The Mask of Atreus (44 page)

The stone ramp was the only thing that wasn't burning. What had kept her alive so far, she thought, was the fact that she was below the worst of the fire and smoke, not above it, but she would have to go up and through it to get out. She put her head down and ran. As the ramp shallowed to nothing, the heat increased exponentially. There was a small lever at the top. She pulled it, and the ceiling trap swung down with a sigh of grateful flame as the air from below was sucked into the conflagration.

She put her head through, feeling wisps of her hair frizzle and shrink in the heat. The way she had come in was a wall of fire. There was no getting out that way. There was also no getting out if she stayed where she was. Without giving herself time to think, she climbed up, out, and skulked low and fast down the corridor with its burning walls, her shirt over her mouth, her breathing shallow.

At the end of the corridor she came to a door and put her hand on the handle. It was so hot that she heard the skin of 373

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

her palm sizzle before she felt the searing pain. She pulled back and ran on farther, coughing now as her breathing roughened. The next door handle was cooler, but on opening it she found it led only to a closet. She gasped, crumpled, and sank to her knees, pressing her face to the floor to inhale the cooler, cleaner air. Compared to what she had been breathing it tasted like a mountain spring. She got up and ran on, rounding a corner at a stumbling trot. Suddenly, up ahead were doors, doors to the outside.

There was a great crash above, followed by a groaning of timber as part of the ceiling gave way in a shower of sparks. Deborah put her head down and ran for the doors as a beam above where she had been standing exploded as if it had been stuffed with dynamite. Then the doors, their hot bolts and fiddly, maddening latches, and then the cool, moist night air. She bolted out of the front and onto an expansive driveway lit not just by the fire which raged impressively behind her but by the lights of three fire trucks whose crew, several of whom were connecting hoses, stared at her openmouthed. As the first of them came sprinting heavily over to her, oxygen mask at the ready, she heard one of them exclaim, "They said there was no one inside! They said . . ."

"Is there anybody else in there?" said the firefighter with the mask, helping her down the steps, cradling her like an infant. She felt suddenly weak, almost beyond speech let alone walking, and leant into him gratefully.

"Any
body
?" she said.

"Is there anybody else still inside?" he repeated. "We can't get it under control. We were just going to make sure it didn't spread. Let it burn out. There's no one else still inside, right?"

She thought for a moment and then shook her head.
Let him burn.

CHAPTER 78

It was morning. Deborah had spent the night in Grady Memorial Hospital as a precaution, had been given a few hits of oxygen, and had her cuts, burns, and bruises poked and treated by various nurses till they pronounced her fit to go at dawn after a short and fitful sleep. Cerniga and Keene came by personally at six.

"Busy night?" said the federal agent.

"Average," she said.

"Wanna tell me about it?"

"Not here," she said. "On my turf."

"Home?"

"The museum," she said.

The traffic was still light at this time, and they were inside in under twenty minutes.

"Can we do this in Richard's room?" she said.

"Sure," said Cerniga. "Why?"

"I don't know." She shrugged. "Closure, I guess."

Cerniga sat at Richard's desk with his notebook in front of him. Deborah sat in the one armchair with her back to the bookcase, feeling the tenderness of the skin on her arms and hands, one of which had had to be heavily bandaged. She had been given various creams and lotions for her burns, but the skin still felt papery and sensitive, tingling when the air so much as shifted. Keene watched, looking abashed and saying nothing.

"This
is
closure, I take it?" she said.

"As far as I'm concerned," he said. "It will drag out for 375

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

months in paperwork of one kind and another, but I'll do what I can to keep you out of that."

"You're sure it was him?"

"Bowers?" said Cerniga. "Yes. The van was found burning in a gully near Virginia Highlands."

"It crashed?"

"Hard to say," he said. "It looks more like it was torched."

"Torched?"

"Self-immolation is a favorite with these political martyr types," he said. "Though we don't understand why they would do it when they had apparently gotten away with what they had been looking for. Two bodies were removed. One was clearly the tattooed skinhead you described. The other, the driver, was, presumably, Calvin Bowers. We'll have to wait on dental records, but it seems a safe call. There was a third body in a box in the back. Is that what I think it was?"

