no getting away from that, and grief, separated, was doubled in intensity. How could Marina ever understand how bereft he himself felt, how harrowed he was by his own sense of guilt?
He noticed a smell of stale sweat in the room, suggesting that one of the cleaners had only just left. And the curtains were drawn, at an hour when they would normally have been left open. In his distracted state, Janson did not make the inferences that he was trained to make. Grief had interposed itself between him and the world like a gauzy scrim.
Only when his eyes adjusted to the light did he see the man who was seated in an upholstered chair, his back to the curtains.
Janson started, reaching for a gun he didn't have.
"It's been a long time between drinks, Paul," the seated man said.
Janson recognized the man's silky, unctuous tones, the cultivated English with just a slight Greek accent. Nikos Andros.
He was flooded with memories, few of them fond.
"I'm hurt, you visiting Athens and not telling me," Andros continued, rising to his feet and taking a few steps toward him. "I thought we were friends. I thought I was somebody you'd look up for a drink, a glass of ouzo. Hoist one for old times' sake, my friend. No?"
The pebbled cheeks, the small darting eyes: Nikos Andros belonged to another era in Janson's life, to a temporal compartment he had sealed off when he left Consular Operations.
"I don't care how you got in here - my only question to you is how you prefer to leave," said Janson, who was past any displays of joviality. "Quickest would be off the balcony, nine stories down."
"Is that any way to talk to a friend?" Andros wore his dark hair severely short; his clothing was, as always, expensive, neatly pressed, fastidious: the black blazer was cashmere, the midnight blue shirt was silk, his shoes a soft, burnished calfskin. Janson glanced at the nail grown long on Andres's little finger, a foppish custom of certain Athenians, indicating a disdain for manual labor.
"A friend? We did business together, Nikos. But that's all in the past. I doubt you've got anything to sell I'd be in the market for."
"No time for 'show and sell'? You must be a man in a hurry. No matter. I'm in the charity business today. I'm not here to sell information. I'm here to give you information. Absolutely gratis."
In Greece, Nikos Andros was known as a conservator of the national treasures. A curator at the Piraeus Archaeological Museum and a crusader for preservation programs, he was frequently quoted on the subject of repatriation, regularly urging that the Elgin Marbles be returned to the country from which they were taken. He lived in a neoclassical villa in the leafy Athenian suburb of Kifissia, on the lower slopes of Mount Pen-deli, and cut a colorful figure in Athens's elite circles. His connoisseurship and erudition in classical archaeology made him a much-sought-after guest in the drawing rooms of the rich and powerful throughout Europe. Because he lived well, and occasionally made oblique reference to family money, he appealed to the Greek reverence for the anthropos kales anatrophes, the man of high breeding.
Janson knew that the soigne curator grew up the son of a shopkeeper in Thessaloniki. He also knew that Andros's hard-won social prominence was crucial to his sub rosa career as an information broker during the Cold War. It was a time when Athens sector was a center for networks run by the CIA and by the KGB alike, when human assets were often smuggled through the Bosporus Strait, when complex gambits involving the neighboring countries of Asia Minor were launched from the Aegean peninsula. Andros was perfectly detached from the larger play of superpowers; he was no more inclined to favor one side over another than a commodities broker was to favor one customer over another.
"If you have something to say," Janson said, "say it and get the hell out."
"You disappoint me," Andros said. "I've always thought of you as a man of sophistication, worldliness, breeding. I'd always respected you for it. Transactions with you were more enjoyable than with most."
For his part, Janson recalled his transactions with Andros as being particularly excruciating. Matters were simpler with those who understood the value of the commodity and were content with a straightforward value-for-value exchange. By contrast, Andros needed to be flattered and cajoled, not just paid. Janson remembered well his endless, wheedling requests for rare varieties of ouzo.