Trojan Gold vbm-4 Page 2

  “It’s been used. Probably by Nancy Drew.”

  Schmidt didn’t ask who Nancy Drew was. Maybe he knew. As I said, he has deplorable tastes in literature. “And,” he went on cheerfully, “a good beginning for an adventure.”

  “What makes you think this is the beginning of an adventure? If,” I added, “one can apply that melodramatic word to the unfortunate incidents that have marked my academic career.”

  “I hope it is. It has been six months since our last case. I am bored.”

  Since Schmidt’s only contribution to my last “case,” if it could be called that, was to be pushed into the local slammer by a group of suspicious Swedes, his use of the plural pronoun might have been questioned—but not by me. He was still sulking about missing most of the fun. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I didn’t want to encourage him either. I had had enough “cases,” or “adventures,” or, more accurately, “narrow escapes.”

  Not that I expected the mysterious photograph (damn! another thriller title) would lead to any such undesired development. It wasn’t really mysterious, only odd, and if I could find the covering letter—there must be one, Gerda had simply overlooked it—the oddity would turn out to be odd only in the academic sense. Like most academicians, I had received my share of crank letters. Some were communiqués from the lunatic fringes of historical scholarship—like the woman who claimed to be possessed by the ghost of Hieronymus Bosch. Before her family got her committed, she sent me fifteen huge canvases she had painted under his spiritual direction. Some were from amiable ignoramuses who hoped to sell us some piece of junk they had dug out of the attic. This would probably turn out to be something of that sort, and my present quest was a real waste of time and effort. Possibly an explanatory letter had been sent under separate cover and had been delayed in transit. In any case, if the idea was important enough to the sender, he or she would write again when I failed to reply.

  Having arrived at this reasonable conclusion, did I return to my office and my duties? No, I did not. I was still annoyed with Gerda, and an odd, provocative sense of something not quite right about that photograph was beginning to trouble my mind. With Schmidt trotting happily at my heels, I threaded a path through the maze of corridors and rooms that constituted the basement of the museum. The plan represented the Graf’s vague idea of a medieval undercroft, complete with model dungeons and torture chambers. Schmidt had tried to set up the usual labs and studios, but the workers had gone on strike, even after fluorescent lighting had been installed and the rusty shackles and implements of torture had been removed. Von Blauert, our chemist, complained that he kept having nightmares about being shut up in the Iron Maiden. So Schmidt resignedly moved the whole lot up to the top floor, and the cellars were used only for storage of nonperishable items. There was also a door opening into the sunken enclosed courtyard behind the museum, where the trash from the museum ended up in big bins that were picked up bi-weekly by a local firm. The courtyard did double duty as a staff parking lot, which was how I knew about the trash.

  Hearing our footsteps ring in dismal echoes along the authentic-stone-paved passageway, Carl, the janitor, opened the door of his room. His face lit up when he saw me, and he greeted me with flattering enthusiasm. At least it would have been flattering if I had not known that I was not the object of his adoration. It was my dog he doted on.

  There’s an antique witticism that runs, “I don’t have a dog, he has me.” Caesar is a Doberman, big as a pony and slobberingly affectionate. I had to bring him to work with me one day when the exterminators were dealing with an infestation of some strange little purple bugs in my house. Carl was in the courtyard when we arrived, and it was love at first sight, on both parts. Carl was in the habit of paying a formal call on Caesar every few weeks; he always brought presents of bones and took Caesar for a long walk.

  I had to give him a detailed rundown on Caesar’s health before he allowed me to question him. Yes, he had emptied Gerda’s wastebasket that morning. He emptied her wastebasket every morning and every afternoon. No, the trash men had not collected that day; Tuesday and Friday were their regular days. Certainly, we could prowl around in the trash all we liked. He hoped we enjoyed ourselves.

  He didn’t offer to help, and I didn’t ask, since I couldn’t tell him what I was looking for. I only hoped I would recognize it if I saw it.

