The Tombs (A Fargo Adventure) Read online

  “I do that,” she’d said. “I’ve studied many of those fields myself, and taught a few. When I worked as a reference librarian, I picked up some sources and know many experts on the others. I’ll take the job.”

  Sam said, “You don’t even know the salary yet.”

  “You don’t either,” she’d said. “I’ll accept minimum wage for three probationary months and then you can name the figure. I assure you, it will be much higher than you know. You’ll be much more appreciative then than you are now.”

  She had never been less than delighted that she’d chosen to work for the Fargos. It was as though she had never looked for a job but instead was to be paid for being a good Selma. She even helped Sam and Remi plan this house. She had researched architecture and architects, materials and sustainable design, and because she had already studied Sam and Remi she could remind them of things they liked and would need space to accommodate. She had also explained what was necessary for a first-rate research facility.

  The telephone rang, and she considered letting Pete or Wendy, her junior researchers, pick it up. The idea lasted a half second before she became, as always, the victim of her own intense curiosity. “Hello. This is the Fargo residence. Selma Wondrash speaking.”

  “Selma!” came the voice. “Meine Liebe, wo sind Ihr Chef und seine schöne Frau?”

  “Herr Doktor Fischer. Sie sind tauchen im Golf von Mexiko.”

  “Your German is better every day. I’ve made a fascinating discovery and I’d like to discuss it with Remi and Sam. Is there any way I can reach them right away?”

  “Yes. If you’ll give me a number where you can be reached, I’ll ask them to call you as soon as I can get them above the surface.”

  “I’m in Berlin. The number here is . . .”

  As Selma wrote down the number, she was already thinking she would put the McCullough book aside. Albrecht Fischer was a professor of classical archaeology at Heidelberg. It wouldn’t hurt to spend some time this evening reviewing a few of his recent academic publications just to see what might be next. “Thank you, Albrecht. I’ll get Sam and Remi’s attention as soon as I can.”

  Late in the evening, after their romantic dinner of shrimp etouffee, softshell crab, and bread pudding at the Grand Jatte and a moonlit walk home along the Gulf, Sam and Remi had just gotten into bed when his cell phone rang.

  As Sam dropped his feet to the floor to get his phone from the top of the dresser, Remi raised her head and leaned on her elbow. “Mine has an off switch.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot it was on.” He flipped his thumb across the screen. “Hello?”

  “Sam?”

  “Selma.” He looked at Remi. She turned away and pulled the covers up to her chin.

  “I hope I’m not calling too late.”

  “Of course not.” He smiled at Remi. “What’s up?”

  “Albrecht Fisher called. He’s made a discovery he wants to discuss with you and Remi.”

  “Is he at his university office in Heidelberg?”

  “No, he’s in Berlin. He gave me his number.”

  “Yes.”

  She read him the number, and he used the pen he’d left on the dresser to write it on a slip of paper in his wallet. “Thanks, Selma. How’s everything at home?”

  “Everything proceeds with the utmost serenity at the manor whether the lord and lady are in residence or not.”

  “You wouldn’t call a man up in the middle of the night just to make fun of him.”

  “Never,” said Selma. “Sleep tight.” She hung up.

  Sam went out to the kitchen and began to close the door, but Remi was already out of bed and put her hand on the door to keep it from closing. “I’m already awake. We may as well both be tired tomorrow.”

  “What time is it in Berlin?”

  “Seven hours ahead of Louisiana.”

  “So it’s eight a.m.”

  Sam tapped in the number and waited while the connection was established, then switched his phone to speaker. They listened to it ring.

  “’Allo, Sam. Wie geht es Ihnen?”

  “Fine, Albrecht. Selma said you had something to tell us, so we’re both listening.”

  “I do,” he said. “It’s a find that I made only a week ago. I brought a few things here for testing and the results have come in.”

  “What is it?”

