Solomon's Jar (17 page)

He gestured around at the shambles. “Did vandals do some of this?”

“I doubt it.” She pointed to a volume lying open against the juncture of deck and bulkhead. A ragged streak of blood crossed it at a violent angle. “At least some of the destruction probably happened before the murders. Or during. Anyway, as you just pointed out, nobody's tried to reclaim this vessel, despite the fact it's still probably worth the life's savings of an entire fishing crew. Who'd dare to vandalize it?”

“Not I,” Pascoe said.

Her foot began to slip on the canted deck. She reached out reflexively and grabbed the back of the pilot's chair, which was fixed on a pedestal.

She felt a shock as her skin contacted the slashed leather. It was as if she had completed an electric circuit, though not unpleasant. Inside herself she seemed to perceive a hint of golden glow.

She felt a chill as if the sun had gone out instead of set. She shuddered.

“Annja!” Pascoe exclaimed, exquisitely sensitive. She felt the reassurance of his hand on her shoulder. The strength of his grip surprised her. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head as if shedding water. “Yes,” in a shaky voice.

“What is it?”

“It was here.”

“The jar?”

She nodded.

“That's what made you shudder like that? You looked as if you'd seen a ghost.”

“Not seen, Aidan. The jar was here. I'm sure of it. But it's long gone.”

He nodded. “We reckoned that.”

“It's not the only thing. There was something here. Something I've sensed before. At Ravenwood Manor and the Wailing Wall. And, oh, on Mark Stern's yacht, when Eliete von Hauptstark attacked me. I just realized what it is.”

“And that is…?”

“Evil.” The word had force precisely because she said it quietly, with utter lack of inflection.

Pascoe looked around quickly. “Is it still here?” She could see from his frown that his trained skepticism was warring with his emotions. And losing.

“No. All I'm feeling are the traces it left behind.”

“Months ago? It must have been a pretty potent evil.”

Wordlessly she waved her hand around the blood-splashed cabin.

“Right,” Aidan said. “Forgive my being a git.”

Pupils dilated more than the gloom justified, Pascoe's eyes scanned the interior, even the overhead, which was likewise liberally streaked with blood spray. “Do we need to search any further into the
bloody boat?” His tone said that he fairly urgently didn't want to.

“No point,” she said. “We're not crime scene investigators, thank goodness. We know what we came to learn.”

Before she finished the last word he had slipped backward out the hatch. She joined him before saying, with a shaky smile, “I'm just as glad as you are.”

He stood with his feet at the joining of deck and gunwale, head down with chin on clavicle and moving side to side like a bull's, drawing deep, quavering gasps of air in through his open mouth. She recognized the signs of a desperate fight against nausea.

The wind was blessedly coming in from the sea. The warm, humid air felt almost air-conditioned on Annja's face, which she realized was streaming sweat in a way the day's exertion in the sun had not been able to achieve. The moist sea breeze smelled sweet, like life itself.

Aidan clambered over the rail and jumped down to the sand. Then he reached up a hand to help Annja. She hid a smile at that. Some women she knew might have angrily spurned the gesture as chauvinistic—and it was certainly unnecessary, given that she was as strong or stronger than he was. It struck her as archaic, gallant and altogether sweet. Just the sort of thing, she thought, a well-bred and very handsome young British archaeologist ought to do. She took his hand and jumped lightly down beside him.

He withdrew it as if it were hot. “Sorry,” he said, eyes down. “I think I've just been a right Charlie again.”

“Not at all,” she said. “I thought it was sweet.”

“What now?” he asked awkwardly.

She looked to the west. The sun was almost out of sight, just a blazing white arc backlighting a rounded peak. Around them she felt the velvet mauve darkness, the cooling of the heavy air.

“Better see if we can find our friend Spyridon before he drinks himself to sleep,” she said.

He touched her arm, lightly and deliberately. “Don't move,” he said softly. “We may have a spot of bother.”

She turned to look at him. Light and movement drew her focus beyond him, north up the beach, to where an irregular line of torches slowly approached.

They were borne by half a dozen or more shabbily dressed men. They held knives and makeshift clubs in their other hands.

