The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

  The waiter, who is just setting out our coffee, looks horrified.

  “Sorry, gotta run,” I say in English. “Drink them yourself.” And I throw twenty euro on the counter.

  Inside the bank, there’s a long counter with half a dozen teller windows, all but one of them empty. We walk forward, stop at a little rope barrier, and a doughy woman looks up at us the way a large, bored fish might look at something inedible. She has lots of mascara, a cheap top that’s too tight, and peroxide-white hair with inky roots. Forty-five, trying for twenty: doesn’t work.

  She looks down, ignores us ostentatiously while she scribbles something, looks up again. Finally, in response to a query from Morag, she sighs in a theatrical way and confirms that, yes, they have a deposit box under the name of DAY-reck Para-TREE-jeh. But it can be accessed “solo dal proprietario e”—she peers myopically at her screen—“da O-illium Gala-DAI-reh.”

  “Only by the proprietor and who?” I whisper.

  “Not proprietor, owner. And Bill.”

  “Oh, right. Only the owner and ‘O-illium Gala-DAI-rah.’ Got it.”

  The bored fish-woman turns away again, as if dismissing us. We’re screwed. What we need is right here, and there’s no way to get to it. I waste some time and energy imagining all the ways we could (but really could not) get to the box. Digging a tunnel? Having a professional makeup artist disguise me as Dad? Being equipped with a getaway Maserati and a kilo of C-4? Then I see the blue-jowled security guard eyeing us from the other side of the lobby, as if reading my thoughts. But either Morag’s not getting the social cues or else she has a better feel than I do for what works. She grabs my passport, thrusts it in the woman’s face, points from me to it and back again, and starts talking angrily in Italian at a mile a minute.

  I’ve never seen anything like it. Her entire body language, her entire set of facial expressions, changes until she’s not so much talking Italian as being Italian. I hear Gala-DAI-rah several times, but otherwise it’s a blur. It goes on, and on, rises to a shrill crescendo, then ends as she slaps down the passport, eyebrows arched and hands flared out, drilling the teller with her eyes.

  Rosko is grinning. The teller is not. After losing the staring competition, she makes a show of examining my passport minutely, then looks me up and down slowly, as if noticing I’m male for the first time and deciding whether I’m worth hitting on.

  Finally she does a little sour puckering thing with her lips. Either she’s disappointed I’m not more of a stud, or she’s just decided she can’t be bothered to get into an argument with this crazy Asian chick. Either way, seconds later she jangles a bunch of keys, stops to adjust her bra’s underwire, then gestures toward a big steel door.

  “I’ll wait outside and keep an eye on things again,” Rosko says, still smiling. “You go ahead. A-plus on the rant there, Morag.”

  Morag and I step inside the vault. When I hand our key to the teller, she inserts it next to hers in a steel plate, and Partridge’s box slides out of the wall. It’s at least eight inches deep, must weigh twenty pounds. She hands it to me, then ushers us into a private side room that’s decorated with two plastic chairs, a metal table, and a mold problem. Also strip lights that sound like an approaching swarm of bees. When Morag and I sit down, the woman hangs over us for a minute, as if expecting to see the goodies, then leaves, slamming the door.

  Inside the deposit box there’s a plain brown envelope; inside that, a clear plastic folder; inside that, some sheets of written text, cracked and stained and full of holes—midbrown script in Greek, on a pale-brown surface. I hear Dad’s voice, from any one of a dozen museums: Look at this, Daniel! Papyrus—the hot new Egyptian technology that took over from clay tablets. What everyone wrote on, for a thousand years. See how the edges of the sheet crack along the horizontal lines? Those are the reeds it was made from.

  I hand the folder to Morag. Underneath, a thicker envelope contains what appears to be an unpublished book galley—a preprint—of Partridge’s next masterpiece of quirky historical scholarship: Burning the Books: What Really Happened at Alexandria? There’s even a photocopy of the author photo they’re planning to use, in which Partridge looks like a cross between Gandalf and a chicken.

