The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  It was her Facebook page. He ran through the posts for anything significant. Worried notes from friends he’d called on Sunday, hoping she was OK, cut off with a quick line from Julie that the Italian police had traced her. No one else knew anything. No answers.

  He typed out a quick message.

  I still haven’t heard from Lily. If anyone was on the dig and saw something unusual, or knows where she might be, please get in touch.

  The words appeared in her timeline and went grey. While he waited for a reply, he opened another tab and logged in to their bank account. Still no transactions since he left Berlin.

  Charis’s question came back to him. Do you have any idea what she was getting up to in Italy? He started scrolling back through the bank statement, looking at what had happened before Lily went missing.

  If life had been normal that previous week, it would have stood out straight away. But Lily had been in Italy and he’d been all over the place: every cashpoint he’d touched had spoken a different language. French, Dutch, Italian, Greek, German …

  Greek?

  He read the line on the statement.

  22 AUG 2012

  ATM SYNTAGMA SQUARE, ATHENS GR EUR 100.00

  Touring was a dislocating experience. Clubs, hotels, fast-food joints – the same brands in different languages, and everyone speaking English regardless. It was easy to forget where you where, even easier to forget where you’d been. But he knew he hadn’t gone within five hundred miles of Athens on that tour.

  The card might have been stolen – but there was still money in the account, and Jonah didn’t think a thief would have taken it all the way to Athens just for a hundred Euros.

  But Lily had been in Sibari that week. He’d spoken to her every night.

  Or maybe not. Perhaps there’d been one night: the promoter had taken them to a club, the bass so loud he never heard his phone. When he finally got out, Lily had sent him a text message saying she’d gone to bed. Was that Monday? Tuesday? Rotterdam or Ghent?

  Still, she would have mentioned if she’d been in Athens.

  Wouldn’t she?

  He clicked back to her Facebook page and stared at the photograph, wishing it could answer. Wondering what a gold tablet and a trip to Athens had to do with why she’d vanished out of his life. Suddenly, the smile on her face became something desperate. Get me out of here, she said, buried in the earth.

  His phone beeped with a text message. Richard – he hadn’t had the guts to call. Jonah thought about calling him straight back, but knew he wouldn’t answer.

  What have you got to hide? he wondered.

  He read the message.

  They’ll see you at two tomorrow.

  * * *

  It had once been the biggest port on earth, moving goods from every corner of the world. Now, the only thing they traded in Docklands was paper. Jonah slouched through the crowds of suits and felt like a tramp in his skinny jeans and Beta Band T-shirt.

  He walked into the lobby and wondered whether he had the right building. The sign behind the reception desk didn’t say anything about the Eikasia Foundation. In large brass letters it said: OPHION SHIPPING SA.

  A second later he realised he knew the name. He’d read it on the internet two days ago, but not in connection with the foundation or Richard. It was the family firm of Ari Maroussis, the shipping heir who owned the yacht Nestis. The yacht that he’d watched sail into the night the day Lily vanished – vanished from the dig sponsored by the Eikasia Foundation. Whose offices Richard had sent him to. Except that actually the offices belonged to Ophion Shipping.

  The receptionist didn’t smile as he approached.

  ‘I’m looking for the Eikasia Foundation,’ he told her.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’ Her face said she found it unlikely.

  ‘Jonah Barnes. They’re expecting me.’

  She gave him a pass and sent him to another reception area on the fourteenth floor. No one was there to meet him. He sat down on a coffin-sized leather sofa, comfortable and cold, and took a brochure from a glass table. He flipped through, scanning the photos for any sign of Lily among the scientists and smiling field workers. A lot of the projects didn’t seem to have anything to do with archaeologists: there were physicists, philosophers, marine biologists. Obviously the foundation had plenty of money to splash around.

  A glass door opened and a grey-suited man stepped through. He was tall and tanned, with wiry black hair and a chiselled, alpha-male face.

