Caught

by Kristin Hardy

  “Well, he’d better watch he doesn’t stick the pages together. That’s what it’s for—adhering things.”

  “Like dirt?” Alex held up a slip of paper that had been tucked into the book. “And sand and what? Some kind of paint?”

  Julia looked closer. “Dried pigments.”

  “Right. Maybe he’s got art ambitions. You know, painting with fish guts.” Alex glanced at the jumble of sample blocks. And looked again. “Huh. That’s weird.”

  “What?”

  He pulled one out of the pile. “This.” He held it next to the paper. “Look at them, the pattern’s the same. Like he painted the block to match.” Alex turned the block over in his fingers, studying the whitish backside, the altered front. “He really made it look just like sandstone, didn’t he? Like the statue.” He reached over to open the artifact box and studied the figure inside. “Yeah, he really made it look the same.” He brushed his finger over a reddish area on the block that was the shape and size of one on the statue. “Look how close it is.” He held the block over the statue, near the red spot. “Same colors, same place. Really close.” And then his voice changed. “No way is this an accident.”

  “Of course not.” Julia looked for a moment. “That’s probably why he has the statue out—he’s using it as a model to mimic the look of sandstone.”

  “To mimic the look of sandstone or to mimic this statue?” He turned the block slightly, and suddenly the patterns of surface mottling synched up identically. “Not close at all,” he murmured. “He’s copied it almost exactly.”

  It took her a moment to process and then she gave him an amused look. “You think he’s making a forgery.”

  “I just think it’s weird. I mean look at it. It’s not just close, the pattern of mottling is practically identical.”

  “If Paul Wingate were making a forgery, it would be identical.”

  “Unless he’s still getting the hang of it.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a nice fantasy to pass the time, but you can forget it. Paul’s an incredibly well-respected conservator. And very good. Of course he’s working with dirt and pigment and mock stone. It’s part of his job.”

  “So what’s the statue doing out of inventory without being checked out?” Alex demanded. “What’s it doing here at all, if you didn’t approve it? What’s he doing with isinglass? What’s he doing with a wireless card that he hides?”

  “Not all that carefully,” she reminded him.

  “What’s he doing hiding it at all? And getting e-mails from your friend the Sphinx, unless he’s making merchandise for him to sell.”

  “Those were spam, Alex,” she reminded him.

  “Were they? After all, if you’re e-mailing someone about forgeries, you’re not exactly going to list them by part number.”

  “Look, Sherlock, there are legitimate explanations for all of this.”

  Alex crossed his arms. “Sure, you can explain almost anything away if you try. Doesn’t it strike you as strange, though? I think we should look around a little more.”

  “You are not going to rifle through his office just on the basis of suspicion,” she said hotly. “We have a hard enough time keeping him happy without you giving him another reason to pitch a fit.”

  “Well, let me add to that suspicion. I just noticed something interesting about the spam.”

  “What?”

  “Look at the preview pane. Did you notice who it’s addressed to? Isis53@bluemail.com. It’s not his museum address. And take a look at the subject line.”

  “‘Hot and horny teens want to meet you’”

  “It’s a reply, Julia. How many spams have you ever replied to? Now, maybe Paul likes hot and horny teens, but I’m betting not. I think there’s something else going on here.”

  She opened her mouth and then shut it. Her lips tightened. “Spam gets more sophisticated every day, Alex. I’m telling you, conservators are supposed to mimic materials. That’s part of their job. You have no idea the mess this could stir up if you insist on carting off and making accusations, especially when it’s totally plausible that it’s aboveboard.”

  “Yeah, well, to me it all seems fishy, and not just the isinglass. And maybe you can ignore it but I can’t. If there really is something going on here, we need to find out what it is so that we can hit him with it when he comes in tomorrow morning.”

  Julia gave him an incredulous look. “What do you think this is, some CSI: Miami? This is the real world. You don’t search people’s offices, you don’t ransack people’s desks, and you sure as hell don’t go carting off accusing people of things without being right about it.”

