The Gold of Thrace

by Aileen G. Baron

  “That’s sophistry, intellectual imperialism.”

  “Besides,” he said with a lift of his head as if settling the argument, “the Elgin Marbles were bought and paid for from the Ottoman Empire, the legitimate government of the time.”

  Tamar found herself getting angry. “That was a deliberate political ploy on the part of the Turkish government. If you sell the past, you lose it, lose the meaning of it, lose the human heritage. It’s immoral.”

  “Immoral? Unethical? How so? Moral choice requires an ability to embrace ambiguity.” He took a sip of the Bloody Mary and put the glass on the table next to the coaster. “I just do the same as the ancient Greeks and Italians. In ancient times Etruscans bought and sold objects of art, traded them, brought Greek pottery to grace a wealthy Etruscan’s afterlife.” He moved his glass to the coaster and traced his finger along the ring the glass had left. “Now we find Greek pottery in Etruscan tombs. The pottery is part of my heritage and I do with it as I think best.”

  “So you do well by doing good?”

  “Yes, I do good. You think dealing in antiquities is evil?” he asked.

  “If it’s not evil, it leads to evil.”

  “We can only understand evil by looking within ourselves. We all keep a bit of it there. In evil, everyone is an accomplice, everyone is a victim. We excuse ourselves, and point the finger the other way. The blame is always on them, them, them.”

  The doorbell sounded. Tamar heard Fabiana grumble as she shuffled along the back hall from the kitchen to answer the door. Voices echoed from the foyer, and Enzio appeared at the entrance to the dining room. He carried a small, battered gym bag in his right hand.

  “You have something for me?” Gilberto asked.

  Enzio raised the bag and nodded.

  “Good, we’ll take care of it after lunch.”

  This time, the lunch began with steak tartar spiked with scotch and went on endlessly, with beefsteak and side dishes, tomato salad, and ice cream drizzled with maraschino for dessert.

  When they finished, Gilberto turned to Tamar. “Come along, my dear. We go downstairs. You can learn about the business, see how evil it really is.”

  He led the way down a narrow curved stairway, and Tamar followed, groggy from the Bloody Mary and the two glasses of wine at lunch. They entered a small room with a brick floor burnished to a luster. In the center, four black leather sling chairs with chromium legs faced a chrome and glass coffee table. Funerary stelae of men in the prime of life, their heads bowed in grief, of desolate Greek youths being led into eternity by long-nosed dogs, of coifed matrons draped on lounges and gazing into mirrors, lined the room.

  An alcove on the far wall held a wine cellar, stacked floor to ceiling on all three walls with wine bottles that sat in their pigeonholes like ancient manuscripts in a columbarium.

  “We go into the workroom,” Gilberto said and led the way through a door in the far wall to a room with two waist-high workbenches covered with carpeting. Shelves crammed with jars and cups filled with tubes and brushes lined the walls.

  Gilberto took the bag from Enzio and spilled the contents onto a worktable. Painted pottery sherds tumbled onto the table and Gilberto began to match broken bits of pottery to each other as if he were working a jigsaw puzzle.

  “A black on red.” He picked up a piece of curved rim and a handle and held them about three inches apart, narrowing his eyes as if envisioning the whole vessel. “A jug. An oinichoe.”

  “I found it in an Etruscan cemetery, near Civita Castellana,” Enzio said.

  Tamar edged closer to the workbench, craning her neck to see around Gilberto’s left arm. “They’re all fresh breaks. You broke this yourself?” she asked Enzio.

  “Easier to take out of Italy. I drove up over the Alps, through San Bernardino Pass. The border there is more user-friendly.”

  Gilberto dropped a sherd on a small wooden side table. It made a dull clunk. He tried another. The same deadened sound.

  He turned to Tamar and handed her a sherd. “What can you tell me about this oinichoe?”

  “From the sound when you bounced it on the table, I’d say it was fired at a low temperature.”

  Gilberto nodded and smiled, encouraging her to go on.

