The Gold of Thrace Read online

  “Archaeological gold contains uranium 238 as a trace element. With radioactive decay, the uranium produces helium. When the metal is heated to the melting point, all accumulated helium escapes and establishes a zero time for measuring when the artifact is manufactured. Accumulation of helium starts when the gold is cast and can be measured with a mass spectrometer.”

  “As a trace element? In parts per million?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And the coin?”

  “Not a bit of helium. Not even a trace. Not even 0.0001 in ppm—parts per million.”

  “So the coin is modern.”

  “Born yesterday,” Enzio said.

  “What about Irena?” Tamar asked. “Did the police arrest her too?”

  “She’s gone. The suitcase with the Bactrian hoard went with her. She’s probably halfway to South America by now, looking for a new partner.”

  Tamar fingered the bracelet. “This bracelet was part of the Thracian gold that Chatham was taking to the British Museum?”

  Enzio nodded.

  “So Demitrius, or Dimitar, or whatever his name is, killed Chatham.”

  “Not likely,” Enzio said. “When Demitrius saw you wearing the bracelet, he thought that you stole the Thracian gold.”

  “So he….”

  “Tried to run you off the bridge. Gilberto said he got the bracelet from one of his runners. My guess is that something went wrong this time, someone else killed Chatham and found the gold after they killed him. A windfall.”

  Tamar took another bite of the sandwich and decided that she was hungrier than she thought. She signaled the waiter and asked for a menu.

  “There’s another reason that I don’t think Demitrius killed Chatham,” Enzio said. He leaned forward. “Orman Çelibi was killed in The Hague.”

  “Orman?” Tamar put down the sandwich. It tasted bitter.

  “Two co-directors of Tepe Hazarfen have been killed,” Enzio said. “You are the only one left.”

  This time, she spilled the sherry.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Basel, Switzerland, August 17, 1990

  Tamar walked to Hohenstrasse through streets still damp from a nighttime drizzle and smelling of wet cement. Gilberto had told her to come by at ten o’clock, to wear comfortable shoes. He had smiled and rubbed his hands with anticipation and said, “You like Roman mosaics, no?”

  A Mercedes limousine stood at the curb outside of Gilberto’s house. The man she had seen at the basement door the other day leaned against the fender, smoking a cigarette. Today, he wore a gray chauffeur’s uniform. Closer up, she saw that what she had thought was a sneer was a scar on the right side of his face that ran from his lip and across his cheek.

  Before she could go up the walk, Gilberto appeared. He carried a picnic basket and led her to the limousine. With a bow and a grand gesture, he opened the door.

  Inside, all gray leather and burled wood, Tamar sat in the back seat and stretched out her legs, luxuriating in the feel of the butter-soft leather against her back.

  Gilberto sat next to her, placed the basket on the floor, clapped his hands, said, “I have a surprise for you,” and grinned.

  “A mosaic?” she asked, nursing a faint hope that he had found it.

  “Better than that.”

  She aimed her foot at the basket. “We’re going on a picnic?”

  “Even better.” He clasped her hand, leaned forward toward the driver and spoke to him in rapid Italian, saying something about Augst. Gilberto told the driver, as far as Tamar could make out, to take the route to Luzern and get off on exit eight. The driver said he knew the way.

  “We’re going to Luzern?” Tamar asked.

  Gilberto, still holding onto her hand, gave her a bemused look. “You speak Italian?”

  “I don’t speak it. I understand a little.”

  He raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Of course. You know Latin. You translate Italian into Latin, and from there to English.”

  “Something like that. It makes for a thirty-second delay in processing,” she said.

  Gilberto raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Better than better.” He chuckled and squeezed her hand again. “You’ll see, you’ll see.”

  Better than what? And where were they going?

  They reached the highway, riding past suburban houses, and drove out into the open country.

  “The driver is Italian?” Tamar asked.

