“My clothes?”
“I can’t take his,” he said, pointing to Paul’s legs. “He’s a stork.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Paul said. “We’re supposed to just let you—”
“You have your agency, but if you rat me out, I swear . . . your friend will be lost.”
Once the clothing trade was complete, Scissors said, “She is nearby, in a place called the Blue Motel.”
“Don’t you want the map in return?” Paul asked.
Reinhardt hugged himself and tried not to shiver.
“No,” he said. “That is no longer of interest to me. Sophia is with a woman named Kristine Frangos, who is, at the moment, propositioning her. If you hurry, you’ll catch them both there. Frangos won’t dare try to move her for another few hours.”
“Why are you here?” Paul asked.
“Frangos is behind all of this. She has ties that go all the way up. If you hurry, you’ll be able to expose her. I can’t be the one who does it. Beyond that, I have my own plans to mop things up. The artifacts Cluff had were penny ante compared to what this woman has locked up in her house.”
“Why would you help us, after everything you did?”
“Frangos made a lot of mistakes, and she left me exposed. So, I’ve decided she doesn’t get what she wants. Not this time.”
“That just leaves more questions,” Paul said.
“Too bad. I’m done.” Scissors stood and adjusted his ill-fitting new clothes. He pocketed the key and picked up the tools, which he used to open the lock on the cell door. “Give me fifteen minutes before you start yelling or I’ll go straight to the Blue Motel and end it.” He shut the cell door, picked the lock to the hallway door, and was gone.
Paul and Reinhardt both looked at the clock. It said 8:17.
“What do we do?” Reinhardt asked. “Wait until 8:32?”
“I say give him three minutes to get out of the building, then we start shouting.”
“Good,” Reinhardt said. “I’m freezing.”
___
Sophia came back from the bathroom and sat in the chair. She reopened the photo album and turned the pages backward and forward while the woman looked on. There were Chinese ritual bronzes, Olmec calendars, sarcophagi, funerary urns, jade masks, a nearly intact Mesopotamian astronomical calculator, Vietnamese copper gongs, and Syrian mosaics. “None of this is possible. One person couldn’t—” Sophia said.
“You’re right. Not with the resources and restrictions normally available to a museum or university, certainly not a national park. That said, capital is easy to come by. Interesting ideas are not.”
“So, let me get this right. You remove artifacts from sites before you—”
“Rescue,” she interrupted. “I rescue these things.”
“But what you do to rescue the artifacts destroys the integrity of the sites.”
“Their destruction is assured, but I am able to make use of magnetometry, ground-penetrating radar, and 3-D modeling. We digitize everything, put time in a bottle.”
“Why do the maps matter to you?” Sophia asked.
“I need for there to be only my maps, my reports. Anything else would undermine the reality I am trying to establish. This way I can keep what matters and sell the rest.”
“Without provenance.”
“Which is what the market prefers.”
“Once it’s gone, it’s unrecoverable.”
“The other option is to squirrel it all away in drawers until everything is lost through neglect. This mad dash to save disappearing people didn’t begin with the virtuous Victorian elite. Phrenologists wanted skulls. It was the science of racism. The better angels of the age wanted to save whatever they could before it was gone, by any means necessary. What I’m offering you is the chance to do more than futz around with history, Sophia. Look at those photos, what I have been able to save will stand the test of time. I can throw the land to the jackals, which is all they want anyway. Do you know the poem ‘Ozymandias’ by Shelley?”
Sophia nodded. She thought of her professor’s obsession with it.
“Then you’ll know that Ozymandias was the king of kings. How often a man believes he is the alpha and the omega. Sophia, you have seen this a million times. Men build monuments to themselves, and when they have gone, the ruins shout, ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’ How ironic, really. I want to give you the chance to preserve history, and it won’t require a vow of poverty or the subjugation of yourself to the venalities of bureaucrats. We will be Amazons.”
