The Fox Knows Many Things: An Athena Fox Adventure

by Mike Sweeney

  More debris from the riot ahead. There were a couple of damp cardboard boxes shoved against the front of the Atlantis Gallery.

  Boxes that hadn’t been there when I left. An archaeologist noticed such things.

  As I watched one started smoking.

  A whole bunch of thoughts went through my head very fast. My Nobody, who had probably been following after Satz, Satz with the handy Facebook breadcrumbs Drea had left for him. A man who didn’t care. It was hard to wrap your mind around that. You wanted to think someone would have to hate you or fear you in order to try to murder you, but he would do something just because you were in the way. To you, to anyone else who happened by, it didn’t matter.

  And this was Athens, a town where anarchists threw Molotovs and planted bombs in the offices of the local fascists. It made it almost too easy…

  “Down!” I screamed, shoving Satz hard before throwing myself flat on top of him.

  Nothing happened.

  “What the hell was that about?”

  “I’m sorry, I thought — ”

  The blast wave slammed into us. I was lifted clear off the ground. Something snapped in my ears leaving only a hiss behind. I could only blink as debris fell silently around us and a pall of smoke rose from where Ariadne’s gallery had been.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE SIRENS WERE whispers. I was numb, my entire body tingling. My ears were hissing and warm fluid felt like it was running from them. I touched a finger, brought it to my eyes and tried to focus. It didn’t look like blood. It was hard to tell. My clothes were so wet all I could feel was the rain water and the cold.

  White uniforms. A penlight in my eyes. I looked down at myself. Counted two legs, two arms. All good.

  Outis. He’d bombed Atlantis. The smoke just when we walked up, it couldn’t be a coincidence. He’d been hoping to take care of all of us.

  Ariadne! I hadn’t been able to see, through the lights, the crowds of first responders. How bad was the damage? How was she?

  I grabbed at someone’s arm, tried to get them to listen. They shook me off. There was an order to such things, and they were going to follow it to the letter.

  I was still wrapped in cotton wool when they bundled me into a police station. All I could hear was hissing, voices in the background like a badly tuned radio. All I could feel was my sodden clothes hanging on me, trickling cold inside. I was shivering like a Pekinese.

  A burly man in uniform was shouting at me. I couldn’t understand one word in ten.

  “How is Ariadne?” I shouted back. “Is she okay?”

  He was still yelling questions. Something about Anarchists. Really, is that all these stooges could think of?”

  “He did it!” I said. “I don’t know his name. He tried to kill us!”

  “Nobody” had planted a bomb. Yeah, tell them that. It’d work for me about as well as it had worked for Polyphemus.

  He was still out there. Something, something about the sherd was dangerous to him. He had to have it, or destroy it. But what?

  No. Not dangerous to him. Mister Nobody, a man so cut off from ordinary humanity he couldn’t believe it could happen to him. No, he wasn’t afraid for himself. I didn’t know if he even could be. He had to be — he had to be protecting someone else!

  How could I possibly explain? I could feel tears of frustration welling up. I couldn’t even hear my own voice, much less theirs. No velvet words, no clever stratagem, no Third Cretan Lie was going to happen. I was helpless.

  Then it got worse.

  I saw my bag as it was brought to the desk. The sherd. The Athena sherd that I’d protected for so long. They had it. Frowns. The shivers washed over me again.

  “I got it in Germany,” I said. I hadn’t heard the question, but I knew what they would ask.

  More shouting. They sounded even less friendly now.

  “His name is Xander. Xander Newman of the Free University Berlin. You can look him up!”

  Shaking the sherd. Pointing at it. More questions I couldn’t hear.

  “I can’t hear you,” I said.

  Angrier. Louder voices. I caught “Atlantis” in the question. No! They weren’t going to implicate Ariadne! Not after all that had happened already!

  “Embassy!” I shouted back.

  A guffaw of laughter greeted that.

  “Embassy!” I demanded again.

