Authors: Carolyn G. Hart
I stepped close to him and wrapped the belt around his wrists. When it was fastened, I slipped my hands up his arms to his shoulders. There was a faint tinkle of metal.
He reached up awkwardly, his hands together, to clasp my right hand. He loosened my fingers and touched the Saint Christopher medal.
“I found the MG and I took the medal. Because it was yours.” My fingers closed around his. “I was trying to warn you.”
“You thought I had come in the MG?”
I nodded.
“Juan took my car,” Tony explained. “He apparently headed for Tlaxcala the minute we realized you were missing. It took me a little while to get the story straight. The twins told me everything when we couldn’t find you, but by that time Juan was already gone. I shook the story out of Gerda.” His face was dark and angry. “She told me you were sent to Mexico so that it would appear you were the buyer.”
“That’s why Lorenzo grabbed me. Tony, what are we going to do? He thinks I have money to buy the treasure. He brought me here to show it to me, but I managed to slip away when we got off the motorcycle. He followed. I hid and he tried to persuade me to come out. He never stopped talking about the money. He kept calling to me. Then the MG came. Both of us heard it. That was when he ran away. He was afraid someone had come for the treasure.”
Lorenzo spoke then, but neither of us answered. I think he had been listening hard trying to follow, but his English was not quite good enough to catch and understand all we said.
“I didn’t know it was Juan in the MG,” I said. “I thought somehow you had come for me. So I ran. I was terrified for you. I knew he was a killer. He killed the night watchman in the alley behind your house.”
“You knew that?” Tony demanded. “Yet you came after him?”
“I thought it was you in the MG,” I said simply.
I looked up at him. I made no attempt to mask how I felt. For a moment, we saw in each other’s eyes more than words say. For that magical space in time, we were alone together and nothing around us mattered, not the poor crumpled body of Juan, not the dangerous wounded hulk of Lorenzo, not the dim, musty, cavernous room where Death, that grinning bony lady, was in command.
Chapter 16
The knife parted us, the knife and Lorenzo’s angry, desperate voice, ragged with strain.
We did as he commanded for we knew he was very near to slashing us down. He had nothing to lose.
He motioned for Tony to sit down with his back against the wall. He had me lash Tony’s feet with a dog’s leash he’d found nearby.
When I was done, he said, “I will show you now, miss. You will see that I tell the truth.”
I stared at him stupidly and could not imagine what he meant.
Impatience and a hot, desperate anger flickered in his eyes. “The gold; when you see the gold, you will give me the money.”
The gold, and money, much money, money I didn’t have. If I could persuade him that I had the money somewhere else, perhaps I could entice him away from here, away from Tony. When he discovered I had lied, I would die. There would be a final moment when he would know he’d been tricked.
But Tony would be safe.
My tongue edged out to wet dry lips. I nodded. “Gold,” I repeated. “Yes, the gold.”
He relaxed and almost managed a smile. His lifeblood still dripped steadily down. How could anyone lose so much blood and still live? If we held on, time and blood might run out for Lorenzo.
His chest pulled in and out, in and out. He stepped back a pace and leaned on the wine rack, hiding Juan’s body. I was grateful for that. Poor Juan, who had flirted with death, teased death, and finally been claimed. He had danced too near the edge of the precipice, beckoned on by a fascination he could not deny.
“Now, miss”—and I wondered if Lorenzo knew his voice was weakening—“go past Juan, all the way to the end of the casks. I followed him today, saw him go that way. After he left, I checked and found the suitcase.” He pointed to the opening between two wine racks.
I had to step over Juan to enter that space. I didn’t let myself look closely at him. Even so, I saw too much, saw one hand twisted, lying palm up as though relaxed in sleep, saw the glisten of the earth by his head and knew his blood spread there.
Nineteen years old and brought down because he dared to taunt death. But I knew, as I stepped past him, that if it had not been Lorenzo’s knife, Death would have found him in a fast car or on a hurtling motorcycle or while challenging wild surf. That thought helped me walk down the darkening passage between the wine racks, helped me find a suitcase deep in the last shadow, gave me strength to pull and tug the heavy case all the way back to the light. I hefted the case over Juan and pushed it all the way to Lorenzo.
Lorenzo leaned against the wine rack, his face gray now. Blood still ran down his arm to drip on his pants, pattering into an ever-widening stain at his feet.
Tony and I needed time.
“Open it,” Lorenzo directed.
I knelt beside the suitcase. Seeing it in the light, I felt a little twist of surprise. The suitcase was big, perhaps four feet tall and a hand’s breadth in width, but it was made out of some kind of cardboard. The bag was scuffed and dirty. A huge water stain discolored one side. The suitcase had originally been a brownish cardboard. Dirt and mildew had colored it an overall dingy gray.
