The Destroyers Read online

  “What?” Raina barked, not at Elise or at the priests. She was glaring at the ugly, stump-fingered man who wouldn’t stop staring at her. Elise noticed a thin scar running from the corner of his mouth. The man gazed down at his newspaper. Elise concentrated on her own reflection in the taverna’s window: she looked shapeless and blank. Car wheels and legs passed through her face and continued on.

  “Why didn’t he call me back?” Raina whined. “What the fuck did I do wrong? All he sent me was a text this morning asking if I had anything of his. Does he really expect me to return his stupid T-shirt?” She laughed unconvincingly. “Do I have anything of his? He knows we’re leaving today.”

  Elise’s sweat chilled her. She thought of the diamond, its sharp contours against her chest. Now she worried that he might show up. She glanced over her shoulder, combing the crowds for Charlie, praying she wouldn’t find him rushing toward the taverna, an officer following in his shadow. Had he ransacked his boat looking for the ring? Had he determined that the thief must be one of the two American women he had invited on board? She saw tourists wheeling their bags across the road to line up by the metal gates for the ferry.

  “When he comes I’m going to ask him what he meant.”

  Elise’s hand trembled as she reached into her backpack to gather the two ferry tickets.

  “Raina,” she said. “We’ve got to go now. The ferry arrives in five minutes.”

  “I told you—”

  “We have to get in line. We won’t get seats otherwise. Let’s just go. Please.”

  What were jails on Greek islands like? Elise realized that she had no idea how much the diamond was worth. Five thousand or eight or ten? That kind of figure had never occurred to her before. And here she was sipping a Campari in the exact spot Charlie came every morning. If he had accused her of taking it on day five or seven, she could have handed it over with a sour excuse: Jesus, calm down. I was going to return it the next time I saw you. I forgot I tried it on while you were violently screwing my best friend. But how could she explain boarding an outbound ferry with the ring dangling underneath her shirt?

  The three priests rose from their table. The oldest one clapped his hands in thanks to the passing waiter. Elise tried to flag down the waiter. “Check,” she called. “Conto. I mean, bill!” She furiously scribbled a check mark in the air. What if he did show up to ask about the diamond? What if he demanded their bags and bodies searched? She could go to the bathroom right now and drop the ring in the toilet. But even in the midst of her panic, it pained her to toss something so beautiful and expensive away. She knew her fear was half-invented, a casualty of a conscience that wouldn’t let her perform one reckless act without filing her own police report. All she knew was that she desperately wanted to get on the ferry. Once it pulled away from the island she’d be safe. She began to scoop coins from her pocket and stack them on the table. “How much was your drink? Please, let’s get to the dock.”

  “Charlie,” Raina said.

  Charlie. The name clogged all communication. Sometimes it was easier to abandon a friend than to humor her. Raina grinned, and Elise caught herself smiling back in gratitude.

  “Is that him?” Raina asked, dodging her head around the obstruction of Elise. She lifted her arm to wave. Elise turned, the diamond skidding around her chest bone, and she saw a young man who looked like Charlie, but he was taller, heavier, smoke-skinned, and he passed the taverna without entering. Two long-haired Christian girls giggled by the cypress tree. A group of French backpackers commandeered the table that the priests had vacated. Their knees were hairy and sand-caked.

  “The line is getting long,” Elise pleaded. “Let’s go. We’ll write him a nasty postcard from the boat.”

  “You go,” Raina said, clutching the arms of her chair. “I’m waiting until the last second. I bet you he’ll show. That prick.”

  “He’s not going to come,” she moaned.

  A bell was clanging from a church in the distance, like a goat bell rolling down a hill. And closer, an impatient tapping on metal. The stump-fingered man next to them was drumming his lighter on the table. A long, shrill horn wailed from the sea. The ferry was entering the harbor, a giant white rectangle as featureless as a midwestern shopping mall. Movement ran through the cafés along the port, people grabbing their bags, stirring each other like flocks of birds. The waiter brought a round of beers to the French backpackers. They raised their glasses and chanted “Santé!”

  “Come on,” Elise begged. She collected her bag straps on her shoulders.