  They took a break at that point. Parked me in a chair. No guard, no cuffs. No passport, either; they’d taken that, and even my broken phone.

  I sat and shivered. I was starting to feel again. But all I felt was pain. And the cold water. And despair.

  A change. A new group of uniforms had entered. Uniforms and suits. Among them, a man built like a Greek wrestler in a brown suit with a name badge clipped to the pocket and a worried look on his bulldog face.

  Giulio?

  “My friend!” Giulio said. He lifted me bodily out of my chair and hugged me close. I fell into him, the shakes taking over.

  He yelled at the other suits. They seemed to agree. My bag came back to me. “Come!” he said. He set me back on my feet. “Miss Mavrokordatos, she is unharmed,” he said. I heard that. My heart unclenched a little. “I told them you work for me,” he said.

  The rain was over when we got outside. Water was running hubcap deep in the streets. The rain was over. All of it was over. The authorities had the sherd.

  We got into his car.

  “My flight is Monday,” I said, not sure if it was to myself.

  “I am sorry. The Hellenic Police said you are to stay in Athens. I convinced them to return your passport at least.”

  “That’s going to be awkward at checkout time.” I tried to make a joke of it.

  “I am sorry again. If there is anything I can do…”

  And with that I was at my hotel. I was wet, I was half-deaf, my knee still hurt, my clothes were ruined, and I was probably in shock. Not that the police gave a shit.

  I’d lost.

  And Athena Fox was out of a job.

  Part V

  What Does the Fox Say

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE WORST NIGHT of my life was finally over.

  I’d gone to bed sick and hurting. I’d woken up in pain. It took a long time to untangle my thoughts from the fading dreams. It had been a wild one, disturbing in its internal consistency. Some South Seas island with crazy weather, infested by cultists all toting guns left over from the Pacific War. I’d been crawling through tunnels, flinching from spike traps. And being shot at. I woke up when I took a bullet in the leg.

  No, it was a cramp. I really, really hated waking up with a leg cramp. It was a struggle to wade through the bedclothes to get to the knotted muscle. I kneaded at it, trying to keep it from clenching further. Finally it relaxed, not without a few last twinges. I let myself back down gingerly, lay there in a fresh sweat amid the soft sheets. Lay there, in my Athens hotel room, breathing deeply and trying to put behind me that had happened over this crazy week.

  It was a while before I could get up and stagger to the shower. The warm spray did an amazing job at easing the aches and pains.

  I came out of the water dripping and found the sad remains of the Athena Fox outfit on the chair. Yeah, I wouldn’t be wearing those clothes again. I supposed I should replace them with something. For all the bags I’d brought, there were actually precious few decent outfits there.

  I was…free.

  No more hunt, no more mystery to solve. The sherd was gone. There was nothing left to fight over. The bad guys had gotten away. If justice ever came for them, it would come from the Hellenic Police.

  I felt weak everywhere. My quest had been driving me for so long, I hadn’t realized how much it had taken out of me. Now, with everything over, I could barely stand up. I had no passion left for anything.

  So that left only one thing to do.

  The hunter-gatherer strategy was to do walkabout, finding the richest locations first, without picking up a
nything. It would only slow you down, after all, and there might be something better a little way down the trail. Only when you had covered your entire range did you work your way back, collecting the choicest bits to bring back to your lair.

  I hadn’t learned that in Anth 101. I’d learned it from my sister. Gally was an amazing shopper.

  I was following Ariadne’s advice. When sad…you shop.

  The day was clear and bright. The rain had washed the streets clean most of the traces of Saturday’s demonstration, leaving that fresh post-rain smell in the air. This was Monday and the last of September and Athens was transitioning. The tourists were going home, the business cycle was starting up again. The glamour was being put away for another season and reality was seeping back into the world.

  I’d been through the Plaka once before. I knew exactly which shops I wanted to return to. Well, there was that sandal shop that had just caught my eye —

  Behind me! I ducked, hard, nearly putting my head into a wall. Looked back and glared at the motorbike. It had only been a tap on the horn. Not very loud. But I hadn’t been expecting it.

