The Tombs (A Fargo Adventure) (5 page)

Remi said, “And before him, Hegel, Schopenhauer, the Brothers Grimm . . .”

“Today we’re going to rely on Remi’s specialties,” said Albrecht. “A bit of history, a bit of physical anthropology.”

He stopped at a dark laboratory, took out a key, and opened the door. They stepped in, and he turned on the fluorescent lights. “This is it.” The room had black counters along the side walls, a whiteboard in front, and a half dozen large stainless steel tables. On one of them was a polished wooden coffin.

“Who died?” Remi asked.

“I call him Friedrich.” He walked to the coffin. “Specifically, I’ve certified that he’s my great-great-uncle Friedrich von Schlechter. When I found him, I didn’t want to arouse curiosity, so I bought a coffin and hired an undertaker in the nearest city to put him in it, get the proper export papers, and ship him to Berlin for burial.” He opened the lid. Inside was an age-browned skeleton with a few scraps of material that seemed to be rotted leather and a length of rusty metal like the blade of a sword.

Sam and Remi looked inside. Sam said, “He seems to have gotten his head disconnected during the trip.”

Remi looked closer. “It didn’t happen in transit. See the mark on the vertebra, right here?” She pointed at the back top surface of the last vertebra, where a deep chip was missing. “That’s from an ax or a sword.”

“Very good,” said Fischer. “If you spend some time with him, you begin to learn more about who he is. Judging from the wear on the molars, and the good condition of the bones, I’d estimate he was at least thirty, but not yet forty. If you’ll look at his left radius and ulna, you’ll see some more marks. Those are clearly wounds that healed long before he died. The decapitation, of course, was his last injury. But these marks tell much more about him. He was a warrior. He was probably using some kind of two-handed weapon when an opponent swung a blade at his forearm. Or if he was using a shield, the blow got behind it. He lived and the wound healed.”

“The swords and shields remind me,” said Remi. “Have you run the carbon 14 yet?”

“Yes. We did one on a chip of his femur, one on a strip of leather that was with the body—a fragment of his shoe, a wrapping for a weapon perhaps. The reading was 82.813 percent of the carbon 14 remaining. I had also taken samples from another individual near him and tested them here. The result was the same, giving us a date of around 450
C.E.
”

“Four fifty,” said Sam. “And where is the site?”

“It’s a couple of miles to the east of Szeged, Hungary.”

“Wow,” said Remi. “And you think Friedrich here is just one of many?”

“Yes. How many, I don’t know yet. A battlefield is essentially a very large mass grave. The place where the bodies come to rest is lower than the surrounding area, whether they’re buried in the usual way or covered over time. I’ve detected remains as far apart as a hundred yards. Here. Look at this.” Fischer went to another table and unrolled a large hand-drawn map with a grid on it. “This is the Tisza River, and here’s the place where the
joins it. This grid is where I found Friedrich, and this one, way over here, is where I found another individual at the same depth.”

“Who could they be?”

“I’m tempted to assume they were Huns. The area of Szeged was the stronghold of the Huns at around that time. But when they fought a war, they would decamp as a group and go off to the enemy’s country to fight. They fought the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, Romans—both from Rome and from Constantinople—the Avars, Gauls, Alans, Scythians, Thracians, Armenians, and many smaller peoples whom they swallowed up in their conquests. They were also at some point allied with each of these groups against one or more of the others. Sorting out who was in this battle will take some time and examination.”

“Of course,” said Sam. “It’s hard to say much about a battle after looking at two skeletons.”

“Exactly,” said Albrecht. “I’m eager to get back to begin an excavation. But there are problems.”

“What sort of problems?” Remi asked.

“It’s a big site—a large open field that at one time was a pasture, part of a collective farm under the Communist government, but has been lying fallow for more than ten years. It’s out in the open near a road. Szeged is a thriving modern city, only a few miles away. If the word got out, there would be no way to stop people from coming out on their own and digging for souvenirs. And there have been enough stories of treasure being found in classical-era sites to attract thousands. In a day, everything could be lost.”

“But, so far, everything is still secret,” Sam said. “Right?”

“I’m just hoping that I’m imagining things. But I got the impression several times while I was exploring the district around Szeged that I was being spied on.”

“There’s a lot of that going around,” said Remi.

“What do you mean?”

Sam said, “While we were in Louisiana, we were followed wherever we went to dive. It turned out to be an exploration team from a company called Consolidated Enterprises.”

“That doesn’t sound like archaeologists. It sounds like a business conglomerate.”

