The Messenger of Athens: A Novel (37 page)

Ahead, magnificent
Aphrodite
was sailing from St. Savas’s Bay, moving at speed towards the open sea. At the tip of her high mast, the blue-and-white flag of Greece fluttered below a flag of navy and gold that Lukas couldn’t identify; on the deck, diminished by distance, stood the fat man.

Lukas ran to the jetty’s end, and waved his arms towards the yacht.

“
Yassou
, my friend!” he shouted. “
Yassou
, Nikos! God speed!”

For a moment, he thought he was unheard, but then the fat man touched his forehead in flamboyant salute, and raised his hand to wave goodbye.

Approaching the headland at the bay’s end, the yacht began a turn to starboard. The clouds were shifting in the blustery wind, and between their cracks a few rays of weak sunshine fell in spotlights onto
Aphrodite
’s decks. The fat
man moved up to the prow, and stood, legs braced, hands at his back, like a commander of the fleet judging the sea.

As Lukas watched, the clouds moved back together, the spotlights were extinguished.
Aphrodite
slipped away around the headland, and she—and the fat man—were lost from view.

I
remember that day. Who could ever forget it, the shame of it? But the truth was, I felt a strange relief. Through the jeering and laughing, the screaming and the crying, I felt free. I thought, I don’t have to hide now. The hiding’s over.

Elpida threw me out, of course. Was I sorry to go? I was sorry for myself, and I was sorry for her, for the awful embarrassment we both believed she’d never live down. When my mother saw me, she wept; my father was so angry, he took a swing at me, swore he’d never allow me back in the house. But my mother stood up to him, in a way I never have. She made him let me stay. Because she loves me
.

She called the doctor, and asked him what to do; then she bathed my head with oil, and wrapped it up in bandages. Every day she tended to me, bathing and rewrapping. Gradually, the feathers worked loose, and after a week or two, most of the tar came away. My hair began to grow. I began to look the way I had before
.

But I was not the same
.

I fished, and thought. I spent many, many days, out there on the water, letting the sea calm me. Often, in the early mornings,
when the sun’s rays first strike, instead of twisting off the surface they pierce it like slender arrows, white shafts pointing the way to the depths. Sometimes, I was tempted to follow those arrows and dive into that lovely blueness. The idea held no fear for me. It offered the caress of sleep rather than a choking death; it was an offer I thought I would, one day, accept
.

Time passed, and my mother wanted me to see Elpida. She wanted us to talk, she said; what she wanted in her heart was the way things used to be. But I had changed too much to fit back inside that empty marriage—what could I say to Elpida that wasn’t lies?—so I refused to go. Besides, there’s Eleni. Eleni took to praying in the churches—night and day, fasting and not sleeping, on her knees until they bled and she stank from lack of washing. All through Lent, she prayed, and was admired for her piety. But at Easter, she still refused to stop, so they locked her in the house, and called the specialists. The doctor diagnosed dementia, a swelling of the brain, while Pappa Philippas proclaimed it a true calling, and the grace of God. Months later, there’s no change; they say the house is like a cathedral, all incense and candles, and every inch of wall covered in icons. Dementia or true piety, it’s all the same; my mother-in-law’s made a prisoner of herself, striving for the halo of a saint. As for Elpida, she’s happy enough; the burden of her crazy mother’s care has granted her the status of a martyr
.

And I remain alone
.

You know, our language overflows with wise little placebos to comfort the distraught and the desperate—and the plain embarrassed, the mortified, like me. One hundred years from now it will all be forgotten, the old folks say. But it isn’t so, not on this island; it just isn’t so
.

The truth is this: that we who have been infamous are destined to remain so, news forever in a land of nothing newsworthy
.

O
n an island not far from home, Andreas’s small catch sold well. In the town square, he sat down at a café table shaded by the branches of a plane tree and, pulling the money—a few notes, a great deal of silver—from his pockets, began to count.

“You’ll be a rich man, soon.”

She stood before him, holding a tray beneath her arm. Her short-cropped hair was streaked with gray, and when she smiled, the lines of her face grew deeper.

He looked up at her, and returned her smile.

“I’ll never be rich,” he said, “and if I were, it wouldn’t make me happy.”

“Are you unhappy, then?” she asked. The question wasn’t flippant; the woman seemed to care.

“I lost my wife last year,” he said. “Life’s not the same, alone.”

“You’ll miss her, I know,” she said. “It’s been four years for me, and I still wait for my man to walk in through the door. What can I get you?”

Her eyes, he thought, were like Irini’s.

