Enemy and Brother Read online

  Stephanou accepted the government’s offer of political amnesty in coming in to testify against me, establishing as motive my covetousness of Webb’s wife. Margaret’s testimony was taken by affidavit. Ioannina was too perilously close to guerrilla-held territory to require the presence of secondary witnesses. Nothing in my conduct, she swore, had ever suggested more than a very young man’s infatuation. She stated that she had not known her husband’s destination or his companion until receiving a letter posted in Patras three days after his departure from Athens. The letter was produced in court and the critical sentence read aloud: “I decided to take young Emory with me. I wonder how that will strike you, my dear.” I have wondered my life since. The jury construed its meaning to the prosecution’s pattern.

  Nor was the camp woman produced by either defense or prosecution. Since I had admitted her existence it was of indifferent value to the prosecution that she be called. Stephanou swore ignorance of where she might be found. But then, having seen only the flash of her nude body before our hasty retreat, I could not possibly have identified her myself.

  I have said that I was found guilty. The sentence was death by shooting. When I asked for them I was given pencil and paper with which to write to my mother. I had not been told that she was dead. I do not know to whom among the Greeks it was known. The American press, I learned later, mentioned it.

  An Orthodox priest visited me the night before my scheduled execution. It is ungrateful of me to tell it, but all I remember of him was that he, poor man, smelled worse than the prison drain, and in my giddy state I cried and laughed aloud at what I thought an excellent joke for one about to die. “Take him out,” I kept shouting. “He stinks to high heaven!”

  I composed a litany of stenches: Greek justice, Greek lawyers, Greek juries, Greek revolutionaries, Greek reactionaries. Then I started on my own compatriots who, for all their observers and advisers, had turned not a word on my behalf. I surpassed The Man Without a Country in my renunciation.

  An English doctor was admitted to give me an injection. He complimented me on my invective. I did not think I slept. Yet I have no recollection of leaving the jail, only the dull sense of walking over rough terrain, stumbling, being helped, half-carried. Nor could I see. Afterwards I knew I had been blindfolded. A jolting ride in some sort of motor transport followed, timeless, then the sickening swell and swoop of a small boat. My first moment of real comprehension came shortly after sunrise. The blindfold was removed. When my eyesight cleared I saw what my nose had already told me: I was then aboard a fishing vessel.

  A swarthy, gold-toothed man with eyes that twinkled like his teeth in the sunlight was grinning at me.

  “Where you want to go?” The accent was Italian.

  “America,” I said.

  He laughed heartily. I had not heard laughter in a long time. It sounded good.

  “You don’t like the Greeks?” He nodded toward the distant shoreline.

  I looked back tentatively, far less confident than Lot’s wife. The whole of rockbound Greece seemed to be sinking into a golden sea. I did not know or care then how much of myself was vanishing with her.

  Another seaman sat straddling the prow of the boat, his eyes on the waters ahead, binoculars in hand: the waters were still mine-infested.

  My benefactors spoke very little English and I no more Italian, but it was plain in any case that such questions I should ask pertaining to my escape would be answered with a shrug. I had no money, no identification. I assumed I still bore resemblance to existing photographs of myself. And I did have a large brown birthmark on my left arm. Sometimes in the many days at sea that followed, I found myself looking at it as though it were a link to my source as well as a mark of my being, a sort of auxiliary navel.

  Four nights and two boats later I was put aboard a freighter, La Stella—I think off Sicily—bound for New York. I asked no questions. I was given a change of clothes, GI suntans included, a toothbrush and a safety razor. The American maker, no doubt with me in mind, had patented it under the brand name Pal.

  A U.S. Coast Guard cutter met us where we came into American territorial waters and I was turned over to their officers. If they had any foreknowledge of my identity or my nationality, it was not communicated to me. Very little was. Even when I asked one of the men how the Chicago Cubs were doing, I got no more than a cynical grunt. But then, the Cubs might have been in last place. Slightly ahead of myself.

  At the office of the chief immigration inspector I asked for a lawyer. I gave only my name and as port of embarkation “somewhere in Greece.” In those days, so soon after the war, “somewhere” had the ring of geographic validity.

  Before the question of whether or not I was to have a lawyer was settled, a Mr. Redmond of the State Department came to interview me. He was a big, affable man whose very presence made me realize I was at last in America. I told him everything I could of my fantastic story. He asked no questions but, from his occasional pulling of a long face, I sensed surprise but never disbelief.

  He sat in thoughtful silence for a long moment when I was through. It was a warm day. I began to sweat. I resented the cool immaculacy of the man opposite me.

  “And yet,” he said finally, “our every report indicates you had a fair trial. Our people followed every word.”

  “But the testimony was false!”

  “In plain English, you were framed. Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What do you think your chances are of proving it?”

  “Somewhat more than if I were dead,” I said.

  “I wonder.”

  I threw up my arms. “Right now I’d have trouble proving I’m Jabez Emory without help.”

  He looked at me solicitously. It occurred to me that word of my escape might have been suppressed.

  “Oh, we knew you were at large. The story is that you broke jail with the help of Communist sympathizers. Supposedly you were taken into their territory.”

