She took a deep breath. “I had a long day with the border patrol. Of course, I know some of them, one of them lives in Lutsen and we train our sled dogs together, but they needed to know who hired me, who sent you up here, why I thought you was a terrorist.”
She fidgeted with her watchband but looked me resolutely in the eye. “I shouldn’t have acted like I did, judging that young girl just because she wore a scarf on her head. Being so close to the border we get ten alerts a week, so we shrug them off, and then I come face-to-face with an actual Muslim girl and I act like she was fresh from Iraq with grenades strapped to her body. I’m truly ashamed.”
I wondered if it would have made any difference to the outcome. Even Lenore’s Wrangler couldn’t have navigated the woods we hiked through once we left the Border Trail, but if she’d driven us closer we might have beaten Kettie to Tarik’s hideout. And then faced Kettie and Mitty somewhere else, I suppose.
“We all live too fearfully these days,” I finally said, as close as I could bring myself to offer absolution. “It’s not easy to prove you’re not a terrorist. I will probably always show up on watch lists when I fly, and that does not make me happy.”
“I understand,” Lenore muttered.
She finished her tale in a subdued voice. The head of the border station ended up speaking to Darraugh, since the plane we’d flown up on was registered to CALLIE Enterprises. He sent Caroline Griswold, his PA, up to vouch for me. She came with videoed testimonials from Lieutenant Finchley and various Chicago power brokers. The most important was Darraugh’s, of course: as CEO of a multinational with substantial Canadian interests, he carried more weight than a Chicago cop. Darraugh recorded a short comment for me—“thanks for keeping your Russian mob from shooting my plane”—followed by a hoot of his dry laugh.
Caroline also assured me there would be a plane to take me back to Chicago as soon as I wanted to go. Darraugh had needed his Gulfstream to fly to Nairobi, but the firm had a smaller plane, which had brought her north. She would send it back to Grand Marais after she returned to Chicago.
When I checked out of the hospital, I was astonished to find that Darraugh had taken care of the charges. My fight in the backwoods had nothing to do with any work I was performing for him.
I was less astonished by the cameras that surged toward me as I left the hospital grounds—a dead billionaire is always news. One who’s drowned in a river in the company of a Russian mobster is big news.
“Kettie collected artifacts looted from Syrian and Iraqi museums,” I told the reporters. “He thought I had one and chased me across the river trying to get it back.”
“What was it?” they all wanted to know.
I spread my hands. “He was wrong: I don’t have any artifacts, stolen or otherwise. He got confused. He was dealing with a scandal in one of his core businesses, his payday loan company, and he wasn’t thinking clearly.”
I tried to step them through the stock price manipulation, but that wasn’t interesting; pilfered Syrian gold was news.
“You should talk to his Chicago lawyer, Richard Yarborough. Kettie gave Dick several ancient figurines, including one whose arms Kettie pulled off so he could get at that gold serpent he wore on his right hand. Dick can tell you all about it.” I kindly gave them Dick’s private number as well as Glynis’s direct office line.
Lenore drove me back to Grand Marais, where I spent a night with Tarik and Rasima before going home. Lenore proved more than a match for the gang of TV reporters who followed us. I decided I could start absolving her. After all, it wasn’t her fault that Kettie had known where I was headed. Dick had done that or, at least, Glynis Hadden, who had taken Harmony to wheedle the information out of Mr. Contreras.
Lenore had arranged a vacation-house rental for Rasima and Tarik, with a room for me. She’d persuaded the owner to let us have it free of charge for a week. Okay, I absolved her.
Rasima flung her arms around me when I came through the door. “Victoria, you are my hero for life. What you did for two strangers—it is unbelievable to me.”
Her father stood behind her, smiling fondly at his daughter’s enthusiasm. When she released me, he took my right hand in both of his and spoke to Rasima in Arabic.
“He says to tell you how grateful he is. It is true that many worries remain, but they are easier to bear when a stranger steps forward out of nowhere and becomes a friend.”