  “Swiss. He’s from Ticino, from near Locarno on the Lago Maggiore. He grew up among pretty piazzas and colorful gardens in the shadow of the Castello Visconteo. It’s a museum now.” He squeezed her hand once more, as if there was a secret between them. “He’s a romantic, and he dreams that he could be the illegitimate descendant of the Visconti Dukes of Milan.”

  “We all dream, don’t we?” the driver rumbled from the front seat.

  Tamar leaned toward Gilbert and said in a low voice, “I saw him coming out of the basement door a few days ago.”

  “Of course you did. He was probably making a delivery. He works for Helvetia Transport. I use them for shipping.”

  The Rhine flowed past on the left side of the highway. Gilberto gestured out the window with his free arm to the scattered meadows with an occasional cow or two and the pungent-sweet smell of pasture peeking through the trees of the wooded suburbs on the other side of the car.

  “You know, of course, the story about how God made the meadows of Switzerland.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  He laughed, and pressed Tamar’s hand again. “When God made the world and everything in it, he asked the Swiss what they wanted. ‘Give us some mountains,’ said the Swiss.” Gilberto pointed vaguely in the direction of the Juras in the distance, purple and gray through the mist. “So God gave them mountains. God saw that that was good, and asked the Swiss what else they wanted. ‘Give us some meadows between the mountains’, they said.”

  Gilberto dropped Tamar’s hand to have both hands free to wave toward the meadows that nestled below the foothills and mountains of the Juras. “So God gave them meadows. God saw that that was good and asked what else the Swiss wanted. ‘Give us some cows to put in the meadows,’ they said. So God gave them cows. And God milked a cow, drank of the milk, and saw that it was good. ‘What else do you want?’ God asked. ‘Three francs fifty-three,’ the Swiss said.”

  Gilberto leaned back in the seat and laughed. Tamar laughed with him. He hadn’t stopped smiling since they left Basel, and now he beamed as they pulled into a parking lot and stopped near a sign that said Augusta Raurica.

  “This is Augst, oldest Roman city north of the Alps, with over 20,000 inhabitants in its heyday,” he told her as the driver came around to open the back door. “Now we take a journey back in time, and it has taken less than fifteen minutes to get here.”

  Gilberto raised his eyebrows, and gave the driver half a nod. The driver nodded back, leaned against the trunk of the limousine and lit a cigarette.

  “I’ve arranged a special treat,” Gilberto told Tamar at the entrance to the site.

  He traced his fingers on the map at the entrance along the paths that led to the curia, to the Roman house, and to the baths. “First, the cellar of the curia,” he said at last, “the city hall.”

  He led her into a little museum with exhibit cases holding small figurines, silver statuettes of Roman gods and goddesses, iron tools, jewelry, and the characteristic fine Roman tableware of the first and second century AD—red Terra Sigillata.

  Past the vitrines, they descended a few steps into what had been the basement of the curia. With a grand sweep of his arm, Gilberto presented the display—an array of mosaics.

  “Over forty-seven mosaics were found here,” he said. “From private houses and the baths, made from native materials—local limestone, glass, bits of broken ceramics. Most were simple geometric patterns, some with rosettes or vines.” He pointed to a mosaic separate from
the others, with the figure of a gladiator and, in the center, a crater with a fountain springing from it surrounded by fish. “This one, the gladiator mosaic, was found in the house of a rich man.”

  When a bell sounded from somewhere outside the curia, Gilberto grinned again.

  “There it is,” he said. “Now we go into the Roman world and live like Romans for just a little while.”

  He grabbed Tamar’s hand, rushing toward the Roman house, pulling her along behind him as if she were a child. A guide met them at the entrance to the house. She said “Ave,” in Latin, and led them to a changing room—a red-walled Roman bathing room with a small vitrine containing perfume bottles, a shelf piled with towels and togas, and an armless statue of Venus overlooking it all. The guide handed Gilberto a toga, Tamar a long tunic and peplos, and instructed them on how to dress as ancient Romans in simple Latin, illustrating her words with elaborate gestures.

