Death of an Elgin Marble by David Dickinson Page B

believed to refer to a revolutionary period in his middle years, who had boasted only seven teeth when Johnny had first encountered him. Now he proudly pointed to his last remaining two, assuring Johnny, to Johnny’s great delight, that there was food enough in the drink if you remembered to order the right stuff. But he was able to direct Johnny to the Cock and Whistle off Southampton Row where the porters from the British Museum took their refreshments at the end of a working day. Johnny was surprised at the number of Greek porters on the staff. There was a Yannis with a limp and a Kostas with an enormous beard, an Evangelos who doubled up as a card sharp in the evenings and a Stavros with immaculate English, all working alongside more conventional Londoners with more conventional names. Some of them, Johnny decided, might have been on duty the day the Caryatid was switched and the original disappeared. The Greek contingent, he discovered, felt more at home in a different pub called The Fox and Hounds near the Greek Cathedral on Moscow Road in Notting Hill. Here the landlord’s brother-in-law was Greek and maintained a private drinking establishment in the basement serving a variety of Greek drinks, the aniseed-flavoured
ouzo
and
tsipouro, mastika
and
kitron
, a citrus-flavoured liquor from Naxos, and
tentura
, a lethal cinnamon-flavoured potion that came from Patras. On Saturday evenings his wife cooked a variety of Greek dishes, served with an assortment of wines from the homeland, which Johnny Fitzgerald believed produced the longest-lasting hangovers of any alcoholic liquid he had ever tasted.
    But here, Johnny felt, was a place where he might be able to catch the hidden pulse of the Greek community in London, their secret hopes, their dreams of home, the things from Athens and Thessaly and the islands the exiles missed the most. Sometimes he felt so much of an outsider, speaking no Greek, unaware of the nature and origin of the drinks they so kindly pressed upon him, that he wanted to go home right away and never come back. But these exiles from the Aegean saw something of a kindred spirit in the Irishman, his lust for travel, his sense of adventure, his love of fun. They nicknamed him the Green Odysseus behind his back. He reminded them, he was told one evening, of a famous character, well known to all Greeks in London, Sokratis Papadopolous, ostensibly a former art dealer, but believed by his fellow countrymen to have been a smuggler of antiquities, and a pirate in his better days. He was believed to have seen the interior of prisons in France, Italy and England. The Greeks from the Fox and Hounds took Johnny to see him in the hospital where Sokratis was dying, his liver now a thing of the past, his other organs shutting down one after another like flowers closing at the fading of the light. Only one visitor was allowed at a time. Johnny asked the emaciated figure about the theft of the Caryatid. Johnny didn’t think the man was in a position where he would be able to tell anybody anything ever again. An Irish nurse by the side of the bed was making clucking noises as if her patient should be left to die in peace.
    The man was muttering to himself and thrashing about in the sheets. ‘Remember the Riddle of the Sphinx, remember.’ A pair of mad staring eyes bored into Johnny’s skull. A violent coughing fit seized Sokratis at this point. Sometimes he shouted and pointed dramatically at the ceiling. Johnny knew some of the symptoms from the worst excesses of his own past, the voices in your head, the vivid flashes of lightning so intense you felt your head would burst, the spiders on the bedclothes crawling all over your skin, the rats hanging upside down from the ceiling above. Time had no meaning in this alcoholic half world, the only consistent feeling one of acute fear and terror. Sometimes the walls and the ceiling would start spinning round and continue even after you had closed your eyes. On one occasion,