by Mike Sweeney
“Welcome to Athens,” Ariadne said without irony.
“Okay, I get it. Look, I don’t like the idea of stuff disappearing into private collections, is all. Surely you understand that as an archaeologist I want it properly studied.”
“Do you know how much is kept in storage at those museums of yours?” Ariadne countered. “In the States, seventy percent of the collections are not on display. At the big museum here, more like ninety percent. Penelope, they are running out of storage for everything.”
“Okay,” I said shortly.
“Museum collections aren’t safe, either. Even without fires, or what happened in Bagdad. They don’t have the money to preserve what they have and it rots, Penelope, it rots in cardboard boxes in a basement!”
“Okay!” I said. “This isn’t my argument. I don’t care if it is in a museum or not. It just pisses me off to see history reduced to things, to pretty things that can be traded and sold.”
She gave me one of those intent Greek looks. “You don’t like art?”
“I do like art,” I said shortly. “I like history, too.” The history we learned when we could properly excavate a site. “I get what you mean, though. Nefertiti. The Rosetta Stone.”
“Napoleon had archaeologists with him,” Ariadne said with a smile.
“Or the nearest equivalent. But the Stone was fought over like a basketball. Science took second place to national pride.”
Ariadne stood. “This is a wonderful conversation. I am so glad we became friends. The coffee is ready.”
She brought out tiny cups with a dark, thick coffee in them. I wondered what the system was. Every time I’d tried to get “Greek,” coffee, they’d brought me a large cup of something with milk and sugar in it. Maybe I’d been eating at places that were too touristy?
“You called this Turkish,” I said.
“I’m not silly. Some people try to pretend we invented the coffee. And the baklava, and all those other foods. I have no problem admitting it came from the Turks.”
“It’s always about the Turks, I’ve noticed. Nobody complains about the Byzantines, or the Venetians.”
“No,” Ariadne laughed. “I suppose we really should.”
“Well, it isn’t like the Venetians have much of an empire now,” I said wryly, remembering that compact, lovely, sinking city.
“You are fun, Penelope. Now let’s see that fragment of yours again.”
I brought it out. “I believe this is Athena,” I said. “That’s what Giulio must have meant, when he named Enceladus.”
“I think you may be right.” She had found a hardbound catalog of some sort and was already turning pages with a practiced hand. “Even without the white glaze.”
“Or with the short tunic.”
“No, that’s not — here, look at this. The meeting of Achilleus and Penthesilea.”
“I don’t know that one.”
“The Trojan War. The Amazons came to relieve Troy. Like Memnon had. According to the story, Achilleus did not realize how lovely she was until after he had slain her, and he mourned.”
The picture she showed me was also black-figure ware. Achilles was as black as the BBC’s David Gyasi. The Amazon was painted white, from bare arms to long legs. It was a briefer tunic even than my Athena.
My Achilles would have liked that outfit, too.
“Penelope?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, really, Penelope?”
“Leave it,” I said. “We’re this close to passing the Bechdel Test. Let’s not blow it now.”
“Shop.”
“What?”
“When I feel sad, I shop. You,” she pretended to be trying to politely hide her disdain, “really need to shop.”
“This is what Germany left me,” I said defensively. “I did get a dirndl out of it,” I added.
“Well.” Ariadne had gone back to flipping through her books. “Your Athena sherd fits. Same period as the other sherds in Edward’s collection. This was typical of a ceramics workshop, Penelope; one master, many apprentices who would do the bulk of the work. Edward was an idiot.”
“No argument here.”
“The calyx, though. I would suspect Edward did not restore it. Cosimo,” she barely restrained herself from spitting the name, “would have seen the value in the fragments. His business partner Christakos must have done a rough assemble to make a photograph he could show around.”
“He...” what had Giulio said? “He was in a car crash?”
“Yes. Driving too fast, the Carabinieri said.”
“Carabinieri? In Italy, then.”
