Elizabeth Peters: Trojan Gold

I inspected the envelope again. It was still blank.

Eventually the caffeine penetrated my brain, and I gathered enough strength to pry myself off my chair. There was a pile of work waiting for me, but I decided that first I would go and kill Gerda.

My office is at the top of one of the towers. There are four towers, one on each corner, plus battlements and machicolations and all the other accouterments of nineteenth-century pseudo-medievalism. The Graf was as loony as his king, mad Ludwig of Bavaria, and both of them loved to build castles. It’s fashionable to sneer at Ludwig’s taste, and I admit he went overboard on the interior décor—all that writhing gilt and those enormous Wagnerian paintings—but anyone who can contemplate unmoved the fairytale towers of Schloss Neuschwanstein framed by the misty mountain-tops hasn’t got an ounce of romance in his/her soul.

I chose my office in part because of the view. There are windows all around, looking out over the rooftops and towers of the city that I love like a native daughter—the twin green onion domes of the Frauenkirche and the lacy stonework of the Rathaus tower, the Isar winding gracefully between banks that are green in summer and snowy-white in winter, and the bustling traffic of Karlsplatz with the clock tower and the gates and the shops. You can keep your Parises and your Viennas; give me Munich any day. It’s one of the happiest, handsomest cities in the world.

Another reason I chose to perch up in my airy aerie was for purposes of privacy. There is no lift, and people who want to see me have to want to see me very badly before they will tackle five flights of stairs. Even Gerda doesn’t do it often; I suppose the chance to pry during my absence had been too strong to resist. I keep telling myself that climbing stairs is good for the figure, but I must admit that I don’t tackle them myself unless I want something rather badly. This morning I wanted Gerda.

The director’s office is on the second floor, but I had to go all the way down and then climb the central stairs, since the towers connect to the main building only on the first level. By the time I reached Gerda’s room, I was full of adrenaline and pent-up rage.

She had been expecting me. I heard her typewriter start to rattle as I opened the door. She kept on typing, pretending she hadn’t noticed me, even after I stamped across the room and stood beside her desk. When I saw what she was wearing, I became even more annoyed. The turtle-neck knit shirt, in bright stripes of shocking pink and pea green, was an exact copy of the one I had worn to work the week before.

This was a form of flattery, and it should have touched me. My hair is blond; Gerda’s is brown. Gerda is five feet and a fraction; I am a fraction less than six feet. I am a bean pole, Gerda is a dumpling. For some crazy reason, she wants to look like me.

What woman in her right mind would want to be six feet tall? How can you look coyly up at a man from under your lashes when your eyes are on the same level, or higher? How can you find skirts long enough to cover your knees? Put a pitchfork in my hand, and I look like a farmer; put a spear in my hand, and I look like an undernourished Valkyrie. I’d much rather be cute and cuddly like Gerda—well, maybe not quite that cuddly—and it infuriates me when she tries to imitate me, especially since the clothes that look okay on me don’t suit her at all.

I slapped the edge of the desk with the photograph. It cracked, like a pistol shot. Gerda jumped. “What’s the idea of opening my mail?” I shouted. “How many times have I told you not to open my mail?”

I yelled in German. It’s a good language to yell in, and I added a few expletives to my rhetorical question. Gerda answered in her meticulous, stilted English.

“That is impossible to calculate. It is also a meaningless question. To open the mail, it is my duty. In order to direct each piece of mail to the proper destination within the museum, it is necessary that I should investigate—”

We went on that way for a while, in a mixture of languages. My voice kept rising; Gerda’s remained studiously calm, but her cheeks got pinker and pinker till she looked like a kewpie doll. The whole thing was ridiculous. Yelling was making my head ache, and I regretted having started the fight. We all knew Gerda’s habits, and we all made damned good and sure none of our personal mail was directed to the museum. I wondered why I was doing this and how I could stop.

I was saved from retreat by Schmidt, who came barreling out of his office and added his bellow to the general uproar.

“ Was ist’s, ein Tiergarten oder ein Museum ? Cannot a man absorb himself in study without two screaming females interrupting his thoughts? Die Weiber, die Weiber, ein Mann kann nicht —”

“You sound like The Merry Widow ,” I said. “Calm yourself, Herr Direktor.”

“I calm myself? Whose screams were they that interrupted my contemplation?”

“Not mine,” said Gerda smugly.

“I knew that,” Schmidt said. “What is it this time?”

“You know,” I said. “You’ve been listening at the keyhole. You couldn’t have heard us unless you were listening. That door is six inches thick.”

Schmidt’s pudgy little hand stole to his mustache. He started growing it to compensate for the complete absence of hair on his head, and it has got out of hand. I think his initial model was Fu-Manchu, for Schmidt has a deplorable taste for sensational literature. Unfortunately, Schmidt’s mustache came out pure-white and bushy. He’s about Gerda’s height, a foot shorter than I, and that damned mustache was the only touch needed to turn him into a walking caricature of a quaint German kobold or brownie—round tummy, twinkling blue eyes, and an adorable little pink mouth, like that of a pouting baby.

He didn’t deny the charge. “The post,” he said. “Again the post. What is it today—a letter from, er, grr, hm, a close friend, vielleicht ?”

He leered and sidled around the desk trying to sneak a peek at what I was holding. I handed it to him.

“Sorry to disappoint you, Schmidt. My er, grr, close friends don’t send passionate love letters to me at this address. If they did, they would cease to become close friends. I don’t know who sent this, because Gerda has removed the outer envelope and, probably, an enclosed explanatory letter. Now I haven’t the faintest idea what it means or what I’m supposed to do about it.”

Schmidt’s pink forehead crumpled into rows of wrinkles. “ Sehr interessant ,” he muttered, worrying his mustache. “Now where have I seen this face before?”

“Something strikes a chord,” I agreed. “It looks like a theatrical costume. Hardly the sort of thing we’d want for the collection.”

“ Nein, nein . And yet…What is it that strikes me?”

Gerda cleared her throat. “I recognized it at once, Herr Direktor. When I took the course at the university last spring—or perhaps it was summer—yes, it was the Herr Professor Doktor Eberhardt’s course in the minor arts of Asia Minor—”

I was tempted to lunge at her. She’d had hours to check on that photograph and make fools of her two educated bosses. Schmidt was just as infuriated. “Get to the point,” he shouted, glaring.

Gerda looked smug. “Surely the very-highly-expert doctors recognize the photograph. It is that of Frau Schliemann wearing the treasure of Troy. If you recall, it was in 1873 that the distinguished archaeologist found the mound of Hissarlik, in what is now Turkey, and identified it as—”

“You need not summarize the career of Heinrich Schliemann,” said Schmidt, with heavy sarcasm. “Hmm. Yes. Possibly you are correct. It is not, of course, my field.”