The Gold of Thrace (9 page)

Chapter Twelve

Basel, Switzerland, August 12, 1990

Tamar opened her eyes, stretched luxuriously in the featherbed, put on the terry robe that the hotel provided, and rang for the floor concierge to bring breakfast—filtered coffee, butter, a basket of croissants, and small pots of jam. She opened the door a crack and retrieved the shoes she had left out the night before. They always reappeared in the morning, shining and tidy, lined up next to the door. She looked for the newspaper and then remembered it was Sunday. She felt slightly annoyed at the inconvenience, then laughed at her reaction.

I’m an archaeologist, she thought, why am I complaining? I dig in the dirt with a cramp in my knee and dust in my hair. I couldn’t live without it, the adventure of it, the thrill of handling the artistry of long dead hands, the chance to whisper to the past.

When she first came to dig at Tepe Hazarfen, the dig house in Kilis was so bad that when she told the driver, “The mansion of Neshet Effendi,” he stopped at the police station to pick up a gendarme, sure that the address was a mistake. When they found it, the house had broken windows, peeling paint, and Orman’s head popping over the cracked garden wall like a jack-in-the-box on a spring.

He called out, “Tamar, is that you?” as the car drove up.

The garden was filled with trash, old tires and broken bottles, the detritus of abandonment since the turn of the century when it was last occupied. Nights, Orman and Chatham crashed through the house with a broom chasing bats, turning lights on and off because Chatham had said bats go toward the light.

“What do you mean, go toward the light?” Orman would say. “They’re bats, you damned fool, they’re blind. Blind as bats.”

But here at the Euler, with her featherbed and her morning luxuries, she delighted in opulence. This is the life, she decided, this is how I will live from now on, surrounded by servants and comfort. She stretched again, amused at the prospect.

She foraged in the small refrigerator in the corner of the room for the last peach she had bought at Marktplatz then opened the door at the knock of the floor concierge. He carried the tray to the small table near the windows and she gave him a five-franc note. He closed the door gently as he left.

She yawned again luxuriously before she turned on the television and began surfing through the channels, looking for a program in English. She passed a station, mostly static and snow, with an image that wavered in and out, and thought she recognized a picture of Chatham.

Why Chatham?

She turned up the volume. Some incomprehensible words filtered through the interference in a Slavic language. Czech, maybe? Some Cyrillic letters appeared below the picture, and then it faded out. She shrugged, went on surfing hoping to find a broadcast from the BBC. She gave up, settled on a foggy French station with a wavering performance of
Les Sylphides
, and sat down to breakfast.

She had almost finished when the door buzzer sounded. She looked through the peephole to see Gilberto’s head, nodding in rhythm to some inner music.

Tamar opened the door and he sailed in, carrying three large shopping bags filled to the brim and bright with flowers cut off at the stem: asters the color of jewels, dainty rosebuds, yellow daisies, white daisies, zinnias, perfumed gardenias.

He made straight for the bathroom. “The world of a beauty must be adorned with marvels to match her loveliness,” he said, and dumped the flowers into the tub.

He came back to the bedroom and stood contemplating her.

“You are so beautiful,” he said. “A profile like a cameo, eyes like a cat. You are as beautiful as a Botticelli.”

He fell onto one knee and held up his arms as if in worship. “You are as beautiful as my mother, and she was very beautiful indeed.”

Then he rose and turned to go. “You will, of course, come to lunch,” he said over his shoulder before he left. He closed the door behind him, leaving a trail of petals and bits of flowers behind on the carpet: a rosebud, two purple petunias, and Tamar, standing dumbfounded in the middle of the room.

She gathered the scattered remnants of petals from the carpet, laid them on the table next to the breakfast tray and went into the bathroom. She took off the robe and wondered how to deal with the stemless flowers that smiled up at her and filled the bottom two inches of the tub. She turned on the water and stepped into the shower. The flowers crunched beneath her feet. She stood on the floral carpet beneath the stream from the showerhead, savoring the bite of hot water, steam and perfume from the flowers filling her nostrils. She thought about the mad, handsome Italian who had invaded the bathroom, then left, and she began to sing.