“I’d say that’s pretty accurate,” said Sam. “Their business plan seems to be to wait for someone else to find a promising site and then push them off it and dive it themselves.”

“Sam got them to follow us into a swamp on foot and then borrowed their boat.”

Albrecht chuckled. “Well, you’ve become known for finding gold and jewels. I’m just a poor professor who studies people who lived a long time ago and whose idea of treasure was a good barley harvest. This battlefield is the most dramatic thing I’ve found. I’d been studying the contours of the land, looking for signs of a Roman settlement. At one point, the area was part of a Roman province. The main reason I took interest in the field was that it wasn’t covered with buildings.”

“Do you have any idea who was spying on you in Szeged?” asked Sam.

“One day someone broke into my hotel room. I had my notes and my laptop computer with me. My luggage was searched, but nothing was taken. But on several days I saw a large black car with four big Eastern European men in dark suits. I would see them three or four times in a day watching me, and sometimes they would have binoculars or a camera.”

“They sound like police,” said Sam. “Maybe they suspected you were doing something illegal—like shipping Friedrich out of the country. If they knew you were an archaeologist, they’d want to know about any artifacts you’d found.”

Albrecht looked at his feet. “I’m guilty of smuggling Friedrich out. But if I had stayed in Hungary to do the lab work, the word of my discovery would have been out in a day. Keeping a find secret is standard procedure. Everyone who has gone public prematurely has come back to a site that’s been looted and trampled and all scientific and historical value destroyed. And this site is more vulnerable than most. The bodies I’ve found still had whatever weapons and armor they’d died with. There are textile fragments, bits of leather and fur. All that would be lost.”

“Of course we’ll respect your secrecy,” Sam said. “And we’re here to help you any way we can.”

“We’re good at secrets,” Remi said. “But wouldn’t it be a good idea to get Selma thinking about this? We may be able to use her help, and she has a way of anticipating what we might like to know.”

“Do we have your permission?” asked Sam. “It would mean alerting the rest of our staff, but that’s all.”

“Of course,” said Fischer. “The more good minds working on our side, the better. For now, I’m going to put Friedrich away.”

“After we’ve had a chance to unpack and recover a bit, we hope you’ll come to the hotel and have dinner with us,” Remi said.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be alone?”

“We’d love to have a chance to talk some more tonight about your discovery,” she said.

“I’d be delighted,” Albrecht said. “What time?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Good. I’ll just stay and lock up here, then get ready. I’ll be there just before eight.”

After they all shook hands, Sam and Remi walked out of the building, went past the huge statue of Frederick the Great on his horse, then turned right to walk onto Unter den Linden. At the distant west end they could see the Brandenburg Gate, and the Hotel Adlon Kempinski almost beside it. As they walked along the pedestrian mall under the linden trees away from the university, they passed famous streets one by one—Friedrichstrasse, Charlottenstrasse. They passed the Russian Embassy, and near their hotel was the Hungarian Embassy.

It was beautiful in the late afternoon, and Remi held her head high and looked at every sight.

“What are you thinking?” Sam asked.

“I was just wondering why we’re being followed.”

B
ERLIN

“W
HERE ARE THEY?” ASKED
S
AM.

“Give yourself a few seconds,” said Remi. “After that, take a look behind us at about the seven o’clock position. There’s a young blond woman, and she’s with a tall man with a shaved head.”

Remi touched her shiny auburn hair as she walked. “A young blond woman in Berlin, eh? What could be more surprising than that?” Her body language said she hadn’t been satisfied when she’d touched her hair. She took a small compact from her purse and appeared to look at herself, and brush a fine strand back into place with her hand. “It’s one of the women from the team in Louisiana. And the man . . . Yep, him too. Their pictures were in that notebook we stole from their boat. How could they even get a flight to Berlin that quickly? We just got here a few hours ago and we knew where we were going.”

Sam shrugged. “I guess they must have a corporate jet.”

“Maybe we should get a job with Consolidated Enterprises. I wonder what other perks they get.”

“Not the best time for them to show up.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“I suppose we could ask a German lawyer if it’s illegal to follow us around.”

“Let’s do that,” Remi said. “Albrecht has gone to so much trouble to keep his discovery secret. I’d hate to have these idiots we brought with us claim jumping. Maybe we can get them deported.”

“I’d rather have them in Germany than Hungary.”

“Good point,” Remi said. “We can talk to Albrecht at dinner.”

“I’d like to do something before then.”

“What?”

“I only see two. Let’s split them up.”

“After all the diving and flying, I could use an hour of pampering in the hotel salon.”

