Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  Marilyn said the counselor would take that on, but Harmony was doing better—Arcadia House had a walled garden in back that no one really attended to. The counselor had suggested to Harmony that she do something with the weed-choked beds. After an apathetic start, she’d become engaged in cleaning the beds.

  I was close enough to home that I stopped to see Mr. Contreras and Mitch and take Peppy out. She seemed anxious not to be gone too long from her wounded son; we did a circuit of the block and she ran back to Mitch and my neighbor.

  I told Mr. Contreras about Harmony’s distress over her necklace.

  “We should get her another one, doll.”

  “That would be a good idea, to show her you care about her,” I said. “But this one was special, something from her foster parents that can’t be replaced.”

  Mr. Contreras wanted to be doing something, anything, to stop feeling so helpless. I printed out a list of self-storage facilities, starting with ones in walking distance from Fausson’s apartment, and asked if he could call them.

  I explained why it seemed important. “Say you’re Fausson’s father or grandfather, that since his death you’re trying to find the locker he rented so you can empty it out.”

  He wasn’t enthusiastic at first, but the idea of finding hidden treasure sparked his interest. I told him he could use his own name, but he decided he had to be in character. “They named the boy for me, I’ll tell ’em. Which is more than Ruthie ever did with my own grandkids.”

  His only child, Ruthie, rubbed him the wrong way, and vice versa, but he loved his two grandsons.

  I went to my office to start a search for lawsuits against Trechette. I was low in spirits, and time spent with litigants isn’t exactly exhilarating.

  Of course, any large enterprise is always involved in litigation, a lot of litigation, so it didn’t surprise me to find over a hundred outstanding suits. The one I’d seen in Dick’s office, Ti-Balt v. Trechette, dealt with a dispute over a completion bond. I did a quick sort of litigation by cause; seventy-one had concerned insurance in the secondary marketplace. Trechette had bought the upper layers of insurance but had not paid, or had paid only token amounts.

  If you’re a company, or even a person, who wants insurance in the value of hundreds of millions of dollars, your primary carrier will sell you the policy, but will resell chunks of it to third parties. It’s a prudent form of gambling.

  Perhaps you’re a construction company with a big stake in a hydroelectric plant. If there’s never a claim, or no claim for many years, your insurer happily invests the premiums and makes a lot of money. A flood destroys the plant, you present your insurance claim, and your insurer calls on all the third parties who bought a piece of the action to pay their share of the bill.

  Trechette seemed to have reneged on their share of the claims, not once, but many times. Was that what Reno had discovered in St. Matthieu? She’d overheard conversations about the claims?

  I went back to the Rest EZ website to see if they sold insurance. They offered some cheap policies—high-deductible auto and renters insurance with a twenty-thousand-dollar limit. The website didn’t say which company provided the coverage—Rest EZ didn’t have their own insurance company. Neither did Trechette.

  I looked at the clock. Seven p.m. My appointment with Sansen down at the OI was at seven-thirty; there was time for a call to Donna Lutas, Reno’s boss at Rest EZ.

  “Have you found Reno?” she asked.

  “Not yet. But I’ve found a whole bunch of lawsuits against Trechette.”

  “I’m not a lawyer,” Donna said roughly. “I don’t know anything about those.”

  Red-gold squares covered the floor where the setting sun shone through the skylights. I had a childish impulse to play hopscotch on them, but I turned on my desk light and drowned them out. “You know who Trechette is, though.”

  “All I know is they own Rest EZ.”

  “Their headquarters are in St. Matthieu.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve never been there.”

  I ignored her studied rudeness. “What company provides the coverage Rest EZ sells?”

  “What do you mean? You just said we sell it.”

  “I mean, when I buy the policy and look at the dec page—the first page that outlines the limits and so on—does it say ‘The Rest EZ Insurance Company,’ or is there some other name?”

  “Buy a policy and see for yourself.” She hung up.

  We were definitely not BFFs these days. She must feel humiliated from revealing her secrets to me when I was at her home.

