David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘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 that 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.’