The Mask of Troy (25 page)

 

R
ebecca Howard stood on the gloomy landing of the flat in front of the chipped white door and straightened her fleece, then eased off her backpack and waited hesitantly, glancing back at Dillen. He reached the top of the creaky wooden stairs and smiled at her. They had arrived in Bristol half an hour before, on the train from Paddington in London, having landed at Heathrow airport from Istanbul soon after dawn that morning. In the taxi from the station Dillen had called Jack on
Seaquest II
to confirm their arrival and his plan to escort Rebecca back to the hotel in London, where she would meet her school party that evening for her trip to Paris. He shivered slightly, pushing his hands into his coat pockets. The old house was one of a row of villas off Royal York Crescent, a magnificent location overlooking the city and the Avon Gorge but exposed to the westerly winds coming off the Atlantic. For once, at least, it had not been raining, and it promised to be a beautiful June day.

He felt the cold because he was tired, and he looked forward to the warmth he always found here, sitting back on the dilapidated sofa and cradling a cup of hot chocolate in front of the gas fire, relishing the familiar smells of old books and coffee and drying clothes. It felt as if he were returning home. His parents had been killed by German bombing in London when he was only five years old, and Hugh had taken him under his wing at boarding school and offered this place as a home. There had been other young people like Dillen, and they had grown up together as an extended family. Every time Dillen mounted these stairs he felt as if he were on vacation from university, bursting to tell Hugh what he had seen and done, to introduce him to new friends. He glanced at Rebecca, and remembered with a jolt that more than fifty years separated them. He had made this same pilgrimage with her father when Jack was her age, almost thirty years before.

Rebecca gestured back down the stairs. ‘Does he always leave the front door unlocked?’ she whispered.

‘He usually has young people staying here,’ Dillen said. ‘Always has done, since I was a boy. They used to be pupils like me from Clifton College and Bath School for Girls, orphans from the war with no other family to stay with out of termtime. We had the other rooms off this landing, the doors behind you. Nowadays the net’s wider, I think. Street kids. Come on, knock on the door. He’ll be waiting for us.’

Rebecca raised her hand and rapped on the door. A muffled voice shouted, ‘Come in!’ She turned the knob, pushed the door and stepped inside. Dillen slipped in behind her and shut the door. Hugh was crouched with his back to them over the electric ring in front of the gas fire. The warmth was lovely, just as Dillen remembered it. The room was large, the bedroom of a spacious Victorian townhouse, with a shuttered window that overlooked an untidy garden with large trees, the rear windows of the adjacent row of houses just visible beyond. In the centre of the room was the old sofa-bed, folded back with the bedding stowed beneath, and beside it the battered oak table that was the only gift Hugh had wanted from the school on his retirement, scarred with the graffiti of generations of boys he had taught Greek and Latin. The walls were buried under books, thousands of them, in cases and tottering piles, the spaces in between filled with old prints and drawings.

Everything was as Dillen remembered it. On the mantelpiece was Edward Dodwell’s 1821 print
The Gate of the Lions at Mycenae
, the image that had so fired his imagination when he had first sat here as a boy. Beside it was the black-and-white photo from the Second World War. It showed a tanned, good-looking young man leaning languidly against the bonnet of a jeep, desert sand in the background, goggles hanging around his neck and a holster slung low over his shorts, cracking a smile at the camera. He was wearing the ersatz uniform of an irregular soldier, a tattered old jumper that made him look like a schoolboy, yet he exuded the confidence of a seasoned veteran. It was the picture of a man who had been forced to grow up fast, been toughened before his time. At the bottom was a faded signature, the words
Peter, Egypt 1941
clearly visible, in the same handwriting as the dedication to Hugh in the volume of Pope’s
Homer
that Dillen had given Rebecca at Troy the day before.

Hugh took the pot off the electric ring and poured the contents into three mugs, then picked up a spoon and stirred them. He watched the steaming liquid for a moment, then picked up two of the mugs and turned towards them. ‘Perfect timing,’ he said, looking intensely at Rebecca, a twinkle in his eye. ‘It’s a fine art, you know. If you’d arrived a moment later, this would have been ruined.’ He had an educated accent of the 1930s, with clipped vowels but a softness that came from his West Country childhood. He was wearing corduroy trousers, threadbare in places, an oatmeal-coloured jumper with holes in the elbows and a frayed silk scarf tucked in around his neck. He had thick white hair, swept back and neatly cut, and he was clean-shaven. Dillen thought he was a strikingly handsome man, and he had seemingly lost none of his vigour, despite having passed his ninety-second birthday a few months before. Rebecca nodded politely. ‘My dad told me about your hot chocolate. He said it was the best ever.’

