Authors: Carolyn G. Hart
Lorenzo stood a little straighter. “I told Juan. I warned him.” His face was hard. “He killed Raúl.”
She was on her feet, flinging herself at him, one arm upraised. She had Juan’s knife. She said nothing. There was nothing left in her but fury. The knife began its downward sweep.
I watched, paralyzed with shock.
Her hand faltered. The knife fell from nerveless fingers.
I closed my eyes but I had already seen too much, the great gaping wound, the welling blood on her white silk blouse. Lorenzo had been quicker. She crumpled at his feet.
I lost all hope. It didn’t matter that he was wounded. He still survived, clung tenaciously to life. Why should he spare us? Too many had died this night for us to survive.
I pushed the suitcase out of my way. I didn’t care what the shabby old suitcase held, what might be damaged now. I wanted in these last moments to be near Tony, to touch warm hands and to kiss, for the first and last time, loving lips. Nothing mattered to me but Tony. I was so set in my purpose, so determined in my course that I paid no attention to a commanding whisper behind us.
Tony frowned. “Sheila, wait. Listen.”
A harsh whisper sounded. I heard my name and stood still. The circle was complete now, the final evil link in place.
“Don’t turn around, Sheila Ramsay. Not if you want to live.”
The whisper was deliberately hoarse and uninflected so I wouldn’t recognize a voice. Someone I knew whispered my name. If I turned I would see a familiar face. I understood that I must not turn.
Lorenzo moved away from the support of the wine rack, straightening to meet one more challenge. I heard him speak sharply in Spanish.
I knew the answer even if I couldn’t translate the questions.
“It’s all right, Lorenzo,” I said bitterly. “This is the man you wanted in the first place. This is the man from the museum. The man with much money. Gerda must have brought him here tonight.”
Lorenzo crossed the floor behind us, moving in a heavy, tired shuffle. “Is it true,” he was asking, “are you the man who has come to buy the treasure?”
Whoever it was must have nodded without speaking. I wondered what he thought, the man from my museum, as he looked across that huge, dim room at Gerda’s body. Did he see Juan lying there, too? Why should he care? He had sent me, defenseless, to shield him from view, to protect him from interlopers such as Lorenzo. Everything had worked out for him. Juan was dead and Gerda, too, but why should it matter to him? The treasure was within his reach.
Who stood there, watching to be sure I did not turn? Was it my contemporary, Timothy Simmons, clever Timothy? Was it small, dark, careful Michael Taylor? Could the whisperer be Karl Freidheim? Had he, years ago, been a soldier with Gerda’s father? Was he Hans? Could the shadowy figure be plump-faced Dr. Rodriguez?
I tried to swallow and couldn’t. Would he order me to stay turned away if he intended to kill me? I stood still and tried to hear what the man was telling Lorenzo, but they spoke so softly I couldn’t make out a word.
A flicker of movement in front of me caught my eye. Tony was edging imperceptibly nearer Gerda. I saw his determined eyes on the knife that lay near Gerda’s hand.
“No,” I breathed, “no.”
He looked at me and I read his eyes so well. If a man must die, he must die well, his implacable gaze said.
“Wait,” I whispered. “Please, Tony, for my sake, wait.”
He hesitated and the moment was past because Lorenzo was shuffling slowly, heavily back toward us. He came up behind me. “Now, miss, everything is going to be all right.”
Tony yelled as pain exploded on the back of my head—fiery, unendurable pain—and then there was nothing at all.
Chapter 17
They found Lorenzo’s body early the next morning, on Reforma, slumped in the backseat of Gerda’s car. He had bled to death. There was no trace of the car’s driver. Or of an outsized, shabby cardboard suitcase.
It was some days later before I knew this. Much of what had happened was pieced together by Tony and the police.
Tony spent most of his time at the hospital with me. “I’ve never been so scared,” he told me later. “One minute you would open those misty green eyes and smile and then you would just fade away. I kept calling to you.”
