Levkas Man

PART ONE

It was Sunday, the street empty, the canal black under a louring sky. My footsteps sounded solitary on the cobbles and the years rolled back to childhood, every detail clear-etched on the retina of memory-the house barges moored by the bridge, the flowers set out in pots on the pavement, the newsvendor on the corner. And then the house itself, shabbier than when I had seen it last. That had been two years ago when my ship had put into Rotterdam and some strange urge-a desire for reconciliation-had brought me here. The front door and all the windows had been freshly painted then, green like the linden trees. It had been summer; now it was March and the trees were bare.

My footsteps slowed as I neared the door, a reluctance, a sense of dread almost. Last time I had had a shipboard world behind me, a job and the companionship of men I knew. Now it was different. I could feel myself beginning to tremble as I felt once again the pull of the old man's personality. There

had been no reconciliation, no renewal of our strange relationship. He had been away on one of his periodic bouts of travelling, rootling for old bones. And now, when I came seeking a temporary refuge … a fit of trembling reached down the muscles of my arm and into my hands. I paused, hesitating, summoning up the courage to face him again.

A small wind from the north blew cold down the gut of the canal between the old houses. The narrow gable, four storeys above me, had the date on it-1694-just below the jutting beam hooked for a pulley to hoist furniture in at the windows. I shivered, wondering why the hell I had come. The trembling reached into the pit of my stomach. It was nerves and quite uncontrollable. It had been like that in moments of stress since I was ten. I knew it would pass. It always did. But still I hesitated, unwilling to commit myself and step again into that lonely, embittered world from which I had escaped eight years ago.

A car drove past me, its tyres drumming on the cobbles. A girl was driving it and the quick glance of her eyes broke the spell. I went up to the door and rang the bell, remembered that it had never worked and slammed the knocker twice. The sound of it was loud enough to wake the street, but nothing stirred within the house. I stood back then, looking up at the facade; the windows were all shut, and as I tried the knocker once again, a sense almost of relief flooded through me at the thought that he might be away and I would have the place to myself.

A gust of wind blew down the canal and a branch swayed above my head to the dry rattle of twigs. A leaf left over from the autumn fell at my feet, withered and browned by frost. I thought of all the times I had walked the streets with him. He had suffered from insomnia and sometimes he had woken me in the middle of the night to go out with him into the sleeping city; walking the streets and the banks of the canals had been a sort of sedative, a means of dulling the restless energy that drove his mind. In summer he had always worn sandals and an open-necked shirt. In winter his wiry body had been bulked

out by an old goat-skin jacket, and always he had gone bareheaded, the stooped, white-maned figure with its shambling walk a familiar sight in Amsterdam. But as I had grown older he had been away more often.

The ring of keys was in my hand, still burnished bright from the years it had jostled in my pocket. Had he missed them, I wondered, remembering the loneliness, my sudden decision to go. The sun glimmered momentarily, the clouds black as ink. It looked like rain and the house stood silent, waiting. I pulled myself together then, found the key I wanted and inserted it into the Yale-type lock. The door slid open and I hesitated, the stillness of the house yawning before me. Then I picked up the suitcase I had bought the night I had abandoned the car in London and went into the house.

He was away. I could sense it the moment the door clicked shut behind me, the silence of the old house closing in. I thought of all the times I had been frightened here, frightened by his extraordinary magnetism, his unpredictable nature.

I hesitated, listening to the stillness that had closed about me. The wind sighed in the eaves and a board moved. As in all these old Amsterdam houses, the stairs were narrow and almost vertical, like a ladder leading to a loft, and the stair carpet showed thin and worn in the pale glimmer from the fanlight.

I forced myself to think why I was here, and gradually the trembling ceased, and my throat relaxed. I wasn't a child any longer and the house was empty, the old man no more than a ghostly presence. I had what I wanted-a refuge in which to lie low and time to sort myself out. That was all that mattered. I humped my suitcase up the stairs and went into the study on the first floor.

It was just as I remembered it, nothing changed; the big desk with the Anglepoise lamp, the heavy swivel chair padded in black leather, the bookshelves ranged along the wall opposite the windows, even the sombre velvet curtains and the marble clock on the mantelpiece. Though it was almost mid-

day-a quarter to twelve, in fact-the room was shadowed and dark. The sun had gone, rain gusted against the windows. I switched the light on, put my suitcase down, and took off my raincoat. What I needed was money, Dutch money. And then a round of the dockside taverns to see what I could pick up.

I went over to the desk, where a pile of letters and journals lay as though awaiting his return. I tried the drawers, but with no success. They were crammed with old bills, bank statements, cheque stubs, correspondence dating back for years; in one I found my old school reports under a litter of broken pipes, birds' feathers and old tobacco tins. And in the bottom right-hand drawer, in an old cigar box full of letters I had written him from school, I came across a short note from my mother, written from Kenya, announcing my birth and asking him to be my godfather. Pinned to it was my birth certificate and the adoption papers that changed my name from Scott to Van der Voort. In another drawer was some correspondence about a mortgage, with the deed attached, and a bundle of letters relating to his mother's estate in South Africa, faded now and held together by a thick rubber band. And below these were the details of the sale of the boat. He had only had it just over a year and the sale had been within a few months of my leaving him.

As I straightened up, the clock on the mantelpiece struck twelve. Its beautiful, clear tinkling chime was so much a part of my memory of the room that I took it for granted. My eye was caught by the top letter on the pile of correspondence. It was from a Dr. Gilmore in Cambridge, something about carbon-14 and a dating of 35–30,0006.?. Bones, of course, and the journals were all scientific. There were unpaid bills, too, and right at the bottom a note from somebody, who signed himself Alec Cartwright, confirming that he would be arriving in Belgrade with the Land-Rover on February 26.

So the old man had been gone at least three weeks.

I turned to the bureau then. That was where I'd found the cash I had needed as a kid. It stood in the corner opposite the door, a tall piece with glass-fronted shelves for books and a curved let-down flap, the walnut surface of it gleaming with the rich patina of the years. The glass case held the same collection of antique-bound books on the top shelf, the rest of it full of old bones and bits of worked flint-artefacts, he had called them. The word Mousterian came back to me, for the bones and the primitive flint axe-heads had had a certain fascination for me when I was about twelve years old. The picture my young mind had conjured up was of wild, hairy men emerging from caves to attack each other with blunt-bladed axes. I had even produced axes of my own, made with flint found at the bottom of a derelict barge, and he had shown me how to work them and how to bind the "blade" to the wooden haft with leather thongs. But it was only a passing phase and I had lost interest after he had given me a hiding for gashing another boy's head open.

The contents of the top three shelves were exactly as I had last seen them, the skull in the same place, in the centre of the third shelf, a lower jaw and a few pieces of bone, the rest built up of a smooth, ivory-like composition. The bottom shelf was empty except for some small fragments of bone in the right-hand corner; there were some teeth amongst them that looked as though they were human teeth. It was on this shelf that he had kept the books he valued most-a first-edition Darwin and several old-fashioned tomes, some in French, some in German. Breuil-that name came back to me-the Abbe Breuil, and Chardin. They were gone now, all except the worn leather-covered Bible. A slip of paper caught my eye and I opened the glass front and took it out. It was gummed paper and on it he had written: skull-cap fragments and 2 teeth, Kyzyl Kum No. 5.

Seeing his writing again after all these years, I stood there for a moment, the faded slip in my hand, remembering in detail the night I had surprised him sitting at the bureau with a pen in his hand and a leather-covered book in front of him. I had come down in my pyjamas, startled out of my sleep by a cry like that of a wounded animal. He was just sitting there, his head bowed in his hand and the book open in front of him.

Something, the draught from the open door perhaps, had made him turn. I had never forgotten the strange look in his eyes, the shock my presence seemed to give him. For a moment he had been unable to speak, his whole body shaking as though the effort of control was almost beyond him.

And then, suddenly, he was himself again and he had quietly ordered me back to bed. But that was the last time I ever dared enter his study at night, and even in the daytime I always knocked first. And though it had happened at least fifteen years ago, the terror of that moment when he had turned and discovered me in the doorway, the blank look in his eyes, was so vivid that my hands were trembling again as I found the key that unlocked the flap below the glass-cased shelves.

But there was nothing in the satinwood drawers, only sheaves of paper covered with notes in his minute, spidery writing, and when I slid back the writing top to reveal the secret cavity below, there was nothing there but letters; the leather-covered book he had always kept there-his Journal, a diary, or whatever it was-had gone. The letters were in two bundles, each tied with string, the larger from somebody in Cambridge who signed himself Adrian. But it was the other bundle that caught and held my attention, for the writing was the same as in the letter I had found announcing my birth. They were signed Ruth, which was my mother's name, and they were love letters, each beginning My Darling or Darling Peter.

I sat there for a long time, staring at that bundle of letters — not reading them through, not wishing to pry, but disturbed, almost appalled, by the thought that they had once loved each other. I had never understood why, following the death of my parents, I had been sent half across the world to live with a man whose whole life was devoted to dusty digs and anthropology. He had never told me and I had never dared to ask. Now at last I knew, and the knowledge shocked me in a way I did not quite understand-as though a door, previously barred to me, had suddenly swung partly open.

I could only just remember her-tall and serious, full of warmth and a dark-eyed vitality, at moments very emotional. My father had been the complete opposite, a broad, sunburned man with a moustache and a voice that carried through the bush like the roar of a lion. It was the country I remembered mostly, and those last moments when the Mau-Mau had come to the farm.

