Chapter Sixteen
Chapter
Sixteen
Dani
They all climbed out of the car and followed Andreas through the already-bustling tourist area toward the Acropolis Museum.
The modern glass building sat directly next to the southern entrance to the Acropolis but was a separate attraction all to itself.
Her original tour group had planned to make both stops. She wondered how it was going.
Maybe she could find a way to say goodbye to Harold after all.
It was before opening hours, but Andreas swiped a badge to let them in. He casually strode over to speak with the security guard, telling him they were his prearranged guests, then motioned for them to continue following him to the elevators.
Ding!
The elevator doors opened, letting them out into the basement.
“This is where we keep some of our archives and storage,” Andreas explained, leading the way once again.
The basement was cold and dry—probably temperature controlled—but Dani’s body was still on fire from her and Theo’s little rendezvous that morning.
Things had heated up fast. One second they were kissing, and the next, well, if they hadn’t been interrupted, who knew what would have happened.
She couldn’t wait to be alone together again.
Finally they made it to a locked room, and Andreas swiped his badge again. At the front of the room were a few large tables. He told them to wait there for a moment, and then he finally returned with a box.
“Here, put these on,” he said, handing white gloves to each of them.
As they put on the gloves, he pulled out some old documents, sealed in plastic sleeves.
“These are pages from Papantonis’s journal,” Andreas said as he lined them up in front of Theo and Dani. “They were discovered over one hundred years ago at some ruins on the west side of Crete.”
Dani bent over to read the documents, but she couldn’t understand a thing since they were written in Greek. But Theo quickly became engrossed in the pages.
“May I?” Theo asked Andreas, motioning toward the small notebook in his satchel, asking for permission to take notes.
“Please,” Andreas said, nodding for him to proceed. While Theo scoured the documents, Dani turned toward Andreas.
“Why aren’t these on display in the museum?” she asked.
“For many reasons,” Andreas said, folding his arms and resting against a counter behind him, “primarily that we only exhibit a fraction of the museum’s collection at one time. But for this item in particular—the journal? Because its authenticity has been questioned,” he explained.
“By who?”
“Truthfully, I don’t know. But I suspect it has something to do with Τα Παιδι? του Μιν?ταυρου.”
“What’s that?” Dani asked, furrowing her brow.
“The Minotaur’s Children. A cult that protects the secrets of the Minotaur.”
The hairs raised on Dani’s arms. Cult? She didn’t like the sound of that. Seriously, what were they getting themselves into?
“Are they dangerous?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t found any evidence of their existence. Just rumors, whispers, and dead ends.”
“Did your papou ever talk about this cult, Theo?” Dani asked.
He looked up from the pages, glancing around as if he hadn’t heard a thing they’d been talking about. She loved when he got so focused on something that the rest of the world almost seemed to stop around him.
She loved it because that’s how she felt whenever they were together.
“I’m sorry, what were you saying?” he asked.
“The cult. Did Papou Zeno ever talk about it?” she repeated.
He shook his head. “Never. First I’d heard of it was yesterday when Andreas showed me this.
” Theo reached into his satchel and pulled out a small leather-bound book with clippings and other papers sticking out of it.
He handed it across the table to Andreas, who then flipped through the pages and stopped on a drawing of the eye and μ symbol.
Dani wrinkled her brow. “This is your family’s crest,” she said.
“Yes, we changed it many years ago, trying to draw attention to the Minotaur’s Children.”
“Has it worked?”
He tipped his head to the side and laughed. “Would we be here if it did?”
Well, at least it didn’t get their attention in a bad way.
“Oh, this is interesting,” Theo said.
He picked up one of the letters encased in plastic and placed it in the center of the table so everyone could read it. Again, not that Dani could read anything.
They leaned in, staring at the document before Dani shrugged her shoulders and said, “It’s all Greek to me.”
Andreas laughed. “I’ll read it to you then.
This one says, ‘We’ve reached the gateway to the sea with the eye of the Minotaur, it no longer being safe in its original burial place.
Its power grows restless and must be released from confinement.
Now its true potential will be realized, and it will be free.