  Snowflakes trickled down out of a pewter-gray sky as I climbed on a packing case and peered down into the bin which, according to Carl, held that day’s garbage. Schmidt, who would have needed a ladder to reach the same height, jumped up and down to keep warm and demanded that I toss down an armful or two so he could help me search. I was tempted to give him a bundle of the riper refuse—the remains of people’s lunches, from the smell—but controlled myself. A handful of papers stopped his outcries; he hunkered down in the lee of the bin and began sorting them, happy as a puppy with a moldy bone.

  Cold had turned Schmidt’s pink face a delicate shade of lavender by the time I found the envelope. It should have been on the top of the heap; but in the manner of all desired objects, it had slid down into a corner, behind a soggy paper bag containing two apple cores and the crusts of a Gorgonzola-and-wurst sandwich. For once Gerda had not exaggerated. The paper was filthy. A disfiguring brown stain covered much of the envelope. It was an old stain, hardened and dark; and although I am not particularly fastidious, my fingers were slow to close over it.

  A shiver ran through me. The shiver was not one of apprehension; it was freezing out there. I only wish I did have premonitory chills when something awful is about to happen to me. Then I might be able to avoid it.

  I dragged my purpling superior from the papers he was examining. Once inside, we examined my find.

  “Ha,” Schmidt cried eagerly. “Blood!”

  “Mud,” I said shortly. “Schmidt, your imagination is really deplorable.”

  “There is no return address.”

  “Oh well, I tried. Now I can forget the whole thing.”

  “But, Vicky—”

  “But me no buts, Schmidt. Don’t think it hasn’t been fun; we must meet and pick through garbage again someday.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “To the library. I have work to do.”

  I had work to do, all right, but not in the library. I stayed there only long enough to get the book I wanted. Then I took it upstairs to my office.

  The snow was falling more heavily now; it formed a lacy, blowing white curtain around the walls of my room. I felt much better. Nothing like a little exercise and a yelling match to restore a lady to perfect health after a night on the town. I spread my clues out on the desk and settled down to study them.

  The envelope first. There was no return address, at least not on the part of the envelope that had escaped the obliterating stain. After prolonged rummaging in my desk drawers I found the magnifying glass Schmidt had given me for Christmas one year. Schmidt expected me to use it while I crawled around on the floor looking for clues in the dust—something I hardly, if ever, do. I actually had used the glass a time or two in the preliminary stages of authenticating a work of art; sometimes all it takes to spot a fake is a close-up look at the brush strokes or the machine-drilled “wormholes.”

  On this occasion the Holmesian accessory was of no help. Under magnification, the blurred letters of the postmark were larger but no more legible. The first two letters might have been a B and an A. Bad something? There are hundreds of towns in Germany named Bad Something. The opaque dark stain covered most of the back of the envelope and a good third of the front, including the areas where one might have expected to find a return address. Even under the lens I couldn’t see any traces of writing.

  I filled my sink with water and dunked the envelope. It was of heavy paper coated on the inside with a thin layer of plastic, which had prevented the stain from spreading to the inner wrapping. I was wasting a lot of time on something that was probably a peculiar practical joke; but w
hen I returned to my desk and opened the reference book from the library, I knew why my curiosity had been aroused. Gerda had been only half right. Superficially the photo I had received did resemble the famous photograph of Sophia Schliemann decked out in the gold of Troy. But mine was not a picture of Sophia. It was of a different woman—wearing the same jewelry.

  Not the same jewelry—a copy. It had to be a copy, because my photograph had been taken quite recently. The woman’s hairstyle, the photographic technique, and a dozen other subtle clues obvious to a great detective like Victoria Bliss proved as much.

  Besides, there was a calendar on the wall, visible behind the woman’s shoulder. It read “May 1982.”

  The gold of Troy had vanished, never to be seen again, in the spring of 1945.

  I felt it begin—a warm, delirious flush of excitement rippling giddily through my veins. A harbinger of adventure and discovery, of mysteries solved and treasure restored to an admiring world? More likely a harbinger of certifiable lunacy. I slammed the book shut and planted both elbows on it, as if physical restraint could contain the insanity seeping from those pages like a dark fog, inserting sly tendrils into the weak spots of my enfeebled brain. I swear the damned book squirmed, as if struggling to open itself.

