The Mask of Troy jh-5

by David Gibbins

  ‘Peter might well have been dead already,’ Dillen said. ‘If there were enemy troops in that forest, and renegade SS camp guards. That might have been why Lewes was driving back alone.’

  ‘And he would never have forgiven you if you hadn’t taken that intelligence straight back,’ Rebecca said. ‘From what you’ve said, he was the kind of guy who would have put the lives of all those men way ahead of his own, the soldiers who would have died fighting in the forest if the Germans had been allowed another day to get established.’

  ‘What happened to the drawing?’ Dillen asked.

  Hugh blinked hard, wiped his eyes again and cleared his throat. ‘I put it in my battledress tunic pocket. After I passed on the SAS intel to HQ, everything was a whirlwind. HQ was packed up immediately and moved out. I knew Peter’s fate was sealed, but I hadn’t yet connected myself with it. I’d passed on the intel without thinking. It was my absolute duty. And I was in a poor way, really. Then the malaria really whacked me, dropped me stone cold. Next thing I remember was coming to in a hospital in France three weeks later, hearing the church bells ringing. The war was over.’

  ‘And you still had the drawing?’ Rebecca whispered.

  ‘Carefully folded with my belongings,’ Hugh said. ‘And I still have it. Over there, on my desk.’

  ‘Can we see it?’ Dillen asked.

  Hugh gestured at the table. Rebecca got up and went over, scanning the papers. She pointed at a yellowed sheet of notepaper beside the computer screen, and Hugh nodded. She carefully picked it up, and stared at it, then looked at Dillen, her eyes wet with tears. ‘These two people, holding hands. I know they’re the girl’s parents, because

  …’ Dillen stood up and put his hand on her shoulder. She sniffed and wiped her eyes, looking apologetically at Hugh. ‘Stupid of me, now. Sorry.’ She swallowed, and blinked hard. ‘It’s just that when I was a little girl, her age, I grew up without my dad, and my mum had sent me away to my foster parents in America to keep me from the Mafia world she’d grown up in. I often used to daydream, and I drew pictures like this. We were always together, holding hands, we three.’

  Hugh stared out of the window. ‘She would have been about seventeen when I saw her, but this is like a drawing made by a child, a little girl. After the war, I found out that most of the children I saw in those camps had survived Auschwitz, where they had seen their parents selected at the railhead for immediate gassing. Those children had been kept alive for some reason. I was told that this girl was in the orchestra. And worse. There was a brothel. But drawings like these preserved the last memory they had of their parents, as if they were still little children. As if their whole world had ended at that moment on the railhead.’

  Dillen leaned over, and stared at the drawing. ‘How strange,’ he said. ‘A reverse swastika. She’s drawn it above her, and coloured it gold and silver.’

  Rebecca took a deep breath, and blinked hard. ‘A swastika,’ she said, swallowing. ‘So, what’s the big deal about that? Isn’t that what you’d expect? The hated symbol?’

  Hugh spoke quietly. ‘The last time I saw Peter, the last time I ever spoke to him, was those few moments we had in Corps HQ when I handed over this drawing. He and I both saw that reverse swastika at the same moment. We were both suddenly overcome with excitement. That’s how I try to remember him. To understand why we were excited, I have to tell you about an extraordinary discovery at Mycenae.’

  ‘ Mycenae,’ Rebecca exclaimed, sniffing. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Before the war. When Peter and I were digging there.’

  ‘You mean when he made the dedication in the book.’

  ‘A lifetime before everything I’ve been telling you. But what I’m about to say may be the key to the whole mystery. The key that may unlock Troy, but also open up a terrifying discovery. Are you with me?’

  Dillen nodded, looked at his watch, then got up. ‘Before that. Quick breather to call Jack for an update.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Rebecca said to Hugh, putting her hand on his arm. ‘This must be so difficult for you. Are you tired?’

  ‘After all these years bottling it up, I feel I’ve been waiting a lifetime to tell this,’ Hugh said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. And a breather gives me time to do another brew-up.’

  ‘Give Dad my love,’ Rebecca said to Dillen. ‘And everyone else.’

  ‘Will do.’ Dillen opened the door and turned back. ‘Fifteen minutes.’

  Hugh checked his watch, and leaned over the fire. ‘No more, no less. Your drink will be ready.’