“ ‘From here, we will travel back to my home. There, below where Helios rises in the east, I will put the eye to rest, accessible only to those who recognize its power. Despite his quarrels, Poseidon himself could not have picked a better place for this beast to spend eternity. It is here that the eye will sleep and blend into the dirt itself, watching over the land of my ancestors and bringing strength and fertility to my people.’ ”
They stood in silence, waiting for Theo to explain.
“Don’t you see?” Theo asked. “This might be a clue.”
Andreas and Dani both raised skeptical eyebrows.
“Papantonis talks about traveling back to his home,” Theo said as if that explained anything.
“I can see that. But we already know where Demetrios is from. You’ve been there already,” Andreas said. “My yayá’s mill?”
He said it as if saying, Remember?
“Right, and she told us that the eye was moved. Maybe it was somewhere else on Crete at first and then he took it to your yayá’s property. Have you already searched the grounds at the mill?” Theo asked.
“Of course, we’ve looked all over there.”
Theo and Andreas stared at each other, racking their brains as to where else on Crete the eye could be.
“Near Knossos?”
“What about Rethymno?”
“Or Sitia?”
They continued calling out the names of various locations in Crete with no rhyme or reason, while Dani sifted through the pages of Papantonis’s journal. There had to be something there. Some clue as to where he was from.
She thought of all the people who’d come to the local library in Grand Rapids, searching for information on their own families. So often people came to realize that their family histories were not what they’d been led to believe.
Perhaps the same could be said of Papantonis.
“What if it’s not in Crete?” Dani blurted out, interrupting Theo and Andreas’s friendly debate.
“What do you mean?” Theo asked, tilting his head to the side.
“The eye. What if it’s not in Crete because Papantonis was from somewhere else?” she said.
“And you’re basing that on what?” Andreas asked, folding his arms.
A swarm of nerves buzzed through her body. She brought her hands to a steeple at the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. Think. Think.
She allowed her brain to wander, pulling out pieces of Papantonis’s letter and letting them ruminate in her mind.
Blend into the dirt.
“The dirt!” she exclaimed.
“Daniela, I’m not following,” Theo said, clearly wanting to understand her but frustrated that he didn’t.
“What do you know about the soils in Greece?” she asked no one in particular.
Not that it mattered, because no one answered. They all looked around at one another, waiting for someone else to respond.
“Look, Papantonis said the eye would blend into the dirt. What if he meant that literally, as in the soil was the same color as the gemstone? I’ve seen red soil before.
Not here, of course, but in other parts of the world,” she said, as if she’d been to other parts of the world.
But that was beside the point. “Maybe we need to dissect each word of this letter and analyze what it could mean.”
She had to admit, she wasn’t basing it on much more than a hunch. But what other options did they have?
“So, where do you think he was from, then?” Andreas asked.
“I…that, I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m a librarian. Let me help find an answer.”
“And how do you presume to do that?” he asked.
“Got any libraries?”
Andreas laughed. “Well, Greece is home to the library, didn’t you know?”
“I did know that, actually,” she responded. The question was borderline insulting, although she was sure Andreas hadn’t meant it to be. A person didn’t love books as much as Dani did and not know where libraries came from.
“Then you may also know that Athens has many wonderful libraries,” he said. “Though I’m afraid, I’ve probably searched every book in this city for answers, and I’ve come up empty-handed.”
“Even the rare collections?” she asked.
“Especially the rare collections,” he said.
“When was the last time?” Theo asked. “What building?”
“It was in the Vallianeio Megaron,” Andreas responded, clearly wondering what he was getting it. “But I’m telling you, there was nothing.”
“Did you know that when the library was moved to its current location at the SNFCC, they discovered a whole collection of old texts in a room that had been blocked for decades by a bookshelf?” Theo asked.
Andreas straightened his stance. “No, I…I didn’t know that. How did you know that?”
“Libraries are a special interest of mine,” Theo said, giving Dani a wink.
Dani could barely hold back her smile. Her mind took her right back to that morning.
“To the National Library, then?” Andreas asked, pulling her out of her thoughts.
“To the library,” Dani said, staring straight into Theo’s eyes.