I put the letters back unread, slid the writing top over the cavity and unlocked the cupboard under the flap. But all I found there was an album of snapshots, myself mostly at various ages between ten and nineteen, though the first few pages were taken up with faded pictures of an old stone farmhouse, of himself as a boy with his parents-Edwardian figures against a background of overhanging cliffs and a winding river. A cutting from a French newspaper had been pasted in and a letter signed "H. Breuil." His boyhood I remembered had been spent in France. Also in the cupboard were some models of boats I had made and a chess set; he had tried to teach me chess once. At the back were old copies of the American Journal of Anthropology, but nothing of value, and I got to my feet, looking round for something I could raise some money on.

The two Greek statues on the mantelpiece were no longer there and the clock was too heavy. The wind outside had dropped and in the stillness I could hear it ticking. It was an eight-day clock and he had always wound it first thing Sunday morning. The sound of it, so faint, yet so persistent, held me rooted to the spot for a moment. Somebody had been in this room, somebody who knew his routine.

The key was where he had always kept it, in the old clay tobacco jar to the right of the mantelpiece, and when I fitted it into one of the holes in the clock's white face, it only turned twice before the spring was fully wound. Whoever it was had been in the study within the last two days. I wiped my fingers across the clock's marble top, down the whole length of the mantelpiece, but no dust showed. The bureau was the same, the desk, too. I couldn't understand it. He had never had a housekeeper or even a woman in to clean. He had always looked after the place himself, and we had made our own beds, got our own meals-a bachelor existence.

In the tiny dining room opposite the study, everything was clean. But the bits of silver, the salvers and the rather ornate candlesticks, were gone, put away perhaps for safekeeping. I went upstairs. In the spare room I found blankets and an eiderdown neatly stacked at the foot of the bed, and in the drawer of the dressing table there were hairpins and a dusting of powder. The room had a faintly alien smell, quite different from the test of the house.

I crossed the landing to my own room. The bed was completely stripped and nothing had been altered since my abrupt departure. I stood for a moment in the open door, a world of memories flooding back. My first chart, stolen from a vessel in the docks, had been studied at that table by the window. The window was closed now, but on summer nights … it looked out on to the backs of houses, each window, as the lights went up, revealing glimpses of other boxed-in worlds, and of that girl; my eyes switched involuntarily to the second-floor window of the old grey house opposite, where she had undressed so slowly through the hot nights of that last summer.

I closed the door quietly, shutting out the tawdry memories of adolescence, and was standing at the head of the stairs, considering what to do next, when I heard the click of the front door closing, and then the creak of the stairboards, the sound of somebody climbing, slowly, hesitantly.

I thought at first it was the old man and my body froze. But then a woman's voice called out, "Who is it? Who's there?"

I shrank back into the shadows and the house was suddenly still.

"Is anybody there?" Her voice sounded scared. I thought I could hear her breathing. The footsteps started to climb again.

There was no point in staying where I was. The light was on in the study and she would see my suitcase. I went down the stairs and I could feel her waiting, breathless, on the landing. We met outside the study door and she said, "Who are you? What are you doing here?" Her voice was pitched high, barely controlled. I could almost smell her fear as she stood very still, peering up at me in the half-light that filtered through from the fanlight at the bottom of the stairs. Then she gave a little gasp. "You're Paul Van der Voort, aren't you?"

"Yes."

Her face was no more than a pale oval, her head, outlined in silhouette, was bare.

"What are you doing here? How did you get in? I saw the light. ." And then: "You had your keys, of course." And she added, the whole timbre of her voice changed, "There's nothing for you here, no money-nothing that would interest you." The nervousness was gone, cold anger in its place: "And if it's his Journal you're after, you won't find it. There's nothing for you here-nothing at all. They shouldn't have sent you."

"What the hell are you talking about?" I stepped past her and thrust open the study door. "Come in here where we can talk." I wanted to see who she was, what she looked like.

"No. I'll go now." The nervousness was back in her voice. "I'd no idea it was you. I thought. ." But by then I had her by the arm and had pushed her through into the light. She was younger than I had expected, a plain-looking girl with large eyes and wet, straw-coloured hair cut like a boy's. She wore a plastic mac that dripped water.

"Now then," I said, closing the study door. "Let's start with your name."

She hesitated, then said, "Sonia Winters."

"English?"

"Half-English."

"How did you recognize me?"

"The photograph in his bedroom. Another in your old room."

"You don't look like a housekeeper."

She shook her head.

"Then why have you got the keys to the house?"

She didn't say anything, but just stood there, staring at me with hostile eyes, her breath coming quickly as though she had been running.

I was certain she wasn't a relative. I don't think he had any relatives-either he had alienated them or else they were all dead. And then I remembered the pile of opened letters on the desk. "You were acting as his secretary, is that it?"

"I did some typing for him. I live just across the canal. And then when he became ill I looked after him."

"When was that?"

"About three months ago."

"And you lived here?"

"For a week or two. It was pleurisy. He had to have someone to look after him."

"And where is he now?"

She hesitated. "Somewhere in Macedonia. I'm not sure where. He wouldn't think of writing to me. But my brother's with him and I had a card from Hans recently, posted at Skopje, which is in the south of Yugoslavia." She stared at me. "Why are you here? What have you come back for after all these years?"

"I need some money and a roof over my head."

"Well, there's no money here," she snapped. "The house is mortgaged, even the furniture, everything's sold that could be sold."

"You mean he's pawned the house to go looking for bones in Macedonia?"

That seemed to get her on the raw. "You don't understand him, do you?" she blazed. "You never did. He's one of the world's most brilliant palaeontologists and it means nothing to you. No wonder he spoke of you with contempt. You owed him everything-education, your upbringing, a roof over your head, even the food you ate, everything. And what did you do? Got yourself expelled, mixed with the riff-raff on the docks, stole, lied, beat people up, landed in jail …"

"You seem to know quite a lot about me."

"Yes, I do-and everything I've heard about you sickens

me. You left him like a thief in the night, and now you come back-"

"It wasn't all my fault," I said quietly. "He's a very strange man and he expected too much."

"You took everything-gave nothing. Of all the heartless, selfish people. . you didn't even answer his letters."

"I came to see him two years ago. But he was away. He always seemed to be away."

She sighed. "You could still have answered his letters. He was lonely. Didn't you realize that? No, I suppose not. You wouldn't understand what it's like to be alone in the world. But you could have written. That was the least you could have done." She gave a little shiver and drew her dripping mac tight to her body. "I'll go now. I can't stop you staying here, but I warn you, if I find anything missing, I'll call the police."

She was halfway through the doorway when I stopped her. "Have you any Dutch money on you?"

She turned, her eyes wide. And then after a moment she felt in the pocket of her slacks and produced a 20-guilder note from a purse. She seemed surprised when I offered her two pound notes in exchange. "No," she said quickly. "No, it's all right. I expect you need it." She looked at me speculatively for a moment, and then she was gone. I listened to her footsteps on the stairs, the sound of the front door closing, and from the window I watched as she crossed the bridge by the house barges and walked quickly down the other side of the canal, head bent against the rain and the lash of the wind. The house she entered was almost directly opposite.

It was unfortunate. She'd probably talk and I wondered what her father did. It would take time for them to trace me to Amsterdam, but it was dangerous and I'd need to move that bit faster. I switched out the light, put my raincoat on and went quickly down the stairs, cursing myself again for having involved myself in somebody else's troubles. I could still see the look on the man's face, the heavy jowls, the small eyes wide with sudden fear-bastards like that shouldn't be allowed to do their dirty political work in a free country.

I could have shipped out in a tanker that night. Stolk tipped me off in the Prins Hendrik by the Oosterdok. But it was bound for Libya, a quick turn-round and back to Amsterdam again. And anyway I was tired of ship routine. I had a feeling that this was a sort of crossroads in my life, that what I had done must lead me on to some new road. The sea was all I knew, but the sea is wide-Australia or South America, I thought. I wanted a new world, a new life. I was twenty-seven.

Dusk was falling, the night sky darkening over the Amstel river, when I finally found my way to Wilhelm Borg's shop on Amsteldijk. I hadn't seen him since the days when I'd been mixed up with his gang of dockside toughs. Quite a few Dutchmen had crossed my path in the five years that I had been at sea and Borg was reputed to handle anything from fake antiques to a lorry-load of Scotch. He had put on weight since I had seen him last. He looked prosperous now and the old oak furniture and brasswork in his shop were certainly not fakes.

He took me through into an office at the back, gave me a drink and listened while I talked. His round face was as innocent-looking as ever, but his eyes were colder. "You want a change, eh-something different. Why come to me?" He spoke Dutch with a Friesland accent. His family, I remembered, had been barge people from Delfzijl.

"Why does any man come to you?" I left it at that, not telling him I was on the run, but I think he guessed it.

I was talking to him for about half an hour before he said, "There are some things I want out of Turkey, collectors' pieces. You could be just the man."

"Smuggling?" I asked.

He smiled. "For you it would be just a pleasant little holiday. The sort of break I think perhaps you are needing. You charter a boat-out of Malta, I think-for a cruise in the Aegean. You go to Crete and Rhodes, behaving all the time like a tourist-eating in the tavernas, visiting the ruins of Knossos, the fortress of the Knights of St. John. And then you go north to Kos, possibly to Samos. Both these islands are very close to Turkey. It's not organized yet, but you will almost certainly be making delivery to my clients somewhere off the Tunisian coast." He lumbered to his feet. "Think about it, eh?"

It was something, the escape door opening. Dangerous probably, but I didn't care. The Eastern Mediterranean, full of islands-you could lose yourself there, change jobs, change a name. "How much?" I asked.

He laughed and patted my shoulder. "You make up your mind, then we talk business."

I got him to change one of the two fivers I had with me, and that was that. It wouldn't get me to Australia or South America, but it was something to fall back on if things went wrong. I went to the Bali and stuffed myself full of Indonesian food.

