A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (17 page)

I placed my hands on the top of a low stone wall and vaulted over, skirts and all. “Of course not. I have always viewed his lordship as a cross to be borne on this voyage. A voyage, I might add, that is of the utmost importance and urgency to a most prestigious, a most honored, a most
essential
peerage of Great Britain. A pillar of that empire you so ardently built and championed during your reign.”

“He is a danger to your moral serenity.” The word
serenity
ended in a grunt, as Her Majesty heaved herself after me. I had not troubled myself to glance in her direction, so I knew not what she wore, or how she handled herself over the obstacles in
our path. I imagined her plump face must be flushed with effort, and her hair perhaps loose from a practical wool hat.

“He is no danger at all. I know what he is. I know what I am.”

“You will end up like your mother, and then where will we be? In disgrace.
Disgrace
, Miss Truelove: profound and irrecoverable.”

“I will not end up like my mother!” I shouted, and my left foot slipped right out from under me, causing me to slide down a pile of rubble and into the well of a stone doorway, shaded from the winter daylight.

“Excuse me,” said a polite masculine voice above me. “May I perhaps be of some assistance to you, Miss Truelove?”

I looked up to see a familiar tanned hand stretched out toward me, connected to a wool-covered arm that belonged to the foreman, Mr. Vasilakis.

“Thank you.” I took his hand and found myself instantly lifted to my feet, as effortlessly as I myself might lift a small child. “I'm sorry to trouble you. I am looking for this”—I held up the map, which bore a small black circle in the relevant quadrant—“the place where Mr. Haywood conducted his investigations.”

“Ah! Where we found the frescoes, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Vasilakis nodded at the doorway. “The site is right through there, near a room we call the queen's library.”

“Right through there?” I turned my head, looked down at the map, and lifted my gaze to the dark rectangle before me, leading into the ground.

“Yes. Perhaps you will allow me to escort you? The chambers and corridors, as one might expect, are difficult to navigate.” He smiled, and his teeth were quite white and even, as if he visited a dentist regularly. How and where, I could not imagine.

“Of course. The labyrinth.”

“The entire palace is a labyrinth, Miss Truelove. It is endlessly fascinating. I have been working here since the beginning, five years now, and I sometimes feel I have not learned a tenth part of what is hidden here.” He raised his other hand, which contained the same paraffin lantern that had rested on the table in his tent. “Would you like to see inside?”

I hesitated, and then imagined Lord Silverton at his ease in the Villa Ariadne, glowing with wine and food and the eager attention of Mrs. Poulakis.

I looked over my shoulder. Her Majesty had disappeared.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

The lantern was already lit, and I followed its round glow down a number of stone corridors and rooms that led into one another. The walls contained decorations of all kinds, crumbling and faded but still visible, and the floors were stacked with artifacts: some in boxes, and others simply arranged in groups. From time to time, an open shaft appeared, channeling the meager light from the world outdoors. I paused before a kind of seat, built into the wall of one especially large room. “Is that a throne?”

“So we presume. It is of alabaster. You see the griffins painted on the wall behind?”

I squinted. “How beautiful! Have you restored them?”

“In fact, these required hardly any work at all. Mr. Evans discovered this room nearly intact, very soon after the excavation began, only a few inches below the surface. A miracle. We have since enclosed the chamber and many others, so that the rains and so on do not destroy in one season what three thousand years could not.”

“So these are exactly as the Minoans painted them?”

“Yes. Other areas of the palace were not so lucky. We are beginning work on many of the frescoes. We have artists and chemists and so on. Sometimes there is nothing to go on but a few flakes on the floor.”

“Then how do you know what they were? The images, I mean. How do you know that these griffins are, indeed, griffins?”

“Because there are certain—what is the word—motifs that repeat themselves elsewhere. The griffin is a symbol of divine power. It is not surprising to find them next to this throne. Elsewhere, there are many dolphins and such things. And of course there is everywhere the sign of the double ax—”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The double ax. Did you not see it, scratched into the rocks?”

