A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (10 page)

I would have preferred to remain out of sight in my room at the Hotel Grand Bretagne until our meeting with Mr. Livas at the Ministry of Antiquities, but Lord Silverton insisted we first visit Max Haywood's flat, in that warren of streets directly below the Acropolis. I will cast aside pride and concede that he was right.

“As I feared,” said Lord Silverton, as he stepped out from behind me to view the interior, “it seems we're not the first ones here.”

“Perhaps he's only disorganized.”

“Not Max.”

He reached inside his waistcoat pocket. I was expecting him to produce his pipe, but instead he drew out a small pair of wire-framed spectacles and unfolded the arms, one by one.

“I didn't know you wore spectacles,” I cried.

“I try to avoid the practice, wherever possible.”

“But why?” I felt unreasonably affronted, as if he'd been keeping back a vital secret from me.

“Vanity, I suppose. You won't tell a soul, will you?”

He settled the specs on the bridge of his nose, and before I could catch a glimpse of the general effect, he moved forward to pick his way around the scattered books and papers. I released a put-upon sigh and bent down to begin gathering them up, but before my fingers could find the first notebook, his lordship commanded me to stop.

“Stop? Why?”

“I find it's more useful to leave things undisturbed, in such cases, until we've got some idea what we're looking at.”

“Such cases? Do you encounter this sort of thing often?”

He made his way to the desk without replying. Mr. Haywood's rooms faced east, away from the Acropolis and its monuments, and the parlor was now quite dark, though I imagined the sun would flood through the windows in the morning. I could still smell the warmth of the trapped sunshine in the wooden furniture, the unmistakable scent of a house that has not been lived in. I folded my arms and peered out between the rooftops to the parkland on the other side. “Is His Grace an early riser?”

“His Grace?”

“The former Mr. Haywood.”

“Max? Yes, the devil take him. Wakes at dawn and works until lunchtime. Why do you ask?”

“The windows face east.”

Silverton checked his survey of the desk and turned to me. The spectacles glinted briefly. They were small, but they changed his aspect entirely: he now looked like a rather dashing scholar, a rumpled mathematician unaware of his own charm. “Yes. So they do. An astute observation, Truelove.”

“Is that the royal palace?” I pointed to the corner of the window, on the other side of the jumble of orange-tile rooftops laid out before me.

His lordship rose and picked his way through the debris to stand beside me. “Yes, the king and queen. It seems they're in residence, if I don't mistake the meaning of that pennant snapping in the breeze.”

“And they are not even Greek,” I murmured.

“What's that?”

“The king and queen. Don't you think that's precarious? Inviting the second son of Denmark to accept your crown?”

Silverton shrugged. “They seem to be rubbing along all right. It's been—what? Forty years?”

“But what's the point? I don't understand. You might as well have a president, if you're just going to go around inviting suitable candidates to be king. The royal family is meant to be a link to one's heritage, to the nation's past. Its soul.”

“The reassuring illusion of permanence.”

“Yes, exactly. It gives me great satisfaction to know that a drop of the Conqueror's blood runs in His Majesty's veins.”

“I suppose it would be churlish of me to point out that William was a Norman.”

“Very churlish.”

“And our merry King Edward, God save him, owes his rule to the kind intervention of Olympia's own ancestors—mine, too, come to that—dragging old Dutch William and his wife across the North Sea to replace the Stuarts.”

“Yes, but Mary
was
a Stuart by blood, and so was her husband, if I recall. They were both grandchildren of Charles the First.”

“Oh, if you like. But you can't jolly well explain away the Hanovers.”

I laughed. “Yes, I can. The first George's mother descended directly from James Stuart, as you must know well enough, if you paid any attention at all to your schoolmaster. Just because it's through the female line doesn't make the blood any thinner, you know. It's the women who saved the succession for Britain.”

Silverton turned around and leaned against the window frame,
bringing his hands together atop the flat stomach of his waistcoat and twiddling his thumbs. As I said, the windows were shadowed at this hour, and the blue of his eyes had faded to a lazy gray behind their glass lenses, but the austere effect of this demi-illumination seemed to suit him, not that a man of his careless beauty needed any augmentation from the surrounding atmosphere. He smiled at me and said, “At least for the Church of England. No lack of Catholic heirs of the male line, after all.”

“That isn't the point. The point is that a king should have
some
sort of blood claim to the throne, or he's not a king. You might as well dispense with all the mystery and the ritual and have a proper republic.”

“Call a spade a spade, in other words.”

“Hmm.”

He went on twiddling his thumbs, gazing at me in such a way that I was compelled to gaze back, waiting for him to speak. The sensation was unsettling, the quarters too close. There was, I realized, something intimate about his wearing of the spectacles. They had humbled him, like an admission of guilt. A faint scent of pipe tobacco drifted from his tweeds. I touched the tender side of my face and said, “What's the matter?”

“I was just thinking I should have hit the damned fool a little harder,” he said quietly.

I pushed away from the window and turned to face the room. “I don't understand this. Who would ransack Mr. Haywood's rooms? Why? He was a scholar, an archeologist. What were they looking for?”

