The Fox Knows Many Things: An Athena Fox Adventure

by Mike Sweeney

She frowned. I was clearly supposed to be awed. Sure, Princess, sure. I knew models. I’d grown up in LA. Hell, Sis could give her a run for her money, and I’d seen my sister brush her teeth. I still had her stuffed bunny, too. It took more than a facade to impress me. Everyone in Burbank had a facade. That’s how that town worked.

  I spared a glance for Outis. He was gazing at her. I’d been wrong again. I supposed I should be getting used to that. There was something real in his world, and it was her. What was the past that bound them together? A debt, a duty? I saw the way he looked at her and I felt like I could see long generations of service and obligation and feudal tradition, and I finally got it.

  He hadn’t been protecting the money. He’d been protecting her. Now it all fell into place. Selling a few trinkets on the side was fine as long as it never came back to her. He’d reacted in Germany because I was threatening her. Right then, he’d seen the sherd could bring attention back to her, and that’s when he had coldly and efficiently picked up a rock to do me in.

  “This is private property,” Diana said. “I am well within my rights to have you shot.” The French accent was a lot less attractive on her than it had been on my friend Océane.

  She gestured at Outis and he happily raised his rifle again.

  “I’ll tell you what I told him,” I said quickly. “The Ministry knows what is here. Sure you can shoot me, but it is too late to cover up the rest of it.”

  “I am not talking to you, child. I am talking to the one who sent you.”

  “Nobody sent me, lady!” I changed gears. “You’ve got a problem, and you just happen to be speaking to someone with a solution.”

  “Really.”

  At least he wasn’t shooting. “I’ve got one question first. Why Sharpe, why the whole Dorian thing? Isn’t that sort of counter to the philosophy of Golden Dawn?”

  “It amused me,” she said.

  Sure, okay. According to Ariadne, she hardly spent any time in Greece anyhow. For all I knew she didn’t even speak Greek. Although a little birdie was telling me she was probably terrifyingly competent in a whole bunch of things. Riding. Hunting. Making money. Politics. Having me shot.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said quickly. “You announce the discovery. Open the island and sponsor a proper dig. Sure, you lose a perfectly good boathouse. But Cosimo brings back the loot he took and the Ministry conveniently forgets it ever left the island in the first place. No harm, no foul.”

  She laughed. Boy, she had a perfect laugh. If you’d been casting a stock villain.

  “My, what a clever plan. She has been teaching you, I can see.” She dropped the fake smile for an equally artificial frown. “And why would Uncle Cosi go along with all that?”

  “Because it keeps him out of prison,” I said bluntly. “The Art Squad might slip him a bone, too. After all, ‘Uncle Eddie’ was here for years and he might have stumbled on a few little pots here and there. As long as the National gets first bid on them, of course.”

  “You really think you can make all this happen, child?”

  “I do,” I grinned, then. “You know, I actually do.”

  “I am almost tempted to let you try. It would be so entertaining to see you fail.” She snapped her fingers. I swear I had never seen anyone do that in life. “But this is simpler.”

  The rifle came up again.

  I didn’t budge. “That ship has sailed, lady.”

  “Oh, really?” She still hadn’t seen what was behind her.

  “Or should I say, ‘rowed?’” I grinned wider.

  One hundred and seventy pairs of oars make a hell of a noise when they are suddenly back-sculling for all they are worth. Diana swiveled so quickly she startled her horse. Some horsewoman.

  The bright colors of the Olympias were filling the water before the dock. A figure in a brown suit, coat off and sleeves rolled back to show off those wrestlers’s arms, waved at me from the tall wooden bow.

  Diana gestured sharply. Outis put down his rifle, then came trotting to her side as she turned her horse.

  “You have chosen…wisely,” I said. I couldn’t resist.

  Diana cantered off, her private killer stalking behind her. I had to let him go. We’d never said, but it was part of the bargain. His time would come. Some day. I went to Enceladus to make sure there were no hard feelings.

  With great whoops and laughter the rowers were streaming across the beach like they were about to take Troy. I didn’t see David Gyasi. That was okay. I had my own Achilles.

  Tanned, muscular Greeks, stripped to the waist. Pale Austrians, sunburned Americans, a little of everyone. Men and women. Rowers and fans of history and volunteers for a cause, all working together. And all deliciously fit and running up the sands towards us.

  I sat down on a stone to enjoy the show.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  GIULIO PICKED ME up outside Ariadne’s rebuilt gallery. The last few days had been very busy for all of us. I looked back. The decorations were still in progress, but the new sign was up.

  “Atlantis Risen.” What else.

  Ariadne wasn’t going to change. She still had her museum of oddities. She was still selling the crystal skulls and the magic pyramids, but I couldn’t find it in me to dislike her.

  “She’s been making out like a bandit,” I told him when I got in. “In the end, the publicity more than paid for itself.”

