by Jasmine Walt
“I am.” She smiled. “I specialize in ancient artifacts.”
“You can always call up the IAC,” I said. “They can hook you up with an authenticator. I’m due out of the country tomorrow.”
I was able to reschedule my spa trip, and my plane was leaving in the morning. Nothing short of the Holy Grail would get me to miss my date with manufactured mud, a man-made sauna, and artificial indoor lights. And I knew for a fact that the Grail was a myth. I turned from Ms. Van Alst and began to head down the steps.
“I doubt anyone else from the IAC could read this,” she called out. “I’ve never seen writing like this. The script predates any ancient Chinese writing on record. It looks to be older than the Shang Dynasty. Languages are your specialty.”
I slowed my pace as I reached the last step. Languages were my specialty. Like a stamp or baseball card collector, I collected languages. I knew all of them ever written or spoken.
My ears perked up like a dog smelling a meaty bone. I didn’t like being baited or manipulated into doing anything. And this woman clearly knew my weak spots.
Before I turned back around, I constructed a bland mask over my face. It would’ve been easier if I’d had a facial in the last week. I had meant to look Loren Van Alst in the eye when I spun around. Unfortunately, I miscalculated.
When I turned, Ms. Van Alst had come down a couple of steps so that her chest was directly in my sight line. She’d already turned the photographic paper my way. My gaze caught on her trimmed nail and the characters it pointed to in the photograph.
I didn’t hear anything else she said. My heart raced, urging me to step closer to the image. My brain fogged, trying to reach out through the haze. My fingers ached from the memory of carving characters into bone.
This dragon bone was authentic. I knew it to be true like I knew my own name, because I was looking at my name on the carving of the bone in the picture. That was my signature on the two-thousand-year-old artifact. I had written that message.
4
I watched as Loren swirled her glass of expensive wine. We sat in the courtyard bar of the American Art Museum. The bar was indoors but the windows were wall to wall, allowing patrons to see outside and onto the lawn of the Smithsonian. Workers milled about, scarfing down paper-bag lunches and trying to catch a small dose of vitamin D before they had to go back into their windowless cubicles. I’d never sat in a cubicle a day in my life. I doubt I could stand the confinement. I was feeling trapped enough by my companion as she stood there holding the information hostage.
Loren had long since put the photograph back in her vintage bag. It was no matter. I’d committed the markings to memory. Although my short-term memory was photographic, it was the longer-term ones that had the tendency to fade—like photographic paper. I’d need to transcribe the markings I’d seen onto paper to translate all the words. I could only make out a few of the meanings, and what little I understood didn’t make sense.
“It’s uncanny,” Loren said. “The woman in that painting…”
I turned and looked through the large picture windows into the gallery. The portrait Loren indicated was of a dark-haired woman in an eighteenth-century ball gown sitting alone on a courting bench. The secret smile on her lips told the viewers she didn’t expect to be sitting alone for long.
And I hadn’t sat alone for long. Zane had joined me as soon as he’d painted the last stroke. But we hadn’t stayed on the bench. The gown hadn’t stayed on my body either.
“She could be your younger sister,” Loren mused.
I inhaled slowly through gritted teeth. She didn’t know she was insulting my age. I looked exactly the same as I had two hundred years ago.
“An ancient relative, maybe?” she asked, eyes still locked on Zane’s painting. “What is your cultural heritage?”
I didn’t know. I was a mix of everything. Brown skin that could be Asian or Spanish or African. Angular features that could be Indian or Egyptian or Irish. I had no idea where I came from or who I belonged to. That memory had faded a few millennia ago.
I turned from the painting as a man in a museum service uniform passed by the work of art that depicted me in another time period and focused my attention on the woman in front of me.
“So, Ms. Van Alst.” I paused, waiting to see if she corrected the title. Like married women, women with doctorates always corrected their salutation. Loren didn’t. In fact, she smiled at me like she knew exactly what I was doing. “Where did you study?”
