Epilogue I
The Palace of Thalia
Thalia
Four months later
"Thalia." Margot crouched beside me with her Leica in one hand and a thermos of coffee in the other.
"I have been watching you for three minutes, and I want to state for the historical record that you are visibly pregnant, squatting in a trench, humming to a three-thousand-year-old rock, and somehow radiating more authority than the entire executive board of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture combined. "
"The rock is listening."
"I am certain that it is. What am I photographing?"
"The lintel groove. I need the 7 AM light to capture the tool marks.
The Minoan stonemasons used a bronze chisel with a distinctive angle, and the marks will confirm the dating within a fifty-year window.
Get three exposures — one wide, one medium, one tight on the groove itself — and bracket each for the shadow detail. "
Margot set the thermos down on a flat stone, raised the Leica, and began photographing with the competence of a woman who had spent ten years photographing excavations in five countries and who had once — on a famously bad dig in Syria — photographed a tomb wall during an active firefight while a local militia negotiated their passage.
She had been my student. She was now my closest friend.
She had arrived on the island eight weeks ago with a professional contract, a six-month visa, and the stated intention of making sure I did not, quote, "turn into a Greek shipping-heiress housewife the moment the archaeology got inconvenient. "
I was, as she had noted on arrival, in no apparent danger of this.
"Turn slightly to your left," she said from behind the viewfinder. "I need the belly in the frame."
"Margot."
"The cover of Archaeology magazine is going to want a human element, and I am not going to let them settle for a shot of your hands. The world needs to see the woman who found the palace and is currently gestating an heir to a Greek criminal family while she finds it."
"Former criminal family."
"Former-as-of-this-quarter-but-we're-still-monitoring criminal family. I am not going to pretend the transition is complete. The transition is going to take Spiro ten more years of quarterly reports."
"Eight more years. He has already served two."
She lowered the camera and looked at me with the particular mixture of exasperation and fondness that had characterized our friendship since her first year of graduate school.
"You are defending his timeline. To me. Four months ago you were informing me, over a transatlantic phone call during which I was in the middle of a cocktail party, that you had been abducted by a Turkish syndicate and rescued by your three Greek lovers and that all of this was, quote, 'under control.
' Now you are quibbling about whether Spiro has two years or three of monitoring duty remaining.
The shift in your tone is diagnostic of something, Thalia. I have not yet decided what."
"It is diagnostic of the fact that I have accepted my circumstances."
"It is diagnostic of the fact that you are in love with three criminals and hormonally compromised by pregnancy and approximately four minutes away from humming a lullaby to a limestone block."
"I was humming a ballad, not a lullaby. And the stonemasons would have appreciated it."
She took another photograph. The shutter clicked. The morning light moved another half degree across the trench.
By 8 AM, the site was populated. The team I had assembled — sixteen archaeologists, three conservators, two epigraphers, a photographer, and a small army of graduate students from the University of Crete — were arriving in waves, setting up their stations, calibrating equipment, unfolding the wide tarpaulins that protected the more fragile surfaces from the sun that was now climbing toward the harsh middle register of the day.
Yannis Pavlidis was already at the security perimeter, giving terse instructions to a pair of former Greek Navy men who had been briefed that the site's security protocols were to be executed with the precision of a military operation and the dignity of a cultural heritage installation.
Yannis, at sixty, had settled into his role as head of excavation security with the equanimity of a man who had spent his entire working life protecting other people's decisions and had finally found decisions he believed in.
"Dr. Manos." He crossed the trench edge to where I was now standing. "Your Uncle Petros is arriving at eleven."
"Petros?"
"He called at six and informed me that he would be arriving with a bottle of Mavrodaphne and an opinion on where the lintel stone should be displayed when the site museum is completed.
I informed him that the lintel stone is going to be displayed where you decide to display it.
He took this well. He said, quote, 'That woman has better judgment than the three of my nephews combined. Tell her I bring wine.'"
"Thank you, Yannis."
"You are welcome." He paused. He was not a man who lingered, but he lingered now.
"Dr. Manos. I would like to say — and I am saying this once because I do not repeat myself — that what you have built here is the finest thing I have been associated with in forty years of service.
I am honored to secure it. I will continue to do so as long as you require. "
I nodded. There was nothing to say to a speech like that except to receive it, and I received it, and he returned to the perimeter.
Athan arrived at 9:30 with a briefcase and a phone pressed to his ear.
He was speaking in rapid Italian to someone at the University of Bologna about a publication schedule that had become complicated in the way that publication schedules always became complicated when three international institutions and two ministries were trying to reach agreement on which citation format to use.
I watched him cross the edge of the trench, still speaking Italian, and pause at the point where the soil gave way to exposed limestone.
He looked down at the lintel stone. He did not interrupt his conversation, but the expression on his face — which was the expression of someone surveying an asset whose value could not be quantified, shifted into something I had only seen on him in very private moments. He was proud. Not of himself. Of me.
He finished the call. Set the briefcase down on a folding table. Crossed to me and, without asking permission, placed his hand on the curve of my belly.
"How is she?"
"Kicking. She was kicking during the 7 AM photo session. Margot captured the kick on film, if the timing was right."
"I will have the photograph framed for my office."
"Athan."
"Two copies. One for Athens, one for the island."
I did not argue. I had learned that Athan's requests regarding the documentation of my pregnancy were not negotiable, and that the non-negotiability was a form of care that I had, after some initial resistance, agreed to accept.
Constantine was at the western perimeter, conducting what he called a "walking security audit" and what I called "being physically present so that unauthorized visitors understand that unauthorized is not an option here.
" He was wearing dark clothes and dark glasses and a radio earpiece, and he was pacing the boundary of the site with the same methodical precision he had once brought to surveillance operations, except that the thing he was surveilling now was a Bronze Age palace and the thing he was protecting was a pregnant archaeologist and a graduate-student population that had, over the past four months, developed a collective crush on him and a complicated relationship with the fact that the man protecting them was also periodically seen, at dawn, carrying Thalia's water bottle up a hill because she had forgotten it at the villa.
The graduate students referred to him, among themselves, as "Mr. Stavros" in the way that one refers to a natural phenomenon one is not sure how to classify.
Spiro was in Athens today. He was managing a conference call with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, and a Swiss foundation that had expressed interest in co-funding the site museum.
His law degree, which had been, for fifteen years, an ornamental credential that he had used mostly for intellectual amusement, had become the instrument through which the Palace of Thalia was being woven into an international legal framework that protected it from the kind of plunder that had defined the Mediterranean antiquities trade for two hundred years.
He would fly back tonight. He would arrive at the villa at 10 PM.
He would, I knew with absolute certainty, check on me first and then on the excavation report and then on the brothers in that order, because the order was the correction he had been making consistently for four months and intended to keep making.
At 11 AM, Petros Stavros arrived in a cloud of cigar smoke and Mavrodaphne and the kind of Greek curses that had not changed since the occupation.
He surveyed the excavation site with the expression of a man who had not expected to be proud of his nephews' archaeologist's work and who had, against his own better judgment, become proud of it anyway.
He planted himself on a folding chair that Yannis produced for him, accepted a small cup of Greek coffee that a graduate student produced for him, and proceeded to narrate the history of the Stavros family in the particular key of a seventy-year-old Greek patriarch who had decided to rewrite the family's origin story in real time so that the new version included cultural patrimony as a founding value.