Solomon's Jar (16 page)

“No. I mean, what drives you? You seem just as determined as I am to find the jar. You'd have to be, to keep at it after all that's happened to you so far.”

“Well, I do seem to have acquired my very own guardian angel, have I not?” He smiled. “Still, I'd like to think I'd have persevered in spite of what's happened had you never intervened. Provided I
survived
, of course, which I'm realistic enough to know is far from a given.”

He sat back with his chin sunk to his chest a moment, contemplating. “I could give you a load of rubbish about desire to keep a priceless artifact out of the hands of unscrupulous men but I'll spare you reciting the whole laundry list. I'm sure we both know it by heart by now.”

“If we even know all the players in the game,” she said.

“Lovely thought, that. It's true enough, of course. Like any responsible archaeologist I detest pothunters.”

For a moment he fell quiet. Annja had closed her eyes, resting them, but she could feel his scrutiny like the glow from a heat lamp on her cheek. He still doesn't altogether trust me, she thought. Well, who could blame him?

“But I have to admit, thoroughgoing rationalist and modernist that I am, I've always harbored a hope, deep down inside, that things like the jar are
real
,” he said quietly.

“I think most of us feel that way—if we're honest
with ourselves,” Annja said, opening her eyes. “Not many of us are brave enough to say so.”

“You think? You might be right, judging from the postings on alt.archaeo.esoterica. Then again I'm sure archaeologists aren't any more prone to self-honesty than all the rest of the ruck. I frankly doubt I'd believe a word of your story if I hadn't repeatedly seen you do things which defy what I once considered rational explanation. But if I'm forced to swallow one impossibility, to say nothing of an entire set of them, others become more palatable, somehow,” Pascoe said.

“All my life I've wanted to make a difference, Annja. I've always been appalled by how much ugliness I've seen in the world, how much evil. War, starvation, neglect. It's naive, I suppose, but I've never been able to see people suffering without wanting to help them.”

“You're kind,” she said.

He leaned forward. “Think what it would be like if the jar is
real
, Annja. That kind of power. What couldn't we do to make the world a better place?” His cheeks were flushed. His eyes glowed like beacons.

“With demons, Aidan?”

He laughed. “It sounds improbable, I know. But Solomon was a great man, a wise man. A good man, even if a lot of his contemporaries thought the worst of him for building pagan temples for his favorite wives. He didn't use the power for evil. Perhaps he even built the
temple in Jerusalem using the demons, and that's a righteous thing, to be sure. It must be possible to subordinate the demons to one's will for good, as well as for wicked purposes.”

Annja thought back to what Tsipporah had told her. She hadn't shared anything about the mysterious American-born kabbalist sage with Pascoe. But from the information she had provided, Annja suspected he was correct.

She felt a certain disquiet.

You're just tired, she told herself. Being silly. He's an innocent.

Pascoe had relaxed for a moment. Then his intensity returned. “What do
you
intend to do with the jar if you get your hands on it?” he asked, eyes narrowed.

She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don't know yet.”

“Ah.” The man's teeth were brown and crooked surrounded by his short, grizzled beard. “You must mean Mad Spyros.”

The quayside watering hole was not one of your quaint tourist tavernas. Nor did the clientele consist of tourists, glossy and well-scrubbed. Womb dark after the brilliant Ionian Sea sunshine outside, the tavern smelled of the same things its patrons did: fish, varnish, sweat and brutally harsh tobacco. It was a mixture nearly as potent as tear gas. Annja found it hard to keep smiling and not blink incessantly at the stinging in her eyes.

Pascoe gave her a look. His blue eyes were clear. I'm surprised they're not bloodshot, she thought.

“Spyros?” she said tentatively. “Could that be your cousin, Aidan?”

He shrugged. “Well, he's a bit on the distant side. And I've never actually met him in person, you know.”

“It is short for Spyridon,” their informant said helpfully. He was a short, thick man with bright black eyes shining from red cheeks, and a cloth cap mashed down on graying curls.

Annja and Pascoe had spent a sweaty, footsore day tramping the dives along the waterfront in Corfu, where the hills crowded with whitewashed buildings tumbled down almost into Mandouki Harbor. They had climbed up the Kanoni road past the archaeological museum and the old fort on its island across a causeway, along the esplanade and around the tip of the peninsula to Arseniou, then along the north shore past the containership fleet landing of the old port, past the late-sixteenth-century Venetian new fort toward the new fleet landing and the Hippodrome. They were posing as a pair of tourists on a genealogical vacation, tracking down a missing relative of Aidan's. Despite the fairness of his skin, his curly black hair made it plausible he had Levantine ancestry.

To Annja's eyes he looked rather Byronic, in his white shirt with open collar and sleeves rolled up and his faded blue jeans. She knew George Gordon, the sixth Baron Byron, had come to the nearby Ionian island
of Cephalonia to fight in the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Turks. Indeed to Annja's eye her companion bore a slight resemblance to the infamous poet.