  “Exactly. Which means I need to find proof.”

  Julia gave an exasperated sigh. “You need to find a shrink because you’re going nuts. Now, I’ll be in the book repository. If you come across a smoking gun—shoot yourself with it.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.” She stood with her arms crossed, glaring at him.

  “You can go anytime.”

  “I will.” She didn’t move.

  “Good.” A corner of his mouth twitched. “You’ve got good eyes if you can read all the way from here.”

  “I’m warning you…” But she turned on her heel and went.

  17

  Sunday, 10:00 a.m.

  IRRITATION CARRIED JULIA through the first couple hours of work. She knew it would have been easier with Alex’s help, but she was damned if she was going to ask him. She’d taken her share of ancient-history courses. She knew how to research, and anyway, she had the electronic index. She’d make out just fine.

  Whether she’d find anything, of course, was another question. She was lucky with sources, often finding English translations of earlier works. Where she didn’t have translations, the language was usually Latin. Reading it was far from easy, but she was able to stumble along and be reasonably confident she wasn’t missing too much.

  But she was missing Alex.

  She found herself glancing over and over again at his chair. The chair he’d been using, she corrected herself, but she couldn’t keep from smiling at the spider he’d made with a few paper clips and an eraser. She missed the companionship, missed being able turn to him and read some particularly interesting tidbit, ask for his opinion on which source to seek next.

  He was better at this than she was, she acknowledged reluctantly. And she was better when he was around.

  It had been silly to get so ticked off at his wild accusations, no matter how off base they might have been. She should have just remained amused. Somehow, though, it had felt like an attack on one of her own. And it had felt as though Alex were making her a part of it. Whatever differences she had with Paul, he still deserved respect, he still deserved the benefit of the doubt. It was ridiculous to think that he would take such a risk with his career and his life, particularly right under her nose.

  But deep down inside, she wondered if she were trying too hard to explain things away. Sighing, she raised her head from her book just in time to see Alex step through the door.

  And despite herself, felt the quick rush of pleasure.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, yourself.” He walked to his chair, brushing a hand over her hair as he passed.

  And every thought in her head scattered. She took a deep breath and brought herself back. “So, did you find your smoking gun?”

  He sat, as relaxed as if he were at a baseball game. “Nope, no smoke to be seen. Everything looks completely normal.”

  “See?” she said in relief. “I told you—”

  “Except for the fact that the bottom drawer on his desk is still locked.”

  “Like I told you yesterday, there are any number of reasons for that.”

  “That’s what I decided, too,” he said easily. “So I thought I’d come in and see if you wanted to kiss and make up.”

  She felt a ridiculous smile spreading across her face. Maybe she’d been angry at his feckless accusations, b
ut it was hard to stay ticked off for too long. It felt too damned good to have him there. “You really don’t ever give up, do you?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.” Abruptly, the smile was gone. Something flickered in his eyes then, something hot and determined, something that dragged her back into memories of the night before, his body hard and naked against hers, his mouth relentless, his back slick under her fingers—

  “Get your hands on anything?” Alex asked.

  Julia blinked, jerked out of her reverie. “Well. Well,” she repeated. “Uh, so far, I know where the White Star isn’t. Does that help?”

  “It’s information.”

  “I suppose. It’s the needle-in-the-haystack thing again. You know how crazy it makes me that we don’t have the Internet or at least a comprehensive library?”

  He rubbed his knuckles over his jaw, dark now with a weekend’s worth of beard. “They wouldn’t necessarily help you. Don’t forget, not a lot of people really knew about the White Star, except as a legend. Even if we were outside, you’d still have to go to rare-book libraries to track it. Your best bet for now is to do what you’re doing, sift through data.”

  “I’ve been combing through some histories of Constantinople and stories of the sack, hoping to come across something helpful, maybe a letter or something I could use.”

