Spartan Gold

Muller waved his hand. “The vagaries of war.”

“Just out of curiosity,” Sam said, “can you tell us about your mission? What were you and Boehm trying to accomplish?”

Muller frowned, thinking. After a few moments he said, “I suppose it doesn’t really matter now. . . . It was an absurd task, really, concocted by the Fuhrer himself. Manfred was supposed to sail up Chesapeake Bay and attack the navy base at Norfolk. At the same time, I was to attack the ammunition depot in Charleston, but Ilsa had a problem with her screw, so we were delayed. Before we could repair it, we were recalled to Bremerhaven. You know the rest, about the Lothringen and all that.”

“You’d stopped at Rum Cay for refitting? What kind?”

“Bigger batteries to increase the boats’ ranges. Another idiotic plan. Both Manfred and I knew the missions were suicide.”

“Then why did you volunteer?”

Muller shrugged. “Duty. Indiscretion of youth. Neither of us were fond of Hitler or the Party, but it was still our country. We wanted to do what we could.”

“We were hoping you might tell us more about the bottles,” Remi said. “Where they came from.”

“Why?”

“We’re collectors. As it turns out, they were very old and very rare.”

Muller chuckled. “I never knew. Well, I might have guessed they were important somehow. My brother Karl gave them to me before we shipped out from Bremerhaven. He told me he found them here, actually—he was in the army and was part of the occupation force.”

“Where exactly did he find them?”

“Let me think. . . .” Muller scratched his head. “My memory isn’t quite what it used to be. It was a castle . . . no, not a castle. A fort.” He sighed in frustration, then his eyes lit up. “It was one of the islands in the bay. . . . Do you remember that book by Dumas—The Count of Monte Cristo?”

Both Sam and Remi had read it. In an instant they knew what Muller was talking about. “Ile d’If?”

“Yes! That’s it. He found them in the Chateau d’If.”

CHAPTER 29

CHATEAU D’IF, FRANCE

Despite their love for Marseille, the Fargos had never managed to squeeze the Frioul Archipelago and Chateau d’If into their itinerary, an oversight they planned to correct that night with their own private tour. They doubted the chateau’s staff would let them explore every nook and cranny of the island. Though neither of them knew exactly what they’d be looking for, or whether they’d recognize it if it appeared, the expedition seemed the next logical step in the journey.

From Muller’s apartment they took a taxi to the Malmousque, a waterfront district overlooking the Friouls, and found a quiet cafe. They settled under the umbrella on the patio and ordered a pair of double espressos.

A mile offshore they could see Chateau d’If, a faded ocher-colored lump of rock fronted by sloping cliffs, vertical ramparts, and stone arches.

While the island itself covered just over seven acres, the chateau itself was a smaller square, a hundred feet to a side, made up of a three-story main building flanked on three sides by cylindrical turrets topped with crenellated cannon slots.

At the behest of King Francois I, Chateau d’If began its life in the 1520s as a fortress to defend the city against attacks from the sea, a purpose that was short-lived as it was converted into a prison for France’s political and religious enemies. Much like San Fran cisco’s Alcatraz, Chateau d’If’s location and its deadly offshore currents gave it a reputation as escape proof, a claim that was shattered, at least fictionally, by Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, in which the character Edmond Dantes, after fourteen years of imprisonment, managed to escape d’If.

Sam read from the brochure he’d picked up at the Vieux Port tourist office: “ ‘Blacker than the sea, blacker than the sky, rose like a phantom the giant of granite, whose projecting crags seemed like arms extended to seize their prey.’ That’s how Dantes described it.”

“Doesn’t seem so bad from here.”

“Try being stuck in the dungeon for a dozen years.”

“Good point. What else?”

“The prison operated by a strict class structure. Rich inmates could buy their way into private cells on the upper floors, with windows and a fireplace. As for the poor, they got the basement dungeons and the oubliettes— which are . . .”

“It’s derivative of oublier—‘to forget.’ They were essentially trap doored pits in the floor of a dungeon.” Remi’s French was also better than Sam’s. “You go in and you’re forgotten—left to rot.”

The phone trilled and Sam answered it. It was Selma: “Mr. Fargo, I have something for you.”

“Go ahead,” Sam said. He put the phone on speaker so Remi could hear.

“We’ve deciphered the first two lines of symbols on the bottle, but that’s it,” Selma began. “The other lines are going to take some time. I think we’re missing a key of some kind. Anyway, the lines spell out a riddle:

“Folly of Capetian, Sebastien’s revelation;

A city under cannon;

From the third realm of the forgotten a sign that eternal

Sheol will fail.

“We’re working on solving it—”

“Done,” Sam proclaimed. “It’s talking about Chateau d’If.”

“Pardon me?”

He recounted their meeting with Wolfgang Muller. “The fortress is where his brother found the bottles. I already had the answer; from there it was just a matter of working backward. ‘Capetian’ refers to the dynastic line King Francois I came from; he had the fortress built. ‘Sebastien’ is the first name of Vauban, the engineer who had to tell the government the fort was all but useless. For whatever reason, the architects had built it with the heaviest fortifications and gun embattlements facing not the open sea, and potential invaders, but the city—‘a city under cannon.’ ”

“Impressive, Mr. Fargo.”

“It’s in the brochure. As for the second line, I don’t know.”

“I think I do,” Remi said. “In Hebrew, ‘Sheol’ means abode of the dead, or underworld. The opposite—eternal Sheol—is everlasting life. Remember the cicada from the bottle . . . ?”

Sam was nodding. “From Napoleon’s crest: resurrection and immortality. And the other part . . . ‘the third realm of the forgotten’?”

“It’s the French version of a dungeon: oubliette. To forget. Unless we’re wrong, somewhere in the basement of the chateau is a cicada waiting to be found. But why a riddle at all?” Remi wondered. “Why not simply, ‘go here, find this’?”

“That’s where it gets really interesting,” Selma replied. “From what I’ve been able to translate so far, Laurent’s book is part diary, part decryption key. He makes it pretty clear the bottles themselves aren’t the real prize. He called them ‘arrows on a map.’ ”

“Arrows to what?” Remi asked. “And for whom to follow?”

“He doesn’t say. We’ll know more when I finish the translation.”

Sam said, “Well, it seems clear Laurent was doing this on Napoleon’s orders, and if they went to this much trouble to hide the bottles, whatever’s at the end of the map has to be something spectacular.”

“Which might explain why Bondaruk has no problem with murder,” Remi replied.