by Tom Harper
He jumped up and pulled the bell cord. The tram lumbered to a standstill. Grant rose, but Marina stayed seated.
“Not my stop. I’ll see you back at the hotel.”
“Keep your eyes open.”
She lifted her handbag a little. It looked surprisingly heavy—more than the usual lipstick and powder. “I can take care of myself.”
Grant and Reed stepped off and found themselves at the gates of a large white neoclassical building, set back from the street in spacious grounds and surrounded by a high stone wall. A brass plate on the gatepost announced THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ATHENS.
“The place looks half asleep. They might as well have hung out a Do Not Disturb sign.”
“Most of the staff are probably away for the Easter holidays. But with any luck . . .” Reed pumped the doorbell enthusiastically, until a young woman in a gray jersey dress emerged from the house. She eyed them with suspicion—Reed in his outmoded suit and floppy sunhat, Grant in his boots and shirtsleeves—but Reed’s name seemed to have some talismanic power. The mere sound of it turned her hostility into something more like starstruck awe. She led them through the gate and up a hill, through a garden of olive trees, pines, cypresses and oleanders, into the cool of a high-ceilinged hallway.
“I’m afraid the Director is away today, or he would have come to meet you himself. He’d be so honored by your visit, Professor Reed. If you could just sign in the visitors’ book.” She slid the book across the table and held out a pen. Reed signed with a flourish and passed the pen to Grant.
“Do all visitors have to sign in here?” Grant scribbled something meaningless and illegible under Reed’s name, a small piece of subterfuge that had become habit.
“Of course. Even our most esteemed guests.” She flashed Reed an apologetic smile.
“Do you mind if I have a look?”
Grant leafed back through the book. It looked like an artifact in its own right, a relic of the past that had been dusted off and propped back on its shelf. Page after page, row after row of names and dates whose regular spacing gave no hint of the erratic passages of time they represented. Sometimes there were a dozen or more on the same date; more often days or even whole weeks passed without the book being disturbed. Then, just once, something different: two neat ruled lines like a scar across the page, dividing April 1941 from January 1945. Four years, Grant thought. Four years when the world had done its best to tear itself apart. All in the white space between two parallel lines.
On the page before the divide, Grant found what he was looking for. He turned the book to show Reed. “Pemberton was here: 21 March 1941.”
“You knew John Pemberton?”
“We met once. Were you here then?”
She shook her head. “Most of us have only been here since the war.”
Grant thought for a moment. “You said this place funded Pemberton’s digs on Crete. Would you have records of his expenses?”
The girl looked taken aback at the request. She glanced uncertainly at Reed, who gave a reassuring nod. “I can look for you. It may take a little time. If the records are anywhere, they’re probably in the cellar.”
“We’ll be in the library.”
Grant had never been much of a man for libraries; Reed was in his element. While Grant sat by the window and skimmed through a three-week-old copy of The Times, Reed flitted among the shelves, gathering books and piling them on the table like a bird making its nest. Grant glanced at the gold lettering on the spines: Through Basque to Minoan; A Clue to the Cretan Scripts; The Palace of Minos by A. E. Evans, in four table-bending volumes. Grant’s heart sank. There were more books there than you could get through in a year.
“Are you really going to read all of them?”
Reed’s head popped up from behind a particularly forbidding volume. “Maybe. People have been trying for fifty years to crack this particular riddle. In some respects, it makes Ultra look like a bank holiday crossword.”
“Ultra?”
Reed blushed to the roots of his snowy hair. Mumbling something about Muir, he sank back behind the safe rampart of books. Grant reopened his newspaper.
A knock at the door provided a welcome interruption. It was the girl, clutching two dog-eared cardboard folders tied together with string. She put them on the table in front of Grant. The delicate scent of rosewater and lilies wafted down as she reached over him.
“These are the Knossos accounts for the first months of 1941, before the staff evacuated. Are you interested in anything in particular?”
“I want to know if Pemberton bought anything on his last visit to Athens.”
She sat down beside him and turned through the ledger. Across the table, Reed hummed and sucked the end of his pencil.
