by Will Adams
He lay back on his bed and resolved to make the call in the morning, But it was a resolution he'd made a hundred times before, and still he was alone.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I
Mikhail Nergadze unwrapped a butterscotch as he came into Nadya's line of sight, popping it into his mouth, discarding the scrunched-up foil onto the carpet. He sucked hard twice to flood his mouth with the sweet sticky saliva, before pushing it to one side with his tongue, the better to talk. He was holding her purse, she saw, and now he opened it up, pulling the credit cards out of their sleeves one-by-one, examining them for a moment, then pushing them back in. 'Nadya Ludmilla Petrova,' he said. 'How I hoped it would be you. When I heard that a woman called Nadya was after me, a woman with a limp.'
There was no way for Nadya to know how much he knew about her. Best to assume he knew nothing, lest she give him anything for free. 'After you?' she asked. 'What are you talking about? Who are you?'
'It's a real honour for me, this. I mean that sincerely. I'm one of your biggest fans. I've been living in America these past few years, you see. They think Georgia is where the Atlanta Braves play baseball. So I've been starved of home news. I used to read your blog avidly.' He waved his hand. 'Everyone else, all the so-called serious media, they merely reprint the official press releases then go off for their long lunches. But not you. Typical, isn't it? The only Georgian with the balls to tell it as it is, and she's a woman.'
'What do you want with me?'
'You know what I want, Nadya. I want to know why you've made it your business to interfere with my business. I want to know why you hired a detective to wait outside the airport for my family plane last night, then follow my guests to my house. I want to know why you tailed us out to Eleusis earlier, and why you interfered with my effort to talk with Daniel Knox. And please don't bother to deny it. Your detective called me earlier and volunteered everything. You really should pick your help more carefully next time.'
That damned Sokratis! She should have known he'd betray her. She tried to recall how much he'd have heard and could have passed on. 'Investigating campaigns is what I do,' she said. 'You must know that, if you read my blog.'
'And what do I have to do with any campaign?'
'I'm not here because of you. I'm here because of a man called Boris Dekanosidze. He's one of Ilya Nergadze's most important advisers, you know.'
'Is he now?' laughed Mikhail. 'Very well, then. Why are you after him?'
'Because the first thing you learn in this business is that you never get scoops from following the candidates; they're too well protected. It's always the right-hand men who lead you to the real story.'
'Ah! The secret of your success!' he mocked. 'The herd trails haplessly after the leaders; but you go after the consigliore?'
'It led me to you, didn't it?'
'And why should you consider that a result? Why should you think I matter?'
Nadya blinked at her own impetuosity. She needed to be sharper than that if she was to get out of this. 'I'm still working on that.'
'You're lying,' said Mikhail. 'You know exactly who I am. You knew before you flew out here. In fact, you flew here looking for me.'
'I assure you I-'
'Don't lie to me, Nadya. You'll regret it if you do.'
'I'm not lying,' she said. 'It's the truth. I needed something good on Ilya Nergadze. Something juicy. My readers were starting to accuse me of being in the tank for him.'
'It was that press conference, wasn't it?' asked Mikhail. 'The way you looked at me, I knew we must have met before. I just couldn't place you. It was only when we picked you up earlier that I was sure.' He stood tall again. 'How unlucky can a man be? Back in Georgia for two days, and I run into one of my widows.'
'One of your widows!' Despite her predicament, his callousness shocked her out of her pretence. 'What kind of monster are you? What had Albert ever done to you?'
'Don't you know?' answered Mikhail. 'He stuck his nose into our family business. We had to flee to Cyprus because of him.'
'But he had nothing to do with that,' she protested. 'It was the Americans.'
'The Americans!' said Mikhail contemptuously. 'And just who do you think told them? Unfortunately for your husband, one of the people at Justice was on our payroll.' He shook his head at the ways of the universe. 'We needed him silenced; we needed him punished. I was in Cyprus at the time, the only one of the family not under twenty-four hour surveillance, so my grandfather asked me home. I'm good at that kind of thing.'
