by Tom Harper
Two piggy eyes stared at him down the barrel of a fat pink snout. The pig tossed its head; then, with a reproachful snort, went back to feeding itself.
On the far side of the clearing the swineherd was on his feet. 'Do you forget something?'
Grant scrambled to his feet and dusted himself off. Half his face was caked with earth and his hand bled where he'd scratched it on a rock. 'The tablet — with writing and painting. You only found one piece?'
'One piece, yes.'
'And that was the piece that your cousin stole.'
'Yes.'
Grant took a deep breath, tasting the dry dirt on his tongue. 'Tell me: was the tablet broken when you found it? Or was it complete? Whole?'
The Greek looked puzzled by the question. 'One piece. We find only one piece.'
'Yes. But…' Grant unbuttoned his shirt pocket and pulled out Pemberton's photograph. He thrust it into the Greek's startled hands. 'Is this what you found?'
The swineherd stared at it. The double-exposure had left the image blurred and indistinct, but the outline of the tablet was clear enough.
'Well?'
The Greek shook his head. 'We find one piece. This is only half.'
* * *
Reed pushed up his glasses again. 'As you know, the Iliad and the Odyssey drew on an established story cycle of the Trojan war. They dealt with specific episodes — the rage of Achilles, the homecoming of Odysseus. But once Homer had become so successful, other would-be poets also tried their hand at the Trojan war. Particularly, they wanted to fill in the gaps between Homer, so that eventually the whole tale of Troy — from the abduction of Helen to the final homecomings of the Greek victors — would be set in epic poetry. It's hack work, of course, which is presumably why the texts haven't survived. No one believes that Hamlet would have been improved by five more plays on the subject of Danish medieval history.'
He looked at Muir. 'The Aethiopis is the long-lost sequel you wanted to the Iliad. It describes Achilles' final battle and death. And…' He ran his finger along the cramped lines of Greek, mouthing the words to himself. 'What happens next. "They lay out Achilles' corpse. His mother, the sea-nymph Thetis, arrives with the Muses and mourns her son. Then she snatches him up from the pyre and carries his body to the White Island."'
His finger seemed to tremble as it hovered over the page, but his face glowed with amazement. 'Of course. The White Island.'
Sixteen
Paleo Faliro, Athens
They were back in the hotel, eating food that looked suspiciously like the previous night's leftovers. There were more guests there that evening, though few enough for their tables still to be spaced well apart, a far-flung archipelago in the empty sea of the dining room.
'The White Island was a sort of Greek Valhalla, a place where dead heroes went to enjoy the afterlife,' Reed explained.
'I thought that was the Elysian Fields,' said Grant. He was pleased to have some classical knowledge to offer, even if it was something he'd picked up from a girl on the Champs-Elysees in newly liberated Paris. He waited for Reed to acknowledge his contribution.
Instead, the professor just looked cross. 'Well, yes.' He jabbed his fork so hard at a piece of meat that the tines chimed on the plate. 'To be honest, Greek conceptions of the afterlife were a little imprecise. The popular version that's come down to us — Hades for the torments of the damned, the Elysian Fields for eternal bliss — is a relatively late refinement of the scheme. It probably owes as much to our desire to project back our own ideas of heaven and hell. Certainly in Homer, the Iliad in particular, there's no concept of the afterlife as an ongoing business. Immortality comes from the deeds you do in your lifetime and the glory you achieve. All that survives when you die is a shadow, a grey facsimile of the man you were.'
'So where does the White Island fit in?' asked Muir.
Reed frowned. 'Actually, cosmologically speaking it's a bit of an anomaly. There are a few analogous ideas: the Isles of the Blest that Pindar describes, which are a sort of insular Elysian Fields. The Garden of the Hesperides, where the golden apples of life were kept, was also thought to be on an island at the edge of the world, though they're not quite the same thing. But geographically, the White Island was always thought to be somewhere in the Black Sea.'
'Why there?'
