A gull cried overhead, a sheep bell tinkled, a distant ferry blew its deep horn. Nick set his wine glass on the ground and pulled the young man into an embrace. They kissed, working at unbuttoning each other’s shirt without letting their lips come apart, and felt the cool night air on their shoulders when they pressed their bare chests together.
“Let’s go inside,” Nick murmured.
They did, stumbling to the bed where they kicked off their shoes before sinking onto the mattress. Grappling with belt buckles, they pulled of the other’s clothes, until Takis only had on his socks. Nick put his legs over his shoulders to peel them off, and then teasing with his tongue, closed his lips on his cock. Takis moaned with pleasure, but pulled Nick off him. “Let’s make it last” he said.
They did, kissing and touching everywhere except Nick’s back, which he kept turned away. “I want to see your back,” Takis finally said.
“Nobody sees my back.”
“I did last night.”
“Not in its full glory.”
“Do you think a few scars are going to put me off?”
“They might.”
“I’ve already felt them. Turn over.”
Reluctantly, he let Takis nudge him onto his belly.
“What happened to you?”
“Burning oil.”
“Burning oil?”
“Like what they used to pour over castle walls on invaders. Seen enough?”
“No. Were you in a fire?”
“I told you, I was an invader.”
“Is that why you have a thing about fires?”
“I didn’t know I had a thing about fires.” Nick tried to roll back over.
Takis stopped him by straddling him.
“What are you doing?”
He gripped Nick’s hands to stretch out his arms and hold him down, and bent to kiss his shoulders. Nick tried to buck him off, but Takis rode him, and dragged his tongue down the slick trails left by the burning oil. Never had Nick imagined his ruined back to be erotic, yet he had never been so aroused. He fumbled in the bedside table, and with a backhanded flip, tossed Takis a condom.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A GLOOMY DAWN BROKE OVER the channel. Dense blue fog obscured Turkey’s close hills. High waves, pushed by north winds, crashed on the shore; and the water, retreating through the pebbles, sounded like thousands of glass bottles shattering all at once. It was deafening, and brisker than Ridi expected; he wished he owned a heavier coat as he made his way down the beach, working the tips of his shoes into the pebbles to kick aside the larger ones. He was in search of jewels for Athina’s crown, and the smallest pebbles naturally worked their way the deepest. The colorful array, spewed from the island’s volcano millions of years ago, surprised him. He uncovered green, orange, and red pebbles—and even a couple blue enough to pass for lapis. To make sure they would shine up nicely when he oiled them, he wetted each one in his mouth, tasting the salty sea that had worn them smooth over many thousands of years.
So preoccupied was he with his search that he didn’t see the rubber raft emerge from the fog riding the swells until its passengers started screaming as it sank. The captain had slashed one side, making their craft unseaworthy to guarantee that they would not be turned back, but he cut it too soon. The heavy surf flipped the raft over, tossing into the sea its load of five men and a woman.
Ridi didn’t think about the fact that he was a poor swimmer and ran into the water to help them. He paddled furiously, struggling to stay atop the incoming waves that swamped him. By the time he reached the flailing woman, he needed rescuing as much as she; and they both nearly drowned when she clung to his neck and inadvertently pushed him underwater. He pried himself loose and kicked to the surface. Gulping air, he heard a loud, booming voice. At first he thought it might be one of the men who had gone overboard with the woman, but then the Coast Guard cutter emerged from the fog.
The crew tossed them life preservers. Ridi grabbed one and shoved it at the woman, who, reaching for it, took a wave in the face and went under. When she didn’t reappear, he let go the preserver and dove underwater, throwing out his arms and legs hoping to find her by touching her, before he was forced to surface for air. The life preserver had floated away and he was swimming for it when something bumped his leg. He reached down and pulled the unconscious woman to the surface. She was dead weight, and as drained as he was, he could barely keep her face above water.
