Pressed against Christian, Elizabeth felt his body shaking uncontrollably. The dashboard lights illumined his tight-set lips and narrowed eyes, and she wondered if Margaret"s driving, on top of the other perils of the night, had brought him to the brink of hysteria.
"I had better fill you in on some of it," Margaret said, peering nearsightedly through the dusty windshield. "Things are more desperate than I thought. I never dreamed Wolf would hide it so close to home."
"Where?" Elizabeth asked.
"In the barrow."
Christian emitted a brief bleating sound that Margaret interpreted as a question. Impatiently she went on, "Now, Christian, you know what a barrow is-one of the prehistoric mound tombs. I helped Fred Leinsdorf excavate it some years ago. That is how I met Eric and Wolf; the barrow is on their farm. It was a great disappointment-robbed in antiquity and in poor condition-so, although it is officially an Ancient Monument, no one has bothered with it since. Eric and Wolf have always considered it their private property. No doubt it is, in one sense; one of their own ancestors may have been buried there. Perhaps Wolf felt it was a suitable place. . . . But I am deeply concerned; the damp in that chamber is frightful and I pray no serious damage has ensued."
With no more warning than a sharp gasp she stamped on the brake. Christian"s outflung arm saved Elizabeth from a cracked head as she was thrown toward the windshield. Then she saw what had prompted Margaret"s stop. Square in the middle of the road, blinking in the headlights, sat a large long-eared rabbit.
Margaret put her head out the window. "Get out of the way, dear," she shouted. "That is a very dangerous place to sit."
The rabbit glanced disinterestedly in her direction and scratched one ear. Some perverse instinct told it the nature of the person it was dealing with, for it did not appear to be at all alarmed. After another, more urgent, request from Margaret, it got up and started hopping down the middle of the road. If it had run, Elizabeth would have thought it was frightened witless, but its pace was leisurely in the extreme, and from time to time she saw its eyes glitter as it glanced casually over its shoulder.
"Exasperating animal," Margaret said, steering. Their progress was at the rate of approximately two miles an hour. "Christian, perhaps you had better get out and-"
"I"ll do it," Elizabeth offered.
The rabbit seemed to be enjoying the game. It managed to keep just out of her reach for another hundred yards, its white tail flapping. Finally it got bored and disappeared into the brush on the side of the road.
Margaret did not pick up speed until they were some distance past the spot where the rabbit had vanished, but she made up for lost time thereafter. The other two were bounced around like popcorn in a popper. Crouched over the wheel and squinting, Margaret appeared to be enjoying herself, but when she spoke her voice was anxious.
"I fear we have lost too much time. I had calculated that they would run out of gas before they reached the hiding place. I did not know it was only a few miles away."
"You drained their gas tank?" Elizabeth asked. "Wasn"t that dangerous? If they had noticed-"
"Eric did something to the gauge. I don"t understand these things, I simply asked if it could be done and the clever man did it. They believe they have a full tank. However, the car is one of those European types that can go a good many miles on a small amount. Let me see. It has been a long time-but I think the turn is here!"
Elizabeth was flung from one side to the other as Margaret made a sweeping turn, without slackening speed. The truck ricocheted across the road and hit something with a loud crunch.
No one said anything for a while. In the dead silence Elizabeth heard the pensive chirping of a chorus of small animals or insects. The engine had stopped. From under the hood, which was tilted at a strange angle, came a thin plume of smoke. The headlights burned steadily.
WE WOULD have had to leave the truck here anyway," Margaret said cheerfully. "If they are still at the barrow, the lights and the sound of the motor might alert them to our presence."
"If that crash didn"t alert them, they must be at least ten miles away," Christian remarked.
Margaret pretended not to hear this. She drooped forward over the wheel. "Now that we are here, I am afraid to look. I fear the worst." The lights from the dash shadowed her features grotesquely. A few strands of plasticine or putty still clung to her chin like a scanty beard.
