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The Fox Knows Many Things: An Athena Fox Adventure

Page 24

by Mike Sweeney


  I’d made a promise there. I wasn’t going to back out.

  The tension forced a short laugh from me. I had no sherd, no plans, no clue. No faithful sidekick, no tools. Just my wits and my knowledge and a hell of a good museum.

  Take it back to the dirt-basic. Archaeology. The study of the past through the material remains. Archaeology, where other people’s garbage was our treasure. Historians could go and read through Caesar’s Commentaries and make all sorts of clever guesses about Iron Age Germanic peoples. We dug up their helmets and the swords and their loom weights and their soup pots to learn about the actual lives of the people.

  The dirt. I was looking down, down the stairwell, down to the slope, down through the glass where a historic Athenian neighborhood was being uncovered trowel by careful trowel.

  We dug…in the dirt.

  It flashed through my mind in an instant.

  Giulio, in Padua; “It comes out of the ground in heaps and finds its way to auction with the dirt still on it.”

  Ariadne, speaking of the Sharpe collection: “I was shocked at how dirty some of the pieces were.”

  I’d made the same mistake I’d been chastising everyone else about. I’d been so fixated on the Artifact, I’d missed the Archaeology.

  It wasn’t the Sharpe collection.

  Not all of it, at least. All those random sherds Ariadne had complained about? They were freshly dug. There was an undiscovered archaeological site and it was being looted for everything it had.

  No, no. The puzzle went deeper than that.

  “What is better than an archaeological site in your backyard?” I asked aloud. The answer was easy. It had been shouted at me with lots of added profanity by a couple of young Athenians. What was better was no archaeological site in your backyard.

  When I’d made a fuss over the sherd in Germany, I’d drawn a bullseye on the site. At that instant it became a lot less a bit of extra cash and a lot more a legal liability. And that’s when Outis moved in to remove me. Make me vanish, make the sherd vanish. No more problem.

  That’s what had been puzzling me. How had he known the sherd was safe in my cabin? He hadn’t. As far as he knew, he was hurling the evidence into the depths of the Adriatic along with the annoying person who kept focusing unwanted attention on his little side project.

  And now he was going to destroy it. Cover it up for good.

  He was going to try.

  I opened the bag I’d bought in Ebernburg. I had the hat in there. I didn’t know why. Maybe because I thought it might come in handy to shade my eyes from the sun. Maybe because there’d been room.

  I turned to address the assembled gods of the Parthenon Frieze. “You wanted Athena Fox?” I asked. “Well, that’s great. But I created the character. You don’t get to decide how I play her. And you don’t get to take it back.”

  Nobody did, not Herr Satz, not Vash. They could try to manipulate me, they could try to shape me in their own image, but I was still the girl who loved history, who loved science, and I was going to do this right.

  I put the fedora on my head and I tilted it back at a jaunty angle.

  “I never asked for this, but I will see it through.”

  Outis had better watch out. Athena Fox was coming for him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “ARIADNE!”

  She was in black jeans and a long-sleeved black t-shirt that were both filthy with plaster dust and I ran to her and embraced her and held on tight.

  Atlantis was a ruin. I couldn’t even put it in perspective. All I saw was the same broken walls and crumbling rubble of a Pompeii, a Knossos, a Parthenon after the Venetian artillery. “It looks worse than it is,” Ariadne said into my shoulder.

  I pulled back and held her at arm’s length. She was…okay. The light was still in her eyes, her chin up with the determination to recover, to rebuild. She was Greek. That is what they did.

  Giulio popped out of a back room. “The police have come and gone,” Ariadne said.

  “So to speak,” I said.

  “He has been helping me.” Ariadne looked from one of us to the other in question. “Most of the collection is intact. The shelves protected them.”

  “The bomb was almost a dud,” Giulio said. “Water got into it.”

  “He isn’t going to get away with it.”

  “Penelope?” Ariadne was looking me full in the face again. “You’ve changed.”

  “It started a while back.”

