Moon over the Mediterranean

by Sheri Cobb South

  We passed through the Beulé Gate and began climbing the stairs to the massive Propylaia, the original (and much more impressive) entrance to the Acropolis. If I hadn’t known better from the guidebooks, I might have mistaken this for the Parthenon, for it had huge Doric columns that would once have supported a roof, just like the more famous structure. But once I saw the Parthenon, there was no confusing it with anything else. The pictures I’d seen didn’t do justice to its size. Each of its forty-six columns was thirty-four feet high, and wider in diameter than I was tall—and each, when seen up close, contained a patchwork of newer material where chunks of the original marble had been lost. Its size was best appreciated up close, but more distant views made it easier to imagine it as it must have once looked.

  “And the sad part is that most of the damage could have been avoided,” Markos replied, when I voiced these thoughts aloud. “For some unknown reason, the Ottoman Turks thought it would be a good idea to store ammunition here. It’s possible they supposed their enemies would not fire upon a building of such importance to the history of Western civilization, but if this was the case, they made a tragic miscalculation. The Venetians fired on it—no one knows if they struck it by accident or targeted it deliberately—and almost completely demolished it, then looted what was left. What you see here has been reconstructed from the rubble.”

  I looked up at the jagged roofline, putting up a hand to shade my eyes. “It’s a pity so many of the statues along the roof are missing.”

  “Oh, they aren’t missing,” Markos said drily. “Some of them are, of course, but most of them are safe and sound in the British Museum.”

  “Removed by Lord Elgin, you mean.” I recalled something of this from my reading. “But he had permission from the Greek government, didn’t he?”

  “First of all, there was no ‘Greek government,’ since Greece was still part of the Ottoman Empire at that time. Aside from that, he had permission to build wooden scaffolding for the purpose of measuring, drawing, and making plaster casts. Somehow he ended up with twenty-one figures, fifteen metope panels, and chunks of the frieze that totaled seventy-five meters in length. Lord Byron called him a vandal to his face, and wrote about it in one of his poems.”

  “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” I said. I’d thought the lines were moving when I’d read them in college, but never dreamed that someday I would actually see the ruins Byron described. “ ‘Dull is the eye that will not weep to see thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed by British hands.’ ”

  “You are familiar with it, then.”

  “I majored in English literature,” I reminded him. “There’s more, but I don’t remember the rest. Still, I’d never really thought much about what it meant to the Greeks. There’s a difference between reading something and seeing it for yourself.”

  Having looked our fill at the ruined beauty of the Parthenon, we picked our way across the uneven, rocky ground (mere rocks, I wondered, or more antiquities just waiting to be discovered?) to the Erechtheum, a temple dedicated to Poseidon and Athena, who according to Greek mythology had competed for patronage of the city. Along the wall nearest the Parthenon, a porch jutted out, its roof held up by five caryatids, women in Grecian draperies that appeared flowing even though they were made of marble.

  “Oh, how lovely!” I exclaimed.

  “It’s called the Porch of the Maidens,” Markos told me.

  I dug out my camera and snapped a couple of photos. “I like this better than the Parthenon. It isn’t as large, but there’s a grace and beauty about it that the Parthenon lacks. Although,” I added charitably, “I’ll admit I was hardly seeing the Parthenon at its best.”

  “You’re not seeing the Erechtheum at its best, either,” Markos said. “There was originally a sixth caryatid.”

  “Was there? What happened to her?”

  “What else? Lord Elgin, of course. He actually tried to take two, and when he had difficulty with the second, he instructed workmen to saw her into pieces. The pieces smashed, and he abandoned the fragments where they lay. The lady you see here has been reconstructed, and the missing one may be seen in—”

  “The British Museum,” I finished for him. “I see now why you went to England to study archaeology.”

  He grinned at me. “There is a legend here in Athens that says the five remaining caryatids may be heard at night, wailing for their lost sister.”

