Hair sprouting as vigorously from his open shirt as it must once have done from his head, Mr. Telemakhos insisted on ordering for us, claiming he knew precisely what we needed. “A young man like you,” he said, patting Nick on the shoulder with nostalgic camaraderie, “must eat meat. Remember that. Lots of meat. Otherwise”—he leaned closer to impart his wisdom behind a folded-up newspaper—”you won’t have the energy to keep the ladies happy. Eh?” He chuckled at their secret understanding, then added, more gravely, “That’s what happened to Menelaos. He didn’t eat his meat, and couldn’t hold on to his woman.” Mr. Telemakhos sighed and shook his head, reaching out for his ouzo glass. “It happens to the best of us.”
“His wife was the beautiful Helen,” interjected Rebecca, mostly to Nick, “who ran away with the carnivorous Paris and started the Trojan War.” She smiled, anxious to maintain the merry tone. Mr. Telemakhos was recently divorced, she had told us earlier, and desperately needed some cheering up.
“A toast to Menelaos”—our host held out his glass—”who didn’t realize what he had until she was gone. Helen, that two-timing bitch.”
“To the vegetarian,” said Nick, raising his own glass, “who launched a thousand ships.”
I glanced at him, amazed at his cool. Here he was, after just jamming a knife into my back, looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world. If the beautiful Helen had been a two-timing bitch, what was the number on Nick?
“And this,” Rebecca went on, passing him a bowl of caper berries, “as you have already guessed, is where Menelaos launched them from. Big brother Agamemnon’s pad—the bedrock of Greek power in the Heroic Age.”
“Heroic! Pffff.” Mr. Telemakhos batted away the word as if it were an annoying fly. “Man will be man; kill first and explain later. That is why we have this big brain, you see.” He clutched his head as if he meant to pull it right off. “It is so we can sit around and tell nice stories afterward. Homer was good at that.”
“Apparently,” interjected Rebecca, who had clearly heard the rant before, “the beautiful Helen never existed. She was a plot device, meant to shine a romantic light on the destruction of Troy.”
“Sorry to slow things down,” said Nick, leaning back on the chair as far as humanly possible, “but where exactly was Troy?”
I groaned inwardly. Was this more of his act? Rebecca, however, was only too happy to plunge into one of the greatest archaeological questions of all times. “Even to this day,” she told Nick, “after decades of excavations at Hisarlik, some of my colleagues are still not convinced we have the answer.”
“Hisarlik is in Turkey,” I added, “on the northwest coast of Anatolia, right where the Aegean Sea meets the Sea of Marmara.” I pointed over my shoulder. “Basically over there. Four days by boat in Homer’s day.”
“And that was precisely the problem.” Rebecca leaned forward to reclaim her narrative. “Location, location, location. Troy was prime real estate for anyone who wanted to dominate the Aegean Sea.”
“The Trojan War was never personal,” Mr. Telemakhos chimed in, looking as concerned as if he were personally to blame for what had happened back then. “We, the Greeks, were building a commercial empire, and Troy was in the way.” He stabbed a few slices of sausage and transferred them to his plate. “Call it what you want, but don’t call us heroes.”
After dinner we took a moonlit stroll through the Mycenaean ruins, marveling at the masonry on this seemingly remote hillside. The contrast between these massive walls and the completely unfortified Knossos palace in Crete was striking. It was hard to believe the two civilizations had been so close both in time and space.
“The Greeks took control of Crete sometime around 1450 B.C.E.,” said Rebecca. “Traditionally, the Knossos palace was thought to have been devastated by fire only half a century later, but there has been intense debate over the dating of this fire, and some people”—her raised eyebrows suggested she was one of those people—”are ready to swear it actually didn’t happen until around 1200 B.C.E. Take for example the Pylos tablets—”
“Where is all this going?” muttered Nick, falling behind the babbling academics on their walk to have a quiet word with me.
