The Lost Labyrinth (25 page)

Gaille sat up a little straighter, intrigued by the idea. ‘You’re not suggesting that Eleusis is a celebration of Thera erupting?’

‘Why not? According to the myth, after Persephone was abducted, her mother Demeter cursed the earth and made it infertile. And this wasn’t some unusually long winter: it was a famine that clearly lasted
years
. But when Persephone was finally restored to Demeter, she made the earth richer than ever.’ He dropped one of his stones again, couldn’t find it this time, so tossed the other irritably away. ‘Volcanic ash is incredibly rich with nitrates. That’s why people live near volcanoes, even though they’re so dangerous. Visit Bali some time, if you don’t believe me. You’ll never have seen such greens. So each time Thera had one of its minor eruptions, it would have covered the surrounding islands with ash, devastating at least
one year’s crops, maybe even two or three. But when the fields finally started producing again, the harvests would have been magnificent. Just like in the Eleusinian myth. Until the big one, at least.’

‘Can you imagine what that would have been like?’ smiled Gaille, leaning her head back against the stone parapet, its edge pressing like stress against her nape. ‘To have been in Crete when it went off?’

‘A front-row seat on the most spectacular event in human history,’ nodded Iain. ‘An explosion that would literally have shaken the world. One hundred cubic kilometres of rock raining down over the next few days. Tsunamis destroying your fleets and coasts. The sun blacked out for months. The seas thick with ash. And the survivors knowing that even if they won their personal battle against starvation, their empire was doomed. It took years for the Mycenaeans to take over, but surely that was only because they’d been ravaged by Thera as well.’

‘And traumatised. Think how much courage it would have taken to go back into the water after that.’

‘Exactly. The whole of eastern Mediterranean civilisation smashed apart by a single catastrophic event. And though we’ve managed to find a great number of the jigsaw pieces it left behind, we’re still not sure that they all belong to the same puzzle,
or how to fit them together, basically because the picture on our box is wrong, because it’s been drawn by Greek specialists, and by Egyptian specialists, and by Asia Minor specialists, not by Mediterranean specialists. But throw that box away, start out with a new picture of Crete and Santorini at the hub of a great and sophisticated empire, then everything suddenly fits. And thanks to Plato, we already have a wonderful idea of how this new picture should look.’

‘
The Atlantis Connection,
’ suggested caille.

‘
The Atlantis Connection,
’ smiled Iain.

It was still too early for Knox to call it a night, so he played around on the Internet for a while. He forwarded the photos Gaille had sent to his email, opened them on his screen. Agia Georgio, her message had said, near the southern coast. He tracked it down on a map of Crete, then brought up Google Earth. The connection was light-speed compared to the treacle of Egypt. He zeroed in on the Mediterranean, Crete, its southern coast. He found the port of Hora Sfakion, the town of Anapoli, then Agia Georgio.

Seen from above, the terrain looked mountainous and bleak, grey limestone covered in thin
scrub, dotted with the green circles of trees. He zoomed in on remote buildings, but none of them matched Petitier’s house. He broadened his search, looking for that distinctive amphitheatre of rock. It was amazingly, disturbingly voyeuristic: nowhere was private any longer. At last he found a plausible candidate, zoomed in until he was certain: a house with two polythene greenhouses nearby.

He stared at it a while, thinking fondly of Gaille, wondering how mad she still was at him, how much grovelling he’d have to do. The prospect made him smile. He wondered if she’d learn much about Petitier. If anyone could, she would. It bugged the hell out of him that so many people insisted on giving him all the credit for their Alexander and Akhenaten adventures, because the plain truth was that she deserved most of it.

He closed Google Earth, ran a search on Roland Petitier instead, not expecting much other than a few news reports about his murder. He’d dropped out of sight twenty years before, after all, well before the Internet age. But to Knox’s surprise, he got a number of hits linking to the on-line index of one of the more obscure archaeological journals. Petitier, it seemed, had published an article in it, and it had evidently provoked quite a vibrant discussion. But it wasn’t Petitier’s name that most struck Knox, nor even the title of the piece, though that was intriguing too.

No, what really caught his eye was the name of the man who’d co-authored it.

