She decided not to argue and calmly did as he asked.
“We’ll be leaving now,” Tan said, pocketing the coin. His breath stank of beer. “Stay here.”
She had no intention of challenging them. She knew to respect weapons pointed at her.
The men wove their way to the front door and left the cafe.
“They took my coin,” Klaus said, his voice rising. “I’m going after them.”
She couldn’t decide if it was foolishness or the drugs talking. “How about you let me handle it.”
He appraised her with a suspicious gaze.
“I assure you,” she said. “I came prepared.”
TWENTY-TWO
COPENHAGEN
7:45 P.M.
MALONE FINISHED HIS DINNER. HE WAS SITTING INSIDE THE CAFE Norden, a two-story restaurant that faced into the heart of Hojbro Plads. The evening had turned nasty with a brisk April shower dousing the nearly empty city square. He sat high and dry by an open window, on the upper floor, and enjoyed the rain.
“I appreciate you helping out today,” Thorvaldsen said from across the table.
“Almost getting blown up? Twice? What are friends for?”
He finished the last of his tomato bisque soup. The cafe offered some of the best he’d ever eaten. He was full of questions, but realized answers, as always with Thorvaldsen, would be apportioned sparingly. “Back at that house, you and Cassiopeia talked about Alexander the Great’s body. That you know where it is. How’s that possible?”
“We’ve managed to learn a lot on the subject.”
“Cassiopeia’s friend at the museum in Samarkand?”
“More than a friend, Cotton.”
He’d surmised as much. “Who was he?”
“Ely Lund. He grew up here, in Copenhagen. He and my son, Cai, were friends.”
Malone caught the sadness when Thorvaldsen mentioned his dead son. His stomach also flip-flopped at the thought of that day two years ago, in Mexico City, when the young man was murdered. Malone had been there, on a Magellan Billet assignment, and brought down the shooters, but a bullet had found him, too. Losing a son. He couldn’t imagine Gary, his own fifteen-year-old, dying.
“Whereas Cai wanted to serve in government, Ely loved history. He earned a doctorate and became an expert on Greek antiquity, working in several European museums before ending up in Samarkand. The cultural museum there has a superb collection, and the Central Asian Federation offered encouragements to science and art.”
“How did Cassiopeia meet him?”
“I introduced them. Three years ago. Thought it would be good for them both.”
He sipped his drink. “What happened?”
“He died. A little less than two months ago. She took it hard.”
“She love him?”
Thorvaldsen shrugged. “Hard to say with her. Rarely do her emotions surface.”
But they had earlier. Her sadness watching the museum burn. The distant stare out over the canal. Her refusal to meet his gaze. Nothing voiced. Only felt.
When they’d docked the motorboat at Christiangade, Malone had wanted answers, but Thorvaldsen had promised that over dinner all would be explained. So he’d been driven back to Copenhagen, slept a little, then worked in the bookstore the remainder of the day. A couple of times he drifted into the history section and found a few volumes on Alexander and Greece. But mainly he wondered what Thorvaldsen had meant by
Now he was beginning to understand.
Out the open window, across the square, he spotted Cassiopeia leaving his bookshop, dashing through the rain, something wrapped in a plastic bag tucked beneath one arm. Thirty minutes ago he’d given her the key to the store so she could use his computer and phone.
“Finding Alexander’s body,” Thorvaldsen said, “centers on Ely and the manuscript pages he uncovered. Ely initially asked Cassiopeia to locate the elephant medallions. But when we started to track them down, we discovered someone else was already looking.”
“How did Ely connect the medallions to the manuscript?”
“He examined the one in Samarkand and found the microletters. ZH. They have a connection to the manuscript. After Ely died, Cassiopeia wanted to know what was happening.”
“So she came to you for help?”
Thorvaldsen nodded. “I couldn’t refuse.”
He smiled. How many friends would buy an entire museum and duplicate everything inside just so it could burn to the ground?
Cassiopeia disappeared below the windowsill. He heard the cafe’s main door below open and close, then footsteps climbing the metal stairway to the second floor.
“You’ve stayed wet a lot today,” Malone said, as she reached the top.
Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, her jeans and pullover shirt splotched with rain. “Hard for a girl to look good.”
“Not really.”
She threw him a look. “A charmer tonight.”
“I have my moments.”
She removed his laptop from the plastic bag and said to Thorvaldsen, “I downloaded everything.”
“If I’d known you were going to bring it over in the rain,” Malone said, “I’d have insisted on a security deposit.”
“You need to see this.”
“I told him about Ely,” Thorvaldsen said.
The dining room was dim and deserted. Malone ate here three or four times a week, always at the same table, near the same hour. He enjoyed the solitude.
Cassiopeia faced him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it.
“I appreciate that.”
“I appreciate you saving my ass.”
“You would have found a way out. I just sped things up.”
He recalled his predicament and wasn’t so sure about her conclusion.
He wanted to ask more about Ely Lund, curious as to how he’d managed to crack her emotional vault. Like his own, there were a multitude of locks and alarms. But he kept silent-as always when feelings were unavoidable.
Cassiopeia switched on the laptop and brought several scanned images onto the screen. Words. Ghostly gray, fuzzy in places, and all in Greek.
“About a week after Alexander the Great died, in 323 BCE,” Cassiopeia said, “Egyptian embalmers arrived in Babylon. Though it was summer, hot as hell, they found his corpse uncorrupted, its complexion still lifelike. That was taken as a sign from the gods of Alexander’s greatness.”
He’d read about that earlier. “Some sign. He was probably still alive, in a terminal coma.”
“That’s the modern consensus. But that medical state was unknown then. So they went about their task and mummified the body.”
He shook his head. “Amazing. The greatest conqueror of his time, killed by embalmers.”
Cassiopeia smiled in agreement. “Mummification usually took seventy days, the idea being to dry the body beyond further decay. But with Alexander, they used a different method. He was immersed in white honey.”