Hugh smiled back at her. ‘I do apologize. I’ve been rude. But I couldn’t take my eye off the pot.’ He held out the two mugs. ‘Hello, Rebecca. Your dad has told me all about you. And hello, James. I can’t believe what you told me on the phone. Marvellous discoveries.
Marvellous
. That cup from the shipwreck, with the word for king. You really think it could be Agamemnon? And the painting of the lyre-player with that word
Homeros
. Quite astonishing. It really puts the fire under our translation project.’

Rebecca took the mug and shook Hugh’s hand, and Dillen did the same. ‘Hello to you too, Hugh,’ he replied warmly. He nodded at the papers and manuscripts piled on the table. ‘How goes the war?’ Hugh followed his gaze, then exhaled forcefully, stooped down and picked up the third mug. He stood with his back to the fire, legs apart, his free hand behind his back, and took a sip from his mug. ‘The war,’ he replied, ‘goes slowly. Too damned slowly for my liking. It’s those wretched fragments of the
Cypria
in the Trojan epic cycle. I just can’t make up my mind whether they’re genuine Homer or not. There’s Homer in them, no doubt about it. But I just can’t say whether it’s the poet himself, or some later pastiche of bits and pieces that survived down to the Hellenistic period, thrown together to look plausible. I’m completely stumped. I can say that to you, but not to my editor at the university press. My siege, James, is in need of a Trojan Horse.’

‘Then I can be your Odysseus.’ Dillen took a large envelope out of the laptop case he had been carrying, stepped over to the table and dropped it on the pile of manuscripts. ‘As I promised.’

‘You’re certain you want me to do this?’

‘Never more so.’ Dillen turned to Rebecca. ‘I’ve asked Hugh to help me translate the
Ilioupersis
. After spending time with your dad and Maurice over the past week, it became clear to me that the translation is about more than a clue to an ancient shipwreck. The fall of Troy, this text, is the backdrop to everything we’re doing out there. What with my work on the excavation, it was going to take me a month or more to get the text done. Jeremy’s too busy, and he doesn’t have the expertise in early Greek. With Hugh’s help, it might get done in a week, maybe ten days.’

‘That’s about how long Dad sees the fieldwork running,’ Rebecca said.

‘As tight as that?’ Hugh murmured.

Dillen nodded. ‘Very tight, I think, with the shipwreck as well as Hiebermeyer’s excavation. The Turks are planning a major naval exercise in the region and everything has to shut down by the beginning of August. The IMU operation is going to have to run with military precision. They need you there really, Hugh, an old soldier, but HQ have assigned you to intelligence, I’m afraid.’

‘
Plus ça change
. They were always doing that. I was too damned cocky for my own good. Always being treated like a boffin, but I preferred being at the sharp end. Still, I’m sure Jack can handle it. Wars need young men, not old ones.’ He rocked on his feet in front of the fire. ‘And the
Ilioupersis
. It’ll be marvellous to get my teeth into some real Homer. Some Homer I can truly believe in.’

‘You’re convinced I’m right?’

‘Those lines you sent me? Absolutely.’

‘Excellent.
Excellent
.’ Dillen put down his mug and rubbed his hands. ‘After I’ve taken Rebecca back to London and got her settled in her hotel, I’ll come straight back and we can get cracking.’

‘You
really
don’t have to take me,’ Rebecca said. ‘I
can
manage.’ She looked at Hugh, and sighed. ‘Sometimes they treat me like I’m some kind of innocent little girl from a finishing school. I’m not.’

‘I promised Jack,’ Dillen said. ‘And there’ll be an IMU security man waiting for us at the hotel. That’s a done deal.’

Rebecca rolled her eyes. ‘IMU security?
Please
.’

‘Problems?’ Hugh said to Dillen.

‘Precautions,’ he replied. ‘Rebecca was involved in the repatriation of that Dürer from the Howard Gallery earlier this year, you remember? Art stolen by the Nazis. She overstepped the mark rather by going off on her own and doing a shady deal with some character in Amsterdam. Jack went ballistic when he heard.’

Rebecca stared defiantly into the air. ‘It was
not
a shady deal. His name was Marcus Brandeis. Not really a bad man, exactly. He said he’d had a change of heart about the antiquities black market, but I knew perfectly well he was turning informant because he needed protection. I was just the right person for him to talk to.
And
it helped make one of Europe’s most notorious black-market art dealers into a police asset.’

‘
And
stirred up something of a hornets’ nest,’ Dillen said. ‘All of the bad guys who wanted his neck, and their armies of neo-Nazi and Russian thugs.’

