The Lost Labyrinth (26 page)

‘You don’t mean…’

‘Yes,’ smiled Franklin. ‘LSD.’

A shock of smelling salts beneath her nose startled Nadya back to consciousness. She tried to open her eyes, but they seemed to be glued shut, leaving her reliant instead on the sensations flooding in from all across her body. She was sitting in a hard chair, her ankles tied to the legs and her wrists to the struts behind her back, the knots pulled so tight that her fingers and toes were tingling, and stress was building uncomfortably in her joints. A rope gag cut into her lips and gums. She had a crick in her neck. Panic welled suddenly in her; she began struggling and trying to kick out.

‘Calm down,’ grunted a man in Georgian. ‘How can I loosen these damned things if you won’t keep still?’

She breathed in deep through her nose, forced herself to stop fighting. There’d be time for that.

‘That’s better,’ said the man, as he picked at the knots and then removed the gag. ‘Scream if you want to. No one will hear, and I’ll just put it back in.’

She licked the edges of her sore lips, worked her jaw this way and that. ‘I won’t scream,’ she assured him.

‘Good.’ He picked his fingers at the tape over her eyes next, then pulled it off in one go, leaving her eyebrows raw and stinging. She blinked several times as her vision adjusted. There was no one in
front of her, just a plush double bed with a red chintz cover and, on its far side, a mahogany dressing table with a triple mirror on which stood a bottle of water and two glasses, a bowl of
pot pourri
, a vase of carved and painted wooden lilies.

She glimpsed movement in one of the mirrors. A door opened and then closed behind her, leaving her with the impression she was alone. She craned her head as far as she could, saw an
en suite
bathroom to her right, French windows to her left, a gap between the curtains through which she glimpsed the iron railings of a balcony, pollarded trees and a night sky unsullied by city lights. Outside Athens, then; presumably in Mikhail Nergadze’s house. She remembered Sokratis gloating about how remote it was, how
vast
.

The door opened and closed again behind her. She heard breathing. Her heart began hammering. ‘Who’s there?’ she asked.

But she already knew.

Nico was sleeping on his side when the attack started, a malevolent demon reaching down his throat into his chest, taking hold of his heart and wrenching it sideways. He cried out and fell onto his back, clawing at his bedside table, searching
blindly for the pills upon it, the glass of water; but the demon was too strong for him, a wrestler pinning him to the mat, pummelling at his heart. Another jolt ran through him. He arched silently. A sudden memory of his finest hour, a fifteen-yearold at the national weightlifting championships in Athens, a boy taking on men and yet not backing down; and that moment conflated with the reaction to Knox’s talk earlier that day, that gratifying moment of silence before the applause started, all that glorious applause, a whole auditorium on the rise.

The vision faded. He slumped with exhaustion. One crowded hour of glorious life; that was all he’d ever wanted. What wouldn’t he give now for an age without a name? Minutes passed. His sweat cooled and chilled. His heart settled back into its proper rhythm. The tunnel receded.

Not this time. Not this time. But soon.

He sighed and swung his legs to the side of the bed, sat up and buried his face in his hands. Living alone as he did, the
squalor
of death preoccupied him. The thought of being found like poor Antonius…it was almost worse than death itself. He needed someone in his life who loved him, someone who could check up on him, perhaps even be there when the time came. It wasn’t a burden he could lay upon any of his friends or colleagues, nor even upon his brother and Charissa. Burdens like that, you could
only ask of parents or spouse or children. And he was unmarried, childless.

He lay back on his bed and resolved to make the call in the morning, But it was a resolution he’d made a hundred times before, and still he was alone.

Mikhail Nergadze unwrapped a butterscotch as he came into Nadya’s line of sight, popping it into his mouth, discarding the scrunched-up foil onto the carpet. He sucked hard twice to flood his mouth with the sweet sticky saliva, before pushing it to one side with his tongue, the better to talk. He was holding her purse, she saw, and now he opened it up, pulling the credit cards out of their sleeves one-by-one, examining them for a moment, then pushing them back in. ‘Nadya Ludmilla Petrova,’ he said. ‘How I hoped it would be you. When I heard that a woman called Nadya was after me, a woman with a limp.’

There was no way for Nadya to know how much he knew about her. Best to assume he knew nothing, lest she give him anything for free. ‘After
you?’ she asked. ‘What are you talking about? Who are you?’

