as he stared into space.
‘We don’t get many tourists this time of year. Usually the ones more interested in the island’s ancient and medieval history prefer to come when the crowds of holiday makers have gone.’
‘That’s us.’
‘Are you interested in anything in particular? This city was built in the fourteenth century, but we have places dating much further back.’
Stratton stared at Cristos as he considered something. ‘You probably know the Mediterranean pretty well.’
‘I am second-generation travel shop. My father and mother had this place forty-eight years ago. There’s not much I don’t know about this part of the world.’
‘If I were to describe a town that had a horseshoe-shaped harbour, that once had a large population - several thousand people, a thousand houses say - but only a few people now lived in it, where would you think I was talking about?’
Cristos grinned.‘Kastellorizo,’ he said without hesitation. ‘Have you been there?’
‘No.’
‘Well you have just described it as if you have seen it for yourself.’
‘Kasta . . .?’
‘Kastellorizo. It’s an island. Kastellorizo means red castle.’
‘It has a castle too?’
‘Yes. The same knights who built this place built it. The soil is red so they called it château roux, which in bad Greek means Kastellorizo.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Off the coast of Turkey, about seven hours from here by boat and forty minutes by plane.’
‘And this place is practically deserted?’
‘Before the First World War it had seventeen thousand people on it. It was . . . how you say . . . when people are taken from a sinking ship?’
‘Rescued?’ Stratton offered.
‘Yes, but . . . evak . . .’
‘Evacuated.’
‘Yes. It was evacuated during the Second World War by the British Navy before the Germans came. Then it was mostly burned down. Some say it was the Germans who looted it, some say the British. Who knows? Someone does, I suppose.Then, after the war, everyone was happy in their new countries, and so only a few people went back there. There was not much to go back to. There’s a ferry every few days and not many people go or come from there.’ Cristos smelt the potential business. ‘You want me to check on flights or ferries for you?’ he asked.
Stratton looked around at Gabriel who was staring at Cristos.
‘Could you?’ Stratton asked, looking back at Cristos.
‘That’s what I do for a living,’ Cristos said, pulling a book from a stack on his desk and flicking through the pages. ‘When do you want to go?’
‘Today, if we can,’ Stratton said, always preferring movement to stagnation.
Cristos paused to look at the two men, shrugged and carried on thumbing through the book. ‘We will do our best,’ he said.
Half an hour later, Stratton and Gabriel were heading out of the old city and along the waterfront towards the harbour. There were no flights scheduled from Rhodes to Kastellorizo for the next five days and even then there was no certainty it wouldn’t be cancelled, but there happened to be a ferry leaving for the island late that morning.The boat’s advertised departure and arrival times were not to be taken seriously, Cristos had advised, listing several factors that included unreliable engines and machinery as well as captain and crew lethargy. If all went well, bearing in mind the likely storm, it was expected to arrive at around seven in the evening, give or take an hour, which posed one other problem for them. Accommodation. The phone cable from the mainland was over eighty years old and for unexplained reasons foul weather affected transmissions, which was why, according to Cristos, he could not contact any one of the handful of faxes or phones on the island to book rooms for them, although he promised to continue trying.
As they approached the harbour and identified their ferry, the only large boat in the harbour, Stratton phoned Sumners to tell him about their move and to set in motion his idea about getting as many photographs of similar harbours for Gabriel to take a look at if Kastellorizo was a dead end. As they rounded the corner of the mole, the poor condition of their boat became apparent. Rusty streaks from the rails on the main deck covered it from front to back, a stream of hot, dirty water spurted from a hole just above the waterline and the hum and rattle of the ancient engines grew louder the closer they got.
As Stratton and Gabriel approached the rear ramp, a crewman appeared - an older man with a roll-up stuck to