Greek Key

by Spangler, K. B.

  “All of this is legal?” I asked.

  Atlas twitched. “Ms. Blackwell—”

  “’cuz I’ll walk out of here right now if you can’t prove that you’re the rightful seller.”

  “Of course,” he said, resigned, and reached back into the satchel for the documentation.

  He spread this out on the table, tucking each piece of paper underneath its corresponding box. I didn’t recognize any of it—all Greek to me, haha—but I took a couple of photos and sent them to Speedy.

  The koala answered in record time. Mike must have been typing for him; Speedy’s claws are too bulky to bang text out on a cell phone. “Either authentic or good forgeries. It’ll hold up.”

  “K,” I replied.

  “My friend says these look authentic,” I said. “I’m sorry if I implied a lack of trust.”

  “You have made it quite clear how you stand on the matter of legality,” he said. “I’ll respect that.”

  He waited, probably for me to say that I’d start respecting his own professionalism.

  Nope.

  Listen, any dude who smarms his way through the appetizers is probably going to keep pushing me until he gets it through his head that I push back. Sooner or later, Atlas Petrakis would grok me, and then we’d be friendly friend-friends. Until then? Game on.

  Atlas stifled a sigh. “Greece is protective of its treasures. If the original owners didn’t give me permission to sell these items, they wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country.”

  I nodded, and he began opening the boxes.

  He went from largest to smallest, showing me ancient items. Here, a miniature marble frieze. There, a necklace. A strip of leather cut and twisted into the figure of a bull…

  Then he got to the smallest box, and that same heart-halting moment that had slammed into me back in my kitchen grabbed me again.

  I pretended to inspect the necklace as I ignored what was shouting at me from inside a ring box.

  Petrakis lifted its lid. Inside, three pieces of glass—no, three beads, but flattened so they looked more like shards of glass than beads—lay on the satin cushion.

  One was a vivid bottle green. The other two, pale blue. They tugged at me in the same way the fragment of the Mechanism had, and I knew these little beads had history.

  “Aw!” I said in the same voice I’d use if a friend was showing me an especially average cat, and not as if I was strangling myself to keep from grabbing the beads and running. “Cute.”

  Then I went back to inspecting the necklace.

  The waiter arrived and reminded us that our meals were soon to come out of the kitchen, and Atlas packed up his goods with the same careful precision he had used to set them on the linen cloth.

  I’m serious about food. I didn’t let us talk business during the meal. Fish and meatballs and spanakopita, which I had had a zillion times but had never really experienced before, and something that Atlas insisted were fried zucchini flowers stuffed with rice.

  And pita bread? The kind that’s made on a baking stone and slathered in farm-fresh butter? Divine.

  Dessert was a custard, which sounds boring until you try it. Lemon, sugar, a thin crust on the bottom? Simple can still be perfect.

  Through it all, Atlas told stories about Greece. Ancient Greece, mainly, stories he had come across in his travels. Stories of gods and heroes, of enormous troves of gold and riches still waiting to be found among the islands…

  Mostly, he spoke of kings.

  Hundreds of kings, with dynasties lasting for millennia, and I was suddenly glad that America only has a few centuries of history behind it. Seriously, I have my hands full dealing with a bunch of Founding Fathers. Thank God and any other deity listening that I was born to a relatively new culture. I don’t know how I’d handle three thousand years’ worth of ghosts bobbing around my personal periphery all the damned time.

  When our waiter had whisked the custard plates away, Atlas finally started on the queens. Hippolyta, ruler of the Amazons. Penelope, who drove men to ruin through waiting. Hecuba, the grieving mother.

  And Helen of Troy.

  I rolled my eyes when he got to her. I couldn’t help it: I’d never been a fan of Helen of Troy. Yay, she was pretty. Everybody cheer for pretty.

  “Ah,” Atlas laughed. “You’re familiar with the American version of Helen. What a shame—did you know Helen was a warrior?”

  “Helen, the face who launched a thousand ships? That Helen?”

