The Mask of Atreus (22 page)

She blundered into the first cafe she found, overturning a metal table as she fought her way through to the back where the kitchens were. The place was empty of customers, but a waiter was smoking by the bar. He turned as the table clattered 180

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to the ground, startled and irritated, then a middle-aged woman in black, hair pulled back in a bun, face lined and severe, was coming toward her looking focused and lethal. Deborah's will to keep going finally left her, or she finally allowed herself to let it go. She lost her balance and crashed to the floor, scattering chairs and overturning another table. Bruised, bleeding, and tired beyond anything she had ever experienced, she felt completely unable to move.

"Sorry," she muttered, as the Greek woman's face loomed into view.

The woman barked something at the waiter, then turned back to Deborah, her hard face breaking into a look of concern.

"Ees OK," she said, as the waiter thrust a bottle of water into her hands.

The woman raised Deborah's head and pressed the lip of the bottle to her mouth.

She took a long swallow, feeling the delicious cold course through her like life.

Deborah still felt that she might pass out but lifted herself onto her elbows and forced herself to look back through the chaos of chairs and tables to the road. The motorcyclist was there, the green helmet's blank visor turned impassively toward her. Then the bike revved, a great nasal bellow, grating and metallic, and it surged down the street and out of sight. CHAPTER 38

The Greek woman, who said her name was Sophia (like Schliemann's wife), gave Deborah food (grilled lamb and sliced cucumbers) and water, then swabbed her grazed and sliced skin, daubing her thigh with iodine from an ancientlooking brown bottle with a glass stopper. She spoke only a few words of English, mostly connected to her menu, but chatted continually in an amiable fashion that put Deborah strangely at ease.

Deborah told her she had been chased from the Acrocorinth by a man on a motorbike. She did not say she had been shot at and waved away Sophia's suggestion that they call the police. She wasn't sure why, though she sensed the Greek woman was slightly relieved, probably because she knew with what skepticism her story would be met. When Deborah stood up and said she was well enough to find a bus or taxi back to her hotel, Sophia said simply, "No," and started shouting at the waiter, till he left looking hard done by, returning in the driver's seat of an old Fiat. Before gratefully, if a little apprehensively, clambering into the tiny, rusted vehicle, Deborah accepted first a bottle of water and a loaf of bread, then--and most surprisingly--an ungainly embrace. Sophia, who spoke a steady stream of unintelligible Greek, patted her cheek and gave a last smile of encouragement, and Deborah, squeezing her long, stiff, and wounded legs into the car, felt inexplicably close to tears for the first time since she had arrived in Greece. Sophia made sure that the waiter knew how to get to the hotel, which was as well, since his English seemed to be confined to the names of British soccer players ("Beckham, Scholes, 182

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Owen," he said, grinning and making enthusiastic but unspecific noises), and they drove off back to the modern city and the Ephira.

For reasons she couldn't see clearly, Deborah expected there to be some form of news waiting for her at the hotel: a note from Marcus, or the man himself sitting smoking his pipe in the lobby, word from Calvin in Atlanta, perhaps. That there was nothing at all, and no one to express interest or concern for her hellish afternoon, depressed her deeply. It would have been nice to hear from Calvin today.
Ah, a little self-pity to add to your adolescence. Great.
It wasn't just a sense of anticlimax though, she thought, as she thanked the waiter, who seemed happier to have been of assistance outside Sophia's rather overwhelming presence, and returned to her room. It was more than that. She had fled Atlanta because she had felt in danger, but she was no safer here, and she had made no real progress toward discovering why Richard had died. She had found out nothing of real significance, and she was left, as she sat in the cafe and sipped her rapidly cooling coffee, with the sense that she had failed Richard as well as herself. It was also quite clear now that no discovery would make sense of Richard's death if by that she really meant that it would make it somehow comprehensible, acceptable.