‘It’s a real honour for me, this. I mean that sincerely. I’m one of your biggest fans. I’ve been living in America these past few years, you see. They think Georgia is where the Atlanta Braves play baseball. So I’ve been
starved
of home news. I used to read your blog avidly.’ He waved his hand. ‘Everyone else, all the so-called
serious
media, they merely reprint the official press releases then go off for their long lunches. But not you. Typical, isn’t it? The only Georgian with the balls to tell it as it is, and she’s a woman.’

‘What do you want with me?’

‘You know what I want, Nadya. I want to know why you’ve made it your business to interfere with my business. I want to know why you hired a detective to wait outside the airport for my family plane last night, then follow my guests to my house. I want to know why you tailed us out to Eleusis earlier, and why you interfered with my effort to talk with Daniel Knox. And please don’t bother to deny it. Your detective called me earlier and volunteered everything. You really should pick your help more carefully next time.’

That damned Sokratis! She should have known he’d betray her.
She tried to recall how much he’d have heard and could have passed on. ‘Investigating
campaigns is what I do,’ she said. ‘You must know that, if you read my blog.’

‘And what do I have to do with any campaign?’

‘I’m not here because of you. I’m here because of a man called Boris Dekanosidze. He’s one of Ilya Nergadze’s most important advisers, you know.’

‘Is he now?’ laughed Mikhail. ‘Very well, then. Why are you after him?’

‘Because the first thing you learn in this business is that you never get scoops from following the candidates; they’re too well protected. It’s always the right-hand men who lead you to the real story.’

‘Ah! The secret of your success!’ he mocked. ‘The herd trails haplessly after the leaders; but you go after the consigliore?’

‘It led me to you, didn’t it?’

‘And why should you consider that a result? Why should you think
I
matter?’

Nadya blinked at her own impetuosity. She needed to be sharper than that if she was to get out of this. ‘I’m still working on that.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Mikhail. ‘You know exactly who I am. You knew before you flew out here. In fact, you flew here looking for me.’

‘I assure you I—’

‘Don’t lie to me, Nadya. You’ll regret it if you do.’

‘I’m not lying,’ she said. ‘It’s the truth. I needed something good on Ilya Nergadze. Something juicy.
My readers were starting to accuse me of being in the tank for him.’

‘It was that press conference, wasn’t it?’ asked Mikhail. ‘The way you looked at me, I knew we must have met before. I just couldn’t place you. It was only when we picked you up earlier that I was sure.’ He stood tall again. ‘How unlucky can a man be? Back in Georgia for two days, and I run into one of my widows.’

‘One of your widows!’ Despite her predicament, his callousness shocked her out of her pretence. ‘What kind of monster are you? What had Albert ever done to you?’

‘Don’t you know?’ answered Mikhail. ‘He stuck his nose into our family business. We had to flee to Cyprus because of him.’

‘But he had nothing to do with that,’ she protested. ‘It was the Americans.’

‘The Americans!’ said Mikhail contemptuously. ‘And just who do you think told them? Unfortunately for your husband, one of the people at Justice was on our payroll.’ He shook his head at the ways of the universe. ‘We needed him silenced; we needed him punished. I was in Cyprus at the time, the only one of the family not under twenty-four hour surveillance, so my grandfather asked me home. I’m good at that kind of thing.’

‘You shit!’ she spat.

‘Now, now,’ he smiled. ‘This is scarcely the time
to be hurling insults, is it? I don’t kill unless I have to. Not people I admire, at least. And I do admire you, Nadya. So I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise that if I were you.’ He walked around her, as though assessing her. ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Are you left or right-handed?’

‘What?’

He produced a pair of pliers from his pocket. ‘I’m asking for your own good,’ he said, when she didn’t answer. ‘No? Very well. You’re wearing your watch on your left wrist, so I’m going to assume you’re right-handed. Do tell me if I’m wrong.’ He took her left thumb, wrenched it away from her fingers, pinched it between the pliers’ blunt jaws.

‘Don’t!’ begged Nadya, twisting in her chair. ‘Please!’