  After I got my pulse rate back down, I finished crossing to the sandal shop.

  I considered a dressy pair of sandals but I already had one in my bags and, really, I was a cross trainers type of gal. That and boots — the Athena Fox boots had finally dried out and I was wearing them again, at least for this day. But in the front were some Roman-style sandals. Even if they did keep bringing to mind a certain emperor nicknamed “Little Boots” after the soldier-type sandals he wore as a child. Yeah, I was buying them. No way I could resist. Those with a short and sleeveless dress, a big clangy necklace…!

  Next was pants. I’d admired a pair I didn’t have the time to try on, before. Now I had the time. I had nothing but time. A little tremor went through me but I shook it off. Into the changing room. I came out smoothing my hands down my thighs. Gave a wriggle. Hell, yeah. Faun-colored, a blend that was warm and comfortable, and just snug enough. I wanted two pairs, and I was leaving here with one of them on.

  Shirts and blouses next, then a break for a pita gyro at one of the hole-in-the-wall shops, Delicious but I was so glad I hadn’t found a new blouse yet. I dabbed at my damaged shirt. My hand was trembling. The chili sauce looked too much like blood.

  I looked up and there were pots in my line of vision.

  Another of those stores with ceramic stuff for the tourists. Red-figure, polychrome, even some black-figure ware. Fake, of course. For all I knew, manufactured in India and sent here by the shipping container.

  The pots glared at me. I shifted my eyes, guiltily. There was nothing I could do. I was out of it. No more ideas, no more clever ruses. My hands were knotting at my sides. I forced my fists to unclench. I was done. No more games, no more ideas. He was still out there but I couldn’t stop him, not now. And he didn’t want me, anyhow. Not any more. Not since I’d lost the sherd.

  The sherd. My only clue. The thing I had protected for so long. “I’m sorry,” I said to the world. To Xander, to Athens. To Giulio, even though I now knew the secret he had been hiding. Police and secrets, right. I wondered if that was even his real name.

  Stop it. None of that mattered anymore. I forced my feet towards the next store.

  Shawls and scarves and all that. I still liked that shimmery scarlet scarf I had seen earlier. But beside it, oh, no. I had to have this one!

  It could have been cut from the lining of a bomber jacket from the Pacific War. That is, the escape map they had printed in fine ink on the silk. This one covered half the Pacific, compass roses and topographical detail and all. If and when I had another history lecture ready to shoot, this would be the new Athena Fox scarf.

  If and when. I was in no hurry.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I’D GOTTEN ALMOST back to Syntagma. I was out where the tour buses prowled. Clever architectural design had funneled me onto a fancy promenade, the pedestrian-only walkway lined with trees that worked its way past all the great sites from Acropolis down.

  It was comfortable. It was normal. Look at me, just another American tourist in Greece.

  Hey, wasn’t that the new Acropolis Museum? Yes, it was. I’d heard about this place. I wiped my eyes and headed that way.

  It was cool and library hushed inside. Just what I liked in a museum. Fancy as hell, spanking new. Oddly empty.

  Sure, it had amazing stuff. This is where the actual caryatids from the Erechtheion were staying, for instance, while tag-teams of restorers cleaned off the degradations of time and pollution.

  And more kouros and kore than I’d ever seen in one place. So it wasn’t a lack of a collection. No, what there was, was almost a presence. The art world liked to talk about negative space. This was a museum filled to the brim with negative space.

  Working my way up, I visited several statues and other sculptural elements which were cleverly accompanied by casts that were painted up to reflect how the original appeared.

  Yeah, painted. I’d heard about this, too. Some people (Vash’s buddies sprung to mind) got really out of sorts about the idea that the classical Greek statues weren’t actually gleaming white marble. They’d been painted, probably in lifelike colors but there was too little left to be entirely sure.

