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“And abducting professors isn’t something every criminal does. We need to know who is interested in the archaeology of this area, both legitimate and not.”
“I’ll see if Interpol will tell us who has been dealing in smuggled artifacts from Hungary, and the rest of Central Europe, lately. I’ll also check with museum curators and antiquities dealers. If I got the date right, it was 450 C.E.?”
“That’s right,” Sam said. “And one more thing.” He took out the card the cabdriver had given him. “I’d like you to check out a driver in Szeged named Tibor Lazar. He was waiting for a fare outside the train station when we arrived and he speaks English like the average Londoner. See if he’s too good to be true.”
“I’m on it. Another question for Interpol.”
“Thanks,” said Remi. “Meanwhile, we’ll be here trying to draw attention to ourselves.”
“Is that the best idea?”
“At the moment, it doesn’t have much competition,” Remi said. “If we do what Albrecht did, maybe we’ll get a reaction from the same people who noticed him.”
“Let’s hope it’s not the same reaction,” said Selma. “I’ll get this information to you as soon as I have it. The map is already on your iPad with the site marked. Good-bye.”
Sam turned off his iPad. Remi said, “Ready to face the tour?”
“Eager.”
They went outside to where Tibor was sitting in his cab. He got out and opened the back door. When they were in, he said, “You wanted to see the town?”
“Yes,” said Sam. “Can we start at the river?”
“Of course,” he said. “This is a good year for the Tisza. There are no floods, no droughts, no chemical spills upriver, no anything. Last year, we had everything.”
Sam was watching his telephone, where Selma’s map was on the screen. “It looks like a big river.”
“It runs from north of Hungary, in the Ukraine, all the way down here, about a thousand kilometers, and empties into the Danube on the Serbian border. It’s been important since ancient times. We don’t get a lot of rainfall here on the southern part of the great plain. But the water comes south from the high country in the Ukraine, and the Mura River comes in from the east in Romania and brings the snowmelt and rain from the Transylvanian mountains.”
Remi said, “I suppose the course of the river has changed since ancient times?”
“Many times. It was a slow, meandering river, with big loops going back and forth across the plain. But people never leave anything alone. In 1846, Count István Széchenyi started straightening it. He cut it down to about a thousand kilometers just by cutting across the loops. Now there are about six hundred kilometers of dead channels. They did more to improve it in the eighteen eighties, nineties, and the nineteen hundreds. Maybe there was some more that I’m not remembering or never heard about. But then in 1937 they realized that they’d better start fixing the parts that they’d ruined. Now the river is pretty straight, but it still floods—maybe worse than ever. The channels fill up with silt. But they’ll keep fixing it as long as new politicians are born.”
Sam said, “Up ahead, can you cross the bridge and show us the other side of the river?”
“Certainly,” said Tibor. “We call that side Új-Szeged. It means ‘New Szeged.’ The old city was all on the west side.”
“Is the east side really new?”
“It was always here, of course, but the city has grown mostly in the empty areas.” He crossed the low, recently painted iron bridge, and they looked down on the river.
“Can you take us along this side a few miles?”
“Sure,” said Tibor. “It’s a beautiful, sunny day. We have the sunniest city in Hungary.”
He drove them along until Sam could see they were near the spot that Albrecht had mapped. It was a large open field that was planted with alfalfa and left fallow.
“What is this land on the right?” asked Remi.
“This? Oh, it’s just an old farm. It used to have cattle grazing on it. During the Communist times when I was a kid, it was part of a big farm collective. Since then, the government has been part of an effort by all the countries in the Danube basin to clean up the rivers. They haven’t reopened the cattle farm. It’s too dirty to be this close to the river.”
“Can we stop and take a look?”
“Of course,” Tibor said. He pulled over to the side of the road and parked. Sam and Remi walked a bit on the field by themselves.
“Well, we came,” said Remi, “and I don’t see anybody.”
“No signs of recent digging either,” Sam said. “Albrecht must have replaced the turf when he left and it hasn’t been disturbed.”