Aboard the cutter, a guardswoman, assessing Ridi’s distress, stripped off her boots and jacket and dove overboard. With a few strong strokes she made it to them, and slipped an arm around the woman to keep her head out of the water. Another life preserver landed within reach, and she made sure Ridi had a firm hold on it while she propped the woman’s head on it. She signaled to be hauled in and slowly they were drawn to the cutter. A harness dropped over the side, and the guardsman slipped it around the unconscious woman. She was dangling over their heads when a second harness splashed next to them. Seconds later Ridi was hoisted onto the deck.
Without bothering to remove the harness, a guardsman started pumping on the unconscious woman’s chest. When she didn’t respond, he pinched her nose and blew hard into her mouth. Still no response, so he pressed all his weight on her chest, forcing out seawater. Finally she choked and spewed out seawater. The guardsman rolled her on her side to drain her of more.
Ridi, leaning against the deckhouse, finally managed to stop coughing up his own share of the Mediterranean, and stepped over to look at the woman for whom he’d almost lost his life. She’s young, he was thinking, when her eyes fluttered open. It took them a moment to focus, but when they did, they widened in astonishment just as she was lifted onto a stretcher and an oxygen mask slipped over her face. She tried to say something, and repeated it more urgently when the guardsmen picked up the stretcher.
“Wait,” Ridi said. “She wants to say something.”
They paused and lifted her mask.
“Ridi?” she asked, her voice weak.
Had she said his name?
He stepped closer to peer at her. Astonished, he said, “Jura?”
“It’s me, Ridi.”
A guardsman replaced her mask before they carried her below.
◆ ◆ ◆
NICK WOKE IN THE SAME state he had fallen asleep: in love with the beautiful young man in bed next to him; or if too soon to call it love, he was certainly enamored with him. They had played much of the night before finally nodding off. Now it was mid-morning, judging by the sunlight sneaking through the shutters. Takis stirred.
Nick draped an arm over him, prodding him to wake up.
“Again?”
“Why not?”
“Wait.”
Takis slipped into the bathroom and peed. He came back, his breath smelling like mint toothpaste, and Nick made his own bathroom run before returning to bed for a morning romp. They had just collapsed into each other’s arms when a key rattled in the door and swung open.
“What the fuck!” Nick blurted, and pulled the sheet over them.
Athina took in the situation. “Oh cool!” she said. “You’re still here and you’re doing it!”
Takis told her, “Get out of here.”
“Oh shut up, Takis. Everybody knows you’re queer.”
“What are you doing here?” Nick asked.
“Cleaning your room, and I hope your toilet isn’t too yucky.”
“I thought you worked at your mom’s restaurant.”
“I have to have one job that pays in real money and not food, and yes, you can tip the maid. It’s encouraged.” Athina pulled her phone out of her bag and instantly started taking pictures. “But this is so cool! I’ve been posting a whole photo thing on what I find in hotel rooms.”
“No!” the men cried in unison, and jumping out of bed, pulled the sheet over the girl’s head.
Athina screamed with laughter. Inadvertently they knocked over a bedside table. Nick’s travel wallet fell out of its
drawer, spilling out his FBI badge.
Takis picked it up and gave Nick a curious look. “You work for the FBI?”
Nick laughed it off. “It’s from the souvenir shop. You give them a picture and they make a fake ID. It’s fun to show at parties.”
Athina pulled the sheet off her head. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” Nick said, and snatched her phone.
“Hey, that’s mine!”
“Trade you.” He swapped it with Takis for his ID.
Takis started pressing keys on the phone.
Athina grabbed for it. “Wait! What are you doing? Don’t mess it up, please!”
He handed it back. “I reset it to factory settings.”
“You what? You deleted everything? All my everything?” On the verge of tears, she checked her phone, and glared at him. “You said that just to be mean.”
“I deleted the pictures you took of us. If I missed one, I better not see it posted anywhere.”
“Can you come back later to clean the room?” Nick asked.
“If you don’t walk off with the outside key. Some people do, and then they blame me when their room’s not cleaned.”
“I didn’t know there was an outside key.”
“Everybody leaves one outside, usually over the door so little kids can’t reach it. Goodbye, creep!” she aimed at Takis. “If you erased anything else, I’ll post it that you’re queer.”
