Trojan Gold - Elizabeth Peters [48]
I gave him a brief rundown of the day’s activities.
“Ve-ry interesting,” John said thoughtfully. “Let’s concoct a plot, shall we? I’ll begin; feel free to interrupt if you have contributions or criticisms.”
“I will.”
“I’m sure you will. All right, here we go. Forty-odd years ago, Hoffman was an official of the museum where the Trojan gold was displayed. After the war—”
“Wait a minute, you’re skipping. What was he doing during the war?”
“Irrelevant. We have to assume he was in Berlin at the end of the war and that somehow he managed to make off with the treasure. Otherwise we don’t have a plot.”
“Okay, I’ll buy that.”
“All the same, I wish I knew how he managed it,” John mused. “It was one of the master scams of all time, played against a background of epic tragedy—Homeric tragedy, one might say. Crawling across a hellish no man’s land pocked with bomb craters and fallen bodies, with shells bursting overhead and buildings flaming around him, clutching that precious bundle…We’ll never know, I suppose.” I nudged him and with a wistful sigh—the tribute of a master to a brilliant amateur—he resumed his narrative.
“After the war, he turned up in Bavaria, married the innkeeper’s daughter, and settled into a life of quiet obscurity, giving up what might have been a distinguished academic career. The preservation of the Trojan gold had become an idée fixe, perhaps a symbol of all the masterpieces of art and learning smashed by the barbarians and never to be retrieved, as your friend the carpenter put it. Why should he hand it over to someone else? He had as much right to it as anyone—more, because he had saved it and they had threatened to destroy it. In his admittedly distracted mind, there was no difference between conqueror and conquered. One had bombed London and Coventry, but the other had reduced Dresden to rubble and gutted the Cathedral of Cologne. Well—what do you think?”
“Very literary, very intuitive, very profound. You may even be right.”
“To resume, then. His first wife must have known about the treasure; he photographed her wearing it. Was it her death that made him decide to share his secret with someone else? The inevitability of death is the one undeniable fact we all try to deny—”
“If I want more philosophy, I’ll read Plato,” I informed him. “Get on with it.”
“His wife died,” John said obediently. “He married again—a woman forty or fifty years younger. Did he tell her about the treasure?”
“Of course he did. Men do stupid things when they’re in love.”
“Dear me, what a sweeping, sexist generalization.”
“I said, skip the philosophy.”
“You were the one who…. All right, what next? Did the second Frau Hoffman promise to carry on the trust? Or did she urge him to hand over the gold to the proper authorities?”
“Neither of the above. She’s a greedy, ignorant little gold digger, John. If she found the True Cross, her first idea would be to hock it.”
“I’ll accept your evaluation—without,” John added pointedly, “any sexist comments. The reaction you describe is unfortunately common to many members of the human race, male and female alike.”
“So she said something like, ‘Oh, Anton darling, think of all that money,’ and he said, ‘Bite your tongue,’ and she…well, whatever she said, he realized he had picked the wrong lady. The minute he died, she’d have the treasure out of hiding and into the hock shop. That realization was what made him decide to pass on his trust to a more suitable custodian. Better it should end up in a museum than in the hands of—forgive me—someone like you.”
I paused to give him time for rebuttal; he chose not to take advantage of it, so I went on. “He kept putting off the decision to act, however. How many people die without a will? Something finally forced him to make up his mind. I suspect—and there is some confirmatory evidence—that he learned Friedl had already betrayed him—gone behind his back. To—who?”
“Whom,” said John. “Ouch,” he added indignantly.
“Then don’t be a pedant. You derailed my train of thought. Where was I? Oh—Friedl’s extramarital