The Mask of Atreus (14 page)

"That seems very unlikely," he said flatly. "I do not see how such a thing could happen." He checked his watch and smiled, but the smile was careful and did not reach those dark, hard-candy eyes. "Now, I'm sorry, but you will have to excuse me. I have work to attend to. Please," he said, a version of his former smile flicking back into place, "enjoy your visit. And," he added, turning back to her after he had already taken several steps away, "please come back. Mention your name at the door, and they will not charge you."

Deborah watched him walk away, wondering what she had said that had made him beat what was clearly a hasty and unsettled retreat.

CHAPTER 23

On the way back from the archaeological museum Deborah stopped at a roadside stall and bought a bright yellow backpack: her luggage for the present. She then sought out the least expensive looking boutique she could find, and filled it with clothes, wondering vaguely if this meant she intended to stay more than a day or two. She bought T-shirts, shorts, cotton underwear, a hopeful bathing suit which was probably too small, and a long, flowing white dress made of a soft, breathable fabric that might have been muslin. It was very Greek, or at least what she took in her uninformed way to be very Greek in the classical sense. Today all the women looked generically European, the young ones stylishly flamboyant, suggesting both panache and a curiously sexy naivete, the old ones wrapped in incongruous shawls over shapeless black frocks that must have been like personal microwaves. She had hoped her purchases would make her blend in, but there seemed little chance of that. She'd seen no one, male or female, as tall as her, and felt interested, unapologetic eyes on her almost all the time.

On Themistokleous Deborah found a large bookstore with a good selection of guides and histories in English. She bought several archaeological and artistic studies, some of them books she had seen on Richard's shelves, and a twovolume paperback edition of Robert Graves's
Greek Myths
. The welter of classical subjects invoked by the museum had left her acutely conscious of how much of Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides she had forgotten or never known. She had a lot of catching up to do.

By the time she had gotten back to her hotel, it was after 113

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four, and she was tired and hungry. Part of her would have been happy to go straight to bed, but she had to eat something, and she felt the presence of her new books like an unwrapped Christmas present. She read for an hour and a half, then took the briefest of showers, donned some of her new clothes, and went back out into the dry, dusty heat, taking a couple of the books with her.

She walked down Ermou from Syntagma Square and into the Plaka, the newly gentrified Turkish core of the old city. Here Athens's cars and concrete were forgotten, and the cobbled streets were lined with neoclassical houses tiled with terra-cotta, the intersections broken by Orthodox churches, all minarets and domes and rustic brick, many of the buildings looking curiously half scale. From time to time she saw much older remains: the remnants of a Roman arch, a partial colonnade from Greece's classical period. The feel of the place soothed her as the museum (and her slightly cryptic conversation with its director) had not. This was the Athens she had half expected and secretly hoped for: a thriving and elegant city firmly engaged with its storied past. This thought was passing through her head when she looked up and caught her first glimpse of the Acropolis itself and part of a building lined with columns (Doric or Ionic? At this distance, she couldn't tell), all brushed with golden light. It was breathtaking. She stopped where she was and gazed up at it, feeling the power of the place. She was looking, she gathered from her guidebook, at part of the Propylea, or the Temple of Athena Nike, not at the Parthenon itself, which was considerably larger. The elegant pale marble of the structure seemed to glow, flushing with an inner fire that made it separate, unearthly. From there, said the legends, Theseus's father had awaited news of his son who had gone to fight the minotaur in the labyrinth beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete. Theseus had promised to display his success by dressing his ships with white sails, but in his triumph, he forgot. When his ships sailed into the harbor, their sails still black, 114

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his father, assuming his son had been killed, threw himself off the precipice to his death.

Legends. The place positively breathed them. Maybe this was what drove people like Richard, or, for that matter, Schliemann himself. In a place like this, maybe the stories of gods and heroes at war really could be true.

She ate grilled lamb kebabs and a salad of tomatoes, black olives, and feta cheese, in an open-air taverna called The Five Brothers. She read--to deter the romantic interest of the waiters as much as anything else--watched the skinny, ubiquitous cats which snaked through the restaurant's chair legs, and resolved that whatever Greek had told Elaine Shotridge that the cheese in her feta filo pastries tasted as good as anything from his native land was being, at best, polite, at worst, sarcastic. This was the real deal, moist and salty and sharp, perfectly complemented by the slight sweetness of the minted, oil-drizzled tomatoes. She read enough to assure herself of her way up to the Acropolis, paid, and left.

She had less than an hour before the site would close. It wasn't enough time to see the place properly, and she would certainly have to come back for the Acropolis Museum, but it would be good to get a sense of everything in the soft light and cooler temperatures of the evening. Her guidebook suggested that there would be fewer tourists now as well, since most out sightseeing in the evening would be headed for Philopappus Hill, from which vantage they got the best view of the Parthenon as the sun went down.

From the Roman marketplace, Deborah walked briskly, ascending the long, slow ramp which climbed around and up the great rock on which the Parthenon was situated. She was pleased to note that most of the foot traffic was descending, tourists in bright colors and absurd hats, faces, legs, and arms all pink and sweaty. There were some boisterous teenagers with backpacks who seemed (and intended to seem, she thought) ready to climb another mountain, but most looked tired and a little subdued. What caused that? Exhaustion, disappointment, the unavoidable and maddening sense of one's 115

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own ignorance, each day's complement of much-vaunted sites blurring together in one great and baffling pile of meaningless stones? Even thinking as a historian and archaeologist, she couldn't blame them. She remembered somebody's remark about being a tourist: "What I see bores me and what I don't see worries me."

