Gospel (68 page)

Father Irenaeus glanced down into his lap, frowning at his clasped hands. “There have only been three such incidents, all in places, sir, where you have been staying.”

“Father, if I were to do such a horrible thing, do you think I would leave my briefcase as evidence?”

The young monk spoke heatedly: that the monk who had come upon the vandal surprised him and he might well have made a clumsy exit, knocking over the Bible stand as well.

Father Irenaeus shrugged slightly. “What are we to think? We have found out who you are. You are a learned, honored man, Mr. O'Hanrahan. We have relayed messages to and from Father Sergius at Skete Prophet Ieremiou who vouches for you completely and I am willing to believe him. Father Kallistratos at Dionysiou attests to your innocence as well. Indeed, we took in forty pilgrims this night, a large group from Thessaloniki, and amid this collection one man is not accounted for—it is perhaps this man who has done this thing.”

O'Hanrahan was relieved.

“But wherever you are, for whatever reason, this seems to happen. So I must ask you to leave Athos.”

O'Hanrahan was quiet a moment. “May I see my satchel?”

It was slid to him. O'Hanrahan looked inside. The notes were gone and, yes, so were the photos. Someone else now had the text of the gospel. “I have been robbed,” said O'Hanrahan, “of my notes and research.”

There is paint, said one of the younger monks, inside the satchel.

O'Hanrahan, understanding, snapped at him in modern Greek: You accuse me unjustly!

“I sympathize with your odd situation, sir,” said Father Irenaeus, now standing. “But whoever has done this has done this, perhaps, because of you, and so you must depart immediately.”

So close! “But Father, please, I have come for only one thing, to see the
Sermium Compendium
and commentaries of the Great Library of Megistri Lavra—”

“No, sir, I must insist. The Greek police have already been notified.”

“Notified?”

“To escort you off Athos. For your protection, of course,” added Father Irenaeus insincerely. “Since someone is following you with such malicious intent. Besides, some of the brothers would as soon stone a man associated with … with these crimes.”

“Father, please. I have come all this way—thousands of miles, hundreds of dollars.” The men were unmoved. Oh damn, his bribe money had been sacrificed back at Father Sergius's skete. “Have your monks stand guard over me, watch me every second—”

“Sir, I believe you. You are not to blame for these godless acts of desecration, but nonetheless, you see our position.”

*   *   *

Day Four in exciting Ouranopolis threatened to be a rerun of Days Three and Two, which were a rerun of Day One, which was a rerun, Lucy suspected, of some day around the time of Homer. She rose at ten
A.M.
-ish and walked out to the lagoon and read the same, frayed newspapers that had been there on the stands yesterday, browsed through the same paperbacks.

Lunch was predictable. Forget Skylla and Kharybdis, thought Lucy, the modern Odysseus attempts to navigate beyond Souvlaki and Moussaka, the twin titans! Odysseus' men approach Kirke and are turned into a reconstituted lamb slab on a gyro spit. The eye of the one-eyed giant could be put out with a shish-kebab … Lucy wished Dr. O'Hanrahan was around to develop these silly mock-epic ideas. She missed him actually.

Lucy dutifully sat for an hour in the lobby of the Hotel Poseidon. No phone call as arranged. The deskman said he would be happy to take a complete message or send out an errand boy to track her down, the village hardly being big enough to get lost in.

Sighing, slightly concerned about O'Hanrahan's disappearance, she stood on the hotel porch and felt the intense blast of the sun, searing, supreme. If her body were more presentable, she would join the bronzed Teutonic maidens on the beach for a sunbathing session, but that was too much exposure. She looked above at her balcony. Private. Unobservable. Lucy then viewed with mild amusement Stavros's tanned, glistening body wavering and squatting on the sailboard, trying to make the thing propel with too little wind. With each awkward plunge back into the water, the attendant Nereids, Helga and what's-her-name, giggling, bore him upon the surf and bade him try again.

