Gold of Kings

by Davis Bunn

  “Thank you. One moment, please. Very well, we are ready at this end.”

  “How many people are listening?”

  “Just myself and a technician. I have no gift for technology. I would ask that you tell me about the art market. What has changed in the past few years.”

  The cottage was perched on a natural ledge overlooking the Bay of Kyrenia and the section of Mediterranean known locally as the Akdeniz. Clouds clustered around the peaks behind her. The descending sun laced the far western edges with brilliant hues. “We could spend days on that topic and get nowhere.”

  “Pretend there is no time. A swift discussion, then I am gone. One thing. Maybe two. The biggest differences.”

  Storm tried to focus. Not to identify the most relevant items. She could have done that sleepwalking. But she needed to place the words in an order that would make sense to this man. “Okay, two things. First, the money. Despite the overall economic situation, prices within the art and treasures markets are rising faster than ever before. What was last year’s ceiling is today’s cellar.”

  “Why is this, do you think?”

  “Partly because of the new investors. In the seventies and eighties it was the Arabs with their petrodollars. Now it’s the Chinese and the Russians. But the market itself has gone through a drastic change. Real estate and stocks and bonds are all uncertain investments. Rich collectors see this as the time for a boom in the art and treasures market. But the amount of genuine articles available is limited. And there are a lot of dollars out there. Even some of the world’s largest museums are finding themselves priced out of the market.”

  “This is very clear. I thank you for putting this in terms I can understand. What is part two?”

  “There are fewer dealers who really count. The agencies and shops and auction houses that once handled midlevel items have no product to handle. But whatever trapped these players in the middle range remains the same—bad credit, bad rep, not enough smarts to predict what will rise or fall, low funding level, poor client contacts, patchy expertise. So these middle-tier people are getting frozen out.”

  “Like Syrrell’s?”

  “We’re more high-end than most. And we were doing okay in a tough market, until the scandals hit.”

  The setting sun cleared the cloud’s lowest edge, turning the ancient harbor and the surrounding waters a pure and timeless gold. Her internal illumination struck just as hard. “That’s what it is.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What this guy is after. It’s not about cornering a portion of the market. He’s after untraceable transfers. In and out of countries, completely beyond the reach of bank controls. It’s perfect.”

  “Could we perhaps return to my question about—”

  “Perfect,” Storm repeated. “Who can say how much a piece is worth in this crazy market? Ten million, twenty million, who cares? So he sells the item…”

  Hakim gave her a moment, as though pushing to catch up. Then, “You were saying, Ms. Syrrell?”

  Her mind raced ahead. She was trained for this, the best provenance expert Syrrell’s ever had, a specialist in half truths and mysteries hidden beneath centuries. That wasn’t bragging. It was fact. “He’s setting up a string of dealers and maybe a few auction houses, all in different countries. Which would make it incredibly hard to track the flow of money, right? He’s going to sell the pieces to himself. On and on, a daisy chain around the globe. His name doesn’t appear on any ownership documents. Who’s to know? He keeps inflating the price, laundering money every time.”

  Storm heard his hesitation, and knew with the same piercing quality that Hakim was tempted to lie. And if not lie, then deflect. But when he spoke, it was to say, “I asked you for honesty, Ms. Syrrell. I did not expect brilliance as well.”

  To her right, the wind drummed through the tree limbs, making cymbals of parched leaves. A gull flew overhead, turned to a golden blade by the setting sun. The gull gave one operatic call and swept away, leaving the sky empty of all but her dreams. “You’ve known this all along.”

  “Suspected. The international banking industry is becoming increasingly well patrolled. But certain groups need money. Large amounts of untraceable cash.”

  “We’ve got to stop him.”