'For the Greeks, the earth was a flat disc bounded by a great, cosmic river flowing round the circumference — the Oceanus. The Mediterranean was the axis across the middle. Passing through the straits of Gibraltar brought you into the Oceanus to the west; going out through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea took you out on the east side.' He leaned forward. 'The Black Sea was beyond the limits of the ancient Greeks' compass. It was the edge of the world, a no man's land where the realm of men and the realms of gods dissolved into each other. Naturally, anything you couldn't locate within the known world you assumed would be there. Especially if it had mythic or spiritual associations.' His thick eyebrows tilted towards each other as he saw the look on Marina's face. 'You disagree?'
'The Black Sea.' She looked around the table, as if baffled that they didn't understand her meaning. 'Don't you see the connection? Maybe it wasn't just geographical convenience that made the Greeks put the White Island there. So much of Odysseus's wanderings seem to take place in the Black Sea, but there's no reason for him to be there. It's not on his way home.'
'It's probably a later story that's been interpolated into the myth.'
'But what if it isn't? What if the White Island was a real place, a lost shrine or temple for dead heroes? Odysseus must have had a reason for sailing east when the home he was desperate to return to lay to the west. Perhaps he went there to deposit Achilles' armour at this temple on the White Island.'
Jackson put down his beer and stared at her. 'I'm sorry — are you saying that Odysseus was a real guy?'
'Of course he wasn't,' said Muir. 'We won't get anywhere chasing after myths and legends.' He turned to Reed. 'How did you get on with translating the tablet, before our Greek siren started leading you off on wild-goose chases?'
'I've got a rough idea of the characters.' Reed unfolded a piece of paper. It was almost completely covered by a large grid of cabalistic symbols, about a hundred in total. Some were linked by arrows; others had question marks and notes scrawled in the margin beside them. 'A few of them are a bit doubtful, but those tend to be less frequently occurring anyway.' He looked at Grant. 'Do you still have Pemberton's photograph?'
Grant fished it out and passed it across the table. 'You can't make out the symbols on that. It's too blurred.'
'Mmm,' said Reed, not really listening.
Muir sparked a cigarette. 'So — you've got the alphabet. What next?'
'Hmm?' Reed didn't look up. 'It's not necessarily an alphabet, you know. Broadly speaking, there are three ways to represent language on paper. The most exact is alphabetic. Each letter represents one sound of the language. That makes it possible to spell out just about anything you can think of saying. Tremendously powerful and flexible — but, from a historical point of view, a relatively recent innovation.'
'How recent?'
'A shade over two and a half thousand years ago, in its final form. Here in Greece. The ancient Greek alphabet was the first completely phonetic alphabet in the world. Arguably, it was the key that unlocked the extraordinary flowering of civilisation that followed in the next four hundred years. Previous forms of writing were crude, ungainly systems. Words were passive receptacles, good for record keeping but not much else. The Greek alphabet was the first one to go beyond it, to make the written word an exact copy of the thoughts in your head. Instead of being backward-looking and static, writing became this wonderful tool for expanding the mind's reach.
'But all that came afterwards. Before that, there were two types of symbology: ideographic and syllabic. Ideograms are like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, or modern Chinese characters, where each symbol represents a word or a concept. It's purely graphic; there's no phonic link
between what's written and the spoken word. A syllabic symbol-set, by contrast, breaks up the language into every possible combination of consonant and vowel and represents each one with a symbol. So in English you would have one character for "ba", one for "be", one for "bi", for "bo", for "bu", then for "ca", "ce", "ci" and so on to "zu". The modern Japanese hiragana alphabet uses exactly this system.' He didn't explain how he came to be so familiar with Japanese — there were only a few score people in the world who were cleared to know that piece of history and only one was seated at the table.
Grant did a quick mental calculation, five vowels times twenty-one consonants. 'That would give you a hundred and five characters.'
Reed beamed. 'In English, yes. Which, as chance would have it, is not far off the number of characters I've identified in Linear B. Ninety-three, to be exact. Not enough to be ideograms — though I suspect there maybe a few for particularly common words; too many to be purely alphabetic.'