“According to you, everybody already knows.”
“I’m the first eyewitness.”
“Figa apo etho!” he said. Get out of here!
◆ ◆ ◆
KOUFOS WAS NAKED, BATHING IN the sea, when the body floated up to him. He had never seen a dead man before. He had seen dead animals—birds in a field, a stinking goat carcass on the beach, cats run over on the road—so he instinctively knew that anything living could be killed; but he had no sense of death’s certainty: not the many ways it could happen, nor the fatal sentence of longevity. He had no concept of years—or for that matter, old age—so for all he knew, people he recognized as old people could have been eons old, from the beginning of time old, not only seventy or eighty years old. What reason did he have to think that people didn’t live forever unless an accident befell them, like a bird breaking its neck on a window or a bug crushed underfoot?
He dragged the dead man onto the pebbly beach and examined his face: colorless, eyes half open, jaw slackened. Always hungry, Koufos checked his pants pockets for food, and pulled out a sesame bar. He devoured it, ever attentive that the man, though dead, didn’t somehow try to snatch it from him. The man’s hands were already waterlogged, so Koufos had a hard time twisting off his ring, which he wanted to trade for a special dinner. Two of the pearly buttons on the man’s silky red shirt were hanging only by threads, and he carefully removed it before pulling off the man’s mustard-colored pants. He spread the wet clothes on wild rosemary bushes to dry.
He was curious about the man, especially the naked parts (the man wore no underwear) that he had never seen before except bending over trying to look at himself. Something primal made him want to touch him and something primal stopped him from doing it. So he didn’t, and instead, sitting cross-legged on the pebbles, he pulled the man’s head onto his lap. He put his hands on the man’s shoulders—they were clammy from the sea—and kneaded them, pressing his fingers into their flesh. Looking at the body stretched out before him, Koufos had a new sense of himself. For the first time he saw a man naked from head to toe, and realized that this was every man’s end—that death would be his end, too. Tears sprang from his eyes spontaneously, as did a soulful cry from his throat, mourning inevitable mortality. As his tears landed on the man’s chest, he spread them across his shoulders and far down his belly, howling until his throat was raw.
The man had come from the sea. He had been a gift. Koufos’s enlightenment was also a gift, though a sad one. He pulled the body back into the water, its joints already stiffened, and swam from shore tugging it along until he felt the swift, cold currents and let the man go.
Then Koufos swam back to collect his new clothes.
◆ ◆ ◆
FATHER ALEXIS HAD A FITFUL night that was enduring well into the morning. He had a tough decision to make. Nick’s wad of money sitting on the vestry’s table tempted him as much as the Russian’s Faustian promise; more, considering what it would let him do. Nick’s offer for the Crowned Madonna—and he thought he was buying the forged one at that—would make it possible for the priest to buy his mother an apartment immediately. Otherwise it would be another year or two of his mother living in that oil-drenched graveyard longer than absolutely necessary.
Accepting Nick’s offer would also mean crossing Vladimir Azarov, captain of the Birch Runner and indefatigable looter of Greek icons. When they met three years earlier in the village that reeked of pigs, the priest had assumed that Vladimir was merely another member of Russia’s ruling criminal class who wanted to bequeath a splashy collection of art to the Hermitage Museum to atone for his earthly sins. He trolled through the Greek islands, collecting icons while leaving forgeries in his wake, not to build a memorial to himself but to his mother. His father, a director at a state-owned oil company, had met her on holiday in Greece, and lured her back to Saint Petersburg, promising it was the Paris of Russia. “Only if you squint,” she said once she got there, and by the time she grew tired of squinting, she’d already given birth to young Vlad.
His father, a member of the Party, had grown accustomed to carousing and womanizing; habits which became all the more debauched when he became an owner of his newly privatized oil company. His parent’s relationship turned hateful. His mother, trapped unless willing to abandon her son to return to Greece, sought solace in the religion she had been all-but-forced to abandon when she moved to godless Russia. She requisitioned a room in their palatial apartment where she created a private chapel filled with Greek icons, none of special value, and some made simply from photos she had glued to wood. As the walls filled up, her depression deepened and she rarely left it, often missing meals, and eventually absenting herself from her husband’s obligatory business functions. It was in the chapel that Vladimir was sure to find his mother when he came home from school.
