The Lost Temple (24 page)

Grant stopped his fist mid-swing and stepped back. The man in front of him was doubled over in pain, but there was no mistaking the tight crew-cut, the broad shoulders and the navy blazer. Further back, Muir was sitting on the end of the bed with a cigarette in his hand.

“Where the fuck have you been?”

A stifling silence gripped the library. It was partially the weather, which after a week of April breezes had turned hot and sultry; partially the collective effect of more readers in the room. The Easter holiday was over, and the motley company of students, artists and academics who made up the British School’s clientele had begun to drift back. They perched on desks around the room, earnestly poring over books that looked almost as ancient as the civilizations they told of. Sitting by the window with a newspaper, Grant felt as out of place as he ever had, oppressed by the worthy purpose around him. That and Muir’s reaction the previous night.

“And that was all? He told you to go and you just went? Like a fucking puppy?”

Grant barely bothered to argue. “It was his home ground—and he had a gorilla next to him in case I tried something.”

“If you’d told us where you were going—instead of sloping off with the girl like some salesman in Bognor—we could have followed you. We’d know a damn sight more if you had.”

“There was no time. Molho arranged it that way. If you’d tried to follow us he’d probably just have dumped us.” He remembered the hole in the car seat. “Or worse.”

Muir jabbed his cigarette dangerously close to Grant’s
face. “Right now, this little Yid is our only link to the rest of the tablet. Next time he calls, don’t you dare call your fucking girlfriend. You call me. Otherwise I’ll have you off this caper and back in a cell in some shitty corner of the Empire faster than fuck. Understand?”

Grant put down his paper and went over to Marina. Her pile of books had grown, though she still had some way to go before it matched Reed’s, opposite. He peered over her shoulder. “What are you working on?”

She leaned back so he could see—the curious book with its pasted-in patches of Greek. At the bottom, in a neat line of faded cursive script, someone had written what looked like a string of nonsense. “Paus.III:19:11; Strab.VII:3:19; Lyc.
Alex
:188; Arr.
Per
:21.”

“Is that a crossword clue?”

Marina sighed. “They’re references—places in the ancient texts where the White Island is mentioned. Pausanias wrote a guide to Greece, a sort of ancient Baedeker. Strabo was a first-century geographer. Lycophron wrote an almost indecipherable poem about the Trojan war and Arrian was a Roman functionary who wrote a description of the Black Sea to amuse the Emperor Hadrian.”

“Do they say anything useful?”

“They all say it’s somewhere in the Black Sea.” She put down her pen. “Apart from that, they can’t agree on anything. Pausanias and Lycophron say it’s by the mouth of the Danube; Arrian only says it’s somewhere in the open sea and Strabo puts it about five hundred stadia from the mouth of the Dniester.”

“How far’s that in real money?”

“About a hundred kilometers—but he doesn’t say in which direction.” She shuffled through her papers. “I also found a reference in Pliny—he claims the White Island is actually at the mouth of the Dnieper. You can’t really rely on the ancient geographers for measurements, but both the Danube and the Dnieper estuaries are actually approximately one hundred kilometers from the Dniester.”

Grant scratched his head. “So either it’s by the Danube, or the Dnieper, or it’s nowhere near either of them.” He glanced across the table to Reed, lost in a whirl of symbols and photostats. “I thought he said this island was just a legend—some sort of mythic paradise for heroes.”

“I think he was wrong. In all the references I’ve found, the only hero they ever mention is Achilles—or sometimes Patroclus, who was Achilles’ companion. The White Island wasn’t a
generic
paradise. It seems to have been specifically, uniquely, associated with Achilles.”

“You think that makes it more likely to be true?”

“It must have come from somewhere. There’s no comparable legend for any of the other heroes: there must be a reason why this particular story grows up around Achilles.”

She pulled one of the books toward her. “According to Arrian, there’s a temple to Achilles on this island. Pliny goes further and says that his actual tomb is there.” Her eyes sparkled, bright as life in the dusty library. “What if it was—is—a real place? The lost temple of Achilles and his tomb inside. No one’s ever found it.”