It was about ten before I got back to the house, and when I switched the light on in the study, I found the curtains drawn and a note placed carefully on top of my suitcase. It said: Dr. Gilmore is in Amsterdam. He is another "bone" man and he would like to see you. I will bring him to the house at 11 a.m. tomorroic. Please be in. The writing was roimd and feminine. She hadn't bothered to sign it.

I crossed to the desk and read the letter I had glanced at before. Dr. Gilmore's world and the world of Wilhelm Borg were poles apart. I found it difficult to adjust my mind to the fact that here was a doctor of something or other at Cambridge University who seemed greatly excited over a piece of bone the old man had sent him. // you are right and this belongs to Cro-Magnon man, then I don't need to tell you how important it is. The dating puts it earlier than Les Eyzies or subsequent finds. I respect and understand your secrecy, but in view of the importance of this discovery I feel you have no right to keep the location to yourself. I have agreed to attend a conference at The Hague and will be arriving in Amsterdam on Sunday, March 16. .

Now, I was being asked to see him instead, and I wondered what the point was as I carried my suitcase up to my old room.

There I found the bed had been made up ready for me. It seemed an odd gesture in view of the things she had said. The water heater had been switched on, too, so that I was able to have a bath, which I badly needed. Lying there, naked and relaxed, I was amused by the girl's clumsy attempts to involve me. I was also mildly curious, so that after my bath I went back down to the bureau in the study and got the bundle of Cambridge letters from the secret cavity.

The signature was the same untidy scrawl, but they told me little about Dr. Gilmore. They were chiefly answers to scientific queries, all typewritten and highly technical, except one, which was in the Doctor's untidy hand and might almost have been referring to some criminal activity. Whilst I sympathize with you, I cannot, of course, condone. What you have done places you beyond the pale. Whatever you write, whatever you discover from now on, will be suspect. You have affronted the moral rectitude of a luorld that, whilst often confusing truth, believes in it absolutely. However, whilst I cannot obviously defend your conduct in public, I want you to know that I understand and wish that it will make no difference to our long-standing friendship. That was all. Nothing stated, only implied. The notepaper was headed Trinity College, Cambridge, and dated April 21, 1935.

It was a long time ago now, but like the love letters from my mother, it had obviously been put there for greater secrecy. I found some Fuckink geneva in the usual place in the dining room sideboard, and as I sipped the old familiar liquor and browsed through his bookshelves, I wondered what he had done that had brought such a severe reprimand from a man who seemed to have been both tutor and a life-long friend.

The books ranged over everything associated with anthropology, and words and dates, sometimes whole passages, had been underlined; most of them had notes scribbled in the margin. A passage about the behaviour of an unusual insect caught my eye, chiefly because I had actually seen the coral-coloured flower take wing and it took me back to the dim-remembered life in Kenya.

The oblong blossom of this artificial flower is formed by the clustering of moths on a dead tiuig. An example of insect camouflage-yes, but it is something much more. Shake the twig and the moths rise in flight, then after a while they settle again on the twig and for a moment they are just moths of different colours craiuling over each other with no apparent purpose. But purpose there is, for in another moment order has replaced chaos and, suddenly, there is the flower again, the full flower, all coral-so perfect a blaze, so natural a form that humans are fooled into leaning doiun for the scent and birds ignore it in their flighting search for food. But there is more to this wonder yet, for the fiattids have not assumed a natural camouflage; there is, in fact, no real blossom that approximates to the form they take instinctively. They have thought this form up for themselves, creating it in the same way that an abstract painter creates a picture. And if you breed these little insects, you luill find that each batch of eggs produces at least one luith all-green wings, whose place will always be at the tip, several with shades of green tinged with coral, and the rest pure coral. In other words, the whole fantastic hoax is self-perpetuating from the egg to the twig.

For some reason insects and birds had meant more to me in those early years in Kenya than all the big game. Even the long journeys through the bush in the battered old Plymouth were remembered chiefly for the birds around Lake Victoria. The passage was heavily underlined with a date scribbled in the margin. And on the second shelf I found an album of photographs with pictures of caves and digs. One of them, heavily ringed in red, was of a scattering of bones, including the lower jaw and part of a cranium that looked human, laid out in the dirt at the bottom of some pit. Against the picture he had written: Only a hundred miles from Olduvai! The picture was not a very clear one, but further on in the album they became sharper and less faded, as though he had been able to switch to a better camera, and the captions ranged from Africa to Turkey, even Russia.

It seemed strange that he had never been able to communicate his own enthusiasm to me. I could remember his voice, dry and detached, talking about bones and flints and ape-men with long, impossible names, and it had all meant nothing to me, nothing at all. No doubt I was a great disappointment to him, but I couldn't help being the boy I was, and beating me hadn't helped. I could remember those beatings more distinctly than anything he had ever told me-his impatience, that barely concealed sadistic streak.

The books, and the geneva perhaps, made me feel suddenly sad. If he had gone about it differently, our relationship might have been changed. My life, my outlook, my whole behaviour pattern, too. I had finished my drink and was just on the point of going to bed, when my eye was caught by a group of foreign books on the bottom shelf, the dust wrappers still on and the titles curiously anonymous in an unknown alphabet. They contained no marked passages, no notes, but some of the pictures had been reproduced from the photographs in the album. They were, in fact, duplicate copies of two titles published in Russian. And on the same shelf, I found other copies published in Berlin, Prague and Warsaw. The East German edition carried his name in recognizable print-Dr. P. H. Van der Voort. I could find no sign of an English, or even a Dutch edition. He had always disliked the English, but that did not explain why his work only seemed to be recognized by the Iron Curtain countries.

I went to bed then. The wind had died, the rain had stopped. The house was very still as I lay thinking of the last time I had slept in that room, the urgent desire I had had to get away, the wild plans I had made. Now, once again, I had plans to make and it was a long time before I could get to sleep.

The sun was shining when I woke next morning. It was late and by the time I had been out for coffee it was almost eleven. I got back to the house only a few minutes before they arrived. Dr. Gilmore was small, neat and very alert for his age. "So you're Pieter Van der Voort's son." His hand was dry and barely touched mine, but his eyes and his smile had extraordinary warmth.

"Dr. Gilmore is a palaeontologist also," the girl said.

"Which means what exactly?" It was a word I had never really understood.

Dr. Gilmore smiled. "Put crudely, I'm a bone man-an expert on all types of fossils. It derives from the Greek: palaios — old; ontologia-the study of being. I like to think it was because he studied under me that your father specialized in palaeontology."

"I always thought of him as an anthropologist."

"Anthropology is a broad term covering the whole study of man."

"Dr. Gilmore is a leading authority on Stone Age Man," the girl said. "He is the author of Neolithic Settlements of Eastern Europe."

I took them up to the study and the old man paused in the doorway, his eyes travelling over the room. "I take it that this is where Pieter worked. I often wondered. ." His gaze went unerringly to the bureau and he walked over to it and stood for a moment, peering closely at the skull and the artefacts. He was like a bird, his eyes bright, his movements quick. But age showed in the stoop of his shoulders and in the dry, parchment texture of his skin, which was slightly chapped with the winter's cold. "There you are. Miss Winters," he said, turning to the girl. "That's what all the trouble was about." His voice, his whole manner, was extraordinarily boyish. He shook his head. "Too clever. Too clever by half, you see."

I sat him down at the desk and offered him a cigarette. He hesitated, smiling quietly to himself. "I have been told to cut down." But he took one all the same and I lit it for him.

"You wanted to see me," I said.

He nodded and leaned back in the swivel chair, holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, puffing at it quickly, drawing the smoke into his lungs. "But I don't know whether it will help. I was hoping to find you-" he hesitated- "a more academic type. Now I'm not certain that it will do any good, particularly as I gather you haven't seen your father for some time."

"Not for eight years," I said.

"It's as long as that, is it?"

"We didn't get on very well. ."

"No, no-I understand. Miss Winters has told me something of your relationship. A very difficult man. Very brilliant. Too brilliant in some ways. I would go further-a genius. Men of that calibre are never easy to live with." He waved his hand at me. "Sit down, my dear fellow, sit down."

I hesitated. As long as I was standing I felt I could cut the interview short. I didn't see what he wanted, why the girl had brought him here. And I didn't want to get involved. "I know nothing about his world-"

"Of course. I understand. And that makes it very difficult for me-to explain my sense of uneasiness." He looked at me, a long, appraising stare, his eyes grey like pebbles as they caught the light from the windows. "But perhaps that's an advantage-that you know nothing about his world." And then he surprised me by saying, "I met your mother once. In London during the last war-nineteen forty-two, I think; I was up for a meeting of the Royal Society and he brought her to see me at my hotel. A charming woman, very good for him. Gave him confidence. They should have married." He was smiling to himself, a gentle, quiet smile. "Companionship of that sort would have made all the difference. She had a strong, unselfish personality."

"He has a strong personality, too," I said, wondering at his reference to a sense of uneasiness.

"Yes, but not unselfish." And then abruptly he said, "He kept a Journal. Has done for many years. Did you know that?"

"A leather-covered book?"

He nodded.

"Yes," I said. "There's a secret cavity in the bureau over there. That's where he kept it." And without thinking I told him how I had once surprised him writing in it.

He nodded. "Yes, that would be it. A very personal document."

"Well, it's not in the usual place," I said, thinking that that was what he had come for. "I imagine he's taken it with him."

But he shook his head. "No, I have it. And there are altogether three volumes of it now. I've just read them. That's why I wanted to see him. It's a very strange, very disturbing record-not a diary exactly, something much deeper, more personal. It covers about twenty years of his life-intermittent entries, about himself, his thoughts, his inmost fears and hopes. And then suddenly, when he was ill. ." He stopped there and turned to the girl. "You tell him. Miss Winters. It will have more immediacy coming from you."

