by Paul Preuss
“So I stayed. I still had hangovers two or three nights a week, but I was getting used to them, and besides, I promised myself I’d become a better person soon. I was scouting a fashion shoot for some German magazine at the archaeological museum in Ayios Nikolaos when I saw Alain. It was the first time I’d laid eyes on him in half a decade…”
“I really am on vacation, my dear, believe it or not.”
“Here’s to your vacation.” Anne-Marie held up her glass and glanced it off Alain’s. “Are you having any fun?” she asked, sipping the cold, astringent white wine.
“I am, actually. I’m quite the amateur scholar these days. Not a great reader, not compared to you, but I’ve taken an interest in old books. As objects, you know. I’m an antiquarian at heart, incapable of ignoring any nearby museum. The one here is small but choice.” They were sitting at a table on the terrace of the class-A Minos Beach, west of town; Alain’s bungalow-by-the-sea was a few steps away. “And you’re a photographer. I’ve seen your work in the magazines. Very, mm, what shall I say? Engaged? Strong. Social commentary with a sense of style. I applaud that. I’m proud of you.”
“Kiss my ass,” she said without humor. “Snapshots of drunken socialites. Their groupies and gigolos and whores. Not-quite-dirty pictures.”
“You earn your living. I earn mine.”
“A good one, it seems. Congratulations.”
“Which makes us grown-ups. Not like before.”
“You don’t look as happy as you claim to be,” she said.
“I have no reason to be unhappy.” His smile was thin; he avoided her eyes.
“Maybe it doesn’t work that way. Maybe what we need is a reason to be happy.”
“And how are we doing in our search?” he asked quietly, looking up.
She resented her brother for being such an attractive man. She wished she could censor her odious comparisons of him with the rich creeps who took up too many of her days and nights. She felt a moment of panic. They were not through their first drink—had they already run out of safe topics?
“Alain! We’ve been looking for you!”
Alain recoiled at the sound of loud American voices across the terrace; he winced and grinned and waved in one fluid suite. “We’re stuck,” he whispered to Anne-Marie, “but not for long. Don’t lose hope.” He pushed his chair back and stood as two men approached from the bar, carrying their drinks. “Anne-Marie, allow me to introduce my friends Howie Thomas, Charlie Phelps…Gentlemen, my sister.”
Both men were in their late twenties and both wearing Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts, their bare feet stuck into boat shoes, but while Howie was short and rotund, with peeling freckled skin and thinning orange hair, Charlie was as tall and slim as Alain, his otherwise unremarkable features made exotic by a tan almost as deep as Anne-Marie’s.
“Happy to meet you, Anne-Marie.” Charlie managed a bow, then turned to Alain. “You didn’t mention you had a sister.”
“If she really is his sister,” Howie muttered, with a pop-eyed leer he evidently meant as a compliment. “My God, Alain, where have you been hiding this gorgeous woman?”
“This is actually the first time we’ve seen each other in years,” Alain said. “We were just catching up.”
“Why don’t you both sit down and tell me where Alain’s been hiding you two?” Anne-Marie had assumed a glassy vivaciousness. “He claimed he was alone.”
“One drink,” said Charlie, his eyes fastened upon her. “We don’t want to break up a family reunion.” He and Howie dragged chairs to the table while Alain signaled a waiter, who hurried to take their orders. “As for us,” Charlie continued, “your brother’s been on board for a week, ever since we ran into him on Rhodes. A bunch of us from San Diego are doing the islands on a charter.” He glanced sidelong at Alain. “Sorry if I’m blowing your cover, but you did call us over.”
Alain shrugged, but Charlie was watching Anne-Marie. “Have you ever done that? A yacht charter? It’s a wonderful way to experience Greece.”
“It must be wonderful,” Anne-Marie replied, lifting her glass and gulping the wine. On how many yachts had she been a passenger? She’d come to think of island-hopping as a good way to avoid experiencing anything.
“Alain has been a terrific guide. To the ruins, you know? And what’s in the museums? We couldn’t have hired…well, that’s a stupid thing to say. He’s a friend.”