'You shit!' she spat.
'Now, now,' he smiled. 'This is scarcely the time to be hurling insults, is it? I don't kill unless I have to. Not people I admire, at least. And I do admire you, Nadya. So I wouldn't do anything to jeopardise that if I were you.' He walked around her, as though assessing her. 'Tell me something,' he said. 'Are you left or right-handed?'
'What?'
He produced a pair of pliers from his pocket. 'I'm asking for your own good,' he said, when she didn't answer. 'No? Very well. You're wearing your watch on your left wrist, so I'm going to assume you're right-handed. Do tell me if I'm wrong.' He took her left thumb, wrenched it away from her fingers, pinched it between the pliers' blunt jaws.
'Don't!' begged Nadya, twisting in her chair. 'Please!'
He didn't listen, he began to squeeze. She braced herself and closed her eyes, as though that could help; but she couldn't close her ears to the crunch of bone and the sickening liquid noise of crushed and twisted gristle. Then the pain came at her, spikes being hammered up her arm, making her arch and twist in the chair, shrieking and shrieking because shrieking was all she could do until finally she was over the hump of it and coasting down the other side, the pain still exquisite and intense but now at least lessening and manageable again, capable of being contained. She glanced down at her hand, she couldn't help herself. Her knuckle was a gruesome mangled pulp, already turning purple and black, the nail bulging from the pressure of blood beneath, a red crescent around its edge. She knew with certainty that she'd never be able to use it properly again.
Mikhail crouched down again in front of her, hands upon his knees, and regarded her with curiosity, a zoologist encountering some unfamiliar species. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed her eyes. He smiled almost sympathetically as he took her left index finger.
'Please,' she sobbed, as the fear engulfed her. 'I'll do anything, I swear I will. Just tell me what you want.'
Mikhail frowned, a little disappointed at her obtuseness. 'I want to hurt you,' he said.
II
'You must have heard the theories,' said Franklin. 'Why would people as sophisticated as Sophocles and Aristotle be so enraptured by the Mysteries, unless they'd experienced something truly transcendent? And what's the simplest explanation? Some ravishing coup de theatre? Some exquisite philosophical insight that has eluded us ever since? Or a generous dollop of acid in the drink? After all, one of the few things we know about Eleusis is that celebrants drank a barley brew called kykeon. Ergot grows on barley, and LSD is made from ergot. And it wouldn't be the only time that drugs were used as a way to experience the divine. The Hindu soma, for example. Peyote in Mexico. Cannabis in Germany.'
'The blue lotus in Egypt.'
'Exactly. The Aztecs called psilocybin mushrooms teonanacatl, which literally means flesh of the gods. The Greeks had the same conceit. Mushrooms were Zeus's plant because they so often spring up after thunderstorms. It's the rain, of course, but many people believed that they were a product of lightning strikes.' A man and a woman walked past the window at that moment, arms around each others' shoulders, looking at each other as they talked, rather than at the pavement. 'Zeus was the god of lightning,' continued Franklin, 'therefore mushrooms were his plant. And if you eat magic mushrooms, you certainly get a glimpse of extraordinary things. Petitier used to claim that the Catholic Eucharist was originally just amanita muscaria-those red-and-white capped mushrooms, you know.'
'T
he fly agaric,' said Knox.
'Exactly. There's plenty of evidence that they were held sacred by the early church. Those wonderful mushroom frescoes in Plaincourault and elsewhere, for example. Think of it: the body of Christ an hallucinogenic mushroom.'
'I begin to see why you and Petitier ran into problems,' said Knox.
'There are more serious problems with the theory than that it trod on toes, unfortunately,' said Franklin. He took a final puff of his cheroot, stubbed it out in the glass ashtray, tiny embers scattering. 'Ergot doesn't grow with any dependability, for one thing, and rarely in the kind of quantities they'd have needed. Extracting LSD is complex and precarious. Experiences would have been decidedly mixed. Some celebrants would have got sick or even died; others wouldn't have noticed anything at all. Besides, the Greeks were intimately familiar with drugs and their effects. They mixed their wine with all kinds of potent herbs. They used hemp and opiates regularly. Is it likely that so many highly intelligent and experienced people could have got stoned without realising it? And if they had realised it, would they truly have considered it the great numinous centrepiece of their lives?'