  He nodded. “The mythology puts her as a child of Zeus, but no matter who her father was, she was born a princess of Sparta. All Spartan children were raised in a culture of war. Some of the stories say that she was trained in the martial arts from childhood, and was equal to her brothers in battle.”

  My memories of seventh-grade world history are a joke. “Her brothers…?”

  “Castor and Polydeuces. Legendary fighters. Savage, cunning, and possessed with the strength of the gods. They were among the best of Sparta’s legendary warriors.”

  They sounded familiar. “Gemini? The Twins?”

  “Yes!” A bright smile lit his face. This one, as opposed to his devil’s grin, seemed sincere. “The constellation of Gemini. Polydeuces was Zeus’ son, and when Castor was to die, he petitioned the gods to let his twin share his divine nature. They were transformed into stars, to never be separated, not by death or by distance.”

  “Helen was a twin, too, wasn’t she?”

  Atlas laughed aloud. “Yes!” he said again. “Twin to Clytemnestra, who became the wife of Agamemnon.”

  “Agamemnon… He played a small part in the Trojan War?”

  That smile faltered a bit. Apparently I needed to brush up on my Greek myths. Or…poetry. Or history. Something.

  “A large part,” Atlas said. “He was the brother of Menelaus, the king who married Helen. When Paris kidnapped Helen and began the war, Agamemnon brought his armies to fight by Menelaus’ side.”

  I sniffed. “Helen couldn’t have been that hot a warrior. Not if she let herself be taken captive by the Trojans.”

  “Maybe she didn’t,” Atlas said. “We know about her from stories in which she was no one’s hero. Hard to say what kind of person she was, when she was alive. It’s a sad truth of history: men are remembered for their deeds; women, for their beauty.”

  “If she lived at all,” I said.

  “I’m sure she did,” Atlas said. He returned to his satchel, and removed the smallest box. He was not as careful with it this time, merely flipping his saucer over so its clean underside kept the box out of the crumbs we had left on the table. He opened the box to show the three little beads and said, “The man who sold me this? He claimed they belonged to Helen.”

  I poked the velvet box with my pinkie. The three beads rolled around their satin bed, and the sound of them brushing against each other chimed like small bells. The sound was barely loud enough to hear, but it bypassed my ears completely. That chiming resonated within my brain, kicking and punching in its eagerness to tell me things.

  “Sure,” I said. “Can you prove it? That these were once Helen’s?”

  He hesitated. It was quick and hard to notice, but I was already there. “Of course not,” I answered for him.

  “If I could,” he replied, “these wouldn’t be for sale. They would be priceless, artifacts owned by one of the most memorable women who had ever lived.”

  “Uh-huh.” I jabbed the box again, and reminded myself that if I grabbed the box and leapt over the edge of the balcony, it would go badly for me. The fall to the ground, for starters. Then, the police, and the arrest, and having to explain to Ben and Sparky that the beads were screaming at me…

  “They have been dated to when Helen most likely lived,” Atlas said, as he tried to push the smallest items he had brought with him into my checkbook. “Some historians say that such beads were given as prizes in battle. Perhaps Helen herself won these in a tournament.”

  “A few chunks of glass? Some p
rize.”

  “They would have looked different when new,” he said. “Such beads were often covered in gold sheaths to bring out the details in the relief.”

  I craned my neck down towards the beads, and saw that two of the beads might have had faces stamped in them. “So what you’re saying is that these are damaged?”

  This time, his sigh was audible.

  I grinned at him. “Good job,” I said. “Spinning a story about a warrior woman because you know your audience. Let me see the necklace again, and we’ll pretend Helen of Troy owned that instead.”

  He paused, and then told me why that wasn’t possible. The necklace was made during a different period, used distinct craftsmanship, didn’t align with what was known of Helen’s life or location…blah blah and blah.

  So Atlas Petrakis passed that test, too.

  I walked out of there with a pretty necklace, and a gorgeous man on my payroll.

