The Lost Sisterhood

As he stood there in front of me in all his tawny glory, it was impossible not to admire his physique, which was as chiseled and polished as a Roman statue and equally inviting to the touch. I told myself that for all his present physicality Nick was so removed from me in everything but time and space that indeed, he might as well have been made of marble. But it was no use; he still made my boreal blood run wild.

  “Thank you,” I said, looking away. “Should I pass on a message?”

  “Tell them you were worth every cent. Here—” He pushed a bankroll into my hand. “Half and half euro and dollars.”

  I weighed the roll in my hand. “Is it all here?”

  “No tip yet. So better be nice to me.”

  A splash later, I was left with the money and his phone, and a lingering sense of regret. Earlier in the day, when Rebecca and I had made up the bed in our small cabin, she had demanded to know what was wrong with me. Clearly, my anger with Mr. Telemakhos was only the tip of it. Too tired to fabricate anything more flattering than the truth, I had given her a quick summary of Nick’s confession from the night before. “So, obviously,” I had concluded, boxing my pillow into shape, “he’s a lying, thieving charlatan. Unfortunately, in her fathomless nonsense, your pathetic old friend has managed to become ever so slightly—”

  “I knew it!” Rebecca stood up straight, morning hair abristle. “He’s the fourth horseman. I knew it the moment I saw him. There he is, I said to myself, there is the man who is going to finally outdo the fencing shyster in the art of breaking Diana’s heart.”

  “Oh, please!” I protested, already regretting having confided in her.

  Rebecca nearly jerked the bedspread out of my grip. “Weren’t you the one who told me he was disgusting? That he smelled?”

  I grimaced at her, fearing Nick might hear us through the wall. “Yes, but the problem is that I like the way he smells. Even when he’s disgusting, which he isn’t.” I shook my head, trying to get rid of the blur. “It’s as if I’m trapped in some sort of balloon where the laws of physics don’t apply—”

  “Then allow me to puncture your balloon.” Rebecca came around the bed to slap me on the bottom with her hairbrush. “There! Feel better?”

  “Ow,” I said. “That hurt.”

  “Good! Now get a grip. This is what happens with people on boats: They forget who they are and what really matters.”

  AFTER OUR SWIM I called my parents, who, fortunately, were not at home. “Sorry about that,” I said to their answering machine, “but my phone just suddenly stopped working.” Then I sent a quick text to James, stating simply, “Amazon hunt continues. Next stop Troy. Aiming to be home by Monday.”

  “So,” said Nick, laying out his towel next to mine. “I can’t wait to pick up where we left off.”

  “And where was that exactly?” I glanced at Rebecca and saw her rolling her eyes before disappearing belowdecks to change.

  Nick sat back on his elbows, squinting against the afternoon sun. “How about your grandmother’s notebook?”

  “Oh.” Because of the playful overture, I had half-expected him to take me back to the shared sleeping bag by the Nahanni River and was mildly upset to have strayed down that path all by myself.

  “Last night,” he went on, his frown confirming we were thousands of miles apart, “when you told me about your grandmother, you said that she—most likely—had been trained as an archaeologist, and that the notebook must be the result of her efforts to decipher an ancient unknown language.”

  “That,” I said, berating myself for admiring his recumbent body and, more important, for having told him so much, “seems the only logical—”

  “Then how do you explain the modern words?” He turned abruptly toward me. “Tomato. Corn. Cocoa.” When I did not immediately react, he smiled. “Come on, Dr. Morgan, don’t disappoint me. Those plants all came from the Americas during the sixteenth century. So, explain to me why a Bronze Age civilization in North Africa needed words for them.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but the truth was, even if I knew the notebook fairly well by now, I had never paid much attention to these so-called modern words. My starting point had always been the foreign symbols, never the English glossary. In other words, the reason I had never stumbled over the word “tomato” before was that it had never appeared in the text I was actually translating. Nor, I was sure, had “corn” or “cocoa.”

  “So, you looked through the notebook?” I eventually said.

  Nick spun his phone absentmindedly on the varnished wood. “Of course.”

  “Why? To find traces of present-day Amazons?”