“There isn’t much for that period. The digging season hadn’t started.” She gave him a sideways glance, obviously uncertain how much he knew about archaeology. “To be honest, I don’t quite know why he stayed on in Crete.”
You’d be amazed, Grant thought. He limited himself to a noncommittal grunt.
“Here’s something.” The sleeve of her dress brushed his arm as she held down the page. “Fifty pounds on 21 March. All it says is ‘Museum Acquisition.’ Signed off by the Director.”
“Does it say where he got it?”
She untied the second file and turned out a jumble of ticket stubs, coupons, requisition forms and receipts. “It’s a bit of a mess. They can’t have had time to file it before the Germans came.” She shuffled the papers in her hands and started dealing them out like a croupier. Despite her schoolmarmish appearance, her nails were painted a vivid red. “No—no—no . . . What’s this?”
She laid a crisp sheet of cream notepaper on top of the pile. The receipt had been written out in thick blue ink, copied in both English and Greek. Late Minoan clay tablet (partial), uncertain provenance. 50 British Pounds. At the top of the page, the letterhead was engraved in flamboyant curlicues: Elias Molho, Dealer in Rare Antiquities. There was an address below.
“He didn’t get that from a flea market.” Grant felt the ridged paper between his finger and thumb. “Do you know where this address is?”
Grant left Reed behind his barricade of books and took a bus downtown. He didn’t have a map, but he had spent enough time in Greece to have picked up the local custom of just asking at every news-stand and kiosk. Gradually the answers that came back changed from occasional nods to a steady pulse of recognition, a sort of human sonar. Soon enough, it guided him to a quiet, gently dilapidated street lined with shops that had seen better days. Many of the buildings were still pocked with bullet holes, though whether Fascist or Communist, domestic or foreign, Grant couldn’t tell. Even the locals had probably lost track. A few children kicked a football against a plane tree at the far end of the street and a scrawny ginger kitten chased its tail on the steps of a defunct bakery. Otherwise it was deserted.
Grant found the address on the paper—number twenty-three. Elias Molho, Dealer in Rare Antiquities was still there, but only in the memory of faded letters above the doorway that no one had bothered to paint out. The shop itself had become a tailor’s. Grant groaned.
He heard the slap of running footsteps behind him. He turned, and saw a man sprinting down the empty street toward him. Two things about him caught Grant’s eye: first that he had no shoes on and second that he was carrying what looked like a bottle of vodka with a rag trailing out of its neck. Grant went for the Webley, but the man barely noticed Grant. He ran straight past him and kept going.
The children, who only a moment earlier had been happily kicking their football, had suddenly vanished. The only men in the street were the fugitive and Grant. Grant didn’t know who he was or why he was running, but he had seen enough similar scenes in the war to know that trouble wouldn’t be far behind. He ran up the steps and stepped smartly into the tailor’s shop, just as an American jeep driven by Greek soldiers veered round the corner.
A stooped old man looked up from his new
spaper as Grant walked in. Racks of suit jackets and flannel trousers gathered dust against the walls. The jeep roared past. “I’m looking for Mr. Molho,” he said in Greek.
The old man gave him a long, penetrating stare.
“Mr. Molho is not here.” He spoke slowly, pronouncing every word. It might just have been his age, but there was a light in his walnut-brown eyes that made Grant suspect there was plenty of life left in him. In the distance he heard the screech of tires, then shouts and a fusillade of shots.
“Do you know where he went?”
“Away.” The old man picked up a measuring tape and a chalk disc, and advanced from behind his counter. “Perhaps you want a suit?” His look said Grant could use one.
“Where did he go?” He edged behind a display table that held a tray full of ties. “I need to find him.”
“He went away,” the tailor insisted. “In the war. Away.”
He flapped the tape measure at Grant, who knew when he was beaten.
“If he does come back, give him this.” There was a pad on the counter. Grant took a pencil and quickly wrote out his name and the address of the hotel in Greek capitals. He thrust it at the tailor, who recoiled and stared at the floor. His nervous hands had twisted the measuring tape into a knotted tangle.
