by Paul Moomaw
Chapter 8
Artemisa Pankratis shifted drowsily to pull her shoulder blade away from a rough spot on the rock ledge. The candle Spyros Agrotis had brought to the underwater cave still burned brightly, and Artemisa judged that not much time had passed since they had finished making love. She ran a fingertip across his bare shoulder, which glowed dark gold in the flickering light. He shrugged slightly but did not awake. His breathing echoed softly against the walls of the cavern, but he did not snore. That was good, she thought. Both her father and mother made enough noise at night to drive her, on warm nights, out of the house and into the arbor to sleep. Just past Spyros’ head the candle flame glistened against the chain belt of brass and colored glass that he had brought her from Athens. He had insisted she wear it tonight, clasped around her bathing suit.
“It makes you look like a sea goddess,” he had said. It was especially beautiful in the warm glow of the candle, she thought. He was beautiful, too. Although not very practical, she warned herself, and tried to let it matter. She smiled again, snuggled closer to him, and let herself drift.
She was asleep, and dreaming that she and Spyros were making love again, when the light came on. For a panicky moment she thought she was at home in bed, and that her parents had caught her with Spyros. She moved to cover herself, and the reality of the stone scraping against her skin brought her back to the cave. She felt Spyros sit up as her eyes popped open. The candle was out, and the illumination came from below the surface of the water.
Spyros leaned over the edge of the shelf, reflections rippling across his face as he stared into the water.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Some kind of search light shining on the cave entrance. It must be powerful. Look, you can see almost to the bottom.”
As her eyes followed his pointing finger, something dark floated into view, well under the water, and descended to the bottom. Another followed, and then more. She counted a dozen.
“They look like trash cans,” she said.
“Sometimes depth charges, like they use to kill submarines, look like that,” Spyros said. “I saw it in a movie, once.”
He slid into the water.
“Where are you going?” she asked, and grabbed his arm.
He patted her hand. “To take a look.”
“What if they see you?”
“They won’t. I’ll stay under water until I’m out of the light.”
He upended himself and swam toward the cave entrance, his form outlined clearly as he worked against the incoming current. Then he was gone. Artemisa settled back on the shelf and hugged her knees. She wished he had left his wristwatch, so she could mark the passing of time. She put her swimming suit back on. Then she tried counting seconds and marking the minutes by scratching the stone shelf with a chip of gravel, but the gravel was too soft to scar the rock. She collected a pile of pebbles and chips, with the idea of lining them up, placing one down each sixty seconds.
She had arranged an even dozen when the water went dark again. She crouched on the ledge, torn, wanting to leave but afraid to venture into the blackness alone. She tried counting seconds again, lost track, and decided at last that she would have to go.
She slid from the ledge and swam to the front wall of the cave, not wanting to spend too much time under the surface because she didn’t know how long she could hold her breath, then dove for the entrance. The current caught her body at an awkward angle, and she could make no headway. It swept her back and she fishtailed to the surface, gasping for air as her head broke water.
She swam toward the ledge, and banged painfully against it in the dark, then draped her arms over it while she caught her breath. She began to be afraid. The idea of death, a thing that had always before been something that happened to someone else, wrapped itself around her guts and twisted them. She wished Spyros would come back, and decided to climb back up on the ledge to wait, for him or for dawn, when at least she could see the way out. The idea calmed her, and she climbed back onto the shelf and stretched out on her stomach. But then the darkness began to tease at her, began to convince her that she could not stay, that the black waters would rise over her, to the very ceiling of the cave, and she would drown. She felt panic, and everything began to spin. The rock itself seemed to heave and shift under her, trying to hurl her back into the water.
“The cave is safe,” she said. The sane part of her mind knew that was true, that there were no tides or currents around the island that would be strong enough to affect the level of water in the cave. She banged her knuckles against the rock as hard as she could, to cause pain and distract herself from the panic. That worked for a while; but then the fear returned, and she could not force herself to stay.
Trembling, she crawled to the edge of the shelf and lowered herself stiffly into the water. She took a deep gasp of air, and another, then ducked her head and pushed off as hard as she could with her feet. She swam harder than she had ever swum, her muscles fighting both the current and her own panic, until her lungs were bursting and she had to rise, not knowing whether she would encounter air or rock.
Her head broke the surface, and she flailed noisily as she sucked in fresh air. She looked up and saw the stars briefly. Then a brighter light went on, blinding her.
“Voila lagonzesse!” It was a male voice, one she had never heard, speaking a language she did not recognize. An engine rumbled to life and grew louder as a boat approached her. Afraid again, she began to swim for the rocky shore. The engine increased in pitch, and got closer, and then she was snatched up, dragged roughly over the gunwale of the boat, and dropped to the deck. The light went out as the hands released her, and the boat began to turn. It pulled away from shore slowly, engine burbling, until it had gone about a thousand meters.
“C’est bon,” a voice called, and the engine was still. Someone shoved her roughly toward the stern, where a small light glowed under an awning that stretched over the rear deck. The boat was not very large, perhaps twelve meters, with a brass and mahogany railing, and bench seats along the sides, facing each other. Spyros sat on one of the seats. A man stood next to him, swinging a heavy flashlight.
