And, this morning, behind his locked door, he was going to have some fun with his writing.
The first two thirds of the book were ready in manuscript form and sitting with his publisher in London. He’d dealt with the life and career of his subject, Alexander of Macedon, and he’d done it well. It had taken years in time snatched from an active life but it had been meticulously researched. Started in the trenches of Macedonia during the Great War—1915, he remembered—some of his early pages of notes were difficult to read under the brown blotches of mud and blood. He could remember the exact moment when he’d had the idea. He’d taken a copy of Plutarch’s Lives to war with him in his backpack and, finding himself stationed amongst the silver-fir-clad slopes of the very mountains where Alexander was born and raised, he’d begun to reread the conqueror’s story. Stormed and retaken from the Ottoman by the Greek army only a few years previously, this northern province beyond the shrugging shoulder of Mount Olympus was now accounted a part of Greece, though not many people nowadays were entirely convinced that this was a political certainty. According to Prime Minister Venizelos—there could be no doubt! It was now firmly in the territory of the New Greece. And, in Alexander’s day, the boy king himself showed no geographical confusion whatsoever! Alexander had had the confidence to write to his enemy Darius, King of the Persian Empire, a letter of intent—intent to invade Asia—and the reason Alexander gave was, just like the man himself, blunt: “Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Greece and did us much harm …”
Good point, Alexander! A telling sentence. It was clear from this that he regarded Macedonia as the prime province within Greece and not separate from it. And also that he took the sufferings meted out by the Persian invaders on two occasions to the string of Greek city-states as a personal insult. Alexander saw himself not, as many critics had claimed, as “a barbarian” but as a Hellene. A Greek speaker, a Greek thinker, and an avenger of Greece.
Crouching amongst the crags and the glens of those northern fastnesses where the only creatures about him apart from the military whose presence scarred the land were sheep and eagles, Andrew had had a vision of the young highland soldier more than two thousand years in the past. Raised in a tough school, a warrior among warriors, loved by his loyal kinsmen, the prince had been driven by ambition—and probably by rivalry with his father, Philip—to conquer the world. They said his favourite line from Homer was “Ever to be best and stand far above all others.” They said his mother Olympias was descended from the hero Achilles, who had so plagued and defied King Agamemnon, his war lord. And Alexander had grown up intending to rival Achilles in glory. Like his ancestor, the boy king had chosen to trade the chance of a long and dull life for a brief but glorious one which would ensure his eternal fame. His choice certainly made for a gripping biography.
Andrew’s research was incomparable, his style modern, flowing, and involving. And now at last he’d come to it: the nub of the book, the point, the culmination of the last ten years of effort. Ten years he’d spent off and on exploring the desert sands, not in the hope of making a sensational discovery in the style of archaeologists like Schliemann or Howard Carter, but always with fingers crossed and—bizarrely—half hoping for a nil return. He’d been bent on eliminating possibilities, dutifully pursuing trails into the dust, laying the foundations for his coup. Such was the tenacity generated by an idée fixe. But he was conscious of the weaknesses, the traps that opened up at the feet of men who sought to make the facts fit their theory. Dangerous self-deceit, he knew. Self-deceit could be his undoing.
He’d had considerable success. It was hard to stick a spade into the sands of Egypt without success of some sort and he’d made the most of his, using his skill and his scientific background to shape the young discipline of archaeology. He couldn’t rival Howard Carter’s astonishing discovery in the Valley of the Kings, but Andrew knew he had on his side three attributes Carter could never boast: an aristocratic background, an impeccable education, and a “good war.” His scholarship and his independence were trusted by the Academic Establishment—as far as those prima donnas trusted anyone. Andrew Merriman was the man governments chose to consult when problems arose and they needed to quote advice from an impeccable source who had the world’s approval.
They would read his final chapters and swallow the hook.
Andrew sighed with anticipation. His time was coming! He could pull it off!