“You are not understanding. He will not come back. He was Evraios. A Jew. He does not come back.”
“A fucking dead end. Literally.” Muir speared a piece of lamb with his fork. Blood and fat dribbled out of the meat. The hotel restaurant was virtually empty. Grant, Reed, Marina and Muir sat in majesty in the center of the grand dining room, heavily outnumbered by the sullen staff who loitered by the kitchen doors, gossiping and smoking.
“She had more luck.” Muir jabbed his knife across the table at Marina. “Flashed her tits at the Minister and found out all sorts of things.”
Marina shot him a look of barely controlled disgust and played with the clasp of her handbag. “There were only four archaeologists issued permits for Minoan or Mycenaean sites in the winter of 1941. One was Pemberton . . .”
“We know that,” Muir interrupted through a mouthful of lamb.
“Two others were Swiss carrying out secondary excavations at Orchomenos. The fourth was a German, Dr. Klaus Belzig, looking at a new site in Cephalonia.”
“Belzig?” Grant shared a look with Marina.
“You know him?” said Muir.
“He was on Crete in the war, looking for Pemberton’s journal. Some of the things he did . . .”
“Sounds like our man. But what the hell was a Kraut doing in Greece before the war?”
“The government was doing everything it could to avoid invasion, right up to the last minute. They didn’t want to give the Germans any excuse.”
“And he was digging in Cephalonia, you said?” Reed looked up from the soggy mass of wild spinach on his plate. “Cephalonia,” he repeated, as if the name held some secret meaning. “Remarkable.”
Muir swung round to Reed. “What’s so bloody marvellous about Cephalonia?”
“Cephalonia is the main island in the group that includes Ithaca. The home of Odysseus. If he took the armor . . .”
“Can we stop chasing fairy tales? If this armor exists, we’re not going to find it guarded by a one-eyed giant and a pair of singing mermaids. How did you get on with the writing on the tablet?”
Reed stared at his plate and toyed with the tendrils of spinach. When he looked up, his eyes were clear as the sky. “I made some progress.”
“How long until you crack it?”
Reed gave a short laugh, so condescending it verged on outright pity. “Some of the best minds in the business have been trying for half a century. It’s going to take me more than an afternoon. I haven’t even got the symbols yet.”
“What do you mean?” asked Grant.
Reed pushed away his plate and leaned back in his chair. “If you think about it, all writing is a form of code. The writer takes language and converts it into visual symbols, which the trained eye then converts back into the words they spell out. Modern cryptography is all about transforming it—usually mathematically—to such an extent that only someone with a pre-arranged key can transform it back. Now, normal written languages have a great many recurring patterns. Common letters, common combinations of letters, common sequences of words. Given enough text to work from, a straight substitution cipher—one where each letter is always encoded by the same other letter or symbol—can always be broken if you know the patterns of the original language. So modern cryptographers spend a great deal of effort, time and ingenuity turning sequences of letters—i.e. sentences—into strings of numbers so convoluted as to seem almost completely random.”
“You seem to know a lot about it,” said Marina.
“I’ve dabbled.” A dangerous glance from Muir discouraged Reed from being any more forthcoming. “The problems that confront us with the tablet are very different. We can assume that the men who wrote the tablets weren’t trying to disguise what they wrote. On the contrary, they probably wanted it to be as plain as possible. But three thousand years later, we’ve lost not only the key to the code, but also any knowledge of the language that’s been encoded. There are two ways of approaching it. You could start by looking at the symbols—or you could attempt to guess the underlying language, and then work out how the symbols represent it.”
“But these tablets are over three thousand years old,” Grant objected. “How would we know what they spoke?”
“We wouldn’t. But that hasn’t stopped scholars trying to fit other languages—or their hypothetical antecedents—to the pattern of Linear B. They’ve proposed everything: Hittite, Basque, archaic Greek, proto-Indian, eteo-Cypriot, Etruscan—which is particularly fanciful, as no one’s managed to translate that yet. Most of it’s a load of nonsense, a rather hopeless blend of tenuous coincidence and willful optimism.”
“Sounds like another dead end.”
