The Angry Hills - Leon Uris [61]
She took his hand and touched it to her lips.... “You are very sweet.”
Mike’s hand touched her golden hair and slid to her cheek. Her eyes closed and again she looked like a small child. He kissed her forehead and she smiled.
Mike walked to the lamp and plunged the shack into darkness.
He lay restlessly on his cot and stared into the darkness. As he listened to the sound of her breathing, he remembered his sensations when he walked beside her, when he held her...
“Vassili,” her voice called softly, “are you asleep?”
“No.”
He heard her move in the darkness....
The cot swayed. She was beside him. Her hand stroked his hair. “I will not let any harm come to you,” she said.
He pulled her down beside him and found her lips. “Lisa—Lisa...”
Her hand pushed at his chest. “No, darling, no—don’t be angry—please—don’t be angry.”
“It’s—it’s all right. You—you’d better get some sleep.”
EIGHT
TWO DAYS PASSED. LISA did not come. Mike was frantic. He blamed the confinement, he blamed her beauty, he blamed the mystery and romance. All reason told him he was being foolish. Lisa was a woman he did not know, would never see again. Lisa might well be his enemy.
Rationalization failed. He had quite simply fallen in love with her.
He knew it was no novelty for men to fall in love with her. Perhaps she liked him and didn’t wish to hurt his feelings.
Then he began to wonder about other things.... How many men had she been to bed with? What would it be like to love Lisa?
How strange—how very strange for this to happen! Mike knew that when Ellie died that love had died with him. There would never be the thrill of another romance... there would never be a love like Ellie.
Mike paced the dirt floor of the shack in Chalandri.... Was he destroying the memory of Ellie? Could he stifle this feeling for Lisa?
He remembered his first novel—a book about a man’s one great love. His editor, in the cynical manner of most editors, argued that the “one great love” was a condition that existed only in fiction. In reality a man could have many loves in many times and each one of them true in its own way. His editor further argued that only in a book is a man willing to live forever with a memory. Mike knew now that his editor was right.
The contrast in loves and times was unexplainable. Ellie had been tall and fresh and bubbling and earthy. She had gone barefoot and had worn slacks and her happiest moments found her with a tennis racket in her hands or hiking through a backwoods trail or wrestling with Mike on a beach.
Lisa was frail, sad, queenly, shrouded in mystery.
Lisa knew—of that, Mike was certain. Only his declaration was missing. But he would never make it. He would chalk it up as a strange happening among many strange happenings and he’d forget her—sooner or later.
On the third day around noon he heard her footsteps coming up the path. She had never come this time of day before.
The door opened and Lisa entered. She seemed more lovely, more beautiful than he remembered her. She looked directly at him and spoke in a cold monotone.
“Tonight you will go into Athens alone. At nine o’clock take a sidewalk table at the Café Andreas on Constitution Square. A man named Nico will meet you. He will be wearing a black suit and have on a Mason’s ring. Nico will take you to Dr. Thackery.”
She turned around and opened the door.
“Lisa, will I see you again?”
“No,” she answered and walked from the pump house.
NINE
EIGHT O’CLOCK.
Mike put the pistol in his belt, took a last look around the pump house and stepped from the door.
The half-empty tram rolled toward Athens.
Eight-thirty.
Mike’s stomach churned. At the intersection of Leophoros Alexandrou and Leophoros Kifissias he transferred to another tram—this one crowded. Many German soldiers were about. He shrank against the window and looked out. The tram rolled past the iron gate of the American Embassy. Two Marines in dress blues stood guard before it. Mike choked up at the sight of the American flag. The tram passed the Embassy.
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