  ‘Mr Barnes.’ He didn’t smile. ‘I’m Andreas Maniatis, the executive director. Thank you for coming to see us.’

  His English had the sheen of something foreign that had been expensively perfected. He led Jonah through double glass doors, into a private office. Full-length windows showed the building’s reflection mirrored in the opposite block.

  ‘I’m sorry about your wife. This must be a difficult time for you.’

  Difficult? The word implied some sort of relative degree, a continuum that stretched from easy to hard. Jonah was several steps beyond impossible.

  ‘Doctor Andrews will join us in a moment. He will have more precise answers to your questions.’

  A secretary brought two pots of coffee and cream.

  ‘I thought I had the wrong place,’ Jonah said, while she poured the coffee. ‘What’s the connection with Ophion Shipping?’

  ‘Ophion’s owners also fund our foundation.’

  ‘Ari Maroussis.’

  ‘Among others.’

  ‘He was there, wasn’t he? On site, the day Lily went missing.’

  Andreas tapped a silver pen on the table. ‘The Maroussis family are interested in where their money goes. Naturally.’

  ‘Can you hear me?’ a tinny voice interrupted. Jonah turned to the door. But it was closed – and the voice had come from behind his back, though he hadn’t heard anyone enter. He spun round on his chair.

  A screen on the wall had burst into life, a widescreen Richard sitting at a desk. It looked like the lab in Sibari. He’d put the camera too high and too close, so that it squashed him down into his chair and magnified his nose.

  ‘Thank you for joining us, Doctor Andrews,’ said Andreas. ‘You know Jonah Barnes.’

  Jonah hadn’t made the connection. To him, Richard had always been Richard, never Doctor Andrews. He shifted his chair closer to the middle of the room, not sure where he should be. He couldn’t see the camera on his end.

  ‘As Richard knows, I want to hear about the Orphic gold tablet you found at Sibari,’ he said to Andreas.

  Andreas studied him a moment, as if Jonah were a pair of cufflinks he was thinking about buying.

  ‘I am not an archaeologist. Here, we just write the cheques.’ He tapped the pen on the table again, emphasising the point. ‘And we have made nothing public yet from the Sibari dig.’

  His tone was so patronising, Jonah wondered if it was deliberate. Designed to wind him up.

  ‘They found a tablet,’ he said. ‘You know what they are, the Orphic tablets? Ancient little scraps of gold with writing on them. There’s one in the British Museum. Lily found another on the Sibari dig.’

  ‘All our staff sign confidentiality agreements.’

  ‘This is about my wife,’ Jonah reminded him.

  ‘Doctor Andrews says the police have found her already.’

  ‘They haven’t. And I think the tablet is part of the reason.’

  A three-way silence. Andreas’s pen had stopped moving. Jonah turned to the screen, trying to stare Richard down. It was hard without knowing where the camera was, but he must have found it. Richard squirmed.

  ‘We’re not supposed to talk about it.’

  ‘What’s so secret?’

  Richard’s eyes darted over Jonah’s shoulder to Andreas’s desk. The class swot, always seeking the teacher’s permission.

  ‘It’s a major find. We need to authenticate it, study it … There are procedures.’

  ‘But you did find it?’ />
  An unhappy nod.

  ‘Was there anything special about it?’

  ‘Special?’ Richard scratched an itch on his nose. ‘What do you mean?’

  I wish I knew. I wish I knew why Lily copied it out and posted it to her sister the morning she disappeared. But he didn’t want to tell them about her letter.

  ‘Can I see the tablet?’

  Richard and Andreas exchanged another look. Richard’s mouth opened, but the lips didn’t move.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell him,’ Andreas said.

  Richard leaned towards the camera. His face filled the screen.

  ‘There was a break-in at the lab last week. Someone opened the safe and stole the tablet.’

  It took him a moment to process what he’d just heard. ‘Did you tell the police?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘When they asked about Lily, I mean? First the tablet went missing, then she did. There must be a connection.’ Was he the only one who could see it? They were still holding something back. ‘Christ, Richard, don’t give me your fucking procedures. She’s your friend.’