  She led them through the bathing process, all in Latin, showing them replicas of ancient bottles filled with oil that Romans used to anoint their bodies instead of soap, showing them the curved strigilis used for scraping off oil and residue as bathers prepared to plunge into the warm water of the caldarium before a quick, tingling dip into the cold water of the frigidarium. The guide reached for Tamar’s arm, rubbed it with fragrant oil smelling of lavender and ran the strigilis against her skin, scraping away the remnant of oil.

  They went on to the Roman house and, heads covered, paid homage to the lares and larerium—the household gods— ensconced in a niche in the colonnaded atrium, before they visited rooms with bright frescoed walls that led from the central court.

  They went through a kitchen that had ceramic pans and casseroles stacked on shelves, pottery storage jars, wooden barrels, and brick ovens. A wax figure stood at a table making sausages.

  Sausages and a kitchen for the staid Helvetii, Tamar thought. No Artemis for them, no Priapos. She pictured an ancient Swiss housewife bustling through the day, cooking and shopping and scrubbing the color off of frescoes.

  They toured bedrooms and workrooms, and ended in the triclinium, the dining room, lined with long couches. Here, too, was a patterned mosaic floor. The contents of their picnic basket that Gilberto brought—eggs and olives, bread and cheese, and apples—were laid out on small tables set before the couches.

  They began the meal. “Ex ovo usque ad malum,” the guide told them. From the egg to the apple, from the beginning to the end. As they ate, the guide made polite conversation in Latin, asking if they were well, if they enjoyed the house, if they enjoyed being Roman.

  At the end of the tour, they removed the Roman costumes and emerged from the house into a different time and place, where children ran, and tourists moved along the paths examining and exclaiming over the strangeness of the ancient world.

  “Now for the public baths,” Gilberto said, taking Tamar’s elbow. “There were hot springs here,” he said. “For natural baths.” He led her to the ruins of the baths next to the remains of the Forum, a hypocaust, where the square remnants of columns stood.

  Tamar’s vision of ancient Swiss captives of the Roman legions, forced to stoke the fires that heated the caldarium in the stifling basement of the baths, was interrupted by a loud exclamation, “Defense de fumer.”

  Tamar turned to see a woman at the top of a small rise. The butt of the Frenchwoman’s anger was a man standing near a small wooden box-like structure, calmly smoking a cigarette, gazing at something or someone in the other direction. The man looked like Enzio.

  “I think Enzio is here,” she told Gilberto.

  “Not really? Where?”

  When she turned back to show him, the man had disappeared.

  Gilberto said, “Why would he be here, anyway?”

  She could be mistaken, she thought, but still, she wondered why she saw Enzio when he wasn’t there.

  She asked Gilberto about the boxy structure near where the Frenchwoman had been standing.

  “Those are the steps that lead to the sewer from the baths.” He pointed to the knoll where the Frenchwoman stood. “The women’s baths were there, near the entrance to the sewer. The tunnel is open to tourists.”

  “Let’s go down the steps to the sewer,” she said. “Let’s explore.”

  “I’m too large for the tunnel. A sewer is the realm of rats. Not for the timid, or the tall.” He hesitated. “If you must go down….”

  But she had already started down the steps at the opening of the structure.

  Gilberto was right, she thought, as she descended into the tunnel and slithered along dank stones smelling of mold toward the dark end of the sewer. The vault of the ceiling wept moisture a scant few inches above her head; the damp walls closed in on either side. She moved slowly, creeping along carefully, wary of slipping on the slick stones.

  She thought she heard flat, masculine footsteps of someone who had entered the tunnel, hesitant at first and then surer, moving a little faster, a little louder, clattering just behind her, coming so close that she could smell the scent of stale tobacco on his clothing.

  There was no room to let someone by. She was ready to turn around to apologize for blocking the way, to squeeze against the fetid walls to let him pass.

  She had almost turned when the blow to the back of her head came and knocked her onto the cold stones.

  When she opened her eyes outside, she was flat on the grass, with a headache and a thousand faces looking down at her, speaking German, speaking French, speaking Italian.

  And Gilberto, looking concerned, carrying a package.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  She sat up. She felt dizzy and her head hurt even more. Two of the people that crowded around her helped her to her feet.

