The Marathon Conspiracy

by Corby, Gary

  Diotima temporized. “It’s not your fault if the girl knew how to beat the guards, Zeke.”

  “Do as you will with this search. It’s obvious I’m too old to be of any use.” Zeke turned on his heel and walked away.

  “You must forgive Zeke,” Thea said in the uncomfortable silence that followed. “He feels this situation extremely. He holds himself responsible for what’s happened. The gods know he’s not as young as he once was, to bear these shocks.”

  “How long has Zeke been here?” Diotima asked. “I remember thinking he was old when I was here.”

  Thea stifled a laugh. “That was only six years ago, young lady,” she said. “That’s less than one tenth his years.” She paused. “At least, I think it is. I doubt if even he himself knows his own age.”

  “Was he here before you, High Priestess?” I asked.

  “I was a young woman when Zeke arrived. I remember every detail of that day.” Thea sighed. “These days I struggle to recall the names of the new girls, and every year everything seems to get harder, and I become more forgetful. Age does terrible things.”

  “Zeke’s older than you, yet you came to Brauron first. Isn’t that surprising?”

  “It’s no surprise at all, young man. I was raised at this temple. I was left here as an orphan, like Gaïs.”

  Doris showed no surprise at this news. I guessed it was common knowledge.

  It struck me that Doris was much younger than Thea. Thea was well-grayed and small and carried a sense of serene tiredness. Doris had gray hair too, though more of it, and a stout, healthy demeanor. Thea and tall, thin Zeke were the only ones here who remembered the time before the sacking.

  “Where’s Zeke from?” Diotima asked.

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  “He didn’t say?”

  “Zeke’s grown old in this sanctuary. Perhaps he’s a bit set in his ways because of it. He resents outside interference, no matter how well meant. I’ll talk to him later. Meanwhile, the slaves are yours to use in a search. It would help me to mollify Zeke if you could make sure you find Ophelia.”

  THE INVESTIGATION HAD thrown up many leads that could only be answered in Athens. Not least of these was the strange attitude of Polonikos. Why wasn’t he worried about his missing daughter? Why, in fact, was he anxious for us to not find her?

  I thought about this as I bounced on Blossom’s back. Every now and then, he would skid on gravel and my head would jerk back and forth. Without the cart he was able to carry my weight, but only a masochist could have enjoyed such a ride. Diotima’s attempts to feed the donkey were having some effect—at least he didn’t look like he was about to expire—but he still resembled a refugee from a slave camp. His spindly legs were sturdy, but there was something wrong with his muscles, and every step felt like a kick up my behind. I thought longingly of the smooth stride of a high-performance racehorse.

  Every explanation for Polonikos that I could think of was suspicious. I wondered if we’d paid enough attention to his odd behavior. As I approached the outskirts of Athens, I realized that his property lay not far off my path. The land of Attica resembles nothing so much as a giant octopus, with Athens at the head and the roads her tentacles that spread across the landscape. Running from the major roads in all directions are narrow dirt tracks, and it is down these tracks that one find the farms and estates.

  My bottom was sore, but I needed answers more than I needed comfort. When I came to the dirt track that led to Polonikos, I took it.

  Polonikos himself was out in his fields when I arrived, supervising his slaves. They held sticks, with which they beat the olive trees. Children collected the fallen fruit in baskets.

  Polonikos took one look at Blossom, who had carried me this far, and said, “What is that?”

  “I believe it’s a donkey, sir. It’s a rental. My fiancée’s choice.”

  The corners of his mouth twitched. “You didn’t fall for the adorable donkey routine, did you?”

  “The what?”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Er … we’re not quite … yet. We’ll be married next month.”