Sam and Remi walked along the mall together. Then, when they reached the entrance to the Adlon Kempinski Hotel, Remi kissed Sam’s cheek and went through the doors into the lobby. Sam walked alone for a few steps, then looked back to be sure the blond girl went in after her. He also saw the tall man with the shaved head stop suddenly and pretend to look back at someone in the other direction. Sam moved on.

He moved quickly past the Brandenburg Gate and entered the Tiergarten, the big urban park. He headed along the pathway under the trees toward the Hauptbahnhof, the big, shiny metallic building that was Europe’s largest two-level railway station. He entered with the tall man with the shaved head still a distance behind, slipped into the crowd of travelers and commuters milling about, and bought a ticket for an S-Bahn train across the city. He hurried to the proper platform to arrive just as the doors opened up, stepped in, looked to see if his follower walked into another car, waited until the doors were about to close, and stepped off. He ran from the platform and disappeared down the escalator to the long-distance trains that ran east–west. He stood by the underside of the escalator for a few minutes, watching for the tall man with the shaved head.

When he was sure the man was not coming, Sam took the escalator up to the ground level, walked out of the Hauptbahnhof, found a comfortable bench in the shade, and watched the station exit.

It took twenty minutes before his tail emerged, looking glum. He’d stopped looking for Sam and kept his eyes on the ground a few feet ahead, his hands in the pockets of his thin raincoat. After he had a good head start, Sam stood and followed.

The man walked north onto Alt-Moabit, kept going until he reached the Tiergarten Hotel, and went inside. Sam slipped into a small bar across the street, sat at a table by the front window, and watched the hotel. It was a four-story building with no more than sixty rooms. A waitress came to the table, he smiled and pointed at the glass of beer the man at the next table had, so she brought him one.

He saw the young woman with the blond hair return to the hotel about ten minutes later. He kept watching. He saw the woman appear in a window on the fourth floor, open it, then draw the curtains. As he was finishing his beer, the front door of the hotel opened again, and, one at a time, the other four members of the Louisiana team emerged. There were three men and a woman with short dark hair. They paired themselves, two and two, and began to walk.

As Sam followed them through the Tiergarten, he decided they looked like a group of young accountants who had just come off work and were on their way to have a drink together. He was not surprised when he saw that they were heading toward the Adlon Hotel. After they arrived, two of the men split off and went into a nearby restaurant. The other two, now looking like a couple, walked into the lobby of the hotel.

Standing in the middle of the lobby, they looked a little uncertain. They stopped and turned, their eyes directed upward toward the curved ceiling with its crisscrossing of beams. Sam passed behind them and stepped into the elevator without looking back and took it to the floor above the Fargos’ floor before walking back down the stairs to their room.

He knocked, and Remi opened the door, wearing an emerald green Donna Karan dress that he had admired when he’d seen it on a hanger. On Remi, it was hypnotic, making her skin glow and her eyes seem a brighter green than usual.

“Wow,” he said. “I just had a dream that I was married to a woman who looked exactly like you. I hope I don’t wake up.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere. And you may recall I just spent two hours getting pampered. So what’s the result of your sneaking around like a Cold War spy?”

“I completed the mission, but the news is not good,” he said. “The whole bunch are here, all six. Two are watching the lobby now, and two are having dinner down the street. They’re probably going to be the late shift. I don’t think we’ll see baldy and blondy again until morning.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll take a turn worrying while you get showered and dressed. Your suit and white shirt are hanging over there in the closet. Albrecht will be here in a half hour.”

“Right. While you’re worrying, maybe you should call Henry again and see if he knows any great lawyers in Germany or Hungary.”

“I already did and he doesn’t. He’s going to e-mail me a recommendation from a friend of his while we’re at dinner. That reminds me. I’m starving, are you? I’ve been dreaming of smoked goose and champagne and marzipan cake since I heard someone talking about it in the salon.”

“Don’t. You’re making me hungrier.” Sam showered and dressed. Eight o’clock passed. When Albrecht was fifteen minutes late, Sam called his cell phone but it was turned off and the call went directly to voice mail. He called the front desk to ask whether their friend had come. Then he checked with the restaurant to find out whether Albrecht had been waiting for them there.

“Let’s hope he got distracted with his friend Friedrich and forgot the time. If he’s had colleagues here doing carbon dating, maybe he was getting other tests done and they distracted him,” Sam said with concern.

“Let’s try home.” Remi took out her phone and dialed.

“Hi, Remi.”

“Hi, Selma,” she said. “We seem to have lost track of Albrecht.”

“What do you mean ‘lost track’?”

