Byron's Shadow

by Jason Foss

  Flint introduced Lisa under her pseudonym. ‘This is my drinking partner, Jules. He’s into bones, hates to see anything with its skin on.’

  She extended her hand. ‘I’m Lisa in real life, but don’t tell Vikki.’

  Jules glanced at Flint, who gritted his teeth.

  ‘Deeper and deeper,’ Jules said, holding one hand above his head.

  *

  Flint and Lisa slipped back into their real personas as the Americans made for their beds. He closed the door of the minibus and they were plunged into the total, moonless, night of the campsite. Lisa stood with her back against the minibus, looking towards Orion. The air was thick with the musty smell of dune grass mingling with sounds of surf on shingle and the ever-present cicadas.

  ‘This is not real,’ she stated quietly. ‘Here we are, grown up people, running around, stealing pottery, making up names for ourselves…’

  ‘It’s a bit like “Bonnie and Clyde” without the hillbilly music and gunfire.’

  ‘But what am I doing here with you?’ she laughed, ‘This life suits you; you’re an adventurer and a revolutionary; you’ll always be twenty-five; you’ll always be a hippy. But I’ve grown up and all this terrifies me — it isn’t a game. The police are going to get us.’ Her tone had suddenly become sober.

  ‘Don’t be daft, I’ve got my passport back. Someone thinks I’m innocent.’

  ‘Sending you that passport could just be a trick to try to lure you to the airport.’

  ‘I know, but I didn’t go; plan foiled. Tomorrow I’m going to introduce you to post-ex.’

  ‘Huh.’

  He thumped the side of the van. ‘The answer is in here.’

  ‘You’re so terribly full of yourself...’

  Flint was tired and his morale was sagging, ‘I’ve got no choice. It’s me and you versus the rest of the world, with a little help from our friends. If I don’t believe in myself, what chance do I have?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, stroking his arm, ‘I’m always pulling you down and I shouldn’t. It’s because I’m tired. Would you mind if I went and found that girl’s tent?’

  He laid his hands on her waist and kissed her. ‘Go on, I can’t handle you tonight, I don’t have the energy.’

  She ruffled his hair. ‘That will be the day.’

  *

  Flint awoke with glorious dawn. Viewed over the rim of his sleeping bag, the experience outweighed the stiffness induced by the sand. At first he missed the close proximity of Lisa, then allowed himself to sink back and appreciate the scene and the sounds. Water breaking on the shoreline eased him awake as it had eased him asleep. Across the straits, a sliver of burning gold shimmered above the mountains of Euoboea, a sight which once must have greeted twenty-five thousand Persians encamped on that same shore. None of them knew that sunset would see their army in bloody chaos and the invasion plans of their king in ruins. Flint took a handful of sand and reflected on the past; his home ground, the place he knew best, but a place he could never go. The sand dribbled through his grasp, one grain for each Persian slain by Athenian bronze, each man forgotten. No glory awaited the loser.

  Excavation began with the air still cool and the sun still rehearsing for midday. The Americans dug from seven till eleven, took a four-hour break, then worked from three until six. Flint and Lisa joined the Americans for second breakfast, taken at nine, sharing bread and cheese. Elena Kyriacou said little to expose her charade, whilst Paul Adams tried hard to be the subdued character he had already created. Once his team were working again, Max commandeered two trestle tables and set them beside the Avis minibus (now technically stolen) which was drawn up in concealment beside a wall. He helped the pair unload the boxes and site notes.

  ‘So what are you guys up to?’ Max asked Lisa.

  ‘He’s the expert,’ Lisa said, ‘I just hope he can help me sort out this mess.’

  ‘Is this the stuff from Corinth you were talking about, Paul?’

  Flint made an ambiguous grunt. He hated lying to someone as open as Max.

  ‘Just checking her data. This lot is going home next week and we just need some space.’

  Again Max seemed to sense the brush-off. ‘Swell. Okay, just holler if you need me. I can’t jaw all day, we need to be off-site by next Saturday and there’s a billion chores to do.’

  ‘Where do we start?’ Lisa asked quietly, once Max had gone.