And he wouldn’t have recourse to ancient curses, dogs howling in the night, unexpected deaths, and suchlike vulgar attention-grabbing devices! The King Tut Music Hall obsession had entertained the world but he would manage his show much more skilfully. With the understanding of a director for his audience, he would present to the world a mummy of a splendour that would push the insignificant young Pharaoh of Egypt to the back pages. A golden mummy. The embalmed remains of the Son of Zeus. Or so Alexander of Macedonia had thought himself. And oracles, soothsayers, priests, and kings had hurried to support his pretensions. The world had prostrated itself at the feet of its young conqueror. And would again!
The Death of a God. (Who murdered Alexander?) And his Entombment. (Where Do His Remains Lie?) Hard not to scatter the capital letters about. Andrew thought he knew the answers to both questions. And his readers, from the most eminent classical scholars to the man on the London omnibus, would—carried along by the impeccable prose and irrefutable facts of the body of the book—accept in its entirety the astonishing conclusion.
And now for the bonne bouche! The finger-tingling climax of his writing. For inspiration, Andrew propped the drawing of Alexander’s magnificent golden funeral carriage up in front of his inkstand and stared at it. A hypnotic image.
Borodin’s caravan swayed out of sight in time with Andrew’s vision. A flute gave one last plaintive flourish. The bells on the golden sepulchre fell silent. The professor smiled with satisfaction. A moving temple, fit for a god. Time for it to make its glittering appearance in his pages!
Ignoring the surreptitious movement of the door handle, Andrew Merriman began to write.
Chapter 4
Soulios Gunay strolled to the café fanning himself with his straw boater. Ridiculous headgear! He still felt comfortable with nothing but his red fez. He felt more comfortable with his true given name: Suleyman … but, when in Athens … He joined three men at their table. They looked up eagerly.
“Kalimera, sympatrioti,” said one. Was the Thracian greeting sincere or a sly and indiscreet reference to his northern origin? Soulios returned a stiffly polite reply. He looked at their drinks, signalled the waiter, and ordered more ouzo all round with mint tea for himself.
“I shouldn’t indulge you,” he commented with distaste when the four drinks arrived. “You should be keeping a clear head. That’s what I pay you for.”
“Oh, come on, now, we got it right this time, didn’t we? That was him, wasn’t it? You saw! You knew him, or you wouldn’t be celebrating by standing us another ouzo,” one of them reasoned.
“Give me the photograph.”
The oldest man, his cousin, took a battered sepia photograph from his briefcase and put it in the middle of the table. They all considered the image, matching it with the features of the man they had witnessed briefly.
“Hard to tell. I’d know the horse if I saw it again,” the cousin commented. “But the arrogant poser in the saddle? Still has that swagger about him … if it is him we saw just now. All that bowing and scraping! It’s possible. He’s aged, if so … It’s been how long? Ten years?”
“Eleven,” said Soulios firmly. “The year of the Salonika fire—1917. That’s when I first encountered him. But it’s five years since he rode up to my door with his pockets stuffed with gold. It’s him. That’s all I need to know.”
The three men relaxed and exchanged congratulatory smiles. “Then you’ll be wanting us to …?” The youngest of the trio mimed unsheathing a knife.
Soulios stopped him with a peremptory gesture. “No. The ne
xt bit is delicate. I don’t mean to offend you but I have things to do, things to check … It will take time. My permit runs out next week and I must return … home.” The word always caught in his throat. He dislodged it and spat it out again: “Home … to Turkey.” He listened politely to the expressions of sympathy his show of emotion had triggered and concluded: “I’ll return when I can and prepare you for a busy summer. Meantime—you may stand down.”
His cousin shrugged. “Five years, Soulios. Strike while you still have the venom in you. Leave it any longer, you’ll start to forget. You’ll make yet another fortune, marry another wife … grow fat and easy sitting under your olive trees. Could be your last chance.”
Soulios smiled. “Oh, no. The poison distils. Or rather—it improves with keeping, like a good brandy.”
