The Mask of Atreus (16 page)

"You think that Richard had the mask which Schliemann believed had covered the face of Agamemnon himself?" she said carefully, clarifying the outlandish claim by putting it into words. It was impossible, even if there really was a 130

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historical Agamemnon. But she had not yet heard Marcus's most extraordinary claim.

"Not just the mask," said the voice on the telephone. "You saw enough of the collection to see its richness, yes?"

"Yes," she said. She found that she was getting a little breathless, something like dread or excitement creeping over her as she listened, a thrill which drowned out her considerable doubts about this man and his story with the rush of possibility, however remote.

"And did it not strike you as strange that the killers should leave such things behind and take only a death mask?"

"Yes," she admitted, "though I thought the mask was more . . . distinctive, unique."

"And so it is," said Marcus. "But the mask was not simply removed from a case, was it?"

"No," she said, the breathlessness increasing as she felt some awful truth dancing just out of the reach of sight.

"They took the entire case," he said. "It was a large case which had to be wheeled out."

She remembered the oily tracks on the carpet, the separate electrical outlet in the floor, and that great rectangle of light. Whatever had been displayed in the center of that room had been much larger than a single mask. The hairs on her arms had risen. The room felt impossibly chilly.

"So what was it?" she forced herself to ask.

"I asked if they had taken the body," he said. "I didn't mean Richard's. I meant Agamemnon's."

CHAPTER 28

It was impossible. Of course it was. That the little room in Atlanta had contained the body of Agamemnon himself was absurd. That a nineteenth-century archaeologist could unearth and preserve an intact corpse which had been in the ground for three and a half thousand years was impossible. She told him so, and then, because she was suddenly irritated that she had listened to such nonsense for so long and that Richard might just have believed it, she was suddenly overcome with a depression she had managed to hold off thus far. She demanded a number where she could call him back (no more would he dictate the terms of their conversations), which he gave her without hesitation. After she had hung up, she sat there on the bed for over an hour, and a possibility occurred to her. She thought for a long moment, not wanting to pursue Marcus's absurd idea
(Agamemnon?)
, and then picked up the phone and started dialing.

The Dekalb County police station took exactly three minutes to find a contact number for David Barrons, the man who had translated the Russian letter on the illegal immigrant called Voloshinov. She hung up and dialed it. Barrons answered on the second ring, sounding awake and alert. Deborah left her own details vague, trying to sound official without actually claiming to be so, and got straight to it.

"The line in the letter which referred to the remains. Do you have a sense of what those remains could be?"

"The Russian word was
ostaki,
I think," he said, apparently sufficiently enthusiastic to talk about his subject that he didn't much care who she was or why she was interested. "It 132

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can mean any number of things. Old things. Leftovers. Things left behind."

"Antiquities?"

"I guess so. Wait a minute. I'll check my notes."

There was a pause, some background noise that might have been a television, and then he was back.

"
Ostaki,
I said, right? Wait, no, that's not it." He sounded less crestfallen than intrigued. "It's
ostanki
. I didn't notice the
n
. Huh."

"What?" said Deborah. There was note of puzzlement in his voice. "What does it mean?"

"Well, it's similar in sense," said the translator, "and it still means
remains,
but now it's a bit more specific."

"Go on," said Deborah, her voice slightly hushed.

"Now it means
human
remains. You know, like a corpse."

Deborah closed her eyes.

"Weird," said Barrons.

"And the last word of that fragment," Deborah pressed on, feeling her heart rate increase. "You wrote
Mary
. Do you have any idea what it meant?"

"I'm not even sure those letters were right," he said. "The letter was badly torn and stained, and crudely written to begin with. It looked more like
MAGD,
but I didn't know what it meant, so I put
Mary.
"

"Could it be part of a longer name? A person . . . or a place?"

"I guess. I don't know."

Deborah thanked him for his time, hung up, and lay on her back, staring at the ceiling fan for ten minutes, then she checked that the door was barred and got back into bed. She was asleep in less than five minutes.

