spoke her name like a whispered supplication. The view out of the room’s picture
window was incongruously sunny, and the honking of frustrated motorists was
almost a balm, the bleating white noise of the urban late afternoon. A sea of
commuters rushing home to their families: men, women, sons, daughters—the
geometry of domestic life.
When she looked at him next, it was through a lens of tears. “Did he save
somebody? Did he rescue someone? Tell me his death wasn’t in vain. Tell me he
saved a life. Tell me, Paul!”
Janson sat motionless on a wicker-back chair.
“Tell me what happened,” Marina said, as if the specifics of the event would
provide her a purchase on sanity.
A minute elapsed before he could collect himself and speak, but then he told her
what had happened. It was why he had come, after all. He was the only one who
knew just how Theo had died. Marina wanted to know, needed to know, and he would
tell her. Yet even as he spoke, he became intensely aware of how little the
explanation in fact explained. There was so much more that he didn’t know. So
many questions to which he had no answers. All he knew was that he would find
those answers, or die trying.
Hotel Spyrios, located a few blocks from Syntagma Square, was built in the bland
international-resort style; elevators were trimmed with resin-coated travertine,
doors covered with a mahogany veneer, furnishings designed to sparkle in
brochures but afford no unnecessary pleasures.
“Your room will be ready in five minutes,” the man at the front desk told him
carefully. “You have a seat in the lobby and we’ll be right with you. Five
minutes, no more.”
The five minutes, being metered out in Athenian time, were more like ten, but
eventually Janson was given his key card, and he made his way to his ninth-floor
hotel room. The ritual was automatic: he inserted the narrow key card in the
slot, waited for the green diode to blink, turned the latch knob, and pushed the
heavy door inward.
He felt burdened, and not simply by his luggage. His shoulders and upper back
ached. The meeting with Marina had been every bit as wrenching as he’d expected.
They had bonded, in their sense of loss, but only momentarily: he was its
proximate cause, there was no getting away from that, and grief, separated, was
doubled in intensity. How could Marina ever understand how bereft he himself
felt, how harrowed he was by his own sense of guilt?
He noticed a smell of stale sweat in the room, suggesting that one of the
cleaners had only just left. And the curtains were drawn, at an hour when they
would normally have been left open. In his distracted state, Janson did not make
the inferences that he was trained to make. Grief had interposed itself between
him and the world like a gauzy scrim.
Only when his eyes adjusted to the light did he see the man who was seated in an
upholstered chair, his back to the curtains.
Janson started, reaching for a gun he didn’t have.
“It’s been a long time between drinks, Paul,” the seated man said.
Janson recognized the man’s silky, unctuous tones, the cultivated English with
just a slight Greek accent. Nikos Andros.
He was flooded with memories, few of them fond.
“I’m hurt, you visiting Athens and not telling me,” Andros continued, rising to
his feet and taking a few steps toward him. “I thought we were friends. I
thought I was somebody you’d look up for a drink, a glass of ouzo. Hoist one for
old times’ sake, my friend. No?”
The pebbled cheeks, the small darting eyes: Nikos Andros belonged to another era
in Janson’s life, to a temporal compartment he had sealed off when he left
Consular Operations.
“I don’t care how you got in here—my only question to you is how you prefer to
leave,” said Janson, who was past any displays of joviality. “Quickest would be
off the balcony, nine stories down.”
“Is that any way to talk to a friend?” Andros wore his dark hair severely short;
his clothing was, as always, expensive, neatly pressed, fastidious: the black
blazer was cashmere, the midnight blue shirt was silk, his shoes a soft,
burnished calfskin. Janson glanced at the nail grown long on Andres’s little
finger, a foppish custom of certain Athenians, indicating a disdain for manual
labor.
“A friend? We did business together, Nikos. But that’s all in the past. I doubt
you’ve got anything to sell I’d be in the market for.”
“No time for ‘show and sell’? You must be a man in a hurry. No matter. I’m in
the charity business today. I’m not here to sell information. I’m here to give
you information. Absolutely gratis.”
In Greece, Nikos Andros was known as a conservator of the national treasures. A
curator at the Piraeus Archaeological Museum and a crusader for preservation
programs, he was frequently quoted on the subject of repatriation, regularly
urging that the Elgin Marbles be returned to the country from which they were
taken. He lived in a neoclassical villa in the leafy Athenian suburb of
Kifissia, on the lower slopes of Mount Pen-deli, and cut a colorful figure in
Athens’s elite circles. His connoisseurship and erudition in classical
archaeology made him a much-sought-after guest in the drawing rooms of the rich
and powerful throughout Europe. Because he lived well, and occasionally made
oblique reference to family money, he appealed to the Greek reverence for the
anthropos kales anatrophes, the man of high breeding.
Janson knew that the soigné curator grew up the son of a shopkeeper in
Thessaloniki. He also knew that Andros’s hard-won social prominence was crucial
to his sub rosa career as an information broker during the Cold War. It was a
time when Athens sector was a center for networks run by the CIA and by the KGB
alike, when human assets were often smuggled through the Bosporus Strait, when
complex gambits involving the neighboring countries of Asia Minor were launched
from the Aegean peninsula. Andros was perfectly detached from the larger play of
superpowers; he was no more inclined to favor one side over another than a
commodities broker was to favor one customer over another.
“If you have something to say,” Janson said, “say it and get the hell out.”
“You disappoint me,” Andros said. “I’ve always thought of you as a man of
sophistication, worldliness, breeding. I’d always respected you for it.
Transactions with you were more enjoyable than with most.”
For his part, Janson recalled his transactions with Andros as being particularly
excruciating. Matters were simpler with those who understood the value of the
commodity and were content with a straightforward value-for-value exchange. By
contrast, Andros needed to be flattered and cajoled, not just paid. Janson
remembered well his endless, wheedling requests for rare varieties of ouzo. Then
there were his whores, the young women, and sometimes young men, who would
accompany him at inappropriate junctures. As long as he himself was taken care
of, he cared little whether he was jeopardizing the safety of others, as well as
the integrity of the networks with which he made contact.
Nikos Andros had grown rich as a Cold War profiteer; it was as simple as that.
Janson had contempt for such men, and though he could never afford to display
this contempt when he might still require their goods and services, that time
was long past.
“Who sent you?” Janson demanded.
“Oh dear,” Andros said. “Now you’re behaving like a koinos eglimatias, a common
thug—a danger to yourself and others. You know, your acquaintances are divided
between those who think you have changed since your days in Vietnam … and those
who know you haven’t.”
Janson tensed visibly. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.” His face
grew hot.
“Don’t I? You’ve left quite a few enemies from those days, a number of whom went
on to pursue similar careers to your own. There are some who find it difficult
to forgive you. In my travels, I myself have met one or two who, after a bottle
of ouzo or two, will admit that they consider you a monster. It’s said that you
gave evidence that got your commanding officer executed for war crimes—despite
the fact that what you yourself did was as bad or worse. What a curious sense of
justice you have, always pointed outward, like the guns of a fortress.”
Janson stepped forward, placed a hand on Andres’s chest, and slammed him hard
against the wall. A clamoring filled his mind—then was silenced by sheer force
of will. He had to focus. “What is it that you want to say to me, Andros?”
Something like hatred flashed in Andres’s eyes, and Janson recognized, for the
first time, that his contempt was not unreciprocated. “Your former employers
wish to see you.”
“Says who?”
“That’s the message I was asked to deliver. They wanted me to tell you that they