The Mask of Atreus (45 page)

"For a barbaric weapon, that thing works pretty good,"

said Tonya.

Deborah stared at her.

"Just tell me," said Tonya, "you didn't spill that perfume by accident."

CHAPTER 80

Two Months Later

The fund-raiser was almost over. The food (significantly improved over last time) had been served, and the staff of Taste of Elegance had begun busily--some might say conspicuously--cleaning up. The only thing still to do was for Deborah to give her closing toast.

She stepped up onto the podium and glanced over at the string quartet, who had stopped playing and were taking the opportunity to quench their thirsts. She looked out over the crowd of faces, some of whom were starting to focus on her, and caught Tonya, at the back, brandishing a showy smile, a prompt to Deborah who promptly snapped one on. Someone began tinkling the side of their glass with a spoon, and the museum lobby fell silent.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," said Deborah. She paused, waiting for all traces of conversation to finish. "I don't want to spoil the evening with a lengthy speech, but I would like to make a few announcements. First, on behalf of the museum, I want to thank you all for coming and for offering assistance after what has been a very difficult time. Your support--moral and financial--has been invaluable to us over the last few weeks and will go a long way to ensuring the success of the museum in the future."

A pattering of applause. She waited for it to die down, smiling and nodding.

"I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce you to one of our new staff members," she said. "Tonya Mulligrew has been with us for several months now, but her role has changed, and she will now function as the museum's communications director, a catchall title covering matters of publicity, community 382

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relations, and whatever else I can think of to dump on her. Tonya?"

The crowd pivoted, and Tonya, smiling humbly, raised a hand, half greeting, half admission of guilt. The fact that the sea of faces was larger than usual and broadly diverse of color was testament to the work Tonya had already done, something Deborah and Richard's best efforts had been unable to achieve.

"I also wanted to announce two new exhibits, one permanent, one visiting, which will come to Druid Hills in the next twelve months. The permanent exhibit will concern Georgia's nineteenth-century slave culture: an exciting and moving study of the region's African American heritage, including a narrative documentary to be shown in a purposebuilt auditorium, and exhibits combining artifacts, photographs, and documents detailing everything from the capture and trade of slaves in Africa and the slave ships themselves, to plantation life and the Underground Railroad. We hope to gather pieces from small, underfunded museums and from private collections from Savannah and elsewhere in the state as well as presenting materials on life in Atlanta before the Emancipation Proclamation."

Another patter of applause, longer, more heartfelt this time.

"The temporary exhibit will be here for the first three months of next year and presents a unique opportunity to glimpse ancient Greek antiquities in North America. Thanks to Dimitri Popadreus, director of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the Druid Hills Museum will be the first non-European museum to display a special traveling exhibit of Mycenaean gold, bronze, and ceramics. This will be, as you can imagine, an extraordinary exhibit, unlike anything seen in the area, perhaps even in the country, and we are delighted to be able to host it."

More applause.

The exhibit was, of course, Popadreus's tribute to Richard's goodwill and Deborah's tact, but it was still astonishingly 383

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generous. The call had come, unsolicited and unexpected, only three days before, the Greek's languid tone echoing down a crackling line like a voice from the ancient past. The thoughtfulness of the gesture had brought tears to her eyes. In some corner of her heart she felt that Richard would have thought it all worthwhile just to be able to show the people of Georgia the culture which had inspired Homer and, in turn, him. He might even have thought it was worth dying for.

"Lastly," she said, "I want to offer a toast to a man without whom none of this would have been possible, a man we miss sorely this evening . . ."

Her voice warbled and cracked. She paused, opening her mouth again and pressing a smile, as the crowd waited, patient and understanding. But the words wouldn't come. She had prepared several minutes on what Richard had meant to the community and to her personally. She had anecdotes on his courage as a leader of the arts, on his sense of humor and his compassion. She had sat up half the night trying to find a way to express her love for the man who was gone, but now the words stuck in her throat.