Gaille was beat from her long day. She called it a night early, grabbed her wash-bag and a bottle of water then went to the edge of the roof and squeezed a worm of toothpaste onto her brush.

Iain came to stand alongside her, wearing only his boxers and a T-shirt, holding out his own brush for water. She poured it for him, the spill splashing against their feet. They stood side by side by the edge of the roof, their brisk brushing joining the sawing of the crickets. They spat in unison, toothpaste bombs making faint pale spatters on the dark ground below.

He held the flap of the tent open for her, shone in his torch. There was room enough for two, but just the one sleeping bag. She looked uncertainly around.

‘All yours,’ he smiled.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely. I’ve got jerseys and a jacket.’

The ground was hard and she was too tired to protest. She kicked off her shoes and socks, slipped inside the bag, unhooked her bra and removed it from beneath her T-shirt, then stripped off and
folded up her trousers for a pillow. The torch went out. She could hear him fumbling around, laying out clothing to lie on, pulling on a T-shirt. She’d almost drifted to sleep when she heard him muttering, then he tapped her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise it would be this uncomfortable.’

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Shift up. I’m coming in.’

She didn’t know what to say. It was his sleeping-bag, after all. He tugged the mouth open. She felt his knee in her back, his cold foot brushing her calf, reminding her of Knox. Had it really only been last night? ‘I don’t know about this,’ she said.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I won’t try anything, I swear. What kind of man do you think I am?’ He turned onto his side, his front against her back, pleasantly warm where they touched. She wondered what Knox would make of this; but Iain was his friend, after all. ‘Good night, then,’ said Iain, snuggling close, putting his arm around her waist.

She hesitated a moment longer, and then her opportunity to object was gone. She rested her head back upon her folded trousers. ‘Good night,’ she said.

It was past midnight when finally a taxi pulled up outside Franklin’s house, and the man himself emerged in his dinner jacket, and then his wife, elegant in a pale green gown and woollen shawl. They must have been at Nico’s closing banquet. Knox walked towards them, slowing deliberately as he drew close, so that they’d know he had business with them. Franklin’s expression clouded when he saw him. ‘You!’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You know what I’m doing here.’

He licked his lips but said nothing. ‘What is it, Claude?’ asked his wife, in the nasal tone of deafness taught to speak. ‘What’s going on?’

Franklin turned to her with a calm smile. ‘Nothing, my love,’ he assured her, signing the words as well as speaking them. ‘Please go inside.’

‘But I—’

‘Please,’ he repeated. ‘Go inside. Go to bed. Everything’s fine. This gentleman and I just have some matters to discuss.’ He watched her go in, the lights coming on downstairs and then up. ‘Well?’ he asked.

Knox told him. ‘I just ran an Internet search on Roland Petitier. Unusual name. Did you know he’d published an article while he was at the French school. More to the point, can you take a wild guess as to who his co-author was?’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘It was you, Dr Franklin. You, who told me this morning that you weren’t really his friend, that you only shared a house with him for a while.’

‘Everything I told you was the truth.’

‘But not the whole truth,’ said Knox. ‘You coauthored an article with him called
The Mysteries of Eleusis Revealed
. Or didn’t you think that was worth mentioning?’

Franklin looked both ways down the street, almost as though contemplating running for it. But then his shoulders slumped a little. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he said. ‘I’m going to need a drink for this.’

Nadya walked slowly through Psyrri on her return to her hotel. There were queues outside the nightclubs; music boomed from within. Evenings like this, loose with drink, she liked it if a brash young man made a play for her. But there were no takers tonight, not even for a little eye contact. She’d been beautiful once, lusted after; and not even that long ago. But the last few years hadn’t been kind.

She reached the quieter, older streets of Plaka. Several middle-aged men were sitting in low-slung canvas chairs around a table. She walked close by
them, but they didn’t even look at her, so she turned around and came back and gave one of their chairs a little nudge. But all she got was laughter.

Her ankle turned on the cobbles. She went sprawling. It was always a risk to mix vodka and heels. She picked herself up, brushed off her hands and knees, aware she should be embarrassed, yet not. Her left palm began to throb. It was wet and speckled with grit and torn skin. She watched with passive curiosity as the first hints of blood arrived, the sharpness of each pulse.