  Finally, at the bottom, there’s a sturdy cardboard box. The lid slides off to reveal layers of tissue paper over a cocoon of bubble wrap. Inside the bubble wrap, there are three scrolls. I gently untie some modern ribbon from around the first scroll, worried it will disintegrate if I breathe too hard.

  “Can you read it?” M whispers.

  Ordinary modern text is split up by the spaces between the words. But this stuff dates from before word spacing was invented—it’s just a bewildering, continuous string of characters, fragmented only by the dozens and dozens of what look like moth-holes in the papyrus itself. The letters dance before me, teasing. Most of them are still legible, individually. Even a few words are familiar. But the meaning is beyond my reach.

  “I know a bit of modern street Greek, M. This is a dialect of ancient Greek. Almost a different language.”

  “So we don’t even know for sure what it is. Doesn’t it have a title?”

  “I think we’re a few centuries early for title pages. If they put the author’s name anywhere, it was—hang on a sec.”

  I can hear Dad, in his museum voice again: Centuries before books, Daniel, before book spines that you could print a title on, they used a little parchment tag. The Greeks called it a syllabos. Attached to the end of the scroll, so that the librarian could identify it without unrolling it.

  I pick up the third scroll and hold it up like a telescope. Miracle: tucked inside, there’s a small slip of material. Can’t even get my fat fingers in there: Morag has to pick it out. She holds the curled fragment up to the light. It’s torn, the writing almost impossibly faint. But I know what I’m looking for, and there’s no question what it says:

  Eratosthenes

  Geographika

  She puts the syllabos down on the table; reaches out and touches the scroll with her fingertips, the way a pilgrim might touch a holy relic. Then she picks up the plastic folders again. “So this must be the letter from Cicero. Damn. I assumed it would be in Latin.”

  “I think all those guys wrote both.”

  “I kinda realized that. Just hadn’t thought of it.” She spreads the documents out on the table. “The crafty old bastard.”

  “Cicero?”

  “Partridge. He must have stolen all this from the Biblioteca Angelica.”

  “Trouble is, he could read it—and we can’t.”

  “Aye. Seriously annoying, from my point of view. I’ve been meaning to tackle Greek for ages. Wasn’t exactly top of the list in Iraq. Or Africa. But a script I can’t read, oh, it’s like being a kid looking at a big slice of cake from the wrong side of a shop window.”

  She touches the scroll again, adds wistfully: “I could learn it in a couple of weeks.”

  “We don’t have that kind of time, M. And I know only three people I’d trust who could read it now.”

  “Partridge himself, obviously. Bill.”

  “And Pandora.”

  “Of course. Problem solved, then. We take it to Crete.”

  “Yeah, that simple. Take it to Crete. I’m sure the Italian government won’t mind us walking off with an ancient national treasure, so long as we don’t, like, get it wet or anything.”

  “Hey, does the Geographika look Italian to you? It’s already been in the wrong country for more than two thousand years. We’ll just be taking it home.”

  Ridiculous argument—but then, what choice do we have? So the scrolls go back in their box, then we load everything into a green plastic supermarket bag and manage to squeeze the whole thing into my day pack. On the way out, I slide the empty metal deposit box back into its place.

  Back in the bank lobby, we thank fish-woman, who ignores us totally. We nod politely to the security guard, who dittos. And step back outside, where Rosko is nowhere to b
e seen.

  I’m scanning the street, wondering whether to panic, when Rosko comes up behind us, head down, walking fast.

  “Follow me,” he hisses. “Quickly.”

  Just as we catch up, he turns down a small side street, then another, and another.

  “What’s going on?”

  Another side street. “We’re being watched.”

  “Who? Where?”

  “Two men. The pair I saw outside Partridge’s office. They were scoping the bank the whole time you were in it. A short one with gray hair, maybe forty-five, and a younger one with a dark ponytail.”

  We duck into a pharmacy, study a display of hair-care products. No other entrance that I can see—if they saw us come in here, it’s a dead end. After a few uncomfortable minutes, Rosko sidles to the window and looks out.

  “I think we lost them for now. What’s the plan, Daniel?”

  I take the opportunity to get him up to speed about the documents.

  “So you’re carrying something in your pack that’s the whole reason Partridge thought he was being followed. And we’re going to take that to Crete with us?”

