Black Sand

by William Caunitz

  Yiotas was enjoying his solitary pleasures when a feeling of dread came over him. He sensed a presence lurking behind him, watching him. He tensed, ready, if need be, to leap up and run. Continuing to stir the dessert, he began to cast his eyes from side to side without moving his head in an attempt to see who was standing there. He heard movement and saw the torso of a man come from behind him and go around to the front of his table. A chair scraped back. The stranger sat down. Yiannis continued to mix the meli. When he had steeled himself, Yiannis shyly raised his eyes up to look at the intruder. He blanched and suddenly felt sick to his stomach.

  “Hello, Yiannis,” Colonel Pappas said, pulling a spoon from the glass in the center of the table and scooping up Yiannis’s meli. “I love this, it’s my favorite.” Licking the spoon, he added, “How have you been, Yiannis? I haven’t seen you – let me see, it’s been over ten years. I arrested you for a payroll robbery in Plaka.”

  Yiannis Yiotas had a sudden urge to go to the bathroom. “Hello, Major,” he said, forcing courage into his voice.

  “It’s Colonel now. What a pleasant surprise, running into you at George’s.”

  “I eat here a lot, Colonel.”

  A raw edge came into Pappas’s voice. “I know.” He picked up the pitcher and poured wine into one of the empty glasses on the table. He offered the copper wine pitcher to Yiannis, who held up his glass and uneasily watched the colonel pour retsina.

  Pappas put down the pitcher and laughed. “I read in the newspaper this morning about a prison riot in New York City. A place called Rikers Island. The prisoners were upset because there were not enough telephones for them to use.” He scooped up more meli. “Can you believe that? Telephones for prisoners. They even have televisions on this Rikers Island.”

  Yiannis laughed nervously. “I can’t believe that, Colonel. It sounds more like a hotel.”

  Pappas drank wine. “It doesn’t sound like a Greek prison, does it, Yiannis?”

  “No,” Yiannis snapped.

  “Here we know how to treat prisoners. We make them pay for their clothes and food. We don’t go out of our way to make their miserable lives easy. Isn’t that true, Yiannis?”

  “Yes, sir.” Yiannis’s legs were shaking.

  “How old are you now?”

  “Forty-six.”

  “Forty-six,” Pappas echoed solemnly. “You’re lucky that you have given up your old way of life. Prison would be difficult for you now, very difficult.”

  “Yes, sir, it would be,” Yiannis said, sliding his hands under the table and grabbing his knees in an attempt to stop the shaking.

  “It’s too bad that your boss got himself murdered,” Pappas said, licking the spoon’s underside.

  “Boss? What boss?”

  “Orhan Iskur.”

  “I didn’t work for him. I used to run errands for him sometimes, that’s all. I know nothing about his business.”

  Pappas spread his hands in disappointment. “Yiannis, it’s not nice to lie to a police colonel. It upsets me.”

  “I never worked with him, I swear.”

  Waving his spoon at the thief, Pappas said, “Let me tell you a story. Sixteen years ago in London, two men with Greek passports tried to sell a fake antiquity to an American. The American happened to be a dealer, and he recognized the statue as not being genuine. He called the police, and the two men were arrested. A few days later, for reasons we’ll never know, this American decided to drop all charges against the two men. Constable Wade, who was the arresting officer, was a conscientious policeman, so he went back to his station and prepared an Interpol intelligence report. The duplicate copy remained at his station; the triplicate went into the central file, and the original made its way to Paris, where it remained until an inquiry was recently made by the Hellenic Police Department.” He stabbed the spoon at the thief’s sweating face. “Yiannis Yiotas and Orhan Iskur were the two men arrested.”

  “I forgot all about that,” Yiannis blurted. “It was a mistake, I swear. We didn’t know that it was a fake.”

  “Of course you didn’t.” Pappas drank some more retsina. He lowered the glass and made wet circles on the paper tablecloth. “Did Iskur have a mistress?”

  The thief’s eyes widened. “How did you know about her?”

  Pappas smiled. “Men like him have either a mistress or a young boy.”