  In the end I was almost fifteen minutes late to my meeting with Peter Sansen. I was on my way out when I discovered tomato sauce on my trousers. Red blotches on gray serge—a perfect Lady Macbeth moment, I realized after futilely trying to spot-clean them. By the time I reached the museum, the damp spots had dried to a dark rusty gray. I hoped my keen professional brain would keep Sansen from noticing.

  On Wednesdays, the museum was open late, so I didn’t need a guard to let me into the building, but I wasn’t allowed to go up the stairs until Peter Sansen came down to vouch for me.

  When we’d met on Monday, his sunburned face had glowed with a kind of energetic humor, as if he found life an engaging enterprise. Now, though, he was squinting from fatigue. The scar on the right side of his face seemed to glow redder.

  “I’ve spent the day with more law-enforcement agencies than I knew existed. Our campus cops, the city, the FBI, Interpol, Homeland Security—which includes so many agencies I gave up trying to follow them. They wanted me to testify that this was the work of ISIS, or perhaps a lone wolf on campus recruited by ISIS.”

  “Could it be?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Anything’s possible, but I don’t see ISIS tracking down a lone artifact at an American museum when it’s so much easier for them to do wholesale looting at the source. Unless the artifact has some special symbolism. The Dagon was unusual, perhaps unique—certainly the first example Candra or I had ever seen of a figurine instead of a bas-relief—but I don’t see it as particularly meaningful to radicals.”

  “How did the thief get into the building at all?” I asked. “Those doors aren’t easy to breach, and I presume you have good security, with all these treasures to protect.” I waved an arm toward the gigantic Sumerian horsemen who guarded the entrance to the rest of the museum.

  “Security cameras, motion sensors, trip wires in unexpected places. And our conservation area is also tightly safeguarded. We’ve been more cavalier about the faculty offices, although I’m sure that will change.

  “As for how the thieves got in, the police or the FBI, I forget which, think someone hid in a classroom or unused office while the museum was being locked down at closing. Our guards do make a thorough search, or at least they’re supposed to, but it’s a rabbit warren when you get down to it.”

  “Do they ever find anyone?” I asked.

  “People fall asleep, or ignore the closing announcements, but you’d be surprised at who tries to linger—scholars from other institutions, who could easily get a pass, or students trying to show up authority.”

  I followed him up the stone stairs to the second floor and down the hall to Candra van Vliet’s office. Someone had already replaced the broken glass in her door. I tried the knob; the door was locked. Sansen was getting out his keys, but I stopped him and used a credit card to press the lock tongue back.

  “They didn’t have to break the glass,” I said. “Whoever went in was making a statement. Did the police pick up prints?”

  Sansen shook his head. “They say the intruder wore gloves.”

  I stepped aside to let Sansen enter the office first. When he’d turned on a light I took a quick look around, but so many LEOs had been through here that the main residue of the crime was fingerprint dust and empty DNA swab kits, some labeled FBI, others from ICE and Interpol.

  “Professor Van Vliet said she was on her way to Philadelphia. Is she there now?” I asked. />
  “An antiquities conference. Ironic in a grim way. I suppose our brief ownership of the Dagon will be the main conference topic.”

  “Was anything else taken from the Institute besides her eight-breasted goddess and the Dagon figure?”

  He smiled sardonically. “No one’s reported anything, and no one else’s office was broken into, but I can guess that for the next few months, every time someone has mislaid an inscription or a prized bead, it will be blamed on the thieves.”

  I made a slow circuit of the room, feeling like an actor playing Sherlock Holmes in an amateur drama. I stopped at the window to look out, expecting to see either the chapel bell tower or Fifty-Eighth Street, but I was looking down at an interior courtyard. Ground lights showed a greensward with a few trees and bushes surrounded by cobblestones.

  I tried the window latch. It moved easily and the casement opened smoothly, without squeaking. Sansen watched while I shone my flashlight around outside the window.

  “Hold my legs, will you? I want to look farther down the wall.”

  He cocked his head. “You’re not joking.”