  “If you’re about to suggest we wait until dark and listen for them, let me tell you that climbing up the side of a moving ship is not an experience I care to repeat!”

  “No, no, I think once was enough,” he conceded, although I thought he sounded a bit regretful.

  We turned away from the Erechtheum, and Markos took my arm to steady me as he led me toward a spot from which we could look down over the remains of the agora, the marketplace of ancient Athens. When I caught my toe on one of the many rocks strewn about the ground, Markos put an arm about my waist to steady me—and didn’t remove it, even after I’d regained my balance. The agora was to the northwest of the Acropolis, and from where we stood we couldn’t miss the sun sinking lower in the sky.

  “I suppose we’d better start back down if we don’t want to miss the ship.”

  His arm tightened about my waist as he spoke, and I regarded him suspiciously. “I don’t suppose there happens to be an ‘old tradition’ regarding sunset atop the Acropolis.”

  “No,” he said with a sigh, and this time there was no mistaking the regret in his voice. “But I wouldn’t mind starting a new one.”

  Chapter 15

  To give each figure in the photograph his living name.

  ROBERT TRAILL SPENCE LOWELL, Epilogue

  I wouldn’t mind starting a new one. Was he suggesting that our shipboard romance—if one could call it that—might continue after the voyage ended?

  Even as I pondered the question, it was answered for me—and the answer was a resounding no. “I’ll be glad when the ship docks in Venice and you go back home,” Markos said.

  I’d heard all about the fleeting nature of summer romances. Still, his words stung more than I cared to admit. I gave a little grunt that was supposed to pass for a laugh. “Well, that’s flattering!”

  “I’m serious, Robin,” he insisted, and when I saw the intensity in his dark eyes, I believed he meant it. “I want you well out of this.”

  There it was again, that vague reference to some unknown danger—something to do with Devos and very likely Sylvia as well, but nothing specific.

  “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what ‘this’ is?” I demanded. “You keep telling me to be careful, but it’s difficult when I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking out for.”

  Markos regarded me curiously. “I should have thought you would have figured it out by now.”

  “I know it has something to do with Devos, and something to do with my camera, which probably means the photos I took in Pisa.”

  “It’s impossible to talk privately in this crowd,” Markos grumbled, glancing around impatiently at the mob of tourists poking about among the ruins. “Still, it might be safer here than on the ship, where we don’t know who might be listening. I wonder—yes, I think we are two lovers exchanging secrets that could not possibly be of interest to anyone else.”

  Before I could ask for an explanation, he put his arm around my waist and pulled me close to his side, bending his head until it rested against my hair and gazing soulfully out over the ancient agora. “Yes, it has to do with the photos your aunt took in Pisa. The camera shop—or rather its storage room—was broken into while we were on Mykonos.”

  “Markos!”

  “Sssh! Nothing seems to be missing, but someone rifled through the drawer containing the envelopes of photos waiting to be picked up. Several of them were no longer in alphabetical order, and one or two had fallen to the floor. Yes, that will do very nicely.”

  “What will?” I asked, bewildered by the sudden change of sub
ject.

  “That look of wide-eyed wonder. Just the thing for a young woman receiving a declaration of love. As I was saying, nothing was taken—he could not have taken them in any event, for they aren’t there. I had already given them to you, remember?”

  “And he’d already searched my stateroom, and hadn’t found them,” I deduced. “So when he didn’t find them among the recently developed photos either, he assumed the film must still be in my camera—which is why he tried to grab it in Istanbul. I’m assuming, of course, that ‘he’ is Devos.” Markos confirmed this assumption with a nod. “But why? What’s so special about them?”

  He was silent for a long moment before answering in a low murmur. “Over the last year or so, there has been a dramatic increase in antiquities sold on the black market.”

  “So Mr. Hollis was closer to the truth than he knew!”

  “Mr. Hollis?” Markos echoed sharply. “What does he have to do with this?”

