The Mask of Troy Page 22

  ‘Ah,’ Dillen murmured. ‘That explains it. The mysterious deformed skeleton. It’s in Schliemann’s book.’

  ‘It was apparently in very poor condition,’ Hugh said. ‘But the boy recognized the misshapen skull. It was from a Bronze Age cemetery the team had been excavating outside the city walls just below the Lion Gate, and then abandoned once Schliemann realized they were just humble graves, not royal tombs.’

  ‘Why on earth would they do that?’ Rebecca said. ‘Put a skeleton into Agamemnon’s grave?’

  Hugh held up his hand. ‘Before that. To Troy, fourteen years later. Night after night the man watched Schliemann and Sophia disappear off into the ancient citadel mound to dig alone, just as they had done in 1873 when they uncovered Priam’s treasure beside the great trench. Only this time the dig was much more secretive, in a part of the citadel to the west that remains unexcavated today. The last time he saw them digging was the evening after the end of the second Troy Congress, held at the site in March 1890. Schliemann had sat down with the boy, the man, for a few minutes before the congress, and seemed to want to confide in him. He said he’d known all along that Priam’s treasure dated a thousand years before Homeric Troy, but only at this congress would he finally acknowledge it.’

  ‘Which he did,’ Dillen murmured. ‘It’s on record.’

  Hugh nodded. ‘But it wasn’t an act of humility. Not Schliemann. No, he told the man that he’d misdated the treasure deliberately, to make it seem as if the greatest treasure of Homeric Troy had been found. He had wanted to deflect attention from the real revelation he and Sophia believed they had begun to unearth in 1873. Only now, in 1890, had Schliemann reached the point in his discoveries at Mycenae and around the ancient world when the time was right to return to Troy, to finish the excavation, to make that revelation. The man knew it must have something to do with the secret digging. That very night, Sophia laid a trail of little candles from the site entrance to the tunnel in the western perimeter. It was typical Schliemann, very theatrical. And the man soon realized why. All of the delegates to the conference had gone, but three new men arrived. They were clearly important men, travelling incognito. The man never saw the faces of two of them, and afterwards they left before he could get close enough to see. He was too far away to hear their conversation. But the third man he recognized.’

  ‘Who was it?’ Dillen asked.

  ‘Schliemann frequently returned to America to manage his business empire, and on one occasion he took the boy with him. They’d gone to Washington and stayed with one of Schliemann’s benefactors from his early days as an entrepreneur at the time of the California gold rush. They’d maintained a close but secret friendship ever since. The man’s name was George Frisbie Hoar.’

  ‘George Hoar,’ Dillen exclaimed, thinking hard. ‘Good God. Yes, that makes sense. Hoar was a prominent antiquarian, a patron of the Smithsonian Institution and the Peabody Museum at Harvard. But he was more than that. Far more. He was one of the most prominent American politicians of the second half of the nineteenth century. That’s why Schliemann would have courted him. Hoar’s was a voice of moderation and humanity, famously warning against American imperialism and foreign wars. By 1890 he’d been a senator for years, one of the most respected in the House. If you were going to choose the most important American politician of the time, you might have put Hoar above any incumbent president.’

  Hugh reached back and picked up a heavy hardbound volume from his desk, handing it to Rebecca. It had lavish embossing on the cover, a golden bull’s head, the horns curving upwards. ‘That’s Schliemann’s account of his excavations at Mycenae, where he describes the Mask of Agamemnon,’ he said. ‘I had that actual volume with me on the dig in 1938, and I’ve been reading it again for the first time in years. I remember your dad poring over it when he first came to visit me. His eyes just lit up when he saw the account of the mask. Now, take a look at the inside cover.’

  Rebecca carefully opened the book. Dillen leaned over, and saw a pasted coat of arms with the word HOAR in Gothic script beneath. ‘It’s a complete coincidence, pretty amazing, but these things happen,’ Hugh said. ‘I bought this book on a visit to New York City the year before Peter and I were in Greece, in 1937. Some of the contents of Hoar’s library were for sale and I was expanding my archaeology collection. I’d inherited some money and spent it on books.’