'Opiates and hemp give very different experiences than LSD,' said Knox.
'You sound just like Petitier,' smiled Franklin. 'He was certain he'd found the answer. As far as he was concerned, there was only one question to answer: how they prepared the potion with the technology available to them.'
Knox pushed to his feet and took both their glasses back to the drinks cabinet for a refill. 'Don't tell me,' he said, returning to the chairs. 'That's why you were really in trouble? You and Petitier searching for the secret of kykeon?'
Franklin shrugged acknowledgement as he took back his glass. 'We tried everything you could imagine. LSD, LSA, LSM and other such derivatives of ergot, all mixed up with opiates, marijuana, magic mushrooms and lord knows what else. We convinced ourselves it was serious and bold academic research. That we were pioneers!' He threw back his head and laughed heartily. 'We'd write up notes afterwards. Petitier insisted on that. It was utter gibberish, of course. We were kidding ourselves. The truth is, we were young men having fun. Too much fun.'
'Too much?'
He raised his glass in a wry toast. 'I began craving it every night. LSD isn't addictive; nor is hemp. But others of our ingredients were. My left hand began to tremble. I could feel my concentration wavering. I lost interest in things that had once compelled me. I was aware of all this, but I didn't know what to do about it.' He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. 'That was when I met Maria. It's one of the reasons I fell for her so hard, I suspect. Self-preservation. She was my lifeboat.' His expression softened, his gaze lengthened. 'Have you someone like that in your life? Someone who makes you want to do absurd things for them?'
'Yes,' said Knox.
'Keep good hold of them.'
'I intend to.' He put down his glass. 'So you met your wife-to-be and stopped taking drugs. What about Petitier? Presumably if your drug use was known about, his was too.'
Franklin nodded. 'The French School couldn't ignore it any longer, not after the scene he made at the Evans lecture, because he was roaring drunk at the time. And so he left. The irony is that his ideas have since gained traction. I think most people now accept that there was something in the kykeon. For one thing, celebrants described their experiences in such physical terms. They talked about sweating, about getting the cramps. They gave the impression that it was an ordeal as much as it was an ecstasy. Take my word for it: that's exactly like acid. It feels as though your soul is being torn from your body. The heart of the word intoxication is "toxic", after all; drugs are poisons, only in smaller doses.'
'It must have been a hell of a shock for you when Petitier reappeared,' said Knox. 'After all that time trying to bury your misspent youth, I mean.'
'Yes,' agreed Franklin. But there was something in his tone that made Knox look curiously at him. 'Oh, it was a shock, all right,' insisted Franklin. 'It's just, I've been thinking a great deal about it recently, and perhaps it shouldn't have been.'
'How do you mean?'
'It's one of the hazards of being an archaeologist here in Greece that farmers and other landowners keep pestering you with the magnificent treasures they're certain are buried on their properties, which they'll happily sell you for a very reasonable sum.'
'We have them in Egypt too,' smiled Knox. 'Amazing how rarely they find anything exciting on good agricultural land.'
'Quite. It was part of Petitier's job to answer such letters. He used to bring some of them back to the house, to give us all a laugh. But he'd visit Crete quite often too, and check some of the more promising leads out. And then he came into some money, I remember. His grandmother died; he celebrated with champagne.'
'What a charmer,' said Knox. 'So you think one of these letters may have alerted him to a real Minoan site; and that he bought it with his inheritance?'
'It's possible, don't you think? After all, he'd pretty much burned his academic bridges here; no one else was likely to employ him. And it would have been just like him to sulk off into the wilderness, vowing never to return; or not until he could prove himself right, at least, and all his critics wrong.'