The man who had mentioned Mad Spyros spoke in Greek to his companions. They were a tough-looking lot, professional fishermen like the object of Annja and Aidan's search. They all laughed and nodded. Most of them were short, some wiry, some wide. One tall man with a touch of bronze to his beard loomed over Annja and rumbled something in a voice like thunder. He finished his speaking with the word “Nomiki,” suggesting to Annja that was their informant's name.

“Surely it must be, as my friend Petros says,” Nomiki said, jutting a thumb back over his shoulder at the big man.

“There's an appropriate name,” Annja heard Aidan mutter beneath his breath. She agreed. She knew very little Greek, but she knew
petros
meant “rock.”

“Spyros is our friend. But, poor man, he has taken to the drinking, to seeing bad things everywhere. He is, what you say, paranoid,” Nomiki said.

He looked expectant, with his head cocked to one side. His eyes glittered like obsidian beads.

“Uh, yes,” Annja said. “I think that is the word you're looking for.”

“So my cousin's name is Spyridon,” Pascoe said. “I don't know if I'd say he's paranoid. After all, something
did kill his shipmates.” The men made the sign of the cross, in the Orthodox manner that looked backward to Annja, accustomed as she was to the Catholic version.

 

I
T WAS MURDER
that had brought them to Corfu. The island was a riot of hills, intensely green with olive trees, shaped like a horse's haunch and snuggled up next to the Greek mainland in the Ionian Sea at the mouth of the Adriatic, altogether too close for comfort to the coast of turbulent Albania. Rumor had connected the discovery of King Solomon's Jar to the mysterious, violent deaths of six local fishermen reported on the wire services worldwide.

Annja and Aidan had started out that day asking about the killings. They first posed as crime tourists, what some pundits were calling the new ecotourists, people with a morbid fascination with forensic pathology from watching too many television shows.

It was not an occupation that had ever appealed to Annja. While her own profession brought her into frequent contact with human remains, like most archaeologists and physical anthropologists, she had a marked distaste for dealing with specimens that were fresh.

Not unexpectedly, the locals they questioned at first had regarded them with fascination mixed with loathing. Annja suspected that only Aidan's liberality in buying drinks for the house wherever they went—with handfuls
of cash to prevent leaving plastic tracks—kept them from having to fight their way free of some places.

But gossip is a powerful force in human affairs, as Annja had discovered as a child. They soon started hearing a persistent rumor that the six crewmen who had been murdered on the boat were not the same six who had been aboard when the ancient jar was found. One member of the original crew had somehow survived.

The pair switched their focus to trying to find that lone survivor. To cover the fact they didn't know his name, Aidan claimed to be an Englishmen of Greek extraction who had heard rumors from an estranged branch of his family that a distant cousin had been involved in the horrible business of the fishing-boat murders. He told their listeners since he and his female friend had already planned a Greek holiday, he agreed to his aging mother's request to check in on Corfu and see if they could track the poor man down and bring him comfort from his displaced family in the British Isles. It was thin at best, but as far as Annja could see, it was their only option.

 

“W
HERE MIGHT WE FIND
poor cousin Spyros, then?” Pascoe asked.

Nomiki cocked his head to one side. A calculating look came into his eyes. Aidan reached for his wallet. Not quite sure why, Annja stopped him with a touch on his arm.

The Greek man spoke again to his friends. His manner was earnest. The ensuing conversation was low and intense. Annja had the impression of general disagreement, of men not accustomed to muting their emotions trying, for reasons unknown to her, to keep the argument from rising to the boisterous levels it ordinarily might. As they argued Aidan stood by smiling vaguely and humming to himself, as if oblivious to the passions being kept simmering below the surface.

Finally Nomiki turned back to the pair. “The boat was the
Athanasia
.” He and his companions crossed themselves again. “It is to be found on a beach a few kilometers south of town. There you may find poor Spyros, as well. He cannot leave it behind, it seems.”

Pascoe's smile widened. “Splendid! Thank you so much.” Now he did dig in his pocket. “Allow me to buy a round of drinks for the house.”

Nomiki leaped back as if afraid the mad young Englishman was going for a gun. “No, no!' he exclaimed, holding up callused hands with fingers twisted from being broken repeatedly hauling in water-heavy and stiffened nets.

Then he smiled. It was forced, ghastly. “It is not necessary. We do this as a favor to kinfolk of our friend Spyridon.”

He spoke quickly to the others. They all seemed to draw back, then nod and smile fixedly.

Pascoe shrugged. “Well, thank you all, and good day.”

He waited a moment, then turned and walked out. Annja stayed close to him. She felt a tingling sensation at the nape of her neck.

Out on the street an old man in a dark wool suit teetered past them on a bicycle. Away to the north bruise-dark storm clouds gathered above Albania. The sky was clear and achingly bright blue above them, the water a deep green inshore and a royal blue so intense it seemed almost self-luminous farther out.

“Odd,” Pascoe muttered.

“What?” Annja asked.

“I've never known working men in a pub to turn down free drinks,” he said.

