The Gold of Thrace (3 page)

“I was at the Society of American Archaeology meeting in San Francisco that year. It was the talk of the meetings.”

“You were at the SAA?” Orman asked.

“I’m a museum man, not a field archaeologist. There was a special session on setting up a worldwide computerized registration code and network. I was at the British Museum that year, and it was my turn to go.”

While Mustafa spoke, Orman watched Tamar, his eyes narrowed and speculative.

“You owe it to other archaeologists to do whatever you can to stop the looting,” Orman said to her. “To Binali and to Alex.”

“To make the world safe for archaeology?”

“And archaeologists,” Orman said gently.

And for those who wait anxiously through the endless darkness of long nights in Meride with the cloying scent of night-blooming jasmine, with the humid air heavy as doom.

“I’ll go,” she said at last.

Chapter Five

Svilingrad, Bulgaria, August 7, 1990

Chatham hesitated at the compartment door to check the number. It was his compartment, all right.

“Who are you?” he asked the woman in his seat. “What are you doing here?”

The woman looked up at him with a shy smile, then shrugged. “We say in Bulgaria, ‘Every train has its travelers.’”

Her voice was velvety and musical—like the rest of her, he thought, with her creamy olive skin, the soft curve of her cheek, her slate blue eyes. My God, she was beautiful.

The train began to move, throwing him off balance. He gripped the doorframe, tried to steady himself. The train lurched away from the platform and he staggered into the compartment toward the seat opposite her. When it jolted to a stop, he fell forward on one knee, feeling awkward and foolish.

“I don’t mind riding backwards,” he said and felt even more foolish.

She lowered her eyes and her dark lashes brushed against her cheek. Chatham thought he detected a tear. A strand of hair, soft and glossy, cascaded across her face and danced with the movement of the train. He reached out to touch it and pulled back just in time.

He wondered again who she was, how she got into his compartment. He wondered about the bracelet on her arm with the horse’s head. Thracian, maybe.

She lifted her head and moved her hand with liquid grace to tuck the strand behind her ear. Her fingers were long and slender, her arms silky smooth.

She gave him another smile and crossed her legs. The train jerked forward again. The compartment door slammed shut with the sudden movement and the train heaved out of the station.

He waited for the woman to speak while they swayed with the motion of the train.

“You must help me, Professor Chatham,” she said at last.

“You know who I am?”

“I waited for you. I need your help.”

“Who are you?”

“I am called Irena.” She hesitated. She was shaking. “You must help. You are our only hope.” Her lip quivered and she extended her hand in a beseeching gesture.

How delicate she was, how vulnerable. “I don’t understand.”

“I must show you.”

She clicked open the latch on the suitcase and lifted the lid. The case was packed with parcels wrapped in newspaper. She waited a moment. For drama, he thought. He watched the nervous slide of her tongue across her upper lip before she reached for a parcel, unwrapped it and held up a pair of elaborate gold earrings with a galloping horse and a small worked amphora dangling from the loop. She laid them on the seat beside her. Then she opened another—a golden laurel wreath—and still another—a necklace with a bull pendant.

He leaned forward and caught his breath. It was Thracian gold, all right, all of it.

The Thracians had villages and cities along the Euxine Sea: the Black Sea today. Even the fabled Byzantium, long before it became the gilded city where Constantine built his marvels and monuments to rule his empire, had been a Thracian settlement.

“Thracian, like the bracelet wrapped around your arm?” he asked. Thracians, the wild people of the north, Herodotus had said. They came from the land where the Boreal winds blew, and they had gold.

She moved her head in assent. “The bracelet is very rare.” She lifted her right hand to stroke the horse’s head on her arm and he envied her fingers.

When he reached over to examine one of the earrings, he brushed against her knee. He held the gold between his fingers and traced the magnificent workmanship.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” he said. “Where did you get these pieces?”

“Are they worth a great deal?”

“A museum or a collector would pay a lot of money for this at auction, but—” He hesitated. “I’m an archaeologist, I can’t help you sell it.”

He put down the earring and picked up the delicate laurel wreath and looked over at her. Thracian women, according to Herodotus, were promiscuous and dripped with gold. The thought sent a tingle of desire through him. This time, he brushed against her thigh.

“Where did you get these?” he asked again.