“I— No. I hadn't noticed.”

“Well, you must look more closely, Miss Truelove. Upstairs, there is an entire ceremonial chamber devoted to the symbol. In fact, the many replications of this double ax gave Mr. Evans his first belief that this palace was truly the genuine Knossos, the origin of the labyrinth. You see, in the Greek, the object is called a
labrys
, and its image, among other things, has the power to protect a person or an object from being destroyed.”

As I stared at the alabaster throne, and the half-crumbled shapes on the walls behind it, I felt a sense of chill wash over my skin that had nothing to do with the dank air in the chamber around me.

“Is this—this symbol still in use today?” I asked.

“I don't believe so. It was primarily a relic of the Mycenaean Greeks, who conquered this island directly after the Minoan culture collapsed. Come along, now. It is likely to rain soon.”

I turned and followed him out of the room. “I am a resident of Great Britain, Mr. Vasilakis, and quite accustomed to rain, I assure you.”

He laughed over his shoulder. “Miss Truelove, I assure you this is not a gentle English rain we speak of. It is winter in Crete.”

“But almost spring.”

He did not reply, but went on turning corners before me, so swiftly I could scarcely keep up, let alone pause to examine the building stones for the double-ax motif.

I saw the object in my mind's eye, however, in strict detail: as a gold earring in the lobe of a man in the doorway of an Athens hotel room, bearing a strange-looking pistol in his hand.

“Here we come to one of the more interesting aspects of the palace,” said Mr. Vasilakis, “which is the storerooms.”

“Storerooms?”

“Yes. They are more in the nature of magazines, and very well engineered. Most of them are on this side of the palace, the western side, along with the domestic suites. The other wing, across the central court, has a more monumental scale. See here, however?” He squatted on the flagstones and pointed to the wall. “Here is a good example, almost whole. The double ax.”

I knelt next to him and traced my finger along the rough and crumbling plaster. The image was etched to a mere hairline depth, and missing in pieces, but it could not be anything else: the double-bladed head of an ax.

“What is the word for it, again?” I asked.

“A labrys. So it is interesting, you see, that in English, fully three thousand years later, you have this word
labyrinth
, which we can translate to mean
place of the double ax
. And yet this site around us has only been discovered in the past thirty years.”

“The true Knossos,” I said in awe.

“This is our conclusion. An exciting one, if one is at all enchanted by the ancient myths.”

I straightened and turned to face him. “I have heard it said that all myths have some origin in a grain of truth.”

“I do not doubt it.” His eyes were bright. “But come. Around the corner we have the curious frescoes that so intrigued your friend Mr. Haywood. I find myself eager to know your opinion on them.”

Something in the tone of his voice caused the skin at the back of my neck to warm, but before I could ask him what he meant—why
my
untried opinion should matter, when there were so many experts to hand—he had turned and rounded the corner.

I followed him, breaking into a run to catch up, and then stumbling to a halt when he stopped abruptly, about halfway down a corridor, and ducked through a narrow doorway. For an instant I hesitated, for the room into which he had repaired was small and quite dark, such that the paraffin lantern, swinging luridly from the foreman's large hand, provided the only source of light.

But this was foolish. What had I to fear? I passed through the doorway, ducking my head reflexively just as Mr. Vasilakis had, though there was no danger to my own shorter stature.

“There we are.” He raised the lantern and pointed to the back wall.

At first, the rough plaster appeared quite blank to me, and I thought that Mr. Vasilakis was mistaken and had turned into the wrong room. But as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, and to the shifting nature of the glow occasioned by the lantern, I began to see the familiar three shapes rise in relief from the gray surface of the wall.

“What do you think?” asked the foreman.

I took the lantern from his hand and held it close to the first figure. From some distance came the sound of a hard and sudden rain, drumming against the rocks, the way one imagines a monsoon. The air inside the chamber filled with damp wool and the oily reek of paraffin.

