The Bestiary (24 page)

I had erroneously thought that a successful séance must be a collective exercise, everyone sharing in the same sights and sounds, seeking a glimpse into what my grandmother used to call
il Grande Oscurità,
the Great Darkness. I realized that, from Talmet’s point of view, this sort of unanimity was beside the point. A convincing outburst and one or two participants hearing voices was all he needed to ensure an influx of clients. Some artful manipulation could always elicit such responses. These were people, I thought, who couldn’t take no for an answer, even from Death. Gripped by anxiety and longing, they viewed the séance as a kind of elaborate telegraph office, with Talmet the well-paid operator who knew the right codes. That was why they were willing to fork over 200,000 lire. Only the grim young woman had gone away dissatisfied; wanting urgently to speak to her late fiancé, she was furious when all she got was Talmet’s humming and Signora Starza’s hysteria.

Champagne and canapés were served afterward. Talmet held court in a chair adorned with the Mocenigo coat of arms, a lion clutching crossed swords. Marczek was sprawled on a divan, deep in conversation with Signora Camarelli. Glass in hand, I wandered down the corridor, studying another set of Mocenigo portraits.

I passed a succession of dark rooms, descended one stairway and climbed another, and at the end of an L-shaped corridor stepped into an enormous, musty room. It was an orangery, many centuries old. The roof was glass, the walls mirrored, and double doors gave onto a wide terrace. There was a fountain centered by a statue of Atalanta, in her tunic, stooping to pick up an orange. The marble floor, itself a faded mosaic of orange trees, was streaked with water stains. A hose was coiled in a puddle beside the planting table. At the time of the Crusades, this room must have housed over a hundred trees, imported from the Holy Land. They grew in wooden planters that could be wheeled onto the terrace in summer. Now there were just two rows of thin orange trees and a lone date palm. Dozens of empty, broken planters lined the wall.

I sat on the edge of the fountain and finished my champagne. Reaching into my jacket pocket for one of Marczek’s Cuban cigars, I instead pulled out a handful of letters the concierge had given me when I was leaving my hotel. I had forgotten all about them. There was a laundry bill, a library notice, a letter from my landlord in Paris, and another letter—twice forwarded, ricocheting across the Atlantic and back—from Pericles Arvanos, postmarked two weeks earlier in Athens.

I knew at once what it was. I hadn’t heard from Arvanos, or my father, in three years. Once our financial connection ended, there was no social correspondence.

I was at a séance, yet the spirit farthest from my thoughts was the one that might actually have been in transit from this world to the next. He had, however, contacted me so seldom in life that I couldn’t expect him to make the effort in death.

My father was dead.

5

M
Y ROOM
was on the top floor of a hotel on Mount Lykabettos that was ringed with eucalyptus trees. From the balcony, squinting into the sunlight, I could imagine the clean lines of the ancient city, the marble
polis
buried in the helter-skelter limestone of modern-day Athens. The landmarks of that vanished city had been fixed in my mind in New England classrooms long before I set foot in Greece: the Temple of Zeus, the Agora, Pnyx Hill, and the Parthenon rising in a cloud of bright dust. Beyond the sprawl of working-class neighborhoods to the north, I could make out the harbor at Piraeus beneath a layer of smog. Of the many freighters anchored there, one of them now belonged to me.

I had just come from the offices of Pericles Arvanos, where he read me my father’s will. It had been difficult for me to travel to Greece, and so long as my father was alive, I never intended to do so. The associations were just too painful. Despite my passion for the language and the history, first and foremost it had been the place where my father lived when he chose not to live with me. I had always wanted to know why he made that choice, and I hoped when our business was concluded, Arvanos might fill me in on that and some other things.

After all the years of transatlantic communications, I was as curious about Arvanos as I was about the will. I knew him only from those letters, and the (comically sinister) mental image I’d conjured up thirteen years earlier—swarthy, corpulent, ham-handed, with a bushy moustache and a deep voice—that in no way meshed with the man before me, who was pale, lanky, stooped, clean-shaven, with a musician’s hands and wispy white hair. His beige suit was well cut, his tortoise-shell glasses stylish. His English was excellent, for he had studied law in England as well as in Greece. He was soft-spoken, with an easy, almost slow-motion manner—not the sort of man I would have expected my father to entrust with his business affairs. I could barely imagine them in the same room together. That was my failing; when Arvanos addressed me in earnest, peering past the stacks of color-coded folders on his desk, and I got a closer look at his steady gray eyes, I knew exactly why my father had retained him. He specialized in maritime law, and his dusky office off Constitution Square was decorated with model ships and navigational maps, and an odd assortment of bric-a-brac, notably a stuffed kingfisher and a bronze statuette of a mermaid with mother-of-pearl scales. Across from his desk there was an oil painting of Odysseus’s ship sailing past the Sirens: the crew with beeswax in their ears pulling at the oars; the claw-footed Sirens singing on the reefs; and Odysseus, lashed to the mast, straining to get free.