She seemed distraught, concentrating on what she had to say, as her lashes brushed her cheeks again. “It’s all we have left,” she began in a low voice.

He had to lean forward to listen, one hand reaching across the space between them to rest on her thigh. Carefully, she took his hand in hers, uncrossed her legs and crossed them again while he watched.

She told him how her brother found a tomb on the grounds of their country house, and Chatham watched the seductive movement of her lips as she carefully pronounced each word.

She told him how she and her brother had gone out each night to dig in the tomb, bringing back the treasure piece by piece to hide in her room, and Chatham wondered how it would feel to stroke her silken skin.

She talked about the mansion where she was raised, about the dark wood paneling, about the broad staircase, the seat below the stained glass window at the landing where she would sit and read, and Chatham savored the motion of her crossed legs and watched her thighs, tight against her flimsy dress, swaying with the movement of the train.

Thracian gold, he thought, and only I know about it. I can publish the find, make a name for myself, became a star of Near Eastern archaeology. With that, and my other project, I can be free of Emma, out of bondage at last.

“When the Communists took over,” she was saying, “they took everything.” And he watched her uncross her legs and let her gently pry the laurel wreath from his hand before she wrapped the newspaper around it again.

She told him how her father had died, drunk with grief, stumbling on the ice in front of a speeding car. She described her mother’s last days, hungry and gasping for breath, during that same cold relentless winter.

“Irena,” he said, enchanted with the sound of her name. “Irena,” he repeated and longed to console her, to brush the tears from her cheeks, to enfold her in comforting arms.

She kept talking and he was overwhelmed by the thrum of her anguished voice, the music of it slithering through his soul, the rocking of the train mesmerizing him until he was lost in a cloud of desire.

The screech of brakes jolted him out of his haze, and for a moment he thought of Lilith, the Screech Owl Goddess with the feathered legs, and remembered Emma.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Plovdiv,” she said.

The train stumbled to a stop. Passengers waiting at the edge of the platform seemed to waver in the currents of air that eddied around the slowing train and backed away as the conductor lowered the steps. A milling crowd, waving leva and shouting for attention, surrounded an old woman selling sandwiches and bottled drinks in the far corner of the platform.

“I haven’t eaten for two days,” Irena told him.

“There’s a sandwich vendor out there,” Chatham said. He knew that she had seen the old woman, but he said it anyway. “I’ll get you something.” That was the least he could do for her. “Be right back.”

Chatham lingered at the edge of the crowd, trying to find the end of the queue. Hands and arms reached over him, passing money and plastic-wrapped sandwiches back and forth over his head. No queue, just a wild grab of confusion. He pushed his way forward, almost overwhelmed by the smell of body heat, snatched a sandwich from the basket and threw down a ten leva note.

He made his way back to the train just as the conductor pulled up the steps, and hurried toward the compartment.

Irena was gone. The suitcase and Irena, both gone. Only a card was left on the seat.

He looked out the compartment door and searched the passageway. The train began to move. He stumbled to the window and searched the platform. No sign of her. The platform receded as the train picked up speed. He hoped for a glimpse of her, waving, calling, running after the train. He would pull the emergency cord and rescue her, reach for her, pull her onto the train, her body close against his, warm and damp from the effort of running. The train emerged into the open air, into the countryside, and still he stood at the window, searching, hoping.

Finally, he picked up the card and sat in her seat to catch the warmth of her, the scent of her.

The card was printed in Cyrillic on one side and English on the other. It said:

Irena Konstantinova

Ulitza G.S. Rakovsky 10

Blok 4, Entrance g, Floor 3, Apt. 26

Sofia

He held the card between his fingers and pictured holding her lovely face between his hands, imagined stroking the sleek softness of her skin. He stared into the space in front of him and summoned up the seductive sound of her voice, the graceful movement of her hands.

Her presence haunted him. He gazed out the window at the hills and plane trees and saw the flutter of her hair in the stir of the leaves, the motion of her lashes in the gentle movement of tufts of grass in the breeze. He closed his eyes to remember more, hoping, as he lingered on the edge of sleep, to dream of her.

He woke to the caw, caw, caw of a screech owl. Emma, angry again. He opened his eyes, feeling as if he had slept all night. His mouth was dry and he was disoriented, surprised that it was still daylight. He was on a train, he remembered. The noise was the bleat of the train signaling that they were going around a curve.

