Read The Gold of Thrace Online
Authors: Aileen G. Baron
Tags: #FICTION, #Mystery & Detective, #General
Lyon, France, August 22, 1990
They had just finished lunch at an outdoor café overlooking the Rhône and drunk a half a bottle of Beaujolais. The breeze coming off the river was bright with the first hint of autumn and dried leaves swirled in little eddies on the pavement around the table.
Tamar sat back and closed her eyes while the sharp autumn air fanned her hair.
Enzio lit a cigarette. The smell was sharp, acrid, and somehow familiar.
“Different brand?” Tamar asked, her eyes still closed.
“Turkish.”
The smell of the cigarette combined with the gentle wind off the river tugged at her memory.
“You should really give up smoking,” she said.
There was a crisp day just like this one, she remembered. There was a small stucco house with a sign that said “The Future Foretold, Palms Read” that hung from the porch and swung in an autumn breeze.
“She’s very good,” her grandmother had said as they drove down Whittier Boulevard. “She’s never wrong.”
“Did she tell you about the accident?” Tamar asked, about the day everything changed.
“Don’t be impertinent.” Her grandmother had narrowed her eyes. “She warned me that someday I would be burdened with the upbringing of an impudent child.”
That was supposed to be enough to keep her quiet, but Tamar said, “Can she read my fortune too?”
“You’re only a child,” her grandmother said, as if her future would not be fully formed until after voting age.
“I’m thirteen. If I were in Samoa, I would be married, with children. Margaret Mead says so.”
“You’re wrong,” her grandmother said.
Inside, the house of the fortune-teller smelled of cigarettes and damp, mice and stale cookies. The fortune-teller had long earrings and a scarf on her head, and her fingers seemed to curl and cup around her words when she spoke. Her name was Zelika.
Tamar sat in a chair against the wall while Zelika scanned her grandmother’s hand and told her grandmother what she wanted to hear.
And then, Zelika looked over at Tamar. “For the young lady, I have something special,” she said.
Her grandmother was about to remonstrate, but Zelika had already gone through the curtain into the back of the house. She returned a few minutes later with a bowl of ice water and a saucepan she clutched with a padded glove at arm’s length.
“No charge,” she said.
She put the bowl on the table. The contents of the saucepan hit the water in the bowl with a sizzle.
“Melted lead,” she said.
Tamar came over to the table and saw a shiny tangle of bones and skulls at the bottom of the bowl.
“You’re going to marry a doctor,” her grandmother declared.
“She’s going to marry, but the marriage will end in tragedy.”
Her grandmother gave her another accusatory look, as if to say she brings on all this tragedy herself. Maybe she was right. Years later in the Yucatan, when Tamar gazed at reliefs along the base of a ball court with the bones and skulls like the lead drippings, she remembered her grandmother.
“But she will find another,” Zelika continued.
Her grandmother looked skeptical. “She will?”
“Someone who deceives her when they meet,” Zelika said, and Tamar felt a chill of apprehension and longed for safety.
“You do séances?” Tamar asked.
Her grandmother yanked at her arm and gave her a look that would freeze a penguin.
But Zelika bent down and stroked her cheek.
“I can’t bring back your momma and poppa, little one,” she said. “No one can bring back the dead.”
***
“What are you thinking?” Enzio asked. “You look like you’re asleep.”
She opened her eyes and sat straight in the chair. “No. Just thinking.”
“About Gilberto?”
She contemplated the water. An excursion boat passed, going downriver.
“Sort of,” she said. “Gilberto, Mustafa, Chatham, Orman, the whole thing. That first day I was at Gilberto’s, when Fabiana gave the deposition to the police about the coins Firenzano stole when she left the basement window open, Gilberto was angry that they let Firenzano go.”
“Gilberto was angry about the whole thing—that Fabiana had set it up. She used the coins to pay Firenzano. It didn’t cost them anything. Fabiana figured that Firenzano would be released as soon as she gave the deposition to the police, and the insurance would pay for the coins when Gilberto reported the theft to the police.”
Tamar nodded, said, “Hmm,” and played with her napkin. “I still don’t understand why Chatham was killed.”
“Chatham and Mustafa were partners, and Fabiana was on to them.”
“The fresco that never arrived?”
He nodded. “That and other things. It was dangerous to cross Fabiana. They were cheating her.”
“But why?”
“Chatham needed money. He hated his wife, but needed his own money to get away from her.”
“So Firenzano followed Chatham from Turkey on the train and killed Chatham on orders from Fabiana. And Demitrius and Irena were in on it.”