They got out of the truck. A stiff breeze was blowing, but Elizabeth was too excited to feel the cold. Clouds fled across the dark bowl of the sky, first baring and then concealing the lucent white globe of a moon nearing the full. The headlights made a wide path of yellow across a field broken by hedges and brambles; but the landscape to the left was illumined only by the fitful moonlight. Mysterious and indistinct, it might have been part of the Denmark of a thousand years in the past. There was no sign of life. Straight ahead and only a few hundred yards away, a dark shape loomed up against the star-sprinkled sky. Crowned with scrubby trees and ragged with bushes, it looked wholly natural until they were almost upon it. Then the strengthening moonlight silvered the angles of a block of stone, too sharply cut to be anything but the work of human hands. The rest of the stonework was hidden under brush.
"The entrance is around here, I think." Margaret looked uncertainly to her left. "I do wish I had a flashlight. Christian?"
"Such as it is." Christian took the small flash from his pocket and switched it on. The circle of light was limited, but it showed a depressing sight-tall gra.s.ses beaten down in an uneven but distinct path.
"d.a.m.n," Margaret said. "They"ve already been here. This way."
She plunged through the weeds, following a roughly circular route, with the mound on her right. Finally she stopped and turned to face the slope. The light showed trampled weeds and torn branches and, beyond them, a patch of exposed stonework, broken by a single gaping hole. Christian"s little light was vanquished by the sullen darkness within. They saw only the green glistening of water-soaked lichen encrusting the walls of a narrow pa.s.sage.
Margaret swore. "We sealed the pa.s.sage when we closed the tomb ten years ago. Wolf would have had sense enough to replace the stones, but he probably didn"t think of camouflaging the entrance. At any rate," she added, more cheerfully, "They had to sweat to pry those stones out. Mr. Schmidt wouldn"t care for that."
"You"re stalling again," Christian said. "Don"t cop out now."
She sighed. "After you, dear."
Christian climbed over the pile of brush. He had to bend double to enter the pa.s.sage, and his shoulders brushed the sides. After a moment his voice came back, weirdly amplified by echoes. "Come ahead. n.o.body"s here."
The pa.s.sage was so low that even Margaret had to stoop to enter, but it was only eight or nine feet long. Christian put out a hand to guide them as they emerged from the pa.s.sage and stood upright.
The chamber was some twelve feet in diameter and ten or twelve feet high in the center. The walls sloped sharply down from a domed top, like the interior of a beehive. The floor was of beaten earth, the walls of roughly shaped stone. Stone and earth glistened greasily in the light. Small pools of oily looking water had collected in hollows. It was the gloomiest, most depressing place Elizabeth had ever seen, and the recent admission of air had not improved the musty scent of death and burial.
Christian turned the light toward the only object in the chamber-a low stone chest that rested against the far wall, blocking the entrance to what appeared to be another chamber beyond. The stone was neatly smoothed and polished, quite different from the rough construction of the tomb. Its soft-gleaming pallor had an undeniable beauty, and its function was evident from its dimensions -six feet long by three and a half wide by two feet high. It was a marble coffin, or sarcophagus; and it was open. The slab of marble that had sealed it lay to one side.
Slowly Margaret moved toward it. Christian followed with the light and shone it down into the sarcophagus. A moan of pure anguish came from Margaret.
"Too late," she murmured, like a Greek tragic chorus. "Too late, too late, too late."
The objects that covered the bottom of the coffin bore little resemblance to a decent burial-disarticulated bones, with strips of leathery flesh hanging from them, a tangled heap of fabric, like the contents of a rag bag. Delicately Margaret lifted one long fragment from the debris. The light reflected from tarnished cloth of gold, in a pattern of flowers and twining leaves.
"I"m sorry, Mother," Christian said.
"We did our best. But the tragedy of it . . ." Margaret sighed. "Some people would say it doesn"t matter-that the human tragedies, death and disease and starvation, are more important. They are, of course they are; but the two values aren"t mutually exclusive. Human agony and the irretrievable loss of knowledge are both wrong, both unnecessary. They can and should be stopped. It"s happening all the time, all over the world-a continual process of theft and destruction. Often the thieves wantonly destroy objects they can"t steal. The laws are totally inadequate, and our own government refuses to pa.s.s legislation, much less enforce it, that would prevent the importation of stolen art and antiquities. Collectors, even museums, encourage thieves by buying from them, no questions asked. Oh, it makes me so angry!"
