The Samurai Inheritance

VI

Central Berlin, Jamie reflected, was like the centre of many German cities: an illusion. The beautiful old buildings that looked as if they’d been built when it was the capital of Prussia were modern replicas, a legacy of April and May 1945 when Allied bombers and the Red Army turned the city into a gigantic rubble field. No matter what you thought of Germans, you had to admire their resilience. When the dust settled they’d gone to work with their celebrated efficiency to disguise the scars of war. Whether it was with a great, rust-stained block of workers’ flats as favoured by Walter Ulbricht or the initial restoration of the Reichstag by Paul Baumgarten, most of the ruins were replaced within a couple of decades.

It took less than five minutes to walk from the hotel, over the Liebknecht brücke to Museum Island, and across the grass of the Lustgarten into the shadow of the Altes Museum. As the name suggested, it was the oldest of the museums on the island. It held some of the ancient world’s greatest works of art and Jamie would have liked nothing better than to spend a couple of hours among the Greek statuary, but his destination was the nearby Neues Museum.

Museum Island had been east of the wall, in the care of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Fortunately, Jamie decided, if the leaders of the DDR were keen on one thing it was museums. It took a few years for their masters in Moscow to acknowledge that most of the contents of Berlin’s museums had ended up in the Hermitage or the basement of the Kremlin, but by the late Fifties they’d recovered most of their important exhibits. A few bits and pieces were still missing. Priam’s Treasure, the hoard of gold and silver Heinrich Schliemann dug up from what might have been Troy, was one. It eventually turned up in the Pushkin Museum, but the Russians decided they’d keep it as war reparations. Jamie thought this had a certain ironic symmetry considering Schliemann more or less stole it from the Turks in the first place. That was the thing about the early German archaeologists and anthropologists, many of them were little better than looters. Not far away, the Pergamon Museum owed its existence to an engineer called Carl Humann who had excavated a site in Izmir, Turkey. In 1880, Humann did a deal with the Turks to keep fragments of friezes he discovered, and ended up taking an entire Greek temple back to Germany, an act of cultural vandalism that made Lord Elgin look like a high-street hustler. Naturally, the Turks asked for it back, but the German authorities ignored the request, as they did Iraq’s for the return of the museum’s Ishtar Gate, a thirty-foot masterpiece of glazed blue brick that was once one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Priam’s Treasure had been the centrepiece of the New Museum collection. The original Neues had been built in the 1850s and, unsurprisingly, got its name from being slightly less old than the Altes. The Egyptian collection was probably the finest outside Cairo, but today Jamie had no time to spare with the star exhibit, an iconic limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti. He had other things on his mind as he followed his escort through the exquisitely painted rooms and past the glass cases to the Herr Direktor’s modest office on the fourth floor. When the Neues opened, it had been the repository for anything that couldn’t be displayed properly in the Altes, which meant just about everything not Greek or Roman. If the Bougainville head had been deemed of sufficient importance it could be here.

A secretary ushered him through a door and a tall, lean figure in a dark suit welcomed him with a grave smile and a formal handshake. ‘You would like some coffee, Herr Saintclair?’

‘That would be lovely, sir,’ Jamie greeted Museum Direktor Muller. ‘Milk, no sugar.’

It was two years since Jamie had last been here, just after the museum reopened, but the man opposite him appeared about a decade younger. Then, the Herr Direktor had exhibited all the signs of a man under overwhelming stress: all twitching moustache and eyes darting nervously from a bony, pallid face. Now he exhibited the urbane air of a man in charge of his destiny. A man who knew the position of every bust and every mummy in his diverse collections. They waited until the coffee arrived and Muller took a delicate sip before opening the conversation.

‘First I must thank you for the generous donation to our funds,’ he said with a smile. ‘The state, of course, is bountiful, but conservation and research is expensive.’

Jamie returned the smile. ‘It was the least I could do after the help you provided on my previous commission,’ he acknowledged. ‘My client was most grateful for the return of the crown.’ In truth, the recovery of the Crown of Isis had brought him a modest cheque from the New York Police Department. The donation had come from the Princess Czartoryski Foundation finder’s fee for the Raphael. Nonetheless, contacts like Herr Direktor Muller were like plants: they required nurturing. A few thousand euros was money well spent now he could afford it, as his host’s genial cooperation confirmed.

‘And now you are here on another mysterious quest. I am intrigued. How can we be of assistance to you?’

Jamie hesitated. He’d been turning this conversation over in his mind since he’d landed at Tegel. It was all very well asking about Italian renaissance masterpieces and Egyptian crowns, but how did one broach the subject of a severed human head? There really was only one way. He took a deep breath and twisted his features into the apologetic grin that had seen him through a hundred dodgy negotiations.

‘The object I’m attempting to locate is a shrunken head that originated on the island of Bougainville.’ He saw the smile freeze on Herr Direktor Muller’s face but carried on without pausing for breath. ‘It would have been donated to the museum by an anthropologist named Adolfus Ribbe at some point between the years eighteen ninety-five and nineteen hundred. I’m aware it won’t be in any of your main collections, but I wondered if it might be hidden away somewhere in your basement?’ he ended lamely.