  “My friends, I think I’ve found something incredible, and it has to be kept absolutely secret for now. It’s so big, I can’t excavate it alone. I can’t even do a preliminary survey alone. Full summer will begin in a month, and again the need for secrecy in this situation doesn’t even bear describing.”

  “We understand the secrecy, but can’t you even tell us what it is?” asked Remi.

  “I think . . . I believe that what I’ve found is an ancient battlefield. It seems to be intact, undisturbed.”

  Sam wrote on his slip of paper, “What do you think?” Remi took the pen and wrote: “Yes.”

  Sam said, “We’ll come to you.”

  “Thank you, Sam. I’m in Berlin now, buying some things and borrowing others. Send me your flight information, and I’ll meet you at the airport.”

  “Remi and I will be on a plane sometime in the morning, but the flight will probably add a whole day. See you soon.” He hung up and looked at Remi.

  “We should have asked what kind of battlefield,” she said.

  “All he said was ancient. So I guess we don’t have to worry about unexploded ordnance.”

  “If it’s in Europe, we may.”

  “He’s in Berlin, but it sounded as though that was where he was doing tests, not where the site is.”

  “We’d better get packed.”

  In the morning, as they made the fifty-four-mile drive to New Orleans, Sam called Ray Holbert and said, “I’m sorry, but a friend called last night and needs some emergency help on a project, so we’ve got to go. I apologize for leaving in such a hurry.”

  Holbert said, “Don’t think anything of it. You gave us a great month’s work and we’ll miss you. We don’t have many volunteers who pay all their own expenses and plenty of ours too. But we’ll keep in touch and let you know what else we discover.”

  “Thanks, Ray.”

  “Oh, and Sam? If someone were to go look for those people who rented that black-and-gray boat, where would you suggest they start?”

  “I can’t say for sure. Somewhere in the bayous inland from Lake Vermilion and Mud Lake, would be my best guess.”

  Selma had their itinerary waiting at the airport. Sam and Remi flew Royal Dutch Airlines from Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans to Atlanta and then on to Amsterdam. Sam and Remi slept on the transatlantic flight and then woke in time for arrival in Amsterdam. The final flight into Berlin was much shorter, and when they arrived at Tegel Airport in Berlin at 11:20 the next morning, there was Albrecht Fischer.

  Fischer was tall and thin, with blond hair that was slowly lightening to white and once fair skin that had been tanned by the sun so many times that it had stayed that way, making his blue eyes stand out. He wore a gray sport coat that looked weather-beaten, with a dark blue silk scarf hanging loose from his neck. He shook Sam’s hand and kissed Remi on both cheeks. It wasn’t until they were walking toward the exit from the terminal that Albrecht Fischer spoke about his find.

  “I’m sorry for telling you so little on the telephone. I think you’ll understand when you see what I’ve brought to Germany.”

  “This isn’t where it came from?” asked Remi.

  “No,” he said. “At the site, I sensed I was being watched. I needed to do lab work and examinations, but I didn’t dare do them there. So I came back here. There are colleagues at Humboldt and at the Free University who have let me use their labs. I’ve been sleeping in the office of a colleague who is on leave and using the shower in his chemistry lab.”

  “Why not just go back to your own lab at Heidelberg?”

  “A bit of a ruse to throw off an
yone who might be interested in what I’m doing. I had some odd feelings while I was at work, and I’ve found that when you think you’re being watched, you usually are.”

  Fischer took them outside the terminal, where he hailed a cab that took them to the Hotel Adlon Kempinski. While Sam checked them in, Remi took in the beauty of the hotel—the ornate carpets, fine furniture, vaulted ceiling—but she also noticed that Albrecht Fischer’s eyes were moving constantly, scanning the steady stream of people coming and going through the lobby. He was agitated, impatient, and, at the same time, there was something else. He seemed to be afraid. Sam sent the bellman up to their room with the luggage, then rejoined Remi and Fischer. “Shall we go up?”

  Remi shook her head. “I think we’d better go see what the good professor has been working on.”