She nodded. "He was going to burn it. That was the night I telephoned for a doctor. He had me light a fire here in the study. He was in bed at the time. I thought perhaps he was feeling better, and then he sent me out for something. When I came back, I found him down here, half-collapsed in his chair, and the Journals were lying on the floor. Several pages had already been ripped out and their charred remains were lying in the grate. When I asked him why he had done it, he said, 'I don't want him to have it. I don't want anybody to have it.' And he asked me to put it on the fire for him. 'That's the best place for it.' "

She was sitting very tense, her hands clasped tight in her lap. And when I asked her who it was he wanted to conceal the Journal from, she looked at me, her eyes wide. "Why, from you, of course." And she added, "But I wouldn't do it. I refused. And when he began to recover, I think he was glad. In the end he sent it to Dr. Gilmore. I posted it for him just before he left. He was up half the night writing a letter of explanation."

Gilmore nodded. "It needed explanation. In toto it amounts to an indictment of Man based on a self-portrait as it were." He hesitated. "This is something it may be difficult for you to understand. A practical man, you're naturally impatient of the sort of introspective self-analysis on which Pieter Van der Voort was engaged. 'Probing the ultimate depths of Man's aggressive instincts,' he called it, and he talked of the Devil and a spiritual struggle. It's all there, all his instinctual urges-the good and the bad. It goes back to his original thesis." And he added a little wistfully, "I should have come here before-as soon as I had read it. A man like that-alone, delving into the fundamental problems of mankind … I should have come at once."

"Then why didn't you?" I asked.

"My dear fellow, if one did everything one ought to. . But I did come here once. When was it? In nineteen fifty-four, I think, for a conference rather like the one that has brought me to Holland now. But there was nobody here, the house empty. He was in Russia, and of course his reputation. ." He gave a little sigh. "You must realize I had an official position." '

"But since you retired," I said. "Surely you could have-"

"My dear boy." He held up his hand, smiling. "That is just the point. Until last vac I was still teaching, still Reader in Physical Anthropology. Then all the business of handing over. I had the money to travel-a stroke of extraordinary luck-but never the time. Students are very demanding and to teach well …" He drew a last puff from his cigarette and stubbed it out in the onyx bowl on the desk that had come from Turkey. "How I envy men like Teilhard de Chardin- Java Man, Pekin Man, off to Africa to check on Leakey's discoveries. As a Jesuit he had his problems, but he wasn't tied to generations of students. And your father-I even envy him, too, in a way. You know he was brought up in France? His family had a house at St. Leon-sur-Vezere and he had the priceless advantage of coming under the influence of the Abbe Breuil at the precocious age of eleven. This was when Breuil and other French savants were digging into the limestone caves of the Vezere to reveal more and more engravings and paintings done by men fifteen to sixty thousand years ago. It was a remarkable experience for a young boy and it set him on his way at a very early age, marked him for life, you might say."

He leaned back, his eyes half-closed. "Breuil, Peyrony, Capitan, Riviere-he met them all at the most impressionable age, squirming down limestone cracks, exploring caves that no man had been in for thousands of years. It was not only

the savants, you see, it was the fact that he was living and breathing the prehistory of a long dead age of Man's evolution." He nodded his head slowly, opening his eyes to gaze out of the window. "A boy with that background. ." He sighed, I think in envy. "Hardly surprising that he was the most dedicated student I ever had through my hands. But the thesis he elected to work on … It was on the Weapon as the basis of Man's development." He shook his head, smiling a little sadly. "They didn't like it, of course. It was just after the first war and he was ahead of his time. He only just scraped through, and that annoyed him. He went off to South Africa, where his family still had relations. In fact, I think they returned there just before the Germans invaded France in nineteen forty."

He looked down at his hands, frowning. "Pieter's sensitivity was always his greatest weakness." He made a little movement of his hands, a gesture almost of helplessness. "And to choose a thesis like that. ." He shook his head, reaching for the packet of cigarettes I'd left on the desk, and when he had taken one, he sat staring out over the canal, his eyes half-closed, tapping it against the edge of the desk. "It was flying in the face of accepted thinking, and of the Cliurch, of course. Man the Tool-maker was one thing, Man the Weapon-maker. ." He smiled and lit the cigarette. "Now, after a second world war, after Korea, Vietnam, Nigeria, the Middle East, the pendulum has swung-from optimism we have switched to pessimism, forgetting Man the Thinker-that we have within us the power of good as well as of evil." The grey eyes, turned inwards, suddenly stared directly at me. "Eight years-that's a long time. Do you know what he looks like now?"

"He can't have changed all that much," I said.

"Perhaps not." He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. "To me, of course, he has aged a great deal-beyond his years. And that in itself is disturbing. But it is the loneliness, the absorption …" He pulled two photographs from the envelope and passed them across to me. "They were taken in Greece last year by John Cassellis, a young American

who studied under me. Pieter had written to me that, after investigating a possible site in the Jannina area, he had worked his way down to the coast and found nothing, but that he was now engaged on a dig that might prove of considerable importance. He didn't say where it was, but his letter was postmarked Levkas. It's one of the Ionian islands on the west coast of Greece and I suggested to Cassellis, who was doing a tour of the Aegean and Asia Minor, that he try and locate him. I thought he might be of some use to Pieter since the boy had time to spare."

They were colour prints enlarged to postcard size. The first showed the curve of a cliff overhang, dark in shadow, with a glimpse of blue sea beyond. A figure was seated cross-legged in the foreground, bare to the waist, his thin body burned almost black by the sun. He had a piece of stone in his hand and he was examining it, his head bent, his face in shadow and half obscured by his white hair.

"Now look at the second," Gilmore said. "Cassellis was using a cine-camera and it's a frame from a shot taken at the moment when Pieter looked up to find a stranger intruding on his territory."

He had zoomed in on the figure itself. The old man was staring straight at the camera, his hands hovering protectively over the stone. "What is it?" I asked. "He's trying to conceal it."

"A stone lamp, I think."

But I barely heard him. I was staring at the face, so lined and aged, and the expression secretive, almost hostile, like a dog guarding a bone. "Is that stone important?" I asked.

"Perhaps-I don't know. And Cassellis didn't comment, or even say where he''d found him-only that he was on his own. A very lonely figure was the way he put it in the letter he wrote me, and that's not good. Not at his age and with his background."

I handed the photographs back to him. "What are you suggesting-that he's in danger of going mad?" It seemed the only

conclusion to be drawn from what he was saying, and it didn't altogether surprise me.

"Mad?" His eyes flicked open, staring at me, grey and direct. "You tell me what madness is. A man who is mad is only somebody who has moved on to a different mental plane. However. ." He gave a little shrug. "My thoughts are of no concern to you. You're young, full of life, and I'm old enough to dwell, a little unhealthily perhaps, on the final frontiers of the mind." He paused, still staring at me. "You're different. I can see that. You will be very good for him." He cocked an eyebrow at me, waiting.

I didn't say anything, and after a moment he went on, "Miss Winters has told me about a book he is writing. The self-analysis of his Journal forms the basis, and this has so coloured his view of world events, of the urges that produce mob violence in a world where man has proliferated to the limits of natural tolerance, that it is leading him inevitably to the conclusion that modern man is a rogue species and doomed. This gloomy view ignores the fact that man's aggressive instincts are the mainspring of all his achievements."

I thought of my own aggressive instincts, the way my fist, my whole body had moved, and the man going backwards over the edge of the oil pier, that last, thin, high-pitched cry, and the way the other man had closed in, his features distorted by the need to attack. "I can't help him," I said. "I've told you, we don't get on together. We've nothing in common."

"He's your father."

"By adoption."

He looked at me for a while, not saying anything, and the directness of his gaze gave me an uneasy feeling, as though there were something he hadn't told me. "I'm almost eighty," he said finally. "Too old to go out myself. Miss Winters has offered to go. But it would be difficult for a girl. Anyway, that isn't the answer. He needs your sort of strength. Particularly now, when he has made what may prove to be an important discovery. He will have great difficulty in convincing the academic world."

"Why, if he's as brilliant as you say?" I was thinking of the books on the shelf behind me. "He's published in Russia. If they recognize him. ."

But he shook his head. "The Russians backed him because his writing was helpful to the Soviet image. With their money he was able to lead expeditions to the Caucasian mountains, to Turkey and up through Georgia into Kazak, one I believe as far as Tashkent, and the books he wrote as a result both supported the view that Homo sapiens sapiens came from the east; in other words, that civilized man stemmed from the Soviet Union. But now he certainly hasn't the support of the Russians, for he's changed his line of thinking. As a result, he's had to go it alone, using his own resources."

"He's nothing left now," the girl said. "This is the third expedition he's financed. He's operating on a shoe-string and in such a hurry he's gone out into the mountains of Macedonia before the winter is over. He's killing himself."

"To prove what?" I asked.

"That modern man came north, from Africa."

"Does it matter?"

"Not to you," she said tartly.

Dr. Gilmore sighed. "I appreciate that it's difficult for you to understand, but Good God! If I were your age and gifted with a brilliant father. ."

"He's not my father," I said curtly. "He adopted me. That's all."

His eyebrows lifted and then he stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. "Very well. But at least I have told you what I felt you should know. What you do about it is your own affair. I can only repeat that in my view he needs you very badly indeed." He glanced at his watch and turned to the girl. "I have to go now. Professor Hecht is expecting me at noon." He got to his feet.

I opened the door for him and he paused momentarily, taking in the room again with that alert, bird-like glance of his. "A pity," he murmured. "If I could only have talked with him myself. ." He gave me a long, searching look, and I

thought for a moment he was going to appeal to me again. But then he turned and went down the stairs with astonishing agility.