  “Nothing that I’m aware of. I don’t even know yet what Devos has to do with it,” I pointed out with some asperity. “When Devos tried to steal my camera in the Grand Bazaar—although I didn’t know it was him at the time—Mr. Hollis guessed someone hoped to sell it on the black market.”

  “I see,” Markos said with a shrug, seemingly dismissing Mr. Hollis’s involvement as being of no importance. “As I was saying, over the last year, more and more artifacts are ending up in the hands of private collectors who purchase them through less than legal means. Over the course of a long and no doubt tedious investigation, one common factor has emerged: In every case where an artifact’s provenance can be identified, the cruise ship Oceanus has been in port a very short time before.”

  “How short?

  “Usually a few days, but sometimes a matter of hours.”

  “As if a buyer were already waiting,” I observed.

  Markos nodded. “And in each case, there was among the Oceanus’s passengers a man whose physical description roughly matched that of Konstantin Devos. Always his name was different, and his passport was issued by a different country—sometimes Italy, sometimes Greece, once Bulgaria, and once Macedonia. Sometimes he wore a beard or moustache, while at other times he was clean shaven. Sometimes his hair was long, or short, or gray. Once he was bald. Sometimes he wore glasses. Still, there was one characteristic he could not change.”

  “A tattoo on his right forearm,” I guessed.

  “Precisely.”

  “But these artifacts—Markos, I think I might have seen them! Or at least some of them. I went to Devos’s cabin last night—no, the night before—”

  “You what?” Markos demanded, looking thunderous. “Didn’t I warn you to avoid the man?”

  “You threw out a lot of ambiguous warnings, yes. But Maggie wanted to invite him to participate in a shuffleboard competition she and Paul were putting together, and she could hardly hobble all that way herself, so when she asked me to stop by and deliver a message—well, I couldn’t refuse without telling her things that I suspect you’d rather she not know.”

  Markos conceded the point, but didn’t look happy about it. “All right, then, what did you see in Devos’s stateroom?”

  “First of all, I wasn’t ‘in’ his stateroom—I’m not that stupid! I was standing just outside the door. But I could see the bed reflected in the mirror on the wall, and it was littered with objects—pottery, statues, that kind of thing. He said he’d bought them as souvenirs for his nieces and nephews, and I remember thinking they weren’t the sort of things you should give children to play with.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Children?” I asked, baffled by the sudden non sequitur. “He didn’t say.”

  “Not children,” Markos said impatiently. “Artifacts!”

  “Oh. I didn’t count, but maybe a dozen or so.”

  “Could you identify them if you saw them again?”

  I thought back to the little collection, all seen from a distance and backwards, given that I was actually seeing their reflection—all, that is, except one. “I know I could identify one of them. It was a figurine of a woman in flowing draperies.” Actually, she’d been half out of them, but that was beside the point. “I’d asked Devos for a closer look, and he let me hold it. I asked him if he would sell her to me—I even offered to pay him something for his trouble, over and above what she was worth—it’s a good thing he didn’t take me up on the offer!”

  “Interesting,” he murmured thoughtfully, and I knew he wasn’t thinking of my trying to cut a deal with Devos. Nor, for that matter, was he thinking about the ancient Greeks, although no one seeing him staring out over the remains of the ancient agora would guess as much.

  “There is one more thing I’d like to know,” I said.

  Markos came abruptly back to earth. “Yes, what is it?”

  I cocked a knowing eyebrow at him. “Just how does a ship’s photographer manage to know all about an international smuggling ring?”

  He blew out a long breath. “Because I’m not exactly a ship’s photographer,” he confessed somewhat sheepishly.

  “Now, why does that not surprise me?” I wondered aloud.

  “A little more loverlike, if you please, or all these good people will think we’re quarreling. What I mean is, I am the ship’s photographer, of course—you should know that, you’ve seen me with my camera often enough. But that’s not the only thing I am.”

