The Mask of Atreus (18 page)

"That would be good," she said, setting her glass down and meeting his eyes. "Let's assume we are both looking for the same things: Richard's killer and the treasure which was in his keeping, including"--she swallowed, hating to say it aloud--"the body of an ancient Mycenaean king."

"Agamemnon," said Marcus.

"Whatever," she said.

"Then can I add a 'whatever' to that searching for Richard's killer business?" he replied. "It wasn't me, I trust it wasn't you, and that is as far as I care about the matter. I didn't know Richard, and I assume there are proper authorities who will pursue and prosecute his killer."

"Maybe," said Deborah.

His brow furrowed, but he waited till the waiter had served their food before inquiring further.

"What do you mean?"

It wasn't where she had wanted to start, but it seemed relevant. She wasn't sure how far she could trust him, but this couldn't hurt her and, as a show of good faith on her part, it might get more out of him.

"There are two detectives investigating his murder, an 147

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officer Keene and an officer Cerniga," she said. "Except that Cerniga isn't a policeman at all."

She recounted the overheard conversation, and Marcus's face clouded.

"Your turn," she said, sampling her stew. It was, as he had said, excellent.

"Very well," he said. "Then let me offer this. The
Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
revealed that Richard's body was stabbed, but they said no more about the wounds. I believe that those wounds were made by a curiously long blade with a hilt that curved down on either side. Am I right?"

She remembered the blood-streaked body, the wounds that cut right through Richard's pale corpse so that the blood pooled beneath him. She remembered the strange weapon in the picture with the swastika on the handle, and felt an impulse to shudder.

"If you didn't kill him," she said, "how did you know?"

"Richard was not the first man to die like that," he said.

"Ten years ago in a French village on the Brittany coast, another elderly gentleman perished of the same wounds."

"Ten years ago?" she said. "In France? Are you sure there's a connection?"

"Oh yes, I'm sure there's a connection. In fact, I know what the connection is."

She waited as he took a bite of his meal, then a sip of wine.

"The gentleman in question was a potential buyer of the ancient royal corpse which found its way to America and into Mr. Dixon's collection. He had been pursuing it for many years."

"You think Richard had something to do with it?" she asked, incredulous.

"No," he said. "In fact, I think the people who killed the first man also killed Mr. Dixon. They too had been pursuing Agamemnon's body and were prepared to stop at nothing to get hold of it. In France it slipped through their fingers, and it 148

A. J. Hartley

took them years to track it down again. I think that whoever was doing the selling went underground after the murder in France, but the killers were still waiting when the piece went back on the market earlier this year. They intercepted the transaction, and the rest, you know."

"Richard was selling it?" Deborah asked. That meant he had indeed kept it from her, that he wasn't looking to display it at their museum. Her heart sank.

Marcus nodded, first slowly, then faster. He put the end of his unlit pipe into his mouth and chewed on it.

"Yes," he said. "He had had it in his possession perhaps since it left France a decade ago. He decided to sell it. When he began to put out feelers for a buyer, the killers were finally able to track it down."

"Years later?" said Deborah. "Who would be prepared to kill--at least twice--and wait decades for a corpse? Why does it mean so much to them?"

"It is the most remarkable historical find ever made," he said simply and with something like vehemence.

"I think there are people who would dispute that," she said.

"Collectors are an odd breed," said Marcus. "Their desires border on obsession. And for a piece like this which is so rich in history as well as sheer market value, something so steeped in legend and power . . . Some men will do anything to get their hands on such a piece."

She believed him, and the look in his eyes troubled her.

"How did you know about it?" she said.

"I had been keeping my ear to the ground for some time,"

he said with a bleak smile. "The body, its grave goods, and the other Mycenaean pieces which were left behind had been known to me for many years. I also knew that when they went missing they were being transported with other less interesting or valuable artifacts. I knew that if I ever found one of them, I would be close to finding Agamemnon's body as well. One of those artifacts is quite distinctive, perhaps even 149

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unique. A couple of months ago that piece resurfaced and in the most unlikely of places. Do you know where it was?"