I was lucky enough to find a taxi for him and as he stepped into it, he touched me on the arm. "Think about what I have told you. Pieter Van der Voort is a very remarkable man, but he shovdd not be too much alone." He got in then and the taxi drove off, leaving me standing there with the girl. It was a perfect spring morning, the canal a bright gleam under the arches of the bridge, the sky a cloudless blue. It was an awkward moment, the silence stretching between us like a gulf.

Finally she said, "You don't intend to do anything, do you-about your father?" "No."

She stared at me, her tight little face cold and hostile. Finally, she turned without a word, and walked away towards the bridge. I watched her go, and when I went back into the house it seemed more empty than ever. I sat in the chair where Dr. Gilmore had sat, staring out over the canal and thinking about what he had told me. I had never thought of the old man as being important in the academic world. A genius, he had said-and difficult to live with. He had certainly been that; but now time and the emptiness of the house made it all seem different, the shadow of his personality touched with greatness. I was beginning to realize what I had been living with. And his loneliness-that was something even I could understand.

But his world was not mine and right now I had more immediate problems facing me. I got my raincoat and went out into the roar of the traffic, walking quickly towards the docks. Five hours and a lot of drinking later I got wind of a vacancy on an ore carrier completing repairs at a shipyard in the Maas. The third officer had been taken to hospital with suspected peritonitis and the ship was sailing next day for Seven Islands in the St. Lawrence. I went back to the house to get my case, intending to spend the night in Rotterdam and be at the yard first thing in the morning. Drinking around the dockside

taverns costs money and I had changed my last fiver by the time it was dusk.

It had been a long day and my feet seemed barely connected to my body as I stumbled back along the canal. The house-barges all had their lights on, the square, hulked shap›es warmed by the lit curtains. In some the curtains had been left drawn back in the manner of the Dutch country towns, and in these I glimpsed the comfort of families at home, the flicker of TV sets. It was cold, a touch of frost in the air, and mist was hanging like a grey veil over the waters of the canal.

In my stumbling' haste, I nearly passed the house. I checked, and focused carefully on the traffic. It was the evening rush hour and they drive fast in Amsterdam. Standing there, waiting to cross, I gradually registered the fact that there were lights on in the house, the fanlight over the door and the tall windows above. I crossed the road, fumbled the key into the lock, and hauled myself up the stairs by the rope hand-support, impatience and anger mounting in me at the unwelcome intrusion.

I found her waiting for me in the study, sitting in the swivel chair with a book in her lap and the curves of her body picked out by the Anglepoise lamp. "What the hell are you doing here?" My voice sounded thick in my ears. She had turned at my entrance and her face was in shadow, so that I could not see her expression. But I could guess what she was thinking, and that made me angrier still. "There's no point in your talking to me. I've got the chance of a ship and I'm leaving for Rotterdam right away."

"A ship?" I could almost hear her waiting for an explanation.

"I'm a ship's officer-I forgot to tell you." I was just at the stage where sarcasm sounds clever.

"Oh-then I don't quite understand. A Mynheer Borg called whilst you were out. He seemed under the impression that you were going on some sort of a yachting trip in the Mediterranean."

"Why didn't he phone?"

"He couldn't. There isn't a phone here any more. The electricity would have been cut off by now, too, if they hadn't muddled the dates."

I leaned against the bureau, my head touching the glass. It was cool, the skull right under my nose and my eyes trying to focus on the cracks between plaster and bone. "Borg shouldn't have come here," I muttered. "What did he want?"

"I've no idea," she said coldly. "He mentioned that he'd seen something he thought would interest you in an English newspaper." I could feel her working herself up into a cold fury. "I've been waiting for you all afternoon. This morning I had a letter from my brother. I'd like you to read it. Or are you too drunk?"

"You read it for me," I said, "while I go up and pack." What the hell did I care about her damned brother? What was his name? Hans? Yes-Hans. Well, to hell with him, it was Borg that worried me, and I turned to go.

She musLhave got up from the chair very quickly, for suddenly she was there, between me and the door. "You can read Dutch, can't you?"

I nodded automatically and she thrust the sheet of paper at me. "Read it then."

The light was on her face now and I could see her quite plainly. She looked pale and tired, very intense. I pushed the letter aside. "I have to hurry." I didn't know when the last train went and I wasn't going to miss it. Borg wouldn't have come here unless I'd killed the man.

"You're running away again." Her eyes flashed, colour showed suddenly in her cheeks. "You've spent your whole life running-running. ."

"Have it your own way," I said, wearily, and I lurched past her towards the door.

She hit me then. "You callous bastard!" It was an open-handed slap across the face, and I picked her up and flung her back against the wall. It knocked the breath out of her.

"Now stop making a bloody nuisance of yourself," I said.

go Levkas Man

"I've got problems enough of my own without having somebody else's troubles hung round my neck."

"It's about your father." She was sprawled slackly against the wall, breathing heavily.

"My father!" I almost laughed in her face. "My father's head was sliced from his body by a gang of native boys when I was ten." I saw her eyes widen at the shock of what I had said. It shocked me, too, for I could still see it lying there on the verandah, the moustache, the thick head of hair, the sunburned face with the teeth bared, all bright with blood, and the trunk some feet away, inert and lifeless like a rag dummy. I was suddenly almost sober. "Forget it," I muttered. "It was years ago." I was thinking of those letters in the bureau, wishing I had never seen them. "I'll go up and pack now." And I went quickly up to my room.

It didn't take me long to throw the little I had into my suitcase and she was still there when I came down. She was sitting in the chair again, her body slack, the letter on the desk beside her. "You're going now." It was a statement, not a question, her voice flat and without expression.

I nodded, hesitating, unwilling to leave her like this. "Better tell me what your brother says."

She gave a little shrug, a gesture of hopelessness. "There's no point now." She turned her head and I saw she had been crying. "I'm sorry for what I said." The toneless way she spoke, I didn't know whether she meant it or not. "I hope you get the job you want."

I thanked her, and that was that. I left her sitting there at his desk and went downstairs, out into the streets again. The mist had thickened, the lights all blurred, and it was cold. I caught the last train and spent a miserable night in a cheap hotel in Schiedam. When I went to the yard in the morning, I found tugs standing by and the ship ready to be towed out into the stream. She was sailing as soon as she had bunkered, and the third officer was back on board. He had strained a muscle, that was all.

I took a bus down-river to the Europort. I was so short of money by then that I would have taken a job on any ship. But there was nothing immediately available, and in the end I went back to Amsterdam. There at least the roof over my head was free. But by the time I had paid the fare and had had coffee and a sandwich at the railway station, I had only a few guilders left in my pocket.

My train got in just after five. I took a Number 5 tram as far as the Ruyschstraat and walked back across the Niewe Amstel bridge to Wilhelm Borg's shop. There was nothing else for me to do now, and anyway I wanted to know what he'd seen in the English papers. This time there was a young woman in charge. She was small, dark, expensively dressed, and had a diamond on her left hand that would have kept me in idleness for at least a year. I gave her my name and she asked me to wait. "Wilhelm is engaged at the moment." She spoke Dutch with what I think was a Belgian accent. But at least Borg was in. I put my suitcase down and seated myself on what she assured me was a genuine sixteenth-century Italian chair. It was high-backed, ornately carved, and the colours of the leather had faded to a soft richness. A large Buddha sat facing me, cross-legged on an ornate cabinet. The oak and the brasswork were all gone.

"Quite a change since I was last here," I said.

"Ja, ja. All this. ." The diamond flashed in the light from the glass chandelier. "It is new, and in a few days it will have been shipped out and more will come in." The telephone rang and she answered it, speaking swiftly in German. She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. "I have remembered now," she said, switching into English. "I was in Dusseldorf when you came before." She leaned down over the telephone and reached into a drawer. "Wilhelm said to give you this if you called again." She handed me a press-cutting from the Daily Telegraph and I read it whilst she got on with her call. It was just a short paragraph headed: POLISH SEAMAN DROWNED. He hadn't looked like a Pole to me, but they gave his name as Zilowski and referred briefly to a dockside brawl. The paragraph ended: The police are interested in dis-

covering the whereabouts of Paul Van der Voort, second officer of the tanker Ocean Bluebird, who may he able to help them with their enquiries. I knew the formula. It meant a charge of murder, or at best manslaughter. There was no mention of Mark Janovic.

The door to the inner office opened and Borg came out with a man who looked English. He went with him to the door. "Okay, we ship it across as soon as we have made up a complete container." A taxi had drawn up outside and Borg stood there with a big smile on his face while the other got in. He waited there until it had driven off: then he closed the door and turned to me. "Nina showed you the cutting? Good. Then come into the office." And he added as he led the way, "That man who has just left-we ship stuff over to him and he puts it up for auction in London as part of an estate." His manner was friendly, almost confidential. "That way we get good prices and no questions asked." And he added, "All my arrangements are very efficient, you see."

"What's the proposition?" I asked.

He sat himself down at the desk. "You are broke, ja? And you need to get away until they have lost interest in you." He smiled comfortably, knowing I was in a jam, and his offer was tailored to the situation-all expenses, including the chartering and running of the boat, but no salary, only the vague promise of a bonus on delivery. "And if this consignment goes well, then maybe we make it a regular run, eh?"

"What's the risk?"

He smiled and reached into a drawer. "For a man like you, very little I think." He produced a rolled-up chart and spread it out on the desk. "We have now decided on Samos as the best place-about early May I think." It was the British Admiralty Chart No. 1530 covering the eastern half of the Greek island of Samos and part of the Turkish shore. "As you see, the straits between the island and the mainland are very narrow here, less than a mile wide. Ideal for your purpose. And there is a good port." He pointed to Pythagorion just west of the southern entrance to the straits. "You can lie there until you

receive final instructions. Okay?" He let go of the chart and it rolled itself up. "Now, about the boat." He was still speaking in English, slowly and with a strong accent. "There is a man in Malta-Barrett. I have met him. His boat is called Coromandel and he lives on board. He is an engineer, has very little money and is also somewhat-" He hesitated, searching for the right word. "Unworldly, ja?" He smiled.