  “You are looking beautiful today,” Giulio complimented me.

  “Why, thank you!” I had the high lace-up sandals on, and a sleeveless linen dress, and a big clangy ancient-looking necklace that Ariadne had loaned me and said was inspired by the “Jewels of Helen.” The stuff Schliemann had draped his young Greek wife Sophie with in that infamous photograph. I seemed to remember it had only been a year or two since the Pushkin Museum admitted they had them; they’d left Berlin with the Red Army and hadn’t been seen for decades.

  “I’m going to Dora Stratou with Achilles, later,” I said.

  “He is a nice young man,” Giulio said. “You enjoy dancing with him.”

  “Every night,” I confided. And managed not to blush too furiously as I realized the double entendre.

  I’d had to get Biro to tell the idiot to stop sulking in his tent but eventually he saw reason. It was still an interesting negotiation of two very different cultures, but we were making it work. And, yeah. We both knew and accepted it was a summer fling and wouldn’t last. But, oh, those summer nights!

  Giulio had found a place that was right at that point where ties were optional but jackets were not. I was glad I’d dressed up.

  “This is going to be going through the courts for years,” he told me once we’d ordered. “Many people at the Ministry of Culture still want to charge Signor Nardella. My agency is trying to convince them he is worth more to us if he cooperates. I’m not fond of letting him go free, but we all have to make sacrifices.”

  I’d had to make the same about Outis. Funny. Out of all we’d gone through, and I still didn’t know his name. He’d vanished back into the privacy of the Kousoumvris family. Back into his natural invisibility, or Diana was protecting him. I didn’t know and I was trying not to care.

  “The negotiations over the Enceladus site are progressing well, at least. The Kousoumvris lawyers only made a few conditions. Including two rather odd ones. The first is, well let me quote; ‘No person given the name Athena is to be part of any negotiation.’”

  “Oddly worded.” I kept my face neutral.

  “The other is, and I am sorry, that you, personally, are never to visit the site that you saved.”

  My face moved at that point. She’d scored with that one. And she knew damn well I’d have to accept that, too.

  The food arrived. First up was souvlaki. Really. The first thing any of my friends had thought of when I told them I’d be going to Greece, and this the first time I’d intentionally ordered it. This was a fancy place. Almost un-Greek. Usually all the dishes arrived at once.

  “
Your pot really showed the way, didn’t it. Funny how that worked out. So let me see if I’ve guessed right. The Carabinieri already had their eye on Signor Cosimo Nardella. Then his buddy Christakos goes off the road to Rome and the Carabinieri find Polaroids in the wreck.”

  “Genoa, not Rome.”

  “I thought all roads led to Rome.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “So you check the records and this is a new artifact entering the market and you realize the chances are far too good that it has been looted. You are there at Atlantis the night Ariadne invited me because you are still trying to push it with Cosimo and get him to admit he has it.”

  “Yes, yes.” Giulio nodded.

  “But…Polaroids? Where did he even find one of those?”

  “Christakos was very traditional.”

  “Huh.” More food was here, and I tucked in.

  “Doctor Geissler has not had time, he tells us, to make a proper survey. He is an archaeologist after your own heart, Miss Fox. He is so very excited but he knows not enough yet to commit himself.”

  Miss Fox? Well, it was better than Miss Bright. And at that, I’d come off better than Gally. Seriously, Mom? She’d changed it faster than I had.

  Giulio was continuing. “He believes this may be the earliest discovered ceramics workshop of the young Attic industry. It could stand just at that moment when Attic ceramics, and Athens, began their rise to dominance. And for all the looters have done, amazingly intact.” Giulio knew this period very well himself, I knew. The excitement was in his voice.

  “And the calyx? The master’s hand, I’m guessing.”

  Giulio laughed. “A master painter, perhaps. This is what Doctor Geissler tells us. He says the calyx shattered in the kiln. That’s why it was still on Aráchnos. The pieces were in the rubble. The rubble they dug up about two years ago when Miss Kousoumvris returned to Greece and decided she needed a bigger boathouse.”

  “Except for the Athena Sherd. It got kicked over the fence or saved as a reminder or used to prop up a shaving basin. It got separated, and it was on top of the ground when our enharmonic Professor Sharpe came strolling out with his equally racist buddy Spyros.”

  “Enharmonic?”

  “E. Sharpe.”

  Giulio lost it. He started laughing so hard he knocked over the wineglass. People were swiveling around to stare. “You…!” he said. Started laughing again. I understood. It was a release of tension. Of his own long chase. Of worry. Over me, too. “Always, with you,” he said. “Always something unexpected.”

  “La donna e’ mobile…” I sang lightly.

  “Hah!” he said. “The fox knows many things.”

  “I’ve heard that one before. Tell me the rest of it.”

  “It is an ancient saying. It is attributed to Archilochus. The fox knows many things, the proverb says, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” He looked at me. “The original saying is not kind to the fox.”

