Grimacing, he took a sip of the bitter brew, the pain causing his thoughts to turn to the red-haired man who’d given chase. Did Lovett tell him about the excavation? If he did, it meant that Caedmon Aisquith knew about the massacre and the treasure that initiated the bloodbath. As God was his witness, he wouldn’t have shared that information with his own mother. The bitch.
An unmarried woman, Iphigenia Argyros earned the condemnation of her family and neighbors when she was raped by a Libyan refugee. Like hundreds of his countrymen seeking asylum, Saviour’s father arrived on the island of Chios in a rickety fishing boat, having braved the treacherous seas to get there. Apprehended by the Greek coast guard, he was transferred to a detention center in Thessaloniki, managing to escape in short order. First he satisfied his hunger. Then he slaked his lust.
Saddled with an unwelcome bastard, whom she named Saviour out of spite, Iphigenia blamed her miserable lot in life on the child born of that violent union. The fact that his father was a “filthy, dirty Muslim” made Saviour subhuman in his mother’s eyes.
On his thirteenth birthday, enraged that his mother had refused to mark the occasion, Saviour stormed out of the two-bedroom flat in Vardalis Square. It had been the only home he’d ever known.
The first night of his newfound freedom had been terrifying. Curled in a fetal position, he’d slept in a doorway. The second night, he sneaked into the Agía Sophía. The Church of Holy Wisdom. Lulled to sleep by the soft glow of devotional candles and the strangely erotic scent of incense, he’d been rudely awakened the next morning by a bearded priest who dragged him across the tiled floor, bodily tossing him through the ornately carved church doors. Holy wisdom obviously did not include Christian charity.
His belly aching from hunger, he’d had no choice but to steal food from the Modiano market. A fiasco, as it turned out, a furious fruit vendor beating him with a rose switch. Sobbing, his backside a mass of raised welts, he feared what would happen to him come nightfall. As fate would have it, that’s when he met Ari, a street-smart fourteen-year-old who’d been homeless for nearly five years.
Putting a brotherly arm around his shoulders, Ari shared a loaf of bread and a bottle of Coca-Cola with him. Then he invited him to the abandoned cannery that was home to a half dozen runaway boys. Ranging in age from ten to fourteen, they were a close-knit family, Ari the acknowledged leader.
To earn money, the older “brothers” hit the wharf each morning just after dawn, giving blow jobs to the dockworkers arriving for their day’s labor, jockeying for business with other homeless runaways. Using a banana, the two of them laughing uproariously, Ari had showed him how to arouse a man in record time so that he was on his knees only a minute or two.
Soon his days fell into a pattern. Morning “wages” in hand, he and Ari would buy a pack of cigarettes and a box of kadaifi, a nut pastry drizzled in lemon syrup. They would then spend the next few hours lounging on the beach, mocking the dockworkers who, like donkeys, had earlier grunted and brayed as their hips spasmodically jerked. He and Ari had names for them. Hairy Ass. Scrunch Balls. Blowtorch. Little Stump. Late afternoon ushered in another round of blow jobs when the fishermen came in with their daily catch, the boys often paid with fresh mackerel. Pooling their meager funds, the brothers would buy several bottles of retsina to wash down the fish they grilled on an open fire pit.
While it was far from a perfect life, it was a vast improvement over the one he’d had. With Ari at his side, no one dared to call him a bastard.
About to lift the demitasse to his lips, Saviour felt a soft vibration against his waist. Lowering the cup, he gingerly reached for his mobile phone, the pain in his right hand having intensified in the last few minutes. He didn’t have to look at the caller ID to know that it was his beloved Mercurius.
“Did you use the dagger?”
“As instructed,” Saviour answered, annoyed that the question had even been asked.
“I assume that it went well?”
For a brief moment, Saviour contemplated lying. Thinking better of it at the last, he truthfully replied, “I dealt with the archaeologist. However, there was an unforeseen complication. The archaeologist may have revealed his findings to a man and woman whom he met here in Washington.”
“Their names,” Mercurius demanded, uncharacteristically brusque.
“The woman’s identity is unknown. The man is named Caedmon Aisquith.” He spelled the unusual name.
On the other end of the line, Saviour could hear the soft peck of fingertips striking a computer keyboard. He assumed Mercurius just keyed the name Caedmon Aisquith into an Internet search engine.
“Who is he?” Saviour inquired, curious about the red-haired man.
On the other end of the line, he heard a ponderous sigh.
“A dangerous threat.”
CHAPTER 12
A dangerous threat, indeed, the man known as Mercurius thought as he hung up the kitchen phone and walked over to the stove. He peered into the cezve, the Turkish coffee-pot; the brew had started to froth. Using a small spoon, he skimmed the light brown crema into a small cup.
As he knew all too well, the world was full of dangerous threats. Always lurking. Ready to spring forth when one least expected, a knife to the throat. A gun to the temple. Such was the nature of our earthly existence. And though he felt deep remorse over the archaeologist’s demise, Mercurius knew that Jason Lovett would have sold the sacred relic to the highest bidder. An action that would have prolonged the misery, the relic mankind’s only hope for escaping this wretched world.
Turning off the gas burner, Mercurius carefully poured the hot coffee as close to the side of the cup as possible, the froth slowly rising to the top. That done, he opened a tin, removed a sugared candy and placed it on the saucer beside the diminutive cup. A piece of rosewater-flavored Turkish Delight to cleanse his palate. Mercurius carried the cup and saucer to the study, his olfactory senses assailed by the rich aroma that wafted through the air.
As always, the pungent scent reminded him of that long-ago night in 1943. How could it not?
Cybele, their aged housekeeper, had just set a large tray of Turkish coffee and powdered sweets on the table in the elegantly appointed drawing room. All of the furnishings — the elaborately carved cabinets, the gilt mirrors, the upholstered settees — had been imported from France and at no small expense, as Thessaloniki was a lengthy sea journey from Marseille. His mother, lounging on a velvet-covered divan, was in the process of smoking a lemon-scented cigarette. His grandmother plied her hand to a piece of petit-point embroidery. His two sisters played cards at a table specifically designed for that purpose. And his father sat in a tufted leather armchair, deep in conversation with his best friend of more than forty years.
Suddenly, a knock sounded at the front door.
Every head in the drawing room had swiveled toward the entry hall. Osman de Léon, a Muslim Ma’min, glanced at the man sitting next to him, Moshe Benaroya, a Jewish Kabbalist. In years past, their friendship would have attracted no notice. That was when they’d both been subjects of Sultan Abdul Hamid, Thessaloniki part of the fabled Ottoman Empire. Before their respective religions had been hermetically sealed off, one from the other, in the aftermath of the first of the world wars.
Of course, as anyone familiar with history knows, those same fierce winds had blown across central Europe five hundred years earlier when Thessaloniki — named for Alexander the Great’s sister — had been conquered by the Turkish sultan, Murad II. In the aftermath of that war, the name of the city was changed to Salonica. When the winds died down, a new era of prosperity and religious tolerance were ushered in as evidenced shortly thereafter when the sultan welcomed to Salonica thousands of Jews who’d been banished from Spain by the radical Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand. Learned, skilled, and entrepreneurial, the transplanted Sephardi, as they were known, adjusted quickly to life in the Ottoman city.