Lucy sauntered back through the lobby, got her key, and trudged up the stairs. She hadn't thought to bring a swimsuit to England, so consequently her sunbathing attire was underwear, or should she feel more daring, no clothes at all. She'd never sunbathed nude. She stepped out on her balcony. There was no higher building so there was no possibility of voyeurism. Stavros was in the lagoon, O'Hanrahan on Mt. Athos, so the only possible observation point, the neighboring balcony with its solid concrete wall between, was not a risk. She studied her own balcony of white polished tile with the concrete wall—a virtual solar reflector.

Lucy went back in the room and undressed and removed from her purse some sunscreen, the strongest available. All right, she told herself, twenty minutes tops in this strong sun or I'll be a beet like Derek and Tracy. She lathered herself and gave herself one unaccidental glance in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. Now I have lost some weight, she told herself. Not ready for the nude beach yet, but getting there.

It was hot, hot, hot.

Lucy lay on her back on a towel with an arm across her closed eyes. Sweat mixed with tanning oil swam at the edges of her eyes, so that she wiped her face with the corner of the towel constantly. Here I am, she told herself, nude-sunbathing in Greece. I'll tell Judy. I'll tell her I did it on a beach with thousands watching. Very European showing your breasts to strangers. She groped for the wristwatch beside her: I've been out here eight minutes, she discovered.

Then she turned over on her stomach. You know, she thought, I have never felt sun on these parts of my body before and it's not bad, not bad at all. There was the faintest breeze above the balcony and she sensed it above her, almost alleviating her glorious, luxuriant broiling—

“I seee yoo,” said a familiar voice.

Lucy froze. Stavros was on the neighboring balcony, leaning around the concrete wall. Damn him. Well, she was on her stomach and better that than the other. No, she would not get up and run. He would go away and she would slip into her room quickly.

“Hello, Stavros,” she said. “Please go away.”

“I want to see.”

“Well, you've seen, so now go away.”

“You turn, uh … orange.”

Orange is a familiar word because of American soft drinks. “Red. I might turn
red,
not orange.”

“No,” he laughed, “orange!”

She craned to look around at her feet and saw him leaning out around his balcony. “Are you going to go away?” she asked firmly.

He misunderstood. The next thing she knew he threw a leg around the partition separating the balconies and swung around to her side. He stood there dripping in his brief bathing suit, still leering at her. “Look what you do to me,” he said, pointing at his bikini briefs.

Oh my God, thought Lucy.

She looked away and began to compose in her head a stern edict, when she saw his discarded bathing suit flung into the far corner of the balcony with a slap. The next second, on his stomach, he lay down beside her on the towel. “Halloo Lucy,” he said.

Lucy shook her head. Well, maybe the worst was through. She wouldn't turn over, he wouldn't turn over, and what a story this would make! Judy, just wait till you hear about this!

Stavros spied the bottle of sunscreen on the far side of Lucy. He leaned over her, supporting his weight on her back and Lucy felt her breath become more shallow. “White, white, white,” he said, commenting upon the expanse of Lucy's Irish coloring. He squirted some oil on her back before she could say anything. He rubbed it in with both hands, deeply kneading her back.

Lucy swallowed with difficulty. She sucked in her stomach as tight as she could, and lengthened her body as best she might, willing her appearance to thinness. You better get him out of here, she told herself, or it's going to end in … Yes. Maybe it should end the way it's going to end. She could feel Stavros's breath on her neck as he leaned over her shoulders. He rubbed oil on her upper back and his hands strayed perilously close to the edge of her right breast. She craned her neck around to see him, naked, amusing himself by rubbing oil on her.

Well, of course it's going to happen.

And I'm not going to prevent it, she heard herself think. It will be now. In such moments there is only the present; maybe the consequences fall to some other entity, but not the Lucy Dantan who is right here in this moment—

“You want?” Stavros asked.

