The Gold of Thrace Read online

  “Pull and money?” Mustafa asked.

  Tamar nodded and laughed.

  Orman shook his head. “Don’t defend him. He made advances to one of my students. And once he cornered the cook.”

  Orman’s face seemed to be all points with its fine pointed cheekbones, a delicate pointed nose, and a smile that caught at the corners of his eyes.

  Mustafa wrapped the pots on the table, tagged and boxed them, taped them shut and labeled them.

  “We’ve finished here.” He smiled at Tamar. “Off to Hazarfen.”

  “At last,” she said.

  ***

  They stopped for a brief lunch in Kilis and reached Hazarfen shortly after one o’clock. The drive, a little over eight kilometers, took fifteen minutes. Orman was driving.

  He slowed the van as they came to the end of the paved road.

  They brushed the dust of the drive from their clothes and trudged through dry grass, crisp against their soles in the hot summer afternoon.

  “The mosaic floor is in a Roman villa,” Tamar said to Mustafa. “You’ll have to decide whether to preserve it in situ or lift it and bring it in to the museum.”

  “Not much money in our budget.”

  “We could apply for a grant from the Getty. Or the Volkswagen Foundation.”

  “Maybe. First let’s see it.”

  She led them over the top of the hill and down the saddle away from the village. “I haven’t photographed it yet. We need a photographer with a tower.”

  Below them, one of the village women, her head covered with a scarf, her dark dress flapping against her ankles in the summer breeze, was laying out wash on the roof of one of the houses. She glanced up at the three of them on the top of the hill and waved. Tamar waved back.

  When Tamar first came to Hazarfen three seasons ago, all the villagers were strangers. She had loped through the hamlet and over fallow fields bright with wild tulips and poppies with the trepidation of an outsider. Drawn by the ruins of Greek columns and Roman arches outlined against the bright blue sky on the hill above, she had climbed the narrow alleys between house compounds, skirting the kindling piled against their mud-brick walls, and up to the tel.

  The village below her seemed caught in time, the walled farmhouses and courtyards echoing ancient prototypes: wells in the courtyards; farmers repairing flat roofs with clay rollers; low ceilings in ground floor cotes for sheep and goats and outside stairs that led to living quarters above them. All reflected the dusty remnants of long-gone villages, the remains of collapsed houses that she had found in ancient settlements. The whole world was here—the past, the present—vivid and alive with the smells and heat of reality.

  That first day of the first season, she had climbed on the roof of a saint’s tomb on the top of the hill to scan the ten-by-ten meter squares laid out with surveyors’ pins. The villagers had been paid for the use of their fields, paid to work on the tel. The men leaned on their shovels, daring her, watching her, waiting to see what she would do.

  Now the people in the village were her friends. She laughed at their children’s play; she drank the water from their wells. She sipped coffee with the women in the shade of pistachio trees in their courtyards and carried eggs from their chickens back to the dig house at Kilis.

  She would nod and smile when they talked, her knowledge of Turkish too fragmentary to join them in conversation. She knew just enough to say good morning, please, thank you. The women of the village didn’t seem to mind. They clasped their arms around her and greeted her with kisses when she arrived in the morning, and waved when she rode back with the others to Kilis at the end of the day.

  “The villa is in a latifundia,” Tamar told Mustafa. “The ancient Roman farming complex of a rich man.”

  They made their way past the stubs of ancient walls of outbuildings.

  “Next season,” she said, “I thought I’d dig in the foundry, recover some tools—plowshares, bits of nails and knives, axes, mattocks….”

  “If there is a next season.”

  Tamar turned to look at Mustafa. “What do you mean?”

  “Even Chatham’s rich father-in-law will have a hard time convincing the Department of Antiquities that he can be trusted.”

  When the three of them reached the Roman house, Tamar paused to give them time to arrange themselves around the tarp. Orman stood at the right of the mosaic, and Mustafa at the foot where he could have the best view. Carefully, she lifted the stones from around the edges of the tarp, and with a flourish, threw back the covering.

