The Mask of Atreus (36 page)

"You don't think my father was worth the attention?" she said, a hint of that swagger Deborah had seen before coming back into her attitude. "You don't think anyone's nose would be put out of joint by the murder of a black man in 1945?"

Deborah backpedaled, suspecting that it was already too late.

"I'm not saying that," she said. "I just don't think it fits. Why would your father's killer go to the trouble of putting his body in with the fake grave goods, putting the death mask on him?"

"To conceal the fact that he was an American," she snapped back, "that he'd killed one of his own."

"But you said your father's body was buried," said Deborah. "No one tried to cover up the fact that he was dead. They didn't have to. They knew that the word of a white MP was enough to silence a division of black soldiers in 1945."

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A spasm of rage crossed Tonya's face, but it wasn't just anger. There was hurt and humiliation in her eyes too, as if Deborah had hit her.

"Well then everything's just fine," she said, turning and marching toward the door.

"I'm not saying that," said Deborah, rising and going after her. "I'm not saying they were
right
."

"I know what you are saying," said Tonya, still walking.

"Tonya," said Deborah, pleading a little now. "I'm sorry. Today has been . . . I didn't mean . . ."

"It's fine," said the other woman over her shoulder, yanking the door open. "I'll see you in the museum."

And then she was gone, the slam of the door reverberating throughout the apartment for a moment. Deborah listened to Tonya's heels clacking through the tunnel outside, but she felt weighed down with weariness and a penetrating, numbing sadness, and she did not give chase.

The perfect end to the day,
she thought,
the alienation of
your last ally.

She shut the main light off and then crossed to the computer to turn it off. She had guided the mouse to the Shut Down menu before she realized what was displayed on the screen. It was the results page for her last search:
Atreus, hate
crime.

The first hit was one she had not seen before. She clicked on it and waited.

The page that came up was headed "Southern Poverty Law Center: hate groups by region."

In the middle of the page was a red map of Georgia, dotted with colored symbols: confederate flags, swastikas, a white hood, a black jackboot, a crucifix. Underneath them was a list of clickable organizations keyed to the symbols above: Black Separatist, Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity, Racist Skinhead, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Nazi, all subdivided into specific groups from the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panther Party, through the North Georgia White Knights and Aryan Nations, to a group called White Revolution in Brooks, 304

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Georgia, and a National Socialist group in Morrow. Deborah's heart was in her throat. At the bottom of the list was a cluster of groups listed simply as "Other."

One of them was labeled simply "Atreus."

The symbol representing it, the only one of its kind on the map, was situated right where Atlanta should be. The tiny image looked like a yellow triangle, but as she leant closer, Deborah saw with a sudden chill that the triangle had jack-o'lantern eyes. It was a gold death mask. CHAPTER 63

Her first impulse was to read everything the Web site had to say, her second, to call Cerniga.

He already knows,
she told herself.
This is why he's here.
This is what it was always about. Not Schliemann. Not
Agamemnon. This. Whatever this is.

She went back to the Web site and began clicking her way through all the information she could find.

The entry on Atreus was a good deal shorter than those on the other hate groups. It read:

Small, possibly defunct organization with racist skinhead
leanings. Atreus was apparently founded in the fifties, but was
so shrouded in secrecy that some analysts deny it ever really
existed, and for several decades the organization either disap-
peared or became dormant. Its name reappeared in skinhead
tattoos in the early nineties, and occasional Web postings
have suggested that it has a small and secretive membership.
Their agenda is not clear, though it seems--like other skin-
head groups--strongly linked to violence, as well as to hatred
of gays and nonwhites, particularly Jews and blacks. The im-
age of the gold mask which has been observed on banners
and tattoos linked to the group seems to date back to the or-
ganization's founding, though its meaning is obscure.
The mask again
.

She stared at it. Her mind wanted to shy away, but something caught in it, like a trailing fishhook snagging hair or fabric. The mask looked different from the real thing somehow, as if making it small had taken all the primitive craftsmanship 306

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out of the thing, made it neat and precise, a logo like a theater mask or . . .

A logo
.

She had seen it before. She was sure of it. She knew the mask inside out by now. But there was something different about this stylized computerized miniature that was familiar but which was not about the mask itself, either the countless photographs she had seen or the thing itself in its case in the archeological museum in Athens.

Now that she thought about it, she had had the same impulse when she had first seen the tattoo on the chest of that murderous kid in Mycenae: a vague sense that she had seen the image before, not the mask itself, but this miniature impression of it . . . She gazed at the image on the computer and then got up and began to pace back and forth around the room, trying to remember when she had first seen it. And then she became quite still. The image had suddenly clarified in her head, not gold or the yellow of little electronic pixels on the computer screen, and not the blue-black scoring of tattoos on pale skin, but black ink stenciled onto thick white paper. She came back to life, moving quickly into the bedroom and to the purse she had carried halfway round the world and back. It was heavy with unopened correspondence from two weeks ago, letters and bills she had collected the night of the fund-raiser and never passed on because Richard was dead by the time she next saw him. She leafed hurriedly through them and saw it: a white business envelope, heavier than usual with a rich texture like linen. It had been addressed on a manual typewriter to Richard at the museum--which was why she had gotten it. Had it been sent to his residence, she never would have seen it. In the upper left corner where a return address might be, there was only a small, stylized mask. It looked quite innocuous, and Deborah felt sure that when she had first seen it she had thought it a request for donations to a local theater company. But in the context of everything 307

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that had happened, in the context of that little yellow icon on the computer screen over there on the desk, it was anything but innocuous.