They looked at each other with the agitated disappointment of muzzled hounds shown the hare. “Well, when you need us you know where …”
He did. He owned their businesses and their homes.
“Thank you. There is one thing … Cousin, your boy—he is how old now?”
“Twelve, Soulios. Well grown. He’s a big, strong boy.”
“Time he was earning a wage?”
His cousin shrugged. “It’s not easy. The city’s awash with cheap labour, you know that. Lads that’ll work for a day to earn a crust of bread.”
Soulios glanced back up the street. “I think a job should be found for him. And I have one in mind. Send Demetrios to see me this evening.”
He smiled and rose to his feet, drawing the meeting to a close. “That will be all for the moment. You’ve seen him. You will know him again. You can go now.”
The bleak features invited no argument or comment. Respectfully, the three men finished their drinks, slipped away the banknotes he offered them, bowed briefly, and left together.
Soulios watched them walk away, eyes narrowed in speculation. He decided he had chosen well. The men were bound to him by the double tie of family allegiance and financial interest. The two older cousins had acquired a ruthless competence during their spell in the Greek army during the Balkan wars. They had not yet sunk into the mire of postwar lethargy; their spirit was not yet quenched by domesticity. They could handle weapons. They could kill. The youngest had a naturally vicious streak and a cockiness that pushed him to outdo the two others, whom he jokingly called his “uncles.” They would need careful management, but their talents, Soulios calculated, would be quite adequate for carrying out the first stage of his plans. The simplest.
His ultimate goal, a coup so ambitious and so satisfying he could scarcely bring himself to believe it attainable, his cousins had no conception of. And they must catch no whisper of it. They would have no sympathy for his plan. In fact it would horrify them. They would refuse to be involved with it at any price. Soulios could understand that. No—for this a professional operator would be brought in from a foreign power. It would be expensive but Soulios was prepared to put his last drachma behind it. It would be tricky but, at last and surprisingly, there’d been a breakthrough. He’d learned to wait. And waiting had thrown up support from an unexpected quarter.
He’d discovered there were people in the city more fanatical and madder than he considered himself. Reckless, impetuous, wild-eyed people he wouldn’t trust as far as the end of the garden, but they had in place exactly what he needed: a network that threaded Europe. At the centre of the web was Athens, and from here it looped its way from glittering capital to glittering capital in a tangle of telegraph and telephone wires. He’d made discreet use of these people and what he suspected was their leaking sieve of an organisation. They were eager to help. And they’d found exactly what he was looking for in London.
London. The irony pleased him.
When he was sure he was not overlooked, Soulios sat down again, ordered some more tea, and took from his wallet another photograph. He placed it over the first. Dark brown with weathering and much use, the subject was barely distinguishable. Three dark heads close together, six bright eyes, a white streak which might have been a pearl necklace around a slim throat. Three innocents dead.
But it would take four lives to pay the bill.
His loving eyes made out the fading features with painful clarity. His wife, his six-year-old son, and his two-year-old daughter. Their image was still there, etched forever on his mind, as, clasped in each other’s arms with not even a burial sack to cover their dead faces, livid and lost, they sank slowly beneath the grey waters of the Bosphorus.
Chapter 5
October 1928. Athens.
In an ancient scoop of land, a sheltered hollow on the southern slope of the Acropolis where the rock was still warm from the day, a man’s scream ripped through the gathering darkness.
The scream followed the unmistakable sound of a blade thrusting into flesh.
For a few seconds all other sounds were pushed to the edges of perception; the rumble of traffic, the pealing of a cracked church bell, the squabbling of a pair of birds were discounted by everyone within earshot as listeners strained to make sense of what they’d heard.
It came again, the same butcher’s blow, accompanied this time by a grunt of effort. A second piercing shriek of surprise and outrage turned abruptly into a guttural rasping: the gargle of a dying man whose lungs refuse to function, whose air passages are filling with blood. And yet the unseen victim went on fighting to snatch one more breath.
