Decision at Delphi Read Online Free

special-delivery letter with a receipt to sign for the purser’s office. The letter was addressed to him in Steve Kladas’s handwriting. It felt as if something solid were enclosed. He slit the envelope with his knife. Yes, there was a key inside, a very small key which would fit the lock of a small suitcase. And a sheet of cheap yellow paper filled with Steve’s large letters. “Knew you were travelling light,” Steve had scrawled. “I’m weighed down with more excess baggage than usual. Can you help me out? The extra film is necessary, or I wouldn’t bother you. Be seeing you. Stefanos.”
    “Everything all right, signore? “the steward asked anxiously. Strang nodded, and began opening the last telegrams. The steward hesitated. The small suitcase no longer seemed to trouble the American. Signore Strang must have made a mistake; it was understandable—all that champagne, and scarcely a half-bottle left.
    But when the man had gone, Strang dropped the telegrams, took the key, and opened Steve’s small case. It was packed with rolls of colour film, each in its sealed yellow box. They were the type he could use in his own Stereorealist camera. For that he was thankful. Otherwise, how was he going to explain them through customs? So he locked the small case—it was the size of an overnight bag, easy to handle, and for that he was thankful, too—pushed it back under the bed with his foot, attached its key to his own ring, tore up the letter, found his coat, remembered to remove his camera from its pocket, and went upstairs again. He’d get some exercise and air until the three-mile limit was passed. This might be an interesting sea voyage, after all. It shouldn’t be too difficult on this ship to find an excuse to talk to Miss Katherine (how would a Greek say that?—oh, yes. Despoinis Katherini) and find out why she was so frightened. After all, duennas did not dance.

2
    Duennas did not dance. But neither did Katherini. Nor did she sit and read in any of the deck chairs around the pool. Nor play shuffleboard, nor write letters, nor take the air, nor go to the movies, nor visit the library. Nor did she eat: not once did she, or the duenna, or the aunt, appear in the dining-room for meals. And not even the romantic moment of sailing among the islands of the Azores in a strange effect of cloudburst and sunset—where one huge mountaintop, rising blackly from dark waters, was almost blotted out by rain while the island opposite, across a short stretch of sea, lay golden and placid under flame-tinged skies, with whitewashed houses scattered on green hillsides—brought any of the three women into view.
    Apart from an entry in the passenger list that might possibly refer to the invisible travellers (“Signora Euphrosyne Duval, of Athens; and niece, Signorina Katherini Roilos, of Athens”), and a second glimpse of the girl herself one evening, when everyonewas crowding into the cocktail bars or dressing for dinner, the women might have been only something he had dreamed up to break the monotony of the interminable, grey Atlantic.
    Strang had worked dutifully that afternoon, and at six o’clock had come up to the emptying decks for a brisk walk. Eight times around the ship, or some such nonsense, made a mile, it was said. But that gave him a feeling of imitating a phonograph needle, and so he preferred to climb stairs as he came on them and twist his way vertically through the layers of decks. He had reached the topmost stretch of scrubbed white wood, where the suites of rooms had doors that opened out on to the deck itself, as private a veranda as one could have on a public carrier. He might not have noticed the girl, so still was she standing at the rail’s edge in the shelter of a lifeboat, had the blue chiffon scarf round her head not streamed wildly out in the wind. It escaped her hands and blew toward him. She turned quickly—this time she was wearing a voluminous dark fur coat, no doubt one of the little old