Hugh grinned at Rebecca. ‘You’re a chip off the old block. That’s the real problem. Jack sees too much of himself in you.’

‘He also remembers what happened to my mother in Naples,’ Rebecca replied, more quietly.

Hugh reached out and touched her arm. ‘Of course.’ He steered her to the sofa. ‘Sit, please.’ She put down her mug, then shrugged off her fleece and sat down. Dillen took off his coat and sat beside her. Hugh turned back and adjusted the dial on the gas fire. ‘I hope you can bear the heat. It’s my one indulgence. From the war, you know. Winter of ’44, in the Ardennes. Too many nights in the open. Once you’ve known the true meaning of cold, heat becomes the most precious thing.’

‘It’s perfect,’ Rebecca said. ‘It feels very homely.’

‘That’s what James said the first night he spent here, in my old army sleeping bag in the room across the landing, with the other children I put up.’

Dillen sipped his drink, fingering the pipe in his pocket. He turned to Hugh. ‘About Rebecca’s security. Jack thinks the IMU operation at Troy is bound to set the underworld buzzing, antiquities smugglers and dealers like Rebecca’s friend in Amsterdam. Everyone knows Jack’s projects are rarely piecemeal, but go for the big questions, leave few stones unturned. The advantage of having virtually unlimited resources.’

‘Ephram hasn’t been hit by the recession, I take it?’

‘Ephram? Far from it. He keeps pumping more and more into the endowment for IMU. And he’s just agreed to fund the Herculaneum ancient library project.’

Hugh turned to Rebecca. ‘Ephram Jacobovich was one of my last pupils before I retired. I sent him on to James at Cambridge. I knew he was going to make a fortune. You can tell, with some boys. I was determined to stoke his fascination with ancient history and archaeology, to push him to study that at university, rather than computers. He knew all that anyway. And look what’s happened.’

‘That must be very satisfying,’ Rebecca said.

‘I was going to be a kind of archaeologist once,’ Hugh said quietly, glancing back at the mantelpiece. ‘With a friend of mine. Long time ago. That couldn’t happen, but all of this, everything with IMU and your dad, means I’m living a little bit of that dream.’ He turned to Dillen. ‘Speaking of Jack. You were saying. Carry on.’

Dillen nodded. ‘Jack’s never made any secret of his belief that part of Schliemann’s treasure is still hidden away, somewhere in Europe. It’s one occasion where he felt that going public was the best way to spirit up the clues. You remember the TV documentary he did last year? He thinks the gold that showed up in Moscow in 1993 was only part of it, that Schliemann secretly sent other finds back to Germany, and that some of those may have ended up in Nazi hands.’

‘So you’re saying that these underworld characters just have to watch and wait.’

‘Jack’s worried about kidnapping and extortion,’ Dillen said. ‘It’s becoming a bigger problem now in Europe. And of course Rebecca is vulnerable.’

Rebecca gave an impatient shrug. ‘I
can
look after myself, right? Every time I’ve been on
Seaquest II
, Ben’s given me self-defence training, and taken me through another weapon. He says I’m a natural with Dad’s Beretta nine-millimetre.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Hugh said. ‘I don’t doubt it at all.’ He gave Rebecca a steely look, then turned back to Dillen. ‘Now, let’s get to the other reason you’re here. You said on the phone that you’d been researching Schliemann’s papers.’

‘Only skimmed the surface. Schliemann was a prodigious correspondent. Do you remember Jeremy Haverstock, Maria’s American assistant in the Institute of Palaeography? I mentioned him a moment ago. He and I worked together through Schliemann’s papers from the time of his first dig at Troy in 1871 to his final visit there in 1890. It was fascinating, and Jack was right. He says treasure-hunters worth their salt always leave clues for future explorers, in case they don’t make it. To find the clues, you have to get into the mind of the treasure-hunter, something Jack was sure Schliemann knew too. But it’s what we
didn’t
find that was so revealing. Schliemann had a virtually uncontrollable urge to tell the world everything he discovered. At Troy he found the treasure of Priam; at Mycenae, the Mask of Agamemnon. He trumpeted them both to the world. His name was splashed over the newspapers, and he loved it. But then there’s something not quite right. He abruptly departed each place, Troy, Mycenae, at the moment of his greatest breakthrough, when he should have stayed and dug for more. After finding the mask at Mycenae he embarked on fifteen years of restless exploration, in Greece, in Italy, in Egypt, chasing dreams that seem half-baked, almost unhinged. It was as if he’d lost the plot, let his ego get the better of him.’