The Little Summer of Saint Demetrios had settled over Greece, smiling a blessing. It looked as though they were to have a gentle October. But the harsh heat of the past months lingered on in the citizens’ minds, a recent and scorching memory. The memory was too easily triggered by a glance upwards to the contorted shapes of trees outlining the hills and the occasional whiff of charcoal carried down on the breeze. September rain had quenched the sporadic fires and already underbrush was shooting fresh and green amongst the blackened stumps, a premature taste of spring.
As the sun set, the evening sky began to flush with the grey-purple light that the slopes of Mount Hymettus bounce back with some optical witchery to stain the heavens for a few moments over the city. Athens, the violet-crowned, was settling gratefully for the night under a single silken sheet.
It should have been a moment of deep peace but, somewhere just out of sight, a man was screaming in his death throes.
A grey shape, hooded and masked, detached itself from a crowd of similar grey shapes standing frozen in horrified tableau within yards of the butchery, and with a wide gesture called for silence. “Quiet!” The voice was deep and authoritative. The crowd stopped its murmuring at once. And then the same voice came again: “There’s been murder done here!” The comment was sepulchral in meaning and delivered with an awed intensity, yet it was so superfluous, following the blatantly obvious nature of the assault, that it risked provoking an explosion of nervous laughter from two women who were sitting at ease on the hillside, listening, a short distance away.
This was no time for levity. The dying man’s pain was evident to all who heard it; his dogged refusal to surrender to whatever horror was staring him in the face aroused a sympathetic agony. A third slicing blow and a low gurgling sob had them twitching in response.
Was it over now? They longed for it to be over.
The two women stirred uneasily, listening on, wanting to block their ears yet not daring to miss a sound. Their tension, stretched beyond its limits by fear and pity, frayed and fell apart at a further vocal onslaught, unravelling into strands of impatience and anger. Enough! Enough! Was the victim now attempting to call for help? Surely not! The man knew he must die. Why couldn’t he just bow to Fate, give up the ghost and slide away, putting the listeners out of their misery?
Laetitia Talbot, seated in the centre of the first row of marble steps, turned to whisper as much to her companion but closed her mouth, censoring the ungracious comment.
“Lord! Geoffrey’s really hamming it up, isn’t he?” Maud Merriman had no such com
punction. “Where on earth does he think he is—the Torture Chamber at Madame Tussaud’s?” Maud’s commanding English voice risked disturbing the action even when produced, as now, in a whisper. She sighed and hunted for the spectacles that dangled on a gold chain on her bosom. She popped them onto the tip of her nose and turned the face of her watch to the dying light from the west but shrugged, unable to read it. “If I rightly remember the play, I reckon we’ve got three hundred lines more to come … Now—you’ve got the script, Letty. Aren’t you supposed to be prompting? Just have a look and check I’m right, would you?”
Laetitia knew that she needn’t bother. Maud knew every line of the tragedy by Aeschylus, whether in this new English version of Agamemnon they were hearing or in the ancient Greek.
“Good thing they invited us to their rehearsal, my dear! They can depend on hearing our informed opinion—delivered with unsparing honesty.” The relish in Maud’s tone promised a stinging application of the renowned Merriman honesty.
“We must tell them to speed things up a bit before the actual performance … Somewhere between lines nine seventy-five and thirteen-forty, I’d say. Wouldn’t you agree, Letty? Mark it up in your copy. No! There! There!” An imperious finger flipped over two sheets of the script in Letty’s lap and pointed with unerring accuracy to line 975. “One hesitates, of course, to edit dear old Aeschylus and I’m quite certain the suspense is just what the author intended at this point—keeping us on the very edge of these uncomfortable seats—but all the same … An hour and a half should be the absolute limit for a modern audience. Great Heavens! This could all take another twenty minutes!” Maud hurried on, not requiring a comment. “Fifteen if they dash through it—longer if Geoffrey indulges himself in another death rattle. Don’t, I beg you, Laetitia, call for an encore! He’s showed off quite enough for one night.”
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