"No," she said. "They didn't get away with what they had been looking for. That's probably why they torched it and themselves. The third body was Marcus. I switched the corpses and left the other to burn in the Atreus tomb. At the time, they were in a hurry and didn't look too closely, but I expect they realized soon after they left."

Keene gave a low whistle.

Cerniga looked at her. He said nothing, but she thought he looked impressed. She looked away, not wanting his admiration or his pity, anxious to get this all over.

"Did the death mask survive the fire?" she asked suddenly.

"Not in a way you'd want to display, sorry."

"It's OK," she said. "Marcus would have liked to be burned on a funeral pyre in the grave mask of Agamemnon. Or," she added, smiling sadly, "something like it."

"You know that when the Germans invaded Greece," said Cerniga, "Hitler gave express instructions that Athens should not be bombed. He saw it as his spiritual home. They say that World War Two was a modern war in terms of its technology but an ancient one in terms of its objectives."

"The annihilation of the enemy," said Deborah. "The 376

A. J. Hartley

eradication of alien cities, cultures, people that were considered inferior."

"Pretty grand goals for Atreus, considering they never had more than a couple of members," said Cerniga. "I guess that's the price of secrecy and paranoia. You can't exactly recruit outside Wal-mart. Still, they had a ton of money evidently."

"From Graves?"

For a moment Cerniga looked baffled.

"
Graves,
capital
G
," said Deborah. "Edward Graves, the military policeman."

"Right. Yes. It seems he raised a lot of money while he was in France and put it to good use once he got Stateside. Quite the entrepreneur and businessman. Respectable too."

Deborah snorted wearily. She saw no paradox there.

"Now that we know who was running Atreus," said Cerniga, "we'll be able to get access to his bank accounts. I expect we'll find Calvin Bowers had a rather substantial fortune. He would need it to orchestrate a plan of this scale."

Deborah looked away. She had, she thought, been briefly fascinated by Calvin's aura of confidence and power, attracted to it even. The thought unsettled her. She had always assumed she was immune to such things.

Maybe that's not possible. Not really. Better be on your
guard against it . . .

"When you went back to see Bowers," said Cerniga, cutting off her train of thought, "did you know?"

"What?" said Deborah, shifting under his steady gaze.

"Did you know he was the guy, the Nazi, the one who killed Richard?"

For a second she didn't say anything, then she looked away as if distracted and shook her head.

When Cerniga and Keene left her, she sat exactly where she was for ten long minutes, thinking about Marcus and about Richard, even a little about Calvin. She had thought that the mask of Atreus was the gold faceplate placed over an ancient 377

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

body, but it wasn't. It was the face that Calvin--and people like him--wore on a daily basis, the constant lie that allowed them to live in the world unrecognized, untouched by the panic, horror, and disbelief that their true faces would produce. How many more of them were there today, in Georgia, in America, living the lives of ordinary people, privately hating, despising, wishing for the utter destruction of all who didn't look like them, or believe like them, or love like them?

The thought chilled her and depressed her, like an iron gauntlet tightening about her heart and lungs.
Children and their fathers,
she thought. That's what it was all about. Deborah and her father, Tonya and hers, Marcus and his, Alexandra and hers. Less literally, Richard. Maybe even Calvin and Graves, the fascist MP who had mentored him in Atreus. Atreus himself and Agamemnon, Agamemnon and Orestes, who revenged himself on his murderous mother . . . Priam and Hector. Achilles and Pyrrhus. The countless--and, to her, nameless--victims of the death camps, parents and children all. The curse of Atreus had been the repetition of murder and vengeance visited upon his successors. Sitting there in silence now, she saw it had spread like blood through fabric, like contagion, corrupting anyone who touched it. She turned to her book:
The
Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany
.

Calvin was dead, a suicide unable to live with his failure. Pending dental records, of course. But who else could it be?

