At two o’clock a Mercedes from a Salzburg car service pulled up before the café and three hours later, after a scenic drive, during which Remi and Sam watched for signs of pursuit, they checked into the hotel under the names Hank and Liz Truman.
Fed and warmed by the brandy, they first e-mailed Selma the photographed symbols from the Saint Bartholomae bottle, then dialed Evelyn Torres at home.
“So why the sudden interest in Xerxes and Delphi?” Evelyn asked over a speakerphone after a bit of small talk.
“Just a little project we’re working on,” Remi replied. “We’ll fill you in when we get home.”
“Well, to answer your questions in order, at the time of Xerxes’ invasion, Delphi was arguably the most sacred place in Greece. The Pythia’s predictions were sought for everything, from matters of state to marriage and everything in between. As for treasure, there wasn’t much there of tangible wealth—a few treasuries, but nothing compared to the riches of Athens. Some scholars disagree, but I think Xerxes didn’t understand Delphi’s place in Greek culture. From what few oral histories I’ve read, he considered the Oracle a novelty, like a modern-day Ouija board. He was convinced the Greeks were hiding something at Delphi.”
“Were they?”
“There’ve always been rumors, but there’s no solid evidence to support them. Besides, you know the history: Xerxes’ raiding party was turned back by the divine hand of Apollo—in the form of a well-timed rock slide. A few Persians got through and made off with ceremonial objects, but nothing of importance.”
Sam asked, “Did anything of value survive the invasion?”
“The ruins are still there, of course. Some of the columns from the treasuries are in the Delphi Museum, as are some pieces of altars, stone friezes, the Omphalos . . . no gold or jewels, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Do you remember anyone ever nosing around about Delphi when you were there?” Remi asked. “Anything unusual?”
“No, not really. Just standard research requests from universities for the most part.” Evelyn paused for a moment. “Wait a second. There was this one guy about a year ago . . . he was from the University of Edinburgh—the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, I think. Weird character.”
“How so?”
“He’d applied for a permit to examine the Delphi artifacts, and we granted it. There are rules for hands-on examinations—things you can and can’t do with the objects. I caught him breaking one of the biggies—or almost breaking one, that is. I walked in on him trying to do some kind of acid test on one of the columns.”
“Which columns?” Remi asked.
“The Karyatids. They stood at the entrance to the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi.” Before either Remi or Sam could ask the next question, Evelyn answered it. “A Karyatid is a stone column—usually marble—in the shape of a robed Greek woman. The most recognizable ones are at the Athens Acropolis.”
“What kind of test was he trying to do?” Sam asked.
“I don’t remember. He had a jeweler’s hammer and pick and some kind of acid kit. . . . I put it all down in my report to the board. I may still have a copy. Let me look while we talk.”
They heard Evelyn moving about, then the rustle of cardboard and the shuffling of paper.
Remi asked, “What did he say when you caught him?”
“That he’d misunderstood the rules, which was bunk. I gave him the rules myself. He was lying, but he refused to say what he was up to. We ejected him and notified the guy’s department chair at Edinburgh.”
“No police?”
“The board decided against it. Lucky for him, too. The Greeks take that kind of thing seriously. He would have done jail time. I heard Edinburgh fired him, though, so that’s something. I don’t know what happened to him after that. Here’s the report. . . . His name was Bucklin. Thomas Bucklin.”
“And the acid kit he had?” Sam asked.
The sound of flipping pages came through the speaker. “This is strange,” Evelyn said. “I’d forgotten this part. He was using nitric acid.”
Remi said, “Why’s that strange?”
“It’s not a standard artifact test. It’s highly corrosive. We don’t use it.”
“Who does?”
Sam answered. “Metallurgists. It’s used to test for gold.”
They talked for a few more minutes, then hung up. Sam opened his MacBook Air—one of the few things they’d brought along in his backpack from Königssee—and logged into the hotel’s wireless Internet connection. There were almost two thousand hits for the name Thomas Bucklin. It took only a few minutes to narrow their search to the right one.
