The Fox Knows Many Things: An Athena Fox Adventure

by Mike Sweeney

  He was shaking his head again. “Exarcheia is Anarchist territory. I’ve seen them throw barricades across the streets.”

  Biro laughed. “There’s not going to be any action in Exarcheia tonight. Nobody sent out invitations.” We all looked up. The roar of the crowd had increased. “This is where the action is this evening. They’ve started to move.”

  “Nasim will be coming back here,” I said.

  “Betcha.”

  “Penny. Penny. Why do you have to do this? Why do you have to get involved?”

  “I don’t know, Markos.” My tone was a little shorter than I would have liked. “Maybe because I’m already involved.” I’d taken on a promise. I’d taken on too many promises. Promised Xander I’d see to the sherd. Promised Shirine I’d find her man. Promised the very gods I’d find and return the Calyx.

  And I shouldn’t have. I wasn’t a hero. I was out of my depth, too ignorant of what was going on, blundering about. I was an outsider playing with things that other people were taking seriously. Very seriously indeed.

  “What did Georgio mean?” I asked suddenly. “When he said ‘conquest?’”

  “Territory,” Biro returned promptly. It was getting hard to hear each other against the now moving crowd. “You really don’t know? No, you tell her.”

  Markos thought over his words.

  “Cultural appropriation?” I ventured a guess.

  “What?” It really was getting hard to hear.

  “Cultural. Appropriation.”

  “Hah! They’ll have to wait in line. People have been culturally appropriating us for two thousand years. So you mean like the statues of Alexander all over Skopje? The fake-Greek sculpture they buy in Italy?”

  “They do all that?”

  “Next they’ll teach their children Katharevousa!”

  “Don’t confuse her!”

  “Too late!”

  “No, it is simple,” Markos explained. “They don’t want to be Greek. They want to be Macedonia. All of Macedonia.”

  “They want Thessaloniki.”

  “What?” I said. “You mean march in?” I thought furiously. Yes, okay. It was an age-old pattern. Whether it was Taiwan or Schleswig-Holstein, control the narrative and you were half-way to controlling the territory. Crimea has always been a part of Russia; we’re just taking it back. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

  I was nodding as I got it. “That’s why everyone hated the name.” Biro had to speak directly into my ear. “They even tried to get a seat in the UN right by Mexico. Like that would get everyone just sort of accepting that they were Macedon. So we told them to go sit by France. But they didn’t like everyone thinking of them as the ‘Former’ anything. Last I heard they are over by Thailand.”

  “Thailand? Why?”

  “The Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia.”

  “Sirens!” Markos warned.

  He didn’t have to. I’d heard them. It was dark enough now that the flashing lights behind the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier were obvious, lighting up the front of the Old Royal Palace. It looked like the police didn’t want the demonstrators to get any closer to the Greek Parliament.

  “Time,” Markos demanded. This time I agreed.

  We turned and walked as quickly as we could out of the commotion. Lots of people were still out, milling about the square and the surrounding streets, at least parts of which seemed to have been blocked off already by busy police. I was stepping over spilled flyers and even a few of the hand-held Greek flags.

  We made it to smaller streets without incident. Heading, my mental map said, in the general direction of the National. With any luck we’d run into Nasim on the way.

  Wait, I had a mental map? I’d been using the crutch of GPS so long, I’d never had a reason to ask. Yeah, maybe I did. It wasn’t detailed, but I had some sense of where the rest of Athens was in relation to me. Well, that and I could still see the Acropolis looming over it all. It did eventually get lost to view when you moved away from the city center, but the Athenians had been very careful not to let any developers build a building tall enough to block it entirely.

  Okay, that wasn’t on the map.

  There were lights in front of us. Light bars. Police cars. They had the street blocked off.

  “Penny.” Markos grabbed my arm.

  Suddenly people appeared, piling in from a street to the East; from the direction of Exarcheia. These were younger and largely bare of banners and signs. More than a few had bandanas or other clothing obscuring their faces. They eyeballed the waiting police cars and continued their cross.