  I pressed down harder with my elbows and dropped my head onto my hands. I knew what was wrong with me. I was bored and depressed and disgustingly sorry for myself, otherwise I would never have given the insane hypothesis a second thought.

  Christmas was only a few weeks away, and this year I couldn’t afford to go home to Minnesota. They would all be there for the holidays—Grandmother and Granddad Anderson, my brothers and their families, including Bob’s new baby son whom I had never seen. Mother and Grandmother, the world’s greatest Swedish cooks, would be baking, filling the house with the warm rich smells of cinnamon and cloves and chocolate and yeast; Dad would be decorating the tree and Granddad would be sitting in his favorite chair telling Dad he was doing it all wrong and trying to pick fights about politics with his “damned liberal grandchildren”; and the kids would be screaming with excitement and punching each other and trying to figure out how to break into the closet where their presents were hidden….

  I was all alone and nobody loved me.

  But even as I watched a fat tear spatter on the cover of the book, my unregenerate memory was trying to recall what I knew about the gold of Troy.

  My field is medieval European painting and sculpture. However, in my line of work, it is necessary to become something of a Jack-of-all-trades, since museums can’t afford to hire experts in every specialty of art history. I had had to learn about jewelry, since we have one of the best small collections on the Continent. And the career of Heinrich Schliemann is a fable, a legend, a children’s book come to life.

  Schliemann was the original Horatio Alger hero. He began his career as a stock boy, sleeping under the counter of the store at night, and ended up a millionaire merchant. Once he’d acquired his wealth, he dumped his business interests and turned to the subject that had obsessed him since his daddy had read to him from Homer. Unlike most historians of his time, naïve Heinrich believed the Homeric poems were literally true. The credulous merchant was right, and the historians were wrong. Schliemann found Troy. At the bottom of the trench he had cut across the city mound, he came upon a disintegrated wooden chest that held the treasure of a vanished nobleman.

  Schliemann had found more treasures than any amateur deserves to find. He’d dug up another hoard at Mycenae a few years later. But it was the first one, the Trojan gold, that fired his imagination. He decked his beautiful wife Sophia in the jewels for the picture that had been so often reproduced. Perhaps the divine Helen had worn these very diadems, earrings, chains, and studs…. Actually she hadn’t. The gold didn’t come from Priam’s Troy, but from a period a thousand years earlier.

  That was about the extent of my knowledge of Schliemann’s find. I knew even less about the disappearance of the treasure, though that event was as dramatic as the circumstances of its discovery.

  Schliemann had presented the gold of Troy to a German museum, over the objections of his Greek wife, who felt it ought to remain in Greece. The Turks also claimed it, since Hissarlik, the site of Troy, was on Turkish soil. If the gold had turned up—which of course it hadn’t…But if it had, the question of legal ownership would present an interesting tangle.

  Nowadays, excavators can’t remove a potsherd without the permission of the host government, but in the nineteenth century, archaeology was a free-for-all, and possession was nine-tenths of the law. The major museums of the world owe their collections of ancient art to methods that are at best highly dubious and at worst downright dishonest. The Greeks have never stopped complaining about the Elgin marbles and the Aegina sculptures; the Egyptians still want Nefertiti to come home. But the marbles remain in the British Museum, and the Aegina pieces are in the Glyptothek in Munich, and Nefertiti has gone back to a case in a Berlin museum after a brief vacation in a bomb shelter.

  Like Nefertiti, the gold of Troy had been removed from its museum during World War II and placed in safekeeping. Somewhere in Berlin, that was all I knew. The Russians had been the first to reach Berlin. And that was the last anyone had seen or heard of the Trojan gold.

  If I had given much thought to the matter, which I had not, I would have assumed the Russians had taken the gold to Moscow, along with other little odds and ends like factories, the Pergamum altar sculptures, German nuclear scientists, wristwatches, and the like. But surely, I mused, most of that stolen property had eventually resurfaced—hadn’t it? The factories had turned out steel and concrete for Mother Russia, the scientists had helped build lots of lovely missiles; even the Pergamum sculptures had been returned to a museum in Berlin. East Berlin, that is.