“They've surrounded us,” Aidan said through clenched teeth.

She turned to look south. A similar group approached from down the beach. Their dark, bearded faces were grim in the wavering orange light of their driftwood torches.

“Nice traditional touch, that. Torches,” Pascoe said. “Pity it's not an agrarian enough setting for them to have pitchforks. Still one supposes it's the thought that counts.”

Annja felt a stab of admiration for his insouciance. She felt little herself.

She recognized the approaching men weren't carrying torches to act out a classic monster-movie scene. Rather, it was because of the traditional role of fire in cleansing evil.

“If we've trespassed, we apologize,” she called out to the nearer group, the one coming from the south. “We mean no harm.”

Her eyes darted—her head unmoving so as not to reveal her desperation. The beach was isolated. A small scatter of shacks lay several hundred yards up the beach to the north. To the south a jutting headland walled it off. A few more little warped-plank buildings leaned in various directions across the road, a hundred yards or so inland. Help was far distant—if anyone in the vicinity would care to help them against their own neighbors.

Pebbles crunched ominously beneath boots. The torch flames were gaudy in the heavy twilight.

“You've done enough harm,” called a voice. To Annja's shock it was familiar. The voice of Nomiki had coarsened to a raven's croak. “You devils killed our friends, our kin. Now the time has come for you to pay.”

With a scream of jet engines, an airplane lifted off from Corfu International Airport just across the narrow mouth of the inlet. It sounded to Annja like a lost soul fleeing.

Someone cried out hoarsely. With a rush the fishermen were on them. Any doubts Annja entertained as to their seriousness were dispelled in a blink when one man took a horizontal swipe at her face with a torch. Its head blazed a meteor orange trail as she ducked back. A piece of her hair passed through the flame and she smelled the stench of it burning.

She moved quickly, tweaking the torch from its wielder's grasp and throwing it end over end to fall with a hiss and a fizz into the foam of a retreating wave. It was a small gesture, and only momentarily satisfying as more angry men crowded around.

She punched the man who had swung the torch in the face. He sat down hard with a crackle of shingle and an aggrieved outcry. “Stay behind me,” she called to Pascoe without looking back.

If the fishermen felt any Old World compunctions about attacking a woman they took care not to let them show. Annja pirouetted around a clumsy knife slash, smelling a waft of alcohol breath that accounted for much of the clumsiness. She dropped its originator sprawling and gasping with an elbow at the back of the neck. Somehow she sensed it as a club swung for the back of her head. She bent forward sharply at the waist. The club swished behind her skull. She mule-kicked straight back, caught an ample abdomen with hard muscle beneath and elicited a whoosh of forced-out air as its owner was launched back several feet.

Another man rushed her, bellowing, club raised to crush her skull. She turned and charged past him, catching him with a forearm high on his chest that dumped him hard on his back and left him stunned and breathless. She stiff-armed a second attacker.

Annja moved through the crowd of attackers in a
controlled frenzy, allowing her training and reflexes free rein. Rather than block, she dodged, ducked and weaved. In preference to kicking and punching she grabbed and swung or simply pushed. She kept moving through her assailants, directing blows away from her, thrusting men into one another. Then she heard Aidan shouting angrily to the men to keep their hands off of him and she turned to glance back.

The move undid her. Strong arms thrust beneath her armpits from behind. Huge hands clasped the nape of her neck. She was lifted kicking off the ground, knowing the bronze-bearded giant, Petros, had caught her.

A man closed with her from the front, empty handed. She raised her knees and kicked him hard in the gut with both feet. He flew back, out of her sight beyond the ring of torches that had walled her in with barracuda suddenness. She became aware of various smells. Indifferently washed bodies, wool steeped in sweat, grease, sea salt and fish scales, garlic, decaying teeth, and resinous Greek wine and Albanian beer that smelled like formaldehyde, all mingled to cause a bit of sting for the eyes. She also sensed an edge of fear.

Then Nomiki himself was before her, bandy-legged and mysterious as Pan in the shifting of dark and torchlight. A snarl of hatred bared his brown and jumbled teeth. A blade protruded from his hand, with torchlight sluicing along it like the premonition of blood.

