The Mask of Atreus (33 page)

"Please," said Deborah. "We're pretty sure it's a fragment of a sixteenth-century Spanish galleon, but we need to be sure."

"Very well," he said, showing them into a large, rectangular room lit from above with fluorescents and humming with the steady pulse of electricity.

"This is where the tests will be performed?" said Deborah. The equipment in the room was a series of consoles, metal cylinders, bafflingly complex instruments, and miles of colored cable, much of it encased in wire cages and framed in blue-painted metal. Kerem smiled suddenly, a wide, proud smile, as if he had been complimented on his son's Little League performance.

"She's a National Electrostatics 1.5SDH-1 Pelletron Accelerator Mass Spectrometer," he said. "You thought it would be bigger, right?"

"Right," said Deborah, judging this to be the desired response.

"Five hundred kV," said Kerem, still beaming. "Can measure isotopic concentrations on a parts per quadrillion basis. This little beauty will give the Goliaths a run for their money, and I mean detection in the half percent range, detection limits down to four times ten to the minus eighteen moles of C-14."

Deborah and Calvin looked suitably impressed. 275

T h e M a s k o f A t r e u s

"That's right," said Kerem, as if somebody had suggested otherwise. He pointed at the various components and intoned their name and function, apparently assuming Deborah had some idea what he was talking about.

"One thirty-four sample ion source," he said, indicating the contents of one of the caged areas. "That," he said, pointing in turn to each section of the apparatus, "is the injection magnet, then there's the Pelletron accelerator itself, the analyzing magnet, off-axis Faraday cups, electrostatic analyzer, and the C-14 particle detector. If it's less than sixty thousand years old, we'll nail it."

"Right," said Deborah again. "Excellent."

Kerem put out his hand for the test tube containing the fragment of wood.

"You can leave that with me," he said. "Process the paperwork at reception, and we'll be in touch when the tests are completed. It will be four hundred dollars."

"How long will it take to get the results?"

"Approximately two to three months," he said. "Is it urgent?"

Deborah's face had fallen. "Kind of," she said.

"We can do a two-week turnaround for six hundred dollars," he said. "Maybe a little faster."

Two weeks?

She thought quickly.

"When will the other results be ready?" she said.

"Other results?"

"Yes," she said, not looking at Calvin. "Our museum sent some other samples by a week or so ago. Human remains and some ceramic shards. A couple of Greek guys brought them. Maybe we could pick up both sets of results at the same time."

She held her breath. The technician frowned and flipped the pages on his clipboard.

"I don't see any other samples pending for your institution," he said. 276

A. J. Hartley

"It might be under Dixon," she tried. "Richard Dixon. He's the museum's principal trustee and handles the larger expenses."

Another pause. Deborah bit her lip.

"Dixon," he said. "Yes, here it is. There was an extra fee paid to speed up the process, and they should be ready tomorrow afternoon. The contact information is different, however. We'll have to put them in the mail."

"That's fine," said Deborah, her heart thumping. "Maybe we can swing by tomorrow before you send them out. Mr. Dixon is anxious to hear as soon as you know something. We have a rather pressing decision to make about a display."

"That should be fine," said Kerem. "You are staying in town?"

"About to check into a hotel," said Deborah, still not looking at Calvin. CHAPTER 56

They booked two rooms, though Deborah thought the chances of them using only one of them were better than average. The thought made her nervous and clumsy. She wasn't sure what he was thinking, and though she thought they were on the same page, her doubts--always the loudest voice in situations like this--made her nervousness increase.
Situations like this.

That was a joke, like they happened on a weekly basis. In fact it had been . . . too long to give numbers to. She shrugged the thought off and watched him eat. She would have been happy with a sandwich and a beer, which Athens--college town that it was--could supply in spades. Perhaps, she had thought, they could catch an upand-coming local act, hot on the heels of REM and the B-52s. Calvin had had other ideas, however, though she wasn't entirely sure what they were, except that they involved raising the tone of their evening somewhat.

