The Mask of Troy (15 page)

‘Yes?’ Jack said.

‘Something we found.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Jack said, looking at them intently. ‘
Of course
. I hadn’t forgotten. Not a chance. Maurice, they’ve found something. Where you set them digging. On our way out.’ He carefully lifted his khaki bag with the shape in it and slung it over his shoulder, eyeing Dillen as he did so. ‘It looks as if today is the day for revelations. Jeremy, lead the way.’

 

Two hours later, Jack walked out on to the veranda of the bungalow that served as Hiebermeyer’s excavation headquarters, the very place where Schliemann had stayed almost a century and a half before. Costas and Jeremy followed, and they went over to where Rebecca and Dillen were sitting together on a long bench swinging from a frame in the garden, with the mound of the ancient citadel looming beyond the trees in front of them. Rebecca was rocking gently to and fro, humming to herself, and Dillen was cradling his pipe, an unopened packet of tobacco on his lap. Jack and the other two sat down on garden chairs facing the swing. It had been a long day, and Jack suddenly felt dead tired, drained by the dive that afternoon and the decompression, which always sapped his energy. He and Maurice had rushed off before the main course to have another quick look at the sculpture in the passageway wall, and that had been the subject of intensive conversation for the rest of the meal. It had been a day of extraordinary discoveries, a portent of what might come. And Jack still had not told Dillen about the ancient cup from the wreck. The time for that would be later, in the right place, a special moment alone with his old mentor.

He stared off into the sunset beyond the mound of Troy, then turned to Rebecca and smiled. She was holding an old book, about five by two inches across, with faded gold lettering on the spine. Jack peered at it, and then at Dillen. ‘I recognize that, James. It’s your old edition of Pope, isn’t it?’

Dillen put the pipe between his teeth, clenched it and nodded. ‘
The Iliad of Homer
, translated by Alexander Pope in the early eighteenth century, this edition published in 1806.’

‘I recognize that tear on the spine. It was always on your desk in Cambridge.’

‘It’s so cool,’ Rebecca murmured, carefully opening and closing the cover, then tracing her fingers over the worn leather boards. ‘Professor Dillen has just given it to me. I feel like a real collector now.’ She looked at Dillen. ‘Dad gave me John Wood’s
Source of the River Oxus
for my birthday. We’re planning to go back there again, you know, to Afghanistan, to search for it.’

‘When the war’s over,’ Jack murmured.

‘You’re a rare breed, Rebecca,’ Costas said. ‘The only seventeen year old I know who collects antiquarian books.’

Jack grinned at Costas. ‘And you’re the only submersibles engineer I know who can quote Auden.’

‘Jack!’ Costas looked aghast. ‘You promised not to tell!’

Jeremy looked in astonishment at Costas. ‘You? Poetry? I don’t believe it.’

Costas gave a theatrical groan. ‘See? My credibility shattered.’

‘No. Not at all.’ Jeremy shook his head emphatically. ‘Auden was the subject of my undergraduate dissertation at Stanford. Before I switched to palaeolinguistics, I wrote about Homeric imagery in Auden.’

‘You’re kidding me.’ Costas had been playing with a spanner, and spun it between his fingers. He looked at Jeremy quizzically. ‘I was thinking of Auden again when we arrived here this afternoon, seeing James photographing the excavation. You know?’

‘Sure,’ Jeremy replied, nodding enthusiastically. ‘About the eye of the crow and the eye of the camera, looking on Homer’s world, not ours.’

‘And earth being more powerful than both gods and men, yet being impassive, uncaring,’ Costas said.

Jeremy nodded. ‘That was published in 1952, but it was written in memory of a friend who died in April 1945, in the final weeks of the Second World War. It’s the poem I studied most intensively, along with
The Shield of Achilles
.’

‘Funny. Jack and I were just talking about that one,’ Costas said. ‘On board
Seaquest II
, before our dive.’

Jeremy cocked an eye at Jack. ‘Really? He and I talked about it in Oxford several months ago, when he and James came to talk about the
Ilioupersis
, just after Maria and I had found it.’

‘Jack.’ Costas narrowed his eyes at him. ‘You knew about Jeremy and Auden all along.’

‘I said you’d be surprised.’

Rebecca opened the old book, and examined the frontispiece. ‘This is what I really love,’ she murmured. ‘Where people have annotated books, written in them. It really makes them come alive.’

