The Mask of Troy jh-5

by David Gibbins

  ‘I was thinking about the swastika, the meaning, the associations,’ Costas said. ‘On one side, the clockwise swastika, you’ve got war, horror, the Nazis. On the other side, peace, the balance of power, if you’re right about this place.’

  Jack stared at it. ‘The ancient Hittites had a saying. “I give you a tablet of peace; I give you a tablet of war.” It’s the same thing, offering the same tablet, different sides. We make the choice. One side, war. The other side, peace.’

  ‘Unless you’re up against Agamemnon with ten thousand arrows of iron, or Hitler and the Nazis.’

  ‘Or a bunch of Russian thugs.’

  ‘No choice there.’

  ‘None at all.’

  A team of Turkish naval ratings in overalls appeared with body bags and went past them into the chamber, quickly bagging the two bodies and carrying them out. Jack looked back at the extraordinary place Hiebermeyer had found, that Schliemann had found, thinking of the days ahead when this discovery would be splashed across world headlines. Hiebermeyer would take the cake, but Jack would be there alongside him once the shipwreck excavation was finished and he could reveal the splendours of the Shield of Achilles and the other discoveries. He looked around again. Had Schliemann truly dug this far, and seen this? Jack fervently hoped so, hoped that in the days before his death Schliemann had been vindicated, had found what he needed to prove he had been right. This place now would be put before the world as Jack imagined Schliemann would have planned, not simply as an astonishing discovery but also for its place in history, to show a time when men might have found a way to curb war. He looked around one final time, and sniffed. He could smell the blood in the chamber. He thought of it for a moment, of all that this meant. The smell of blood. The smell of iron. He shook his head. He looked at his fingernails, and realized that they still had the dark residue of blood in them from the Russian he had killed in the mine. At Troy, killing was never far away.

  ‘I think…’ he said to Costas, rubbing his stubble. ‘I think I might take a trip to Paris. Look at some art, you know. It’s been a while.’

  ‘While you’ve got a Trojan War shipwreck to excavate? No way. You mean you plan never to let Rebecca out of your sight again, ever.’

  ‘You can come too.’

  ‘Me? The Louvre? Dad and Uncle Costas? Accidentally in Paris, just when Rebecca happens to be on a school trip there? No way Rebecca will allow that. Let Ben deal with security. Anyway…’

  ‘Let me guess. You’ve got a submersible to fix. And Jeremy’s waiting.’

  ‘Uncanny mind-reading ability.’

  ‘What do you expect? That’s how I’ve saved your life so many times.’

  ‘Huh? What? Let’s just get that right. Who defused that mine?’

  ‘You didn’t defuse it. You activated it.’

  ‘And what about in there? Covering your back like that?’

  Jack put his hand on Costas’ shoulder. ‘Yeah, yeah. What would I do without you?’ He cracked a tired grin. ‘I need to get under the sea again. Let’s get out of here.’

  Epilogue

  (Auschwitz), Poland

  James Dillen got out of the taxi, paid the driver and watched the battered old car reverse and speed back the way it had come, belching exhaust into the narrow lane. He waited until the noise had gone, then turned, pulling up the collar of his coat, tucking the folder he was carrying under his arm and shoving his hands into his pockets. It felt cold, like the cold he had felt that morning five months ago when he and Rebecca had gone to visit Hugh in Bristol, only this time it was not tiredness that made him shiver, but the real bitterness of an early November morning, cold enough for snow.

  He smeared his foot over the light hoar frost that covered the lane. The air itself seemed to have frozen, reducing visibility to a few hundred yards. He took a deep breath, feeling the sharpness in his lungs, and then exhaled forcibly. He smelled burning, the lingering fumes of car exhaust. He reached out and put his hand on one of the trees that lined the lane, wanting to feel what life felt like in this place. Place of the beeches, they had called it. Birkenau. The bark felt tough and carapaced, yet also strangely yielding and soft. He leaned over, and smelled a mossy smell. Close up, he saw the colours of vegetation beneath the frost, deep browns, dark greens. He watched a leaf detach itself from a branch and fall, spinning slowly down, brushing his leg and coming to rest in the wetness where his foot had smeared the frost. He watched it settle, absorb the moisture, lose its colour, suddenly flat and immaterial.