  14

  D illen pushed open the door into Hugh’s flat and pocketed his phone. He had caught Jack on Seaquest II just before diving, uncertain about the state of the Aquapods. The schedule off Tenedos had been delayed a few hours to allow a Turkish navy minesweeper with an underwater demolition team to remove the mine from the shipwreck. Mustafa, the IMU Turkish liaison, had also arrived, and there had been delicate negotiations with the Turkish commander to convince him that it was feasible to float and tow off the mine, rather than detonate it where it was. The commander had refused to have his divers in the water while the mine was being shifted, and Jack had completely understood. He had taken the man into the lecture room and shown him a picture of Monticelli’s Shield of Achilles. That had done the trick, in combination with Costas taking the navy team on a tour of Seaquest II ’s equipment to show them the other available options. Eventually two Turkish divers had gone down to attach lifting bags to the mine, but the actual job of raising it was being done using IMU’s remote-operated vehicle.

  It had been going on at that very moment, while they were on the phone; Jack was on Seaquest II ’s foredeck describing it to Dillen. The minesweeper had blast protection so had remained on site, but Seaquest II had stood off two miles to the south of Tenedos on Captain Macalister’s insistence. Meanwhile there was an issue with the electronics on one of the Aquapods. Dillen could sense the tension in Jack’s voice. He was glad he was not there. The good news was that Hiebermeyer had made some kind of breakthrough in the underground passageway at Troy. Jack was going to fill Dillen in at the end of the day, when Dillen would also be able to run through anything new that Hugh might have told them. Dillen had held off mentioning the mysterious swastika until Hugh had explained the connection with Mycenae. And by then Jack and Costas should have completed their dive. If the equipment glitch was sorted out, this could be another day of huge excitement.

  Dillen stood for a moment, trying to think ahead. His mind was in a turmoil. He did not know what the next few days might hold for him. Much would rest on what Hugh told them now. He would return here as planned after taking Rebecca to London, to spend time with Hugh on the translation, but only to get it started and to map a course of action. The pressure was already on at Troy to get results, with the deadline of the military exercise looming, and now he felt another line of investigation was going to cascade before them and require his involvement, with Jack and the rest of the team fully committed in the field. And they needed to keep ahead of the game before word leaked out that they were on any kind of new trail, not at Troy this time but in the shadowy underworld of present-day Europe.

  He closed the door behind him, and sat down. Hugh handed him another steaming mug. ‘Call get through?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘Good show. Are they diving?’

  Dillen looked at his watch. ‘Scheduled for fourteen thirty local time. They’re planning to use the one-man submersibles, the Aquapods.’

  ‘Blast it all. If only I were younger. Jack got me into a drysuit and tank in the IMU pool a few years ago, and it was wonderful. At least he keeps me up to date, with that gizmo.’ He pointed at the computer half submerged under the stacks of papers on his table. ‘Real-time video. Not for this project, though, it seems.’

  ‘Media blackout,’ Rebecca said. ‘Too many bad guys watching. But I’m sure Dad will link you up as soon as it’s safe.’

  ‘Do you want to have
a proper rest before talking more?’ Dillen asked.

  ‘Good Lord, no. Let’s carry on.’

  ‘To Mycenae, then.’

  Hugh leaned forward. ‘All right. The summer of 1938. One of the foremen on the excavation had actually known Schliemann. Had actually known him. The foreman was frail and crippled, too arthritic to dig any more, a kind of camp elder. But as a boy, he’d been the one who first showed Schliemann the mound at Hissarlik when Schliemann went there in 1868. It was astonishing to hear his account. It wasn’t Schliemann who discovered Troy. It wasn’t even Frank Calvert, the British consul who led him to the site. The local people had always known about it. A clan in the village of Hissarlik claimed they were descended from Hector, the Trojan prince. Schliemann knew the power of local legend, and of course he believed that real history lay behind myth. And he knew the power of dreams in childhood. That had been where his own quest had begun, as a little boy in a town in Germany, dreaming of Troy. So when he went to Hissarlik, the first thing he did was to go to the children. He offered them riches beyond their imagination, to open up the world to them as the world had once been opened up to him. And the boy who became the crippled old man had taken the bait.’

