The Lost Labyrinth (16 page)

‘You get used to it.’

The traffic eased. A sign proclaimed Knossos ahead. They crested a hill to see car parks to their left, and beyond them a glimpse of the
archaeological site, the palace of King Minos and reputed home of the labyrinth of legend. It was there that the half-man, half-bull Minotaur was said to have slaughtered the young men and women sent in tribute from the Greek mainland, until it had finally been bested by Theseus, thanks to the assistance of Ariadne, King Minos’s own daughter. But Iain turned right down a private drive instead, past a charming small cluster of buildings set around a garden of hollyhocks and date palms, to a beautiful house set in lush gardens of acacias, hibiscus, lilies and hyacinth, along with a headless Roman statue or two. ‘Villa Ariadne,’ he said, somewhat redundantly. He nodded further on down the track. ‘The Strat-Mus is down that way,’ he said.

‘The what?’

‘Sorry. The Stratigraphic Museum, where we keep our finds.’ A dog began barking furiously. ‘Security,’ said Iain, as a second dog joined in. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added, pulling a three-point turn. ‘They’re chained up. I won’t have the bastards running free, not when I’m here. Bloody things scare the life out of me.’

‘We’re not going in?’ she asked.

‘No. We actually do most of our work down at what we call the Taverna, those buildings we passed at the head of the drive. Much more relaxed than the Villa. Another reason the little darling headed back
to the States, I suspect. She pictured herself in the grand house, you know, liveried servants bringing us mint juleps and mimosas on that lawn, that kind of thing.’

‘It is beautiful,’ said Gaille neutrally.

‘I’ll show you round later, if you like. But first let’s brew up some coffee. You can tell me your plans.’

‘I really don’t have any plans,’ confessed Gaille. ‘Other than to get here, at least, then try to track down this man Petitier. But I haven’t the first idea how.’

‘Then why don’t you put your feet up for a few minutes,’ suggested Iain. ‘I’ve got some phone-calls I can make.’

Knox and Franklin had reached the Telesterion, the large rectangular courtyard where the Mysteries had anciently been celebrated. The high walls that had once ensured the secrecy of its rites had long since tumbled down, leaving only their outlines, yet it was an atmospheric setting all the same. ‘African?’ smiled Knox. ‘Isn’t that rather a bold claim?’

‘It is,’ admitted Franklin. ‘It’s a very bold claim. But that doesn’t necessarily make it false. It’s not
as cut and dried as that, of course. Nothing ever is. But I still stand by the core of it, which is that the western world has a dark secret: the golden age of Athens didn’t spring fully-formed out of nothing thanks to some extraordinary flowering of Greek genius. It was simply one part of the overall evolution of thought; and much or even most of the breakthroughs that we attribute to the Greeks were actually learned in Egypt and merely
publicised
by the Greeks. And the remarkable thing is that the ancient Greeks themselves admitted as much. Not only did they explicitly credit the Egyptians with being the pioneers of religion, philosophy and thought, they also travelled in huge numbers to Egypt for their education. Thales, the father of philosophy, spent years there, as did Pythagoras, the father of mathematics, Solon, the father of law and democracy, and Herodotus, the father of history. Archimedes and Anaximander both travelled there, as did Democritus, Hipparchus, Plato and—’

‘You don’t need to convince me that the Greeks were influenced by the Egyptians,’ said Knox, aware that the list could go on for a while yet.

‘Forgive me,’ said Franklin. ‘I forgot that you’re an Egyptologist.’ He paused a moment to admire the view, down over the perimeter wall and terracotta roofs to a recreational marina, where masts swayed and clacked in the light breeze. ‘But your awareness makes you the exception rather than
the rule. Though that wouldn’t have been the case four hundred years ago, say. Back then, educated Westerners broadly accepted the Greek’s own account of Egyptian primacy.’ He paused and turned to Knox. ‘Europeans try their best to forget, but it wasn’t just America that grew rich on slave-labour. It must have been a strange thing, don’t you think, for Europe’s enlightened aristocracy to own slaves? They liked to think of themselves as good, as we all do; but it must have been hard while they were shipping their fellow men in their thousands to their plantations, then whipping them to death, just for having the wrong coloured skin. The notion that Africans could be their equals or even their superiors would have been intolerable, so they did the obvious thing. They rewrote history to shut Africa out. And that’s all my beloved Doric invasion ever was—another of the many theories invented by white people to rewrite the story of classical Greece as a white man’s triumph.’

