“You thought that?” Gregor Kovpak shook his head. “No,” he said gently, “in this you are wrong. The treasure is not in Russia, nor has it ever been. That is the truth. And as for the auction being a hoax, I’m quite convinced it is quite genuine. Since I first heard of this auction I’ve spoken with people I know at various museums, and they assure me the pieces they received as proof of the genuineness of the offer, were themselves quite genuine.” He looked at her. “Wasn’t this also your experience?”
“It was. But, in that case, why do you think this conference is a waste of time?”
Gregor hesitated, putting his thoughts in order, twisting the stem of the martini glass in his fingers, watching the contents sluggishly attempt to follow the motion of the glass but never quite catch up. At last he looked up.
“I think your conference is a waste of time,” he said quietly, “because of the people you are dealing with. Consider your first session today. Four claimants, each convinced he represents the party to whom the treasure morally and legally belongs. Do you believe you can convince those four people that they are wrong? As indeed they are? And your discussions will get more disruptive, not less. Most of those present want the treasure, and they want it for themselves. If they were serious people, they would agree that each museum put up a portion of the asking price and they would buy the treasure jointly. And then decide in some kind of future lottery among themselves how each museum would exhibit it in turn. In that way—” He frowned at the expression on Ruth’s face. “What’s wrong? What did I say?”
“You said exactly what I said to our board of directors!” Ruth said triumphantly, and smiled at him. “That is exactly the proposition I intend to present to the conference tomorrow morning. In fact, I’m going to suggest that the four claimants, as you call them, be allowed to share without paying anything. That was my idea when I set up this conference.” She felt exhilarated. “So you agree that’s the best way to handle the matter. I’m sure it is.”
Kovpak was frowning at her. “I do not agree at all! I said that is what would happen if you were dealing with serious people. But you are dealing with fanatics, collectors. Do you honestly believe the four who spoke today are going to relinquish their claim, just because they are given a small share of something they believe is totally theirs? Now you expect to ask the others to not only pay their own share, but to add something on for the claimants. Then you intend to tell them they possibly might not be able to exhibit the treasure for as much as fifteen or twenty years, perhaps.” He shrugged. “Many of them will be dead by then.”
“They could visit the museum exhibiting the treasure and see it there—”
“That would be even worse. They don’t want to see the treasure, they want to own it. Many of them have already seen the treasure in Berlin, before the war. Certainly the two German museums who argued for possession today have seen it. It would be even more galling for them to travel, say, to the Metropolitan in New York, and look at a treasure they feel (a) is theirs, (b) is in the hands of someone else, and (c) they cannot show in their own museum for ten or fifteen years.” He shook his head decisively. “They will never agree. Which is why I said the conference is not only amusing, but is also a waste of time.”
Ruth shook her head stubbornly. “I think you’re wrong. Bob Keller said the same thing as you, and I told him I thought he was wrong, too. In fact I bet him a dinner on it—”
Kovpak wondered who this Bob Keller was. For a moment he felt an unreasoning wave of jealousy, and then realized how foolish he was being. “Speaking of dinner,” he said, happy to be getting away from the subject of Bob Keller, whoever he might be, “would you like another drink here, or with dinner?”
“With dinner, I think.”
They finished their drinks and Gregor signed the tab. He came to his feet, helped Ruth up, and walked into the lobby with her, smiling down at her. “There’s a restaurant that’s been highly recommended to me. It’s only a few blocks from here. It’s a nice evening. We could walk over there and try it, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
They left the hotel and walked slowly along Park Lane, with the traffic pouring by on the park side, and turned into the quieter Curzon Street, not speaking, each busy with his own thoughts. The restaurant was easily identifiable, being the only one in the block across from Shepherd Market that exhibited any light at all. It occurred to Kovpak that they had no reservations, but his fears on that score were allayed when he saw the restaurant was practically deserted. If that was an indication of bad food, Kovpak said to himself, I’ll have the major’s scalp! On my first and probably last date with Ruth McVeigh! Not that food was all that important, but still...
They were seated, ordered a cocktail as well as their main meal, which was to be delayed awhile, and looked at each other in silence. Ruth could see the admiration in Gregor’s eyes, and wondered if he could see the same in hers. She decided it was time to change the unspoken subject, and picked the first thing that came into her mind.
“You said before, that the arguments of those four people who made claim to the collection were completely invalid,” she said. “On what basis?”
“Simply because they were. On the same basis, you could claim the treasure for the Metropolitan, or possibly the Smithsonian. After all, one made his claim on the basis of Sophie Schliemann being Greek. Well, after all, Heinrich Schliemann was a citizen of the United States at the time he discovered Troy; not of Germany or Greece, but of the United States.”
“But that’s ridiculous—”
“Of course it is. As were the other arguments you heard today.” He suddenly grinned. “The only valid arguments for ownership — there are two of them — would have to come from Russia.”
“Russia? You’re joking.”
“I’m quite serious,” Gregor said, his grin disappearing. “It’s easy to say that Heinrich Schliemann spent the last part of his life and most of his fortune searching for Troy, or Mycenae, or anything else. The thing that enabled him to do this, instead of working as a clerk somewhere, was money. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Ruth said, wondering where he was leading.
“Money,” Gregor said, repeating himself. “Money discovered the treasure, because it was money that hired the workers who did the actual excavation. It was money that paid for the equipment, for the shovels and picks and the wagons and everything else. It was money that paid for Heinrich and Sophie to travel to those places. And that money was Russian money.” He saw the look on Ruth’s face and nodded. “It’s quite true, you know. It was money Schliemann made by holding the Russian army up to exorbitant prices during the Crimean War. Schliemann had managed a monopoly on the indigo trade in Russia, and he made the Russian army pay what even an American would call an unconscionable price for indigo at a time when the army found it an indispensable product. It was a natural product then. Indigo wasn’t synthesized until many years later, and by — the word is gouging — the Russians, Schliemann became wealthy enough to indulge his passion for exploration.” He shrugged. “So, on the basis that it was Russian money that financed the discovery of the treasure in the first place, one has to say the treasure properly belongs to Russia.”
He paused as their drinks came. Ruth McVeigh had been listening to the argument with a slight frown on her face, wondering if Gregor Kovpak was serious, or if he was pulling her leg. They picked up their drinks and sipped. Kovpak put his glass down and went on.
“I said there were two arguments for my country to claim the treasure. The second, of course, is that the treasure was recovered by the Russians in a bunker in Berlin. That much is true. And on the basis of that find — a spoils of war — the treasure also properly belongs to Russia.”