“You’re very kind,” Alain whispered.
“What do you do when you aren’t experiencing Greece, Charlie?” Anne-Marie asked brightly.
Howie smirked and bounced in his chair. “He makes money.”
“Oh? You must tell me how you do that.”
Again Howie answered for him. “Real estate, venture capital, oil. Hollywood even. How many people do you know who make money investing in movies? Meet Charlie Phelps. Hardly thinks about it, he’s so rich to begin with. Maybe that’s his secret.”
“You’ve got a big mouth and a weird sense of social chitchat,” Charlie said.
“Oo, ow. Hit me again, Chuck.” Howie rolled his eyes and sucked at his cocktail.
“Probably we ought to get on over to Tracy’s,” Charlie said. “We’ve organized a buffet in Tracy’s bungalow,” he explained to Alain. “You two must join us, after you’ve done your catching up.”
Alain assumed an expression of deep regret, but before he could frame his excuses, Anne-Marie said, “We’d be just delighted.”
By the time they got to the party, Alain had grown sullen. He pushed through the crowd to the makeshift bar in the kitchen, leaving Anne-Marie in the bungalow’s overflowing suite, which was crammed with young American and German and French tourists and a Japanese couple in stylish white linen and the crew of the charter boat. Charlie forced his way through the press in her direction, reaching her just ahead of the nearest hot-eyed Greek sailor.
Half an hour later she still hadn’t been able to shake Charlie and his determination to make investment banking seem romantic. She’d sought safety in numbers, but this was too much, really oppressive.
Almost every time she turned in Alain’s direction he was staring at her, and then suddenly he was leaving. She pushed herself away from Charlie—actually pushed him away, her palm on his chest—pleading a need to use the toilet; once across the room she slipped through the open doors to the little terrace overlooking the beach.
She ran across the lawn and down to the sand. It was pale in the starlight. The sea was a silent, light-sucking void, barely visible or audible where it splashed feebly on the shore. She pulled her espadrilles off her bare feet and let the lukewarm waves lap her toes as she walked toward the lights of the town, which seemed to recede as she approached. Something about the night’s nonevents, just like all the nonevents of her nonlife so far, had tipped her into a slide. She wasn’t even drunk yet, and blackness was descending.
A torrent of recorded bouzouki music from tinny speakers announced a beachfront taverna; it had a trellis with little white lights twined among the grapevines. She paused and looked back toward the hotel and saw Charlie Phelps trudging toward her through the sand.
What followed would forever remain hazy in her mind. She could have run—escaped outright—but she didn’t. Why not? She could have escaped another way, by playing the nitwit, the airhead, the rah-rah girl, stroking his ego and soon enough his dick; she could have stood one more one-night stand and in the morning gotten rid of him. Why not? What she did instead was sit in the taverna and talk to him. And long before the crescent moon had risen over the lifeless sea, she’d agreed to marry him.
To marry him. A man she did not know and, if he’d been described to her before she’d met him, a man she would have avoided. Instead, in response to his passionate arguments, his recitation of his vita and prospects, his conviction that in her he had found his destined mate, she put him off with a cruel promise and sealed it with a practiced kiss and left him there grinning stupidly as the moon rose, having made him swear not to follow her as she
walked back up the beach. She planned to vanish before sunrise.
As she trudged along the beach past the hotel, Alain came out of the darkness and seized her arm. “We must talk,” he said reasonably, even as she struggled against his bruising grip. “There are things we must have done with.”
They did not have done with them. Instead there was a new and more horrible beginning.
“It comes back when I’m dreaming or when I’m daydreaming of other things. Suddenly I’m on that beach again. The moonlight, the struggle. The way he beat me. The rape.”
“What courage you have. What a stupid and insensitive game I’ve been playing.” The last flames fluttered among the coals. Minakis’s worry beads, silent for long minutes, began to click again. “Please accept my apology. Please know that I’ll give you whatever you need to satisfy Alain.”
Anne-Marie nodded wary thanks. “To satisfy Alain I need to see that treasure of yours for myself, take my own pictures.”
