The Mask of Atreus (26 page)

"Herr Schliemann slept in the village," he said. "Three houses down the street. Not just Schliemann. Many famous people. Himmler and Goebbels slept here too."

Deborah shot him a glance, half expecting him to say he was only joking.

"The Nazis?" she said.

"Certainly," he said, shrugging. "Mycenae was very important to them. Schliemann himself was . . . how they called it . . . a
Teutonic superman
."

He laughed croakily at the phrase, or his recollection of it. Deborah and Tonya exchanged a wry look.

He threw open a heavy door and flicked on the light. The room had a concrete floor with a series of large metal braziers at one end. There were several different anvils, and a wall full of long-handled tools, fire-blackened forceps, bluish pliers, and hammers with heads burnished from use till they shone like chrome. Along one wall was a workbench covered with wax statues in various states of completion.

"We use only the ancient techniques," he said. "Even with the bronze castings. Each wax figure makes only one mold, each mold makes only one statue. Very slow process, very expensive. No one but us does it like this anymore."

"What about the masks?" said Deborah. "Can you make them?"

"Certainly."

"Have you made them before?"

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"One or two," he said, shrugging. "Many years ago. Small like this."

He cupped his hands to indicate an area about six inches across.

"Can you do them bigger?" said Deborah. "Life-size."

"Of course," he said, repeating the shrug, reminding Deborah of the museum director in Athens. "But the gold is expensive. Very hard to find in Greece today. In the old days, in Agamemnon's day, the gold had many impurities. Tin. Zinc."

"Can you make them like that, with the same mixture?"

He frowned.

"Almost," he said. "The original masks are all different. Each one is probably made of metal from different places, so there is no single correct . . . er . . .
composition
. Which one do you want copied, the Agamemnon?"

"No," said Deborah. "I want a mask which is like them, but different. Could you do that?"

He nodded and held up a solitary finger as if telling them to wait. Then he left the room and was gone for several minutes, in which time the women merely smiled and looked around, studying the work that was already in progress. When he returned he was holding what Deborah thought were two of the black-and-white photographs from the living room.

"Look," he said, showing the first picture.

Deborah's heart seemed to hammer and then stop. The monochrome picture showed a man bent over an anvil. He was holding a large death mask. It was different from any in the National Archaeological Museum. It was the mask she had seen on Richard's computer.

"My grandfather," the smith said proudly. "See."

He pushed the other picture toward Deborah. It showed two men smiling into the camera, one brawny, with a heavy mustache and a jovial expression, the other also mustached but thinner and professorial in wire, rimless glasses. Both were dressed in antiquated dark suits with curiously small collars.

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"Again, my grandfather," the old man said.

"Who is the other man?" said Tonya.

"That," said the smith, tapping the glass of the photograph like a conductor bringing in the violins with his baton, "that is Heinrich Schliemann."

CHAPTER 46

Deborah had known the moment she had seen the photograph. She had recognized Schliemann's habitual pose, half addled academic, half pompous showman, and her heart had sunk. It had taken the two women ten minutes to talk their way out of the house, and they had bought two pieces from the elderly couple and several from the showroom sight unseen to make the escape a little more palatable, and in that time Deborah had been almost incapable of thought. It was as if news of a family emergency had been interrupted by a telemarketer, and she had lost the capacity to be either reasonable or civil. She had to get out of the forge, the village, the country. It was over.

Because the photographs could mean only one thing as far as Deborah was concerned. The mask and everything with it, all the pieces for which Richard had died, were fakes made by a gifted Greek craftsman at the end of the nineteenth century. The fact that Richard and Marcus--and perhaps people in both the Greek and Russian governments--had also been duped into thinking those pieces were real was no consolation whatsoever. Everything she had been doing, the probing and digging, risking her life, risking her freedom and reputation as a scholar and businessperson back in the States, was all based on a lie.