"I'm sorry," she managed.

She paused, composed herself, still smiling in an apologetic and self-deprecating way, and then she opened her mouth to say something, anything. Tears broke from her eyes and streamed suddenly and unstoppably down her cheeks. No words came.

Somehow, her vision blurring fast, her eyes found Tonya at the back and saw her silently raise her drink. Deborah did the same, and the room as one lifted their glasses and said,

"Richard Dixon."

"A touching speech," said Harvey Webster. "I didn't think you had it in you."

"You are the master of the backhanded compliment, Harvey," said Deborah, smiling. Five more minutes, and they would all be gone. Five 384

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minutes, and she could go home, sleep, get back to running the museum and to some version of normalcy. Five minutes of enduring the condescension and lechery of this bloated old goat.

"There is one other thing you might have announced," he said, "but I thought it best to bring it to you privately."

Deborah tensed.
The board was going to try to oust her, or
cut her fundings or . . .

"Go on," she said, taking a steadying sip of her gin martini.

"The League of Christian Businessmen is disbanding,"

he said. "We feel its time has passed. We will, as our last philanthropic act, be donating a significant lump sum to the museum."

"That's very generous of you," said Deborah, feeling a tide of relief. Getting the League and its dubious interests off her back would give her untold freedom with the museum, simultaneously eliminating a growing suspicion, suspicion that would be touched with guilt so long as the museum was receiving their support.

"It was the least we could do," said Webster, smiling, showing that wet, sluggish tongue of his.

"Interesting timing," said Deborah. "Why break up the League now?"

"It just seemed right," he said, his eyes fixed.

"The FBI believed that Atreus was linked to other more legitimate business concerns," said Deborah, apropos of nothing. "They thought that they provided a kind of hard-core hit squad for more respectable organizations which shared white supremacist assumptions."

"Really?" said Webster. "I am not familiar with that organization."

"I'm sure you're not," she said. "They were a cell of what might be considered a terrorist organization. We thought they had gotten hold of a particularly powerful weapon, but it turned out that the weapon was more ideological than practical."

"Indeed," he said, still smiling, still simulating polite curiosity, still playing along. "Atreus, you said? Sounds Latin."

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"Greek," she said, still smiling. "He was the father of a doomed house, responsible for the most appalling acts of brutality against members of his own family, for which his descendents were cursed to fight pointless wars and die violently at the hands of their spouses and children. As a figure of violence and hatred, tied to Greece's ancient glory, these neo-Nazis made him and his descendents their emblem, a representation of all they wanted to accomplish, particularly against people like Tonya and me. "

"Extraordinary," he said.

"Yes."

He shaped a bleak, hard smile.

"It will always be something with people like you, won't it?" he said. "There will always be some cause, some wrong to be righted."

"God," she said, "I really hope so."

"Crusades," he said, avuncular now, "can be
very
expensive."

"I know," she said. "But they are always worth it. There was a homeless man killed a few months ago. A Russian. He was a crusader. His fight, his obsession, cost him everything."

"Well, there you go," said Webster, smiling.

"I got a letter from his daughter yesterday," she said. "His government has reinstated all the awards he won and given him a special posthumous medal for service to his country."

"He's still dead though, right?"

"Yes," she said. "But his daughter loves him again, and you can't beat that."

As she walked away, her phone rang.

It was Cerniga. He said he had wanted to be there for the fund-raiser--as a show of support--but he had had to work. He said he was glad she seemed to be doing OK and that the museum was back on its feet, and maybe she would like to join him for a drink sometime, "to catch up."

Deborah considered the throng of people milling around beneath the great greenish ship prow with the dragon-lady (now proved authentically sixteenth-century) bestowing her 386

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glazed smile on the sea of people. It had grown on her. She still thought it ghastly, but it had a kind of wit, like it was Richard's last wry joke at her expense, and for that, she rather liked it.

"Thanks," she said to Cerniga. "I appreciate the offer."