Knox looked curiously at him, sensing the anger burning away beneath the surface. ‘Just because a theory doesn’t work out,’ he pointed out, ‘it doesn’t mean it was malicious.’

‘I’m just telling you what I thought at the time,’ said Franklin, somewhat unconvincingly. ‘I was a young man who’d dedicated his short academic life to a theory, only to discover that it was wrong. It’s not surprising that I felt a little bitter.
And there’s also something indescribably heady about realising the Emperor is naked, you know. You want to point it out to everyone who’ll listen, not always in the most sympathetic fashion.’ He broke off as he led the way up a narrow flight of wooden steps to the forecourt of the Eleusis museum, on which the conference pavilion had been erected. ‘So I took it upon myself not merely to attack these theories, but also to explain why they’d been devised in the first place, and why some of my colleagues clung to them with such tenacity, in the teeth of all the evidence.’

Knox raised his eyebrows. ‘You accused them of racism?’

‘Racism, colonialism, imperialism, bad scholarship.’ He gave a somewhat rueful laugh. ‘That was the one that really rankled, of course. Bad scholarship.’

‘So how did it all pan out?’ asked Knox, opening the pavilion door for him, ushering him ahead into the cool darkness within.

Franklin turned to him with a charming smile. ‘Unexpectedly,’ he replied.

Gaille poured herself a fresh cup of coffee in the Taverna kitchen, then took a little wander. The walls were covered incongruously with framed photographs of marmalade and tabby cats. A bookshelf in the dining room was filled with easy-reading material, old magazines and PG Wodehouse novels and thrillers with swollen yellow pages and bodice-rippers with their lurid covers half falling off. She picked out an old
Marie Claire
and took it outside, along with her coffee and a pack of biscuits, then up onto the roof terrace, where she moved a chair into the dappled shade of a tall conifer. Snatches of Iain’s phone calls reached her on the breeze, his tone by turns cajoling, humorous and stern, but tiredness quickly caught up with her, and she fell into a light doze, only to be startled awake when
Iain appeared suddenly on the roof. ‘
There
you are!’ he said, as though he’d spent hours searching for her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. The sun had risen above the trees, forcing her to shade her eyes with her hand as she squinted up at him. ‘Not much sleep last night.’

‘I’m only teasing,’ he smiled. ‘I saw you coming up here. I would have let you sleep, but I’ve made a bit of progress, and I thought you’d want to know.’

‘Fantastic!’

‘I’ll start with the bad news. No trace of your man Petitier with the local government agencies. Mind you, it would have been a miracle if there had been, the way they are.’ He grabbed a biscuit and began munching it, spraying crumbs as he talked. ‘But you said he was an archaeologist, so I had an inspiration. I ran his name through our own database here, and guess what? Turns out he was one of our regulars.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean he used to come here sometimes to do research. I even met him once or twice myself, as it turns out, though I only knew him as Roly. The thing is, we went through a security phase a few years back when we issued all our guest researchers with a picture ID; so I’ve got a photo of him, if that’s a help?’

‘That’s brilliant!’

‘Thought you’d be pleased,’ he grinned. ‘I’m running off a copy now.’ He gestured vaguely towards his office, inviting her to go with him. Her legs were strangely uncoordinated on the steps, as if chiding her for waking them too soon; but it felt gloriously cool inside after the direct sunlight, with the ceiling fan on its lowest setting, breathing down upon her like a kindly angel. The printer was in the corner, the page still chunking out. ‘Damned thing takes forever,’ he said, going over to it. ‘Never any budget for new technology: not when we can spend it on old books instead.’

It was just the kind of office Gaille loved, high shelves against every wall, packed tight with academic texts on Minoan Crete and the Mycenaeans, others on Ancient Egypt and Classical Greece, the Hittites and the Babylonians, more stacked on the desk. A letter marked a page in a bound compendium of
Journals of Egyptian Archaeology.
Curiosity got to her: she turned to it. Addressed to Iain from a small but respected London publisher, confirming the schedule for his forthcoming book. ‘Hey!’ she said. ‘Congratulations!’

