Fischer was tall and thin, with blond hair that was slowly lightening to white and once fair skin that had been tanned by the sun so many times that it had stayed that way, making his blue eyes stand out. He wore a gray sport coat that looked weather-beaten, with a dark blue silk scarf hanging loose from his neck. He shook Sam’s hand and kissed Remi on both cheeks. It wasn’t until they were walking toward the exit from the terminal that Albrecht Fischer spoke about his find.
“I’m sorry for telling you so little on the telephone. I think you’ll understand when you see what I’ve brought to Germany.”
“This isn’t where
it came from?” asked Remi.
“No,” he said. “At the site, I sensed I was being watched. I needed to do lab work and examinations, but I didn’t dare do them there. So I came back here. There are colleagues at Humboldt and at the Free University who have let me use their labs. I’ve been sleeping in the office of a colleague who is on leave and using the shower in his chemistry lab.”
“Why not just go back to your own lab at Heidelberg?”
“A bit of a ruse to throw off anyone who might be interested in what I’m doing. I had some odd feelings while I was at work, and I’ve found that when you think you’re being watched, you usually are.”
Fischer took them outside the terminal, where he hailed a cab that took them to the Hotel Adlon Kempinski. While Sam checked them in, Remi took in the beauty of the hotel—the ornate carpets, fine furniture, vaulted ceiling—but she also noticed that Albrecht Fischer’s eyes were moving constantly, scanning the steady stream of people coming and going through the lobby. He was agitated, impatient, and, at the same time, there was something else. He seemed to be afraid. Sam sent the bellman up to their room with the luggage, then rejoined Remi and Fischer. “Shall we go up?”
Remi shook her head. “I think we’d better go see what the good professor has been working on.”
Albrecht brightened. “Yes, please do. I know you’re probably tired from all the travel, but I’ve been keeping myself quiet about this until I’m half mad. And the lab isn’t far.”
Sam and Remi exchanged a glance, and Sam said, “Then of course. Let’s go.” They stepped outside, and the doorman signaled a cab and opened the door for them. Albrecht waited until the door was closed to say, “Humboldt University, please.” The cab let them off only a few blocks away at the statue of Frederick the Great in front of the main building of the university on Unter den Linden.
They walked quickly into a building that seemed to be all science laboratories—doors with smoked-glass windows with numbers on them. The ones that were open had young people inside, wearing lab coats and wandering among black boxes with screens, stands that held chemistry apparatus, and counters with centrifuges and spectrometers. As they passed, Sam kept looking into each lab. Remi took Sam’s arm. “I know you’re reliving the high points of your college years.”
“What do you mean?” asked Albrecht. “I thought all American students did was drink beer and go to parties.”
“Sam went to Caltech. They worked in labs, then drank beer and went to parties.”
“I was just thinking about some of the people who went to this university. There was one student who was promising—a kid named Albert Einstein.”
Remi said, “And before him, Hegel, Schopenhauer, the Brothers Grimm . . .”
“Today we’re going to rely on Remi’s specialties,” said Albrecht. “A bit of history, a bit of physical anthropology.”
He stopped at a dark laboratory, took out a key, and opened the door. They stepped in, and he turned on the fluorescent lights. “This is it.” The room had black counters along the side walls, a whiteboard in front, and a half dozen large stainless steel tables. On one of them was a polished wooden coffin.
“Who died?” Remi asked.
“I call him Friedrich.” He walked to the coffin. “Specifically, I’ve certified that he’s my great-great-uncle Friedrich von Schlechter. When I found him, I didn’t want to arouse curiosity, so I bought a coffin and hired an undertaker in the nearest city to put him in it, get the proper export papers, and ship him to Berlin for burial.” He opened the lid. Inside was an age-browned skeleton with a few scraps of material that seemed to be rotted leather and a length of rusty metal like the blade of a sword.
Sam and Remi looked inside. Sam said, “He seems to have gotten his head disconnected during the trip.”
Remi looked closer. “It didn’t happen in transit. See the mark on the vertebra, right here?” She pointed at the back top surface of the last vertebra, where a deep chip was missing. “That’s from an ax or a sword.”
“Very good,” said Fischer. “If you spend some time with him, you begin to learn more about who he is. Judging from the wear on the molars, and the good condition of the bones, I’d estimate he was at least thirty, but not yet forty. If you’ll look at his left radius and ulna, you’ll see some more marks. Those are clearly wounds that healed long before he died. The decapitation, of course, was his last injury. But these marks tell much more about him. He was a warrior. He was probably using some kind of two-handed weapon when an opponent swung a blade at his forearm. Or if he was using a shield, the blow got behind it. He lived and the wound healed.”
“The swords and shields remind me,” said Remi. “Have you run the carbon 14 yet?”
“Yes. We did one on a chip of his femur, one on a strip of leather that was with the body—a fragment of his shoe, a wrapping for a weapon perhaps. The reading was 82.813 percent of the carbon 14 remaining. I had also taken samples from another individual near him and tested them here. The result was the same, giving us a date of around 450 C.E.”
“Four fifty,” said Sam. “And where is the site?”
“It’s a couple of miles to the east of Szeged, Hungary.”
“Wow,” said Remi. “And you think Friedrich here is just one of many?”
“Yes. How many, I don’t know yet. A battlefield is essentially a very large mass grave. The place where the bodies come to rest is lower than the surrounding area, whether they’re buried in the usual way or covered over time. I’ve detected remains as far apart as a hundred yards. Here. Look at this.” Fischer went to another table and unrolled a large hand-drawn map with a grid on it. “This is the Tisza River, and here’s the place where the joins it. This grid is where I found Friedrich, and this one, way over here, is where I found another individual at the same depth.”
“Who could they be?”