  ‘And afterwards he followed Schliemann to Mycenae?’ Rebecca asked.

  Hugh nodded. ‘The boy’s father was a Greek sailor his mother had met in nearby Canakkale, and the boy could pass himself off as a Greek or a Turk. Schliemann was as good as his word and took the boy on as a kind of protege, teaching him to read, teaching him English and German, showing him the tricks that had led Schliemann himself to wealth and fame. But the boy was unambitious and content to remain by Schliemann’s side. After the great man’s death, he never rose above excavation foreman, working for the German and British archaeologists who followed in Schliemann’s wake. But what he did tell us was fascinating. He knew perfectly well that Schliemann and Sophia had dug secretly at Troy. And he told us the Ottoman authorities knew too.’

  ‘So the Ottomans turned a blind eye?’ Dillen said.

  ‘It was more than that. At Hissarlik, the local Ottoman vizier threatened to expose the boy’s Greek paternity if he didn’t inform on Schliemann. That was why the man opened up to us, all those years later, when he knew he was close to death. All his life he’d felt as if he’d betrayed Schliemann’s trust, and he wanted to ease his burden and tell those he felt might forgive him. But Schliemann like many showmen was too absorbed in his own self-image to realize that others were playing him as well. He was a huge international celebrity, a powerful tool for regimes aspiring to improve their status in the world. The Ottoman court in Constantinople was a decaying beast by the 1870s, but was still a byword for intrigue. It suited the Ottomans to know that Schliemann had dug secretly at Troy and found treasure he had spirited away. One day they might use that knowledge as leverage to make him play their game, to enlist him to help blow their trumpet abroad. The Ottomans were well aware of their bad reputation. Schliemann’s friend Prime Minister Gladstone of Britain was particularly antagonistic towards them. Schliemann unwittingly became a pawn in the world of international power politics. The Greeks allowed him to dig at Mycenae so they could keep up with the Turks, to allow Greece to lay claim to her own share of the Trojan War myth and the Schliemann celebrity juggernaut. Everyone knew that. But that was only what the world was allowed to see. Behind the scenes, the Greeks were playing the same game as the Turks.’

  ‘You mean Schliemann dug secretly at Mycenae too?’ Rebecca said.

  Hugh leaned towards them, his voice low. ‘One night in 1876, just before the excavation closed for the season, Schliemann and Sophia got the Greek inspector of antiquities – the ephor – blind drunk, and secretly made their way up to the citadel. Or so they thought. The ephor wasn’t really drunk. And the boy, by then a teenager and spying for the Greeks as well, was sent to follow them. He said Schliemann was always visible at night at Mycenae because he loved to stand like Agamemnon at the highest point of the ruins, staring out towards the sea. The boy watched Schliemann and Sophia descend with their tools into the royal shaft grave, the place where a few days later the world would watch as Schliemann raised the golden mask of Agamemnon.’

  ‘The boy saw that?’ Rebecca whispered.

  Hugh nodded. ‘Then, almost fifteen years later, he watched Schliemann and Sophia do the same at Troy, secretly digging again, night after night. Schliemann should have known he would be watched. Maybe he did. Maybe that was part of his game. Once, when the boy was small and watched the great trench being dug through Troy, Schliemann joked that he was not the descendant of Hector but of Homer himself, always watching, perched above like an ancient bard, playing his toy pipes. The Greeks at Mycenae said that about Schliemann, too. The ephor told the boy that Schliemann was a poet, and Sophia was his muse. He said the Greeks had a soft spot for foreign poets coming to their shores, like Byron. He said that was really why they tolerated Schliemann. Do you remember, James, when you were a small boy and I first told you the stories of Homer, I said that we were poets too, and that one day you would sit on the walls of Troy and see the ghosts of heroes, and hear the bellow of Agamemnon?’

  Dillen stared at Hugh. ‘I do remember. You should have seen me at Troy, yesterday. But tell us what the boy saw.’

