No, what really caught his eye was the name of the man who’d co-authored it.

  III

  Gaille was beat from her long day. She called it a night early, grabbed her wash-bag and a bottle of water then went to the edge of the roof and squeezed a worm of toothpaste onto her brush.

  Iain came to stand alongside her, wearing only his boxers and a T-shirt, holding out his own brush for water. She poured it for him, the spill splashing against their feet. They stood side by side by the edge of the roof, their brisk brushing joining the sawing of the crickets. They spat in unison, toothpaste bombs making faint pale spatters on the dark ground below.

  He held the flap of the tent open for her, shone in his torch. There was room enough for two, but just the one sleeping bag. She looked uncertainly around.

  ‘All yours,’ he smiled.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’ve got jerseys and a jacket.’

  The ground was hard and she was too tired to protest. She kicked off her shoes and socks, slipped inside the bag, unhooked her bra and removed it from beneath her T-shirt, then stripped off and folded up her trousers for a pillow. The torch went out. She could hear him fumbling around, laying out clothing to lie on, pulling on a T-shirt. She’d almost drifted to sleep when she heard him muttering, then he tapped her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise it would be this uncomfortable.’

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Shift up. I’m coming in.’

  She didn’t know what to say. It was his sleeping-bag, after all. He tugged the mouth open. She felt his knee in her back, his cold foot brushing her calf, reminding her of Knox. Had it really only been last night? ‘I don’t know about this,’ she said.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I won’t try anything, I swear. What kind of man do you think I am?’ He turned onto his side, his front against her back, pleasantly warm where they touched. She wondered what Knox would make of this; but Iain was his friend, after all. ‘Good night, then,’ said Iain, snuggling close, putting his arm around her waist.

  She hesitated a moment longer, and then her opportunity to object was gone. She rested her head back upon her folded trousers. ‘Good night,’ she said.

  IV

  It was past midnight when finally a taxi pulled up outside Franklin’s house, and the man himself emerged in his dinner jacket, and then his wife, elegant in a pale green gown and woollen shawl. They must have been at Nico’s closing banquet. Knox walked towards them, slowing deliberately as he drew close, so that they’d know he had business with them. Franklin’s expression clouded when he saw him. ‘You!’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘You know what I’m doing here.’

  He licked his lips but said nothing. ‘What is it, Claude?’ asked his wife, in the nasal tone of deafness taught to speak. ‘What’s going on?’

  Franklin turned to her with a calm smile. ‘Nothing, my love,’ he assured her, signing the words as well as speaking them. ‘Please go inside.’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘Please,’ he repeated. ‘Go inside. Go to bed. Everything’s fine. This gentleman and I just have some matters to discuss.’ He watched her go in, the lights coming on downstairs and then up. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  Knox told him. ‘I just ran an Internet search on Roland Petitier. Unusual name. Did you know he’d published an article while he was at the French school. More to the point, can you take a wild guess as to who his co-author was?’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘It was you, Dr Franklin. You, who told me this morning that you weren’t really his friend, that you only shared a house with him for a while.’

  ‘Everything I told you was the truth.’

  ‘But not the whole truth,’ said Knox. ‘You coauthored an article with him called The Mysteries of Eleusis Revealed. Or didn’t you think that was worth mentioning?’

  Franklin looked both ways down the street, almost as though contemplating running for it. But then his shoulders slumped a little. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he said. ‘I’m going to need a drink for this.’

  V

  Nadya walked slowly through Psyrri on her return to her hotel. There were queues outside the nightclubs; music boomed from within. Evenings like this, loose with drink, she liked it if a brash young man made a play for her. But there were no takers tonight, not even for a little eye contact. She’d been beautiful once, lusted after; and not even that long ago. But the last few years hadn’t been kind.

  She reached the quieter, older streets of Plaka. Several middle-aged men were sitting in low-slung canvas chairs around a table. She walked close by them, but they didn’t even look at her, so she turned around and came back and gave one of their chairs a little nudge. But all she got was laughter.

  Her ankle turned on the cobbles. She went sprawling. It was always a risk to mix vodka and heels. She picked herself up, brushed off her hands and knees, aware she should be embarrassed, yet not. Her left palm began to throb. It was wet and speckled with grit and torn skin. She watched with passive curiosity as the first hints of blood arrived, the sharpness of each pulse.

  ‘Excuse me?’ asked a man, German from his accent. ‘Are you okay?’

  She looked hopefully around, but he already had a woman. ‘I’m fine,’ she told him.

  She took her shoe in both hands, tested the heel. It wobbled a little, so she kicked the other one off too, then carried them as she wandered, uncertain of her way. Her feet grew cold and wet; the streets grew narrow and emptier. She reached a familiar plaza, turned left and saw the illuminated sign that ran down the front of her hotel. There were no black Mercedes outside her hotel, just a few cars and a white van. She wasn’t that drunk, not to check. She paused to pull her shoes back on; her concierge was pompous, she didn’t want him getting all superior with her. The echo of her footsteps made her realise how empty the streets had become.

