Chapter One
The Last Projectionist
The ferry was late, which on Anthos was the schedule, and Eleni Makri waited for it at the harbour with the trolley, because whatever London had sent would have cases, and the island's one taxi was at a christening.
She knew him before the gangway touched. Not because he looked like an archivist, though he did, linen gone hopeful in the heat, a laptop bag worn crosswise like a bandolier, but because he came down the ramp sideways, shielding from the sun not his own head but the two aluminium cases he carried, the way you shield children, and Eleni, who had spent her life around men who carried film, felt the first unwilling point score itself somewhere under her professional dread.
"Miss Makri." He set the cases down with a bomb officer's gentleness and offered his hand. "Nick Andreou. The archive sent me about the collection." His Greek was good and strange at once, London over something older, an accent like a returned postcard. He looked past her then, up beyond the harbour front, to where the town climbed white and blue toward the low hill, and on the hill's shoulder, catching the late sun, the wall. The famous seaward wall of the Cine Asteri, seventy years whitewashed, screen bright even empty, visible, sailors said, from halfway to the next island.
"That's it," he said, not a question, and something crossed his face that did not belong to any inventory. "The cinema."