  “With your help, Ms. Syrrell, I am certain we are going to do precisely that.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE ORIGINAL ROMAN PORT HAD been located to the northeast of Kyrenia’s present harbor. In AD 120 Hadrian, the same general who had crushed the Jewish rebellion, extended the rock promontory out and around the deepwater basin, in case he needed to recall his ships in winter storms and put down another revolt. Fifteen thousand Cypriot Jews who had survived Hadrian’s initial slaughter died building the breakwater. The old harbor was now used by the local fishing fleet. Everything was exactly as Storm had found in her research. A modern road had been laid over the original track leading inland from the port to the island’s second Christian community, Chrysova.

  The community had been built around a rock quarry. Harry and Emma found the stone pit the Christians had worked, but nothing else. A tiny museum held little besides confirmation of all that Storm had uncovered. The quarry was about 220 yards long and about 110 yards deep. Steps carved into the quarry face had been worn to dangerous nubs by the ensuing two thousand years. Harry slipped under the warning rope and made a careful descent. He walked the base, searching for a carving or inscription that had managed to survive the twenty centuries. But his hunt was futile. When he returned to ground level, they found where the church had once stood, a meager square of stones about the size of a modern-day living room.

  Back at the harbor, Harry asked if Emma would mind a detour. “It doesn’t have anything to do with our search. But I’d sure like to have a look.”

  “Tell you what. Why don’t we declare ourselves a night off.”

  “I like that idea. I like it a lot.”

  “Let me check on Storm and I’m yours.”

  Harry bit down on the words that popped into his mind, which were I wish. He waited until she snapped the phone shut and stowed it back in her purse. Then he reached out and took her hand.

  Emma looked down, then up at him. Harry met her gaze and waited. She sighed her way to his side and said simply, “Lead on.”

  The Kyrenia fort marked the beachhead between the original Roman garrison and the modern town. The initial fort had been rebuilt and enlarged by one set of rulers after another. A series of poorly translated placards gave a brief rundown as they climbed to the inner keep. The Romans had been followed by the Byzantines. They had lasted the longest, ruling from the fourth to the twelfth century. After that, King Richard the Lionhearted used the island as his staging point for the conquest of the Holy Land. He sold the island twice, first to the Knights Templars, who failed to pay him. Richard then resold Cyprus to Guy de Lusignan, former king of Jerusalem, after Lusignan was defeated by the Ottoman general Saladin. Two hundred years later, the Lusignan kingdom was conquered by Venetian merchant princes, who in turn were defeated first by the Egyptian Marmeluke kings and finally by the armies of Istanbul. The island remained under Ottoman control from 1570 until 1878, when Britain took control by force and by treaty, intending to make the island a fortress against Russian aggression in the eastern Med. After decades of revolt, the island finally won its independence in 1954, but had a constitution imposed upon it that satisfied nobody, and in the minds of many, resulted in its current divided status.

  The former royal chambers held a museum for the oldest boat ever recovered, a merchant vessel that had plied the Aegean over twenty-five centuries ago. They walked a raised platform around a glass cage sixty feet long. The ship was the color of dried mud, old bones stuck together with time, encased in an air-conditioned sarcophagus. Harry felt the air spark with the joy of a major find, even one that wasn’t his. The other chambers held the ship’s cargo, raised with the vessel from the mud outside the Kyrenia harbor walls. Harry stop
ped before a display of shoulder-high clay jars. “These amphorae were used for over two thousand years. They made for great storage. The narrow end was designed so they could be stacked in a ship and fitted to the vessel’s curved bottom. Brilliant concept.”

  Emma watched him with the same intensity, but her former tension was absent. “You really know your stuff.”

  “I got my start with these babies. The insides were insulated. Resin was used for jugs carrying wine, wax for those holding oil. On land they were held in three-legged iron stands or terra-cotta holders. I once found an amphora and holder both painted with dancing nymphs, probably used in a wealthy household for lamp oil. Sold it to an Athens museum. Tore me up to let the thing go.”

  “You sold it through Sean?”

  He led her up into the light and across the inner courtyard. The sun was blocked by the western keep, casting the courtyard into shadows made more brilliant by the wall of light overhead. “Sean came four years later, when I brought up my first treasure off Sumatra. A sixteenth-century Chinese junk hauling porcelain down to the island kings. Porcelain, jade, and gold are the treasure dog’s favorite loot. They’re the only three items known to man that aren’t corroded by salt water. Sean saved my bacon.”

