Van Horn was sitting on the terrace in the same canvas chair smoking a cigarette and looking out to sea with a pair of night glasses.
“Ah, there you are,” he said. “Enjoy your walk?”
“I went down to the beach,” Lomax told him. “Quite a boat you’ve got there.”
Van Horn nodded. “Comes in very handy. It means I can get across to Crete when the mood hits me. The mail boat only calls here once a week.”
“I’m only too well aware of that fact,” Lomax said.
He leaned against the balustrade and looked out over the darkening sea and after a while, Van Horn said softly, “Why did you come back, Lomax? Why now after all these years?”
Lomax shrugged. “I felt like a change, it was that simple.”
“But nothing ever is,” Van Horn said.
Knowing.,at once that he was right, Lomax frowned, trying to get it straight in his own mind. After a moment he said, “I seemed to have taken a wrong turning somewhere.”
“You wanted to be a writer, didn’t you?”
Lomax nodded. “Oh, I became one all right. Not the great novelist I’d imagined or anything like that, but I’ve done all right in the film game.”
“Learning to compromise is one of the hardest things in life.”
Lomax laughed harshly. “In my case it seemed at times as if life had done the compromising. I reached a state in which my mornings carried a permanent taste of dead yesterdays. I thought that if I came back to the Aegean, took some time off to think, that I might find where I’d gone wrong, begin again.”
Van Horn sighed. “Isn’t that what we all want to do and never can? We wouldn’t make the same mistakes twice-we’d simply make fresh ones.” He smiled softly. “There’s an old Greek saying: ‘For every joy the Gods give two sorrows.’ We must accept life as it is, Lomax, and work from there.”
Lomax shook his head. “Too fatalistic for my taste. A ais man must be willing to fight back when the going gets rough.”
“Presumably you intend to do just that?”
Lomax nodded. “I’m fully aware that I have some sort of moral responsibility for starting what happened here, but I didn’t pull the trigger on these people. I don’t see why I should carry the cross for the person who did.”
“But you’ve nothing to go on. You don’t even know what you’re looking for.”
“It’s quite simple really,” Lomax said. “I’m looking for the member of the original group who doesn’t fit into the general pattern. The person who obviously benefited by his treachery.”
“Or his weakness or fear, have you considered that?” Van Horn’shook his head. “It won’t work, Lomax. Every member of the group suffered in one way or another. Some died, the rest saw the war out in Fonchi, and we all squatted In that Hell together. No one received special treatment, I can assure you.”
“Except Alexias,” Lomax said.
“As I think I mentioned earlier, they sent him to Gestapo Headquarters in Athens for special treatment of another sort.”
“But why should they?” Lomax demanded. “They knew he’d worked with me and with the EOK on Crete, but it’s highly unlikely he could have told them anything about the general set-up there that they didn’t already know. Under the rules of the Geneva Convention they were quite entitled to shoot him as a spy and yet they didn’t.”
“On the other hand, they usually executed Special Air Service officers when they caught them and failed to do so hi your own case.”
Lomax nodded slowly. “That’s the one thing I’ve never understood. Why Sterner didn’t have me shot. They couldn’t have been saving me for Crete because the policy was to hold a public execution in front of the local populace where they caught you.”
“I might add that if you’re looking for someone who doesn’t fit into the general pattern there’s always Katina,” Van Horn said calmly.
Lomax looked at him in astonishment. “For God’s sake be sensible. We know exactly what happened there.”
“We only have her word for it. If you suspect her uncle then you must logically suspect her also.” Lomax frowned and sat down in the opposite chair and Van Horn continued. “Another thing. Even if Alexias did betray us, that still doesn’t explain how the Germans got on to him in the first place.”