Greeks Bearing Gifts

TWENTY

A few days later, after a very good lunch indeed, we went to the Archaeological Museum in Piraeus. Built by Themistocles at the beginning of the fifth century BC, the town was home to almost half a million people. It was the center of Greek coastal shipping and the industrial heartland of Greece, with spinning factories, flour mills, distilleries, breweries, soap factories, and chemical manure plants. It certainly smelled that way. About a twenty-minute drive from Athens, the town had no important ancient monument thanks to the Spartans, who’d destroyed the original fortifications, and the Romans, who’d destroyed much else besides. That’s the most comforting thing about history: you find out that it’s not always the Germans who are to blame. Next to the museum was a virtual builder’s yard of assorted archaic marble torsos that almost made me think I was back in the mortuary at the Schwabing Hospital. But inside the two-story building there were many fine treasures, including a bronze statue of Athena that was as tall as a giraffe; she had one hand held out in supplication, as if she was begging for some small change, and, but for the rakishly worn hoplite’s helmet, she reminded me of the Hungarian woman I’d tipped earlier on.

We found Dr. Stavros Lyacos, the assistant director of the museum, in the basement, next to the laboratories for the maintenance of clay, metal, and stone objects. His office had a large marble eye on the wall and, lying on the desk, was a Greek fertility goddess rather more attractive than the morbidly obese German fertility goddess found at Willendorf. Even Dr. Lyacos was more attractive than her. He was tall and thin with a small tight mouth, sharp heavy-lidded eyes, and half-moon glasses on the bridge of a pointy Pinocchio nose that helped to make his face look more fastidious than comically mendacious. He wore a generously cut double-breasted gray flannel suit with lapels as wide as a pair of scimitars, and a blue-striped bow tie. The red carnation in his buttonhole made him look as if he were going to a wedding and since he clearly wasn’t, it made me think he was a man in possession of a large mirror and for whom the marble eye mounted on the wall was something of a personal statement. Smoking a cherrywood pipe, Dr. Lyacos listened politely and smiled without any great warmth while I introduced myself and explained my mission, and then he went to fetch a file from a cabinet that stood between a headless marble lion and the torso of a young man who was missing most of his genitals and—not that it would have mattered in those tragic circumstances—both of his hands. Lyacos had no German nor very much English and, later on, Garlopis told me that he spoke a Greek that was full of ancient words, which was always the sign of an educated man.

He said that he’d met with both Siegfried Witzel and Professor Buchholz, that both men spoke fluent Greek, and that their permissions were gold-plated, in evidence for which he returned from the filing cabinet with a variety of official paperwork. These showed that the Germans’ expedition had the blessing of no less a figure than the Greek interior minister, Dimitrios Makris, in the form of a handwritten letter on parliamentary notepaper, as well as all the proper consents and approvals from the Ministry of Public Works on Karageorgi Servias Street. There were also several forms stamped by the Naval Ministry on Paparigopoulou Street and the Greek coast guard in Piraeus. It seemed that Professor Buchholz had been most charming and even presented Dr. Lyacos with a signed copy of his book on Hellenistic art, which he might have read had it not been in German. When I asked if he still had a copy of the book, Dr. Lyacos said he had, removed it from a drawer in his desk, and laid it in front of me. The book, published by C. H. Beck and lavishly illustrated, was called Hellenism: The Rise and Fall of a Civilization and, as Lyacos had told me, was indeed signed by Professor Philipp Buchholz and inscribed in German and Greek: To Stavros Lyacos, in gratitude for his generous help and assistance. Lyacos proceeded to explain that the arrangement between the two museums had been that anything found by the expedition would be shared, with the museum in Piraeus having first pick and the museum in Munich having the remainder.

“Tell me, doctor, is it usual for all these permissions to be granted so quickly?” I asked, noting the close proximity of the dates on the official paperwork. “All of this seems to have happened with a rapidity that, if you’ll both forgive me for saying so, seems a little remarkable even in Greece.”

Not usual at all, was the doctor’s answer; then again, the Ministry of the Interior had crabs in its pockets when it came to funding archaeology in modern Greece, which meant that it was stingy; this was the first Greek-German cooperation in the field of archaeology since 1876, when the Greek Archaeological Society had worked with Heinrich Schliemann at the royal graves site in Mycenae, so perhaps there was a hope that this might prove to be just as successful as that. It was, after all, Schliemann who’d discovered the famous golden mask of Agamemnon, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. The two Germans had been very respectful and accommodating, Lyacos concluded.

I looked at Garlopis and shook my head. “I can’t see anything wrong here, can you? Everything sounds very proper.”

Garlopis shrugged and then translated what I’d just said for Dr. Lyacos.

“Well, not everything, perhaps,” said Garlopis, interpreting what Lyacos now said. “But after all, he says, this is Greece, so how could it be?”

“Like what, for instance?”

Lyacos puffed his pipe, looked uncomfortable for a moment, and then started to speak.

“He doesn’t wish to say anything against a man as distinguished in the field of Hellenism as Professor Buchholz,” explained Garlopis. “Even so, the small artifacts found on the wreck site by Herr Witzel had been identified by the professor as late Helladic when in the opinion of Dr. Lyacos they were actually much earlier. Late Bronze Age, probably. But it’s not uncommon for experts on antiquity to disagree about such things, so he doesn’t think it’s important.”

“Nevertheless,” I said, “he sounds like he was a bit surprised by that.”

“He was, I think. Especially as there are some very similar late Bronze Age artifacts in the professor’s book that are correctly identified.”

Lyacos turned the illustrated pages to reveal a photograph of a bronze tripod, a golden ring, and a little statue of a snake goddess.

“These,” said Lyacos.

I nodded and then closed the book.

“How do you go about getting the permission of someone like Mr. Makris to look for this kind of stuff, anyway?”

Garlopis spoke to Lyacos for a second and then answered that he wouldn’t know.

“Is he sure about that?”

The two Greeks spoke for almost a minute, during which time they laughed several times, and then Garlopis said, “He says he believes that the minister of the interior, Takos Makris, has always done what Konstantinos Karamanlis tells him to do. And I have to say I agree with him there. Mr. Makris is married to the niece of Mr. Karamanlis, Doxoula, so it’s certain that the two men are very close. After a man like Mr. Makris gave his permission it’s certain that everyone else in the government must have sat up and paid attention.”

Idly, I opened the book on Hellenism again—C. H. Beck was one of Germany’s most prestigious publishing houses—and glanced over what had been written about Professor Buchholz in the author’s biography on the flyleaf.

And it was then I noticed what I’d been too dumb to notice before: that Professor Buchholz was the assistant director at the Glyptothek Museum, in Munich.

It was certainly a coincidence that my first job as a claims adjustor working for MRE had been to investigate a break-in at the Glyptothek, but a remarkable one? There had been a time when I had strongly believed that a good detective was merely a man who collected coincidences—a perfectly respectable activity since Pascal and Jung—with the aim of connecting one or two of them until they looked like something more meaningful and concurrent. Of course, it’s no great surprise that over a long period of time, as fortune takes its course, many coincidences should occur. But here the question was this: Did the several weeks that had elapsed since the break-in at the Glyptothek count as a long period of time and therefore enough to discount coincidence?

Or, to put this in a less mathematically naïve way, could I smell a rat?