"If you believe him, somebody in Moscow mislaid a few million dollars.
Darndest thing."
"It's better left alone, darling."
"I'm on vacation, remember?" He winked at her. "With better things to
do."
"I should hope so." She leaned back again and studied his profile.
"Well, at long last it's happened. I finally have to admit I need you
for something." Her long, dark lashes fluttered. Warming me up, he
thought. Now we're getting down to business. "Which is why I wanted to
meet you here."
They were five minutes out of Iraklion, on an unpaved back road he
loved, headed for the palace at Knossos, and so far she'd done nothing
but hint about what was on her mind. Everything was still a puzzle. For
one thing, she never needed anybody. She was the stalwart Russian who'd
ended their affair eleven years earlier just as casually as she had
begun it. This afternoon, though, she seemed to be deliberately keeping
the lid on, holding back. Uncharacteristic.
"The truth is," she went on, "I've been thinking about us, the old
times, and the palace."
She'd called him in Nassau four days earlier, wanting to get together.
It was the old Eva, darling this and darling that. When he said he was
going to Crete, she'd grown strangely silent. Then she'd said--in a
curious, tiny, voice--"Why don't I just meet you there? In fact, that's
sort of why I rang. . . ."
"So why's the palace suddenly so important to you?" He examined her,
still trying to read her mood. "I need to go back out today. Try and
brush up a bit. But that place was part of our problem back when, not
part of the solution."
She didn't answer. Instead she shifted the conversation sideways.
"Speaking of the palace, I suppose I should congratulate you on finally
being proved right. Did the Stuttgart team really ask you to look in on
their dig?"
"Call it the ultimate capitulation," he grinned. "Remember, they were
the ones who led the critical fusillade when the book first came out.
That makes it doubly sweet."
"Right. I also remember that book of yours caused such a stink that no
serious university would consider hiring you. Which, I assume, is why
you ended up a part-time spook. Probably it was the only job you could
get."
"You're closer to the truth than you know." He laughed, wondering for
the ten-thousandth time if he should have stuck out the academic slings
and arrows. No, the secret truth was he was bored with the university
regimen. He yearned for the real world. He knew it then and he knew it
now.
"Then the next thing I heard, you were down in the Bahamas, goofing off
and renovating some old yacht." She looked him over once more, shaking
her head. "What did you end up christening it? The Fuck Everybody?"
"Crossed my mind. But then I chickened out and called her the
_Ulysses_." He leaned back and reflected momentarily on the forty-four-
foot Bristol racing sloop he'd restored, having picked it up for a song
at a customs-house sale on Bay Street. Formerly the possession of a
Colombian in the export business, it had a hull of one and three-
quarter inch planked cedar, with a trim beam, did an easy fifteen knots
in a decent breeze. He loved her. He'd installed a fortune in
electronics, including a Micrologic Commander LORAN and a Navstar
satellite navigation system. "It started out as a hobby, and three
boats and a mortgage later it ended up a business."
"And what do you do down there all day? Just sit around and drink
margaritas?"
"Sure. About once a month." He reached up and adjusted the open top of
the car. "Hate to admit it, but on a typical day I'm usually out of bed
by sunrise. Check the weather, then maybe take a short swim to get the
oxygen flowing. After that I go to work. The 'office' is up forward in
the _Ulysses_. My main discovery is that chartering is pretty much like
any other business. Mostly problems."
It was. There were always tourists who came to Nassau thinking they
wanted more than the standard hotels, topless shows, and casinos on
Paradise Island and Cable Beach. They wanted a taste of what it was
like sailing through the Family Islands, away from the glitz, a feeling
for the real Caribbean. Or so they thought. That was until they
discovered the hard way that the real thing included broiling sun,
jellyfish stings, nosy sharks, hangovers, seasickness, close-quarters
quarrels with spouses and significant others, snapped fishing lines,
generator failures, unexpected weather . . .
"And you manage to do okay, right?"