“Bucklin’s written a number of papers on classical history, mostly focusing on Persia and Greece, but nothing more recent than a year ago,” Sam said.
“About the time he got fired,” Remi said, looking over his shoulder. “Are any of his papers available?”
“Looks like JSTOR has them all.” JSTOR was a nonprofit online archive for scholarly work whose subjects ranged from archaeology and history to linguistics and paleontology. Sam, Remi, and Selma used the site extensively. “I’ll have Selma download and forward them.” Sam typed up a quick e-mail and sent it. Selma responded thirty seconds later: Five minutes.
Remi asked, “Any mention of what he’s been up to since leaving Edinburgh?”
“Nothing.”
Sam’s e-mail chimed. Selma had found fourteen papers by Bucklin; they were included as pdf attachments. “Here’s something interesting,” Sam said. “According to Selma, Bucklin had been on a sabbatical from Edinburgh when he showed up on Evelyn’s doorstep.”
“So he was freelancing,” Remi replied. “He wasn’t there on behalf of the university. Who the heck is this guy?”
Sam stopped scrolling, his fingers frozen over the keyboard. He leaned closer to the screen and squinted. “There’s your answer. Have a look.”
Remi leaned over his shoulder. One of Bucklin’s papers included a photo of the author. It was small, and in black-and-white, but there was no mistaking the mostly bald pate, fringe of orange hair, and black-rimmed glasses.
Thomas Bucklin was the lab-coated man they’d encountered in Bondaruk’s private laboratory.
CHAPTER 52
Bucklin’s papers were compelling, if not well received or widely circulated. According to JSTOR, Sam and Remi had been only the second party to purchase them since their publication. They had little trouble guessing the identity of the other interested party.
Sam forwarded the papers to his iPhone and gave Remi the MacBook, then they spent the next three hours wading through Bucklin’s work. Not wanting to taint one another’s conclusions, they waited until they were finished to compare notes.
“What do you think?” Sam asked. “Nutcase or genius?”
“Depends on whether he’s right or wrong. There’s no mistaking he’s obsessed with Xerxes and Delphi. His version of the invasion didn’t make him any friends in the academic world.”
Through years of painstaking research Bucklin had come to an outlandish conclusion: that Xerxes’ raid of Delphi had been more of a success than Greek historians admitted. According to Bucklin, in the weeks leading up to the invasion the keepers of the Siphnian Treasury devised a scheme to protect their wealth. Knowing no place would be safe from Persian plunder, the Siphnians melted down their stores of gold and cast it into a pair of Karyatids. When the columns cooled they were covered in gypsum plaster and put in place of the real columns that stood astride the treasury’s entrance.
For reasons unknown the Persian raiding party did not fall for the ruse. On Xerxes’ orders, a detachment of two hundred specially trained troops called Immortals fled with the Karyatids, intending to head north out of Greece before swinging east through Macedonia and Thrace and returning to the Achaemenid Dynasty capital of Persepolis, where Xerxes planned to melt down the Karyatids and have them cast into a massive throne, a memorial to his triumph over the Greeks that would sit in hi
s Hall of a Hundred Columns for eternity.
Unbeknownst to the Immortals, word of their desecration of Delphi reached Sparta less than a day after the Persian raiding party left. A phratra of Spartan soldiers, roughly twenty-seven in all, gave chase, intending not only to recover the Karyatids, but also to avenge the brothers they’d lost at the Battle of Thermopylae.
They caught up to the Immortals in present-day Albania and cut off their easterly escape route. For three weeks the Spartans hounded the Immortals, chasing them north through Montenegro, then Bos nia and Croatia, before finally cornering them in the mountains of northwestern Slovenia. Even outnumbering them ten to one the Immortals were no match for the Spartans. The Persian raiding party was all but destroyed. Of the original two hundred that had left Greece a month before only thirty survived, these spared to serve as porters for the Karyatids.
