The Orpheus Descent (27 page)

But the spirit of Pheidippides seemed to possess Adam as he piloted the car along the empty highway, the digital speedometer rock-steady on
180
km/h. Jonah wondered if the traffic police were on strike too. He watched the roadsigns fly by, the strange names in a strange alphabet. The same letters – the same language – as someone had pressed into a gold tablet
2
,
500
years ago.

Adam didn’t do small-talk. Jonah piled right in.

‘Lily came here last week to see you.’

Adam nodded, keeping his eyes fixed down the tunnel of streetlights.

‘She wanted to talk to you about the gold Orphic tablet they dug up.’

‘Did she tell you about that?’

‘I found out about it.’

Adam didn’t ask how – or mention the non-disclosure agreement. It had failed its purpose; it didn’t exist any more.

‘After she came here, you went back together and fired Sandi McConn, the conservator. Why?’

‘That’s not relevant.’

The speedometer slipped to
179
, then jumped back to
180
.

‘I think it is. You wanted to do something with the tablet. Sandi McConn didn’t approve, and I don’t think Lily did either. That was Tuesday. By Friday, they’d both left the dig.’

‘That’s an explanatory hypothesis.’ Adam swerved the car past an ancient BMW dawdling up the hard shoulder. ‘You know the difficulty with hypotheses? You can never prove one. You can stack up all the evidence in the world to support it, but all it takes is one piece of negative evidence and the whole thing’s refuted.’

‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘The point being,’ Adam continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘if the foundation wanted to hide the tablet – and assuming Lily didn’t, which is also untrue – why did she steal it?’

‘She didn’t.’

Did she?
A tired voice in Jonah’s brain told him he couldn’t keep denying everything forever. But if he accepted what they were telling him, he was letting go of everything he’d ever believed about her. And everything he’d believed about himself.

Is it her you won’t let go of?
he asked himself.
Or are you just clinging on to a version of yourself that doesn’t exist any more?

They plunged off the highway, into a warren of narrow, double-parked streets. Jonah hung on to the seat and braced himself for impact, while Adam piloted the car through the asteroid field of motorcycles, pedestrians and other drivers.

‘And they call it the birthplace of civilisation,’ Jonah muttered.

‘Plato complains about the crazy traffic in the
Republic
. Nothing’s changed.’

They pulled into a parking garage and went up to the flat.

A lifestyle magazine – in the unlikely event one ever visited Adam – would have called his flat minimalist. A Spartan from ancient Greece might have found it a bit functional. The word that came to Jonah’s mind was ‘empty’. The furniture was white and low, designed to disappear; the table was glass and the chairs were thin, spidery steel. Even the walls were transparent, floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a panorama onto every side of the city. To the east, he could see a yellow moon rising behind the floodlit Acropolis.

‘You must be hungry,’ Adam said. He took noodles and vegetables from a white cupboard and began to stir-fry them. The smell crept through the apartment like the tendrils of some exotic vine. Jonah wandered around, though there wasn’t much to see. The whole flat was one open room on the top of the building, except for a bathroom tucked into one corner. The bedroom was a futon on the floor with crisp white sheets; the living room was the sofa. A line of cupboards at knee height presumably stored a lifetime supply of black clothes.

He stopped in front of a large painting hung on the bathroom wall. In the stark space, it blazed like a planet. An engraving of a dahlia filled the middle of the canvas, though it was almost invisible under a violent red crayon scrawl, as though a two year old had tried to obliterate it. Below, slightly cutting it off, a crimson blood-blot stained a dirty strip of canvas where thin, washed-out letters spelled VENUS. It was the only colour – the only decoration – in the whole flat, so vivid it made him uncomfortable.

‘Cy Twombly,’ said Adam. He tipped out the stir-fry onto a white plate and put it on the table. He didn’t take any himself. He sat down opposite and watched Jonah eat.

‘Why haven’t you asked the most obvious question?’

‘What’s that?’ Jonah asked through a mouthful of noodles.

‘If I was having an affair with Lily. If she left the Sibari dig and came here because she’s left you for me.’

‘Because it’s not true.’ He tried to remember what Adam had said earlier. ‘It’s not a “valid hypothesis”.’

