The Gold of Thrace Read online

  Gilberto and Ercole are creations of Fabiana, just as Firenzano was. It was Firenzano who sneaked through the basement window that Fabiana had left open when the coins were stolen from Gilberto. It was Firenzano Tamar saw at the basement door after he met with Fabiana, Firenzano who brought the Thracian gold from Bulgaria.

  Fabiana continued up the stairs toward the gallery. Tamar trudged after her, uncertain whether to follow.

  Fabiana couldn’t have run it all—run Gilberto, run Firenzano, run smuggling contraband, run stealing finds from archaeological sites that ended up in Basel.

  They had reached the landing now. The vitrine stood against the far wall just as it had before, but the desk had been moved closer to the railing into a dark corner of the gallery. The Kore stood alone on its plinth near the corner of the gallery.

  Light filtered from the skylight and glanced off the glass door of the vitrine. Tamar noticed gaps in the shelves; the place where the Roman Kybele had been was empty. The Kybele was gone.

  Fabiana grunted and pointed to left lower drawer of the desk. “In there,” she said.

  Tamar had to wedge herself into the narrow space between the desk and the railing to open the drawer.

  The drawer was stuck. She tugged again. It pulled loose, she stumbled against the rail, the purse fell to the floor.

  She reached for it. No room to bend. She kicked at it with her foot, pulled it up by the handle.

  Fabiana had moved to the front of the desk, crowding Tamar into the corner next to the Kore. Tamar tried to wriggle past. Fabiana blocked the way.

  Fabiana reached into the top drawer of the desk, took out a packet wrapped in blue tissue paper and began to unwrap it, rolling the paper along the top of the desk.

  “This dagger belonged to an Arab sheik in the time of the Crusades,” Fabiana said without blinking. “Gilberto has a buyer who will pay a million dollars for it.”

  A diamond hilted dagger with a gold blade rolled out of the wrapping and across the desk.

  Gold is too soft to do any harm, Tamar thought. It’s just decorative.

  “Beautiful,” she said.

  Fabiana picked up the dagger, wrapped her hand around the hilt, and jabbed it in the air. Her face was blank and cold, with no expression—no acknowledgment, no rage, no warning.

  Tamar felt a chill of fear, her pulse quickened; she backed further into the corner. The purse swung awkwardly from her shoulder. She squirmed in the narrow space, tried to get around Fabiana.

  Fabiana lurched forward, the dagger clutched in her fist, pointed at Tamar.

  Tamar ducked. The tip caught her right arm.

  “Just decorative,” Tamar said.

  She looked down. Her arm was bleeding.

  She tried to move out, swung the purse. Fabiana ducked, pressed closer and let loose a rapid spate of Italian.

  Tamar’s arm throbbed.

  “Gold over steel,” Fabiana said and fingered the tip of the blade. “Like me.”

  Her grip tightened on the handle of the blade. “It was used for royal executions.”

  She lunged, thrust the dagger at Tamar.

  Tamar dodged. It caught her on the side, rent her dress, nicked her arm again.

  She shrank back, wedged tighter into the corner, held the purse in front of her like a shield.

  “It’s all gone,” Fabiana said, almost spitting. “You took everything.”

  She let loose a spate of curses in rapid Italian and pounced again, this time straight at Tamar’s chest.

  Tamar parried with the purse, heard the blade crush into the straw, felt the force against her body, felt the prick of the dagger embed in the purse.

  The purse dropped over the railing, tumbled purse over dagger, dagger over purse onto the stone floor of the foyer.

  “Merda,” Fabiana said and grabbed Tamar’s injured arm, wrenched it.

  The pain flared up into her shoulder.

  Footsteps in the foyer, Ercole shouting, “No, no, no.”

  Fabiana clutched Tamar’s sleeve. The sleeve tore away.

  “No, no, no,” from down below. Fabiana looked down.

  Tamar pushed her back, back, scrambled out from behind the desk and Fabiana charged, rammed with her head.

  Tamar staggered, lost her balance, backed farther, fell to the floor, her back against the stand of the Kore.

  She saw it rock, tilt off the plinth. She closed her eyes, crossed her arms over her head, ducked and rolled away.

  She heard a thump, heard a groan from Fabiana, heard the Kore shatter.

  “No, no, no.”

  She opened her eyes, saw Fabiana on the floor, still gripping Tamar’s torn sleeve, her eyes still open, her head at an odd angle. The broken Kore lay smashed on the floor next to her head.

  Ercole had come up the stairs, bent over Fabiana and let out a soft cry. He sat on the floor with Fabiana’s head in his arms and rocked back and forth.

  “Is she breathing?” Tamar asked and sat down next to him.

  She couldn’t stop shaking.

  Still rocking, Ercole leaned down, listened with his head close to Fabiana’s face. Tears ran down, over the bridge of his nose, across his cheek, onto Fabiana’s open eyes, and he continued rocking.

  “Does she have a pulse?” Tamar asked.