  “Saved you how?”

  “Three-quarters of all salvage operations are sucker work. As in, the local government is the sucker and the treasure dog is the suckee. Government bureaucrats are nothing but leeches in suits. Sean personally negotiated a deal for me with the local politicos.”

  They descended the hill to Kyrenia Harbor. The tourist vessels were painted in bright colors, matched by the myriad flags fluttering in the sultry breeze. The stone walls lining the harbor were burnt ochre by the sunset. They selected a restaurant whose three tiers of waterfront tables extended from a medieval trading house. They let the owner order for them, then Emma asked, “What got you into treasure work?”

  “I guess you could say it was a case of finding the only job I’d ever be decent at. My street radar is very very good. Growing up in a foster home with future murderers for roommates meant either I honed my radar or I was marmalade. This is all-important in the treasure business. You’ve got to have a gut honed for danger, and for knowing which trail to follow.”

  “You were in the Gulf. I read that in your military records.”

  “My feelings about my navy stint are pretty mixed. On the one hand, it got me out of what the county officials called juvenile care. On the other, I learned a whole different way to shuck and jive. After the first Gulf blowup was over, I stood duty on the fleet patrolling the region. We took our shore leave on Bahrain, which a lot of the guys hated. Me, I got to know some of the local fishermen. One day, they started complaining about something that caught their nets. Too deep for any of them to find out what it was. I offered to go down for a look-see. I found this old vessel. At the time I didn’t have a clue what it was. Now I figure it for a dhow. Some of them went to two hundred feet long, traveled as far as Sri Lanka to the east and islands off the Cape Horn down south. I spotted this old treasure chest off the rear, what must have been the lieutenant’s cabin. Couldn’t decide what to do with it. If I hauled it up, they’d cut my throat for sure. Those Gulf fishermen are all half pirates to begin with. I figured they knew what it was all along, and were just waiting for some wet-behind-the-ears yokel to haul it up for them. So I swam back and told ’em it was just coral. Things went bad in a jiffy.”

  “They attacked you?”

  “Sort of. They left me stranded on this atoll a mile and a half off the shore. Then off in the distance I heard the nasty sound of all the fleet’s anchor chains being hauled in. Then came the big blast from the admiral’s boat, and off they chug. Leaving poor Harry standing there looking at thirty days in the brig for going AWOL.”

  “Did you go back for the chest?”

  “I tried. Got my papers nine months later, took off straight for Bahrain. Spent two weeks diving the area. Couldn’t find the wreck. Last time I ever left a treasure without putting down a tracker.”

  “But you’d found your calling.”

  “Only job I ever want. Only thing I’m good at. I’ve worked salvage ops all over the world. Five in the Med, in Malta and Egypt and in Libya and two off Greece. Florida coast twice, once with Mel Fisher’s group and the other with Bob Marx. Manila. Malaccan Straits. Hong Kong. Singapore.”

  When Harry stopped, Emma quietly added, “Barbados.”

  He squinted over the harbor. “I heard about this wreck my first year out. One of the last Spanish treasure galleons lost in the New World. Worked on the research for years. A lot of other dogs had tried and failed. But I had this idea that was taking me in a different direction. Winds and currents and politics, basically. I never liked the work like Storm does. I’m your basic point-and-shoot kinda guy. I did the research because I didn’t have anyone else to trust with it.”

  “But you found it.”

  “I took the details to Sean. He tried to warn me off. I went down anyway.” He looked down at the table. “They nabbed my boat, took just about everything I owned. Including the wreck. Which was right where I said it would be. In international waters.”

  “If it’s any consolation, Harry, I believe you.”

  “Back in America, they’ve got all these special names for being inside the joint. You say the word, prison, it means one thing. Jail is something else entirely. Then there’s the farm, work release, county lockup, the federal system, whatever. Where I was, things stayed a lot more basic. There was one jail for the whole island. Place called Glendairy. There was another place for women, I heard the name but I don’t remember.”

