The Mask of Atreus (40 page)

But it wasn't, and she had no idea where it was now or who had it. And could it still be what those long-dead Nazis hoped: a way of uniting all those white supremacist lunatics under a single banner, rallying them, making them multiply, sending them forth to storm Troy from within: the housing estates and subdivisions, the office towers and small businesses all falling to an enemy who had always been slumbering inside them like the Greeks in the wooden horse? Surely, it was impossible. Or was she being naive? She remembered the mapping of the hate groups on the Southern Poverty Law Center's Web site, the way the screen had filled with icons, the KKK, Aryan Nations, skinheads, New Confederacy . . . Maybe it wasn't so impossible after all.

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The moment they landed she would call Cerniga, tell him everything. Tell him about Hitler and Voloshinov, tell him about Magdeburg and the fall of Berlin, tell him . . .

. . .
he was wrong?

That too. It would not be an easy conversation. She thought about Calvin and wondered what he would make of all this. Last night, in bed, she had finally let her mind go back to the night before they had gotten the results from the CAIS lab, the night they had spent together, but she found she could remember almost nothing. What recollections she did have were in her fingertips, not in her mind's eye because he had turned the lights off and the heavy hotel drapes had shut out the streetlamp glow utterly. In the morning he had been up before her, and she found herself regretting she had never seen him out of his professional clothes, if only because such a memory would feel more real, more concrete than that vague fumbling in the dark which was all her brain could summon now. It would have been nice to see his face then, nice now to remember it.

Well,
she thought,
it needn't be the only time it happens.
Next time you'll see and remember
.

Perhaps. But to get back to that moment would require a more difficult conversation than any she would have with the police.

CHAPTER 68

"This is conspiracy-theory garbage," said Keene. Cerniga had agreed to meet with her reluctantly and had shown up at her apartment with Keene in tow.

"Listen," said Deborah. "We have a dead Russian obsessed with Hitler tracking him down to the Druid Hills Museum . . ."

"Just because some crazy old Soviet believed that--"

"Listen," said Deborah again. "You think this is all convoluted what-if-the-moon-landings-were-really-shot-in-a-filmstudio rubbish, but it's actually the simplest solution that fits the facts. We have a neo-Nazi group chasing what you take to be a weapon. We have an art collector chasing what he believes to be an ancient artifact. We have a body from the mid1940s laid out like an ancient military hero. What if they are all the same? What if you aren't looking for a nuclear device or a store of smallpox? What if the body
is
both the artifact
and
the weapon?"

Keene opened his mouth to protest, but Cerniga was listening. The anger with which he had dismissed her at their last meeting had been replaced by a sort of resignation, but the more she talked, the more uncomfortable he had seemed, and Deborah knew in her gut that he thought that--preposterous though it sounded--she might be right.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Maybe the weapon isn't biological or chemical," said Deborah. "Maybe it's
ideological
. Political. To these Nazi lunatics Hitler is God and father. His body is overwritten with a significance that borders on the magical."

"Magical?"

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"It seems so to them. It's more than just a banner, it's a talisman, an icon, the supreme human symbol of what they are and believe."

"OK," said Cerniga, "but how does that make it a weapon?"

"Because people flock to that kind of symbol. The body was supposed to have been obliterated decades ago, destroyed by the enemies of all Hitler stood for. For the body to reappear now in glory is as close to a resurrection as they can get. It's a triumph, a war standard and, whether they are right or wrong, the Atreus group thinks it can help lead them to exactly that: war."

"Against who?"

"Jews, Arabs, blacks, gays, the handicapped, the Left, interracial couples," said Deborah, ticking them off on her fingers,

"and anyone who helps them or believes in their right to exist."

They were both looking at her now, silent, uneasy.

"The rediscovery of Hitler's body--in the hands of his friends--could be just what is needed to get the ball rolling,"

she said.

"It couldn't happen here," said Keene, quietly now.

"I hope you're right," said Deborah.

"Even if it did, they couldn't win."