She opened it cautiously and with difficulty, using a knife to slice through the heavy paper, tipping the contents at arm's length into a bowl on the table, one hand over her mouth. If she saw powder, she had decided, she would not inhale until she was out in the street.

But there was no powder, only a single sheet of the same expensive paper, typed on the same machine. There was no signature and no date. It read simply:

We are aware of the object in your possession and your plans for it. You must change them. Rest assured that if the object does not find its way into the hands of those destined to take up the great man's cause, its terror will be visited on you and the degenerates with whom you associate like the sword of almighty God himself. Do not allow it to leave the country, or expect exquisite retribution when its power is inevitably unleashed. Deborah put the letter down carefully and backed away from it, as if there might be some contagion beyond anthrax or nerve gas in the words themselves.

"It's not about archaeology," she said aloud, repeating what Cerniga had told her.

Unless these white supremacist crazies thought they were
the heirs of Agamemnon himself . . .

That was it.

They had taken the Trojan War--the legendary model of nobility and honorable resolve--and made it into something altogether more brutal and disturbing: a genocide, an attempt by Greece, as the foremost power in Europe, to eradicate its counterpart in the Near East: Occidental against Oriental, Caucasian against Arab, the lands which became the home of the early Christian Church against the infidels of Turkey. 308

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They had taken Achilles, Agamemnon, and the rest and made them Nazi icons, heroes who ground foreign cultures beneath their Aryan heels . . . However much it was bad history and the willful misreading of literature and culture, Deborah knew it made sense, at least to whoever had written that letter claiming that Agamemnon's Bronze Age war as a racist crusade. But it also seemed that whoever the Atreus group were, they wanted the contents of that crate because it was to be of some dreadful use to them. The crate contained "the sword of almighty God himself," it said, the capacity to unleash "exquisite retribution."

What had Marcus said?
"It's not what we thought."

Cerniga had been right. This was not about archaeology. It wasn't about history or art or even money. Deborah still didn't know what was in that crate--knew, perhaps, even less than she had before, since all her assumptions seemed to have been wrong--but she knew now why people were prepared to kill for it. They would do anything to get hold of it because they believed it contained a weapon, a weapon of extraordinary destructive power. CHAPTER 64

"Yes," said Deborah into the phone, "it is urgent."

She repeated her name and then sat there waiting, the room lit only by the computer screen. The voice which came onto the line was brisk and irritated.

"Cerniga," he said. "What do you want?

"I found a letter that was sent to Richard the day before he died, maybe two days," she said. "He never got it, and I never opened it till now, but I'm fairly sure that that is why someone tried to kill me in Greece. They couldn't find the letter and assumed I had read it."

"What does it say?"

Deborah read the whole thing back to him, holding it up to the light so that she could see it clearly through the Ziploc bag in which she had put it. She was taking no chances this time. When she was done, there was a long pause.

"Agent Cerniga?" she said. "You still there?"

"You're at home?"

"Yes."

"Stay where you are and talk to nobody."

"It's a weapon," she said, as soon as he arrived, "isn't it?"

He was not alone. Keene was skulking, sour-faced, behind him.

"Come on, Cerniga," she said. "Is it a weapon?"

Cerniga sighed and began studying the letter. He didn't speak till he was done.

"You just have to know everything, don't you?" he said. Deborah wanted to smile in a vaguely self-deprecating way, 310

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but his eyes were hard, his mouth thin. He looked at Keene, as if too exasperated to do any of the talking himself.

"Tell her," he said.

"All of it?" said Keene, shooting the FBI man a look of doubtful outrage.

"If it will shut her up and get her out of our way for ten minutes, sure."

Deborah looked down, her face hot.

"OK," said Keene, sitting down. "Yeah, we think it's a weapon. There have been references to the Atreus group since the fifties. They come in waves, always full of vague, apocalyptic crap. But they've never claimed responsibility for anything, and though we know they have ties to violent right-wing groups, we don't know what they want. For a time they seem to have been led--and probably founded--by a local entrepreneur called Edward Graves, a multimillionaire. He died in the mid-sixties and we don't know who, if anyone, took up the reins. What we do know is that a lot of his money seems to have gone astray, and it was suggested that a good chunk of it was earmarked for Atreus's future. Anyway, most analysts thought the group dead, even after its name started floating up again a few years ago. Then the name surfaced in connection to the death of a British national in France."

"Marcus's father."

"I guess. The Feds didn't know what the old guy was doing there, except that he was trying to get hold of some archaeological remains on the black market. The British police searched his home and found evidence of some kind of link to Edward Graves at the end of World War Two. They referenced a mask--"

"Was Graves in the army during the war?" said Deborah, cutting in.

"Yes," said Cerniga. "He was an MP. Why? Something else you haven't told us?"

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"Well?" said Cerniga, his voice raised. He looked colder, more dangerous than ever, and Deborah saw again in her mind's eye the bodies of the two Greeks, men whose lives she could have saved . . .

"Tonya's father," she said, "was in an all-black tank regiment moving through southern Germany at the end of the war."

She told the whole story, including the possibility that the body under the mask was Andrew Mulligrew, Tonya's father. Keene scowled and looked down, and Cerniga made her repeat the story twice, taking notes and then double-checking them. This, apparently, was news. It probably changed nothing since it was all ancient history and about as relevant to the current whereabouts of the crate as Schliemann's excavations, but Deborah was pleased to finally offer something he didn't already know, even if it didn't soften the lines about his face when he looked at her.

"I thought the tattoo of the eagle I saw on that kid in Greece was Roman," she said. "But it wasn't, was it? It was German."

"The two are connected," said Cerniga, "The Third Reich fancied itself the descendents of ancient Greece and Rome."