He had found and booked a table at what had to be the city's most exclusive and expensive bistro, where they could be sure of seeing no summer school kids, and ordered lamb with what he pronounced a fine Bordeaux, with the air of a man showing that he knew how to do these things. Deborah resisted the urge to order a beer to make a point, partly because she wasn't entirely sure what the point was, partly because it amused her to see him turning up the class like this. Nevertheless, the bistro did rather starch the evening, and she found it hard to settle. The place was almost unnaturally quiet, more like a temple than a restaurant, and it loaded every utterance with significance until, unable to think of anything 278

A. J. Hartley

especially worthy of significance, she opted, for once, to let him talk.

He told her about his job, emphasizing its general tediousness rather than its details, for which she was relieved, and about his passion for fly-fishing, sparing her the details of that too.

"It's all about strategy," he said. "Selecting the right fly for the fish and the conditions--better still, tying your own, making new ones: learning to outthink the fish."

She grinned.

"I know that sounds like it should be easy for someone who is paid what I am," he said, "but trust me: outwitting a brown trout up there in a fast-moving stream . . . More fulfilling than any deal or contract that comes out my way, no matter the price tag."

She liked that.

"So you're a schemer," she said.

"I like a little gamesmanship," he said, nodding and smiling so that the precise subject of the conversation became enticingly murky. "I like a pursuit you have to think about, plan for."

"A pursuit of fish," she said.

"What else is there?" he said, grinning.

She laughed and then took a moment to consider him.

"You remind me of Richard a little," she said. His brow clouded, unsure of whether this was a compliment or not.

"How do you mean?"

"Just a feeling, I guess," she said, flushing slightly, wishing she hadn't said it.

"Go on."

"Well, you both have a kind of playful wit," she said, feeling for the words as she spoke. "I mean, there's a cleverness there that can be a little off-putting."

"For you?" He laughed. "Surely not."

"I don't mean intimidating exactly," she said. "I mean there's a thoughtfulness, a calculation almost, that keeps people at a distance, like you are sizing them up all the time: like 279

T h e M a s k o f A t r e u s

they're little fish and you are carefully zipping your flies or whatever you do."

"Tying." He laughed.

"Whatever."

"I don't know about me," he said, "but I know what you mean about Richard. Sometimes when he looked at you, it was like he knew all your secrets."

"Do you have many secrets?"

"None," he said, shaking off a pensive moment with a grin. "I'll tell you anything."

"I'll bet," she said.

"Anyway," he said, reverting to their previous discussion.

"I'm not sure I like the sound of this version of me as calculating and conniving, however clever it makes me sound. It doesn't sound wholly positive."

"Oh, I don't know." She shrugged, looking away as if it didn't matter. "It has a kind of allure."

She reached for her wineglass and took a long drink, her eyes down.

When they got back to the hotel it was clear that they still didn't know how the evening would end. They had flirted back and forth, always withdrawing to cover as soon as anything deeper or more physical was visible on the horizon. Deborah told herself that she was happy with this, that it was good for her to move slowly since she was so unused to moving at all, that she didn't really know this man that well, but when he moved to kiss her in the hallway outside his room, she gave herself utterly to the moment.

Inside, they kissed some more, gently, cautiously at first, then deep and hungry and urgent. Still, when his hands moved to the buttons of her shirt, she felt herself stiffen, almost against her will, so that he stopped and looked at her. She blushed, unsure of what to say or feel, wishing that his eyes were not exactly on a level with hers. His silent gaze made her less comfortable still, and she turned away, maddened by the feeling of his eyes upon her, until he reached over and shut the bedroom light off.

280

A. J. Hartley

The heavy, generic drapes blocked out every trace of light, and the darkness made her heart skip, as if she was back in the Mycenaean passage delving down to the ancient cistern. As he renewed his kisses, however, and his hands, cautiously, slowly, seeking permission, began to move over her, she embraced the freedom of the darkness, as if she had shed some part of herself. It was like being drunk or on holiday, nameless and absolved of all responsibility. She drew him to her, holding back a strange, unexpected, and alarming impulse to weep.