It didn't matter how the mask and the other pieces had found their way to America. It didn't matter if there was a body. It didn't matter if the Soviets had been chasing it for fifty years. It didn't matter who had it all now. It was all so much trash, worth no more than any other better-thanaverage tourist souvenir. This was what Tonya's father had 218

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been killed for, what Richard had been killed for. It was all a bitter, humorless joke, a joke in the worst possible taste that got drier with each new corpse it created. Back out in the sunbaked street of the village, Deborah felt the sudden urge to throw up.

Tonya didn't need to ask what Deborah thought or felt. It had taken her a moment longer, but it was clear from the humiliated tears that she wiped from the corners of her eyes before they even got out of the forge that she knew all too well the implications of those proudly displayed photographs. Had Schliemann known or been involved, a little caper to raise the funds for his Athenian mansion? Probably not. It didn't make any difference either way. Tonya's father had died for nothing. It might have been better, she thought, if it really had just been complete and undiluted racism. At least then her rage would be righteous and morally indignant. As it was, it made her father somehow the unwitting victim of some stupid accident. Yes, it was all no more than a bad joke.

They left addresses with the shopgirl to have their purchases shipped to them, handing over their euros without concern. They wouldn't need them now anyway. They would be going home. As they walked back to the little red Renault, Deborah tried to recall what she had bought and couldn't remember a single item.

"You want a ride back to Athens?" asked Tonya.

"I'll go back to the hotel in Corinth," said Deborah. "Get my stuff. See if Marcus or Calvin called. I'll go back tomorrow first thing."

"You sure?"

"Yes."

Tonya nodded. She took the car keys from her purse and then, as if on an impulse she had been trying to fight back, took Deborah's arm and pressed it. Once more their eyes met, and both women nodded and smiled, squeezing back the unshed tears, saying nothing. Tonya got in the car and drove away. Deborah did not wave good-bye.

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* * *

She began to walk back to the bus stop. A car blew its horn, and she veered toward the wall of a house to get out of its way. It honked again. She turned, irritated, and found it was a taxi. The driver thought she wanted a ride.

What else would a gawky American be doing around here?

"You want to see old city?"

She didn't, not again, but a part of her knew that she was now ready to say good-bye to Richard. He had probably been buried by now. She would say good-bye here, in the fortress with which he had been so fascinated, however misguidedly. She opened the back door and got in without speaking. Everything that had happened in the last few days seemed remote and irrelevant, wiped out by her half discovery in the village. One last act of closure, and she could go home. She still had her ticket from the morning, so they let her in for nothing. Mycenae was the same as before, except that now it seemed smaller, less grand, like a theater after you've been in the dusty ordinariness backstage. She made the same climb up through the lion gate, saw the same circle of the grave shafts where it had all begun, and went up onto the acropolis itself. It was late now, and most of the tourists had gone home or, more likely, moved on to restaurants and souvenir shops. Some would be en route to Athens, some to Delphi, their sense of the grandeur of myth and history still enviably intact. From the highest point of the citadel Deborah turned to look back down to the walls with their Cyclopean masonry, the grave circles and tholos tombs, then the merchants'

houses and the road and the dusty scrub of the hills.

"I came for you, Richard," she whispered. "I came to try to help. I kind of wish I hadn't, but I guess I had to." She stooped and picked up a handful of coarse dust and gravel.

"Good-bye Richard. You were a good man. A bad historian and curator, but a good man. I loved you very much."

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And she threw the dust and gravel down in a broad arc into the empty air, where some of it might drift down into the grave shafts themselves.

