Tomb of Odin

Chapter 17

Jari watched his guests with a keen eye. His dogs came to sit by his chair, one on each side. It was peculiar. As if they were trained to do so, the large black beasts took their places. Purdue could hardly stifle his eagerness to ask the questions he had traveled so far to ask, but he had to give Sam time to ease into it.

“Jari, do you mind if I ask a few questions?” Sam asked their host.

“Not at all,” Jari replied kindly.

Nina took up the video camera. “You don’t mind being filmed, do you?” she smiled, really working her charm. It was unnecessary, though, for the old man would probably allow her anything.

“You may film, yes,” he nodded, satisfied.

“How long have you been an art collector?” Sam asked, reading from his notepad. Purdue listened as the art and relic dealer answered every mundane question Sam directed at him with professionalism and content. He was getting awfully impatient with their charade and wished he could just come out and tell Jari why they were really there, but gold was not a thing to be given away so easily, especially when the billionaire considered it a godsend, bestowed on him personally.

Dave Purdue was far from a religious or even spiritual person, but he could not deny the blessings that certain people and certain opportunities have brought him under the mask of self-respect and discipline. The place where they were now almost owned a magical quality, full of old-world guile just like the craftiness concealing the house and the precise behavior of the dogs.

“What are their names?” Purdue asked inadvertently. He gasped at the realization that he spoke out of turn, as if sleepwalking, and talked right over one of Jari’s lectures about how to choose a good artifact. Sam and Nina both looked at Purdue in puzzlement as Jari ceased his words.

“Oh, my God, I am so sorry!” Purdue apologized liberally for his error. His open hands were out in front of him in contrition. “I don’t know what happened there. I… I just said what I was thinking. My sincerest apologies.”

“Whose names, Dave?” Jari asked, completely disregarding Purdue’s blunder with a twinkle of humor in his eyes.

“The…” Purdue cleared his throat awkwardly, “the dogs, your dogs. I’m just curious.”

“This is Geri,” Jari pointed to the dog on his left, “and this is Freki,” he smiled proudly. Purdue acknowledged the answer with a small salute and sat back again.

“So sorry, Sam. Carry on, please,” Purdue smiled.

Nina fixed the lens on Jari, but she was not fully attentive to the conversation. Just like Purdue a moment before, her mind drifted off to seek the reason for the familiarity she felt at the names of the animals. Utterly bemused, she recalled every name of significance in Nazi history, and then proceeded to think of folk tales and foreign friendships she had forged before. Still nothing came to her to match with the two names.

“Can we take a moment, please?” Jari suddenly asked Sam. “I have to take a piss.”

Sam laughed, “Of course, you can take a piss! This is your house, after all.”

“Kiitos,” Jari smiled and disappeared into the dark heart of the house, leaving his two canines on point to watch the visitors. At least that is how it seemed.

“When are you going to get to the real question, Sam?” Purdue pressed in a soft voice.

“Aye,” Nina agreed, “you are taking too long.”

“I have to make it look believable, people!” Sam explained as quietly as he could. “I’ve done this a million times. It is not just for asking straight out, ‘hey, so, who is the artist you inherited the fucking cross from?’ There is more to it!”

“Josef Palevski,” came the answer from the doorway that led to the porch. Jari stood there, lighting his pipe.

Purdue, Sam, and Nina were dumbstruck. They never expected him to be back so soon, nor did they ever think he would be willing to answer this all-important question.

“It’s written on that prob-… pro-… provenance I sent you with the relic, Mr. Purdue. Or you had a hard time to make out the handwriting?”

Again he delivered a revelation that shook all three of them.

“How did you know who I was, Jari?” Purdue asked, pleasantly amazed.

“Do you think I don’t look for what kind of people I make transactions with?” he asked Purdue. “By the time I sent you the stone cross…” he puffed at his pipe, “I knew the size of your shoe.” Jari laughed robustly at their feeble attempts at deceit. “You could have spared much time just by telling me why you came.”

“Truthfully, we didn’t think you would tell us,” Nina shrugged awkwardly.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because you probably did not want to explain who gave it to you to complete strangers, just because they asked for no reason at all,” Sam fumbled his answer ineloquently.

“That is the only time I would have told you,” Jari exclaimed in astounded disbelief. He was obviously entertained by their careful scrutiny. “If for no reason, then where is the harm, eh?”

They laughed at the misunderstanding and only after their merriment died down did they start digging shamelessly. More wine was poured on the stoep of Jari Koivusaari’s hidden house before Nina finally asked, “Did Josef ever tell you why he made the cross?”

Jari pondered a little. His face changed into contorted sorrow. There was no doubt that he knew the artist well and missed him in his absence. The old man composed himself and cleared his throat. “Pretty woman, why you want to know this? David Purdue, are you not satisfied with your purchase?”