  “And the color of the cross section—gray with red inclusions—I’d say that confirms a low firing temperature, with older pottery grout.”

  “And?” Gilberto tilted his head at her. “Go on. Why would someone make pottery like that?”

  “To get around thermoluminescence.”

  “How would that work?”

  “It’s a very simple principle. All clay contains some radioactive impurities. They emit alpha, beta, and gamma rays, causing ionization that is trapped inside the clay and increases at a steady rate over time. When the clay is fired above a certain temperature, the charge is released in the form of light. The firing is the zero point. After the clay is fired the charge begins to accumulate again. The longer the time period, the greater the charge. The greater the charge, the more light is emitted, and the more time since the pot was fired.”

  “What does that have to do with what you noticed, the gray core and the pottery grout?”

  “The gray core and the dull thud when the sherd was dropped on the table mean that the pot was fired at a low temperature, probably below the point at which ionization would be cleaned out.”

  “And the red pottery grout?”

  “Most clay is too slippery to work and needs rough inclusions—temper, or grout—so that it holds its shape. The potter used ground-up bits of ancient pots as temper. Those are the red bits. The pot was fired at a temperature low enough not to reset the ionization, so thermoluminescence would give a false, ancient date because of the red grout.”

  “Now look at this,” Gilberto said. He took down a bottle from a shelf and a wad of cotton. “Simple nail polish remover,” he said, wetting the wad of cotton and rubbing it over the surface of one of the sherds. The paint smudged. “It is impossible to imitate the process the Greeks used to paint pottery. If this were genuine, it would not smudge. Besides,” he said, putting two of the sherds together to form a part of the figure of a man with a spear, “this oinichoe is a copy of one published in Beasely.”

  “Beasely?” Tamar said.

  “The corpus of classical Greek pottery.” Gilberto shook his head. “Enzio, Enzio. Not even a good imitation.” He gave another nod and a mournful glance. “My oldest friend. How could you do this to me?”

  His jaw worked in anger. He held the gym bag open against the edge of the table, swept the pottery sherds into the bag and turned to go. He shoved the bag at Enzio.

  “Don’t speak to me. The last time you did this, one of my runners landed in jail, and I was almost arrested myself,” he said and stomped out and up the stairs.

  Tamar looked after him.

  “You knew it was fake,” she said to Enzio.

  “So did you. You did that very well,” Enzio said. “How did you figure it out?”

  “I have the fine, analytical mind of an archaeologist.”

  “That would account for your conjectures about the pottery. And your lecture about scientific dating?”

  “Hell, I teach it.”

  “That explains it.”

  “You listen well. When I give this lecture in my Intro class, the students’ eyes glaze over.”

  “I was fascinated by your ability to infer so much from the color and sound of a piece of pottery.”

  “What was that about? Why bring a fake oinichoe to Gilberto?”

  “It’s just an old joke we have between us, that’s all.”

  “You know Gilberto well?”

  “Of course I know Gilberto. I’ve known him a long time. I knew him when his name was still Sergio Benetti. We were children together, playing in the slums of Naples. He spent a lot of time around the museum, sometimes begging for pennies on the steps outside, sometimes in the halls dr
inking in the sight of statues and vases, memorizing them.”

  “That’s what inspired him to go to the university?”

  “What university? One day he stole a wallet from one of the tourists in the museum, almost got caught. He grabbed the money and ran to the railroad station, hopped on the first train. It was going to Bologna.”

  “He studied in Bologna?”

  “You could say that. The museum there uses old men as guards. They fall asleep and the museum cases aren’t always locked. He stole a kylix—one of those graceful drinking cups with a high base and handles on either side that the Greeks used for wine. Red on black with a fine drawing of a drinking scene on the tondo. He hid it under his coat. He came back to Naples and told me how easy it was. He sold the kylix to someone and said he was going back to Bologna, had an order for a lykethos. I didn’t see him again until he turned up here in Basel as Viscount Gilberto Dela Barcolo.”