‘Excuse me?’ asked a man, German from his accent. ‘Are you okay?’

She looked hopefully around, but he already had a woman. ‘I’m fine,’ she told him.

She took her shoe in both hands, tested the heel. It wobbled a little, so she kicked the other one off too, then carried them as she wandered, uncertain of her way. Her feet grew cold and wet; the streets grew narrow and emptier. She reached a familiar plaza, turned left and saw the illuminated sign that ran down the front of her hotel. There were no black Mercedes outside her hotel, just a few cars and a white van. She wasn’t that drunk, not to check. She paused to pull her shoes back on; her concierge was pompous, she didn’t want him getting all superior with her. The echo of her footsteps made her realise how empty the streets had become.

The van door opened. A man got out. She knew at once. She turned and tried to flee, but her broken heel betrayed her and she tumbled hard onto the pavement. She opened her mouth to scream, but too late; a hand was clamped over it, holding a moistened pad of some kind. She felt its chemical burn on her lips as she breathed it in, and the strength began draining from her muscles, despite her fear. Then she was lifted bodily and carried to the van; and the last thing she saw was Mikhail Nergadze kneeling beside her, smiling down at her as though he’d just won himself a bet.

Franklin led Knox through to a dimly-lit front room with huge unframed expressionist canvases on the walls. He went to a drinks cabinet and poured himself a clouded shot-glass of firewater that he knocked straight back and refilled. ‘My wife doesn’t like me drinking in public,’ he confided. ‘I have a bad habit of not knowing when to stop, and then saying things to embarrass myself.’ He turned to Knox with a meaningful look. ‘She hates embarrassment, my wife, more than anything in the world. So I do all I can to avoid it: because I love her.’

‘I understand.’

He found and filled a second glass that he handed to Knox. ‘Do you smoke?’ he asked, opening a silver case filled with cheroots.

‘No, thanks.’

‘You don’t mind if I do?’

‘Of course not.’

They sat in a pair of armchairs set obliquely near the front window, through which they could watch the few cars that passed, the occasional pedestrian. Franklin lit his cheroot; it gave off an aromatic smoke. ‘I apologise for not mentioning that article earlier; you must understand that I gave my word I’d never talk about it again.’

‘To your wife?’

‘In part. But more so to her father.’

‘Your mentor,’ nodded Knox. ‘When you promised to change your life, and he gave you another chance.’

‘Exactly,’ said Franklin.

‘Still,’ said Knox. ‘I need to know.’

Franklin sank back into his chair, vanishing into shadow, except for a faint glow whenever he took a puff. ‘It was Petitier’s influence. It was greater on me than I like to admit. I already told you about his battle against Eurocentric history, but that wasn’t his only fight. He hated all establishment institutions, particularly anything
smug
, anything
vested
. He was raised a Catholic, but of course he turned against them. And he couldn’t just set it all aside, like most lapsed Catholics. He wanted payback.’ A car pulled up a little way down the street. Its doors opened and then closed again. Knox kept an ear cocked as Franklin talked,
wondering if Nergadze could somehow have tracked him here. ‘He became obsessed by the
absurdity
of belief. Mocking religion was one of his favourite pastimes. That was one reason he was so fascinated by Eleusis. All these brilliant Greeks convinced they’d encountered something numinous and transcendent here: he was sure if he could find out what it was, he could take the mystique out of it, and so debunk belief.’

‘And?’

‘He’d originally written the paper while lecturing in France, but the journals wouldn’t deal with him any more, he was simply too difficult.’ He reached forward, tapped off some ash. ‘But they
would
deal with me, so I submitted his paper instead. It was rather mischievous, I’m afraid, but then I was in the mood for mischief. It attributed the Greek Mysteries, indeed pretty much all established western religion, to something called ergot.’

‘Ergot?’ frowned Knox.

‘A naturally-occurring parasitic fungus you sometimes find on grasses and grains,’ explained Franklin. ‘But, more pertinently for our case, a precursor of lysergic acid diethylamide.’