  Yiannis was so relieved at the shift in direction that he took a deep breath and went on to tell Pappas about Nina Pazza. A tall, strikingly handsome woman, Iskur had met her in Rome ten years ago, when she was sixteen. He fell in love with her and brought her back to Athens with him, installing her in a fashionable apartment on Aristodimou Street.

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  “Nothing, really. I used to chauffeur her on some of her shopping trips. But she never talked to me about anything. Just park here or there and wait for me.”

  Yiannis Yiotas’s legs still would not stop shaking.

  Pappas looked hard into the thief’s eyes. “Why don’t we talk about the Voúla massacre?”

  Yiannis’s mouth fell open; he began to tremble violently.

  “We know it was you who got the car that was used by Cuttler and Simmons. We also know that it was you who followed officers Tasos Lefas and Lakis Rekor and learned their routines, and it was you who took the photographs of the officers to give to their killers,” Pappas lied, following nothing more than an educated guess.

  Panic filled Yiannis Yiotas’s face, and Pappas knew that his dart had hit the bull’s-eye. He had to keep up the pressure, not give the thief time to think, increase his panic, and then when there was no hope, to throw him a lifesaver. “You’re going to spend the rest of your miserable life in prison.” Then he smiled at the thief. Yiannis was shaking so much that Pappas thought he might faint. Now was the time to play nice guy. “Of course, if you cooperate, we might be able to work something out so that you don’t have to go to jail, maybe not even be arrested.”

  Yiannis clutched the lifeline. “You won’t arrest me?”

  “I’m not interested in you. I want the people who planned Voúla. If you tell me everything you know, I’ll see to it that you don’t go to prison.”

  Yiannis Yiotas covered his face with his hands and wept. People at nearby tables turned and looked at him in open astonishment.

  Pappas needed an admission of guilt. “You didn’t know why Iskur wanted you to do those things, did you?”

  “No. I swear, I didn’t know, I didn’t know.”

  “It was you who made the arrangements with the taxi driver to pick up Aldridge Long, the American, at the airport and drive him to Iskur’s shop, wasn’t it?”

  Yiannis absently nodded his head. “Yes.”

  “Were you with Iskur when Long arrived at the shop?”

  “No. He made me leave before he got there.”

  “Had you ever met Long?”

  “No.”

  Pappas glanced around the taverna. This was not the place to conduct an interrogation. He had opened the door a little; he’d open it a lot more on the top floor of 173 Leoforos Alexandras. He mentioned to the waiter. “My friend would like to pay the bill.”

  Watching the waiter add up the tab, Yiannis happened to notice that the wall clock inside the butcher shop read six minutes after midnight. It was now Tuesday, a bad luck day.

  8

  Teddy Lucas walked out of his building’s lobby and stopped. The air was crisp and vibrant with the sounds of Manhattan. He looked up at the green canopy of trees and saw Ajax perched on a tree trunk. He moved jauntily down the steps. In a nearby playground, toddlers dashed under the shower’s gentle spray while their mothers relaxed on benches next to it.

  Lucas turned right, moving onto the wide concrete path that wound through Stuyvesant Town’s carefully maintained shrubs, down the steps, and onto the sidewalk, which led to the city streets.

  “Teddy,” a familiar voice called out.

  He stopped, aware of the imm
ediate pounding of rage inside his head. He turned and saw her stepping out from behind a tree, a nervous smile on her lips.

  He warned himself to stay calm.

  “Hello, Teddy,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean to ambush you, but you wouldn’t answer any of my calls.”

  He glared at his ex-wife. Heavy brown leather sandals, loose-fitting Indian cotton dress, long hair swept up behind her head with a leather thong. No makeup, pallid skin, and dark circles under her otherwise pretty eyes. He tried in vain to recall some intimate detail of the life they had once shared. Only hurt and deceit came out of the grave of his memory.

  “What do you want, Ellen?”

  “Just to talk.”

  He heard a slight catch in her voice and found himself walking in silence beside her to a bench. Ellen sat, slapped the folds of her dress between her spread legs. Watching kids run under the spray, she said, “We wanted children once, remember?”