  “It was awful, wasn’t it.”

  Harry felt his face grow so tight the skin around his mouth and eyes probably looked seared. “I have nightmares.”

  Emma pushed her plate aside, reached over, and snagged his hand with both of hers.

  Harry looked down. The strength of those smooth-skinned hands radiated through him. “I wake up inside the dream. I’m just another bum, cadging drinks from one of the bars where me and my mates used to meet and laugh and pretend we were all going to be kings one day. In the dream my strength is long gone, my money, my good name. I laugh with them though I don’t understand what they say. And I pretend I don’t see the disgust in their eyes, or feel the shame that burns me.”

  Emma traced the hair over his wrist, her fingers slipping up to his elbow, then back again. “You’ve been out of prison, what, a couple of weeks. You get hooked up with a beautiful young lady. Storm is wounded herself, and she’s come to rely on you totally. It’d be so easy for you to…” Emma shook her head. “Never mind.”

  Starlings swooped about the water and the moored boats, shrilling what was only a song to them. Every restaurant played a different music, from Turkish salsa to Snoop Dogg. The muezzin’s cry melted into the sunset tune.

  Harry said, “I met a woman the first time I went into Barbados for supplies. I went back. Several times. The last time, the cops were waiting for me. They based their claim that I was diving inside their waters by how they arrested me at her front door.”

  He looked at her. Straight on. Open as he knew how. “Then Sean sprung me. I still had 366 days on my sentence. But he did it, and the lawyer working for him was the one who told me Sean had been killed. Sean’s last request was, take care of Storm. And that’s exactly what I aim to do.”

  Emma met his gaze, the fading dusk magnifying the golden tint to her eyes. “I keep waiting for a buccaneer’s line. And you keep surprising me.”

  Harry told her what he had decided on the Salamis road. “There’s a thousand reasons why it won’t work between us. So I’ve decided to toss away the salvager’s standard line, which is to sing you the myths. It makes for a pretty tune, but it doesn’t last. I’m going to give you the truth, Emma. Much as you want. Whenever you ask.”

  Emma leaned forward, coming in so close he could smell the mint and the coriander on her brea
th. See the pain in her features. “What are you doing to me?”

  He stood, dropped some bills on the table, said, “Let’s walk.”

  THEY WALKED OUT TO THE BREAKWATER to the ancient lighthouse, a cone of pitted rock shaped like a giant’s torch. Somehow Emma seemed smaller, walking up close to him. Or perhaps it was how she was more relaxed than ever before. She molded to him, holding his hand and also gripping his upper arm. She said, “There ought to be a different word for the colors here. Especially the hour after sunset.”

  Harry felt her head ease over to rest upon his shoulder. He buried his face in her hair, taking in the flavor of her in one huge draft. “You have my permission to make one up.”

  She walked slightly tilted, so that she could curve to him from ankle to hair. Even so, she trod the rocky path with the grace of a cat. “Cypriot blue.”

  “I like it.”

  “A thousand different hues. A painter’s palette, all in one color.” The wind whipped her hair into his face. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  They reached the end and turned back. The harbor mouth wore the restaurant’s gay lights like a necklace, one that swayed in the evening breeze. “Sunsets last a long time here.”

  “Not long enough. We could go right through to tomorrow, and it’d still be over too soon.”

  The twilight magic was strong enough for Harry to remember without pain, even without the need to acknowledge his recent black hole. Instead, he looked back and saw another dusk, heading home from a day of diving, after finding treasure scattered across the Caribbean floor. He recalled the weary grins, the taunting laughter of a crew who for that night, that sweet hour, knew in silent communion that theirs was an impossible quest. Because even on the best evening of the best day of the best find, the hunger never went away. It was the myth as much as the find that attracted a good treasure dog. But no one ever admitted it, except on a perfect evening, with a beautiful lady sharing a warm sunset breeze. A lady who turned to him then and said simply, “Kiss me, Harry.”