“Not entirely sure,” I said, although I knew only too well what Rebecca was doing. Despite all my warnings about foul play and ticking bombs, she was trying to impress Nick with her expertise, hoping it would result in a job offer. “Apparently, Mr. Telemakhos has a surprise for us.”
And so did you, I thought to myself, watching Nick as he checked a new text message. Even though he was wearing something as normal as jeans and a T-shirt, I knew the normality didn’t run deep. He was full of nasty surprises.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” said Nick, interrupting my bitter thoughts. “What are you going to do next time someone attacks you? Hope they run away again, like the guy in the labyrinth?”
The question was meant to provoke me, and it did. “I’ll be just fine, thank you very much,” I said. “I know how to take care of myself.”
“Come here.” He waved me closer. “I want to show you something.”
Thinking he was referring to something on his phone, I did as he told me. But as soon as I approached, he seized my arms in a powerful grip and spun me around so that my back was pressed against his front.
“Got you,” he said, right into my ear. “Now what are you going to do?”
I was too shocked to even attempt to free myself. “Count to three—”
“And then what? You can’t talk your way out of everything.”
“One!” I said, with forced patience. It infuriated me that Nick felt at liberty to play games with me like this, and I was determined not to stoop to his level. “Two—”
“You’re banking on the fact that I’m a nice guy. What if I wasn’t?”
“Three.” I waited calmly for him to release me, and just when I started fearing he wouldn’t, he did.
“Diana,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re lucky to be alive. What about next time? How can you not want to learn how to defend yourself or the people you love? I can show you some easy tricks—”
“I bet you can.” I glared at him as he stood there framed by moonlit rubble, looking as if he really meant it—as if my safety was his number one priority. “But I don’t need your cheap tricks. I happen to be on the college fencing team.” Realizing how lame it sounded, I added, with more dignity, “I prefer chivalry and proper etiquette over hooligan methods.”
Nick nodded, clearly not unimpressed. “Good. That’s great. But where”—he opened his arms and pretended to look around—”is your sword?”
Grinding unspoken retorts between my teeth, I turned away and continued up the path in search of the others. Not once did I stop to check whether Nick was tagging along; I needed to put space between us in so many ways.
Rebecca and Mr. Telemakhos were waiting at the entrance to the ancient citadel. They stood framed by gigantic boulders and a colossal monolith lintel, which I could barely make out in the poor light but recognized from illustrations in books: This was the famous Lion Gate with a relief of two fierce animals sitting face-to-face.
“Built by giants,” said Mr. Telemakhos, proudly patting the imposing stone. “The Mycenaeans were mountain bears, you see. Big, hairy men who liked to sit around a roaring fire and talk about war.” He scratched his chest and looked around. “They built an empire through force, but were raided by pirates in the end. How is that for poetic justice?”
“Those who live by the sword—” I said.
“Get shot by those who don’t,” muttered Nick, right behind me.
“Let us not forget their legacy of stories,” Rebecca pointed out as we continued up the steep path, “which inspired the Greek tragedies and Western literature ever after. Agamemnon, Cassandra … returning from Troy to a dinner with murder. Orestes, who killed his own mother. And Electra—”
Her list continued all the way to the summit. Not until we were finally
standing on the foundation of the old royal residence, looking out over the limestone hills toward the distant lights of Argos and the black ocean beyond, did she stop to catch her breath.
“All right, Diana Morgan,” said Mr. Telemakhos, who, despite his size, did not seem the least bit fatigued by the steep climb. “Tell us why we are here.”
The request would have made me smile, had I not been too preoccupied with conflicting thoughts. I had come to like Nick, I realized, far more than I should, and no matter what I did to change that, it felt as if I were swimming against a massive current that was bound, eventually, to pull me under. Whatever it was he was really after, and whoever was helping him, it was all on a scale that dwarfed my own contribution. I was obviously not one of the experts he had mentioned in his phone conversation, for—as I had told him in the car when we first talked about it—I had never for a minute believed the Amazon Hoard was real, nor did I have a clue as to where such a treasure—if it did, in fact, exist—might be found.