“It’s a hard climb, an all-day trip. Let’s talk about it in the morning.”
“You agree?”
“I’ll give you what you want, Anne-Marie.” He pocketed his beads and stood up. He took a candle from the mantelpiece and lit it with a match, then turned to look at her. “I wonder why you haven’t told Peter what you’ve told me. He seems to have great affection for your children.”
“Yes. We were in love before I even knew I was pregnant with Jennifer. A happy ending, it seemed.” Hot tears flooded her eyes. “As illusory as all happy endings. The morning after Alain raped me, even Charlie seemed like a savior.”
“Did you ever think of telling Peter the truth about Carlos? Or Charlie the truth? Before now?”
Anne-Marie pushed away from the table and stood up unsteadily. “I thought about it, when I knew I was suffocating again, when I was ready to do anything to get some air. But I’d lied so persuasively before—I even managed to get myself run over, that night after Alain left me alone, so I could explain the bruises.” She shivered. “Only by a motor scooter. Still…Charlie’s the kind who needs proof.”
“But Peter. Surely you can tell Peter everything. He can only admire you for your determination to recover your son.”
“We’ll see.” Her smile turned into a yawn. “At least he’s not a Greek.”
“This Greek will tell you that a grandmother like Katerina was worth much more than an absent father. A sadalos like John Pendlebury was worth more to me than an absent father.”
“Yet you were eager to know your father.”
“In those days I dreamed he was an English soldier.” Minakis gave her the candle; her blue eyes were liquid in the light of its flame. “Imagine my disappointment if he had turned out to have been an American investment banker—or a Swiss antiquary, for that matter.”
“Don’t you still think about him?”
“What does it matter, after all these years?” He opened his palms, signing helplessness. “Go lie down on the bed, before you fall asleep standing up. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
25
The Sea of Crete rolled in a strong northwest wind. Peter watched the seething blue water come up fast beneath his oval window before land appeared abruptly beneath the wings, dry white and bright yellow; then tires squalled and the Airbus settled heavily to the runway.
Outside the terminal, Peter found a dented gray Mercedes taxi-cab and showed the driver the address of the foundation.
“No problem!” the man said heartily.
“How far is it?” Peter asked.
“Get in,” said the driver.
“I mean, should I find a hotel first? Or can that wait?”
“No problem,” said the driver.
“No problem for me? Or for you?”
“Get in,” the driver said impatiently.
Peter got in.
The foundation was south of town on the road to Knossos, housed in a concrete heap that looked more like a bunker than an office building. The taxi fare was modest. So what if the driver had no English? No problem. Peter tipped him better than he would a New York cabbie and got out, dragging his suitcase and his laptop behind him.
“Peter, good to see you again.” Markos Detorakis grabbed Peter’s hand and punched his shoulder. “And how is Kathleen?”
“Fine, I hear. You know she’s remarried?”
Detorakis was a mathematician Peter had known at Berkeley—not his colleague so much as his ex-wife’s colleague—and a hulk, as tall as Peter but substantially wider, with a luxurious growth of hair on his face that made him look like a slovenly monk. “And you too. I hear you’re a newlywed. How’s your wife? Keeping her happy?”
“I try,” Peter said.
“Good. Good for you.” Detorakis led him down waxed-concrete corridors to a small office with a view of the parking lot. Beyond the parked cars were green vineyards and chalky hillsides.
“Nice,” Peter said politely.
“I like it well enough.” Detorakis shuffled the papers on his desktop, selected a couple of pages, and held them out. “Here’s what I could find by your guy, what’s in English.”
“Thanks for doing the search.”
“I should thank you. This guy Minakis is big. Wish I’d known about him before now.”
Peter glanced through the photocopied pages, articles from Nature and Reviews of Modern Physics and Scientific American—old-fashioned typeface, words and diagrams so close-set as to make a jeweler squint, having to do with Schrödinger’s cat and Wigner’s friend and the arrow of time. Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen. Wheeler and Feynman and Cramer.
“This stuff is over ten years old,” Peter said, looking up. “No wonder I couldn’t find it on the net.”
