Keller finished tamping his pipe and carefully set a lit kitchen match to the bowl, puffing slowly, his steady gray eyes watching Ruth McVeigh as he waited. Jed Martin, however, was not the type to wait.
“Well, what is it, Ruth?” he asked impatiently, and glanced at his wristwatch in a rather pointed manner. “I’ve a million things to attend to.”
“You may have one more,” Dr. McVeigh said quietly, and picked up the letter. “I want to read you both something. This came inside of a package that was delivered last night, after I left for the day. Together with some photographs I’ll show you later. I just got it this morning. Let me read it to you.”
Jed Martin shrugged and sat back, his small birdlike eyes watching Ruth almost suspiciously, as if she might be using the letter merely as an excuse to waste more of his precious time. Still, he knew that the new director seldom wasted words and never wasted time, neither her own or anyone else’s. Bob Keller’s expression didn’t change in the least. He puffed steadily and watched Ruth McVeigh, liking what he saw.
“This is what the letter says,” Ruth began, and glanced down. She paused to look up a moment. “There is no salutation, and no date. And, for reasons I’m sure you’ll understand when you’ve heard the letter, there is, of course, no signature.” Her eyes went down again as she began to read.
“The enclosed ring is from the collection of gold objects discovered at Hissarlik in the Troad in Turkey by Heinrich Schliemann and his wife, Sophie, in early June of 1873. The entire collection, consisting of approximately nine thousand separate items, and with a net weight of approximately 8,600 drams, will be held for auction to selected bidders of whom you are one, beginning October 1, 1979. Instructions for submitting bids will be furnished before September 1, 1979. Bids will be secret, as will the identity of the winner.
“The photographs attached will prove the authenticity of the statements made herein. Further proof can be obtained by examination of the enclosed specimen taken from the actual collection.
“No opening bid below fifteen million dollars will be considered.”
Ruth McVeigh put down the letter and looked at the two men across the desk from her. No muscle moved on Robert Keller’s phlegmatic face, but his eyes looked interested, and momentarily he had stopped puffing on his pipe. Martin, on the other hand, was staring at the director incredulously; he had come to the edge of his chair and was perched there, almost birdlike.
“What absolute and utter rot!” he said, and snorted. “Let me see that!” He took the letter Ruth handed him and read it again, quickly, before tossing it back disdainfully. “The Schliemann treasure! It’s been in the hands of the Russians for donkey’s years! Everyone knows that!” He picked up the photographs, leafed through them quickly, and tossed them beside the letter, sneering. “Someone got hold of Schliemann’s book, simply had some duplicate pieces made up that look like the objects Schliemann had pictures of — probably made them out of tin and painted them with dime-store gold paint — and then took photos of his fakes. With an up-to-date calendar alongside to show the pictures were taken recently. And they expect to get away with it?” He reached over and fished the ring from the box. “And this—” For the first time he hesitated a moment and then frowned. “Well, I expect he did read up enough on the subject to know the rings that Schliemann found were made from gold wire, not from the solid slabs of the stuff in those days...”
“You’ll still check the ring for authenticity?” Dr. McVeigh’s tone made it an order, not a request.
“Oh, of course,” Martin said. “We’ll check it for age, for purity of gold content, for the rare earths that were found in the gold of that day, and everything else. We’ll have it done in our own laboratory, and we’ll send it out for further checks if we have any doubts as to its — well, its un-authenticity, I should say.” He snorted again, eyeing the small ring malevolently, as if it threatened him somehow. “The Schliemann treasure! Really!”
Bob Keller cleared his throat a bit self-consciously. He had gone back to puffing his pipe and was frowning thoughtfully at the ceiling. “You know,” he said slowly in his deep voice, speaking almost as if to himself, “I’ve wondered for years about that gold treasure Schliemann found...”
“Wondered what?” Martin demanded, as if the statement was a challenge to his judgment.
“I’ve simply wondered if the treasure really was in the hands of the Russians,” Keller said quietly, and watched the smoke from his pipe weave its way upward. He sighed and sat more erect, bringing his attention back to the others in the room. ‘What do we actually know about the treasure? What does anyone really know? We know that Heinrich Schliemann and his wife, Sophie, discovered it at what Schliemann was convinced was the original site of Homer’s Troy in June of 1873 — whoever wrote that letter is right about that, at any rate.”
“Which has been no great secret for the past hundred years,” Martin said argumentatively. “Any more than the number of pieces and the troy weight of the stuff. What does that prove? That your letter-writer has an encyclopedia, that’s all.”
“Probably,” Keller said agreeably, and went on. “We also know that Schliemann, over certain objections of his wife, donated the treasure to Germany toward the end of that decade. His wife wanted it to go to Greece, which was her home country, and since she was almost certainly the one who first noticed the treasure, and almost certainly was the one instrumental in getting the treasure from the discovery site to their cottage without anyone’s knowledge — carrying it under her skirts, you see — her word might have carried some weight. But in those days” — he cast a mischievous glance at Ruth McVeigh — “the man in the house was the boss. So the treasure went to Germany, where it remained in some museum or other until the Second World War, when, for safekeeping, it was hidden in a bunker at the Berlin Zoological Station.” He took his pipe from his mouth, examined the bowl as if to be sure he had enough ammunition in the form of tobacco to finish his discourse, and then, satisfied, returned the pipe to his mouth and began puffing again. “And that,” he said, “is all we know.”
“Wait a second!” Martin said, swiftly objecting. “Not quite. We know a lot more. We know, for example, that the Americans foolishly allowed the Russians to capture Berlin, including the bunker under the zoo. And we also know the treasure has never been seen since. Are you suggesting, Bob,” he asked sarcastically, “that there is no connection between those two facts?”
“I’m only saying we don’t know,” Keller pointed out mildly. “If the Russians have had the Schliemann treasure all these years — how many is it? Since 1945? Thirty-four years, over a third of a century — why haven’t they ever exhibited it?”
“Because they have no legal right to it,” Martin said triumphantly. He made it sound as if the statement in itself proved the correctness of all he had said before.
“Besides,” Keller went on, quite as if Martin had not spoken at all, “according to your theory, this person” — he pointed to the letter with the stem of his pipe — “has gone into quite a bit of research in order to attempt this swindle.” He frowned, but his eyes were twinkling. “I don’t care for that word ‘swindle’ — not for something as big as this, something involving a sum as huge as fifteen million dollars. There should be a more expensive title for a ploy that grand. This project, I suppose, would be better. If this person has gone to all this research, not to mention trouble — copies of articles, photographs — then he obviously would also know that the Russians have possession of the real treasure. Right?”