Chương 127: 117. Diktyo

I passed nine years in a town on the Maeander mending nets, and no one there ever once wondered what a mender of nets might see. The useful disguise is not a false face. It is a true one the important men do not look at. — Codex of the Long Watch, Field Observation, 4th Century, Caria Petros had the last name he needed before his coffee was cold.

He made himself finish the cup slowly anyway, because a man who hurried his coffee was a man with something pressing on him, and he did not want to be that man in front of the fuel dock. Vangelis hauled oil up the coast road behind a mule and owed Petros for an axle and a fortnight of not asking where the new carts had come from. So Petros bought him a coffee and let him talk, and did not steer, because you never steered Vangelis. You waited for the road to bend on its own.

It bent when Petros asked, idly, who was still paying real money for anything these days.

"A house," Vangelis said, sucking his teeth.

"Off the Iera Odos, up toward the old works. They take bread from Kostas, oil from I do not know where, and they pay, re, they pay in silver like it was nothing." He shrugged.

"Big house. And quiet. I dropped a drum there once. Too many mouths in that house for a family. And nobody ever comes out the front." Petros nodded, and turned his cup a little on the saucer, then said something about the price of bread, and let the road bend away again. He had the measure of it now. Kostas the baker had a nephew, and the nephew had let slip a week ago that their standing order had trebled and the money came in silver scraps.

A carter had grumbled about the same address to Spyros over a net two days back. Now Vangelis, closing the triangle without knowing he had drawn a line at all. Three men who had never met, each holding one true line, and only a fourth man sitting still in enough kafeneía to lay the three beside each other. A house off the Iera Odos that ate like a barracks and answered its door like a secret. The climb home took him past the requisition notices, which had gone up on every second wall like a rash.

The Council was pulling stone off half the ruins in Attica and men off every boat it could spare, and all of it was going to the same place. Up the old rock, where they were raising walls no one had needed for two thousand years. Petros spat. Kala. Let them build. It was not his stone and not his morning. • • Eleni put a plate in front of him before he had dried his hands, because that was how his mother said good morning.

He ate standing while his mother asked him to act like a civilised man and go sit down with his plate. The others were at the table. Maria had already taken the children up, which Petros had asked her to do without saying why. He would have to talk to her privately and it would be a long conversation. Yiayia sat in her chair by the window with her hands folded, watching everything, as though the room were a pot she did not entirely trust not to boil over.

"You found it," Donna said, looking at his face.

"I found it." He pulled out a chair and sat.

"A house off the Iera Odos, up past the old gasworks. It buys food for thirty and shows a face for four. Quiet street, quiet money, and the money is silver scraps, which means someone with more than a boatyard behind them is feeding it." Steve was tapping the blunt end of his pencil on the wood.

"How sure are you?"

"Three men who do not know each other told me the same house without one of them meaning to." Petros spread his hands.

"That is as sure as I can make it. You want a signed paper, go back to Antoniou. You want the truth, it is that house."

"Good work," Arthur said, nodding, and Petros felt a flicker of pride at the praise.

"Right then. We watch the place. Learn the pattern. Who comes, who leaves, when it's at its thinnest."

"You watch a warehouse like that," Donna said.

"If you mean to assault it. We do not need tactical information. We need to know what is happening and everything real happens behind the door."

"Somebody needs to be in that room." Donna said, looking up from the table.

"And it has to be someone they will believe wants what they are selling. Arthur could not walk into an Athens meeting and go unnoticed. Steve could not. I could not. We carry the wrong language, the wrong faces and the wrong culture. Sarah has the language and the face. She also has candles burning in her name at the Aghía Triáda and the archbishop's public blessing delivered on a street full of witnesses." Nobody said the name, because they didn't have to. Petros had known it since the fuel dock.

"It is me," he said.

"Ela, we all know it is me. Say the rest."

"Petro." Sarah's head had come up.

"I know this coast, Re. I have walked into a hundred rooms where I did not belong and walked out with what I came for and a man buying me a drink besides. This is a room. I am good at rooms."

"It is not a room," Sarah said forcefully.

"It is a room that kills people, Petro. The Despóta said it himself. They take the lost and the lost do not come back. That is not a room you charm. That is a room that, if it reads you wrong, ends you, and none of us are close enough to do anything but bury what is left."

"Then it reads me right," Petros said.

