tend to do, then we’ll have a fairly impressive landslide, block Bako’s road to Hungary, and be on our merry way.”
“Merry? Are you sure?”
“If it works, we will be merry. It just will take an enormous amount of work done in a hurry and a massive helping of luck.” He turned his attention to shoveling away the dirt and small stones that seemed to be holding the four-foot boulder in place a hundred fifty feet above the road. Remi stood on the other side of the boulder and shoveled too.
They reached a moment when the boulder seemed to have emerged from the dirt of the hillside. They had freed more than half of its bulk, and its bottom was undermined. Sam walked a few yards to a sapling, selected a dead limb about ten feet long and two and a half inches thick. He then rolled a nearby rock in front of the boulder to use as a fulcrum.
“Okay, Remi. Go along the ridge until you can see what’s coming from a distance. When it’s safe to drop the hill on the road, give me a wave.”
“I’m off.” She trotted along the ridge, sometimes stopping to jump a gap in the rocks or avoid obstacles. Finally she stood far above the road a distance from Sam, raised her arm, and waved.
Sam set his lever horizontally against the fulcrum and pushed. He was ten feet to the side of the rock so he could use his entire lever. He pushed again and there was something behind the rock that began to groan as the boulder moved.
The first try failed to dislodge the boulder, so Sam set his limb again against the rock. He looked up and saw Remi waving her arms frantically. He waited.
Down below, he saw a bus laboring up the road, the driver making a groaning downshift as it struggled toward the crest. After a minute, Remi waved her arm once more. Sam moved his fulcrum closer to the boulder, set his shoulder against the lever, and pushed with both legs. The boulder rocked forward, rocked back, and then rolled out of the bowl where it had sat. At first, it turned painfully slow, rolling once and then merely sliding, the topsoil too loose to allow it to turn. The boulder scoured the ground and vegetation. It reached a vertical drop of about six feet. When it hit the next group of rocks, it seemed to shatter the shelf where they sat, propelling them forward and downward. The boulder outran the ground debris, but it had dislodged much of the hillside, so at first there was a slide of rocks and gravel, and then a layer of soil with mature trees growing in it started down the hill. The trees remained upright until the rocks and soil caught them by the roots and they plunged. The slide was all very noisy— tons of moving rock and dirt and cracking wood—and then near silence.
Sam looked down. His landside had covered the road from rock wall to rock wall. There were about ten more seconds of small, round dislodged stones bouncing down the last few yards onto the pile and then the silence was total.
Sam grabbed the shovel, rope, and crowbar and trotted along the ridge until he reached Remi. Without speaking, they used their spades to keep from falling and setting off a second landslide. When they made their way down, they ran along the road to their car, threw their tools in the trunk, turned around, and drove off toward Alba Iulia. It seemed to Remi that they were now seeing many more cars and trucks heading along the road than they’d seen at first. All the traffic was heading toward them now. It was after about fifteen minutes that Sam’s driving brought them close to other cars going the same way.
“I hope the cousins all made it out before we wrecked the road,” said Remi.
“I’m sure they did,” said Sam. “We gave Tibor plenty of time. What we need now is a name and phone number of whatever group in Romania controls the smuggling of antiquities.”
“I’ll call Selma,” Remi said.
“Hi, Remi,” said Selma. “Tibor tells me you’ve decided to go it alone again.”
“The other team beat us to Bleda’s burial place. Sam pointed out to me—possibly because of our experience in France—that finding the treasure and bringing it home are two very different things. We are now broadening our game to include being tattletales. Who can we call in Romania to report Bako smuggling antiquities to Hungary?”
“We’d better have Albrecht do that through an intermediary,” said Selma. “The federal police in Romania are run out of a place called the General Inspectorate in Bucharest. We’ll call and say we’ve got a case for Interpol and they’ll send the border police. I can use a computer for the call and run the signal through a couple of forwarding services to keep us out of it.”
“Thanks, Selma.”
“You’re welcome. Bako’ll get in trouble if they catch him. Romania’s Law No. 182 of 2000 says everything found must be registered and given a classification certificate by the government. They consider any antique part of the ‘movable cultural heritage.’”
“We’ll call you as soon as we tie up some loose ends.”
“It’s not over?”
“I’m afraid not. We still have to see the chamber.”
“Be safe.”
They drove through Alba Iulia again, past the wooded area where they had found Bako’s vehicles. They parked at the next parking lot and walked back through the forest. As they came close, they heard a voice shouting in Hungarian what seemed to be instructions. They crept closer, staying low behind bushes, until they could see Bako sitting on the edge of the chamber with his feet dangling in the dark void below. Four men held a rope that was tied around him under his armpits. A fifth man ran up and handed him a flashlight.
Bako pushed off and slid into the chamber. Sam and Remi could see from the twisting of the rope that he was moving around, trying to shine his flashlight into the chamber in every direction at once. A couple of times his men, exhausted from digging and moving stones, seemed likely to lose their grip on the rope and drop him.
At last he was in the chamber. The men relaxed and rubbed sore muscles while the rope went slack. There was a shout from the chamber. The men pulled up the empty harness, and one of the security men put it on and was lowered inside. The rope went slack again, and the men knelt by the entrance to hear the conversation of their superiors. They looked at one another in consternation.
Remi whispered, “Something’s wrong.”
There was another yell from the echoing chamber, and the men exerted themselves to pull their colleague up quickly. He spoke to the others and then they lowered a camera into the chamber. Several times light flashed from the dark entrance up into the surrounding trees. When they pulled up Bako, he stomped around, looking angry, muttering to himself. Suddenly he shouted orders at his men.
The security men worked at loading their equipment into the truck, but they didn’t seem to be bringing many artifacts up from the chamber. There were a few weapons, some textiles, some pottery. There was much conversation in Hungarian, and Bako, his head security man, and two others got into one of the two SUVs.
Remi whispered, “They’re not taking any of the artifacts in Bako’s car.”
Then one of the other security men came and opened the hatch at the back of Bako’s SUV and lifted the rug and a panel to reveal the spare tire and jack. He slipped a sword in a sheath, a belt with a dagger, and a bullet- shaped steel helmet inside. He closed things up and shut the hatch.
“Thank goodness,” she whispered. “At least now he’s guilty of something.”
The SUV backed up, then turned and drove off along the 
River toward the blocked road.
Two men had been left behind to clean up and then drive the other SUV and the truck back to Hungary. Remi and Sam crawled back through the brush and then walked the rest of the way to their car. They drove back to the last parking lot, playing the car radio so loudly that the men couldn’t help but hear. They slammed the doors and began to walk up the path, making all the noise they could.
By the time they reached the chamber, the two men had gone. They had hastily covered the entrance with brush. As Sam and Remi approached, they heard the two vehicles start and drive off. Sam took the rope he had brought and quickly lowered Remi into the chamber.
Her feet had barely touched when she said, “I can see what’s wrong. Come down quickly.”
Sam joined her and they explored the space together. The skeleton of Bleda lay on a slightly raised bier, like a low bed. In a corner was the three-foot skeleton of Zerco, the dwarf. They both lay in the postures of the buried and both had broken skulls. They had obviously been hit with a heavy weapon. The only treasures in the tomb were much-decayed clothing, leather horse harnesses, and saddles.