  “They’re heading to Ermou!” I said.

  “Very clever!” Biro crowed. “How did you figure that out?”

  “I live in San Francisco nowl. I’ve seen this. Ermou is where the money is. And the big plate-glass windows.”

  “Time to go.”

  “Nasim might be with them,” I said. “I promised.”

  “Penny, no!” Markos protested.

  I didn’t listen. I was already following. A few other people joined us, part of the trickle still coming up from Syntagma.

  A young man with wild hair grinned at us as he ran past. He had a fancy video camera in his hands and was stumbling for balance as he tried to follow the action.

  Ahead there was smoke, gray smoke hanging in the air and lit from within by flashes of yellow flame, and puddles of thick white fog that rolled along the ground. I caught the cloying chemical smell, as much like apples as the air freshener in a car was like pine needles. I knew that smell. Once you’ve smelled that smell, you remembered.

  The skirmish lines were ahead.

  Skirmish. That was a good word. The cops were formed up in tight squads, the riot shields edge to edge like a Roman phalanx. Sturdy wooden gladius in the other hand.

  Another tear gas grenade burst between the lines. A protestor ran forward into no-man's-land, a sputtering flame coming from something in his hand. He hurled and liquid fire splashed between two of the groups of officers.

  “Molotov cocktails?!” I screeched. Puddles of fire guttered amid the debris of of rocks and broken glass.

  In one small part of my mind I was still an archaeologist, calmly analyzing what I could see. It was almost a ritual dance, like Hoplite warfare. Form up to defend against projectiles. Advance when they ran low on ammunition. Pressing, always pressing, and the first side to break was the side that got wiped out.

  I looked down. We were treading on a new set of flags, cheap red cloth wrapped around heavy chunks of wood. “The Commies have left the field,” Biro crowed. “I wonder which side they were fighting on this time?”

  I looked again at the heavy sticks, so transparently selected as weapons. My skin started to crawl. There was a large spatter of glistening red on the concrete. Someone had gone down here. Someone had bled, and badly.

  I felt sick. My muscles trembled. Tunnel vision on the quickly shifting battle.

  The police — the police were charging! In an instant the lines had broken, the mass of protestors streaming away down side-streets and past us.

  Somewhere in the fog of war someone had fallen. Protestor, bystander, it didn’t matter. The sticks came down viciously.

  I turned and ran. Markos was beside me, grabbing at me as he tried to urge me faster.

  I stumbled on one of the fallen Communist flags. Markos slowed, reaching back for me. I pushed up from the ground facing back towards the advancing army.

  The videographer had fallen too. He was holding his head and looked dazed.

  I turned back, facing the advance.

  “Why?” Markos yelled.

  Because I wasn’t a hero. Because a good person wouldn’t have to hesitate. I’d barely taken a step when he grabbed me hard by the arm.

  “Let. Go.” I shook my arm free and turned away. Almost fast enough to miss his look. He dropped his arm, sadly, and turned away.

  No! I didn’t mean...!

  I had no time. I stumbled,
running broken-field back towards the idiot with the camera.

  “Yse malakas,” I said. I got my hands under his armpits and hauled. “Come on. Up!”

  He upped. We weren’t moving well, but we were moving fast enough. The cops didn’t follow us.

  Neither did Markos.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ONCE AGAIN, I paused on the street in front of the Atlantis Gallery.

  I still felt guilty. I hadn’t done the job Ariadne had hired me for. The envelope was in my bag. I didn’t even want to look at how much was left in it. Not much. Not after that last boat ride.

  The sherd was in the bag, too. I still didn’t know where it had came from. Where the calyx it belonged with had gone. But I was about to go in there and accuse her of being part of an antiquities smuggling ring.

  I settled the hat more firmly on my head. The least she deserved was to get the Athena Fox she’d contracted for. Even if the jacket was at the bottom of the Adriatic and the pants and shirt nearly beyond rescue themselves.

  I sighed. Pushed open the door.

  She wasn’t visible. The same young man with the white shirt did the same grudging glance acknowledging me. Then back to his phone. I hoped it was a good conversation.

