Levkas Man Read online

  I took a bus down-river to the Europoort. 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 are 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 Nieuwe 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 last 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 brass-work 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 dock-side brawl. The paragraph ended: The police are interested in discovering the whereabouts of Paul Van der Voort, second officer of the tanker Ocean Bluebird, who may be 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 Alacahüyük 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 morning.’

  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.

  2

  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 o
ne 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: Sicialian 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 be little doubt that the immediately preceding drop in sea level by nearly 300 feet was eustatic What the hell did eustatic mean?… and that it reflected the withdrawal of water during the Würm 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 shore line 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, wrong—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 Anglepoise 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 Schiphol 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 1928. He resigned in 1940 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 1941. 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 1946 and was mixing freely with their most prominent academics in the years immediately after the war. Later he returned to Amsterdam, and from 1950 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 scentific 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?’

&nbs
p; 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 1956, 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 1940.’

  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 1959,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, that fits in nicely—the Hungarian rising, 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—1959 and ’60 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 was in Cyprus in 1964, 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.’