"And how does it read you right?" She leaned in.

"What is it you are going to tell them you want, that they believe? What is Petros Vassilou doing in a room full of people who have given up?" He had not wanted to do this part in front of his mother. He turned to look at the stove and found Eleni listening to the conversation. A mother watching her two children pull at a rope between them. Petros put both his hands flat on the table, and took the armour off. The grin left without effort. The effort had always been in putting it there.

It was something he had learned to do when his father died and his mother needed someone in the house who acted as though the ground was still solid. Petros had made himself that person because the alternative was two women and two children staring at the wall. He did it without any warning, which was the only way he knew to make them understand it was real. The ease went out of his face and the lift went out of his shoulders.

What was left in the chair was a smaller man, a tired one, the kind who collected grievances like coins, and counted them when he was alone.

"My sister," he said, his voice dull and even, "went away. Years, she is gone. Sudan, wherever, saving the world, while I stay. I hold the boatyard. I hold my mother when my father dies. I sign the papers, I bury him, I keep the lights on, and where is Sarah? Sarah is important. Sarah is somewhere that matters." The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. He made a scratching motion on the tablecloth.

"Then the sky breaks, and everyone is nothing, everyone is dirt in the road, and I think, kala, now at least we are the same. And she comes back." His smile was small and ugly.

"She comes back with power in her hands, and the whole street is now lighting candles. My mother weeping over the daughter who left like she hung the moon, and me, I am still the one who fixes the boats. Petros who fixes the boats. And I am done being that. The strong take everything now, everyone can see it, and I was owed better than fixing winches for a saint. I want mine. I do not care any more how I get it." The table had gone completely silent. He let the words hang for a moment, and then he was Petros again.

The same grin, the same open friendly face. The difference between the two men was a thing you felt in your stomach.

"That," he said quietly.

"That is what I tell them. And they believe it, because the words under it are true. My father is dead. I stayed. You left. You came back with all of it. There is nothing in there a man could check and catch me out on, because there is nothing in there to check. Only the last piece is a lie." He looked at his sister and his voice dropped further.

"That I hate you for it. I do not hate you for it, Sarah. Not for one second of it. But I can wear that, and no one can prove I am lying, because everything holding it up is real." Sarah was not looking at him. She had found the grain of the table and was following it with her eyes.

"You are very good at that," she said.

"Ne. I am."

"When did you learn to be that good at that?"

"I do not know," Petros said with a rueful smile.

"It is a thing my mouth does. You point it at a man and it finds the words he wants and becomes the words. I never plan it. It arrives on its own, and after, I am a little ashamed of how easy it was." He turned the cup again.

"It is not a nice thing to be good at. But it is mine, and it is the one I have, when the rest of you have levels and shields and hands that close wounds. This is my shield. Let me carry it."

"Archie," Sarah said, not raising her voice.

"Tell him. Tell him what the odds are of a man who is not trained for this. Sitting in a room of people who murder for their god and not slipping once. Tell him the number." The four of them went still. Petros had seen it before and it unsettled him every time, how his sister and the three foreigners could stop mid-breath and listen to something the rest of the room was not allowed to hear. He watched them wait, and then the wait grew long.

"He will not answer that," she said, clenching her fists on the table.

"He has an opinion on everything. He weighs in on my mother's coffee. And I ask him a direct question and he says nothing. Because he doesn't have an answer that helps me."

"Or," Arthur said, carefully, "he does not have a number for a thing that has never been measured. Petros is not a candidate. There is no data on Petros."

"That is worse," Sarah said.

"That is so much worse." Petros reached across the table and put his hand over his sister's clenched fists.

"Listen to me," he said, softly and in Greek, so it was only theirs.

"You want to know why it has to be me and not one of them. It is not the language, and it is not the face. It is that they are worth something. Arthur is a wall and the candidate. You close wounds. And that one," he said, not looking at Steve, "carries a whole library in his skull. If any of you goes into that house and does not walk out, the world has lost a thing it needs. Me, I fix boats." He tightened his hand.

"That is not sad, Re, do not make the face. It is the truest thing in the plan. The lie I tell them is that I am a bitter, forgotten, hollow man with nothing to lose. And the only part of it I have to act is the bitter." Sarah pulled her hand out from under his, and for a moment he thought he had cut too deep. Then she turned it over and gripped his and did not let go.