"They didn't win last time," Deborah said to Keene, "but look what happened along the way. Anyway, it won't be like that: not tanks and uniforms and invasions. It will be terrorist attacks: blow up a bridge, shoot up a McDonald's, bomb a power station. It doesn't need to be open war to have unacceptable consequences. One casualty in a war like that is one too many."

There was a long silence, and then Cerniga got up. He looked unsettled, as if he too had been doing a jigsaw puzzle and Deborah had turned the whole thing upside down. The picture looked different now, stranger than before, disturbing, but it made a kind of sense.

"I don't know," he said. "It seems . . . I don't know. But we have to pursue it. I'm not saying you're right, but there might be something to it. Thanks."

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Deborah just nodded. Keene studied his shoes.

"Listen," Cerniga said, shifting gears as he moved toward the door. "I was too hard on you before. It wasn't your fault those Greek men died. You didn't do the shooting . . ."

"I know, but if I had told you . . ."

"It's still not your fault."

He waited, and she nodded small, her mouth set in a tight line.

"Is there somebody you can stay with?" he said, getting to his feet. "Friends, family?"

Deborah looked away.

"There's someone," she said, wondering if it was still true. CHAPTER 69

After they had gone, Deborah sat on the edge of her bed looking out of the window into the night and the rain. A steady drizzle had come and gone and then returned with a greater sense of purpose. There were thunderheads rolling in now from the west. They'd get lightning--probably a lot of it--before the night was out.

She checked her address book and found a home number for Tonya. She didn't know if it was still current and couldn't remember ever having used it before, but it was all she had. It rang eight times before the machine picked up. Deborah stammered an apology and then, even more awkwardly, a kind of plan, an absurd contingency strategy involving all those products Tonya called "girlie": makeup and perfume . . . Whatever. She trimmed her nails and slipped the file into her back pocket.

She called Calvin at home and got his machine too. Unable to think of anything brief and witty that would be in any way adequate--particularly if he was sitting there listening to it as she spoke--she hung up. It was insanely late, but she tried his office anyway, just in case, and got more voice mail. She was getting ready for bed when she remembered his penchant for working late at the museum. She could swing by as if by accident, to work, and they could hash it out there.
Ready to explain why you didn't even speak to him after
the CAIS lab visit? Why you fled the country again without a
word . . . ?

She got back into her street clothes and dialed the museum on her cell as she locked the apartment door behind her. 341

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It rang for a long time and then was snatched up. It was Calvin, and he sounded impatient.

"Yes, Deborah, what is it?"

"How did you know it was me?"

"Who else would call at this time?"

"I'm coming over," she said. She wouldn't do her apologies over the phone.

"Just like that?" he said. He was angry, and she couldn't blame him. "You leave the country without so much as a call, then just show up on my doorstep--"

"Actually it's my doorstep," she said, opting for cute in an attempt to defuse the situation. "You're at the museum."

"That makes no difference."

"Can we talk about this face-to-face?" she said. He seemed to consider this.

"OK," he said.

"Should I bring something?" she said. "Chinese?"

"Why don't you come over and we'll see how it goes before doing anything as rash as eating together."

"Fair enough," she said.

"I printed a menu off the Web," he said, as she walked into the museum office. "It's from the Hong Kong Garden."

"I thought we were going to see how things went before we did anything rash," she said.

"I played a hunch," he said.

They still hadn't smiled at each other.

"And what was that hunch based on?" she said.

"I figured you were coming to apologize and that you had a lot on your mind--judging from what I heard about that house in Palmetto--and I would therefore be more sympathetic than you deserved and--"

"Shut up and give me the menu," she said.

Now he smiled, and she returned a slightly more selfmocking version of the same thing. 342

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"What do you fancy?" he said.

"Kung Pao chicken," she said.

"What else?"

"Pot stickers," she said.

"Anything else?"

He was standing beside her now, and his tone was amused, playful.

"Oh," she said, looking up and grinning at him as he slipped his arms around her waist, "you mean what would I like other than food?"

"Right."

"Hmm," she said thoughtfully. "I think that's all. Maybe a spring roll."