How strange, Sophia thought. Yes and no to everything. Point by point, she was right about men and bureaucracy. Add it all up, and this woman was some combination of a supervillain and a CEO, the kind of crazy that needs to be locked up. She was as ludicrous as she was terrifying, well dressed, but in the end just banal evil.
Sophia wanted to give this woman a monologue of her own. Instead, to buy herself time, she leaned forward and said, “I’m listening.”
___
The exact moment the minute hand clicked from 8:19 to 8:20, Paul and Reinhardt both shouted simultaneously as loud as they could. No one came right away. A minute later, Paul crossed to the door and pushed it open. “Hmm,” he said.
“Be careful. They might think we’re escaping,” Reinhardt said.
Paul crossed to the phone on the wall and dialed 0. “Hello, this is Paul Thrift. I’m back here in holding—”
“How did you reach the phone?” the woman asked.
“That’s part of why I’m calling. The guy they brought in just released himself. Bad news is he’s the guy the FBI is looking for. We’ll be back here, waiting.” He hung up and joined Reinhardt on the bench.
Reinhardt’s face fell. He placed his hand on Paul’s shoulder, and they sat together saying nothing until the sheriff and deputy burst into the room, their guns drawn, their eyes scanning the cell. “Where’s the guy?” Dalton asked.
“Like Paul said, he released himself,” Reinhardt said.
“He what—how?”
“I’m not sure I can explain what happened. He brought some tools,” Paul said.
“But he was nearly naked,” Dalton said.
“I think that might have been a distraction,” Paul said.
“He regurgitated the tools,” Reinhardt said, pantomiming how they came out of his mouth.
“We can keep telling you what happened, but it won’t clear anything up,” Paul added. “It was for sure the guy who’s been after us. He came in here to tell us Sophia is in the Blue Motel. Apparently, he’s got a bone to pick with the woman who has her.”
“The Blue Motel in Fredonia?” Dalton asked.
“I’m pretty sure that’s the one.”
“Chris, can you get this to dispatch?” Dalton addressed Reinhardt, “Did he steal your clothes?”
Reinhardt nodded.
“You got that, Chris? He’s wearing the German’s work clothes.”
Tanner nodded and left. Dalton came up to the cell. “Thrift, I don’t know what’s going on, but you’ve got a lot of heat on you. I’m going to take your friend so he can help with the description. We’ll get this figured out.”
“I get it,” Paul said, leaning back against the wall.
A low rumble came through the floor.
“What’s that?” Reinhardt asked.
A voice came across Dalton’s radio. “This is just crazy—there’s been a huge accident on the highway, right outside in front of the office. I can see it from my desk. It looks like a tour bus.”
“I’m an EMT, I could help you out,” Paul said.
“You know they’d string me up if I did that.”
“Then take him. He’s a good doctor.”
___
The tour bus was on its side. They were looking at the wheels and drive train; the roof was facing the other side of the road. Cars were backed up on either side, tourists with their doors open, standing in the summer heat, shielding their eyes, snapping photos
, their vacations ruined.
People emerged from the windows that were now facing skyward. They stood atop the wreckage, silhouettes with the sun behind them.
A voice on Dalton’s radio told him the volunteer fire department was ten minutes out. He turned to Reinhardt, who was now wearing a pair of running shoes with no socks, shorts, and a Kane County Sheriff’s Department T-shirt, and told him to run back to the station and ask LaRae to get the ladder. Dalton cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted to the people on top. “It’s higher than you think. Stay put, and we’ll get you down.”
LaRae was on the radio when Reinhardt got there. “Get the German to the ladder out back.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“People said some guy tore out of here in a Buick, cut off the bus, and that tipped it over. And I’m sorry, LaRae,” Dalton said, “it looks like he took your Regal.”