  He straightened up, discomfited. He had expected to be overwhelmed by this place, not absorbed in detail. Perhaps it was the detail that gave definition to the enormity that lay just beyond, in the mist. He looked through the trees and spotted the disused railway track, bisected by the path to the house. He left the lane and walked towards the track, then knelt alongside it, listening. There would always be trains running along this track, lines of boxcars, frozen in time. He wondered if those trees had been saplings back then, whether they held some imprint of what had passed this way: crammed-together faces in boxcar doors of trucks, anxious mothers and exhausted children, moments of sudden fear. He looked up to where he knew the railway line was heading. The track cut across the image like a great tear through a canvas, and for a moment he felt as if he were a crouched figure in a painting, anonymous, insignificant. He stood up. He had come here to see Hugh, and the girl. And he had come to tell the others the final reckoning on Troy, the words of the ancient poet that he and Hugh had so painstakingly translated in the weeks since Rebecca had been freed and the excavation had ended.

  ‘James!’ He looked over to the house, startled. A figure was hurrying towards him, wearing snow boots, a grey school greatcoat, a multicoloured scarf and an orange hat, her long dark hair streaming behind her. She was rubbing her hands together, and gave him a quick hug when she reached him. ‘Come on inside. You must be freezing.’

  ‘Is Hugh here yet?’

  ‘Dad and I flew in with him to Warsaw yesterday.’ Rebecca blew on her hands again. ‘We’ve only been here about an hour. The couple who run this place are really nice. Hugh’s not very well, you know. It was a bit of a shock seeing him away from his room. He’s pretty frail.’

  ‘I know.’ Dillen paused. ‘But before we go in. How did you work out that this was the place?’

  Rebecca shoved her hands in her pockets. ‘After we came back from Troy, Dad decided to see if we could find out what happened to her. To the girl with the harp. He’s been really preoccupied with that awful bunker, did you know?’

  ‘I know that NATO has agreed to an excavation, and meanwhile the airbase is on complete lockdown. I know there’s great excitement about the works of art and antiquities that might be there, but huge trepidation about what else they might find. It’s going to be the big story next year.’

  ‘And Saumerre,’ Rebecca said grimly. ‘When Dad had his little chat with him, the arrangement was that Saumerre keeps away from us, and we won’t expose him. Dad said he only spoke to him about underworld dealings, his family business, and in no way hinted that we suspected any fundamentalist terrorist connection. The media already knows about Saumerre’s family background, and if any of this stuff about stolen art and antiquities and the odd murder and kidnapping leaked out, then he could try to shrug it off as a media fantasy, meanwhile doubly securing himself against any personal implication. But if the idea of a fundamentalist backdrop leaks out, that’s another story.’

  ‘That’s why Raitz’s trial is so important.’

  Rebecca nodded. ‘Dad’s hoping it can be stalled at least until the bunker excavation is finished. He thinks Raitz is a weakling and will spill the beans about Saumerre in his trial, even after what Dad said to him. If that happens, then Saumerre will disappear and become another Osama bin Laden. The security services don’t want that. He has to be kept in play as long as possible, until his organization can be infiltrated. But Dad’s worried that even before his trial, Raitz will break
and try to plea-bargain. He’s got influential friends in London, lawyers, politicians, who will be encouraging him to do this, and meanwhile painting his detention as a human rights issue. That’s why the Turks are going to want to hold the trial pretty soon. They’re only putting it off because of all the strings we’ve pulled. The security services know what’s going on and why, but as far as public perception goes, it looks bad. Eminent architectural historian held for months without trial by the Turkish military for trespassing on an archaeological site. That’s what it looks like.’

  ‘Sounds almost as if a stray round should have got Raitz during your little showdown.’

  ‘Dad says keeping him alive was essential to the game that’s being played now, as Raitz is basically taking the fall for what’s happened. But it’s a pressure cooker and it’s going to blow. Realizing that was what made Dad push for the bunker excavation. If we can find and secure whatever’s in there, then at least that’s one ingredient out of the equation.’

  ‘Has Jack told Hugh about the excavation?’