The worries that remained, of course, had to do with Tarik’s undocumented status. The border agents here in Minnesota had focused on Kettie, the Russians who’d been in his entourage, and my own activities, but they wouldn’t leave Tarik alone forever. Even if they wanted to, the pressure from Washington would force them to act, and acting would mean deporting.
“The Canadians are inviting Baba,” Rasima explained to me. “He can be a poet at a college in Toronto, where there are many Syrians and many Arab speakers. But then, how can we see each other? He won’t be able to return here, and on my student visa I can’t be coming and going to Canada. But if he stays in the United States, then they will come for him and deport him.”
“You could apply to a school in Canada,” I suggested. “Montreal has a fine engineering school.”
She blushed. “Yes. Felix and I have, we have talked about that. . . . But now that you have taken the weight of arrest for murder from Felix, and the fear for the Dagon’s safekeeping from us both, I want to see whether I like Chicago when I’m not fearing for my or Baba’s safety. Or Felix’s.”
Felix was home from the hospital; he and Rasima had spoken several times and seemed to be texting constantly. Martha Simone told me with a great deal of satisfaction that the sheriff had agreed that Felix had nothing to do with Lawrence Fausson’s death. The border guards had arrested the two Russians who’d been tracking Rasima and me in the helicopter. When they learned that Kettie and Mitty—Dmitri Rakitin—were dead, the Russians instantly blamed all the crimes that they knew about on Rakitin, including Fausson’s murder and the kidnapping and torture of Reno.
Tarik said, through his daughter’s translation, that he did not want to make one more decision under a twenty-four-hour gun. “Ever since Bashar’s men came for me, it has been like that. Twenty-four hours to get Rasima to Beirut, to get my wife and son to Jordan. When I was released, twenty-four hours to choose to board a ship bound for Havana. And then a chance to get in a boat to America to see my daughter: again, twenty-four hours. This time, no. This time I need to think before I cross another border.”
The best I could do was to put him in touch with Martha Simone, to see whether she could help work something out.
Over dinner, I asked Tarik about the translation of Mandelstam’s poem that had sent him to prison.
Tarik knew Russian. He explained: during the cold war, when Syria was closely allied to the Soviet Union, he’d spent a year in Moscow as an engineering student, but his first love was always poetry. He’d made friends among people who circulated samizdat; through them he learned the work of the great dissident poets of the 1930s.
“Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva. For me the best was always Mandelstam. I tried to translate. The language is hard, but also the—” He beat his hand on his thigh while Rasima fumbled for a word.
“Rhythm,” I suggested, “or meter.”
“Yes. It was hard, but wonderful. When I returned to Saraqib, I married, I had a son and my beautiful, clever daughter. I repaired bicycles, led tours, but I was always writing poetry. Kind French friends collected my poems and that turned out to be my—” Again Rasima fumbled for a word; we settled on “undoing.”
“My own poems, and some of my favorite translations from Russian, they were gathered together and published in Beirut. One of Bashar’s ‘thin-necked half men’ saw the Mandelstam poem and showed it to Bashar.”
Tarik recited “Stalin’s Epigram” for me in Russian and then in Arabic. It sounded beautiful in both languages, although I understood neither. When I pulled out my phone and looked
it up, I saw why it would rile a dictator. Mandelstam wrote that Stalin had a mustache like “cockroach whiskers,” his followers were “a rabble of fawning half men” who “whinny or purr or whine” at his command, his laws were “horseshoes” that hit people in the head or the eye or the groin.
“In 1933, after the ‘Epigram’ reached his ears, Stalin had Mandelstam arrested and, ultimately, killed,” Tarik said. “Of course no poet should be surprised when the police arrive in the middle of the night.”
I thought of the fawning half men in my own government, braying about “fake news,” and shivered.
“The problem was the mustache,” Tarik added. “Stalin’s was big, like a cockroach resting on his lip. Bashar’s mustache is tiny, like a pencil—” Tarik rubbed his fingers on the table, imitating an eraser.
“Smudge,” I guessed.
“At my three-minute trial I did try to say that Bashar couldn’t be confused with Stalin because his mustache was too small.”