  “He lies a lot?”

  “He doesn’t think of it as lying. He thinks of it as embellishing, just fills in the blanks with his imagination,” he said.

  But still, it bothered her. “Neither of you can be trusted.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me. I like Gilberto very much. He’s a man with a wealth of misinformation at his fingertips. It’s gratifying to find someone who is more deceptive than I am. Besides, he’s my oldest friend.”

  Enzio opened the door to the other room and went to the wine alcove. He reached for a bottle of wine and inspected the label. “Ah, Blanc de Blanc, Rothschild 1983. That will do. Let’s go upstairs.”

  Upstairs, he handed the bottle to Gilberto. “A peace offering.”

  “Now he tries to bribe me with my own wine,” said Gilberto, looking at the label. “Enzio, Enzio, you are incorrigible. What am I going to do with you?” He put the bottle on the table and reached into a drawer for a corkscrew. “This calls for a special observance.” He opened the wine with a resounding pop and strode to the door. “Fabiana,” he shouted.

  She appeared through the dining room, a dishcloth in one hand, untying an apron with the other.

  “Some ice and a torte di inglese.”

  She stood in the door of the dining room, glaring at Gilberto, the apron hanging loose from the straps around her neck. “Per favore?” she said.

  “Scusi.” Gilberto gave a slight bow. “Per favore.”

  “No pablum,” she answered.

  “No problem?” Enzio said.

  “That’s what I said. No pablum.”

  Fabiana flounced out to the kitchen and reappeared in a few minutes without the apron, carrying a tray with a bucket of ice, plates, a cake, and four champagne flutes.

  “Grazie,” she said, as if she were giving an order.

  Gilberto bowed again and reached for the tray. “Grazie,” he said and rested the tray on the coffee table, gently laid the bottle of wine in the ice bucket, and began to twirl it while Fabiana seated herself in a chair in front of the fireplace. Gilberto carefully poured out four glasses and handed them around.

  When they finished the wine and the cake, Tamar left, deciding that a walk back to the Euler would clear her head. As she stood on the steps outside of Gilberto’s, she noticed a plump gray-haired man leaving by the cellar door. He seemed to be sneering. He gave Tamar a steely-eyed glance as he strode off.

  ***

  Back at the Euler, dizzy and headachy from too much wine and wondering about Enzio and his performance at Gilberto’s, Tamar fell on the bed and slept for the rest of the afternoon. In her dreams, she saw her grandmother’s stern face and heard her angry voice, “Too young, too young. You should have gone with them,” and ached for her lost parents and her brothers.

  When she awakened, she still had a slight headache. The dream haunted her, and the memory of the terrible day that she heard about the accident that killed her parents and brothers.

  The dream was about Alex too, she thought. I should have been with them, she told herself, plagued by a vague notion that somehow her presence would have changed things.

  She had dinner in her room and then went downstairs to the bar to buy a bottle of water.

  Enzio sat at one of the tables. He waved her over and she joined him. She was still bothered by his attempt to fob off the fake oinichoe on Gilberto, but she had become used to the talks they had since the first night she arrived in Basel.

  The waiter brought a sherry and a bottle of Evian water for her and a Campari for Enzio, just as he had every evening.

  She leaned back in her chair and asked, “Did you also have another name, before you became Enzio?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. My name was Aldo. So, of course, I changed it. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is named Aldo.”

  Beads of moisture had formed on the side of the water bottle. Tamar trailed her finger along it.

  “Your English is very good,” she said.

  “I spent two years in Brooklyn. It’s kind of a rite of passage. Almost every Italian spends two years in Brooklyn, even Mussolini. He spent two years there when he was a journalist.”

  She took the small paper napkin from under her sherry glass and wiped the side of the water bottle. “And Gilberto? Did Gilberto spend two years in Brooklyn?”

  “Not Gilberto. Gilberto spent five years in Manhattan.”

  “How did he manage that?”