“He was supposed to meet us at the hotel a half hour ago, but he hasn’t shown up, hasn’t called, and isn’t answering his cell. I thought he might have left a message with you, but I guess he didn’t. Do we have any other numbers on file for him? He was staying at some professor’s office at Humboldt University.”

“Just his home and his office at Heidelberg.”

“Probably that’s a dead end.”

“Anything else I can do?”

“Yes, actually. See what you can find out about a company called Consolidated Enterprises.”

“Are they American?”

“I read something that said they were based in New York, but we just saw six of them here.”

“I’ll get on it.”

“Thanks, Selma. They seem to be following us. And if they’ve already spotted Albrecht, we might have a problem. He’s so paranoid, he may have decided to walk to France to throw them off.”

“I’ll let you know who and what they are.”

“Good night, Selma.” Remi put her phone back into her purse and turned to Sam. “Nothing. Any other ideas?”

“Well, you can either stay here keeping your beauty pristine or you can put on something practical and go with me to see if we can find him.”

She shrugged. “I guess I’ve already shown myself to the only guy I was trying to impress. Take one last look before I put on a pair of jeans and sneakers.”

“Sorry.”

She kicked off her high heels and opened the small refrigerator, selected a chocolate bar, and took a bite. “Here. Have some dinner while I change.” She gave him the bar, then turned around so he could unzip her dress.

A few minutes later Sam and Remi walked briskly back along Unter den Linden toward Humboldt University. The streets were full of people—locals and tourists—enjoying the beautiful walk beneath the double row of linden trees on an early-summer night. The fourth time Sam looked over his shoulder at the walkway behind them he said, “I don’t see our stalkers.”

Remi said, “They probably knew we had a dinner reservation at a Michelin-starred restaurant and figured we’d be accounted for over the next three hours.”

“Are you getting worried?”

“More and more,” she said. “Albrecht Fischer isn’t an absentminded professor. He’s used to running an academic department, teaching, writing, and putting together mental models of incredibly complex buildings with very little to go on. He doesn’t ask friends to come halfway around the world and then forget they’re here.”

“Let’s not assume anything,” Sam said. “We’re almost there.”

They reached the laboratory building where Albrecht had taken them a few hours earlier. The outer door was still unlocked. They could see lights on in some of the labs on upper floors, but when they reached Albrecht’s lab, it was dark.

Remi said, “Could we have passed him on the way?”

“Probably not. I was studying everybody I could see to spot watchers. But he might have gone somewhere to change for dinner, so we don’t know which direction he’d be coming from.”

Sam reached out tentatively to test the doorknob of Albrecht’s lab and found that it turned. He opened the door, reached in, and turned on the lights. The coffin with Friedrich’s remains was gone. The lab tables that had been lined up very precisely in two rows earlier were pushed aside at odd angles, and two had been knocked over. Two chairs looked as though they had been hurled across the room. As Remi and Sam moved farther into the room, they found several large splotches of blood in a trail leading toward the door. The scarf Albrecht had been wearing lay on the floor. Sam picked it up and put it in his coat pocket.

Remi took out her cell phone, dialed quickly, and clapped the phone to her ear.

“Police?” asked Sam.

“Uh-huh. In Germany they’re 1-1-0.” She heard something in German and said, “Hello. Can I speak to you in English? Good. I think a friend of ours has been kidnapped. Abducted. My husband and I were going to meet him at our hotel at eight o’clock. He didn’t come, and so we’re here at his laboratory at Humboldt University. There’s blood on the floor, the furniture is knocked over, and things are missing.” She listened. “My name is Remi Fargo. Thank you. We’ll wait for them at the front door of this building.”

Remi and Sam turned off the lights, left the laboratory, and walked down the hallway to the entrance. The on-off wail that European sirens make grew louder. When they opened the door, they saw the police car emerge from Friedrichstrasse and head toward them. The car stopped in front of the building, and two police officers got out.

Sam said, “Hello, Officers. Do you speak English?”

“I have a little English,” said one of the policemen. “Are you Herr Fargo?”

“Yes. And this is my wife, Remi. Please come and see what we’ve found.”

He and Remi led the two policemen into the laboratory and turned on the lights. As soon as they saw the condition of the room, the policemen looked more comfortable. They were on firm ground again: there had been a crime and so they were in charge. As they looked closely at the various physical signs of violence, the officers asked questions and took notes. “What is your friend’s name? Is he a professor at Humboldt? If he’s a professor at Heidelberg, why does he have a laboratory here? What is the nature of his work? Does he have a rival who would do something like this?”