  Only dust lay under the tarp.

  The mosaic was gone.

  Chapter Three

  Istanbul, Turkey, August 7, 1990

  Something was wrong, but Chatham couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe it was the man with the worn black bag who watched him when he stopped at the kiosk at Sirkeci railroad station to buy a paper. The man stood near the buffet, trying to look like he wasn’t paying attention. He had a bulbous nose and glasses, and from this distance it looked like his cheeks were pitted with acne scars.

  The kiosk was sold out of the London Times. Chatham had to settle for a day-old Herald Tribune. He could feel the man with the suitcase watch him as he took the change from his pocket and paid for the paper. When Chatham left the stand, their eyes met. The man turned away.

  ***

  Nothing was going right today. The hotel in Istanbul woke him late with breakfast, his tea was cold, he was forced to dress and pack and gulp his tea at the same time if he wanted to make the train.

  His wife Emma called to tell him about the murder of Binali Gul. He thought about it a minute, then said, “Send flowers.”

  He was about to hang up when she began to argue again. He had been up half the night ruminating over their last encounter, reliving the anger, the bitterness.

  And the long queue at the hotel desk when he checked out, the cold stare from the clerk when his credit card was rejected. Damn Emma.

  At the cashier’s cage, he pulled out a pen and wrote a check. “I’ll miss the train,” he mumbled. “You know me. I’ve been coming here for years.”

  “Yes, Mr. Chatham.”

  “Professor Chatham.”

  “Of course. Professor.”

  No need to be subjected to this indignity.

  “Sorry for the inconvenience, professor.”

  He hurried out to a cab, his bag banging against his leg. The taxi reeked of stale tobacco. Smoke from the driver’s cigarette blew back in his face and tiny sparks flew out the open window.

  He was unhappy about the route the train would take, through the Balkans. They could blow any day now. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union a few years ago, the Balkans were trouble. Without Russian support, the only way to make a living was smuggling and stealing from your neighbor.

  And any day now, Yugoslavia was going to shatter into ethnic enclaves like splinters of a broken pot. The whole region was being, well, Balkanized. Every village would seek revenge for wounds five hundred years old, and rivers of hatred would flow, ice cold, from every crag and mountain.

  Balkanized. That was the word. He laughed out loud, and caught the look the driver gave him in the rear view mirror.

  ***

  From the train window, Chatham saw the man with the suitcase again, peering into car after car.

  And now the man was on the train, flinging open the door of Chatham’s compartment. This close, Chatham saw that his ill-fitting suit was brushed to a shine and the suitcase, made of cardboard, had a wide scratch along one side that ran diagonally from one corner to another.

  Chatham snapped his paper upright and began reading. Without a word, the man disappeared.

  At the border, the train stopped for customs checks at Kapikuli on the Turkish side. Chatham inserted a cigarette into the holder and lit it.

  Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, an hour.

  By the time someone finally knocked on his door, h
is eyes burned with the haze of smoke that filled his compartment.

  “Your passport, please.”

  He handed it to the customs official.

  “You have contraband?”

  “None.”

  The officer leafed through his passport again. “An archaeologist? You carry no artifacts? Nothing from your excavations?”

  “Certainly not.”

  The customs officer glanced at his luggage in the overhead. “Open your suitcase, please.”

  Chatham lugged the bag onto the seat and unlocked it.

  The officer bent over it, pawed through the contents, and stamped Chatham’s passport. “Be careful as you go through Bulgaria. Smugglers and drug dealers transport goods through to Albania and Italy. Watch yourself.”

  He left Chatham’s bag open on the seat and closed the door behind him.

  Chatham repacked while the train lurched over the border. It stopped at Svilingrad, where another contingent of officials boarded the train, this time Bulgarians.

  When the knock sounded on the door, a uniformed officer leaned into the compartment. “Passport, please.”

