by Jean Rabe
“Double wow,” Otter said. “This shit looks old.”
Bridget took in the display. “This is it?” She didn’t hide her disappointment. “I expected more from this shipment. Last month I was told—”
“Boss, the mate said not everything got loaded. Said Spanish and Italian cops were crawling through Genoa looking for cocaine smugglers. Captain didn’t want to get caught in the net by accident, so he left before the big pieces came on. Said that stuff is probably long gone. But he said this was the best of the lot anyway. Looks like this is worth a crapload.”
“Triple wow.” Otter seemed oblivious to the conversation and tentatively reached forward, stirring some old coins in a box.
“Hey—” one of the men warned.
“Some cool stuff, boss, don’t you think? Said come late spring he’d make another run for you. And we got the ship coming in from England in a week with some paintings, and then the one from France after that. So, do you want—” Bridget waved him off, and the man stepped back.
“No, not bad then, considering,” Bridget decided. “Definitely not bad.” She’d been shorted before because of problems in port; smuggling was often a crapshoot. At first glance she estimated that these goods could bring in four to five million, with thirty three percent going back to the captain, who had some expenses on his end, and another fifteen percent divided among Bridget’s crew. Bridget had other costs to take out of it too, but in the end she was certain to pocket at least a million for herself.
Bridget went to the first table, Dustin close enough behind her she could smell the scent of his soap. She cleared her mind and let the heavy silence of the warehouse close in. Bridget had spared no expense in having the building soundproofed so the city noise did not slip inside; nor did sounds from within travel out. The resulting quiet was eerie and thick, and helped Bridget focus and call up her talent.
A quartz bottle stopper capped with an oval cut sapphire caught her eye. She held her palm above it. Then lower, lower, until her skin touched the crystal.
She let the magic take over.
“Show me,” she whispered.
An image formed behind her eyes, of an artisan chipping away at the sapphire, polishing it, then another man setting the finished gem into the housing of the stopper. The image shifted and a manic, yet regal-looking man came to the fore. Bridget absorbed the face and dipped deeper.
“Rurik,” she said. The stopper had been crafted for Rurik in … she strained to get the information … 872. He was a Varangian chieftain who gained power over Lagoda ten years prior and went on to found the Rurik Dynasty, which ruled Russia until the seventeenth century. The history of the piece rushed at her now. The stopper was presented as a birthday gift along with a case containing three bottles of plum wine from the vineyards of a monastery. Rurik, a pagan, had served the “Christian brew” to his servants because he feared one of the monks had poisoned it. There was no sheet detailing any this information, but Bridget had “read” it clearly nonetheless because of her arcane sight.
With a little more effort Bridget saw Rurik’s age-spotted hand touching the bottle stopper, holding it up to admire the facets caught in the sunlight spilling through the window of the chieftain’s sitting room. There was pleasure in the man’s wild eyes; he seemed to delight in shiny things. Today, Bridget placed the stopper’s value at $11,700. Her gift of psychometry let her see—in her mind’s eye—not only the person who had owned a thing or touched it or crafted it, but the actual worth of it. And she always translated that worth into today’s American coinage. It wasn’t automatic or unconscious—she couldn’t simply touch a thing and discover its past. She had to center herself and concentrate before her mind could pull in the details.
Near the stopper was a heavy silver comb dotted with tiny pearls. Her palm hovered above it. Ufanda, Rurik’s wife, used this, inherited it from her mother Umila. Bridget felt the beautiful Ufanda dragging it through her thick hair as she hummed a dissonant melody. Value in today’s market, more because of its pure silver content rather than historical merit: $700.
Another elaborate comb, made of ivory and with a tine missing, could bring $400 from a collector if Bridget could prove the provenance of the tsar’s family. Other trinkets from the same lot, a bulky cameo on a silver chain: $2,800; a battered brass chalice festooned with mismatched pieces of topaz once belonging to Rurik’s grandfather Gostomysl: $2,100; a bronze cup set with a single large canary diamond also once held by Gostomysl: $38,500 for the stone alone; two balsa-rimmed mirrors inlaid with gold and ivory: $1,700 for the pair. Bridget saw Vadim, Rurik’s cousin, stealing the mirrors from the bedchamber of a young woman who had refused his drunken advances.
