Still, it was doubtful that the package contained anything intended for the museum. Such mail and packages were normally properly addressed and delivered to the museum’s mail room, not to the reception desk. And as for personal mail for her, or any unexpected gift, what could the occasion be? This was April and her birthday was in September, and what other occasion was there for a gift? Or from whom? Most of her friends were off in distant places around the globe, busy with their small hammers, scoops, and brushes. Many had not had a chance even to hear of her new position. And she knew she had not ordered anything from any store, and if she had she would have had it delivered to her home, not her place of work. Besides, no store she knew went in for sealing wax on the corners of their packages.
Of course, it was a puzzle easily enough resolved, and all her prior detective reasoning had probably been wasted. In all probability it was a new sales gimmick, offering her a free copy of a new woman’s magazine for a lifetime subscription or a Florida condominium at a reasonable price at her advanced age. She smiled at the thought as she reached her office. She nodded to Marge, her secretary, and went inside. She sat at her desk, pushed aside the pile of incoming mail awaiting her attention, studied the exterior of the package a few more seconds, and then reached for her letter opener, inserting it carefully at one corner, prying the wax seal loose. One would think I was opening a mummy’s tomb, she thought with an inner grin. The grin faded. Or a letter bomb. It was a disturbing thought and she put it away, instead slitting the paper neatly and folding it back. There was an inner wrapping which she removed with equal care; too many years of being taught to open all things with circumspection prevented her from tearing or even wrinkling the wrappings. She removed the cover.
Inside was another box. For a moment she wondered if possibly one of her practical-joking acquaintances had gone to all this trouble just to send her one of those sets of nesting boxes that ended up containing something quite minute and utterly useless. It would fit in with the type of mentality that would go to the trouble of machine printing her name and sealing the box with paraffin wax. With a sigh she removed the cover of the inner box, but inside, rather than any more boxes, was a translucent envelope through which she could see photographs, and on top of them, clipped to the envelope, was a letter. So at least it was no practical joke, she thought with a touch of relief, and then smiled; it also was no letter bomb. She took the envelope from the box and then noticed one further thing at the bottom of the package, in one corner. It was wrapped in cotton-batting and appeared lumpy. She picked away the cotton and stared at the small ring that was enclosed. With a frown she picked up the letter and read it.
When she was done she stared at the ring for a moment, a deep frown on her face. Then she reached for the telephone, pressing the button for her secretary.
“Marge, would you ask Dr. Keller to come in? And ask Jed Martin to come along, too.”
She replaced the telephone and leaned back in her chair, staring at the letter. Then she opened the envelope and removed the photographs, studying them intently. Could it be that, after all, she was still being the victim of a practical joke? Or of a bomb of a different type? Well, this day, at least, had not started off in its usual manner, and she had a feeling that many of her days would be changed as a result of the strange package; a feeling similar to the one you got when you dug carefully into the earth and encountered the resistance of something and knew, just knew, it was not a stone, but something that could lead to an exciting discovery—although this package with its letter most probably was just a stone. She looked up at a rap on the door; a moment later it opened to admit Dr. Robert Keller and Jed Martin.
Dr. Keller was the director in charge of special projects. He was a large, handsome man in his late forties whose rumpled clothes looked as if they had been slept in. He sat down, crossed his heavy legs carelessly, dug a pipe from one pocket and a sack of tobacco from another, and began filling his pipe with slow, methodical movements while he waited for the subject of the meeting to be broached. Jed Martin, in sharp contrast, was wearing a neat, spotless laboratory jacket over a conservative vest. Jed Martin was the curator of Greek and Roman antiquities. He was thin almost to a point of emaciation, and dapper to the point of being a dandy. He also chose a chair, looking almost as if he would have liked to dust it before offering it to the seat of his neatly pressed trousers. Ruth McVeigh looked at both men appreciatively. Although completely different in temperament as well as appearance, both men shared one faculty; they were both excellent in their fields.
Keller finished tamping his pipe and carefully set a lit kitchen match to the bowl, puffing slowly, his steady gray eyes watching Ruth McVeigh as he waited. Jed Martin, however, was not the type to wait.
“Well, what is it, Ruth?” he asked impatiently, and glanced at his wristwatch in a rather pointed manner. “I’ve a million things to attend to.”
“You may have one more,” Dr. McVeigh said quietly, and picked up the letter. “I want to read you both something. This came inside of a package that was delivered last night, after I left for the day. Together with some photographs I’ll show you later. I just got it this morning. Let me read it to you.”
Jed Martin shrugged and sat back, his small birdlike eyes watching Ruth almost suspiciously, as if she might be using the letter merely as an excuse to waste more of his precious time. Still, he knew that the new director seldom wasted words and never wasted time, neither her own or anyone else’s. Bob Keller’s expression didn’t change in the least. He puffed steadily and watched Ruth McVeigh, liking what he saw.
“This is what the letter says,” Ruth began, and glanced down. She paused to look up a moment. “There is no salutation, and no date. And, for reasons I’m sure you’ll understand when you’ve heard the letter, there is, of course, no signature.” Her eyes went down again as she began to read.