‘No,’ Adam agreed. ‘But you can’t falsify it. Doesn’t that worry you?’

‘I know I’m right.’

‘I think the word you’re looking for is “axiomatic”.’

Jonah leaned low over his plate and sucked up a noodle.

‘How’s work going?’ he asked.

‘Fine.’

‘Sandi said you’re the program director. It sounds important.’

‘It’s just a title.’

Silence.

‘How’s the band?’

‘We just finished a tour. It might be our last.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

Jonah shrugged. ‘All good things come to an end.’ He heard himself say it and winced.
Not all things
, he told himself.
Some things should be forever
.

He finished his meal; Adam took the plate to the kitchen area and washed it in a gleaming porcelain sink. ‘You can have the bed. I’ll sleep on the sofa. I’ve got some work to do before I go to sleep.’

The last thing Jonah saw before he shut his eyes was Adam curled on the sofa with his laptop. His disembodied head floated in the screen’s sea-blue glow like a drowning man.

When Jonah woke up, the sofa was empty and he was alone. In the stark flat, he felt like a mariner shipwrecked on a desert island. The only evidence otherwise, the footprint in the sand, was the hiss of steam coming from the bathroom, and the light rattle of a saucepan on the hob.

A white egg sat on the counter next to a pan of boiling water. Jonah dropped the egg in the water, set the timer, and watched the sun rise over Athens.

Two minutes later, Adam emerged from the shower. Naked, you could see how gaunt he’d become. Jonah wondered again about those rumours he’d been ill. Unselfconsciously, he pulled on a pair of black suit trousers, a black shirt and a pair of black loafers from a white cupboard.

‘What are you doing today?’ Adam asked. The egg timer beeped.

‘Maybe I’ll catch the sights.’ He really had no idea. Twelve hours in, coming to Athens was already beginning to feel like an indulgent fantasy, the dying notes of a song that had already ended.

‘Be careful. Athens isn’t safe these days. Communists, anarchists, fascists, demonstrators – and the police are almost as bad. Stay away from the Parliament building in Syntagma Square. The tear gas is usually worst there.’

‘You’re better than TripAdvisor.’

In the Oxford vernacular the others used, Adam had ‘taken a double first’ in Physics and Philosophy. After graduation, he’d started a doctorate in the Computer Sciences department. The degree didn’t work out, reasons unknown, but it had permanently affected the way he spoke. Every sentence seemed to emerge in ones and zeros, each word meaning neither more nor less than had been programmed into it. Or perhaps he’d always spoken that way.

He handed Jonah a round steel pebble. ‘The
ostrakos
,’ he said. Jonah didn’t know what that meant. ‘Wave it at the door if you need to get back in. I’ll be back around nine. Will you be staying tonight?’

There was no subtext that Jonah could detect. No implication Adam wanted to get rid of him, nor equally any suggestion he’d like him to stay. Just a request for information.

‘If that’s OK.’

‘Of course. Just be careful.’

Three minutes after he’d left the building, Jonah’s mobile rang.

We mustn’t be panicked by the arrival of the tyrant and his henchmen; but go and poke around every corner of the city, observing carefully, before we rush to judgement.

Plato
, Republic

When the guards struck off the shackles, I thought I’d died. I felt weightless without them, as if my soul had been separated from my body. Though if I’d actually started to float away, I’m sure the guards would have stopped me.

They took me out of the chamber, down corridors, and across a wide open courtyard. It was the first time I’d seen the stars since I was captured. On the far side, another door led into a barracks block, up a flight of stairs, and into a small, unpainted room with a bed and a window.

As soon as the guards had left me, I sat down on the wooden bed and put my head in my hands. Violent shivers ripped through me; the sea seemed to pour through the window and roar in my ears. I didn’t hear the door open.

‘I knew you’d come here.’

The triumph in his voice was out of place. So was the voice itself, though I didn’t know why. It sounded off, the wrong string plucked on a lyre so that even the tone-deaf notice.

Euphemus stood in the doorway, wearing a gold-trimmed robe and a smug smile that vanished as he saw the welts on my neck, the bruises, the ragged tunic and the dirt caking me.

‘What on earth happened to you?’