Annja kicked the knife from his hand.

Nomiki fell back with a curse as she kicked him in the face. But then her leg was seized, followed by the other, and more men piled on than she could kick away with all her strength.

She realized she had made a potentially fatal mistake. She'd been holding back when her opponents were not.

Petros's monster hands thrust her head forward, intending to snap her neck. Her neck muscles strained, popped, seemed to groan aloud as she fought his strength. She would not give in. She couldn't win, but that meant nothing to her resolve….

A voice cried, “Stop!”

It called out in English. It was a male voice, high-pitched, harsh with an accent and something more. As it penetrated Annja's fog, in which she had been aware of almost no sound since the fight began, it must have penetrated the consciousnesses of the mob swarming over her. The men actually did stop and paused in their sinister intent.

A man hobbled forward, using a broken oar as a sort of crutch. The men at the back of the mob surrounding her fell back with torches in hand like an inadvertent honor guard, producing an illuminated aisle for his approach.

Nomiki stood before Annja rubbing his jaw. He spit what looked suspiciously like a fragment of brown tooth onto the slate shingle at his feet. “Spyros?” he croaked.

At first glimpse Annja had thought the newcomer was an ancient, so hitched and painful were his movements. Now she realized the hair surrounding his head like a clumped and matted halo was dark. His naturally lean features were drawn further by pain as though stretched on a frame. His dark eyes were pits of sorrow, black in the torchlight.

Someone barked at him in Greek. He replied in a low voice, more dead than deliberately soft, it seemed to Annja.

“But Spyros,” Nomiki said with a touch of whine in his voice. “They killed your mates.”

“No,” the lame young man answered in English. “They did not. Now go.”

Petros protested. The young man's face twisted as if he had been struck. “Enough killing! Enough pain. Spare my soul more burden! Go!”

He cried out again in Greek, his tone desperate, yet angry rather than pleading. Annja felt the self-righteous energy of the mob drain away. Where they had been a pack of raging predators half a minute before, now they were just normal men, rapidly feeling themselves overtaken by shame. Like a clot of muck being washed from a deck with a hose, the erstwhile lynch mob began to come apart, and then flowed away down the beach in separating streams, as if the men were too ashamed even for one another's continued company.

Aidan knelt on the shingle by the
Athanasia
's red
hull, fists down like a sprinter's on the line, breathing heavily through his mouth. Annja knelt beside him. “You're hurt,” she said.

“You oughta see the other guy,” he joked through split and puffed lips. “Actually, the other guys look splendid, if you leave aside the effects of hard living and doubtful hygiene. I never laid a finger on them. Not for want of trying, though.”

Despite her protests he started to rise. When his determination became obvious she helped him stand and let him lean half surreptitiously against her. His body was warm, flushed perhaps by effort and fear, against hers.

Aside from bruised cheeks and puffy eyes he didn't seem badly hurt. Apparently all that had struck him had been fists, not wood or steel. Not that fists alone couldn't do severe damage.

“You're Spyridon, then?” Aidan said to the young man who stood before them, leaning on his crutch and panting from the effects of his own passionate outburst.

“I am.”

The young Englishman forced himself by visibly painful degrees to stand fully upright. Not for the first time, Annja was surprised by his toughness. He looked so boyish and—tender, perhaps, not soft exactly, she thought. But he had steel in his spine.

“We owe you our thanks,” Pascoe said.

“Thank you,” Annja added.

But the wild-haired head shook decisively. “You owe me nothing,” Spyros said. “I do it for me. I am doomed. I hope to not be damned.”

He turned and stumped off. Bats swooped overhead, taking flittering tiny insects as they followed him up the darkened beach. A gibbous moon was rising across the waves. Pollution haze or something else stained it red around the rim, like dilute blood.

They followed. “How did you know we weren't who your friends thought we were?” Pascoe called after him.

“You tourist couple, very nice,” he said over his shoulder. “Who killed my crewmates—not nice.”

“Might be some holes to that logic,” Annja said to Aidan, quietly.

He shrugged. “Roll with it, I say.”

