When they’d docked the motorboat at Christiangade, Malone had wanted answers, but Thorvaldsen had promised that over dinner all would be explained. So he’d been driven back to Copenhagen, slept a little, then worked in the bookstore the remainder of the day. A couple of times he drifted into the history section and found a few volumes on Alexander and Greece. But mainly he wondered what Thorvaldsen had meant by Cassiopeia needs your help.
Now he was beginning to understand.
Out the open window, across the square, he spotted Cassiopeia leaving his bookshop, dashing through the rain, something wrapped in a plastic bag tucked beneath one arm. Thirty minutes ago he’d given her the key to the store so she could use his computer and phone.
“Finding Alexander’s body,” Thorvaldsen said, “centers on Ely and the manuscript pages he uncovered. Ely initially asked Cassiopeia to locate the elephant medallions. But when we started to track them down, we discovered someone else was already looking.”
“How did Ely connect the medallions to the manuscript?”
“He examined the one in Samarkand and found the microletters. ZH. They have a connection to the manuscript. After Ely died, Cassiopeia wanted to know what was happening.”
“So she came to you for help?”
Thorvaldsen nodded. “I couldn’t refuse.”
He smiled. How many friends would buy an entire museum and duplicate everything inside just so it could burn to the ground?
Cassiopeia disappeared below the windowsill. He heard the café’s main door below open and close, then footsteps climbing the metal stairway to the second floor.
“You’ve stayed wet a lot today,” Malone said, as she reached the top.
Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, her jeans and pullover shirt splotched with rain. “Hard for a girl to look good.”
“Not really.”
She threw him a look. “A charmer tonight.”
“I have my moments.”
She removed his laptop from the plastic bag and said to Thorvaldsen, “I downloaded everything.”
“If I’d known you were going to bring it over in the rain,” Malone said, “I’d have insisted on a security deposit.”
“You need to see this.”
“I told him about Ely,” Thorvaldsen said.
The dining room was dim and deserted. Malone ate here three or four times a week, always at the same table, near the same hour. He enjoyed the solitude.
Cassiopeia faced him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it.
“I appreciate that.”
“I appreciate you saving my ass.”
“You would have found a way out. I just sped things up.”
He recalled his predicament and wasn’t so sure about her conclusion.
He wanted to ask more about Ely Lund, curious as to how he’d managed to crack her emotional vault. Like his own, there were a multitude of locks and alarms. But he kept silent-as always when feelings were unavoidable.
Cassiopeia switched on the laptop and brought several scanned images onto the screen. Words. Ghostly gray, fuzzy in places, and all in Greek.
“About a week after Alexander the Great died, in 323 BCE,” Cassiopeia said, “Egyptian embalmers arrived in Babylon. Though it was summer, hot as hell, they found his corpse uncorrupted, its complexion still lifelike. That was taken as a sign from the gods of Alexander’s greatness.”
He’d read about that earlier. “Some sign. He was probably still alive, in a terminal coma.”
“That’s the modern consensus. But that medical state was unknown then. So they went about their task and mummified the body.”
He shook his head. “Amazing. The greatest conqueror of his time, killed by embalmers.”
Cassiopeia smiled in agreement. “Mummification usually took seventy days, the idea being to dry the body beyond further decay. But with Alexander, they used a different method. He was immersed in white honey.”
He knew about honey, a substance that did not rot. Time would crystallize, but never destroy, its basic composition, which could easily be reconstituted with heat.
“The honey,” she said, “would have preserved Alexander, inside and out, better than mummification. The body was eventually wrapped in gold cartonnage, then placed into a golden sarcophagus, dressed in robes and a crown, surrounded by more honey. That’s where it stayed, in Babylon, for a year, while a gem-encrusted carriage was built. Then a funeral cortege set off from Babylon.”
“Which is when the funerary games began,” he said.
Cassiopeia nodded. “In a manner of speaking. Perdiccas, one of Alexander’s generals, called an emergency meeting of the Companions the day after Alexander died. Roxane, Alexander’s Asian wife, was six months pregnant. Perdiccas wanted to wait for the birth then decide what to do. If the child was a boy, he would be the rightful heir. But others balked. They weren’t going to have a part-barbarian monarch. They wanted Alexander’s half brother, Philip, as their king, though the man was, by all accounts, mentally ill.”
Malone recalled the details of what he’d read earlier. Fighting actually broke out around Alexander’s deathbed. Perdiccas then called an assembly of Macedonians and, to keep order, placed Alexander’s corpse in their midst. The assembly voted to abandon the planned Arabia campaign and approved a division of the empire. Governorships were doled out to the Companions. Rebellion quickly erupted as the generals fought among themselves. In late summer, Roxane gave birth to a boy, christened Alexander IV. To keep the peace, a joint arrangement was conceived whereby the child and Philip, the half brother, were deemed king, though the Companions governed their respective portions of the empire, unconcerned with either.
“What was it,” Malone asked, “six years later when the half brother was murdered by Olympias, Alexander’s mother? She’d hated that child from birth, since Philip of Macedonia had divorced her to marry the mother. Then, a few years later, Roxane and Alexander IV were both poisoned. None of them ever ruled anything.”
“Eventually, Alexander’s sister was murdered, too,” Thorvaldsen said. “His entire bloodline eradicated. Not a single legitimate heir survived. And the greatest empire in the world crumbled away.”
“So what does all that have to do with elephant medallions? And what possible relevance could that have today?”
“Ely believed a great deal,” she said.
He saw there was more. “And what do you believe?”
She sat silent, as if unsure, but not wanting to voice her reservations.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You tell me when you’re ready.”
Then something else occurred to him and he said to Thorvaldsen, “What about the last two medallions here in Europe? I heard you ask Viktor about them. He’s probably headed after those next.”
“We’re ahead of him there.”
“Someone’s already got them?”
Thorvaldsen glanced at his watch. “At least one, I hope, by now.”
TWENTY-THREE
AMSTERDAM
STEPHANIE STEPPED FROM THE CAFÉ BACK INTO THE RAIN. AS SHE yanked the hood over her head she found her earpiece and spoke into the mike hidden beneath her jacket.
“Two men just left here. They have what I want.”
“Fifty meters ahead, heading for the bridge,” came a reply.
“Stop them.”
She hustled into the night.
She’d brought two Secret Service agents, requisitioned from President Danny Daniels’ overseas detail. A month ago the president had requested that she accompany him to the annual European economic summit. National leaders had gathered forty miles south of Amsterdam. Tonight Daniels was attending a formal dinner, secure within The Hague, so she’d managed to corral two helpers. Just insurance, she’d told them, promising dinner afterward wherever they’d like.