She moved restlessly around the chamber, her hands exploring the rough walls.
"Then why don"t we stop talking and go after them?" Christian said. "They still have to get out of the country with their loot."
"There"s no hurry now," Margaret said drearily, continuing to fumble at the wall. "We may as well wait here; we haven"t any means of transportation now that I. ... Aha, here they are. I thought we might have left some."
Elizabeth couldn"t see what she was holding until she struck a match and lit the wick of the candle she had found. There was a sizable bundle of them; Margaret lit one after the other with profligate speed and stuck them onto ledges on the stone in puddles of their own grease.
"Queen Margaret"s bathrobe," Elizabeth murmured. "Not so obscure at that. It really was her robe they were after."
"Not so much the robe as the gems that ornamented it. And her jewels-rings, bracelets, crown. . . aieh!" The shriek made Elizabeth jump. Margaret darted back to the coffin, now illumined by a dozen candles. She plunged her hands into the debris. After a moment she looked up, wild-eyed and furious. "Her head," she stuttered. "The skull isn"t here. They have stolen Margaret"s head!"
This final profanation infuriated Margaret beyond all reason. Elizabeth couldn"t see that it mattered very much, and Christian shared her opinion.
"That"s a minor catastrophe," he said.
"Carrying it around in a-in a gunny sack or brown paper bag!" Margaret wrung her hands. "Queen Margaret"s head!"
Elizabeth decided some distraction was called for. "I don"t understand how she got here. Her tomb is in Roskilde."
"Her tomb, but never her body." The prospect of lecturing restored Margaret"s calm. "She was originally buried in the abbey church at Sor0, with her son and her husband. Bishop Lodehat decided to move her to Roskilde when the new cathedral was completed. They cared about such things then, you know. People still do, in fact, or they wouldn"t move bodies back to their native earth.
"The monks at Sor0 didn"t want to give Margaret up, but they knew Lodehat would resort to force if he had to -oh, I know it sounds ludicrous, but have you forgotten how the Venetians stole the bones of Saint Lawrence from Cairo, hiding them in vats of pork fat, which was so abhorrent to the Muslim guards that they didn"t bother to inspect the boxes? The abbot of Sor0 also resorted to trickery. He hid Margaret"s body and let the Bishop carry off an empty coffin, which was duly interred with all pomp and ceremony. For five and a half centuries the secret was kept and pa.s.sed on from father to son as a sacred trust. Eric"s ancestors must have been monks at the abbey, or perhaps skilled workmen who a.s.sisted in Margaret"s secret burial."
"And Eric betrayed that trust," Christian said.
"He needed money." Margaret gave a soft, humorless laugh. "There"s your cla.s.sic conflict-human suffering versus ancient treasures. A small farmer has a hard time making a living these days, even in Denmark. And there was Wolf. They have no other family; Eric couldn"t bear the idea that Wolf would be left to the tender mercies of the state after he died. He betrayed the ancient trust to help his brother. I cannot judge him."
There was a brief silence. Christian, obviously impressed and moved, stared thoughtfully at the floor.
"By this time," Margaret said, "Eric was the only one who remembered the old story. He broke into the abbey and, with Wolfs help, stole Margaret"s coffin. Then he was faced with the problem of marketing his find. Schmidt and Radsky had the necessary contacts. They are members of an unusual and specialized profession- thieves of art and antiquities. How Eric got in touch with them I don"t know, that is the one piece of information he refused to give me, so I suppose he has friends who acted as go-betweens-people to whom he feels loyalty.
"Wolf took an instant dislike to the members of the gang, especially Radsky. I"m sure other motives influenced him-remorse, religious scruples, superst.i.tious fear of disturbing the dead. At any rate, before they could complete their arrangements to dispose of the treasure, Wolf stole the coffin, hid it here, and fled, after writing a frantic letter to me. The poor boy never thought of telephoning me; and I admit that the complexities of an overseas collect call would tax a stronger brain than his. It was two weeks before I could get here, and he was on the run the entire time, with Schmidt and Radsky close on his heels. His nerves were quite shattered and he was running from shadows-even mine!
