by Tom Harper
Reed ignored him—so completely that Muir began to wonder if he’d actually spoken out loud. Stretching precariously on the top rung, Marina prised out a thick hard-bound book. A cloud of dust rose off the shelf; she sneezed, lost her balance and flailed around desperately. That didn’t help. The ladder swayed like a pendulum, creaking so loudly Reed was sure it must collapse in splinters. With a small shriek, Marina let go of the book and grabbed on to the frame.
The book dropped like a stone and landed in Reed’s arms with a thud. He winced, set it aside and held the ladder until Marina had got down safely. She tugged down her dress, which had risen up over her slip in the commotion.
Reed laid the book on the table and cracked open the cover. Two dead flies fell out of the title page.
“Maybe it hasn’t been borrowed for two thousand years,” quipped Muir.
“The Chrestomathy is a literary anthology: a sort of classical Reader’s Digest. It was put together by a scholar named Proclus—about whom we know almost nothing—around the fifth century AD.”
As Reed turned the pages, the others saw that it was no ordinary book. It was more like a scrapbook, made up entirely of small squares of typed paper cut out with scissors and pasted on to the blank pages. Often they had peeled away and been stuck back down with tape. It seemed to be a work in progress: many of the clippings had been scored out or amended in ink, or had new excerpts painted over them. Some were no longer than single sentences; others ran to complete paragraphs. All were in Greek.
“This is a collection of the fragments that survive.” Reed ran his finger down the page.
“Fragments—you mean scraps of parchment or paper or whatever they were written on?”
Reed shook his head. “Very occasionally. Far more often they’re small pieces of the text that come down to us through quotations in other works that have survived more or less intact. Think of Shakespeare. Even if we didn’t have complete texts of any of his plays, we could still reconstruct them—partially—from all the subsequent scholars who’ve quoted them. Some of the quotations would overlap, in which case you could piece them together; for others you could guess their approximate position in the play by knowing something about its plot. Time and history try their best to erase our human endeavors, but they’re hard to get rid of completely. They endure, like pottery shards embedded in the soil. Here we are.”
His finger came to rest on a long excerpt that almost filled the page. “The Aethiopis, by Arctinus of Miletus.”
“I thought you said it was by this fellow Proclus,” said Muir.
“Proclus wrote the Chrestomathy,” Reed explained patiently. “But he was only summarising other authors—in this case, Arctinus of Miletus. Later, some of the scribes who copied out the Iliad added excerpts from Proclus as supplementary material.”
“It’s so tenacious,” Marina marvelled. “Almost like a virus, copying itself from one host to the next until it finds one that survives.”
“Never mind that,” barked Muir. “What does it say?”
“We should call the cops.”
Grant stared at Jackson. They were walking back down the hill, their boots crunching on the twigs and acorns.
“His cousin stole this thing, right? So he probably knows more than he’s saying. The way I figure it, we get the local boys in blue to bring him in for questioning. They’re probably chumps, but who cares? Maybe they can soften him up a little. Either way, it puts him just where we want him.” He caught Grant’s incredulous gaze. “What? I read your file. I know what you did in the war. The girl, too. Is that shit true? She must’ve been some piece of work.”
“We shouldn’t get the police involved, not if we don’t have to,” Grant insisted. He shook his head angrily. Something didn’t make sense, but he couldn’t work out what it was. It was like trying to finish a jigsaw: there was only one piece missing—but the box was empty.
He realized Jackson had been saying something. “What?”
“I was saying we could bring in a team to dig up the hill. We’re trying to find the other half of this tablet, right? If pig-man says they only found the one piece, then the other one’s probably still up there. That’s what the professor said.”
“The second piece.” Grant stopped in his tracks. “Belzig knew what that tablet was worth. If he only found half of it, why did he never come back to look for the other half?”
Jackson looked confused. “Why?”
But Grant had already forgotten him. He sprinted up the slope, pushing pell-mell through the branches. Haste made him careless. His foot turned over on a loose stone, pitching him forward; he stumbled, flailed out his arms and had almost regained his balance when an exposed tree-root caught him square on the shin. He toppled over, crashed through a bush and planted himself face first in the dirt.
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.”
CHAPTER 16
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-Élysées in newly liberated Paris. He waited for Reed to acknowledge his contribution.
Ins
tead, 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 gray 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 Blessed 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 toward 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’ armor 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 civilization 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 afterward. 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 may be 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 realized 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 stari
ng 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 toward 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.