Dillen shifted in his seat, and raised the unlit pipe again to his mouth. ‘I was going to point that out to you,’ he said between clenched teeth. ‘Read the inscription out to us, would you?’

Rebecca angled the page, finding the best light. Jack got up to glance at it, to remind himself. The ink was faded, but the handwriting was bold, elegant. ‘
To Hugh, with love and affection from Peter. Remembering our summer at Mycenae, 1938
.’

Jack glanced at Dillen. ‘That’s Hugh Frazer, your old schoolmaster?’

Dillen nodded. ‘And Peter Mayne, a fellow undergraduate of Hugh’s at Oxford. They both studied classics, and dug together on the British excavation at Mycenae just before the war. They were close friends.’

‘Must have been
very
close,’ Rebecca said, looking at the inscription again.

Dillen sat back, rocking slightly. ‘They were steeped in Homer, in a world of heroes and gods, of Arcadian groves and lovers. I think it was pretty innocent, though. The war changed all that.’

‘Of course,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘Young men in 1939. Just like the young men of 1915, over there at Gallipoli.’

‘They both became soldiers, army officers,’ Dillen said, putting his pipe in his mouth, thinking for a moment, then taking it out. ‘I know little about it, actually. They both ended up in special commando units, but I don’t know what happened to Peter in the end. Hugh never spoke about it, and I never pressed him. Hugh had been one of the first into the concentration camp at Belsen, so he’d seen the worst. When I was a schoolboy in the fifties, you didn’t speak to veterans about that. Chaps like Hugh who’d found some way of surviving mentally just wanted to get on with life. Maybe he’d talk now, though. The defences fall away in old age, all that suppression of trauma. They say talk can help.’

‘Where is he now?’ Costas said.

‘Lives in a flat in Bristol, the same place as when I was a schoolboy there. My parents had been killed by German bombing in the Blitz, and he put me up. He’s frail, but perfectly alert. I visit him a couple of times a year. I owe him a visit about now.’

‘Maybe his friend Peter was killed,’ Rebecca murmured, staring at the inscription.

Dillen put his pipe in his mouth, dry-sucked it, then took it out again. ‘The only time he ever said anything was when he gave me that little book as a graduation present, almost fifty years ago now. He said Mayne had been badly wounded, at Cassino. I think the wounds were more than physical. Afterwards he went into a special unit involved in the reparation of works of art, antiquities stolen by the Nazis. Funnily enough, it was Costas who jolted my memory, a few weeks ago when I was at the IMU campus, when you were arranging for the return of that painting from the Howard Gallery to Germany.’

‘We talked about my uncle,’ Costas said. ‘The US army Monuments Man.’

Dillen nodded. He looked at his pipe, then cleared his throat. ‘There
is
something else. Something that’s been especially on my mind here, at Troy. I’ve always kept it to myself, but this is the right time and place to tell it.’

‘Please do,’ Jack said.

Dillen tapped his pipe on the arm of his chair, then put it down and spoke. ‘Something Hugh said to us at school, in a Greek lesson. It was my first year there, when I was twelve. He told us the story of Heinrich Schliemann and the discovery of Troy. I remember it as if it were yesterday. He was sitting on the edge of his desk, passionate. Gesticulating. We were utterly entranced. The fifties was a pretty grim decade, with post-war deprivation and the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the distant past seemed a far more interesting place than the future. Hugh said he believed in the Trojan War,
absolutely
believed in it. And he said he knew something top secret. During the war, he’d heard about the most incredible treasure, something Schliemann had found and hidden away and then the Nazis stole. He didn’t say anything more. He swore us all to secrecy. It became a kind of myth. There were half a dozen of us, but I was the only one who carried on with Greek. I never knew for sure whether he was telling a real story, or just trying to inspire us with a dream. I didn’t want to burst that bubble, to discover it was only fiction. That’s why I never brought it up with him again. I still want to believe in it. He was an inspirational teacher.’

‘Not the only one,’ Jack murmured.

Rebecca carefully closed the book, and held it in both hands. ‘I’d love to meet him.’

‘He was always very fond of your dad,’ Dillen said, picking up his pipe again. ‘I first took Jack to see Hugh when he wasn’t very much older than you are now.’

‘Well, then,’ Rebecca said, suddenly businesslike, looking at Jack. ‘Professor Dillen and I both have to fly back to London tomorrow, right? He’s got a conference at the end of the week, and I’ve got my school trip to France. We’ve both got tomorrow afternoon free. Why don’t we take a trip to Bristol? I’ve been there, to the university open day. I might even study there, actually. You don’t know that yet. Now you do. It’s only an hour and a half on the train from London.’

