The Mask of Atreus (2 page)

into the path of his battle-weary platoon.

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A. J. Hartley

Mulligrew's tank and the rest of the platoon had been separated from the rest of the 761st Tank Battalion as they pressed east through Regensburg on the Danube five days earlier. They were seventy-five miles or so northeast of Munich, less than that from both Austria and what had been Czechoslovakia before the Nazi carve-up, not much more from the Swiss border. It was spectacular country, all wooded mountains with snow-capped peaks and distant, romantic castles. One moment they had been rolling along with the rest of the group, finally starting to believe that their nightmarish slog from Normandy through the Ardennes into Germany was coming to a victorious end, and in the next they had been pinned down by enemy artillery. Mulligrew's platoon had been ordered to peel off to cut enemy supply lines, but two days later, they had found themselves completely alone. The rest of the battalion had been ordered on at their best speed, rushing with the rest of the army to Steyria on the Enns River to meet--somewhat anxiously--with the Russians. Mulligrew and the rest of the company had made the approach north by themselves, and apart from dealing with roads jammed with refugees, he had started to think they had gotten the softer deal. Since Regensburg they hadn't fired a shot and were starting to believe they might fire no more. By all accounts, the war was over.

Now this.

Mulligrew switched to the tank's internal circuit and started yelling orders, swinging the nose of the Sherman around, and calling for armor-piercing rounds. They had just got off the road when they saw the armored car coming their way. It was doing at least fifty miles an hour and skidded badly as it struggled to find cover, its turret guns opening up so that they could hear the machine gun rounds kicking off the Sherman's turret. But it was what he could see behind the armored car that drained the life from his face. The Jagdpanther was huge, low and menacing like a crocodile or a shark, and its frontal armor was well sloped and 3

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several inches thick. Even at close range the Sherman's 76 mm weapon had no chance against it. And if the German tank could get its 88 trained on them, they were dead. Simple as that.

Mulligrew screamed to get the tank into the field and the turret swung round. Their only chance was to slip past the Jagdpanther and hit it--several times and at close range--

from the side. The Shermans behind him would have to deal with the other German tanks.

They were coming up out of the ditch by the roadside when the 88 fired, a great blast of smoke and muzzle flash filling Mulligrew's visor so that he winced away involuntarily. It took him two full seconds to be sure they weren't hit. Then he was screaming the order to fire, conscious even as he did so that Williams's turret had taken the full brunt of the 88, tearing a hole the size of a trash can lid in the front, the shell ricocheting around inside . . .

Seventeen long minutes later, Mulligrew stood on the back of the German truck and gazed out over the smoking ruins that littered the road and fields around it. Two of the Shermans and one of the Stuarts had been knocked out; a third had been badly damaged. Williams and all but one of his crew were dead, so were Smith, Jenkins, and Pole. Rogers had lost a leg, and Lumpkin was blind in one eye. Both of them thought they'd got off easy.

The Germans had barely stopped. Instead of repositioning, digging in, and picking them off with their superior weapons, they had tried to just push through, like they were desperate to keep moving. As the Shermans had fanned out to try to hit their flanks, they had done nothing to adjust, still pushing south, exposing even the sides and rear of that monstrous Jagdpanther, a tank that probably could have dealt with the entire platoon if it had hung back and made them come to it.

It made no sense.

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And then there was the way that, as the battle had started to turn in favor of the Americans, the Germans had hemmed in this one truck, squeezed together around it as if determined to make sure that if only one vehicle made it out in one piece, it would be that battered little Opel.

"Let's see what was worth all that," Mulligrew said. Tom Morris, Mulligrew's driver, unhooked the latch on the back of the truck. His face was blank, his eyes wide with the shock of the battle and its strangeness.

Mulligrew swung himself up, climbing over the young German who had tried to hold them off with a machine pistol until they had riddled the truck with .30 caliber rounds. Inside was a single large crate, stenciled with a German eagle and swastika. He took the pickax from the side of his tank, worked it under the top of the box, and leant his weight on it until the pine splintered and tore. Then he pushed it aside and became quite still, staring in silence.

What the hell?