“Coffee,” he said. “And if I’m not being too forward, can I buy a drink for you? Don’t think you’d have to sit with me, if folk would talk.”

Her smile grew broad.

“It’s not as if we’re children,” he said, “or me some blushing virgin.”

They sat together companionably; the talk flowed easily, until it was time for him to prepare the boat, and leave.

“I’ll be here again next week,” he said, “if the weather holds.”

“You’ll always find me here,” she said. “Just ask for Zoë.”

Walking away towards the quay, he raised a hand goodbye.

By the café door, her aged father watched her watch him go.

“Do you believe in Providence?” she asked, clearing their table.

“You’d be a damn fool not to,” he replied. “No matter what life throws at you, my girl, sometimes the gods are kind.”

F
rom the cast-iron gate, Theo surveyed the garden he remembered so differently—infested by chest-high weeds, overrun with thistles. Now the weeds lay mown and rotting by the wall, and shoots of new grass showed amongst their sharp, scythed stalks. The path to the house was swept, and marked with pots of flourishing cyclamen.

Theo stepped through the open door into a kitchen bright with sunshine, light with the perfume of cut flowers and wood polished with beeswax.

“Aunt Sofia!”

She answered him at once, and came to kiss him on
the forehead, beneath the line of his short, short hair. She had, it seemed, abandoned widow’s black, and wore instead a dress of lime and yellow; her nose was dusted with powder from a compact, and on her cheeks, she’d rubbed a smudge of rouge.

“How are you, Theo?” she asked. She made him sit, and sat beside him. Reaching out to touch his face, she said, “You don’t look very good to me, my love. I’ll make some tea.”

“I don’t want tea.” A fly settled on his forearm, and for a moment he let it remain there. “I’ve been thinking I might go away. Just for a while. A change of scene.”

“What a good idea,” she said. “Why not? Your feet are not chained to this island, to this rock. There are cities, and other islands. There are other countries, if you were brave…”

“It would cost money,” he said. He brushed the fly from his sleeve. “It’s money that I’m lacking.”

A silk handkerchief, laundered and pressed, lay on the dresser shelf, and on the handkerchief lay the business card of a lawyer based in Athens.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I’ve come into a small inheritance, and I’ve been thinking of a little trip myself. So if you thought you’d like some company—the world can be such a lonely place, sometimes—maybe you and I could go together. We could go far away from here, Theo. We could go anywhere.”

She placed an arm around him and pulled him close, as she had done to heal his hurts—cuts, bruises, insults—when he was just a boy.

He let his head fall to her shoulder.

“Laugh at me,” he said, “but I’m afraid to go. This place is all I know. It made me what I am, and now it’s made me, it’s saying it has no place for me. It’s telling me to leave, but the leaving will be exile, and every day I am away, I know this wretched place will call me home.”

Sofia kissed the top of his head.

“Then you and I shall miss the place together,” she said, “and when we’re really homesick, we’ll call your mother, and she’ll tell us all the gossip and the scandal. And one day, when time’s moved on, maybe we’ll come back here, and call it home again. But now—you’re right—it’s time for us to go. We’ll have each other, Theo. And more than that, we’ll have some kind of future.”

From the port, the horn of a departing ferry blared a single, somber note.

“So go and pack your bag,” said Sofia, “and say all your goodbyes. When the next boat leaves, you and I will sail with it. Trust me,
agapi mou
. We’ll find somewhere we are welcome, even though we are unknown—somewhere no one knows the lives that we lived, once.”

F
or their enthusiasm, advice and careful reading, thanks to Chris and all the team at Christopher Little, and to Arzu Tahsin, Holly Roberts and Emily Sweet.

Thanks to Julie and Ian Kidd for their highly practical support.

And special thanks to my son Will, who put up with a lot.

Reading Group Guide

THE MESSENGER OF ATHENS

A S
EVEN
D
EADLY
S
INS
M
YSTERY

A
NNE
Z
OUROUDI

A conversation with Anne Zouroudi

As a writer, why did you choose crime fiction, or did crime fiction choose you?

Well, two parts to this answer. Though I do read all kinds of books—classics, novels, biographies, modern literature—crime novels are my favorite books to read, and it makes sense for me to write books I would enjoy reading. But are my books crime novels? Most crime novels are about crimes the legal system would recognize and punish. My books are also about moral crimes—not necessarily crimes in the eyes of the law or the police, but bad deeds that deserve punishment. So I feel my books are about natural justice, which makes them a little different from most crime novels.