  ‘That’s it!’ Rebecca exclaimed excitedly.

  ‘What?’ Dillen said.

  ‘That coat of arms! The double-headed griffin! You remember the golden ring, the one Hiebermeyer found yesterday in the excavation? Dad said he’d seen the emblem somewhere before, but couldn’t remember. This was where!’

  ‘Good God,’ Dillen murmured. ‘I do believe you’re right.’ He stared at the arms, then turned to Hugh. ‘Yesterday afternoon, Maurice was digging in a tunnel under Troy and found a Victorian signet ring, with exactly that motif on it. We assumed it was somehow lost by one of Schliemann’s well-to-do guests.’

  ‘And now we know who it was,’ Rebecca exclaimed.

  ‘A tunnel, you say,’ Hugh murmured, staring hard at Dillen. ‘A tunnel. I’ve kept up with the excavations of the last few years. You mean the watercourse tunnel they found on the south-west part of the site, leading to the spring?’

  Dillen shook his head. ‘Something I was going to tell you, and it may as well be now. It’s extraordinary. In the last few days Maurice has found a passage under the Homeric citadel, a deep trench with inward-sloping sides in the same masonry as the city walls, clearly late Bronze Age. That watercourse may perhaps lead to it, to whatever lies at the end. We don’t know. Maurice hasn’t got there yet. What we do suspect is that it was some kind of monumental entranceway, not to the citadel but to something underneath. The walls were lined with stone stelae, some with inscriptions. Maurice thinks he’s even seen hieroglyphics. And there’s a colossal sculpted head of a king, like a gate guardian. Rebecca and Jeremy found it.’

  Hugh continued staring hard at him, then reached over to his desk and took a scuffed old sketchpad from the pile. He held it closed for a moment, deep in thought, then opened it and leafed through to a double-page pencil drawing in pastel colours. He carefully turned the open book around, and handed it to Dillen. ‘You mean like this?’

  Dillen took it, and gasped. The sketch showed an entranceway as he had just described, but with two gate guardians, one on either side. ‘That’s incredible. Where on earth is this?’

  ‘The old man described it to us, when we spoke to him at Mycenae in 1938. This is what he saw that night under Troy.’

  ‘Good God. This is it. This is what Maurice has found.’ Dillen looked across. ‘You’ve kept this a closely guarded secret.’

  Hugh paused. ‘It’s been hard for me to look at that again. It’s been locked away, since the war. That’s Peter’s drawing. Based on the old man’s description. Peter was quite a good watercolourist. He was always trying to frame what he saw. He told me once when we met up before Cassino that he did that after battle, to try to take one step back from what he was really seeing, from the carnage and the horror. ’

  ‘It looks so much like the entranceway to a tomb,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘Like the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae.’

  ‘That’s exactly what the old man said,’ Hugh replied enthusiastically. ‘We were there, at Mycenae, and he showed us. And he was convinced that it’s what Schliemann thought, too. That somewhere at the end of the passageway was a tomb, a treasury, right under the palace of Troy. But this passageway, as much as you see in this drawing, was as far as Schliemann and Sophia got.’

  ‘What happened?’ Rebecca asked. ‘Why didn’t they finish excavating it?’

  ‘That night in 1890, it was as if Schliemann had invited the three guests to view a work in progress, but at a time when he knew there’d be a great revelation. Perhaps he was prepping them, stoking their enthusiasm, for another visit several months, maybe a year ahead, when all would be revealed. But later t
hat summer Schliemann drove himself to a physical breakdown.’

  Dillen nodded. ‘It’s all there, in his papers. Gladstone was concerned about his health, writing to him about it. And there’s one letter Schliemann himself wrote that summer to another of his friends, Prince Otto von Bismarck of Germany. It sticks in my mind. He said, “My workers and I are utterly exhausted. I shall be forced to suspend operations on 1 August. But if heaven grants me life I intend to resume work with all the energy at my disposal on 1 March 1891.” ’

  ‘But that wasn’t to be,’ Rebecca murmured.