‘Your patron.’ With Dionysius, my voice had seemed to belong to someone else – someone fearless and sure. Now it belonged to a corpse.

‘How …?’

‘They caught me on the mountain outside Rhegion. They put me in the quarries.’

I watched the information work its way through him, the contortions of a man adjusting to a new reality. In the end, he fell back on self-righteousness.

‘I told you not to go.’ A pause. ‘Did you find Agathon?’

‘Dionysius said he was here.’

He looked surprised. ‘I’ve been here a week and I haven’t seen him. But I didn’t know you were here either, until they told me just now.’ He spoke quietly, as though something profound was happening inside him. Then he remembered himself. ‘You look terrible.’

I had no strength. I followed Euphemus like a sheep as he found a bath and hot water, oil and fresh clothes. Nobody stopped us moving around the palace. Within the hour, I looked almost human again.

He helped me into bed. ‘Are you hungry?’

I shook my head. Probably I was ravenous, but my stomach hadn’t caught up yet.

‘I’ll get some bread and milk in case you want them in the night.’

‘Stay with me,’ I said. After so long in the prison, I wasn’t ready to be alone yet.

Euphemus sat down on the window ledge and blew out the lamp.

* * *

When I woke next morning. Euphemus had gone. A basin of cold water sat on the windowsill where he’d been. I splashed my face and looked down at the sea foaming against the rocks. I wouldn’t get out that way. But when I tried the door, it opened to the touch.

‘Up already?’

A guard was standing there, square in front of the door, as if he’d been just about to knock. He gave me an ugly smile.

‘It’s time for your first lesson.’

On the parade ground outside, men in Dionysius’ red tunics practised in the shadow of a huge stone lion. Among the clash of arms and sticks, I heard a melee of unknown languages. Even the Greek was barely recognisable.

‘A cosmopolitan bunch,’ I said.

‘Dionysius buys the best,’ the captain told me.

I shuddered. ‘Slaves?’

‘Not any more.’

I don’t approve of slavery. But giving slaves freedom and weapons so they can tyrannise the society that owned them doesn’t seem an improvement. Except, admittedly, for the slaves.

We climbed a staircase and emerged into a raised garden, with curved steps at one end like the tiers of an empty theatre. A fat boy sat there, dressed in a thick purple robe that was too heavy for the hot day, munching his way through a bowl of almonds.

‘This is Dionysius’ son, Dionysius,’ said the guard.

Of course a tyrant names his son for himself: it’s the thing he loves best. Though looking at the boy, I doubted his father loved him much beyond the name. At eight years old, he was a poor knockoff of his father, like the pottery copies of Phidias’ sculptures you can buy at Olympia. The cheap material softens the features, blurring the character and the purpose of the original.

He peered at me as if seeing the world through a mist, and offered a formal greeting. In spite of who he was, I actually felt a small measure of sympathy with him. We were both prisoners of the same man – and only one of us had any hope of escape.

‘His father says to give you whatever you need. Books, tablets, pens …’ The guard looked at me for guidance. As our eyes met, I realised neither of us had the least idea what you need to teach an eight year old.

What could I do?

Too late, I understood the cruel beauty of Dionysius’ game. Like his namesake the god, he barely had to lift a finger. He’d given me all the rope I’d need.

‘I’ll want two tablets and a stylus,’ I told the guard. ‘And some books.’ I turned to the boy. ‘What have you been reading?’

A blank look.

‘What did your last teacher give you?’

‘The
Iliad
.’

That sounded hopeful. ‘You’ve been reading Homer?’

‘He told me the stories.’

‘Can you read?’

He looked at the ground. ‘Some.’

‘I presume you have a grammatist to teach you reading? And other specialists for music, gymnastics and so on?’

A glum nod. I didn’t envy the man who had to teach him gymnastics.

‘Then I’ll concentrate on your moral education.’

A clatter as the guard came back and dropped two tablets on the steps. He leaned against the wall, smirking.

I’d never improve the boy’s character with that brute glowering over my shoulder.

‘Can you leave us alone?’

He pretended to be horrified. ‘You? Alone with the boss’s son?’

‘Really, the only danger is that I’ll bore him to death.’

He considered the threat seriously. I shouldn’t have tried irony.