“No,” he said with finality, and roughly wrapped the pieces back into their original coverings, thrusting the packages back into the trunk and closing the lid tightly. “No. We’ll take it back to the sergeant. Maybe some of the guys will want to take some of this junk home with them for souvenirs.” He grinned, exhibiting large stained teeth. “They can tell their friends these are samples of the handiwork of the master race.”
“My old grandmother,” Private Boldin said critically, “half-blind and crippled with arthritis, could do better. With mud.”
“I’m sure,” Corporal Sokolov said politely. He picked up his rifle with one hand and one of the end straps of the trunk with the other, while Boldin picked up the other end. Even with its cargo of the four packages of metal the trunk was not very heavy, and the two men had no trouble bringing it to the room adjoining the captain’s quarters, where they set it on the floor before Sergeant Kolenko. The sergeant considered them quizzically.
“It’s all we found, at least all we found that the other guys weren’t already using, like benches and chairs and tables and stuff,” Corporal Sokolov stated, and sounded a bit shamed by his failure to bring more loot to his superior. He shrugged apologetically. “No food of any kind. It’s obvious this bunker was used just as an air-raid shelter, plus to store those paintings, and not as headquarters for any group who might have left any supplies behind. There’s no sign of continued occupancy.”
“I see,” the sergeant said, and studied the trunk. Its appearance was certainly not very prepossessing. He raised his eyes. “Where did you find it?”
“Boldin, here, was kicking at a pile of rubbish and this was behind it, in a little hole in the wall. Apparently it had been plastered over, but the barrage must have shaken the wall and the plaster broke.”
“Was there anything else in the hole?”
“No, sir. It was just about big enough for this trunk, as a matter of fact.”
“I see,” the sergeant said, and raised the trunk lid. He knelt down and opened the package Sokolov had rewrapped loosely and had placed on top. The sergeant stared at the contents with a frown upon his face. He unwrapped a second package, followed by his rapid unwrapping of the final two packages in the lot. His hands began to tremble. With an effort he kept his face expressionless as he came to his feet and carefully closed the lid.
“Boldin, here,” the corporal said into the vacuum, for the sergeant seemed at a loss for words, “he wanted to shoot the stuff up, just for the hell of it, I guess, or just for fun, or to make sure no German ever got to use the junk again, although why anyone would want to, I can’t imagine. But I figured that even if it’s garbage, maybe some of the guys might like to have pieces of it to take home for souvenirs—”
“You” — Sergeant Kolenko restrained himself with an extreme effort. He had been about to say “Idiots!” but managed to change it at the last moment — “are to be congratulated on your restraint. And you, too, private. That will be all.”
And when the two soldiers had left, the sergeant stared at the closed trunk lid for several minutes, sighed deeply, and then walked into the captain’s quarters. The captain was lying in his hammock, staring at the arched ceiling of the bunker.
“Captain—”
The captain rolled over in his hammock, almost pleased with the interruption; he had been thinking of the duties that peace would impose upon him and others of the occupying forces, condemned to try to clean up the mess their own artillery had produced. They were not pleasant thoughts.
“Yes, sergeant?”
“Captain,” the sergeant said, and took a deep breath, trying to keep his voice from trembling. “Captain, have you ever heard of the Schliemann treasure?”
I
1979
Chapter One
New York — April
As she did every working day, Dr. Ruth McVeigh spent the hour between nine and ten o’clock in the morning, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened to the public, to walk around her newly acquired domain. It was not so much to see that everything was in order — for its nearly six-hundred employees saw to it that it always was — as it was to bask in the heady feeling of achievement, or fulfillment. The vast galleries of the museum with their wealth of rich treasures were the tangible evidence of that. Ruth McVeigh had been the new director of the Metropolitan for two months now, the first woman director in the long history of the museum, and it was more than a sense of power that made her daily inspection trip so rewarding; it was the knowledge that she was fully capable of assuming the responsibility for the vast and complex operation. And that others, in selecting her for the position of director, had recognized that ability.
Ruth McVeigh was a handsome, in fact extremely beautiful, well-built woman in her mid-thirties, whose life had been dedicated to archaeology, learned from her earliest days from her father, the noted archaeologist, James McVeigh. Her childhood had been chiefly spent in exotic and therefore uncomfortable places, with demanding climates and strange tongues. Her earliest schoolhouse had been a shaded bench someplace under an awning, for trees were rare in the places her father and his crews chose to dig; her teacher had been her martyred mother, a woman to whom the arcana of yesterday had come only to mean the suffering of today. And when at last Sarah McVeigh had gone to join the sand that had been her prison for too many years, she left behind a personal failure, for despite her dire warnings and her attempts to teach odium for all things connected with archaeology and excavations, her only child found herself dedicated more and more to the earth and the many things hidden beneath it.
College was a necessary evil, as was graduate school — merely a means of obtaining the degrees vital in these academic years, to advance her in her chosen field. But each day in classroom or library, she felt, was a day stolen from working beside her father in the field. Even her unhappy and soon terminated marriage to one of her professors had been done, consciously or unconsciously, from the desire to wed herself closer to her field by sharing her body with one whose knowledge was greater than her own. It did not work. One of the reasons for the failure of the marriage, other than a surprising lack of passion on the part of her husband, was her early recognition that he was a book scholar, three pages ahead of his class, but many chapters behind her in both perception and experience.
Nor, when her father died — not from any mummy’s curse, but from overwork and a lifetime of self-neglect — did her ambition waver. She spent four years in the field, digging in various Luxor sites with several groups financed by various institutions, spent three more as assistant curator for Egyptian antiquities at the Cleveland Museum, three more as curator for Greek and Roman antiquities at the Smithsonian. Now, at thirty-four years of age, Ruth McVeigh had found her niche. She was director of the Metropolitan Museum. Her ambition went no further. She knew she would be satisfied with the job forever, forever content to walk the huge galleried halls quietly glorying in their contents and her relationship to them, before buckling down each day to her desk full of papers. The job kept her more than amply busy, and more than compensated — she often told herself at night in her large empty bed — for the lack of male companionship in her life.
She came down the high-arched corridors, nodding at the guards neatly suited in their blue uniforms, her eyes subconsciously searching for the slightest sign of vandalism from the previous day’s guests — there had been nearly thirty-thousand visitors the day before by the time she had left for the day — or any exhibit that seemed the least bit out of place. Or even with the faintest mote of dust upon it. I’m getting to be a crotchety old housekeeper type, she said to herself with a wry smile, and moved into the Egyptian galleries last. They were her favorite. Some of the exhibits there had been brought from their age-old hiding places by her father. Her tour now complete, she walked into the huge rotunda of the main entrance just as the doors were about to be opened to the public. She smiled at the eight receptionists at their octagonal station, and was about to pass on toward her second-floor office, when one of the women there called to her.