  Sound at the door. The assistant, still in his black pants and white shirt, still not meeting anyone’s eyes. “Miss Mavrokordatos?” he said. “It’s about my check.” He saw me and the carelessness turned to tension.

  “Hey!” I said suddenly, looking outside and putting all my acting skills into it. “What’s that man doing with that big truck?”

  The assistant bolted for the door. Giulio blocked him.

  “He’s a plant,” I said.

  “Cosimo recommended him,” Ariadne told me.

  I closed in. “He’s not Cosimo’s man,” I said. “If he was, I wouldn’t have had to tell Satz where to find me. He could have ambushed me right outside.”

  “What?” Giulio was a little behind on developments.

  “Shut it, Prince Calaf,” I told him. “You!” I cornered the assistant. “Who did you send that text to!”

  “Yiannis?” The Clytemnestra face was back as Ariadne stalked in on him. I could take lessons from her in scaring the shit out of people.

  “I don’t know who it was!” the assistant yelled, still trying to edge for the door. “I only saw him once.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Not really?”

  “Bingo,” I said softly. I motioned for Ariadne to let him escape.

  “He left without his check.”

  “Can anyone please explain what that was all about?” Giulio sounded plaintive.

  “It is simple, really,” I told them both. “All those random sherds? They didn’t come from the Sharpe estate. Cosimo was using the pre-UNESCO status of Edward’s collection to launder a freshly looted site.”

  “He what?”

  I grinned. “He padded the Sharpe objects.”

  “You!” Ariadne said. “Have you been waiting all morning to use that one?”

  “Yes, yes I have.” I was unrepentant. “The calyx fragments had to have been dug up by the looters. Edward wouldn’t have missed it. He might have been an ass, but you can’t say he wasn’t Sharpe.”

  “Would. You. Stop.”

  “But the Athena sherd was his find. He gave it to Xander, to Doctor Newman. Which means he was there. There at the site Cosimo’s source is digging up now.”

  “The Kousoumvris Estate!” Ariadne cried as she got it. “Where Spyros and Sharpe and Cosimo used to spend summers.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It had been a simple plan. Launder the stuff they dug up by pretending Sharpe had collected it all in the late ‘60s. They’d reached out to the white power sorts to add a little extra seasoning, but they hadn’t counted on just how fast the internet could move and how big something could blow up. Even then, they might have made it. Until I fingered the sherd in Germany. A sherd that could be traced clearly back to them.

  “Kousoumvris,” Giulio sighed. Yeah, tell me he hadn’t had his eye on the place already.

  “I’m glad you are here,” I told him. “I could use a ride.”

  “You are going to need a boat. I will make some phone calls.”

  “A boat?” I echoed.

  “It is on a private island,” Ariadne told me. “Just off the coast, near the Temple of Poseidon.” She stopped and fixed me with a glare. “Okay, what is it?” She was looking from me to Giulio.

  “You want to tell her or should I?” I asked.

  “You seem to have guessed already,” he said, surprisingly good-natured about it.

  “He’s a cop. An undercover cop.”

  “Carabinieri Art Squad, actually. I’ve been working closely with
the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.”

  “You should not have quoted ‘Nessun Dorma’ around Signor Nardella,” I chided him. “I bet he knows opera, too.”

  Giulio shrugged, one of those elegant Italian shrugs. “I did not realize I was doing so until it was over,” he said. “The heat of the moment, as they say.”

  I laughed shortly. “You want heat? Here’s heat. The site is dangerous to them now. If we are lucky, the storm kept them from doing anything but if they have any sense they are bulldozing it back into the dirt as we speak.”

  They both gaped at me.

  “Dottore, we have to move! Now!”

  He moved, finally. “You’ve changed,” Ariadne said. “And I like it. Hold on,” she grabbed at my sleeve. “With all that’s happened, I almost forgot. A very strange man came by and he left a package for you.”

  Giulio and I tensed up immediately.

  “I already opened it!” Ariadne laughed at us. She crossed to the only intact desk. “Here,” she said.

  A jacket?