  Richard’s head had bowed so low his face was almost hidden.

  ‘Jonah?’

  Andreas’s voice, cool and commanding. Jonah spun slowly on his chair.

  ‘What my colleague is trying to say is that only three people on the dig knew the safe combination where the tablet was stored. Doctor Andrews himself, the conservator … and your wife.’

  Greece

  Together in the trench – the first time, before the snakebite, before the sea cave. Squeezed together in what had once been a store-room. Now it was just four low stone walls making a rough square. Lily was on her knees, scraping away the ground; Jonah swept up the earth with a wicker brush and carried it away in a bucket. It was hot, tedious work. He’d drunk too much at dinner the night before and slept badly, kept awake by Julian’s snoring.

  ‘Is this really what you want to do with your life?’ he asked. It came out more surly than he’d meant.

  ‘If someone gives me a job.’

  ‘You couldn’t pay me to do this.’

  ‘You paid to be here,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Don’t remind me.’

  The bucket was full. He took it to the spoil heap and dumped it out. He came back and sat on the ancient wall, watching Lily closely. Her face was a mask of concentration, pigtails tucked back behind her ears. There was something intimate about seeing her so fixed on what she was doing.

  ‘I never know what you’re thinking,’ she said suddenly. ‘You watch everything from behind your fringe, like some kind of animal hiding in the long grass, and never say a word.’

  Jonah glanced to the far side of the trench, where Julian and Charis were cleaning out a pithos vase and having a loud discussion about Julian’s love life. ‘Just because someone talks the whole time, it doesn’t mean you know what they’re thinking.’

  ‘At supper last night, you didn’t say a single thing for fifty-seven minutes. I timed you – I wanted to see if you could go a full hour.’

  Jonah shrugged. Lily sighed.

  ‘How are you ever going to be a rock star if you’re so quiet?’

  ‘They give me an amp on stage.’

  ‘And do you just stand there scowling at the audience like you scowl at me?’

  He didn’t try to explain. He didn’t really understand it himself. Off stage, he was happy to stand at the back of the room, watching. Not shy or nervous: he just didn’t have much to say. Not in words. The things that mattered he put into his music: feelings and colours, shades of emotion and longing.

  ‘I’m not scowling at you.’ He bared his teeth in a forced, ferocious grin. ‘I’m concentrating.’ He reached in front of her and swept the dirt away, letting his shoulder touch her arm. ‘Come and see a gig when we’re back in the UK.’ In the lights, plugged into something awesome and beautiful, that was where he came alive. ‘I’m different on stage.’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘Maybe I don’t want you different.’

  ‘You don’t even know what I’m thinking.’

  She offered him the hand-pick. ‘Shall we swap?’

  He took the pick gingerly and squatted over the hole Lily had made. The sun had baked the ground so hard that the only way in was to hack it apart, then scrape away the lumps. Each time the blade bit the earth, he had his heart in his mouth, in case some priceless vase took the hit. Lily did it like surgery; Jonah felt like he was chopping wood.

  ‘You want to know what I’m thinking,’ he said after a while. ‘I’m wondering how a person like you wants to do the world’s most boring job.’

  She flicked him with the brush. ‘You’re as bad as Julian. It’s only boring if you’re boring.’

  ‘Sell me.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever want a time machine? You’ll never walk in ancient Athens, but if you dig in the right place you can stand on the same stones that Plato or Euripides might have trodden on. You can pick up a cup or a coin, and the last person who touched it before you lived two thousand years ago. Hand to hand. Not like in a museum, where everything’s in airless boxes and you can’t touch it. This is real.’

  She lifted her hat and wiped her forehead. ‘Adam says it’s like quantum superposition. You know the theory that every possible world exists simultaneously? Archaeology’s a way of reaching through the dimensions and touching something from a different reality.’