  “I see.” Polonikos sighed. “Take my advice, young man. For the rest of your life, never let your wife go with you to a sale yard. The moment those salesmen see a man coming with his wife in tow, they haul out of the stables the scrawniest, most underfed donkey they’ve got. They put an old straw hat on the beast, stick a flower in the hat, and wait for the woman to say, ‘Oh, isn’t he cute!’ Usually the salesman comes up with some cock-and-bull story about how the beast belonged to a little old lady who only used it to carry her herbs to market, and how she’s died and the stupid beast will be off to the knacker’s that day unless someone buys the animal. By the time the salesman’s finished, the only question the ladies ask is what color the hat comes in.”

  “Thank you, sir, I’ll remember that. I wanted to ask you—”

  He quickly held up a hand. “Stop right there,” he said sternly. “I told you to drop the investigation.”

  “Yes, sir, you did. But Pericles, the archons, and the High Priestess of Artemis at Brauron want me to carry on. Another person who wants Ophelia found is her fiancé.”

  I paused, waiting for a reaction.

  Polonikos signaled to a slave, who hurried over with a bowl of water. In this, Polonikos washed his hands. “Working with fruit always makes my hands sticky,” he said absently.

  “Is it true, sir, that a marriage had been arranged for Ophelia?”

  “It’s a lie!” Polonikos burst out with no warning.

  He must have seen my surprise, because he said, visibly calming himself, “I’m sorry. I’m afraid this subject upsets me considerably. The truth is, there were negotiations. But Thessalus can say what he likes; I deny that anything was ever finalized. If he insists I’ll have to take him to court.”

  “That would be Thessalus, the father of Melo?”

  Polonikos nodded.

  “I understand the two of you were at the sanctuary together.”

  “That was during the negotiations.”

  “And that Melo later went to visit Ophelia himself.”

  Polonikos looked startled. “He did? Not with my permission.”

  “So the marriage negotiation failed?” I prompted him. Melo had said nothing of this.

  “Talks broke down for the usual reason: we couldn’t agree on the dowry.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. That’s what marriage is all about, young man, merging the wealth of two families.”

  A shout from the orchard, a hundred paces away, and a large number of olives fell to the ground. At once the children bent to put the fallen fruit into the baskets. The baskets would be sent to the agora, where the fruit would be sold.

  “There’s wealth, right over there,” Polonikos said, half to himself. “Would that there were more of it.” He looked back to me. “This is a strange trade you ply,” he said in a voice more friendly than before. “Who pays you?”

  “My clients, sir. I accept work on commission, like any artisan.”

  “You’re a craftsman of crime then. Does it pay?”

  That brought home a difficult question. One that I’d been keeping from my own thoughts. “I have a large sum due from a client any day now,” I said with more confidence than I felt.

  Polonikos smiled cynically. He’d seen me ride in on a scrawny donkey. That made me angry, so to prove my words I said, “The sum is substantial. So large that it will more than meet my immediate needs. I’ll need to invest the rest,” I lied with a deadpan face. “Or maybe I’ll put my spare cash in a bank.”

  It was an idle boast, but Polonikos held up his hands in horror and said, “Are you mad? Take my advice, young man, and avoid both borrowing and lending. These new-fangled bank businesses seem to be springing up all over the place, but frankly, I see no future for Athens in banking.”

  “They do seem somewhat unethical,” I said, thinking of my past experi
ence with bankers. I rubbed my chin.

  “Unethical? Who cares about that? I’m talking about making a profit, lad. Land, young fellow, that’s the future. Country estates. Come with me.” Polonikos had become excited. He took me by the arm to lead me out to his fields. “Do you see that?” He swept his arm to display his fields and the working slaves. “That’s wealth. These banks you talk of … they’re more than happy to take your money—money you earned by hard labor on your own land. Then those vultures, those dogs, they’ll lose your funds in the blink of an eye—”

  I was struck by an inspiration. “Sir, have you by any chance recently lost money on an investment?”

  “Who told you that?!” he barked. Then, before I could answer, he calmed down once more. “Never mind. I suppose the news was bound to spread. As it happens, I do have a matter before the courts at this very moment.”

  “What happened, may I ask?” I stated the question with some care. Polonikos seemed a man of wild mood swings. He was a man on edge.