  This time the music was soft and sounded somehow ancient. Some kind of classical Greek harp or something? Display shelves were set into the walls, protecting various sculptures and pots — the latter starting to look a little more familiar after my efforts at the National.

  With Markos. I missed him. His smell, the strength of his arms, his smile when he looked at me. His mind, and the way he so effortlessly caught the ideas I bounced off him.

  I’d called, yes of course I’d called. He wasn’t picking up. I’d blown it. In the confusion of the riot, caught up in my own needs, I’d said the wrong thing and I’d lost him.

  Sighed again. Waited for Ariadne. When would this ever be over?

  This is what I got for messing around with archaeological fantasies. Fantasies like the ones that had gotten me into the fedora and in front of the camera in the first place. Fantasies like the Dorian thing that had snared generations.

  Fantasies like, well, like the ones people made up about that Phaistos Disc there.

  Yeah, that thing. Sand-colored clay, a six-inch pancake found on Crete, covered with mysterious symbols that wove around the disc in a spiral pattern, probably created during the Minoan Age but even that was uncertain.

  I strolled over for a better look.

  Ariadne had a couple of different sizes for sale, including a nifty set of earrings that tempted me for a long moment. Clearly marked as replicas but they were museum quality ones, not tourist-shop knock-offs (in some parts of Athens famous vases and busts were in every other shop front).

  And…no way. I knew those, too. Crystal skulls. There was information with them. Imported from Mexico City, made of Brazilian quartz, and, the literature said slyly, “Identical to the famous skull in the collection of the British Museum.” Amused, I looked closer. These had the name and signature of the sculptor.

  It was like being among old friends. I remembered the early, heady days when I was writing the first Athena Fox scripts. Encountering all those tantalizing mysteries for the first time. Easter Island, Nasca Lines, the Great Pyramid, Machu Picchu.

  She had some authentic Minoan material behind glass, as clearly the real thing as the machined brass Antikythera Mechanism replicas were not. And Cycladic figurines, these looking clearly modern and in expensive metals to boot.

  Some mysteries were better than others. Some mysteries were real.

  Others were bullshit, and I had discovered over a few years that bullshit was inevitably shallow. It lacked the depth that real archaeology provided.

  I was getting the sense of this place now. Ariadne wasn’t trying to fool anyone. But her eye went to those artifacts that had a mystery about them. That represented cultures that had proved endlessly fascinating. New Kingdom Egypt. The Mayans. The Minoans.

  “I’m with her there,” I said under my breath. “You don’t have to believe in Atlantis to find the Minoans exciting.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that.”

  I whirled. Ariadne.

  “I am so glad to see you safe!” She reached out to grasp my upper arms warmly. “I am so sorry I put you through all of that!”

  “I…I’m sorry I didn’t do what you hired me to do,” I fumbled.

  “You didn’t do what I expected,” she corrected. “What you did…well let me just say it was well worth the investment.”

  Really? She’d made sales…? Okay, we needed to get this out in the open.

  “You did Germany. To stir interest in Sharpe’s collection.”

  “It was Cosimo’s idea,” Ariadne was unrepentant. “Professor Sharpe did have some nice items in his collection but it was the connection to him and his work that made them valuable.”

  “Cosimo knew Xander, I mean Professor Newman?”

  “He knew Edward Sharpe. They’d spend winters with Spyros on his island, talking about the past glories of Greece and making plans on how to bring them back.”

  “Spyros the Golden Dawn guy?”

  “Oh, you have been studying up, Athena!”

  “I really prefer Penny.”

  “That’s something I don’t understand about you,” she said. “Why you shorten it like that. Penelope is a good name. It is a strong name. Have you not read the story?”

  “Yeah, I read it.”

  “We are both weavers, Penelope. Think of it; Adriane and Penelope, weavers standing together.”

  “Um, did Ariadne weave, or did she just stand around with a ball of thread?”

  “Hush.” She gave that a dismissive wave. “All royal women wove.”

