Death on Delos Read online

  The guard stood aside.

  Pericles sat rather heavily upon a camp stool. He poured a cup of watered wine, offered it to me, poured another for himself, and said, “What news?”

  I told him.

  Pericles sat a little straighter by the time I finished.

  “I confess, when I sent you on this mission, I had little hope of you succeeding. You must be more persuasive than I thought. You have done well, Nicolaos.”

  “Pericles, the amount he asks for is enormous,” I warned him.

  “But what we gain is even larger,” Pericles said. “Though of course you are right, it would be cheaper if Geros wasn’t an impediment. When must you reply to him?”

  “At dawn, at a place on the island far north of here.”

  Pericles glanced out his tent. “Dawn approaches. You had best be on your way. Tell Geros yes.”

  To say that I was exhausted would be an understatement. I’d barely had a chance to sit down since we’d arrived. Now here I was dragging my feet across the sands of Delos once more. I couldn’t stop yawning. I tripped over stones that normally my feet would have missed. I closed my eyes on one flat stretch, merely to rest them, and it was a conscious effort to open them again. I consoled myself with the thought that when I met Geros, it would be a quick conversation. Then I could go home to the cottage in the village and sleep for the rest of the day. I need only tell Geros yes; the details could be sorted out later, though no doubt Geros would be anxious to hear how we intended to pay him.

  Pericles already had that worked out. He told me that an account in Geros’s name would be created at one of the new banks springing up in Athens. These banks were an innovation of the last decade: organizations which held money for their clients and invested their funds in various enterprises. No one had ever thought of such a thing before, but they had proved remarkably popular.

  “But Geros is on Delos, where there’s no bank,” I said. “How could he use money that’s in Athens?”

  “He writes a letter to the bank, with instructions on what he wants done,” Pericles said. “If he wants a thousand drachmae for spending money, then a courier will arrive on the next boat with his coins. If he wants to buy a farm, the bankers will pay Geros’s money straight into the other man’s bank.”

  “That will work?” I asked. It sounded too easy.

  “Merchants do this all the time, Nico,” Pericles assured me. “It’s how one merchant pays another when they live in different cities.”

  “It is?”

  “You don’t think wealthy men send shipments of gold across the sea, do you? Dear Gods, no, every pirate in the Aegean would be waiting for them! The banks simply keep a tally. The point is, with the money in a bank in a city far from Delos, no one here will ever know Geros is a wealthy man. The whole transaction will be discreet.”

  The ease with which Pericles reeled off these arrangements suggested it wasn’t the first time he had bribed an official from another city. That was both alarming and at the same time strangely reassuring. It meant my boss knew what he was doing.

  “We will deposit the funds after we return to Athens,” Pericles had finished. “Make sure Geros understands this.”

  I knew what that meant. Pericles intended to use part of the treasure that we removed from Delos to pay the man who let us take it. Thus the bribe would never appear in the official and well-audited accounting books of Athens. A treasure would depart Delos, and the same treasure, minus thirty talents, would arrive in Athens.

  Delos looked different in the light of dawn, far less threatening, and less ominous. The place where I had run into Geros was indeed a graveyard. I had never doubted it, but was surprised to see that the graves were in a very poor state. What had not been visible in the dark were the funeral stele that had toppled over. No one had bothered to right them. Bits of stone had broken or chipped off some memorials. No one had repaired them, and the pieces lay where they had fallen. The ground was highly uneven with many potholes. It was no wonder I had had trouble crossing in the night—weeds grew up all around, tall enough to sway in the sea breeze.

  I could hardly credit what I was seeing. On an island full of priests, no one had tended a graveyard? It beggared belief.

  In the night, I had thought there were a couple of huts on the other side of the graveyard. In the light of day I saw that the huts amounted to a small village by the sea. The place looked like it had been sacked by raiders. There were perhaps twenty tiny cottages still standing, meaning that the roofs had not completely collapsed, nor the walls completely caved in. Obviously nobody lived there.

  I could see why Geros had told me to meet him in that abandoned village. The remaining walls sheltered those inside from general view—necessary for any bribe transaction.

  I picked my way around the fallen masonry to enter the misshapen village square. No one seemed to be around.

  “Hello? Anyone here?” I called out.

  There was no answer. I would have to wait for Geros to arrive.

  I picked the most likely place to wait, the cottage in the best condition, with all four walls still standing. Like the others it was built of mud brick that had once been whitewashed. But years of storms had eroded the walls, and the whitewash had turned to a repellent brown color. The door and shutters had long since rotted.

  I peered inside. The floor was littered with an astonishing amount of rubbish. Not only rubble, but hairpins, a few bronze rings tarnished to green, and a moldy leather sandal.

  “Hello?”

  No answer.

  But there, lying on the ground with his cloak about him, lay Geros.

  I guessed what had happened. Like me, Geros had been awake all night. He had lain down to rest while he waited for me and fallen asleep. If I’d lain down, I would have done the same.

  Lucky bastard, I thought to myself. But there was bribery and corruption to be done, and I intended to do it so I could go home to get some sleep for myself.