“I believe you Americans call it the School of Hard Knocks. My dad had the degrees. I tagged along on his expeditions and learned on the job.”
“Van Alst?” A memory tugged at the corner of my mind. It wasn’t a glowing one. The Dr. Van Alst I was remembering had been cast aside in disgrace.
“Yep, that Van Alst.” Loren said it with her head held high, waiting for a challenge.
Dr. Van Alst had been renowned for his work ten years ago. But a forged artifact had brought it all crumbling down. That forged artifact had been a dragon bone.
The man had claimed the bone was from the Xia people of Asia. Most historians believe the Xia were a small tribe in ancient China that had thrived for a brief period before the more well-known Shang Dynasty. No one conceded the Xia qualified as a dynasty.
The dragon bone Dr. Van Alst found proclaimed the tribe to have been led by a queen. That hadn’t helped his case. There was no record of a female ruler in China. Soon after that, the bone was declared a fraud carved on a fossil stolen from a modern-day museum. Van Alst copped to the forgery, but he swore the markings he’d drawn were real and that he’d copied them from the real bone, which he said the modern-day Xia wouldn’t allow him to take. To this day, no one had ever found the site.
It looked like the younger Van Alst was on this mission for redemption and not necessarily to raid the Chinese of their ancient riches. Dammit, I was a sucker for a good underdog story. I turned away from Loren’s steely shoulders and stiff upper lip. Once again, my eye caught the museum worker.
The man was unscrewing a painting beside the one of me from the wall. On the floor was a frame with “Out for Cleaning” written on it. No alarm sounded, but a bell rang in my head. It was curious because I happened to know that all restoration work was done after closing hours.
“Aren’t you going to ask?” Loren said, snapping my attention back to her.
“If the bone is authentic?” I shook my head. I knew it was. Not only because of my signature and what I had already translated, but because I knew this woman wasn’t stupid. If she had the balls to go after the artifact that had disgraced her father, she’d make damn sure it was the real deal.
“Where exactly did you find the bone?” I sipped my pomegranate martini and watched the worker struggle with the bolt on the painting. He was wrenching the bolt to the right. Apparently, he didn’t know the old adage of lefty-loosey, righty-tighty.
“The Gongyi province in southern China,” she said.
Damn, that was deep in the heart of the country—nowhere near a proper city. I grimaced, turning back to Loren. She’d missed the look on my face. Her attention was also on the worker. She spoke to me as we watched him struggle with the bolt.
“I noticed you haven’t done work in China in the last five years that you’ve been working with the IAC.”
She was wrong. I hadn’t done work in China since before the IAC was founded.
“How do you know so much about me to begin with?” I asked. “My work with the IAC isn’t exactly publicized.”
“I’m good at puzzles, and I see your pattern,” she said, catching my gaze. “Lost civilization, government lockdown, and there you are. You’re easy to find if you know where to look. I knew you were in Honduras. When I saw that artifact pop up on the—” She coughed into her hand to cover the word she nearly let slip. Then she put her fist to her chest, as though to excuse herself, and began again. “When I saw it pop up on the Smithsonian registry, I figured you were behind
it and decided to head here.”
I knew her fake cough was to catch herself from outing her knowledge of the darknet site for tomb raiders. But it was the fact that she saw a pattern in my movements that made me most uncomfortable. If she could find me, that meant other people could. Luckily, I was getting out of here in the morning.
“So…” Loren said. “You’re in? You’ll come to China, ground truth the site, authenticate the artifact, and help me translate the bones?”
I chuckled. She had balls, this one. That was four things she’d asked me for. The problem was I couldn’t do the first item on her list.
“I went ahead and procured you a first-class ticket to Beijing.” Loren reached into her bag and pulled out an airline ticket.
“I’m not flying to Beijing.” I put down my empty glass.