  Ercole’s nose was running. He wiped it with the back of his hand, fumbled for Fabiana’s wrist, and began to sob.

  Tamar started to reach out to him, then changed her mind.

  She crept down the stairs. Her hand, sticky and wet with blood, clutched the banister.

  She searched in her pocket for the card Fischer had given her, went into the small alcove off the living room, and called him.

  She sat in the alcove, staring out the window until she saw Fischer’s car pull up and went to the door to let him in. Enzio was with him.

  Enzio looked at the cut on her arm, her torn, bloodstained dress. “You certainly are hard on your clothes,” he said.

  She led them up to the gallery. Fischer knelt down next to Fabiana, felt for a pulse, then shook his head. He looked over at Ercole, seated on the bottom step of the stairway, his hands pressed against his forehead.

  “My name is Benito Motti,” he said. “I come from Cortina.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Lyon, France, August 22, 1990

  They had just finished lunch at an outdoor café overlooking the Rhône and drunk a half a bottle of Beaujolais. The breeze coming off the river was bright with the first hint of autumn and dried leaves swirled in little eddies on the pavement around the table.

  Tamar sat back and closed her eyes while the sharp autumn air fanned her hair.

  Enzio lit a cigarette. The smell was sharp, acrid, and somehow familiar.

  “Different brand?” Tamar asked, her eyes still closed.

  “Turkish.”

  The smell of the cigarette combined with the gentle wind off the river tugged at her memory.

  “You should really give up smoking,” she said.

  There was a crisp day just like this one, she remembered. There was a small stucco house with a sign that said “The Future Foretold, Palms Read” that hung from the porch and swung in an autumn breeze.

  “She’s very good,” her grandmother had said as they drove down Whittier Boulevard. “She’s never wrong.”

  “Did she tell you about the accident?” Tamar asked, about the day everything changed.

  “Don’t be impertinent.” Her grandmother had narrowed her eyes. “She warned me that someday I would be burdened with the upbringing of an impudent child.”

  That was supposed to be enough to keep her quiet, but Tamar said, “Can she read my fortune too?”

  “You’re only a child,” her grandmother said, as if her future would not be fully formed until after voting age.

  “I’m thirteen. If I were in Samoa, I would be married, with children. Margaret Mead says so.”

  “
You’re wrong,” her grandmother said.

  Inside, the house of the fortune-teller smelled of cigarettes and damp, mice and stale cookies. The fortune-teller had long earrings and a scarf on her head, and her fingers seemed to curl and cup around her words when she spoke. Her name was Zelika.

  Tamar sat in a chair against the wall while Zelika scanned her grandmother’s hand and told her grandmother what she wanted to hear.

  And then, Zelika looked over at Tamar. “For the young lady, I have something special,” she said.

  Her grandmother was about to remonstrate, but Zelika had already gone through the curtain into the back of the house. She returned a few minutes later with a bowl of ice water and a saucepan she clutched with a padded glove at arm’s length.

  “No charge,” she said.

  She put the bowl on the table. The contents of the saucepan hit the water in the bowl with a sizzle.

  “Melted lead,” she said.

  Tamar came over to the table and saw a shiny tangle of bones and skulls at the bottom of the bowl.

  “You’re going to marry a doctor,” her grandmother declared.

  “She’s going to marry, but the marriage will end in tragedy.”

  Her grandmother gave her another accusatory look, as if to say she brings on all this tragedy herself. Maybe she was right. Years later in the Yucatan, when Tamar gazed at reliefs along the base of a ball court with the bones and skulls like the lead drippings, she remembered her grandmother.

  “But she will find another,” Zelika continued.

  Her grandmother looked skeptical. “She will?”

  “Someone who deceives her when they meet,” Zelika said, and Tamar felt a chill of apprehension and longed for safety.

  “You do séances?” Tamar asked.

  Her grandmother yanked at her arm and gave her a look that would freeze a penguin.

  But Zelika bent down and stroked her cheek.

  “I can’t bring back your momma and poppa, little one,” she said. “No one can bring back the dead.”

  ***

  “What are you thinking?” Enzio asked. “You look like you’re asleep.”

  She opened her eyes and sat straight in the chair. “No. Just thinking.”

  “About Gilberto?”

  She contemplated the water. An excursion boat passed, going downriver.

  “Sort of,” she said. “Gilberto, Mustafa, Chatham, Orman, the whole thing. That first day I was at Gilberto’s, when Fabiana gave the deposition to the police about the coins Firenzano stole when she left the basement window open, Gilberto was angry that they let Firenzano go.”

  “Gilberto was angry about the whole thing—that Fabiana had set it up. She used the coins to pay Firenzano. It didn’t cost them anything. Fabiana figured that Firenzano would be released as soon as she gave the deposition to the police, and the insurance would pay for the coins when Gilberto reported the theft to the police.”

  Tamar nodded, said, “Hmm,” and played with her napkin. “I still don’t understand why Chatham was killed.”

  “Chatham and Mustafa were partners, and Fabiana was on to them.”

