The Mask of Atreus (32 page)

A. J. Hartley

was just to get it away from the Russians who were approaching from the east, that still didn't explain how it wound up two hundred and fifty miles farther south.

Deborah returned to her search and tried one more page. A single article in English stood out from the rest. She clicked on it, and her puzzlement deepened. It read:

Blood and Blossom:

New Evidence in Magdeburg Atrocity

During construction of a new building in 1994, laborers stumbled upon the skeletons of 32 bodies, all apparently young men, all murdered at the same time. Since the grave seemed to date from a moment between 1945 and 1960 it was initially assumed that evidence of another Nazi atrocity had been discovered, though it would be unusual for the Gestapo to create such a mass grave in the centre of a town. New evidence, however, suggests that the atrocity took place not at the end of the World War II but seven years later, and that the perpetrators were the Soviet secret police.

While it has become commonplace to use pollen in forensic examinations of bodies to discover where they died, biologist Reinard Szibor, of Magdeburg's Otto von Guericke University, has used pollen in this case to demonstrate that the victims perished in the early summer. Szibor discovered that the skulls of seven of the victims all contained pollen from plantains, lime trees, and rye, plants whose pollen is released in June and July, significantly after the fall of the Nazis in 1945.

This lays the responsibility for the crime squarely at the feet of Soviet intelligence.

That was all there was. Deborah's puzzlement deepened. Why did the blame automatically fall on the Soviets, and what were the story's implications for Voloshinov, the supposed homeless man who had died so close to the museum?

Was the massacre itself relevant to her search for Richard's killers and the trail of faux antiquities which apparently led 267

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them to him? There was no reason to think so, but all these old corpses seemed linked somehow, as if each bone she uncovered so blindly was part of a larger, stranger creature whose true nature would only be clear when she could step back from the complete skeleton.

It made about as much sense as Tonya's new idea about hate crimes, though she was trying not to think about that. As she walked back to Cerniga and her ride home, she told herself that it wasn't based on any hard evidence, just a chance observation by Tonya's cop friend about why the Feds got involved in murder cases. It didn't add up to anything real. But she found herself recalling the skinny white boy who had twice tried to kill her in Greece: the mean, smug look, the skinhead do, the tattoos . . .
Hate crimes?

Cerniga drove her home in stiff, professional silence. He waited behind her while she opened the apartment door and then hovered in the doorway as she satisfied herself that she was otherwise alone in there and that everything was as it should be. She didn't realize that it wasn't until after he had left.

Everything looked fine at a glance, but after she had been back for an hour or so, she had started to notice the tiny incongruous details: clothes hung up that she had thrown into the laundry hamper, a desk drawer left locked, books out of place on the shelves. Marcus had said he had not disturbed anything in her apartment, and she had believed him. If he had been telling the truth, then someone else had been in there since she left, and they had apparently been searching for something. They had taken their time over it, as if they had known she wouldn't be back in the immediate future, and they had done a pretty good job of concealing the search. If she didn't have such a perversely controlling nature, she thought wryly, she probably wouldn't have spotted anything out of place. What they could have been looking for, however, she had no idea. 268

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She called Cerniga and told him, but said that she didn't want anyone coming round. She checked the place over again and then used the hammer from the kitchen drawer to ram home the long painted-over bolts on the door.

"Probably take me ten minutes to get out in the morning,"

she muttered, laying the hammer on the table where she couldn't miss it.

In the silence of the apartment, with the brooding humidity of an Atlanta summer night all around her, she began to wonder if she had even the beginnings of an idea about why Richard Dixon had died. In Greece everything had seemed clearer, though that already seemed long ago and far away, a distance in time and space that made her experiences there as foreign and exotic as the ruins themselves. There her problems and confusion had seemed appropriate, but she had expected to find clarity with her return home that was somehow tied to the familiarity of her environment. Now that she was here, however, with the strangeness of the police presence at the museum still in effect, with Tonya's stranger theories hemming her in, and with the space which Richard's death had left in all which had once made up her sense of home, she felt completely at sea.

On impulse, she picked up the phone and dialed.

"Hello?"

"Hi Calvin," she said. "It's Deborah. I'm sorry it's so late."

"I thought that one of the upsides of getting you back into the country was that I'd get a decent night's sleep," he said. She smiled, all the discomfort slipping off her like fine sand as she heard the pleasure in his voice.

"Don't tell me you need your beauty sleep," she said.
You,
of all people,
the tone had implied. She bit her lip as he chuckled.

"Since you are clearly awake at all hours regardless of what continent you're on," he said, "the whole beauty sleep thing is clearly a myth."

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She flushed and shifted the conversation before she could screw it up by being sarcastic about how easily he flirted.

"Did you think it odd that the Feds showed up to investigate Richard's death before anyone said anything about smuggling or the kinds of crimes that might involve different states or nations?"

"I hadn't really," he said, focusing quickly. "But now that you mention it . . . What's on your mind?"

"Can you think of any reason that Richard's death could have somehow been connected to a hate crime?"

He was silent for a second, as if the air had been pulled right out of him.

"A hate crime?" he said. "Against Richard? How?"

"I don't know," she said lamely. "I was just wondering."

"An odd thought to come into your head in the middle of the night," he said.

She could hear the smile again. At least he hadn't said

"pretty little head."

"I know," she said, brushing it off now. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have bothered you."

"It's no trouble," he said. "I'm glad to talk to you. Before . . . with the cops, I mean . . ." He faltered. "This is better."

"Yes," she said.

"Are you OK? Would you like me to come over?"

