Spartan Gold (45 page)

“First that brandy I promised you, then Evelyn,” Sam said.

“We’re going to need clothes and essentials.”

“Brandy, Evelyn, sleep, then shopping.”

Since eluding Kholkov on the Königssee, they’d been awake and on the move for over twenty-eight hours. Heading south along the shoreline at a snail’s pace, they reached the Obersee’s Salet docks an hour later and disembarked. Sam opened the boat’s scuttle cock, waited until a foot of water was sloshing on the deck, then pointed the bow toward the center of the lake and eased the throttle forward a notch. It disappeared into the snow.

Remi said, “We haven’t exactly been low-impact tourists, have we?”

“Don’t worry,” he said with a wink. “We’ll make an anonymous donation to the Saint Bartholomae’s Historical Society. They can buy a fleet of speedboats.”

From the docks they followed the gravel path inland for a half mile, then across the land bridge to the mouth of the Obersee proper, where they found another boathouse similar to the one at Saint Bartholomae’s. This one, however, had an adjacent warming room. Inside they stripped down to their underwear, draped their clothes over coat hooks on the wall, and then found a kerosene lantern around which they huddled until nightfall when Sam started a small fire in the woodstove. They spent the remainder of the night curled together around the stove then rose at eight thirty, donned their clothes, and waited for the day’s first boatload of tourists. They intermingled themselves with the crowds, strolled about for a few hours, and kept their ears tuned for any discussion of gunshots the previous day or a floating body having been found in the lake. They heard nothing. At noon they took the boat back to Schönau.

Once ashore they decided to err on the side of slight paranoia and not return to the hotel; nor would they use their rental car. Watchful for Kholkov and his men, they ducked into the nearest gift shop, then out the back door into the alley. For twenty minutes they picked their way away from Schönau’s waterfront until they found a café on a secluded side street, where they called Selma.

At two o’clock a Mercedes from a Salzburg car service pulled up before the café and three hours later, after a scenic drive, during which Remi and Sam watched for signs of pursuit, they checked into the hotel under the names Hank and Liz Truman.

Fed and warmed by the brandy, they first e-mailed Selma the photographed symbols from the Saint Bartholomae bottle, then dialed Evelyn Torres at home.

“So why the sudden interest in Xerxes and Delphi?” Evelyn asked over a speakerphone after a bit of small talk.

“Just a little project we’re working on,” Remi replied. “We’ll fill you in when we get home.”

“Well, to answer your questions in order, at the time of Xerxes’ invasion, Delphi was arguably the most sacred place in Greece. The Pythia’s predictions were sought for everything, from matters of state to marriage and everything in between. As for treasure, there wasn’t much there of tangible wealth—a few treasuries, but nothing compared to the riches of Athens. Some scholars disagree, but I think Xerxes didn’t understand Delphi’s place in Greek culture. From what few oral histories I’ve read, he considered the Oracle a novelty, like a modern-day Ouija board. He was convinced the Greeks were hiding something at Delphi.”

“Were they?”

“There’ve always been rumors, but there’s no solid evidence to support them. Besides, you know the history: Xerxes’ raiding party was turned back by the divine hand of Apollo—in the form of a well-timed rock slide. A few Persians got through and made off with ceremonial objects, but nothing of importance.”

Sam asked, “Did anything of value survive the invasion?”

“The ruins are still there, of course. Some of the columns from the treasuries are in the Delphi Museum, as are some pieces of altars, stone friezes, the Omphalos . . . no gold or jewels, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Do you remember anyone ever nosing around about Delphi when you were there?” Remi asked. “Anything unusual?”

“No, not really. Just standard research requests from universities for the most part.” Evelyn paused for a moment. “Wait a second. There was this one guy about a year ago . . . he was from the University of Edinburgh—the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, I think. Weird character.”

“How so?”

“He’d applied for a permit to examine the Delphi artifacts, and we granted it. There are rules for hands-on examinations—things you can and can’t do with the objects. I caught him breaking one of the biggies—or almost breaking one, that is. I walked in on him trying to do some kind of acid test on one of the columns.”

“Which columns?” Remi asked.

“The Karyatids. They stood at the entrance to the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi.” Before either Remi or Sam could ask the next question, Evelyn answered it. “A Karyatid is a stone column—usually marble—in the shape of a robed Greek woman. The most recognizable ones are at the Athens Acropolis.”

“What kind of test was he trying to do?” Sam asked.

“I don’t remember. He had a jeweler’s hammer and pick and some kind of acid kit. . . . I put it all down in my report to the board. I may still have a copy. Let me look while we talk.”

They heard Evelyn moving about, then the rustle of cardboard and the shuffling of paper.

Remi asked, “What did he say when you caught him?”

“That he’d misunderstood the rules, which was bunk. I gave him the rules myself. He was lying, but he refused to say what he was up to. We ejected him and notified the guy’s department chair at Edinburgh.”

“No police?”

“The board decided against it. Lucky for him, too. The Greeks take that kind of thing seriously. He would have done jail time. I heard Edinburgh fired him, though, so that’s something. I don’t know what happened to him after that. Here’s the report. . . . His name was Bucklin. Thomas Bucklin.”

“And the acid kit he had?” Sam asked.

The sound of flipping pages came through the speaker. “This is strange,” Evelyn said. “I’d forgotten this part. He was using nitric acid.”