  Albrecht brightened. “Yes, please do. I know you’re probably tired from all the travel, but I’ve been keeping myself quiet about this until I’m half mad. And the lab isn’t far.”

  Sam and Remi exchanged a glance, and Sam said, “Then of course. Let’s go.” They stepped outside, and the doorman signaled a cab and opened the door for them. Albrecht waited until the door was closed to say, “Humboldt University, please.” The cab let them off only a few blocks away at the statue of Frederick the Great in front of the main building of the university on Unter den Linden.

  They walked quickly into a building that seemed to be all science laboratories—doors with smoked-glass windows with numbers on them. The ones that were open had young people inside, wearing lab coats and wandering among black boxes with screens, stands that held chemistry apparatus, and counters with centrifuges and spectrometers. As they passed, Sam kept looking into each lab. Remi took Sam’s arm. “I know you’re reliving the high points of your college years.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Albrecht. “I thought all American students did was drink beer and go to parties.”

  “Sam went to Caltech. They worked in labs, then drank beer and went to parties.”

  “I was just thinking about some of the people who went to this university. There was one student who was promising—a kid named Albert Einstein.”

  Remi said, “And before him, Hegel, Schopenhauer, the Brothers Grimm . . .”

  “Today we’re going to rely on Remi’s specialties,” said Albrecht. “A bit of history, a bit of physical anthropology.”

  He stopped at a dark laboratory, took out a key, and opened the door. They stepped in, and he turned on the fluorescent lights. “This is it.” The room had black counters along the side walls, a whiteboard in front, and a half dozen large stainless steel tables. On one of them was a polished wooden coffin.

  “Who died?” Remi asked.

  “I call him Friedrich.” He walked to the coffin. “Specifically, I’ve certified that he’s my great-great-uncle Friedrich von Schlechter. When I found him, I didn’t want to arouse curiosity, so I bought a coffin and hired an undertaker in the nearest city to put him in it, get the proper export papers, and ship him to Berlin for burial.” He opened the lid. Inside was an age-browned skeleton with a few scraps of material that seemed to be rotted leather and a length of rusty metal like the blade of a sword.

  Sam and Remi looked inside. Sam said, “He seems to have gotten his head disconnected during the trip.”

  Remi looked closer. “It didn’t happen in transit. See the mark on the vertebra, right here?” She pointed at the back top surface of the last vertebra, where a deep chip was missing. “That’s from an ax or a sword.”

  “Very good,” said Fischer. “If you spend some time with him, you begin to learn more about who he is. Judging from the wear on the molars, and the good condition of the bones, I’d estimate he was at least thirty, but not yet forty. If you’ll look at his left radius and ulna, you’ll see some more marks. Those are clearly wounds that healed long before he died. The decapitation, of course, was his last injury. But these marks tell much more about him. He was a warrior. He was probably using some kind of two-handed weapon when an opponent swung a blade at his forearm. Or if he was using a shield, the blow got behind it. He lived and the wound healed.”

  “The swords and shields remind me,” said Remi. “Have you run the carbon 14 yet?”

  “Yes. We did one on a chip of his femur, one on a strip of leather that was with the body—a fragment of his shoe, a wrapping for a weapon perhaps. The reading was 82.813 percent of the carbon 14 remaining. I had also taken samples from another individual near him and tested them here. The result was the same, giving us a date of around 450 C.E.”

  “Four fifty,” said Sam. “And where is the site?”

  “It’s a couple of miles to the east of Szeged, Hungary.”

  “Wow,” said Remi. “And you think Friedrich here is just one of many?”

  “Yes. How many, I don’t know yet. A battlefield is essentially a very large mass grave. The place where the bodies come to rest is lower than the surrounding area, whether they’re buried in the usual way or covered over time. I’ve detected remains as far apart as a hundred yards. Here. Look at this.” Fischer went to another table and unrolled a large hand-drawn map with a grid on it. “This is the Tisza River, and here’s the place where the joins it. This grid is where I found Friedrich, and this one, way over here, is where I found another individual at the same depth.”