“It is curious,” I said. I didn't want to touch the old paint, but my finger was irresistibly drawn to the small dark box in the hand of the first figure, the strap around the fingers, the perfect circle that might or might not form the aperture of an Eastman Kodak No. 1 Brownie camera. “Did you ever speak to Mr. Haywood about this?”

“I? No. He kept very much to himself.”

“But you must have encountered him often, in such a relatively confined space.”

“Mr. Haywood spent little time in this room itself, once his initial study of the fresco was complete. His chief task was to catalog the artifacts we had discovered, to see if any one of them might explain this anomaly.”

“You mean finding something else that looked like a modern Brownie camera.”

“Yes, I suppose that would be it.”

I moved to the next figure, the woman, who was much smaller, and only reached the shoulder of the heroic figure before her. She was dressed in white, and wore an elaborate headdress. The man behind her had no head: that is, the upper part of his body had crumbled away. In real life, he appeared even more burly and thick-limbed than he had in the photograph, and his skin was a different color. Darker, and a little reddish.

My back was beginning to ache from stooping. I straightened and stepped back, taking in the whole of the work in the circular
illumination of the lantern. “It's extraordinary. It's uncanny, and yet there's something else about it. I don't have the proper technical language, of course, but—” I stopped, because I could not articulate the nature of my intuition, nor the sour taste at the back of my tongue as I gazed upon those three enigmatic figures. I could not explain to Mr. Vasilakis my sense that these ancient persons were
alive
, even now, straining against the prison of paint that held them against the wall. That they wanted to turn their heads and tell me something.

“I am happy to hear this,” said Mr. Vasilakis. “Happy, I mean, to hear that you perceive something unnatural about what we see on the stone before us.”

I looked at him in surprise. “Why is that?”

“Because it is my personal opinion that this painting is a
fake.”

At last the hour of the procession arrived, and the Lady stood with her father the King and her husband the Prince at the entrance of the palace to await the arrival of the Athenian youths. Her heart began to misgive her, for those three days and nights in the great hall by the sea now seemed to belong to a dream, and the great strength and beauty of the Hero the offspring of her own imagination.

But when the cavalcade appeared around the curve of the dusty road, the Lady saw the fair head of the Hero towering above all, and his face turned to hers in the full sunshine of steadfast love, and so her courage returned to her.

By the Lady's side, the Prince saw also the beauty and magnificence of the Hero, and the lust boiled in his belly to see this perfect youth stripped and humbled before him . . .

T
HE
B
OOK
OF
T
IME
, A. M. H
AYWOOD
(1921)

I
returned to the Villa Ariadne through a drenching rain. Mr. Vasilakis had begged me to seek shelter in his tent until the storm passed—they are torrential, these downpours, he told me, but they do not last over an hour or two—but I was too eager to find Lord Silverton and communicate what I had discovered, this monumental news that made my fingers shake as I scrambled over the streaming rocks and paving stones toward the Royal Road.

This time, I didn't bother with the knocker, and simply let myself in. The surging notes of a piano wound around the corner of the entrance hall; I followed them to a large square room overlooking the back garden and found Lord Silverton seated before a magnificent ebony instrument, eyes closed in a kind of male rapture. Chopin. His hair spilled downward in a thick gold wave from his forehead. He broke off at my entrance and stood, scraping the legs of the bench against the wooden floor.

“By all that's holy, Truelove. Did you swim back, after all?”

I thought,
I will smack him
.

“I suppose you have no reason to realize that there is a torrential downpour taking place out-of-doors.”

He looked at the window. “Is there, by God? I confess, I have been too deeply occupied to notice.”

I snatched the pins from my hat and lifted it, dripping, from my head. “I daresay.”

“Now, Truelove. I detect a certain accusation in your tone, which I feel I must parry at once. I have been
working
, I assure you.”

“So I see.” I turned away. “Regardless, we must leave here at once. I shall bathe and change first, if you don't mind. I am soaked through, to say nothing of chilled, and have been tramping about the ruins for the past two hours while you've been so
deeply occupied
inside the shelter of these rooms.”

