The Samurai Inheritance by James Douglas Read Free Book Online Page A

he’d done the right thing. He knew he was a man of little imagination, that was why he was still only a junior lieutenant at thirty, but he was methodical. The priority had been to inform headquarters about Yamamoto. Everything else was secondary to that fact. In any case, what was worth stealing? His heart stopped as he remembered the white-gloved hand resting on the sword hilt. Yamamoto’s sword. What if …?
    ‘Faster,’ he barked, breaking into a trot. ‘Get your lazy arses moving.’
    They reached the crash almost before Hamasuna realized it and the first thing he did was rush to the admiral’s corpse. With a surge of relief he saw the sword was still in place. He closed his eyes and let out a long breath. When he opened them again they strayed towards the patch of scorched grass where the briefcase had lain.
    It was gone.

VI
    Central Berlin, Jamie reflected, was like the centre of many German cities: an illusion. The beautiful old buildings that looked as if they’d been built when it was the capital of Prussia were modern replicas, a legacy of April and May 1945 when Allied bombers and the Red Army turned the city into a gigantic rubble field. No matter what you thought of Germans, you had to admire their resilience. When the dust settled they’d gone to work with their celebrated efficiency to disguise the scars of war. Whether it was with a great, rust-stained block of workers’ flats as favoured by Walter Ulbricht or the initial restoration of the Reichstag by Paul Baumgarten, most of the ruins were replaced within a couple of decades.
    It took less than five minutes to walk from the hotel, over the Liebknecht brücke to Museum Island, and across the grass of the Lustgarten into the shadow of the Altes Museum. As the name suggested, it was the oldest of the museums on the island. It held some of the ancient world’s greatest works of art and Jamie would have liked nothing better than to spend a couple of hours among the Greek statuary, but his destination was the nearby Neues Museum.
    Museum Island had been east of the wall, in the care of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik . Fortunately, Jamie decided, if the leaders of the DDR were keen on one thing it was museums. It took a few years for their masters in Moscow to acknowledge that most of the contents of Berlin’s museums had ended up in the Hermitage or the basement of the Kremlin, but by the late Fifties they’d recovered most of their important exhibits. A few bits and pieces were still missing. Priam’s Treasure, the hoard of gold and silver Heinrich Schliemann dug up from what might have been Troy, was one. It eventually turned up in the Pushkin Museum, but the Russians decided they’d keep it as war reparations. Jamie thought this had a certain ironic symmetry considering Schliemann more or less stole it from the Turks in the first place. That was the thing about the early German archaeologists and anthropologists, many of them were little better than looters. Not far away, the Pergamon Museum owed its existence to an engineer called Carl Humann who had excavated a site in Izmir, Turkey. In 1880, Humann did a deal with the Turks to keep fragments of friezes he discovered, and ended up taking an entire Greek temple back to Germany, an act of cultural vandalism that made Lord Elgin look like a high-street hustler. Naturally, the Turks asked for it back, but the German authorities ignored the request, as they did Iraq’s for the return of the museum’s Ishtar Gate, a thirty-foot masterpiece of glazed blue brick that was once one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
    Priam’s Treasure had been the centrepiece of the New Museum collection. The original Neues had been built in the 1850s and, unsurprisingly, got its name from being slightly less old than the Altes. The Egyptian collection was probably the finest outside Cairo, but today Jamie had no time to spare with the star exhibit, an iconic limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti. He had other