The Spartan commander decided not to return home, not while Xerxes’ army was still ravaging their country. The columns had become a symbol of Greece’s survival, and the Spartans pledged to die rather than let them fall into Xerxes’ hands. Not knowing how far the Persian invasion would advance, the Spartans headed north out of Slovenia, intending to find a place to hide the columns until it was safe to bring them home. The phratra was never seen again, save a lone soldier who stumbled into Sparta a year later. Before succumbing to his exhaustion and the ravages of exposure, he claimed that the rest of his comrades had perished and the Karyatids had been lost with them. Their location died with him.
“So that’s the last puzzle piece,” Remi said. “Or one of the last, that is. How Bondaruk and Bucklin found each other we may never know, but it’s clear Bondaruk believes the story. He thinks Napoleon’s Lost Cellar is a treasure map to the Siphnian columns. They’re the family legacy he’s trying to recover. Remember what else Kholkov said in Marseille about Bondaruk’s motive: ‘He’s simply trying to finish what was begun a long time ago.’ ”
Sam nodded slowly. “The bastard wants to melt them down, just like Xerxes did. We can’t let him get away with it, Remi. As archaeological artifacts, those Karyatids are priceless.”
“Beyond priceless. It all fits: After the Battles of Plataea and Mycale, Xerxes abruptly hands over control of the army to Mardonius, and goes home—goes home assuming the Karyatids are on their way. Most accounts have him returning to Persepolis and starting a massive building program—including the Hall of a Hundred Columns.”
“Where Bucklin claims he planned to display the throne. I’ll give you one guess where Bondaruk plans to put his throne.”
“The Persian playground in the basement of his estate,” Remi replied. “It’s sad, if you think about it. Xerxes died waiting for a prize that was never coming—a prize that meant relatively nothing to the Greeks—and Napoleon died waiting for his son to follow the riddles and recover the same prize.”
“We might as well keep the streak alive,” Sam said.
“What do you mean?”
“We make sure Bondaruk dies never getting his hands on the Karyatids. He’ll be in good company.”
At six the next morning Sam’s iPhone trilled. It was Selma. “It’s early, Selma,” he said groggily.
“It’s late here. Good news. We’re getting better at this, I think. We’ve deciphered the code, but we thought you’d want first crack at the riddle.”
“Okay, e-mail it to me.”
“On its way. Call me later.”
Sam shook Remi awake. She rolled over just as Sam’s e-mail chimed. “Another riddle,” he said.
“I heard.”
He called up the e-mail and together they read the lines:
Man of Histria, thirteen by tradition
House of Lazarus at Nazareth
Son of Morpeth, Keeper of Leuce, the land that stands alone.
Together they rest.
“Any thoughts?” Sam asked.
“Ask me after coffee.”
Having already unraveled two of the riddles, Sam and Remi now better understood the patterns Napoleon and Laurent had used to produce them. A patchwork of double meanings and obscure historical references, the solution to each puzzle depended upon the fusion of its individual lines.
By midmorning they’d gathered from the Internet the most obvious references for each line:
The first—Man of Histria, thirteen by tradition—likely referred to Histria, the Latin name for Istria, a peninsula between the Gulf of Trieste and the Bay of Kvarner in the Adriatic Sea.
The second—House of Lazarus at Nazareth—could have hundreds of meanings. The name Lazarus was mentioned twice in the Bible, once as the man Jesus raised from the dead, the other in the parable of Lazarus the Beggar. Nazareth, of course, was the childhood home of Christ.
The third—Son of Morpeth, Keeper of Leuce—was also too broad to nail down. Morpeth was a town in northeast England, and in Greek mythology Leuce was a nymph, the daughter of Oceanus.
The fourth—Together they rest—was the most ambiguous of all. Who were “they”? Did “rest” mean sleep or death, or something else altogether?
“Think about the last riddle,” Sam suggested. “Napoleon and Laurent used a similar line—the ‘Genius of Ionia’ to reference Pythagorus. Maybe they’re doing that here. We know the third line probably contains a place-name—Morpeth. Let’s find out if Morpeth was home to any famous residents.”
Remi shrugged. “Worth a try.”
An hour later they had a list of a dozen semiprominent Morpeth “sons.” None of them were immediately recognizable.