  The stump-fingered man punched the table, scooted out of his chair, and stomped off toward the tobacco stall. He had left his English newspaper behind. July 2, one day old, as all papers on the island were. They’d land in New York on the Fourth of July.

  “I’m sending him one last text,” Raina said, tapping a message into her phone. “A mean one. And then I’ll wait ten more minutes. He promised he’d say good-bye. I’m sure he’s coming.”

  “We don’t have ten minutes!” Elise cried through the adrenaline knot in her throat. She rose from her seat. The sun was pounding on her neck. Under no circumstances did she want to see Charlie again. “Just forget about him. We’re going to miss the ferry. And then our flight home. Please. They’re boarding.”

  Raina smiled with leaden eyes, purposefully, almost flirtatiously uncooperative.

  “I said go ahead without me. There’s still time.”

  Elise bent down and pushed Raina’s heavy, monogrammed bags aside. “You’re crazy,” she muttered. She picked up the last of Raina’s suitcases, uncovering her nylon duffel, which lay on the ground alongside a dark-green backpack, the kind that belonged to the roving, beach-for-bed hippies on their endless pursuit of spirituality or B-grade marijuana. A gold patch was sewn on the bag. It read BEHOLD, I MAKE ALL THINGS NEW.

  “Whose bag is this?” Elise peered above the lip of the table. Raina leaned down to examine it.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it belonged to that creep with the scar next to us. Or one of the backpackers? I didn’t see it before.”

  Elise grabbed her duffel and pressed it against her chest. She felt the diamond dig into her skin. She could pawn the ring in New York. It might afford her a few months’ rent in her Brooklyn studio. Maybe all things could be made new. She liked that word, Behold.

  “I’m going to the boat.” She waited one last second for Raina, stalling for fear of losing her. Raina drew the empty glass to her lips and let a cube of ice slide onto her tongue. “I’ll see you on board.” Elise placed the second ferry ticket on the table. “I hope you make it.”

  “You need to put some lotion on your cheeks. You’re starting to look like a homeless woman.” Raina chewed on the ice. “Want to hear something interesting? Do you know what I—”

  A wave of pressure, a reverberation with no sound. The sound came after, too late for Elise to hear. The explosion ripped through the outdoor patio of Nikos Taverna, catching the cypress tree on fire, blasting shrapnel of metal and bone. A giant globe of dust swept through the incinerated awning, churning in its uplift, and began to snow as glass fell in slivers on the cobblestone.

  CHAPTER 1

  When Charlie and I were young, we played a game called Destroyers. We invented it ourselves. Destroyers always began with the same frightening, make-believe premise: a group of gunmen in black balaclavas (number variable) bursts into the room and starts shooting. What do you do?

  Destroyers required no equipment. We built its universe out of words. It existed entirely in our overlapping imaginations, and we played it primarily at night over the phone when we were sure our parents weren’t eavesdropping. Destroyers ran on the gas of our wits and the places we knew by heart. We set it in Central Park (our favorite spot was the zoo), in the aisles of the uptown D’Agostino, in our wasp-hive apartment buildings, and in the seductively vulnerable halls of Natural History, MoMA, and the Met. We also set it—compulsively, with a rigor to the anatomy of the stuffy
blue-brick Victorian on East Eighty-fourth Street that its original bricklayers would have appreciated—at Buckland Academy for Boys. Not every location was accommodating. Charlie often wanted to stage Destroyers in the subway, although his skills for a successful mission were thwarted by lack of familiarity with the system (his family had a round-the-clock limo, and he somehow persisted in the belief that subway cars had easily accessible roof hatches). I yearned to set it in the marble nave of St. Patrick’s—the confessionals were enticing hiding spots, the priest raising his gold dish above the altar the perfect first fatality—but Charlie’s parents had given up religion long before relocating their family from Cyprus. I knew the insides of churches, but Charlie was useless at liturgical details.

