The Lost Temple

by Tom Harper

  “You think that makes it more likely to be true?”

  “It must have come from somewhere. There’s no comparable legend for any of the other heroes: there must be a reason why this particular story grows up around Achilles.”

  She pulled one of the books toward her. “According to Arrian, there’s a temple to Achilles on this island. Pliny goes further and says that his actual tomb is there.” Her eyes sparkled, bright as life in the dusty library. “What if it was—is—a real place? The lost temple of Achilles and his tomb inside. No one’s ever found it.”

  “Because no one can agree where it is. Besides, even if it’s all true, what’s to say that this magic shield will be there?”

  “I think it’s where Odysseus brought it, as an offering to the dead hero on his way back to Ithaca. So much of his story takes place in the Black Sea, it makes no sense unless he was there for a reason.”

  “Maybe he was blown there by accident.”

  “There’s no wind that could carry a ship all the way from Troy to the Black Sea. It was famously difficult even to sail up the Dardanelles. And once Odysseus gets to the Black Sea, he keeps on going east. Look.” She grabbed another piece of paper, a list of points joined by flowing arrows. “These are the episodes whose imagery or associations suggest they take place in the Black Sea. They almost all happen in sequence, suggesting some sort of geographical coherence. And the centrepiece—the whole point of his journey there—is his visit to the underworld.”

  Across the Oceanus’ stream,

  A desolate shore where sirens scream

  And heroes dream

  Beach your ship at Persephone’s bower,

  Where poplars soar, where willows flower

  And die that hour,

  Then hasten down

  To the mouldering House of Death.

  “Odysseus goes there. In a chasm where two rivers meet he makes a sacrifice and he opens the door to Hades.” She held the book so Grant could see. On the facing page, a woodcut illustrated the event with dark, heavy lines. A ship was drawn up on a beach fringed by poplars, so straight and high they looked more like the bars of a cage. In the middle of the page two white torrents cascaded down the flanks of a dark mountain and at the point where they met a tiny figure stood dwarfed beneath the stark crags. A haltered white ram waited on his left, a black ewe on his right, and the cliff in front of him yawned open.

  Despite the warm room, Grant shivered. “You’re saying Odysseus went down to hell?”

  “He summoned spirits from the dead. To the ancient Greeks, Hades wasn’t a place you physically went to. Travelling there was a spiritual process, a journey of the soul. They believed there were certain sacred places where the barriers between the worlds thinned—that if you went there and performed the correct rituals, you could commune with the dead. In the poem, when Odysseus comes to the far side of the Oceanus, he digs a shallow trench. He pours wine and milk and honey round it, then fills it with the blood of the sheep he’s sacrificed. And the ghosts come. Tiresias the prophet; Agamemnon, killed by his wife Clytemnestra; Ariadne and King Minos.” She paused significantly. “And Achilles.”

  Grant allowed himself to look impressed. “You think that Achilles’ temple—his tomb—was the place where Odysseus went to the underworld?”

  “Or perhaps that he went to the tomb, on the White Island, to offer the shield to the dead Achilles, and later the story was misremembered as a visit to the underworld.”

  “So all we have to do is find it.” Grant looked at the two lambs in the picture, staring ahead at the monstrous cliff and awaiting their fate. “Do we have to sacrifice sheep to get there?”

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to sacrifice anything else.”

  Grant left Marina and the professor to their books, and wandered out for a cigarette. Unsettling pictures filled his mind: lowering cliffs, pools of blood, ghosts like wraiths of cloud and carrion birds calling from the rocks. The images were so strong that he forgot to look where he was going. He walked through the library door and straight into a man coming the other way, almost knocking him down. A sheaf of papers flew into the air, blowing around the corridor like snow.

  “Sorry.” Grant reached down to help the man up. The gesture was ignored. With an irritated harrumph, he got to his feet and brushed himself off. He was a squat, ugly man, with a square head and thin fair hair cut very short. His skin was red and grainy, as if a nasty rash had consumed his face, and his close-set eyes burned with anger.