Later I remembered some of that, remembered Tony’s dark worried eyes, the soft voice of the nurse, and, of course, bell clear in my mind was the last time I saw Jerry Elliot. He was furious. He bent over the hospital bed, his bony face red with anger. He even shook his fist at me. “Dammit, why didn’t you call me that night? You could have. If you’d been at all concerned about saving the treasure, if you’d thought about anything but the Ortegas, we could have saved the gold. Now who knows where it is? The world may never see any of it again.”
The irascible voice faded away. I slipped free of that angry, quarrelsome spirit. I wondered, even as I swept down into unconsciousness, how I ever could have thought him attractive. I had not only thought him handsome, but I had crossed a continent to see him again—but my last thought was quick and grateful for he brought me to Mexico and to Tony.
I was conscious, awake and weak, when the funerals were held. Tony came to the hospital when they were done, still in his stark black suit, his face weary. He sat by the bed and held my hand.
“How is your father?”
“It is a heavy burden,” Tony said quietly, “but he doesn’t know, he’ll never know about Gerda and Juan.”
I touched his lips with one finger. “Of course not.”
He nodded, glad I understood. “We told him that Gerda was so grief stricken at Juan’s death that she attacked Lorenzo before we could stop her. The truth, you see, but not all the truth.”
“It is better that way.”
We were both quiet for a moment. I couldn’t fault Gerda altogether. True, she had started a fateful chain of events when she came to Tlaxcala. But she had felt within her rights. Who of us could be sure that she hadn’t cared for Tony’s father? She had yet to meet Juan.
Tony had searched Gerda’s papers and probed back to her days in Puebla, where she was raised by the Reinhardts. Mrs. Reinhardt, a dour, thin-lipped sixty, had little to say. No, she had not known Gerda’s parents, had only heard by word of mouth of the little German left an orphan when her parents were killed in an accident in the mountains.
What kind of accident?
Their car skidded off a mountain road late one night. Near Tlaxcala. There was a baby left alone. The Reinhardts had taken the baby and swept into a box the miscellaneous papers Gerda’s parents left behind. There wasn’t much. Nothing of value. It wasn’t until Mrs. Reinhardt was leaving her own house many years later, to live with a married son, that she sorted through that small box of clutter and found a leather diary. She thumbed the first few pages and realized it was Gerda’s father’s record of his war years. The old lady thought Gerda might be pleased to see the journal and had mailed it to her. Gerda received the diary in the spring. She had read it and come straight to Tlaxcala and hiked in the hills. It was then that she fell and twisted her ankle and was found by Señor Ortega. She had married him and who knew what was her strongest motivation. He was kindly and rich and she was alone. Too, the marriage made it easy to keep on hunting in the hills. She couldn’t have known when she married him that she was going to fall in love with Juan.
Tony brought the diary to me because it was written in German. I read the letter, too, from Mrs. Reinhardt and wondered at the workings of fate. If the diary had been thrown away years before or if it had never been written so much grief could have been avoided.
Everything was recorded in the diary, incluing those last fateful days in Berlin.
Gerhardt Prosser’s duty was to guard the Treasure of Priam. He knew the gold would be taken by the Russians when they came. He decided to smuggle out the treasure and try to escape Berlin. Another solider caught him at it and, of necessity, became a conspirator, too. The diary told how Gerhardt and his pregnant wife and the sergeant, Hans Rieger, traveled over war-convulsed Germany, fleeing all the armies. Their trip almost ended in disaster a dozen times—when a stolen staff car wrecked, when the Americans blockaded the best road south, when other deserters cornered Gerda’s father and Hans in a burned-out farmhouse. Her mother had gone for water and came up quietly from the back and shot the deserters dead.
They stole food and fresh clothes in Lisbon and sold two golden earrings to get money enough to book passage on a rotten old freighter to Buenos Aires. The trip took four months and Gerda was born on the ship. They had hoped to settle in Argentina but they were too frightened to try to sell the treasure, and they became increasingly afraid of Hans. Late one January night, they crept out of their rooming house and began the long run that would end in death on a mountainside in Mexico.