“It was very sad. Cosimo was quite upset.”
“So Professor Sharpe never saw the calyx whole. And he gave the Athena sherd to Xander. And Xander proceeded to pretend to dig it up in Germany.”
“And then you identified it,” Ariadne said with satisfaction. “My Athena Fox. I knew I did right in sending you.”
“At which point Cosimo realized he was sitting on a gold mine. He needed the sherd to complete the calyx. And that’s why he sent Satz to get it from me.”
“Satz? Who is that?”
“Um...it’s a joke. He was putting on this really bad fake German accent. So I started calling him a fake German. Ersatz. Herr Satz.”
Ariadne wasn’t that good a friend. She didn’t pretend to laugh.
“But this still leaves us with nothing,” I said, frustrated. “We still don’t know he has it.” And I was running out of time.
Well, there was one lead. One bit of very unfinished business. “May I?” I gestured to the computer on her desk.
“Of course, Penelope.” She logged in and stood up. “May I ask...?”
“Of course.” I smiled grimly. “I’m going to update my Facebook page.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE RAIN, AND the winds, were here. Zorbas had hit Athens with a giant “Opa!” and we were all dancing to it. At least I had a hat. I needed a new jacket.
I’d picked the Kerameikos because I knew it was near. Ariadne had mentioned it, during the reception where I’d first seen Herr Satz.
I was passing through another up-and-coming Athens neighborhood, lots of eateries and galleries and, from the looks of it, a vibrant street scene when rain hadn’t driven people indoors.
The graffiti here was excellent. Ladies with flowers growing out of their eyes, those strange long-headed creatures that only seemed to appear in certain poster art, a giant photo-real mural of a guy with a clockwork key in the side of his head.
Some of them had slogans, of course. In at least two languages. In one, against a backdrop of riot police and flames was a portrait of a noble-looking dog. “Loukanikos,” read his dog tag. There was a long piece of Greek poetry beside him.
The Kerameikos was where the potters of Athens had congregated. It was also a cemetery. At first glance it wasn’t that different from the current Athenian Agora; open ground, winding paths, low stonework that was all that remained of old walls. Many of the paths were bare dirt and all of that was muddy now. The rain was starting in earnest. Could I not have done this on a different day?
Why was it, every ruin was down to the last few courses of stone? Okay, think like an archaeologist. Ground level rose, as a rule. And people liked stone for their own homes and roads. So they’d cart away everything that was above ground but not go digging for that last few rows?
It made as much sense as anything.
In front of me was the Dipylon Gate. I’d come from the North, so the wrong direction for the great Panathenaic Procession which had started from this gate in Classical times. Or so I had read.
Pericles had stood here to give a famous speech on the virtues of Athens. Hetaira, if that was the word, had also stood here. Extolling a different set of virtues.
It was gone now, of course. Nothing but a few stones, although as in so many places, an effort was being made to put some of them back in the right place.
Which itself was a b
it of a puzzle. If I remembered from my reading, Pericles or one of his successors had used grave stones from the actual cemetery in the construction. To the general displeasure of Athenians who had family buried there.
So where did those stones really belong today? It was the age-old problem of restoration in Athens. Or anywhere else.
There was a warning rush of sound as the rain turned rabid. It pounded on my head and shoulders, driving me down with its weight. I couldn’t see ten feet.
So I ducked under the protective awning over the remains of the right gate tower. One of Athens’s numerous cats looked at me from the highest point it could reach, then went back to suffering nobly the damp and cold.
It felt wrong. There was no tape, no sign. The dirt floor was covered in footprints and not a few cigarette butts, but it still felt wrong. I was walking on an open dig. On a potential archaeological horizon.
The rain hammered at the plastic. I took off my hat and water poured out where it had been trapped in the brim and crown.
It wasn’t that active a dig. There were no stakes or tools. A few stones had cryptic marks on them. Was that German? Sure...a sign somewhere had said excavations around here were being done by DAI, the German Archaeological Institute at Athens. More Germans. But most Germans weren’t idiots.
