The Mask of Atreus (15 page)

"You think I don't know what you did?" she said, suppressing a wave of nausea, her voice level and little more than a whisper. "You killed Richard."

Again his eyes narrowed, as if he was trying to gauge something about her.

"You know I had no hand in that," he said. It wasn't a passionate denial, just a reasoned statement of something he thought she already knew. "Why would I have telephoned you?"

"You knew he was dead right after it happened."

"No," he said, his eyes momentarily dropping. "I did not. I knew there was to be a . . .
transaction
that night. I called and got no reply. So I called you."

"I know about the mask," she said. It was a stupid thing to say, but she wanted to keep him a little off balance till she could get to the tour group. "I'll take it from you and I'll turn you in."

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"Take it from me?" he repeated, for a moment seemingly confused. "What are you talking about?"

"You have it," she said. "I know you do."

He shook his head and, in a gesture of parental exasperation, turned away. It was the moment she had been waiting for.

Deborah ran.

CHAPTER 25

She didn't look back. She watched the uneven ground, and she ran, head down, her long legs extended as far as they would go. She didn't stop until she had barreled right into the center of the startled tour group, stumbling to a halt and colliding with a heavyset man who reacted irritably in a language she did not know. She babbled her apologies and, when she had figured out which one was the guide, said, "I'm being chased by a man. Can someone call the police?"

Half a dozen cell phones appeared, and Deborah, framed by the backdrop of one of the world's most famed historical structures, was suddenly very glad to live in the twenty-first century, smog and all.

She told the police officer she eventually met overlooking the staggering remains of the ancient theaters at the foot of the Acropolis that the man had been following her, but that he had apparently fled as soon as she had joined the tourists. No, she didn't know who he was. Yes, she would like a ride back to her hotel. She did not say he had pursued her across the Atlantic.

"Will you stay there?" said the policeman, a young, laconic guy who seemed a little ill at ease with this storklike American female.

"I need to get my things," she said. "But then maybe . . ."

Maybe what? Run again?

"I can wait," he said, "take you to the airport, if you wish."

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Run like you ran from Atlanta, like you ran from the En-
glishman just now? And run where? They're here too. They
followed you . . .

"You know what," she said. "Forget it. I'm fine. The guy's gone. I can go back to my hotel by myself. I'm not done in Athens yet."

CHAPTER 26

She half expected him to be waiting for her at her hotel, the mystery man with the British accent. He had been tailing her before she had gotten on the plane, had seen her in the museum, and approached her quite deliberately on the Acropolis. That he didn't know where she was staying was inconceivable.

She kept her wits about her as she made her way through the quiet streets of the Plaka and round to the Achilleus, and she summoned her old defiance. It was the young policeman's knowing smile that had finally triggered it, but it had been lurking much earlier, before the stranger had spoken to her at the Parthenon, before she had left the States even, perhaps as early as when she had fled her own apartment.
Fled.

That was the word, and that was what she hated. Deborah Miller didn't back down. She fought her corner. She stood up for herself armed with a quick mind, a
tough
mind and, as Harvey Webster had pointed out in what now felt like the early fourteenth century, a smart mouth. She was not going to flee anymore.

The hotel lobby was cool and dark when she got back, a little refuge from the outside world. The old man was on duty again. He looked shrunken with fatigue but brightened as she approached, turning automatically to the cubbyholes behind him where the keys were stored. He didn't need to ask her room number.

Deborah thanked him and took the key, which was large and brass, like she thought keys in Athens should be. 124

A. J. Hartley

"Any messages for me?" she said. "Calls? Inquiries of any kind?"

He frowned, sensing something beneath the question.

"No, miss," he said. "Is there a problem?"

"I don't think so," she said. "I'm going to make an international call from my room."

"You don't need to tell me in advance," he answered.

"I know," she said. "But I think I may be getting another call very soon. My phone will be occupied for a few minutes. You might tell him to call back at, say, ten o'clock."

If he was perplexed by all this extraneous information, he didn't show it.

"Very good, miss," he said with a shallow bow. Her room was undisturbed and unoccupied. She wasn't surprised, but she was feeling cautious enough to check the place over systematically. All the way home she had been considering who would get that overseas call. The first person on the list was her mother, but the prospect of explaining the situation exhausted her. Unless the police had called them--a horrifying thought--her family didn't even know Richard was dead. She knew she couldn't have that conversation without emerging feeling somehow responsible. The thought saddened her because for the first time in years she really wanted to tell her mother everything--for both their sakes--as she might have done when she was ten.
Sorry Ma,
she thought.
I'll tell you later. All of it. I prom-
ise.

She fished in her wallet and dialed a number. It rang for a long time. Then a man grunted on the other end.

"Calvin?" she said.

"Yes, who the hell is this? It's four in the goddamned morning."

"It's Deborah Miller."

There was a pause, and all the sleepiness and irritation fell away from the lawyer's voice.

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"Deborah? Where in God's name are you?"

"I'm in Greece, Calvin," she said smoothly, "and I'm staying here, at least for now."

"What is going on?"

"Are the police looking for me?"

"Yes. Not seriously," he said. "I'm not sure. One of them asked me if I knew where you were, but that's all."

"Which one?"

"Which one? What difference does it make?"

"It makes a difference. Which one?"

"Keene," he said. "I don't think he likes you much. He's going to be furious when he finds out you left the country."

"He probably already knows. Listen, Calvin, I know we don't know each other, but I need to trust someone, and you had some dealings with Richard so . . . that will have to do."

"Sure," he said, wide awake now. "What do you need?"

"Anything you can e-mail me on Schliemann, Mycenae, Agamemnon, or Atreus that you can find on Richard's computer."