  “No, but I should have asked, can you hold my legs? I don’t want both of us tumbling to our deaths.”

  “It’s not the strangest thing archaeology has demanded of me. Roll up your pants: I’m going to hold your left leg, above the ankle; if my hands slip, they’ll catch on your shoe. Ready?”

  I unwrapped the dressing from my hand so that I could use my fingers more easily, rolled my trousers up, and knelt on the radiator under the window. The old cast-iron sections cut through my trousers into my knees, but in a moment, Sansen had seized me in a strong grip. I inched over the stone sill. When I was hanging upside down the blood rushed to my head and my hand sweated on the flashlight. I blinked back the spots dancing in front of my eyes and shone my flash at the wall.

  “Pull me back up!” I shouted.

  Sansen kept one hand on my leg and grabbed my waistband with the other. The serge ripped, but I had my left hand on the sill and boosted myself back into the office.

  My arms and legs were trembling; I collapsed onto a chair and massaged my arms. I felt the back of my trousers, where the fabric had split—and not along a seam.

  “Second pair of trousers I’ve damaged on this investigation. You have strong hands, for which, believe me, I’m very grateful.”

  Sansen grinned. “You often do Batwoman impersonations?”

  “It’s my second-favorite party trick. But I’m afraid this is how your perp got into the building. I can see the marks in the wall where he—or she—inserted holds, and there are scuffs about a yard below the sill that could have come from climbing shoes.”

  The scar along Sansen’s jawline pulsed redder. After a long pause, he said, “Someone here in the Institute gave him precise directions.”

  “I’m afraid so. The smashed glass in the door was a misdirection. By the way, didn’t that noise rouse your security?”

  He shook his head. “This office is pretty remote from the lobby, where the guard waits for normal robbers to come in through the front door or ground-floor windows, which all have alarms on them, anyway.”

  “You don’t think the guard—”

  “Horace has worked here for seventeen years. I trust him absolutely. I’d believe Candra staged the whole thing before I’d accuse Horace.”

  “Could Professor Van Vliet have staged it? She could have delivered the package here, after all.”

  Sansen glared at me. “Absolutely not. Anyway, why go through a charade like that?”

  “If not the guard, and not the professor . . .”

  “Yeah. I know. Someone else who works here or studies here.”

  We sat in uncomfortable silence for some minutes. Could the young woman I’d met on Monday be hard up for money? It was difficult to believe such a dedicated archaeologist would do so criminal a favor for a thief. There were probably hundreds—well, maybe dozens—of university employees who were more likely suspects; that was a police job, to track them down, not mine.

  Finally Sansen shook his head. “I can’t believe we had all these FBI and Interpol idiots here today and none of them thought to hang upside down, when it was daylight and easy. Why the hell do I pay taxes, anyway? I’m sorry about your pants.”

  My arms had stopped trembling, although my legs were a bit wobbly when I stood. I rubbed my hip, the spot where I’d landed last week. It had been healing nicely, but was reminding me now that I wasn’t thirty anymore.

  “I could use a drink,” Sansen said when we were back in the hall. “You a teetotaler?”

  “I have been known to sip scotch in a Batwomanly way.”

  “What’s that like?” He cocked his head, eyes amused.

  “Mm, you know, as if you were daintily helping yourself to someone’s blood.”

  38

  The Things They Carried

  Over drinks at a bar in Bucktown, I showed Sansen the pamphlet I’d picked up at Rasima Kataba’s apartment earlier in the day.

  He turned the pages slowly. “I spent time at Ebla, years ago, but I never heard about the museum in Saraqib, although that isn’t so surprising—every town of any size in Syria has—used to have—a small museum. You think Kataba brought the Dagon out with him when he fled?”

  “That was my first thought.” I turned the pages of the pamphlet back to the black-and-white photos. “This lion, with the right paw broken off, that was on Lawrence Fausson’s desk in his apartment.”

  Sansen looked at me in surprise. “I thought you didn’t know Fausson.”

  “I didn’t. I learned his name from an anonymous phone call, and then I found where he lived. And I went inside, which I have not revealed to anyone in law enforcement.”

