The Magus - John Fowles [111]
�e. Heard it down at Moutsa. Thought it was a fisherman. Left my bag out for me. Nothing pinched. Just that bloody fourmile walk back to the school." "You must have been furious." "_Was_ slightly chokka. Yes." "But you didn't let them get away with it." He smiled to himself. "Right. Quite simple. I composed a little report. First about the thing during the war. Then a few little facts about where our friend Mr. Conchis's present political sympathies lay. Sent it to the appropriate quarters." "Communist?" Since the civil war ended in 1950, Communists had been hounded relentlessly in Greece. "Knew some in Crete. Just said I'd seen a couple on Phraxos and followed them to his house. That's enough, that's all they want. A little bit goes a long way. Now you know why you never had the pleasure." I fingered the stem of my glass. "And so you had the last laugh." "Habit of mine, old boy. Suits my complexion." "Why on earth did they do it in the first place? I mean, all right, they didn't like you... but they could have given you the brush-off from the beginning." "All that stuff about their being the old boy's godchildren. All my eye. Course they weren't. They were a pair of high-class tarts. Language the Julie one used gave the game away. Damn funny way of looking at you. Suggestive." He glanced at me. "It was the sort of setup you run across in the Mediterranean--especially your Eastern Mediterranean. I've met it before." "You mean..." "I mean, quite crudely, old boy, that the rich Mr. Conchis wasn't quite up to the job, but he... shall we say... still got pleasure from seeing the job performed?" Again I surreptitiously eyed him; knew myself lost in the interminable maze of echoes. Was he, or wasn't he? "But they didn't actually suggest anything?" "There were hints, old boy. I worked them out afterwards. There were hints." He went away and got two more gins. "You might have warned me." "I did, old boy." "Not very clearly." "You know what Xan--Xan Fielding--used to do to any new chaps who were chuted in when we were up in the Levka Ore? Send 'em wham straight out on a Job. No warnings, no sermons. Just--'Watch it.' Okay?" I disliked Mitford because he was crass and mean, but even more because he was a caricature, an extension, of certain qualities in myself; he had on his skin, visible, the carcinoma I nursed inside me. I had to suspect, the old paranoia, that he might be another 'plant'--a test for me, a lesson; but yet there was something so ineffably impervious about the man that I could not believe he was so consummate an actor. I thought of Lily de Seitas; how to her I must seem as Mitford did to myself. A barbarian. We moved out of the Mandrake onto the pavement. "I'm off to Greece next month," he said. "Oh." "Firm's going to start tours there next summer." "Oh God. No." "Do the place good. Shake their ideas up." I looked down the crowded Soho Street. "I hope Zeus strikes you with lightning the moment you get there." He took it as a joke. "Age of the common man, old boy. Age of the common man." He held out his hand. I would have dearly loved to have known how to twist it and send him wham straight over my shoulder. The last I saw of him was of a dark blue back marching towards Shaftesbury Avenue; eternally the victor in a war where the losers win. Years later I discovered that he _had_ been acting that day, though not in the way that I feared. His name caught my eye in a newspaper. He had been arrested in Torquay on charges of issuing checks under false pretences. He'd been doing it all over England, using the persona of Captain Alexander Mitford, D. S. O., M. C. _In fact_, said prosecuting counsel, _although the accused went to Greece in the occupying forces after the German collapse, he played no part whatever in the Resistance_. Later there was another bit: _Sometime after demobilisation Mitford returned to Greece, where he obtained a teaching post by forging false references. He was subsequently dismissed from this post_. Late that afternoon I dialled the Much Hadham number. It rang a long time but then someone answered. I heard Lily de Seitas's voice. She was out of breath. "Sorry. I was in the garden. Dinsford House." "It's me. Nicholas Urfe." "Oh hello." She said it with a bright indifference. "I'd like to see you again." There was a small pause. "I have no news." "I'd still like to see you." I knew she was smiling, in the silence that followed. She said, "When?"