“No, they had a different scam going. Chatham fell for it. Finding the Thracian gold was a windfall for Firenzano.”
“But why Chatham? Why not Mustafa? Mustafa was the one in Basel.”
“He was supposed to be next. Fabiana was waiting for Firenzano to get back from The Hague.”
“Where he killed Orman.”
“Fabiana didn’t plan that. He killed Orman on his own. After he got the money from the Thracian gold, he got more independent, didn’t just take orders from Fabiana. Besides, Orman was getting too close.”
Enzio lifted the bottle of Beaujolais and was about to pour some into her glass.
She put her hand over the rim. “No more for me, thanks. I’ll fall asleep during the interview.”
“Gives you courage.”
“I’ll have to find courage on my own.”
He shrugged and reached for the bottle of Evian water to pour into her glass.
“And Mustafa? Why did he need money?”
“His money was going to Freedom Fighters for Kurdistan. Mustafa is a bit of an idealist.”
“He did it for the Yezidi?”
“No. The Yezidi are peace loving. These are Kurdish extremists fighting for an independent Kurdistan, Kurds from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.”
“What about the Aristides?” Tamar asked. “Were they in on it?”
“Not at all. Leandro is busy working on his corpus of Byzantine coins and Madame Aristides is in Paris for her annual session with her plastic surgeon.”
“I think Mustafa liked the irony of financing rebels with antiquities stolen from Turkey,” Tamar said. “He cheated Fabiana because he probably thought she deserved to be cheated.”
“He blamed Gilberto. That’s why he killed him.”
“For Chatham’s death?” She grasped the stem of the glass and twirled it. “I don’t think Gilberto knew the full extent of what Fabiana was doing,” she said.
Enzio nodded “Gilberto was an easy dupe. He was too busy enjoying his sybaritic life-style—cases of the best vintages automatically sent over by the wine merchant, epicurean lunches with the elite—the prince of antiquity dealers. Fabiana manipulated him.”
Tamar sighed and took a sip of water. “He knew what was going on.” She watched the white caps on the river rise and fall, whipped by tiny gusts of autumn breeze. “He let Fabiana take care of the dirty work.”
They both fell silent, gazing at the boats that moved dreamily along the river, at the gentle motion of the current, listening to the water slip back and forth along the riverbank.
“Will you be going back to Hazarfen next season?”
“After all that’s happened?”
“You found what you came after in Basel,” he said.
“I found the mosaic, if that’s what you mean.”
“And you broke up an illegal antiquities operation.”
“I suppose.” She looked at the river, not at Enzio. “It’s all gone now. Benito will sell off what’s left and go back to Cortina.”
“Not really,” he said. “He’s now Ercole Sforza, the CEO of Sforza Galleries.”
“Sforza Galleries?”
“With branches in Paris, New York, and Berlin. He’s developed a new wrinkle for the antiquities trade. He’s selling franchises. He provides the design for displays, sets up the galleries, then sells them overpriced antiquities that have been artfully mounted on acrylic bases and gives them letters of authenticity and provenance. He seems to have an endless supply.”
“So that’s what happened to the Roman Kybele. All the antiquities come from the collection of the Marquis de Cuvier?”
“No, some come from the family collection of the descendants of Baron Von Humboldt.”
“Humboldt was a nineteenth-century geologist.”
“Who would be in a better position to collect antiquities?”
“He never married. He didn’t have descendants.”
“That’s the beauty of it.”
“Did anyone find the Kybele missing from Ephesus?” Tamar asked.
“Not yet. Rome wasn’t sacked in a day.” He leaned back. “Besides, it was on loan from a certain Demitrius Konstantinopoulis.”
“Mustafa was casing Ephesus, you know. He was checking out the security in the museum.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it.” Enzio signaled the waiter.
“
L’addition
,” he said and stood up.
“We have to go or you’ll be late,” he told Tamar. “Have to find a taxi.”
He totaled up the check again when the waiter brought it, running his finger quickly down the edge of the paper, left a pile of franc notes and took what was left of the Evian water.
***
The taxi left them off near the gate.
Tamar gaped at the high green iron fence topped with razor wire, at the reflecting pool around the concrete and glass building.
“Your mother’s house?” Tamar asked.
Enzio nodded. “As the French would say,
Formidable
.”
The gendarmes at the gate inspected her passport and waved her on toward an intercom at the front gate.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” Enzio said.
“I’m not afraid,” she said, and realized that for the first time in a long time she wasn’t afraid at all.
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