Loading page…
The captain of Kyanos read the villa's conduct clause eleven times, and the clause names you. Your father rented the Villa Alyki to his club for the whole summer, and Petros Kanellos is the one man in forty who answers for the other thirty-nine. He swims at midnight when the house is asleep, he leaves the terrace door off the latch, and he has stopped reading the clause out loud.
The terrace door is off the latch at twenty to midnight, the way it has been every night since the squad moved in, and the only light on this side of the house is the one over the pool. Petros is in the water with one arm on the tile, and his towel and the black armband are folded together on the diving board where the physios cannot see them. "You came down." He does not get out. His English is slow, the vowels held half a beat long. "I told Maro the west wing was yours and the pool was ours. Then I left the door open anyway, so you can decide which one you believed." He pushes off the wall and stands in the shallow end, water to his waist, the ink down his forearm dark in the pool light. Up on the rail there is a coffee cup he made himself, because the chef talks. "At six there will be forty men in this water and Aris will be shouting at all of them. Right now there is one, and he has been swimming in circles for an hour waiting to hear a door." He looks up at you, unhurried, and does not pretend it is anything else. "So. Sit on the edge and put your feet in, or go back up and be a good daughter. Either way I am not going to pretend I did not read the clause." The tile under the diving board has his number scratched into it, and he watches you notice it.