  And the beads, of course.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was the most vivid dream I’d ever had.

  I was running naked through the woods, a dagger ready at my side. My legs weren’t mine—the skin was darker, white scars covering it in stripes. My feet were calloused from rougher surfaces than a dojo mat. I heard a laugh from somewhere ahead, and knew it was my sister.

  The stag broke cover.

  It ran south, towards the stream. There was a thicket that way, with hard thorns that would be kinder to a deer’s hide than mine. I whistled, and received an answering chirp as my sister raced to get ahead of the stag.

  She had a gladder spirit than me, my sister did, and she danced along the low branches, just above the thorns. When she dropped from the trees, the stag stopped and shied from her.

  I followed the path the stag had made through the brambles, and was ready when it turned to flee. I moved in, close and quick, beneath the sweep of its horns, and had run my dagger through its foreleg before it could leap away.

  My sister giggled like a wild woman, and threw her own dagger aside as she picked up a sharp stone.

  It was like that, then.

  I threw my own dagger to join hers on the damp earth, and together we closed on the stag.

  The beast bellowed, lashing out with its antlers, its hind legs… We moved in and out, cheering each other on as the stag exhausted itself. My sister scored with her rock against a leg, and the stag fell, twice lamed.

  We went for its throat, both of us laughing.

  We knew well the taste of blood, my sister and I, and it was always better when it wasn’t our own.

  The stag was heavy, and we were not yet ten. We had to take its head and leave the body.

  We stopped by the stream where we had left our clothes, and washed before we dressed ourselves. Then, the stag’s head carried carefully between us, we returned to camp.

  Father was waiting.

  We knelt and gifted the king with the head of the stag, and worried. It was such a small stag, such a young stag, and it hadn’t yet learned enough of the ways of hunters to give us a good chase…

  Father nodded.

  Our people don’t reward half measures. Had we failed, we would have been sent out again. Or, worse, suffered the shame of not being allowed to try a second time.

  He sent servants to recover the meat, and that night we dined on our stag.

  My sister and I shared its heart between us.

  After, he presented me with a gold necklace. A double strand of beads, the sinew knotted tight around each to keep them from falling off the line when it was cut.

  I had drawn first blood. It was my prize to keep. I drew my dagger and sliced the joined strands of beads into two, and knotted one half around my twin’s neck. When it was fastened tight, she did the same for me.

  Father smiled.

  I woke in a grumpy rush, choking on the imaginary taste of deer blood. Beside me, Speedy slept on, undisturbed by my sudden coughing fit.

  “What,” I sputtered, “The. Fuck. Was. That?!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Let me tell you the worst thing about being the world’s second worst psychic.

  Shit happens to everybody. It’s part of the human experience. We process this shit as best we can: sometimes it cleans up nicely and we can wad up the toilet paper and flush it away, and sometimes it smears itself all over our psyches. In my weird life, shit happens on a fairly regular basis, and most of this shit is outside the scope of the typical human experience.

  My best friend is Benjamin Franklin’s ghost, for fuck’s sake! My perspective on what is normal is somewhat skewed.

  So when I have a dream in which I’m Helen of Goddamned Troy—prepubescent Helen of Troy, no less, and hunting a deer while buck (sorry) naked—I can’t dismiss it as just a dream.

  I also can’t call up any of my psychic buddies for advice, since I don’t have any. Just Mike, and he knows less about this weird stuff than I do.

  I didn’t have a lot of options, so I did what any sensible person would do when they woke up from something that was half a nightmare: I rolled over and went back to sleep.

  The morning came in another bright blaze of golden glory across the ruins of the Parthenon. Mike and I got dressed, deposited Speedy at a nearby café under the watchful eye of a heavily-bribed barista, and went for a jog around the city.

  Athens turned out to be larger than we thought. We called it quits after a couple of hours, and took a shortcut through the Plaka to get back to our hotel. The Plaka is this great little neighborhood near the acropolis, kinda touristy but with an old-world charm. We grabbed some slush drinks from a cart, and wandered through the streets. Cars aren’t allowed in the Plaka, but small vehicles are, and I nearly got trampled by a donkey.