"And?"

"I have your number," she said.

"OK," he said, uncertain.

Deborah hung up and started surveying the crowd for Tonya. Despite the promising behavior of the caterers earlier, they had still left an entire table heaped with napkins and discarded plates. She needed to get these people out of here, politely but firmly, so she could get to work, and get to bed at a reasonable hour. Tomorrow was Saturday, and she had decided--as she had told her astonished mother on the telephone the night before--to attend Shabbat Balak for the first time since moving to Atlanta at Havurat Lev Shalem, a reconstructionist chavurah she had stumbled upon online. Whatever else it was, it would mark a new start, and that she found immensely appealing, better at least than the lipstick and perfume she had returned to the cabinet under her sink for the immediate future. She would say good-bye to Richard, to Marcus, perhaps even to her father and the nameless dead of her grandmother's family in the words of the "El Moleh Rachamim," whispered privately to herself:
O, God, full of compassion, Thou who dwellest on high, grant
perfect rest beneath the shelter of Thy divine presence among
the holy and pure who shine as the brightness of the firmament
to the soul of my beloved who has gone to his eternal home.
Mayest Thou, O God of Mercy, shelter him forever under
the wings of Thy presence, may his soul be bound up in the
bond of life eternal, and grant that the memories of my life
inspire me always to noble and consecrated living. Amen.
Did she believe it yet? Not really. But she might, in time, because a part of her felt that she might have to say the words 387

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to make them true, that if she
could
say them in the presence of others who wrestled with the same world, the same hard truths, the same balance and paradox, then the new beginning she looked for might yet be within her grasp. There was at least hope, and that, she thought, was worth so much more than she had imagined.

While all novels inevitably draw on fact,
The Mask of Atreus
does so more than most, and while the core story and its characters are fictional, I thought it worth directing the reader's attention to some of the material I consulted in constructing the story. The list of source materials that follows (some of which are referenced directly in the novel itself) may help the curious to discover for themselves some of the historical or otherwise factual bones which hold the tale together.

--A. J. Hartley

On Greece and Its Archaeological History

The Rough Guide to Greece
, Mark Ellingham, Marc Dubin, Natania Jansz, and John Fisher. Sixth edition. London: Rough Guides/Penguin, 1995.

Also, the 10th edition (2004) by Lance Chilton, Marc Dubin, Nick Edwards, Mark Ellingham, John Fisher, and Natania Jansz.

Memoirs of Heinrich Schliemann: A Documentary Portrait
Drawn from His Autobiographical Writings, Letters, and
Excavation Reports
, Leo Deuel. London: Harper and Row, 1977.

Schliemann's Discoveries of the Ancient World
, Dr. C. Schuchhardt, trans. Eugenie Sellers. New York: Avenel Books, 1978.
Lost and Found: The 9,000 Treasures of Troy
, Caroline Moorhead. New York: Viking, 1994. 390

S o u r c e M a t e r i a l

Minoan and Mycenaean Art
, Reynold Higgins. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

The Greek Myths
, Robert Graves. London: Penguin, 1964.
On WWII and Its Aftermath

"Of Flowers and Murder--Mass Grave Found in Magdeburg, Germany,"
Discover
, February 1999. Copyright (c) 2000 by Gale Group. www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_2_20/

ai_53631736.

On Nazi body-doubles: www.blackraiser.com/nredoubt/identity. htm.

World War II Tanks
, Eric Grove. London: Orbis, 1972.
Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion,
WWII's Forgotten Heroes
, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton. New York: Broadway, 2004.
The Architecture of Doom
, dir. Peter Cohen. First Run Features, 1989.

Miscellaneous

Garlikov, Rick. "Jewish Beliefs As Found in Jewish Prayers."

www.garlikov.com/sundayschool.html.

Southern Poverty Law Center. www.splcenter.org. CAIS (Center for Applied Isotope Studies). www.uga.edu/~cais/.