The Gold of Thrace (2 page)

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, his 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?”

“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.

She found the impress of tire tracks and matted-down grass where a vehicle had turned around and a small puddle of grease where it had parked.

She hesitated, then picked up the loose
tesserae
, put them in her pocket and began to clamber back up the escarpment, grabbing for roots, searching for toeholds. Her hat slipped off and dropped to the ground below. She watched it fall, and let it lie there.

When she reached the top, she lay on the grass a moment to catch her breath, her arm shielding her face from the sun. Someone in the village must be involved. The looters must have known where to go, how to get here the back way. And the equipment. They came prepared. You don’t wander around the countryside with all that equipment on the off chance that you’ll find a mosaic floor in the middle of the night.

For a moment, she thought she heard something stir in the grass, sat up to see what it was, and watched a channel in the dry grass undulate as some creature moved through it. Behind her, she heard Orman and Mustafa climbing up from the village.

“What are you doing lying in the sun?” Orman called to her from across the site.

“Cultivating skin cancer.” She rose to greet them. “What did they say? Did they know anything about it in the village?”

“They complained about noises in the night and dogs barking all night long. Mostly, the barking annoyed them. The general consensus was that a man and a woman met for a night of dalliance. No one wants to talk about it because it could end in violence, even murder.”

“So much for Sherlock Holmes and dogs that bark in the night.”

“The looters must have been strangers,” Mustafa said.

She nodded. “But how did they know about the mosaic? Know how to get here?” She turned toward the back of the site. “Come on, I want to show you something.” She signaled for them to follow and indicated the footprint.

Mustafa put his shoe beside it. “Must be a big fellow, two meters or more. His shoes are a good four centimeters longer than mine.”

“There are other footprints,” she said, and pointed to another trail of footsteps beside them, smaller in size.

“Another member of the team,” Mustafa said.

She led them to the rope marks from pulleys along the cliff face, and pointed to the tire tracks and oil stain below. “Right there, beyond my hat. A large vehicle, with wide tires, probably some kind of truck. They came prepared.”

“How do you know the marks are from last night?” Mustafa asked.

She pulled the
tesserae
from her pocket. “I found these on the ground next to the tire tracks.”

Mustafa looked at the
tesserae
in her hand and lifted his arms as if making an offering. “You have to understand what something like this means to a poor peasant. Whatever he got for the floor was probably more than he could earn in three years. It could mean survival, the difference between starvation and just getting by.”

“And if an archaeologist gets in the way of the transaction,” Tamar said, “what then?” Her voice caught when she remembered that horrible night in the Yucatan. “What then?” she asked again. “Kill the archaeologist?”

“That doesn’t happen,” Mustafa said. “The poor peasant needs to eat. It’s better to feed starving people than hide tomb offerings in a rich museum where they gather dust in a dark cupboard for years.”

For a moment, she forgot Hazarfen and the villa and remembered only that long night in Meride in the Yucatan. She remembered every moment of it, remembered her toes pinching in her high-heeled shoes as she paced the hallway, remembered the smooth feel of the silk shawl against her bare shoulders. She and Alex were going to celebrate, a double celebration for their first anniversary and for Alex’s discovery of the lost site of Katamul hidden in the jungle. They were going to dine in the roof garden on lobster and champagne, make love all night, and wake up in the morning smiling.

She was still holding out the
tesserae
. “I know how it operates in the Yucatan. A poor peasant finds a ‘specimen,’ a ‘tomb furnishing’ when he plows his field, and he knows it’s worth more than his cash crops. He sells it to an
estelero
. The
estelero
sells it to a dealer in Meride for twice the price, who sells it to a dealer in Mexico City where it doubles again. That dealer smuggles it into Los Angeles. Now the price really escalates, three, four times. The L.A. dealer sells it to a movie star for ten times the price. The movie star donates it to the museum, which evaluates it at double what she paid for it. Everybody’s happy. Everybody makes a tidy profit, and the movie star gets a hefty tax write-off.”

Mustafa reached for the
tesserae
and stashed them in his hip pocket. His clenched fist in his pocket made an outline against his hip. “What we dig up goes from one hole in the ground to another, ends up in the basement of a museum. In the end, no one remembers anything about the artifact and the archaeologist’s notes are torn and scattered and eaten by worms.” He took his hand out of his pocket and said in his significant voice, “These things should be seen, give others an appreciation of the past.”

“You’re as cynical as Chatham.”

Mustafa squatted near the rope marks, running his hands along the dry grass along the edge of the cliff. “I’m not saying I approve of it. I’m just saying that I can understand how it happens.”

Tamar had started back toward the missing mosaic when she heard the stirring in the grass again. It sounded like the parched scraping of a rope along the dry ground. The grass shifted again, this time closer, moving toward Mustafa with a hissing sound.