While I was fascinated with Arvanos, however, he seemed to have a strictly professional interest in me. What other kind should he have had? For years, he had been my sole conduit to my father. To him, I was the son of one of his many clients. When I walked into his office, the blinds drawn and cigarette smoke in the air, I was nervous and off-balance. Arvanos was cordial enough, but detached. Some of this, too, owed to the circumstances: I was the one, after all, being informed of my inheritance.

I had not expected to inherit anything. The gulf between my father and me had grown so wide, the silence so resounding. And as far as I was concerned, he had fulfilled his financial obligations by supporting me generously, past the age of twenty-one. Unknown to him, he had even put Lena Moretti through college. Nothing more was necessary.

That said, I was stunned by what he did leave me: not money or securities or land, but a 300,000-ton, 450-foot freighter. The
Makara
was currently under contract to a textile company that brought cargo from the Far East; after maintenance, insurance, and all other expenses, I would receive an income of eighty thousand dollars for the year.

“Next year you can do what you please,” Arvanos said, “renew the contract or lease the ship to another client. Your father’s remaining cash will be used to overhaul the ship this winter.”

He paused, but I remained silent.

“Good ships are always in demand,” he continued. “This one should yield you a solid income for many years, as it did your father. Of course you can also sell the
Makara
outright next year. I would estimate its worth at around three million dollars. Even after taxes, there would be a good amount to reinvest.”

I tried to read his eyes—for what, I didn’t know. Never wavering, they matched his tone, calm and matter-of-fact. Meanwhile, all sorts of feelings were churning up in me: rage, resentment, guilt. I said, “I had no idea what my father owned, and I never gave a thought to what he might leave me.”

“He’s left you everything.”

“By default?”

“Oh no. You are the stipulated beneficiary. He had no other survivors.”

“What about his other ships?”

“There are no other ships. The
Makara
was his single largest asset. He bought it thirteen years ago. It was the first ship he owned. That’s when I became his lawyer.”

“What happened to the rest of his fleet?”

Arvanos poured himself a glass of mineral water. He offered me one. Then he told me the story—framed succinctly as a legal brief—of my father’s life in the years he had known him.

“Two years after your father bought the
Makara,
he married a woman named Eléna Louritis.”

He paused, studying my face.

“If you’re wondering if I knew,” I said, “the answer is no. But I’m not shocked. I suspected it. I always asked myself why he was so secretive. I used to think he had a second family here. I came up with all sorts of scenarios.”

“There was no family—no children. The marriage was short-lived and unhappy. Eléna came from a wealthy family—the wealthiest, in fact—in the town in Crete where your grandparents were born, Asprophotes. Most of the Louritis family left there long ago, and settled in Irakleion, but they kept their houses and land. Your father met Eléna in Irakleion, courted her aggressively, and proposed marriage. She accepted. She was over forty years old, plain-looking and shy. She had nearly given up on the idea of marriage. But she was impressed by your father’s imposing presence, his physical strength. She’d had suitors before, but never one like him, a real seaman. It was impressive the way he had pulled himself up out of the boiler room. Working overtime, taking out high-interest loans, risking everything, really, and never flinching until he got what he wanted: a ship. Eléna’s grandfather, the patriarch, had gone to sea as a young man and then made a fortune in shipping. But, unlike your father, he had some capital to start with. His son, her father, assembled a fleet of oil tankers and freighters, thirty ships in all. When he died, her two brothers ran the business. But she inherited a third of it. So, for a time, after she married your father, he oversaw a fleet of eleven ships, including the
Makara.
Your father could never have married into the Louritis family if they knew he had previously been married and had a child.”

The look on my face stopped him. He cleared his throat, then offered me a cigarette. I declined, and he lit one himself.

