Death of an Elgin Marble Page 8

  Captain Dimitri, the ship’s captain, watched the two men carefully from a chair on the deck of his vessel. Strangers were common in Brindisi, but they were usually sailors or railway workers or refugees from the countryside looking for work. These men were foreigners, rich foreigners.

  The single-track railway line stopped opposite the ship and about a hundred yards from the water. Between it and the ship there appeared an ancient crane that must have been painted dark green in its youth but was now a rather dirty black. Its driver sat in his coach with a bottle of retsina in front of him. A couple of dockers appeared and made a great fuss of attaching the cables of the crane to the container. A space appeared to have been cleared on the deck of Captain Dimitri’s craft to receive the visitor. By now it was almost one o’clock. There was a heated conversation between the Captain and the crane driver. Powerscourt suspected it might have to do with the time to stop for lunch, the Captain anxious to get the container on board as soon as possible. A handful of notes changed hands. There was a great roar as the crane’s engines began to lift the container off the ground. Shortly after that Johnny Fitzgerald grabbed Powerscourt firmly by the arm.

  ‘For God’s sake, Francis! There’s something wrong with that bloody crane!’

  The container was well aloft now, twenty to thirty feet above the ground. The driver began to turn his load towards the ship. Then disaster struck. Whether it was a mechanical malfunction, or the retsina, or the driver was having a fit or a heart attack, the crane began throwing the container higher and higher in the air in a series of great loops, rising further and further from the ground every time. Powerscourt and Johnny could see the driver struggling desperately with the controls. A flock of seagulls that had been sitting quietly on a couple of bollards further round the quay took off in search of safety. The monkeys on deck, blessed perhaps with some form of second sight, set up a terrible squawking. The humans, the barman, the Captain and a couple of members of his crew were frozen, staring at the great box that might come crashing down on their heads at any moment. Higher and higher went the container. It was now swinging like a trapeze artist way above the quay. Then one of the cables snapped. Still it swung, but listing now like a drunken man going home on a Saturday night. Inside the cabin the driver had fallen forward, collapsed over his controls. The waitress from the café came out on to the pavement and screamed when she saw the great rectangle swinging erratically above their heads. Johnny maintained ever after, he could never say how or why, that the screams were responsible for the other cable breaking. The container seemed to hang in the air for a fraction of a second. Then it fell and landed on the hard stone of the quay with a terrible crack. The sides caved in and splinters of wood shot around the little harbour. The actual cargo inside broke into pieces before their eyes. Powerscourt saw an elegant marble head that might have come from the start of the fifth century before Christ. There were two sections of dress flowing in elegant lines. There was what might have been a marble knee, protruding slightly from the bulk of the statue. Shards of marble joined the wooden fragments from the container, shooting round the wreckage. Then all the pieces toppled slowly into the water. There was a mighty splash, but after a few minutes the waters had closed over the remains of the cargo that had left Victoria station a few days before. Small fish, which had disappeared with the noise, gradually reappeared and circled the great muddy space on the water where the remains had fallen.

  ‘God in Heaven, Francis,’ whispered Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘Do you think that was the Caryatid from the bloody museum?’

  ‘Yes, I do. The only question is was it the Caryatid, or a Caryatid. Real or copy? False or original? Made in Greece or made in Britain? We’d need a team of divers to bring up the statue before we could know the answer. But I tell you one thing, Johnny. Here on this forgotten quay, surrounded now by splinters of broken wood and shards of broken marble, we have just witnessed the Death of an Elgin Marble.’

  Before Johnny could answer, they were being prodded heavily in their backs. Two men, swarthy and unkempt, pushed them towards the boat, shouting at them in Greek to move along.

  ‘Such a pity I can’t remember much of my ancient Greek, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I always knew I should have paid more attention in class. How was I to know it might come in useful one day?’

  The two men were marched onto the boat across a plank that Powerscourt thought looked rather precarious. They were shoved onto a couple of chairs opposite the Captain and a young man in a suit who gave his name as Euripidis. Powerscourt wanted to ask him if he wrote plays in his spare time but thought better of it.

  The Captain spat out a torrent of Greek abuse. Off to their left a series of bubbles was breaking through the surface of the water where the Caryatid had fallen, as if she were sending a last message to the faithful.

  ‘What are you doing here, the Captain wants to know?’ Euripidis spoke English with a strong American accent.

  ‘What are you doing here, we might ask?’ said Powerscourt indignantly, going onto the offensive. ‘We are simple tourists, just come from London, staying at the Hotel Mazzini. We came to take a look at the harbour, that’s all.’

  Euripidis translated. The lion was watching them carefully from its cage on deck, rubbing its face with a great paw from time to time.

  ‘The Captain wants to know why you have come to see the Caryatid, why you are here this morning.’

  ‘Caryatid?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Caryatid? What’s a Caryatid for heaven’s sake? I think we have one of them in some museum in London and there’s half a dozen on permanent duty at St Pancras Church in Camden, but I’ve never set eyes on any of them. Was that thing that fell into the water one of these Carry things? I must tell my children when I get home. They’re very fond of Greek statues and stuff like that.’