"And that's the boat I'm to charter?"

He nodded. "I have cabled him already."

"Is he a good seaman?"

He shrugged. "You are the seaman, so what does it matter? But inshore-ja-he is good. And he knows the Aegean. He has done a lot of diving-for old wrecks and underwater cities."

I asked him then about the nature of the consignment and he laughed. "No drugs, nothing like that. Just antiques. And small objects at that-bracelets, drinking cups, pottery. You can easily stow it out of sight in a boat the size of Coromandel."

"It's stolen, I take it?"

"Not at all." He managed to look suitably hurt. "My friends will have purchased it at the market price. Of course, the market price to a peasant who has been plundering the graves at Alacahiiyiik is not the same as the open market price in, say, London or New York. But first you have to get it there." He sighed. "Governments, you see. It's always the same-export restrictions, Customs dues, licences; it is the biggest headache I have in the antique business."

"And it provides you with the fattest profits-so long as you can find fools who'll risk their necks for you."

He raised his eyebrows slightly, the babyish face blandly innocent, and then he shrugged and said, "What do you want me to do-inform the English police about you?" And he added, smiling, "Come here at ten o'clock tomorrow morning. Nina will have your air ticket by then. Okay?" He was on his feet and moving towards the door. No offer of a drink this time.

"Where have I got to deliver the stuff?"

"Pantelleria. But we can discuss the details in the morn-ing."

I hesitated. "This fellow Barrett-he can't be so innocent he'll agree-"

"How you fix it with him is your business."

He had the door open and I paused, wondering how sure he was of me. "See you tomorrow at ten," he said. It couldn't be easy to find the right people for his sort of business.

"Maybe," I replied.

There were stars that night as I walked back through Amsterdam and I barely noticed the traffic. My mind was already at sea. The first voyage I had ever made in a tanker had been outward in ballast from Southampton, through the Mediterranean to Kuwait. That was in 1966, and by the time we were loaded Nasser had closed the Canal. Since then all my voyages had been by way of the Cape. I had never seen the Mediterranean again and all I knew of Malta was a hazy rampart of buildings looking like cliffs in the early morning sunshine as we'd ploughed our way eastwards about three miles offshore. But it was the stars I chiefly remembered, for before then I had been in cargo ships on the North Atlantic run; the night sky was so clear we could watch sputniks and satellites wheeling across the Milky Way.

As I approached the house, I glanced up at the windows, half-expecting Sonia Winters to be waiting there for me. But they were dark, and when I went up the stairs into the study there was no message for me. I had a vague feeling of disappointment. She had seemed to haunt the place like a stray cat, and now that I had thrown her out, I was conscious of the emptiness and the past closing in again. I took my suitcase up to my room. The bed was unmade, the towel I had used still lying on the floor and the air cold from the window I had left open.

I should have gone out then and walked the city until I was tired enough to sleep. But this was my last night, the last time I should be alone in the house, and something held me there, something more powerful than myself.

I made the bed and went down into the kitchen. The fridge was empty, but in one of the cupboards I found a stale packet of biscuits that the mice had been at and two tins of sardines tucked away behind old jam jars and a litter of plastic bags. It wasn't much of a meal, but it was something, and I poured the remains of the geneva into a tumbler and took it through into the study. I ate at his desk, sitting in his chair and browsing through an English book called Frameworks for Dating Fossil Man. It had a chapter on the changing levels of sea and land, and what had attracted me was a table giving mean height above present sea level at various stages: Sicilian showed ± 100 metres, and Calabrian ± 200 metres. But the rest of the chapter was beyond me. For example:

One of the most important events in the history of the Mediterranean shores was the "Great Regression" sometimes known as the Roman or Romanian regression which followed the "Milazzian" (or as some prefer, Sicilian II) and preceded the Tyrrhenian stage of high sea-level. The fact that it coincided with a very striking change in the composition of the marine molluscan fauna is of considerable interest because the Mindel Glaciation, with which this regression probably corresponded, was a time of equally dramatic change in the continental mammalian fauna (Zeuner, 1959a, p. 285).

That paragraph, and others, reminded me of the way the

old man had talked, and I wondered why scientists had to make things so unbelievably abstruse. There can he little doubt that the immediately preceding drop in sea level by nearly ^00 feet was eustatic What the hell did eustatic mean?. . and that it reflected the withdraiual of water during the WiXrm Glaciation. Vaguely I remembered that the level of the oceans had varied in geological time according to the amount of water held in suspension in the form of ice.

I sat there for a time, sipping my drink, thinking of the seas I had sailed and how changed the shoreline would have been with the water level lowered by 300 feet. I could not recall what the depths were in the Malta Channel, but all that area of the Mediterranean was shallow. Volcanic, too-those banks that had emerged, been reported, and had then submerged again.

Thinking about the Mediterranean I suddenly remembered my birth certificate. As proof that I had another name, that I had been born Paul Scott, it might be useful. I reached down and got the old cigar box out of the bottom drawer of the desk. I was just about to fold the papers small enough to fit into my wallet when I saw that the half-sheet of notepaper announcing my birth had something written on the back. I unpinned it and turned it over, laying it flat on the desk and smoothing it out as I read the words my mother had written twenty-eight years ago: My husband will never know, of course, but it was wrong, wrong, ivrong-of me, of you. We should never have met again. Now God knows whose child he is. Just those three lines, nothing more, except her name- Ruth. She had signed it. If she hadn't signed it I could have pretended it was a lie, something added later. But it was in the same hand-the same hand as the love letters in the bureau. Christ Almighty! To discover you were born a bastard and that your mother was sleeping with a man old enough to be her father. Or was he? What age would the old man have been then? I didn't know. All I knew was that the last childish tie, clung to through all the years of loneliness following the tragedy, was now gone, killed by the lines my mother had added, now lying faded in the pool of light cast by the Angle-poise lamp.

My first reaction was one of anger. I was filled with a deep, instinctive sense of shame. But then, as I thought about it, my mood changed, for I had no doubt, no doubt at all. Everything suddenly made sense-the long, vividly remembered journey to Europe, his meeting me at Schipol Airport and the years in this house. No wonder Dr. Gilmore had looked at me so strangely when I had insisted that he was only my father by adoption. And now that I knew the truth, the whole relationship took on a deeper significance. I understood at last the emotions of love and hate that had always existed between us.

I pinned the sheets of paper together again-my mother's note, my birth certificate and the adoption papers. It was all there, the whole story. Why hadn't I realized it before? I should have known the truth without my mother's frantic confession of guilt. And he had never told me. In all those years he had never even implied that I owed him a deeper allegiance than that of an adopted son. Why? Was it just the code of an earlier generation, their greater chivalry towards women, or had it been the fear that I might not understand a love that must have been compelling and uncontrollable?

I sat there for a long time, the papers in my hand. The conviction that he was my natural father-a certainty that was instinctive rather than logical-affected me profoundly as I went over in my mind all that Dr. Gilmore had said. It gave me a sense of pride I had never had before, pride in him and in that part of me that I now recognized as belonging to him. We were so entirely different on the surface-but underneath … I was smiling to myself, remembering the latent hostility, my struggle to survive against the strength of his personality, when my thoughts were interrupted by the knocker banging at the front door. I slipped the papers into my wallet and went down to find a man of about forty-five standing there.

"You're Dr. Van der Voort's son, are you?" He spoke English with a North Country accent and my body suddenly froze. But then he said, "I'm Professor Holroyd of London University. Gilmore told me I'd find you here."

I was too relieved to say anything. I just stood there, staring at him. He had a pipe in his mouth and his face was round and smooth, his manner brisk. "I'd like a word with you."

I took him up to the study and he went straight over to the swivel chair and sat himself down. "I haven't much time," he said. "I'm attending a conference at The Hague and I'm due shortly at the Rijksmuseum." His overcoat was unbuttoned and his dark suit hung on him so loosely it might have been made for somebody else. "I'm not a man who believes in beating about the bush. I've done some checking up on your father. I'll tell you why later."

Though he was speaking with his pipe clamped between his teeth, he still managed to arrange his mouth in a smile. The smile, and the twinkle that went with it, were both produced to order. He thrust his head forward in a way that I was sure he had found effective. "He was a Communist. You know that, I imagine."

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Your co-operation. That's all." He took his pipe out of his mouth and began to fill it. "You're not a Communist yourself, are you?"

"No."

"You reacted against your father's ideological principles, eh?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, I presume you are aware of his political activities."

"He was helped by the Russians-I know that. But only from Dr. Gilmore."

"I see." He lit his pipe, puffing at it quickly and watching me over the flame, his eyes narrowed. "I'd better fill in the picture for you then. Pieter Van der Voort joined the Communist Party as a student in nineteen twenty-eight. He resigned in nineteen forty following the Russian invasion of Finland. I have no information as to whether he renewed his membership following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in nineteen forty-one. Probably not, since he would have been suspect as a revisionist. We can, however, regard him as a fellow-traveller. Certainly he was in Russia in nine-

teen forty-six and was mixing freely with their most prominent academics in the years immediately after the war. Later he returned to Amsterdam, and from nineteen fifty onwards he was kept supplied with substantial funds. This enabled him to embark on a whole series of costly expeditions, the results of which were published in Russian scientific journals. Later, they were incorporated into books produced by the Russian State Publishing House with eulogistic forewords by Ivan Szorkowski, a very mediocre, but politically powerful, professor of Moscow University."

"Are you suggesting the work he did during this period was purely political?"