  “And what were they supposed to have done with me, converted me?”

  “Do you think they converted Webb?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Nothing in your conversations pointed that way?”

  “I wouldn’t be the best judge,” I said, and he could not possibly know how much of an understatement that was. “But I’d say no.”

  “Would you say his story might have favored them, assuming he had lived to write it?”

  My sweat turned cold. It was the leading question again. “I cannot say.”

  “It was unfortunate that his notebook could not be produced. You would have told at the trial, of course, if you had any notion where it was.”

  “He carried it in the inside pocket of his coat,” I said. “But he did not take his coat when he went out to the woman. It was still in the cottage in the morning. I thought of going back for it to take to him, but I was not permitted to.”

  “A pity. Possibly it might have exonerated you.”

  “I hope to be exonerated now—at home at least.”

  He sighed as though pained at what he now had to say. “Your government is in a very delicate position.”

  “So is one of my government’s citizens.”

  He smiled. “Something you said a moment ago—about Jabez Emory—let’s talk in possibilities for a moment. Suppose he had actually vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Let me be frank with you—I know quite a lot about him. Good army record, a young man of several talents. In school he was torn between journalism and drama, wasn’t it? Maybe he still is. Maybe he could still go either way. He has no immediate family, no responsibility except to himself….”

  It was the nightmare again, the man saying patently false things about me as though I were not present. I shook my head violently, trying to stop the automatic talk.

  “My mother!” I shouted. “I’ve got a mother!”

  His face became a mask of shock, and to this day I do not know whether his reaction was true or feigned. “M
y God, man, weren’t you told that? It was in the newspapers. I am sorry….”

  I had not seen a newspaper I could read in months and told him so. He then told me what I have already set down in this account, that my mother had died during my trial. I had no way of knowing, or at the time of caring, whether he was honest or calculating in the manner of telling me such news. His job required excellence in dissembling.

  Once again I was captive and docile before a fate beyond my power to comprehend. I heard him in blandly sympathetic terms detail the life possible to the man before him, a new life under a new identity. He suggested the possibility of my returning to school, perhaps at his own university where he “might be able to do me some slight service.” He suggested the name Eakins. The American painter of that name had done a portrait of his grandfather which hung in the university he recommended to my consideration.

  To acquire a new identity, one must shed an old one, however ghostly the man presenting his papers to the courts. Mr. Redmond was prepared to obtain copies of Jabez Emory’s birth certificate and army discharge papers. And because Emory had served his country as a soldier, a sum of money could be found to support him during what might be called his period of rehabilitation. He supposed I could live a little better on it than I had lived… abroad.

  He cleared his throat, saying the word, and asked if he might proceed along the lines he had suggested.

  I said he might proceed, and that night, registering at a New York hotel, I first signed the name, John Eakins.

  So much is prologue. I have told of Eakins’ progress, of the fellowship to work on a life of Byron and of the passport in hand. I should probably have gone in any case, but an item in the New York Monitor was the final catalyst. It was datelined Athens, and it read:

  Paul Stephanou, jailed as an accessory in the murder of the American newspaper correspondent, Alexander Webb, in 1948, will be released next month after serving seventeen years of a life sentence.

  2

  I ONCE CALCULATED THAT my transport from Greece to New York had taken twenty-three days. I returned in nine hours’ flying time. American emigration and Greek customs officials were excessively polite. People I expected to examine my passport waived the privilege. I was who I said I was to everyone except myself. In the plane I sat next to a wholesale grocer from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I might have been on my way to Chicago to speak before the 19th Century Club.

  But at the desk of the Grande-Bretagne Hotel in Athens something extraordinary happened to me. I had filled out the registration card, the porter waiting behind me with my luggage, the desk clerk waiting in front of me, a key as large as an anchor in his hand.

  “Your letters will be at the mail desk, Professor Eakins.”

  I knew he meant to hurry me, but I checked the card anyway, the habit of one steeped in footnotes. I had signed my name Jabez Emory.

  The shock of seeing what I had done froze me. The clerk reached for the card. I only managed to prevent his having it, crumpling it under my hand. I stuffed it into my pocket. “I’m sorry,” I said. “May I have another card?”

  Contemptuously he turned his back while I filled out the second card. As I made my way to the mail desk I thought that in all the world I was my only enemy.

  The Grande-Bretagne is no scholars’ haven. Its lore is strictly British upper class. The ranking staff, Greek though they may be, are the very models of model major-generals. I wondered if any of them remembered “the kid.” I doubted it. But I remembered some of them. I had done a lot of loitering in my few months in Athens, and most of it at the Grande-Bretagne bar.

  My mail consisted of a letter of welcome from Dr. Palandios, the director of English Studies at the university with whom I had corresponded regarding my Byronic studies. He hoped that I would be free to attend a small dinner party at his home that night. Nothing suited me more perfectly, so early a recognition of my legitimate pursuits. I unpacked a few necessities, gave the valet a suit to be pressed and phoned my acceptance.