  “Pass auf!” He took a step back. The piggy eyes widened—as much as they could—then narrowed quickly. “Next time, you must be more careful.”

  His English was almost impenetrably accented, but even so, Grant could sense something evasive in it. He looked closer at the man. Did he know him? Not that he could remember. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that in that moment of anger there had been a flash of recognition.

  The man picked up his papers and pushed past Grant into the library. Looking back through the glass pane in the door, Grant saw him sit down at the central table, two seats along from Reed.

  “Probably nothing,” he muttered, trying to convince himself. He’d been promising himself a cigarette for the last half-hour. And Marina was there to keep an eye on things.

  He smiled at the girl on the front desk as he went out. The air around him felt almost as hot as the smoke in his lungs, but it was good to be free of the stuffiness inside the library. He wondered how men like Reed could spend their lives locked in those places. To him they were too much like mausoleums, necropolises of dead pages in dead languages.

  The thrum of an idle engine disturbed the mid-morning air. Outside the gate, across the road, a green Citroën had drawn up on the pavement. One man sat in the front seat reading a newspaper; another lounged against the rear door and picked his teeth.

  “Got a light?”

  Grant spun around. Marina was standing in the shade of a plane tree, looking slightly surprised by how quickly he’d turned. She held out a cigarette expectantly.

  “Who’s watching Reed?”

  “He’s in the library.” She gave a wary smile. “I wanted to talk to you. Last night . . .”

  “Not now.” Grant almost knocked her into the flower bed in his rush. He burst in through the front door, past the receptionist and raced down the corridor. A flock of bewildered, bespectacled faces turned up in surprise from their desks and carrels as he all but kicked down the library door.

  Reed was still there, exactly where he had left him, peering up at Grant from behind a stack of books. At least he looked more surprised than irritated.

  “Mr. Grant.” The girl from reception must have run to catch up with him. Her face was flushed, her hair tumbling out of its bun. She looked at him with a mixture of astonishment and outrage. At last, her eye settled on the cigarette still jammed in his mouth. “You can’t smoke in the library.”

  Grant spat out the cigarette and ground it into the wooden floor with his heel. Even he was struggling to hide his embarrassment. He let the door swing shut and walked, shamefaced, to Reed. One by one, the other students and academics turned back to their work.

  “Was there a purpose to that little drama?” Reed inquired as Grant slid into the chair beside him. He looked around guiltily, as if worried to be associated with the blundering barbarian who had disturbed the library’s sanctity.

  “I thought . . .” The chair two places down, where the German had sat, was empty now. But what of it? This wasn’t the war, where any foreign accent was automatically suspect and every German was an enemy. “I thought you might be in trouble,” Grant concluded lamely.

  “Only troubled by interruptions.”

  “What are you doing?” Marina had joined them. Behind Reed’s back, she shot Grant an accusatory look.

  “There was a man.” Grant lowered his voice as he drew reproachful glares from the surrounding academics. “He looked suspicious.” There was a touch of defiance in his voice. He realize
d how feeble it sounded, but his instinct had been right so often that he wouldn’t apologize.

  “Well, he didn’t try to slit my throat.” Reed’s patience was evidently becoming strained, eager to get back to the maze of scribbles and squiggles on his desk. “And he didn’t steal”—he looked down, the reflexive glance of a man checking his watch—“my bag . . .”

  Grant followed his gaze down. Four wooden chair legs, two flannelled trouser legs, a pair of scuffed Oxfords—but no bag.

  “My bag,” Reed repeated. He sounded dazed. “It’s gone.”

  “Was there anything important in it?”

  “Important? The tablet was in there.”

  Grant barged through the doors and rushed down the corridor. He skidded to a halt by the receptionist’s desk. “A German—fair hair, brown suit—did he come this way?”

  His furious urgency squashed any thought of her scolding him. She simply nodded and pointed to the door. Her arm was still raised when Grant ran through it, down the steps and between the trees toward the gate. The green Citroën was still there: the back door slammed shut with a flash and the car leaped forward.

