The Gold of Thrace (11 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Basel, Switzerland, August 15, 1990

All the way back to the Euler, Tamar checked the road behind her taxi and watched for signs that Konstantinopoulis had followed her, even suspicious of the cars in side streets that waited for traffic to pass before they made a turn. Once she spotted a dark blue Mercedes through the rear window and began to panic until she noticed the Swiss plates. Still, she breathed easier when the Mercedes pulled to the curb and parked before they reached the turn at Aeschenplatz.

She arrived at the hotel without incident and went straight to her room. I’m just foolish, she thought. Enzio must be wrong. No one is after me.

She lifted her arm to brush a tuft of stray hair and realized she was still wearing the bracelet. She wrenched it off her wrist as if it were contaminated, wrapped it in a tissue from the bathroom and hid it in the dresser drawer under her underwear, determined to give it back next time she saw Gilberto.

She sat in the chair by the window, thinking about the mosaic, pondering what she must do to find it. Gilberto, charming as he was, was a dead end.

I’m not made for this, she thought. I dig holes in the ground; I do research, analyze tools and bits of ceramics in laboratories and examine old collections in museums.

This is also research, she told herself, and decided to try a more direct approach, starting with the museum. She crossed over to the telephone and found the listing for
Antikenmuseum
in the hotel handbook, called the Antiquities Museum and asked for the head curator.

After a few clicks, a woman’s voice answered. “
Hochstadtler hier.
”

Tamar hesitated, unsure of what to say next. “This is Doctor Saticoy,” she began.

“The American professor,” Hochstadtler said.

“You know who I am?”

“We are a tight little community. I even know what you have for lunch. Gossip keeps us busy, keeps us out of trouble.”

Tamar made an appointment for later that afternoon and left the Euler. With time to kill, she took a leisurely stroll to St. AlbanGraben, stopping along the way at a coffee bar for filtered coffee and a gelato. She sat at a table outside, absentmindedly watching housewives marching home laden with packages and children running, laughing as they left school playgrounds. Sometimes a man passed, once a man in a polo shirt with a leather bag hanging from his wrist, another time a man wearing a dark suit and carrying a briefcase.

She looked at her watch and saw that she still had a couple of hours to spare. She had heard about the
Kunstmuseum
, about how the city voted to buy two Picassos in a referendum, and how Picasso, touched by a city’s appreciation of art, donated four more.

She made her way to the
Kunstmuseum
at the end of the street, walked around Rodin’s
Les Bourgeois de Calais
that stood at the entrance, smiled at the portly, self-important men of Calais, and went inside. She paid the entrance fee and bought a catalogue at the desk.

The Picassos were on the second floor. On the first floor, she lingered at the Holbeins, examining paintings of Erasmus and the good burghers of Basel, then went upstairs to walk amid Picassos, Braques, Klees with lollipop faces, until it was time to leave for the
Antikenmuseum
.

She found the staff entrance of the Antiquities Museum on the side of the building—a small door next to the loading dock—went inside and told the guard at the desk that she had an appointment with Dr. Hochstadtler. He folded his newspaper and asked her to wait, pointing to a bench near the door, picked up a telephone and murmured something into the mouthpiece.

“A minute,” he said to Tamar and went back to his newspaper.

Before the minute had passed, Dr. Hochstadtler, a small woman with ash blond hair and dimpled cheeks, came clicking down the hall.

She smiled at Tamar and shook her hand vigorously. “Always good to meet a colleague.”

She led the way to her office along a corridor crammed with crates and painted backdrops for displays. “Please excuse the mess,” she said. “We’re getting ready for a new exhibit. Opens Tuesday.”

They reached her office and she gestured toward the seat facing the desk. “I have only a few minutes.”

“Dr. Hochstadtler…” Tamar hesitated, not sure of how to begin.

“Maria, please.”

“Has anyone offered you a mosaic floor from a Roman villa?” Tamar asked.

“You asked Gilberto? I heard he recently acquired one.”

“That one is from a villa near Pompeii. I’m looking for one from Turkey.”

“Turkey?”

“It was stolen from my site.”

The curator shook her head and sighed. “There’s a lot of that lately. It’s getting worse.” She crossed her arms. “We won’t deal with things like that. We always check for provenance.” She looked over at Tamar. “I can keep an eye out. You have pictures?”