“Chust ein moment, Fräulein.”
Most.
“I believe ‘Fräulein’ went out of general use in the ‘70s,” I said without turning around. Detlef had told me that. German women had objected over the diminutive and the way it suggested that they weren’t a full woman until they had found a husband.
Herr Satz was continuing the act. “Zee tomb of ein hero, nicht wahr?”
“Oh, stop it,” I said. It was all so clear now. I’d written those lines. Poor Detlef had to speak those lines. And Satz?
“No wonder you were getting your tongue so tangled,” I said. “A native German speaker trying to do an impression of what an ignorant American would think a German bad guy would sound like? I’m amazed you could talk at all.”
I turned around. There was something in his hand, something black with a tapering muzzle and that oh-so-distinctive knurled toggle on top.
A luger.
I went cold. He wasn’t looking so good. Not just the rain, which had made him into a drowned blond rat. He looked tired, and not a little desperate.
Things, as I suspected, were starting to happen. Outis had probably beaten me back to Athens by only a few hours. And he wanted the orphan as bad as Satz did. Or, rather, Cosimo. Satz had to be his flunky.
“Please,” he said. He pointed with the muzzle of his gun.
I opened my bag and I placed the Athena sherd on a stone between us.
He unwrapped it with his left hand. “You gave it to me.” He seemed surprised.
“Gun,” I said, mouth dry despite the dripping rainwater. “I’m not an idiot.”
“I’m sorry it came to this,” he said. “We would have paid.”
“You mean Signor Nardella would have paid,” I said.
Satz frowned briefly. “Sure,” he said. The rain was letting up. Probably just a lull between cells, but at least we could hear the outside world again. He seemed disappointed. The final confrontation with Athena Fox had taken place, and he won without a shot fired.
Then he started looking around on the ground, as if hoping to find something.
“What now?” I asked.
He grinned, a bit of the old Satz returning. “Now, I suppose I’d better tie you…”
“In your dreams!”
“But…”
“You take one step towards me, and I’ll start screaming. And then we can see just what the Athenian cops think of guys who wave guns around.”
He shook the gun irritably. “It’s not real,” he said. “Plastic.”
“It’s not a real gun?”
“No.”
“Pity. This is real.”
“What is?”
“This.” I pivoted like the dancer I had been and buried my fist in his gut.
Satz doubled over, dropping plastic gun and pottery sherd in his pain.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” I said, doubling over in pain myself. “I think I broke my thumb!”
“You, have to, put, your thumb,” he wheezed, “outside.”
“Outside? Are you sure?” I blew on my poor thumb, cradled my hand.
“Outside,” Satz gasped, “like, this!”
I totally saw it coming and tried to duck and his fist caught me in the temple instead. The cat complained as I staggered backwards towards its perch. Satz let out a bellow of pain.
“You hit soft parts with hard parts, moron,” I said, still cradling my hand. Then winced. The shelter seemed to be turning a bit, on more than one axis. I could feel a throb of pain starting in my head.
“What the hell is your head made of, concrete?” Satz was staring at his knuckles.
If only. He seemed to be recovering from the first punch. I abandoned hero style fisticuffs. Stamped down his shin instead, the way they talked about in those self-defense advice things.
Wrong foot! The knee I’d tweaked falling into the cistern flared up hot and red and I staggered back, sitting hard on the stones before I could fall.
Satz roared and tried to shove at me. I saw his feet go out from under him on the slick mud and he hit ground like the grand piano in a silent comedy.
“Uncle!” he gasped. He was rolling on the ground, trying to hold his stomach and rub his leg at the same time.
“Truce,” I said when the spinning slowed a little. We were hurting ourselves more than we were hurting the other guy.
“You maniac. What was that for?” he complained.
“Really? You don’t know?”