It wasn’t until later, after she was fully dressed and had combed her hair, that she wondered about the ghostly image of Chatham on a television station that came from a place she didn’t know and told a story in a language she didn’t understand.

Chapter Thirteen

Sofia, Bulgaria, August 12, 1990

Irena read about the body found in the outskirts of Sofia in the
Vecherni Novini
, the
Evening News
.

The dead man had no identification, no packages, empty pockets, only a label in his suit from a tailor in Savile Row in London that raised the possibility that the corpse was British.

She had to wait until the next day, Monday, before she could call the British Museum and ask for Chatham. She was told he hadn’t arrived yet. She asked when he was expected.

“Last week,” the woman from the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities told her. “He seems to be delayed. We’ve had no word from him.”

“It’s him,” she told Dimitar. “The corpse in the newspaper. I’m sure it’s Chatham. How can we claim the insurance without him?”

It was bad enough that the locker at the airport was empty, with no sign of the suitcase or the gold, and now this.

“We wait,” Dimitar said, and picked up the paper to read the article himself.

Irena was fuming. They had worked so hard, and this time, nothing went right.

Who expected that stupid Chatham to send two
bortsi
to the hospital? And that Italian, or Swiss, or whatever he was. The arrangement they made in Turkey was for him to rescue Chatham in the park after the robbery and pour him on the plane so he could contact Lloyd’s.

Not this. You can’t trust anyone anymore.

She rubbed her arm with irritation. “We should go to the police and identify him.”

“We can’t do that. Our identity cards are suspect. God knows what they will think. That we are spies, maybe? We could get shot.”

“I’ll go. I’ll smile and they won’t look too closely at my identity card.” She paused a moment to think. “Wait. I have an old British passport somewhere. I’ll go as a concerned friend.”

“The passport’s too old. It’s expired.”

“Fix it. I’ll go this afternoon.”

After lunch, armed with a well-worn but current British passport, she went to the police and told them that she was concerned about her traveling companion, a man who had gone missing. She waited in the reception hall of the station for two hours seated on a hard wooden bench, and then they brought her to the morgue.

“It’s not a pleasant sight,” the man said. “The wild dogs…”

He brought her to a well-scrubbed room of tile and stainless steel that smelled of alcohol and rot. The man went through a door and reappeared behind a glass at the far end of the room and beckoned to her.

The room beyond the glass had a steel gurney in the center holding a body covered with a sheet. The man pulled back the sheet.

The face was recognizable but the dogs had done their work on his arms and upper body.

“It’s Chatham,” she said, and fainted. When she came to, she asked the man if he found the suitcase that Chatham carried.

“There was nothing found with him,” the policeman told her. “Not so much as a handkerchief.”

“We have to give a report,” he said. He took the information from her passport and turned to her to ask a question.

“I think I’m going to faint again,” she said, holding her head. “I must lie down.”

“You had a great shock,” he said.

“Can we finish the report tomorrow?”

He offered to drive her to the British Embassy. She asked him to drive her to her hotel instead, repeated that she needed to lie down. She promised to return the next day so that he could complete the report.

He said he understood and drove her to the new hotel, the Sheraton at Sveta Nedelya Square where she told him she was staying. She thanked him at the curb and assured him she would be all right by the next day. She went through the lobby, took the elevator to the eighth floor, then the stairs back down to the lobby. She left the hotel by the Largo Street entrance and crossed the street to the Archaeological Museum. She stayed there for an hour, looking at the exhibits, and then took a taxi back to the apartment on Rakovsky.

Chapter Fourteen

Basel, Switzerland, August 12, 1990

The table in the dining room was set for three, but only Tamar and Gilberto were there, waiting for lunch.

When her taxi arrived at Gilberto’s that morning, she saw a heavy-set man who seemed to be sneering, hunched at the side entrance to the basement. When he saw Tamar, he ducked back inside. Probably just a friend of Fabiana’s, Gilberto said when she told him about it.