“I’m sure that didn’t help.” I couldn’t hold back a laugh and instantly apologized, but Tarik laughed softly as well.
“Yes. Not help,” he said in English. “Bashar want big cockroach mustache.”
Tariq had spent twenty-two months in Assad’s prisons, twenty-two months where he was whipped with electric wires, among other tortures. When he was released, he left Syria immediately. His wife was dead, his son remained in Jordan, but Rasima, his beloved “tiny scrap,” was in Chicago. He made his way there.
64
Self-Justification
I flew back to Chicago in Darraugh’s second-best jet with Rasima, who was eager to see Felix. Tarik remained in Grand Portage, as a guest of the Anishinaabe Nation. It wasn’t a good long-term solution; the United States might well send agents into the tribal township at a second’s notice, but this would give him some breathing room so that he didn’t need to make a twenty-four-hour decision.
Sansen was returning from Amman the following week. Rasima and Tarik agreed that she should turn the Dagon over to him to house at the Oriental Institute until such time that the treasures of Saraqib could return home.
“It may not happen in my lifetime,” Tarik said. “But it will happen. I cannot live a life without the hope that the wheel will turn and good will follow evil.”
The morning after I reached home, I enjoyed a long sleep-in, followed by French toast with Mr. Contreras and Harmony, who was once again staying with him.
“I hope you can forgive me, Vic,” she whispered. “I stayed until you got back so I could apologize.”
“That’s all water over the dam,” Mr. Contreras said heartily, but Harmony shook her head.
“I was confused and angry and made big mistakes. I wanted Uncle Dick to want me in his family and so I believed him when he said he needed to get those papers Reno had so he could protect her. I guess I only half believed him, but Glynis treated me so differently from when I first got here. Then she acted like I had some bad disease, but she suddenly started treating me like—I don’t know—a niece, I guess. She and her husband put me up in their guest room. But after that morning, when we came here and she took the letter you’d left for Uncle Sal, then I saw she and Uncle Dick were just using me.”
“That’s right,” Mr. Contreras said. “She saw who her real friends were. She ran away from that Glynis person and came straight back here.”
Mitch and Peppy were ecstatic to see me home. I took them and Harmony to the lake. Daffodils and crocuses were blowing near the paths where Harmony and I had been assaulted two weeks earlier. Spring was coming to Chicago.
Harmony returned to Portland later that day: she’d remained in Chicago long enough to make sure Reno was mending and, after that, to apologize to me. When Mr. Contreras and I drove her to the airport, he handed her a flat jeweler’s box.
“It ain’t what your ma gave you, but maybe it’ll help you remember you got another family here that cares about you.”
I slept again and then went to see Lotty. We’d spoken while I was in the Thunder Bay hospital, of course, but it was important to be with her in person. She held my hands, inspecting my fingertips for any lingering frostbite.
“Thank God you got the right care in time,” she said. “Thank you for risking so much for Felix.”
“I didn’t do it for Felix,” I said, “but for you.”
In the end, though, I did it out of my rage over Kettie. For years he’d gotten away with theft—theft of artifacts, theft of money, theft of dignity from the people at the bottom of the pyramid who turned to Rest EZ to keep food on the table. It wasn’t enough that he could charge them 400 percent interest, but he swindled them with his stock scams, all to add something to his own billions.
“It was a fluke that he drowned. In some ways I wish he’d survived so that everything he’d been doing would come out in the open, but then I think of how easy it is for today’s hyperwealthy to evade the law: it’s possible he would have skated away from everything.”
“He needed the Russians to shore up his companies.” Max had been sitting so quietly in the corner while Lotty and I reconnected that we were both startled when he spoke.
“I had our own portfolio manager at Beth Israel do some digging to make sure we weren’t holding any Kettie Enterprises assets. He’d overextended his development projects over the last decade and had gotten himself in debt to some of Putin’s friends. Not a good place to be.”
“Why did he care so much about that gold statue?” Lotty asked. “Why did he try to kill you and the Katabas himself?”
