The Alexander Cipher Page 0,35

of the Mallawi papyri, his hands resting like a priest’s on the walnut frame as he gazed down at the yellowed reeds and the faded black writing. A feeling of intense love, awe, and pride burned in Nicolas’s chest when he beheld him. A king of fierce countenance indeed!

Dragoumis looked up and drilled his son with his emotionless black eyes. “Yes?” he asked.

“They’ve found Akylos,” Nicolas blurted, his excitement almost too much. “It’s started.”

Chapter Eight

ABLUE TRUCK CUT IN FRONT OF ELENA as she drove back south to the Delta, forcing her to slam on her brakes. She blasted her horn until the truck moved aside; then she wound down her window, shook her fist, and yelled some choice Arabic phrases at the bewildered driver. She was in a troubled mood. It was speaking to Nicolas that had done it. That, and that damned Frenchman. So smug. Between them, they’d stirred memories of her late husband, Pavlos, and Elena hated that, because it just reminded her of her loss.

She’d known of Pavlos long before she’d ever met him, had been infuriated and entertained in equal measure by the tone, anger, and wit of his articles ridiculing Macedonian nationalism. She’d been intrigued, too, by the gossip of besotted women throwing themselves at him. She was a proud and independent woman herself, and like so many of her kind, she had yearned to fall helplessly in love. They had finally met on either side of a radio debate in Thessalonike, and he had surprised her from the start. She had expected someone sharp, assertive, dressy, plausible, but Pavlos hadn’t been like that at all. Though he wasn’t exactly arrogant, she had never met a man so confident of himself. She knew from their first handshake that she was in trouble. He had an unsettling way of looking at her, then and later, as though she were completely exposed to him, as though he understood not just everything she said but all its subtext, too. He had watched her as though she were a movie, one he had seen before.

He had trodden all over her in their debate, defusing her best arguments with humor, hammering relentlessly at her weakest points. Disconcerted, she tried to press him back by citing Keramopoullos on the idiosyncratic style of Macedonian ceramics, before remembering that the words had come from Kallipolitis. She glanced up fearfully to see him grin, and for a terrible moment her scholarly reputation had been at his mercy. That moment—the moment of being at his mercy—had changed her life.

For two days after the debate, Elena had wandered her museum from room to room, hugging herself like an addict. Each time she tried to work, a craving like hunger would disturb her. She had never needed to call men, but she called Pavlos. Scared he would mock her, she introduced herself brusquely, remarked that he had raised interesting points in the debate. He thanked her. Then her nerve had failed. She held the phone against her cheek, wanting to say something clever or hurtful but not knowing what. When he asked her to have dinner with him, she could have cried.

How had it been? It had been everything. She remembered little of the detail, as though the intensity of her love had simply been too much for her memory. But she could remember the joy of it. Even now sometimes, she could experience an exquisite moment of bliss, catching sight of his double on the street, smelling his brand of cigarette in some passerby’s hand, or having some man look at her in the way Pavlos had—as that arrogant Frenchman had, certain he could take her to bed whenever he damned well chose.

Pavlos’s death had devastated Elena. Of course it had. She still hadn’t recovered from it. How could she? Grief hadn’t been as she imagined, any more than love had been. She had imagined grief as a great sea swell that lifted you into wretchedness for a while before setting you back down again much where you’d been before. But it hadn’t been like that. Grief had changed the fabric of who she was as completely as blown carbon changes molten pig iron.

Yes, she thought, the metaphor worked: grief had turned her into steel.

THE WOMAN DROPPED THE MANILA ENVELOPE through the open rear window of Nessim’s Saab as he paused to buy a packet of cigarettes from a vendor. He drove off in a flurry of dust back to his hotel’s underground parking lot, then