  “Okay, I get it. Jack of all trades, master of none and all that. The girl who won’t settle down. I’ve been called lots worse.”

  “Other essayists take the fox’s side,” he told me. “As do I, perhaps. You, a fox in name or not, was what was needed to break the stalemate. You were the fox in the henhouse. You came in and everything changed and now we have Enceladus. Whole.”

  “Well, I…I don’t know what to say.” I hid my embarrassment with a napkin.

  “That is what I realized, when you left me there on that beach. Vissi d’arte.”

  “I heard about that too but I didn’t find out what it means.”

  “It is what Floria Tosca sings, at her lowest moment. I gave my life to art. Yes. This is why I joined, this is why I did all this I did. For art.”

  I reached over and took his hand. There wasn’t any more I could say. There wasn’t anything I needed to say.

  “Oh, but there is one other thing.” His usual smile had returned. “Do you know when your man the Professor B Flat was walking on that beach?”

  “Oh.” I said. “Oh! UNESCO 1970. So…the Athena sherd technically…isn’t looted?”

  “It was removed from private property with the permission of the owner,” Giulio smiled. “It was given to Doctor Xander Newman with a letter included describing it and documenting the transfer.”

  “It had…provenance?”

  “Doctor Newman sent us a copy of the letter, along with another. Here, let me show you.” Giulio had another piece of paper to show me.

  “I hereby transfer ownership of said object to the idiot currently calling herself Athena Fox…” I read. “No.” I said.

  “Yes.” He was grinning widely, now. “It is fully legal. The final piece of the Enceladus Calyx is yours. And the National Museum of Archaeology is very interested in obtaining it from you.”

  Wow. Ariadne would be so jealous. I’d better let her broker it. Or maybe she’d let me donate it. The museum was probably broke, anyhow. Make it a loan from the collection of Athena Fox? No, now I was just getting silly.

  “I’d toast you but I still have a week to go,” I said.

  “Are you ever going to explain that?”

  “This dinner isn’t long enough for the whole story,” I said. Besides, he’d just worry about me. “Let me just say I had an exciting time getting back to Athens.”

  “More exciting than having a fist-fight in an ancient ruin, surviving an explosion, and sailing alone out to the Island of Spiders?”

  “You forget getting in a wrestling match with a giant,” I laughed. “Anyhow, I am so glad you changed your mind, and talked the Olympias into going. Vissi d’arte must have worked for you.”

  Giulio gave me an odd look. “You talked them into it,” he said.

  “I did?”

  “That was a very good speech. I told you it would work.”

  “No…”

  “And you were right,” he said. “It sounded even better in Greek.”

  Epilogue

  THE YOUNG WOMAN looked right into the camera and gave a wide urchin grin. “So there you have it, fans and Patreon supporters. The amazing open air market of Monastiraki, the bargain district right outside the Athenian Agora. And look at all the stuff I got!” She held up two huge bags.

  “So that’s her, eh? Well, I’m glad you made me watch all of this.”

  “Gracious of you.”

  “But those stories — how much of them are true?”

  “More than you suspect.”

  The handsome Greek by the young woman’s side draped his arm back across her shoulder. The camera wiggled and another young man, dark curly hair and a gleaming grin of his own, stuck his head in front for a moment.

  The young woman hugged back. She looked out across the district. There was a moment as a shadow crossed her eyes, a brief look of wariness. For an instant, one could see through the laughing facade and see the blaze of raw intelligence. Those were eyes, that moment said, that noticed everything. And a brain that made so many, many plans.

  “And how much do you think she suspects?”

  “More than some people would like.”

  “That scares you?”

  “It makes me sure which side I want to be on. And it isn’t the one that might have to go up against her.”

  The camera took one more turn around the narrow cobbled alleys, the bustling crowds, the clothing and ceramics and trinkets on display, and the Acropolis gleaming golden in the sunlight. Then it came back to the young archaeologist, tourist but no longer outsider, comfortable in her role.

  “Signing off from Athens, with my good friends Biro and Achilles,” she said. “This is Athena Fox.”

  Athena Fox will return in

  FOX AND HOUNDS

  PENNY IS IN ENGLAND, and although parts of it are very old, none of it is merry.

  She’s finding out being a real archaeologist is harder than she thought—particularly when old enemies and an old shame come back to haunt her.

  She’s kicked off the dig, he
r channel is shut down, and soon she’s penniless in the cold streets of London.

  Then things get interesting. Deep under the streets of the old city, dragged into an ancient mystery and fighting for her life, Penny must come to grips with what it truly means to be the hero she once played.

  Find announcements and samples at my small but growing website, Writing Down the Sherds, and stay for the essays on writing and history and my well-hoarded links to useful tools.

  https://wordpress.com/home/writingdownthesherds.wordpress.com