all the objects in this room, has historical significance."
He lifted the bottle off the shelf and held it up to the lamp. It sparkled through the light.
"This was recovered from the Nazis. All the failures of the human mind, the Nazis. The lust for power, the desire to be led. Delusions of superhumanity, put toward the lowest acts of bestial murder. Tell me, Jeremy, have you ever seen a Nobel Prize?"
"No, sir."
"They're quite beautiful." With his right index finger, he traced a circle the size of his palm. "Two hundred grams of 23-carat gold. The front features an engraving of Alfred Nobel and the dates of his birth and death in roman numerals."
He took the scrap of paper from my hand and wrote on it:
NAT--MDCCCXXXIII
OB--MDCCCXCVI
"The back displays the prizewinner's name, above a picture representing their field of endeavor. The medals are handed out each year in Sweden by His Majesty the King."
His eyes drifted off, as if he were picturing a king clasping his shoulder and pressing the medal down into his palm.
"Do you know what the poet Yeats said when he accepted his medal?"
"No," I answered, for the fiftieth time that night.
"He saw his engraving: a young man listening to a beautiful woman stroking a lyre. And he said, 'I was good-looking once like that young man, but my unpractised verse was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it were; and now I am old and rheumatic, and nothing to look at, but my Muse is young.'
"Now," he smiled, "to answer your question. In 1940, the Nazis invaded Denmark. Until that point, the Institute for Theoretical Physics had been a haven for German scientists fleeing the Nazis, including the Nobel Prize winners James Franck and Max von Laue. Suddenly, they had just hours to hide their medals before the Nazis stormed the institute. They had to hide the gold, or the Nazis would use it to fund their horrors. But where to hide it? The Hungarian chemist de Hevesy suggested burying the medals, but Neils Bohr argued that the Nazis would just dig them up. Then de Hevesy came up with a brilliant idea: he would quickly mix together some aqua regia. He dissolved the medals into a beaker--this beaker, actually--and placed it on his shelf among hundreds of identical beakers.
"The Nazis raided the laboratory and walked right by the beaker, God knows how many times, over the years. When the war was over, de Hevesy returned to Denmark and found the beaker untouched. He distilled the gold, and in 1952, the Nobel committee presented Professor Franck with a new medal."
He paused and smiled at me kindly.
"That's amazing," I said. "How did you find the beaker?"
"I purchased it at an auction in Copenhagen. I had to have it. What a magic trick! Good dissolves itself, passes right throughevil, and reforms on the other side. Flawless. Come. I don't want you to be late."
Late for what?
We walked through a door behind his desk, into a dimly lit room. All at once I smelled a clean, pungent, hollow smell. The first thing I noticed was the strange chandelier hanging above me, and in a moment of revulsion I realized that its twisting, interlocking shapes were bones, tied and fixed together. It swayed gently as fresher air breezed in from the study. Candles rose from the empty sockets, spilling wax over the bones and illuminating the room with a dull amber glow. The shadows flickered and revealed other shapes in the room: above me, cloaked angels made from skeletons were suspended from the ceiling, giving the impression of flight; bony wings butterflied out from their spines. The walls and ceiling were covered with hideous designs: lines and circles of leg bones, wrists, vertebrae. Then I saw the worst thing of all--a fireplace composed entirely of hundreds of skulls, stacked into a macabre mantel.
"It's a reproduction," he said from behind me. "The Capuchin Crypt, in Rome, under the church of Santa Maria della Concezione."
"What is it?"
"An underground tomb, decorated with the remains of four thousand
He lifted the bottle off the shelf and held it up to the lamp. It sparkled through the light.
"This was recovered from the Nazis. All the failures of the human mind, the Nazis. The lust for power, the desire to be led. Delusions of superhumanity, put toward the lowest acts of bestial murder. Tell me, Jeremy, have you ever seen a Nobel Prize?"
"No, sir."
"They're quite beautiful." With his right index finger, he traced a circle the size of his palm. "Two hundred grams of 23-carat gold. The front features an engraving of Alfred Nobel and the dates of his birth and death in roman numerals."
He took the scrap of paper from my hand and wrote on it:
NAT--MDCCCXXXIII
OB--MDCCCXCVI
"The back displays the prizewinner's name, above a picture representing their field of endeavor. The medals are handed out each year in Sweden by His Majesty the King."
His eyes drifted off, as if he were picturing a king clasping his shoulder and pressing the medal down into his palm.
"Do you know what the poet Yeats said when he accepted his medal?"
"No," I answered, for the fiftieth time that night.
"He saw his engraving: a young man listening to a beautiful woman stroking a lyre. And he said, 'I was good-looking once like that young man, but my unpractised verse was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it were; and now I am old and rheumatic, and nothing to look at, but my Muse is young.'
"Now," he smiled, "to answer your question. In 1940, the Nazis invaded Denmark. Until that point, the Institute for Theoretical Physics had been a haven for German scientists fleeing the Nazis, including the Nobel Prize winners James Franck and Max von Laue. Suddenly, they had just hours to hide their medals before the Nazis stormed the institute. They had to hide the gold, or the Nazis would use it to fund their horrors. But where to hide it? The Hungarian chemist de Hevesy suggested burying the medals, but Neils Bohr argued that the Nazis would just dig them up. Then de Hevesy came up with a brilliant idea: he would quickly mix together some aqua regia. He dissolved the medals into a beaker--this beaker, actually--and placed it on his shelf among hundreds of identical beakers.
"The Nazis raided the laboratory and walked right by the beaker, God knows how many times, over the years. When the war was over, de Hevesy returned to Denmark and found the beaker untouched. He distilled the gold, and in 1952, the Nobel committee presented Professor Franck with a new medal."
He paused and smiled at me kindly.
"That's amazing," I said. "How did you find the beaker?"
"I purchased it at an auction in Copenhagen. I had to have it. What a magic trick! Good dissolves itself, passes right throughevil, and reforms on the other side. Flawless. Come. I don't want you to be late."
Late for what?
We walked through a door behind his desk, into a dimly lit room. All at once I smelled a clean, pungent, hollow smell. The first thing I noticed was the strange chandelier hanging above me, and in a moment of revulsion I realized that its twisting, interlocking shapes were bones, tied and fixed together. It swayed gently as fresher air breezed in from the study. Candles rose from the empty sockets, spilling wax over the bones and illuminating the room with a dull amber glow. The shadows flickered and revealed other shapes in the room: above me, cloaked angels made from skeletons were suspended from the ceiling, giving the impression of flight; bony wings butterflied out from their spines. The walls and ceiling were covered with hideous designs: lines and circles of leg bones, wrists, vertebrae. Then I saw the worst thing of all--a fireplace composed entirely of hundreds of skulls, stacked into a macabre mantel.
"It's a reproduction," he said from behind me. "The Capuchin Crypt, in Rome, under the church of Santa Maria della Concezione."
"What is it?"
"An underground tomb, decorated with the remains of four thousand
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