"You are not surplus," she said, in English, so the table would hear her say it.

"You are the one who held everything together while I was gone. That was the true part. I heard it."

"I know," Petros said.

"I heard all of it, Petro."

"I know you did." Then whatever had been holding his sister let go, and she came round the corner of the table and put her face into his shoulder. Petros held on to her with one arm and braced the other against the table edge, because she had come across hard enough to move him. He did not say anything. There was nothing to say that was not already sitting in the room. She was saying things into his shirt, and he only caught a word in three and he let her.

Looking over the top of her head at nothing, he found that his own face was wet and did not do anything about that either. Behind them the pot came up to a boil, and Eleni did not turn to lift it off the heat. Steve had become interested in his pencil. Donna was reading the far wall like it might do something. Arthur, who could not have said why, was studying the joint where the table leg met the top, following it down, taking the measure of it.

• • They had lunch to give all of their emotions some time to settle down. Petros had gone up to Maria and that conversation had cost him as well. Sarah had spent both waiting days in the courtyard with Yiayia, helping with the circle under the lemon tree. It had grown since they had come back from the cape. Eight people now, sometimes ten, because the ones who came back brought a neighbour or a cousin who had heard about the grandmother and the doctor at the Vassilou house.

Sarah showed them where to put their hands and Yiayia stood next to her watching her granddaughter teach what she had taught her..

"When," Arthur asked when Petros was back. He had skipped past whether entirely, and Petros was grateful.

"They meet in the evenings," Petros said.

"There is a way in through Kostas the baker. He does not know who he delivers to, only that a serious young man asked if he knew anyone at a low time who wanted to hear about better days coming." He stood, and picked up a biscuit.

"Tonight. I go and I sit and I listen and I let them like me. Nothing more. I do not ask one question. A man who asks questions the first night is a man who came for something." He looked at Sarah.

"I come back and I tell you every face. That is the whole of it. Sitting. A quiet man with his eggs."

"You said that last time," Sarah said.

"It is not dangerous to sit."

"And it was not," Petros said, and picked up his jacket.

"This time I only have to sit better." • • The house off the Iera Odos was further from the water than anything felt right to Petros. It took the better part of two hours on foot from the harbour, and by the time he reached it the street had emptied of everyone with somewhere better to be. He had left the jovial man on the last corner, folded him up and put him in a pocket, and walked the final stretch as the other one, shoulders down, hands in his coat, a man arriving somewhere he was not proud to be arriving.

The house did not turn out to be what he had built in his head. He had built a chapel, incense, an effigy to fear. What he found was a wide dim room behind a plain door, chairs set in a loose ring and perhaps a dozen people in them who all had the same defeated look in their eyes. He knew the type from the harbour on a bad night. The difference was that no one here was drinking. A man came to him from the ring.

He was in his early thirties, clean-shaven and wearing a white shirt with its sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He wore no collar and carried no book.

"You are Kostas's friend," the man said, taking both of his hands.

"I am Lefteris. Sit, sit. You came. That is the hard part, and you did it, so the hard part is behind you." He guided Petros to a chair as if the chair had been set out for him and no one else.

"You do not have to say anything tonight. Nobody speaks who does not want to. We only listen to each other here. That is all this is, in the beginning. People the city forgot, remembering they are still here." Petros sat down. He kept his eyes low and his hands loose in his lap. Behind the low eyes the other Petros was already at work, counting. Twelve in the ring, thirteen with him. Two men by the inner door who stood as Donna did, their weight even and hands where they could be used.

There were others like Lefteris in the room, working the grief. Sitting next to people and holding their hands and pretending to listen while sorting people into buckets.

"I will tell you what I tell everyone their first night," Lefteris said, pulling a chair around to sit near him, his voice pitched for Petros alone under the low murmur of the room.

"You did not come here because you are weak. You came here because you are the only one still awake. Everyone else in this city is pretending the old rules still count. Be good, be patient, wait your turn, and God or the Council or somebody will set it right." He shook his head, gently, sorry for them all.

"You know that is finished. You felt it finish. The strong take, now, and the rest line up to be taken from, and something in you has stopped being willing to stand in that line." He tilted his head, reading Petros's lowered face with an interest that was almost tender.

"Someone made you feel small for a long time. Am I close?" And Petros kept his eyes on his own hands, and let his mouth go dull and even, and said, "My sister came home."