He didn’t listen, he began to squeeze. She braced herself and closed her eyes, as though that could help; but she couldn’t close her ears to the crunch of bone and the sickening liquid noise of crushed and twisted gristle. Then the pain came at her, spikes being hammered up her arm, making her arch and twist in the chair, shrieking and shrieking because shrieking was all she could do until finally she was over the hump of it and coasting down the other side, the pain still exquisite and intense but now at least lessening and manageable again, capable of being contained. She glanced down at her hand, she couldn’t help herself. Her knuckle
was a gruesome mangled pulp, already turning purple and black, the nail bulging from the pressure of blood beneath, a red crescent around its edge. She knew with certainty that she’d never be able to use it properly again.

Mikhail crouched down again in front of her, hands upon his knees, and regarded her with curiosity, a zoologist encountering some unfamiliar species. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed her eyes. He smiled almost sympathetically as he took her left index finger.

‘Please,’ she sobbed, as the fear engulfed her. ‘I’ll do anything, I swear I will. Just tell me what you want.’

Mikhail frowned, a little disappointed at her obtuseness. ‘I want to hurt you,’ he said.

‘You must have heard the theories,’ said Franklin. ‘Why would people as sophisticated as Sophocles and Aristotle be so enraptured by the Mysteries, unless they’d experienced something truly transcendent? And what’s the simplest explanation? Some ravishing
coup de theatre
? Some exquisite philosophical insight that has eluded us ever since? Or a generous dollop of acid in the drink? After all, one of the few things
we know about Eleusis is that celebrants drank a barley brew called
kykeon
. Ergot grows on barley, and LSD is made from ergot. And it wouldn’t be the only time that drugs were used as a way to experience the divine. The Hindu soma, for example. Peyote in Mexico. Cannabis in Germany.’

‘The blue lotus in Egypt.’

‘Exactly. The Aztecs called psilocybin mushrooms
teonanacatl
, which literally means flesh of the gods. The Greeks had the same conceit. Mushrooms were Zeus’s plant because they so often spring up after thunderstorms. It’s the rain, of course, but many people believed that they were a product of lightning strikes.’ A man and a woman walked past the window at that moment, arms around each others’ shoulders, looking at each other as they talked, rather than at the pavement. ‘Zeus was the god of lightning,’ continued Franklin, ‘therefore mushrooms were his plant. And if you eat magic mushrooms, you certainly get a glimpse of extraordinary things. Petitier used to claim that the Catholic Eucharist was originally just
amanita muscaria
—those red-and-white capped mushrooms, you know.’

‘The fly agaric,’ said Knox.

‘Exactly. There’s plenty of evidence that they were held sacred by the early church. Those wonderful mushroom frescoes in Plaincourault and
elsewhere, for example. Think of it: the body of Christ an hallucinogenic mushroom.’

‘I begin to see why you and Petitier ran into problems,’ said Knox.

‘There are more serious problems with the theory than that it trod on toes, unfortunately,’ said Franklin. He took a final puff of his cheroot, stubbed it out in the glass ashtray, tiny embers scattering. ‘Ergot doesn’t grow with any dependability, for one thing, and rarely in the kind of quantities they’d have needed. Extracting LSD is complex and precarious. Experiences would have been decidedly mixed. Some celebrants would have got sick or even died; others wouldn’t have noticed anything at all. Besides, the Greeks were intimately familiar with drugs and their effects. They mixed their wine with all kinds of potent herbs. They used hemp and opiates regularly. Is it likely that so many highly intelligent and experienced people could have got stoned without realising it? And if they
had
realised it, would they truly have considered it the great numinous centrepiece of their lives?’

‘Opiates and hemp give very different experiences than LSD,’ said Knox.

‘You sound just like Petitier,’ smiled Franklin. ‘He was certain he’d found the answer. As far as he was concerned, there was only one question to answer: how they prepared the potion with the technology available to them.’

Knox pushed to his feet and took both their glasses back to the drinks cabinet for a refill. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, returning to the chairs. ‘That’s why you were really in trouble? You and Petitier searching for the secret of
kykeon
?’

Franklin shrugged acknowledgement as he took back his glass. ‘We tried everything you could imagine. LSD, LSA, LSM and other such derivatives of ergot, all mixed up with opiates, marijuana, magic mushrooms and lord knows what else. We convinced ourselves it was serious and bold academic research. That we were pioneers!’ He threw back his head and laughed heartily. ‘We’d write up notes afterwards. Petitier insisted on that. It was utter gibberish, of course. We were kidding ourselves. The truth is, we were young men having fun. Too much fun.’