  Jonah wasn’t much interested in what Adam said, even if he’d understood it. He glanced at Lily, trying to read her face. Adam says. He’d have loved to know what she thought about Adam.

  ‘Wait!’

  Lily shot out her arm to block the pick mid-air. ‘Look there.’

  He’d missed it – predictably. A blush of pink in the grey earth, flush with the floor. A millimetre deeper and he’d have smashed it.

  ‘Your turn.’ He handed her the pick and got out of the way. Lily knelt, tapping the soil like a builder testing a wall.

  ‘Can I have the triangle tool?’

  He gave it to her, a nine-inch wooden handle with a triangular iron scraper on the end. She pulled it across the hard earth, taking off fractions of dust each time.

  ‘It’s a big piece,’ she announced. ‘Better go and get the professor.’

  The others came over to watch. They stood in a circle around Lily as she scratched and brushed and chiselled around the piece of pottery. She never once looked up. She was like a sculptor or a potter, drawing a form out of the clay that was invisible to everyone but her. Jonah wished the others would go away.

  It took almost an hour. By the time Lily had finished, the piece that had been buried now lay free in a flat crater, though she hadn’t touched it once. You could pick it up as if it had been dropped five minutes ago. They measured the position and photographed it; the professor entered the details in the Field Journal.

  It was a figurine, a clay woman with wide hips and full breasts, arms raised in power. Her face had been wiped almost smooth: all that remained was a thin crescent groove that might once have been a knowing smile.

  Lily cradled her in her hand while the professor wrote the tag for the bag. Her face shone with sweat and pride, as if she’d just given birth.

  ‘You see?’

  London

  Jonah felt as if the chair had dropped out from under him.

  ‘Lily wouldn’t …’

  He remembered the bank statement, the trip to Athens she hadn’t told him about. The family emergency that never happened.

  Do you have any idea what she was getting up to in Italy?

  Andreas jabbed the pen at him. ‘Perhaps now you could tell us exactly what Lily said about the tablet.’

  He stuck to the lie. ‘Just that she was worried about it.’ Did that sound too empty to be true? ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘I think it’s precisely the point.’

  He wanted to breathe, but no air came. He wanted to be able to explain, to convinc
e them there was no way on earth Lily would have stolen an artefact. But the words weren’t there.

  ‘We’re as keen to find her as you are,’ Richard put in.

  ‘So why didn’t the police try to arrest her when they traced her?’ At that moment, even having Lily in a cell seemed like it would be a step forward. At least he’d know where she was.

  ‘The Italian police.’ Andreas made a face as if he’d tasted a glass of wine and found it corked. ‘Your missing person request went to a different office from the one that was investigating the theft. By the time they had made the connection, Lily had escaped again.’

  He still didn’t believe it. ‘You said there was a third person who had the combination. The conservator.’

  ‘She wasn’t there. She left the dig … early.’

  Again, Jonah noticed the gap in his words. A missing piece, something unsaid. ‘Why did she go?’

  ‘She had a prior obligation,’ said Andreas smoothly. ‘It’s quite normal. When you hire the best people, they’re in great demand.’

  ‘We’ve confirmed she wasn’t in the country,’ Richard added.

  A nasty thought. ‘What if someone forced Lily to open the safe?’

  ‘It’s possible.’ Unlikely, Andreas’s eyes said.

  ‘Was anyone worried about safety? Anything suspicious?’

  ‘Not in the least. It’s Italy. We have projects across the Middle East, north Africa, Balkans …’ He waved at the window. ‘Italy, it’s like digging in your own back garden.’

  Jonah remembered something one of the volunteers had said at dinner, a passing crack about the Mafia. ‘What about organised crime?’

  ‘The Mafia?’ Andreas shrugged. ‘For sure, they’re down there. But archaeology, it’s not really what they do.’

  ‘A priceless gold tablet might have got them interested.’

  ‘All the staff signed confidentiality agreements. No one outside the dig knew the tablet was there. Except you, apparently.’