  I found I really couldn’t be angry at her. “Look, I get it,” I said. “You are selling the sizzle with the steak. I don’t understand why Sharpe’s theories ever got popular.” Yeah, that was being polite about it. “But I see why you and Cosimo got the book reprinted, and sent people to go check out Xander’s dig, and yeah I get what you were doing at that little reception of yours.”

  “Honestly, Penelope, I had to. Seriously, there was a lot of junk in Edward’s collection and it wasn’t going to move by itself. It wasn’t even well stored. I was shocked at how dirty some of the pieces were.”

  “So you reached out to a bunch of American neo-nazis,” I said. “Hold on. Really? Internet sales are that good?”

  “This is for street traffic,” Ariadne gestured at the open shelves. “Of course, I meet personally on the more valuable items. But bits of broken pot with little going for them other than a story? That goes on eBay.”

  “Oh, really?” I said. “Hold on,” I said. I opened up my bag and unwrapped Xander’s sherd. “Bits of broken pot like this?”

  She studied it, her bright eyes moving swiftly. “Where did you find this?”

  “Germany.”

  “This is not trash. This is the work of a master.”

  “There’s more,” I told her. “This matches that pot Giulio was looking for.”

  “It’s real,” Ariadne said. Her face took on a still look. A hard look. For a moment, I saw in her face the face of Irene Papas as Clytemnestra, looking out across the rocky shoreline of Aulis. “Cosimo lied to me,” she said at last.

  “I’m…I’m sorry.” It wasn’t enough.

  “We agreed to split. All the costs. All the profit.”

  “The calyx is worth that much?”

  Ariadne gave a short laugh. “You have no idea.”

  She was right. I didn’t. In fact, it kind of bugged me how she had spoken of the other material. As bulk, as something that had to be fobbed off in job lots on eBay because even with those phantom Dorians that the white power nuts wanted to believe in it just wasn’t worth that much.

  “Not to archaeologists,” I said aloud. Sherds were our life blood. Sherds could tell us so much. An artifact, divorced of provenience, stoo
d mute. All that was left was to admire it. To purchase and trade and show it off. Sherds, in their assemblage, recorded in their context, told us about lives.

  “It isn’t?” Ariadne was skeptical.

  “Err, we’re talking across each other,” I said. How to explain, how to get her to understand how much that debris meant? I mean how much it could have meant, if a real archaeologist had been there to record it while it was still in the ground?

  “I don’t like collectors,” I said instead.

  “You are in the wrong business, then.”

  “I’m an archaeologist. You knew that when you hired me.”

  Ariadne gave me a pitying look. “Where do you think archaeology came from? It came from people digging into the ground to find treasures to sell.”

  “I know that,” I snapped. “That was then.”

  “Oh, my dear Penelope. It still is. Where do you think the money comes from?” She stopped, then. Her lips twisted in an apologetic look.

  “You want anything? Turkish coffee? Raki?”

  I’d love raki. “Maybe coffee,” I said.

  “Come.” She led me back to her office. She had a fancy desk, art and antiquities on display, but the door was open to a nook with fridge and microwave and a sink for washing up and it gave the office a much more comfortable, lived-in look.

  “Penelope, it has always been about the collectors. And what is wrong with preserving beauty?”

  “Preserving?” I wanted to see where she was going with this.

  “The Minoans. Those gorgeous, impossible Minoans. How much do you really know, Athena Fox? What do you know of Sir Arthur Evans?”

  “He...” He was a bit of another Schliemann. Not the Schliemann I had admired. The Schliemann I was starting to discover. “He reconstructed the Palace of Knossos,” I said. “He made a lot of mistakes.”

  He’d distorted the archaeological record. His fanciful reconstructions had tainted the field for generations. Snake Goddesses, Horns of Consecration, even the name “Minoan.” All him.

  “And if he hadn’t?”

  “It would probably be a mall by now,” I admitted. Like Mycenae. Like Troy. Like the Acropolis, like Rome, like the Doge’s Palace. Tourism preserved it as much as it threatened it.