I wondered why Juan and Gerda had put the treasure in such a messy container. It never occurred to me that the treasure might have been hidden in this flimsy cardboard grip. Not if it were the fabled store of Aztec gold.
Cheap.
That was the word for this suitcase. Imitation leather straps buckled at the top. They were rotted and frayed. The big clasp in the center was tarnished yellow-green.
It was easy to open, however. The old straps slipped free quickly and the clasp snapped up. It must have been opened and closed a good deal recently. I laid the case on its side, lifted the lid, and looked down at yellowing humps of old newsprint. A queer electric tingle raced up my back as I saw old yellowed newspaper and recognized distinctive, unmistakable typescript.
I didn’t know what the clumps of old newspaper held, but I knew that nothing I had guessed was right.
My hands shook a little as I picked up a rounded lump and began to unwrap the decaying newspaper. My excitement must have communicated itself to Tony and Lorenzo. They both watched intently as I unwrapped and unwrapped. I was reminded of the child’s game where something quite small is swathed again and again. The last sheet of newspaper fell away, its small German print barely discernible.
A bracelet fell into my hand.
My breath caught and held for an instant. I looked at a simple but spectacularly beautiful piece of jewelry and knew it at once. At the same time, sure as I was of its origin, I felt it couldn’t possibly be so.
The gold was the color of butter. Even in the dim light of that cellar, the bracelet glowed with the unmistakable fire of gold.
“You see, miss, Raúl spoke truly, did he not? This must be the gold of the gods.”
I shook my head.
Before I could speak, he yanked me around and the knife was sharp against my throat. His face was drawn, his shirt wet with sweat and blood. “It is gold!” he shouted. “It is gold!”
“Yes,” I breathed.
Slowly the prick against my skin eased.
The knife fell away, but still he loomed above me, his eyes angry and desperate and sick.
“Yes, Lorenzo,” I said slowly, soothingly. “Yes, it is gold. Very valuable gold.”
That calmed him. He moved slowly back to lean once again against the wine rack. He moved slowly, tiredly, as a wounded animal when the end of the hunt is near.
“If this treasure”—I waved my hand at paper-wrapped lumps in the suitcase—“is what I think it is, it is even more valuable than anyone knew.”
I spoke calmly enough, but I was far from calm. Valuable. How do you set a worth on treasure thought lost forever? How do you put a money value on one of the oldest, most incredible finds in archeology?
To find Aztec gold would be to reach back four hundred and fifty years into the past and touch a craftsman’s work. But this bracelet linked me to a goldsmith in the third millennium BC. If I was right, I held in my hand a piece from one of the world’s most ancient and beautiful treasures.
When I saw more, I would know. I laid down the spiral bracelet, a heavy shining wire of gold that looped around a wrist three times to end in conical knobs, and reached into the cheap suitcase for another clump of yellowing newsprint.
This time I looked at the dateline and once again that queer tingle of excitement ran through me. The date was April 8, 1945.
My mind ran back like a skittering mouse, back through mounds of dates, and placed this particular time. April 8, 1945. The Russians were battering toward Berlin in the grim spring of 1945. Russians were coming from one direction, the Allies from the other. In Berlin itself, bombs fell day and night. Ordinary Berliners were dying by the thousands. Luckier ones, important Nazis and the last-ditch defenders, had some protection. Objects valued more than people had the most protection. The world’s deepest, safest bunker had been built in the Berlin Zoo. Atop it were placed powerful guns. The Allies’ bombs sought that bunker and the animals of the zoo began to die like their fellow Berliners.
After the war, long after the war, when one thing and another was sorted out, when this survivor’s reflections and that one’s memories were added together, a good deal was known about the bunker beneath the zoo and its last days before it was destroyed in the rain of bombs that washed over Berlin.
It was known for a fact that the Treasure of Priam had at one time been moved to the bunker for safekeeping. The Treasure of Priam, Heinrich Schliemann’s triumphant proof that Homer’s Troy was historic and rich. It didn’t matter that the golden baubles were later attributed to an earlier age than Priam’s—the treasure bore his name, for this jewelry was fit for a king.
There was no more stirring account in all of archeology than Schliemann’s discovery of the Treasure of Priam. Schliemann always believed that Homer wrote the truth about Helen and Menelaus, about Priam and Hector. No one else believed the stories to be true. Scholars deemed the
Iliad
a pretty story, an exercise in classic Greek, nothing more. But a German grocer’s assistant heard the stories as a boy and determined that one day he would go to Troy. By Zeus, he did. With extraordinary talents, he learned five languages fluently and secured the wealth he felt he needed to pursue his dream. He set out to find Troy. At a huge mound in Turkey called Hissarlik, he excavated and found proof of many settlements there.