  He finally met my eyes, and beneath all the teasing I spied the profound darkness I remembered so well from Algeria. “There are also words for hotel, train, and envelope. I think that’s more than a trace, Diana.”

  Shocked at the fact that he had discovered so much in Granny’s notebook, I lay down on my elbow, mirroring his posture. “What are you saying?”

  “Do I really have to spell it out?”

  I shook my head, refusing to take him seriously. Here I was, a lifelong Amazon believer with every reason in the world to embrace the idea of modern-day Amazons … yet still frozen with indecision on the edge of that ultimate leap of faith. And here was Nick, coming out of nowhere and jumping right in. “Why do you even care?” I said. “Isn’t this all just a big illusion, staged to fool the enemy?”

  Nick rolled away from me, an arm over his face. “What matters is that they believe. Your laptop, by the way, is in Geneva.”

  “How on earth do you know that?”

  “There’s a group in Switzerland that’s been on our radar for some time. They’re a slick network of smugglers and dealers headquartered in the Geneva Freeport. They have fingers in all the major international markets.” He moved his arm to cast me a knowing glance. “I’m pretty sure they’re in bed with your friends, the Moselanes.”

  There was still some warmth in the sunshine, but I suddenly felt chilled. “Honestly, Nick—”

  He folded his hands over his chest and continued, “Did you ever ask your boyfriend how his ancestor got the title in the first place? Well, I’ll tell you how. It was a reward from the king for bringing back such a huge haul of treasures from the ancient world. Lord Moselane has a proud family history to live up to, and the Geneva network is his faithful supplier. These people are experts at removing dirty fingerprints and creating fake provenances. My favorite one is ‘Gift from an anonymous Swiss collector.’ “

  More than anything, it was Nick’s arrogant invective against James that caused a timely flare-up of my anger from the night before. Regardless of whether he was lying—which I highly suspected he was—I knew Nick’s jab at the Moselanes had no other purpose than to provoke me.

  “How do you know my laptop is in Switzerland?” I asked, studying his face. “And what about my cellphone? Let me guess, you are tracking my personal belongings with some sort of device?” When he didn’t contradict me, I shook my head. “And you have the nerve to call other people crooked!”

  Nick looked embarrassed, but not for long. “That’s the nature of the game,” he said, with a grim shrug. “I thought you’d been bought off by Grigor Reznik.” Glancing at my gobsmacked expression, he quickly added, “Why else would you pretend to board a plane to the UK but go to Crete instead? I couldn’t figure it out. But I know Reznik is obsessed with those jackal bracelets.” He nodded at my wrist. “He’d pay good money for that one, trust me. It’s not surprising that he wants to see what’s on your laptop. Your phone, however”—he shrugged noncommittally—”seems to be on a tour of Spain. Don’t ask me why.”

  I was so disoriented I could barely remember what we had touched on when we discussed the nefarious Istanbul art collector and his deceased son in the car from Algeria. “I never knew the bracelets were part of Reznik’s Amazon fixation,” I said. “And how do you know that he has been after my laptop? I thought we agreed that he was not behind the explosions in the
temple—that someone else had tried to implicate him—”

  Nick looked surprised. “I guess I forgot the most important part: Reznik is the gray eminence behind the Geneva network I just told you about. Whether or not they actually blew up the temple, his people have been following us, right from the beginning. I’ll bet my life on it.”

  “But why?” I was reluctant to espouse his slapdash theory without a few pros and cons. “Does Reznik really believe in the Amazon Hoard? If that’s the case, it would seem his treasure hunt began long before we joined in.”

  “He obviously knows something we don’t,” agreed Nick. “But what? Maybe the answer is in your Historia Amazonum … which would explain why he’s so interested in you. You wrote to him, didn’t you, asking to see it?”

  “But he never replied.”

  “Oh, he did.” Nick nodded at my bruised temple. “I bet you’ve been in his crosshairs ever since. He’s probably been tapping your cellphone. That’s how he knew you went to Crete.”

  “But then why would he have his people steal it?” I countered. “It doesn’t make sense. Now he can’t listen in on my conversations anymore.”

  Nick was quiet for a while. Then he said, squinting at the hazy horizon, “It seems we have two options. Either we split up, go home, and do everything we can to convince Reznik we’ve given up. Or”—he shot me a daring smile—”we continue together and find the treasure before he does.”