  Then I told Mike about my dream.

  I didn’t leave anything out. The sounds, the sensations… Most of all, I focused on what I had seen. I have a Hollywood education in ancient Greece, and nothing from my dream matched my mental images of pale stone and flowing robes and curtains. Hell, nearly every adult woman there had had at least one boob showing, and that definitely didn’t fit into anything I had ever bumped into while channel surfing.

  Mike’s noisy when he’s thinking quietly.

  “What do you think? Did I buy Helen’s ghost along with those glass beads?”

  He shrugged.

  “That’s it?” I asked. I popped the lid on my drink and started gnawing on the ice. “No sage advice? Woulda sworn you’d pull out some obscure Buddhist saying and tell me that the dream is significant.”

  “All things are significant.”

  “But…?”

  He shrugged. “Not all things have meaning. At least, not in relation to our own small scopes of self.”

  “That’s more like it. What about this dream?”

  Mike turned and lobbed his empty cup into a trash can, swoosh, nice and clean. As the can was across the street and had a fancy iron cover over all but a teeny cup-sized hole, half of the people walking the Plaka turned towards us. Some of them started to point.

  I waved. “Damn it, Mike,” I muttered as the cameras came out.

  We took off running.

  We stopped before we reached the café where we had dumped Speedy. “Here’s what I think,” he said, as we walked the last couple of streets to cool ourselves down. “The dream was probably just a dream, and until we learn otherwise, I suggest we don’t worry about it.”

  I nodded. That’s about where I had ended up myself. Except…

  “Ever heard of psychometry?” I asked.

  “Oh lord,” Mike said, rolling his eyes. “Which superpower is that again? The one where you touch an object and know its past?”

  I chuckled. “Yup.”

  “That’s bullshit,” he said. “Psychics can’t affect objects, or vice versa. We deal with biological matter, whatever form it takes.”

  “I thought so, too,” I said. “But those beads, Mike…”

  He shrugged but didn’t say anything. When I
had brought the beads back to the hotel the night before, Mike couldn’t look away from them. When I had asked what he thought of them, he had said they were loud.

  I knew what he meant—they were still loud. I had expected that the pressure that kept chiming against the inside of my skull would ease over time. Nope. Before we had left for our run, we had agreed that they were still as loud as they had been the previous night. Maybe louder.

  “I’m thinking psychometry might be an advantage,” I said. “If it is a real talent, it’d definitely be useful on this trip. Even if we can’t pick memories off of an item, it could help us separate real pieces of the Mechanism from false leads.”

  “I’ll call my mother,” he said, his voice as tight as it ever got. “Maybe she knows something.”

  I laid my hand on his arm. It felt as if I were touching iron.

  Inner peace only gets you so far. After that comes family.

  We strolled up to the café. I was expecting a crowd out the door: Speedy tends to enjoy putting on a show. Instead, the koala was sitting on a table, deep in conversation with Atlas Petrakis.

  “Wow,” Mike said as he caught sight of the antiquities broker.

  “I know, right?”

  “You said he was delicious, but…wow.”

  “And he’s got a sexy accent,” I said. “And he’s hella smart, and he likes to wear really thin linen, and—”

  My mouth stopped working as Atlas looked up from a spreadsheet and spotted me and Mike. He gave us that million-watt smile as he waved us over.

  “Wow!”

  “You mentioned,” I told Mike, as I propelled him towards the table.

  We dragged over some loose chairs on the way, and I flagged down the waiter for some water. Lots of water. Athens is a little arid.

  Atlas stood. I needed a few moments to realize that he wanted to help me into my chair.

  I laughed and let him. I was such a wreck that I could have wrung a gallon of sweat out of my shirt, and the gesture struck me as hilarious. He tucked me neatly into the table, as properly as if Mike and I had come in dressed all fancy-like.