'Terrific,' said Muir heavily. 'At this rate, in another three years we'll be getting somewhere.'
'Not that it'll do us a hell of a lot of good without the rest of that goddamn tablet.' Jackson sawed at his chicken with uncharacteristic gloom. 'If this jerk-off Greek stole the thing, who knows what happened to the other piece?'
'Actually,' said Reed, 'I think I can guess.'
He looked around the table, pleased with the incredulous reactions he'd drawn.
'What are you, Sherlock Holmes or something?' said Jackson.
'I always preferred to see myself as Mycroft, actually.' Reed picked up the bag that lay by the feet of his chair and pulled out the tablet fragment. It was still inside the napkin he'd wrapped it in the previous evening. 'Let's begin with what we know. According to your swineherd, Belzig found the tablet intact. One of his workers then stole it and somehow it came to a dealer in Athens. By the time Pemberton found it in the shop, one tablet had become two fragments. Somewhere along the line the tablet broke in half. Or, more likely, somebody realised that the tablet would fetch more money in two pieces than in one.'
'So what happened to the other one?'
Reed laid the photograph on the table next to the tablet. 'Do you notice anything odd?'
Grant, Jackson, Marina and Muir craned forward to look. The photograph was so blurred it was hard to make out anything in detail.
'They're not the same.' Reed let the significance of his words settle around the table. 'The fragment in the photograph isn't the same as the piece we found in the shrine on Crete.'
'Then how…?'
'Both pieces must have been in the shop. This is pure conjecture, but I'd suggest that Pemberton only had enough money for one of them. He photographed the other.'
'How come no one saw this before?' Jackson demanded.
Reed shrugged. 'It's a terrible photograph. It's only from spending so long staring at the symbols that I noticed it.'
'Bravo.' Jackson and Marina were staring at Reed like some sort of magician; Muir looked as though he couldn't have cared less. 'So both pieces of the tablet were in the shop, wonderful. But that's not much fucking use if the shopkeeper got a one-way ticket to Auschwitz. Who…'
He broke off. A waiter in a white jacket was gliding through the sea of tables towards them. He stooped down beside Grant and murmured something discreet in his ear.
Grant pushed back his chair. 'Apparently someone wants me on the phone.' He followed the waiter. Four gazes — suspicious, curious, surprised, hostile — followed him out.
At the reception desk the girl on duty deftly slotted a plug into the switchboard and handed him the receiver.
'Mr Grant?' The voice was soft, precise, elongating the unfamiliar syllables.
'This is Grant.'
'Listen to me. There is a car waiting outside your hotel. I advise you to get in it. You have two minutes.'
'Who the hell is this?' Grant demanded.
'Someone you would like to meet. As a token of my good faith, you may bring one companion. You may also bring your gun, if it would reassure you, though you will not need it. Two minutes,' the voice repeated. There was a click and the phone went dead.
Grant waved over one of the bellhops and handed him a drachma note. 'In the dining room, a table with three men and a woman. Tell the woman to come here at once.' He didn't have time to explain, let alone argue it out with Muir and Jackson.
Marina emerged from the dining room a minute later. Grant ran an appraising eye over her. She had made an effort for dinner — heels, nylons, lipstick, the whole show. It didn't quite fit her, he decided. Whereas some women could make themselves unattainable, on Marina it actually made her look more vulnerable, an earnest girl studying to please. Though she certainly looked good enough to draw long, lip-licking stares from the suits and uniforms in the lobby.
'What is this?'
Grant offered her a cigarette, lit it and hooked his arm through hers. 'I'll explain in the car.'
'What car?'
Grant escorted her to the door, feeling the stares they attracted. The doorman opened it with a flourish and they were out on the hotel steps. In the driveway, under an ornamental palm, a long-snouted limousine gleamed black in the sodium light. Its engine throbbed hungrily.
'In we get.'
The car was a Mercedes. There was no one inside except the driver, who said nothing as he ushered them into the opulent interior and slammed the door. When Grant leaned back on the seat he felt a knot against his shoulders. He twisted round. A small hole, about the size of a .38 calibre bullet, had broken the leather and been inexpertly sewn up. Grant poked it with his finger. 'Looks like somebody didn't enjoy the ride.'