  Flint checked a list of plan numbers and box numbers which corresponded to his work in the olive grove. ‘Box 52 is the junk from the gully and 55 is from field walking under the olives. We’ll start with those.’

  Each box was tightly packed with brown paper bags marked in Emma’s distinctive italic hand, already fading with age. Flint grabbed the first bag.

  ‘I hate these paper bags, they’re a pig to use and they rot after a few years. I asked Embury to buy polygrips, but would he listen? No. Story of his life — and his death.’

  Scrubbed artefacts of several eras were tipped into a pile. Lisa watched every action he made.

  ‘So what are you doing?’

  He was rummaging through the pile with a finger, flicking objects to one side or another. ‘The jargon for this is “finds processing”.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be careful with those things?’ Lisa asked, almost alarmed.

  ‘Only if anyone’s watching.’ He picked up a sherd of pottery. ‘To you this is a valuable piece of a two-thousand year old pot. To me, it’s just very old junk.’ He tossed it aside. ‘Seen one, seen ’em all and it’s not what we’re looking for.’

  Finds from box fifty-two rattled onto the table top. This was the rubbish he remembered, but each piece was examined, checked against the record book, then shunted into a pile. Sherds of modern bottles, a button, a few bones, a couple of hunters’ cartridge cases and other, even less stimulating material.

  Lisa picked up the button. ‘More gold,’ she said with irony.

  ‘Brass.’ Flint took it off her, wondering about the style of design on the green corroded object. Then he picked up the brass cartridge cases.

  ‘Do you notice something about the patina?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The corrosion. Both this cartridge case and the button show the same level of corrosion.’

  ‘Does that mean they’re the same age?’

  ‘Have a degree in archaeology.’

  Lisa grinned broadly, ‘Thank you. So what’s this then?’

  She prodded a small, furry piece of lead.

  ‘We have the cartridge cases, so I guess that was a bullet. See how it’s flattened? Some defenceless rabbit probably copped it.’

  ‘But these are never rabbit bones, are they?’

  ‘No.’ Flint ran his index finger through the pile of bones, making wild, unspoken guesses. After a few moments, he arose.

  ‘Time to see Uncle Jules.’

  Within the tent which served as the Americans’ site hut, Flint talked over the problem with Jules, with Max leaning on the table, uncomfortably interested in what was said. Roles still had to be played and Jules was obviously uneasy.

  ‘Jules just loves bones, don’t you, Jules?’ Max crooned.

  ‘Yeah, so why did I come here?’ Jules said with a hint of nerves.

  ‘He says our soil is all wrong,’ Max said.

  All the bones on Jules’ own work table were in tiny, barely identifiable fragments. ‘If you guys got bones, show me, give me a treat.’

  The expert left his own work and came over to the sister project. Jules sat on a box and sorted through the thirty bones spread on the table. Twenty immediately went into a pile as he recited; ‘Sheep, goat, sheep or goat, goat or sheep.’

  Coming to a trio of small knucklebones, Jules paused and pushed them into another pile.

  ‘What are those?’ asked Lisa.

  ‘Those, my dear, are human.’

  Flint met her alarmed glance with an enthusiastic nod.

  Jules seemed to be thinking deeply, ‘What’s you
r soil type?’

  ‘The usual; arid, alkaline. This context is adjacent to a water channel, so you could expect periodic inundations.’

  The expert nodded. ‘You know, none of these are very old,’ Jules concluded, consigning some rib cage fragments to a ‘rabbit’ pile. ‘These knuckles still have ligaments, they were probably articulated until you disturbed them. What sort of site are you digging? A graveyard?’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  A graveyard, not old. It was something which could have caused offence and Christos Dracopoulos, site guardian or Vassilis Boukaris, son of local hero, were both well placed to take up the cause. Sebastian Embury was a man who might ignore warnings, even misread them, to assume he was about to stumble on something spectacular. That was theory of the day.

  *

  The American excavation had seven days to run, one week for Flint to kill before he could act. Each day, he would walk a mile to a grey concrete petrol station cum coffee shop and vegetable stall which stood back from the coast road. He would spend an hour, or two, wrestling with the telephone system, keeping Vikki at bay and making a dozen attempts to find Owlett.