  “I knew it! You’re with Interpol!” Remembering his warning, I gazed soulfully up at him. “Is Markos Rondo your real name?”

  “Yes.” His breath was warm against my face. “That is, no, I’m not with Interpol—I told you that once already —but my name is Markos Rondo. Dr. Markos Rondo, in fact, for I have a Ph.D. in Archaeology. I’m with the Ministry of Culture. You need not look at me like that, flattering though it is,” he added hastily. “I don’t have a very exalted position there—undersecretary to an undersecretary, in fact—but I’m sufficiently well-versed in the field to recognize genuine artifacts if I should stumble across them, and yet I still look young enough to be convincing as a member of the Oceanus’s crew.”

  “How old are you?” I asked irrelevantly.

  “I’m thirty.”

  “And when I saw you at the museum today?”

  “I had a meeting—a debriefing, you might say.”

  “I thought you’d been fired for missing the ‘all aboard,’ and were interviewing for a job.”

  He nodded. “I know you did. It is very kind of you to worry about me getting in trouble with the captain.”

  I didn’t miss the hint of amusement in his voice, but a fresh thought drove it from my mind. “But you didn’t get in trouble with the captain, because you don’t answer to the captain.”

  “On the contrary,” Markos protested, “everyone on board his ship answers to the captain. But no, he could not dismiss me without creating a great deal of ill will between the cruise line and the Ministry of Culture. The last thing the Oceanus’s parent company wants is for word to get out that one of their ships has been involved, however inadvertently, in the smuggling of artifacts. They have been very cooperative thus far—and as far as the captain knows, my tardiness in leaving Mykonos was purely for professional reasons.”

  “You mean he thinks you were wooing me in the hopes of determining whether or not I was an international smuggler.”

  He grinned at me. “Well, yes. But if he should ask, I will assure him of your innocence.”

  As I sputtered for words to express my indignation, two boys came running up to the edge of the outcrop, calling to the middle-aged couple who followed them, “Mummy! Daddy! Look at this!”

  Without hesitation, Markos caught me to his chest and kissed me passionately.

  “Larry! Frank! Come back here,” their mother called, glaring at us and muttering something under her breath how young people these days had no shame.

  “Some of them don’t, anyway,” I scolded, freed at last from Markos’s e
mbrace.

  “I didn’t think we needed an audience,” he said defensively. “I suspect you’re not done asking questions yet.”

  “Darn right I’m not! What’s so special about those photos, and why does Devos want them so badly?”

  Markos shrugged. “I confess myself at a loss. I thought the photos would show something incriminating, but other than making it appear you and he were a couple, I saw nothing that might—”

  “Oh, but there was another one!” I exclaimed, suddenly remembering the one I’d tucked away in my bag the night before we’d docked at Mykonos. So much had happened since then that I’d forgotten all about it. I fumbled in my bag for the glossy black-and-white square—now somewhat the worse for having spent the last three days in the bottom of my bag—and handed it to Markos, who frowned over it. “It’s not as clear as the others,” I said, “but you can see Devos on the left, over my shoulder. He’s turned away from the camera, so you can’t see his face, but I recognized him by his shirt. It’s the same one he’s wearing in the other photos. I’d thought at the time that it was odd, his wearing long sleeves on such a hot day—not only in Pisa, but two days later in Pompeii as well. Hiding that tattoo, I suppose.”

  But Markos wasn’t interested in Devos’s wardrobe. “Do you happen to know what he was holding here, or whether he was giving or receiving it?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t know he was there at all until I got the photos back from you.”

  “Do you still have the negatives? You didn’t throw them away, did you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That is, yes, they’re still in the envelope with the photos. I didn’t throw them away, although I probably would have tomorrow, to lighten my bags as much as possible for the flight home.”

  “Thank God for that, anyway! Come on.” He grabbed my hand and picked his way as quickly as he could through the large stones toward the path.