Deborah slept soundly for the first few hours but was wide awake before the sun came up. By the time the National Archaeological Museum opened at eight o'clock, she had been sitting on the steps for half an hour. Popadreus, the museum 133

T h e M a s k o f A t r e u s

director, was already in his office, she was told, in response to her liberal dropping of his name, and could not be disturbed.

"He is expecting me," she said, which was probably true, if not in precisely the way the remark suggested.

"Wait here," said the faintly military woman who was apparently in charge of admissions. Deborah wasn't sure if her abruptness stemmed from her comfort level with English or from her personality, and she quietly kicked herself for not having mastered a few more Greek phrases. Confined to their own language, she supposed, it was impossible for tourists not to come off looking smug and condescending, content in their assumption that the world would accommodate their cluelessness. Touched with a pang of guilt, she smiled and said,
"Efharisto."
The military woman gave a kind of upward nod which acknowledged the word, but she did not return the smile. A door opened, and Popadreus walked into the lobby, in conversation with a tall, sallow-skinned man in heavy glasses and a business suit. Some men never look comfortable in suits, she thought, but these men wore them like a second skin. They projected an easy, familiar authority. She turned to face them, and the museum director caught her eye and led the other man across the lobby toward her. Their meeting, it seemed, was at an end. Popadreus gave her a wry look as he approached.

"More examination of the exhibits," he said, "or of me?"

"Both," she said, smiling.

"Naturally." He turned to his formal-looking guest. "Miss Miller is an American museum curator," he said, "with an interest in our Mycenaean collection. This," he said to Deborah,

"is Alexander Davos, the minister of culture and antiquities."

"I'm honored," said Deborah, caught a little off guard as she took and shook the proffered hand.

"I trust you are not looking to make any purchases from our friend here," said the minister, smiling his politician's smile. His voice was even, his English impeccable, the words clipped short so that his mouth barely opened. "We prefer to keep our treasures in their native land."

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"Of course," said Deborah. "It is unfortunate that that has not always been possible."

There was a flicker of something in his eyes, and he half turned to Popadreus, but then the smile snapped back into place, and whatever he had considered saying was shut down.

"Indeed," he said. "Well, I must be going. Dimitri," he said to Popadreus, "you will . . ." He concluded the sentence in rapid Greek. The museum director nodded in assent and shook his hand.

"Miss Miller," said Davos. "A pleasure."

And then he was walking briskly back to the main doors. The Greek staff recognized him, and they smiled and bobbed their heads, part greeting, part rudimentary bow.

"I hope I didn't offend him," said Deborah.

"Of course not," said Popadreus. "You wanted to talk to me?"

"About Schliemann's excavations."

"Again," he said, tilting his head on one side, his expression laconic. "Naturally. Perhaps you would like to step into my office."

He walked away, and she followed. He walked quickly, and even with her long strides she had to jog a little to keep up.

His office was as spartan as the rest of the museum: bare plaster walls, old--but not antique--furniture, bookcases, a couple of certificates in Greek on yellowing paper, and a framed poster advertising an Egyptian exhibit. The director took his place behind his desk and gestured her to a chair. The brusqueness which had ended their previous interview was gone. He was genial, even pleased to see her.

"Coffee?" he offered. "It's real. Not Nescafe."

She accepted out of politeness. She suspected that not everyone got coffee in this spare little kingdom. He picked up a phone and spoke quickly into it, then turned his attention back to Deborah.

"So," he said, "you have questions."

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"The Mycenaean grave circles," she said, "did they contain bodies?"

"Of course," he said. "They were graves."

"I mean were any of the bodies still there when the shafts were excavated?"

"Ah," he said, shifting. "There were partial remains, yes."

"Really? After all that time?"

"Are you familiar with the peat bog men of northern Europe?"

"Of course," she said.

