The Lost Labyrinth dk-3 Read online

'I want to know why you're so interested in me.'

  She studied him a moment, as if to assess him for sincerity. It always amazed him how credulous these people were: she seemed to have forgotten her checklist already. He kept his expression impassive, knowing she wanted to tell him, her own cleverness bottled like champagne bubbles inside her, pressing for release. When she began to talk, she quickly grew excited. She stood up, began walking back and forth across the narrow room, gesturing grandly. She was working on a paper for the journals, it transpired. Her subject matter was narcissistic sociopaths. That Mikhail was one would be obvious to any first-year student, of course; but most people with narcissistic personality disorder were either cerebral or somatic, which was to say arrogant because of their intelligence or because of their physique and athletic prowess respectively. He was both. That in itself made him a curiosity. But there was more. Most narcissists were, at heart, self-loathing. It was their very hatred for themselves that drove their desperate need for adulation and worship from the people around them, their need for what she called narcissistic supply, and which she talked of as though it were a drug. When they were deprived of that supply, their fantasies about themselves collapsed, they fell into depression and despair. But he, while displaying all the signs of classic narcissism, seemed immune to depression and despair, even when his narcissistic supply was denied him, and she wanted to know why. Criminal narcissism was her thing, and she sensed in Mikhail an opportunity for a real advance, because if she could find his secret, maybe it would offer a way to palliate self-loathing in others and so break the narcissistic cycle altogether. She got all excited and earnest, wobbling a little on her heels as she walked, red patches glowing on her throat and cheeks, like a litter of kittens seen through a night-sight. Finally she stopped and gave him one of those well, there it is shrugs, expecting him to honour his part of the deal, tell her how he'd raped and murdered that innocent little thirteen-year-old Lolita.

  Innocent! Hah!

  He stood and pushed back his chair, its feet growling over the bare cement floor. Then he started walking towards her. She produced a nervous smile, her pupils flickered, and she backed away until she was up against the wall by the door. He kept advancing, slowly, fixing his best unthreatening smile in place, as though she were some lapdog yapping at him, and he didn't want to spook it, or he'd lose his chance to kick it.

  She balled her fist up to pound on the door and summon the guard. She tensed her arm twice in preparation, but Mikhail kept advancing and in the end she couldn't quite bring herself to do it. Self-knowledge at last. She put both her arms down by her side, fingers splayed like sunbursts. He was standing right in front of her now, their bodies almost touching face, chest, knee, toe. He could hear her breathing patterns change until they were in synchrony with his. He rewarded her with a smile. He placed one hand on her left shoulder, the other, on her hip, began to gather up the charged fabric of her skirt. They stared each other in the eye. She neither stopped him, nor encouraged him, but when he slipped his hand beneath the skirt and up her thigh over her knickers to her pudenda, she gave an almost inaudible exhalation, like some pre-packaged grocery product being punctured, allowing that preservative air to escape. A moment of almost pure silence, except that he could hear the saliva washing around her mouth and throat, while a pulse flickered in her pussy, like some terrified rodent cowering in his palm. 'Mr Nergadze,' she croaked, in her best schoolmarm tone, as though to reprimand him. He waited, but she said nothing else, so he gave her a gentle encouraging squeeze and smiled more broadly at her. She smiled weakly back, a smile of complete concession, an invitation to do whatever he wanted.

  He let go of her, stepped away, returned to his chair, sat back down and folded his hands once more in his lap. 'Narcissistic, am I?' he asked. 'Or is it simply that I am beautiful?'

  TWO

  I

  The Kastelli Hotel, Athens, Greece, two weeks later

  The three of them were laughing hard at the sheer awfulness of Knox's joke when Augustin swiped his hotel key-card through the lock outside his room and pushed his door open with his foot. But the laughter died at once.

  It was the smell that did it for Knox: not that it was overpowering, just sour and ugly, but it provoked an immediate and visceral disgust, so that he knew something was badly wrong. He looked over Augustin's shoulder and saw gouts of blood and vomit on the fibrous blue carpet, and then a naked elderly man lying on his back in the narrow aisle between the double and single beds, his right arm thrown out above his head. There were stains around his waist, where his bladder and bowels had vented. There was a great gash in his forehead, too, from which copious amounts of blood had spilled, and there was a look of such stark terror on his face that Knox instantly assumed that not only was he dead, but that he'd sensed his fate in the very moment it had overtaken him.