The car carried them on, up the empty road that ran along the seafront. Grant had supposed they'd be going to Athens, but the driver ignored all the turnings and continued straight on. Gradually, lights appeared in the night ahead, very high up. At first Grant thought they must be villages on a mountainside; then, feeling foolish, he realised the night had tricked him. They had arrived in Piraeus, the port of Athens, and the lights like strings of pearls in the sky traced the contours of cranes and looming hulls. Grant looked out of the window and stared through the barred gates and barbed-wire fences as they rushed past. It was like being whisked through a museum, each vessel an exhibit picked out in the floodlights. Some sat silent and ghostly; others hived with life as stevedores and longshoremen stripped them of their cargo like ants. A hand-painted banner, in Greek and English, hung limp against a freighter's hull:
USA feeds the patriotic people of Greece.
They turned off the main road and darted through a succession of backstreets and alleys, each tighter than the last, until the car stopped. Grant thought perhaps the Mercedes had taken a wrong turning and couldn't get through, but in an instant the chauffeur had hopped out and was holding open the door. Grant just had time to glimpse boarded-up windows and political slogans daubed on the walls; then he was being ushered down a dank staircase. A metal gate protected the door — necessary, to judge from the dents and scratches in the wood. A battered sign above showed a figure draped in black standing in what looked like a canoe. Flickering neon letters beside it spelled out 'Xapov'.
'Charon,' Marina translated, though Grant could read it for himself. 'The ferryman to the underworld.'
A world of smoke and music collided with Grant as he opened the door. The smoke was thick enough to kill him, a solid cloud that seized his lungs as if he'd been punched in the stomach. It didn't drift or swirl; it just hung in the air under the cones of light cast by the low-hanging lamps. As well as the acrid bite of tobacco, Grant could taste a sweet undercurrent of hashish, and as he looked about him he saw bulbous water pipes on almost every table in the room. The patrons squeezed round them seemed to represent every conceivable stratum of Greek society: ladies in mink and pearls or in rouge and paste diamonds; men in evening dress, in overalls, in disarranged uniforms, in shirtsleeves and threadbare waistcoats all mingled around the nargiles, passing the coile
d hose from one mouth to the next. No one gave Grant and Marina a second look.
On a low stage at the front of the room a five-piece band sat hunched over their instruments: a fiddler, a lute player, a man with a drum tucked under his arm and one with a flat dulcimer-like instrument resting on his knees like a cigarette tray. The only one who even seemed aware of the audience was the singer, a waif-like man in an open-necked black shirt, who stared at the microphone with deep, tubercular eyes. Grant couldn't understand the words, but the song was fast and impossibly sad.
A waiter appeared at his elbow and guided him to the back of the room, where a row of round booths lined the wall. Most of them were crammed with as many people as could jam on to the leather banquettes, but one, near the end, was almost empty. There were only two men inside it: one thickset, bulging in all the wrong places; the other small and light, his grey hair slicked back severely and his moustache carefully trimmed. Though dwarfed by his companion, you could tell from his face and his bearing who obeyed whom. He gestured Grant and Marina to take a seat opposite.
'Mr Grant.' He reached his right hand across the table; his left he kept out of sight, resting on his knee underneath. The skin was dry and waxy. 'I am Elias Molho.'
Seventeen
'Elias Molho. Dealer in Rare Antiquities.' Smoke curled on Grant's tongue as he said it. 'I thought you were dead.'
The grey-haired man smiled and spread his hands. 'I am… as you see me.'
'I heard the Nazis got you.'
Molho's mouth twitched with displeasure. 'Perhaps they did. Or perhaps it was convenient to me that people should think so. So many people vanished — even the Germans could not record them all. I chose to vanish on my own terms.' He reached in his trouser pocket and pulled out a slip of paper. Grant recognised it from the tailor's shop, the one he'd written the hotel address on. 'But now it seems you have been asking questions about me, Mr Grant.'