  A very, very nice jacket. Looked like fine Italian leatherwork, triple-stitched hems and everything. Nary a label on it, of course. “They do good work in Albania,” I said distantly. It was classic in style, almost vintage, and it was comfortable enough for a god.

  I put it on. I got the scarf out of my bag and added that. Settled the Athena Fox hat back on my head.

  “You ready?” Giulio asked.

  “I am hell of ready. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “NO GO,” GIULIO said, frustrated. He studied the phone in his hand as if it might have hidden answers. Put it away with a sigh.

  He had parked near a small but busy marina. The smell of fresh rain was still in the air, the wind was blowing offshore and there was a crowd over at one end where something large and colorful had pulled in.

  A…trireme? Oh, my, gods, it was a Greek trireme.

  “That’s the Olympias,” Giulio followed my gaze. “A reproduction of an ancient Athenian ship. Owned and registered by the Hellenic Navy but rowed by volunteers. Sometimes they take it out for day trips. He is normally berthed at Piraeus.”

  Piraeus, the ancient seaport of Athens, connected during the Peloponnesian War by the Long Wall. We’d skipped all that. Giulio had driven very fast along the insanely winding and badly kept up Greek National Road 91 until we were nearly as South as you could get without driving over water.

  “My coworkers were going to meet me here, and we would arrange for transport,” he said. “But there were problems.”

  “Manpower?”

  “Politics.”

  “Imagine my surprise.”

  I looked out at the small marina. I could almost see the island, or could have it it wasn’t around the headland from us. “This is bad. If I know my political favors, they travel both ways. They know something is up now. If we try to come out there in a motorboat, they will hear us.”

  “We can not anyhow,” Giulio said, those Greek Wrestler shoulders knotting under the brown suit jacket. “It is private property. I do not have the right.”

  “So they can sue me,” I said cheerfully. I was still looking, thoughtfully. “Sails don’t make much sound,” I said. “Neither do oars.”

  “You are insane.”

  “The word you want is crazy,” I grinned. “Crazy like a fox.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know. Talk to them. Try to convince them. Tell them this could be an important piece of Greek heritage that’s about to be destroyed.”

  “Oh, I’d like to hear that.”

  I took it as a challenge. I hopped off the hood. Took a noble pose.

  “Friends, Athenians, Hellenes, whatever we call ourselves. My name is Athena Fox. I am an archaeologist. And I need your help.

  “There is a crime being committed, a crime against humanity. We are shaped by our past. Our ideas of our nations and ourselves is imbedded in the stories we tell of our past. We can not let that past be thrown away, not in fear, not in anger, not for monetary gain.

  “We owe a debt that can never be paid to the people who dreamed and built and created and formed the basis of the civilization we now have. We owe it to our ancestors and to every future generation to preserve the record of who they were and what they did. To understand it as best we can, so that we can see better the threads that connect and unite every one of us in the skein of history.

  “You may not trust what I am telling you. I may be wrong; archaeology is an imperfect science. But would you rather take a nice little row to a pleasant island? And if I am an idiot, then let me make it up to you by treating you. Perhaps I can talk the mistress of the house into offering viands. And if not, the beach is smooth and the Aegean gleams like a fine jewel.

  “Or would you prefer to stay home on this Saint Crispin’s day, to be those who are not remembered? To pull separately in your own directions?

  “I am no Greek. I have no right to ask what I ask of the Hellenic Navy, or you great and gorgeous volunteers, or anyone. But I ask anyhow. I ask in the name of Athens. In the hope and promise and dream that Athens made possible. Please. Please come with me. Please help save our past.”

  Giulio said nothing.

  “That kind of got away from me a little there,” I said. “I’m going down to the water. Maybe I can rent a boat.”

  “I’m going to make another phone call.”

  “Athena?”

  “Yes?” I turned.

  “I wish you had given that speech to them.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe it would sound better in Greek.”

  He wasn’t willing to take me. Not once I told him where I needed to go. He also wouldn’t rent to me. Apparently, you had to have a license to sail.

