Turn of the Cards

Chapter Seven

Mark sat there on the bald rock of the Areopagus and let the wind tousle his hair. The sky was a high, thin blue scattered with fat, fraying cotton boils of cloud. In his mind he saw a couple of satyrs carrying those funky panpipe things Zamfir always plays on late-night ads on cable come out of the weeds to check him out. Life was kind of a Disney flick for Mark, when he was left to his own devices, even though he hadn’t imbibed any illicit chemicals — for recreational purposes anyway — since blowing Amsterdam a week ago. He was not an ideal Clean and Sober poster boy.

He sat and stared off at the crisp weeds and Japanese tourists stirring among the white-stone jumble that surrounded the Parthenon, over on the Acropolis. It wasn’t anywhere near as large as he’d expected, the Parthenon, even though it was just as lovely as advertised. That was an ideal encapsulation of life: that which was eagerly anticipated turned out to be, at firsthand, smaller than it was in the imagination, and either shabby or — as in the Parthenon’s case — somehow fake-looking. It would be the hip and happening thing to blame that phenomenon on television and movies and the easy street-level availability of wonders, designer drugs for eye and mind from the secret labs of Industrial Light & Magic. Sitting up here on these ancient-shaped rocks with the same wind running its fingers through his hair as had run them through Solon’s when he was splitting for the coast with the ever-fickle Athenian mob at his heels, Mark had the heretical notion that people had been feeling that way, shortchanged by actuality, since they developed crania larger than egg cups.

Getting here had been easier than he would have imagined. At Brindisi he had gone straight to the docks. There he looked at freighters: not too large, not too clean, definitely nothing that looked as if it were owned by some uptight multinational. Multinationals had books of rules and regulations and suits who prowled to make sure they were followed to the letter. The rules didn’t provide for any clandestine passengers, he felt sure.

He didn’t even care, particularly, if the damned boat looked as if it would float. The Med is not a huge sea, and he had a vial of gray powder left. The were-dolphin Aquarius could swim a long way in the hour of freedom it would give him.

He was looking at ships that flew flags from countries in what he had grown up thinking of as Eastern Europe and was now being called Central Europe, the way it had been when his dad was growing up. He figured Eastern — no, Central-Europeans had gotten mightily pissed off at their own governments and might be inclined to transfer their anger to government in general. At least to the extent of not caring too much about the finer points of law.

His third try he got lucky. The Montenegro had a Yugoslav registration — which was looking more academic by the moment — and a mostly Baltic crew. The ship had a load of Catalan tennis balls from Barcelona to Piraeus, the port of Athens. The captain would be more than happy to take Mark along for five hundred dollars American.

Mark had no plans to go to Athens. But then, he had no plans not to, and until he settled on a final destination, Athens was as good a waystation as any. He suspected that five hundred American was more than the trip would have cost on a luxury liner. But luxury liners were sticky about things like passports, and their pursers had lists of names of people the authorities would like to talk to in case they tried to slip off for a nice relaxing cruise. Mark was dead sure his borrowed name of “Hamilton, Gary A.” would be on them. The master of the Montenegro didn’t give a particular damn if his passenger called himself Nur al-Allah. Or even if he was Nur al-Allah, as long as he behaved.

The Italian authorities were no problem at all. Italian exit controls were anything but notoriously strict, something they had in common with the Dutch ones. Like everybody else the Italians were on the watch for guns, drugs, and undocumented immigrants coming into the country from places with economies still more blighted than their own. They didn’t worry much about who left, or what they left with, as long as it didn’t look like immobile naked people with very pale complexions under tarps.

The trip was uneventful. The crew seemed genuinely friendly. Half of them spoke some English, and his science-symposium German was enough to get him the rest of the way.