  I went down to the bar and took my first step back into time. The decor had changed, the hotel having been remodeled. Nonetheless, I saw it now as I best remembered it, the heavy furniture, dark and plush in feeling, the cheeriness of crystal and elegant chandeliers, and not enough light anywhere. And I remembered the bartender who now set a whisky and soda before me. He still liked to talk, but now, as then, to somebody else. I watched him for a moment, thinking back on his imitation of a German colonel during the occupation who insisted on inspecting the glass before his drink was poured. The routine included a monocle and I had suspected then that the whole performance came out of an Erich Von Stroheim movie.

  I took my glass to a table such as that at which I was sitting scribbling in a notebook when Alexander Webb had come over, set his glass down and eased his great bulk into the chair next to me. He had sat a moment, blinking, as he looked at me. His expression was perpetually sardonic, something else I admired naturally. He breathed like a drinking man.

  “How would you like to go on a little journey with me?” He pointed to my notebook. “It might give you something to write about one of these days.”

  “I’d go to hell and back with you, sir,” I said with a fervor that might have embarrassed even him.

  He grunted. “It might just be that.” Again the breathy silence. That day too the bar was all but deserted. If there had been more people, I should not have had my notebook out. “You’re to tell no one about this,” he said. “Absolutely no one.”

  “I understand.”

  “Not even Margaret.” He looked at me sharply.

  By then I had met Margaret Webb perhaps a dozen times. Sometimes we walked. Mostly we sat and talked in the hotel lobby where she seemed to be forever waiting for her husband. But at a New Year’s ball, with audacity brewed of several drinks and the confidence a waltz gave me, I had asked her to dance. We made an impression on many people that night which had lasted even to a murder trial.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “What do you talk about, you and Margaret?”

  I knew he was baiting me, albeit good-naturedly, but I could only be earnest, truthful.

  “Mostly you,” I said and then amplified: “Well, mostly me, then you, sir.”

  He grunted and tapped a stubby finger on my notebook. “Tear out a piece of paper and write what I tell you to.”

  I wrote: “I promise to neither write nor relay by word of mouth anything I may see or hear while accompanying Alexander Webb from and to Athens until released by Webb from this promise.”

  I signed and gave him the paper.

  “I want to be sure I’m not scooped by a cub,” he said. “Where do you come from?”

  “Illinois—a small town not far from Springfield, Illinois.”

  “You’re a long way from home, young Jabez Emory.”

  He gave me the name of a dockside taverna in Piraeus where I was to have my dinner at ten o’clock that night. He might or might not eat with me. I was to wear my army shoes for heavy walking, and to take only such essential articles as I could carry in my trenchcoat. We might be gone for as long as two weeks, and again we might be back much sooner. I was also to wear a sweater.

  “Do I need money?”

  He grinned with that downward pull of the corners of his mouth. “Do you have money?”

  “A little.”

  “Is your rent paid?”

  “Just till tomorrow.”

  “Then pay it so they won’t be looking for you.”

  He bought us a drink then, and, after paying for it, put the piece of paper on which I had written my promise into his pocket.

  I had almost finished dinner when he joined me at the taverna that night. He sipped brandy and reminisced about his boyhood in Elyria, Ohio. We talked about Sherwood Anderson. He seemed completely relaxed. The bouzouki players never rested. A roaming band of sleek-haired youths danced for a while and then moved on to another bouzoukakia. I had written an article on these waterfront tavern
a, so popular then with the teen-aged boys. Toward midnight a vendor of herbs came to the table. Webb bought a bunch of sage.

  “Sage for wisdom,” he said to me. “We can go now.”

  We walked some distance along the water’s edge, Webb peering into the darkness. He stopped. Only then did I see the rowboat, the man waiting at the oars. Webb threw the sage down to him. Then we climbed into the boat. He rowed us out to where a fishing vessel was waiting. It was in Patras three days later that we made contact with our guide, Paul Stephanou.

  In the National Library that afternoon I searched three months’ files of the Athens newspapers for mention of Stephanou’s release from prison, impending or actual. I found not a word. While in New York I had looked for it without success in American, British and French publications. If I had not carried the small clipping from the Monitor in my wallet I should have doubted ever having seen it at all.

  I went back in the newspaper files to the period covering the trial. How strange to turn the yellowed pages and suddenly confront myself, aged twenty-three, hollow-cheeked, unshaven, my eyes sunken and furtive as any criminal’s. The picture was taken on the day I went to trial. In the next column was a picture of Paul Stephanou. His jaw was out in defiance and he had smiled at the moment the photographer caught him; handsome, his dark hair tousled, he looked as though he had just run off a football field. I learned nothing, reading, that I did not already know by heart.

  I left the library and stepped into the late afternoon rush. It was the beginning of June, a few days later in the season than when Webb and I had left Athens. The first heat of summer had come and the first flush of tourists. During my last sojourn there had been no tourist problem, but the restless trafficking of people had been the same. Then it was swarms of advisers, military and civilian, British and American, some hurrying to settle in, others to pack and go home. Churchill had grudgingly passed on the burden of his brother’s keepership. I stopped in my tracks, remembering the phrase. It was Alexander Webb’s.

  I was still wondering as I dressed for dinner if the Webb case remained a matter of sensitivity to the Greek government or if it was so well forgotten as to be worth not a line of newsprint.