by Gary Corby
“It’s like you said. I’ve spent more time in the army than you. I’ve had more practice at tracking people in the night.”
“Why did you follow me?”
“I wasn’t, really. The man I wanted to follow was the priest. But after I saw you move, I could hardly let myself get in front, could I? You would have seen me. I had to trust that you knew what you were doing, that you wouldn’t lose him.” Philipos had fallen instinctively into his army role. He spoke to me like an officer to a difficult soldier. “Then you ran into that wall. It ruined my plan,” he said accusingly.
“Sorry about that.”
“It’s a wonder your scream didn’t bring everyone running,” he said.
“I didn’t scream.”
“Yes you did.” He smirked. “I realized before you did that the priest had turned left. I jumped the wall and followed until I reached that graveyard. But like you, I’d lost him. I hid behind one of the funeral stele, waiting to see if I could pick him up. Then I saw a light.” Philipos pointed at the village. “It was coming from there.”
That must be the same light that I had seen. It occurred to me that Diotima and I hadn’t paid enough attention to that light. Who had made it? It seemed that not only had Geros been walking about in the dead of night, as had I and Philipos, but there had been a fourth person in what was supposed to be an abandoned part of the island.
“Very well then, Philipos,” I said, “Now tell me what in Hades you thought you were doing, following me in the night.”
“I told you,” he said. “I wasn’t following you, I was following Geros.”
“Yes, but why?”
“To kill him, of course.”
I put my head in my hands. “You’re admitting to the murder?”
Philipos hung his head low. “No, I failed.”
“In the names of all the gods, what on earth were you thinking?” I had to prevent myself from shouting.
“Pericles said it himself,” Philipos said defensively. “Who will rid me of this priest?”
“He didn’t mean it!”
“How was I to know that?”
I sighed.
“Besides,” Philipos added, “I knew perfectly well you’d been sent to kill the old priest.”
“I did no such thing!”
“There’s no point lying, Nicolaos,” said Philipos. “I heard Pericles give you the order. I approached when the two of you were talking together, remember?”
I had to think back to recall. Yes, Philipos had come up to warn Pericles about the approaching lambs.
“I remember. Go on.”
Philipos drew in a breath. “As I walked up, I overheard Pericles tell you to deal with Geros. Deal with! Those were his exact words. There’s no point trying to deny it,” he finished in a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s all right, Nicolaos, I won’t tell anyone.”
So that was the problem. A coincidence of two phrases from Pericles, both innocent. Well, mostly innocent, if you didn’t count corruption and bribery. Philipos had heard the words out of context. He’d heard an order to kill.
“I figured it may as well be me who did it instead of you.” Philipos shrugged.
“You enjoy killing people?” I asked.
“No. Even on a battlefield I never liked it much.” He sounded unhappy to admit it.
“I’m not surprised,” I said gently. “I’ve known real assassins, Philipos, men who enjoy it, and let me tell you, you’re no assassin.”
“Well, I’ve discovered that,” he said. “But there’s no need to rub it in.”
“There’s nothing to rub,” I said. “Assassination is not fun. It’s not even exciting. Mostly it’s just scary.”
“How would you know?”
“I know, trust me.”
Philipos shot me a look. I stared back, daring him to ask the next question.
“There’s the problem,” he mumbled. “You know that, and I don’t.”
“I don’t understand you, Philipos. You thought I was going to eliminate Geros, you thought the job was going to get done anyway, and yet you took an enormous risk to do something that wasn’t your problem?” I paused, to let that sink in, then asked the burning question. “Why?”
Philipos looked away. “Pericles is a genius,” he said.
“That’s debatable,” I told him, “But either way it doesn’t answer the question.”
“Yes it does,” he replied with some heat. “As a man, I’m nothing special.”
He paused, waiting for me to argue with his modest self-opinion.
I didn’t.
Philipos glared at me and went on. “Pericles is guiding Athens. Have you not seen how much greater our city has become since he became our leader?”
I nodded.
“Then there is Aeschylus, who writes plays; and that Sophocles fellow too,” said Philipos. His voice had quickened and his words held belief. “They are great writers. Then there are all those philosophers with their thoughts, and the sculptors and the artists and Callias the diplomat. I am nothing special, but I am surrounded by all these great men who are changing the world. Men like you.”
“Me!”
“You. Who does Pericles send on all the most important missions? I hang around his house, and he sends me on errands. He could ask me to do something important—I would do it!—but when something important comes up, something that needs a man of action, he turns to me and says, ‘Send for Nicolaos.’ Why not me? I’m not a statesman or a philosopher or an artist or anything like that, but I could do the job you do. Why doesn’t Pericles ask me to be the agent?”
“You want my job?” I said, astounded.
“See?” he said bitterly. “You think I can’t do it.”
“No, I think you’re insane,” I said with considerable feeling. “Is that why you went to murder Geros? To prove you could do what I do?”