  ‘He’s really torn about whether to tell him – because of Peter, how he might have died, that his body might still be in there. Anyway, Dad really wanted us to do this search for the girl. He said he’d spoken to you about it, and you’d decided we should do it straight-away, for Hugh’s sake. So we started off at the Imperial War Museum in London, where the Belsen material is archived. Eventually we found reference to a satellite camp. Some sign-off forms for supplies by a doctor who’d gone straight out there from medical school at Guy’s Hospital, and a tally form of new arrivals at the hospital the Red Cross set up at Belsen. The date was right. First of all we tried to find the doctor, but after the war he didn’t return to finish his degree and there was no record of him. Then came the real scoop. A few years ago, one of the Red Cross nurses at Belsen recorded her experiences for an audio presentation at the museum, and we found her. She remembered another nurse, a friend of hers, who’d spent her first day out there at this other camp, the satellite camp. Next stop for us, Australia.’

  ‘ Australia.’

  Rebecca nodded. ‘The two women had kept up a correspondence. We found her in a nursing home in Brisbane. A lovely lady, Helen, very no-nonsense. But she wept so much when we spoke. It was like Hugh. It was the first time she’d really talked to anyone about it. She’d been in charge of the children at that camp. She remembered the girl with the harp, and the drawing. She was the one who gave it to Hugh when the SAS patrol came into the camp.’

  ‘So she knew what had happened to the girl?’

  Rebecca paused, staring at the railway line. ‘Apparently the girl never spoke, but others who’d been at Auschwitz told the nurse the story. The girl and her parents were brought to the new Auschwitz camp at Birkenau in a cattle car in 1942, along this very line.’ She faltered, and shivered. ‘Her parents were immediately gassed, but she survived because they told the SS at the railhead that she was a talented musician. The SS put her in the camp orchestra, which played jazz and dance songs to the arriving Jews. Then they took her to the brothel. In early 1945 she was put on the march west, ending up in the camp near Belsen. Shortly before liberation, the SS camp leader, a woman, found out what the girl had been at Auschwitz and paraded her in front of the others, like an animal. Apparently, she screamed at the girl, I will personally see that you suffer. Ich werde personlich dafur sorgen, dass Sie leiden. Helen said she always remembered being told that. It was only a few days before the liberation, and the SS knew the writing was on the wall, yet that woman could still be so cruel. Helen was told that they dragged the girl off into the forest, where she was raped by the guards in that bunker. She was left for dead but escaped into the forest, then went back into the camp when she saw the SAS patrol arrive. She was seventeen years old at liberation.’

  ‘Have you told any of this to Hugh?’

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘Dad said Hugh would have a good enough idea. And we didn’t want to upset him.’

  ‘So the nurse in Australia, Helen, sent you here?’

  Rebecca nodded. ‘She’d worked here herself, in the 1950s. This is the last of these special houses, within sight of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. It’s a closely guarded secret. There are benefactors, Jewish organizations, others. They still call them the children, even seventy years on. They’re the ones who could never be rehabilitated. It’s as if their lives ended that moment on the railhead, and the only chance of happiness is to bring them back here, because this was the last place before the train drew up at that ramp.’

  ‘Hugh said that, when he showed us the drawing in Bristol. He’d spoken to the nurse.’

  Rebecca nodded. ‘She remembered him. That’s why she agreed to tell us about this place. At first she wouldn’t, but then Dad went back to her alone, flew all the way to Australia to talk to her again. She said it was for Hugh.’

  ‘Okay. Let’s go inside,’ Dillen said.

  Rebecca mounted the steps, then turned and held Dillen’s arm. ‘You said you knew? When I told you I thought Hugh wasn’t well.’

  Dillen paused for a moment, then looked at her. He took her hand in his, and held it. ‘The day after we visited Hugh, just before you were kidnapped, when I went back to Bristol to set him up with the translation, I went with him to the hospital. He wanted me to know. He’d known for some time.’

  Rebecca was crying. ‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘I thought there was something wrong when Dad and I picked him up. I just knew it. So Dad knew, too?’

  ‘He didn’t want to upset you. He thinks you’ve had enough already.’

  Rebecca took off her glove and wiped her eyes. ‘So that’s what he went back to tell Helen in Australia. That Hugh was dying.’

  ‘We don’t know that. For sure.’

  ‘He’s ninety-three.’