He took her hand and squirted some oil into it and then pressed it to his chest and said something in Greek to her. He spoke again but she shook her head, not understanding. He touched her cheek, then stopped smiling as he took her shoulder and turned her over on her back. She closed her eyes in the searing sun, which had turned the day white and otherworldly; through her eyelids there was only the red and in her ears only a furious heartbeat and she fought to keep her eyes closed as he led her hand down to his waist, and his other hand traced a line down to her waist … Briefly there was flash of something ancient and dimly lit, a mother's face at church, an indistinct shape of sorrow, someone not quite recognizable, something not to be heeded, and though they all reached out, Lucy, throwing her head back, obliterated them in the sun. And she pulled Stavros, who smelled of oil and sweat, closer, and when he became more energetic and pressed himself upon her, she held him all the more lightly as if he might break or dissolve, and a drop of sweat from his forehead fell on her tongue with miraculous accuracy, the deliberateness of a nail through a hand—

Her heart beat furiously, the beating of wings, fallen angels cast out—they bore her aloft as a supreme selfishness welled within her, but she would not recant or be moved though fire consume her, though broken on the wheel, though tossed to wild beasts, she would now hold tighter, she would own this sin and commend herself to the sun above, the white-hot chorus of the Aegean …

Consummatum est.

*   *   *

O'Hanrahan, packed and ready to go, stood at the door of Megistri Lavra, now at midday. Father Irenaeus had assigned Brother Nikolas to stand guard over him while a boat could be procured, then to accompany him to Daphne where the police had been summoned.

“So,” the professor protested politely, “I'm to be handed over, even though I'm innocent, to Greek authorities?”

Father Irenaeus: “Yes, to tell your side of the story, so that when this culprit is caught your witness will be on record.”

I'm looking at three days down the tubes, thought O'Hanrahan. Greek police, Greek bureaucracy and of course, they may decide expeditiously that I
am
guilty of these things. Father Sergius wouldn't be able to come testify for me and no subpoena would be effective on Athos …

“Young Nikolas,” explained the father, “will take you down to the dock now. The boat has arrived.”

Nikolas, the earnest, fiery one with accusing eyes and a straggly teenage beard, said to his elders that he would be careful with O'Hanrahan and would soon return with news.

Oh yeah? thought O'Hanrahan. We'll see about that, little boy.

Nikolas escorted O'Hanrahan down the winding, rough cobblestone road on which O'Hanrahan had endured such dire prostrations ascending the day before. O'Hanrahan brooded briefly on the failure to see the
Sermium Compendium.
And what's worse was the mysterious Mad Monk had seen that very codex the week before. Bah, enough of this! First thing was to lose this twerp.

“Do you speak any English?” asked O'Hanrahan.

He didn't, he mumbled in Greek.

O'Hanrahan could make a run for it … Yeah right, huffing and heaving up this very road yesterday afternoon—what kind of getaway could he make? Maybe he should hit the kid over the head with—what, a rock? No, an act of violence would be taken as a sure sign of guilt. At the pier, an older fisherman in a tiny motorboat caked in blue-green peeling paint sputtered up to the concrete jetty.

“I am eager to get to Daphne,” O'Hanrahan began. He then repeated it in Greek: “I want to clear up the whole trouble. And I hope they catch the fiend who did this.”

“Neh,”
said the monk, eyeing the professor unsurely.

“All my research stolen! What a disaster my trip to your monastery has been. Accused of a horrible crime, my papers taken…”

The monk softened.
“Me sinhorite,”
he sympathized.

“The policeman will meet me at Daphne, correct?” asked O'Hanrahan, hoping to get into the boat alone, where he might promise a bribe to the fisherman.

“Yes, I will be there to guide you,” said Nikolas.

“You hardly need to trouble yourself, son,” added O'Hanrahan, patting the novice on the shoulder. “Have no fear, I want to go to Daphne and assert my innocence.”

“Ohi,”
he said sharply, “I will accompany you.”

No dice. O'Hanrahan smiled sheepishly at the monk before stepping into the center of the boat; the monk, precariously, then stepped into the bow. The puttering motor was revived and the old fisherman began them on their journey around the end of the peninsula, back to Daphne.

Maybe the policemen would be understanding … This was dreaming! Then it occurred to him: whoever stole my photos has to escape from Mt. Athos too. At some point today he will have to go through Daphne and take the boat back to Ouranopolis, unless he wishes to walk the length of the peninsula, forty grueling miles. If I could get free then I could maybe intercept this criminal, see who he is.

“Beautiful!” exhaled O'Hanrahan, as the peninsula passed by to their right. “
Ti thaumasios keros!
” he said, hoping to initiate banter about the weather. He continued in Greek: “This is Karoulia, no? Where the monks live in caves?”