There wasn’t a single document to explain the age or significance of any piece. Bridget’s gift precluded a need for such and let her differentiate originals from clever copies. She’d come into her “sight” when she was a little younger than Otter, but it took her a few years to fully develop it and understand that there was real magic in the world.
She had briefly considered taking on a legitimate job because of her amazing talent—museum curator, archaeologist, historian. There was so much trafficking in stolen and forged artifacts that her gift to determine genuine from fake would have been put to a good use.
But all of those occupations required an advanced college degree to back her up, and Bridget had never finished high school. By the time a friend suggested she could pay to have forged whatever diploma she needed, Bridget had decided that smuggling and brokering for the Westies was more interesting.… and allowed her to keep the choicest pieces.
There were more belongings of the Russian family: a chalice, two swords, a bejeweled glove with the leather rotted, a mug with crudely cut emerald inlays, a gold anklet that once belonging to Rurik’s raven-haired mistress, a wood horse the size of a pumpkin; Bridget felt the hands of Rurik’s young son carving it.
All interesting and all able to be sold above and below the counter in her Fort Greene antiques shop, but nothing truly outstanding. Perhaps the goods on one of the other tables could yield more.
“See anything here you’d like for your birthday, Otter?”
“Anything? I can have anything?”
“Of course.” Bridget hoped the boy would not realize the value of some of the oldest pieces and would make a selection based solely on appearance. Still, tonight she was prepared to give away whatever caught her son’s fancy.
“What about this?” Otter was several feet away, looking at a table filled with ornamental swords and daggers. Bridget sensed that they had once belonged to French nobles. She would have to get closer to pinpoint which weapon had been carried by which man. The boy held up a thin-bladed sword with rubies and citrines set into the hilt. “This is awesome.”
Bridget joined him and concentrated on the piece. “Curious.” The fingers of her left hand grazed the hilt and for an instant the air smelled of an overly sweet perfume. This was the one piece in the collection not owned by a French nobleman.
“This was actually a woman’s, Otter.” After a moment’s focus she gained a name. “Diane de Poitiers, mistress to King Henri II.” Bridget placed its value, for its history and gems, at $89,800. She hoped her son would select something else, as she knew a sword collector in Manhattan who would buy it.
“A woman’s sword, huh?” Otter laid it down, apparently no longer interested. “Hey, look at this over here! This is kinda cool.” He hefted a silver chalice. A mix of dark and faint blue stones were set in a fleur-de-lis pattern. “French, I take it. King Henri’s? Or one of his mistresses?”
“Eventually Henri’s.” Bridget concentrated and sorted through the images that came at her. “Henri’s grandfather owned that first, then his brother, then eventually Henri.”
“I could set this on my desk at home. Too pretty to drink out of. But I could put pens and pencils in it.”
Bridget smiled. The faint colored stones were blue-white diamonds, their size and clar
ity making the piece exceptional. It was, perhaps, the single most valuable piece on this table, perhaps of everything in the warehouse: $151,000 would have been her asking price. Maybe Otter had inherited some of Bridget’s skills after all.
“I like it, Mom. I’ll take this cup-thing,” Otter said, the grin wide on his face. “Okay? Of course I know not to show it to anyone, ’cept Dad. I won’t even show it to Lacy. None of this stuff … well … someone’s probably looking for it, right?”
The majority of the items on the tables were stolen from the basements of museums and collections from estates, certainly none gained through any proper channels, else they would not be here, Bridget knew.
“Someone could be looking, yes,” Bridget agreed. “But they’ll forget about it after a while.” If they even remembered owning the pieces in the first place. She knew that some of those estates and museums had so much inventory, they might never notice what was missing.
“Years,” Otter supplied. “A lot of years, I’d bet, they’d be looking. Well, they won’t think to look in Dad’s condo. Thanks for the cup, Mom.”