He didn’t find gold.
Schliemann had a good many frustrations as an excavator, including almost continual harassment by Turkish authorities. He was nearing the end of excavation and there were only a few days left to dig before the ruin would be closed. He and his young Greek wife, Sophia, were in one of the excavation’s deepest cuts when Schliemann spied the soft gleam of gold in one of the walls. Quickly, he told his wife to call a rest for the workmen, though it was only midmorning.
When they were alone in the ruins, he hacked at the wall with his knife, every moment fearing that the great stones hanging above him would dislodge and tumble down to crush them. But he had not come so far and toiled so long to lose his treasure now. Later he claimed his wife Sophia wrapped pieces of the golden hoard in her red shawl.
I crouched by that cheap suitcase and shared in Schliemann’s delight across the span of a century. In my hand I held a pin that a Trojan queen must have worn. It was three inches wide and absolutely exquisite. As the newsprint fell away, there was no longer any doubt in my mind what treasure I had found. I had seen too many pictures of this particular pin to be wrong. The head of the pin, an ornamented rectangular plate, was framed between two slender strips of gold. The bottom strip ended in curling upswept spirals. Six tiny golden jugs were attached to the top strip, perfect little jugs.
“Tony, come and look.”
I had forgotten he was bound, but he managed to struggle and roll close enough to see. Lorenzo still rested against the wine rack, but he leaned forward, listening.
I held up the pin. “Do you know what this is?”
Tony looked and surprise flickered in his face. Aztec gold had never looked like this.
Before he could answer, I was telling Tony and Lorenzo, my voice wobbling with excitement, that we were looking at the most fantastic treasure imaginable. “. . . and the bunker at the zoo was demolished. Someone escaped with the treasure, smuggled it out before that last day.”
Running steps clattered across the earth floor of the cellar. Gerda came at me like a wild thing, snatching at the pin, crying and shouting, clawing and pulling. Every word that spewed from the perfect mouth was in German so I was the only one in the cellar who understood.
“How did you know?” she screamed. “You have no right. This is mine. All mine.” She had the pin now and I saw the metal bend in her clawlike grasp. “All mine, do you hear? My father saved the gold from the Russians. You have no right.”
It was hard to catch every word. Her husky voice cracked as she screamed at me. She seemed oblivious to Tony and Lorenzo. She never once looked past me and back into the shadows that held Juan. She couldn’t see beyond the gleam of the gold.
Her story came out in bits and pieces. A young German private assigned to guard duty at the bunker saw the end coming. He knew what would happen when the Russians reached Berlin. He was young and tough and clever. He and his new bride, a nurse, smuggled the treasure out among the refuse of amputated limbs from the air force hospital in the bunker. Their clever plan was discovered by a fellow soldier, Hans, who became a part of the effort. The three of them fled Berlin and took the treasure to Portugal and finally reached the New World. It was hard to follow Gerda here for she railed on about Hans, and I wasn’t quite sure who Hans was or what he had done or how he was involved, but the three of them reached Mexico with the treasure.
Why the gold remained hidden all these years and why Gerda began her search so recently wasn’t clear.
She paused and opened her purse. She pulled out a small black notebook. “It is all here,” she cried. “My proof. This all belongs to me.”
I didn’t think Schliemann’s Treasure of Priam qualified as war booty, but at this point what did it matter what I or anyone else thought?
She was quiet suddenly. She stood there, breathing hard, the small gold pin clasped tightly in her hand. Her eyes flicked back and forth, from me to the suitcase, from me to Tony, from Tony to Lorenzo.
“Juan?” she cried.
I think that was the first moment she had realized he was not there.
“Juan?”
Her cry chilled all of us.
Her face, already haggard and strained, blanched an icy gray. “Juan.”
No one moved. There was no sound in that huge, dim room but her ragged breathing.
She took a step nearer, another. Her eyes moved past us, swept the shadows. Then she saw him. Her lips parted and she gave a deep moan, the bereft cry of a broken spirit. She moved slowly toward him, one beaten step dragging after another. She had cared. Juan had been more to her, much more, than just a handsome young man.
She moved into the shadow thrown by the wine racks, dropped to her knees, and pulled his poor lolling head up onto her lap. Her hands held him and once again came that stricken cry. Her face, old and ravaged, turned toward us.
“¿Por qué?”