Spyros led them to a rough shelter at the south end of the beach, masked from view by some large rocks covered in brushy arbutus and fragrant bay. Knocked together out of planks and tarpaper, it was little more than a lean-to. He lowered himself painfully to the ground, set aside his broken oar, gestured for them to sit. Annja and Aidan looked at each other, then perched side by side on a chunk of driftwood perhaps eight feet long that seemed to serve as a sort of boundary for the young man's living space.

Rummaging around in litter piled beside the shelter Spyros made a little stack of newspaper and dry twigs,
broke some small bits of driftwood onto it and lit a fire from a plastic lighter. By its uneasy orange light he dug in a mound of reeking cloth Annja realized must be his bed. He came up with a bottle, upended it. She smelled the turpentine-like scent of cheap ouzo as it ran down both sides of his narrow stubbled chin.

In the firelight she studied him as he drank. He had a triangular head and hunted-fox eyes. He was wiry to the point of emaciation. His eyes were sunken deep in pits of blackness.

At last he lowered the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What you want with Spyros?” he asked. He sounded sad. An undercurrent in his voice, the way he held himself, ever poised as if for flight, the way the firelight flickered from eyeballs turning restlessly this way and that spoke eloquently of a fear that nagged with ceaseless rodent teeth.

“You were part of a crew that dredged an ancient jar from the sea,” Aidan said without preamble. “Is that correct?”

Spyros nodded. He looked even less happy. “King Solomon's Jar,” he said.

“Why do you say that?” Annja asked.

“When it came up in our nets it look like nothing but big lump. Like lava, but green, you know? But Ioannis, my brother-in-law's cousin, he scrape some corrosion away with his knife. Beneath was yellow metal. Brass.”

Next to her Annja felt Aidan shudder at such desecration of an ancient artifact. She felt some of the same thing. She couldn't muster quite the same outrage. For some reason she found herself seeing different points of view with a lot more clarity and empathy these days.

Isn't that kind of an occupational impediment for a champion of good? she wondered. It would make sense for her to start to see everything in black and white.

But that would be too easy, she thought.

“Once he clean up some, in the brass we saw drawings.” Spyros said. “Engraved, very fine, but we could just see them. Almost like letters, but not like any letters I see. Not even Chinese. Not Egyptian hieroglyphs.” He shook his head.

“Then Georgios, our captain, he get very excited. He had seen writing like that in some book he read once. He said it was used to write the name of spirits. He said it meant we had found jar of King Solomon himself, that he used to put spirits in.

“We laughed at him, even if he was captain. He reads too much! But he was so serious. He got angry that we laughed, so angry he threaten to heave Ioannis over the rail into the sea. Vasilios, he was our mechanic, he thought he knew too much because he lived for a time in America. He said if there were ever spirits in the jar, they were not there now, for there was no stopper. Georgios, he say that not matter. He knows someone pay much for the jar!”

For a moment the young man sat cross-legged staring into the fire. “I grew up with Vasilios,” he said. “He was a year older than me, bigger. He stayed bigger when we grew. He used to catch me, rub mud in my hair, laugh and laugh. But it was just fun. He was my friend.”

He looked up. “So we sailed to Haifa. A Jew met us in a launch, an Israeli. Doctor from Ministry of Antiquities. Ehud Dror his name. He was man who studies old things, a scientist, you know—what is word—?”

“An archaeologist,” Pascoe said in a tight voice.

Spyros nodded. “That's right. Archaeologist. From the government. Georgios does business with him before. Sometimes we bring other things up in our nets, you know? Old things. And he paid us well, just like the captain say. American dollars.”

He took another pull from his bottle. For a moment he sat staring into the small pale flames of his fire.

“Then a month ago,” he said, “a lifeboat broke loose in a bad sea. It broke my ankle. I was in hospital. I have to use this—” he held up the sawed-off oar “—because the crutch the health service gave me keeps folding up. But at least they did not give me saltwater injection and call it antibiotic.”

He drew a deep breath, as if nerving himself to go on. “My nephew Akakios took my place. It was his first voyage—he was sixteen. He could not believe his luck.”