  I said, “Geros, wake up.”

  He didn’t move. I wasn’t surprised.

  I touched his shoulder and, when that didn’t work, shook him.

  “Wake up!”

  Geros was a solid sleeper. This called for extreme measures.

  I bent over Geros, to roll him. As I did, my eye fell on the wall behind him. That corner of the room was very dark, even in the light of day. Now that my eyes had adjusted I saw what I should have seen before. There on the wall above Geros, written in letters of dark red blood, was a single word.

  NEMESIS

  Suddenly I had a horrible feeling. I heaved him over. Geros stared up at me with unseeing eyes.

  There was a dagger plunged into his heart.

  It’s not my fault

  “I fear you have some distance to go with your negotiation skills,” Pericles said coldly. “Killing the other party is not the normal tactic.”

  “I didn’t kill him!” I protested. Why didn’t anyone believe me?

  Perhaps it was because the body was still warm.

  Geros was so recently dead that I had mistaken him for a sleeping man, even when I touched him. That meant the killer or killers could not be far away. I had prowled around the other deserted houses with the greatest possible care—I assumed Diotima would be upset if I got myself killed—before concluding that whoever had done in Geros had fled.

  That left me in a quandary. Should I raise the alarm, or should I search for clues? I decided I must raise the alarm.

  I ran, with a sore foot that made me hop from time to time, across the graveyard to the nearest civilization, which as it happened was the sanctuary of the temple complex. There I found the priestess Meren wandering about. I told her to bring Anaxinos, but first of all to wake my wife and tell her what had happened. Meren gasped at the news that Geros was dead, looked at me strangely, and backed away.

 
“Did you kill—” she began to say, but choked on the words.

  “No, I didn’t kill him!” I said. I was astonished that she thought I might have. It was the first hint that I might have a problem.

  She nodded, then took off down the Sacred Way like a frightened deer.

  I needed to tell Pericles, and wanted to do so personally, but I didn’t dare leave the body alone for so long, and I wanted to be there when everyone else arrived, if only to judge their reactions.

  I couldn’t be in two places at once. Or three, rather, because I also wanted to scout the surrounding area at once for clues and for any hidden killers. In addition, I needed to search the ground around the body before it was trampled by a hundred new arrivals. I had rarely felt so torn by conflicting priorities.

  There was nothing for it but to send Pericles a message and hope that he didn’t explode. I rushed to the Oikos of the Naxians, where I would be sure to find a stylus and something to write on. The doors creaked ominously when I pushed them open. I’d expected the Oikos’s doors to be unbarred, but I hadn’t expected to see anyone inside at such an early time.

  Yet there, to my relief, I saw two slaves. Both looked up at the sound of the door. One was a middle-aged man, and the other quite young. The young one looked like he might once have been a soldier from some foreign land, captured in battle. A lot of men became slaves that way.

  “You can’t come in here!” another man objected. He was a clerkish looking fellow, seated behind an enormous desk, bent over piles of papyrus.

  I ignored him.

  The older of the slaves began to say, “Master—”

  “Shut up and listen,” I told him.

  The slave closed his mouth. I turned to the younger man.

  “I was going to write a message, but you’ll do even better. I want you to go to Pericles . . . do you know who he is?”

  The slave nodded.

  “You’ll find him at the dock in a great tent. Tell the guard out front that you have an urgent message, and don’t take no for an answer.”

  The slave nodded. He was listening closely.

  “Say to Pericles that his presence is urgently required at the abandoned village at the north end of the island. Tell him . . . tell him that if he doesn’t go there at once, he’ll regret it.”

  I deliberately withheld the news of the death. This seemed to me the best compromise. I would keep an eye out for Pericles and waylay him as he arrived, to ensure he heard my version of events first.

  “Have you got that?” I asked the slave.

  He nodded again.

  “Then run.”

  The slave ran.

  I returned to the scene of the crime.

  This time I knew to stop at the outskirts of the buildings, to look for clues. I would have liked to have found footprints, but the ground was too hard and rocky even this short distance from the coast, and covered with gritty sand that blew easily in the constant sea breeze. Closer to the shore there was sand and there was virtually no tide, so footprints would hold their shape, but there were too many, and they went in every possible direction. Unfortunately I knew for a fact that people had been walking back and forth in the night. Among them was me. It looked like the multitude of prints that you would see at any beach. I could think of no way to make sense of them before the hordes arrived.

  The first of these was on his way.

  Pericles is a far more athletic man than most people give him credit for. He arrived first, though he was probably the last to receive the summons. I saw him bounding over the gritty sand and potholes of Delos like an angry rabbit. Running at his heels was Philipos, a shadow that couldn’t quite keep up.

  I jumped out in front of the buildings and waved to them.

  Pericles stopped before me, panting. Philipos ground to a halt earlier, favoring one leg.

  “This had better be important,” Pericles gasped. “The slave you sent made it sound like a matter of life or death.”

  “It’s funny you should say that,” I said, searching desperately for a way to make what I had to say any less distressing. “Because Geros is dead.”