“Because no one can agree where it is. Besides, even if it’s all true, what’s to say that this magic shield will be there?”

“I think it’s where Odysseus brought it, as an offering to the dead hero on his way back to Ithaca. So much of his story takes place in the Black Sea, it makes no sense unless he was there for a reason.”

“Maybe he was blown there by accident.”

“There’s no wind that could carry a ship all the way from Troy to the Black Sea. It was famously difficult even to sail up the Dardanelles. And once Odysseus gets to the Black Sea, he keeps on going east. Look.” She grabbed another piece of paper, a list of points joined by flowing arrows. “These are the episodes whose imagery or associations suggest they take place in the Black Sea. They almost all happen in sequence, suggesting some sort of geographical coherence. And the centrepiece—the whole point of his journey there—is his visit to the underworld.”

Across the Oceanus’ stream,

A desolate shore where sirens scream

And heroes dream

Beach your ship at Persephone’s bower,

Where poplars soar, where willows flower

And die that hour,

Then hasten down

To the mouldering House of Death.

“Odysseus goes there. In a chasm where two rivers meet he makes a sacrifice and he opens the door to Hades.” She held the book so Grant could see. On the facing page, a woodcut illustrated the event with dark, heavy lines. A ship was drawn up on a beach fringed by poplars, so straight and high they looked more like the bars of a cage. In the middle of the page two white torrents cascaded down the flanks of a dark mountain and at the point where they met a tiny figure stood dwarfed beneath the stark crags. A haltered white ram waited on his left, a black ewe on his right, and the cliff in front of him yawned open.

Despite the warm room, Grant shivered. “You’re saying Odysseus went down to hell?”

“He summoned spirits from the dead. To the ancient Greeks, Hades wasn’t a place you physically went to. Travelling there was a spiritual process, a journey of the soul. They believed there were certain sacred places where the barriers between the worlds thinned—that if you went there and performed the correct rituals, you could commune with the dead. In the poem, when Odysseus comes to the far side of the Oceanus, he digs a shallow trench. He pours wine and milk and honey round it, then fills it with the blood of the sheep he’s sacrificed. And the ghosts come. Tiresias the prophet; Agamemnon, killed by his wife Clytemnestra; Ariadne and King Minos.” She paused significantly. “And Achilles.”

Grant allowed himself to look impressed. “You think that Achilles’ temple—his tomb—was the place where Odysseus went to the underworld?”

“Or perhaps that he went to the tomb, on the White Island, to offer the shield to the dead Achilles, and later the story was misremembered as a visit to the underworld.”

“So all we have to do is find it.” Grant looked at the two lambs in the picture, staring ahead at the monstrous cliff and awaiting their fate. “Do we have to sacrifice sheep to get there?”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to sacrifice anything else.”

Grant left Marina and the professor to their books, and wandered out for a cigarette. Unsettling pictures filled his mind: lowering cliffs, pools of blood, ghosts like wraiths of cloud and carrion birds calling from the rocks. The images were so strong that he forgot to look where he was going. He walked through the library door and straight into a man coming the other way, almost knocking him down. A sheaf of papers flew into the air, blowing around the corridor like snow.

“Sorry.” Grant reached down to help the man up. The gesture was ignored. With an irritated harrumph, he got to his feet and brushed himself off. He was a squat, ugly man, with a square head and thin fair hair cut very short. His skin was red and grainy, as if a nasty rash had consumed his face, and his close-set eyes burned with anger.

“
Pass auf!
” He took a step back. The piggy eyes widened—as much as they could—then narrowed quickly. “Next time, you must be more careful.”

His English was almost impenetrably accented, but even so, Grant could sense something evasive in it. He looked closer at the man. Did he know him? Not that he could remember. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that in that moment of anger there had been a flash of recognition.

The man picked up his papers and pushed past Grant into the library. Looking back through the glass pane in the door, Grant saw him sit down at the central table, two seats along from Reed.

“Probably nothing,” he muttered, trying to convince himself. He’d been promising himself a cigarette for the
last half-hour. And Marina was there to keep an eye on things.