He smiled again, but it was that thin, dry smile that contained no real humor.

"How would I know where it is?" Deborah answered, irritated by his knowing manner. "I don't know
what
it is."

He set down his pipe, leaned across the table, and took both her hands. His fingers were strong and cold; she started to flinch away, but he held her tight and leaned across the table toward her, his face suddenly wolfish as the lips drew back from his teeth.

"It is," he said, "an early Renaissance Spanish ship prow, half woman, half snake. Does that sound familiar, Miss Miller?"

CHAPTER 31

Deborah tried to remember Richard's gleeful unveiling of the grotesque dragon-woman. It had been two or three months ago, no more. She had come in one morning and it had been there in all its hideous glory. It had been there for the first of the recent fund-raisers. Its picture had appeared in the paper . . .

"Yes," said Marcus, watching the realization dawning. "I don't know how long he had had it, or why he chose to reveal it then, but as soon as I saw it I knew what it was and what had been traveling with it. And if I knew, I'm pretty sure other people did too."

"Maybe that was the idea," said Deborah. "If he was hoping to sell the body and its treasures, maybe making that thing public was a way of announcing that he really had what he claimed to have."

Deborah considered her food, her appetite suddenly gone.

"What's the matter?" said Marcus.

"Nothing," she lied.

"You're wondering why he never told you about it," he said, "why he never bequeathed it to the museum."

"Yes," she said.

"I don't know," he said, gently now. "And I suppose we'll never know."

"Odd, isn't it," she said. "You work with someone for years, and you think you have a clear sense of who they are, what they want out of life, and then . . ."

She shrugged out of the confession and the mood.

"If only we knew more about who else might have linked the ship prow to Agamemnon," said Marcus.

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"There is something," said Deborah, focusing. "You said you thought Richard met two Greek businessmen. There were two Greeks at the party the night he was killed. They weren't on the guest list, and I never saw them. They spent some time with him, apparently but . . ."

An idea dawned. It was probably a kind of desperate hope, but it made a sort of sense, a sense that reinforced the image of Richard as she had known him.

"Richard was obsessed with Greek legend," she said,

"with the Trojan War. But he was also a man of principle. What if he bought the entire collection some time ago. He spent years researching it quietly, trying to discover whether or not it was genuine, intending to make it part of the museum collection. But," she went on, speaking quickly, barely seeing anything but the idea unfolding in her head, "part of him thinks that Agamemnon--because he really believes that the body he has is Agamemnon himself--shouldn't really be in the States at all. It belongs in Greece. Richard was like Schliemann in his passion to prove Homer right, but he wasn't like him when it came to the ethics of ownership. Either he was approached by--or he initiated contact with--

some Greek antiquities organization, maybe even the Greek government. He told them what he had and revealed that ship prow to the world so that they would know he was telling the truth. Maybe he cut a deal: they get to take Agamemnon's body back to Greece, he gets to keep the rest of the collection and put it in the museum. At last, representatives of the Greek organization come to view the piece. Something goes wrong. Or they aren't the people he took them to be, or . . ."

She ran out of words and sat, suddenly deflated. It was all speculation, and it got them nowhere.

Marcus didn't think so. The light that had been in her eyes had transferred to his.

"If you're right," he said, "they'll try to bring it back to Greece. They won't dare risk flying it back, so they'll put it on a ship."

"Like Schliemann did," she said.

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"We need to get to Corinth," said Marcus, putting down his knife and fork as if he intended to leave right away.

"Corinth? Why?"

"Do you have a guidebook or something?" he said. "A map?"

Deborah produced her
Rough Guide
and flicked to its map of Greece and the surrounding region.

"Look," he said, pointing to the map. "Athens is here. Any shipping from the United States will eventually dock in Piraeus here, but Piraeus is too major a port for convenient smuggling, and it requires ships to sail through the Mediterranean past Italy and then all the way round the Peloponnese and through the Cyclades. But they can save a good deal of time and inconvenience coming straight down the Gulf of Corinth and through the canal. They can off-load any dubious cargo as they go through Corinth, then proceed to Piraeus. If nothing else, using the canal saves them two, three hundred miles in open water.