  “If these guys already have Dad, they could have taken him anywhere. Getting Pandora to read this is our best chance of understanding what this third home thing is all about. I don’t know what else to do.”

  Rosko’s reading the label on a tube of sunscreen, as if that might tell us. “I guess you’re right. We need Pandora to read the documents—and maybe Crete’s the right place to go anyway.”

  “So much for relaxed sightseeing in Rome,” Morag says, jabbing at her phone. “Whole bunch of flights to Athens, then Heraklion. Should be no problem—assuming we can even get back to the airport.”

  “Come on, then.”

  For almost a whole minute, we’re on our way.

  The pharmacy is on a street that’s little more than an alley. No one about. And the men step out of their van only three or four paces ahead of us.

  Rosko coughs to warn us, but doesn’t look at them, which gives us a small element of surprise: they don’t think we’ve rumbled them. And a second mark against them is that they choose a classic pickpocket’s trick, which sets off one of the little alarm bells sensei installed. The younger, taller one with the ponytail, call him Paulo, moves around to my left side. The shorter, paunchier one—call him Lucky, if you have a taste for irony—locks eyes with me and smiles, raising a folded newspaper, pushing it toward my face and jabbering something I can’t follow.

  The standard version goes like this: They’re after my money and my passport, so Lucky’s copy of Il Fatto Quotidiano hides his hand as it goes fishing in my pockets. He palms the contents to Paulo, who vanishes into the crowd while I’m still wondering what Lucky’s rabbiting on about.

  But the same two Roman street grifters, outside Partridge’s place and the bank, and now here? Nah. Lucky’s hand does go to my chest, as if reaching for a wallet, but I guess that he’s only planning to shove me back, off balance, so that Paulo can have an easier time grabbing—or razoring—what he really wants. The goodies in the day pack.

  Your average tourist would do just what Lucky wants: step back. Thanks to hundreds of hours of cajoling by sensei—No, Daniel, not like that, like this. No. Again. And again. OK that’s better—I do the opposite. Rising on the balls of my feet, I step sharply forward, trapping his wrist against my lower rib cage, and get myself a firm double grip: one hand around the back of his elbow, so that his hand can’t escape, and the other around the lower forearm. Crushing his ulna and radius together is merely painful; what does the serious damage is the twisting downward dip, which forces all those imprisoned metacarpal joints to bend in impossible ways. He gasps. But before he even has a chance to convert his new lungful into a scream, I pivot sharply on one heel, spinning him over my thigh.

  The theory is, he will collide with Paulo. But Paulo isn’t behind me, and Lucky collides instead with a parked motorcycle, which goes over. Paulo is several steps away, wrestling with both Morag and Rosko at once. One look at the scene and I know that I guessed wrong. They were betting on Morag’s bag, and Lucky was just trying to take me out of the picture. Paulo has Rosko in a headlock; his other arm is looped around the handle of Morag’s bag while she hangs on to the other side and kicks out at him.

  When the handle breaks, Paulo stumbles backward. I throw out a foot. Bag in hand, he goes airborne, and when he lands his head whiplashes down onto the sidewalk.

  Suddenly there’s too much happening to take in:

  Paulo is lying on the ground, screaming, “Cazzo cazzo cazzo!” I notice for the first time the Seraphim triangle tattoo on his neck. Inexplicably, Rosko and Morag are shouting at each other in what sounds like Russian. Lucky has gotten up and looks like he’s about to jump on me. I spin awkwardly, almost too late, but as he lunges forward, I take a step toward him and manage to plant my knee in the exact place already being rented out by his balls.

  Lucky makes a noise like a tire with a nail in it, folds in half, drops. Then things really get strange. Rosko grabs Morag’s bag from the ground, says something else to her that I don’t understand, and sprints away down the street, disappearing around a corner. Paulo says cazzo one more time, even louder, picks himself up, and throws us a look of pure hatred before sprinting after Rosko. Lucky, completely silent in his agony, is doubled over to the point where his head’s between his knees—but when he sees Paulo depart, he gets up and starts to hobble crabwise after him.

  “What the hell just happened, M?”