He smiled at the girl on the front desk as he went out. The air around him felt almost as hot as the smoke in his lungs, but it was good to be free of the stuffiness inside the library. He wondered how men like Reed could spend their lives locked in those places. To him they were too much like mausoleums, necropolises of dead pages in dead languages.

The thrum of an idle engine disturbed the mid-morning air. Outside the gate, across the road, a green Citroën had drawn up on the pavement. One man sat in the front seat reading a newspaper; another lounged against the rear door and picked his teeth.

“Got a light?”

Grant spun around. Marina was standing in the shade of a plane tree, looking slightly surprised by how quickly he’d turned. She held out a cigarette expectantly.

“Who’s watching Reed?”

“He’s in the library.” She gave a wary smile. “I wanted to talk to you. Last night . . .”

“Not now.” Grant almost knocked her into the flower bed in his rush. He burst in through the front door, past the receptionist and raced down the corridor. A flock of bewildered, bespectacled faces turned up in surprise from their desks and carrels as he all but kicked down the library door.

Reed was still there, exactly where he had left him, peering up at Grant from behind a stack of books. At least he looked more surprised than irritated.

“Mr. Grant.” The girl from reception must have run to catch up with him. Her face was flushed, her hair tumbling out of its bun. She looked at him with a mixture of astonishment and outrage. At last, her eye settled on the cigarette still jammed in his mouth. “You can’t smoke in the library.”

Grant spat out the cigarette and ground it into the wooden floor with his heel. Even he was struggling to hide his embarrassment. He let the door swing shut and walked, shamefaced, to Reed. One by one, the other students and academics turned back to their work.

“Was there a purpose to that little drama?” Reed inquired as Grant slid into the chair beside him. He looked around guiltily, as if worried to be associated with the blundering barbarian who had disturbed the library’s sanctity.

“I thought . . .” The chair two places down, where the German had sat, was empty now. But what of it? This wasn’t the war, where any foreign accent was automatically suspect and every German was an enemy. “I thought you might be in trouble,” Grant concluded lamely.

“Only troubled by interruptions.”

“What are you doing?” Marina had joined them. Behind Reed’s back, she shot Grant an accusatory look.

“There was a man.” Grant lowered his voice as he drew reproachful glares from the surrounding academics. “He looked suspicious.” There was a touch of defiance in his voice. He realized how feeble it sounded, but his instinct had been right so often that he wouldn’t apologize.

“Well, he didn’t try to slit my throat.” Reed’s patience was evidently becoming strained, eager to get back to the maze of scribbles and squiggles on his desk. “And he didn’t steal”—he looked down, the reflexive glance of a man checking his watch—“my bag . . .”

Grant followed his gaze down. Four wooden chair legs, two flannelled trouser legs, a pair of scuffed Oxfords—but no bag.

“My bag,” Reed repeated. He sounded dazed. “It’s gone.”

“Was there anything important in it?”

“Important? The tablet was in there.”

Grant barged through the doors and rushed down the corridor. He skidded to a halt by the receptionist’s desk. “A German—fair hair, brown suit—did he come this way?”

His furious urgency squashed any thought of her scolding him. She simply nodded and pointed to the door. Her arm was still raised when Grant ran through it, down the steps and between the trees toward the gate. The green Citroën was still there: the back door slammed shut with a flash and the car leaped forward.

Grant ran into the street, just in time to suck up a mouthful of exhaust fumes and dust. He pulled out the Webley and emptied it after the fleeing Citroën. The rear windscreen shattered; pimples appeared in the green bodywork. The car slewed round; the driver struggled to control it but he had no chance. The car crested the pavement and slammed head-on into the side of a house. Shards of paint and plaster rained down over the smoking hood. The man in the passenger seat rattled his door frantically, but the impact had buckled it and it wouldn’t open.

Smoke and steam from the wrecked engine had begun to cloud the picture; through the shreds, Grant saw the rear door open and the thief scramble out. Reed’s leather satchel was hooked over his shoulder. He shouted something to the driver, then began running away down the street.