The Mask of Atreus (24 page)

"What the hell is that?" said Tonya.

Deborah pushed it across the table to her. Tonya, who had taken her hand off the gun in her purse, regarded it suspiciously, sniffed it, and sipped.

"Licorice?" she said, startled. "Like absinthe."

"But rougher," said Deborah.

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"Does it make you crazy like absinthe?" said Tonya, fighting her corner. "Or blind?"

"I don't think so."

"Chalk one up for New Orleans," said Tonya, a tinge of pleasure putting a little swagger into the remark.

"You're from Louisiana?" said Deborah.

Tonya nodded, unable to keep the pride out of her eyes. Deborah nodded and raised her glass in salute. New Orleans? That made sense of Tonya's oddly non-Southern accent. She'd known New Orleans people taken for New Yorkers in Georgia: a port thing, perhaps.

A port thing . . .

According to Marcus, the delayed Greek container ship was at port in New Orleans. A coincidence?

"So what is it?" said Tonya.

"What's what?"

"The thing that's missing from the collection?"

"You really don't know?" said Deborah.

"You're gonna tell me," said Tonya, steely again.

"Depends who you believe," said Deborah. "Richard, and this British guy called Marcus, think it's the body of Agamemnon."

Tonya didn't react, but not, Deborah felt sure, because the name meant nothing to her.

"There's a death mask," Deborah said. "Other grave goods too. Weapons. Jewelry. Pottery, maybe. But the mask is the big thing, and the body."

"Valuable?"

"If it's real," said Deborah, sipping the ouzo. "Priceless."

"Do you have it?"

"I've never even seen it," said Deborah. Tonya gave her a hard look, and Deborah put her glass down on the table so that it banged. "Listen, Tonya, I've been run ragged over the last few days. Richard was my . . . friend. He was, if you want to know the truth, like a father to me. I came here because I felt in danger and because I thought I could . . . I don't know, help somehow. Yesterday someone tried to kill 199

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me. Seriously. Not a random push in the back at the bus stop: a sustained effort over a couple of hours."

"Who?" said Tonya. She looked both curious and surprised.

"I have no idea, but I'll tell you what: I'm not in the mood to mess about. I don't have what you're looking for. I don't know who does. I don't know much of anything, apparently, and unless you blow my brains out with that little peashooter of yours, I intend to take a bus back to Athens first thing in the morning and get on a plane to Atlanta."

Tonya considered this, her eyes fastened on Deborah's face as if scouring for a hint of duplicity. After a long moment she looked away, breathed out, and settled back in her chair.

"The police will be waiting for you," she said.

"I know," said Deborah. "Time to face the music, I guess. In the end they probably can't convict me of anything except stupidity and paranoia."

"You said Cerniga wasn't a cop," said Tonya. "Are you sure?"

Deborah told the story, and Tonya's frown deepened.

"I trust Keene," said Deborah. "I don't like him, but I trust him. He may try to throw the book at me, but I'll deal with him, and if there's any chance of trouble, I'll go to the next county and turn myself in to the first beat cop I see. It's probably what I should have done in the first place."

She shrugged at the admission of her own bad judgment, and Tonya nodded fractionally, even sympathetically. The look announced a shift in the mood, and both women seemed to relax a little more. Tonya's purse--and therefore her pistol--was still right beside her, but her hand had moved away from it.

"OK," said Deborah. "So you came here to find something you've never seen, presumably because you thought I had it. You were going to hold me up and then sell it?"

Tonya shook her head and frowned. "No," she said, as if slightly revolted by the idea. "I'm not all that interested in the thing itself beyond what it means for my family."

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"Your father?" said Deborah.

"Right."

"I don't get it," said Deborah.

Tonya smiled, ruefully this time, then gestured to the waiter who had been hovering in the shade inside.

"Get us two more of these damned licorice things," she said, holding up Deborah's glass. "OK," she said, turning her attention back to Deborah with a last appraising look and a shrug of decision. "Here's what I know."

CHAPTER 43

Tonya took a drink of the ouzo and considered the glass, as if still unsure whether she liked it or not. Deborah waited, wondering if Tonya was having second thoughts about telling her story.

"OK," said Tonya, leaning forward and putting her hands on the table in a businesslike fashion. "My father was killed in World War Two. He was in the 761st Tank Battalion, commanding a Sherman M4A3E8 tank: what the tankers called an 'easy Eight' because of the smooth ride."

"He was a tank commander?" said Deborah, unable to contain her surprise. She hadn't known that black soldiers had served in that capacity.

"That's right," said Tonya. She wasn't indignant, just proud.

"The 761st was an all-black battalion. They were shipped from England to Normandy in October 1944 as part of Patton's Third Army. They fought their way through the Battle of the Bulge and into southern Germany. They even liberated some of the death camps."

Deborah blinked.
The death camps.

Deborah's family had moved to the States from Germany in the twenties, in the brief moment of doomed stability between the ruinous conditions of the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War and the Depression which brought the end of the Weimar Republic, rushing the dubiously titled National Socialists to the forefront of German politics. Her grandfather had been a young, single man looking for opportunity, and he chose it in the States though, by accounts, reluctantly and with little sense of what National Socialism--soon more commonly known as Nazism--would bring under Hitler. 202

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Her grandmother had moved to Boston from Poland three years later, by which time a considerably darker future was visible on the European skyline, though many stayed. Deborah had Jewish relatives in both Germany and Poland who had felt the full brunt of the Nazi "philosophy," and many of them had not survived till the end of the war. She knew them only as young, unsuspecting faces in very old photographs and not, she was suddenly ashamed to say, by name. Her parents had been successful people with an unusually un-Jewish lack of concern for the past.