“I can make you my agent in the United States, set you up in business,” Gilberto was saying. His voice was as seductive as cream. If she weren’t careful, she would slide into agreement with him.

“I’m an archaeologist, not an antiquities dealer,” Tamar said.

“You can’t make a decent living at it. Not enough to live well.” He leaned forward and touched her arm. “I can make you rich.”

She clutched the edge of the table. “I couldn’t. It’s unethical.”

“To be rich?”

“To deal in antiquities.”

“Once I thought the same, when I studied archaeology—in Florence, in Rome at the Pontifical Institute, at the Sorbonne.” He waved his glass with the Bloody Mary in her direction as if he were offering a toast and almost spilled some on the carpet. “Elegance, my dear, elegance is what you need, and enough money to live elegantly.”

His hands moved eloquently, enticingly as he spoke. “If the Elgin Marbles were not in the British Museum, where would they be today? Blown up in a Turkish ammunition depot?” Even his hair was sensuous, black and lush, with the silver accent at the temples. “If Napoleon left the Rosetta stone in a little town in the Egyptian delta, what would we know of ancient Egypt?”

“That’s sophistry, intellectual imperialism.”

“Besides,” he said with a lift of his head as if settling the argument, “the Elgin Marbles were bought and paid for from the Ottoman Empire, the legitimate government of the time.”

Tamar found herself getting angry. “That was a deliberate political ploy on the part of the Turkish government. If you sell the past, you lose it, lose the meaning of it, lose the human heritage. It’s immoral.”

“Immoral? Unethical? How so? Moral choice requires an ability to embrace ambiguity.” He took a sip of the Bloody Mary and put the glass on the table next to the coaster. “I just do the same as the ancient Greeks and Italians. In ancient times Etruscans bought and sold objects of art, traded them, brought Greek pottery to grace a wealthy Etruscan’s afterlife.” He moved his glass to the coaster and traced his finger along the ring the glass had left. “Now we find Greek pottery in Etruscan tombs. The pottery is part of my heritage and I do with it as I think best.”

“So you do well by doing good?”

“Yes, I do good. You think dealing in antiquities is evil?” he asked.

“If it’s not evil, it leads to evil.”

“We can only understand evil by looking within ourselves. We all keep a bit of it there. In evil, everyone is an accomplice, everyone is a victim. We excuse ourselves, and point the finger the other way. The blame is always on them, them, them.”

The doorbell sounded. Tamar heard Fabiana grumble as she shuffled along the back hall from the kitchen to answer the door. Voices echoed from the foyer, and Enzio appeared at the entrance to the dining room. He carried a small, battered gym bag in his right hand.

“You have something for me?” Gilberto asked.

Enzio raised the bag and nodded.

“Good, we’ll take care of it after lunch.”

This time, the lunch began with steak tartar spiked with scotch and went on endlessly, with beefsteak and side dishes, tomato salad, and ice cream drizzled with maraschino for dessert.

When they finished, Gilberto turned to Tamar. “Come along, my dear. We go downstairs. You can learn about the business, see how evil it really is.”

He led the way down a narrow curved stairway, and Tamar followed, groggy from the Bloody Mary and the two glasses of wine at lunch. They entered a small room with a brick floor burnished to a luster. In the center, four black leather sling chairs with chromium legs faced a chrome and glass coffee table. Funerary stelae of men in the prime of life, their heads bowed in grief, of desolate Greek youths being led into eternity by long-nosed dogs, of coifed matrons draped on lounges and gazing into mirrors, lined the room.

An alcove on the far wall held a wine cellar, stacked floor to ceiling on all three walls with wine bottles that sat in their pigeonholes like ancient manuscripts in a columbarium.

“We go into the workroom,” Gilberto said and led the way through a door in the far wall to a room with two waist-high workbenches covered with carpeting. Shelves crammed with jars and cups filled with tubes and brushes lined the walls.

Gilberto took the bag from Enzio and spilled the contents onto a worktable. Painted pottery sherds tumbled onto the table and Gilberto began to match broken bits of pottery to each other as if he were working a jigsaw puzzle.