She rubbed her swollen ankle and accepted the words that had suddenly appeared in her head:
It's time to go home.
She checked the lock on the door, lay down naked under a single sheet, and slept till morning, waking only once with the shrill whine of a motorcycle arcing through her dreams. The depression with which she had gone to bed stayed with her into the following morning, returning as she awoke, like a hangover or the memory of some terrible loss. She checked in with the concierge before breakfast, but there had been no messages for her. Marcus had, apparently, abandoned her. She went down to the cyber cafe and checked her e-mail, but there was nothing there either.

She changed the dressing on her thigh, wiping it clean to 183

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see if it had become infected. So far it looked OK, but the cut was deep, and the area around it was pink and swollen. Maybe she could get some antiseptic lotion from the concierge. For some reason the thought sapped her of energy, and she sat back on the bed, staring out of the window over the tiled rooftops to the domed basilica and beyond to the sea.

It was indeed time to go home, to face the music, hand over the investigation to the people who knew how to do it, and concentrate on not finishing up in jail for hindering the investigation of the murder of her friend and mentor. There was only one thing to do before she went back to Athens and the airport: the one thing she had always known she would have to do before she left.

CHAPTER 39

"Mikines," barked the woman who had taken her ticket. She wore heavily tinted glasses and a curious wrap about her head, in multiple colors tending to mustard. "Mikines," she said again, pointing to the door of the bus as if Deborah was costing them valuable seconds.

Deborah disembarked and considered the dusty road junction with its ancient gas station, as the bus bellowed and surged off in a cloud of brown and bitter smoke. As it moved away, the driver leaned out and stabbed his finger in the direction of a long, straight side road. Mikines (three syllables) was the modern village which had grown up on the ancient site of Mycenae, though the ancient citadel was another mile or two up the hill. Deborah hoisted the backpack and set off in the direction the driver had pointed, testing her ankle and her bandaged thigh before she got into stride. She winced, then decided that it was just stiff and that the discomfort could be walked off. It wouldn't go completely, and it might start getting worse if she walked on it too much, but this was her last day, and she was going to see the citadel that had started it all, even if she had to spend a week in convalescence back in Georgia. She would, after all, have nothing better to do.

The village fell quickly away, leaving only a handful of small hotels and restaurants with large, empty patios under dusty umbrellas. The tourist coaches would be along later, she thought, and these places would quickly fill with Brits, Germans, and Americans sheltering from the fierce afternoon sun, especially since the excavated sites were notoriously short of shade. After the cafes there was only pale farmland 185

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with twisted, dwarfish olive trees, dust gray in the strong light, and the tall, fragrant eucalyptuses which lined the road. Deborah had seen enough olive trees the day before to last her a good long while.

At the first sight of the citadel walls, red and gold and imposing, rising out of the dry mountains to the northeast, she paused to drink from her water bottle and just look at it for a moment. There were no columns or decoration that she could see from here. It was rugged and grand, a place of might and legend.

She paid the nominal entrance fee and climbed the paved ramp up to the celebrated lion gate. The walls of the fortress were made of immense, irregular stones, boulders really. Cyclopean, the poets had called them, alluding to the tradition that the citadel had been built by the great one-eyed giants. It was difficult not to be impressed, even awed, by the capacity of the city's ancient inhabitants to maneuver these vast hunks of rock, levering them into position, stacking and mortaring them without access to the most basic of modern construction equipment. Here, as with Stonehenge or the great pyramids, Deborah felt the extraordinary smugness of her twenty-first century self take a significant hit. People were so used to a sense of cultural evolution that they assumed their ancient forebears were their inferiors, but presented with achievements like this, it was hard to imagine what she would be able to contribute to the civilization that had once thrived here if she could step back in time into their midst. Without motor vehicles, computers, or access to electricity, what wonders of the modern world would she be able to demonstrate to these long-dead and forgotten people? Nothing. She could tell them a few principles of science or astronomy, perhaps, but nothing she could prove. They'd probably execute her for being a witch or, more likely and infinitely worse, ignore her, like she ignored the homeless man on Roswell Road who had told her the world was ending. She passed under the relief of the two stone lions and wondered again if Richard had been right. Had a great army 186