“Maybe they felt it would be bad luck, for some reason. They were obviously still feeling the effects of the murders.” Annja said.

“I can understand why.” He shrugged. “Ah, well. Let's rent a car and nip down to this beach to find the boat. I don't fancy poking around a scene like that in the dark.”

Annja laughed. “What? You're not superstitious, are you?”

Aidan laughed louder. He thrust his elbow out from his side.

After a moment Annja threaded her arm through his. Side by side they began the lengthy hike back to the car-rental office.

 

T
HE HILLS OF
C
ORFU WERE
a deep and beautiful green. That was the good part. Looked at more closely a note of monotony came to the fore. Most of the island's copious verdure, wild as well as cultivated, consisted of olive trees. They were the island's main, close to only crop. Export of olives to the mainland and fishing were key sources of income for the islanders, although both came well behind tourism.

Now the green, made into different hues and values by the island's vigorous relief, had begun to take on a dark uniformity as the sun declined toward the rugged mountains inland.

Gravel turned and shingle crunched beneath their feet as they made their way down the beach. At its southern extremity a boat lay beached on the shingle, heeled over onto its port side. Its bottom and screws had rusted red.

“
Athanasia
,” Aidan said, looking at the characters painted on the stern. “That's the boat we're looking for.”

“You know Greek?” Annja asked, a trifle suspicious, and ready to be more than a trifle put out if for some reason he had withheld knowledge and allowed them to struggle through the whole day trying subtly to interrogate people who spoke dribs and wisps of English if any at all.

But he only laughed. “The dire consequences of a classical education,” he said. “I speak a few words and understand next to nothing of the spoken tongue. But
I read it fair enough. Well enough to transliterate, surely.”

He walked up to the boat and rapped on the hull. It did not ring so much but echo hollowly. “Besides, this is a big craft. Maybe thirty feet long. A substantial investment, especially on a poor island such as this one. Do you see any holes in her hull? I don't. So there must be some serious reason she's moldering here on the beach with nobody trying to take her to sea.”

“I guess you're right,” she said. “She's a lot bigger than I thought she'd be.”

“She's not even being used to dry nets,” Pascoe said. Several other craft, obviously also fishing boats, bobbed at anchor not far out from the little beach. Wet nets had been spread out over upturned dinghies and stretched out on the shingle and held down with large rocks. “People are afraid of her,” he stated.

Annja glanced toward the sun, which hung low and swollen above the steep green hills. “I guess we'd better take a look aboard while there's still some light,” she said.

Throughout the day they had not yet found it necessary to refer to the jar itself. This was good, Annja thought. Whoever or whatever had killed those men might still be in the area, or have spies on the ground. The guilty party or parties might or might not be fooled by touristy preoccupation with the macabre, or goofy genealogical enthusiasms. But the killer's putatively
pointed ears would definitely prick up if somebody turned up asking about the priceless, supernaturally powerful relic the hapless crew had pulled from the sea in its nets. Provided, of course, the murders had actually been connected to Solomon's Jar, and not some semirandom element. Such as drug smuggling gone bad, as follow-up articles said the Greek police surmised. That was the catchall of bad, lazy, or simply stymied police investigations, Annja knew full well.

Scrambling over the port rail was easy. Climbing uphill into the wheelhouse was something of a challenge, although nothing daunting to a pair as fit as Annja and her companion. Pulling herself through the open hatchway, though, she came up short.

The stench struck her like an invisible barrier.

“Ghastly,” Aidan muttered. “I didn't imagine it would smell this foul after so much time.”

“Neither did I,” Annja said. Her cheek rode up in response to the stink, squinting her amber-green eyes. “The humid climate must keep the smell active. I guess that's why we're archaeologists instead of medical examiners.”

“We're wimps,” Aidan said, holding on to a stanchion right behind her. “I can live with that.”

By force of will she thrust herself into the reeking dimness. Flies swarmed up to meet her. Their bodies fuzzed the air like a living haze. The sunset light shone
almost directly through the cracked front port, yet it made little impression on the gloom within.

She could still see enough. More than enough.

The first impression, which did not particularly surprise her, was that someone had tossed buckets of dark paint liberally around the compartment. Copious buckets. Her stomach began a slow roll.

You've seen blood splatter like this before, she reminded herself sternly. You've even caused it. So you'd better learn to face up to the consequences of your actions, no matter how righteous.

Lest they become too easy
. The voices of Roux and Tsipporah sounded in her head.

Beneath the irregular coating of dried blood the compartment was a shambles. Chair seats and backs had been ripped in parallel slashes and bled yellowed stuffing. An obvious radar screen and other navigation instruments were smashed. The chart table lay broken against the bulkhead below. Charts and logs had been torn to pieces and strewed around. The papers had mildewed and crumpled in the humidity, and some had begun to melt into the varnished wood and painted metal of the deck and bulkheads.

The sound of the flies was like an idling engine's growl.

“My God,” Aidan said, coming in behind her. “A charnel house.”

“Literally,” Annja whispered.