"Nobody ever got rich in the charter business, at least the kind I'm
in. If you're not running high-priced South American produce, you have
to do it for love, not money."
His real livelihood, which he didn't bother to mention, came from
elsewhere. In between managing Bahamian skippers and crews he also kept
a hand in another occupation. In years past he'd served as a financial
consultant for the CIA, helping monitor the flow of illicit drug and
terrorist money passing through the banking laundries of Geneva and the
Caribbean. When the Company finally formed its own section to handle
that work, he'd moved on and hired out his expertise to a free-lance
organization called ARM, the Association of Retired Mercenaries. They
were retired, all right, but only from the antiterrorist units of a
half dozen European nations. They still saw plenty of covert action,
squelching those terrorist activities European governments wanted dealt
with outside official channels. He was their money man and they paid
him well, which was how he kept his three vessels shipshape and lived a
yachtsman's life of "ease."
"So after all these years, you ended up doing exactly what you wanted."
She looked at him admiringly. "A lot of people would probably envy you
that."
"I like taking my own risks, if that's what you mean."
"Well, all the same I suspect you're secretly very pleased with the
fact you've been invited back to Crete. I always thought you'd return
to archaeology sooner or later. If I know you, you couldn't stay away
forever."
Was she right? Even now he didn't know. "One thing's for sure. Crete's
a world apart."
That was an understatement. As he glanced back at the road, it was now
blocked entirely by a herd of sheep, their shaggy brown fleeces
suspended above dark, spindly legs. Around them the silence of the
Cretan countryside was rent by bleats and the jangle of bells. The
flock milled and darted about their rented Saab, but failed to move on
down the road. Why bother? The shepherd, in dark hat and coat, lounged
sidesaddle on his burro, oblivious, while his black-shawled wife
trudged in his dusty wake, bringing up the rear. Strangers came, gazed
upon the wonders of his land, then departed; he, possessor of donkey,
sheep, and wife, would remain. And prevail. His weathered face
contained all the worthwhile knowledge in the world. The parched hills
and verdant valleys of Crete belonged to him alone. Now and forever.
"Okay," he went on, "you're here, I'm here. Now how about telling me
what's going on?"
"That's just it. I don't know for sure. Everybody at NSA claims I'm
starting to see things." She paused to examine a long red fingernail.
"So don't you say it too. I need some moral support."
"Maybe I'd better hear this first."
"Michael, I . . . I don't want to talk about it yet. It's just--"
"Well, give me a hint at least."
"A few days back I decoded part of a transmission . . ." She leaned
over and started to turn on the radio, then changed her mind and
straightened. "Look, I just need you to help me get my thoughts
organized."
"Is that why you came all the way here? To organize your thoughts?
You'll forgive me if I'd hoped for a little more." In spite of himself,
he felt mildly annoyed. The truth was, he'd been looking forward to a
reunion that wasn't about business. "You know, I sort of had the idea
you wanted to . . . well, maybe try and piece things back together." He
looked her over. "Being with you wasn't exactly the worst experience of
my life."
She sighed wistfully and smoothed back her hair. "Fixing Humpty Dumpty
is tough work, darling. We both know that. It's been a long time.
Life's never that simple."
"Maybe not for you. But it seems very simple to me. We just lose the
past. Pretend it never existed." He felt his pique growing. "Or then
again, screw it. What are we doing here anyway?"
Could it really work a second time around? he asked himself. Why not?
Through all those years after things fell apart, he'd never once
stopped remembering her. Her mind, her body, her excitement.
Those memories dogged him now as they drove down the road he knew so
well, had traveled so many times in his long-ago life. At times the
ancient palace here on Crete had seemed almost a second home. After the
publication of his book about it, Realm of the Spirit--to universal de-
nunciations--he even began to dream about it. He thought he'd never come
back, and now here he was with Eva. Life took strange turns sometimes.
Eleven years ago in New Haven when he'd decided to work for himself,
he'd actually been saying good-bye to this world and all it stood for.
Back then it had seemed a golden moment to give academia the bird.