  Looking back, I suppose every unhappy kid plays a similar sort of game to unbind himself from the glue of the present: abandoning friends and loved ones without a whisper of remorse; using unassuming bystanders as distractions; keeping only a speculative agreement with the laws of gravity or architectural blueprints (the latter was prized much more than the former—you could sometimes levitate into high rafters, but jumping through a nonexistent window was strictly prohibited). The goal was to find a way out.

  Here’s an example of Charlie playing a scenario I’m leading: “You’re in the Buckland cafeteria when six gunmen enter. I dive below the table. Simon McMarnely crawls under with you. Wait, fuck you. I’ve never once sat at lunch with Simon McMarnely. You and Simon were assigned a report on Uganda. You were working on it together. Okay, I climb behind Simon so he’s in the way of the bullets. Gunmen spray bullets under the table. Simon’s hit in the stomach. You’re exposed. I grab Simon’s glasses from his face and crouch-run for the window bank. Those windows don’t open. The last one does partway if you unroll it. A gunman is standing at that window. Okay, instead, I bolt through the door to the pantry. I go through the pantry to the main hall. Two of the gunmen are cutting through the pantry after you. I run down the hall. They’ve chain-locked the front doors. I go up the side stairs to the second floor. You pass Miss Sheedy. She’s walking down with a stack of Latin exams, unaware that anything’s happening. I knock the papers out of her hands so they spill on the steps. That buys me time because they’ll slip on them coming up. I get to the second-floor hallway. Echo of gunfire. Miss Sheedy screaming. The sound of boots slipping on paper. First classroom on the right, the chem lab. That door’s locked during lunch period. With the extra time, I pry off an arm of Simon’s glasses. I use it to pick the lock. I go inside, shut the door, and lock it. I move through the chem lab, into Dr. Chandler’s office. You hear the handle of a machine gun smashing through the window of the lab door. They’re in. Crap, okay. There’s no window in Dr. Chandler’s office. Nope. You’re trapped. No, I’m not. I close the door and shove his desk against it. They’re banging on the door. I jump on the desk and get to the old ventilation shaft. That connects to the library. I pull off the metal frame. They’re hurling their shoulders against the door. It opens a crack. The muzzle of a gun peeks in. I climb through the hole, wiggling. You feel gunfire strike the wall around you. A bullet pierces your foot. Extreme pain. I drop into the library and sprint-limp to the windows. You hear them running back out into the hall, toward the library. They’re on to you. I open the middle window, the one closest to the oak tree whose branches are just within reach. I climb over the xylophone display and get my feet on the radiator ledge. One of the gunmen follows your blood trail and sees you between the stacks. He takes aim. You can’t jump in time. I use Simon’s glasses again. It’s sunny out. I hold the lens, catch the light, and reflect it right into his eyes. The gunman squints, recoils, and shoots a round into the ceiling. I stretch my legs over the windowsill. I see the branch. I jump.”

  It went on like this, on and on and on. We took turns. We improvised weapons and shields and intricate booby traps constructed out of Old Masters paintings or jugs of crab salad. Occasionally we dangled lifesavers, like keys pressed in the hands of the dying or dead (janitors were messiahs with very short lives). Sometimes, maybe one in six, we didn’t make it. We died panicking, stung by our wrong choices, on the ice floes of penguins or across our parents’ beds or on the unclaimed bags in coat check. I always fared better than Charlie did, either because I proved a wilier strategist or because Charlie didn’t enjoy reveling in my murder. But it was Charlie’s tendency to make bad decisions, as if attracted to the deadest of ends and yet still expecting to escape without a scratch.

  I don’t know what Destroyers said about us. I never mentioned the game later to a roommate or a therapist, perhaps embarrassed by its macabre premise, even though such tragedies occurred with almost weekly regularity in real life and the news fixated on the same lurid details bullet by bullet. I often think the whole world was secretly playing the same game. In our defense, our obsession with Destroyers hardly seemed a symptom of psychosis. We were never the killers, never the black-balaclava gunmen of unknown political or personal affiliation savoring the massacre’s toll—and if anything, it caused us to be nicer to those who unwittingly supplied cameos, people like Simon McMarnely and his obliging glasses, poor Simon and what he went through in our fantasies in order for us to live.

