The Gold of Thrace (7 page)

“Not exactly. Sometimes.”

“You don’t look very rich either.”

He lifted his foot. “Brunos,” he said with a flourish toward his shoe.

“Who’s Bruno? An antiquities dealer?”

“A shoe manufacturer. You never heard of Bruno Magli?”

“I’m looking for antiquities, not shoes. I don’t know where to start.” She waited for him to make a suggestion. “You know any antiquities dealers?” she finally asked.

“Try Gilberto Dela Barcolo. Ask anyone about him. He’s the prince of dealers, the Duveen of the antiquities trade.”

“Duveen was a bit of a scoundrel.”

Enzio took a sip of his Campari and made a face. “Exactly,” he said.

“Everything from this Dela Barcolo has provenience?”

“Provenance. If it doesn’t have one, he’ll get one for you.”

She looked down at his shoes. “He wears Brunos?”

He nodded.

Gilberto Dela Barcolo it is, Tamar decided. I’ll try there in the morning.

She took a sip of water. “Who are you?” she asked him. “Besides Enzio from Napoli who wears the right kind of shoes.”

“A man with proper provenance.” He contemplated his foot and moved it from side to side. “I have to visit Gilberto tomorrow. I can take you there, if you want to come along.”

She hesitated, then decided that she would rather go on her own. She reached for the water bottle to take up to her room. “I have to go now.”

He stood up when she did and threw twenty francs on the table. “Tomorrow, here, at eleven?”

“Don’t wait,” she said.

Chapter Ten

Basel, Switzerland, August 10, 1990

At ten thirty in the morning, Tamar took a cab to Gilberto Dela Barcolo’s house in the St. Alban’s district. Herr Keller, the manager at the Euler, had given her the address and called for an appointment.

“It’s his home,” Herr Keller told her. “Full of beautiful antiquities. He loves beautiful things, lives with them, sits back and admires them. You’ll see.”

“
Hohenstrasse Sieben
,” she told the taxi driver in her best German and leaned back in the seat.

“
Hohnstrosse Siebe
,” the driver corrected her in Basler
Schwyzertuesch
. He nodded to himself and then nodded to her in the rear view mirror before he started the meter and drove off.

Hohenstrasse was a narrow, quiet street crammed with staid cars, mostly gray Mercedes, and lined with upscale nineteenth century townhouses. The taxi stopped before the largest of these, a three story stone house behind an elaborate wrought iron gate.

The driver printed a chit from the meter, handed it to her, and grunted. She counted out the fare and tip.

“
Merci viel mals
,” the driver said in the local patois, and Tamar smiled at the mixture of French and German.

She stood in the street for a moment, then opened the gate that went along the path between low rose hedges. Halfway up the walk, she stopped. Her heart thumped and her hands grew clammy, with a chill of trepidation, beset with worry about meeting a stranger, about finding the mosaic.

She took a deep breath and continued up the walk, up the steps to the door, and rang the bell. She waited and peered through the beveled glass into a short vestibule with five marble steps covered by a red carpet anchored with brass rods. All seemed silent inside the house.

A second pair of double doors stood closed at the top of the stairs. She pressed the bell again and heard the echo of a harsh ring reverberate in the foyer beyond.

A man wearing a dark turtleneck sweater and fine Italian shoes opened both doors at the top of the stairs with a flamboyant gesture. He was strikingly handsome, with liquid brown eyes caught in thought and dark hair tumbling onto his forehead. He frowned, holding a finger to his lips, and ducked his head to see who rang the bell. When he saw Tamar waiting, he came striding down the red carpet with easy grace.

He opened the door with a flourish and held out his hand. “Gilberto Dela Barcolo. Sorry you had to wait, Miss Saticoy. The housekeeper seems to have gone off somewhere.”

He waved her in with a slight bow. “You are Miss Saticoy, aren’t you?”

His hair had a touch of gray at the temples, just enough to make him distinguished.

He reached for her hand and gave it an air kiss. “Please to come in.”

Everything about him was suave and sleek and charming, even his voice, so mellifluous and resonant with a faint Italian accent.

They climbed the stairs into a grand foyer. A domed skylight high above a patterned mosaic in the center of the floor immersed it in a luminous twilight. At the far wall, a staircase led up to a second floor gallery, and then a third. A fine antique Oriental rug, the colors muted by time, hung on the wall behind the landing. The far corner of the gallery held a desk and another glass showcase.

Dela Barcolo made a casual gesture in the direction of the carpet. “A Shah Abbas,” he said with a modest smile.

He climbed the stairs to the landing, quiet elegance permeating every move, and stood in front of the carpet, waiting for her to follow.