Realizing everyone was waiting for my answer, I said, “Well, there are many unknowns—”
Mr. Telemakhos snorted like a mule. “Suit yourself! Be boring. But if you ask me, there is a playground between known and unknown. And in that playground, everyone has a name. The name of your three-syllable priestess-queen, for example”—he nodded at Rebecca, who had blurted it all out over the phone to him before we left Crete—” is not hard to guess. And you, Diana Morgan”—he shook an accusatory finger in my direction—”should have figured it out long ago. Any old crosswords hound could do it. Amazon queen from North Africa. What’s her name?”
I winced before the finger. For all my knowledge of Greek myths and Amazon lore, it had never even occurred to me that the name might be one I already knew. It was such a shock to tumble down this path of inquiry and ram my head against the answer that I almost couldn’t get it out. “Myrina.”
“Bravo!” Mr. Telemakhos clapped his hands. “See, you did know.”
“Wait a minute—” I stepped forward, head spinning, to rein in his enthusiasm before it galloped away with us all. “How do you know the name? How can you be so sure?”
Mr. Telemakhos leaned back on his heels, trying to look down at me. “I trust the myths. They tell me the Amazons were real; they came from North Africa, and their queen was called Myrina. I believe it all. Don’t you?”
THAT NIGHT, AFTER TAKING us back to his house, Mr. Telemakhos launched into the most extraordinary fairy tale about the original North African Amazons. Aided by copious glasses of Retsina, he wove a colorful web of adventure, taking us from Lake Tritonis to Mycenae to the Battle of Troy … spun from a bottomless grab bag of obscure, literary snippets and a local oral tradition no one had ever bothered to write down.
We were sitting in his living room, which had no furniture except a dining table made up of a large beat-up blackboard and five mismatched chairs, all of which bore witness to better days. The walls around us were lined with sliding stacks of journals and frayed volumes; it looked as if someone had just moved in … or, rather, out.
“She even took the bookcases, can you believe it?” said Mr. Telemakhos when he first showed us around. “Now I can’t find anything.” He cast Nick a glance of apology. “That is why I get confused about things.”
Throughout the rest of the evening, our host kept interrupting himself midthought, to stare at Nick and say, “Egypt?” or “Lebanon?” to which Nick would simply shake his head. Not until Rebecca looked at him pleadingly—to spare us more interruptions—did he finally surrender and say, “Iran.”
Mr. Telemakhos slammed both palms into the blackboard table, causing a bowl of olives to tip over. “But I already said that! I said ‘Persia’!”
Nick folded his arms. “That is the name you gave us. Our name is Iran.”
“Ha!” said Mr. Telemakhos. “Mystery solved. I knew it. You have a Persian nose, and I said so. But tell me”—he leaned forward to peer at Nick with courtroom intensity—”what is a man from Iran doing with a Christian name and a Brazilian passport?”
I cringed. It had been naïve of me to tell Rebecca about the passport—which I had spied on the plane from Djerba—and not think it would somehow come back and slap me.
“It saves time,” said Nick, unfazed by Mr. Telemakhos’s knowledge. “Brazilians don’t get terrorized by airport security. Iranians do.”
“But have you ever actually lived in Brazil?” Rebecca wanted to know.
“Sure, I have. My mother is from Rio. We lived there when I was a boy. My father was a street musician.” Nick met my eyes across the table, and for the first time since I had met him I felt he was telling the truth. “The best. Always knew how to read the crowd. And I was the little monkey passing his hat around.” He looked at us all in turn, undaunted by our somber silence. “So now you know why I think all talk of borders and colors and nationalities is absurd. People try to pin you down on a map and paint you a certain color to make everything simple. But the world is far from simple, and intelligent human beings don’t like to be pinned down and painted by some hand in the sky, whether it belongs to a god, a priest, or a politician.”
“So you’re not … religious?” asked Rebecca, still a little shell-shocked.