“A black on red.” He picked up a piece of curved rim and a handle and held them about three inches apart, narrowing his eyes as if envisioning the whole vessel. “A jug. An
oinichoe
.”

“I found it in an Etruscan cemetery, near Civita Castellana,” Enzio said.

Tamar edged closer to the workbench, craning her neck to see around Gilberto’s left arm. “They’re all fresh breaks. You broke this yourself?” she asked Enzio.

“Easier to take out of Italy. I drove up over the Alps, through San Bernardino Pass. The border there is more user-friendly.”

Gilberto dropped a sherd on a small wooden side table. It made a dull clunk. He tried another. The same deadened sound.

He turned to Tamar and handed her a sherd. “What can you tell me about this
oinichoe
?”

“From the sound when you bounced it on the table, I’d say it was fired at a low temperature.”

Gilberto nodded and smiled, encouraging her to go on.

“And the color of the cross section—gray with red inclusions—I’d say that confirms a low firing temperature, with older pottery grout.”

“And?” Gilberto tilted his head at her. “Go on. Why would someone make pottery like that?”

“To get around thermoluminescence.”

“How would that work?”

“It’s a very simple principle. All clay contains some radioactive impurities. They emit alpha, beta, and gamma rays, causing ionization that is trapped inside the clay and increases at a steady rate over time. When the clay is fired above a certain temperature, the charge is released in the form of light. The firing is the zero point. After the clay is fired the charge begins to accumulate again. The longer the time period, the greater the charge. The greater the charge, the more light is emitted, and the more time since the pot was fired.”

“What does that have to do with what you noticed, the gray core and the pottery grout?”

“The gray core and the dull thud when the sherd was dropped on the table mean that the pot was fired at a low temperature, probably below the point at which ionization would be cleaned out.”

“And the red pottery grout?”

“Most clay is too slippery to work and needs rough inclusions—temper, or grout—so that it holds its shape. The potter used ground-up bits of ancient pots as temper. Those are the red bits. The pot was fired at a temperature low enough not to reset the ionization, so thermoluminescence would give a false, ancient date because of the red grout.”

“Now look at this,” Gilberto said. He took down a bottle from a shelf and a wad of cotton. “Simple nail polish remover,” he said, wetting the wad of cotton and rubbing it over the surface of one of the sherds. The paint smudged. “It is impossible to imitate the process the Greeks used to paint pottery. If this were genuine, it would not smudge. Besides,” he said, putting two of the sherds together to form a part of the figure of a man with a spear, “this
oinichoe
is a copy of one published in Beasely.”

“Beasely?” Tamar said.

“The corpus of classical Greek pottery.” Gilberto shook his head. “Enzio, Enzio. Not even a good imitation.” He gave another nod and a mournful glance. “My oldest friend. How could you do this to me?”

His jaw worked in anger. He held the gym bag open against the edge of the table, swept the pottery sherds into the bag and turned to go. He shoved the bag at Enzio.

“Don’t speak to me. The last time you did this, one of my runners landed in jail, and I was almost arrested myself,” he said and stomped out and up the stairs.

Tamar looked after him.

“You knew it was fake,” she said to Enzio.

“So did you. You did that very well,” Enzio said. “How did you figure it out?”

“I have the fine, analytical mind of an archaeologist.”

“That would account for your conjectures about the pottery. And your lecture about scientific dating?”

“Hell, I teach it.”

“That explains it.”

“You listen well. When I give this lecture in my Intro class, the students’ eyes glaze over.”

“I was fascinated by your ability to infer so much from the color and sound of a piece of pottery.”

“What was that about? Why bring a fake
oinichoe
to Gilberto?”

“It’s just an old joke we have between us, that’s all.”

“You know Gilberto well?”

“Of course I know Gilberto. I’ve known him a long time. I knew him when his name was still Sergio Benetti. We were children together, playing in the slums of Naples. He spent a lot of time around the museum, sometimes begging for pennies on the steps outside, sometimes in the halls drinking in the sight of statues and vases, memorizing them.”