  WE REACHED THE DARDANELLES on Friday afternoon. The Dardanelles—or the Hellespont, as it was known by the Greeks—is the extremely narrow passage going from the Aegean into the Sea of Marmara. It is rivaled only by the narrowness of the Bosphorus Strait a couple hundred kilometers further east, where the Marmara Sea connects with the Black Sea, and is, naturally, a windy and potentially dangerous place to sail.

  After the freedom of the open sea, it was daunting to head into the perilous strait, which soon closed in on us from both sides, until the waterway was hardly wider than a large river. For the last hour or so, Mr. Telemakhos had peppered our progress along the coast with comments such as, “Tenedos! This is where the Greeks supposedly hid the fleet, while they waited for the Trojans to take the bait,” and “See the coastline over there? That used to be an open bay, just like Homer described it.”

  By the time we finally moored in busy Çanakkale—the city closest to the ancient ruins of Troy—Rebecca was fast asleep on a mattress on the deck, oblivious to the portside pandemonium. During our time at sea, she had begun napping at the oddest hours, and I suspected that despite her seemingly high spirits she found the whole situation depressing. Here she was, expelled from her beloved Crete, traveling with a friend whose normally sympathetic ear was clogged with competing concerns; even Mr. Telemakhos was too busy savoring his unexpected windfall of young people to spend much time on Rebecca’s predicament.

  As for Nick, he had so far been rudely unmoved by her efforts to enlighten our cruise with insightful lectures, and the hoped-for job offer from the Aqrab Foundation remained conspicuously absent. His only proposal had been for me: Treasure or no, Nick was prepared to pay me another ten thousand dollars to continue on the Amazon trail with him.

  I had told him I would think about it. It wasn’t that I meant to punish him for the uncertainty he had so readily inflicted on me, but rather that I myself was unsure what my next step should be. Despite the frustrations of our detention on the Penelope, and despite Nick’s deceitful behavior, it was hard to imagine parting from him; he had come to represent everything Granny had divined my life would hold—adventure, danger, and discovery.

  In contrast, the reality awaiting me at home had all but lost its luster. After almost two weeks away, I struggled to remember what was so attractive about an Oxford career—why it was so imperative that I hurry back. The more familiar I became with the foreign world around me, the more old Avalon, with its cracked, mossy walls and Gothic rigor, receded into the mists….

  “Aha!” Mr. Telemakhos turned his back on the bustling harbor and nodded at the coastline across the strait, less than a mile away. “Where are we now?”

  “Turkey?” suggested Nick.

  “And over there?”

  “Also Turkey.”

  “Yes-yes-yes.” Mr. Telemakhos looked a little irritated. “But in the big, overall scheme of things?”

  “This is the famous Hellespont,” I explained to Nick, my teeth chattering in the brisk November wind that was funneled down the Sea of Marmara all the way—I imagined—from the Russian steppes. “The juncture of two continents. Here, Europe kisses the Orient.”

  Nick looked from one coast to the other, hands in his pockets. “More of an air kiss, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Take a leap of the imagination,” I countered. “And sink yourself into the romance. Lord Byron did. Swam across, like so many others.”

  “Hero and Leander!” exclaimed Mr. Telemakhos, with as much headshaking tristesse as had they been his relatives. “She was a priestess of Aphrodite, who lived in a tower over there. Fell in love with Leander, who, unfortunately, lived over here. So, back and forth he swam, until … well, he drowned.” Mr. Telemakhos shrugged, already thinking of something else. “Who is going to wake her up?”

  “Why is it always,” muttered Nick, as Mr. Telemakhos began nervously circling Rebecca’s curled shape, “the man who must do the swimming?”

  “Apparently,” I said, inadvertently quoting my mother from one of her many failed attempts at talking my father into a seaside weekend, “it does wonders for the circulation.”

  “Don’t worry, North Sea woman”—Nick took my frigid hands and rubbed them with his own—”there is nothing wrong with my circulation.”