“Wait, Truelove.”

But I was already hurrying down the hall. In the elation of discovery, I had forgotten all about nubile Mrs. Poulakis and the nature of Silverton's investigations inside the villa these past two hours. Now I recalled the reckless swoop of his lordship's golden hair, the languid Chopin, and my cheeks burned.

“Truelove!”

A large hand reached out and took my shoulder, forcing me to stop and turn. “You're cold,” he said. “Cold and wet.”

“Exactly, which is why I must rid myself of these clothes immediately.” The words escaped my mouth quite without thought, and I regretted them at once.

He released me, took his jacket from his shoulders, and flung it about my shoulders.

“Change into what, Truelove? We haven't brought any spare clothes.”

I pressed my lips together. “Then I'll simply wait until my clothes have dried.”

“Nonsense. You'll catch a chill. I'll see if our dear Mrs. Poulakis has got something that might suit you.”

“I will
not
under any circumstances wear—”

But he was already turning back down the corridor. “Only run yourself a bath, Truelove. I'll take care of the rest, never fear!”

A glass of brandy awaited me in the room that had been reserved for my use when I returned, carrying my wet clothes and wearing a dressing gown I had discovered in the cupboard. Lord Silverton was present as well, sitting in an armchair, smoking his pipe and studying some papers. On the bed lay a dress of extraordinary plainness, which I ignored.

“You know, Truelove,” he said, not looking up, “there's something odd about this fresco, and I don't mean the camera. I can't quite put my finger on it—”

“It's a fake,” I said.

He looked up. “The photograph, or the fresco?”

“The fresco.” I hung my wet clothes on the rack before the fire, which Silverton had built into a regular furnace, and sat down on a nearby chair to brush my hair dry in rapid strokes.

“And how did you come to this conclusion?”

“Mr. Vasilakis.”

“Oh, you saw our old friend Vasilakis, did you?”

“Yes. He was tremendously helpful.”

“I daresay.”

I went on stroking my hair with the brush. The fire was so close and hot, it burned my knuckles. “I had the same intuition you did, that there was something wrong about the painting, though of course I lack any sort of experience or expertise in the field. But Mr. Vasilakis explained about the location of the fresco—not a domestic apartment or a ceremonial chamber, but a kind of storeroom—and various other aspects, which cast doubt on its authenticity.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the fact that the male figure is in the lead. In the rest of the palace art, it is the females who occupy the dominant positions.” I set down the brush and picked up the glass of brandy.

“Fascinating.” Silverton watched me sip. “Anything else?”

“Oh, the colors. The pattern of aging, which seemed to him deliberate. The fact that the identity of the third figure—and the third figure only—is obliterated, in such a manner that does not suggest a natural deterioration.”

“I see.”

I lifted the brush again. “But that's not important, really. We haven't time. What matters is
why
. Why someone would take such trouble to create a false fresco: here, of all places.”

“What do you think?”

The coals were a bright orange-red. I could not seem to get enough of their warmth. I thought,
we must pack, we must leave here at once
, but my limbs were so tired and heavy. “I think you know what I think.”

“Someone wanted to lure Max here.”

“Yes. Which means he was probably fleeing somebody when he left.”

Silverton looked back at the photographs and sucked on his pipe. The room smelled comfortably of tobacco, of the coal fire.
The brandy fumes still filled my throat and mouth. In the sizzling heat, my hair was almost dry; I began to pin it up, using the hairpins I had laid aside before bathing.

“Possibly,” he said at last.

“Possibly? What other explanation exists? Did you discover anything useful while I was gone, perhaps?”

“Hmm. Yes.” He set down the photographs and rose from the chair. He approached me slowly, in the manner of a pensive leopard, wearing his spectacles low on the bridge of his nose. “I spent the first hour examining the villa itself, and the second hour going through the room that belonged to Max. It happens to be the room I was assigned as my own.”

“A convenient coincidence.”