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bound for Troy once marched through this very portal, the sun gleaming on their spear tips and their boar's tusk helmets? Had Agamemnon himself ridden in a war chariot at the head of the column, his horses pawing the ground she now trod? Here, looking up at those massive walls and their guardian lions, walking into the city and finally being presented with the circle of shaft graves which Schliemann had sunk into the dry, red earth, it all seemed both perfectly possible and of no real consequence.

"What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her?" said Hamlet, after an actor had performed the Trojan queen's grief at the murder of her husband, Priam. The memory from some undergraduate literature class suddenly struck home, became clear. What did any of those ancient stories matter? What did it matter whether or not Agamemnon had marched forth through the lion gate? What did it matter if his body had been found and saved by Schliemann? None of it would bring Richard back. Suddenly, she wanted to be gone, to be back in Atlanta, rebuilding her life or--she hadn't thought of it before, but it suddenly seemed a better scheme--starting over somewhere else. But she had made it this far and would dutifully tour the site like the thousands of others who wandered about here every year, wondering exactly why they had come. The shaft graves were now, of course, quite empty, and nothing in their stony depths attested to the remarkable finds Schliemann had uncovered there a little over a century earlier. Deborah leaned over the side and peered down, wondering vaguely what she had expected to see, some clue overlooked by a hundred years of visitors?

She walked the ramparts, looking out over the dry hills, watching the goats, and smelling the wild thyme that grew there. She paced the floors of the palace at the highest point of the acropolis and considered the small bath in which, said the legends, Agamemnon had been murdered by his wife and her lover, Aegisthus. She considered the domelike tombs attributed to the two killers by Schliemann, and the remains of 187

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the once impressive "house of columns" at the citadel's southwestern edge. It was all indistinct, even to her archaeologist's eye, a baffling jumble of low walls and thresholds and the dust of ages. Her guidebook said that you could walk the ramparts to the postern gate and that somewhere back there, there was a treacherous, lightless stairway down to a subterranean water cistern built in the twelfth century b.c. The passage ended, said the book, in a sudden and unannounced drop through seventy meters of space down to water whose depth was unknown. Though the idea of walking under the cool, dark earth was vaguely appealing, she was tired, and the passage sounded positively lethal. Suddenly the exhaustion, the fruitless searching, the stress of the previous few days seemed to descend upon her like the wings of a great, dark bird, and all she wanted was to be on her way home. She left the site and began walking back along the road toward the village feeling deflated and a little lost, uncertain what she had come for, certain she had not found it.

Back along the street which curved slowly around the mountain, lined for a while with the remains of Bronze Age merchants' houses, Deborah left the steadily filling parking lot and was heading back to the bus stop, feeling a little sorry for herself, when she noticed a cluster of people on the other side of the street. There was something else there, a site of some sort. She had only glanced at her guidebook and had replaced it in her backpack after a quick consideration of what it had to say about the citadel itself. She was hot and not looking forward to the walk back, so a part of her brain rebelled at the idea of going out of her way to do more vague and uninformed sightseeing, but then the little crowd cleared and she saw clean through to a steep-sided passage which tightened formally at a vast doorway into the mountainside, flanked with vast slabs of stone. Above it was a triangular blank, a dark
V
pointing skyward. This was familiar, this image of the high door with the imposing approach and the triangular blackness above. She had seen it before, long ago, in some undergraduate lecture perhaps.

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And there was something else, something which had been nagging at her, a dim half memory which suddenly flickered into the light of her searching mind. She tore her eyes from the image of the door and wrestled out of her backpack, unzipping it and dragging out the guidebook so that her water bottle fell to the ground and rolled away.