Muller stared at him, lips twisted in an expression that might have been puzzlement, disapproval or the precursor to a burst of hysterical laughter. The manicured hands rubbed at each other as though he were trying to rid them of some unwanted substance. Now Jamie thought of it, the idea seemed so outlandish he felt like running from the room. Before he could decide, the Herr Direktor remembered the cheque, composed himself and gave a sorrowful shake of his head.

‘I’m afraid that anything hidden away in my basement would have been consumed by American incendiary bombs in February nineteen forty-five, Herr Saintclair. To my certain knowledge we do not have an artefact of that nature within these walls …’

The news felt like a kick in the teeth, but why should he be surprised? It had always been a long shot. Still, something in Muller’s voice gave Jamie hope that it wasn’t a complete dead end.

‘But …?’

‘But there is another possibility. First …’ The Herr Direktor pushed a buzzer on his desk. He picked up a fountain pen to dash off a note on the pad by his right hand, the metal nib darting back and forth in neat, regimented lines across the pristine white paper. ‘Ribbe, you say? Have you any other details?’

Jamie mentioned that the anthropologist may have been based in Hamburg and the German added the information just as his secretary appeared in the doorway.

‘First we must discover if the artefact was ever donated to this museum. Fortunately, the archives for early contributions had been moved out of the building to the Zoo flak tower before the bombing and survived the war.’ Jamie knew the Zoo tower had been an enormous anti-aircraft bunker and bomb shelter out beyond Tiergarten. In addition to its more warlike function, it had accommodated the treasures of Berlin’s museums. When the Russians had captured it they’d been dissuaded from their usual wanton destruction by intelligence officers seeking information about Germany’s nuclear programme. ‘We have the originals in storage,’ the German continued. ‘For convenience the records have also been computerized so it should not take too long. In the meantime, perhaps I can explain why I am so certain there is no shrunken head in this museum?’

‘Of course.’ Jamie smiled, knowing this was his penance for wasting the Herr Direktor’s time with his foolishness.

‘Much has changed since your fellow Ribbe made his donation — if indeed he did. In those days studying the differences between various ethnic groups by examining their remains was a perfectly legitimate scientific pursuit.’ He paused and stroked his bottom lip with his index finger as if that would somehow provoke the correct words. ‘At one time most museums — including this one — would have had quite a collection of skulls, mainly for research purposes. These days they would never accept something of that nature, unless it had a specific value, such as giving an insight into ritual practices. In fact, we in the German Museums Association are already working on the details of a repatriation policy for the bulk of our human remains. The Museum of Medical History, for instance, has an extensive collection of skulls of the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea, many of which will soon be returned.’

‘Then perhaps that’s where I should be looking?’ Jamie suggested.

‘Perhaps,’ the Herr Direktor took another sip of his coffee, ‘but we must ask ourselves what medical value a shrunken head would have? It would have gone through an extensive preservation process, which would leave it with little resemblance anatomically to its former self. For a scientist it would be like studying the badly stuffed remains of an animal. I doubt whether the medical museum would have accepted such a donation, unless it was for novelty value alone.’

‘Does this mean you’ll be repatriating all the Egyptian mummies I saw on the way up here?’

A thin smile creased Muller’s face. ‘You are joking, of course, but it is a legitimate question and one that requires addressing. In future we must recognize that these wonderful artefacts are human remains and can no longer be treated merely as objects. When we can, we must show the face behind the bandages, and tell the story of the person within.’

‘Is that something you can do?’ Jamie’s professional interest was piqued.

‘Of course.’ Muller spread his hands like a messiah spreading his message. ‘With the developing technologies at our disposal anything is possible—’

A knock at the door interrupted the conversation and the secretary entered to hand the direktor a computer printout. He scanned the contents and lifted his head to fix Jamie with an amused look that made the Englishman’s heart beat a little faster. ‘It seems your instincts were correct, Herr Saintclair, though you were fortunate Greta decided to search several years either side of our potential dates. In November of the year eighteen eighty-five, the museum purchased from Herr Adolfus Ribbe, lately returned from German New Guinea, “one canoe god — to be placed on the prow or stem of said vessel — seven fish spears in a variety of patterns, a model canoe — five feet in length, with foliage sail — various frond bowls, two clubs, four skulls of varying antiquity and … one shrunken head of a warrior chieftain”. You appear surprised.’

‘Frankly, Herr Direktor, I’m bloody astonished.’ Jamie grinned as Muller blinked at the bluntness of his reply. ‘When I first heard the words “shrunken head” I thought I had as much chance of finding it as winning the lottery.’

‘Of course, this does not mean it is here now,’ the museum boss cautioned. ‘The head would have remained in the Neues for just two years until the new Ethnological Museum in Stresemannstrasse opened its doors. Our entire collection moved there. It is now housed in a rather depressing modern building out at Dahlem, but I must warn you that the Stresemannstrasse site suffered even more gravely than this museum in the latter years of the war. Much of their collection was lost.’

But Jamie was barely listening.

Every hunt began with a first step. Against all the odds, the Bougainville head was more than just a fuzzy photograph taken more than a century earlier. It was a reality.