It was strange, he thought, Emma as Lilith, the screech owl.

He remembered a session on ancient mythology at a meeting on Near Eastern archaeology. One of the papers recounted an ancient Hebrew myth about Lilith as God’s mistake, created before Adam and Eve. The man delivering the paper said that Lilith gave birth only to monsters because she was asexual, that God banished her to Eilat and created Adam and Eve, man and woman, in her stead. The man giving the paper smirked and said the story wasn’t in the Scriptures because the redactors believed God shouldn’t make mistakes.

Chatham thought of Emma as the child of Lilith and almost laughed out loud. He was fully awake now.

He still held Irena’s card in his hand. He wondered whether she was in danger, whether the card was a cry for help.

He pushed the button to call the porter and told him that he wanted his suitcase from the baggage car and gave him the chit.

He waited for the porter to come back and pictured Irena again and again and felt inexplicably giddy with joy.

The porter returned with the suitcase and dumped it on the seat across from Chatham.

“Ten leva, please,” he said and Chatham gave him twelve.

He thought of Emma, lying in the sun in a beach chair at Bodrum, her blonde hair stiff with bleach, her leathery tanned skin, her bony shoulders, and he got off the train at Sofia.

He’d find Irena, he vowed, and he’d find the gold.

He plunged into the chaos and milling crowds of the station and stopped at a stall to buy flowers.

“Half a dozen roses, please,” he said in English, wondering if the flower seller could understand him.

A dog, its coat dusty and unkempt, sniffed at his trousers and then scratched its fleas as it scraped its back along the sidewalk.

“So many…” the woman hesitated, seemed to be searching for words, “strange dogs on the street in Sofia,” the woman said. “People can’t afford to feed pets, so they go loose and run in packs. Not too scary in the day, but at night they attack.”

He paid the woman two leva and found a cab in the taxi rank. The driver had stepped out of the cab and said to him in English, “I take you wherever you wish.”

Another enterprising Bulgarian, Chatham thought, who replaced Russian with English for the tourist trade.

The cab driver tried to smile. He had steely blue eyes and a scar that reached across his cheek to his upper lip. It made him look like he was sneering, and Chatham felt sorry for him.

“Ulitza G.S. Rakovski,” he said and showed the driver the card with Irena’s address.

“I know where it is,” the driver said. “Near the city garden.”

“I need a receipt,” Chatham said.

The driver looked back at him, tore a slip of paper from a pad, and handed it back to him.

“The meter,” Chatham told him. “Set the meter.”

“It’s broken.”

“How much to Ulitza Rakovsky?”

“Fifty leva.”

“Fifty?” He had to go to her, to save her from God knows what, he thought to himself. He shrugged and said okay.

They drove down broad avenues created for parades, past blocks of large, dreary concrete apartment buildings, their facades cracked and peeling.

“The Palace of Culture,” the driver said, gesturing to a building on the right. “When the Russians were here, there was a large ruby and gold star on the top that shone in the night. After they left, someone stole it. People get rich now from stealing.”

“I’ll give you sixty leva if you get me there faster.”

“Okay. I hurry.” The driver waved his hand to the left. “Here we have many museums. I show you Sofia.”

Why had she left so suddenly, with no word?

“Ulitza G.S. Rakovsky,” Chatham said.

They passed a many-domed building, as pretentious as a dowager, its copper and gilded cupolas glinting in the sun.

Maybe she didn’t want to see him. But she left the card.

“The Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky,” the taxi driver said, waving at the building.

The taxi began to circumvent the cathedral while Chatham wondered what Irena was afraid of, why she left so suddenly.

“The cathedral has a museum for icons in the basement,” the driver said. “You like icons? Bulgaria is famous for icons. I can get you an old one by a famous artist, cheap. You want?”

“I want Rakovsky Street.”

They had gone all around the cathedral by now and were starting a second circuit.

“I can get you anything else you need in Sofia.” The driver slowed the taxi, reached into his pocket, and turned to face Chatham. “Anything,” he repeated. “You want my card? I give you my card.”

Chatham waved it away. “Rakovsky Street. Now.”

The driver shrugged, turned back to the wheel and started around the park behind the cathedral. He stopped in front of a large, square block of dilapidated stucco buildings.

“Ulitza G.S. Rakofsky ten,” he said, “as you wished.”