He held the light on Artemisa. “Bonnepoule, ca,” he said, focusing the beam on her crotch. Then he turned back to Spyros.
“Is this all of you there is?” he asked, in heavily accented Greek.
Spyros stared sullenly at his feet and remained silent. The man slammed the flashlight against his head once, then struck the same spot a second time. Spyros bit off a scream.
“Are there more?” the man repeated. He raised the flashlight again, and Spyros flinched away.
“Only us,” he said.
The man hit him again. This time Spyros did not bite the scream off.
“You sure?” the man asked.
“Just us,” Spyros said. “We aren’t causing any harm. Let us go.”
“Nous sommes vraiment dans lamerde,” the man said, turning to his companion, who still held Artemisa. “Q’voudre?”
The other man pointed at Spyros, then made a slashing motion across his throat.
The man at the railing shrugged and pulled a pistol from his belt. He pointed it at Spyros, who stared at him, his mouth sagging open, his eyes as big as eggs.
“Pasde pistole, cretin,” the other man said. He dragged Artemisa to a bench and pushed her down, then strode across to the boy. She watched, dazed, and oddly detached, as if it were all a movie. She had never seen Spyros afraid before. She felt oddly disappointed.
The man who had held her was huge, a giant. Spyros seemed a frightened child in comparison. The man grabbed him by the hair and jerked him up, then let go and slammed an oversized fist into his jaw. Spyros dropped to the deck, and the man hoisted him by his ankles. Holding him high, like a prize goose, he marched toward the railing next to the bench Artemisa sat on. The man smiled and winked at Artemisa. He lowered Spyros, head first, into the sea. The boy struggled as his head entered the water,
striking out with his arms and twisting his back and neck, trying to get his head above the surface. The other man ran laughing to the rail and shined the flashlight into the water. Its powerful beam illuminated the thrashing body as the struggling diminished. First the head became still, then the arms swung more and more slowly until only the waves rocked them with a gentle motion. Finally the feet, jerking and twitching in the giant’s grip, stopped moving.
The man let go. Artemisa watched in a trance, still not fully understanding what was happening, because it lay so far beyond anything she had ever experienced, as Spyros’ body, arms and legs moving in an odd, graceful dance, sank beyond the reach of the flashlight beam.
The man turned to Artemisa. “A little blowjob, non?” he said.
Artemisa shook her head.
“Yes, cutie,” the man said. He unbuttoned his fly and exposed his penis. “You like my cock?”
Artemisa shook her head again. “Please, no,” she said.
The man grabbed her, forced her mouth against his penis. It stank, and she gagged and clamped her lips shut. He slapped her lightly. She shut her mouth tighter and tried to twist away from his grip. He slapped her harder, then pried her jaw open with his fingers and shoved his penis into her mouth. Reflexively, she clamped her teeth down. The man yelped in pain and bent over, grabbing his penis.
“Salope!” he yelled. He slugged her with his fist, dazing her, then grabbed her by the hair and threw her to the deck on her back. “The other end, in that case,” he said. He rolled her over, and slammed her forehead into the planks. The blow left her half conscious as he tugged and pulled the swimsuit from her limp body. Then his weight was on her back, and something was tearing her rear end apart. She screamed and struggled briefly, then followed her mind to a dark corner where the pain seemed more distant, not really hers.
She was not aware that he had finished, and had removed himself from her, until his hands grabbed her and dragged her to her feet. He pushed his face into hers, so that their foreheads touched, and they stared at each other for a moment. Then he began to press her toward the railing with his body. She didn’t comprehend until she felt the cool brass against the back of her knees.
“No. Please,” she said, still staring into his eyes. He stopped, and bent over, and almost gently pulled her swimsuit back on. For just a moment, she allowed herself to believe that he would let her go. But then, still bent over, he grabbed her ankles and flipped her over the rail.
“Au revoir,” he said, and lowered her into the water.
Chapter 9
Irene Argyros balanced against a rock and labored to catch her breath. The climb over the ridge to this little piece of coast had tired her. She took it as one more sign that she was pregnant, and smiled.
“And all because a fat old man wants sons,” she said, and then pinched the back of her hand hard, just as her mother had done to her when she was a child. It wasn’t good to make fun of Milos. He was not cruel, even when he was drunk. And he had married her, rescued her from God knew how many years of wearing a black widow’s dress and sleeping with her cats.
Not that the dress she wore now, of broad, horizontal gray and coffee stripes, was much better. No more black, Milos had insisted, but nothing too bright, either. People will talk. They would talk anyway, she had argued. Sitia might be a town of almost six thousand souls, but when it came to gossip, it was no different than the meanest village up on the Lassithi Plateau. Especially when the bride has been in mourning less than a year, and the groom has a son almost as old as the bride. Milos had won the argument because he paid for the dresses. She had no money of her own, and never would. Her first husband had been a beautiful man, but a dreamer. When her new husband died—and if he didn’t lose weight and cut down on the amount of tsikudi he drank, that might be sooner than he expected—then Andreas would be the man of the house, and he would tell her what to wear. But in the meantime she had a comfortable life. And now she would have a child.