“Yes,” Philipos said in a near whisper.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “From now on you can do all the dirty work that Pericles dumps on me.”
“What?” he said, surprised. “I’m to be Pericles’s agent?”
“Yes. You’re welcome to it.” The moment I said it, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders.
“Do you really mean that?” he asked suspiciously.
“I really mean it,” I told him.
The fact was that I had already been thinking about quitting. I had been badly shaken when Diotima asked me to look after the baby if she died in childbed. I wouldn’t admit it, not even to her, because it would imply less than perfect confidence, but I was terrified that she wasn’t going to make it. If I couldn’t admit it to my wife, I could at least admit it to myself.
A man with children to raise has no business risking his life day after day. I had reached the happy position that I didn’t need Pericles’s money to make my way. The rewards from previous jobs had seen to that. It was time to get out.
Philipos smiled when he realized that I meant it. I felt it only fair to wipe that smile off his face at once.
“The job’s yours. But I’m warning you, Philipos, you won’t like it.”
“What does it involve?” he asked.
“Mostly it involves getting beaten, stabbed, kicked, punched, and spat on, and when you get the job done a thank you from Pericles and a protracted fight to make him pay you for services rendered.”
“You’re trying to talk me out of it,” he said accusingly.
“You’ll learn, soon enough,” I promised him, thinking it was going to be fun watching Philipos discover reality. “In the meantime, you can tell me what went wrong with your murder plan.”
“I fell into a hole,” he said, shamefaced.
I had to suppress a laugh, but Philipos saw my expression.
“Well, you can’t laugh. You kicke
d a wall,” he said. “I saw you. It’s not like I did anything worse.”
“True enough,” I said, and now I grinned. “So neither of us has a future as a dark assassin. What was this hole you fell in?”
“An open grave, in the graveyard. I went straight in and twisted my ankle when I landed. It hurt a lot. I could feel the ankle swelling.” He gestured at the wrapping around his leg. “Well, you see it now. I decided if I couldn’t make a fast getaway then I would have to abandon the attempt.”
“Very wise.”
“I climbed out, only to see you trailing after the priest.”
“You saw me again?”
“I said so, didn’t I? Geros was on his way to the village. I saw him go amongst the buildings. I abandoned my attempt. Then I saw you. I hit the dirt and lay still. You almost walked on me, you know. You’re not very observant in the dark.”
I decided not to rise to that. “What then?”
“I made my way back to camp, staying along the water’s edge to avoid being spotted.”
“Did you see Geros leave?”
“How could I? I was heading back to the fleet while you were still hunting him down to kill him.”
“All right, then what did you do?” I asked.
“Went back to the camp, where you saw me.”
Philipos’s story made perfect sense. The only problem was, with only the smallest change in the details, he could have waited for me to leave, killed Geros on his way through the graveyard, left the body lying where I found it, and then returned to camp before I got there. Which would make it look like I killed the priest, which was what half the other priests thought anyway. Philipos could have twisted his ankle at almost any place on this island and at almost any time.
“Does this mean I’m your assistant now?” Philipos asked as we trudged back to the Athenians.
I thought about it. I still didn’t trust Philipos. If there was any Athenian who could have killed Geros, it was certainly him. But his air of general incompetence suggested otherwise, and if he was acting, then he was doing a fine job of fooling me. Besides which, if I took him on, and he tried to ruin the investigation, then that would be a sure sign that he was the killer. All in all, I thought this might be a good test. I would find him a job that was important, but easily checked.
“Apprentice,” I said firmly. “You’re an apprentice. You have to start from the ground up, you know.”
“Oh yes, of course. What do I do first?”
I tried to think of something that would keep him out of the way.
“There are boat marks in the sand, next to the Old Village. Go check them, will you? They might be eroded. Here are the measurements of the indents in the sand, from when we first saw them.” I handed Philipos the shreds of tunic that I had used to record the lengths.
He frowned. “This seems very simple,” he said.
“Now here’s the fun part. When you’ve done that, find out which boat on this island made the marks.”
“That seems impossible,” he said.
“Nonsense,” I said briskly. “Any decent apprentice could do it.”
I thought to myself that would keep him busy for a while.
“Nico, what is it?” Diotima asked, when I walked in the cottage door. “You let me sleep in! What happened?”
“Add Philipos to your list of suspects,” I said. “And by the way, he is now my apprentice.”
“You’re babbling.” Diotima put a concerned hand to my forehead. “You don’t feel feverish. Have you been drinking?”
She smelled my breath.
“Hear me out.”
I told her everything that had happened. It was a surprisingly long tale. When I finished, Diotima fixated on the point most important to her.
“You’re handing your agent work to Philipos?” she said. She was clearly dubious about that idea.
“We don’t need it anymore,” I told her.
“How will we pay for things?” she asked.
“Do you know how much money we’ve saved?” I asked her.