"If we go to Corinth," he continued, "we can find out if there are vessels scheduled to arrive from the Unites States. Passage through the canal is no picnic, and it has to be scheduled in advance. We could track the cargo as it arrived. Intercept it, even."

"Surely that won't be for weeks," said Deborah.

"Then we'll be ready."

"I suppose we could alert the authorities before it arrived,"

she said.

"For all we know, it's
the authorities
who are bringing it in."

Deborah shook her head.

"I don't think the Greek government would stoop to theft and murder to recover a national treasure."

"Don't you?" he said. "The Greeks feel very strongly about their heritage. It's not surprising, given the way every colonial power in the region has filched from them over the centuries."

"Including the British," Deborah reminded him. "The 153

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frieze on the Parthenon was the jewel of the Acropolis till Lord Elgin levered it off and packed it off to London."

It was now in the British Museum collection and showed no signs of being returned to Athens despite continual requests from the Greeks. Lord Elgin had claimed that had he left the frieze where it was, it would have been destroyed by the Turks, and he may have been right. Now, however, the British hold on the marbles--though it was occasionally buttressed by complaints about the inadequacy of Greek museums--was more about possession being nine-tenths of the law.

"Thank you for that lesson in cultural mores," snapped Marcus. "Can we get back to the subject, please."

Deborah smiled, surprised to find herself warming to him.

"You know," she said, "you've still not said how you got involved in this business. Yes, you're an art collector and historian; yes, you seem as obsessed with Mycenae and its legends as Richard was, but how did you know about the body or--for that matter--that it was traveling with that sixteenthcentury Spanish gargoyle?"

She was still smiling, and her tone had been light, so she was surprised to see that his face looked distant.

"The old gentleman who was murdered in France told me everything," he said. "He had been in contact with an unscrupulous dealer decades earlier but had never laid eyes on the body itself."

"How did he come to tell you all about it?"

Marcus frowned.

"He was my father," he said.

CHAPTER 32

Deborah was at the little subterranean cyber cafe as soon as it opened. The moonfaced young man seemed pleased to see her, flattered perhaps. She was careful not to engage him in conversation, and she politely refused coffee; there was a look in his eyes she didn't want to encourage or exploit. He seemed a little disappointed but did not begrudge her her privacy. There were two messages in her Hotmail box. One was an automated welcome from the e-mail service itself; the other was from Calvin. It was agonizingly brief.

"Computers impounded," it said. "They know where you are. Miss you too."

There was no attachment.

Deborah blew out a long sigh and wondered whether to respond. She didn't know what she wanted to tell him or why. She barely knew the man, after all. But Richard had trusted him, and that had to count for something. More to the point, perhaps, it was prudent to let someone know that she was planning to go to Corinth with a man who twenty-four hours ago she had believed to have been Richard's killer. Her eyes came back to the last sentence fragment: Miss you too. She felt a ripple of nonsensical pleasure, then shook it off.
Don't be so damned adolescent.

She took a breath and typed before she had chance to change her mind.

"Going to Corinth with Marcus. Weather's lovely. Wish you were here."

That was supposed to be a joke, she told herself, an attempt to lighten the strangeness of the situation. As soon as 155

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she had sent it she kicked herself, hating the tonal vacuity of e-mail.

Well,
she thought.
It's too late now
. If Calvin thought she had the hots for him, there was nothing she could do about it from here, and it wouldn't do her any harm. Maybe he would be less likely to turn her exact whereabouts over to the police. That was a depressingly callous thought. And a disingenuous one. She wasn't merely flirting with him (albeit in a pathetically ambiguous and adolescent fashion) to keep him in her corner. She was doing it because a part of her wanted to, because she liked the way he smiled and the way he stretched out his legs in front of him when he sat down . . .
Let's not get carried away
.