  It was a real shock, then, when the man convulsed upon the carpet, a spasm that ran up his body like a flapped-out sheet. It was Claire who moved first, trained medic that she was. She pushed past Augustin and knelt down beside him. 'Ambulance,' she said succinctly. Augustin nodded and hurried around the single bed, then knelt on it to grab the bedside phone and dial the operator.

  The man opened his eyes and gave a little croak, trying to speak, blood-frothed saliva leaking from the side of his mouth. Claire wiped it away with a corner of the bedspread. He spoke again. She shook her head to indicate that he should preserve his strength, but he kept persisting, so Knox pushed aside the bed to make room for himself on his other side, then knelt down and put his ear close to his lips. But the man's voice was so weak that it was almost impossible to make out anything much more than the shape and thrust of the syllables. He frowned interrogatively at Claire. 'Elysium?' he suggested.

  'Maybe,' she shrugged.

  'Who the hell is he?' asked Knox, standing back up.

  'Roland Petitier,' said Augustin, still waiting for the operator to answer.

  Knox nodded. An old archaeology professor of Augustin's who'd vanished without trace nearly twenty years ago, only to reappear unexpectedly a few weeks before, and who was scheduled to address the conference the following afternoon. 'But what's he doing here?'

  Augustin gave a very Gallic shrug, as if to disclaim responsibility. 'I hear a knock on my door earlier. I think it must be you, come to take me to the airport. But no, it's him. After twenty years. He tells me his room isn't ready yet and asks if he can stay here until it is. I tell him no. I tell him I am about to collect my fiancee Claire from the airport. He swears on his mother's life he'll be gone by the time we get back. On his mother's life!'

  'You can't exactly blame him for-'

  Augustin held up a finger. The operator had finally picked up. 'Emergency,' he told them curtly. 'Room five-thirteen. We need an ambulance.' He listened a moment. 'No. He's taken a blow to the head.' Another pause. He looked around the room. 'No. I don't think so.'

  Claire had tilted Petitier's head backwards, and put her ear against his mouth. 'Tell them he's stopped breathing,' she said, with impressive calmness. 'Tell them to bring a defibrillator.' While Augustin relayed the message, she moved briskly into cardiopulmonary resuscitation, using both hands to pump Petitier's chest hard. She clearly knew what she was about, so Knox stepped away to give her space, then took the opportunity to see if he could work out what had happened.

  The room was virtually identical to his and Gaille's on the floor above. The medium-pile blue carpet showed signs of wear; the double and the single bed both sagged a little in the middle. There were dark spots on the mirrors of the dressing table, and on the glass of the framed prints of the Acropolis, Mycenae and Epidaurus on the walls. A splashing noise was coming from the bathroom. He pushed open the door to see the shower spraying hot water into the bathtub, trapping thick clouds of mist against the ceiling. He made to turn it off, then paused at the startling realisation that this might be a crime scene, so he went back out and closed the door behind him.

  A black
laptop case was leaning against the bed, bulkier than Augustin's, so presumably Petitier's. Again, he left it untouched. The white net curtain billowed over the balcony door, pregnant with breeze, revealing a few red smears upon its fabric. He pushed it carefully aside. The sliding glass door was wide open. He went out onto the balcony. The moulded plastic table and one of the two matching chairs had been overturned, as if by a storm or a fight. An overnight bag was lying on its side, the old brown leather ripped open and leaking entrails: underpants, vests, shirts and trousers. He leaned out over the railing, looked down past lower balconies to the narrow alley far beneath, congested with rusting skips filled with multicoloured bags of hotel waste. He looked left and right. The neighbouring balconies were separated from one another by spiked railings, but it would be easy enough for anyone with a head for heights to swing around them; and there was precious little chance of being seen.

  Back inside, Augustin was standing by Claire, wanting to help but not sure how. 'I knew I should say no when he asks to stay,' he told Knox.

  'So why didn't you?'