"What is it, Andrew?" said Morris. "What do you see?"

"I don't know," said Mulligrew, his voice hoarse with puzzlement, even fear. "I don't know. Pretty wild stuff."

"What is it?"

"You'd better call the MPs," said Mulligrew. "Right now."

And though they did so, and even in spite of the carnage they had just endured and the grief which pursued the initial horror, Mulligrew never moved from the back of the truck. He was still standing there, staring as if spellbound, when the ambulances arrived to remove the dead.

Old Bones

"Furthermore, his wounds, yes, every one he had (and many men cut him with their weapons of bronze) have closed, showing how much the blessed gods still love your son, though he is now nothing but a corpse . . ."

"Respect the gods," the old man replied, "and pity me in memory of your own father--though I am more to be pitied, since I have kissed the hand of the man who slew my son."

--Homer,
The Iliad,
Book 24

CHAPTER 1

Present Day

The big man leaned against the wall, his still-substantial weight on the foot he had so casually braced against the doorjamb.

"You're a very striking young lady, you know, Miss Miller," he drawled, his eyes slitting in his piggy face and his tongue showing wetly through his thick, parted lips.

"I know," said Deborah. She was six feet and one inch tall and looked like she'd been assembled out of pieces of pipe. She rarely got called attractive. Never pretty.
Striking,
she heard plenty. In the past she might have been flattered. A long time ago. Tonight, after the weeks of planning and the evening's hours of fixed smiles and indulgent conversation, she was too tired to be polite, even to Harvey Webster, prominent member of Atlanta's League of Christian Businessmen and the head of the museum's financial board. It was after midnight, and she wanted to go home.

"Very striking," he repeated, extending a hand toward her hip, palm open. He was toad-shaped, his skin managing to both bulge and sag simultaneously like a balloon half full of water, sloshing from side to side.

"Mr. Webster," she said, eyeing the liver-spotted hand he was sliding toward her, "I don't think that would be wise."

And,
she thought,
I'd probably throw up if you touched me.
His hand hovered; then, as if he had decided to read her rebuttal merely as coyness, it started toward her again. She flinched away.

"Mr. Webster," she said, her smile a little weary now.

"Please."

He changed tack, his leer opening into a smile, his hand retreating upward in a gesture of surrender.

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"Far be it from me to give offense," he said, the smile spreading wider than the doorway he was still blocking. "I had just hoped you could give me a tour. Now that, you know, everyone's gone home."

The smile stalled for a second, and Deborah glimpsed the calculation behind it. It was uncanny how, for a sixty-fiveyear-old man, he oozed the smugness of a high school jock. Smugness and, she thought, a touch of menace.

"A
private
tour," he added, smirking so that it was impossible to misread what he meant. He had been like this all night and, if she was going to be honest, was always like this, particularly after a few drinks. She thought of herself as a fairly tolerant person, but if she had a rope, she was nearing the end of it.

"Another day, Mr. Webster," she said. "When it's light and crowded and I have had the chance to invest in a decent cattle prod."

She grinned to show she was joking, but his smile curdled a little all the same.

"You have a smart mouth, Miss Miller," he said.

"Thank you," she said, embracing the fact that she just couldn't win with him tonight, "though it's not my mouth that's smart."

He sighed and raised his pasty hands in mock surrender.

"OK," he said, smiling again. "I'll be heading home."

"Drive carefully," she said, shrugging slightly aside as he made one last attempt at an embrace.

"I'll be in to see Richard later in the week, so . . . till then."

He stepped back through the glass door, still looking at her as if expecting her to change her mind and invite him back in.

"Good night now, Mr. Webster," she mouthed, adding to herself,
You drunken, lecherous, old slug.
She felt a ripple of relief as he walked off into the darkness outside, though she guessed that forcing the old man's retreat 9

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might cost her something, maybe more than she realized. Webster controlled the museum's purse strings, and he was influential in the local business community, or an elderly, white section of it, at least. The League of Christian Businessmen didn't openly ban black members, but for an organization of its type to have none--particularly in a city like Atlanta--was suggestive. Deborah had tried to balance the League's presence at the museum with comparable organizations which had a more diverse membership, but it didn't stop her from feeling uncomfortable every time they sent a check. She could probably get a Jewish business group involved, she thought, but that made her uncomfortable too, as if that would be exploiting her heritage, a heritage she did her best to disregard in every other aspect of her life. Why risk exposing herself and the museum to anti-Semitism when the vast majority of her Jewishness was ancient history anyway?