Then one day, she was gone.
She wasn’t in her chapel. She wasn’t anywhere, and from what they could determine, she had taken nothing with her. She simply vanished. Suicide was suggested, perhaps she had jumped from a bridge and been swept away, but Vladimir, only ten, was convinced his father had killed her. He went through the motions of reporting a missing person and contacting her relatives in Greece, but he never demonstrated a glimmer of hope that she might be found. On the first anniversary of her disappearance, he had carpenters dismantle her chapel. Vladimir never learned what happened to her many icons.
That much Father Alexis had learned about the Russian’s motivations over the years, and likewise, the Russian had learned about the priest’s ambition to buy his mother an apartment. They found it amusing that they both entered into their Faustian contract wanting to do something for their mothers. Unhappily, Vladimir’s mother disappeared before her mark on his character had become wholly indelible. It was his brutish father’s influence that saw him into manhood. Since he first appeared in Father Alexis’s church, negotiating for a copy of Saint George slaying the dragon, the priest glimpsed something dark in his soul. He was wary of the Russian and didn’t want to double-cross him. Yet how could he resist Nick’s extravagant offer?
When the Russian had shown up looking for the icon of Saint George, he hadn’t expected to find a priest already knocking off copies so exquisitely rendered that, with little extra effort, they would be indistinguishable from the originals. On the spot, he commissioned Father Alexis to make a perfect copy, including a convincing accumulation of dust. For that, Vladimir offered a handsome price and the priest embraced the challenge, perfecting skills he had never considered as a copy artist�
�front and center, mimicking dust buildup— and in three months he excelled in every respect. With mortars, he extracted tinctures from plants; used only brushes made from natural bristle; and scavenged old wood and rusty nails to stretch his canvases.
Eventually he challenged Vladimir to distinguish the original from his copy and placed them side by side on easels. Arms crossed over his belly, the Russian examined both paintings, stepping closer then back again, looking with his head tilted at assorted angles—and grunted. He circled them, examining their wood frames for any signs of recent tooling, and found none. He picked them up, angling them to catch the light. Each had the same sheen beneath a thin veneer of dust.
“Papoose! You are a masterpiece!” he exclaimed, and clapped the priest on his back, who cringed at the man’s bastardization of his title, Pappas. “It is so perfect that now I take the original.”
“The original?” Father Alexis feigned surprise, though he had always guessed Vladimir’s true intention.
“Why not?”
“Not for the price you have offered.”
That brought short the Russian’s good humor. “We have a deal.”
“For the copy.”
“A painting is a painting.”
“Then take the copy.”
“I will ask you to paint many more icons. You will make so much money from Vladimir!”
“Not for what you are offering. I can sell enough cheap knockoffs and make twice as much money in half the time. And with no risk.”
“Papoose! We will make a deal! No risk!”
When their negotiation concluded, each had a good deal; notwithstanding, of course, that the transaction was thievery, which bothered neither of them. A Russian borne of a miscreant culture and a priest in the Church: they were perfect comrades for a dishonorable venture. The possibility that what they were doing might land them in jail was never discussed.
And so their venture began.
Over the next three years, Father Alexis produced a dozen forgeries for the Russian. In that time, he was rotated two more times on the Church’s rural circuit—where most young priests endured purgatory before ascending to a respectable parish—which had the unanticipated advantage of putting at his disposal new troves of icons to plunder. He made no effort to conceal that he copied them. On the contrary, he painted them in public view. Sometimes he had several underway of the same subject, all but his true forgery hastily finished for quick sales, which he used to repair irksome problems: broken steps, squeaky seats, drafty windows. He wanted no one grousing that he was making a profit for himself using Church resources, so he kept people happy with small gestures, retaining for himself only what the Russian paid for his true forgeries.
Fire on the Island Page 15