  “The fresco that never arrived?”

  He nodded. “That and other things. It was dangerous to cross Fabiana. They were cheating her.”

  “But why?”

  “Chatham needed money. He hated his wife, but needed his own money to get away from her.”

  “So Firenzano followed Chatham from Turkey on the train and killed Chatham on orders from Fabiana. And Demitrius and Irena were in on it.”

  “No, they had a different scam going. Chatham fell for it. Finding the Thracian gold was a windfall for Firenzano.”

  “But why Chatham? Why not Mustafa? Mustafa was the one in Basel.”

  “He was supposed to be next. Fabiana was waiting for Firenzano to get back from The Hague.”

  “Where he killed Orman.”

  “Fabiana didn’t plan that. He killed Orman on his own. After he got the money from the Thracian gold, he got more independent, didn’t just take orders from Fabiana. Besides, Orman was getting too close.”

  Enzio lifted the bottle of Beaujolais and was about to pour some into her glass.

  She put her hand over the rim. “No more for me, thanks. I’ll fall asleep during the interview.”

  “Gives you courage.”

  “I’ll have to find courage on my own.”

  He shrugged and reached for the bottle of Evian water to pour into her glass.

  “And Mustafa? Why did he need money?”

  “His money was going to Freedom Fighters for Kurdistan. Mustafa is a bit of an idealist.”

  “He did it for the Yezidi?”

  “No. The Yezidi are peace loving. These are Kurdish extremists fighting for an independent Kurdistan, Kurds from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.”

  “What about the Aristides?” Tamar asked. “Were they in on it?”

  “Not at all. Leandro is busy working on his corpus of Byzantine coins and Madame Aristides is in Paris for her annual session with her plastic surgeon.”

  “I think Mustafa liked the irony of financing rebels with antiquities stolen from Turkey,” Tamar said. “He cheated Fabiana because he probably thought she deserved to be cheated.”

  “He blamed Gilberto. That’s why he killed him.”

  “For Chatham’s death?” She grasped the stem of the glass and twirled it. “I don’t think Gilberto knew the full extent of what Fabiana was doing,” she said.

  Enzio nodded “Gilberto was an easy dupe. He was too busy enjoying his sybaritic life-style—cases of the best vintages automatically sent over by the wine merchant, epicurean lunches with the elite—the prince of antiquity dealers. Fabiana manipulated him.”

  Tamar sighed and took a sip of water. “He knew what was going on.” She watched the white caps on the river rise and fall, whipped by tiny gusts of autumn breeze. “He let Fabiana take care of the dirty work.”

  They both fell silent, gazing at the boats that moved dreamily along the river, at the gentle motion of the current, listening to the water slip back and forth along the riverbank.

  “Will you be going back to Hazarfen next season?”

  “After all that’s happened?”

  “You found what you came after in Basel,” he said.

  “I found the mosaic, if that’s what you mean.”

  “And you broke up an illegal antiquities operation.”

  “I suppose.” She looked at the river, not at Enzio. “It’s all gone now. Benito will sell off what’s left and go back to Cortina.”

  “Not really,” he said. “He’s now Ercole Sforza, the CEO of Sforza Galleries.”

  “Sforza Galleries?”

  “With branches in Paris, New York, and Berlin. He’s developed a new wrinkle for the antiquities trade. He’s selling franchises. He provides the design for displays, sets up the galleries, then sells them overpriced antiquities that have been artfully mounted on acrylic bases and gives them letters of authenticity and provenance. He seems to have an endless supply.”

  “So that’s what happened to the Roman Kybele. All the antiquities come from the collection of the Marquis de Cuvier?”

  “No, some come from the family collection of the descendants of Baron Von Humboldt.”

  “Humboldt was a nineteenth-century geologist.”

  “Who would be in a better position to collect antiquities?”

  “He never married. He didn’t have descendants.”

  “That’s the beauty of it.”

  “Did anyone find the Kybele missing from Ephesus?” Tamar asked.

  “Not yet. Rome wasn’t sacked in a day.” He leaned back. “Besides, it was on loan from a certain Demitrius Konstantinopoulis.”

  “Mustafa was casing Ephesus, you know. He was checking out the security in the museum.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.” Enzio signaled the waiter.

  “L�
��addition,” he said and stood up.

  “We have to go or you’ll be late,” he told Tamar. “Have to find a taxi.”

  He totaled up the check again when the waiter brought it, running his finger quickly down the edge of the paper, left a pile of franc notes and took what was left of the Evian water.

  ***

  The taxi left them off near the gate.

  Tamar gaped at the high green iron fence topped with razor wire, at the reflecting pool around the concrete and glass building.

  “Your mother’s house?” Tamar asked.

  Enzio nodded. “As the French would say, Formidable.”

  The gendarmes at the gate inspected her passport and waved her on toward an intercom at the front gate.

  “Nothing to be afraid of,” Enzio said.

  “I’m not afraid,” she said, and realized that for the first time in a long time she wasn’t afraid at all.

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