I shrugged. “My guess is that he was furious at being crossed. That’s why he had Lawrence Fausson murdered, after all. And then, when his mobsters couldn’t take care of Rasima and Felix, he was going to show them how a real man handled interference in his affairs.”
Max agreed. “You know that billionaires are investing in technologies to end the aging process? They think that since they can buy and sell everything, it’s only fair that they should be immortal, too.”
Lotty flung up her hands. “The story never changes. I can’t stand it. One after another, people want to strut around in jackboots controlling everyone around them. Enough of this.”
“They’re not the only story,” I said. “You heal the sick.”
“And you drive the swine over the ice into the raging waters.” Max grinned, pouring me another glass of wine.
“Did Kettie have a family?” I asked. I’d never thought to look up his private life.
“Two ex-wives,” Max said. “Two adult daughters. One likes to spend money in Switzerland and the Mediterranean, but the other is apparently her father’s sharklike daughter. You’d better hope she doesn’t sue you for her father’s wrongful death.”
He chuckled, but I flinched—that was all I needed, more Ketties trying to destroy me.
In the morning I went to Beth Israel to visit Reno. The Streeter brothers had left the hospital. With Kettie’s and Mitty’s deaths, and the arrest of the two Russian enforcers, it seemed safe to leave her on her own. She was walking unaided now and eating, so she’d been moved to a regular ward.
She didn’t recognize me until I spoke: she’d been so depleted when we talked earlier that only my voice had registered with her. As soon as I said her name, though, her face lit up.
“Auntie Vic. Thank you for keeping me safe.”
We spent most of the morning going through the events of the last several months. “You are a woman of incredible strength,” I said. “You brought crucial information out of St. Matthieu with you, and you kept Kettie’s mobsters from finding your locket, even at the risk of your life. I don’t know anyone, man or woman, who could have done what you did. Because of you, Gervase Kettie is dead, his mobsters are gone, his companies are in tatters.”
She blushed. “I think it’s because of you that Gervase Kettie is dead.”
I talked to her about the Greta Berman Institute for Victims of Torture. “You can’t stay here any longer, but t
hat’s a place that is immensely helpful to people who have been through the kinds of traumas you suffered. I spent a month there after I had been imprisoned and assaulted.”
It wasn’t a part of my history that I liked to remember, but when she asked for details, I told her: perhaps my example would help sustain her through the next hard part of her recovery.
I went to see her every day for a while, helped her settle in at the Greta Berman Institute on Chicago’s outskirts, made sure she knew I was there for her. In one of our conversations, she told me briefly about her interactions with Dick.
“They helped me find a job, Uncle Dick and his secretary, but they wouldn’t talk to me when I got back from St. Matthieu. I tried to tell him how awful it was, but Uncle Dick said there was no room for crybabies in his world.”
A tide of fury rose in me but I tried to speak in a neutral voice; if I let my rage loose, it might knock her over in her frail state. “Was it Dick or Glynis who persuaded you to talk to the men who kidnapped you?”
“Not them. I didn’t recognize the voice, but a man phoned. He said he heard I wanted to talk to the head of Rest EZ and that was him. He said he hadn’t known the shocking things that went on in St. Matthieu and he’d like to come to my apartment and apologize in person. I was such an idiot. I put on a good outfit and my lucky silk scarf that Henry had given me, and then it wasn’t the head of Rest EZ, it was these monsters who rushed in and grabbed me.” She started to choke.
“It was a lucky scarf,” I said when her retching subsided. “The pieces that caught on branches brought me to you.”
As soon as I left Reno I headed downtown to the Grommet Building. Neither Dick nor Glynis wanted to let me past the security desk. I had the guard put me on the phone with Glynis.
“My next conversation is going to be with Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star. He’s been begging for an interview ever since the Anishinaabe pulled me out of the Pigeon River, and you are going to feature prominently in my remarks. I plan to tell him how you brought Harmony to my home, stole the letter I left for my neighbor, and alerted Gervase Kettie to—”
Shell Game Page 38