Free A Most Extraordinary Pursuit by Juliana Gray Page A

little chat about old Max.”
    â€œThe Duke of Olympia, do you mean?”
    â€œDo you know, I can’t quite bring myself to call him that. The last time I saw Max, he was neck-deep in some damned filthy hole in the ground in Mesopotamia, swearing in five different languages.”
    I shrugged. “I’ve never met him at all.”
    â€œNever? How extraordinary. And now here you are, steaming across the Med to his rescue, in his own private yacht, eating his porridge and listening to his phonograph recordings, except he doesn’t know he owns any of it yet.” Silverton levered himself away from the cabinet and collapsed crosswise into an armchair, allowing himself a splendid vantage of the rain-dashed dome. “The captain informs me we’ll hurtle into the Aegean around daybreak, so it’s now or never, so to speak.”
    â€œWhat’s now or never?”
    â€œWhy, sorting out how we go about this business of tracking down the needle that is Max inside the haystack that is the bloody Mediterranean Sea.”
    â€œI thought he was in Crete.”
    â€œHa! You don’t know Max.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small white ball, which he flung into the air and caught with the other hand, before flinging it up again to be caught in the first hand. “If he hears some rumor about a butterfly’s wings touching a Rosetta stone in Alexandria, he’s off on the next tide, like the cat who . . . who . . .” The ball paused in his hand.
    â€œAte the canary?”
    â€œNo, no.”
    â€œWalked by himself?”
    â€œNo, dash it. Something to do with yarn.” He shook his head and sent the ball back into the air. “Well, it’s gone now. But you know what I mean.”
    â€œI don’t believe I do. In any case, the Rosetta stone is now safe inside the sturdy walls of the British Museum, thank goodness, and— What
is
that?”
    â€œThis?” He held up the ball. “It’s a cricket ball, of course.”
    â€œBut why on earth are you flinging it about like that?”
    â€œFor sport, Truelove.” He tapped his wide golden forehead with the ball. “I find it greases the old gears when the mechanism’s got stuck. Perhaps you ought to try it. You look as if you could use a bit of mental focus, at the moment. All pink about the cheeks and green about the gills. Rather ghastly, in a charming sort of way.
Think
, now. Why might upstanding Max leave his Cretan post in the middle of winter, without leaving word to his nearest and dearest?”
    â€œHas he
really
left it? We only know for certain that he’s not replied to anyone’s messages. Perhaps he’s been busy. It’s not impossible that he hasn’t even received these messages to begin with.”
    â€œThere is the matter of the Greek official, to whom he’s delinquent in sending his regular reports.”
    â€œHe may have his own reasons for that.”
    Smack
went the cricket ball into Silverton’s left palm. “By George, if you’re not swimming in optimism this afternoon. Determined not to fear the worst, are you?”
    â€œI see no reason to borrow trouble. There’s usually a simple explanation for these conundrums.”
    â€œConundrum.”
Smack.
“Now there’s a splendid word. I do like a splendid word now and again. Makes one feel as if words actually matter. So I suppose the first person we should interview is this Greek chap who’s got his fustanella up around his ears about those missing reports. He’ll be as crooked as a mountain path, of course—your petty Mediterranean officials always are—and probably expect a handsome gratuity in exchange for any useful information, unless we can contrive, between the two of us, to make him drunk enough to empty his brain for free.”
    â€œCertainly not,” I said indignantly.
    He tilted his head in my