(2) Crucia

Fabienne lifted her head above the twisted knots of vines, the moon in her eyes.

In the night the grey horse looked as silvery as the moon, and to peer into the little girl's eyes now, with the horse trotting along the wagon tracks toward the villa, would be to see the horse in the moon, and the moon in the dancing mane of the horse.

Fabienne ran between the rows of grape vines, their serrated spade leaves whispering as she passed them. She wanted to see the horse leap the stone fence.

She crossed the wagon tracks and stopped a few moments to catch her breath. She rested bent over, her hands on her knees.

Crucia had promised her: "Your asthma will be healed at the full moon."

Five days. Just five more days.

And what Crucia promised always came true. The horse was proof of that.

Fabienne walked as fast as she could and not lose her breath. Her head was back, her shoulders squared, breathing rhythmically.

"Be strong. Let no one say that you can not do what the other children do."

The old man, his white beard in his fist, had told her that, after the school day was over and the teacher was walking across the parking lot smiling at them, her eyeglasses in her hand, a fragile hand, not like the strong fist that held the beard. The Goat.

That's how Fabienne thought of the old robed hermit. The Goat. And when she did think of him, she thought also of the horse.

Of Pegasus.

Of the horse that leaped up full-winged over the fence, its tail waving at the girl who stood under an olive tree, watching.

In a coffee shop in Greenwich Village Sanguineus set his Nordic smartphone on the small round table where he sat, in the burgeoning morning light that shone from between gingham curtains.

He tapped the g+ icon.

Aside from the fact that it was Monday, when the hand of fate is apt to get restless, he had an intuitive feeling that an assignment was coming.

It had been nearly five months since that convoluted affair in Vienna. There had been some few investigations after his return to New York City, inconsequential leads in cases that did not involve him beyond the routine procedures of checking rumors and analyzing alibis. Well, there had been that week of surveillance: the digital filming of a monsignor whom the archbishop, secretly a Freemason, suspected of Illuminati activity, and who would later be fingered for a hit. Very dull work for Sanguineus, but it brought a welcome addition to his dwindling bank balance.

He was thinking of stepping outside with his cup for a smoke when a notification came.

'Sally Anne Bern shared a post +Ricklen Cruor.'

Sanguineus sat back, his pulse rate rising, and read the post.

'In this first installment of Modern Interpretations of Greek Mythology, we consider the winged horse Pegasus, offspring of Poseidon, and civic symbol of the city of Corinth.'

Sanguineus smiled. He would be going to Greece.

He had stopped over in Athens several years ago on his way to Istanbul. He had seen very little of the birthplace of democracy, just evening traffic to and from his cheap hotel room where crickets came out of the woodwork the moment the sun went down. And, briefly, Corinth: vineyards and an oil refinery, vivacious girls with black hair and blue eyes, narrow shop lanes, the inevitable gypsies in their motorized caravans. And now, an addition: someone who had made an enemy.

The post provided nothing specific about the assignment, other than its locale, departure date, the contact person on arrival, and the flight number out of La Guardia. The initial carrier was always Small World Airlines.

Sanguineus noted a numerology result in the post. It was a reference to Greek names and their astrological import. This gave him the flight number. The five digits after the mention of the god Chronos ("Time") was the date he was to leave, 3-17-13, which in the context of the post was academic mumbo jumbo about the Delphi Oracle. Then there was his contact's identity. This was indicated by the first letter in the last person named: in this instance 'Rhea,' a goddess. The 'R' most certainly meant Rolgo.

A teen waitress, Mamie, came by with a tray of Danish. "How's the sales campaign going, Rick?"

"Leaving for Greece tomorrow," Sanguineus said. "There's a nudist colony on the island of Lesbos. I'll send you a pic."

Mamie looked surprised. It was a habit of hers. "What sort of tools would THEY need?"

"Probably not drills," he replied.

A young woman about Mamie's height, 5 foot 2, but voluptuous, and of a beauty peculiar to the eastern Mediterranean, opened the gauzy white curtains of a bedroom window in her villa overlooking the Gulf of Corinth.

"You're a damn lousy lover," she said, swinging open the double-leaved panes framed in acacia wood.

She tilted back her head and breathed deeply of the inshore breeze. Her white tee-shirt ruffled upon her otherwise naked body. Her long lustrous black hair with its auburn highlights was scintillating in the ray of sun.

The young man in bed sat up, his weight on his elbows. His puerile face with its peachfuzzy chin looked distressed, as if something more than a reprimand was to be found in the woman's remark.