“Why not? They’ve done some serious upgrades to the terminal in the last year. They even have a spa.”
“Really?” My ears perked up. “Wait, no. I’m not going to China.”
I hadn’t been to China since before the invention of air travel. Probably hadn’t been back to China since I wrote on that turtle shell. It was a partial message. It looked like the end of a warning about ghosts in the forests and a queen. I needed the rest of the bones to decipher the entire message.
“Listen,” I said. “I believe that bone is authentic. And I will help you decipher whatever you find. Just bring the other bones to me when you’re done with the excavation.”
“Well, that sounds like a swell plan.” Loren pressed her lips into a thin smile. “Only I can’t get back onto the site. A developer has leased the land from the local government and made it off limits. Maybe you’ve heard of him? Tresor Mohandis.”
I pinched the stem of my empty wineglass at the sound of that name, hurriedly letting it go before I broke the glass with the slight pressure from my thumb.
“Yeah, I thought that would get your attention.” Loren’s thin grin spread triumphantly. “From what I can tell, you’ve successfully stopped him from building on three sites in the last five years by helping to get the land marked protected and historical.”
I’d fouled his plans more than five times, and for a much longer time than I cared to remember. If my life were a comic book, Tres Mohandis would be my arch enemy. Our battles for territory across the globe and over the centuries were epic.
“Through the government, Mohandis has put an injunction on the land,” Loren continued. “So no more excavation or even pleasure hiking. I don’t have the credentials to prove what I found so the site could be marked historical. No one else will bother to move against him because he’s lining their pockets with money. Plus, the locals…”
She took a deep breath, turning away from my inquisitive gaze.
“Let’s just say they didn’t take kindly to my being on their sacred land. Meanwhile, I think there’s more than just bones there. I think it’s a lost civilization. It might be the home of the ancient Xia. I think there are more artifacts there to prove they were a dynasty and not just a series of tribes.”
This woman was very good. She knew dead languages were my catnip and that Tres Mohandis was my Achilles’ heel. Now she went for the kill by implying a potential lost civilization.
“Where’s the bone now?” I asked.
“Where I found it,” she said, still not meeting my eyes. “I didn’t have time to properly excavate and move it before the locals found me and the Mohandis security barred me from the land.”
That shocked me. For a raider, she had a healthy respect for the artifact. I’d seen too many smash-and-grab jobs by other raiders over the years, rendering artifacts nothing more than dust.
“Mohandis had you and your team physically removed from the land?”
“It wasn’t Mohandis,” she said. “It was some overzealous local men who were trying to protect their heritage from nasty foreigners. And I was there by myself.”
I shook my head at the admission. “A tomb raider through and through.”
“Right, I’m labeled a raider because I don’t have a team and degrees? The work I do is just as important as what you do.”
“No, the difference is I share the knowledge, not sell it to the highest bidder.”
“Fine,” Loren said. “So, I’m smarter than you because I get compensated for my work.”
“Knowledge lasts longer than riches, trust me.”
“Maybe.” Loren sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. “But people will choose money in the present over notoriety in the future every day. And Mohandis Enterprises knows how to capitalize off that. He’s going to build on that site in a couple of weeks without looking back at yesterday. Then the truth of my father’s work will be forever lost, and so will the voices, lives, and history of those ancient people.”
I swore that bastard purposely sought out ancient lands to build his modern, metallic, homogenous behemoths.
“Is it just me or is that guy about to steal that painting?” Loren asked.
I turned my attention back to the service worker. I had been thinking the same thing. “It’s not a hard thing to do. The Smithsonian only cares what you bring in the doors. They’re not as good at monitoring what you take out.”
The metal detectors hadn’t gone off at the blade on my hip. It was made of jade, not steel. Most items in this museum, like the parchment that painting was on, weren’t metal. So the detectors brooked no argument if they left without their metal encasements.
“Tell me about it,” Loren said, sipping the last of her wine. “Did you hear about what happened to the snuff box they had from Catherine the Great?”