Remi said, “Let’s cross-reference, see if there’s a connection between any of the Morpeth names and the word ‘Leuce.’ Are any of them experts in Greek mythology?”
Sam checked the list. “Doesn’t look like it. What else do we know about Leuce?”
Remi paged through her legal pad. “She was carried off by Hades, the god of the underworld. Depending on which version you go with, upon her death she was transformed into a poplar tree, either by Hades or by Persephone.”
“Poplar tree . . . ” Sam murmured, tapping on the keyboard. “The Leuce is a type of poplar.” He checked his list of Morpeth names. “This might be something: William Turner, born in Morpeth in 1508. Considered by many to be the father of English botany.”
“Interesting. So is the line about Turner himself, or about poplar trees?”
“No idea. What’s the last part . . . ‘the land that stands alone.’ ”
“My first thought would be island—they stand alone in the middle of water.”
“My thought, too.” Sam’s Google search of “island,” “poplar,” and “Turner” turned up no revelations. “There’re several references to a Poplar Island wildlife refuge in the Chesapeake Bay, but there’s no connection to Turner—unless you count Tina Turner donating some money to the refuge, that is.”
“Let’s try the first line again—‘Man of Histria, thirteen by tradition.’ ”
As they had with Morpeth, they generated a list of historical figures associated with the Istrian Peninsula, but like Morpeth, none of them were historically noteworthy.
They turned to the second line—House of Lazarus at Nazareth—and dug deeper, looking for more obscure references. “How about this?” Remi said, reading from the MacBook’s screen. “During the Middle Ages, Christian religious orders used to oversee leper colonies known as Lazar houses.”
“As in Lazarus, the patron saint of lepers?” Sam asked.
“Right. In Italy, the term ‘Lazar’ morphed into ‘lazaret,’ a quarantine station for ships and crews. The first recorded lazaret was established in 1403 off the coast of Venice, on the island of Santa Maria di Nazareth.” She looked up at Sam. “That could be our Lazarus and Nazareth connection.”
“We’re getting warmer, but it can’t be that easy,” he said. “We’re still missing the first line.”
He did another Google search, combining and subtracting words until he came across a 2007 National Geographic story describing t
he discovery of a mass grave for bubonic plague victims who had been quarantined to protect Venice’s uninfected.
Sam said, “The site was on an island in the Venice Lagoon called Lazzaretto Vecchio.”
Remi flipped through her notes. “Vecchio . . . that’s the modern name for Santa Maria di Nazareth. Sam, that’s got to be it.”
“Probably, but let’s be sure.”
Twenty minutes and dozens of search permutations later, he said, “Okay, here. I used the words ‘island,’ ‘Venice,’ and ‘plague’ and came up with this: Poveglia. It’s another island in the Venice Lagoon, used to quarantine plague victims during the seventeenth century. The bodies were buried in mass pits, sometimes the living mixed in with the dead, or cremated in mass pyres. Estimates put the number of dead between . . .” He paused and his eyes went wide.
“What?” Remi asked.
“Estimates put the number of dead between a hundred sixty thousand and a quarter million.”
“Good Lord.”
“Something else: Before it was called Poveglia, it was Popilia.”
“Why does that sound familiar?”
“Popilia is a derivation of Populus—Latin for ‘poplar.’ Poveglia was once covered in poplar groves.”
“So on one hand we’ve got Poveglia, on the other Santa Maria di Nazareth. Both are solid possibilities. You’re right: It’ll come down to the first line of the riddle and our mysterious man from Istria.”
“Either way, our next stop is Venice.”
SEVASTOPOL
“I can tell by your tone the news is not good,” Hadeon Bondaruk said into the phone.
“They’re gone and one of my men is dead,” Kholkov said. “We found the transponder chip from the Fargo woman’s phone aboard one of the electric boats. How they discovered it I have no idea.” Kholkov recounted the rest of the encounter at Königssee, starting with their arrival at Saint Bartholomae and ending with his losing the Fargos on the lake. “Somehow they must have slipped back into Schönau without us spotting them.”
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