  “You ever wonder how the people of the future are going to write the histories of today?” Alex asked idly. “I mean, people don’t write letters and keep them like they used to. They don’t leave a paper trail.”

  “There’s e-mail,” Julia pointed out.

  “Sure, but it’s here and gone, unless you print it out and most people don’t. People don’t even keep journals like they did. You won’t be able to get a Ph.D. in a hundred years studying the letters of Jonathan Safran Foer because there probably won’t be very many of them.”

  She’d never really thought about it before. “On the other hand, these days most prominent people write their autobiographies.”

  “Prominent people?” He snorted. “Everyone and their brothers have written their autobiography.”

  Julia flashed a quick grin. “Signs of the apocalypse.”

  “Or they write tell-all books. My Life with Jacko. I was a Famous Person’s Chauffeur. Dishing Dirt at the White House. Wait a minute.” He rose abruptly. “That’s what we need.”

  “Dishing Dirt at the White House?” Julia turned to watch him.

  “Anecdota Veritas.”

  “It sounds like a book by some Greek philosopher.”

  “Nope, it’s by a Roman, Sidonius. He was an assistant for Justinian.” Alex’s teeth gleamed. “Sort of the equivalent of the White House press secretary.”

  “Justinian, the Roman emperor?”

  “Gold star for you.” He swooped in to kiss her lightly before continuing his pacing. “He ruled in the mid sixth century, but he wasn’t based in Rome. By his time, they’d moved the seat of the empire to—”

  “Constantinople,” she said simultaneously with him, her lips still vibrating from the touch of his. “How very convenient.”

  “Isn’t it just? Anyway, he mostly stuck to the great-and-noble ruler party line. But after everybody died, the kid gloves came off and he wrote Anecdota Veritas.”

  “The Kitty Kelly edition?”

  “And how.” His eyes flashed green with excitement as he warmed to his subject. “This was serious dish, all the scandals about Justinian, his wife Theodora, society, pretty much anything that went down.”

  “Libelous?”

  “If they’d had laws back then. Of course, the fact that all his targets were dead by the time it was published sort of made it moot.”

  “Timing is everything.”

  “Absolutely. He made a big deal in his preface about how he couldn’t have written it while their evil spies were alive or else he’d have been murdered on the spot.”

  “And would he?”

  “I wouldn’t have been surprised. You’ve got to watch tweaking the tail of a tiger that big.” He sent her a sidelong glance. “You can tweak my tail anytime.”

  Her lips twitched. “I’ll keep that in mind. Is the book credible?”

  “Yes and no. For years, it was the commonly accepted account. According to him, Theodora made Madame du Pompadour look like an amateur. She had Justinian so completely enthralled he just let his empire fall apart.”

  “Why would a man throw everything away over a woman?”

  Alex looked at her. “When it’s the right woman, sometimes a man doesn’t have a choice. Sometimes what his head’s telling him is the last thing that matters.”

  For a moment, she couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything but look into those green, green eyes.

  Then he blinked and released her. “Anyway, the thinking these days is that Justinian and Theodora were decent people and fair rulers. Anecdota Veritas is considered mostly exaggeration, if not downright lies.”

  “So why should we look at it?”

  “Because he had a way of throwing in little details of life in the capital, and maybe, just maybe, he heard something that could help us.”

  “Let me take a look and see if we have it.” She typed the name in and the search results scrolled on-screen.

  “He shoots, he scores,” Alex crowed. “An English translation, no less.”

  A corner of her mouth turned up. “Well, go get it, Shaq.”

  The book’s cover was oxblood-red. Alex flipped it open to the table of contents and pulled his chair up next to her. “You gotta love these chapter names. ‘How the general was cuckolded by his wife’? ‘How the depraved Theodora disported herself’? Maybe we should read that one. You can learn Theodora’s double-jointed marmot-juggling trick,” he murmured in her ear.