He turned back the corner of the carpet to show the fine quality of the stitches. “You know about Shah Abbas,” he said. “Shah Abbas the Great. He ruled Persia in the sixteenth century and was renowned for his conquests, his cruelty, and the magnificence of his court, the buildings he erected, and the beauty of their furnishings. Especially the carpets.”

“Very nice,” Tamar said.

“But you want something older, something ancient, something wrapped in the romance of a more distant past,” he said and they continued up the stairs to the gallery.

A marquetry desk and chair and the head and shoulders of a Kore, larger than life, on a high black acrylic plinth were in the far corner near the railing of the gallery.

The nose and right ear had been repaired, conservator style, with plaster painted the same gray color as the stone.

A vitrine stood against the back wall.

As they walked toward it, the pressure of their steps along the gallery seemed to rock the Kore on the plinth. Tamar reached up to steady it.

“Careful,” Dela Barcolo said. “It isn’t permanently installed. For that we have to drill a hole. It’s a Kore—the Maiden, Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Her statue, garlanded with flowers during the celebration of the Elysian Mysteries, stood in a temple dedicated to the Kore and her mother Demeter. Perhaps you’re interested?”

Tamar shook her head. “Not what I was looking for.”

“No?” Dela Barcolo crossed over to the vitrine and reached inside. “I have something special,” he said. “A Kybele.”

“A Kybele?”

Like the one stolen from Ephesus?

He brought out a ceramic figurine of a Roman matron wearing a chiton and himation and enthroned on a wheeled chariot. She wore the attributes of Kybele, a polis headdress and lions on either side of the throne.

“That’s Kybele?” Tamar asked.

Dela Barcolo laughed. “You were expecting the terrible Anatolian Kybele, of the castrated priests?” He moved to the desk, placed the figurine carefully on top and stood back. “This is the Roman version of the Mother Goddess, the Magna Mater, the Great Mother of the Gods. Like a good Italian mother, she is a nurturer. She probably cooks for her children.”

He laughed again. “Originally, the Roman Kybele was a meteor that had fallen from the sky somewhere in Asia Minor, near Pergamum. They anointed it with oil and draped it with garlands and wreaths to consecrate the rock.”

He stroked the figurine gently. “Beautiful, isn’t she? When the Romans were fighting Hannibal, the Sybil told them they could only conquer Carthage if the Kybele were brought to Rome from Pergamum. The goddess was formally welcomed in Rome and placed in the pantheon to become, eventually, the principal goddess, known to Romans as the Great Mother of the Gods. During her festival, her worshippers anointed and dressed her and paraded her through the streets in a chariot drawn by two lions. In time, her cult was rivaled only by the cults of Isis and Mithras.”

He reached into the top drawer of the desk, pulled out a yellowed envelope and extracted a letter, worn thin at the folds. “The piece has impeccable provenance.” He pointed to the crest on the letterhead. “It was part of the collection of the Marquis de Cuvier.”

Everything from Dela Barcolo has provenance, if not, he’ll get one for you, Enzio had told her.

“Very nice,” Tamar said.

“Some people see a relationship between Kybele and the Black Stone of the Kaaba in Mecca. The Black Stone, too, is a meteorite.” He shrugged. “Scientists tell us that life may have been carried to Earth on the crust of a meteor. Who knows? Perhaps a meteorite is the mother of us all.”

She waited a moment and then said, “I would be interested in something a little more…”

“Sensational,” he said.

He refolded the letter from the Marquis de Cuvier and put it away in the desk, carried the Kybele with both hands back to its shelf and started back down the stairs.

He led her to two glass cases attached to the wall in the vestibule and filled with a range of eclectic artifacts: Roman glass vials, Mesopotamian clay statuettes of bearded worshippers with clasped hands and sheepskin skirts, Astarte figures with coffee bean eyes and elaborate headdresses, bronze figurines from Sardinia that looked like little robots.

He reached into one case and took out a larger clay statuette of a clean-shaven man in a robe, wearing what looked like a cap with a wide headband.

“Gudea, the ancient king of Lagash in Sumeria,” he said, running his finger along the folds of the robe. “Is it not beautiful?”

“I was thinking of something larger, more impressive for the public.”

“You’re buying for a museum?”

She nodded. “A university museum.” How could she put it, so that he wouldn’t suspect that she was seeking a stolen mosaic? “Something Roman perhaps, something grand that we could put at the entrance to catch the eye of visitors.”

“Which university?”

“California State.”

“Ah, the University of California. I know the institution.”

She began to say no, they are not the same, and then thought better of it. Too complicated to explain. Besides, she wasn’t going to buy anything anyway. “Yes,” she said and followed him into a sitting room.

Tamar navigated around a coffee table and between two settees toward a stele fragment set on an easel next to the fireplace.

