The Gold of Thrace (12 page)

She reached for the telephone, asked to speak to Herr Keller, and then decided to go downstairs and report the theft personally. She waited impatiently for the elevator, went down to the lobby, found Herr Keller in the bar, and told him about the missing bracelet.

He seemed insulted. “A gold bracelet, you say?” He called the waiter and ordered a sherry for her. “You looked carefully? You may have misplaced it. Perhaps in your purse? Perhaps a pocket?”

She shook her head and asked him to call the police.

He hemmed and hawed and assured her that everyone on the staff at the Euler was honest, and finally agreed to call the police. She sat forward in the chair, tapping her foot, drumming her fingers on the table, waiting for the police to arrive. Finally a sandy-haired man dressed in a black leather trench coat, Herr Fischer, a detective, swept into the bar and sat at the table next to Tamar.

She repeated the story of the missing bracelet for the detective. She told him it was ancient Thracian gold and he raised his eyebrows. He checked her room, examined the dresser and dusted it for fingerprints.

They went back downstairs and sat in the bar, where she drew a hasty sketch of the bracelet on a napkin for him. He assured her he would call her if he found anything.

When they finished, she went back upstairs, still shaken, feeling violated and imprudent. I should have taken more care, she thought. I should have put it in the hotel safe.

***

By the time she was ready for bed, the rain had turned to hail and she heard the staccato ping of hailstones against the windows. Then came the thunder, rumbling and crashing with occasional flashes of lightning that penetrated the drapes. She began to count the seconds between the lightning and the claps of thunder, waiting for the storm to come closer and then fade away.

The thunder raged all night, like an angry admonition from the sky. She lay awake, listening to the furious storm. The room filled with static electricity, and seemed to be arcing and sparking as her heart began to pound with a sense of foreboding.

Maybe reading something dull would put her to sleep. In the dark, she felt for the museum catalogue and turned on the lamp. It opened to the page about Holbein.

She began to scan the catalogue and fell into a fitful sleep, conscious of the glow of the lamp, never sure if she was awake or asleep as images of abstract paintings and gold bracelets passed through her head, and a dark Mercedes bore down on her while she was running, running to escape. It’s Demitrius, she was saying to Alex as the Mercedes chased her down, Demitrius is the danger.

Chapter Eighteen

Lyons, France, August 16, 1990

He arrived in Lyon at the Gare de la Part-Dieu and took a taxi to the apartment hotel on Boulevard des Belges, right across from the Parc de la Tête d’Or.

He opened the apartment door with the key card he had received in the mail yesterday. He dropped his briefcase on the coffee table and went straight to the computer on the desk in the corner. He turned it on and entered his password, then a second password and a code number. He waited. There was a message for him.

“Onze heure
.” Eleven o’clock.

He deleted the message and turned off the computer. He wandered into the kitchen and found only an opened box with three stale crackers and some crumbs, and decided to go out to dinner.

He headed for the Rhône. He strolled leisurely, with the park on one side and the river on the other, past the rose garden, heavy with the aroma of damask roses, of tea roses, of old eglantines that wafted toward him. He continued on until he found an upscale
bouchon
, a café with a terrace facing the river on one of the quais. He ordered the specialty of the house, veal sausage—
boudin blanc
—and a bottle of local Beaujolais.

Small sailboats slid along the water, music blaring, with shirtless teenaged boys, laughing and tanned, scrambling on the decks. Small motorboats passed with purple-haired women sunning topless, lying on their backs near the bow.

He contemplated the young women in summer dresses who strolled along the plâge in the evening breeze and thought, with a mighty sigh, how little it took to make him truly content.

He sat on the terrace and watched the river until he noticed the waiter hover near him impatiently. He looked around and saw that he was the last customer. He paid the bill, added a substantial tip, and left.

In the morning, he returned to the same
bouchon
for breakfast.

He ordered what he thought of as a typical French breakfast. He put two spoons of sugar into the fine Limoges cup on the table, and with a pitcher in each hand, simultaneously poured strong French coffee and foaming hot milk into it. He reached for a brioche, still warm from the oven and slick with butter, split it, added a dollop of chevre cheese. He slowly scanned
Le Monde
while eating, sipping his
café-au-lait
, looking up now and then to check for loiterers in the street. He noticed a few pedestrians: an occasional jogger; a couple, immersed in each other, leaning together, arms across each other’s shoulders.

He took a second brioche, buttered it, and slathered it with apricot preserves. He bit into the brioche and savored the still fresh, tart-sweet taste of the apricots, glistening and golden, took another sip of
café-au-lait
and leaned back to watch the Rhône.

He checked his watch. Nine o’clock. Still two hours to go.

On an impulse, he left the restaurant and hailed a taxi to take him to the chocolatier on the other side of the Rhône and bought a half-kilo box of chocolates to bring back to Tamar. He took another taxi back to the apartment on the Rive Gauche and dropped off the box of chocolates before he headed for the Quai Charles de Gaulle. He wandered through the streets of
La Cité
, built for tourists and shoppers, and onto a piazza, checked his watch again, and then ducked into the passages that led into Interpol.