  Stay cool, he thought. “Why don’t you get to the point?” A memory floated into his head. The sad look of disappointment on his father’s face when he announced his plans to marry Ellen. “But she’s not Greek,” his dad had said as his mother squeezed her husband’s arm in a mute plea for silence.

  “As you can see, I’m back in New York.”

  “I’m busy, Ellen. What’s the problem?”

  “Well, you see, I’m working in this boutique on Columbus Avenue and I’ve gone back to college. I’m majoring in psychology. I don’t get home till eleven at night and I have to be up at six to make an eight o’clock class.” She shifted uneasily on the bench, fanned her calves nervously with the hem of her dress, and slapped it back down between her legs. “I have a tiny apartment in Bensonhurst; it’s the pits. My life would be so much easier if I could live in Manhattan, but I can’t afford the rents. So, I was wondering” – she ran her finger over the design on her dress – “if you might let me come and stay with you. I’d sleep on the couch and pay my share of the rent. I’d cook and clean; it’d just be until I got on my feet again.” She seemed to run out of words and looked down at her lap, her ears bright pink from embarrassment.

  He laughed and said, “You always did have a big pair of balls. You run off with another man and then reappear five years later asking to move back in because you can’t afford Manhattan rents. Where’s your boyfriend?”

  “Gone. He left me for a nineteen-year-old.”

  He shrugged and looked away from her. “You’re out of my life. I have no intention of letting you worm your way back into it.”

  “Teddy …”

  “Listen to me, lady,” he said, his angry eyes boring into hers. “I married you because I loved you. And I was a pretty good husband.” He stopped and frowned. “I admit, I did spend more time at work than I did with you. So maybe I didn’t think enough about what you needed.”

  She nodded in embarrassed agreement.

  “You wanted to join the community school board, so I didn’t object. And that was how you met the love of your life …”

  “Teddy, please …”

  “Listen,” he said, pressing a finger against her lips. “You left me for a forty-year-old creep with a beard who never worked a day in his life. He’d mastered the art of stroking colleges and corporations out of grants so he could spend his worthless life studying some language that only two people in the world speak. Well, you made your choice – live with it.” He got up to leave.

  “Your damn male Greek ego won’t let you forget that I left you for another man, will it?” she snarled.

  “You’re wrong, lady. I could have forgiven unfaithfulness. But what I won’t forgive, what I can’t forgive, is that you used to go to his apartment and wash his goddamn socks. That kind of commitment I’ll never forgive.” He turned and moved off to the sounds of her sobs.

  At ten minutes before ten o’clock that beautiful morning, the blue Buick slid into the curb in front of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Lucas tossed the vehicle I.D. onto the dashboard and he and Vassos got out of the car.

  Katina was waiting for them inside the vestibule. She was wearing a pink linen suit, bone-colored sling-back shoes. Her long legs were bare. “Good morning,” she said cheerfully, and turned to lead them down the gleaming mahogany staircase into the basement work area. Walking into her office, she picked up a sheet of paper from her desk and handed it to Lucas. “The book dealers that I’ve contacted.”

  Lucas studied the list. “Widener Books? Widener?” He looked at Vassos. “Where do we know that name from?”

  Vassos leaned forward in his chair, suddenly intense. “Belmont E. Widener?”

  Lucas’s voice went up several notches as it came to him. “Hey, he was the complainant who had a book stolen by one of McKay’s boys in ’seventy-seven.”

  “The book by Aristarchus,” Vassos said.

  “Aristarchus of Samothrace?” Katina said, crossing her legs.

  “Dunno,” Lucas said, and proceeded to tell her everything that he could remember about the 1977 robbery. “Have you heard of this guy, Aristarchus?”

  Her smile bore a trace of impatience. “Yes, Teddy, I’ve heard of him.”

  “Fill us in, will you?” Lucas asked.