"In the meantime one of the gang, looking for a clue among Wolfs things, found the rough drafts of the letter he had written me. With their criminal contacts it wasn"t difficult for them to find out what flight I was taking and to prepare a scheme that would admit a spy into our midst. You see, they couldn"t be sure Wolf had not already told me where he had hidden the coffin. When I refused to hire Schmidt, their next move was to incapacitate the hotel staff so that Cheryl would be hired as telephone operator. I didn"t dare call or write you after that-"
"Aha," Christian said. "So you were in touch with Roger and Marie."
"They have their own private line," Margaret said. "I couldn"t tell them the truth, it might have been dangerous for them, but they agreed to keep Cheryl on, though she was quite inadequate for the job. I feared that if she was let go the gang might try something more desperate. That was a slight error on my part, I admit. It led to the kidnapping of Elizabeth."
"That wasn"t your only error," her son said critically. "Margaret, hasn"t it occurred to you that Radsky and Schmidt couldn"t have managed all this skulduggery by themselves? You keep talking vaguely about their criminal contacts, but-"
"Yes, darling, of course. I know just what you mean. Trust me."
"I"ve gone this far, I might as well go all the way," her son said resignedly. "Would you mind telling me why we are sitting in this dismal hole?"
"Waiting for help to arrive, of course." Margaret lowered herself gingerly onto the corner of the coffin. "I don"t think she would mind," she murmured. "I told Eric to telephone. He is waiting for my call, but it will take a while for him to get here all the way from Copenhagen."
The shift in reference only confused Christian for a moment. "I hope," he said, very calmly, "that "he" is not Grundtvig. Because if that"s who you summoned to your rescue, we had better make tracks."
Margaret let out a crow of laughter, like an aging Peter Pan. "My dear, I have underestimated you-and though you may doubt it, my opinion of you has always been high. No, I did not summon Niels Grundtvig. I sincerely hope he is miles away from here."
"I cannot resist that," said a voice from the pitch-dark entrance to the barrow. "What a perfect cue for my entrance!"
They saw the gun first, clutched in a pudgy hand. The rest of Grundtvig followed.
For the first time in their erratic acquaintance Elizabeth saw Margaret genuinely taken aback. "How the devil did you get here?" she gasped.
Grundtvig gestured airily with his left hand. The right hand, holding the gun, remained steady.
"Radsky is a dependable man. He telephoned twice tonight-first when Wolf was taken prisoner, the second time after he had discovered the location of Margaret"s bathrobe. I was well on my way by the time the second call came through; I have, of course, a telephone in my car. I decided to come by way of the barrow to make sure all was well. Seeing the abandoned truck, I feared trouble. And, you see, I was right."
He beamed at them like a genial grandfather. Elizabeth shook her head dizzily. She had begun to harbor doubts about Grundtvig herself, but she still found it difficult to believe.
"You suspected me, young Christian," Grundtvig said. "Where did I go wrong?"
For once the slighting adjective did not seem to bother Christian. "It was a lot of little things, none conclusive in itself. We overheard Radsky and Schmidt talking about some unnamed man in Copenhagen who was working with them. This man clearly was in a position to get information and gain access to certain places and do various things an ordinary criminal couldn"t do. Then there was the severed finger. A highly placed police official would have access to a wide a.s.sortment of cadavers. Kidnapping Elizabeth was another of your mistakes. That was a subtle touch-too subtle to have occurred to a gang whose weapons were guns and blackjacks. The night we visited you at your place you realized that I- that I"d do anything to keep her safe, and that I would put pressure on Margaret to give in to your demands."
"Ah." Grundtvig looked relieved. "Not so bad; I am glad to hear it was no more than that. And you, Margaret? I confess I was hurt that you did not come to me when you needed help."