  'He seemed so desperate. I mean he was really paranoid that someone was after him.'

  'Paranoid?' asked Knox dryly.

  'He made me swear not to tell anyone he was here. That's why I said nothing earlier.'

  'Did he give you any idea who was after him?'

  'No. But he's found something, I know that much. In Crete, apparently. Some seal-stones and maybe some other things. I think perhaps he has them with him, because he won't let go of his overnight bag, you know. I mean he hugged it against him like it was his only child.'

  Lift doors opened down the corridor. There were shouts and the thud of heavy boots. Two policemen in the dark blue uniform of the Elleniki Astynomia appeared at the door, holding white crash helmets and truncheons in their hands, as though fresh from riot duty. The first was tall and powerful, yet his features were soft and unlined, making him look almost too young to be in the police. His partner was older, portly, wheezing from the run. He pushed past his younger colleague, sized up the situation. 'Away!' he ordered Claire. She didn't even look up, too concentrated on giving Petitier CPR. 'Away!' he barked more loudly, angered at being ignored.

  'She's a doctor,' protested Augustin. 'Leave her be.'

  'Away!' he shouted a third time.

  The younger policeman stepped forward, nettled by this lack of respect for his partner. He reached around Claire from behind, grabbing her breast as he did so.

  The colour rose instantly in Augustin's face; he punched the young policeman hard on his cheek, sending him sprawling. Then he turned to Claire. 'Are you all right?' he asked.

  The young policeman got back to his feet, a look of pure fury in his eye. He lashed his baton so hard across Augustin's cheek that a fragment of tooth flew from between his lips, and he cried out and fell to his knees, hands to his bloodied mouth. Knox hurried to intervene, but the older policeman seized him by the arm and held him back. And something seemed to release in his young partner, a kind of obscene rage. His face was almost purple as he smashed his baton down on Augustin's crown, mercifully catching him only a glancing blow, yet still splitting his scalp so that the blood gushed even as he fell onto his side in the narrow gap between the bed and wall. Claire screamed and grabbed the policeman's arm, but he threw her off easily, then turned back to Augustin and hit him again. But the way Augustin had fallen made it hard for the policeman to get at his head, so he pushed the bed aside and stepped around him to give himself a better angle of attack.

  Finally Knox fought his way free. He hurried across the room and grabbed the policeman's flailing wrist, twisting it sharply. The policeman yelped and dropped his baton, turning to Knox with a slightly dazed expression, as though uncertain what was going on. Then he looked down at Augustin lying unconscious at his feet, at the oily dark blood gathering in a shallow lake on the carpet, and at the red spatters of guilt already caking on his own hands, and a look of horror appeared upon his face, and he began to weep.

  II

  A conference room, Tbilisi, Georgia

  Conflicting emotions tussled in Edouard Zdanevich's breast as he stood in front of the painting. It was executed in oils on black oilcloth, perhaps seventy centimetres wide by a metre tall, a portrait of a voluptuous woman in a rocking chair, nursing an infant through the folds of her blue-black dress, the barest hint of breast showing. Simple colours and themes executed with intense power and humanity. A Pirosmani, without doubt, as gorgeous as any in Tbilisi. Yet Edouard had never seen it before, had not even known it existed. And while it was a thrill for him merely to be in its presence, it infuriated him that these damned Nergadzes had it hanging here on their wall, when he doubted any of them knew what it was, or why it was important, or the first thing about the great man who'd painted it. All they ever knew or cared about anything was how much it cost.

  Somewhere in the building, a door opened, allowing out a billow of raucous laughter. Another of the Nergadzes' famously debauched feasts, no doubt. Edouard despised such wanton displays of gluttony, lechery and drunkenness-but it would be nice, he had to admit, to be able to despise them from the inside for a change.