  I had no time. I had no patience. I put one booted foot up on a bollard so I could look him right in the eye. “I am going to Aráchnos. I am going to get there if I have to swim the whole way. Now, are you going to rent me a boat or does this envelope go into the water with me?”

  I opened Ariadne’s envelope and threw it at him. I had no idea how much was left inside. It seemed to be enough to decide him.

  Or something did. I saw him cross himself briefly. Did he just mutter “Mãe de Deus?” Surely that was the wrong language. What was he, Portuguese? I guess there were stranger peoples to find around the edge of the Aegean.

  “I let you have that Wayfarer there.” He took the envelope, and he yelled to an older man who seemed to be a dock hand. The man smiled toothily, jumped nimbly into a small boat and started prepping it. I couldn’t even make out what language that had been, but I was betting the translation would be, “Get this gods-touched fool into a boat and out of my sight!”

  The older man finished in a few minutes. Then he gestured to me.

  I got in. About sixteen feet, one mast, a whole hell of a lot of ropes running every which way. I stepped gingerly, feeling the boat rock beneath my weight. “Seat,” the man said. “Seat.”

  I seat. Sat. He hauled on a rope and the sail went up. Or was that supposed to be called a line? “What do you call that?” I asked.

  “Eh?”

  “The rope. Or is it a line? I kept meaning to read some of those Aubrey-Maturin books. Is that going to bite me in the ass now?”

  “Eh?”

  “Oh, no. Please tell me we have a language in common.”

  He grinned.

  Then he handed me the tiller.

  “That,” he said. It sounded more like “Dat.”

  He pushed my hand towards the right side of the boat. The starboard side of the boat. He did something with the ropes and the sail billowed out. “Dat,” he said again. “Whoosh.” He blew out his lips, making wind noises. “Shit.” He pulled on the rope attached to the sail.

  Some more gestures and a lot more blowing and I got it. I think. The gist seemed to be that you couldn’t point directly at the wind but you could get close if you finessed it right. Well, that made sense. Sort of. It was a wh
ole interplay between the rudder and how tight you held the sail and, oh yeah, it helped a lot to sit on the high side lest the boat tip over.

  We were moving at a good clip already. He pushed my hand again, guiding us out of the marina. When we had open water he pointed at my tiller hand again, simultaneously pulling all the slack out of the rope holding down the end of the boom. “Shit,” he said again. It sounded like “Sheet.” He gestured at my hand again. “Dat.”

  I pushed the tiller over. He reached out with his free hand and pushed my head down. The boom swung over and there was a crack as the sail caught the wind again on the other side.

  “Dat,” he said.

  There was an awful lot of “Dat” over the next twenty minutes or so. Soon he had me holding the sail and the tiller and even though I still didn’t know what anything was actually called, I could just about keep us going in one direction.

  He was grinning a lot and making lots of happy nods. I chose to take this as him meaning I was a fast learner. Which would be why he got more lines into his hands and raised up a big floppy triangle of sail in front of the other one. Jib? Spinnaker? Genoa? It had no boom and ran to two different cleats and now tacking or jibbing or whatever the hell it was called was really an adventure.

  There was a floppy stick hanging off the tiller and the rope in my hand wrapped around a bunch of pulleys that were wrapped around more ropes — I meant lines — that stretched from one side to the other near the stern and there were two more that went from the corner of the jib sail and wrapped around the mast and found more eyes and quick-release cleats.

  And that was just the stuff I was dealing with. What all the other stuff did I had no idea. Heck, if I hadn’t done that video on that old aircraft carrier I wasn’t sure I’d even know which side was starboard!

  I began to understand why people who could run boats had such a high reputation in Bronze Age literature.

  “Dat,” my mentor said. He was pointing towards the shore.

  “What? You aren’t driving me all the way to the island?”

  He shook his head. “Kynigós,” he muttered. I half expected him to cross himself, too. Rightly not trusting my nascent ship-handling skills, he only waited until I was within a few dozen feet of the shore before he let himself out.

 

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