Had it all come full circle now? Fortunately he'd kept up with the
journals when he had the chance, tried to stay on top of what was
happening. With any luck he'd have the pleasure of watching a lot of
academics eat crow. All he had to do was just deal with whatever was
bugging Eva and then get on down to Phaistos. He hoped the Stuttgart
crew wouldn't realize he was over a decade out of date.
"You know," she was searching in her purse, then stopped herself and
looked up, "I always remember the palace when I think of you. It sort
of tied us together."
"Best I remember, it's what finally drove us apart. It turned into our
'irreconcilable difference.' "
"Maybe you're right, and it was dumb of me. Given the lousy luck I've
had with men, you're probably the best thing that ever came along.
After that flap over your book, I let you get away."
"Hold on a second. You announced you had to live your own life, and I
was getting too emotionally involved in my work and it would be better
all around if we just shook hands and called it quits. No hard
feelings."
"It wasn't quite like that." She laughed her alluring laugh, the one he
remembered so well.
"Oh, _no_?"
"Okay, maybe it was a little like that." Out came the sunglasses. The
old Eva again. "But I was changing, Michael, more every day. It was
time to try and make it on my own."
That was definitely what she'd decided to do. He'd always thought she
broke things off because she was obsessed with finishing her own Ph.D.
Self-centered and self-indulgent, that's what he'd called her at the
time, just another pampered Russian blue blood. Only years later did he
realize how self-centered he'd been. Maybe she'd been right; maybe they
weren't ready for each other yet.
She sighed, and then her voice came as a whisper. "You know, after you
called this morning and told me about that nightmare with Alex, I just
drank some retsina and went back to bed." She put on the shades,
adjusted them, and looked his way. He thought they went well with her
new forties hairstyle. "Michael, I know things I shouldn't. And the
things I should know, I don't. The worse part of all is, none of it
makes any sense." Her eyes seemed to soften behind the tinted plastic.
"Do you remember the first time you and I talked about this place?"
"Like it was yesterday." Who could forget? It was just after Realm was
published, relating his theory that the palace, whatever it may have
been originally, had eventually become a ceremonial necropolis, an
abode of the dead. "We ended up having a terrific argument over the
book. Nobody wanted to believe me, including you."
"Come on, darling, it wasn't my opinion you cared about. It was your
father's. The revered holder of Penn's Edelstein Chair of Classical
Antiquities. Supposedly the world's living expert on Minoan Crete."
Did he really care what the old man thought? he wondered. Not in the
way she meant. He would have liked it, though, if everybody had gotten
along a little better. Michael Vance, Sr., never quite knew what to
make of Eva's Slavic intensity, since it contrasted so vividly with his
own up-tight Anglo-Saxon instincts. That was a repressive family strain
Mike had fought--successfully, he hoped--to undo all his life. Eva had
looked to be the perfect soul mate in that battle. She was born
unrepressed.
Her own father, Count Serge Borodin, was president emeritus of the
Russian Nobility Association in America, exiled aristocracy. They were
a people apart. He recalled in particular a Russian Orthodox wedding
they'd all attended once. The operative assumption that sunny afternoon
in Oyster Bay was that the czar had been a living god, the Romanovs the
world's last surviving cherubim. He still remembered the black-hatted
Orthodox prelates and the incense and the tinny balalaikas and all the
counts and countesses drunk and dancing and crying at the same time.
Growing up in the middle of that, she had to be exuberant.
"You'd gone off on your own and set the world of archaeology on its
ear," she continued. "Typical Michael. But your father refused to stick
up for you when all the shit came down. I guess I didn't support you
very well either, I admit now. I'm truly sorry, darling, looking back."
"No big deal. I could handle it."
"Sure." She reached over and patted his thigh. "You handled it just
great. You were disgusted. At me, at him, at all the 'stuffed-shirt'
academics who never went out on a dig and got their hands dirty. You
practically dragged me here to show me you were right. You were
obsessed with the palace, admit it."