He negotiated with the ship’s cook, a wiry and diminutive Macedonian with curly black sideburns who probably wasn’t as young as he looked, for a French passport. It wasn’t his first choice; when you looked at Mark Meadows, Frenchman wasn’t the first word that popped into your mind, unless you were from some weird ex-colonial part of the Third World where the only white guys you’d ever seen were Frenchmen. But French papers cost far less than, say, American, by reason of lesser demand, and anyway the cook had the fixings for a French ID on hand.

Even as he began negotiations, it occurred to him that the simplest way for the cook to get whatever money he offered for the papers was to slip him a plate of food dosed with some nice corrosive sublimate that would dissolve his bowels for him come mealtime. He had been sure to let the cook know — untruthfully — that the settled price took him near the limits of his ready cash. And he had been careful not to dicker too long.

In some ways Mark was turning into somebody he didn’t exactly like, somebody nasty and suspicious of his fellow bits of star-stuff. He blamed his stay on Takis for that; intrigue was like an extra classical element there: earth, air, fire, water, skullduggery. All the same he slept lightly, didn’t venture too near the rail when others were around, and tasted gingerly in case the cook used a little too much lye in the goulash.

The most Mark could say about the passport was that the Polaroid picture of him glued inside it looked rather more like him than the picture of Hamilton in the liberated American one, which he’d handed over to the cook by way of a trade-in. At Piraeus, Customs went over the ship as if they were expecting loose diamonds to have rolled into the seams in the decking, but passed him ashore without a glance. He suspected — that nasty Takisian-born cynicism again — they were really scouting for cumshaw. He had simply shouldered the imitation Vuitton flight bag he’d picked up before hitting the train in Rome and walked down the gangplank with an airy wave to them and his Central European pals.

If only all life’s problems could be blown off with such ease.

The papers had stood him to a third-floor — okay, second — walkup room in a grimy pension, with a sporadic and unsanitary bathroom on the floor below. The stripy-papered walls of the flat were even more sweat-stained than the male concierge’s undershirt, but unlike the building’s water and electricity, the rats inside them ran day and night.

It wasn’t exactly Rarrana, the harem of the Ilkazam. But then it beat Bowery flophouses or the stinking dorms on the Rox. Or a wet, drafty warehouse on the IJ. Creature comforts had never mattered that much to Mark.

And the price was right. Mark had sensibly run Agent Gary’s Gold Card to the cash limit before leaving Amsterdam and picked up a few extra bucks selling the card itself to a hustler on the Brindisi docks — fewer American tourists got down that way than to Rome, so the market price was higher. But he didn’t know where he was going to come by any more money for a while, and he had some very expensive purchases to make if he were going to have a chance of giving the slip to Mistral, her trigger-happy DEA friends, and the mysterious, mustachioed Mr. Bullock.

He glanced at his watch. It was a throwaway digital with a plastic band he’d picked up at a vendor’s cart over by the Pnyx. It had a garish image of a little redheaded guy in a red-and-orange jogging suit leaping skyward on a blast of flame. It was from Taiwan, and was of course unlicensed. Mark smiled to himself; he got a kick out of it. It was the first watch he’d ever worn in his adult life, so it might as well be a souvenir of sorts.

Time to meet a man. He stood up. His joints made rippling cracks, as if they were on ratchets. The satyrs watched him with secret grins. He gave them a thumbs-up and headed off to the northwest.

Mark Meadows once went through a period of intense fascination with ancient Greece — this was during early pubescence, when his hormone — driven interest had been captured by visions of babe goddesses and nymphs in gauzy robes. He still remembered how shocked he was to discover, mainly between the lines, that a good many of those squeezes of old Zeus that astronomers were always naming moons of Jupiter after had been little boys.

Aside from that, he recalled that after the Persians trashed Athens in 479 or so, the city had been rebuilt without any kind of plan. Most of the city these days was Apartment Bloc Generic, and the national government was giving its seat in the Syntagma district in the New Town a bulldozer makeover to bring it more in line with what a capital of the European Community should look like — Mark had the impression sometimes that this whole Unification trip was really just Mickey D’s writ even larger. But here in the Plaka the streets of old Athens were still narrow, twisty, and, given the way the Greeks drove, perilous.

