matter of the utmost importance. It concerned Peter Novak himself. He had tried
every approach, every tactic of importuning, and made no headway.
A message will be conveyed, he was told each time, in an artfully passive
construction that never varied. But they could not convey the real message, the
words of a dreadful and destructive truth. For what could Janson tell them? That
Peter Novak was dead? Those he spoke to at the Foundation gave no indication
that they were aware of it, and Janson knew better than to provide the
information.
Walking through the East Terminal, he heard, funneled through the airport sound
system, the ubiquitous America pop diva with her ubiquitous hit song from the
ubiquitous American blockbuster. That was what it was to be an international
traveler these days: it was to be cushioned in sameness, enveloped in a cultural
caul.
A message will be conveyed.
It was infuriating! Where was she? Had she been killed, too? Or—the possibility
slashed at him like a straight razor across the eyes—was she herself part of a
dire, unfathomable plot? Had Novak been killed by a member or members of his own
organization? He could not automatically dismiss the hypothesis, even though it
carried a horrific implication: that he himself had been a pawn in the
conspiracy. That rather than having saved the man who once saved him, he had
served as the very instrument of his destruction. Yet that was insanity! It made
no sense—none of it did. Why kill a man with a death sentence?
Janson settled into the airport taxi that would bear him to the Mets
neighborhood of Athens, to the southwest of the Olympic Stadium. The task before
him would be a difficult one. He had to tell Marina Katsaris what had happened,
had to tell her face-to-face, and the prospect lay on him like a boulder on his
chest.
The airport was six miles from his destination in downtown Athens; seated
uncomfortably in a backseat without room for his long legs, Janson wearily
glanced around him. The highway that led from the suburb of Glyfada, where
Ellinikon was situated, to the hilly sprawl that was Athens was like a conveyor
belt of cars, their pooled exhaust replenishing the low-hanging fug of sulfur
dioxide.
He noticed the small “2” in a little window on the meter, and his eyes met those
of the driver, a squat man whose chin was darkly shadowed with an incipient
beard, the kind that could never quite be shaved away.
“Is there somebody in the trunk?” Janson asked.
“Somebody in the trunk?” the driver repeated, mirthful. He was proud of his
English. “Ha! Not when I last checked, mister! How come you ask?”
“Because I don’t see anybody else in the backseat. So I was trying to figure out
why you have the meter set for a double fare.”
“My mistake,” the driver said after a beat, his beaming countenance
disappearing. Sullenly, he adjusted the meter, which meant not only shifting to
a lower rate but wiping out the drachmas he had already accumulated.
Janson shrugged. It was an old trick of Athenian cabdrivers. Its only
significance, in this case, was that the driver must have gauged him to be
exhausted and inattentive even to have tried out the petty scam.
Athenian traffic meant that the last mile of the trip took longer than the
previous five. The streets of the Mets area were built on a steep hillside, and
the houses, which dated before the war—and before the city’s population had
mushroomed—harked to an earlier and pleasanter era. They were mostly the color
of sand, with tiled roofs and red-shuttered windows.
Courtyards with potted plants and spiral outdoor staircases sheltered behind
them. Katsaris’s house was on a narrow street off Voulgareos, just half a dozen
blocks from the Olympic Stadium.
Janson sent the driver on his way with 2,500 drachmas, rang the doorbell, and
waited, half hoping there would be no answer.
The door opened after only a few moments, and there stood Marina, just as he had
remembered her—if anything, she was even more beautiful. Janson took in her high
cheekbones, honeyed complexion, steady brown eyes, her straight and silky black
hair. The swelling of her belly was barely detectable, another voluptuous curve
that was merely hinted at beneath her loose, raw-silk frock.
“Paul!” she exclaimed, delighted. The delight evaporated as she read his
expression; the color drained from her face. “No,” she said in a low voice.
Janson did not reply, but his haggard countenance held nothing back.
“No,” she breathed.
She began to tremble visibly, her face contorted by grief, then rage. He
followed her inside, where she turned and struck him on the face. She did so
again, lashing out in broad, flailing strokes, as if to beat back a truth that
would destroy her world.
The blows hurt, though not as much as the anger and despair that were behind
them. Finally, Janson grabbed her wrists. “Marina,” he said, his own voice thick
with grief. “Please, Marina.”
She stared at him as if by force of will she could make him vanish, and with him
the devastating news he had brought.
“Marina, I don’t have words to say how sorry I am.” Clichés came out at such
moments, no less true for being so. He squeezed his eyes shut, trawling for
words of consolation. “Theo was a hero until the end.” The words sounded wooden
even as he spoke them, for the sorrow Marina and he shared was indeed beyond
words. “There was nobody like him. And the things I saw him do—”
“Mpa! Thee mou.” She violently disengaged herself from him, ran to the balcony
that overlooked the small courtyard. “Don’t you get it? I don’t care about those
things anymore. I don’t care about those field-agent heroics, those games of
cowboys and Indians. They mean nothing to me!”
“They didn’t always.”
“No,” she said. “Because once I played the game also … ”
“My God, what you did in the Bosporus—it was extraordinary.” The operation had
taken place six years ago, shortly before Marina resigned from her country’s
intelligence services. A cache of armaments en route to the 17 Noemvri group,
the November 17 terrorist group, had been seized, those who purveyed it
apprehended. “I know intelligence professionals who still marvel at it.”
“And only afterward do you get to ask yourself: Did it make any difference, any
of it?”
“It saved lives!”
“Did it? One shipment of small arms seized. To be replaced by another, routed
elsewhere. I suppose it keeps the prices high, the dealers well paid.”
“Theo didn’t see it that way.” Janson spoke softly.
“Theo never got around to seeing it that way, no. And now he never will.” Her
voice started to quaver.
“You blame me.”
“I blame myself.”
“No, Marina.”
“I let him go, didn’t I? If I insisted, he would have stayed. Do you doubt it?
But I didn’t insist. Because even if he stayed home this time, there’d be
another call, and another, and another. And not to go, not ever to go—that, too,
would have killed him. Theo was great at what he did. I know that, Paul. It’s
what made him proudest of himself. How could I take that from him?”
“We make our choices.”
“And how could I teach him that he might be great at other things, too? That he
was a good person. That he was going to be a great father.”
“He was a great friend.”
“To you, he was,” Marina said. “Were you to him?”
“I don’t know.”
“He loved you, Paul. That’s why he went.”
“I understand that,” Janson said tonelessly. “I do.”
“You meant the world to him.”
Janson was silent for a moment. “I am so sorry, Marina.”
“You brought us together. And now you’ve broken us apart, the only way we could
ever be broken part.” Marina’s dark eyes looked at him beseechingly, and a dam
within her suddenly broke. Her sobs were animal-like, wild and unrestrained;
over the next few minutes, they wracked her like convulsions. There she sat upon
a black lacquered chair, surrounded by the small appurtenances of domesticity
she and Theo had acquired together: the flat-weave carpet, the blond, newly
refinished wooden floor, the small, pleasant house where she and her husband had
made a life—had prepared, together, to welcome another life. In different ways,
Janson mused, a war-torn island in the Indian Ocean had deprived both him and
Theo of fatherhood.
“I didn’t want him to go,” she said. “I never wanted him to go.” Her face was
red now, and when she opened her mouth a filament of saliva stretched between
her swollen lips. Her anger had provided Marina her only mooring, and when it
collapsed, so did she.
“I know, Marina,” Janson said, his own eyes moist. Seeing her begin to slump, he
wrapped his arms around her, holding her to him in a tight embrace. “Marina.” He