  The van door opened. A man got out. She knew at once. She turned and tried to flee, but her broken heel betrayed her and she tumbled hard onto the pavement. She opened her mouth to scream, but too late; a hand was clamped over it, holding a moistened pad of some kind. She felt its chemical burn on her lips as she breathed it in, and the strength began draining from her muscles, despite her fear. Then she was lifted bodily and carried to the van; and the last thing she saw was Mikhail Nergadze kneeling beside her, smiling down at her as though he’d just won himself a bet.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I

  Franklin led Knox through to a dimly-lit front room with huge unframed expressionist canvases on the walls. He went to a drinks cabinet and poured himself a clouded shot-glass of firewater that he knocked straight back and refilled. ‘My wife doesn’t like me drinking in public,’ he confided. ‘I have a bad habit of not knowing when to stop, and then saying things to embarrass myself.’ He turned to Knox with a meaningful look. ‘She hates embarrassment, my wife, more than anything in the world. So I do all I can to avoid it: because I love her.’

  ‘I understand.’

  He found and filled a second glass that he handed to Knox. ‘Do you smoke?’ he asked, opening a silver case filled with cheroots.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You don’t mind if I do?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  They sat in a pair of armchairs set obliquely near the front window, through which they could watch the few cars that passed, the occasional pedestrian. Franklin lit his cheroot; it gave off an aromatic smoke. ‘I apologise for not mentioning that article earlier; you must understand that I gave my word I’d never talk about it again.’

  ‘To your wife?’

  ‘In part. But more so to her father.’

  ‘Your mentor,’ nodded Knox. ‘When you promised to change your life, and he gave you another chance.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Franklin.

  ‘Still,’ said Knox. ‘I need to know.’

  Franklin sank back into his chair, vanishing into shadow, except for a faint glow whenever he took a puff. ‘It was Petitier’s influence. It was greater on me than I like to admit. I already told you about his battle against Eurocentric history, but that wasn’t his only fight. He hated all establishment institutions, particularly anything smug, anything vested. He was raised a Catholic, but of course he turned against them. And he couldn’t just set it all aside, like most lapsed Catholics. He wanted payback.’ A car pulled up a little way down the street. Its doors opened and then closed again. Knox kept an ear cocked as Franklin talked, wondering if Nergadze could somehow have tracked him here. ‘He became obsessed by the absurdity of belief. Mocking religion was one of his favourite pastimes. That was one reason he was so fascinated by Eleusis. All these brilliant Greeks convinced they’d encountered something numinous and transcendent here: he was sure if he could find out what it was, he could take the mystique out of it, and so debunk belief.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’d originally written the paper while lecturing in France, but the journals wouldn’t deal with him any more, he was simply too difficult.’ He reached forward, tapped off some ash. ‘But they would deal with me, so I submitted his paper instead. It was rather mischievous, I’m afraid, but then I was in the mood for mischief. It attributed the Greek Mysteries, indeed pretty much all established western religion, to something called ergot.’

  ‘Ergot?’ frowned Knox.

  ‘A naturally-occurring parasitic fungus you sometimes find on grasses and grains,’ explained Franklin. ‘But, more pertinently for our case, a precursor of lysergic acid diethylamide.’

  ‘You don’t mean…’

  ‘Yes,’ smiled Franklin. ‘LSD.’

  II

  A shock of smelling salts beneath her nose startled Nadya back to consciousness. She tried to open her eyes, but they seemed to be glued shut, leaving her reliant instead on the sensations flooding in from all across her body. She was sitting in a hard chair, her ankles tied to the legs and her wrists to the struts behind her back, the knots pulled so tight that her fingers and toes were tingling, and stress was building uncomfortably in her joints. A rope gag cut into her lips and gums. She had a crick in her neck. Panic welled suddenly in her; she began struggling and trying to kick out.

  ‘Calm down,’ grunted a man in Georgian. ‘How can I loosen these damned things if you won’t keep still?’

  She breathed in deep through her nose, forced herself to stop fighting. There’d be time for that.

  ‘That’s better,’ said the man, as he picked at the knots and then removed the gag. ‘Scream if you want to. No one will hear, and I’ll just put it back in.’

  She licked the edges of her sore lips, worked her jaw this way and that. ‘I won’t scream,’ she assured him.

  ‘Good.’ He picked his fingers at the tape over her eyes next, then pulled it off in one go, leaving her eyebrows raw and stinging. She blinked several times as her vision adjusted. There was no one in front of her, just a plush double bed with a red chintz cover and, on its far side, a mahogany dressing table with a triple mirror on which stood a bottle of water and two glasses, a bowl of pot pourri, a vase of carved and painted wooden lilies.

  She glimpsed movement in one of the mirrors. A door opened and then closed behind her, leaving her with the impression she was alone. She craned her head as far as she could, saw an en suite bathroom to her right, French windows to her left, a gap between the curtains through which she glimpsed the iron railings of a balcony, pollarded trees and a night sky unsullied by city lights. Outside Athens, then; presumably in Mikhail Nergadze’s house. She remembered Sokratis gloating about how remote it was, how vast.

