The Mask of Atreus (23 page)

She found the page she had been looking at. It was stained with sweat and sunblock, but her eye skipped over it in little more then a second. The lion gate. The walls. The tomb of Clytemnestra. The house with the pillars. She turned the page. More. Schliemann. Ancient history. She turned another page, one she hadn't looked at before, and there it was, the doorway into the mountain, and under it the phrase her memory had been tugging at for days:
"The Treasury of Atreus."

CHAPTER 40

It was another of those fanciful names, no doubt, she thought as she crossed the street, and had more to do with nerds raised on ancient myths than it did with archaeology. More to the point, it could have nothing to do with Richard, nothing she would be able to glean from examining the place now, at any rate. But her pace increased as she walked down the great stone-sided passageway to the dark and empty doorway, forcing herself to return to the guidebook as she walked in case it said something--anything--that might be useful. It was a tomb, said the guide, but a tholos or chamber tomb, unlike the shaft graves inside the city walls. It was sometimes called (and she couldn't help swallowing hard at the reappearance of the name) the tomb of Agamemnon.
More nerd myth stuff,
she told herself.
It's strictly for the
tourists. Nothing more. Assuming every find in the area has
something to do with Agamemnon is like the way people who
claim to have had past lives are always attached to someone
famous: Cleopatra's waiting woman or Marie Antoinette's
gardener . . . Tourist stuff
.

Yes, but still . . . The place had a kind of power, whatever you called it. She glanced up at the doorway which now loomed black and cool ahead. It was forty or fifty feet high. A king's final resting place, perhaps. She went back to her book. The tholos was roughly contemporaneous with that called the tomb of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's murderous wife, and, since it dated from about thirteen centuries before Christ, matched approximately the date ascribed by archaeologists to the destruction of Troy. So maybe Agamemnon had been buried here after all. 190

A. J. Hartley

It was called the Treasury of Atreus because of folk tradition which linked the tomb to the ancient royal house of Mycenae, combined with Schliemann's frankly bizarre fixation that that royal house had stored its gold and precious artifacts outside the city walls. Recent scholarship dismissed the idea that the structure Schliemann had excavated was anything but a tomb and said that it was this and not the older grave shafts inside the city that squared with the sacking of Troy. If Atreus and his son Agamemnon had ever really lived, this--and not the grave shafts in which Schliemann had found the death masks and grave goods--might have been their last resting place.

Almost breathless, Deborah entered the darkness of the tomb.

It was vast, perhaps a couple of hundred feet across, and circular. The roof, which was only dimly visible, was domed, giving rise to another name for the style of tomb: a beehive. There was a hollow in one side, but the chamber was otherwise empty. Deborah sat on the floor in the center and waited for her eyes to get accustomed to the dark as the last of a tourist party wandered out, shielding their eyes. There was, she had to admit, little to see, and she felt the disappointment settling on her skin again like the cool tomb air. From inside there was only the roof, that dark alcove in the side where the bodies had probably been interred, and the main entrance now bright with sunlight. The lintel above the massive doorway must weigh tons, she thought, but the weight of the masonry above was incalculable. No wonder they left that triangular space over it. Originally it would have been filled with a thin stone panel, carved on the outside, designed to look solid while sparing the lintel any further weight. It was all very impressive but told her nothing relevant to her life and Richard's death.

Another dead end
.

She smiled mirthlessly at her bleak and all-too-accurate pun and then closed her eyes and put her chin in her hands. She had been sitting in the cool, dark silence of the place for 191

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

almost a minute before she realized that she was not alone. She turned toward the sound of movement and saw someone coming toward her.

"I knew you'd come here eventually," said a voice. She knew that voice, but for a moment, even after she thought she had given it a name, she stood staring mute into the darkness.

It can't be
.

But then she saw the pistol pointing toward her and everything else went out of her mind. CHAPTER 41

"Tonya?" said Deborah. "What are you doing here?" Then, as the gun raised a fraction and aimed at her throat, she added,

"Get that thing away from me."

