Thomas Greanias - The 34th Degree

She was sitting on the bed, the blond head-turner from the bank, wrapped in a towel. Across her lap lay his May issue of Esquire, which she had fetched from his wide-open and most likely thoroughly searched trunk. So he had guessed wrong. He owed Monsieur Guillaume an apology.

“Did Monsieur Gilbert send you?” he asked her in French, closing the door. “Or are you really a little French tart with a well-heeled clientele, Elise? It is Elise, isn’t it?”

Her pale blue eyes glanced down at the Esquire. “‘Hollywood’s Best Bet,’” she said in broken English, reading from the racy American magazine. She smiled and turned a page, revealing a striking pinup girl: one in an evening dress who literally was pinned to a target by arrows. “‘Warner Brothers’ newest starlet, Dolores Moran, eighteen, blonde. Five foot seven of proportions. Waist twenty-five inches, hips and bust thirty-five inches, weight one-twenty.’”

Whether she was one of Baron von Berg’s lethal spies or Swiss Bupo, Andros couldn’t be sure. Knowing Prestwick, Andros wouldn’t be surprised if she was one of Dulles’s OSS agents and they were testing him to make sure he could keep his cover as a playboy. Of course, he couldn’t be sure and had to play the game. The game was what disgusted him.

She tossed the magazine on the nightstand and picked up the pack of playing cards Prestwick had packed, the backs of which depicted the Varga Girl striking various poses as Elise riffled the deck. “Naughty, naughty, Chris,” she said, then switched to her sensuous French. “A man like you doesn’t have to look.”

Andros shrugged and walked over to the dresser. He began to take off his suit coat, then his cuff links, all the while watching her in the mirror. “A man like me is too busy to do much else.”

“Too busy to make love to me?” She loosened her towel to proudly display her full, round breasts.

Andros looked at her in the mirror and cringed inwardly at this deja vu. His first time with a woman had been in a hotel room in Geneva, a present for his sixteenth birthday from his grandfather Basil. She was a sensuous brunette who took special pleasure in initiating him into manhood and later begged him not to leave. At Harvard, there had been a couple of cold, stiff New England girls from Vassar. They were much less exciting than the French woman and incomparable to what Aphrodite would offer him on their wedding night. No sooner. He could never press Aphrodite for that; he had demanded angelic purity from her.

“What are you waiting for?” Elise asked, sounding impatient.

So this was the way it would be, Andros thought: He must break either his cover or his faithfulness to Aphrodite. The irony was that the success of his mission, which he equated with saving Aphrodite, hinged on the Germans buying his cover. He wondered what Aphrodite felt when she faced this decision with von Berg. He was losing only the purity of his devotion to her. She had lost her virginity.

“I haven’t even had dinner yet,” he told Elise, “and already we indulge ourselves with dessert?”

He loosened his tie and turned off the light so he couldn’t look at his face in the mirror before he turned around. He hated games. He hated Prestwick and this whole spy business. Most of all, as he thought of Aphrodite, he hated himself for what he was about to do.

As he approached the bed, he could see her shape in the darkness and her arms reaching out to embrace him and pull him into her.

“Love me,” she groaned. “Love me.”

He thought of Aphrodite and the first time they had kissed under the mango tree that night in Kifissia. He thought of their subsequent secret rendezvous at the top of Likavitos Hill and her guilt-ridden expression when the priest from the nearby chapel caught them kissing. He thought of that night in New York when they could have made love but hadn’t, deciding they would wait for their wedding night. That wedding night now seemed further beyond their reach than ever.

Aphrodite, he thought, please forgive me.

O ne thing Andros had to admit that night as they lay awake in bed was that Elise-if that was her real name-threw herself into her work. She also proved with her relentless, breathless questions that she knew Swiss banking inside and out.

“Pierre has a theory about the Andros fortune, darling,” she told him as she drew hearts on his chest with her finger.

“Really?” By now Andros could see that Monsieur Gilbert was not the discreet Swiss banker he had portrayed himself to be. Unless this woman had worked her bedside charms on him, too. “And what theory is that?”

“He thinks your father transported more than Greek wine, grains, and tobacco.”

“Opium? Ridiculous.”

“No, darling. Arms, guns, explosives. Most recently, to Franco during the Spanish civil war. He got to feed his favorite fascist causes and send his son to the best boarding schools at the same time.”

“Interesting,” Andros replied. “What do you think?”

She sighed. “I think how terrible it must feel to be sitting on a fortune and not be able to touch a single franc.” Her forlorn voice sounded as if it were her money they were talking about.

“So what do you suggest, Elise?”

“You could wait out the war here in Bern with me. We could make love with the Alps behind us and a lifetime ahead, whichever side wins.”

She didn’t mean it. He even doubted she expected him to believe her. He smiled to himself as he resisted the impulse to say “Yes, darling, yes. That’s what I want to do. To spend my life in these sheets with you,” then watch her charm herself out of that. But it would do nothing to advance his agenda-getting into Greece-or, for that matter, hers, which was finding out his agenda.

“A pleasant thought,” he said absently. “But what if my company should go under in the meantime? I don’t think you count paupers among your acquaintances, and that’s what I’ll be. And then I foresee a rather abrupt end to our relationship, don’t you?”

She laughed. “Chris, darling, you really are too funny.”

Andros looked toward the window, where the darkness outside was brighter than in the room. “No, I think the answer is in Greece.”

“Why would you risk your life to go back to Greece, darling?” She rubbed her hand across his chest. “What does Athens offer you that Bern doesn’t?”

“Family, for starters. My uncle Mitchell and grandmother are in Athens. I’m naturally curious to see how they’re getting along.”

“What else?”

“Money. If I can get enough cash to keep Andros Shipping afloat, then the trip will be worth it.”

“But what good is your money if you are dead, darling?”

“Let’s just say I have business to attend to.”

She laughed and kissed his neck. “Monkey business.”

“You mean the black market?” he said, innocently putting the idea in her head. “I’m sure with my ships, I could make out pretty well by the end of the war. What do you think?”

“I think that if you are intent on abandoning me for Greece, I do have a friend who could possibly help you…”

Andros grew still as she continued to draw hearts on his chest with her finger, sighing with affection. He wondered if she could feel his heart beat just a little faster. “You think this friend of yours could help?”

“More so than the Americans or the Swiss, I should think.”

“And where could I find this friend of yours?”

“Oh, at the German Legation. He’s a military attache, so lonely, being apart from his family and all, quite pathetic. Not at all like you.”

And what am I like? Andros asked himself. Elise was giving him what he had been after, but it had cost him his moral integrity. He had broken his vows to Aphrodite and slept with the enemy. How much more like the enemy would he have to become in order to win this war? It was a moot question, he realized grimly. Now that he was in the game, there was no room for wavering. “The German Legation, you say?”