  ‘Come on.’ Dillen took Rebecca in his arms, and gave her a hug. ‘Chin up, as Hugh used to say.’

  Rebecca sniffed, nodded and opened the screen door and then the heavier wooden door behind. It was very warm, and Dillen quickly shut the door behind him. His glasses steamed up and he took them off to wipe them. There was a fire in the room to the right, a warm orange glow, and at the end of the stone-flagged floor ahead he could see a kitchen with someone moving around, a kettle on the boil. Rebecca gestured to a doorway to the left. ‘Keep your jacket on,’ she said. Dillen followed her into a dining room with a partition wall and an open veranda. On the patio beyond he could see several rocking chairs facing a garden, partly obscured in the mist.

  Jack was there, standing quietly at the entrance to the veranda, arms folded, looking out. He turned as he heard them, then put his finger to his lips and beckoned them over. Rebecca let Dillen go first. He nodded at Jack, and then peered round the open door on to the patio. Hugh was sitting outside in a wicker chair, swathed in a blanket, facing away from them. His thick white hair was carefully combed back. Dillen looked beyond, where Hugh was facing. The garden was long, narrow, shrouded in mist, enclosed on either side by high hedgerows. It was facing in the same direction as the railway line, which was visible through a break in the hedge to the left.

  Dillen peered down the garden, straining his eyes for what he knew must be there.

  Then he saw her.

  She was sitting like Hugh with her back to them, bundled up in a thick coat and scarf. He could tell it was a woman, from her shape, from the long hair that tumbled down her back beneath her scarf, wavy and thick. It was white, but it could have been fair. He knew it was an old woman, but it could have been a girl. The image came in and out of view in the mist, sometimes sharply delineated, sometimes barely visible. Suddenly he saw her very clearly. She was sitting behind a musical instrument, large, unmistakable.

  The girl with the harp.

  Dillen couldn’t see Hugh’s face, or hers. He remembered his vision at the railway line, the image of himself crouched beside it. Here, it was two figures, but the image was the same, torn through by the line of the hedgerow, wi
th the railway track beyond. He shivered, and took a step back. His breath crystallized, but he saw barely any breath in front of Hugh. He looked at Hugh’s hands. They were white-knuckled, clutching at the arms of the chair, trembling.

  There was a whinny and a stomp, and a white horse appeared, its head peering over the hedge, shaking its long mane, and then it snorted and cantered off out of sight. It had been the only sound he had heard outside, and it was startling. Jack put his hand on Dillen’s shoulder, and then reached over and pulled the door to, leaving it slightly ajar. There was a sound of tinkling, and Dillen turned to see a woman place a tray of drinks and biscuits on the table. She was small, elderly, and was followed by a man of similar appearance. Dillen stepped forward and shook hands with them. The woman spoke English with an east European accent. ‘Welcome to our home. Can I offer you tea? Coffee?’

  ‘Thank you. Tea, please.’ Dillen gestured to the patio. ‘What about Hugh?’

  ‘He’s already had his hot chocolate,’ Rebecca said, smiling sadly. ‘Said it was the best he’d had since the war.’

  ‘Did you tell him that she was here?’

  ‘You can’t keep anything from Hugh,’ Jack said quietly, smiling. ‘Former intelligence officer, you know. Had to have the full operational briefing before we flew out. But it’s been a very big thing for him. He’s been like that since we sat him out there half an hour ago.’

  ‘And the… girl?’ Dillen said. ‘How long has she been there?’

  ‘Every day,’ the Polish man said. ‘Every day, for as long as we have cared for her. She is the last of the children. Now that winter is drawing in, we’ll bring her back in before too long. She has a hot-water bottle. She’s warm.’

  ‘Does she ever play?’ Dillen asked. ‘I mean, the harp?’

  ‘We think she plays for her parents, in her mind, all the time. We think they loved to hear her play. We never hear it, but sometimes when you get close you can hear her humming quietly to herself, and you can see her fingers playing, nearly touching the strings. Children’s songs, learning songs. The horse can hear it too, we’re sure. It’s got a beautiful mane, don’t you think? It rises in the wind like the waves on the sea. We think she must have had a horse as a child. That horse is descended from the white horse that the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess, liked to ride, when he played with his own children by the river here.’