  “You may as well. It’ll all come out in court anyway. Last year, I joined a consortium to underwrite certain trading ventures. Ventures involving a merchant ship and several cargoes. Nothing could go wrong, they said. Everything was insured. The principals were two bankers, their names Antisthenes and Archestratus … they told me the cargo was insured. I believed them.”

  “What happened?”

  “The ship sank with all hands and, of far greater importance, with the precious cargoes. Or so they say. I have my doubts. I demanded the insurance. That was when those two vultures admitted the insurance had been arranged through their own bank, the payout to be drawn as a collateral loan on the cargo—the cargo that had sunk, mind you—so they claimed the money was lost.”

  My head was swimming. I understood only half of what Polonikos was saying, if that. I decided to ignore the high finance and got to the nub of the matter. “I suppose you found yourself short of cash,” I said.

  “You may say so. But I’m certain to win my money back when the court hears the facts, I promise you!”

  Suddenly I understood his problem. Polonikos did have a contract for his daughter to marry Melo, son of Thessalus, and every marriage contract involved a dowry to be supplied by the father of the bride. The problem was, Polonikos had lost the dowry money in a bad investment. If Ophelia was found, the marriage would proceed, the dowry would come due, and Polonikos would have to spend money he didn’t have.

  It was entirely in Polonikos’s interests for Ophelia never to be found. Or at least, not until he’d won his court case.

  I left Polonikos, the father of the missing Ophelia, to his fields, and walked back through the house gate. A woman of middle age watched me from the second-story window of the farmhouse. She waved, and I understood she wished me to wait.

  The woman soon ran out the front door of the farmhouse, holding up her chiton to keep it out of the farm mud. As well she might, since the dress was clearly of superior make, in hues of red and black and patterned with a conservative border. She was well groomed and bore no calluses on her hands, and her face was smooth skinned. I had no trouble guessing who she was.

  “I heard you speaking to my husband,” she said. “I am Malixa, the wife of Polonikos and the mother of Ophelia.”

  Her eyes were red, and she clasped her hands in anxiety.

  “My husband’s not a bad man,” she said. “But he is one with many problems.”

  “Like your daughter, then,” I said. I couldn’t hide my distaste for Polonikos from my speech. Whatever problems the father had, the daughter’s were infinitely greater.

  “When my husband has resolved these problems with his money, then he’ll go to find our daughter. I’m sure of it.”

  “It might be too late then,” I said. To emphasize the urgency, I added, “It will almost certainly be too late.”

  “I know.” The stress was painted across her face. “I beg you to find Ophelia before then. Please. I’ll pay you.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Any way I can.”

  I said, “Malixa, I will find your daughter because the sanctuary at Brauron has hired me to do so. But I can’t do it without information, and so far, what I have to work with is hopeless. If you want to pay me, you can do it with information.”

  “But I know nothing.”

  I thought she was about to cry.

  I said, “I’ll tell you the truth, Malixa. I don’t even know if Ophelia left the sanctuary of her own will or if she was taken. It could be one or the other, with equal odds. If she was taken, then she’s in enormous trouble. If she went on her own, then perhaps she can be saved. Your husband tells me nothing about your daughter, because he doesn’t want her found. See what you can find out. Does she have friends there? Bring me anything, anything, that might tell us where she went.”

  “I’ll try,” she said. And now her tears began to flow.

  MY PLAN WAS to see the Basileus to discover what had happened to the fifth scroll. If possible, of course. The archons were the busiest men in Athens. It occurred to me as I trudged the roads home that a letter of introduction from Pericles would get me in to see the Basileus faster. So I tethered the donkey at our house—both my feet and my bottom hurt, and I stared longingly at the couches in the courtyard as I passed it by—and dragged my feet to the agora.

  I found Pericles on the steps of the Painted Stoa, where he was talking with other men, all dressed in formal chitons, all with their himation stoles of fine wool draped over their shoulders. Their clothing declared them to be men who had no need to work to earn their bread. No doubt they discussed affairs of state. No doubt they were all wealthy landowners with many slaves. I looked at them with envy.