The bodies of which he spoke (the Lindow Man and the Tollund Man were the most famous) had been found in northern Britain and Scandinavia. They were Iron Age--roughly first century a.d.--and apparently the victims of ritual sacrifice. They had been murdered and dumped into the marshes, only to be rediscovered in the twentieth century in such an astonishing state of preservation that in one case the discovery of the body during construction work in Manchester led the local police to believe they had stumbled on a recent murder victim. Bones, teeth, muscle, skin, hair, stomach contents, the garrote around the neck, were all clearly apparent.

"But the peat bog men were preserved by the chemicals in the marsh, the oil that makes peat burn," she said. "It's a very rare soil composition. There's nothing like that this far south."

"True," he said, smiling, apparently pleased that she knew her stuff. "But such a condition can be created artificially if the body is intact at the point of discovery."

"But it wouldn't be."

"Do you know
Hamlet,
Miss Miller?" he said. "By Shakespeare."

"I've read it," she said, frowning. When she was an undergraduate, her old Shakespeare professor had been fond of saying that all things of consequence led back to Shakespeare.

"You remember what the grave digger says to Hamlet when he asks him how long the bodies stay intact in the ground?"

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"I'm afraid not," she said.

"He says that a tanner's body lasts the longest because the skin has been so toughened that it will keep out water for a while, and
'water is a great corrupter of your whoreson dead
body.'
"

"You mean that the arid conditions here desiccated the corpse?" she said, catching the idea and running with it.

"The first Egyptian burials placed the corpse directly into the hot sand of the desert," he said. "The dryness sapped the body of moisture, effectively mummifying it. Later Egyptian practices--the removal of the organs, the binding with chemically impregnated bandages and so on--were all attempts to re-create the natural desiccation of the desert sand for corpses which were being interred in tombs."

"But surely a body that was so dried out would crumble on contact with the air when it was unearthed."

"Yes," he said, "and most would be reduced to nothing more than very brittle bones."

Deborah felt some of her certainties about the ridiculousness of Marcus's story shift fractionally, as if the ground they were resting on had trembled or sunk.

"What did Schliemann find in Mycenae?" she said.

"In grave circle A he found the bones of several individuals, including children. The bones were carefully packed and transported off the site."

"To where?"

"Here," he said. "We do not display them, but they are stored in the museum vaults."

Deborah was temporarily stunned.

"Here?" she said.

"Yes," he said, smiling at her reaction. "It is no secret."

"But they were just bone fragments, right?" she said.

"All but one," he said. "One found close to the mask you were so interested in yesterday."

Deborah stared at him.

"There was . . . flesh?" she said.

"Apparently," said the director with his characteristic 137

T h e M a s k o f A t r e u s

shrug. "Schliemann said there was an intact corpse, facial features . . . everything. He summoned local embalmers to try to preserve the remains, attempting to create the kind of conditions which preserved the peat bog men, I assume. Alcohol of some sort, resin, perhaps."

"Was he successful?" said Deborah, still staring.

"Alas, no," said Popadreus. "The body disintegrated."

Deborah stood alone in front of the gold death masks and wondered. If the bodies had indeed been dried out by the arid Greek soil, was it possible that Schliemann, who had clearly tried to save an earlier corpse, had perfected his embalming technique on a body whose existence he never revealed to the Greek government? Was that why his (in)famous telegram about gazing on the face of Agamemnon had later been dismissed as apocrypha, because he had been referring to a corpse he had decided to keep from the authorities? But if so, why? The Schliemann she had read about was a selfpromoter as well as a dreamer. Would he not have shouted this discovery from the rooftops?

But in Troy he had not turned over his findings to the Turks. After photographing the hoard he claimed had belonged to Priam, king of Troy, it had vanished. Did it ever reappear? Many of the books in Richard's bedroom had been fairly antiquated, and though some reproduced the image of Schliemann's wife Sophia adorned in the missing jewelry, none had offered any explanation as to what had happened to it. That did not mean there was no explanation to be had. She gazed at the still, gold faces of the masks and wondered: could Richard have acquired the intact body of a Mycenaean king after all?