  We didn’t much mention Destroyers to each other once it bled out of our free time. Like most childhood games, by the eighth grade it had lost its magical hold. I think it stopped when Charlie started insisting on saving girls he liked or when he kept leading the scenario into the more complicated backdrop of locker rooms and swimming pools. (“Ian, the broom is firmly securing the door. Now you say it’s steamy, but I’m walking toward the showers. Be specific. What do I see?”)

  It occurs to me now, almost twenty years later, that Destroyers was teaching us something all along. It wasn’t just the thrill of the chase. We were sharpening our instincts, jettisoning attachments. We were honing strategies for survival.

  I HAVE NO plan but this one.

  The Acropolis is golden in the afternoon sun, but I can’t take my eyes off the dogs. The rooftop bar of the Hotel Grande Palace is an oasis of mist machines and tilted umbrellas growing out of warm, black pools of shadow. Music plays on hidden speakers, a slow tremolo of keys like ice falling softly in a glass. For the past half hour I have been leaning against the railing, staring out over Syntagma Square and the wild dogs that patrol it. They move in a pack, vicious arrow-headed trotters, the color of corroded razor blades, snapping and growling and taunting the tourists whose guidebooks have led them imprudently toward this danger. Pamphlets and burned flags from a dispersed political rally litter the ground like New England leaves. I know I should spend my few free hours climbing around the Parthenon or at least glancing up at it. But in the swampy heat of early August, all of Athens looks like a ruin, sunken and edgeless and blurred spit white. The dogs are thin and frantic.

  I shouldn’t be here. In Greece. At the Grande Palace. On vacation. I have been wearing the same clothes for twenty-eight hours, minus a missing pair of underwear. I smell of spilled red wine, duty-free cologne (Texas cedar and Haitian vetiver), quick intercourse, tuberose hand soap, and human grease. I am only at the Grande Palace at the invitation of the woman I sat next to on the overnight flight from New York. Amy, Ann, Annabel? Neither of us could sleep in the soaring adult nursery full of weighted breathing and fleecy blankets. As I watched the progress of our plane on the miniscreen, she nudged me. I had fallen into the sad, homeless trance of sky travel. We were halfway over the Atlantic.

  “What’s wrong?” She pulled her headphones from her ears. “Excuse my prying, but you look upset.”

  “My father just died,” I told her.

  “Oh,” she whispered. “Are you flying over for his funeral?”

  “No, I’m flying away from it.”

  I have no idea what she saw in me. Maybe she held the belief that anyone traveling business class moved through the world on a special pass. Or maybe she spotted, correctly, an easy target. She was ten years older than me, in her late
thirties. She had a dancer’s skeletal grace, was married according to her finger, and was headed to Athens to attend a telecommunications convention. “God knows why it’s in Greece with all the turmoil going on.” She spoke the language of acronyms—ATSZ, CLO, a satellite hookup on PBX—which sounded too much like the city we had left. The mention of death only suppressed her urge to talk for a few minutes. “Fly Korean, fly Air India, if you ever get the chance, fly Singapore,” she confided in the whisper of trade secrets. “You never get the feeling they’re delivering your dinner at gunpoint. Actually, no, you do get that feeling, and that’s why the service is so strong.” She laughed at her joke and cued me with another nudge to the shoulder. The only other insomniac in our cabin, two rows ahead, had spent the last twenty minutes trying to pluck an intractable nose hair; I was growing impatient for the decisive yank of victory. Ann or Amy seemed to appreciate me most when I didn’t interrupt her. She told me she traveled beaucoup trop trop for work and expounded on her theory that onboard entertainment systems had replaced the need for puke bags—“haven’t you noticed no one gets sick anymore because all of their nervousness has been abated by unlimited movie options? That and the extra legroom.” She motioned toward the Velcro-shut curtains behind us. “I try not to imagine the favela back there.” By the time the plane ticked over the coast of Croatia, the attendants were passing around schizophrenic trays of champagne and coffee, dawn was roaring through the windows, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d upgraded from economy on miles. Business class had the only available seats left.

  “Do you have a hotel?” she asked as we waited in line at passport control.