  Pericles stared at me. He sent Philipos to check, presumably in some vain hope that I was wrong. That was when he accused me of the killing.

  “It’s not my fault, Pericles,” I said. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  I hoped that was true. I hoped Geros hadn’t died because of my offer of a bribe. That put me in mind of a very important detail.

  “Pericles, we’re going to have to tell the priests about the bribery. I’m sure it’ll come out.”

  “You want to be executed for corrupting a public official?” Pericles said acidly.

  “Is that a crime?” I asked, surprised.

  “Of course it’s a crime, you idiot!”

  “Then how come you told me to do it?”

  “Shhh!” Pericles looked left and right, to see if anyone was listening. No one was. “That’s a detail we don’t need to explore,” he said.

  “It’s a detail Anaxinos will almost certainly become aware of,” I told him.

  “Then if it happens I will have to speak with the High Priest, to put these things in their proper light,” Pericles said. “I am disappointed with you, Nicolaos. Very disappointed.”

  I would have to live with Pericles’s disappointment.

  Philipos now returned. “The priest is dead all right. Well done, Nicolaos.”

  “It wasn’t me!”

  Philipos pointed toward the sanctuary and said, “Here come the Delians.”

  Anaxinos walked, as quickly as he could, along the path that diagonally crossed the graveyard. For an older man, he had made good time. In his wake were several of the priests who never seemed to leave his side. Behind him came my wife, with Meren to assist her. I wanted to go to Diotima, but knew that she wouldn’t appreciate the attention. Nor could I have reached her without passing by Anaxinos, which would have been awkward.

  Pericles said to me, very quietly, “Whatever you do, Nicolaos, don’t tell Anaxinos about the bribe.”

  We waited, and they came to us. I took Diotima’s arm and quietly asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Is it true that Geros is dead?” she replied, completely ignoring my solicitous question.

  “Yes, I’ll tell you the full story later,” I whispered.

  “You’ll tell us the full story now,” Anaxinos said. I had not spoken quietly enough. The High Priest of Apollo had overheard my words. “Where is he?”

  I led the party to the house. Anaxinos, Pericles, Diotima, and I went in. There was barely room enough for us all to fit. The other priests and Philipos watched from the doorway. We all looked down at the corpse.

  “There is no doubt that he is dead?” Anaxinos asked.

  “I’m sorry, sir, there’s no doubt,” I said. I knelt beside the corpse and touched the murder weapon and the bloody rents in his clothing. “As you can see, there are multiple stab wounds; the blade must have gone straight through his heart.”

  I pulled the knife out of Geros’s chest. It was hard to extract. I had to twist a little, to relieve the suction. The noise as it came out was sickening.

  I held up the blade for all to see. It dripped blood. “Does anyone recognize it?”

  “It is a sacrificial knife,” said one of the priests. “We use them during ceremonies when a lamb is to be sacrificed upon the altar.”

  Diotima carried a sacrificial knife in her pouch at all times, but hers was much shorter, and the blade curved. This one was double-edged, straight, and thin. What this blade and Diotima’s had in common was that they were both sharp enough to split a hair. It was the perfect assassin’s weapon.

  “Are there many of these on the island?” I asked.

  The priest who had identified the knife snorted. “Not above a hundred
or so. We priests all carry one.” To prove it he reached behind his back and produced his own.

  “There are always one or two left at every altar,” another priest added.

  “Then no one would notice if one of these was missing?” I said.

  The priests shook their heads. “Not after last night.”

  No, they wouldn’t. There had been plenty of sacrifices last night. Apparently Geros had been one of them.

  “Is there any sign of a struggle?” Pericles asked.

  “The ground is so littered that it’s impossible to tell,” I said. “I looked carefully at the ground inside before you all arrived. There are plenty of signs that people have been here.”

  “That seems odd for an abandoned home,” Anaxinos said. “Surely we need only search for anyone who had been here.”

  One of the priests coughed.

  “Yes? Speak up,” Anaxinos commanded.

  “High Priest, these old houses have long been used by anyone who wants to meet . . . ah, shall we say . . . for private conversation.”

  “Oh, I see,” Anaxinos said. He turned a little bit red. “I suppose I should have thought of that.”

  “What it means,” said Diotima, “is that there’ll be more clues in this room than we can cope with.”

  I nodded. “Diotima is right. We could spend ages chasing down every dropped hairpin and every mislaid ring in this place, and all we’d do is discover an embarrassing number of otherwise innocent trysts.”

  “Besides,” my wife added. “Even if we found any real evidence, the killer could claim it was dropped during an innocent meeting.”

  This gloomy conclusion depressed everyone.

  As we spoke, Geros’s blood, which was still liquid, had run the length of the incredibly sharp iron of the blade, collected at the point, and fallen to the ground in a slow but steady trickle. What struck me was that this was the only blood on the dirt floor.

  Anaxinos noted the same thing. “He might not have been killed here.”

  “Not necessarily, sir,” I said. “If a blow is struck cleanly enough, then the blade can act like a plug.”