The last few pages of the diary were the happiest. They were in Puebla and Gerda’s father had found a job with a wool broker. It was on a buying trip to Tlaxcala that Gerda’s father found the cave. The directions to it were on the next to the last page. With the treasure hidden until a good opportunity came to sell it, with a good steady job, with Hans left far behind in Argentina, the two refugees began to feel safe, began to look forward to the future.
I closed the little leather volume with a snap and wondered if the gold had caused as many deaths, as much misery, millenniums ago when it first was hammered into beauty by a Trojan goldsmith.
Probably. And the trail of death and tears had not yet ended. The husky whisperer from my museum was still unknown, still uncaught.
It should have been easy. As first everyone was sure it would be a simple matter to catch him, even though Tony couldn’t describe him. All Tony had seen was dark trousers and black shoes. The man had stood well back in the shadows of the tunnel. Tony never saw his face.
After Lorenzo struck me down, he slammed shut the suitcase and struggled across the broad room to the waiting man. Lorenzo and the whisperer left together. Tony didn’t care what happened to them or to the treasure. He was terrified I was dead. There he was, tied hand and foot, Juan dead, Gerda dead, and, more than likely, I was dead, too. He rolled close enough to Gerda to get the knife and managed to saw through the belt around his wrists.
He hurried to me. “You were lying facedown. All I could see was the blood on the back of your head.”
But I was breathing. He had run then, run down the nearest tunnel, the one that led underground to the main house. There he roused Francisco, the old servant who stayed at the hacienda year round. Francisco heard thunderous pounding on the cellar door and opened it, a candle flickering in one hand, a shotgun ready in the other.
It had not been long before an ambulance arrived and then the police. Minutes after that, the alert was sounded, the border warned, a description of Gerda’s car broadcast.
By the time I was able to hear about it, a week had passed and we realized we had been outwitted.
“But surely,” I protested to Tony, “all they have to do is find out which of the four men from the museum was in Mexico.”
That sounded easy. It wasn’t.
Not one of the men had been in New York that week.
Michael Taylor was in Chicago, attending a seminar.
Karl Freidheim, a bachelor, was home, ill with the flu.
Timothy Simmons was on a hunting trip in Maine. Alone.
Dr. Rodriguez was driving to Los Angeles to bid on a rare collection of pottery at an estate sale. As for the warning message from Señor Herrera, Rodriguez claimed the letter never arrived.
Any one of them could have flown to Mexico, slipping in and out of the country for a day or two. As for tracing them, it was child’s play to obtain an appropriate birth certificate and use that name to get a tourist card.
Each man denied involvement. Then came the real surprise. What, after all, could be proved against that unseen whisperer?
Stolen goods?
Stolen from whom? The golden artifacts didn’t belong to the Ortegas. Or to the Mexican government. If they could be traced without question to Heinrich Schliemann, they should be returned to the Royal Museums of Berlin.
Who could prove that? Certainly not I. I had seen two pieces, in a dim cellar, and I was by no means an authority on Trojan jewelry.
If the man wasn’t a thief, wasn’t a dealer in smuggled goods, then, after all, he was responsible for what?
Juan murdered Raúl.
Lorenzo murdered Juan and Gerda.
The whisperer had done nothing beyond instructing Lorenzo to strike me down. How could that be proved? The man left with Lorenzo, but Tony and I knew how desperately Lorenzo was wounded and it was those wounds that killed him. After an initial flurry of excitement, the case was closed. Lorenzo was dead, and it was he who had left behind such a visible trail of blood.
Jerry, of course, was still furious with both Tony and me. It would have been a fantastic coup if he had been able to find the Treasure of Priam and reclaim for archeology the gold, which shone like butter. He still felt, I thought unfairly, that the loss of the treasure was my fault.
As for me, well, I was glad on several counts that I would not be returning to my museum to work, even though I had loved it. I didn’t think I would ever feel comfortable there again.