As evidence a big lorry with streaked white sides bearing lettering that was all Greek to him had come popping out of a side street and mashed one of those little slab-sided European subcompacts that look as if they’re built around a skateboard. The respective drivers were standing in a pothole waving arms and mustaches at one another. Mark squeezed the vial he had palmed a little tighter, sidestepped the argument, and sidled through the crowd that had gathered in hopes the two would come to blows.

Here on the backside of the Acropolis where the tourists seldom went the buildings seemed to lean in various directions without being visibly off-true. Mark wondered if that were another example of the subtle architectural tricks the Greeks had used building the Parthenon, up on top of the hill. Façades were stucco that was showing a tendency to flake off in huge sheets and had probably been gaudy before it faded. The sky overhead was crisscrossed with clotheslines fluttering with laundry like those strings of plastic pennants that used to festoon gas stations along old Route 66 in the sixties — the early sixties, which were really just a continuation of the fifties. Immense chrome Japanese ghetto blasters vibrated on every third windowsill, further endangering the stucco with earsplitting noise that sounded like a cross between rap and belly-dance music. The occasional shop-front was boarded and graffitied; Greece was suffering another economic downturn, which Mark suspected had lasted since Alexander’s daddy, Philip, blew into town. Even the people who weren’t fighting seemed to communicate at the top of their lungs.

He marveled at just how skuzzy it could be right up against your marvels-of-the-ancient-world. But you didn’t go looking to score drugs in the ritzier parts of town unless you happened to belong there. Since Mark didn’t look like Anthony Quinn, he manifestly did not.

He looked around for his contact man, a gangly joker kid with green-seaweed hair and teeth even worse than the Greek norm. Jokers were generically less likely to blow you up to the authorities, no matter where you were. It wasn’t certain, but scoring proscribed pharmaceuticals was a percentage game.

He took for granted that the odds were going to catch up with him fairly soon. From years of listening to counterculture scuttlebutt he knew that a favorite game of your petty dealers and pushers and hustlers in Third World countries — which Greece to all intents was — was to turn over the occasional foreigner. It kept the cops happy and bought a little leeway, without pissing off the local talent, the people you had to live with — and, more to the point, who knew where you slept.

The nature of his purchases was odd enough to be worth a little extra slack. He wasn’t primarily interested in any of the local drugs of choice, not the ancient Mediterranean standby hash or grass, not smack — a favorite with your seagoing trade and not coke, still in demand by European and American tourists. He was shopping more for psychedelics. In a Med port as ancient and wicked as Athens, or anyway the appendix Piraeus, you could find anything, including acid and psilocybin. But it took time, and money, and made you conspicuous. Mark could not afford much of any of that.

He had also had to blow a major piece of his dwindling roll on fine pharmaceutical scales. The Greek heat was not on the prod for drug labs in any extreme way; home-brewing synthetic dope was not yet a popular local pastime, what with the natural product so readily available. But the requisite equipment wasn’t easy to find, even in an age in which the digital revolution had made even precision scientific measuring equipment comparatively cheap and available. It was another datum, another mote of dust on a pile that would eventually bury him unless he moved quickly enough.

A young woman attracted his attention, one of your occasional Grecian redheads, small and pretty, whose lethal Mediterranean Fat and Mustache Chromosome hadn’t kicked in yet. She reminded him of some of the women he had seen on Takis. She had such a sweet look that he doubted she actually knew what the English word SEX NINJA written in cursive glitter on the front of her T-shirt meant. He caught her eye, smiled, and nodded.

She smiled back behind her big round shades. Then her jaw dropped, and she moved quickly away.

Uh-oh, said one of the many voices available at the back of Mark’s head. He turned.

The two debaters at the accident had opened a door of the squashed subcompact and were taking out Uzis. Their differences seemed to have resolved themselves.