knocked the tip of his cigarette on the table, and lit it.

‘I must assume some prank or practical joke played on the old man,' he said. ‘But even so, it's an intriguing object, and a clever forgery, if forgery it is. I shall treasure it regardless, as its previous owner did, because it reminds me of the greatest rarity in my profession: willingness to part with the truth. Here.' He closed the matchbox, and placed it before him on the table. ‘Let us leave it here between us, as a reminder that hens' teeth – and truthfulness – may both be found, if one searches long enough.' He drew again on his cigarette. ‘So. We have wandered off the track. You were telling me, I think, about your relationship with Santos.'

‘It was, at first, very formal and businesslike,' said Attis. ‘He came to me as a young man, an innocent, naive.' He gave a small smile, as if the memory amused him. ‘He had already had his first volume of poetry published, without the benefit of an agent to help him through the minefield of contracts. He felt – quite rightly – he hadn't got himself a very good deal, and so he came to me and asked me to sell his second collection. Which I agreed to, of course; the quality of his work was unmistakable. I sold it to the same publisher who had his first poems, but on much better terms. We started small, a few hundred copies; but sales have grown, from there.'

‘A few hundred? It seems a very modest quantity.'

‘A common enough beginning, especially for a poet. And his work was well received; the critics liked it, and a few academics. I used my contacts, and word got round in the right circles; the book went to reprint very quickly. Santos was impressed, and we stuck together, after that.' The patron was carrying tumblers of spirits to a nearby table; Attis raised a finger and caught his eye. ‘Will you have another coffee?' he asked the fat man. ‘Or will you join me in something stronger, to take off the morning's chill?'

‘A Metaxa, then, if you're having one. Was Santos happy with his modest success?'

Attis gave their order to the patron, and waited whilst the empty cups were cleared and the fat man's ashtray was replaced with a clean one. When the patron left them, Attis shook his head.

‘No, he wasn't happy,' he said. ‘Not in the end. He became more and more dissatisfied.'

‘And what about his family? Did he not have a wife? Was she content to live a life of poverty whilst her husband served his muse?'

‘He was no longer married. His wife left him, some years ago. I imagine Santos was a hard man to live with. He could be arrogant, at times, and temperamental, often. And if you're going to be investigating any part of his life, I must tell you – I would say in confidence, but the facts are common knowledge, in certain quarters – he had something of a reputation as a womaniser. They say, don't they, that the quiet ones are the worst? Well, women were drawn to Santos – they loved that romantic image of the brow-furrowed, brooding artist – and he saw no reason to resist. He'd look into their eyes, and whisper a few well-chosen lines of poetry – his own or someone else's, they didn't know, or care – and make another easy conquest. And yet he loved his wife. I believe he thought she would tolerate a few short-lived infidelities for the privilege of being married to the nation's greatest living poet, but she didn't see it that way. She put up with him wandering for a while, then ran off with one of his fellow poets – a man with half Santos's talent, but less inclination to reap the more dubious benefits of literary success. I believe she's in America with him now. She and Santos had a daughter, Leda, who has been raised to a large degree by his sister, Frona. Frona's done a marvellous job with Leda. Frona, too, is divorced.'