CHAPTER 57

Calvin was up and off looking for somewhere for them to have breakfast when Deborah awoke, so that for a few minutes she just lay there by herself, worrying in an unspecific sort of way about what the day would bring. She showered, dressed, and was staring blankly at a newspaper when he got back. They breakfasted at a diner on omelets and waffles, the former excellent, the latter almost certainly prepackaged and suspiciously cold in the center. They ate hurriedly, speaking little, as if they were in a rush. In fact, they probably had several hours before the results were ready, but they couldn't sit around in the hotel or in this or any other diner. Deborah checked her watch three times in five minutes, and they resolved to wait at the lab itself, so that they would know the moment the staff were ready to tell them something. It reminded Deborah vaguely of being a teenager, waiting for the doctors who had been working on her father to emerge from surgery. She had sat with a sleeping neighbor for six hours, unable to close her eyes, watching the minute hand on the clock so closely that she had been able to see it move. Several times the doors through which they had taken him had kicked open, only for some intern to march out on her way home, not giving Deborah a glance. When the doctor finally did emerge, there was a fraction of a second before the door swung shut behind him when her heart had leapt, galvanized into hope by all the waiting, and she had gotten to her feet. By the time she was fully upright she had read her father's death in the doctor's face, and she had just hung there, effectively alone in the unnaturally white room, while the doctor fumbled for the right words, and the sleeping neighbor 282

A. J. Hartley

grunted back into consciousness. When she woke properly, the neighbor, who was more religiously conservative than her family had ever been, told Deborah to tear the clothing over her heart as a sign of her grief. Deborah obeyed, baffled. It was the last remotely Orthodox Jewish act she had committed. The following week, she had eaten two shrimp from a salad she had bought on purpose at a Brookline deli. Her family had never been especially careful about keeping kosher, so they may not have recognized Deborah's act for what it was, even if they had known about it. She had not kept kosher since until ordering that meal on her way back from Greece, and she had never returned to Judaism. In truth, she regretted that day and the furtive shrimp, her thirteen-year-old self 's version of contempt for the God who had taken her father. It had been a cheap gesture, and one her father would have found offensive, not for its violation of Orthodox religious practice so much as for its spiteful pettiness.
Well,
she thought.
That's all in the past
. Except, of course, that it wasn't. Not really. She had been reminded of it by waiting for the test results, but surely this would be different? The death of her father had been both an end and the beginning of a new, difficult phase.
Surely,
she thought,
the test results will be an end, not a
beginning, not a restart. The body was old, or it wasn't. Pe-
riod
.

They waited in the reception for an hour and a half before Dr. Kerem appeared.

"Eager beavers," he said, flourishing an addressed envelope from which he produced a sheaf of folded, computerprinted pages. "I'm ready to put those results in the mail. I take it you still want to see them?"

"Sure," said Deborah, affecting a ludicrous casualness that made the doctor peer at her over the top of his glasses. They had been waiting for hours. Of course she wanted to see the results.

Kerem produced a sheaf of papers for each test. Each consisted of a graphic readout accompanied by pages of numbers 283

T h e M a s k o f A t r e u s

and technical schematics which amounted, Deborah assumed, to a kind of narrative.

"What am I seeing here?" said Calvin, brandishing the first packet.

"These are the ceramics," said Kerem. "They are consistently showing to be eighteenth or nineteenth century. We can't be too precise because this is the period when the widespread use of fossil fuels tends to fudge the results."

"You're sure," said Deborah. "They can't be ancient?"

"What do you mean by ancient?"

"Bronze Age," she said. "Say, twelve hundred B.C."

"Absolutely not," he said.

Deborah felt her body sag as if the air had suddenly been released from a balloon in her gut. It wasn't a surprise, but it was still depressing. Richard had died for those worthless copies, had--and this was somehow worse--lived for them.