Nick thought about it for a moment, then said, “To me, there is only one God. An unnamed presence we’ll never understand. Everything else is human politics. It was human beings who wrote the holy books, and human beings who made all the rules and rituals. In other words, it is human beings who turn life into hell. So yes”—he picked up his wineglass—”I try to live by the spirit of God, but not by the rules, because rules are made by man, and man is nothing but a fatally conceited flea on the mammoth of Creation.”
Rebecca didn’t even try to respond. While she might have been running away from it all her life, she was still, deep down, the vicar’s daughter. Well, I thought to myself, at least now she might be a little less eager to ingratiate herself with the Aqrab Foundation and a little more receptive when I told her about Nick’s wicked dealings.
By the time Mr. Telemakhos finally put the exhausted butt of chalk back in his shirt pocket and brushed off his fingertips, the blackboard dinner table was populated by a myriad of matchstick women and multilingual scribbles, negotiating their way around bread crumbs and small puddles of olive oil.
“There you have it,” he concluded. “Diodorus Siculus was right when he said the Amazons came from North Africa and were led by a queen named Myrina. It was only later they moved to the Black Sea and became the warlike wenches we read about in books.”
“Diodorus Siculus was an ancient Greek historian,” I explained to Nick, “who worked from many sources that are now lost to us. He probably spent most of his time at the library in Alexandria … you know, the famous library that was later destroyed. I’ve seen grown men cry over the literary and historical treasures that would have been found there.”
Nick looked a little amused at my pathos. “Let’s hope a lot of Alexandrians were overdue with their library books that week.”
“Now you, my half-Persian friend.” Mr. Telemakhos leaned toward Nick, staring him in the eye. “Tell us what you are thinking. I can see you are thinking something. Persians always are. Even the half ones. And this Greek would like to know what it is.”
Nick smiled, his arms still crossed. “I am thinking you have something up your sleeve. Greeks always do.”
“Ha!” Mr. Telemakhos rose from the chair. “Persians are smart. That’s the problem.” He motioned for us to follow him. “I am going to show you a big secret. You can’t tell this to anyone, do you understand?”
Nick was the first to get up and follow our host down a set of stone steps into the moldy darkness beneath the house. Rebecca and I both hesitated before following. “Why does everything have to be underground?” I muttered to her as we picked our way down the treacherous staircase. “I have spent far too much time in the subconscious lately.”
Even though
I made light of it, the dank stillness of Mr. Telemakhos’s secret space was bringing on a visceral déjà vu not only of my recent fright in Crete, but also of the temple in Algeria. Would I ever, I wondered, be able to descend into a basement again without a shiver?
“Many years ago,” boomed Mr. Telemakhos from somewhere in the darkness, “when I was a little boy playing in these hills, I found something very special.” He turned on a lonely ceiling bulb to reveal that we were in the midst of a small command center with walls and tables completely covered in paper scraps and newspaper clippings. I had never seen anything like it … at least not since my father had gone through Granny’s attic with a bucket, ripping her archive of imagined Amazon activity from the ceiling.
Walking over to an old safe in the corner, Mr. Telemakhos started dialing a code. “I didn’t tell anybody about it at the time because then a greasy little bureaucrat would come out in a van and take it all back to Athens. That is where you have to go to see the artifacts from Mycenae now; they are all in the National Archaeological Museum. Or”—he grimaced with disgust—”at the Louvre in Paris, of course.”
Opening the safe, Mr. Telemakhos riffled around for a bit before finally taking out a small transparent plastic bag. “Come and look!” he said, waving us closer. “It doesn’t bite.”
In the bag lay a jackal bracelet.
“There.” He handed me the bag, beaming with the sensation of it all. “I think you will find it matches the one on your arm.”
I felt a pinch of surprise at his sudden interest in Granny’s bracelet. It had been right in front of him all day, but even as he had regaled us with tales of the Amazons, he had made no mention of it—had barely even appeared to notice it.
“I found this little piece of Amazon jewelry on the hill next to the palace ruins,” Mr. Telemakhos went on. “Deep inside a crater that was probably carved out by lightning. I am guessing people went there to make offerings to the gods of the sky.”