  Dillen shook his head. ‘The ear infection that had plagued him for months became acute, and deafened him. It was pretty ghastly. He sought treatment around Europe, but he died in Athens in December.’

  ‘So what happened to the excavation?’ Rebecca asked.

  Hugh leaned forward again. ‘According to the old man, Sophia backfilled what they’d discovered, the stelae with the inscriptions, those two statues, all by herself. Then she had the man and his brother come in and bury the trench, turfing it over so that pretty soon it looked as if it hadn’t been disturbed.’

  ‘So Maurice was right to be suspicious,’ Dillen murmured. ‘He thought he was digging through stratigraphy that didn’t look entirely plausible, as if it had been deliberately backfilled.’

  ‘But why?’ Rebecca demanded. ‘Why bury it if the moment of revelation was so close?’

  ‘Sophia and Schliemann were truly in love, and were a team,’ Hugh replied thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps with Heinrich gone, she simply couldn’t bear to carry on. But I think there was more to it than that. They were always conspiratorial, digging secretly, spiriting treasures away. Peter and I wondered whether Sophia could have been carrying out Schliemann’s last wishes in the event of his sudden death. Perhaps she was to backfill the trench, and look to the future when some distant archaeologist might take up the baton. Someone of similar stature, someone with the personality and drive to make his discoveries come alive, to sell them to the world in the same way he had. If so, I can’t help thinking he was right. Troy without Schliemann is inconceivable. Another archaeologist might have dug the mound with greater precision, published a more sober monograph, but the site at Hissarlik would never have caught the popular imagination in the way it did.’

  Dillen nodded. ‘His papers show that Schliemann was always afraid of his mortality, afraid that his death might extinguish his myth. Maybe he gained solace from thinking that what had already been revealed might inspire another with the same spark, the same imagination, to take up where he had left off. Schliemann was always leaving little clues. The decoration of his house in Athens, the swastikas.’

  ‘Swastikas?’ Rebecca said.

  ‘Not a Nazi invention,’ Dillen said. ‘It’s found in prehistory from India through Asia, including Troy. It’s actually quite common. The Nazis associated it with their supposed Aryan precursors and hijacked it.’

  ‘That’s why the swastika on the drawing might not be all that it seems,’ Hugh said.

  Rebecca peered again. ‘Because it’s counterclockwise?’

  ‘Not the usual Nazi swastika, which goes clockwise,’ Dillen murmured.

  ‘Those ancient swastikas, the decoration at Troy?’ Rebecca asked. ‘Which way do they go?’

  ‘Counterclockwise too. Not always, but most commonly.’

  ‘So how on earth does the girl with the harp come to draw a Trojan swastika?’ Rebecca demanded.

  Dillen tapped his fingers on his mug, staring at the Mycenae book still resting on Rebecca’s lap. ‘That final night at Troy, with those three guests,’ he murmured. ‘What on earth was Schliemann playing at? Hoar was a pretty important figure. Who were those other two? This was about more than just treasure. Schliemann was an ideas man. He wanted to fire up people’s imagination. He wanted people to do more than just gape in wonder.’

  ‘I still don’t understand how the swastika’s a clue,’ Rebecca said. ‘A clue to what?’

  ‘And you haven’t told us what the boy saw in the grave at Mycenae, before Schliemann and Sophia put in the skeleton,’ Dillen said.

  ‘He saw the golden mask, where they’d left it, but underneath, when he lifted it, he did not gaze on the face of Agamemnon. Instead, there was a void in the clay. A shape, where something had been. He could see fresh marks around the sides, where it had been prised out. He remembered Schliemann had brought a bag with him, a satchel. An object that had been concealed there three thousand years before, and was to disappear again that night until the Second World War, when it was seen by a Jewish girl in the midst of the worst horror imaginable.’

  Rebecca gasped. ‘The shape. You mean a swastika.’

  Hugh nodded. ‘A Trojan swastika. With the arms going counterclockwise. Just as the girl with the harp drew it.’

  Dillen could barely believe what he was saying. ‘So Agamemnon himself could have buried it.’

  Rebecca stared at the picture. ‘Why? Why in a grave? In his own grave?’