  I WAS STILL MILDLY flustered by this unexpected intimacy when we were picked up by Dr. Özlem, an old friend of Mr. Telemakhos and curator of a nearby museum. Although they greeted each other with similar joyous abandon, I saw right away that Dr. Özlem brought a soothing touch of yin to the relentless yang of our effusive captain.

  Slight of build, and weighed down—I guessed—by a lifelong record of thankless labors, Dr. Özlem welcomed us all with hunched handshakes and wary eyes. We had barely piled into his dusty old Volkswagen minibus before he looked at us in the rearview mirror and sighed with slack-faced despondency. “You want to see the bracelets?” he said, in a tone that suggested we were on our way to a family funeral. “Okay, I will show you.”

  The Amazon bracelets were on display in a glass case on the main floor of the museum run by Dr. Özlem—a humble set of barracks dedicated to archaeological finds in the Çanakkale region. “There,” he said, nodding dismissively at the two coiling bronze jackals, which, at first glance, appeared to be perfectly identical to my own. “Nice work, no?”

  Rebecca was the first to break the baffled silence. “Are you saying these are fakes?” she asked. “Reproductions?”

  Dr. Özlem stuck out his chin. “I’m afraid so.”

  “But—” I had a hard time getting my head around the fact that two Amazon bracelet replicas were sitting in a random glass cabinet in Turkey. “How?”

  “They were found here at Troy over a hundred years ago,” explained Dr. Özlem, “but in those days, archaeology was primitive, and we don’t know what layer they were in. One was found in a tomb near the ancient coastline; the other was buried in the ruins of the royal palace.” He looked down at the tile floor, which clearly hadn’t been cleaned for weeks. “The past is layered beneath us, as you know, with the most recent times on top and the distant past at the bottom. Now, when our dear Heinrich Schliemann began looking for Homer’s Troy in the late nineteenth century, he was sure it must be near the bottom, and he did not care too much about the layers he dug through to get there. So you see”—Dr. Özlem straightened to take a deep, cathartic breath of air, then exhaled very slowly, possibly at the recommendation of his doctor—”things have been a bit of a muddle here ever since.”

  Looking discreetly around, I saw what he meant.
The layout of the room made no sense to me; in one cabinet sat items from several different time periods, and a row of pedestals displayed busts that had almost no features left, and —understandably—did not even have tags of identification.

  “I know,” sighed Dr. Özlem, following my gaze. “But only a few of our cabinets have locks on them, so we have to put safety above chronology.”

  “We generally refer to Troy as having nine layers,” interjected Rebecca, mostly to Nick. “Schliemann was convinced the Trojan War took place in the very early, deep layer called Troy 2, but nowadays there is a tendency to regard the much later Troy 7a as the Troy. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, quite a bit of Troy 7a ended up in Schliemann’s junk pile. He did find gold, though”—she made a grimace of reluctant appreciation—”and that did a lot to encourage funding for further excavations.”

  “So,” said Nick, “layer 7a was Homer’s Troy?”

  Rebecca’s eyes lit up. “Don’t get me started.”

  “Yes,” I urged. “Get her started. Please.”

  “The thing is”—Rebecca glanced at Dr. Özlem with timid deference—”we’ve all gravitated to 7a because it seems to be the least implausible theory. But I promise you, no one would put their head on the block over it. Would they?” Seeing Dr. Özlem’s little nod and smile, she went on, with more conviction, “If we are looking for a Troy that was truly spectacular, with tall walls worthy of Homer’s descriptions, then Troy 6 absolutely dwarfs the competition. But the problem is that everyone has been looking for a Troy that was destroyed by war … also in the interest of remaining true to Homer. And that seems to have been the case with layer 7a. However, in my humble opinion, the actual settlement of Troy 7a was only a sad remnant of the spectacular city that once was—hardly worthy of a ten-year siege. Furthermore, Troy 7a was probably destroyed around 1190 B.C.E., which, in many people’s opinion, is far too late. How could the Greeks sail off to war with a thousand ships when they themselves were in the process of being eradicated? It doesn’t make sense. In fact, the picture that emerges is that those were the final days of civilization as they knew it; illiterate brutes were sweeping across the Mediterranean coasts in waves of destruction, and the whole region was thrown into a dark age that lasted for several hundred years until the Greeks basically reinvented the alphabet around 800 B.C.E.”