"What? I can't get access to that."

"Sure you can. You represent his estate. Richard was killed for something in that secret collection upstairs, something they took with them."

"What is missing?"

She hesitated.

"I'm not sure, but I think it included a death mask," she said.

"Like the one you were looking at on the computer," he said.

"Maybe," she said. "Just trust me. I have your e-mail address on your card. I'll write to you, and you can send me anything you find."

She hesitated, then took one last plunge.

"I think there's a chance that the police won't catch whoever killed Richard, that they don't want to."

"What do you mean? You think the police are somehow . . . involved?"

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"I don't know yet," she said. "But I'd check up on those detectives before you tell them anything."

He was quiet then, uncertain. She waited for his acceptance.

"OK," he said at last. "I will."

"And Calvin?"

"Yes?"

"If they start saying I killed Richard," she said, "don't believe them."

Suddenly she found there was more on her mind, on the tip of her tongue, but she hung up before he had a chance to respond, before she had a chance to say anything stupid. Deborah watched the television for ten minutes, then washed quickly in the hard water (she always missed Atlanta water when she was away), and was almost ready for bed when the phone rang.

"Miss Miller," said the now familiar English voice. "I fear I gave you a surprise earlier."

"Never mind," she said. "But we'll need to begin this conversation on more equal footing."

"How do you mean?" he said.

"You know my name, but I don't know yours."

The hesitation was only fractional, and she thought she heard him sigh.

"Very well," he said. "I am Marcus Fitz-Stephens."

He might be lying, of course, but she didn't care. It seemed more important that she force the gesture.

"Let's start from the beginning, shall we?" she said. CHAPTER 27

In the time she had spent walking back from the Acropolis alone that evening she had gone over the exchange she had had with the Englishman at the Acropolis, and very little of it had made any sense. Either he was a gifted actor and a master psychologist, or his sense of the facts did not square with hers at all. The idea that he might talk his way out of being Richard's murderer by pretending to think that she had done it was absurd, which meant that he was delusional. Unless it meant that he really believed she was the killer. And if he meant to kill her, why seek her out to chat with her in a public place? These questions led to another, which was stranger still: was it possible that he really did believe that she had the mask? It seemed likely. Why else would he believe--as he seemed to--that she had
wanted
him to follow her?

It was questions like these as much as her own bloodymindedness that had made her come back to the hotel where she knew he would try to contact her, rather than hightailing it for the bus station or airport.

Now she sat very still, a pad of paper with the hotel's name stenciled across the top on the bed beside her, a ballpoint poised in her hand, and the phone receiver pinned between cheek and shoulder.

"All right, Marcus," she said. "What's on your mind?"

"Apart from startling you," he said, "I fear I did you an injustice in suggesting that you killed your employer."

The formality of his speech rendered the content of the utterance even more absurd, but she managed to see past it.

"You're right; you did," said Deborah, cautious, waiting to see where this would all go.

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"And I fear that you may genuinely believe I might have . . . done the deed."

"Right," she said. "You will now tell me you didn't."

"Indeed," he said.

She could hear nothing on the phone beyond his even, cultured voice, no crackle, no traffic roar or voices. He was probably sitting in a hotel room much like hers . . .

"But when you first called in Atlanta you asked if they had taken the body," she said. "Who was the
they,
and if you didn't know Richard was dead, why ask about his body?"

"The
they
were a pair of Greek businessmen with whom I believe Richard had set up a transaction. One which seems to have gone badly wrong."

"And the
body
reference?"

His silence was a good deal longer this time, so long in fact that she wondered if they had been cut off. When his voice came it seemed to wind out of the darkness like a thin coil of smoke, as if he had turned away from the phone for a moment and had begun speaking before he had the mouthpiece properly in place. She remembered the scent outside her apartment and imagined he was smoking his pipe. It was an odd image, one that made the voice somehow more contemplative, even likable.
That's just because Dad smoked a pipe.

"You never saw Richard's special collection till after he was dead, did you?" he said.

"Is that relevant?"

"It means you don't know what was taken," he said.

"I'm glad to hear that you don't assume I have it," she said.

"I think what we have here is a mutual leap of faith," he said. "A kind of working hypothesis. I assume you are innocent of the murder and the theft, and you assume I am innocent of the murder and the theft. For now."

"For now," she said.

"Then I assume you don't have what was removed from that remarkable little hoard behind the bookcase. And yes, I 129

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

had seen it before, but not in person and not on the night he died."

"Go on," she said, giving no ground.

"What do you imagine was taken?"

"A death mask," she said. "Like the one in the National Archaeological Museum. The one Schliemann said belonged to Agamemnon."

"Schliemann said,"
he repeated. "You don't believe that the grave shafts uncovered in Mycenae contained the remains of the man who led the Greeks against Troy?"

"No," she said.

"Richard did," he said.

"Richard was . . ." She caught herself in a smile and banished it. "A dreamer."

"Perhaps this is why he never showed you the treasures he had amassed, treasures which would put the rest of your museum to shame."

Deborah bridled but replied evenly, "You think the mask in Richard's collection came from the grave shafts dug by Schliemann in the 1890s?" she said.

"You know what message Schliemann telegraphed to a newspaper in Athens at the end of his dig in Mycenae? He wrote, 'I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.' "

"I read that that story was apocryphal," said Deborah. "He later denied sending it."

"Well, he would have, wouldn't he," said Marcus, unruffled, "since the mask he was referring to never made it to his governmental bosses in Athens."

"You think the mask in the museum is a fake?"

"No, it's real enough," he said. "It just isn't the mask Schliemann was talking about. There was another. It came from the richest tomb of the entire dig, one whose contents he kept secret."