LaRae stood motionless for a few seconds, with the microphone next to her mouth, then she came around the front of the desk and looked out the front window. When she didn’t see what she was hoping to see, she steadied herself on the desk. “Well, shit,” she said. “I had that paid off.” She took another second to feel the loss, then she gave Reinhardt a key and told him the ladder was locked up out back.
Reinhardt followed her instructions, and with some difficulty, came back through the building with the ladder.
“Oh, honey, you could have gone around,” she said.
Reinhardt handed her back the key, she opened the front doors, and Reinhardt made his way to the street. An ambulance had arrived, but no other help was there. Dalton waved him over to a spot near the rear of the bus. They pulled the ladder into place, and people began to clamber down. Reinhardt recognized some of the faces and circled around to the front, where he saw the Ranches, Relics, and Ruins card taped to the glass.
___
“Here’s the thing,” Sophia said, her voice elevating. “I am still a little bit whacked out by whatever it was your imp stuck into my neck, but I don’t think I’m making my point. The artifacts on their own are meaningless. They need a story.”
“You’re coming across fine—why does an artifact have to mean anything?”
“Because then it’s just a thing,” Sophia said. “The point is to know more about the people who made it and used it.”
“I know you know this, but let’s be clear. We favor our own stories over the ones Indigenous people tell. I am interested in beauty for its own sake. Meaning is uninteresting, and our ridiculous need for it has caused us to dismiss many things as unimportant because their meaning does not manifest itself easily: poems, trees, abstract expressionism. How many times have people tried to ascribe meaning to pictographs? They just are, and that’s enough.”
“Beauty is a construct,” Sophia said, aware that she was taking the bait. “We should save all of it, even if it is ordinary, maybe because it is ordinary.”
“Which brings us back to the eye of the beholder—”
“And the tragedy is that most people have no idea what they are looking at, and so entire cultures have become decorations, fetishes, trinkets to be bought and sold. They love the artifacts, but it stops there. I don’t see these people supporting clean water projects or advocating for the thousands of Indigenous women who have gone missing.” Sophia interjected. “Call it what you want to, but what you’re doing is a textbook case of cultural appropriation.”
The woman stopped her with a raised palm, then she moved the mask’s stick to her other hand. “Before you say anything else, I want to remind you that we have been talking for thirty minutes, which means we are now playing a different set of roles. I have put an offer on the table and you are arguing theoretical positions.”
Sophia quickly considered the situation. She’d been kidnapped so a woman behind a mask could offer her a chance to help rescue invaluable artifacts with what appeared to be unlimited resources. Saying this to herself amplified the ridiculousness of it. “Look,” she said, “I’m still getting over being chased, shot at, and drugged. And there’s no way I’m going to say anything until I know how you do what you’re doing.”
“The details are tedious.”
“God is in the details, I’m afraid,” Sophia said.
“So is the devil.” The woman laughed softly. “But let’s stop talking about men, could we? Just for a moment, let us talk about what you and I might be able to accomplish together if we could work unimpeded. They would be happy to go on rattling their sabers, issuing sanctions and tariffs. Let them be our misdirection. For them there is only drill, baby, drill. As I have told you—we let them drill, then take what we want out the side door.”
“It makes sense, but I need to pee again,” Sophia said. “I drank that whole thing of gross Gatorade.”
“Right now?” the woman said.
“It’s a Maslow thing. I don’t follow arguments when I’m in this state.”
The woman sighed and gestured to the bathroom. Sophia went inside, pulled the door closed, and locked it.
“Don’t lock it,” Frangos called out.
“Too late. You have boundary issues,” Sophia said, sitting on the toilet.
As she tried to piece everything together, she found herself visited instead by a memory of her mother, sitting at the kitchen table watching CNN on a small white television mounted on the underside of the kitchen cabinets. The correspondent stood in front of a museum in Baghdad, talking about the looting of artifacts from the National Museum. Her mother wept as she watched, and she brought Sophia close and wrapped her in her arms. “My beautiful,” she said. “This thing they are doing can never be repaired. They know it, and that is why it is happening.” Sophia remembered saying, “But Mama, this stuff isn’t from Iran like us.” And her mother said, “Borders won’t stop them. This way of thinking will destroy everything beautiful in the world, piece by piece.” This was the kind of thing the woman out there thought she could use her power and influence to stop.