  Vikki had begun to agitate; where was her story? When was he coming home? How much was all this costing? Lisa, too, was becoming restless, less passionate and more introverted each day that crawled by. Flint grew nervous, fearing his investigation had hit stalemate, fearing the situation was slipping away from his grasp.

  He would watch Max dragging his radar cart across the stony terrain, cursing and playing with the electrics. He watched as Angie struggled with the software which translated the signals from the machine into printed read-out. Max would bring ‘Paul’ over to witness his results, then have to explain later why so many readings turned out to be electronic wishful thinking.

  ‘Back home, my pa can find sewer pipes under concrete highways, but sewer pipes are easy. Archaeology gives it a headache, some features are simply too subtle.’

  Flint’s technophobia was justified yet again; the shovel-and-pick merchants still had a good few years’ work ahead of them, it seemed. He left Max to his gadgetry and made the long walk to the petrol station again.

  Vikki’s voice seemed strained and irritated.

  ‘Vikki, has Owlett rung you?’

  ‘No, I can’t find him; what have you done with him?’

  ‘Nothing. The last time I saw him, he was being followed into a gent’s loo.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘I don’t know; some goon. I skipped out the back, over a wall.’

  ‘You left poor Hugh? If something happens to him, I’ll never forgive you.’

  ‘I’m sure he can handle himself, he’s been around.’ Flint sounded more certain than he felt.

  ‘He covers Trade Shows mostly,’ Vikki said, ‘He doesn’t do murders.’

  Flint pushed all the air from his lungs into a long, demoralised groan. ‘Vikki, I thought you’d sent me a pro!’

  ‘He’s the only person I know in Greece! You’d better find him.’

  Vikki slammed down the receiver — or whatever one does to a mobile phone.

  *

  Had Hugh Owlett eaten his last trade lunch? Had he been arrested, or deported, or chased into hiding, or was a crumpled body lying undiscovered down an Athenian alleyway? Flint wandered back to the site in hopeless dejection, wanting to retrace his steps and wind back time. He couldn’t say anything to Lisa, he’d play boring old Paul Adams to the letter and try again tomorrow.

  On Monday, he left his walk to the petrol station until late in the day, allowing Fate time to bring Owlett back to life. Flint leaned heavily against the metallic phonebooth, watching a mechanic and a marooned driver argue over the bonnet of a rust-red van. Suddenly, he was through, at last.

  ‘Ah, Rodger,’ Owlett said after Flint had spoken.

  ‘Where...’ Flint began.

  ‘Rodger, good to hear from you. Hang on to your hat, I’ve found your friend.’

  Flint stiffened. Something was badly wrong. ‘Who?’

  ‘The late Captain,’ Owlett said, after a pause.

  Captain, captain? It could only be Byron Nichols.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Leoferas Poseidonis—the war cemetery. He’s been dead over thirty years.’

  Nichols was dead and Flint’s rising optimism plummeted back to earth. What was wrong with Owlett? Who else was listening?

  ‘But,’ Owlett continued, ‘someone who tends his grave is going to meet you. It will be a day later than when we first met, but otherwise, same time, same place.’

  This code took some deciphering; it must mean the Acropolis, Wednesday, 2pm, in front of the Erechtheum.

  ‘But, who?’

  ‘Well, we can’t chatter all day, can we?’ Owlett said.

  ‘No, cheers.’

  Numbed by indecision, Flint stood in the telephone box until the mechanic tapped on the glass. He allowed the man to take his place, then walked to barter for a melon. Owlett had been a changed man; talking in cypher as if he had company, or as if his telephone were bugged. Without doubt he had been followed, approached, threatened, even arrested. Lisa was demoralised, Max seemed suspicious, Jules was reluctant to become entwined, now another ally had fallen out of the battle; the struggle began to feel less like the triumphant victory of Marathon, more like the gallant last stand at Thermopylae.