  Grant ran into the street, just in time to suck up a mouthful of exhaust fumes and dust. He pulled out the Webley and emptied it after the fleeing Citroën. The rear windscreen shattered; pimples appeared in the green bodywork. The car slewed round; the driver struggled to control it but he had no chance. The car crested the pavement and slammed head-on into the side of a house. Shards of paint and plaster rained down over the smoking hood. The man in the passenger seat rattled his door frantically, but the impact had buckled it and it wouldn’t open.

  Smoke and steam from the wrecked engine had begun to cloud the picture; through the shreds, Grant saw the rear door open and the thief scramble out. Reed’s leather satchel was hooked over his shoulder. He shouted something to the driver, then began running away down the street.

  The man in the passenger seat was still struggling with the door as Grant reached the car. He’d pulled out a pistol and was hammering the grip against the side window. It shattered, leaving a jagged jaw of broken glass round the frame. In his desperation to get out, he hadn’t noticed Grant coming and Grant didn’t give him a chance. Before he could shoot, Grant reached in through the hole in the window, grabbed his arm and dragged it through. The man was still clutching the gun by its barrel; he tried to turn it round, but Grant banged his arm down on the windowsill, impaling it on the broken glass. The man screamed and dropped the pistol. Still keeping his arm immobilized, Grant bent down, picked up the gun and shot him twice in the chest. The bloody arm went limp.

  Grant let go and ran round the back of the car, to see the driver stumbling toward him. He still looked dazed from the crash. One hand was half-raised, whether in surrender or defense Grant couldn’t tell; the other was fumbling for something inside his jacket.

  Grant didn’t know how many bullets he had to waste, but he knew he had no time. He shot the driver—at that range, there was no question of accuracy—and then, as he tottered, kicked his feet from under him. Before he’d hit the ground, Grant was past him and running after the thief.

  His quarry had already gone some distance down the street, but he was shorter and heavier than Grant, and cramped by Reed’s bag. His brown linen suit flapped round him; his leather shoes slapped on the pavement; the people on the street stared as he ran past, but no one tried to stop him. With so many spectators, Grant didn’t dare risk a shot. But he was making ground.

  The thief reached a corner and looked round. He couldn’t have missed Grant barrelling toward him, waving his gun like a lunatic. He shrugged Reed’s bag off his shoulder and let it fall in the gutter, then sprinted across the street. Grant saw him and accelerated. The boulevard was wide and free of traffic—if Grant could catch him there he’d have a clean shot.

  A bell was ringing off to his left, but Grant ignored it. He reached the corner, dropped into a crouch and raised the pistol. A line of concrete flower tubs barricaded the middle of the avenue, but the thief’s head and shoulders were still clearly visible above, like a silhouette on a shooting range. It was a shot Grant had made a thousand times before.

  And then the man vanished. With a whoosh and a rush and a tolling clang, a brown wall shut him off. A tram rolled down the avenue, impervious to Grant, to urgency, to anything but its own shunting progress. A couple of the passengers inside must have noticed the dishevelled Englishman at the edge of the road waving a gun: they pointed and pressed their faces against the glass, turning as the tram trundled inexorably on.

  Grant ran forward, dodged round the tram’s rear end and jumped up on the concrete tub. He searched the surrounding streets, scanning through the crowd of gray suits and black dresses. The German had disappeared.

  A police car raced up the broad avenue and screeched to a halt. Grant laid the pistol in the flower bed and clambered down. Over on the pavement a familiar figure pushed through the gaping crowd. Marina had finally managed to catch him up. Reed’s discarded bag dangled from her hands, but her face was grim.

  Grant raised his arms in surrender as the police closed round him. “Did he leave the tablet?” he called.

  She shook her head. “It’s gone.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Hotel Grande Bretagne, Athens

  Christ, you know how to make a mess of things.”

  They were in a room at the Hotel Grande Bretagne. It wasn’t as grand as it sounded. Taking the name at face value, the British army had moved in after the liberation in 1944 and never really gone away. Rooms had been commandeered, fittings stripped, furniture changed, walls and partitions knocked down and rebuilt, so that what had once been a de luxe suite was now a cramped office—albeit one with gold flock wallpaper and a crystal light fitting.