III
Edouard paced back and forth downstairs, Nadya's screams jolting through him like electric shocks. He was a coward. He knew that for sure now. He'd always suspected it, of course, despite fond daydreams of himself as one of those quiet, understated men whose heroism only appeared at the hour of greatest need. But that hour was now, and his heroism was nowhere to be seen.
She shrieked again. His heart went out to her, as it would to any fellow human in such pain. How long could it go on? Her scream dissolved into sobs and pleas. He didn't know which was worse to listen to. But one thing was for sure: it was better to be down here listening, then up there, having it done to him.
Curiously, he'd shown a moment of boldness earlier; though of course that had been before the torture had started. After the delivery boy had brought the mobile phone, Mikhail had come inside and put it down on the arm of the settee, then forgotten about it. Edouard, frantic to do something for his family, had pocketed it and taken it to the loo, had sent his brother a text message asking for a contact number for his friend Viktor. He'd quickly grown fearful that Mikhail would notice the mobile was missing, however, so he'd hidden it down the side of the settee, where no one was likely to find it unless they looked, but where it could easily have fallen by accident.
The bedroom door opened. Zaal came out, leaned over the balcony. 'Oi!' he called out. 'Mister Nergadze wants a bottle of vodka and some glasses.'
Edouard looked at him sickly. 'You want me to go up there?'
'Unless you've got a teleporter.' The door closed again. Edouard went to the kitchen, pulled a new bottle from the freezer, found glasses in the cabinet. Another shriek pierced the air. He closed his eyes and waited for silence. What had he become involved in? There could be no excuse for this, no penance. It was an ineradicable stain upon his soul.
'About time,' grunted Zaal, when he took in the vodka. 'Thirsty work, this.'
'Put it on the dressing table,' said Mikhail.
He glanced at Nadya, he couldn't help himself. Her face was white, her cheeks glazed with tears, her jaw and chest with vomit. He caught the smell and saw her hand in the same moment, and the bile rose in his own throat, he dropped the glasses and the vodka and turned and sprinted back out onto the landing then to the nearest loo, but not quickly enough, the pale acidic mush spattering the floor and the seat and porcelain sides, his stomach cramping a second and then a third time. He felt it dribbling down his cheeks and chin, onto his clothes. He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist.
There was laughter behind him. He turned to see Mikhail and Zaal in the doorway. 'Christ, that stinks,' said Mikhail.
He felt dizzy and weak, but he pushed himself up all the same. 'I'm not built for this kind of thing.'
'Clean this up. And yourself too.
' He shook his head. 'You should have more self-respect.'
The vomiting had left Edouard weary, yet it had cleared his head and taken the edge off his fear too. He realised with an almost abstract curiosity that, for this moment at least, he felt unburdened by anxiety. Was that all courage was? he wondered. The absence of fear? He stood there a moment, half-expecting the sensation to pass, but it didn't. Almost as an experiment, he went downstairs to the kitchen for a bucket and mop, surreptitiously retrieved the mobile phone too. Back upstairs, he closed and locked the bathroom door, turned on both basin taps. A slight chill in his forehead, a tightness in his chest, a shiver rippling gently through him. His window was growing short. It was now or never.
He turned on the mobile, clasped it against his chest to muffle its noises. His brother had replied with a contact number. The mobile was pay-as-you-go; it barely had enough credit for local calls, let alone international ones. He knew his debit card details by heart, however. He topped up the account, punched in Viktor's number, ever more aware of the risk he was taking. The Nergadzes would find out about this eventually; and it was a matter of pride with them that no one crossed them and got away with it.
'This is Viktor,' said a man. 'Who's this?'
'Edouard Zdanevich,' whispered Edouard, fearful of being overheard, despite the running taps. 'We met once at my brother Tamaz's house.'
'Yes,' said Viktor. He sounded wide awake, even though it was well into the early hours in Georgia. 'He told me you might call. What can I do for you?'
Edouard hesitated, uncertain how to start. 'It's my wife and children,' he said. 'They're in danger.'
'You're calling me about your wife and children?'
'The Nergadzes have them,' murmured Edouard. 'They're using them as hostages.'
'Hostages? For what?'