“The enclosed ring is from the collection of gold objects discovered at Hissarlik in the Troad in Turkey by Heinrich Schliemann and his wife, Sophie, in early June of 1873. The entire collection, consisting of approximately nine thousand separate items, and with a net weight of approximately 8,600 drams, will be held for auction to selected bidders of whom you are one, beginning October 1, 1979. Instructions for submitting bids will be furnished before September 1, 1979. Bids will be secret, as will the identity of the winner.
“The photographs attached will prove the authenticity of the statements made herein. Further proof can be obtained by examination of the enclosed specimen taken from the actual collection.
“No opening bid below fifteen million dollars will be considered.”
Ruth McVeigh put down the letter and looked at the two men across the desk from her. No muscle moved on Robert Keller’s phlegmatic face, but his eyes looked interested, and momentarily he had stopped puffing on his pipe. Martin, on the other hand, was staring at the director incredulously; he had come to the edge of his chair and was perched there, almost birdlike.
“What absolute and utter rot!” he said, and snorted. “Let me see that!” He took the letter Ruth handed him and read it again, quickly, before tossing it back disdainfully. “The Schliemann treasure! It’s been in the hands of the Russians for donkey’s years! Everyone knows that!” He picked up the photographs, leafed through them quickly, and tossed them beside the letter, sneering. “Someone got hold of Schliemann’s book, simply had some duplicate pieces made up that look like the objects Schliemann had pictures of—probably made them out of tin and painted them with dime-store gold paint—and then took photos of his fakes. With an up-to-date calendar alongside to show the pictures were taken recently. And they expect to get away with it?” He reached over and fished the ring from the box. “And this—” For the first time he hesitated a moment and then frowned. “Well, I expect he did read up enough on the subject to know the rings that Schliemann found were made from gold wire, not from the solid slabs of the stuff in those days …”
“You’ll still check the ring
for authenticity?” Dr. McVeigh’s tone made it an order, not a request.
“Oh, of course,” Martin said. “We’ll check it for age, for purity of gold content, for the rare earths that were found in the gold of that day, and everything else. We’ll have it done in our own laboratory, and we’ll send it out for further checks if we have any doubts as to its—well, its un-authenticity, I should say.” He snorted again, eyeing the small ring malevolently, as if it threatened him somehow. “The Schliemann treasure! Really!”
Bob Keller cleared his throat a bit self-consciously. He had gone back to puffing his pipe and was frowning thoughtfully at the ceiling. “You know,” he said slowly in his deep voice, speaking almost as if to himself, “I’ve wondered for years about that gold treasure Schliemann found …”
“Wondered what?” Martin demanded, as if the statement was a challenge to his judgment.
“I’ve simply wondered if the treasure really was in the hands of the Russians,” Keller said quietly, and watched the smoke from his pipe weave its way upward. He sighed and sat more erect, bringing his attention back to the others in the room. ‘What do we actually know about the treasure? What does anyone really know? We know that Heinrich Schliemann and his wife, Sophie, discovered it at what Schliemann was convinced was the original site of Homer’s Troy in June of 1873—whoever wrote that letter is right about that, at any rate.”
“Which has been no great secret for the past hundred years,” Martin said argumentatively. “Any more than the number of pieces and the troy weight of the stuff. What does that prove? That your letter-writer has an encyclopedia, that’s all.”
“Probably,” Keller said agreeably, and went on. “We also know that Schliemann, over certain objections of his wife, donated the treasure to Germany toward the end of that decade. His wife wanted it to go to Greece, which was her home country, and since she was almost certainly the one who first noticed the treasure, and almost certainly was the one instrumental in getting the treasure from the discovery site to their cottage without anyone’s knowledge—carrying it under her skirts, you see—her word might have carried some weight. But in those days”—he cast a mischievous glance at Ruth McVeigh—“the man in the house was the boss. So the treasure went to Germany, where it remained in some museum or other until the Second World War, when, for safekeeping, it was hidden in a bunker at the Berlin Zoological Station.” He took his pipe from his mouth, examined the bowl as if to be sure he had enough ammunition in the form of tobacco to finish his discourse, and then, satisfied, returned the pipe to his mouth and began puffing again. “And that,” he said, “is all we know.”
“Wait a second!” Martin said, swiftly objecting. “Not quite. We know a lot more. We know, for example, that the Americans foolishly allowed the Russians to capture Berlin, including the bunker under the zoo. And we also know the treasure has never been seen since. Are you suggesting, Bob,” he asked sarcastically, “that there is no connection between those two facts?”
“I’m only saying we don’t know,” Keller pointed out mildly. “If the Russians have had the Schliemann treasure all these years—how many is it? Since 1945? Thirty-four years, over a third of a century—why haven’t they ever exhibited it?”
“Because they have no legal right to it,” Martin said triumphantly. He made it sound as if the statement in itself proved the correctness of all he had said before.