“I agree. So rather than go straight for the language, we attack the symbols. We try to discover their patterns, their internal logic and the rules that govern them, to see what we can learn about the underlying language. The problem is, we don’t even know how many symbols we’re dealing with.”
“Presumably they’re all written out on the tablet,” Muir said acidly.
Reed raised an eyebrow, a mild gesture that had driven many an undergraduate to despair. “Are they?” He pulled a fountain pen from his jacket pocket and drew a cursive letter on the tablecloth, oblivious to the waiters’ horrified stares. “Which letter is that?”
“A ‘g,’ ” said Grant.
“A ‘y,’ ” said Muir.
“A ‘P,’ ” said Marina, who was sitting across the table from Reed and reading it upside-down.
Reed settled back with a mysterious air of contentment. “Is it? Or is it a ‘j’ or an ‘f’? Or ‘if’? Or ‘of’? Or maybe Miss Papagiannopoulou is reading it the right way up and it’s ‘Pn’ or ‘Pr.’ Or perhaps it’s just a slip of the pen. The Minoans and Mycenaeans didn’t set their alphabet in typefaces. They scratched it into wet clay with reeds and sticks—possibly in a hurry, or balancing the tablet on their knees. Even in their perfect forms, lots of the symbols seem to be extremely similar. Judging how much of the difference is genuine and how much is just variation in handwriting requires the wisdom of Solomon. And that’s just to get to the starting gate.”
A glum silence fell over the table. Grant picked at his food, while Muir watched a long finger of ash droop from his cigarette.
“Did I miss anything?”
The dining room’s double doors burst open as if blown in by a gale. A tall, broad-shouldered man was pushing through the field of empty tables toward them. There was something drearily wholesome about him: the tennis shoes; the adolescent haircut; the white trousers and white open-necked shirt, as crisply pressed as his smile. Even if you hadn’t heard the accent, there would still only be one word to describe him: American. If he not
iced the four astonished pairs of eyes staring at him, his beaming face showed no awareness.
“Jackson,” he introduced himself. “Marty Jackson.” He pumped Marina’s hand, then turned to Reed. “Let me guess: Professor Reed. I’ve read all about your books. And you must be Sam.”
He grabbed a chair from the neighboring table, pirouetted it round and squeezed himself in between Marina and Grant.
Grant shot Muir a quizzical look. “Did we make the papers?”
Jackson waved a waiter over and ordered a beer. “Never get it cold enough in this damn country,” he groused good-naturedly. “Still, better than the wine. I hear they make it out of pine cones. You believe that?”
“Mr. Jackson is attached to the Allied Military Mission,” said Muir. It seemed an utterly inadequate explanation. “He flew in this morning.”
“Holding the line against the Commies. You hear what Truman said the other week? ‘We must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.’ That’s what I’m here to do.”
“Are you army?”
“Not exactly.” Just for a second the bonhomie vanished, and Grant glimpsed something sharp and hard behind the floppy grin. Then the smile was back. “But I guess we’re all on the same team, huh?”
“Mr. Jackson . . .”
“Call me Marty.”
Muir winced. “. . . has been liaising with us in the search for Element 61.”
“I hear you’ve been doing some great things.” He leaned forward earnestly, resting his elbows on the table. “That cave on Lemnos—just incredible. I wish I’d been there.”
Reed murmured something that sounded like a mutual sentiment.
“But now we’ve got to shift this thing up a gear. Intelligence says the Reds are all over it like a kike in a coin shop. They put one of their biggest guns on it—Colonel Kurchosov.” He took a photograph from his shirt pocket and laid it on the table. It must have been snatched surreptitiously: blurred and underexposed, there was little to see besides a pair of narrow cheekbones, a thin moustache and eyes that almost vanished in the shadow of his peaked cap. It took a moment for Grant to realize that one eye was actually missing, covered by a black eyepatch. “This is the only picture we got, but we’ve heard plenty. He made his name at Stalingrad—not fighting the Nazis, shooting deserters. Guess the Sovs saw something they liked: the folks at Langley reckon he’s Uncle Joe’s golden boy.”