“From the palace at Nineveh,” Dela Barcolo said. “It belongs in a museum. You see here?” His finger traced a multitude of mounds incised on the stele. “The mountains. And here,” indicating a cluster of wavy lines, “a river. You see the soldiers, who came down from the mountains and crossed the river?” He pointed to a line of armored men wearing pointed helmets and carrying spears.

The stone was dark and cracked. “It looks burnt,” Tamar said.

“Of course, of course, the palace was destroyed by the invading Medes…”

The sharp jangle of the doorbell interrupted him. Dela Barcolo looked toward the back of the house, waited a moment until the bell rang again.

He sighed. “The housekeeper is still out. Please to excuse me.”

He disappeared into the vestibule. Tamar examined the stele again. The same style as the ones at the British Museum depicting Sennacherib’s conquest of Lachish, except that those at the British Museum don’t have as much evidence of burning. This may be part of the same series, she thought, and wondered how Dela Barcolo got it, whom he had bribed, how many crimes had been committed on the way to acquiring it.

She shrugged. One man’s Mede is another man’s Persian, she thought, and moved to the window to look out. Enzio stood at the entrance. Behind him, a taxi pulled up. A woman with bleached and pampered hair and shoe-button eyes emerged, carrying packages with both arms, and darted up the walk past Enzio. Tamar heard a tumble of rapid Italian coming from the foyer hall and saw the woman storm toward the back of the house, shaking her head.

Enzio stood in the doorway of the living room, leaning against the jamb, smiling at her, almost laughing.

“I took your advice,” he said to Tamar. “I didn’t wait.”

“You know each other?” Dela Barcolo asked, looking from one to the other.

“We met at the hotel,” Tamar said.

Dela Barcolo moved closer to Tamar and blocked her view of Enzio. “You are stopping at the Euler?”

She nodded.

“You will stay for lunch?”

“Of course she will,” Enzio said. “Your lunches are famous.”

“And you,” he said to Enzio. “You’ll stay for lunch.”

“Not today.” Enzio looked at his watch. “I can only stay a few minutes. I have an appointment with Aristides at one.”

Dela Barcolo bristled. “You brought something to sell? You offer it to Aristides before you show it to me?”

“I’m not showing it to Aristides. I’ll bring it here tomorrow.”

“Then stay for lunch.”

“I can’t.”

Dela Barcolo shrugged and threw up his hands. “Fabiana!” he called, and made his way to the back of the house.

Enzio stood in front of the stele from Nineveh, and examined it while Tamar wandered the room. She stopped before one of two small curio tables with glass tops and velvet lined trays that held golden earrings shaped like ram’s heads, intaglios set into rings, brooches with the dull yellow luster of ancient gold.

Enzio continued to peer at the stele, running his fingers along the surface. “I wonder where he got this.”

“I’ve been wondering too,” Tamar said.

“He just acquired it. It’s been around for a while. The site was dug in the thirties.”

“You know a lot about archaeology, don’t you?” Tamar said.

“Of course he does,” Dela Barcolo said in his smooth voice as he burst into the room.

“My housekeeper,” he said. “She was at the police, giving a deposition. Two weeks ago, we were robbed. We had a flood in the basement when the washing machine overflowed. Fabiana left a window open to dry it out and the thief crawled in through the basement window. Somehow, he got into the safe and stole a collection of rare ancient coins. The police recovered the coins and are holding him.” He gave Tamar a slight bow. “You will excuse me while I call to ask about the trial date.”

He went into a small alcove off the living room, opened a polished mahogany box on the table, took out a telephone and punched numbers into the keypad inside the box. He spoke into the telephone, listened for a moment, then slammed down the receiver.

“They released him!”

“After Fabiana’s deposition?” Enzio said.

Dela Barcolo held out his hands in a gesture of frustration. “They say they refuse to get involved in my sordid household intrigues.”

“The thief is a friend of Fabiana’s?” Enzio asked.

“She knows him. Mario started as one of my runners. He became a minor dealer, tries to sell me small Etruscan vases, Bucchero ware sometimes. Nothing important.” He smiled and shook his head and threw up his hands in a dramatic gesture. “And now, he’s a special friend of Fabiana’s.”

“He stole only the coins?”

“Thanks to God, he didn’t take more.”

Enzio raised his eyebrows and gave Dela Barcolo a knowing nod. “And he knew when the window to the basement was open, and somehow found the hiding place of the safe and figured out the combination.”

“What are you saying, Enzio? All this can be explained.”

“By Fabiana? It’s up to you, Gilberto. It’s your house she lives in.”

Fabiana came into the room, set a tray of drinks down on the table in front of the fireplace, and flounced out.

“You think she heard you?” Gilberto asked.

“No,” Fabiana called from the dining room. “I was in the chicken.”