  The officer lounged against the door and thumbed through Chatham’s passport, studying page after page. “You must change pounds into leva. One hundred pounds, please.” He held out his hand.

  “One hundred pounds?” Perhaps the officer had trouble with English, or with the exchange rate. “Are you sure it’s a hundred pounds? That’s a bit much. I’m only passing through.”

  “I know the exchange rate. It’s in the newspaper every morning.” He flashed a sidelong glance at Chatham and closed the passport. “I read English. After the Russians leave, we all learn English to live.” His nose was sharp, his eyes bright blue with a slight bulge. “We have a beautiful country. You may be tempted to stay.”

  Chatham reached into his pocket for his wallet.

  “And sixty pounds for a visa.” He peered into Chatham’s thick wallet, his hand still out.

  Chatham began counting. “You mean leva, don’t you?”

  “Pounds.” The officer watched him detach a hundred-pound note, and waited for sixty more. “And another twenty for the yellow card, zhelta carta—carte statistique.”

  “I’m only passing through. Staying on the train.”

  “Nevertheless, those are the rules.”

  He stamped Chatham’s passport and folded a slip of paper inside, then hesitated, still holding the passport. “You forgot the commission.”

  “Commission?”

  “For exchange. That’s ten pounds.”

  Chatham traded his passport for another ten-pound note. “Where are the leva?”

  “Leva?”

  “I just changed one hundred pounds for leva.”

  “So you did,” the officer said. He reached into his pocket for a roll of bills and handed Chatham three thousand leva.

  “What’s the exchange rate?” Chatham asked.

  “That’s the official rate, minus the commission.”

  “But I already paid the commission.”

  “So you did,” the officer said and turned to go. “We have to inspect all the cars. There’s a long delay, two, three hours maybe. You can get off the train, take a walk through the town. Just over the River Maritsa, over the stone bridge.”

  “But my suitcase.”

  “I can store it in the baggage car.” He tied a ticket to the handle of Chatham’s bag and handed him the stub. “Five pounds, please.”

  Chatham stood up, anxious to walk off some of his irritation. “It’s permitted to leave the train?”

  “I suggest you do. We have no buffet car on the train.” The officer reached for Chatham’s suitcase. “There’s The English Pub and a hotel in Svilingrad. You can get a good lunch at either.”

  Chatham started into the corridor.

  The customs officer followed. “Be careful of the local bortsi.”

  “Bortsi?”

  “Mafioso.”

  Chatham stepped onto the platform and descended the steps to the berm. He walked along the track for some distance before he found a path shaded by overarching linden, the cloying odor of their flowers as overpowering as jasmine. He followed the path to a stone bridge and crossed over it into a town that looked like it came out of a fairy tale from his childhood.

  Cherry trees, their red fruit punctuating their leaves like polka dots, lined cobblestone streets. Storks nested in the chimneys of slate roofs. White houses trimmed with dark wood and swathed in grapevines tethered to their broad upper-story overhangs seemed to appear and hide again along the cobbled lanes like women flirting behind fans.

  In the town square, old men played cards under the elm trees. Across the square, in front of The English Pub, men in rumpled suits and body-builders in tank shirts, arms crossed and muscles bulging, sat at tables over coffee and worry beads.

  Smugglers? Mafia? Chatham hesitated.

  He entered the hotel instead. He ate a lunch of vegetable soup flavored with dill and yogurt and bread still warm from the oven. It stuck in his throat as he recalled his last conversation with Emma this morning before he left.

  “Love?” she had said. “The only thing you love about me is my father’s money.”

  He had been tempted to tell her that the money was her principal charm. Instead he laid the phone down on the table and went into the bathroom to clean his teeth. When he came back into the room to dress, he became aware of the bleat of a disconnected telephone line. He put the phone back in the cradle just as a knock sounded at the door. It was the bellboy. “Your telephone, sir….”