  And, yeah, I was sort of with the reactionaries on this one. The painted examples looked a little garish to me. But it still was crazy that this had turned into a whole feud between academics and, well, idiots and racists. Even Mary Beard had ended up in the middle of it.

  There was a niche where an introductory film clip was playing. Sepia-tinted photograph of men up on rickety looking scaffolding, sawing away at the facade of the Parthenon. “…the block fell during the attempt to remove it, breaking into several pieces,” the narration was saying. “The larger of the pieces was placed aboard a British brig, but the Mentor was caught in a storm and sunk off Kythera…”

  The Elgin Marbles. Yeah, no wonder they were angry. I’d read somewhere of the British response to repeated requests for their return. At least once, they’d remarked that Greece didn’t have an adequate place to store and protect them.

  Well, now they did. And now I got the spanking-new Acropolis Museum. It was a giant take that to Western acquisition. It sure as Hades had empty space. It was a museum designed from the ground up to look like a smile with a missing tooth.

  Lord Elgin. Another product of an earlier period of Archaeology. He and Schliemann were birds of a feather. Even by the standards of their time, both were considered to have gone a little far. Still, you could make the same argument Ariadne had made about Sir Arthur Evans. According to Lord Elgin, the Ottomans were busy breaking up the statues for their lime kilns when he got there.

  But see, that was the thing. When Lucas and Spielberg and the sadly under-credited Larry Kasdan had met for Story Conference, they’d been totally upfront about their sources for Indiana Jones. I’d seen the transcripts of that conference. They were basing it on archetypes from earlier movies, which in turn came from basically men like Schliemann. It was an outmoded, colonialist view. A view of Science as some great edifice of the Western powers, for which brave white men were entirely within their rights to go and wrest artifacts from backwards peoples.

  It blended so nicely into the hyper-diffusionist nonsense that none of these primitive people had actually built the things they were known for, not pyramids, not stupa, not even big-headed statues with topknots along the shores of Easter Island. No, it had to be some phantom Dorians, or wandering Hebrew tribes, or, these days, Space Aliens. So the artifact Indiana Jones plucked from its place of veneration now glowed with the light of alien technology. Or at least Atlantean.

  I wriggled a little in embarrassment. That’s what I had copied, that’s what I had done on my show. Episode Three had nothing on that shit.

  But, sorry. For every Schliemann, there had been a Howard Carter. For every Lord Elgin, a Flinders Petrie. It could be done. Archaeology could be better
than that.

  The film had ended and looped over. I stood up. The way the museum was designed, when you first entered, you walked up a long slope then up a grand staircase, as if you were climbing the Acropolis. And the really cool thing? There was reinforced glass set into the floor and below it was an actual live archaeological dig.

  The third floor was the Parthenon friezes. It was oriented to the actual Parthenon, the original visible through the shaded windows that let natural light in. As much of the sculpture as Athens had been able to recover was on the top floor, filled in with casts of the missing elements in gleaming white plaster, a white that only underlined which parts were original and which were ersatz.

  And you could see the whole thing. Really see it. Instead of being high in the air and mostly in shadow, the friezes and metopes were displayed close to ground level where you could properly study the sculpture.

  I leaned in. There was a noise.

  I spun in place. No!

  Nobody was there. I mean, there wasn’t anybody there. Not that Nobody was there.

  Okay, admit it. I had nerves. Standing too next to bombs could do that. Being almost killed, and more than once, could do that. I was a media arts graduate, not some kind of movie hero who could shrug off that sort of thing and go about her business as if nothing had happened.

  My fists were clenched again. I stood there on the top floor of the Acropolis Museum, shaking with fear and guilt and failure. Helpless.

  I looked down. The thumb was on the outside, just like Satz had suggested. My forearms were trembling, the muscles rigid.

  Oh, like hell I was afraid.

  I was angry.

  I looked at my fists again. I wasn’t going to give up on this. I wasn’t going to let him win. Maybe all my life I’d moved on, back down, but while I’d been struggling for my life in the Adriatic I had realized that didn’t have to be so. Some things were worth sticking with.