The Man of Bronze (8 page)

“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “Reuben intended to clear it with you first, but events got out of hand.”

“So it would seem.”

The woman who’d removed Reuben’s bandages walked to a chest-high cistern in one corner of the room. She reached over the cistern’s stone wall and dipped a metal pan inside. A moment later, she walked back to the examination table; the pan was now full of water. The water must have been cold, because when she began washing Reuben’s wound, he flinched.

“You don’t have indoor plumbing?” I asked.

Father Emil shook his head. “The monastery is built on solid rock. No one’s ever managed to drill through the stone down to the water table. There’s a good well outside on the flats; and in the old days, the monks used to carry up water in buckets . . . but they also built pipes to collect rain from the roof and channel it into that cistern. An infirmary needs plenty of water.”

“The water can’t be clean,” I said.

“We use chemical purifiers. The water becomes undrinkable, but quite good as a disinfectant.” He might have said more; but as the doctors washed away Reuben’s crusted blood, the nature of his injury became apparent. Father Emil said, “Is that a bullet wound?”

“A clean in and out,” I replied. “Reuben got shot . . . and he barely escaped getting blown up at the airport.”

“I heard about the explosion. We listen to the news on radio. I knew Reuben was flying in around the same time, and I was afraid—” Father Emil broke off. “But he’s here now, and alive. Praise God.” The monk gestured toward a corner of the room. “Let’s sit and talk.”

We walked to a table with two metal chairs—the sort of place a doctor might take notes while patients described their symptoms. Father Emil held one chair for me, then sat in the other. He gave me a piercing look. “What happened, Ms. Croft? Tell me everything.”

I was tempted to refuse, to explain nothing until I’d gotten answers to my own questions. What was the Order of Bronze? Why had it hired Reuben to investigate bronze statuary? What was in Reuben’s attaché case, and who wanted it so badly? But I decided not to be confrontational . . . at least not until Reuben had been patched up. Besides, if I humored Father Emil he might do me the same courtesy.

“Reuben called me from Athens,” I said, “and asked me to meet him in Warsaw . . .”

The story took ten minutes. I didn’t bother with details on the fight at Jacek’s, but I
did
mention the silver grenade that produced the frigid armor. I couldn’t help asking, “Have you heard of such a thing? A Silver Shield?”

“No,” Father Emil answered, “but I can check—” He stopped himself. I wondered what he’d been going to say. Where does one go for information on shiny violations of nature? But Father Emil just said, “Please, continue your story” . . . and I proceeded to the end.

When I finished, he sat back with a thoughtful expression. “You have no idea who the mercenaries were?”

“No,” I said. “But the Warsaw police will find the bodies and identify them soon enough. Most mercs are ex-military, so their fingerprints will be on file somewhere. Interpol will put out a worldwide alert; they’ll have most of the dead men’s names by morning. Then hundreds of cops and operatives will start investigating the mercenaries’ backgrounds.” I shrugged. “By this time tomorrow, the wire services will publish the gunmen’s names, mug shots, military and criminal records, all that trivia . . . and none of it will matter, because it doesn’t address the real question.”

“You mean who hired the mercenaries and why.”

“Right. We can hope the employer was sloppy—maybe he left a trail. But these investigations usually hit dead ends: anonymous calls from pay phones, or e-mail addresses registered to the tooth fairy. At best, the authorities will trace everything to some expendable go-between whose corpse is now feeding the fishes.” I looked at Father Emil. “Unless the police have extraordinary good luck, they’ll come up empty. We, on the other hand, can approach this business from a more promising angle . . . because now you’re going to tell me what’s in the attaché case and who would kill to get it.”

Father Emil didn’t answer right away. He stared across the room at Reuben, watching Kaisho and Myoko fix new dressings over the bullet wounds. “How is he?” Father Emil asked the doctors.

“Stable,” the women answered together.

“I’m fine,” Reuben said in a wheezing voice. He tried to sit up, but the doctors immediately pushed him back down.

“Lie still,” the women snapped. I wondered if their unison was a twin thing, a nun thing, or a doctor thing.