  “He married a rich American widow. She helped set him up in a shop on Madison Avenue where he sold high end antiquities.”

  She leaned forward and began to pick at the label on the water bottle. “He’s still married to her?”

  “They divorced. After her, he came here, married a Swiss woman and got permanent resident status as the husband of a Swiss national. That also lasted five years.”

  “His relationships have a five year limit?” Tamar asked.

  “It’s not like that. Each time he falls sincerely in love.” He took a sip of Campari and contemplated her. “You’re next,” he said.

  Startled, Tamar sat back in the chair. “What makes you say that?”

  “Since he met you, he talks of nothing but the American professor.”

  She went back to picking at the label. Little bits of paper were falling onto the table. “What does he expect to gain from me?”

  “So young and yet so cynical. What about you? Were you ever married?”

  Tamar concentrated on the label. “Yes. I was.” She brushed the bits of paper from the table into the palm of her hand and stared at them.

  “Divorced?” Enzio asked.

  She felt tears well in her eyes, blinked them back and continued to look down into the palm of her hand, then shook her head.

  “We were doing a survey in the Yucatan,” she said. “Alex had found a new Mayan site in the rain forest that no one knew about, hadn’t been recorded.”

  She rubbed the scraps of paper between her palms and dropped them on the table. “The site was overgrown with vegetation, vines, tropical growth. We found some stelae, what looked like the remains of some pyramids and a ball court.”

  She paused.

  “We came on the site by accident, followed a path that had been hacked out in the jungle with a machete.”

  She took a deep breath, lifted her glass of sherry, looked at it and put it down again.

  “He went back by himself to take some record shots, copy some of the glyphs from the stelae. I stayed in town.” She had the napkin in her hand and was twisting it at the corners. “He never came back.”

  She took a sip of the sherry and held her breath for a moment. “They found him in the parking lot of our hotel in the morning, naked, slashed to death with a machete. No one found the site again.”

  “What about his notes?”

  “The notes were gone, the coordinates of the site, the photos were gone.”

  She ran her fingers up and down the stem of the sherry glass and turned it. Some spilled on the table and she wiped it with the wadded na
pkin. “I should have been with him.”

  “You couldn’t have saved him,” Enzio said.

  “But we’d have been together,” she said, and once more thought of her grandmother, the way she watched her. Tamar looked like her mother, she knew she did, and her grandmother must have hated her for it. Whenever Tamar walked into her room, her grandmother would fold her arms and tap her foot. Silent. Always silent, she would glare at Tamar as if to ask why Tamar was still alive while the others were all dead.

  Tamar took a sip of the sherry while Enzio looked at her. “I was afraid,” she said, almost in a whisper.

  “Did they ever find whoever killed your husband?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Never. Parts of the stelae showed up a year later in museums.”

  All the frustration and anger and self-guilt of the past three years welled up in her.

  “They’re all in on it,” she said with a sweeping gesture. The bottle of water tipped over and began to roll off the table. “From the esteleros in the Yucatan to the tombaroli who rob tombs in Tuscany, to the runners and dealers and the collectors. Gilberto included. Even the museums.”

  Enzio retrieved the bottle of water from the floor and handed it to her.

  “And what about you?” she asked. “What was that trick you pulled today with the oinichoe? Are you a tombaroli or are you a con man?”

  After a moment of silence, he said, “You’re not here to buy something for a museum. You’re here to get some kind of redemption.”

  She considered that for a while and then thought maybe what he said was true.

  Chapter Fifteen

  London Times, August 14, 1990

  BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGIST KILLED IN BULGARIA

  SOFIA, BULGARIA— British archaeologist Andrew Chatham, Assistant Keeper of Near Eastern Archaeology at the British Museum and lecturer at Izmir University, was found murdered here three days ago.

  Chatham’s corpse was discovered fully clothed, face down outside an abandoned warehouse in the outskirts of Sofia. Preliminary autopsy reports indicate that the cause of death was a blunt head trauma. The body had been stripped of all identification.