  A pair of glass cabinets stood against the wall, both filled with Colchian gold jewellery, vessels, ornaments and coins. The pieces were very familiar to him. They'd come from a trove discovered some decades earlier in an abandoned well in the hill-country of Turkmenistan, across the Caspian Sea, and had been on display in their national museum in Ashgabat. It had long been known that many of the pieces were Georgian, but only recently had the Turkmeni government countenanced a sale. Edouard himself had flown to Ashgabat, where he'd negotiated their purchase and repatriation. Though he'd used Nergadze money, the agreement had been clear: he'd bought the cache on behalf of the nation of Georgia, for display in her national museums. Ilya Nergadze had bathed in public admiration for days on the back of his generosity. Yet the gold pieces weren't on display at any national museum. They were on display here, where ordinary Georgians would never have the chance to see them.

  Footsteps approached briskly outside, then the double doors banged open and Ilya Nergadze marched on in, followed closely by his son Sandro and one of his small army of bodyguards. He went everywhere on the march, old man Ilya, like a general on the morning of battle. He was tall and extravagantly thin, with a high brow, a flat nose and a tight line to his mouth, as though life had been unforgivably cruel to him, rather than to everyone who'd come into his orbit. His hair and eyebrows, until recently a snowy white, now glistened with black dye, while his skin had been noticeably tightened by nip-tuck surgery and botox injections, an effort at youthfulness that should have made him look ridiculous, except that people like him somehow never looked ridiculous, particularly not in their presence, perhaps because everyone was too afraid to snigger.

  'I'm grateful you asked me here,' said Edouard, joining them at the rosewood conference table. 'We need to finalise the transfer of-'

  'All in good time,' said Sandro, sitting opposite him. He was considered the diplomat of the family; which was why he'd been appointed head of his father's presidential campaign.

  'But people are talking,' protested Edouard. 'My colleagues at the museum keep asking me when they'll-'

  'He said all in good time,' said the bodyguard.

  Edouard looked sourly at him. Nergadze bodyguards typically knew better than to talk in the presence of their superiors. But this one looked more relaxed than most, perhaps forty or so, wearing a turtleneck sweater beneath his black jacket. He was unshaven, too, perhaps the better to show off the crescent scar in his cheek, where no stubble grew. 'I'm sorry,' said Edouard stiffly. 'I don't believe we've met.'

  'This is Boris Dekanosidze,' said Sandro. 'My head of security. I wanted you to meet him because you're going to be working together over the next few days.'

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'You're leaving for Athens tonight. Directly after this meeting, in fact.'

&n
bsp; 'I'm doing nothing of the sort,' retorted Edouard. 'I thought I'd made it clear that I won't accept any more commissions until you honour your-'

  'You'll accept whatever commissions we tell you to accept,' said Ilya.

  'There'll be plenty of time to complete the transfer of the cache once you return,' added Sandro, in a more emollient tone. 'But right now, we have an urgent situation, and we need your help.' He nodded to Boris, who slid a manila folder across the polished rosewood. Edouard opened it reluctantly, then read through the correspondence inside with growing bewilderment. 'This is a joke,' he said finally. 'It has to be.'

  'My grandson Mikhail is going to see the item in question tomorrow morning,' said Ilya. 'You will go along with him.'

  'But you don't even have a grandson called Mikhail,' protested Edouard.

  'Do I not?' asked Ilya.

  'Boris will be with you too,' said Sandro, into the ensuing silence. 'He'll pay for this item once you've authenticated it.'

  'If I authenticate it, you mean,' said Edouard.

  A look of profound irritation clouded Ilya's face. 'Please don't persist in telling us what we mean.'

  Another silence fell. Somewhere deep in the house, a burst of uproarious laughter was timed so perfectly that Edouard couldn't help but think that Nergadze's guests were watching him on CCTV. Not for the first time, he realised how inconsequential he was to these people. Their presidential campaign was in full swing, and Ilya was making good headway in the polls. Nothing else mattered to them. 'You can't seriously expect me to authenticate a fake,' said Edouard.

  'It won't be a fake,' observed Sandro. 'Not once a man of your reputation has verified it.'

  'It would ruin me. I won't do it.'

  'You will do it,' said Ilya.

  Edouard forced and held a smile, aware he wouldn't get anywhere by confrontation. 'Look,' he said. 'I'd like to help. Really I would. But I can't. Not this weekend. My wife is already furious about how much I've been away recently. She issued me with an ultimatum, as it happens. We spend this weekend together, or else. You know what wives are like.'