Lies That Bind Us

I do not know who it is.

I have been sitting very still as these things go through my mind, and the pain in my wrist has ebbed out of my consciousness, but after the initial paralysis, the impressions of what I may have seen remind me of how badly I need to get out of here. I push down the throbbing tenderness in my wrist and refocus on the manacle.

The lock is crude, barrel shaped. Perhaps with a pin or something similar, I might be able to trip it.

Better chance of that than of shattering the cuff against the concrete bed, even if you don’t break your arm in the process.

I feel around for my solitary sandal and inspect it with my fingers, hoping for the prong of a buckle or something I might use, but it’s all soft parts. I feel my bra, but it has no underwiring, and the clasp at the back is tiny and plastic.

No use there.

I scoot carefully to the edge of the bed, doubly cautious now about overtesting the length of the chain, feeling its weight starting to wake the ache in my wrist, and drop my feet to the floor again. I stretch out my left arm to give myself as much range as I can, bite back the mounting pain, and reach down with my right hand.

Maybe there’s something—a nail or discarded screw—that I might use . . .

The floor feels swept clean, and I can reach no more than a few square feet before the angle of the metal cuff against my wounded wrist becomes more than I can stand and I have to stop.

I sit up again, nursing my wrist, my breathing rushed and uneven, and I try to decide how much more floor I might be able to cover if I push through the agony a little more.

Not much. The chain is less than a yard long, and my reach is not just about pain. If I ignore the agony and stretch as far as is physically possible, I’ll get a few more inches at best. The chance that those inches will contain my lifeline seems slim.

But it’s possible, so I have to try. I find myself wishing that I could somehow detect a usable object with some sci-fi device, like the kind they use on Kristen’s show, something that would light up and show me exactly how far I have to get to reach it. Going through the pain I am about to inflict on myself without even knowing if there is anything out there to be had is maddening.

But I climb back down onto the floor, this time twisting the chain carefully to make sure it doesn’t knot in on itself, and I think I have bought myself an extra couple of inches right there. For a moment I squat where I am, my right hand tracing the places I have already been, lightly, as if smoothing someone’s hair, trying not to think about what else might be there in the dark, the bugs and rodent droppings . . .

Rats?

Even there, with all the other horrors crowding in on me, the prospect of rats sends a visceral shiver of revulsion through my body. I hate rats. I saw two back in Charlotte only a few weeks ago in the dumpsters behind the store: long and brown, furtive but unafraid.

I swallow, then put my hand lightly, palm-down, on the ground, fingers splayed, feeling for something, anything, tracing a rough, expanding oval on the floor.

Then farther, the pain mounting.

Farther.

The manacle is lodged against the heel of my hand—bone, muscle, and sinew roaring in protest as I strain against it, right hand sweeping. I pull harder, and my oval expands another half inch. And another. A cry rises in my throat and comes out of my mouth, a long, teeth-set, relentless wail of fury and desperation. It comes out of me as a shout and keeps going as I reach and claw for whatever might . . .

There!

I touch something. Small and hard and long.

A nail?

But the pain is making me move too quickly. I brush it, and I hear it shift, a thin tinkling sound as it rolls out of reach.



Chapter Sixteen

“There was this guy during the war,” said Marcus. “A Brit called Jasper Maskelyne. Good name, huh? He was a stage magician in the thirties and forties.”

We were sitting on the patio at the back of the villa while Simon and Brad hovered over the burgers, chicken, and bell peppers sizzling on a charcoal grill; and Melissa carried a bottle of chilled white wine, topping off everyone’s glass whether they wanted her to or not. It was a beautiful, warm evening, but the clouds were gathering again over the sea, so Brad and Simon, conferring like surgeons planning someone’s bypass, had opted to fire up the grill as soon as we got back from Knossos. Their focus seemed to open up a space for Marcus, and he had launched into his story without preamble or explanation.

“Maskelyne figured he could put his knowledge of sleight of hand and illusion to work for the war effort,” he said. “So he joined the Royal Engineers. Studied camouflage techniques and added his own stage trickery. He didn’t want to just hide stuff from the enemy—he wanted to mislead them, right? They say stage magic is all about misdirection, about drawing attention to one hand while the other one does all the real work.”

“So what did he do?” asked Simon, moving to the burgers with a spatula only to get a headshake from Brad.

“I already flipped them,” he said.

“The German invasion of Crete was a nightmare for both sides,” said Marcus. “Heavy casualties. The Allies were massively undersupplied and only had a few aircraft, while the Germans had to come in by glider and parachute and then consolidate their position. There were brutal attack and counterattack moves for the next two weeks, but the Nazis had massive air superiority in the region, and the Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, local partisans, and other ragtag imported troops didn’t really have a chance. There’s a monument in Rethymno commemorating them. The fighting was all along this coastline. Awful stuff, and after the Nazis won, they led reprisal raids against the nearby villages, rounding up people, imprisoning them, executing them—”

“Well, this is cheery vacation chat,” said Melissa.

“What was left of the Allied force limped off to Alexandria on the Egyptian coast,” said Marcus, ignoring her. “Ferried at night by whatever bits of the Royal Navy survived the German air assault.”

“What does this have to do with your magician?” asked Brad, nibbling something he had fished off the grill with a long-handled fork.

“He was in Alexandria,” said Marcus. “Which was the Allies’ only toehold in the region. It was the spot they used to launch their counterattack against Rommel and the Italians in North Africa, then the Allied assault on Sicily and the backdoor into Germany. After the Battle of Britain, take the Russians out of the equation, and holding Alexandria becomes the Allies’ most significant achievement in the war. Without it, they lose, plain and simple.”

“Is this what you’re like in class?” asked Simon. “I feel like I’m in school again. It’s freaking me out.”

“Shhh,” said Kristen. “I want to hear.”

Marcus smiled. It probably was, I thought, what he was like in class, and that was why he seemed so at ease, so in control of his story. I liked watching him, hearing the way he built the narrative, laying it out like one of those Greek myths I had so loved in college. It was sexy.

“So there’s Jasper Maskelyne,” said Marcus, “and he knows—everyone knew—that if they lose Alexandria, they are toast, so he puts his mind to using all those old sleight of hand tricks he had learned, and he comes up with this amazing idea: make the enemy think that the Allies are stationed somewhere else and, to make sure the city doesn’t get flattened anyway, hide it.”

“What?” exclaimed Simon skeptically. “How?”

“Well, the first part of the misdirection is to draw the eye to the stuff that doesn’t matter, right?” said Marcus. “So he gets the army to lay out big painted sheets that, from the air, look like buildings. They add plywood aircraft models and inflatable tanks, all stuff the Brits would do again in southern England in 1944 before the D-day landings so that the Germans wouldn’t know where the attack was going to go. He makes sure Alexandria is in full blackout at night, and then sets up fake lights farther down the coast, including a lighthouse, so that when the Nazi night raids come, they bomb the wrong place. He claims he even used a complex mirror system so that when you looked at the city in daylight, it appeared to be several miles from where it really was.”

“Claims?” I said, getting a sinking feeling.

“Yeah,” said Brad. “What does that mean?”

“Means it almost certainly wasn’t true,” said Marcus, smiling. “Maskelyne was a deceiver by trade. A liar. And like a lot of liars, he was ultimately feathering his own nest, building his reputation by claiming responsibility for stuff that was done by other people or that never actually happened at all. He got a lot of press, made some money, but came under more and more critical scrutiny and eventually died a poor and embittered drunk.”

There was an odd, baffled silence. I got up.