Pascali's Island

Excellency, I know what terra rossa is. And with that knowledge other things have fallen into place. But I must deal first with Mister Bowles.

I went straight to his room. He was there before me, as I expected, but it could not have been much before, because when he opened his door I saw signs of chaos and confusion behind him, saw it even before entering, clothes on the floor, a chest of drawers with gaping apertures where the drawers should have been. He had not had time to put this in order. Where had he been then, while I had been writing, sleeping, writing? He must have left the site well before dark.

'Yes,' he said, no doubt seeing my eyes widen. 'Someone has been having a jolly good look at my possessions. Come in, anyway. It will not take long to put things to rights.'

I sat on the bed, watched him bundle clothes back into drawers, into the wardrobe. 'Is anything missing?' I said.

'Not as far as I can see. There's nothing much here except for a few clothes. I always travel light, you know.'

'Except for marble heads,' I said.

Mister Bowles paused in his tidying, and looked at me. 'H'm, yes,' he said. 'But that was necessary.' No slightest sign of a smile on his face. He seems almost totally lacking in humour. Perhaps it is just this deficiency that makes him so successful as a trickster. But it is not enough to explain his u

'Why?' At this moment, by a fortunate chance, I leaned forward on the bed and as I did so I glanced down and saw the little notebook with shiny black covers lying just underneath.

'To think I would leave anything valuable lying about in my room,' he said.

He could not yet have realised it was there. Otherwise, I reasoned, he would immediately have retrieved it. Casually I moved a-little along the bed. The diary was now within reach of my foot. 'Probably Izzet, or some of his minions,' I said. 'They will be trying to find out if you have taken anything of value from the site.'

'I suppose so,' he said. 'They stopped me and searched me as I was coming back today. The two soldiers stationed above the site. I don't think they knew what they were looking for. In any case, it is quite absurd. They can't see the site itself, nor a good part of the ground below it. There are a thousand hiding places there.'

'It is more serious than you seem to think,' I said. 'They won't wait much longer. Your life is in danger. Mine too.'

Mister Bowles was crouching at the chest of drawers with his back to me. I extended my foot, kicked the diary towards me, bent down, picked it up. I had no time to do more than slip it behind my back, before Mister Bowles looked round at me. 'I'm a British subject,' he said.

'You are as liable as any other subject to die of a knife between the ribs,' I said. 'Take my advice before it is too late. Let them have the papers back on the terms they have offered.'

He straightened and turned to face me. 'And the statue?' he said. 'You don't understand. I have a responsibility now.'

Excellency, I ca

'Not at all,' Mister Bowles said. 'All I need is a day or two longer, that's all. That's where you come in, actually. Look, let me tell you how I came to find the statue, then maybe you'll see…'

'All right,' I said.

'I'm going to have a glass of beer and a sandwich up here in my room,' he said. 'Would you like to join me?'

In accents I took care not to make too delighted, I assented to this. He rang the bell and Biron appeared almost at once. The sandwiches were ordered, salami for me, cheese for Mister Bowles. While this was going on I managed to transfer the diary from the bed behind me to my side pocket. Biron was polite and attentive, but he did not look at me, he did not look into my face, either then or when he returned with the food and drink.

'I have been wanting to talk to someone about it,' Mister Bowles said, as soon as Biron had gone.

Over the beer and the sandwiches, he told me about it, told me in that halting, curiously compelling way of his, with blurts of eloquence and self-revelation. I shall give his own words where they seem particularly vivid or revealing. But for the most part I shall use oratio oblique. In short, Excellency, what follows is Mister Bowles's story transmuted into art. It will help towards the effect, however, if you will try to picture Mister Bowles himself, sitting opposite to me, face dark red from the sun, pale eyes glinting, hair smooth and neat in the lamplight.

He had decided, he said, to pay one last visit to the site, before selling back the lease. To have a last look round, he explained, and complete his notes: 'For the book I am writing, you know.'

That he should persist with this story of a book surprised me at the time. But then, of course, it is more than a story, much more. I am coming to understand him. I am sure that his interest in the putative abodes of the putative Virgin is quite genuine. His claim to be writing a book, though I feel sure no words of it have yet been written, is no mere falsehood; the book has that degree of existence fantasy can lay claim to, which is considerable – I speak as one who knows, veteran of many solitary triumphs. No he is not a liar, he is an accomplished fantasist, and like all such – like myself, Excellency – both victim and exploiter. All the same, an uneasy doubt remains. Did he really go back there, in the hot afternoon, to write non-existent notes for a non-existent book? With Izzet and the Pasha in the net, and payment only a few hours off? Certain it is that something took him back there – if not I should have had my money, should have been in Constantinople now.

Nothing much of the villa was left standing, only a single arch and a broken wall. (It was in a cavity below this arch, if you remember, Excellency, that he claimed to have found the objects he showed to Mahmoud Pasha and Izzet.) However, the ground plan was still there to be seen, and he had begun a methodical examination of the site, noting the details. 'I could hear the lizards,' he said, 'slithering about among the stones while I was working.'

Straightening up from his measurements he had seen, in the face of the rock behind the villa, small rectangular niches, obviously cut by hand, blackened inside, presumably by the flames of devotional lamps. 'I have seen the same sort of thing in wayside shrines,' he said. Generations of people had come here to light lamps or candles. Prayers and promises uttered in that remote place, from lips long dead. 'I noted it,' he said. 'It was evidence, of a kind. Popular beliefs have to be taken into account, you know.' Also, he had thought it the kind of personal detail that goes down well in a book.

Behind the villa the terrain was very irregular, strewn with masonry half-overgrown, mounded with heaps of reddish earth. It was clear, he said, that there had been considerable subsidence of the land here, though not very recently. He had made his way over this, seeking to trace signs of outbuildings, and he had come eventually to the edge of a roughly circular declivity, steep-sided, scattered with rocks and scrub. 'I don't really know why I went down there,' he said. It wasn't as if there were any visible signs of habitation. 'There was nothing there,' he said. 'It was impulse, pure impulse.'

There was in his ma