“That’s what inspired him to go to the university?”

“What university? One day he stole a wallet from one of the tourists in the museum, almost got caught. He grabbed the money and ran to the railroad station, hopped on the first train. It was going to Bologna.”

“He studied in Bologna?”

“You could say that. The museum there uses old men as guards. They fall asleep and the museum cases aren’t always locked. He stole a
kylix
—one of those graceful drinking cups with a high base and handles on either side that the Greeks used for wine. Red on black with a fine drawing of a drinking scene on the tondo. He hid it under his coat. He came back to Naples and told me how easy it was. He sold the
kylix
to someone and said he was going back to Bologna, had an order for a
lykethos
. I didn’t see him again until he turned up here in Basel as Viscount Gilberto Dela Barcolo.”

“He lies a lot?”

“He doesn’t think of it as lying. He thinks of it as embellishing, just fills in the blanks with his imagination,” he said.

But still, it bothered her. “Neither of you can be trusted.”

“Don’t misunderstand me. I like Gilberto very much. He’s a man with a wealth of misinformation at his fingertips. It’s gratifying to find someone who is more deceptive than I am. Besides, he’s my oldest friend.”

Enzio opened the door to the other room and went to the wine alcove. He reached for a bottle of wine and inspected the label. “Ah, Blanc de Blanc, Rothschild 1983. That will do. Let’s go upstairs.”

Upstairs, he handed the bottle to Gilberto. “A peace offering.”

“Now he tries to bribe me with my own wine,” said Gilberto, looking at the label. “Enzio, Enzio, you are incorrigible. What am I going to do with you?” He put the bottle on the table and reached into a drawer for a corkscrew. “This calls for a special observance.” He opened the wine with a resounding pop and strode to the door. “Fabiana,” he shouted.

She appeared through the dining room, a dishcloth in one hand, untying an apron with the other.

“Some ice and a
torte di inglese
.”

She stood in the door of the dining room, glaring at Gilberto, the apron hanging loose from the straps around her neck. “
Per favore?
” she said.

“
Scusi
.” Gilberto gave a slight bow. “
Per favore
.”

“No pablum,” she answered.

“No problem?” Enzio said.

“That’s what I said. No pablum.”

Fabiana flounced out to the kitchen and reappeared in a few minutes without the apron, carrying a tray with a bucket of ice, plates, a cake, and four champagne flutes.

“
Grazie
,” she said, as if she were giving an order.

Gilberto bowed again and reached for the tray. “
Grazie
,” he said and rested the tray on the coffee table, gently laid the bottle of wine in the ice bucket, and began to twirl it while Fabiana seated herself in a chair in front of the fireplace. Gilberto carefully poured out four glasses and handed them around.

When they finished the wine and the cake, Tamar left, deciding that a walk back to the Euler would clear her head. As she stood on the steps outside of Gilberto’s, she noticed a plump gray-haired man leaving by the cellar door. He seemed to be sneering. He gave Tamar a steely-eyed glance as he strode off.

***

Back at the Euler, dizzy and headachy from too much wine and wondering about Enzio and his performance at Gilberto’s, Tamar fell on the bed and slept for the rest of the afternoon. In her dreams, she saw her grandmother’s stern face and heard her angry voice, “Too young, too young. You should have gone with them,” and ached for her lost parents and her brothers.

When she awakened, she still had a slight headache. The dream haunted her, and the memory of the terrible day that she heard about the accident that killed her parents and brothers.

The dream was about Alex too, she thought. I should have been with them, she told herself, plagued by a vague notion that somehow her presence would have changed things.

She had dinner in her room and then went downstairs to the bar to buy a bottle of water.

Enzio sat at one of the tables. He waved her over and she joined him. She was still bothered by his attempt to fob off the fake
oinichoe
on Gilberto, but she had become used to the talks they had since the first night she arrived in Basel.

The waiter brought a sherry and a bottle of Evian water for her and a Campari for Enzio, just as he had every evening.

She leaned back in her chair and asked, “Did you also have another name, before you became Enzio?”