"Leave the dead to bury the dead,"
her father had always said.
"Tradition is built by the people who keep going for-
ward. Too many people blame their present on the past. Get
over it. Get past it. Move on."

Deborah's parents didn't talk about the family who had stayed in Europe, and though her father nodded seriously when a TV show touched on the Holocaust, he never spoke of it, never--now that she thought about it--ever said the word aloud.

"It's not good to look backward,"
he had said.
"It stops
you seeing the kind of future you can make for yourself."

Deborah had always believed this a useful and healthy attitude to the world, despite her choice of profession. Archaeology was about discovering a dead past, she had told herself, about learning of those who had gone before, to find out who they were, not to define the present or the future. It had never really occurred to her that this might be some attempt to compensate for her own oddly
past-less
family. She frowned. The reference to the death camps had unsettled her, made her feel a little unsteady, as if stone flags she had paced a thousand times had shifted unexpectedly beneath her. She looked at Tonya, who was watching her thoughtfully.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Go on."

"My father died at the end of the first week of May 1945,"

said Tonya with a grim little smile. "The war was officially over, but some fighting went on afterward, I guess. That's the way war is, right?"

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She paused and settled back, and Deborah dragged her mind from her own concerns to see Tonya afresh. The black woman didn't look old enough to have had a father in the war, but she supposed it was possible. The hair was graying now, though that was clearer at the roots, so maybe it had been dyed black before, and the eyes were certainly old enough. Deborah was surprised--and a little ashamed--that she had never really noticed before.

Strange,
she thought,
to think that people born then are
only in their sixties now, that some who actually fought in
that most myth-making of wars are still alive, still remember
what it was like
.

"I never saw him," Tonya said. "My mother was pregnant when he went into basic training. I was born while he was in England awaiting deployment. I grew up with the story my family was given: he was killed in fighting in southern Germany on the last day of the war. There was no reason to doubt the official account, so . . . I grew up, went to school, got jobs as a journalist and freelance writer in Louisiana, and finally joined the
AJC
eight years ago. I moved to Atlanta and started getting interested in telling my father's story. I pulled military records and tried to track down any surviving members of the unit in which my father had served. I found this guy called Thomas Morris who was still alive and living in College Park. He had served in the same platoon as my father, though it wasn't till I got in touch with him that I found out that he had been the driver of the tank my father had commanded for a while.

"I had assumed that if a tank commander was killed in action that meant that his tank had been destroyed, so I was kind of surprised to find a member of the crew still alive. Turns out it doesn't work like that. When a tank gets hit, the shell can blow right through it, or bounce around inside, killing some, maiming others, leaving one or two untouched. Unless it caught fire, of course, which Shermans were prone to do.

"Anyway," said Tonya, picking up her drink but not tasting 204

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it. "I phoned this guy Morris and managed to convince him to meet with me, but right from the start he was cagey: friendly and all, but . . . careful, like he was holding something back. He told stories about my dad, when they had met, what he was like, the way he used to write to my mom . . . and it was clear he had liked him, been his friend. But when I asked about the day he died, his memory seemed to get vague. Suddenly he couldn't really remember much of anything beyond what the army had already told me. They were north of Munich, their platoon was separated from the rest of the company, and they ran into a German convoy which had fought its way south from Berlin, apparently trying to escape into Switzerland. There was fighting, and they stopped the convoy, but my father was killed in the process."

She shrugged resignedly.

"I kept doing my research," she said. "I figured it might make a good feature for the
AJC
if not being the basis of a book, and I found out a lot, but nothing more about the circumstances of his death. After a while I got used to the idea that Morris's memory had been uneven because he had screened out something that was painful and traumatic, and then Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's book on the 761st came out, and I kind of let the whole project go. I didn't think I had much that was new to add, so I got on with my job."

"Which section do you write for?" asked Deborah.

"Food," she said, smiling a little wistfully, "but it's
did
write, not
do
. I quit to become a maid at the Druid Hills Museum."

"Why?"

"I'm getting to it," she said. "Three months ago I got a call out of the blue. Thomas Morris, my dad's driver. He said he had something to tell me and that he didn't have much time. I went to see him, and he was in a bad way. He was over eighty, I guess, and had lung cancer. He said he had to get something off his chest--other than sixty years of tobacco smoke, I mean. He said my father didn't die in the tank. They had hit this German convoy just like the military reports had said, 205

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but the convoy itself was weird: the wrong kind of equipment for the mission, he said. I didn't really know what he meant, but the gist of it was that it seemed that everything in the convoy was there to protect a single truck. The Germans went down to the last man to defend it."

"Anyway. My father's platoon took some heavy damage, but they destroyed the enemy tanks and captured the truck without putting so much as a shell anywhere near it. My father was the first man to get to it, though Morris and a couple of others were with him when they opened it up. There was a single crate, marked with a shipping number. They radioed back to HQ and let them know the situation, and for a while, they just hung out, dressed their wounds, and paid their respects to the dead. They pretty much forgot about the crate. A few hours went by, though, and my father got curious about what the Nazis had been so anxious to defend. He said he was going to open it up, just to get a look inside, you know? Some of the others said they should wait for the MPs to get there, but he figured he'd lost buddies over this wooden box, and he had a right to know what they had died for.

"He used a pickax off the side of the tank to crow it open, with Morris and the rest of the crew standing behind him. He was opening it up when the MPs arrived. Morris didn't see much, except for this big carved figure, sort of green, part woman, part--"

"Snake," said Deborah, "or dragon. Yes."

"Yes, I thought you'd know that," said Tonya. "Two days before he called me, Morris had seen that same carving in the Living section of the paper I worked for, a feature article on new exhibits at your museum."

"So you got a job there to find out what else your father had seen," said Deborah.