“Take it easy, Reuben,” Father Emil said. “There’s no reason to exert yourself.” He looked at me as if weighing a decision. “Ms. Croft,” he said, “the Order of Bronze does not share confidences lightly. However, I believe you are an honorable woman. I also believe you will not be put off. If I send you away without answers, you will cause us a great deal of fuss. That would be . . . most regrettable.”

I nodded, trying to keep a straight face. It was hard to tell if Father Emil was just stating a fact or making a veiled threat; but with his German-tinged accent, he sounded like a Nazi mad scientist from some dreadful B movie.
Ahh, mein Liebchen, it vould be most regrettable if I vere forced to use vhips und chains!

“Quite,” I said. “Do let’s keep this civilized.”

Father Emil gave me another hard stare. Then he reached into his robe and pulled out two metal keys. One key appeared to be normal steel, but the other was brightly polished bronze.

The steel key unlocked the handcuff on Reuben’s wrist. Father Emil took the attaché case back to the table where we’d been sitting and slid the bronze key into the case’s lock.

Click . . . and the case opened.

Inside the case lay a jumble of papers—maps, computer printouts, scribbled notes in Reuben’s handwriting—but what caught my eye was a sealed plastic box the size of an encyclopedia volume.

I’d seen such boxes before. They were tough, padded containers for transporting antiques. This one was labeled
OM
´
ONIA:
a name unknown to the masses but as familiar as Sotheby’s to someone in my profession. Omónia Auctions in Athens hosted exclusive sales of antiquities from around the world. Most customers were billionaires; most items sold went unpublicized except among the favored few. I myself had attended the sale of King Tutankhamen’s funerary mask—the real one, not the fake displayed for tourists in the Egyptian Museum—and I’d peddled a few of my own finds there too. (Usually, I keep the treasures I fetch from tombs, but some aren’t worth the trouble . . . especially the ones that are cursed. I don’t mind dealing with mummies coming to reclaim their favorite scarabs, but the farmers around Croft Manor complain if I bring home some ancient amulet that makes their milk cows run dry.)

It took all my self-control not to grab the Omónia box and rip it open. Instead, I let Father Emil take it . . . whereupon he spent a maddeningly long time trying to peel off the tape that sealed the box shut. In the end, he carried it to Kaisho, who spent another maddeningly long time slicing through the tape with a scalpel as slowly as if she were performing brain surgery.

To keep from bursting with impatience, I turned back to the open attaché case. I’d intended to flip through the documents inside . . . but my eye was caught by something else: faint scratches around the lock. I looked more closely. The marks had the telltale appearance of furtive probing. Someone had attempted to pick the lock.

Hmm. Had the man at the rental car agency tried playing locksmith before deciding to chop off Reuben’s hand? Reuben had no idea how long he’d been unconscious—the man might have had time to fiddle with the lock. But why? If the man had a knife for severing Reuben’s wrist, why mess with the lock first? I supposed the fellow could have been squeamish about hacking human flesh . . . but if so, why was he assigned to the job? Whoever wanted the case had plenty of mercenaries on staff; so why would the task of wrist lopping be given to someone with scruples? And if the rent-a-car man wasn’t reluctant to spill blood, why did he waste time tinkering with the lock?

Admittedly, the pick marks might not have been recent. The attaché case looked several years old; it could have acquired the marks earlier in its life. The scratches might not even be pick marks. With the explosion and all the excitement at the clinic, the case could have gotten scraped by accident.

But I was still uneasy. Something wasn’t right. I wished I knew what it was.

“Ahh!” said Father Emil. I’d been so distracted by the scratched attaché case, I’d forgotten about the Omónia box. Father Emil had finally gotten it open. He’d put on a pair of latex gloves from the infirmary’s supply cupboard and was now holding up the box’s contents: a statuette of a man cast in greenish metal.

The man stood ten inches high. His legs were spread as if striding forward. His arms were crooked at elbow and wrist in the classic “walk like an Egyptian” pose. He was naked except for a short kilt and the familiar atef crown of a pharaoh: a high conical headpiece with two ostrich feather plumes and a rearing serpent ornament—the uraeus—facing out above the forehead. When I stepped closer, I saw the metal man’s body was inscribed with shallow lines dividing the anatomy into segments. Each arm, for example, was marked with divider lines at shoulder, elbow, and wrist . . . reminding me of childhood dolls that were made of separate pieces jointed together so they could bend into different positions. Unlike my old dolls, the metal statuette had tiny hieroglyphs scrawled across its skin, too small and spidery to read without a magnifying glass.