Sophia finished and sat with the toilet paper wadded in one hand. The woman out there was crazy, but if those photographs were accurate, she was in possession of some of the great lost treasures of the world. She knew she couldn’t work for such a person, and she’d never be allowed to work with her. She was a megalomaniac, and megalomaniacs don’t share. And what would her mother say when she told her that she’d quit her PhD to become this woman’s minion? She would fall silent and shake her head.
Sophia stood and flushed and examined herself in the mirror. She looked exhausted. In the high, escape-proof window above the sink she saw a glint and heard footsteps. She stepped onto the toilet so she could see, and outside there were police officers with bulletproof vests and visored helmets, moving in silence, directing each other with hand signals. One of them saw her peering down and stopped. She lifted a finger to her lips and motioned for Sophia to step down. She then put two fingers to her eyes and held them for a second, then nodded, making the “okay” sign.
“You’re not trying to escape through one of those windows, are you?” the woman in the other room called out.
“No,” Sophia said. “Whatever your guy put into me has destroyed my insides,” she said.
“He’s a blunt instrument, which is why he is gone,” the woman said.
Sophia flushed the toilet again to cover her story, then washed her hands and came back into the main room. The woman had the scrapbook open to another page. “I am particularly fond of this rescue,” she said, and she motioned for Sophia to come look.
She checked for hints of police movement outside, wondering how she might be able to stay clear of a firefight. Her pulse was racing, and she knew it was showing.
“We were given access to important cultural sites in Syria during the ceasefire in 2012. We removed key artifacts, which we swapped for fakes. The originals are now in my collection, and the fakes were scattered on the black market, which has—”
The motel door exploded inward and three poli
ce officers followed. Two of them tackled the woman to the ground, sending her fox mask spinning in the air, and a third swept Sophia toward the far corner of the room, sheltering her. The woman’s plain face was flushed red, her eyes raging. Her face looked strangely expressionless, frozen, ruined.
“Get that binder,” Sophia said. “It’s all in the binder.”
The woman began shrieking and kicking. “You have no idea who I am,” she screamed over and over.
“You have the right to remain silent,” the officer said. The woman thrashed and kicked, until one of them said, “You need to stay down, ma’am. I’m not going to warn you again.” The woman kicked one of the officers in the jaw, and Sophia saw a flash, heard the ticking of electricity, then it was quiet.
Day Eleven
Delegation
Tanner knocked on the open doorjamb. Early-morning yellow light cut through the blinds and striped the walls. “Your vehicle hasn’t moved since last night.”
“That’s right,” Dalton said without looking up.
“I brought you one of these,” Tanner said, producing a red-and-white thirty-two-ounce soda cup with a few inches of paper wrapper on the tip of the straw. Dalton looked up and smiled. His trash can was full of a half dozen similar cups. The top of his desk was strewn with files, his monitor flagged with Post-it Notes. “This wonderful stuff is going to kill me,” he said. “Thank you.”
“It won’t kill you today,” Tanner said, setting the drink within reach.
“How is Sophia Shepard?”
“They gave her something so she can sleep. The FBI is going to take a statement later today.”
“What about the other one. The rich lady with the mask?” Dalton asked.
“Haven’t heard much. I’m so glad all that happened in Arizona. Sounds like she’s some kind of VIP, so the FBI is sweating bullets. Apparently, she’s demanding protective custody. She says her man, Nick Scissors, will come after her,” Tanner said.
“Stan Forsythe has a theory about her.”
“I’m sure he will tell everyone all about it. He’s holding court down at the HooDoo. All the usual crackpots. I don’t know how we’re going to get this particular snake back in the can.”
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