  As he spoke, Powerscourt could see the translator scribbling furiously and handing a message to the Captain. Then there was a further volley in staccato Greek.

  ‘Well, the Captain says to forget all about that. He thought you were somebody else, that’s all.’

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m sorry you seem to have lost your container. Very bad luck. Now, if you’ll excuse us, Johnny and I have to be getting back to our hotel. We’re still tired out from our journey.’

  They waited once more. ‘The Captain wishes to know when you are going back to London, please. He would like to offer you a little cruise in his boat if you have time before you go.’

  ‘We’d be delighted, please thank him very much. Tomorrow perhaps? The day after?’

  ‘The day after would suit admirably. Eleven o’clock? Down here by the café?’

  They all shook hands. The lion looked on, growling slightly as it watched the visitors leave.

  ‘By God, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘that was a close shave. Do you really think he thought we were different people altogether? And why did you say yes to the cruise?’

  ‘Don’t walk so fast, Johnny. We don’t want them to think we’re running away. I would love to know what the translator said to make the Captain change his mind. Did the Captain know we were coming? If he did, how the hell did he find out? And I’ve no intention of showing up for the cruise. I think we’d end up as food for the fishes. Or maybe the lion if the Captain was in a bad mood.’

  ‘Where is Stavros, Kostas’s brother?’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘He had a ticket to bloody Brindisi, didn’t he?’

  ‘God knows. Davy Jones’s locker perhaps? Maybe he offended the bloody lion.’

  ‘There is one good thing, Francis. We’ve found the Caryatid, or, as you said before, maybe a Caryatid, one of a family of sisters perhaps, numbers unknown.’

  They were passing the last known resting place of the marble lady who might have come from the Acropolis. The deep muddy pool that marked her fall had disappeared. The surface of the water was covered with its usual oily sheen and fragments of floating refuse. Down below in a watery grave, the fragments of the Caryatid
waited for redemption and resurrection.

  ‘It’s good we’ve seen her, Johnny, even if it was only for a moment. There’s one other thing. My spoken Greek may be down there with the minnows, but I could just work out the name of the Captain’s ship. I’ll give you one guess as to what it is.’

  ‘The Greek Maiden?’ replied Johnny. ‘The Girl from Athens? Face of the Acropolis?’

  ‘Good try, very good try.’ Powerscourt grinned. ‘Nearly but not quite. We’ve solved one of Sokratis’s riddles at any rate. The Captain’s ship is called The Isles of Greece.’

  PART TWO

  MORTLAKE TERRACE, SUMMER’S EVENING

  Our love of beauty does not lead to extravagance: our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about. As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it: the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it. Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of state as well . . . we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say he has no business here at all.

  Thucydides, Pericles’ Funeral Speech,

  The History of Peloponnesian War

  7

  They left the Hotel Mazzini at half past one in the morning, tiptoeing down a rickety fire escape in their socks. Powerscourt and Johnny had kept a watch on the square all afternoon and evening. There was nothing obvious to be seen, but a series of idlers and loafers, all keeping a close eye on the hotel, had paraded past their windows at regular intervals. Powerscourt only left the building once. In the late afternoon he took himself to the offices of the local newspaper where he secured the services of the paper’s youngest reporter for a large handful of Italian banknotes. Antonio Paravacini, an eighteen-year-old veteran of Brindisi journalism, was to report any further comings and goings of The Isles of Greece and anything else that struck him as relevant to the recent happenings at the harbour. The banknotes should be sufficient to pay for a whole series of telegrams to London.

  Powerscourt had paid for their rooms for two days in advance, a precaution he had been following for years in foreign hotels where a quick escape might be the order of the day. Just after three o’clock a slow train bound for Taranto pulled slowly out of the station. There were two passenger compartments and two goods vans, and an engine that Johnny Fitzgerald claimed must have pulled Garibaldi across Italy on one of his interminable marches.

  ‘When we get to Taranto,’ Powerscourt explained, waving an Italian train timetable liberated from the Brindisi waiting room, ‘we can go home a different way, up the Mediterranean coast through Naples rather than the way we came down the Adriatic coast.’

  Johnny stretched himself out across an entire bench and went to sleep. Powerscourt stared out of the window into the Italian night. He remembered another early escape, in a mail train from Perugia nearly twenty years before in his investigation into the death of Prince Eddy, eldest son of the Prince of Wales. He had been escorted to his compartment long before the dawn by Captain Ferrante of the Perugia police and guarded by two of his officers all the way to Calais and the Dover boat. Dawn, he remembered, had come in slivers through the slits of the carriages, black sacks of Italian mail piled up at his feet.

  Three-quarters of an hour out of Brindisi the train stopped in the middle of nowhere. Peering back at the goods vans Powerscourt saw a number of milk containers being loaded and a man who might have been a shepherd with a couple of sheep going to market.

  The journey from Taranto to Naples took seven and a half hours. Johnny began snoring at Metaponto, continued through a long stop at Potenza Centrale and only stopped on the outskirts of Battipaglia, south of Salerno.