  “I’ve taken care of it. It was off the hook.” He had rummaged on the dresser for a few Turkish lira and handed them to the boy before he closed the door.

  ***

  After lunch, Chatham wandered through the hotel lobby, looking for a shop with English books. He found stalls with icons, gaudy with gold; antique silver teaspoons; old clocks. The books were all in Bulgarian, printed in the Cyrillic alphabet.

  He strolled back to the train along the same path he had taken into town and began to feel blisters form against the heels of his shoes.

  He reached the train, anxious to find his compartment, take off his shoes and nurse his feet.

  When he opened the compartment door, he discovered a woman curled into the corner of the seat, near the window—a beautiful woman wearing a cheap summer dress and a spiral bracelet the deep burnished yellow of ancient gold on her upper arm. The bracelet had a horse’s head and bit decorating one end and a coiled tail on the other.

  And on the seat next to her lay the cardboard suitcase with the scratch across it.

  Chapter Four

  Tepe Hazarfen, Turkey, August 7, 1990

  Tamar stared at the rubble in disbelief. Clods of dirt and bits of broken concrete filled the area where the mosaic should have been.

  She dropped to her knees and scratched at the ground with her trowel. “Must be under all this.” Her voice fluttered with desperation and she continued to scrape.

  Mustafa knelt down next to her. He pointed to a cut mark in the concrete in front of them. “Look here,” he said and pointed further away. “And here. You see the gouges? Chisel marks. Rolled up overnight and stolen.”

  “Rolled up? How?”

  “They slather the surface of the mosaic with heavy glue, cover it with a canvas, loosen it from the matrix with chisels, and roll it up, bit by bit. I’ve seen the same thing at other sites. Professional thieves. They work in teams of three or four.”

  Tamar stood up and walked over the site, eyes on the ground. Chisel marks slashed the surface where the floor should be. “I thought they cut mosaics into transportable sections with a saw.”

  “Too much noise,” Mustafa said. “Rolling it up is more difficult, but quieter, can be done in the night without making a stir.”

  The theft was as personal to Tamar as an assault. “Why would anyone do this?”<
br />
  “For the money of course,” Mustafa said. “A museum or a New York collector will pay as much as a million, a million and a half dollars for a mosaic floor.”

  “And no one in the village heard them?”

  “That is odd, isn’t it?” Orman said and fingered his chin the way he did when he was puzzled or concerned. “Maybe someone in the village….”

  His finger brushed back and forth across his chin. “We’ll go down to the coffeehouse,” he said. “Listen, ask a few questions, see what people are saying.”

  “I’ll stay here,” Tamar told them. “Women don’t go to village coffeehouses.” She sat on the ground, discouraged. “I’ll guard the mosaic now that it’s gone.”

  “You could wander around the village, talk to some of the women. See what they say.”

  “I’ll stay here and mope.”

  She watched Orman and Mustafa start down to the coffeehouse and listened to the dogs bark in Mustafa’s wake and wondered if the villagers would talk in front of a stranger like Mustafa.

  The loss of the mosaic made her feel abandoned and vaguely chastised, as if she were a child who had done something wrong. She sat, knees up, arms folded, and rocked back and forth.

  Sunlight reflected on something on the far side of the ruined floor and caught her eye. She stood up to examine it more closely and crossed the empty ground where the mosaic had been.

  It was a white tessera. From the mosaic border, she thought. She kept walking, following a faint trail to the back of the tel and away from the village. A large footprint with heavy tread marks pointed toward the steep slope behind the site. She kept going in the direction of the footprint, noting the tamped-down grass. She reached the small escarpment where the site dropped off. She kneeled to examine the edge and detected what looked like rope marks in three places along the rim of the escarpment. They used a pulley, she thought.

  Some loose tesserae lay on the ground below. She slid down the short, steep slope and continued across the grass, watching for signs of recent disturbance, bending and tilting her head to see the surface of the dry grass from a different angle.