At ten forty-eight he stood outside the new Interpol headquarters, gazing at the tall wrought iron fence and the reflecting pool that surrounded it like a medieval moat. A twentieth century version of a medieval castle, he thought as he strolled to the gate.

He stopped at the glass booth at the entrance, gave the guard his card and identification number, and stood passively while the guard subjected him to a body search.

He walked into the public area, the click of his footsteps and the buzz and hum of the glass elevators echoing through the soaring vault of the hollow-sounding atrium. He strolled over to the reception desk where a woman sat behind a console, the tip of her head just visible.

When he reached the desk, she looked up at him with a stern-faced stare.

His French wasn’t that good, so he spoke to her in English. “I’ve come to see my mother.”

The receptionist rolled her eyes impatiently and gave him an unsympathetic look. “Your identification, sir.”

He sighed, remembering that humor is not appreciated here, took out his wallet and passed the card over to her.

She inspected it and said, “Place your thumb in the receptacle, please,” while she typed his name into the computer terminal on the console.

He did what she told him and waited until he saw recognition in her eyes and she nodded when confirmation appeared on her screen. She turned and reached for a plastic card from the shelf behind her.

“Your proximity card, sir.” She pointed to the corner of the public area separate from the bank of elevators. “Use that elevator over there, sir. Someone will meet you on the fifth floor.”

He sauntered to the elevator, pushed the button, waited for the elevator cage to stop at the lobby floor, and stepped inside. There was a metal plate where there would ordinarily be a panel with buttons for floor selection. He put the “prox” card against the metal plate, the elevator door closed, and the number five appeared above the plate.

The door opened on the fifth floor. A man in a security uniform met him and said, “This way, sir. Follow me.”

The guard led him to a glass booth one meter square at the end of the corridor, said, “We have retinal identification, sir,” and put his hand on his side-arm.

“Instructions are in three languages, sir. Step one: enter your personal identification number. Step two: place your eye against the scanner when you hear the beep. Step three: after scanning, when you hear the beep, proceed through the door to your left.”

For a moment he wondered what would happen if something went wrong. The glass door would lock; he knew that. The guard would shoot him; he knew that. But would the glass go flying? Would poison gas fill the booth? He wasn’t going to find out.

He went through the procedure as instructed. The door to the secure area opened. He deposited the “prox” card in the lock box next to the door, continued into a windowless corridor, and entered the office at the end of the hall.

Chapter Nineteen

Basel, Switzerland, August 16, 1990

By morning, the storm had calmed to a steady drizzle. Tamar stood at the window, watching a few pedestrians hurry through the rain, then rang for coffee and a roll. She scanned the
Paris Tribune
that was outside her door while she ate, wondering if there was more news on Chatham’s murder, and found nothing. She dressed for the rain in jeans and a tee shirt, put on a yellow slicker and tucked her hair into a rain hat and headed for the taxi stand outside the hotel. She gave the driver the address of the shop that Herr Keller had told her about in Klein Basel, leaned back in the seat, and relaxed.

They drove past the red sandstone Gothic towers of the Münster that stood watch over medieval Basel, and across the Rhine on the Wettstein Bridge.

In a small cobbled square in Klein Basel, red geraniums danced in the window boxes of fourteenth-century half-timbered houses. A trace of sun, just beginning to appear, glinted on the cobbles still shining with rain and dappled the quiet water in the basin of a public fountain fed by a stream of water spouting from the mouth of a stylized griffin. The house on the corner carried a small sign,
Konditurei Basler
.

The shop had three or four tight, low-ceilinged rooms with small fireplaces. Jars of preserves and pastries sat neatly arranged on tables and glass cases.

For a moment, Tamar imagined the house as it had once been, a house where ancestors of the Holbein Baslers once lived in cozy rooms, undersized to protect against the cold, with rag rugs on the floor as a form of insulation and furnished with practical, hand-hewn furniture. How different from nineteenth-century patrician houses like Gilberto’s that flaunted the owner’s healthy pride in his wealth with central heating and spacious, high-ceilinged rooms and walls covered with watered silk.

Tamar bought two quarter-kilo boxes of
Basler Ballen
, and three jars of preserves: strawberry, raspberry, and apricot. She paid, said, “
Merci
,
viel mals
” to the woman behind the register, looped the handle of the plastic bag around her wrist, and left the shop.

Outside, the rain had stopped; the little square was bright and clear under a blue sky with occasional gossamer clouds. The cobbles of the street were shining, and leaves on trees were greener from the rainfall. On a day like this, with the world newly washed and under a clean sun, it would be wrong to be indoors. She decided to walk back to the hotel.

She meandered toward the river, humming, swinging the bag of chocolates and preserves from her wrist, passing a red sandstone Gothic church, passing the grounds of the old Carthusian monastery. She strolled down a tree-lined promenade along the bank of the Rhine toward the old bridge, the
Mittlere Brücke
, and began crossing the river on the pedestrian walkway, letting others pass her, cars and buses moving in her peripheral vision, their exhaust dimming the perfection of the day.