"No, no. The articles he wrote for the scientific journals, which concerned only the results of his expeditions, were of universal interest. They established him as one of the most outstanding men in his field."

"Then why are you telling me this?"

He held up his hands. "Let me finish. Then I think you'll see. The books were undoubtedly political. They drew certain quite unwarranted conclusions. And since these were favourable to the Russian image, they were widely reviewed and acclaimed throughout the Communist world. The second of them was published in nineteen fifty-six, the year Russia crushed the Hungarian uprising. He was, therefore, very much in the limelight at the precise moment when he was again faced with the sort of personal political dilemma that had caused him to resign his Party membership in nineteen forty."

He had been talking very fast, his pipe clenched between his teeth, so that I had difficulty in following him. Now he took it out of his mouth and looked across at me. "His father died in South Africa, I believe. Do you know when?"

"It was in nineteen fifty-nine," I said. "Why?"

He nodded. "Yes, that fits in nicely-the Hungarian uprising, his political doubts and then suddenly he finds himself for the first time financially independent."

"I don't believe it was just a question of money," I said.

He looked at me sharply. "Well, no-nineteen fifty-nine and 'sixty were the years of the great East African discoveries at Olduvai." The smile switched on briefly. "But money makes a difference, even to a scientist. It meant he no longer had to concentrate his efforts in the east. Instead, he switched his attention to the Central Mediterranean-to Malta, Sicily, North Africa. He w^as in Cyprus in nineteen sixty-four, and the following year he made his first expedition to Greece." He leaned back over the desk and tapped his pipe out in the onyx bowl. "Four years ago he suddenly offered a book to a British publishing house. That manuscript was the first indication I had that he had changed his line of thinking. It was based on an entirely new conception; nothing revolutionary, you understand, but the theories it advanced were new as far as he was concerned. The publishers asked me to advise them. I had no hesitation in recommending rejection."

"Why?"

"For many reasons, most of which will probably be beyond you."

"And it was never published?"

"As far as I know he never offered it to another London publisher."

He obviously sensed my hostility, for he added quickly, "I'm not the only scientist in the West who has followed his career with interest, many of us envious of the advantages of State patronage while deploring the inevitable distortion of facts. But there was nothing personal about my rejection of the book. Please understand that. It was a clever piece of writing, but not definitive, and I formed the impression that he was mainly concerned to convince himself of the validity of his own arguments. He had shifted his ground, you see." He leaned forward, his pipe clasped in both hands. "Just over a year ago I heard he was short of funds. He was then concentrating his energies on Greece, in the area of the Ionian Sea. As a member of a Committee that advises on the allocation of certain Government grants, I persuaded the Chairman to write to him suggesting this was something that might come within the scope of our Committee. There was no reply to this. But then, in November of last year. Lord Craigallan had a letter from him. No doubt you are well aware of your father's present financial straits. He admitted he could not mount another expedition unaided. In the end, we not only gave him a grant, but, through my university, put a Land-Rover at his disposal and also provided him with a very able assistant. I had a report from Cartwright just before I left London. He had already informed me that he had found Dr. Van der Voort difficult to work with. But I had no idea how bad things were between them until I read his report."

He paused there and I knew we had at last reached the object of the interview. He put his pipe back in his mouth. "You know, I suppose, that Van der Voort has disappeared. What you may not know is the circumstances."

I stared at him, my mind adjusting slowly to this new information.

"Cartwright has a broken wrist, and other injuries-fortunately minor." He shook his head. "A clash of personalities I can understand. That's always possible in an expedition. Men get tired. The Aveather makes camping uncomfortable. Disappointment saps morale." He was frowning angrily. "But in this case the weather was fine-cold, but fine-and after more than a month of slogging it through the mountains without achieving anything, they had just made a significant discovery. There was no justification for it whatsoever."

"You mean my father attacked him?"

"So Cartwright says. Van der Voort called him out of his tent. There was an argument and he went for him with a stick. It was night, and the attack was so unexpected Cartwright didn't have a chance to defend himself. He took to his heels and that saved him. He describes Van der Voort's behaviour as that of a maniac."

"What happened then? You say my father disappeared?"

"He drove off in the Land-Rover." He was looking at me curiously. "You didn't know about this?"

"No."

"I presumed you did-that it was the reason you were in Amsterdam." I could see his curiosity mounting. He took his pipe out of his mouth and I said quickly:

"Where did this happen?"

"In Greece, near a village called Despotiko up by the Albanian border."

"There can't be many Land-Rovers in Greece," I said. "The authorities ought to be able to trace it quite easily."

He nodded. "Of course. But Cartwright thought it inadvisable to contact the police. They had difficulty enough getting into the country. In any case, he found the Land-Rover himself, abandoned in the nearby town of Jannina. What is disturbing is that the expedition's funds were gone." Apparently they had been keeping the money in the tool locker for safety and the padlock had been forced. "We've cabled them additional funds, but the whole thing is unpleasant to say the least of it." He leaned his head forward, his eyes narrowed. "You haven't heard from your father at all?" No.

"It's just a coincidence then that you're here?"

"Yes."

He leaned back. "I was hoping perhaps you could help me. What I'm concerned about, you see, is my own responsibility in the matter. I sponsored the allocation of the Government grant and I feel it my duty to see that the taxpayers' money is not wasted." He was staring at me. "If anything happens to him you're presumably his heir."

I laughed. "I shouldn't think so for a minute." And then, because he was still staring at me, as though holding me responsible, I said, "It's nothing to do with me. And anyway, as I imderstand it, he hasn't any money."

"I wasn't thinking of money," he said. "But he was writing a book. That book would almost certainly give us the information we need to continue the work of this expedition. And since he hadn't got the manuscript with him, I presume it's here in this house, and if I may say so. ." He stopped at the sound of the street door closing and footsteps on the stairs.

It was Sonia Winters. She burst into the room and then checked at the sight of him sitting there at the desk. "I'm sorry. I didn't know you had anybody with you." She had been hurrying and her voice sounded breathless.

I introduced them. She seemed to have heard of Professor Holroyd, for she repeated his name and then stood there, staring at him, wide-eyed, in that infuriating way she had.

Holroyd smiled. "There's a young man with Dr. Van der Voort on his expedition-"

"My brother." Her voice was tight and controlled. Her eyes switched from Holroyd to me, and then back to Holroyd again. "I'd better go," she murmured. But she didn't move and her eyes remained fastened on him as though mesmerized.

I started to tell her what had happened, but she cut me short. "That's what I tried to tell you last night. Your father has disappeared. It's all in the letter I had from Hans-everything, if you'd only listened." Her gaze swung back to my visitor. "Why are you here?" She was suddenly so defensive, her tone so imperious, that even Holroyd was surprised and at a loss for words. She turned to me. "What does he want?"

"He's convinced my father was working on a book. ."

"He wants to see it?"

Holroyd began to explain about the grant again, but she cut him short. "First an East German professor trying to bribe me, then threatening. Now you. There isn't any book."

"Come, come. Miss Winters." Holroyd's features were still set in a smile, his whole expression moulded to charm. "He's had two books published in Russia. He wrote a third which he offered to a London publisher. Since then he's been on a number of expeditions. Don't tell me he hasn't been committing the results of those expeditions to writing. It wouldn't be natural."

"I was acting as his secretary," she said. "I should know."

"Well, if it's not in book form, then it's in notes-nobody exhausts his personal resources on a series of expeditions without recording the result."

She gave a little shrug. "You can't judge Dr. Van der Voort by your own or anybody else's standards. He kept everything

in his head." And she added pointedly, "He didn't trust anybody, you see."

"Then what was Gilmore talking about?" Professor Hol-royd's voice had sharpened. Her attitude had clearly got under his skin. "He said something about a Journal."

"Dr. Van der Voort's Journal would hardly interest you."

"Why not? A Journal-a diary-call it what you like. ."

"His Journal was concerned with behaviourism. It was a

very personal document, nothing to do with his expeditions or any discoveries. ."

"I don't believe it." His tone was blunt, his accent more pronounced. "A journal is just what I would expect him to keep; the basis for another book." He had risen to his feet, and now he moved towards her. He was a big, flabby man, and she looked tiny as she stood facing him. "Come on, lass. Better tell me where it is. He's disappeared, you know-with money that doesn't belong to him. I don't have to bring the authorities into it, but if the expedition is to go on, it must have all the necessary information." He stood there, waiting, while she hesitated.

Finally she said, "Very well then-Dr. Gilmore has it." "Gilmore?" He didn't bother to hide his annoyance. "But you have a copy, haven't you?"

She gave him a tight-lipped smile. "It was in manuscript."

"I see." He hesitated. "Well, I expect Dr. Gilmore will be

at the Rijksmuseum for tonight's lecture. I'll have a word with

him." He turned to me. "And I'll contact you again as soon

as I have any news. I take it this address will find you?"

I was about to say I was leaving next day, but Sonia Winters intervened. "I'll see to it that any letters are forwarded." He smiled, his eyes twinkling. "I'm sure you will, Miss Winters." He was suddenly all charm as he said goodbye to her. I took him downstairs then. "Tell me," he said, as I opened the door for him, "is Miss Winters a relative?"

"No."

"Do you know her well?"

"I've met her twice."

He grunted. "Well, it's none of my business, but she seems to regard herself as something more than a secretary." And he added, "I would strongly advise you to make certain you have control of your father's writings-his notes, his Journal, everything. They could be of great value-scientifically." His manner was suddenly confidential. "I have a great deal of influence in academic circles and I know what I'm talking about." He smiled and patted my arm in a friendly way. "I hope when we meet again the situation will have resolved itself."

Back in the study I found her standing in the same position. "That man." Her voice trembled. "If Dr. Van der Voort had known the money came from him …" She stared at me. "Have you got a cigarette, please?"