Bridget walked to the next table. She absorbed the history of the collection, discarding various images and locking on the visage of a fat, elderly man who seemed important and who had owned all of this lot. Bridget saw expressions flit across the heavily-lined face: anger, pleasure, sadness, confusion was the most prominent.
“A troubled man,” Bridget decided. The ill-tempered portly fellow had a thin beard and moustache and fancied wearing elaborate collars that hid his thick neck. As Bridget’s fingers brushed first a cloak clasp in the shape of a wolf’s head, next a carving kinfe and fork, then a pipe bowl, and finally a ring, a name came to her: Albrecht Friedrich, a Prussian duke in the 1500s who had seven children. Bridget sensed that Eleanor was the duke‘s favorite, fifth-born and always in his thoughts, dying at age twenty-three while she gave birth to what would have been her first child. Bridget took on the duke’s grief, then cast it aside, felt the man’s smooth fingers wrap around the handle of the carving knife. Then she reached deeper and felt the duke’s hunger and anticipation of a holiday meal. More, and she absorbed a disturbing twinge of … what? … Bridget directed all her attention to the collection, shutting out the pleasant scent of Dustin’s soap and the sound of her son’s continued oohing and ahing. What?
Odd, scattered, chaotic thoughts bordering on the edge of madness. Albrecht had been a conflicted man. The longer Bridget focused on the items, the more she absorbed, and the more her own thoughts became muddled. She picked through the disorder. Albrecht was named Duke of Prussia by the king of Poland, to whom he paid feudal homage. Fluent in Polish, he had tried—and failed—to gain acceptance to the Polish senate. A protestant, he enjoyed the backing of some influential Polish Lutherans, and so believed he could ascend to the Polish throne. But that did not happen. In 1572, four years into his reign as duke, his thoughts became even more ambivalent, and those around him questioned his sanity. Albrecht died more than forty years later, crying out the name of his lost daughter.
“Eleanor.” A tear slid down Bridget’s cheek. She shook off the connection and went to the last table, a mix of more Russian and Prussian antiquities ranging in value from several hundred dollars each to several thousand, and …
A sudden sensation of giddiness threatened to drop her when her mind touched something valuable and out of place with the rest of the assortment. It was something very, very old.
***
Seven
Bridget fought off the lightheadedness and inched toward the very old thing, something carved from wood and sitting in the shadow cast by a black box inlaid with bronze. She pulled in a breath, feeling her lungs grow warm and her face absorb the heat that once beat down upon the carving.
“Wonderful,” she breathed.
It was a wooden shabti statuette, roughly seven inches tall, and Bridget was careful not to actually touch it with her bare hands. She didn’t want the oil from her skin to cause any damage, nor did she want to be overwhelmed by the images such intimate contact with something so old could give. That contact would wait for later, back in her brownstone, when she could savor it in privacy. She’d absorb just a smidgen of it now, a junkie taking a hit to tide her over until she could administer a proper fix. She moved her fingers to within an inch of it.
Talk to me, Bridget thought. Where did you come from?
She picked through a rush of images. This shabti had been placed in the tomb of Yuya, father of Tiye, who wed Neb-Maat-Re Amenhotep III.
A little more.
Centuries raced through her thoughts at a dizzying pace and she tried to grab the most important elements without being deluged. Buried in the Valley of the Kings, Yuya’s single-chambered tomb was found in 1905 and dated to the Eighteenth Dynasty. Yuya and his wife held political influence during Amenhotep III’s reign, and before that in the reign of Tuthmosis IV.
Titles tumbled from Bridget’s mouth: “Lord of Akhmim, Priest of Min, Master of the Horse, His Majesty’s Lieutenant Commander of Chariotry.” All those things Yuya had been called. The tomb, like so many others, had been plundered. But not everything had been taken. Shabtis, including this one, carved statuettes that were meant to animate in the afterlife as servants, had been left behind to be discovered by archaeologists and placed in museums.
This piece had been in a museum.