“I am more than satisfied with it, Jari. That piece is very special to me and I just have a connection to it, for some reason,” Purdue explained to Jari, and every word he spoke was gospel truth. The cross held an appeal since the moment he laid eyes on it, long before he knew it contained a king’s ransom in gold. “Somehow I feel that it speaks to me, that it has a story to tell.” Purdue shrugged. “That was why what Sam said was so true. We… I… just needed to know more for no particular reason.”

Nina and Sam glared at him, both wondering if he was just a very good actor or if there was something about Purdue’s expedition he was too embarrassed to share with them. He was well-known as a materialistic hedonist who did not put much stock into the deeper meanings of the things he chased after, except maybe for Nina Gould. And here he was confessing to having an emotional attachment to something he purchased, worth no more than what he had on his credit card balance at any given time.

“Josef Palevski contacted me to ask if I could be a broker for his art. He said he heard I was good, honest man who did not cheat people out of their money. I liked his work very much, so I said yes,” Jari told them with a steady thread of emotion in his words. “We became very good friends, even if he was more than thirty years older than I was.”

“Wow,” Nina whispered, evoking a slight smile from Jari.

“So, then he starts telling me his past when we become better friends. He tells me he had a bad life. Not for years could he stop having nightmares of the Second World War,” the old man recounted. Nina and Sam perked up at the mention of the war. It was a sign that they were on the right track, finally. However, Purdue listened intently, uncharacteristically ignoring the facts for the sake of the tale.

“Was he a soldier?” Sam asked.

“He was a Polish prisoner of the Nazis, from Jugowice. They took him from Płaszów—”

“Płaszów?” Sam asked again.

“A concentration camp used for forced labor,” Nina told Sam.

“That is correct, Nina,” Jari said, very impressed at her knowledge. He had no idea she was a German history expert, one thing the wise old man did not shock them with. “They took him to build railroads under the Owl Mountains where many he knew as brothers and sisters, some children of ten, eleven years, died of hunger, disease, or their bodies just broke under the hard labor,” he narrated with his pipe firmly between his teeth. “You know about the Nazi gold trains they talk about?”

They nodded.

“Now, Josef told me he saw one full of gold on the railway he helped to build a year later in another location. I did not believe him, of course,” he chuckled sadly, “but he told me there were some things on that trains — they came from scientists who were so intelligent they made things no man could understand.”

“Hollow Earth theory,” Nina guessed.

“Is that the myth of a super race living inside the Earth?” Purdue asked. “I’ve heard that so many times from those political science academics at charity parties.”

“I told him is bullshit, right?” Jari laughed. “But then he showed me what he stole from that train after the war ended because he knew where it was. But he could not take much with him, only some gold, some things from the underground scientists and when I told him he lied, he gave me these mirror sheets that have no solid state inside the frame!”

“No fucking way!” Sam marveled, bowled over by the coincidence.

Purdue shook his head in wonder, his jaw buried between his hands as he listened.

“So the mirrors around this house are not actual mirrors?” Nina asked.

Jari shook his head. “It is made like fine embroidery, but with many metals they spin like spider webs to weave a floating reflect surface,” Jari described what he knew in his best rendition. “But it does not bond, so you can fold it like smoke. Only the edges are solid and hold the metal compounds in.”

“Did he say what it is?” Sam asked.

“Boron is the base element. Most of their work come from the stars,” Jari said, looking up at the sky.

“Boron is the lightest metalloid chemical on the periodic table,” Purdue chimed in out of nowhere, still locked in awe though. “It is produced by supernovae and cosmic ray spallation, mostly.”

“Ah-hah,” Sam murmured, mocking Purdue’s terminology by acting as if he knew exactly what the genius inventor was referring to. Nina laughed, slapping him on the upper arm again.

“It is a stone that comes from space, Sam,” Purdue patronized him. “It looks like silver, like a mirror, if a mirror was a rock.”

“All right, all right, you two!” Nina said. “Let Jari tell us the rest.”

The old man adjusted his seat. “It was only a year before he died that I finally learned why he contacted me, really. Josef was my father.”

His visitors sat in silent amazement, spellbound.

“He made the cross and said I must put it in my garden here for 19 years and two months,” he told them. “But me and my wife… the trade was bad for a few years and nobody was buying rare items to keep us with enough money. And now they want to take my property, so I sold my father’s cross to David Purdue. Now me and my wife can keep this house, this land another year or two! So, it was a good thing.”

“What happened after 19 years and two months?” Purdue asked.

“I don’t know,” replied Jari. I sold the cross to you a month before that time… a month ago.”

Collectively, the faces of his visitors went ashen.