Decision at Delphi Read Online Free Page B

cable and went down to the bar. Like all men who value their own personal independence, he disliked meddling in the private affairs of other people. In the last five minutes, he had decided that the girl and Steve Kladas could work out the difficulties between them. There would be plenty. The very rich knew how to protect their investments, and a marriageable daughter was a big one.
    The little tables in the bar were crowded. (Cocktail Lounge, it was called, but euphemisms had a tendency to curdle Strang’s blood.) The blue-haired ladies were in full regalia, ear-rings and fur scarves and beaded bags and dependable lace. The few younger women were already welcoming the Mediterranean in brightly flowered, low-cut dresses; it was amazing how pretty shoulders could keep a girl warm even in the cold Atlantic draughts. The men were mostly retired, if not retiring, coaxed into that little trip which they had been promising their wives for the last ten years. Some of them, sitting carefully in new dinner jackets, feeling their empty hands, watchful, wary, were going back, along with their completely silenced wives, to their native villages for the triumphal visit. It was just a pity that their friends could not see them travelling, right in the Bella Vista Cocktail Lounge.
    Captain’s dinner tonight, Strang remembered: tomorrow, the ship would be reaching Gibraltar. He chose a seat at the small bar itself, keeping company with a Hollywood actor who seemed to spend most of his waking time in self-imposed silence on that same high stool, and ordered a Scotch. He studied the decorative panel behind the rows of bottles—the Italians were good at that kind of graceful abstract design—and, in order to keep the actor from realising he had been recognised, got lost in his own thoughts again.
    It was his guess that Miss Katherini, in her startling visit to Lee Preston’s office, had been terrified by her aunt’s warning: stop that man from following you to Europe, or else your father and your brothers and your sisters and your aunts will find a way to discourage him permanently. And. Strang, remembering the Greeks he had seen in action back in Athens on that grim Christmas of 1944, did not underestimate their capacity to even the score. The avenging Furies were a Greek invention. Surely Steve Kladas hadn’t become so Americanised in the last ten years that he had forgotten that.
    Hardly, Strang decided, and ordered another drink. The Hollywood star was watching him covertly. Don’t worry, friend, I shan’t ask for your autograph or describe all the finer points in your last picture; I shan’t even exchange a glance with you. Doesn’t that make you happy? What’s your problem? Can’t be money, can’t be women; you have plenty of both. But one thing is certain: if people don’t have problems, they do. their best to invent them. You’re in good company, chum. I invent mine hard. All I have to do is to persuade myself that Steve Kladas can take care of his own troubles, and I begin to think and think, just little driblets of thought, nothing to worry Erasmus or Einstein that a new star is swimming up in the heavens to outshine them. Odd, isn’t it? Here we are sitting, with a background of satisfied customers all congratulating themselves that the seasick days are over and that, tonight, they even can risk all the free champagne, caviar, and pressed duck. And there will be balloons, and cute paper hats, and miles of streamers, and isn’t that all such merry, merry fun? And there you are, profile, worrying in case people don’t recognise you, hating them if they do. And I am just worrying, period.
    I wish to heaven I knew why. Perhaps I’ve been thinking too much about Athens as I last saw it. Perhaps, too, if I’d stop trying not to think about it, and just let the pictures take hold of my mind, I’d work this whole damned thing out of my system. Not very happy pictures, actually. It is never a happy sight to watch brave