He pushed her away, laughing.

"Tease," he said.

"A girl has to eat," she said. "We'll discuss dessert later."

"OK," he conceded. "Wanna walk round to pick it up? I've been in here for hours, and you have a lot of explaining to do."

The museum was nestled in a wooded hollow a couple of hundred yards from the main road, and as they walked along under the oaks and sweet gums, the freshness of the rainwashed night was intoxicating. Calvin listened to her heavily edited history of the last few days and took her hand when she said how responsible she had felt for the Greeks who had died.

"You're not," he said. "The only person responsible is the one who shot them."

She squeezed his hand and looked at him. He was wearing a thin white T-shirt under a khaki shirt, with chinos and docksiders:
"Southern lawyer casual"
he called it. In the high, amber light of the sodium lamps, his face was perfectly balanced, angular: handsome. She smiled properly, a reward for his compassion, and then they were at the restaurant, which was large and red and Disneyfied: China as imagined by snow globe makers.

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Their food was ready and packaged to go as soon as they reached the counter, but that didn't save them from the rain, which had begun again in earnest by the time they got outside. For a moment they sheltered under the vast crimson portico of the restaurant, before deciding that it was going to get heavier before it got lighter. They made a run for it.

The thunder started properly before they had gone two blocks: a great bark of it chasing a flare of lightning downtown. They laughed and kept going. Calvin sang a little Fred Astaire, and Deborah danced sportingly through a puddle deep enough to come over her shoes. The water poured down the drainage ditches, rushed into the sewers with an exuberant roar. Even the twinge of Deborah's ankle couldn't take the fun out of the thing, running with this beautiful man through the rain, feeling her clothes sticking to her, her hair dripping. They would have to get undressed as soon as they got indoors. It was the only smart thing to do . . . By the time they reached the museum doors, and Deborah was fighting to get the key into the lock, she was laughing almost too hard to stand. She was soaked from head to foot as if she had been sitting in a bath fully clothed. Calvin plucked his arms out of his top shirt, and his T-shirt looked painted to his skin.

They almost fell through the door when it opened, into the cool stillness of the museum lobby, so that their laughter echoed recklessly. It was like being taken with the giggles in temple as a kid, she thought, all this unstoppable good humor shattering the moldy, reverential silence. Calvin closed the door behind him and turned to her, grinning from ear to ear.

"I think I'm wet," he said.

Deborah just looked.

No. No. No. Not this. Anything but this
. The khaki shirt was dripping in his hands. The lights above the entrance picked him out and made him glow against the dark, storm-battered glass behind him, like a 344

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saint. The white T-shirt plastered to his chiseled chest and stomach, the fabric thin and transparent with its weight of rain, was like the merest skin, as if something reptilian had been sloughed off, so that she could see the faint lines underneath the shirt, dark and bluish, the tattoo etching of a death mask overlaid with a German eagle, and the single word:
Atreus
.

CHAPTER 70

So,
she thought,
it's true
.

She had wondered, feared, fought not to believe it, but there it was.

If I just turn away and behave normally,
she thought,
maybe he won't notice. He'll dry off, or he'll put his shirt
back on, and he'll think I never saw it. He'll think he got
away with it like he did when he turned out the lights in the
hotel room. He'll think I won't know what he is.
But faking her feelings wasn't Deborah's strong suit; never had been. She could walk away, keep to herself, and kill a minute or two, but he was expecting them to eat together and, probably, rather more than that. She wouldn't be able to look him in the face. She wouldn't be able to endure that smile without asking if he had used it on Richard before he had stabbed his Nazi dagger through his chest. She wouldn't be able to listen to his voice without hearing him whispering the address of the house where the two Greek men were waiting into the phone from the CAIS lab restroom. She didn't need to ask him what he had done or how. It was all quite clear. It had fallen into place in the hollow of her chest where her heart and lungs had been a moment earlier, filling her with certainty, as if she had seen him do it all firsthand.
And you knew. You convinced yourself you didn't, but you
knew.