Epilogue II
What Remains
Athan
Two years later
There were three hundred and forty guests.
I knew seventy percent of them by name, forty percent by reputation, and approximately twelve percent well enough to predict which conversations they would attempt to initiate with me and which topics they would attempt to steer me toward.
The Greek Minister of Culture was seated at table four.
The German ambassador was at table seven.
The director of the Louvre's Department of Near Eastern Antiquities was at table twelve with his third wife and a translator.
The Swiss foundation representatives who had co-funded the the site museum for the palace the press still insisted on calling by her name were at table fifteen, and the Italian academic delegation was at table nine, and the British Museum contingent — complicated allies, sharp critics, occasional collaborators — occupied two full tables near the stage.
I had seated none of them myself. My executive assistant, a woman named Katerina who had been with the Foundation since its inception more than two years ago, had handled the seating chart, and she had handled it with the precision of a woman who understood that diplomatic disasters at Mediterranean archaeology galas were the kind of event that could derail a fifteen-year legitimization project in a single evening.
The legitimization project had not derailed. The legitimization project was, against my own initial forecast, exceeding every metric I had set for it at the two-year mark.
We had married quietly — a civil ceremony in Heraklion, witnessed by Margot and Yannis, with Despina asleep in Constantine's arms and the Aegean visible through the registrar's window.
Thalia had refused a church wedding, refused to take the Stavros name, and refused to be referred to as anyone's wife in any context that implied she had been acquired rather than consulted.
The marriage was a legal instrument — her term, delivered with the same precision she applied to excavation permits — designed to protect the child's inheritance rights and the family's institutional standing.
That the legal instrument also happened to formalize the most significant emotional commitment of my life was, she informed me, a secondary benefit I was welcome to enjoy privately.
I enjoyed it privately. I also enjoyed it at every Foundation event, every ministerial meeting, and every occasion on which the word wife served to communicate, to men who understood no other framework, that the woman beside me was permanent.
I crossed the ballroom and found my brother Constantine at his customary position — within ten feet of the main emergency exit, wearing a dinner jacket he had purchased under protest, holding a glass of water that I knew for a fact contained only water because Constantine did not drink during operations and Constantine still classified any public event at which Thalia would be speaking as an operation.
His earpiece was concealed under the collar of his shirt.
His radio was in contact with Yannis at the entrance.
His left hand was in his pocket. His right hand was holding the water glass with the kind of grip that indicated readiness without indicating anxiety.
"Constantine."
"Athan."
"Status."
"Entrance is clear. Two guests on the initial flag list reviewed and cleared.
Turkish cultural delegation — Ministry officials, not Arslan-affiliated — arrived nine minutes ago, seated at table twenty-two.
No incidents. Yannis has four men outside and two men on the service corridor. The floor plan is locked."
"Thalia?"
"Upstairs in the greenroom with Margot. She is reviewing her notes and drinking, I regret to report, the weaker of the two Greek coffees Eleni sent up with her this afternoon. The stronger coffee was reserved for the morning."
"And Despina?"
Constantine's face did the thing his face did when Despina was the subject.
It was a small thing — a softening at the corners of the eyes that I had never, in thirty-three years of knowing my brother, seen before the day he had held his daughter for the first time — and it was the kind of expression that no one in this ballroom except me would have noticed, and that he would have denied if any of them had.
"Despina is at the island with the nanny.
She is eleven months old now and has three teeth and my mother's jaw.
I called at 6:30. She was eating olives and refusing to wear a shirt.
The nanny said, and I am translating, 'She has acquired, from somewhere, the conviction that shirts are optional.
I am losing this battle. I will put her to bed in a shirt regardless.
' I said good. I said I would call again at 9. I will call at 9."
"You will call from the service corridor where the acoustics are better."
"I will call from the service corridor where the acoustics are better."
The corridor where Constantine called his daughter at 9 PM during Foundation events was a detail of our operational rhythm that no one else in my life knew about.
I knew about it because I had begun, approximately eighteen months ago, conducting my own 9 PM calls to the nanny from the same corridor, on the grounds that the acoustics were indeed better and the service staff had been trained to allow us the privacy.
Spiro arrived at the ballroom at 8:02, late, but late in the professional way that was understood as the arrival pattern of a man who had been finalizing a legal document that could not be rushed.
He had flown in from a Ministry meeting in Thessaloniki at 3 PM, changed clothes on the plane, and arrived at the hotel with six minutes to spare.
He crossed the ballroom to where I stood with Constantine, nodded in the particular economy of gestures that had characterized his social behavior for two years, and accepted a glass of sparkling water from a passing server.
"Report," I said.
"The Thessaloniki meeting went as planned.
The protocol on site registration is signed.
The Swiss co-funding tranche clears tomorrow.
And Brigitte called at 6 PM to inform me that the quarterly review for the current cycle has been rated, in her words, 'boringly compliant.
' She asked me to convey to you that boringly compliant is the highest praise her office offers. "
"I will accept it."
"She also asked me to inform you that she has met Despina exactly once, at the christening, and that she would like it noted that Despina is, quote, 'better-behaved than most of the informants I have managed in fifteen years.'"
"She is not better-behaved than most informants. She refused to wear a shirt tonight."
"Brigitte was impressed by her at the christening. The bar was low."
Constantine, who had been silent during this exchange, turned his water glass in his hand and said, "Spiro. Exits?"
"Two behind the stage. One through the kitchen. The service corridor to the east parking lot. I walked all of them when I arrived."
"Good."
The three of us stood in a loose triangle near the bar for perhaps ninety seconds, not speaking, not needing to speak, the geometry of our standing arrangement a thing that had been refined over two years of public events and private ones, and then Thalia appeared at the top of the staircase, and I stopped calculating variables.
She was wearing a deep green dress that had been cut to accommodate the subtle shape of a body that had been, two years ago, pregnant with our daughter and was now, two months ago, pregnant again.
The second pregnancy had been Thalia's decision about her own body, communicated to us as fact, though the conversations that preceded it had made clear all three of us wanted this and announced to the three of us at dinner with the phrase "I am doing this again, and you may assist or not, according to preference," and the three of us had assisted.
Her hair was up. The pearl earrings were the ones I had given her on the first anniversary of the Kalymnos incident, on the grounds that the occasion deserved a gift that was not related to archaeology and was.
Her expression, as she crossed the top of the staircase, was the expression of a woman who had been preparing to deliver a forty-minute speech on Minoan administrative geography to a room of three hundred and forty of her peers and who was, at this moment, noticing the three men watching her from the floor below with the kind of attention that required no verbal signaling.
She met my eyes. Her mouth moved, not a smile, the microexpression that preceded a smile when she was in professional mode and not permitting herself the full expression, and she began the descent.
I watched her come down the stairs with the full focus of a man who had never, in his entire life, learned how to look at this woman with any less than complete attention.
Constantine watched her with the focus of a sniper watching the thing he had been deployed to protect.
Spiro watched her with the focus of someone still, two years into this arrangement, permitted to watch her and still aware that the permission had been a gift he had almost forfeited.