Oh please,
said a voice in her head.
Webster probably
doesn't even know you're Jewish.

Deborah checked the museum doors and did a quick walkthrough of the lobby under the T. rex skeleton and that ugly galleon prow Richard had unveiled last month like he was announcing Christmas had come early. It was a half-naked woman fused with the neck of a dragon, and looked like it would be more at home airbrushed on the side of a Harley than adorning the front of a Renaissance Spanish treasure ship, but Richard had thought it a wonderfully hilarious blend of history and kitsch. Deborah glowered at the woman's vacant face and excessive curves, then down to where she became scaly and reptilian, the sexy allure turning--not surprisingly--into the serpent of Eden. She considered the great serpentine thing, its breasts like sixteenth-century headlamps, and grinned a wry, selfdeprecating grin.

"Richard," she said aloud, "I love you, but you have a lousy sense of humor."

She shrugged, blew out a sigh, and paused to take in the carnage visited on the museum foyer by the caterers. They 10

A. J. Hartley

had left four trash cans filled with the paper plates they were supposed to have taken with them. In the semicircular alcove where she had done her presentation three hours earlier she found plastic martini glasses and napkins with the remains of the canapes, and a series of sticky spills on the polished floor. She'd be getting on to Richard about
Taste of Elegance,
and not just because their foie gras tasted suspiciously like Spam.

Richard Dixon was the museum's founder, its principal collector, its main source of funding, and its guiding light. He was her employer, her mentor, her friend. On the rare moments she was frank enough with herself to admit it, he was the nearest thing she'd had to a father since her own had died of heart failure when she was thirteen.

Twenty years ago, almost to the day.

Sometimes as she tried to drag the little museum into the twenty-first century, dealing with the likes of Harvey Webster in the process, Richard Dixon was the only thing that kept her going. Suddenly, standing alone in the museum foyer, dwarfed by the T. rex and lit only by the soft lights from the new Creek Indian cases, she wondered how much longer Richard himself would keep going.

And what would you do if he was gone?
she thought.
It's
been twenty years, and you aren't over the death of your real
father yet. Past it perhaps, but not over it. Not really.
She shook herself.

"You shouldn't drink at these things," she said aloud. "It makes you melodramatic."

She looked around, trying to decide if there was anything else that had to be done tonight. Her passport was still in the office safe where it had been since she had faxed its details to the organizers of the Celtic exhibit (in case, she supposed, she had been planning to leave the country with a few significant pieces stuffed down her blouse), but that could wait till tomorrow. It wasn't like she was going anywhere. She picked up the mail and leafed through it, separating the bills from the junk, the envelopes for her from those for 11

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Richard. A third of it went straight into the trash. The pieces bearing her name could wait, and those addressed to Richard seemed no more urgent. One had a little triangular mask in the corner: some begging letter from a local theater company, no doubt. Richard got dozens per week. He responded to all but the most generic or crass, often including significant donations. Smiling with a tired and familiar indulgence, Deborah put the letters in her purse and began locking up. She would deal with them in the morning.

She set the alarm, peered quickly out into the parking lot with its surround of heavy Southern magnolias, and braced herself for the heat outside. It was June, far enough into the Atlanta summer that the nights could be sweltering. She caught herself at the door. A homeless man had been hanging around the museum over the last couple of days. He was old, but he had bright, intense eyes and muttered in a language she didn't understand. Yesterday he had been skulking in the parking lot when she locked up, skittering crablike between the cars, draped in a heavy overcoat in spite of the heat. Those eyes of his had followed her with unnerving focus. But there was no sign of him or of Webster's carefully waxed Jag, so she stepped out into the muggy night, yawning wide, her long, rangy stride bringing her up against her little Toyota in a dozen steps. All tiredness and irritation aside, it had been a good night.