She hesitated a fraction too long before breezily saying that it was fine, that
she
was fine, and there was no need. That she was all bolted in tight . . .

"If you're sure," he said.

"You feel like taking a drive tomorrow?" she asked. "I have to make sure Cerniga doesn't need me around, but I was thinking of taking a trip."

"Yeah?" he said. "Sure. Where to?"

"Athens," she said.

"You're going back to Greece?" he said, and he was more than shocked; he was concerned, panicked even. 270

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"Athens, Georgia," she said, laughing. "Home of the Georgia Bulldogs and, among other things, the Center for Applied Isotope Studies."

"What in the name of God is that?" he asked, already sounding relieved.

"That is the home of a very large, very expensive machine which may well have been the first stop for what someone believed to be the body of Agamemnon when it left Richard's bedroom."

"The body of what now?" he said.

And she told him.

CHAPTER 55

Deborah spoke to Agent Cerniga first thing in the morning by phone. No, he said, he didn't need to talk to her today. Yes, she could get on with some work in "the area" but she should keep her cell phone on and she should not leave the state. Deborah agreed and managed to evade further problems with vagaries rather than outright lies.

Why,
she asked herself,
don't you just tell him about the
lab, that it might be worth looking into as a place the
Greeks
--
if indeed it was the Greeks who took the masked
corpse
--
may have visited?

Because it was probably a blind alley. Because the stolen goods weren't worth looking after. Because she suspected Cerniga was still keeping his real investigation secret from her. Those things were all true but weren't the real reason. The real reason was because Richard's reputation would be wounded if it came out that he'd put so much energy into a collection that wasn't worth shelf space.

It's not because you like playing Nancy Drew?

No,
she thought, defiantly.
It's not.
She called Calvin, and he asked that she pick him up outside his office. He had some paperwork to take care of before he slipped away for the day. He managed to make their excursion sound like it should be accompanied by champagne and a basket of strawberries, and Deborah found herself dressing to meet him with an attention to detail that was unlike her. She wore earrings and perfume, and did so with a sense of girlish glee that was as uncharacteristic as it was unironic. She tried a stronger shade of lipstick, but that was too big a step, and she wiped it off again, embarrassed both 272

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by the impulse to put it on and the feelings that made her get rid of it.

God,
she thought,
I hate courtship. Or whatever the twenty-
first century has in place of courtship. All the careful playing
back and forth, and simpering smiles, and word-association
conversations, the minor deceptions, studied nonchalance, and
gamesmanship. Yes, that's it. Courtship is like playing tennis
to lose
--
to get a respectable score, so that it doesn't look like
the match has been thrown, but to lose all the same. It's play-
ing tennis in heels and a veil.

Or, said another voice in one of her mind's darker corners, was she just scared of what it all pointed to: romance and relationships
(dreadful word)
and that most absurd of sacred cows, sex?

Who cares?
she said to herself, flinching away from the thought like it might electrocute her.
Let's just say I hate
courtship and leave it at that, OK?

OK
.

She dressed determinedly in a summer dress that was just professional enough to legitimate her visit to the lab while suggesting a certain casualness, as if she had grabbed it off the rail without really looking at it.

Probably should have done just that . . .
She went out to the car pointedly without checking her reflection in the mirror. Calvin's office was in a glass tower which was the iridescent blue of a hot blade. It looked across Centennial Park toward the Coca-Cola Center and the Omni from some of the most expensive real estate in a city where land prices were steadily beginning to challenge their counterparts in Boston and New York. Deborah, who was usually unimpressed by such places and felt their professional opulence to be a challenge to what she did and valued, was unsettled by the tang of pleasure she got from seeing Calvin come strolling out of the building's 273

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smoked glass doors, smiling: one of those who belonged within its sheer and graceful lines.

"Quite a place," she said, as she pulled away. He shrugged.

"It's dark inside," he said, "and there aren't enough elevators. But I live right around the corner."

She smiled and powered through the lights and round to the northbound freeway, wondering if that was the prelude to an invitation.

They drove for forty-five minutes up I-85, then across on Route 316 toward Athens, chatting about books and movies and food, never referring to Richard or their day's ostensible mission. The town surprised them, appearing whole and bustling out of miles of pine forest, like the goddess who was its namesake, born fully grown from Zeus's head. Deborah had been to the university for a symposium six months before and still had a campus map with her, though she only had to check it once before finding her way to Riverbend Road and the CAIS.

It being summer, the building lacked the buzz of students who populated it during term time, but the Center for Applied Isotope Studies had a commercial dimension as well as being geared to university work, and testing was continuous. They spoke to a receptionist, and Deborah confirmed that she had indeed called ahead to set up their appointment and that they had the sample with them, though they would need it to be prepped. Yes, Deborah said, they were prepared to pay extra for the lab to prep the sample themselves, and no, they were not interested in liquid scintillation counting, just the radiocarbon dating. Throughout this exchange, Calvin hovered, looking serious and a little out of his depth. Deborah flashed him a smile as the receptionist conveyed their details to the lab, and he smiled back, a little nervously.

"I don't understand," he said. "You have a sample?"

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"Nothing relevant," she said. "Just play along."

The technician who eventually came out to meet them was a sallow-skinned young man with a trim beard. He might have been Middle Eastern, possibly even north African, but he spoke without any trace of an accent.

"I am Dr. Kerem," he said. "Please step this way. You have the sample with you?"

Deborah produced a stoppered test tube containing what looked like a fragment of wood little larger than a splinter.

"Is that enough?" said Calvin. Deborah gave him a look.

"Plenty," said the technician. "And it needs prepping?"