  “Aristarchus lived between 217 and 145 B.C. He was one of Alexandria’s great librarians,” she began, going on to tell them how Ptolemy had ordered that a complete collection of Greek literature be gathered and stored in the great library. This had never been done before so the librarians had to develop catalogs of the text to be copied, and then they had to rent or borrow the texts from other kings so that the scribes of Alexandria might copy them. In order to protect against forgeries, the librarians were forced to develop new principles of textual criticism. In order to properly copy Homer, for instance, the librarians had to first decide which text passages were accurate transcriptions of oral recitations and not merely the writings of some unknown actor or scribe. They would study Homer’s work and then write commentaries indicating which verses they considered fraudulent or corrupted by scribal emendation. Aristarchus used marginal notes to point out what he considered irregularities or spurious verses.”

  “Where were these notes made?” Lucas asked.

  “On the text itself,” she said. “He developed an entire system of marginal scholia.”

  “Then Aristarchus, after he made his notations on the original text, would write up his report, which you call a commentary,” Lucas said.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “Were these commentaries made part of the original text?” Lucas asked.

  “No, they weren’t,” she said. “Since they were meant to be read only by scholars, they were prepared in separate texts. The librarians would hold weekly meetings to discuss the commentaries and try to agree on what changes the scribes should make in the texts that were being copied.”

  “Then it’s safe to assume that Aristarchus prepared commentaries on the Iliad?” Lucas asked.

  “On the Iliad and the Odyssey. Aristarchus was fascinated by Homer and he became the library’s resident Homeric scholar.” She got up, smoothed her skirt. “Would either of you like a cup of coffee?”

  “No, thank you,” Lucas said, suddenly aware of a strong aroma of coffee.

  Vassos shook his head.

  She left the office and returned shortly holding a delicate cup and saucer.

  Lucas waited until she was seated to ask, “Katina, if I remember correctly, the casket-copy was stored in the library during the time Aristarchus wrote his commentaries.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” she said, taking a sip from her cup.

  Her lipstick left a thick impression around the rim.

  “If I were Aristarchus and I was preparing a commentary on the Iliad, I would certainly use the casket-copy as an authoritative and established text.”

  “I do not see how he could have failed to do such a thing,” Vassos said, awaiting her pronouncement.

  She returned the cup to the saucer and placed them on her
desk. She picked up a pencil and began tapping it over the green blotter. “Yes, I believe that he would have done that.”

  “And if he did,” Lucas said, feeling the strong glow of excitement stirring in his chest, “then he would have made marginal notes on the casket-copy.”

  His comments stilled her hand. She let the pencil fall, regarding him with newfound respect. “I agree with your reasoning, Teddy.”

  Lucas continued: “Aristarchus’s commentary, along with the marginal notes that he made on the casket-copy, would go a long way toward authenticating Alexander’s Iliad.”

  Vassos leaned back in his chair, his eyes drifting over to a poster on the wall of a gondola gliding down a Venetian canal.

  “There’s a flaw in your reasoning,” she said.

  “What?” Lucas demanded.

  Vassos kept his stare fixed on the shimmering black canal flowing under the stone bridge.

  “Aristarchus prepared commentaries on other authors besides Homer. The commentary that was stolen from Belmont Widener in 1977 might have been on any number of texts, not necessarily the casket-copy,” she said.

  “Did many commentaries survive?” Lucas asked.

  “Perhaps ten out of six hundred,” she said, reaching for her cup.

  A summer breeze swept across Manhattan, seasoning the air with the salty smell of two rivers. Widener Books was quartered in a slender, five-story building jammed between two glass skyscrapers on Seventeenth Street between Park Avenue South and Broadway. The building’s cream-colored facade was brightened by window boxes overflowing with summer blooms. Muses and caryatids garnished the roof’s balustrade.

  Belmont E. Widener was waiting for them. A man of medium stature with pointy ears, he had sagging ivory bags under deep-set eyes and thick wavelets of brown hair swept back over a rather large head. The yellow silk bow tie that he wore was patterned with tiny pink butterflies.

  He rushed forward to greet Katina. “Dr. Wright, what a great pleasure. I could hardly believe my ears when my secretary told me that you were coming to pay us a visit. And with the police, no less.” He clasped his dainty hands to his chest and looked innocently at the policemen.