But she could not be so blase. As she neared the summit she looked north to the rocky outcrop known as the Areopagus, or Hill of Mars. This was where Saint Paul had preached, where the Turks had laid siege to the Acropolis 500

years before the birth of Christ, where--in a still more ancient Athens before the world's first (and rudimentary) democracy--the council of nobles had sat. According to legend, Orestes was tried here for killing his mother, Clytemnestra, a son's vengeance for her murder of his father, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, son of Atreus.

The last word Richard wrote, perhaps:
Atreus
. It had led her to his body through the bookcase, but what had it meant to him when he wrote it down and punctuated it with those question marks?

She passed the temple of Athena Nike on her right and moved through the Propylea onto the top of the Acropolis. The Erechtheion with its caryatids--columns shaped like women--was on her left. Directly ahead was the Parthenon itself. She stood and looked at it, glad that she was alone. It was no wonder this was one of the world's most recognizable structures, its great stepped platform and lines of Doric columns proclaiming a grandeur and mystery almost without parallel anywhere else. Of course, it hadn't always looked like this, and most visitors would be appalled by the gaudily painted and statue-cluttered eyesore which Pericles had ordered built after the battle of Marathon. It lost its roof in the seventeenth century during a siege when the temple--

which the occupying Turks had been using as a powder magazine--blew up and burned solidly for two days. Its greatest threats these days, according to her guidebook, were the tourists, who climbed on it every time the security guards 116

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turned their backs, and acid rain. The horrendous Athenian smog was taking its toll on the ancient marble at an unprecedented rate . . .

"The structure maintains a perfect nine-to-four ratio in all its dimensions," said a voice at her shoulder. Deborah turned and found herself looking into the face of a stranger who, though he was gazing raptly on the structure in front of them, was apparently talking to her.

"Is that right?" she said.

And then she knew who he was, and her smile grew warmer. He was dressed quite differently now, but he had been in the airport in Atlanta. She had almost bumped into him when she had considered not getting on the plane after all, a plane, she now recalled, that he had also been on. He nodded and glanced briefly at her, then back toward the temple.

"I take it you found Richard's little collection," he said.

"Or rather, you found what wasn't there."

And then, like the tumblers of a lock clicking into place, another part of her memory opened, and she knew another aspect of him: his voice.

"Did they take the body?"
he had said in that same smooth, un-American accent.

Her mouth parted, and frozen, she began to back away, borne on a wave of slow terror.

CHAPTER 24

He was a big man, broad in chest and shoulder, not trim or athletic, perhaps, but strong and solid. He was, perhaps, forty-five, maybe less. His eyes were fixed on her now.

"You stay away from me," she said. It had come out with a slight catch in her throat and sounded inept, girlish. She took another step backward, cleared her throat, and spat onto the fractured marble blocks at her feet. The gesture seemed to arrest him, but only for a moment. He took a step toward her, and she was dismayed to see how lightly he moved.

"Miss Miller," he said. "We need to talk."

"One more step, and I call the cops," she said, her voice lower this time, firmer.

"Because you have such faith in the police?" he said dryly. The politeness in the way he said her name and the sardonic bitterness in that last knowing response made his accent more apparent. He was English, she thought, not Australian or South African, though a part of her brain--an old, animal part that saw the world in terms of predators and prey--had taken charge, and it said that such nuances were irrelevant. She had barely felt its presence before, but she trusted it now, and it tightened the muscles of her calves and flicked her eyes for the closest groups of tourists. It watched his careful, balanced movement as it recalled where the last security station had been.

There was no one close by. He had timed his approach perfectly, and the Acropolis, which had seemed pleasantly--

even spiritually--quiet, now seemed lethally deserted.

"There's no reason to be afraid," he said, and his tone was more impatient than it was consoling.

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"Right," she said. That prehistoric survival instinct had scanned the ground for a hunk of stone she could wield as a weapon, but the Greeks had learned that anything small enough to be picked up by a tourist would be. There was nothing she could shift without a forklift.

"I am on your side," said the man, taking a careful step toward her.

"I don't have a side," she said, defiant. She risked a half glance behind her. A tour group was emerging from the Propylea two hundred yards away, spilling into a semicircle around their guide, cameras at the ready. She inhaled, and another piece of the puzzle slid into place: he smelled of pipe smoke and cologne. Catching the aroma now with her adrenaline starting to pump reminded her she had smelled it on him in the airport but hadn't connected it to the intruder in her apartment.

"You have something I want," he said. "And I am prepared to negotiate to get it, which, considering my family has already paid for the item in question once before, seems more than reasonable."

"I don't know what you are talking about," she said.

"Come now," he said, smiling indulgently. "I'm prepared to pay a good deal more than any museum will offer."

Another lock tumbler clicked into place in Deborah's mind.

"You followed me today," she said.

"Of course." He shrugged. "As you intended."

He's crazy,
she thought.
He has to be.

"If I had anything that had once belonged to Richard, you don't think I would sell it to his killer?" she said, backing toward the tourists who were, it seemed, an almost infinite distance away. His face clouded.

"So Richard is dead. I feared as much."

She stared at him.

"You know he is."

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"I saw the police cars and I wondered . . . But I thought . . . I hoped . . ."

His voice dried up. For a second he looked smaller, but then his features narrowed and hardened.

"I see," he said. "No wonder you left the country." It was an accusation of a sort, but he didn't wait for her to respond.

"But if you think that getting your hands bloody will increase the amount I am prepared to pay, you are sadly mistaken. In fact the only thing your murderous brutality means for sure is that you won't be able to sell it to any museum anywhere."

He smiled unhappily. "I suggest you consider your terms quickly," he said, "or I shall be obliged to notify the police of your whereabouts."

Deborah felt light-headed at this bizarre change of tack.
He's trying to confuse you.

She felt a bitter, violent hatred for this man rising up in her, a hatred that made her want to pummel his face with her fists. But then perhaps that was what he was trying to do: knock her off balance, upset her.