The Mask of Atreus (29 page)

A. J. Hartley

would send the wreckage of that ship rolling and drifting onto rocks along the Brittany shore.

A boy, twelve years old, apparently, had been the first to raise interest in a particular box, now rotted to pieces by the seawater, a box from which he had recovered a few trinkets to sell in the local antique stores. Only when Marcus had stumbled on discussion of a particular amphora's antiquity did he realize that he was reading the salvage reports of priceless heirlooms his family had already paid for. Would the body of the man himself have survived the journey and--worse--the years underwater? It would depend on how the corpse had been preserved. But if only a fragment of bone had survived, it would be worth all the money, all the years.

The dealer claimed that the contents of the crate were all intact, though he had nothing to base that on beyond the sense that it seemed full. He had been coy about whether other bidders were involved, but Randolph was sure he was prepared to pay more than anyone else. He still carried the pictures, now badly faded and creased, which his first duplicitous contact had sent him all those decades ago. He had to be the one to claim possession. Morally, it was already his. He sat, ramrod straight at a metal table in the appointed cafe, waiting. The dealer was an hour late. Randolph sipped his tea (or whatever you called the result of a tea bag in a cup of tepid water) and tried not to think of a return journey without even glimpsing the dealer, let alone the body itself. A man came striding across the village square, his eyes on the cafe patio.

This must be the dealer.

Randolph's irritation at being kept waiting evaporated like mist.

"Mr. Fitz-Stephens?" said the man, sitting down opposite him. "I'm afraid Monsieur Thibodaux has been detained, but I think I can help."

"He won't be joining me?" said Randolph the mist returning, thicker than ever, so that for a second he felt quite stifled. 241

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"More a question of you joining him," said the other. "Do you mind a short walk? I have a car parked on the other side of the square."

"Where are we going?" said Randolph, getting slowly, creakily to his feet.

"The beach," said the other breezily. He had no French accent at all. They walked, and then they drove, and then they walked again, pacing out the firm dark sand of the deserted spot only a few hundred yards inland from where the wreck of the
St.
Lo
had come to rest, her hull torn and flooded. It was cloudy and getting darker by the minute, promising rain, and heavy rain at that. Randolph had left his umbrella at the cafe. His legs ached, and he had already walked farther today than he usually did in a week.

"I'm curious," said the younger man. "What exactly do you believe is in the remains of that crate?"

"The body of Agamemnon, king of Greece, preserved by Heinrich Schliemann, with all that was interred with him in death," said Randolph. He intoned it, like it was a litany: reverential, a familiar statement of awe and of faith. "And the prow of the galleon," he added, "though I'm not interested in that."

"Anything else?" said the man. He was smiling in a dry sort of way, and though Randolph had seen versions of this smile before when he talked about what he believed had been aboard the
St. Lo,
there was something different about its manifestation here, something colder. He found himself looking for signs of life on the beach and feeling a pang of anxiety that there was no one else around.

"What else would there be?" he said, mustering a little bitter amusement to mask his discomfort. "What more could anyone ask for?"

The man laughed once, a voiceless snort of contemptuous amusement.

They had rounded a long, irregular outcrop of rock which jutted abruptly from the glistening, sea-washed sand, and ran 242

A. J. Hartley

out into the surf. At its height it was perhaps ten feet tall, tapering as the shore fell away into the gray water.

"That amuses you?" said Randolph. He didn't think he liked this man very much.

"Fifty-three years," said the other with unabashed disdain,

"and you still have no idea what you are dealing with! I swear to God, killing you is a mercy. This, by the way, is Monsieur Thibodaux."

The body was facedown behind the rock, half submerged in the encroaching tide so that the hair on his head floated briefly with each wave.

"Who are you?" said Randolph, barely able to take his eyes from the corpse before him.

"Just another bitterly disappointed client of a dealer," he said, half smiling as he considered the corpse, "who did not adequately consider the claims of all interested parties."

To Randolph's amazement, he found himself smiling back.

"You don't have it either," he said.

"I will," said the other. "And you will not be in a position to tell anyone else that it is even out there."

"My son will find you," said Randolph. "And he will find Agamemnon."

"You know," said the other, "I hate to see you die so full of confidence. How about I tell you what you don't know about that crate,
then
I kill you? It will wipe that supercilious grin off your face, trust me. What do you think? You want to die in ignorance, or you want to know what it is you've been so cluelessly searching for all these years?"

Randolph faltered, uncertain, and taking his silence for assent, the younger man drew his curious knife with its overlong, straight blade, then told him. The old man fell very slowly, his eyes wide and staring, stricken not so much by the blade in his chest as by the idea which had been driven into his mind, an idea which bore him on a wave of terror as the waters of the Atlantic would soon bear him up onto the pale sands at the foot of the dunes.

Return to Ithaca

While the Kaddish is recited in memory of the departed, it contains no reference to death. Rather it is an avowal made in the midst of our sorrow, that God is just, though we do not always comprehend His ways. When death seems to overwhelm us, negating life, the Kaddish renews our faith in the worthwhileness of life. Through the Kaddish, we publicly manifest our desire and intention to assume the relation to the Jewish community which our parents had in their life-time. Continuing the chain of tradition that binds generation to generation, we express our undying faith in God's love and justice, and pray that He will speed the day when His kingdom shall finally be established and peace pervade the world.

--A meditation on the Kaddish

from
The Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book
by the Rabbinical Assembly of America and

the United Synagogue of America

CHAPTER 51

Delta flight 133 left Athens on schedule shortly after noon bound for JFK, then Atlanta. All told it would be a fourteenhour trip. Deborah stared out of the window at the blue sky and the heat haze on the runway and tested the legroom with a familiar and self-deprecating hopelessness.
Face it,
she thought.
The world is designed for smaller
women, and in oh so many ways.