“Osiris,” Father Emil said. I nodded. King Osiris, Lord of Eternity, was one of the foremost deities of ancient Egypt: in charge of both fertility and the afterlife. When pharaohs died, they mystically became one with Osiris . . . which made Osiris the embodiment of all former kings.

Unlike much of the Egyptian pantheon, Osiris looked human—no falcon’s head or cat fur—but he still had one distinctive trait. In certain depictions, he was marked with Frankenstein-ish sutures all over his body.

The old myths claimed that Osiris had ruled the other gods with justice and wisdom. One day, however, he was ambushed by his brother Set, who envied Osiris and wanted to seize the heavenly throne for himself. Set chopped Osiris into pieces, then scattered the bloody chunks all over the world. Evil seemed to have triumphed . . . but Isis, Osiris’s wife, searched high and low, found all the pieces, and stitched them together again. That didn’t bring Osiris fully back to life, but he was sufficiently restored to rule the world of the dead; and in a death-centered culture like Egypt, lording it over the afterlife made Osiris an important member of the pantheon.

Most illustrations of Osiris showed him strong and robust—everything a pharaoh should be. Other representations portrayed him as dead but regal, properly mummified and bearing the symbols of royal office. But a few depictions were like the statuette in Father Emil’s hands: a patchwork man made of bits sewn together, with all the seams still visible. Indeed, some heretical versions of the Osiris myth whispered that Queen Isis hadn’t yet found all the pieces. She was still traveling the world, searching, searching, searching for the parts that would make her husband whole.

Father Emil handed me another pair of latex gloves. Once I’d put them on, he passed me the statuette. “You’re an antiquities expert,” he said. “I’d value your opinion, Ms. Croft.”

I hefted the small figure in my hands, testing its weight: quite heavy. It looked to be solid bronze, the metal greened with age. The pose and presentation of the statue were consistent with ancient Egyptian style . . . and small characteristics of face and body let me narrow the date to a specific period. “Nineteenth dynasty,” I said, “1250
B.C.
, give or take half a century. At least that’s what it looks like. These days, I don’t believe any artifact is genuine until I’ve seen a lab analysis. Counterfeiters are getting too good at forgery.”

“Don’t be so suspicious,” Reuben said from the examination table. “The Order bought that at Omónia. Omónia doesn’t sell fakes.”

“That’s what you were doing in Athens?” I asked. “Attending the latest auction?” Omónia’s most recent sale had been two days earlier. I’d been so busy fighting the
Méne
cult, I’d only had time to glance at the catalog. Omónia had been scheduled to sell the collection of a deceased Greek shipping magnate. Some truly stellar pieces were up for bid.

“I didn’t go to the auction myself,” Reuben said. “The Order sent someone else. But they bought Osiris at the sale, and Omónia guaranteed complete authenticity.”

I looked at the statuette again, bringing my eye up close to the metal. It did look genuine . . . but I distrust any artifact I haven’t found myself. You wouldn’t believe how often “reputable” dealers have tried to swindle me with artificially aged trinkets. I examined the position of the hands, the expression on the face, the tiny imperfections in the bronze that one always encounters in early metal casting . . .

. . . and then I saw it. Something that sent a chill up my spine.

As I’ve said, the body was divided into pieces, reflecting how Osiris was dismembered by Set. The front and back halves of the statuette’s torso were separate hunks of bronze joined in a seam that ran up both sides from hip to armpit. When I looked very closely at the seam, I saw a hair-width copper wire hidden deep within: a wire far thinner than Egyptians could possibly produce in 1250
B.C.

It was an antenna. The statuette had been bugged.

Omónia’s experts were far too careful to overlook such an obvious anachronism; and they certainly weren’t the ones who’d hidden a radio transmitter inside the statue. But if Omónia hadn’t done it . . .

I remembered the pick marks around the attaché case’s lock. What if the man at the rental car agency hadn’t just
tried
to open the lock but had succeeded? What if he’d replaced the real statue with a counterfeit? Then he’d waited for Reuben to wake, and made a big show of preparing to cut Reuben’s wrist . . . when he’d never intended to do any chopping at all.