“I have no idea,” she said.
Diotima had never paid attention to the family finances. My wife was a priestess first, a philosopher second, and an author third. None of those jobs involved large sums of money.
“We have the farm that Pericles gave me,” I said.
“It’s minute,” she pointed out.
“It makes a small living,” I allowed. “Father was pleased enough with the farm that he let me remain an investigator, rather than require me to join him as a sculptor.”
“A good thing, too,” my wife said. “You’d make a rotten sculptor.”
While my father lived, he was the head of the family. As a sculptor he made enough to get by, but it wasn’t much. My mother was a midwife, and that supplemented the family income. In recent years I had become the major earner, as a good son should. What pleased me enormously was that I’d managed to do this with the work I wanted, as an agent and an investigator.
“Then there’s the money promised by the Egyptian public service,” I said.
“I’ll believe in that when I see it,” Diotima said.
On our previous assignment I had been promised a very large reward from the head of the public service in the land of Egypt. That money hadn’t arrived; Diotima was right to be skeptical, but I thought it worth mentioning, before I made the most important argument.
“I am now earning more money from commissions for private citizens than I am from Pericles,” I said. “Do you realize that the work we do for the state—under commission for Pericles—pays us the least, but is the most dangerous?”
This was the essential point I needed to make Diotima understand. Since I had begun work for Pericles my name had become known. Other men, private citizens of Athens, had from time to time come to me with problems that had nothing to do with the state or the good of Athens. At first those jobs had been a small trickle, trivial issues like missing sons (usually run off with an inappropriate girl), neighbor disputes (it was astonishing how often men quietly moved boundary stones and tried to get away with it), and agricultural arguments (“He stole my best goat”). These were barely noticeable as a source of coins, but over the years the trickle had become a steady stream. The little jobs had led to more lucrative ones (“My business partner is stealing from me”; “Someone stole my boat”). I was now earning more from my private practice than from work for the state. What was most important, those private commissions were always family squabbles, or business matters—much less likely to get me killed than my work for Pericles, which was invariably fatal for someone. I was aware that I was starting to push my luck.
“I see,” Diotima chewed her lower lip, a sure sign that she was thinking hard. “You’re right, Nico, but can Philipos do the work?”
“Do we care?” I countered.
“What will Pericles say?”
That was a good question.
“Pericles can’t force me to take his commissions,” I said confidently.
“Hmm.” Diotima had her own views on that. “Should I point out that you’ve made a major suspect your apprentice?”
“What better way to maintain tabs on a suspect than to keep him close to us?” I said.
“I can think of several better ways,” Diotima said. “Also, he must be the oldest apprentice in the history of Athens. Do you think he did it?”
I paused before saying, “He’s given us enough evidence to prosecute him, if we wanted, and I doubt he could defend himself in a trial. As far as we know, nobody saw Geros alive after Philipos’s adventure in the graveyard, and what’s more, he exactly fits your motive scheme of an Athenian who didn’t know that the fix was in.”
“Then it’s very possible he is the murderer,” Diotima said.
“Yes, it’s possible,” I agreed. “We’ll have
to be very, very careful around him.” I glanced at the position of the sun. “We need to go.” Time was flying away on us.
“What do you make of Philipos’s story of the open grave?” Diotima asked, as she rode and I walked along the Sacred Way for the umpteenth time.
“It’s bizarre,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes,” Diotima agreed. “Why mention such a thing if he’s the killer? He could have invented a loose stone to trip on. Everyone would believe that.”
“Why mention it if he isn’t guilty?” I replied. “You’re the detective, my dear. You’ll have to decide.”
There was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a man I recognized. It was the slave whom I had commandeered on the morning that Geros had been murdered, the one I sent to take the news of the disaster to Anaxinos.
“I have a message from Karnon,” he said.
“Yes?” I waited for him to tell it to me. Instead, he handed over an ostrakon, a broken piece of pottery into which a message had been scratched. It said, “Come at once. Disaster.”
The slave led us to the Oikos of the Naxians. Inside, Karnon was pacing ferociously back and forth. He alternately swung his arms behind his back, then clenched them in front again in angst.
What could have caused such agitation? I could think of only one answer.
“Who’s dead?” I asked.
“No one,” he replied. He stopped pacing, but could barely stand still. “It’s worse than murder.”
“What could be worse than that?” Diotima asked.
Karnon stared at us in abject horror. “We’ve been robbed.”
The Great Temple Robbery
“After we spoke, I thought I should continue my accounting of the treasure,” Karnon said. “I wanted to be absolutely sure that I had my sums right before anyone moved a drachma.”
Karnon had led us to the Porinos Naos, the temple in which the fighting funds were stored.
“And?” Diotima prompted.
“And the loose change boxes all came up correct. But with the enclosed boxes, they are numbered and weighed. That’s the fastest way to get a quick estimate, you know.”
“I understand.”