Remi said, “Why’s that strange?”

“It’s not a standard artifact test. It’s highly corrosive. We don’t use it.”

“Who does?”

Sam answered. “Metallurgists. It’s used to test for gold.”

They talked for a few more minutes, then hung up. Sam opened his MacBook Air—one of the few things they’d brought along in his backpack from Königssee—and logged into the hotel’s wireless Internet connection. There were almost two thousand hits for the name Thomas Bucklin. It took only a few minutes to narrow their search to the right one.

“Bucklin’s written a number of papers on classical history, mostly focusing on Persia and Greece, but nothing more recent than a year ago,” Sam said.

“About the time he got fired,” Remi said, looking over his shoulder. “Are any of his papers available?”

“Looks like JSTOR has them all.” JSTOR was a nonprofit online archive for scholarly work whose subjects ranged from archaeology and history to linguistics and paleontology. Sam, Remi, and Selma used the site extensively. “I’ll have Selma download and forward them.” Sam typed up a quick e-mail and sent it. Selma responded thirty seconds later:
Five minutes
.

Remi asked, “Any mention of what he’s been up to since leaving Edinburgh?”

“Nothing.”

Sam’s e-mail chimed. Selma had found fourteen papers by Bucklin; they were included as pdf attachments. “Here’s something interesting,” Sam said. “According to Selma, Bucklin had been on a sabbatical from Edinburgh when he showed up on Evelyn’s doorstep.”

“So he was freelancing,” Remi replied. “He wasn’t there on behalf of the university. Who the heck is this guy?”

Sam stopped scrolling, his fingers frozen over the keyboard. He leaned closer to the screen and squinted. “There’s your answer. Have a look.”

Remi leaned over his shoulder. One of Bucklin’s papers included a photo of the author. It was small, and in black-and-white, but there was no mistaking the mostly bald pate, fringe of orange hair, and black-rimmed glasses.

Thomas Bucklin was the lab-coated man they’d encountered in Bondaruk’s private laboratory.

B
ucklin’s papers were compelling, if not well received or widely circulated. According to JSTOR, Sam and Remi had been only the second party to purchase them since their publication. They had little trouble guessing the identity of the other interested party.

Sam forwarded the papers to his iPhone and gave Remi the MacBook, then they spent the next three hours wading through Bucklin’s work. Not wanting to taint one another’s conclusions, they waited until they were finished to compare notes.

“What do you think?” Sam asked. “Nutcase or genius?”

“Depends on whether he’s right or wrong. There’s no mistaking he’s obsessed with Xerxes and Delphi. His version of the invasion didn’t make him any friends in the academic world.”

Through years of painstaking research Bucklin had come to an outlandish conclusion: that Xerxes’ raid of Delphi had been more of a success than Greek historians admitted. According to Bucklin, in the weeks leading up to the invasion the keepers of the Siphnian Treasury devised a scheme to protect their wealth. Knowing no place would be safe from Persian plunder, the Siphnians melted down their stores of gold and cast it into a pair of Karyatids. When the columns cooled they were covered in gypsum plaster and put in place of the real columns that stood astride the treasury’s entrance.

For reasons unknown the Persian raiding party did not fall for the ruse. On Xerxes’ orders, a detachment of two hundred specially trained troops called Immortals fled with the Karyatids, intending to head north out of Greece before swinging east through Macedonia and Thrace and returning to the Achaemenid Dynasty capital of Persepolis, where Xerxes planned to melt down the Karyatids and have them cast into a massive throne, a memorial to his triumph over the Greeks that would sit in his Hall of a Hundred Columns for eternity.

Unbeknownst to the Immortals, word of their desecration of Delphi reached Sparta less than a day after the Persian raiding party left. A
phratra
of Spartan soldiers, roughly twenty-seven in all, gave chase, intending not only to recover the Karyatids, but also to avenge the brothers they’d lost at the Battle of Thermopylae.

They caught up to the Immortals in present-day Albania and cut off their easterly escape route. For three weeks the Spartans hounded the Immortals, chasing them north through Montenegro, then Bos nia and Croatia, before finally cornering them in the mountains of northwestern Slovenia. Even outnumbering them ten to one the Immortals were no match for the Spartans. The Persian raiding party was all but destroyed. Of the original two hundred that had left Greece a month before only thirty survived, these spared to serve as porters for the Karyatids.

The Spartan commander decided not to return home, not while Xerxes’ army was still ravaging their country. The columns had become a symbol of Greece’s survival, and the Spartans pledged to die rather than let them fall into Xerxes’ hands. Not knowing how far the Persian invasion would advance, the Spartans headed north out of Slovenia, intending to find a place to hide the columns until it was safe to bring them home. The
phratra
was never seen again, save a lone soldier who stumbled into Sparta a year later. Before succumbing to his exhaustion and the ravages of exposure, he claimed that the rest of his comrades had perished and the Karyatids had been lost with them. Their location died with him.

“So that’s the last puzzle piece,” Remi said. “Or one of the last, that is. How Bondaruk and Bucklin found each other we may never know, but it’s clear Bondaruk believes the story. He thinks Napoleon’s Lost Cellar is a treasure map to the Siphnian columns. They’re the family legacy he’s trying to recover. Remember what else Kholkov said in Marseille about Bondaruk’s motive: ‘He’s simply trying to finish what was begun a long time ago.’ ”