"It wasn't that bad." He looked over at her. "Was it?"
"Let's not talk about it anymore, all right?" She sighed. "Christ."
"Fine with me." He was pulling off the main road, heading into the
flower-lined trail, the arcade of magenta bougainvillea that led down
toward the palace. "By the way, I brought along some ouzo." He
indicated a pint bottle in his coat. "What's a picnic without a little
rocket fuel?"
"You think of everything."
"I also think we should park up here, dodge the tour-bus mayhem. Keep
the funny hats and loudspeakers to a minimum."
"Yes, please. Besides, I could use the air." She inhaled deeply.
Around them the few lingering white sprays of almond blossoms seemed
like remnants of late spring snow, while the ground itself was
blanketed with wild orchids, lavender and pink anemones, white
narcissus. He watched as she climbed out of the car, then stopped to
pluck a waxy yellow prickly pear flower, next an orange-blue Iris
_cretica_. He loved the flowers of Crete, and the afternoon was fra-
grant with the scent of jasmine and lemon blossoms. Ahead, down the
hill, was the parking lot for the palace, with two tour busses in
attendance, one just pulling out.
"How long has it been since we were last here together?" She brushed
her dark bangs back from her brow as she squinted into the waning sun,
sniffing at her cactus flower.
"It's beginning to seem like forever. But I think it's about--what?--
almost twelve years now."
"And how old is the palace supposed to be? I've gotten a little rusty."
"The latest theory going is that it was destroyed about fourteen
hundred B.C. So we're talking roughly three and a half thousand years
since it was last used."
"Guess our little decade doesn't count for much in the grand scheme."
"Time flies." He remembered how she'd been back then, that day so long
ago when she had been in her mid-twenties, as inviting as the brazen
ladies-in-waiting of the palace frescoes, and even more voluptuous.
_Mais, ce sont des Parisiennes_, a dazzled French scholar had marveled.
She was like that. Perfect sensuality. For a while he'd forgotten all
about archaeology and just concentrated on beauty.
The place where all this occurred was the Palace of Knossos, lovingly
restored in the early part of the twentieth century by the wealthy
English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. There an almost modern
civilization had flowered to magnificent heights, then mysteriously
vanished. The path leading to the palace down the hill was becoming
wider as they walked, opening on the distant olive groves in the
valley. The vista was stunning, probably the reason it had been built
here.
He looked over and noticed she was digging in her purse again. This
time she drew out a pack of Dunhills. He watched while she flicked a
gold lighter, the one he'd given her as a present so long ago,
emblazoned with a lapis lazuli skull and crossbones. At the time, the
hint had worked. She'd quit.
"The return of the death wish? When did you start that again?"
"Last week." She defiantly took a puff.
"Any particular reason?"
"No, darling, I just did it." She exhaled. "I'm wound up. I'm . . . I'm
scared. Michael, for godsake, how many reasons am I supposed to need?"
"Hey, lighten up." He'd quit a month after they met, but it hadn't been
a big deal. "I've mellowed out from the old days. Life is like most
other things--a lot more fun when you don't take it too seriously."
They were moving across the empty parking lot, headed for the entrance
to the palace. It had once been a twelve-hundred-room labyrinth,
perhaps deliberately confusing. Now the upper courtyard and chambers
lay exposed to the sky, their massive red-and-ocher columns glistening
in the waning sunlight. The columns tapered downward, as though tree
trunks had been planted upside down to prevent resprouting.
It was a poetic place to meet Eva again, he thought. And thoroughly
bizarre as well. She'd gotten her Ph.D. in linguistics, specializing in
ancient Aegean languages, then a few months later she'd surprised
everybody by accepting a slot at the National Security Agency, that
sprawling electronic beehive of eavesdropping that lies midway between
Washington and Baltimore, on the thousand acres of Fort Meade. It'd
seemed a startling about-face at the time, but maybe it made sense.
Besides, it was that or teaching.
