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Albrecht Fischer held out an official-looking document. Donat Toth took it, glanced at it, and handed it to one of the other suits, who examined it and passed it on. When it came back, he said, “This is out of date. My client now owns the land and will be taking possession today.”
“This is the property of the city of Szeged,” said Dr. Voss.
“My client, Mr. Arpad Bako, has submitted a very high offer to the city of Szeged, which has been accepted.” He held out some more papers.
Dr. Voss looked at the papers, then took out a pen and wrote something on one of them. She said, “The National Office of Cultural Heritage hereby voids this sale.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I just did.”
“No, you can’t! We put cash money into this!”
“Get it back. Any land containing cultural treasures is under control of the Office of Cultural Heritage. Act number 64 on the protection of cultural heritage says so.”
“Who says that what’s on this land is cultural treasures?”
“The definition of a cultural treasure is in the law too—all goods of more than fifty years of age, including archaeological findings from excavation. I’ve identified some here, and no local government officials can overrule my determination.”
“I’ll go to court.”
“Others have. They lost and so will you.”
Two of the younger lawyers moved in close to Donat Toth and whispered to him with great concern. He waved them away. “What’s to stop me from tearing up this permit?”
One of his legal advisers said apologetically, “Three years in prison, sir.”
Toth threw the permit in the general direction of the professors, but it simply floated peacefully to the ground. One of the students picked it up, blew the dust off it, and handed it to Albrecht Fischer. The men in dark suits returned to their cars, turned around, and drove off. Just as they did, Sam, Remi, Tibor, and János arrived in Tibor’s taxi.
When the boat crew had heard the story, Tibor said to Sam and Remi, “Defeating Arpad Bako’s lawyers isn’t the same as defeating Bako.”
Sam said, “We need to buy the archaeologists more time.”
“How much more?”
“Albrecht thinks they can finish here in another week,” said Remi. “They’ve got the locations of the bodies mapped and most of them photographed and removed. In one more week, he thinks they’ll have everything removed from the site.”
Sam stared out at the excavation site for a moment and then said, “Here’s what we do. Tomorrow we’ll pick a spot. We’ll stop going up and down the river, anchor, and then start diving. The next day, we’ll go to the same place. We’ll let them see us going down with markers.”
“Then what?” asked Remi.
“Then we double down. We do everything we would do if we were bringing up something big and valuable. We want to rent a dredger mounted on a barge. We’ll bring in bulldozers and dump trucks to build our own road to the riverbank righ
t where we’re diving.”
Tibor said, “Are you sure you want Bako to think you’ve found the treasure?”
“I want him to think we know where it is, but that there’s a lot of heavy work to do to recover it.”
“All right,” said Tibor. “I’ll start with my uncle Géza. He has a construction company, and there are always equipment operators who need work.”
The next day, Sam and Remi were out on the deck of the Margit in their wet suits, with compressed-air tanks and other gear in a rack near the stern. They set out buoys and flew a red flag with a white stripe to let passing boats know that there were divers in the water and then submerged.
They explored the bottom of the river together, finding an array of metal objects. There were broken pipes, anchor chains, a few hundred-gallon barrels that had held some liquid that had long ago leaked out through rusted holes. Interspersed with the familiar were the unidentifiable: heavily rusted ferrous objects that could only be described as round or long and thin or hollow. Their names and whatever they had been used for were long lost, but these objects were of greatest interest to Sam and Remi. Anything that looked very old and mysterious was a find. They gathered a pile of these objects under the silhouette of Tibor’s boat and then surfaced.
Across the river, inside the cargo bay of the parked truck that shadowed them each day, the five men had been joined by Arpad Bako. The five all stood very straight, and all of them remained silent, while Bako looked through a spotting scope at the divers. Bako was a tall, muscular man who wore his curly hair long, so it draped across his forehead and hung over the back of the collar of his white shirt. His suit was a fine garment from a personal tailor he had flown in from Italy. His dark eyes were sharp and alert.
Gábor Székely, the squad leader, said, “You see, Mr. Bako? The whole operation is different now. We’re wondering if all that digging being done up the river might just be a diversion from the real operation here.”