Greg Chivers - The Crying Machine

‘I’m looking for Levi.’

He turns away and utters a stream of Arabic too fast for her to catch the syllables. A stool scrapes on the stone floor and movement reveals another figure hunched over a small circular table in the corner covered with trinkets of some kind. Hooded eyes squint to see her and she realizes she must be standing silhouetted in the light of the door. The watcher’s face has the same look of indeterminate age as the teenagers who followed her, but his eyes are older, half-hidden by thick-skinned lids with heavy lashes. A too-big leather jacket fails to hide his youthful skinniness.

‘Are you Levi? Can we talk here?’

‘I don’t know you. This is not how I do business. Maybe I don’t want to talk to you.’

She uncurls the paper with the address and holds it out. He doesn’t look. ‘Farouz Mubarrak told me to come here. He said you could help me.’ She watches for a flicker of recognition at the name but Levi’s face shows nothing. ‘Farouz Mubarrak … from Marseille?’

‘I don’t know anyone in Marseille. He must have heard my name from someone.’

The barman’s cough doesn’t quite conceal a barked laugh. For a moment, hopelessness threatens to overwhelm Clementine. The trafficker in Marseille had promised to make her disappear. The names were part of the plan. Everything was paid for. ‘Can you help me? I can get money.’ The lie feels obvious. If she can change the dirhams in her belt she might have enough for two nights in a hostel and a few days of street food.

‘Sorry, sweetheart. In my experience, money doesn’t come in off the street like a bum looking for a free lunch.’

‘But …’

‘You’re pretty but I don’t need a girlfriend right now. You want help? Go to the Mission. I hope you like to pray.’ He bends over the table, dismissing her with silence, busy fingers teasing the tangled chains of the trinkets apart.

The barman coughs again and she realizes she’s been standing, staring, paralysed by hopelessness.

‘I don’t know what you’re looking for, but Levi … he’s maybe not the right one to help you. He’s right about the Mission though. It’s full of crazies but it’s safe. A woman like you can’t be alone here. You understand?’

For a moment, the sudden, unexpected kindness unleashes the despair she’s been holding back. She nods a silent acknowledgement to avoid saying words that might become a sob and covers her eyes with her hand before stepping outside. The orange-seller curses at the impact of her shoulder before realizing who bumped him. He’s still off-balance, looking down, when she plucks a ripe fruit from the top crate and shifts it between hands quickly so her body blocks his eyeline. By the time he looks up she’s got a five-metre head start if it comes to a chase, but the fat man grimaces in indignant silence, unaware of the theft, pretending not to watch Clementine walk away.

The device defies explanation, like all the best toys. The report compiled by the senior curator ended with those killer words ‘possible religious significance’ – still the internationally recognized archaeologist’s code for ‘we don’t know’. The ignorance was a blessing really – theories beget enthusiasm, and public interest in the artefact would complicate its theft unduly.

When Silas first got the job, it was understood the title ‘Minister of Antiquities’ served as a licence to divert a certain proportion of the city’s excessive historical wealth into private hands. Now, the new breed of officials – curators, law enforcement – they weren’t looking for the money he could bring them. Something was changing in the city. After more than a century of cold turkey, Jerusalem was getting hooked on religion again, and it was bad for business.

To keep things tidy, this device would have to disappear in a way that didn’t connect to him. Today’s inspection would lay the groundwork. The strangely hirsute curator fiddles with the keys to the glass case, droning on about some peculiarity in the engravings on the pottery recovered from the seabed near this Antikythera thing. The device itself bears a few scratches which could be interpreted as a kind of cuneiform similar to Sanskrit, but the pottery is marked with what looks like words in a largely incomprehensible ancient script called Linear B. Despite the discrepancy, the curators have convinced themselves both items (and other less notable finds) were cargo from the same wrecked ship. The slightly flimsy reasoning for this conclusion is that one of the pottery tablets bears what could be the latter half of the word ‘Antikythera’ as rendered in Linear B.

Silas lets the words wash over him. Knowing about these objects is how the curators define themselves – denying them these little moments of superiority would cause pointless upset. This one, Boutros, can be touchy about ‘his’ things, which makes today’s performance all the more necessary. As the dreary monologue ends, the case opens and Silas pounces, hefting the device from where it rests on a little rectangle of cheap black velvet, producing an audible gasp from the beard next to him. Waggling the fingers of his free hand silences the protest on the keeper’s lips. The mandatory white gloves prevent supposedly catastrophic contamination by grease or microbes.

It doesn’t look like much, a lump of greyish-green rock that you might pick up in a construction site or the ruins of an old factory, but that ‘rock’ was two millennia of accretions from the seabed. You could see the outline of a cross-spoked circle, marked with illegible ancient symbols. Patches of vivid aquamarine glitter in the stone like little pools of the sea this thing had come from. The finely worked metal parts within are invisible, but their existence has been inferred from traces of oxidization on the rock-like exterior. Analysis of a tiny sample seemed to show the device was cast from an alloy mankind would not learn to work until centuries after this thing was made. Therein lay the true mystery of the Antikythera Mechanism, but mysteries concern Silas less than the price they fetch.

His buyers had done their own research on it and decided it met their needs. They didn’t tell him what they’d found out, but he didn’t need to know. The only thing Silas needed to know was how badly they wanted it, which, as it turned out, was very badly indeed. The profit from this job would be enough to check out of the game for good, but quitting while you’re ahead is the coward’s choice. No, this money was going to be the start of something far greater. In Jerusalem’s broken democracy, it would be enough to buy power.

The curator’s silent glare warns him he’s allowed the Antikythera Mechanism to stray into contact with a patch of microbe-ridden skin, distracted by the daydream. The money has to come first, which means engaging with the here and now. Silas adjusts his face to assume the air of mock solemnity the museum staff deem appropriate for handling relics. The man seizes the Mechanism from his hands with visible relief and lays it on its velvet cushion in a peculiar motion of obeisance. He’s twiddling through several chained key rings, preparing to seal the transparent security case when Silas holds up a single finger. ‘I want you to put the replica on display …’ He forestalls the inevitable objection before it can be uttered. ‘Nobody will know or care, and I’ve had a warning of an attempt to steal the Antikythera Mechanism, so I want it out of public view and moved into category B storage.’ The curator emits a barely intelligible syllable before Silas speaks over him. ‘Category A storage is an obvious target; it would be effectively less secure than public display. In these circumstances Category B offers the best balance of security and concealment.’ Silas’s stare invites the man to challenge his statement, but makes it silently clear any discussion will be neither pleasant nor profitable.