The Lost Throne

56

The process took a lot longer than they had hoped. In fact, it chewed up half the night.

Allison read the police officer’s journal aloud, sounding out the words phonetically, while Jones used a translation program from the Internet to determine what language was being spoken. Then, after a healthy debate, the two of them decided what Schliemann had said.

It wasn’t an exact science, and it was made even tougher by the evolution of language that had occurred during the past century. But by the time they reached the end of the journal, they were satisfied with the results. Although the translated passages couldn’t be read smoothly — the officer had skipped far too many words for them to reconstruct complete sentences — enough clues had been uncovered to assure them that they were on the right track.

While this was going on, Payne left the Palace Hotel to work on another project. He realized he wouldn’t be much help during the translation process. If anything, another voice would have slowed them down. Besides, his skills were much more useful on the streets of Saint Petersburg. Their meeting with Ivan Borodin was scheduled for ten o’clock, and he wanted to survey the residence to make sure they weren’t walking into a trap.

At first glance, everything appeared fine, but he would check again in the morning.

When Payne returned to the suite, he felt a palpable buzz in the air, as if Jones and Allison had important news and they couldn’t wait to share it. For some reason it made him think of his dad — the moment when his father would come home from work and a five-year-old Payne would run into his arms and tell him about all the things that had happened that day. Now the roles were reversed. Payne walked through the door and was greeted by a burst of enthusiasm.

“Get over here,” Jones said excitedly. “We just finished the translations.”

They were still sitting in the same chairs as before. Most of Byrd’s documents were now on the floor. The only things that remained on the table were the officer’s journal, Byrd’s legal tablet, the computer, and the notebook filled with their work. The top page was divided into three columns, and those columns were filled with words in different-colored ink. Payne wasn’t sure where they’d got the colored pens from, but he assumed they belonged to Allison. She seemed like the type of person who would carry office supplies in her purse.

Jones handed him their notebook. “We translated the entire journal.”

“The entire thing?”

He nodded. “Tell me what jumps out at you.”

“The dumb-ass grin on your face. I’m guessing you’re pleased with the results.”

“Just look at the damn notebook.”

Payne smiled. “Okay, I’ll look at the damn notebook.”

He scanned the blue list first, and many terms stood out. THRONE appeared several times, as did STATUE, ZEUS, OLYMPIA, and GOLD. All of them seemed to support their theory: Schliemann had been talking about the lost throne right before his death.

Next, Payne moved on to the middle column. It was written in red ink. The words weren’t used as frequently as those in the first list, yet CONSTANTINOPLE, FIRE, TREASURES, BOOK, and CAVE were repeated. How they were connected, he wasn’t sure.

The third list, written in green, was much shorter than the others. But it was the list that caught his eye: COAT was written at the top, then LOCATION, then KEY.

“Tell me more about the green,” Payne said as he took a seat.

Allison obliged. “Richard said the coat equals the key. Now we have linguistic proof of that. Schliemann mentioned coat and key on two different occasions.”

“In what context?”

“Unfortunately, context is rather difficult. The policeman did his best to record what Schliemann was saying, but he struggled a bit. Sometimes we couldn’t read his shorthand. Other times he mangled the words. Occasionally he drew long blank lines in his journal to indicate that something was being said that he couldn’t comprehend at all.”

“And the different colors?”

Jones answered. “That was our attempt to give the words some kind of framework. After a while, we noticed that Schliemann clustered the same words together over and over again. We weren’t able to reconstruct long passages — there were too many missing words — but we lumped certain words together. By doing so, we felt it added meaning.”

“And what did Schliemann mean by coat and key?”

“Both times he said coat and key, he also mentioned location. So we know those words are connected. Our best guess is still a coat of arms. We’re hoping it will point to a city or a specific family, thus revealing the location of the treasure. Or at the very least, another clue.”

Payne studied the lists some more. “I only see two cities mentioned. And no names.”

“Actually, we had some problems with proper nouns. Most translation programs have a limited number of words in their vocabularies. Common words like key and coat were easy to translate, because they are words that tourists might use. But names and locations were much harder for us. We lucked out on Olympia and Constantinople. The cop must have been familiar with them, because he actually wrote them in his journal.”

“Speaking of Constantinople, how do the red words connect together?”

He handed the notebook to Allison to refresh her memory. But she didn’t need to look at it. She had spent so much time with the words she knew them all by heart.

“Three words—Constantinople, treasures, and fire—support the original story. Treasures were supposedly removed from the city before fires were set by rioters.”

“What about the other red words?”

“Schliemann mentioned them with the others, occasionally changing his word order. As for what he meant, we’re still unsure. At this point, any theory would be conjecture.”

“Actually,” Jones admitted, “most of this is conjecture. I mean, we translated a century-old conversation, which had been spoken in more than a dozen languages and was then transcribed in Italian. The odds are pretty good we messed some stuff up.”

Allison agreed. “He’s right. Errors are a distinct possibility. But that being said, if we were unsure about a word, we didn’t put it in one of our columns.” She slowly turned the pages and showed Payne everything that they had attempted to translate. There were far more words in their scrap heap than in their actual lists. “We’re pretty confident in what we showed you.”

Payne nodded his approval. He considered it a minor miracle that they had been able to do all this work in a single night. It would have taken him a month, if he could have done it at all. “One question, though. Why didn’t Richard have coat or key in any of his columns?”

“You know,” Jones said, “that bothered us, too. He wrote the coat equals the key at the bottom of a page, but we couldn’t find those two words anywhere in his translations.”

“Any theories on why not?”

Jones nodded. “One. And you’re not going to like it.”

Payne leaned back in his chair. “Go on.”

“We think maybe, just maybe, that Richard used his legal pad as his scratch pad. You know, to work things out before he transferred them to a different page. Kind of like we did.”

“Sounds practical to me. So where’s his main page?”

“We think there’s a chance that he had it on him when he was killed.”

Payne groaned. “Why do you say that?”

Jones glanced at Allison. “Go on. Tell him.”

“Because Richard often carried a folded piece of paper in his shirt pocket. Depending on the color of his shirt, you could see it in there.”

“But you never read it?”

She shook her head. “Nope. I never read it, so it could have been anything.”

“Still,” Payne said, “we have to assume the worst.”

“Which is?”

Jones answered the question. “All the work we just did is currently in the hands of the Russian police, and they’re trying to figure out what it all means.”

“But that’s not all,” Payne stressed. “On the day that Richard was killed, he was scheduled to meet with Ivan Borodin. If Ivan’s phone number was on that paper, there’s a good chance the cops have called him and asked him about Richard’s death. And if that happened, there’s a damn good chance that Ivan called the cops and told them about us.”