"Don't talk to me like I'm the maid," said Tonya in a hushed voice.

But you are the maid,
Deborah wanted to say.
You are!
Instead she said simply, "I don't understand. Why are you here? I don't--"

"Then shut up and listen," she said. "In a minute or so the next busload of tourists will arrive, and I want to be quite sure you aren't going to do anything dumb, OK?"

"OK," said Deborah, all thought of Atreus and Agamemnon forgotten, her focus on the black eye of the automatic.

"Let's begin with some ground rules," said Tonya. "Take one step closer, and I'll shoot you where you stand."

Deborah, who had been absently moving toward the other woman, became quite still.

"Second," said Tonya, "try to talk to anyone else around here and I'll--"

"Shoot me where I stand?" said Deborah. She was being arch, even amused, though it was taking a tremendous effort. She forced her eyes away from the gun and onto Tonya's.

"No you won't. Have you noticed the size of the black population of Greece, Tonya? They'd pick you up in minutes."

It was the wrong thing to say.

"Probably so," said Tonya, even colder now. "I really don't care."

She said it with no dramatic flourish but with such finality that Deborah took a step back, immediately convinced that 193

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she was telling the truth. Deborah also felt that drawing attention to her blackness had somehow made the other woman even more determined and for reasons that went beyond the usual unarticulated wariness they felt toward each other. Dimly and with no sense of how it could possibly be true, Deborah felt that Tonya's presence here and the reason for the gun in her hand had something to do with race.
Race?

"I came here to take back what was never yours," said Tonya. "Or, failing that, to kill you. I really don't mind which, and I expect to do both. If I die or get thrown into some Greek prison as a result, that's fine by me."

She spoke with a resignation that came from a long and bitter anger. It was chilling to hear, and Deborah, who knew that there was no point protesting the absurdity of it and that Tonya had no love of weakness, just asked, "Why?"

The black woman smirked slightly, one of those
as-if-you-
don't-know
smirks that wasn't even slightly amused, was--in fact--wounded, embarrassed, even sad.

"Why?" she repeated.

"Yes," said Deborah. "If I'm going to get shot, I think I should know why. It's only fair."

"For the father I never knew," she said.

Deborah stared at her.

"Sound fair to you now?" said Tonya, raising the pistol a fraction.

CHAPTER 42

"Richard was your father?" Deborah said. "How is that possible?"

"It isn't, you stupid bitch," said Tonya. "Don't play dumb with me, or I swear to God--"

"You'll shoot me where I stand," said Deborah. It was neither a question nor a joke. She could see the barely suppressed fury in the other woman's eyes, and she knew she would do it.

"That's right," said Tonya.

"Are you working with Marcus?"

"Who the hell is Marcus?"

"Cerniga, then."

"Cerniga?" Tonya repeated. "The cop?"

"He's not a cop," said Deborah. "Not according to Keene."

There was a long silence, but it was too dark to read Tonya's face properly. When she spoke, she sounded uncertain.

"I'm not working for anybody."

"You're not a maid, that's for damned sure," said Deborah. She should be afraid, she thought vaguely. She had no reason to believe that this woman wouldn't kill her. In fact she thought Tonya was more than capable of killing her, that the other woman was actually looking for an excuse to do so. She didn't know why, and the reference to Tonya's father made no sense at all, but there was no question that the woman she had considered a maid hated her, and that the wrong choice of words would make her tighten her finger on the trigger and blow a hole in her heart, regardless of how many bystanders there were to see it.

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That said, Deborah was tired of being scared.
"If it be
now,"
said Hamlet in her head,
"it is not to come. The readi-
ness is all."
She wasn't sure she was ready to die, but she sure as hell wasn't ready to beg for life.

"You got that right," said Tonya. "I'm no maid."

Deborah was sure she had heard the hint of a smile in her voice.