  They in turn stared at me with mild disgust as I moved to join them. I was coated in the dust of the road, my feet ached, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d washed. The men’s hut I’d shared with the slaves at Brauron was every bit as foul and smelly as Sabina had promised. No doubt I carried its aroma of goat and sweaty armpits.

  Unlike every other man in Athens, Pericles never seemed to pass the time of day with his fellow citizens: to sit in the shade of the stoas and talk about the meaning of life, which is to say, women and sport. Pericles never wasted his time in such idle pursuits. If he’d ever speculated about what was under a woman’s dress, or who’d win at the athletics, no one had ever heard him do it. If he was in the agora, it meant he had business there. In anyone else such standoffishness would have been considered arrogance, but in his case men admired him for his dedication, even if it did give him the air of a highly intellectual, elegant automaton.

  As I watched, Pericles turned and saw me. He waved as if to say, “Stay there.” He said something final to the people he was with, then joined me.

  “How goes it?” he asked.

  I brought him up to date on the state of the investigation. He summarized my perhaps slightly convoluted explanation with the words, “So you’ve come here to tell me that you’ve made no progress?”

  “That’s not fair, Pericles. There are lines of investigation, and we’ve made progress down every one of them. The problem isn’t lack of leads to follow. The problem is there are too many of them. The High Priestess, the treasurer, a young priestess, and the mysterious maintenance man all look suspicious.”

  “None of these people have a reason to murder,” Pericles said.

  “None that we know of,” I agreed. “The lovelorn Melo might be perfect for the abduction of Ophelia, but he had no reason to harm Allike.”

  “What about this story of a wild bear?”

  “Maybe a bear did kill Allike. But Melo says Ophelia told him she was certain it was a human murderer.”

  That was second-hand hearsay. Even to my ears, it sounded weak.

  “There hasn’t been a bear in Attica for generations,” Pericles said. “Men used to hunt them, but they’re gone now.”

  “I know.”

  “What else?” Pericles
asked.

  “The fifth scroll. It has to be important. Where is it?”

  “Brauron or Athens. Obviously.”

  “Everyone in Athens denies having seen it,” I said. “Everyone in Brauron says they saw it. Maybe Ophelia could tell us the real truth. Pericles, what do you think of this Melo?”

  “Highly untrustworthy,” Pericles said at once. “I don’t know his father.”

  “We have to find Ophelia, and we have to discover what became of the missing scroll, and we have to check the histories of everyone involved in this case who might have been around thirty years ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Because whatever caused this began thirty years ago. I must warn you, Pericles, this might take longer than we originally thought.”

  Pericles thought about that before he nodded. “I see your reasoning,” he said. “Yes, your approach seems satisfactory.”

  I stood in the dusty agora, open-mouthed, astonished that Pericles was being reasonable. It was so unlike him.

  Pericles continued, “Nicolaos, I’ve looked into the issue of your payment for the first commission you carried out for me. I was astonished when I looked it up to see that sorry affair happened a full year ago. How time flies. You’re correct that I never did settle my account. Clearly I owe you, and the agreed sum is sufficient to provide a small, steady income.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ve given this some thought, and I think the best way to acquit the debt is to give you a farm.”

  “What!”

  “Only a small one,” said Pericles, almost apologetically. “But a farm’s good for a small, steady income.”

  “I thought you’d give me money,” I said.

  “So did I at first, but consider, Nicolaos, if I were to give you coins, how could you make a steady income from that? You’d have to invest it, wouldn’t you? To take shares in a trading boat, or perhaps lend it to someone at a rate of interest. These are all risky ventures, and you specifically said a steady income. There’s nothing steady about trade. But land, Nicolaos, land is always a solid investment.”

  I thought back to the words of Polonikos, who had advised me to avoid borrowing and lending and to stick with the one true source of wealth, stretching back to King Theseus: ownership of the land.