He glanced over from the printer, flushed a little when he saw her looking at the letter. ‘That’s private,’ he said, coming over to take it from her, then folding it up and putting it away in his top drawer.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gaille, rather taken aback. ‘I didn’t realise.’

He sighed and found a smile. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to be curt. It’s just, I’ve just been getting a bit of grief from the guys.’

‘What on earth for? You’re getting your book published. You should be really proud.’

‘Didn’t you see the title?’

‘No. Why?’

He pulled a self-deprecating face. ‘My book’s about how we need to revise our understanding of the Eastern Med during the bronze age, using all the information we’re gleaning from our excavations here in Crete, as well as in Santorini and the other islands. I originally submitted it as
The Pelasgian and Minoan Aegean: A New Paradigm
.’

‘Catchy,’ said Gaille.

‘Exactly. Not a sniff of interest. I kept rewriting it and rewriting it, thinking the problem must be with ideas or my prose. But then one night I had a brainwave. I changed the title to
The Atlantis Connection
and got an offer within a week.’ They laughed together at the ways of the world, and the moment of tension was forgotten.

The printer finished chunking out; they went over to it together. It gave Gaille a bit of a jolt to see Petitier: he’d been an abstract concept until now. His photograph did little to warm her to him, his indignation at being forced to pose for
the camera evident, impatience and superiority written in the sour line of his upper lip, visible even through his tangled, tawny-grey beard. ‘You don’t have an address for him, I suppose?’

‘We do require one for our records, as it happens,’ Iain told her, ‘but he only put down some hotel in Heraklion. I called them, just in case, but the woman didn’t know of him, or of anyone answering his description. Maybe she was covering, but I don’t think so. I’ve never seen him in Heraklion myself, and I certainly would have done had he been living there for the past ten years. But don’t worry. I haven’t told you the best bit yet.’

‘The best bit?’

His eyes twinkled. ‘It was just, I was struck by a thought. I mean, if he’s been doing research here, then maybe he’s been to other sites too, right? So I started calling around, and guess what?’

‘You’ve had a result?’

He nodded vigorously. ‘There’s this Belgian dig a little east of here. One of the girls there knows Petitier quite well. The thing is, her brother came over to visit a couple of years back, and she took him on a tour of the island. And who should she see on her travels but Roland Petitier, selling several kilos of walnuts to a local shop and promising to bring more on his next visit.’

‘Home turf!’ exulted Gaille. ‘Where was this?’

‘A town called Anapoli. It’s in the hills above Hora Sfakion on the south coast.’

‘And how can I get there?’

His grin grew broad. ‘By getting back into my car and enjoying the drive,’ he told her.

The pavilion was deliberately windowless, to enable lighting to be controlled during the talks. Only the back third was currently lit, two matronly women setting out coffee cups and jugs of water on trestle tables. Knox felt a twinge of alarm. He’d expected the AV guys to be on hand to show him how everything worked. They must have been caught up in the traffic. He poured himself and Franklin glasses of water. They took them over to the back row of folding wooden chairs, where they sat either side of the aisle. ‘You were telling me how your crusade finished,’ he prompted.

‘Yes,’ agreed Franklin. ‘It was absurd, in its own way. One of my professors—my mentor, I suppose you’d call him—had finally had enough of me. He invited me to his home, an invariable sign of trouble. I was glad, though. I was fired up, eager to hurl my young career in his teeth. He was a stickler for punctuality, so I presented myself at
his front door at seven p.m. sharp. But it wasn’t he who answered. It was his daughter, Maria.’

‘Ah!’ smiled Knox.

‘Quite,’ agreed Franklin. ‘A man gets to know himself in such moments. One look at Maria was all it took for me to reassess my priorities in life. In a way, I’m ashamed of that. In another, I couldn’t be prouder.’

‘Was it reciprocated?’

‘She became my wife, if that’s what you mean, though it took me several years to persuade her. And her first impressions of me were not good. She teases me with it still, the way I gawped. Her father had been delayed at the university, she told me. Some idiot had let off a fire alarm.’ He shook his head at the perverse tricks of fate. ‘Maria sat with me as I waited. By the time her father finally made it home, I was head over heels in love, I couldn’t apologise fast enough. I pledged never to embarrass him or his university again. He asked me to cut myself off immediately and completely from Petitier, who he held more to blame than me. I agreed. He was kind enough to give me another chance.’