There were only three left in the crumpled packet I took from my pocket. She took one almost blindly and I lit it for her. "He hated the academic world, all the institutional professors who sit in judgment, never dirtying their hands in the field, never getting sweaty and tired, living off the work of others and not risking a penny of their own money. The English in particular."

"He always hated the English," I said. "He was a South African, remember."

She turned on me then. "You think that lets you out-that he hated you because you're English. Let me tell you this: It was because of what you are, not your nationality. . Goede Hemell" she said. "Can't you understand? The academic world is a terribly ruthless one. That's why he opted out. He said they were like leeches, sucking the blood of others, taking all the credit. And that man Holroyd is the worst of the lot. His whole life, his whole reputation-it's built on the brains of others."

"Then why did you tell him Gilmore had the Journal?"

"Because he's the only one Dr. Van der Voort trusted. The Journal is safe with him. He knows the sort of man Holroyd is. And anyway, it isn't the Journal Holroyd's after-that wouldn't help him."

She paused then and I said, "Where's the old man now- d'you know?"

"How should I know?" She went over to the desk, drawing on the cio^arette as though she had never smoked one before and staring out of the window, her back towards me. "It would never have happened if he'd known. He'd never have accepted the money. But he was desperate, and then he remembered the letter he'd had from Lord Craigallan. It was like the answer to a prayer. Even then he delayed for months. And after he'd written to Craigallan and had been promised a Land-Rover and the help of a qualified assistant, he never suspected."

"He must have realized there were strings attached."

"Political strings, yes. He was used to that. Politics meant nothing to him any more. All he cared about was completing the work he had already started. He was like a child in some ways, and his illness had frightened him. It had made him realize that he hadn't much time. And now this." And she added, "I never read the Journal. But Dr. Gilmore has. That's what he wanted to see him about. I think he was afraid something like this. ." Her voice trailed away. She was silent for a moment. Finally, she stubbed out her cigarette, grinding it into the ashtray. "I didn't expect you back here." Her voice was hard and brittle. "Then, when I saw the light on this evening, I came straight over. I felt I had to tell you what Hans had said in his letter." And she added, "But it doesn't matter now. You know it all." She turned suddenly and faced me. "I suppose you didn't get the job you were after?"

"No. But I've got the offer of another."

"Oh." Her face looked tired. "And it makes no difference — what's happened out there?"

"No." What the hell did she expect me to say? "I haven't the money to go looking for him."

"No, I suppose not." Moving slightly her hand touched the plate I had left on the desk and she glanced down at the sordid remains of my meal. "I should have thrown those biscuits away." She seemed at a loss for a moment. Then she smiled, a bright, artificial smile. "I'll make you some coffee, shall I?" She was already moving towards the kitchen and I didn't stop

her. She clearly felt the need to do something actively feminine and I needed time to collect my thoughts.

Two things filled my mind-the way this house drew those who were connected with my father, as though his brooding personality were a living force within its walls, and the extraordinary pattern that was dragging me almost against my will into the area of his activities. What if that pattern continued? I sat down at the desk and lit one of my two remaining cigarettes, thinking about it, conscious of a sense of inevitability, wondering what I would do if our paths crossed.

I was still thinking about that when the girl returned with coffee on a tray. "I'm sorry, there's no milk," she said. "And it's instant coffee." I offered her my last cigarette and she took it. The coffee was thin and bitter. We drank it in silence, our thoughts running on different lines. And when I tried to get her to explain what had happened, she only shook her head and said, "It's no good. It wouldn't mean very much to you." And she added, half to herself, "I'm worried about Hans. He's a very serious boy and so absorbed in his studies that he wouldn't know what to make of this." She was withdrawn and very tense, sitting there, nursing her steaming cup and puffing at her cigarette. Her fingers were long and slender, her wrists small. The boyish cut of her hair emphasized the delicacy of her features. It was the first time I had had the chance to study her face. It was like a piece of fine china, very pale, very clean-cut, the brow high, the nose straight and finely chiselled, the mouth and jaw strong.

She met my gaze and smiled uncertainly. Her eyes were the colour of aquamarine and in the gleam of the lamplight they looked brilliant against the surrounding whites. "When are you leaving?" she asked.

"Tomorrow."

She nodded. She wasn't really interested. "It's that man Borg, I suppose." And she added, "He's a crook, isn't he?"

"He deals in antiques," I said.

"And where's he sending you?"

"Malta. And then Turkey." I don't know why I told her. I

suppose I wanted her reaction, to share the feeling I had of a pattern forming.

Her eyes widened, but that was all. "Well, I hope you have a good voyage." She drank the rest of her coffee and stubbed out her cigarette. "I must go now." She got to her feet, her hands smoothing automatically at her woollen dress. It was very brief and close-fitting so that she looked even smaller than she really was. I, too, had risen, and she hesitated, staring up at me. "If you're short of money. ."

"No, I'll be all right, thank you."

I saw her down to the door. It was cold outside, the canal a black ribbon broken by the reflection of the lighted windows opposite. We stood there for a moment, an awkward pause that held us silent. Finally she said, "My address is No. 27B- if you need to contact me." She turned then and was gone, walking quickly towards the bridge.

I watched her for a moment, feeling suddenly alone, then abruptly I went back up the steep little staircase and got my coat. It was already nine-thirty. Not much time, but there was just a chance-a last chance to break the pattern. And if I stayed in that house I knew the pull of his personality would be overwhelming. But all through the icy streets, though I was walking fast, I couldn't get away from him, my mind going over again what Holroyd had told me, the girl's behaviour, and that nice old man with his strange concern for a student he hadn't seen in thirty years.

There was no wind and when I reached the Oosterdok a mist was hanging white over the water, the ships standing like ghosts at the quays, with only their funnels and masts visible. It was just on ten when I entered the Prins Hendrik and Stolk was there, his tousled hair standing out of the dark collar of his monkey jacket as he leaned on the bar. He was with a bunch of Norwegians, all talking bad English, and I hesitated. But then he turned and saw me. "You!" he shouted in his deep booming voice. "Vat you doing here? Iss the yob no good?"

I told him the man had recovered and he laughed. "So, no

yob, eh?" He called for another Bokma. "Drink that. And now I introduce you to Kaptein Johannessen. He is bound for Durban and afterwards Auckland and his third officer has- what do you think, eh? — measles. He has measles, ja." And they roared with laughter.

I stayed drinking with them for an hour, and all the time I was turning it over in my mind. Johannessen was a big, friendly man, his officers a decent crowd, like all Norwegians. And the ship was going to New Zealand. I had only to ask him. I had only to say I wanted the job. Stolk gave me the opening and waited. But somehow the words stuck in my throat. A ship, the sea, the uncomplicated routine life, the crude jokes, the laughter, the easy companionship-I had it in my grasp, and I let it go. "You refuse this yob," Stolk boomed, "and you can buy your own Bokma."

It was bloody stupid of me. The ship was going where I wanted to go-a new life, and all I said was, "I've got a job already, thank you."

It was the old man, of course. I knew that. And walking back alone through the deserted streets, back again to that house and my childhood bedroom, I tried to understand what it was I had done. I'd been given the chance of escaping from the pattern and, God knows why, I had rejected it. I'm not the sort of person to suffer from a guilt complex and the discovery that he was my father didn't really make a damned bit of difference.

Lying in bed, still thinking about it, I began to be dimly aware that it wasn't so much the old man as the world he represented that was drawing me away from the old shipboard life towards an uncertain future. The things he had tried to teach me, and which I had rejected-it almost seemed as though they had lain dormant in my subconscious. There was no other way to account for the awakening of.interest I had felt when looking at his books, particularly when talking to the girl and Dr. Gilmore. And then, too, there was the feeling that I had to see him again if I were ever to understand my own behaviour pattern-a favourite phrase of his I remem-

bered. About the only thing we had in common was the hastiness of temper that led to violence.

I was at Borg's shop just before ten with my suitcase packed. He was standing by the Buddha, waiting for me, and I could see he was relieved. "You're all ready. Good. I have ordered a taxi." He pulled an envelope out of the pocket of his loose-fitting tweed jacket. "That is your air ticket, also sterling for Malta and some drachmas-you will need that in the islands." He handed it to me, smiling. "You see, I am trusting you."

"You've no option," I said, and the friendliness went out of his eyes. He stood there, waiting, knowing I had a reason for saying that. "Have you got a big chart?" I asked. "One that includes the whole of Greece?"

He took me through into his office and produced the Eastern Mediterranean sheet. It was folded in four, and as he opened it out, the creases showed that it had been much used. Black hairs gleamed on the back of his hand and his signet ring flashed in the sunlight from the window as he traced the line from Malta to Crete. "About five hundred miles," he said. "And Heraklion is a port of entry. You can get your Greek transit papers there."

"Is it a power boat?" I asked.

"Sail and power. It's an old boat, but he has a new engine."

"Say four days." My eyes were searching the long, south-thrusting peninsula of the Greek mainland. "Another two, perhaps three days to Samos. And you don't need me there until early May. That's more than a month."

"A month is not too long for the authorities to get used to your presence. What are you getting at?"

I had found what I wanted and I straightened up. "No objection if I take a more northerly route, have you? We've plenty of time."

"Why?"

"The Ionian Sea-I've always wanted to have a look at the west coast of Greece."

He knew it wasn't the real reason, and for a moment I

thought he was going to be difficult. I put the envelope with the ticket and the money down on the desk. He looked at it and then at me. "How long will it take you?"

"A week," I said. "Not more."

He hesitated. Finally he nodded. "Ja. Well. . okay."

We talked over the details then, and when the taxi came he took me out to it himself.

"And when I've completed delivery?" I asked.

"Then we have another little talk, eh?"

Just over an hour later I was in the air.