“No!” He had that good German frown. The frown that said the rest of the world hadn’t learned how to make sense yet, and things would be a lot simpler if they would just see reason.
I levered myself up to a more comfortable position. “I understand what you were doing, now,” I said. “You were playing the role.” He was a flunky, all right. Doing the odd jobs for Cosimo, just at the edge of legality. Surrounded by money men and risk takers and that tantalizing idea of Antiquities Smuggling and Looted Artworks, all that glamorous Topkapi stuff.
And then Athena Fox walks into his life. He jumped at the chance to follow me. To chase me. Every step of my flight through Germany, he was there egging me on to become more the Athena Fox to his suave criminal. The ultimate role-play. Of course, if this had been a real Athena Fox adventure, there would have been a lot more explosions.
“But what you forgot is I’m still a real person,” I said. “A woman alone in a strange country, unable to rest, afraid for my life. You put me through hell, you bastard. I’d hit you again if it didn’t hurt so much.”
“I never touched you,” he said defensively. “There was nothing to be afraid of.” He pointed at the gun. “Just plastic.”
As if being a guy, with all that weight, height, and muscle, wasn’t threatening enough. “You asshole!” I shouted. Stopped as a thought hit. “You mean to say you didn’t even know? How could you miss it?”
“Miss what?” Irritably.
“The other guy tried to kill me,” I said.
Satz just gave me a look. A “dramatic, much?” sort of look.
“Tried to crush my head with a rock while I was lying injured at the bottom of that cistern in Bad Münster. Snuck a MAO inhibitor into my beer at München and I almost died from the drug interaction. Chased me around the ferry from Venice and when he caught me threw me in the Adriatic to drown!”
“I…”
I levered myself up. “One more word and I’m going to come over there and hit you again!”
“I didn’t know there was another guy!” Satz thought quickly. “There is someone. The supplier. He’s trying to pull out of the deal. So my boss leaned on me. So…” He didn’t need to point at the gun.
“A third par
ty,” I said. “I suspected. But there’s something else I’m not getting. Something important.” I stood up. “I need more and you are it. Come with me. We’re going back to talk to Ariadne.”
Satz resisted. “I did my job.”
“You almost got me killed,” I said. “You owe me.” I gave him a thin, ugly smile. “Keep the sherd with you if it makes you feel better. Your boss can always try to make a new deal with Ariadne.”
“No,” he said slowly. “No, it isn’t right. Take it.”
“Up, then.” And then I rubbed it in. “Hier. Schnell. Atlantis awaits.”
I continued to puzzle over it as we traversed the rain-drenched streets back to Ermou Street. Archaeologists, my books said, were good at pattern recognition. At pattern fitting. Being an archaeologist meant being aware. Being situationally aware. Like my Athenians. They noticed things. Well, you had to, if you were doing a walking survey.
Walking survey. Sharpe had found the Athena sherd himself. That made the most sense. But he wasn’t an excavator. So it had been on the surface. Turned up by erosion. Or construction.
“This man, he never spoke to you?” Satz was puzzled. When he’d stopped with the B-Movie nasty impression, he had a light, pleasant accent. A familiar one, too.
“No.” I grinned, then. “You’re from the North. My friend was a Berliner. You have the same accent.”
“It’s not the same accent,” Satz argued. “I am from Lübeck,” he said proudly.
“Well, it’s much better than that thing you were doing in Frankfurt.”
We reached the edge of where last night’s riot had reached. A broken window or two, debris of barriers or bottles that was hard to tell from the general trash. The rainwater was running in the streets, heavy enough to splash up where it hit the wheel of a parked car or another obstruction.
The wind was whipping the overhead lines around, rattling at windows, trying to pull at awnings. It had only slowed the crowd by a little. I’d seen stern warnings on the television to stay in and stay safe but since when did Athenians ever follow orders? At least around this area, the stores were mostly closed; as we left the joyfully splashing brunch crowd behind it was almost peaceful.