"What--?"

"Just get out," she said.

"Ambrosia--"

"Don't say my name, not ever again." She turned, the windblown curtains like broad downy wings behind her.

Her expression was so benign, he thought. Why such cruel words? But he knew better than to argue with her.

She snatched up a red-and-white striped flannel bathrobe from a Roman couch beside her, saying, "Now, get out," and putting it on as she walked from the room as though no one else was there.

Ambrosia went barefoot down a semi circular staircase. She crossed tessellated tiles of a pastel sand color to the wrought-iron grille of the back door.

This opened onto a wide portico of similar tiles, with slender Doric columns along the seaward side.

It was midmorning. A sharp blue sky beamed upon the bluer expanse of the Corinthian gulf. But the old man in the white suit and coral necklace in place of a tie, who eyed Ambrosia's approach while leaning back against a column, did not beam upon her, nor even nod his white-hatted head.

Ambrosia always liked how his long white beard flagged in the breeze.

"Grigoris... Pardon, I mean Tragos...on time as usual," she said, and, frowning, shook her head, as though his punctuality was disgraceful.

"My dear child, late as usual," he responded, completing her joke by acting as though he regarded her tardiness as a virtue.

Smiling now, he met her in the middle of the portico. They hugged affectionately.

"I have decided that I don't want to know," Tragos said. He held her shoulders at arms length, searching her passive face. Her smile was gone but the light was still there.

"You've paid all that money and you don't even want to know the name of the person who killed Pella?" she inquired without the least trace of emotion, beyond that of curiosity.

Tragos tilted his head sideways, an apologetic gesture. "You remember the young professor from America who was visiting us at the time Pella was struck down?" he asked, "Professor Rolgo? Older and I dare say wiser now. Or, at any rate, having more diverse friendships. The private investigator who discovered the identity of the killer is a close acquaintance of Fredrico's. The good professor knows who the gunman is, and that is sufficient unto my satisfaction."

"Knows, but can not prove," said Ambrosia with a half smile, "not in court."

"No, not in court. But the evidence is worthy enough. The shooter targeted Pella deliberately. But," Tragos added, releasing her and wagging a finger, "what makes this so convincing to me is the motive." He put his hands in his coat pockets and looked down at his brogues. "Pella had encouraged a former law student of hers to defend a known gangster." He looked up at Ambrosia, who gazed intently back at him. "You remember that stout frizzy brunette with the mole on her cheek? Pella thought it would be a good experience for her former student to defend a client of such a low reputation, a client charged with first degree murder. When the prosecution won the case, the defense attorney vanished without a trace. You remember? Two weeks later Pella was openly murdered."

"And you don't want to know who murdered her!"

"Because I don't want to be able to put a face and a name to the person who an assassin, a vigilante, is going to kill. All I want to know is that Pella has got her justice."

Ambrosia crossed her arms, sighed, and turned to stare out at the volcanic rocks squatting on the sand and the waves that were hardly larger than ripples running up to them in seeming adoration.

"Not to change the subject," she said, "but the foreman's assistant has been fired." She smiled at Tragos. "I told him to get out. I don't need his silly boyish flirtations. He doesn't care about the quality of the grapes, but only the quality of the girls who tend the vineyard."

"Like your father, he finds vineyards to be a romantic place."

"Oh you and your philosophical way of looking at everything. I am a practical woman. How long will you be staying with us?"

"Til the day after tomorrow," Tragos said, his left hand gripping his beard.

"Now I know that something is bothering you," Ambrosia said, bumping him gently with a shoulder. "You're holding your beard. You only do that when something disturbing is on your mind."

"Oh you and your philosophical observations," Tragos remarked. He let go of his beard, swinging his arms as a penance. "There is this girl at St Nicholas Elementary School, named Fabienne Chora. I had a nice long conversation with her yesterday. Her teacher was one of the post-grad students who would visit my hermitage on Patmos. You remember Marianne? She has been asking me to give a talk in her classroom about the spiritual life, so finally..."

He looked out at the beach, as if what Ambrosia gazed at was something unusual or momentous. She was, in fact, watching him from the corners of her large exquisite eyes.

"So, what about this little girl?" she asked with that emotionless curiosity.

Tragos tilted his head. "She has an imaginary friend, a goddess named Crucia. Apparently she chose the name for her Olympian dea herself. I find it strange that she would choose a name that means 'torture.' And the stories she tells!"

Ambrosia stepped down to the grass and dug at the sandy soil with her toes.