  Hugh looked at her. ‘Where better for a king to conceal something he may never have wanted found? What better way to stamp your authority over it, to lay claim to it, than to bury it in your own grave under your own mask?’

  ‘What did it mean?’ Rebecca said. ‘Why did he have it? How? What did the swastika symbolize?’

  Hugh looked at them intently. ‘The final ingredient of the story. What the old man said he saw that final night at Troy after Schliemann and the three men had left.’

  ‘He saw more,’ Dillen whispered. ‘Go on, Hugh.’

  ‘He’d been spying on them from the rampart above. After they’d gone, he slid down into the unexcavated end of the trench, where the sloping walls disappeared into the soil, converging towards some spot under the citadel. There was a tunnel inside, just wide enough for him to crawl along. It was pitch black, so he took a candle. At the furthest point, a crack in the fallen masonry ahead allowed him to glimpse what lay at the end. He saw what Schliemann must have seen. He realized why Schliemann had summoned Hoar and the others to come to Troy that night. He knew why Schliemann had been supremely confident that a great revelation was to hand.’

  ‘What was it?’ Rebecca whispered.

  ‘He saw bronze, the face of a great bronze door. In the centre was a saucer-sized roundel. And within that was a shape.’

  Rebecca stared at him. ‘A swastika.’

  ‘A Trojan swastika,’ Dillen exclaimed.

  Hugh nodded. ‘It was impressed, exactly the same shape and size as the void under Agamemnon’s mask.’

  ‘Good God,’ Dillen exclaimed. ‘Of course. In a door. It’s blindingly obvious. That’s what Schliemann knew. The swastika wasn’t just a symbol of Troy. It was a key.’

  ‘No wonder Schliemann wanted it kept secret,’ Rebecca said. ‘The key to a secret chamber under Troy. How many treasure-hunters would die for that.’

  ‘And it’s the key to something else,’ Hugh said quietly, sitting up, glancing back at the photo on the mantelpiece. ‘Something awful, something I wish I could deny, like a bad dream. It’s to do with the girl with the harp, and that drawing she made in 1945. I think she may have seen the Trojan swastika in a bunker in the forest. When she was taken there and raped. One of the SS men who tried to surrender to us was raving about something in the forest, kept jabbing his finger, saying there were hidden treasures, underground. He was trying to bargain for his life. We didn’t believe him. We thought the camp was for forest labourers and then was used as an overflow camp for Belsen. We knew there were other SS who had escaped into the forest, so we thought it was just a way of leading us into an ambush. That’s what may have happened to Peter. But now I think that the guard might have been telling us the truth.’

  ‘Do you think that’s what Peter and the American found?’

  ‘I don’t know. We may never know. But there is something else. A few days before we went into the camp, my SAS patrol ambushed a motorcycle courier. We’d been told to kill
any we came across. At that stage in the war they might have carried personal orders from Hitler, the kind of thing that might have spurred wavering German soldiers to fight to the death. Stopping messages like that might have saved countless Allied lives, our own chaps. He rode right into a wire we’d strung across a junction. The man was still alive, but his motorcycle burst into flames that destroyed the dispatch box.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’ Rebecca said.

  Hugh paused. ‘Perhaps I could have got something out of him. But we were behind enemy lines, and in a hurry. We didn’t take prisoners.’

  Dillen leaned forward. ‘But you found something.’

  ‘I saw a charred fragment blow away from the flames. I picked it up, and there was writing still visible on it, a few inches square. It was part of Hitler’s so-called Nero Decree, the order telling his commanders to destroy the remaining infrastructure of the Reich. I’d been briefed on it at HQ, who had a complete copy, so I recognized it. Only this one was slightly different. At the top of the page was a stamped swastika, but not the usual Nazi one. This one was counterclockwise. Exactly the same as the one in the girl’s drawing, and the shape described by the man at Mycenae and Troy. Of course I knew nothing about the girl’s drawing then. But when I saw it and remembered the burned fragment, that swastika, it sent a chill down my spine. And I realized the link with Schliemann because of the words beneath it.’