  “Who could they be?”

  “I’m tempted to assume they were Huns. The area of Szeged was the stronghold of the Huns at around that time. But when they fought a war, they would decamp as a group and go off to the enemy’s country to fight. They fought the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, Romans—both from Rome and from Constantinople—the Avars, Gauls, Alans, Scythians, Thracians, Armenians, and many smaller peoples whom they swallowed up in their conquests. They were also at some point allied with each of these groups against one or more of the others. Sorting out who was in this battle will take some time and examination.”

  “Of course,” said Sam. “It’s hard to say much about a battle after looking at two skeletons.”

  “Exactly,” said Albrecht. “I’m eager to get back to begin an excavation. But there are problems.”

  “What sort of problems?” Remi asked.

  “It’s a big site—a large open field that at one time was a pasture, part of a collective farm under the Communist government, but has been lying fallow for more than ten years. It’s out in the open near a road. Szeged is a thriving modern city, only a few miles away. If the word got out, there would be no way to stop people from coming out on their own and digging for souvenirs. And there have been enough stories of treasure being found in classical-era sites to attract thousands. In a day, everything could be lost.”

  “But, so far, everything is still secret,” Sam said. “Right?”

  “I’m just hoping that I’m imagining things. But I got the impression several times while I was exploring the district around Szeged that I was being spied on.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around,” said Remi.

  “What do you mean?”

  Sam said, “While we were in Louisiana, we were followed wherever we went to dive. It turned out to be an exploration team from a company called Consolidated Enterprises.”

  “That doesn’t sound like archaeologists. It sounds like a business conglomerate.”

  “I’d say that’s pretty accurate,” said Sam. “Their business plan seems to be to wait for someone else to find a promising site and then push them off it and dive it themselves.”

  “Sam got them to follow us into a swamp on foot and then borrowed their boat.”

  Albrecht chuckled. “Well, you’ve become known for finding gold and jewels. I’m just a poor professor who studies people who lived a long time ago and whose idea of treasure was a good barley harvest. This battlefield is the most dramatic thing I’ve found. I’d been studying the contours of the land, looking for signs of a Roman settlement. At one point, the area was part of a Roman province. The main reason I took interes
t in the field was that it wasn’t covered with buildings.”

  “Do you have any idea who was spying on you in Szeged?” asked Sam.

  “One day someone broke into my hotel room. I had my notes and my laptop computer with me. My luggage was searched, but nothing was taken. But on several days I saw a large black car with four big Eastern European men in dark suits. I would see them three or four times in a day watching me, and sometimes they would have binoculars or a camera.”

  “They sound like police,” said Sam. “Maybe they suspected you were doing something illegal—like shipping Friedrich out of the country. If they knew you were an archaeologist, they’d want to know about any artifacts you’d found.”

  Albrecht looked at his feet. “I’m guilty of smuggling Friedrich out. But if I had stayed in Hungary to do the lab work, the word of my discovery would have been out in a day. Keeping a find secret is standard procedure. Everyone who has gone public prematurely has come back to a site that’s been looted and trampled and all scientific and historical value destroyed. And this site is more vulnerable than most. The bodies I’ve found still had whatever weapons and armor they’d died with. There are textile fragments, bits of leather and fur. All that would be lost.”

  “Of course we’ll respect your secrecy,” Sam said. “And we’re here to help you any way we can.”

  “We’re good at secrets,” Remi said. “But wouldn’t it be a good idea to get Selma thinking about this? We may be able to use her help, and she has a way of anticipating what we might like to know.”

  “Do we have your permission?” asked Sam. “It would mean alerting the rest of our staff, but that’s all.”

  “Of course,” said Fischer. “The more good minds working on our side, the better. For now, I’m going to put Friedrich away.”

  “After we’ve had a chance to unpack and recover a bit, we hope you’ll come to the hotel and have dinner with us,” Remi said.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be alone?”