She shrugged out of the dress, rolled it neatly, and wedged it into a crevice well above the waterline. Underneath the dress she wore a two-piece suit of flaming orange, not quite a bikini, but close enough to please her. She patted it and grinned. What her neighbors didn’t see, they couldn’t wag their tongues at. She wondered how much longer she would be able to wear the suit, and whether her body, as it grew, would refuse to submerge the couple of meters to the mouth of the cave below her.
She dived steeply into the water, sweeping her arms to pull herself farther down, and let the current that entered the cave guide her to its mouth. Then she floated through and popped to the surface. Even inside, there was still a current, and she let it carry her to a low shelf of rock on the far side of the cavern.
She pulled herself out and settled cross-legged on the ledge. The cave air still had the same smell she had noticed a few weeks before. If anything, it was stronger now—heavy, sweet, but tinged with a metallic edge she could almost taste. It was unpleasant, but as Irene sat on the rocky ledge, bathed in the dim, blue glow of light from the cave entrance, and let her mind drift, she soon failed to notice it. She had no idea where the odor came from, but had decided from the first that even if it was somebody’s sewage, she would not let it keep her away. She needed the privacy, time away from gossiping neighbors, to think and meditate on the life growing inside her. She could, at any rate, think of half a dozen places in Sitia that smelled worse, including the foul back yard of old Foti Thakis, who went around telling everyone that Irene would bear a kallikanzaros, a monster, because she had conceived during the wrong phase of the moon.
Her hand moved unconsciously to the leather thong around her neck and down to the small, clay pendant that hung from it. It was a figurine, a woman in a full skirt with bare breasts, and an odd, towering hairdo. Milos, who knew about such things, said it was older than even the Greeks on the island, from the time of the Minoans, three or four thousand years in the past. He said it was a goddess, and was supposed to bring luck, which was his way of saying, bring a son; and although he laughed and joked about superstition, she sensed that he wanted her to wear it. So she did. It was no more foolish that any of the other things she had done to please him—placing garlic under her pillow every time she and Milos had sex, and letting crazy old Ioanna Kostos play the flijanou, the fortune teller, with her, making coffee, drinking it, turning the cup upside down to spill the grounds. She had made the sign of the cross three times over the saucer, bent close enough for her half-blind eyes to read the grounds, and then told Irene she must eat the umbilicus of a first-born son. Ioanna had brought the birth cord herself, and watched Irene choke it down.
Irene’s breathing echoed against the walls of the cave. She rubbed her thumb over the pendant, and wondered how her husband would respond if the new life inside her turned out to be a girl.
A dull ache distracted her. It was low in her back, on both sides, in the area she was pretty sure her kidneys occupied. The pain had begun a few weeks before, only coming now and then at first. Now it was there all the time, sometimes not too noticeable, and sometimes intense enough to make her groan. Irene stretched out on her side. The fetus stirred, and she lay quietly, pressing one hand against her belly while her gaze wandered idly around the cave. She caught a glint of something on the rocky shelf. She squinted in the shifting, filtered light. The glint reappeared, and she rose to investigate.
The gleam came from a chain of gold-colored metal. Irene picked it up and carried it back to the water’s edge, where the light was better. It was a belt, made of metal links and faceted pieces of colored glass. She recognized it at once. It was the belt Artemisa Pankratis had worn so proudly the last time Irene had seen her. She had been walking down the street with Spyros, looking as if she owned the world. Irene realized that she had not had this cave to herself after all. The two young lovers had obviously made use of it. She shivered. She had seen the bodies when they had been brought back to town, bloated and gray. She quelled an impulse to throw t
he belt into the water, and inspected it again. It was heavier than it looked, solid and well made. She pressed it against her waist, or where her waist had been, and giggled. There might have been a time when it would have fit, but no longer. She held it out again and swung it slightly, so that the shifting light from the water played across the metal and the stones.
“So pretty,” she said. Her sister was slender. Irene closed her eyes and pictured the belt on Lydia. A brief vision of Artemisa interfered, but she pushed it away. “Lydia will like it,” she said.
The odor in the cave seemed suddenly stronger, and she began to feel sick to her stomach. One of the least charming aspects of pregnancy, she thought. She hadn’t been able to cook kidneys for weeks, and could tell from a meter away if a fish was even a little off. She wrapped the chain belt around her wrist, lowered herself into the water, and swam toward the entrance of the cave.
Chapter 10
Dieter Fugger’s house perched on a cliff, and the window in this room stretched from marble floor to fifteen-foot ceiling, framing Fugger against a shimmering background of sky and water. He stood as tall as Pray, with the over-fed look that the wealthy often have. But he strode toward his visitor with a springy step that spoke of conditioned muscle, and the hand he offered was hard, one that had done real work.
“How do you do, Mr. Pray. I am Dieter Fugger. I hope my driver didn’t give you a heart attack bringing you up our dreadful excuse for a road,” he said.
“Not in the least,” Pray lied.
“Good! A drink?”