“The mosaic disappeared overnight, before we had time to photograph it.”

Maria pondered for a moment, fingering her chin with her thumb. “Come to dinner tonight. Leandro Aristides will be there. He might know. He’s from Istanbul, a specialist in Turkish antiquities. He keeps his ear to the ground, has radar that picks up everything.”

***

Tamar returned to the Euler and found a message from Gilberto. She called and he asked if she could come for lunch, that he had something interesting to show her. “Not tomorrow,” he said. “I have to be elsewhere. Friday. Make it Friday. Tell Enzio to come along too, if you see him.”

She told him that Enzio was in Lyon, visiting his mother.

“His mother is dead,” Gilberto said. “Died a long time ago. They were close. When she died, he changed his name to Enzio, her maiden name.” He paused. “Lyon, you say?”

“Is that significant?”

“He goes there lately. Before that, he went to Paris.” He paused again. “Never mind. I think I know. Friday then, for lunch.”

***

The evening at Hochstadtler’s began with Tamar proffering a bouquet of five roses and, again, vigorous handshakes all around—to Maria Hochstadtler and her husband, to their two daughters, chestnut-haired and solemn like their father, dimpled like their mother.

They all look like Holbeins, she thought. Everyone in Basel looks like a Holbein to me, and she wondered if she had spent too much time wandering the
Kunstmuseum
.

“Maximillian Hochstadtler,” Maria’s husband said as he pumped Tamar’s arm. “Call me Max.”

“Tamar Saticoy. Call me Tamar.”

“Ah! The American professor. Friend of Gilberto Dela Barcolo.” He smiled. “Gilberto of the red carpet.” The last was said with a bit of disdain, as if the red carpet that covered the stairs at the entrance to Gilberto’s house were a little too ostentatious, a little indecent, and hinted of worse going on inside.

Tamar looked around the room, at the cherry wood trim around doors and windows, at the cream colored walls. The taupe sofa and staid brown leather chairs gathered decently around a mahogany coffee table, the lawyer’s bookcase with cloth books neatly lined up at the lip of the shelves, the slightly faded oriental rug all contrasted with the sybaritic splendor of Gilberto’s house.

Max kept talking without stop. He was a chemist who worked for one of the pharmaceutical houses in Basel, he told Tamar. He apologized for polluting the Rhine and asked how she liked the city, how she liked the museums, if she had visited the
tiergarten
, the zoological garden.

“I was at the
Kunstmuseum
this afternoon,” she said.

“Ah, then you met my ancestors.”

He disappeared with a smile into another room and came back carrying a postcard.

“The family Hochstadtler,” he said and handed her the card with a flourish.

It was a photograph of a painting from the museum, a Holbein. No wonder they look like Holbeins, Tamar thought, scanning their faces. All of Basel is full of living, four-hundred-year-old Holbeins.

***

“Leandro was an antiquities dealer. He’s from Istanbul originally,” Maria was telling Tamar in the kitchen as she found a vase for the roses while her daughters filled bowls of ox-tail soup. “He sold a Byzantine collection to Dumbarton Oakes for over two million dollars and retired. Now he’s working for his own pleasure, but he still knows what’s going on in the market. Not much gets past him.”

The kitchen was not like the other rooms Tamar had seen. It was another world, slick white and stainless steel, with bins that opened and shut and pulled out with the touch of a button.

When the doorbell rang, Maria signaled her daughters to finish ladling the soup and rushed into the foyer. Tamar followed.

Leandro Aristides, balding, mustachioed like a Turk, arrived breathless and smiling and carrying a bottle of wine. He presented his exquisite, elegant wife. The astonishingly beautiful Madame Aristides, with her dark hair, thick and shining and tinged with auburn, and her sad, russet eyes, stood next to him almost motionless, inclining her head slightly through a new round of handshakes. On the middle finger of her right hand, she wore an enormous, luminous pearl as faultless as her face.

Dinner began with the ox-tail soup, followed by Coquille St. Jacques, then veal and morels cooked in a cream sauce.

Tamar sat across the table from Aristides’ wife and gazed at the pearl and watched Madame Aristides pushing food around on her plate with her fork. She ate little, just picked at the seafood of the Coquille St. Jacques and moved it to the side of the plate.