“Yes. I found nothing of interest, however. According to Mrs. Poulakis, Max's assistant returned, a few days after their departure, and boxed everything up. It was sent, so far as she knows, to the apartment in Athens, though of course she cannot be completely certain.”

“Max's assistant! And what happened to the assistant after that?”

“She doesn't know. He left, that's all.” He knocked a little ash into the fireplace and rested his elbow on the mantel.

I jabbed the last pin into my hair and hurried across the room to my travel desk. “But don't you think that's suspicious?”

“Not in itself. Max may simply have been done with his work here, or was following another line of investigation. Mrs. Poulakis said there were no other visitors, menacing or otherwise, during his stay.”

“It sounds as if Mrs. Poulakis has been most forthcoming.”

“I can't complain, Truelove. But I find that most people are forthcoming when you're pleasant to them. Don't you?”

I had finished putting away the photographs. I locked the drawer and raised my head to stare at the window, which looked north toward Heraklion. Not that I could see very far; the rain had lifted, more or less, but the air was still too thick, and the day too advanced, to see beyond the terraced garden before me.

Two months ago, Mr. Haywood had set off down that hill and disappeared. What had happened to him? Was someone pursuing him? Had he left by boat? Where had he gone?

The urgency began to boil up again, filling my exhausted limbs with purpose. I turned around to face Silverton, who stood in exactly the same pose as before, nursing the pipe in his mouth.

“Naturally,” I snapped. “So what do you propose we do now? I am most concerned about this development. We are now confronted with the renewed possibility that Mr. Haywood faced some sort of adversary, from whom he fled, or indeed was forced away. We must go the port at once and make inquiries.”

Silverton shook his head. “He wasn't kidnapped, if that's what you mean.”

“Why not?”

“No sign of struggle. Max would certainly have struggled. Mrs. Poulakis would have noticed.”

“Perhaps Mrs. Poulakis has not been so forthcoming as you believe.”

“Oh, she's forthcoming enough.” He grinned.

“Regardless. The answer lies down the hill in Heraklion. Someone down there must have obtained him a boat and supplies for his journey. Someone must know
something.
”

Silverton released a patient sigh. “Truelove, there are hundreds of fisherman scattered over the town. We shall have to spend days interviewing them all.”

“Then we must start immediately!”

“A fool's errand. To the last man, they're all shut up snug in their houses by now, having dinner and making love to their wives, so they can be up at dawn tomorrow. There's no point. We stay here tonight.” He tapped the end of his pipe on the mantel.

“So you can interview Mrs. Poulakis more thoroughly, perhaps?”

“Splendid idea. I'm sure we'll learn more from her than from some damned fisherman down in Heraklion.”

I crossed my arms against my chest. “Oh, no doubt.”

“Besides, Evans might reply to our telegram and sort out the whole matter for us.” Silverton yawned and stretched his arms above his head. A faint blue line streaked lazily from the end of his pipe. I thought he looked lugubrious and magnificent and altogether too satisfied, and I turned away and pressed my fingers against the cold glass of the window. Already the darkness was falling down from the mountains behind us, as if to shroud us further from the truth.

“I don't like waiting like this,” I said. “He's out there. He may be in desperate need of our help.”

“And why the devil do you care so much? You don't even know the man.”

“Because he is the Duke of Olympia.”

“Ah, of course. I'd almost forgotten. And a lady always loves a duke, doesn't she?” I heard him pace across the floor in the direction of the door. “Buck up, Truelove. Perhaps some insight will simply arrive to us, during the night.”

I could not be certain, but I thought I heard the devil wink.

Of course, he was right.

I took a tray in my room that evening, and fell asleep directly
afterward, into an absolute void of exhaustion. As a result, I jolted awake at perhaps three o'clock in the morning, as if stung by an electric barb.

I lay with pounding heart, casting out the net of my senses, but I felt the presence of no unnatural illusion this night, either my father or Her Majesty. And yet something had awoken me, of that I was certain: whether the stimulus had come from the outside or the inside of my skull, I could not say.