  She turned her head a little too quickly and found herself almost lip to lip with him. For a heartbeat, they stared at each other. A fraction of an inch separated them. The merest motion of her head, or his, would have brought them together, would have dragged her into the heat and the madness. His pupils expanded, turning his eyes almost black.

  Julia forced herself to take a breath and moved away. “I’ve forgotten more about marmots than Theodora ever thought of. How about you read something useful, like ‘The extravagances of Theodora and her court’?”

  But it wasn’t there, and it wasn’t in “How decadence overtook the wealthy of Constantinople.”

  “What about ‘How Theodora consorted with grave robbers’?” Julia suggested.

  Alex flicked her a quick smile, skimming the opening passages, and stopped. “I think we might have something here. ‘At this time, one of Theodora’s attendants began to boast of a talisman that bestowed sexual potency, which quickly became a topic of great fascination. Charms from Egypt and Persia became the fashion among the ladies, who would wear them openly or string them about the necks of their lovers.

  “‘A very ambitious trader, Asanius, one day gained audience with Theodora to offer an account of an ancient amulet rumored to exist in Egypt, an amulet able to bestow immense sensual pleasure. It had once belonged to great lovers, he claimed, and had been a treasured possession of the pharaoh Horemhotep. Alas, but upon his death, it had been buried in his tomb with him, for such was the practice with the Egyptians, and his tomb had been lost.’”

  Julia stirred. “Horemhotep?” she murmured.

  “Yeah. A buddy of Felix’s?”

  “Late Dynastic period. I don’t remember when exactly, but somewhere around 400 or 500 B.C. The Egyptians were barely keeping their heads above water at that point. Lots of invasions by the Persians.”

  “Are you trying for another gold star?”

  Unconsiously, she touched her fingers to her lips, remembering the kiss after the first one. Adrenaline vaulted through her. “Just trying to impress you.”

  “I’m already impressed,” he said softly, leaning toward her.

  And she knew that if she kissed him this time, her choices would
be gone. “What else does it say?” she asked a little desperately. “The book.”

  Alex blinked and shook his head a little. “You want to hear more?”

  “Yes,” she said firmly.

  “All right…let’s see. ‘Theodora decried it as pagan nonsense,’” he read, “‘but Asanius spoke persuasively to her of the amulet, until at length she offered him a kingly fortune if he were to produce it for her, demanding always proof that it came from the pharaoh’s tomb.’”

  “That Theodora, she drove a tough bargain.”

  “Wait till you read about all the people she had thrown in underground prisons to rot. All that, and she was sexually rapacious, too.”

  “She must have been quite the multitasker.”

  “And all without a Day-Timer. So, let’s see. ‘Some months went by and became a year, and then more passed until it became nearly two, and finally one day, the trader reappeared at the palace. He was burnt dark by the sun and his beard had gone gray, but his clothing was rich and he wore golden cuffs upon his wrists.

  “‘He told Theodora that he had journeyed to Egypt, where he searched until he found the tomb of the pharaoh Horemhotep. And he delved his way into the tomb, this one deep in the ground, not in a high pyramid, and there did he discover a room full of treasure, and in a golden case, an ivory amulet shaped as a star, with rich carvings. And he produced the case with its signs of Horemhotep, and Theodora pronounced herself well pleased, until she discovered a small flaw upon the back of the amulet, whereupon she refused to pay the trader and had him beaten from the palace.’”

  They stared at each other. “Sounds like the crack again,” Alex said. “The White Star?”

  “Maybe. It’s still hard to be sure. The trader could have brought her junk.”

  He raised a brow at her. “A Moroccan tchotchke?”

  “We didn’t invent forgeries recently, you know.”

  “No. We’ve just been perfecting them.”

  She gave him a long, level look. “Let’s not go there right now.”

  “All right, I’ll give you the end of the story. ‘And she, Theodora, this godless wife of our Christian emperor, wore this pagan thing about her neck, this object plundered from a tomb desecrated by grave robbers. But it mattered naught to her. She flaunted it to the pious as she flaunted her body.