  If the Soviets had returned masterpieces like the Pergamum sculptures, why hadn’t they returned the gold of Troy?

  The book popped open again; I’m sure I never touched it. I placed the two photos side by side and picked up my trusty magnifying glass.

  The reproduction in the book was of poor quality, and my photo was grainy and blurred. I couldn’t make out the finer details. I could see, however, that there were minor discrepancies I had not observed earlier. The pieces were the same—necklaces, earrings, diadem—but they weren’t arranged in quite the same fashion.

  Since I knew that Sophia’s jewelry was the genuine article, the differences should have convinced me that the second set was a careless copy, right? Wrong. You see, the museum displays of ancient jewelry, all shiny and polished and pretty, are the result of long months of repair and restoration. The originals didn’t look like that when they were found buried deep in the earth; they were often tumbled, twisted heaps of bits and pieces, and sometimes it is anybody’s guess as to how the pieces went together. Was this flat jeweled ornament attached to that golden chain, or did it form part of the beaded girdle whose beads have tumbled from the rotted cord? Was this dangle an earring or a pendant or part of a crown? I could not remember what condition the Trojan gold had been in when it was discovered, but it was a safe bet that a certain amount of restoration had been necessary. The differences between the two sets were the sort one would expect to find if two restorers—two authorities—had disagreed.

  My copy certainly was a first-class forgery.

  Another tear plopped onto the book, spotting Sophia’s face. I scowled and wiped it off with my finger. I ought to be ashamed of myself, succumbing to self-pity and Heimweh. That’s all it was, a touch of homesickness. Nothing to do with…. anything else.

  Two

  “THEY” SAY HARD WORK IS THE BEST CURE for depression. I can think of several things that are more effective, but since none of them were immediately available, I applied myself diligently to a long-overdue article for a professional journal and didn’t stop until I was interrupted by the telephone. It was Schmidt, inviting me to lunch. He takes me to lunch once or twice a week so I can regale h
im with Rosanna’s latest escapades.

  Rosanna is the heroine of the novel I’ve been writing on and off for nigh onto five years. I suppose you could call it a historical romance, though the history is wildly inaccurate and romance is a very feeble word for Rosanna’s love life. So far she has been abducted by sultans, outlaws, highwaymen, degenerate noblemen, Genghis Khan, and Louis the Fourteenth, to mention only a few. (I said the historical part was inaccurate.) Rosanna has never been raped because it is against my principles to contribute, even by implication, to the “relax and enjoy it” school of perversion. However, she has had quite a few narrow escapes, and I wouldn’t exactly claim she was celibate. I have given up any idea of submitting the book to a publisher, since it has become too absurd even for a historical romance, which, believe me, is very absurd indeed. I go on with it because it amuses Schmidt—and me.

  Some instinct told me that Schmidt had an ulterior motive that day, but I accepted anyhow. After I had put on my boots and coat, I looked at the sink.

  The water was a sickly, sickening brownish red. I pulled the plug and let it run out.

  Schmidt never climbs the tower stairs except in cases of dire emergency, which is one of the reasons why I chose that particular office. He was waiting for me in the Hall of Armor, adjoining the tower; as I descended, I heard him talking to the guard on duty. I caught the punch line—“But, mein Herr, it is your mustache!”—followed by a chorus of guffaws from Schmidt and his stooge. Everybody laughs at Schmidt’s jokes, even though they are all culled from the Bavarian equivalent of Joe Miller’s book. A director has certain prerogatives.

  I stepped over the velvet rope with its “Eintritt verboten” sign, greeted the guard, tucked Schmidt’s scarf into his collar, and led him out. It was still snowing. There was almost no wind, and the soft white flakes fell gently from the tarnished silver bowl of the sky. Traffic had stirred the streets into a sloppy slush, but the towers of Munich’s myriad churches looked as if they had been frosted with vanilla icing.