  *

  Early the following day, Jules drove Flint to Aghios Stephanos to board a local train with the clanking third-class comfort of a cattle truck. He buried his face in his notes concerning the Civil War, spread in three stages from 1944 to 1950. Added to the death toll of Hitler’s war, over half a million Greeks had died in a decade of savagery. The story of international volunteers fighting fascism in Spain was well known, but few in Britain knew that hundreds of their countrymen had died fighting communism in Greece. The British Government had slowly grown wise to the rule of twentieth century warfare: don’t send troops to the Balkans. Once the British had withdrawn their soldiers, American aid took their place and dollars battered the communists into exile. It was an episode strangely absent from those pithy histories of Greece found in the front of travel brochures.

  Athens seemed like home. Dodging the cars, dodging the eyes of the policemen, Flint felt oddly secure in the streets he had begun to know. He walked a mile from the station and made the hike up the Acropolis in good time. He wanted to gain a feel of the people around him, spot the latecomers and the one, mysterious person who Owlett would not describe.

  Tourists, in bulk; Tourist Police, bored and disinterested; workmen battling to save the past for the benefit of the future; a couple swinging their legs over the edge of the parapet. A tall, possibly American man walked slowly across the scene in his loose shirt and tartan trousers. Flint started to move towards him, but the man drew out a camera and pointed it towards the hazy city below.

  Just a chance said that Owlett had betrayed him to the police, or worse, used the tantalising story as bait. But Owlett was an old hand; Vikki gave him less credit than he merited. Fretting, watching, fidgeting, Flint’s eyes fell on a delicately dressed woman, somewhere in late middle-age, stepping uncertainly over the rough rock below her high heels. The light knee-length skirt flared at the waist and ruffled as it caught the wind. Its colour was white, with just a suggestion of pink. She held onto her wide-brimmed co-ordinated hat and looked around herself through totally black sunglasses. In her other hand she clutched a thick hardbacked book, a biography, with its hero shown in Suliote dress.

  Byron read the flowing gold script of the title.

  ‘Byron Nichols?’ Flint whispered, approaching from behind.

  The woman gave a sharp intake of breath and spun around, still holding her hat.

  ‘You frightened me. I’m not used to this.’ Her voice was educated; she spoke English with a transatlantic accent and only a trace of Greek flattening her vowels.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know who you are,’ she continu
ed. ‘My name is Sofia Kionghis. Mister Owlett said he could not come, in case the police were watching him. I didn’t want to come, my husband would be so angry, you would not believe how angry he would be, but I wanted to tell someone about Byron.’

  She indicated the biography of the poet. ‘Not Lord Byron, but my Byron.’

  Flint suggested they walk away from the crowds, into the shade of one of the lesser, pre-classical monuments beyond the temple of Athena. This was no trap, he was certain. Sofia removed her sunglasses, checked her seat, then sat upon the base of a fallen column. Her age was perhaps close to sixty, yet she looked a decade younger. She was one of the blue-eyed Greeks, with skin finely stretched over her strong cheekbones and age held at bay by the best of cosmetics. She moved and talked with the elegance of the moneyed middle class. Flint was instantly entranced; had he been a poet he could have rushed back to his garret and turned out pages of prose in her praise.

  ‘Do you know about the Civil War?’ Sofia asked. Flint nodded—he had become a minor expert in the subject.

  ‘This is a difficult story and it all happened a long time ago. My family is wealthy and my father was in politics before the Germans invaded our country.’ Sofia spoke hurriedly, as if wanting to tell and run. ‘We spent the war waiting in Alexandria, and when it was over, we returned. I was seventeen when I saw Athens again, and soon afterwards I met a young man called Stephanos Sarris.’ She gave a distant, wistful smile. ‘He wrote poems about love, and freedom, and justice and my maid smuggled them to me.’

  The smiled faded. ‘When the Civil War started again, I hated my father, because he was wealthy and he was a politician and I blamed him for the suffering. People were starving, but my father and his friends ate well. Students of my own age were being locked up in an island prison, some of them were being tortured and killed and the men who signed these orders would come for dinner and my father would tell me how it was all for the good of Greece.

  ‘Stephanos came to me on my birthday, eighteenth December 1946. He asked me to run away with him. He said we would have adventures, hide in caves, live on wine and goats cheese.’