“These people are Cretans, from the mountains,” he went on. “They haven’t changed their ways in centuries. That is why your father kept your existence a secret. Beyond that, he did not confide in me. I cannot speak for his innermost thoughts. He and Eléna lived here in Athens for two years. Then, as her health declined, they moved to Crete. She wanted to be nearer her family. It was clear that her true loyalty was to them—not a good formula for any marriage. Add to that your father’s duplicity, and you see they had a shaky foundation. Eléna insisted they were leaving Athens because of the smog. She had weak lungs. They went to Hydra. There are no automobiles or motorcycles permitted on that island. It’s peaceful. Your father bought a house in the town, up high, overlooking the harbor. Many shippers have homes there. That’s where Eléna died, of a heart attack. Your father was at sea, as he was much of the time. Before his return, her family took her body to Crete and buried her in their plot at Asprophotes. In her will, all her property reverted to her brothers. Under Greek law, that is not something a husband can contest. So your father was left with the house in Hydra and the
Makara.
For a while he owned a piece of a ferry company. He began to live on Hydra year-round. He always lived simply. He would come to Athens for a few weeks at a time, to do business. He rented an apartment near Vathis Square. Last year he sold the house in Hydra and moved here full-time. He said he was having trouble getting around on the island. He was fifty-seven years old, but he looked older. His arthritis was plaguing him. It was bad in his shoulders and spine, from his early years in those boiler rooms. He died at his apartment last month. It was a massive stroke. There was no warning. He was alone. The landlady found him the next day.” He sat back, laying his palms on the desk. “I’m sorry.”

Through the slats in the blinds I watched the traffic crawl toward the city center, so slowly it seemed as if the same cars—gray Mercedes taxi, yellow van, a black sedan—had been there ever since I’d sat down. Though Arvanos had presented the facts in the most orderly fashion, as soon as I took them in they became disordered: the more I tried to fix on them, the faster they flew apart. Trying to imagine my father, who had been so physically imposing, deteriorating to that extent, at that age, rattled me. When I reached for my glass of water, my hand was trembling.

“Where was my father buried?” I asked.

“He wasn’t. He was cremated the day after he died. His ashes were scattered in the sea. There was no church service. No wake. Those were his wishes.”

Apparently all of my father that was left on this earth were the freighter
Makara
and me.

Averting my eyes from Arvanos to Odysseus and the Sirens, I began to feel ashamed, not for myself so much as for my father. I don’t know how Arvanos felt about seeing me before him, a living person, after all those years. But it couldn’t have been any more pleasant for him than it was for me. That my father had abandoned me was bad enough; that he had denied my very existence seemed even worse. That was my bad luck. My father’s seemed to lie in marriage. He had married once for love and once for money, and lost both wives prematurely. The double life I had imagined for him had turned out to be anything but elaborate. And he had remained a loner to the end.

“Outside of money—the tuitions, the allowance—did my father ever speak to you about me?”

“How do you mean?”

“Did he ever talk about what I was like, where I lived in New York, who I lived with?”

“I knew you lived with your grandmother and a housekeeper. I knew your mother died in childbirth. I received the grade reports from your schools and passed them along.” He hesitated. “So I knew what you were studying.”

After an awkward silence, I said, “Is that it? Did you have any idea what I looked like?”

“I saw a photo once. When you were a boy.”

“Did my father ever say why he never brought me here to see him?”

“No.”

“Or why he didn’t have me come after his wife died?”

“No.”

“When was that, by the way?”

“She died in December 1967.”

“So I was seventeen. I guess I should be grateful that he never told me. After working so hard to establish that I didn’t exist, maybe he believed it himself.”

Arvanos let out a long breath. “I know this: your father assumed he would be rich, and for a while he was. Perhaps he rationalized that his short-term actions would be justified when he passed some of that wealth on to you.”

“Excuse me, but I don’t buy that. My father shut me out long before he got married, or got rich. I don’t care how he dealt with his guilt—if he had any.”

“Yet you want to know his motivations.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I would. I wish I could be more helpful. And I understand that you are angry.”

“Yeah, I’m angry. You’ve just told me that, in order to marry for money, my father disowned me.”

“I’m not here to judge,” Arvanos replied evenly. “I was his lawyer. He gave me instructions and I followed them. When it came to shipping, he asked my advice and I gave it. With personal matters, that never happened. We were not friends.”

“Fine. Let’s leave it at that. Do you know of any friends he had here in Athens?”

“It’s not something I would know.”

“Or in Hydra?”

He shook his head. “I know the details about his marriage and his dealings with the Louritis family because they overlapped with business matters. I rarely met with him outside of this room. I can tell you little of what he did outside of his business.”

“Sure.” I felt defeated.

Arvanos leaned forward. “Let me tell you something that might be helpful.” This was the only time I thought he deviated from his prepared remarks. “During all the years I sent you your allowance, your father told me to give you whatever you asked for. This was true even when his wealth diminished dramatically. In the end, I was sending you about half his income.”