“Haven't a clue, I'm afraid. But at least we have a start. We know what they
weren't
looking for.”

“What's that?”

He came up to stand next to me and gestured grandly around the room. “All this.”

After we had made a general inventory of the flat—the bare and shabby parlor in which we stood, which seemed to serve as an office and storage room, and a tiny bedroom in the back, in which a purse containing a hundred and fifteen drachmae was left untouched—we gathered up the papers scattered on the floor and attempted to restore them to order. They were not varied. There were scholarly journals and handwritten notes—Max's handwriting, Silverton said, and indeed it resembled the script I recalled from Mr. Haywood's correspondence with my employer—accompanied by diagrams, almost always in Latin.

“Why Latin?” I said. “Why not Greek or English?”

“God knows. Max was always a bit of a show-off with his languages.”

“I wish you wouldn't speak of him in the past tense.”

“Ah, yes.” He picked up a leather envelope and peered inside. “I nearly forgot we've got a succession crisis of our own. But I don't mean to imply the worst. I've a lingering fondness for the old boy, though he used to ravage me at cards.”

“He plays at cards? He doesn't strike me as the frivolous sort.”

“He did it for the mental gymnastics, you see, not for the companionship or, come to that, the filthy lucre in the center of the table.” Silverton set aside the envelope. “Are you saying I'm frivolous?”

I rose to my feet and carried the last stack to the desk, which was now piled high with neat vertical columns of papers that had
held no interest to our apparent burglar. Silverton tossed the envelope on a chair and went to the door.

“What are you doing?”

“Just casting another beady eye on this lock.”

“Why?”

“Only to confirm my original impression, which is that there's no sign of its having been picked. Or broken or replaced, for that matter.”

“The landlord might have let him in.”

Silverton walked to the window and peered down to the street below. “Hmm. Possible, but unlikely. Climbing through the window, I mean.” He straightened and turned to me. “As for the landlord, I already asked the fellow if anyone else had been to see the flat, and he said there hadn't.”

“Was he telling the truth?”

“Damned if I know for certain. But I slipped him ten drachmae, so I should jolly well hope so.” He nodded at the desk. “Nothing but scholarly rubbish, eh? No business matters?”

“No, nothing.” I paused. “Although I'd have thought . . .”

“What?”

“Well, Mr. Haywood used to send his correspondence from here. From Athens, I mean, so I suppose he would have been staying in this flat. Not his personal letters—he sent those from wherever he was—but the official reports he sent back every quarter. And the boxes, of course.”

Silverton's eyebrows lifted high above his spectacles, like the hair of a hound when it scents a fox. “His boxes, eh? You mean the loot he sent home to Olympia?”

“Yes, he used to send us crates every quarter, along with the reports. Olympia liked to be kept apprised of what he'd found.
He was acutely interested in the progress of Mr. Haywood's expeditions, especially when he came to Crete.”

“Yes, I imagine so.”

“Because of the institute, you see. The artifacts he was sending back for the institute.”

“Exactly. The institute. But do you mean to say he sent them all from here? He would return to Athens every quarter day on the dot, box them up, write up his report, and chuck the whole lot in the post?”

“Actually, he sent them by special courier.”

“By special courier! I see. A singular fact that
you
, as His Grace's personal secretary, would be in the best position to know.” Lord Silverton cast his gaze about the room. “I don't suppose you'd happen to have his name? The courier, I mean?”

“Why, no.”

“Was he English or Greek?”

“Greek, I believe. I never met him. He simply left the shipment with the butler in London and went on his way.”

“There's a chap. And this last shipment arrived at Christmas, am I correct?”

“Yes. Just before his last letter.” I frowned. “You don't think the intruder was looking for the artifacts, do you?”

“I think it's very likely.”

“Why is that?”

Silverton wandered to the cabinet on the opposite wall and opened one door. “Because, Truelove. Unless I'm mistaken, there's no sign of any of his old rubbish here, nor was the intruder troubled to make off with the small fortune in the top drawer of our missing heir's bureau. And that leaves us with two possibilities.”

I leaned back against the desk and frowned at the patch of
blue sky across the room. “Either he sent them all to England at Christmas . . .”

“Or else the burglar was good enough to save him the trouble.”

As a consequence of our activities at Mr. Haywood's flat, we were eleven minutes late for our meeting with Mr. Livas at the Ministry of Antiquities, but Lord Silverton assured me the man wouldn't take offense.

“These Mediterranean chaps have it all right side up,” he said. “They're not troubled about the tyrant clock the way we English are.”

“A sign of spiritual decay.”

“Or the opposite.” He peered out the window of the motorcar. “There's the Parthenon, if you're interested.”

“Oh!” I lurched over his lordship's lap and pressed my nose against the dusty glass. “Oh, it's more beautiful than I dreamt!”

“Surely you've seen photographs.”

“But it doesn't compare. My God, the living Parthenon. Look at the endless columns. How magisterial she sits, there on the hill.”

He picked me up and set me back in my seat. “Not actually living, you understand, at least by the standards of most of Earth's creatures. And she could bear a spot of cleaning and repair.”