She paused in the middle of the bridge and leaned over the concrete railing to look down at the river. Some swimmers cavorted in the Rhine, some pattering a few feet doing a breaststroke, some diving like porpoises. Beneath her feet, she could feel the walkway shudder from the rhythm of the traffic that belched fumes as it hummed across the bridge.

She let go of the railing and saw a dark blue Mercedes turn onto the bridge.

The car moved toward her, slowly at first, picking up speed as it came nearer. The license plate had Cyrillic writing and she could just make out Demitrius Konstantinopoulis at the wheel.

Down in the river, a man was laughing, pitching a bright yellow ball toward a knot of swimmers. A bus moved past her in the center of the bridge, belching diesel fumes, shaking the bridge as it rolled by.

The Mercedes came faster, its wheels slightly canted toward the pedestrian walk. She could see Demitrius’ face now, expressionless, determined.

He revved the motor. The Mercedes was aimed at her like a bullet.

People walked past. Cars moved along the bridge. Only the Mercedes stood out, bearing down on her, ready to jump the curb, coming at her faster, faster.

Heart pounding, she moved back against the balustrade. She tried to raise her arm to deflect the blow.

She knew it was coming.

No time to get out of the way.

Her hand caught on the railing. She felt the weight of the package on her wrist. She pulled at it, grabbed for it with her hand.

No time, just seconds to go.

She swung the bag above her head, hurled it at the Mercedes, watched the bag arc toward the windshield of the car.

She saw Demitrius flinch and duck his head, saw him wrench the wheel, saw the car jerk forward, saw the red jam spill across the windshield, saw it shatter into a web of a thousand shards.

The Mercedes leapt onto the walkway and kept going, ramming the yellow posts that flew from its path, smashing through the balustrade.

The balustrade crumbled. The car crashed past it and plunged, nose down, into the Rhine.

Chapter Twenty

The Hague, Netherlands, August 15, 1990

He had just come from the crowded, wind-swept beach at Scheveningen. The place was full of screaming children, running and kicking up sand while their mothers, covered with oil, slept under bright beach umbrellas.

He still had an hour to kill before he met the principals here in The Hague to get paid for the deal. In front of the Ridderzaal, they told him, inside the Binnenhof, right in the middle of the government offices.

Weren’t they smart?

He strolled idly down Oude Molenstraat, glancing in shop windows, and wondered if he was being followed.

He looked back to check and noticed a man who had stopped about fifteen meters down the street in front of a store window. He looked like a casual shopper. He carried a shopping bag and wore a dark blue windbreaker, one of those American baseball caps in dark blue and a pair of showy American running shoes, white with blue and black decoration.

He had seen the man before. The man had been following him since Berlin. Did they think he wouldn’t notice? Did they think he was stupid?

The man looked too familiar. He had seen the man somewhere else. It had been nagging at him since the first time he spotted the man. Then he remembered. The pictures of the three from Hazarfen, that was where he saw him: Chatham, the girl, and this man.

Orman Çelibi, that was his name. Orman.

He walked about ten meters further and stopped again in front of a cutlery shop with knives and scissors in the window. His reflection in the store window was distorted. It made the scar less noticeable.

Behind him, Orman had stopped, too. I’ll have to lose him, Firenzano thought.

An enormous Swiss knife a meter and a half high mounted on a mountain of knives turned round and round, round and round in the middle of the window. Blades and scissors and nail files and key rings and screwdrivers splayed in all directions, as if the knife had tentacles.

He felt for the switchblade in his pocket. He preferred it to a Swiss knife. It was lighter, it was quicker, it was more practical.

If all goes well, he decided, from now on I will call the shots instead of being ordered about.

If all goes well
.

He paused and crossed himself with a wish. Right there in the middle of the street, right there with Orman watching.

That was stupid.

He looked around, a little shamefaced, to see if Orman saw him. Orman wasn’t there. Relieved, he kept on walking.

Someone on the other side of the street wearing running shoes—white, gray and blue—caught his peripheral vision. He halted a moment and recognized Orman, this time with a white polo shirt; Orman still wore the blue pants. He must have taken off the jacket and cap and put them in the shopping bag.

He knew then that he was being followed by at least two of them, maybe three, someone tracking him on this side of the street, maybe one in front, one behind. The three of them would change places and spell each other like relay runners. Did they think he was stupid?

He looked back again to see if he could spot anyone, then stopped at another shop and looked in the window. Antique furniture.

No one stopped behind him. A man walked past him, brushed against him, and kept going. There must be three of them. Someone was in front, waiting for him to pass.

He crossed the street, his eye on Orman, and stayed behind him. Orman walked faster. He kept pace.

At the corner of Papestraat, he bumped into a man with his head thrown back, dangling a herring over his mouth like a sword swallower about to perform.

What is it with these crazy Dutchmen? They cackle and hauwck when they speak and eat raw herring from a kiosk in the middle of the street.

Next time, he would arrange the meeting himself. Italy, maybe the south of France, somewhere where the food was good.

He turned the corner and saw Orman duck into a doorway. He followed.

After no more than a minute, he came out of the doorway alone and started back toward Molenstraat. He wore the baseball cap and the dark blue windbreaker zipped up to the neck.

He still wore his own shoes. The running shoes didn’t fit.