Bridget gulped in the dusty air of the warehouse and the pleasant scent of Dustin. His hands were on her shoulders, steadying her. Dustin was talking to her, but she paid no attention, she was lost in the images emanating from the shabti. Drunk on it, she couldn’t release the connection. Couldn’t? Wouldn’t. Didn’t want to. Wanted to take the precious shabti back to her brownstone and shut everything and everyone else out and delve deeper into ancient Egypt.
“Bridget!” Dustin raised his voice and broke through. “Are you all right?”
“Mom?”
Bridget tried to wave them off, but her arms felt like lead. So old, this magnificent piece, so filled with history and memory and pictures.
Bridget pressed for more. This shabti, made of cedar, had changed ownership several times, ending up at the Malawi National Museum in Minya, Egypt, and put on exhibit. She saw it in a display case, as clear as if she’d been in the museum.
“A little more,” she whispered, curious how it ended up in her warehouse in New York City. She heard chaos in her probing, a crowd, shouts, sirens, and whistles. It was August of 2013, and a riot was in progress outside the Minya museum. She watched armed thieves scurry in, break the case and steal the shabti, along with many other items. A jumble of news bits hit her like pellets from a scattergun. Looters had ravaged ancient sites and museums in that turbulent summer that year, stealing what they could carry away while demonstrators set fire to things all in a clash between Egyptian security forces and the supporters of the ousted president Mohamed Morsi. Bridget remembered the reports; hundreds died and thousands were injured.
In the bloody conflagration, this ancient piece within her grasp had gone missing. Bridget clearly saw the face of the men who had taken it—and the museum’s other treasures—registered their names and tried to remember every detail about them, every scar and feature, heard the protestors in the background, felt the calloused and careless hands of the thieves on the wood, then felt it pass from one hand to the next to the next until it rested in one darkness followed by another and another.
The hold of the ship that brought it here? Yes, but more.
Its recent black surroundings did not have the feel of a ship.
The blat of a horn flittered at the edge of her thoughts. A ship’s horn. Then a different sound, persistent. Honking. A jarring sensation. Foreign cursing.
The lurching of a damnable New York City taxi!
The darkness that had most recently cocooned this shabti had been the trunk of a cab.
“Mom?”
Bridget’s throat had gone desert dry. She swallowed and
worked up some saliva and broke the connection with the shabti. She was slammed by the sensation of awakening from a three-day bender. “This piece, this little statue … it came with the shipment from Genoa today?”
“No, boss. Not that piece. One of Marsh’s buddies lifted it from some rich dude’s apartment on Eighty-Fifth. Marsh told him maybe you’d want that little statue for your antique shop, told him you like the old stuff. Ugly as hell, ain’t it? Marsh was supposed to be here tonight, but I heard he had to go to the hospital and—”
“Marsh isn’t feeling well,” Bridget said, making a mental note to call and check on him later, pay the hospital bill and hope the concussion wasn’t serious. “Marsh’s friend. The one who brought this. What is his name?”
“Harold. No, Harry. That’s it, Harry.” He scratched his head. “Didn’t get a last name for certain, though I remember it was a color. Black, brown, gray. Should’ve paid more attention. Sorry. He was a scruffy fellow. Dropped it off an hour ago. I gave him two hundred for it. I wasn’t going to give him that much, but he kept dickering. Just an ugly piece of wood, but he wouldn’t take less. Said there was more Egyptian—”
“Find this Harry Black, Brown, or Gray for me. Now. I want the address of the apartment.”
Perhaps some of the other items stolen from the museum in Minya were also in the Eighty-Fifth apartment that Harry had plundered. Perhaps there were more ancient treasures to be had.
She loved very old things.
***
Eight
Bridget selected the darkest spot in the alley and scaled the wall. She used titanium hand claws, similar to Shiobi Spikes or what lumberjacks favored, but sharp enough to bite into the mortar between the bricks and give her purchase. The building was one of several prewar apartment complexes in the area. Its front had been given a serious and elegant facelift. The side in this alley had been left to deteriorate.