NSA was a midsized city, producing among other things forty tons of
classified paper trash a day. Its official insignia, appropriately, was
a fierce eagle clasping a key--whether to unlock the secrets of others
or to protect its own was unclear. Eva's particular branch, SIGINT--for
signals intelligence--was an operation so secret NSA refused even to
admit it existed. Employing ten acres of mainframe computers, Eva's
SIGINT group monitored and analyzed every Russian transmission
anywhere: their satellite downlinks, the microwave telephone networks
within the Soviet Union, the chatter of civilian and military pilots,
missile telemetry far above the Pacific, the split-second bursts of
submarines reporting to base, even the limousine radiophone trysts
between Politburo members and their mistresses. The instant an
electromagnetic pulse left the earth, no matter its form or frequency,
it belonged to the giant electronic ears of the NSA.
So why shouldn't Eva end up as the agency's top Russian codebreaker?
She was a master at deciphering obscure texts, and she'd spoken Russian
all her life. Who better to make a career of cracking secret Soviet
communications. Her linguistics Ph.D. was being used to real purpose.
"I want you to help me think some, love," she went on. "I know it may
sound a little bizarre, but I'd like to talk about some of the legends
surrounding this place. You know, try and sort out fact and fiction."
Now they were headed side by side down the stairway leading into the
central court, an expanse of sandstone and alabaster tile glinting
golden in the pale sun. On their left a flight of stairs seemed to lead
out, but in fact they led right back in again. The deceptions of the
palace began at the very entrance.
"The truth is, about all we have is stories, though sometimes stories
can be more true than so-called history. The standard version is that
this area was where the athletes performed ritual somersaults over the
sacred bulls."
The restored frescoes around them showed corridors crowded with lithe
Minoan priestesses, eyes rounded with green malachite, faces powdered
white, lips a blood red. They all were bare-breasted, wearing only
diaphanous chemises, while their jewels glistened in the sunshine as
they fanned themselves with ostrich plumes.
There were no frescoes, however, of the powerful, bloodthirsty King
Minos.
"Michael," she called out, her voice echoing off the hard walls, "you
know, this place has always felt a little sinister to me. None of the
lightness and gaiety in those frescoes seems real."
"That's part of what made me start wondering if the Minoans hadn't
somehow managed to make a monkey out of every ponderous scholar on the
planet." They were moving down the monumental grand staircase, three
restored flights of which had originally been five, toward the rooms
called the royal chambers. "Maybe the reason this place had no walls or
fortifications was because you only came here when you were dead. Who
the hell knows."
Whatever the truth was, the eerie feeling of the palace seemed to make
the ancient stories even more vivid. The legends told that King Minos's
wife, Pasiphae, had a burning passion for one of the sacred white bulls
he kept, so she arranged for his chief architect, Daedalus, to design a
hollow wooden cow for her covered over with a hide. She concealed
herself inside and, as luck would have it, lured one of the beasts. The
progeny of that union was equally beastly--the Minotaur, a monster with
a human body and a bull's head.
Now they were rounding a final corner in the twisting maze of stairs.
Directly ahead was the boudoir of the queen. The past welled up for
him.
The frescoes over the alabaster arches showed bold blue dolphins
pirouetting in a pastel sea dotted with starfish and sea urchins. And
just beneath them stood the famous bathroom of the queen, connected to
the vast drainage complex of the palace, great stone channels curved in
precise parabolas to control and dampen turbulence. Daedalus was an
engineer-architect who had mastered the science of fluid dynamics
thousands of years before the invention of wind tunnels and
supercomputers.
"My favorite spot. The bedroom." He slipped the small bottle of ouzo
from his trench coat pocket. In the dank of the palace's lower depths,
he needed its warmth. "I've had unspeakably erotic thoughts about this
place--now it can be told--with you no small part of them." He handed her
the bottle. "Want a hit of high octane?"
"Glad to know I've had a place in your memory all these years, even if
it was X-rated." She took the bottle with a knowing smile, then drank.
"It's like licorice."