  “I’m not sure. I think someone hit me.”

  He shook his head. “Too slippery. You slipped on the cobbles.”

  He paused awkwardly and held out the package. “I bought you some books in the museum shop.”

  Gilberto steadied her and she leaned against him. “It’s time to go back to Basel,” he said.

  Back at the car, the driver leaned against the fender, smoking, looking the worse for wear. As she got into the limousine, Tamar noticed two buttons missing from his chauffeur’s uniform and a black smudge on his sleeve.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Basel, Switzerland, August 18, 1990

  Tamar took a taxi to Engelgasse 7 and rode the elevator to the seventh floor. Apartment 7A, Aristides had told her.

  Her head still ached from yesterday’s accident. Gilberto had insisted that it was an accident. “I told you not to go down there,” he said in the car on the way back to Basel.

  But she was sure that she had heard footsteps behind her, had smelled the remnants of cigarette smoke on someone’s clothes.

  A glass door etched with the figure of a peacock was opposite the elevator on the seventh floor. The handle appeared to be a large black snake. A brass plate engraved with the name Aristides and a small speaker were attached to the wall next to it.

  Tamar pushed the button by the speaker.

  A woman’s voice came through. “Wehr ist da?”

  “Dr. Saticoy,” Tamar answered.

  “Please to come in,” the voice said.

  A buzzer sounded, then a faint click. Tamar hesitated, not sure of what to do. She pulled on the snake-handle and the door opened.

  Madame Aristides, with her perfect face and the big pearl on her finger, stood in a stark white anteroom with three translucent doors. She nodded in welcome and shook Tamar’s hand, squeezing Tamar’s fingers with the big pearl.

  “You have an appointment with my husband, yes?” Madame Aristides moved her lips only slightly. “Please to follow me.”

  She opened one of the glass doors and led Tamar into a windowless room. A gilded peacock fountain bubbled in the center of a black and white ceramic tile floor laid out in concentric circles like an optical illus
ion.

  The walls were painted in trompe l’oeil landscapes, each with a path leading through wooded hills and over a stream to a white spring. And on each path, a black snake.

  Tamar stood transfixed, watching the water in the fountain play over the gold of the peacock against the backdrop of the dizzying floor.

  Madame Aristides raised her hand to the painting on the far wall. The pearl on her finger glinted in the light. She pressed against the spot where the snake scuttled on the path and a door opened in the wall.

  A magnetic latch, Tamar thought, and followed. Madame Aristides floated down a long hall. They continued past the open door of an office with books stacked on chairs and the floor and continued past a row of closed doors to a room at the far end of the hall.

  Peacock feathers sprouted from large urns in each corner of the room. Two chairs and a polished coffee table faced a sofa.

  Mustafa Yeğin, the man from Ankara, was seated on the sofa next to Leandro Aristides.

  On his lapel, a pin with the metallic figure of a snake seemed to writhe and squirm as it caught the light when he turned to face her.

  The men rose. Aristides bowed, offered a chair to Tamar, nodded his head in the direction of Mustafa and said, “The friend I was expecting from Turkey.”

  “We’ve met,” Tamar said.

  “In Turkey,” Mustafa said. “At Hazarfen.”

  “You know about the missing mosaic?” Aristides asked.

  With each move, Mustafa’s snake seemed to glow and change color. “So you’re Gilberto’s American professor,” he said. Tamar remained fascinated by Mustafa’s snake.

  Madame Aristides watched her, eyes narrowed. “The serpent is the ancient god of wisdom,” she said and indicated the chair behind Tamar. “Please to sit.”

  Tamar landed in the chair still gazing at the scuttling snake, mesmerized by its luminous glimmer.

  “You are fascinated by snakes?” Madame Aristides asked.

  “She kills snakes,” Mustafa said.

  “You must never do that,” Madame Aristides said as she slid into the other chair.

  “The Great Goddess of the Minoans held a serpent in each hand to show she was the source of wisdom,” Mustafa said.