  ‘This is where it really gets extraordinary. At Mycenae that night, he watched Schliemann and Sophia emerge from the shaft grave and then disappear down the hillside. When he thought they’d gone, he crept down to have a look himself. He saw the Mask of Agamemnon freshly revealed, and he lifted it. Imagine it. A small boy alone, seeing that. Just then he heard low voices above, and he quickly replaced the mask and hid himself in the back of the shaft, inside another grave. Schliemann and Sophia came back down the ladder carrying a bundle. There was much digging and exertion, and half an hour later they left, this time for good. The boy waited a long time, then came out and looked again. The earth had been tamped down as if it had never been disturbed, and even had water poured on it to look as if it had been rained on. He dug down where he’d seen the mask, and uncovered it again, and that was when he saw what he hadn’t seen before, a human skeleton underneath. He hadn’t seen it because it hadn’t been there before. He realized what Schliemann and Sophia had brought with them, in the bundle. They’d brought a skeleton and buried it under the mask.’

  ‘Ah,’ Dillen murmured. ‘That explains it. The mysterious deformed skeleton. It’s in Schliemann’s book.’

  ‘It was apparently in very poor condition,’ Hugh said. ‘But the boy recognized the misshapen skull. It was from a Bronze Age cemetery the team had been excavating outside the city walls just below the Lion Gate, and then abandoned once Schliemann realized they were just humble graves, not royal tombs.’

  ‘Why on earth would they do that?’ Rebecca said. ‘Put a skeleton into Agamemnon’s grave?’

  Hugh held up his hand. ‘Before that. To Troy, fourteen years later. Night after night the man watched Schliemann and Sophia disappear off into the ancient citadel mound to dig alone, just as they had done in 1873 when they uncovered Priam’s treasure beside the great trench. Only this time the dig was much more secretive, in a part of the citadel to the west that remains unexcavated today. The last time he saw them digging was the evening after the end of the second Troy Congress, held at the site in March 1890. Schliemann had sat down with the boy, the man, for a few minutes before the congress, and seemed to want to confide in him. He said he’d known all along that Priam’s treasure dated a thousand years before Homeric Troy, but only at this congress would he finally acknowledge it.’

  ‘Which he did,’ Dillen murmured. ‘It’s on record.’

  Hugh nodded. ‘But it wasn’t an act of humility. Not Schliemann. No, he told the man that he’d misdated the treasure deliberately, to make it seem as if the greatest treasure of Homeric Troy had been found. He had wanted to deflect attention from the real revelation he and Sophia believed they had begun to unearth in 1873. Only now, in 1890
, had Schliemann reached the point in his discoveries at Mycenae and around the ancient world when the time was right to return to Troy, to finish the excavation, to make that revelation. The man knew it must have something to do with the secret digging. That very night, Sophia laid a trail of little candles from the site entrance to the tunnel in the western perimeter. It was typical Schliemann, very theatrical. And the man soon realized why. All of the delegates to the conference had gone, but three new men arrived. They were clearly important men, travelling incognito. The man never saw the faces of two of them, and afterwards they left before he could get close enough to see. He was too far away to hear their conversation. But the third man he recognized.’

  ‘Who was it?’ Dillen asked.

  ‘Schliemann frequently returned to America to manage his business empire, and on one occasion he took the boy with him. They’d gone to Washington and stayed with one of Schliemann’s benefactors from his early days as an entrepreneur at the time of the California gold rush. They’d maintained a close but secret friendship ever since. The man’s name was George Frisbie Hoar.’

  ‘ George Hoar,’ Dillen exclaimed, thinking hard. ‘Good God. Yes, that makes sense. Hoar was a prominent antiquarian, a patron of the Smithsonian Institution and the Peabody Museum at Harvard. But he was more than that. Far more. He was one of the most prominent American politicians of the second half of the nineteenth century. That’s why Schliemann would have courted him. Hoar’s was a voice of moderation and humanity, famously warning against American imperialism and foreign wars. By 1890 he’d been a senator for years, one of the most respected in the House. If you were going to choose the most important American politician of the time, you might have put Hoar above any incumbent president.’

  Hugh reached back and picked up a heavy hardbound volume from his desk, handing it to Rebecca. It had lavish embossing on the cover, a golden bull’s head, the horns curving upwards. ‘That’s Schliemann’s account of his excavations at Mycenae, where he describes the Mask of Agamemnon,’ he said. ‘I had that actual volume with me on the dig in 1938, and I’ve been reading it again for the first time in years. I remember your dad poring over it when he first came to visit me. His eyes just lit up when he saw the account of the mask. Now, take a look at the inside cover.’