"And you don't forget," said Mr. Dainopoulos, turning towards the safe again. "By and by I'll have some more business, big business, and you'll get a big piece o' money if you work in with me. When you come back, eh? Out here, plenty business but nobody honest, to manage." He paused, looking down at the floor, hampered by his deficient English to explain what he meant. He was rather moved, too, because he saw, right there in his own continuing city, opportunities for business undreamed of by the tall blond officers in their shining brown harness down at headquarters. He saw buildings going up which would be sold for a song, a floating dock which might be acquired for a purely nominal sum when the war was over. He saw jetties and rolling-stock and launches which would be sold at hurried auctions for knock-down prices, a score at a time. But one must have somebody one can trust, a partner or a manager. Mr. Dainopoulos wanted no partners. His temperament was to feel his way along alone, making sudden rushes at his objective or sitting down to wait. A partner was of no use to him. But he figured that someone like Mr. Spokesly would be of great assistance in his business as he planned it later.
He put his cash-box away, slammed his safe shut, and began to open his shop for his ostensible business of money-changing.
"Now you get out to the ship as soon as you got your gear," he said, "and that young feller'll go with you in the boat."
Mr. Spokesly was startled to see how close the _Kalkis_ was in shore, opposite the house. Without a glass he could see the balcony and the window within which Mrs. Dainopoulos lay watching the sunlight on the sea. As he came nearer to the ship, however, sitting in the row boat with the trembling young Hebrew beside him, he became preoccupied with her lines. And indeed to a seafaring man the _Kalkis_ was a problem. She resembled nothing so much as the broken-down blood animal whom one discovers hauling a cab. Mr. Spokesly could see she had been a yacht. Her once tall masts were cut to stumps and a smooth-rivetted funnel at the same graceful rake was full of degrading dinges. A singularly shapely hull carried amidships a grotesque abortion in the form of a super-imposed upper bridge, and the teak deck forward was broken by a square hatchway. All the scuttles along her sides, once gleaming brass and crystal, were blind with dead-lights and painted over. Another hatch had been made where the owner's skylight had been and a friction-winch screamed and scuttered on the once spotless poop. As Mr. Spokesly once phrased it later, it was like meeting some girl, whose family you knew, on the streets. A lighter lay alongside loaded with sacks and cases, and the friction-winch shrieked and jerked the sling into the air as a gang of frowzy Greeks hooked them on.