She saw a black snake loom out of the grass behind Mustafa, coiled and ready to strike.

Instinctively, she grabbed a cobble from the ruined floor. “Don’t move,” she shouted, and hurled the projectile at the head of the snake. The rock flew past Orman, past the startled Mustafa and hit the snake squarely in its gaping mouth.

The crushed head of the snake collapsed onto the grass.

Mustafa was still at the edge of the cliff, white-faced, staring at the bloody remnants of the shattered snake with a mixture of horror and regret.

“You killed it,” he said.

“Of course she did,” Orman said.

“You shouldn’t have done that. It was a snake. A black snake.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Orman said. “It was about to attack you.”

“Still. She killed it.”

“And saved your life,” Orman said. He turned to Tamar. “I didn’t see the rock coming. How’d you do that? You could have hit one of us.”

“I’m a pretty good pitcher,” she said, but she was still shaking. “I taught myself.”

“Taught yourself to kill the occasional snake? You threw that rock at from at least four meters away at the head of the snake and hit it.”

“I had brothers. Whenever they went somewhere, they never took me. ‘You’re too young,’ they would tell me. ‘You’re only a girl.’”

“So you taught yourself to throw things?”

“I decided to show them. They liked baseball, so I hung a tire from the branch of a lemon tree and practiced throwing the ball through the tire from ten feet away, then twenty feet, finally the full sixty-six. Then I used smaller and smaller targets, ended up throwing the ball through an embroidery hoop.” She smiled and rubbed her wrist. “Then I went for speed and power. I got so good, they brought me to all their games and let me pitch. Until—” Her voice trailed off.

“Until what?” Orman asked.

“Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.” But she noticed that her hand was shaking. She made a fist and shoved her hand in her pocket so that no one would notice. “Anyway,” she said. “We always slaughtered the other team.”

“Like you slaughtered the snake,” Mustafa said. “You shouldn’t have killed it.”

“Why not?” Orman asked.

Mustafa sighed and inhaled slowly. “In the old religions, you know, snakes were sacred. Snakes are special creatures. They shed their skins and renew themselves again and again.”

Orman played with his mustache. “You’re Yezidi.”

“What’s Yezidi?” Tamar asked.

“Devil worshippers,” Orman said.

Mustafa’s nostrils flared. “Not devil worshippers.”

Tamar was puzzled by his anger. She held out her hand in a helpless gesture, trying to calm him.

He backed away. “Don’t touch me.”

“Nobody thinks you worship the devil,” she told him.

“The snake wasn’t poisonous,” he said. His face was red and his voice heavy with agitation. “It would never hurt anyone.”

Tamar watched him. She was tempted to reach out again, then thought better of it.

“About the mosaic,” she said after a while. “We don’t have pictures. I usually take record shots with a Polaroid, but I didn’t have time.”

“You and Orman are the only ones who know what the mosaic looks like?”

“It was the last day and we ran out of film, I thought your people could—”

“Without pictures, how do you expect to find it?” Mustafa asked.

“Tamar and I can go after it, identify it,” Orman said. “That’s the only way.”

“You think they took it to Istanbul?” Tamar asked.

Orman looked at her, shaking his head. “It’s long gone from Turkey by now. Probably shipped out through the Balkans, ending up in one of the big antiquities markets, Basel or Berlin.”

“You’ll never find it,” Mustafa said.

“Things are missing from Ephesus too,” Orman said. “Maybe Kosay at the museum there has some ideas.” He ran a finger along his chin and rubbed his upper lip. “We’ll stop there first. Then I’ll go to Berlin,” he said. “Tamar to Basel, see what’s hitting the antiquities market, see if we come up with the mosaic.”

Tamar shook her head. “I couldn’t do that. I don’t know anything about the antiquities market. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Orman rubbed his chin again. “What was it American archaeologists used to say in the ’60s? Archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.’ You were trained as an anthropologist. Do a little anthropological fieldwork, a little participant observation. Nothing bad will happen to you.” He leaned toward her. “It’s Switzerland, where they yodel. The land of Heidi and chocolate bars.”

“Besides, nobody kills anthropologists,” Mustafa said. “Or archaeologists, for that matter.”

“Except Binali,” Orman said.

Tamar took a deep breath. “And others.”

That night in Meride seared her memory. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Orman signal to Mustafa and glance toward her.

“Oh,” Mustafa said. “You said the Yucatan.
That
Saticoy. Alexander Saticoy?”

Tamar remembered her last sight of him, standing in front of a stele in Katamul, notebook in hand, giving her a quick wink, a wave goodbye, and a smile as she walked toward the truck. “Yes. Alex. You heard about it here in Turkey?”