  “How did you get in?” Sansen asked.

  “I didn’t have to climb up the building side in the dark—a woman in the building let me in.”

  “Are you thinking Fausson smuggled them into the country himself?” Sansen asked. “But why then give the Dagon to Candra?”

  “He couldn’t have; he was already dead,” I reminded Sansen. “That’s why I was leaning toward Kataba bringing the artifacts to Chicago with him when he managed to get here. And then, when ICE started turning up the heat on him, he or his daughter sent the most important piece to the museum.”

  “Specifically to Candra?”

  “Kataba had met Fausson when Professor Van Vliet’s team was in Syria; the professor said she went to Kataba’s bicycle repair shop. I’m sure you know Fausson liked to leave the Tell and go exploring with the locals. He loved the chance to build his ‘Lawrence of Chicago’ image; he liked working on his colloquial Arabic.”

  “Kataba was in a Bashar prison for twenty-some months,” Sansen said. “Nobody knows how he arrived in the States or where he spent the years after his release, but for a refugee on the move, carrying around a bundle of priceless artifacts as he hid from one authority or another would be pretty damned difficult.”

  “My mother was a refugee from Mussolini’s Italy,” I said. “She carried a set of eight Venetian wineglasses with her from her home in Pitigliano to a hiding place in the Umbrian hills, and then as she crawled through the mountains at night to the Port of Livorno. She brought them with her to Chicago without breaking one.”

  I was the one who had broken them. My headfirst dives into danger, imagining I was in the pursuit of justice—my mouth twisted in a bitter grimace.

  “You value artifacts,” Sansen said, his voice gentle—he’d noted the grimace.

  He looked back at the catalog and paused at the statuette of the horned woman. “This is a very nice figure. Might be almost as valuable as the Dagon—you don’t often see a statue like this completely intact, including the snakes.” His lips moved as he read the Arabic text underneath. “Yes, the snakes are gold, with carnelian tongues and lapis eyes.”

  “Why does she have horns?” I asked.

  “Oh, they show she was a goddess, although I do
n’t know which one. The snakes are fertility signs, so it might be Inanna, the goddess of fertility—among her many other duties.”

  He put a hand over mine, stroking the bite marks. “It looks as though you could use a visit from the goddess Gula—she took care of healing. Did you get these at Fausson’s building?”

  “Different inquiry. Someone jumped my niece in the park; the creep bit me when I intervened.” I nodded toward the scar along his jawline. “And this? Was this from a dig?”

  “Collateral damage. I should have left Iraq sooner than I did—thought I could make arrangements to protect my dig at Tell al-Sabbah and got hit by an IED. I was lucky—it was early in the U.S. invasion, before the whole damned infrastructure collapsed. Someone found me fast and flew me to the medical ship, and I got away with these burns. It was the last straw for my wife, though.”

  “That’s a pity,” I said.

  “It was more than a decade ago, long enough for me to get through my self-pity, along with my skin grafts, and return to the field, in Syria, where I was prudent enough to leave before the fighting turned horrific. I hope you don’t have a partner who turns away in disgust from your wounds.”

  “I used to. He turned away so fast that he ended up in Switzerland. Where will you go next?” I asked.

  He grinned. “My secretary says no government is going to let me in to dig when they see that civil war follows me. I’m still working on it. Turkey has quite a number of Sumerian sites, but I’m not sure. I’m fifty, I want a new venue, new adventure, maybe, before I get past surviving them.”

  He squeezed my hand and released it. “Include a bill for your pants when you send your invoice; I’ll see the Institute reimburses you. And then, perhaps, we could have dinner. I promise I would not bite you.”

  I got to my feet and brushed my own fingers along the puckered skin on his face. “You have my number.”

  39

  Fit as a Fiddle

  I felt them a second too late. One grabbed my keys as I pulled them from my pocket. Before I could react, the second pinned my arms under his own. Black leather-clad, massive as tree trunks, beyond my strength to break free. His partner had opened my apartment, and they were dragging me inside.