As they became airborne she tried to get a last glimpse of the Acropolis from the air but could see nothing but the pale rectangles of faded concrete that made up such a depressingly large amount of that intermittently graceful city. Her sojourn in Greece was at an end, and she was going home. Hopefully, she thought, she would fare better than did the Greeks after the Trojan War. Most of them never got back, and those who did found only murder and chaos awaiting them. Odysseus did better than most, but it took him ten years to make it back to Ithaca and the pandemonium that his return unleashed. For the next hour Deborah scrutinized the flight plan in the in-flight magazine, gazing at all the places she had never been, wondering how many she would see before she died.
If this last week is anything to go by,
she thought,
you'd
better go on safari or something soon, or you can forget it.
Funny. In fact, the familiar, sterile environment of the plane, its muffling drone and the dulling pressure in her ears, made the idea that she had fought for her life twice in the last few days almost impossible to believe, impossible even to imagine. For the first time since she had heard the motorcycle whining up and down the road to the Acrocorinth, perhaps 246

A. J. Hartley

since the first rifle shots had rung out in the ruins, she wondered if it could all have just been some colossal accident or coincidence.

He called you by name, there in the tunnel to the cistern;
he called you "Deborah."

The memory sent a cold shudder through her body.

"About to die and no idea why."

It had been the same assassin both times, and he had been tattooed with the word which Richard had scribbled perplexedly the night he died. It was no accident, no coincidence. Someone wanted her dead. But why her? To kill Richard for treasures that had no real value was one thing, but to pursue her across another continent days after the event made no sense. If she could figure out that the gold and grave goods had been made by some local village craftsman as a souvenir for overreaching tourists, why hadn't whoever was hunting her? It hadn't been hard to figure out. Surely the people who had been chasing after the stuff knew what it was, and what it
wasn't
worth. And if her would-be killer
did
know, then why pursue her further?

It makes no sense.

( . . . no idea why)

Could the treasure trove be real after all? She had no hard evidence to the contrary, just a hunch and some pretty compelling--albeit circumstantial--information. Could Popadreus have misled her into thinking the collection was fraudulent, trying to throw her off the scent while he still awaited its transfer to Greece? It was possible, she supposed, but it seemed unlikely. If they ever got the masked corpse to Athens and put it on display, she would immediately know where it had come from and would plunge the Greek government into a complex and expensive lawsuit about who owned the hoard and how they had gotten hold of it.
Unless you're dead by then,
said the voice in her head that loved to say such things.
You talk to Popadreus about your in-
terest in the death mask, and suddenly you're being stalked by
a killer. Coincidence?

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No way. She just didn't believe the museum director was capable of such bloodthirsty calculation. It wasn't much of an argument, she knew, but it was all she had. She settled back into her seat, closed her eyes, and turned her mind deliberately to Calvin, who had promised to be waiting for her when she got off the plane. She smiled secretly, the pleasure of anticipation briefly drowning out the attendant terror she reserved for
relationships,
and all the dire cautionary warnings (several of them based on examples from her own fairly tragic past) in which that voice of hers so delighted.

But underneath it all, the assassin's taunt
(about to die . . .)
echoed in her head with the ring of truth. She had no idea what was going on. In fact, the more she learned, the more it all felt wrong, like she was trying to complete a jigsaw, but the pieces had been mixed up with another puzzle. The more of the picture she thought she could see, the more she sensed another picture behind it, an utterly different picture which she had missed completely.

Miraculously, she slept for about three hours, waking to find the crew clearing up the remains of dinner and beginning the preparations for landing in New York. Once they were on the ground, Deborah bought a
New York Times
and read it hungrily, cover to cover, while she waited to reboard. Forty-five minutes before they were due to touch down in Atlanta, the stewardess or flight attendant or whatever the hell they were called these days, appeared beside her, bending low, her conciliatory smile not quite masking a note of wariness.

"Miss Miller?" she said, her smile expanding to show her perfect teeth. "Deborah Miller?"

"Yes," said Deborah. "Is there a problem?"

"No, no problem," the woman lied happily. "We're going to be coming in for landing in Atlanta soon, and I just wanted to confirm that you were in the correct seat."

"OK," said Deborah, cautious now.

"When we touch down," she said, "one of the stewards will come and get you."

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"Why? I don't think I understand."

"We just have to have you deplane first."

"First?"

"Before the other passengers," said the flight attendant, her smile now strained like a rubber band.

"What?" said Deborah. "Why me? What's going on?"

CHAPTER 52

Deborah's unease blossomed, but the more she demanded details from the flight crew, the more they protested ignorance and told her to settle down, always stooping and smiling like they were dealing with a tantruming three-year-old or someone who wanted the beef which had run out three rows earlier. At least there was nobody sitting next to her whose curious glances or questions would have to be endured for the last twenty minutes of the flight.

Why did they want her off first, and who were
they
?

Was this a special treat arranged--somehow--by Calvin, to spare her the tiresome pushing and standing around which ended all flights? That seemed a little hopeful. Perhaps it was intended to protect her, maybe from someone on the plane. She looked round quickly, rising and flashing her eyes over the blank, staring faces behind her. No one looked familiar, and the only attention she received was from some kid who remarked loudly to his mother that "that tall woman" was blocking the video screen. She sat down again and buckled herself in, before she had to sit through any more polite reprimands from the flight attendants. Or maybe Calvin wasn't the only one waiting for her in the airport. The idea unsettled her. But even if someone on the ground meant her harm, how would they get the flight crew to comply?

The same way "Detective" Cerniga took over a case with-
out actually being a cop,
she thought. She felt the plane descend, and her stomach seemed to float up in her body, like a boat caught and lifted by an unexpected wave. She began to drum her fingers on the armrest. 250