Michael Frayn - Skios

Here are two of the limousines silently colliding in the rush to get away, and blocking the exit from the car park. One of the security staff (Giorgios) tries to part the drivers, who have got out and started fighting, but they both turn on him, and he retires with his hand over his nose while some of the cars behind try to struggle past the blockage by forcing a way through the screen of bougainvillea.

The scenes from the cameras along the waterfront are even more confused, as crewmen and security staff bundle their employers into dinghies and tenders, and scramble with such haste to cast off that a number of people are left attempting to jump ever more impossible gaps from the quayside. One important-looking woman in low-cut evening dress and high-piled hair can be seen standing on the dock waving her arms at the departing boats, apparently pushed aside in the rush and forgotten about. A speedboat registered as Why Worry of Dubrovnik is run down by Happy Days of Izmir. A helicopter scrambled from the helipad hovers over the scene, possibly with humane intentions, and shines its searchlight down upon colliding boats, people in the water fighting to grab lifelines, and empty lifebelts. One of the boats capsizes in the downdraft from the helicopter’s rotors. Surprisingly, only thirteen bodies were recovered from the water by police later.

* * *

Events up on the hillside at the site of the new swimming pool above Epictetus were harder to reconstruct, because Reg Bolt had evidently turned all the security cameras off. The crane driver must presumably have fled at the sound of shooting, just as he was beginning to lower the enormous crate onto the truck waiting below, and so must the driver of the truck, because the crate had evidently come crashing down out of control, tumbled end over end down the hillside, and split open to reveal its contents.

Nikki, it turned out, had been wrong about them burying bodies behind the screen. They were digging them up. Long-buried bodies. Beautiful bodies, that belonged, now they had been found, not to Mr. Papadopoulou or the Fred Toppler Foundation but to the Hellenic Republic and mankind at large.

Or should have done.

* * *

It was the biggest and most beautiful of all the exhumed bodies that had burst free of the packing that imprisoned them. The first to see her was Chris Binns, watching at his window in Epictetus, struggling with his second stanza, and with no idea what all the noise and running around had been about. Suddenly, there she was, out of nowhere, a towering white figure in the darkness above him. She was wearing a helmet and carrying a shield, and there were serpents writhing at her feet. In the moonlight her face had an unearthly pallor. She stood gazing out over the lights on the agora, the classical ruins, the villas, the fishermen’s cottages, and the lapping water in the harbor. Her right arm was upraised, as if she was surprised by what she saw and was giving it her blessing, or laying a curse upon it. It was impossible to guess from the look on her face, though, what her intentions were, or what she thought about the world before her. Her expression was impassive, unshakeably serene, a blank.

Chris recognized her immediately from her helmet and her long white robes — her chiton, just as Wikipedia said. She was Athena, the goddess of wisdom and civilization, of craft and war and justice, the tutelary deity of the island.

For some moments he was so surprised that he couldn’t breathe. He had conjured her back from the underworld where the old gods live, and he had done it by imagining her, through the sheer power of the words in the poem he was writing about her.

She wasn’t a real physical object, he understood that clearly enough. She was some kind of hallucination, a projection of his own mind onto the external world. Of course. But his residency in Skios was justified. His choice of career. His whole life.

He felt in the darkness for pencil and paper. His long-awaited second stanza was already writing itself.

* * *

The confusion at the entrance by this time had grown worse because, just as the cars struggling to get out had begun to free themselves from the wreckage of the bougainvillea and smash their way through the barrier, they came up against the flashing blue lights and howling sirens of the island’s arriving emergency services.

Soon arms and clubs were being waved, first demonstratively and then in earnest, and soon after that the confrontation between police trying to reach the massacre and participants trying to escape from it was complicated by the violent intervention of a woman who loudly wanted the police to arrest someone for some other offense entirely. It was very difficult in the circumstances prevailing for police officers with only limited English to understand who was to be arrested for what — whether it was someone called Wilfred for impersonating someone called Fox, or the other way round; and whether the man whom the woman was propelling so urgently towards them, and from whom she was snatching some kind of typescript to wave in their faces as evidence, was Fox or Wilfred; and where Fox was if this was Wilfred, or Wilfred if this was Fox.

In the end, so as to get on with the job they had been sent to do, they arrested whichever man it was they had to hand, and later, in the calmer conditions of the police station, charged him with attempting to leave the scene of a crime, inciting public disorder, wasting police time, being an accessory in the deaths of a still undetermined number of people, and bringing the Hellenic Republic into disrepute. Annuka Vos, his accuser, or defender, who had attempted to prevent them throwing him into the van by battering the chief of police about the head with her handbag, and who had thereupon been thrown into the van after him, they charged only with attempted murder.

* * *

Among the last of the wounded to be collected was Cedric Chailey, the token Brit. “I knew there was going to be trouble,” he said to Rosamund Chailey, as he lay on one of the tables in the now almost empty agora, with his wounded leg stretched out in front of him and bound up as best she could in a tablecloth. “As soon as they said he was Norman Wilfred. I was in college with Norman Wilfred. That fellow wasn’t Norman Wilfred. If anything should happen to me, you’ll see that control gets this.”

He handed her the mobile phone he had removed from Mr. Skorbatov’s shirt pocket, containing all the great oligarch’s contacts, codes, and passwords.

* * *

By the time Oliver had packed his suitcase — or at any rate Dr. Wilfred’s suitcase — and arrived at the entrance, the counterpoint of sirens from the departing police and ambulances winding their way back through the mountains was becoming fainter. There was no one to be seen, and no limousines or taxis. He tapped on the window of the lodge. Tapped and tapped — banged with his fist — because Elli had her headphones on, oblivious to the world around her.

“Sorry!” she said, when she at last slid back the glass. “I’m talking to my Auntie Soussana in Patras. What tricks those people in Patras do! You never imagine! So in what way my help you?”

“A taxi, if you would.”

“Oh, were you at the lecture? Is it all over? How did it go? No rain? I thought I heard thunder.”

On the agora the last few candles guttered out. The moon rode ever higher in the sky, and poured a soft classical peace ever deeper into the ruins. The warm air was sweet with the blossoms of the Mediterranean night. From the hillside where she had emerged from her abductor’s crate, the white goddess looked serenely down upon her little protectorate, and held her guiding hand over it once again as she had held it three thousand years before. She had restored peace and civilization to her island.