  “They thought the stuff was in my bag. Rosko’s a quick thinker, I have to say. He ran away with it, so now they’re chasing the wrong person.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “ ‘Get out of here, now. I’ll draw them away. Don’t wait for me, don’t try to find me. Just get to Pandora and I’ll catch up with you later.’ ”

  I start to say, We can’t simply leave him: we need to go to the police or something. Then I remember that I’m carrying a bag of inconveniently stolen museum artifacts, and the police may not be our best friends right now.

  Then we hear the sirens.

  Instinctively, we start running away from them. Only to realize we’re running toward them. Only to realize they’re not exactly after us. The sirens die as we reach the corner of Partridge’s street. At least five emergency vehicles are parked across from the café, where the waiter is standing outside with a rag in his hand, drawn by curiosity. A swarm of bubble lights: luckily, the carabinieri seem preoccupied mainly with shouting at each other. But the waiter turns, looks at us, and there’s a flicker of recognition.

  “Time to go, M.” I step back, away from his line of sight, then step out into the traffic and almost literally grab one of the familiar white taxis. For some situations, even I can get by in Italian:

  “All’aeroporto, per favore. Di corsa!”

  At one point, on the return trip to Fiumicino, we get all the way to forty-five kilometers per hour.

  CHAPTER 17

  ANTIKYTHERA

  On the plane to Athens, I don’t even worry much about being arrested or attacked: I can’t think about anything much except Rosko. If he didn’t get away from Paulo in those first couple of minutes—if the Seraphim catch up with him and discover he doesn’t have the documents—then what? I have a gruesome vision of him bound, shot, and dumped alongside Partridge in a Roman ditch.

  Morag puts up with me panicking about this for a few minutes, then squeezes my hand and proceeds to vacuum up the entire contents of an Italian-to-Greek phrase book, interrupting my thoughts from time to time for my input on pronunciation and idioms. Maybe my face betrays irritation. At one point, she stops and says with exaggerated patience: “I know, D. I’m worried about him too. But there’s nothing we can do now.” The usual Morag combo of right, rational, and really annoying.

  Waiting for our connection in the Athens terminal, I’m certain that someone is about to stop us, demand ID, discover t
hat my backpack contains something over which, by rights, the Italian and Greek governments should be having a medium-sized diplomatic crisis. We stand with our backs to a pillar near some bathrooms. I pretend to read a freebie newspaper while scanning the concourse for a threat I couldn’t identify if I saw it. Morag’s looking at online maps and muttering to herself. Then she realizes how jumpy I am.

  “I’ve been thinking about Partridge’s list of ziggurats,” she says. “He’s interested in a problem my parents have been chasing for years.”

  “How to find more of the things?”

  “No. The fact that there are already so many of them. They’re all over the bloody planet. Why? I mean, it makes evolutionary sense that we’re hardwired as a species to like sugar, and sex. But why would evolution hardwire us to build stepped pyramids in honor of invisible beings?”

  “You have a theory. I can tell.”

  “Maybe. Jimmy and Lorna convinced Bill they’d found the library of Babel. But when I translated the Akkadian Version, I started to wonder: how do we know that was the true Babel at all? The original?”

  “Uh, because it’s at Babylon?”

  “That’s the tail wagging the dog. It’s like thinking angels must come from Los Angeles. It’s like thinking Jesus was crucified in the village church because there’s a cross at one end of it.”

  “So you think it’s somewhere else.”

  “Could be. Could be at Uruk. Or Chogha Zanbil. But no—I don’t think it’s somewhere else. I think it’s something else. What does a ziggurat look like, D?”

  I don’t answer for a minute; a cleaner is pushing a cart full of mops and supplies past us. When he’s gone:

  “A pyramid?”

  She lets out a little sigh—I’m being slow. “Sure. A pyramid. What does a pyramid look like?”

  “A mountain?”

  “Top of the class, D. And at many of these ziggurats—Babel, for sure—the priests maintained fires on top. So inevitably all the scholars jump up and down bleating ‘ritual religious sacrifice,’ because it helps the poor bastards maintain the illusion that they have the ghost of an idea what they’re talking about.”