“Besides,” Keller went on, quite as if Martin had not spoken at all, “according to your theory, this person”—he pointed to the letter with the stem of his pipe—“has gone into quite a bit of research in order to attempt this swindle.” He frowned, but his eyes were twinkling. “I don’t care for that word ‘swindle’—not for something as big as this, something involving a sum as huge as fifteen million dollars. There should be a more expensive title for a ploy that grand. This project, I suppose, would be better. If this person has gone to all this research, not to mention trouble—copies of articles, photographs—then he obviously would also know that the Russians have possession of the real treasure. Right?”
Martin was eyeing him suspiciously. “So?”
“Then how can he hope to take anyone in? If he holds his auction—and he is not trying to sell it to an individual collector, but to a museum—then the whole world will know of it in a short time. Including the Russians. And they could easily prove the man is a swindler—I mean, a project director,” he added with a smile.
“Except I’m sure he has no intention of delivering.”
Keller shook his head decisively. “Then I’m sure he has no hope of collecting. I know those of us in the museum field are thought to be woolly-headed, but we’re really not so stupid as to buy that pig in or out of a poke.”
Martin thought a moment and then smiled craftily.
“Unless,” he said slowly, slyly, “it’s the Russians themselves who are offering the treasure for sale!”
Keller smiled sardonically.
“So now the treasure is suddenly authentic, is that it? Only now it’s the Russians who are peddling it! I suppose you can also come up with a good reason why they would do a thing like that? After all these years of sitting on it?”
Martin shrugged, but there was a gleam in his eye. The more he examined his new theory, the better he liked it.
“That’s simple. Because as I said before, they have no legal right to it. What good is a treasure like the Schliemann gold if you can’t exhibit it? So they probably feel they might as well get some money out of it, at least. And they have to go about it in this anonymous way because otherwise there would be a stink if they sold something they didn’t own.”
Dr. McVeigh had been listening to this exchange quietly. Now she shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I seriously doubt if this letter came from the Russians. They’ve been returning tons of material to the East German museums, and this would certainly fall into that category. After all, the legal ownership of material donated to the Kaiser’s government back in 1887 or 1889 is certainly open to a good deal of question, especially when there have been several completely different governments since, including the late unlamented Third Reich. Lawyers would have fun with that one. And also especially since the material was donated by a man whose own legal right to the treasure has been certainly questioned often enough.”
“Overlooking that fact for a moment,” Keller said, “to sell the Schliemann treasure for a mere fifteen or twenty million dollars? I know,” he added, smiling. “A minute ago I described the sum as huge, and now it’s merely mere. But, really, for the Russians to peddle the Schliemann treasure for less than the cost of a medium Illyushin bomber? Or one of those missiles they parade around Red Square at the drop of a hat?”
“Then it’s a fake, a swindle,” Martin said positively, and came to his feet, holding up the ring and reaching for the photographs, “and if you’ll let me get on with it, I’ll prove it!”
“Do that,” Ruth McVeigh said, and pushed the wrapping paper and sealing wax across toward him. “Take these along and see what you can do about finding out where the package came from, at least.” She watched the small man pick them up with an expression of distaste, add it to his other burdens, and dart through the door. Bob Keller knocked the dottle from his pipe, blew through the stem to clear it of the remains of smoke, and tucked it carelessly into one sagging pocket. This ritual completed, he looked across the desk at the museum director and sighed.
“All right, Ruth,” he said quietly. “I recognize that look in your eye. Let’s get down to it. Let’s take it a step at a time. Let’s suppose the letter is genuine, and Jed Martin and his laboratory prove the ring is from the era of Troy. And let’s suppose the best photographic analysis indicates the pictures are genuine.”
“So?”
“So let’s go a bit further. Let’s suppose someone actually has the Schliemann treasure in his hands—”
“The Russians?”
“No, let’s suppose it’s an individual, n
ot the Russian government. And let’s suppose this person, after all these years, has either just discovered the value of what he has been holding—”
“Or just recently came into possession of it.”
“Which could mean, of course, a recent robbery at one of the Russian museums, although you would think we would have heard of something like that. Still,” Keller said, nodding his big head, “I like that idea better. Whoever he or she is, or wherever they got their hands on it, it’s hard to believe a person could have held the treasure all these years and not known what he had, or tried to capitalize on it before. So what do we have? A man or woman, unknown, is offering the Schliemann treasure—the real article, no substitutions—for auction.” He paused and looked at Ruth McVeigh. “Question: Who is going to bid on it?”
Ruth frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I say.” Keller shrugged and brought out his pipe, but not to light it, merely to stroke it, as if the feel of the smooth still-warm wood aided him in choosing his words. “I know that we won’t bid on it, and I seriously doubt if any other museum will. In fact, I’m sure they won’t. Jed Martin was right in one thing, at least. Whoever has the treasure, whether it be the Russian government or Joe, the hot-dog man at the corner, the legal ownership of the Schliemann treasure is definitely in doubt.”
The Gold of Troy Page 2