  ‘I bet your man Leith hasn’t been on this bloody train, Francis. I can’t see Rosebery careering through southern Italy on this line. Even the man who built it would see it’s totally out of date now.’

  Powerscourt laughed. He had been thinking about their reception aboard The Isles of Greece. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that the Captain knew they were coming. And if he did, how did he know? Had Kostas’s brother told him? And where was Kostas’s brother? There had been no sighting of him on the ship or at the railway station. Had he too been taken for a cruise on the circus ship and tossed into the sea by the acrobats or served as lunch for the lion? Had he been asked to escort the container all the way to Brindisi, only to be disposed of when he arrived? For if he had disappeared, two of the porters at the British Museum, intimately involved with the Caryatid, had both vanished. One body under the Piccadilly Line train might be an accident, but two disappeared brothers was unlikely to be a coincidence. More and more, Powerscourt was convinced that this was an inside job. Who might have suborned the two porters he had no idea.

  It was only in the late afternoon that Powerscourt caught sight of a southern Italian newspaper in Bologna railway station. Inferno a Hotel Mazzini, said the headline. He could just make out the main points of the story. A huge fire had enveloped the hotel shortly after two o’clock in the morning. The staff of the Mazzini and all the guests save two had been evacuated safely. Two English tourists were still missing. Their rooms had been at the very epicentre of the blaze. The local fire chief gave it as his opinion that their bodies would be unrecognizable, so fierce had been the blaze. The local mayor, who prided himself for being a reformer in one of the most conservative parts of Italy, speculated that the fire was the work of the local Mafia.

  The huge coffin dispatched from South Wales arrived safely in New York. The crossing had been peaceful, without any storms that might have disturbed the cargo. The passengers had all disembarked when a couple of men in shiny suits and with large hats pulled down over their eyes made their way aboard. They demanded to see the records of all freight carried on the voyage. Then they removed all mentions of the coffin from Bristol, details of its size, weight, length and general appearance. The vessel’s clerk was initially reluctant to carry out their instructions, maintaining that falsification of documents was a sackable offence. Two stilettos, one under each ear, persuaded him of his folly. When the men in the shiny suits had finished their work on the great ledger where the records were kept, it was as if the funeral statue, so carefully dispatched from the Welsh mountains, had never existed.

  The visitors went below to supervise the unloading of the coffin. It was transferred to the back of a nondescript lorry which drove off in the direction of New Jersey.

  Powerscourt told Lady Lucy on his return that he had rather enjoyed being a dead man walking. The terrible fire in the Hotel Mazzini was not reported in the British newspapers, fires and other disasters being regarded as part of the natural order of things in the unruly lands on the far side of the Channel. Now he was going to meet the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities who had invited him to lunch at a fashionable restaurant near the British Museum, a place where people went to be seen as much as for the quality of the food.

  ‘A glass of prosecco, Lord Powerscourt?’ Tristram Stanhope was wearing a dark pinstripe suit with a cream shirt and the scarlet and gold MCC tie. ‘I always think champagne has grown rather vulgar nowadays. Every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to be drinking it.’ They were in a private room, the dark red walls lined with prints of famous actors and actresses from the past. Powerscourt examined Tristram Stanhope very carefully. Here at last was the man he had heard so much about. Here was a man who could answer many of the questions about the Caryatid that tormented him day and night. He thought the early halo of glamour that had marked Tristram Stanhope’s career – elected to a fellowship at All Souls at the age of twenty-three, winner of the Newdigate Prize, a famous Alpinist renowned for his easy grace on the high rock faces – was beginning to fade. Even the golden hair now had streaks of grey at the temples.

  ‘That would be very kind,’ replied Powerscourt, ‘I’ve always had a weak spot for prosecco. Tell me – forgive
me for plunging into the middle of things, in medias res as it were, but I have a lot of questions for you – how do you find things at the museum on your return?’ Powerscourt remembered that Ragg’s obsession with secrecy meant he had not told Stanhope about the plain clothes policemen at the British Museum.

  Stanhope smiled the kind of patronizing smile he might have worn if some opposing bowler had just sent him a no ball. ‘Well, let me be perfectly frank with you, Lord Powerscourt, things are bad, in my view, if not catastrophic!’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Far be it from me to cast doubt on my colleagues’ abilities,’ he said, and Powerscourt was sure that, as night follows day, Stanhope was about to do just that. ‘It’s Ragg,’ he went on, ‘perfectly competent administrator, but he’s a hopeless leader, absolutely hopeless. He’s made the wrong decision. How do you expect to get the Caryatid back? You are among the most distinguished practitioners of your profession in London, Lord Powerscourt, but forgive me if I say your resources are limited. We need to be working with the police. We need publicity. We need articles in the newspapers. We want eminent scholars like myself writing for the general public about her place in Greek culture and religion, where she fits into the long narrative of Athenian history. We want people coming forward with information every day until she is found. What do we have instead? A wall of silence. The clarion call not of the trumpet but of a broken reed. How on earth Ragg ever imagines the Museum will bring her home I know not. Is she supposed to acquire the power of movement after all these years and walk back into Great Russell Street of her own accord?’