The Story

It was Leonard's habit, on evenings when Diane retired early, to order a second carafe and settle into a different register — looser, more confessional, the social performance dropped by a notch. Martin had observed this over three years and had come to understand it as Leonard's version of intimacy: not warmth, exactly, but disclosure. He told you things. Small things, mostly. Occasionally larger ones. He never seemed to regret it in the morning.

Diane had gone at nine with a headache that may or may not have been genuine. The taverna had emptied. Kostas was doing something in the kitchen that involved a rhythmic scraping, and Yusuf had gone out twice to the back of the building with the rubbish, each time reappearing without sound. The candle on the table had burned down and Leonard had not asked for another, so they sat in the dimmer light with the second carafe between them and outside the wind moved across the harbour in irregular gusts.

"Kostas told me something," Leonard said. He said it the way he said most things — easily, without apparent weight.

Martin waited.

"About the boy. Yusuf." Leonard turned his glass slowly on the tablecloth. "Apparently there are people looking for him."

"What kind of people."

"Greek coast guard, to start with. He came over without papers — well, you assumed that. But it seems there's also someone else. A man. Turkish, Kostas thinks, or possibly Greek-Turkish. He came to the island ten days ago. Asked around the harbour. Showed a photograph."

Martin looked toward the kitchen. The scraping had stopped.

"What kind of photograph."

"The kind you take on a phone. Informal. Kostas said it looked recent." Leonard poured more wine into his own glass, then Martin's. "He didn't tell the man anything. But the man left a number. Asked Kostas to call if he saw him."

"And did he?"

"No. Kostas doesn't like being asked to do things." A small pause. "But he told me."

Martin considered this. "Why did he tell you?"

Leonard looked at him with a mild expression that was not quite amusement. "I think because he didn't know what to do with it. And I've been here long enough that he trusts me with things he can't use." He sat back. "Or perhaps he wanted someone else to carry it for a while."

Outside a gust came off the water and the sign above the door swung and the candle guttered. Martin watched it settle.

"Who is the man?" he said.

"He didn't know. Or said he didn't." Leonard shrugged, a slow, eloquent movement. "A creditor, maybe. A relative with a grievance. These situations —" He left it there, the sentence trailing off into the general category of situations one didn't need to finish sentences about.

"Does Yusuf know the man came?"

"Unknown. I doubt Kostas told him. It would make him bolt, presumably, and then Kostas loses his best worker." Leonard said this without particular cynicism, simply as a reading of the situation. He had a talent for that — for describing the self-interest of others in a tone that implied he was merely an observer.

Martin said nothing for a moment. He heard footsteps from the back of the building — Yusuf returning — and then the particular silence of someone moving carefully through a kitchen, not making contact with anything.

"What do you think we should do?" Martin said.

Leonard seemed faintly surprised by the question. "I don't know that it's ours to do anything. I'm telling you because — " He paused, reconsidering. "I'm telling you because I've been sitting on it for four days and it's uncomfortable, and you're better at uncomfortable things than I am."

This was not entirely true and they both knew it.

"Someone should tell him," Martin said. "That the man came. That there's a number."

"Tell him what exactly? Be careful, someone is looking for you? He presumably knows that already. That's presumably why he's here washing dishes in October."

"He may not know how close."

Leonard looked at him for a moment with an expression that was attentive in a way his expressions rarely were. Then he nodded, slowly, as though conceding a point in a discussion that had been going on longer than this conversation. "Perhaps not," he said.

They sat with it. The wind came again. Martin drank his wine and did not taste it particularly. He was aware of being in possession of something — a weight, specific and concrete — that had not been his ten minutes ago, and the awareness had a physical quality, like a change in air pressure.

"There's something else," Leonard said. He was looking at the table. "The man who came. Kostas said he looked official. Not police. But official in that other way — the way that means private money or private interest. The kind of official that doesn't file paperwork."

Martin absorbed this.

"So it's serious," he said.

"It may be serious," Leonard said carefully. "Or it may be nothing. A family matter that looks like more than it is. These things are often —"

"Yes," Martin said.

Leonard looked at him. "Yes what?"

"Yes, these things are often." He said it without inflection, and Leonard received it the same way, and they did not pursue it.

They finished the carafe. Kostas came out of the kitchen at ten-thirty with his coat on and his keys in his hand, which was the signal, and they settled the bill and went out into the cold. Yusuf was not visible. He was somewhere in the back of the building, or above it, in whatever arrangement passed for his accommodation. Martin did not look for him.

At the pharmacy corner Leonard said good night with his usual warmth, the conversation apparently already filed away somewhere comfortable, the weight redistributed to Martin's satisfaction and his own relief. He walked up the steps in the dark. He was a generous man, Leonard. It was simply that his generosity tended to flow in the direction already indicated by gravity.

The villa was quiet. Diane was asleep. He undressed in the dark and lay on his side of the bed and looked at the ceiling, which he could not see, for some time. Then he slept. He was, it turned out, also tired.