“Don’t remind me,” I moaned.
Someone had snuck out with the priceless artifact that the Russian queen had given to her lover Count Orlov. And that time, the alarm bells had rung in the museum. But the treasure was lost by the time they tracked it down. The diamonds had been removed and sold, and the gold melted down.
The worker had finally figured out his right from his left and was working on the last bolt.
“Did you hear the one about the mail clerk who walked out with ten books from the Natural History Museum?” I asked.
Loren hmphed. “They might as well leave the doors of that museum open; it’s so easy to walk out with anything.”
Jerking my head toward her, I didn’t miss the wince, as though she’d said too much. An ancient reptile shell had gone missing from the Natural History Museum about the time her father came out with his fake dragon bone.
“So, should we do something?” Loren asked.
“We shouldn’t have to.” I pushed away my empty martini glass. “Supposedly, security has improved.”
The painting sprang free from the wall. The man stumbled back as the weight of the frame came into his arms. Loren and I gasped as the priceless work of art shuffled about in his arms only feet away from the hard floor.
The man regained his footing. His gaze went up to the security guard standing at the threshold that led from the courtyard bar to the interior of the museum. The security guard rolled his eyes in annoyance, but he made no move to stop him.
So, it was an inside job.
The thief put the painting on the floor and raised the “Out for Cleaning” sign to take its place. I rose from my seat in disbelief that the idiot would set a one-of-a-kind piece directly on the damn ground.
“Oh, no, he didn’t,” Loren hissed. She reached into her bag and pulled out a baton. Giving it a hard shake, she turned it into a cane like the kind I’d trained with in dojos. This was about to get ugly.
Loren strapped her vintage bag over her shoulder and headed into the museum. I moved into gear to catch up. We passed the security guard, who eyed us nervously.
“I think you misplaced something,” Loren said as she approached the thief. She placed herself between the thief and the painting.
“Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head,” he said. “I’ve got it.”
The man went to reach
for the painting, but the whack from Loren’s cane stopped him. With my pinky finger, I caught the heavy weight of the wobbling painting and stopped it from teetering to the ground. No one saw my interference. Everyone’s eyes were on Loren and the service worker.
“No, you didn’t misplace the painting,” she said. “I think you misplaced your worker ID card. Can you pull it out for me?”
The man cradled his injured hand and glared.
“What’s going on here?” the security guard said as he came over.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Loren said. “Do you recognize this man?”
The security guard gulped. It was a trick question. If he admitted he did recognize him, it would be clear he was in on the theft. If he didn’t recognize him, then he was showing he hadn’t been doing his job.
“Security,” Loren shouted. “And I mean real security this time.”
Everyone in the hall stopped to witness the commotion. The thief had a look of panic in his eyes. He turned to run, but his feet met with the blunt end of Loren’s cane and he tripped. She pulled a set of plastic handcuffs out of her bag and bound him.
“What else do you have in that bag?” I queried.
She winked at me as she finished binding the thief. Then her head turned like a bloodhound scenting prey. The security guard had reached for the painting. Loren lunged, like I’d seen fencers do. With her cane as an extension of her arm, she struck the guard’s hands before he could touch the painting.
“If you’re going to steal,” she said, “at least have respect for the thing you’re stealing. Putting a priceless painting on the floor? Didn’t your parents teach you manners?”
More security came into the fray. “What’s going on?” one of them shouted.
“They were going to steal the painting,” someone from the crowd shouted.
“And that woman stopped them,” another patron added.
The crowd engulfed Loren in an excited hum, swallowing her whole as the other guards took care of the traitor and his accomplice.
I edged myself to the exit, but not before Loren caught my gaze. When I raised my hand in a farewell salute, she reached into her bag, pulled out the airline ticket, and waved the slip of paper at me. I ducked out the door into the courtyard, unsure which way to go. So, I just walked.