"I recognized you," Margaret said simply. "At Tivoli, when I was riding the carousel. Roger had informed me about the ransom note, and I was worried about Christian. I know you too well, Niels. Did you think a false mustache and unfamiliar clothes would deceive me?"
Grundtvig"s blue eyes softened. There were old memories in the glances they exchanged, and for a moment Elizabeth saw Grundtvig as he must have looked fifteen, even ten years earlier, before wrinkles and fat had turned him into a jolly Father Christmas.
"Now you must not say that sort of thing," Grundtvig said pettishly. "It is not fair. A professional must not be distracted from his duty by sentiment."
"But how could you?" Margaret exclaimed. "You, of all people."
"You know why-you, of all people!" Gruntvig turned the gun, and a hostile scowl, on Christian. "He does it to you, as my daughter does to me- "Mama, don"t do this," and "Papa, don"t do that." "Sit down and rest your old bones, mama"; "Eat your gruel, Papa, and die!" Once the old were honored and respected. Now they throw us in the garbage! They want me to retire, can you believe it? Now, when I am at the peak of my powers-to sit hour after hour in that drab little house and amuse myself by whittling Viking ships and tending my garden. I hate gardening!"
A chorus of ghostly echoes flung back a pa.s.sionate accord. Margaret winced. "Oh, Niels ..."
"Don"t you patronize me, Margaret."
"I"m sorry, Niels."
"I am sorry too. Why did you have to interfere? You have narrowed my choices down to two. You or me, Margaret. The survival of one of us means the destruction of the other."
Try as she would, Margaret could not keep her eyes from shifting sideways toward her son; but she knew the futility of that kind of appeal. It was Christian who said, "You can"t kill all three of us before I get you, Grundtvig."
"Oh, can"t I? There speaks the despicable arrogance of youth. G.o.d, I hate that! You are stupid as well as arrogant, boy. I will back into this pa.s.sageway and pick you off one by one."
"Well, I"m not just going to stand here and let you-"
"For goodness" sake, Christian, you"re just making him angry," his mother said in exasperation. "Don"t move." For she, as well as Elizabeth, had observed the tensing of Christian"s muscles. "He isn"t going to shoot us."
"You think not?" Grundtvig tried to look menacing, but his lips would shape no more sinister expression than a pout.
"I know. You"ve spent forty years fighting beastliness and savagery, Niels. You have bent the law a little lately, but killing us would shatter the foundations of your soul. And if you ever did kill anybody," Margaret concluded, "it wouldn"t be me."
In the silence a drop of water splashed into a puddle with a sound like thunder. Elizabeth"s eyes were riveted on Grundtvig"s hand. The universe had shrunk to a single point-a shining weapon and the plump white fingers that held it. Grundtvig"s arm tensed. He flung the gun angrily against the wall.
"Curse you, Margaret, why are you always right?"
"At least I"m old and right," she said, her voice rough with what might have been relief, or laughter, or perhaps tears. "Niels, my dear . . ."
She rose from her incongruous seat and held out her hand. Grundtvig took it in his. "I couldn"t hurt you, Margaret."
"I know, my dear."
"Then it"s a good thing I arrived when I did," said Schmidt, emerging from the tunnel.
"Oh, for G.o.d"s sake!" Christian, who had relaxed with a pent-up burst of breath, spoke more in anger than in sorrow. "How many more people are out there?"
"Just me," Schmidt said modestly, resting his gun hand on his lifted arm. "Radsky and Cheryl are trying to siphon gas out of the truck. That was a smart idea, leaving us with an almost empty tank. It would have worked, too, if some d.a.m.ned fool hadn"t wrecked the truck and left the lights shining like a beacon."
A stronger, n.o.bler man than Christian Rosenberg could not have refrained from shooting a critical glance at his mother. Margaret looked stricken. Grundtvig put a protective arm around her.
"There is no need for killing, Schmidt. Leave them here, unharmed, and I will accompany you. With my influence you can be quickly out of Denmark."
"No deal, Grandpa."
"Grandpa?" Grundtvig lunged forward, apoplectic with rage. Schmidt indicated the gun. Grundtvig came to a stop, breathing hard.