  The door opened and closed again behind her. She heard breathing. Her heart began hammering. ‘Who’s there?’ she asked.

  But she already knew.

  III

  Nico was sleeping on his side when the attack started, a malevolent demon reaching down his throat into his chest, taking hold of his heart and wrenching it sideways. He cried out and fell onto his back, clawing at his bedside table, searching blindly for the pills upon it, the glass of water; but the demon was too strong for him, a wrestler pinning him to the mat, pummelling at his heart. Another jolt ran through him. He arched silently. A sudden memory of his finest hour, a fifteen-yearold at the national weightlifting championships in Athens, a boy taking on men and yet not backing down; and that moment conflated with the reaction to Knox’s talk earlier that day, that gratifying moment of silence before the applause started, all that glorious applause, a whole auditorium on the rise.

  The vision faded. He slumped with exhaustion. One crowded hour of glorious life; that was all he’d ever wanted. What wouldn’t he give now for an age without a name? Minutes passed. His sweat cooled and chilled. His heart settled back into its proper rhythm. The tunnel receded.

  Not this time. Not this time. But soon.

  He sighed and swung his legs to the side of the bed, sat up and buried his face in his hands. Living alone as he did, the squalor of death preoccupied him. The thought of being found like poor Antonius…it was almost worse than death itself. He needed someone in his life who loved him, someone who could check up on him, perhaps even be there when the time came. It wasn’t a burden he could lay upon any of his friends or colleagues, nor even upon his brother and Charissa. Burdens like that, you could only ask of parents or spouse or children. And he was unmarried, childless.

  He lay back on his bed and resolved to make the call in the morning, But it was a resolution he’d made a hundred times before, and still he was alone.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I

  Mikhail Nergadze unwrapped a butterscotch as he came into Nadya’s line of sight, popping it into his mouth, discarding the scrunched-up foil onto the carpet. He sucked hard twice to flood his mouth with the sweet sticky saliva, before pushing it to one side with his tongue, the better to talk. He was holding her purse, she saw, and now he opened it up, pulling the credit cards out of their sleeves one-by-one, examining them for a moment, then pushing them back in. ‘Nadya Ludmilla Petrova,’ he said. ‘How I hoped it would be you. When I heard that a woman called Nadya was after me, a woman with a limp.’

  There was no way for Nadya to know how much he knew about her. Best to assume he knew nothing, lest she give him anything for free. ‘After you?’ she asked. ‘What are you talking about? Who are you?’

  ‘It’s a real honour for me, this. I mean that sincerely. I’m one of your biggest fans. I’ve been living in America these past few years, you see. They think Georgia is where the Atlanta Braves play baseball. So I’ve been starved of home news. I used to read your blog avidly.’ He waved his hand. ‘Everyone else, all the so-called serious media, they merely reprint the official press releases then go off for their long lunches. But not you. Typical, isn’t it? The only Georgian with the balls to tell it as it is, and she’s a woman.’

  ‘What do you want with me?’

  ‘You know what I want, Nadya. I want to know why you’ve made it your business to interfere with my business. I want to know why you hired a detective to wait outside the airport for my family plane last night, then follow my guests to my house. I want to know why you tailed us out to Eleusis earlier, and why you interfered with my effort to talk with Daniel Knox. And please don’t bother to deny it. Your detective called me earlier and volunteered everything. You really should pick your help more carefully next time.’

  That damned Sokratis! She should have known he’d betray her. She tried to recall how much he’d have heard and could have passed on. ‘Investigating campaigns is what I do,’ she said. ‘You must know that, if you read my blog.’

  ‘And what do I have to do with any campaign?’

  ‘I’m not here because of you. I’m here because of a man called Boris Dekanosidze. He’s one of Ilya Nergadze’s most important advisers, you know.’

  ‘Is he now?’ laughed Mikhail. ‘Very well, then. Why are you after him?’

  ‘Because the first thing you learn in this business is that you never get scoops from following the candidates; they’re too well protected. It’s always the right-hand men who lead you to the real story.’

  ‘Ah! The secret of your success!’ he mocked. ‘The herd trails haplessly after the leaders; but you go after the consigliore?’

  ‘It led me to you, didn’t it?’

  ‘And why should you consider that a result? Why should you think I matter?’

  Nadya blinked at her own impetuosity. She needed to be sharper than that if she was to get out of this. ‘I’m still working on that.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ said Mikhail. ‘You know exactly who I am. You knew before you flew out here. In fact, you flew here looking for me.’

  ‘I assure you I—’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Nadya. You’ll regret it if you do.’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ she said. ‘It’s the truth. I needed something good on Ilya Nergadze. Something juicy. My readers were starting to accuse me of being in the tank for him.’

  ‘It was that press conference, wasn’t it?’ asked Mikhail. ‘The way you looked at me, I knew we must have met before. I just couldn’t place you. It was only when we picked you up earlier that I was sure.’ He stood tall again. ‘How unlucky can a man be? Back in Georgia for two days, and I run into one of my widows.’