“Notice the hardware.”
“I wouldn’t call it hardware.” The diagrams in the old papers were precursors of the device in the sketches Minakis had left for him. “Thought experiments, maybe.”
“Then maybe you know we have a pretty good laser-optics lab here, one of the best in Europe. Within the past six months the director has signed off on femtosecond lasers, other stuff I couldn’t describe, all of it charged to an account that doesn’t show up on anybody’s budget. Want to guess who?”
“Minakis.” Peter slid the papers back onto the desk. “How did you learn about it?”
“Asked. It’s no secret, even if Minakis shies from publicity. Director says it’s his private project, fully endowed by Andwin-Zurich. FORTH have no liability. Any unspent funds remain with us.”
“What’s his address? Don’t tell me Athens.”
Detorakis winced. “A yacht: La Parisienne, home port Piraeus. Anyway, you can see why the foundation is happy to help him—happy enough to lend him a government account number and address. Even helpful with the metropolitan.”
“What’s the metropolitan?”
“He’s the head of the Orthodox Church here. It seems Minakis has been permitted to use certain chapels for scientific purposes.”
“Where are they?” Peter asked.
“Yes, that might answer your question.” Detorakis settled his bulk into his armchair and began stroking his beard. “You have two sites to choose from, unfortunately: a mountain called Ambelakia and a peak near Dikti, thirty miles apart and neither of them easy to get to.”
“Which would you choose?”
“I never heard of this guy until you called.” Detorakis gave him a gnomish look. “Flip a coin.”
Peter fished a fifty-drachma piece out of his pocket. He flipped it and called, “Heads Ambelakia, tails Dikti,” and slapped it on his wrist. “Ambelakia it is.”
“Not today,” said Detorakis, “and not in those clothes. Let’s get you a hotel, get you some hiking gear, rent you a car. You’ve got a trip ahead of you.”
Anne-Marie rose through layers of dream imagery, hovering over mountain precipices, floating through sunlit clouds, finally awakening beneath cotton sheets and embroidered wool. The whitewashed ceiling above her was hazy-bright with reflected la
te-morning light. Until the last shreds of her dream had dissolved, she didn’t know where she was.
She was alone in Minakis’s bed, in Minakis’s house in the mountains of Crete. Last night she had talked to him as she had never talked to anyone. The thought of what she had told him made her shiver. She kicked off the sheets and put her bare feet on the cold flagstone floor and pulled on a thin Japanese robe. She went to the curtained arch that divided the bedroom from the rest of the house and peered out.
The outer room was empty, full of shadows. On the table in front of the cold hearth, a piece of paper was bright in the diffuse light. She picked it up and read it.
“I have gone up to the chapel. Join me if you wish. If not, I look forward to seeing you this evening.”
She pictured him at work, fiddling with this and fiddling with that, as fussy about his gear as she was about hers when she was calibrating a new lens. Better to leave him in peace for a few hours. She wished she hadn’t slept so long, but she’d desperately needed the rest. And he had promised to give her what she wanted.
She got oranges and honey from the wall niche and fresh yogurt from the new refrigerator. After she ate, she dressed and took her cameras and went exploring.
She passed a young woman in black sweeping her courtyard and three men discussing how to reassemble a motor scooter that lay in pieces at their feet. They all stopped and stared as she passed, exclaiming, “Kalimera, kyria,” eager to talk, but she smiled and mumbled and kept on walking. Once upon a time she had made a career of photographing more-or-less real people, and these were certainly real people, but nevertheless she felt she had already met them on postcards. Ayia Kyriaki no longer looked quite like the village of Minakis’s tale, a village seen from a child’s point of view, but instead like a grubby miniature of that place. The town square was deserted except for a couple of Nordic tourists on Louloudakis’s terrace. Avoiding them, she went into the church.
The church was empty inside, dark except for the dusty light that sifted through the slit windows at each end. Oil lamps flickered in front of icons with patinaed tin tamata pinned to their frames. The desiccated wood of the iconostasis could have been a hundred years old.