Atreus had been two people. Pathetic really. But the amount of hatred those two carried with them was disproportionate and therefore quite lethal.

She paused, suddenly distracted.

Two? No. There had been a third man, someone she had only glimpsed once as he sat in the van which had driven her to Calvin's little funerary monument . . .

Which means . . .

She had to call Cerniga. She turned in her seat, and at almost the same moment she heard the telltale click of the latch as the bookcase behind her began to swing slowly open. CHAPTER 79

She didn't think the space behind the bookcase could be any colder than the rest of the room, so the chill she felt on the back of her neck and running down her spine had to be in her mind.

"Hello, Calvin," she said without turning round. He walked past her to the door and turned the sneck on the lock. He looked haggard, his easy composure gone, his suit now far beyond the fashionably rumpled look he affected, his hair awry, his face smeared with dirt and grease and blood. He was holding that long Nazi dagger again, though it dangled from his hand as if he didn't remember it was there. It gave him a new and psychotic unpredictability which Deborah didn't like.

"You are not surprised to see me?" he said.

"Hardly," said Deborah. "This last creep-show scare is about your level of imaginative vision. I've been reading about the great Nazi aesthetic: beauty and purification through genocide. If it wasn't so repulsive it would be laughable. I assume the police will find bullets in the bodies you left behind in that burning van?"

"My last bullets, unfortunately, yes," he said. "Though this," he added, remembering the dagger, "has a certain poetic justice, wouldn't you say?"

She looked at the knife but kept quite still.

"Justice," he persisted, taking a step toward her and speaking more insistently, "because of what you did last night. What you did to--"

"Der Fuhrer?"
she said, a note of contempt forcing itself through her caution. "Good. He finally got the ignominious 379

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

torching he deserved. And you know the best part? You set the fire yourself."

"Shut up," he said, raising the knife.

What are you doing?

She didn't know. She was pissing him off on purpose, perhaps because it might throw him off balance when he made his inevitable attack, but maybe because he was just a stupid, stupid man who had gotten too much admiration for too long.

"You people are idiots," she spat. "White supremacists!?

That's a joke."

"Shut up, Jew!" he shouted.

"You can't hurt me," she said, getting to her feet and squaring her shoulders, "you infantile little prick, with your banners and your slogans and your moronic, half-baked ideas, and your--"

He came at her then, lunging savagely, and that little reptilian part of her brain was thrilled with a wild delight as she dodged and parried and kicked. She didn't slap or claw, but balled her fists and smashed at his face, so that he came in close like a boxer, hugging her to his chest to keep her from making contact. She brought her knee to his groin, sharp and hard, but he anticipated and rolled left, twisting her backward so that she fell heavily onto the bed. He went after her, pinning her there, fighting to control her hands while he raised the dagger.

Then there was a knock on the door.

"Miss Miller?"

It was Tonya. Calvin's eyes widened, then one hand closed around Deborah's throat. She fought it, and he released the knife to restrain her, but she couldn't speak, couldn't make a sound. She struggled, catching the muffled sound of Tonya's voice through the door.

"I just got in and didn't know if you were in there?" she said.

Calvin paused, his grip firm around her windpipe. Then his face began to grin.

380

A. J. Hartley

"She doesn't know," he whispered. "Shh . . ." To Deborah's surprise he called out, "Give us a few minutes will you, Tonya? You've caught us . . . er . . .
indisposed
."

"Oh I
am
sorry, Mr. Bowers," said Tonya, respectful and embarrassed, from behind the door. "I'll come back later."

"That's OK," he called back.

No! Don't go! Come back!

He listened to the silence for a moment and then smiled that lurid smile she had glimpsed earlier, and then whispered,

"We'll consummate our relationship yet."

"I really don't think so."

It had been Deborah's thought, but she had not said the words. Tonya had said the words.

She was right behind him. He rolled and twisted as she dropped the key, but not before she had brought the antique tomahawk hard across the side of his head. As he sagged and tumbled into a heap on the floor, Deborah sat up, gasping and clutching her throat.