“In the beginning,” Madame Aristides said to Tamar as she saw Tamar stare at the pearl, “God created a white jewel from his own precious soul.”

Aristides looked startled. He seemed to give his wife a warning look of disapproval, and Tamar turned away.

“The dinner is delicious,” she said to Maria, and saw Aristides’ wife move another scallop to the side. “You’re a true gourmet cook.”

Maria shrugged and smiled and tilted her head. “Don’t be so impressed. The soup was Knorr, the Coquille St. Jacques come from the ready food counter at the Coop. For the rest of the dinner my daughters helped. The menu is typically Swiss, typically Basler.”

“And what brings you to Basel?” Aristides asked.

“I’m looking for a mosaic floor from a Roman villa.”

Aristides raised his eyebrows in question. “Gilberto has one.” He leaned back in his chair and contemplated Tamar. “You know that, don’t you?”

Tamar’s fork hovered over her plate. Could Aristides be trusted? She looked across at the silent Madame Aristides, who didn’t smile, who didn’t move her mouth. Her perfect face was expressionless, as if she were afraid that any emotion would leave scars.

It was Maria who broke the silence. “Tamar is looking for one that was stolen from her site.”

“What site is that?” he asked.

Tamar put down her fork and played with the napkin on her lap. “Tepe Hazarfen,” she said at last.

“Tepe Hazarfen? In Turkey?” Aristides narrowed his eyes and contemplated her. “I know someone who may be able to help you. He’ll be coming in to Basel tomorrow. I’ll make inquiries.”

Maria’s daughters cleared the plates and emerged from the kitchen with slices of apples arranged on a board around an enormous wheel of cheese.

“From the mountains,” Maria told her guests. “This cheese is found only in Switzerland. Too delicate to export.”

They ended the dinner with crisp, tart slices of apple and with cheese spread on segments of Basel’s special hard rolls.

Before they left for the evening, Aristides told Tamar to come by his place the day after next. “I’ll introduce you to the man I’m expecting.” He reached into his pocket and took out a card case. “We are at Engelgasse 7, Apartment 7A,” he said and handed a one of the cards to Tamar. “Eleven o’clock.”

***

Tamar crossed her arms across her chest in the chill evening air as she got into the taxi to drive back to the Euler. It had begun to drizzle. By the time she reached the hotel, it was pouring. She ran through the rain into the lobby. Before she went upstairs, she stopped in the bar to buy a bottle of water and looked around for Enzio before she remembered that he had gone to Lyon. She was surprised at how much she missed their nightly chat.

Herr Keller was in the bar, ready to spend a long evening talking. He asked if she were enjoying her stay, how she liked Basel, if she had been to the museums, how she liked the food.

She told him she had gone to the
Kunstmuseum
and the Antiquities Museum, that she just been to dinner where she ate Swiss specialties—veal with morels, and a cheese from the mountains.

“We have other things,” he told her. “Specialties of Basel, like our own chocolates,
Basler Ballen
. You must try them. Buy a few boxes for your friends back in America.”

She thought of the department secretaries and the dean who arranged for grants for her summer digs, and asked for the best place to buy the chocolates.

He told her about a shop in Klein Basel, across the river, “Where they make the best
Basler Ballen
. They also do the preserves that we serve with breakfast,” he told her and he gave Tamar the address.

***

Upstairs, her room had been readied for the night. Her bed was opened, the drapes were pulled, and a small glass of cassis stood on the nightstand next to the bed.

She listened to the rain, wondering if Aristides or his friend could give her news about the mosaic. She turned on the floor lamp, dropped into the armchair, and reached for the museum catalogue that she had bought that afternoon. She had left the bookmark on the page about the Holbein, but now the bookmark was wedged between the last page of the catalogue and the cover. She looked around the room. Nothing was as she had left it. There must be a different maid, she thought, someone who rearranges everything, and she felt a little annoyed. And then, foolish.

She dropped the catalogue on the bedside table next to the cassis and examined the room more carefully. The door of the armoire that held the television was open; the television was extended to the end of the track and pointed toward the window. Her shoes were on the other side of the closet, the notepad that was usually next to the telephone was on the table under the catalogue. She pulled open a dresser drawer and found her clothes tumbled and in disarray. She opened the top drawer. The gold bracelet that Gilberto had given her was gone.