She stood there in silence for a moment and then looked about her. The sun was beginning its slow descent behind the hills, and the last of the tour guides were filing out of the citadel for a brief look at the Treasury of Atreus. There was only one person still with her in the ruins, a skinny boy, eighteen or twenty perhaps, sitting smoking on the steps she had come up, looking blankly at her with small, hard eyes. When he felt her gaze on him, he stood up slowly, a sideways smirk creasing his pale lips. He had been sitting not on the steps, but on a lime green motorcycle helmet. CHAPTER 47

Deborah became very still. The boy was only thirty yards away, close enough for her to watch every detail of his casual drag on his cigarette and then the way that, watching her with thin amusement, he flicked away the smoking butt. She was still standing there, staring at him, as he rose slowly to his feet, still smirking and looking off to the side, cocky, amused by some private joke. He was sinewy thin and chalk pale, except for the bluish prickle of hair on his shaved scalp. His eyes were small and close together, and they seemed to peer sightlessly into the middle distance, studiously ignoring her but feeling and enjoying her panic. When he chose to look back at her it was with the smug confidence of a showman, as if there were ranks of people there waiting to watch his inevitable triumph.
He's come to kill you: up close and personal this time
. Deborah looked quickly around, tearing her eyes from him to break his cobra spell. The acropolis was not especially high, but if she was to launch herself over the edge she'd probably break something as she tumbled down among the ruins of the next concentric circle of the site, and he would still be on her in seconds. The citadel had been designed to resist attackers, and there was only one way down: the staircase where he was now getting languidly to his feet. There was nowhere to go but up and back, hoping that he would follow and she might find a way to get past him. He waited for her eyes to stray back to him before casually unbuttoning his shirt. The action bothered her unreasonably, doubly so for what the open shirt revealed. There was a knife in his waistband, not the knife which had killed Richard--she 222

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was sure--but a large Bowie-style hunting knife with a long blade whose cutting edge swept up to a cruel point. Yet the knife was somehow less alarming than the tattoos. Even from here she could see them: an ornate death mask that went from nipple to nipple, from throat to pubis, and something overlaid on top of it, a stylized bird, perhaps an eagle, its angles square and imperial. Yes, a Roman eagle, she thought. There was a word written across the mask in Greek script, and though he was giving her plenty of time to find her fear, she couldn't read it from where she was, though she had a pretty good idea what it said.

It seemed an eternity before he moved, and when he did it was a kind of joke, a mock lunge designed to scare, the fingers of one hand spread and reaching, the other switching the grip on his knife so that it pointed down from his fist. Deborah started, and he laughed, a gurgling, boyish laugh, almost a giggle. To Deborah it was scarier than either the knife or the tattoos. She didn't wait to see what would happen next but turned and began to run, back across the top of the acropolis mount, trying frantically to remember the map in her guidebook. He didn't come after her, not right away, and when she glanced back over her shoulder, she saw him gathering up his helmet and walking slowly after her, still smiling as if glad that there would be a chase. He looked studied, in his element, like he was reliving some movie fantasy. He was the Terminator, perhaps, slow, inexorable, coolly brutish. Deborah kept going, heading for the northernmost wall. Mycenae, like most castles, had what was called a postern gate, a secret exit in times of siege through which supplies or troops could be smuggled. It was located away from the main approach to the fortress, and compared to the massive spectacle of the lion gate would be little more than a gap in the wall. She had seen it this morning. It was on the north side, she was fairly sure, but where, she couldn't say, and little of the walls was visible to her now. She crossed behind 223

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the royal palace, striding quickly, clambering up and making a rapid survey of the walls. They arced a good deal farther east than she had remembered.

The postern gate must be that way
.

She moved to the right and broke into a full run. If she could get through the gate and down, he might still be able to catch her by coming down from the front, but down there would be the last straggling tourists and the site's security guards. She checked back and saw him, tracking her, still a good thirty yards behind her, his mouth slightly open and head lowered, like a hunting dog.

No,
she thought,
a hyena
.

She kept well left of the house with the columns and reached the broad walkway on top of the walls. She turned right again, and moved east along the battlements toward the rear of the citadel. She was moving quickly now, conscious that he had picked up speed, probably sensing what she was trying to do. She felt the steady throb of her ankle but kept going. Behind her she heard him clamber onto the top of the wall and begin to follow.