"Then what?"

"It doesn't matter," she said. "As far as you are concerned, I'm just someone here to dig up the truth. You should be able to relate, right,
archaeologist
?"

She said it like it was a mild slur.

"The truth about what?"

"Richard's secret stash behind the bookcase."

Deborah went quiet. She didn't feel like going over all this again.

"Other than the issue of your shooting me," she said, "why should I?"

"The shooting-you thing isn't enough?" said Tonya. She sounded unsure, taken aback.

"I got shot at yesterday," said Deborah with a grim smile, as if a repetition of the event would merely bore her. "Why don't we go outside? I can't talk to you in the dark."

Tonya turned to the entrance. There were people coming, and a guide's voice could be heard proclaiming half-truths over their heads.

"OK," she said. "But stay close till we get to the car."

"You hired a car?" said Deborah. "How resourceful of you. I've been relying on buses and cabs. And you got a gun through customs. That must have taken some cleverness as well."

"You wanna shut up and walk?" said Tonya.

Deborah shrugged and made for the great rectangle of light slowly.

She didn't feel the nonchalance she was performing: not all of it, anyway. But her earlier depression had not wholly left her, and what she felt had more to do with curiosity than 196

A. J. Hartley

it did with fear. Her earlier apathy had somehow freed her of everything but a distant interest in how things would turn out, and how they came to involve Tonya in the first place. No more than that.

She walked out into the sunshine, squeezing past the throng of tourists who were channeling into the tomb itself. Tonya took a couple of quick steps to catch up and gestured significantly with the small purse in which her right hand was concealed, to show that she still had the gun trained on her. Deborah smiled with careless understanding, and Tonya's determined frown flickered with discomfort.
I don't care,
said the voice in her head.
You wanna shoot
me? Knock yourself out
.

They walked to the parking lot without speaking, and Tonya shepherded her to a small red Renault, telling her to get into the passenger side. Deborah did so, convinced that the middle-aged black woman was improvising, that she had never done anything like this before, and that she was far from clear about what was going to happen next. But the steady rage in her eyes hadn't gone away, and Deborah knew she was a long way from being out of danger.

It was an inferno inside the car, and it smelled of melting plastic. Tonya turned on the engine and wound the windows down.

"No AC," she said, almost apologetically.

"OK," said Deborah. If this was an abduction, it was a very strange one.

"I'm going to drive us into the village," said Tonya, "and we're going to talk."

"OK," said Deborah. "Can we get a drink? I'm pretty thirsty."

Tonya gave her a quick look, and for a second Deborah was sure she was going to sputter,
"I ask the questions,"
or something equally absurd, but then she just nodded and turned her gaze back to the road.

"When did you first see Richard's collection?" said Deborah. 197

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"The night he died, while you were hiding in the bathroom or whatever."

"But you knew it was there," said Deborah, remembering the sight of Tonya's sneakers from under the bed.

"Kind of," said Tonya. "I knew something was there, and I knew it was what I was looking for."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I didn't know
what
I was looking for, but I knew I was looking for
something,
" said Tonya, snapping back,

"OK?"

Deborah said nothing. They had left the ancient citadel behind them and were now passing the obligatory restaurants and gift shops that lined the road up to the remains. The car kept moving all the way to the end. At the junction where the bus stop was, it turned left, into the village proper, and stopped at a less ostentatious cafe.

"Get out," said Tonya.

Deborah did so and, following Tonya's lead, took a seat at one of only three tables outside. The place looked deserted. Deborah peered up and down the street. There was only one tourist-oriented store, a vast shop front boasting The Finest Antique Reproductions in Greece! which probably got most of its business from coaches whose guides worked on commission from the store. Few other tourists would ever stray into the village itself.

For a long moment, the two women looked at each other in silence, both trying to gauge which way the conversation would go. Then the waiter was there. Deborah ordered water and ouzo, swilling it around the ice cubes when it arrived till it turned milky.