Dillen sucked thoughtfully on his pipe, smiled to himself, looked at Jack and raised an eyebrow. Jack glanced at Rebecca, then nodded. ‘It seems that when my daughter sets her mind on something, she does it.’

Dillen pointed his pipe. ‘What was it you just said about Hugh? “Not the only one”?’

Jack smiled, looking serious. ‘If there’s a chance this story’s true, then it’s part of the archaeology of this place. We should try to chase it up. But only if Hugh wants us to.’

‘I think he will. And we don’t need to pussyfoot around him. For all the trauma, chaps like Hugh are also tough as nails. Remember what they’ve seen and done and had to live with. He’ll tell us exactly what he wants to tell us.’

‘Mission Creep, yet again,’ Costas sighed. ‘We need to keep focused. On the archaeology. On the diving.’

‘We need to keep all possible avenues open,’ Jack said.

‘I just want to talk to him,’ Rebecca said quietly. ‘Maybe about Peter, if he wants.’

‘I’ll have a word with Ben, who’s personally taken charge of security for this project,’ Jack said. ‘He and Macalister have just liaised with the Turkish navy to get a demolitions team in tomorrow morning to clear that mine from the wreck. Once they’re done, we’re good to go with another dive, Costas. I want to shore up the minelayer wreck and begin doing airlift excavation on the ancient hull straight away. If you can get the Aquapods up to scratch, we’ll be in the water tomorrow afternoon. With the Turkish navy around, I don’t think we’ve got anything to worry about with the security of
Seaquest II
. I think we can spare Ben or one of his guys to accompany you, Rebecca.’

‘Dad.’ Rebecca looked at Jack defiantly. ‘It’s not like I’m a little girl any more. I’m seventeen. I don’t need a chaperone.’

Jack paused. ‘Remember Ben’s reaction when you marched off alone to organize the repatriation of a work of art stolen by the Nazis? There are a
lot
of shady characters out there. Art and antiquities are big business on the black market.’

‘Dad. I’m going to see a lonely old man in a flat in Bristol. And James will be with me.’

Jack looked at her, shaking his head, then at Dillen. ‘We’ll talk about it.’

‘Good. That’s a yes, then. We’re going. Thanks, Dad. And I’ll look after Professor Dillen, don’t worry.’

Hiebermeyer came out of the excavation room carrying a large perspex board with a plan of Troy taped to it. He was still streaked with dirt, and his eyes were gleaming with excitement.

‘You got a result?’ Jack asked.

‘Better than you could have imagined.
Wundervoll
.’ He turned to the others. ‘When Jack and I nipped back to that sculpture during dinner, it was because I wanted to take photographs. I e-mailed them through to the institute in Alexandria. I’ve got a brilliant student there who specializes in Egyptian New Kingdom portrait sculpture. She can spot an individual sculptor’s hand. She knew this one immediately. She calls him Seth IV. She knows him from Thebes. It’s incredibly exciting, because three of his four other known sculptures show officials of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the later thirteenth century BC. And the fourth is even better. It’s a recently revealed statue of Usermaatre-setpenre, otherwise known as Rameses the Great, died 1213 BC.’

‘
Perfect
,’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘Priam would have been about contemporary with Rameses, wouldn’t he? So this sculptor, Seth IV, takes a commission to sculpt the greatest king of Troy, and comes up here with his stone. That clinches it for me.’

‘We’ll do a laser scan and compare the data from the other statues. It’s like fingerprint analysis. But she can tell by eye. You can completely trust it.’

‘Another small step closer to the Trojan War,’ Dillen murmured, shaking his head. ‘I never thought I’d see anything like this in my lifetime.’

Jack pointed at the board. ‘What have you got there?’

Hiebermeyer put it on the ground between them and knelt in front. ‘Look at this. We’ve dug out enough of the passageway walls to project the walls inward to their apex. I’m convinced it’ll be a circular chamber or a tomb.’ He stabbed a finger at the centre of the plan. ‘I’m putting the ground-penetrating radar over that spot first thing tomorrow morning. And I’ve worked out what we need to get through the remaining rubble. I’ve got a crack team coming up from the institute in Egypt. Experienced at digging out pyramids, monumental tombs.
Real
archaeologists. And Aysha’s coming. She’s my top hieroglyphics expert.’