The Samurai Inheritance Read Online Free PDF Page A

at the change in Jamie’s expression. ‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. They believed eating the flesh of their rivals passed on their strength and courage. The story that’s come down over the years is that it was stolen by a German who visited the islands around that time. More likely one of their own fellows traded it to him. There’s a fairly extensive record of who visited the islands. We think the original of this,’ he waved the picture, ‘was taken by the anthropologist who took the head and was part of the price he paid for it. My people have pinned it down to a bloke called Adolfus Ribbe, a Hamburg collector who spent five years touring the islands in the eighteen nineties. Apparently, he sent back bits and pieces to Berlin museums. So now you know why I was so keen to have you on board.’
    ‘That’s it? A German collector might have taken the head. He might have presented it to a museum in Berlin. Have you any idea how many museums there are in Berlin?’
    ‘No,’ Devlin said evenly. ‘But I’m sure you do.’
    A few moments earlier Jamie had been on the verge of walking out, but his belligerence faded under the steady blue eyes. It was the craziest thing he’d ever been asked to do, but Keith Devlin was a difficult man to turn down. And in a twisted way it appealed to him. Take it back to the basics and it was simply tracing an artefact through the museum system. And that was a damn sight easier than chasing all over Germany looking for the sun stone with neo-Nazis dogging his every footstep or literally crossing swords with a power-crazed maniac who wanted to get his hands on Excalibur. It would be safe and whether he found the head or not he’d have two weeks with Fiona and Lizzie at a luxury resort to look forward to. He had plenty of contacts in Berlin and he worked his way through the list of museums in his head. Not the newer ones, for the simple reason that they wouldn’t have been around then. By the time they opened their doors a reputable German museum wouldn’t have touched a human head with a barge pole, not after what their compatriots had done at Dachau and Auschwitz. Likewise the specialist museums, the Bode and the Pergamon, with their massive collections from antiquity. But there were other possibilities …
    He felt Devlin’s eyes on him. ‘You understand that hundreds of thousands of artefacts were destroyed in Berlin by British and American bombs, and that hundreds of thousands more either disappeared or were stolen for Stalin by the Red Army? This is very likely to be a complete waste of your time and your money.’
    Devlin clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I think the time is worth spending and money is no object, son. All I ask is that you follow your nose, like my old man did with his gold, and if you pick up a scent stay with it.’ He reached below the desk and came up with another map, this time a large-scale version of a long, slim island. ‘Bougainville,’ he said. ‘The people are a hotchpotch of tribes, clans and extended families who between them speak nineteen or twenty different languages. Here’s the Panguna Mine.’ He pointed to a conglomeration of narrow contours in the south of the island. ‘Our chief is the leader of a Naasioi-speaking tribe who inhabit the area to the south. The one thing that makes the head distinctive and recognizable is that the natives are very black-skinned compared to the other groups in the Solomons or Papua New Guinea. Aaach,’ he threw the map aside, ‘we’ll put together a pack with all this stuff in it, Jamie. For the moment, just tell me you’re on board.’
    Jamie met his grin, with a shrug of surrender. ‘Fiona has to have the final word, but I think I can persuade her. If I’m in it will cost you.’ He named a price at least double what he had been paid for any past commission. Devlin didn’t even blink as he reached for his chequebook.
    Before he left to break the news, Jamie glanced again at the green