  Grant sat in a hard wooden chair. It was uncomfortably like the one he’d sat in when he first met Muir in Palestine. Except this time Muir was angry. “I’ve got two dead Russians rotting on the street, and everyone from the British ambassador to the fucking librarian wants to know how they got there.”

  Grant leaned back against the chair and folded his arms across his chest. “They were Russian?”

  “Well, they’re not talking—obviously. But the car was registered to the Pontic Shipping Corporation, which is a local front outfit for Soviet State Security. Cigarettes, coins and the usual wallet fluff all point the same way.” He saw the look of surprise on Grant’s face. “Why? You were expecting the Salvation Army?”

  “The thief—their accomplice—was German. I ran into him on the stairs—before he walked off with the bag.”

  “Shame you didn’t shoot him too. Did you get a look at him?”

  “Sandy hair, red face. Solid.” Grant shrugged. “I’d recognize him again if I saw him.”

  Muir’s eyes narrowed. “Would you?” He snapped open his briefcase and pulled out a thick dossier, flicking through the pages until he found the one he wanted. He passed it to Grant. “How about him?”

  For once, it was a good clean photograph; posed, not snatched. That didn’t make it more attractive. A man in bloused trousers and riding boots stood on top of a mound of earth and rubble. He held a spade which he had planted in the earth, a conqueror raising his standard on the ramparts of the city he had vanquished. He was younger, thinner and more handsome than the man Grant had met on the library stairs, but something in the proud face smirking down at the camera in triumph was irreducible.

  “That’s him. Who is he?”

  “Klaus Belzig. Archaeologist, Nazi and all round nasty piece of work. File came through this morning in the diplomatic bag.”

  “You said he disappeared from Berlin in 1945.” Grant’s mind was working quickly. “If the men with him in the car were Russians . . .”

  “. . . They must have dug him up from Siberia, thawed him out and brought him in to help with the hunt. They know what they’re looking for.”

  “Belzig was the one who found the tablet.”
<
br />   “And now he’s got it back.”

  Something about the tablet triggered a flash of worry, a half-formed thought that Grant couldn’t quite complete. Before he could think about it Muir had continued, “It could be worse. Reed says he’d already transcribed the writing that was on the tablet. If he can’t decipher it, I don’t suppose they can.”

  The other half. With a sickening lurch, Grant realized what had been worrying him. “Molho never told Belzig he broke it in half. Belzig thought it was intact, that Pemberton had the whole thing.”

  “So?”

  “So now he knows—he’s going to go after Molho.”

  Muir strode out into the anteroom and snatched the phone off its cradle. “Hotel Eurydice,” he demanded. He drummed his fingers on the desk while he waited to be connected, then waved Grant over and thrust the receiver at him. “You talk to them. You speak the lingo.”

  Grant took it. “This is Mr. Grant—room thirty. Has anyone left a message for me?”

  “One moment.”

  Grant covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Did you and Jackson manage to find Molho’s club this morning?”

  Muir nodded. “Boards, bars, locks: no one home. Jackson left one of his men . . .”

  Grant waved him to be quiet as the receptionist came back on the line. “No messages.”

  He rang off, then dialled the operator again and got the number for the Charon Club. He let it ring for ages, so long that the sound became mere echoes in his brain.

  “Neh?” A woman’s voice, sleepy and suspicious. “Is Molho there?”

  No answer.

  “If he comes, tell him Mr. Grant rang. Tell him I need to speak to him. Very important. Yes?”

  She rang off.

  He couldn’t go back to the library, so he went to the hotel. He lay on his bed and tried to sleep—he should have been tired, but the chase with Belzig had left him tense with adrenaline. Sunlight throbbed through the thin yellow curtains, diffuse and timeless. Someone—probably Reed—had left a book on his bedside table, a translation of the Iliad. Grant picked it up and leafed through it. At some point he must have fallen asleep, though he didn’t realize it until a knock woke him. He sprang out of bed, grabbed the Webley and padded across the carpet to the door. “Who’s there?”