by Gordon Ryan
“You’ve got the Akkadian King?” Tess asked. “But what are you going to do with it?”
“Give it to you, of course,” Peter said. “It’s a peace offering.”
“Come on,” she said. “I don’t believe that. Borisenko was supposedly going to pay seventeen million bucks for the lot.”
“I’ll have to check with my guy, but that sounds about right,” Peter said.
“We could have shot you,” Tess said. “Or you could have come to find the police waiting. Just what are you playing at here?”
“And what about the middleman who is going to meet you here, any minute. What happens when he shows up?”
“The middleman is a Belgian guy named Henri. He works for me.”
“Ah,” Tess said.
“There’s no shipment, so he’s not coming. He’s only there to distract Dmitri, give him something to do.” Peter hesitated. “I’m not sure about your friend, I wanted to talk to the two of you, first.”
Only Dmitri was coming. He’d called in the middle of the night and left a message. He had an in. He was on his way to Arles. Which meant that Peter was lying or hiding something.
“Let me get this straight,” Lars said. “You’ve got the Baghdad artifacts, and you’re going to give them to us?”
“Everything I could get my hands on. And I’ve got something else to offer you, but let’s start with the artifacts. Then you’ll know I’m serious.”
“What do you want, Peter?” Tess asked.
He moved aside his copy of Le Figaro to reveal another copy of her book, Engine of Destruction. He opened to a page marked with a sticky note and turned it around to show the same drawing with the trebuchet.
“Can you build this?”
She gave it barely a glance. “Of course I can build it. So what?”
“And can you operate it? I don’t mean like at La Baux, shooting the occasional stone for adoring tourists. Could you build your so-called engines of destruction under duress and use them to bring an enemy to ruin?”
“Peter,” she warned. “Quit screwing around and get to the point already.”
He leaned forward. “Tess, I need you to win a war for me.”
Chapter Eleven:
Peter produced a sheaf of papers and pictures as soon as the helicopter lifted into the air and thumped northward with a roar. Lars flipped through the pictures and the papers, letting out an occasional whistle.
“You got the relief of the lion eating a man, and all these coins, too? And this. Fantastic.”
Peter pointed to some sheets. “It was an insider job, no question. Bet half the museum staff was in on the looting. They probably didn’t even wait until Saddam fled Baghdad before setting off for Damascus with their haul.”
“Wow, this is amazing.” Lars said. “I never thought we’d see any of this stuff again.”
Tess looked out the window while the two men talked. The Provincial countryside sprawled beneath them, stone and field, but also villages and olive groves and country estates. It gave way to the rugged uplift of the Massif Central. The pilot picked his way between bare granite peaks and along rocky valleys. The highest peaks already had snow.
She’d lost all interest in the artifacts. All she could think about was Peter and Nick and this frustrated her. She’d moved on, she’d stopped recounting the last days and hours before their breakup to figure out what she’d done wrong. Those early weeks had been such a raw edge of emotion that it wasn’t hard to turn sorrow to anger and love to hatred. And eventually she’d managed to dull those emotions, too.
But she couldn’t give up on Nick. That boy had worked his way into her heart. He’d been so vulnerable when she’d met him, mother dead, father an important and busy man. And Tess, finding herself single and childless in her thirties, her life not quite unfolding as she’d planned, had needed him, too.
Nick was a hassle at first. Peter had a nanny, but only part-time, since he said he didn’t want her to be raising his child, and this meant that the baby was always around. Peter had him when she met him at a museum showing in London, and later, on half their dates in Manhattan. She liked Peter, so she tolerated him at first, then come to enjoy his delighted shout, “Tess!” whenever he saw her.
Nick had an earache one night when he was two and she was spending the night at the penthouse. It was Christmas week and the nanny was back in France with her family. Peter gave him medicine, but Nick kept screaming.
Tess called the doctor while Peter walked through the bedroom with Nick screaming in his arms. The phone rang several times, then a machine picked up. She had to plug her ear to hear what it was saying over the screams.
“He’s in Barbados,” she said. “Do you want to leave a message?”
“Dammit, I pay him to be available. What good is that if he goes halfway around the world without telling me?”
“He’ll call back if we leave a message.”
“What good is that going to do, he’s in Barbados.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he’ll call in a prescription, or we could take Nick to the emergency room.”
“The emergency room? You know what kind of germs hang around that place? May as well play a game of Russian roulette.”
The machine had beeped and was now recording their argument. She hung up the phone and turned off the bedside lamp.
Nick stopped screaming, but now said, “No, no, no,” again and again. He arched his back and Peter made exasperated noises. “Come on Nick, just settle down, let the medicine work.” The boy cried out again.
She climbed out of bed and went over to Peter. “Why don’t you lie down, give me a turn? Peter?” She reached in and took Nick, who Peter released only reluctantly.
And as soon as she took him, the boy’s cries turned to whimpers. Peter looked both relieved and dismayed. “Just the medicine taking effect,” she said. “I’m sure that’s all it is.”
Except that Nick calmed so quickly as Peter returned to bed and Tess made soothing noises that she wondered if maybe he hadn’t wanted her all along. He continued to whimper for another ten or fifteen minutes as she carried him into the darkened front room. She sat in the chair next to the window and rocked him until he fell back asleep.
He was so beautiful with dark, curly hair, tears that dried on his eyelashes. She watched his face for a long time, then looked out the window to the snow that fell over Central Park below them. His body was warm, she could hear his breathing and feel his heart beating, and didn’t want to take him back to bed.
Tess was a strong woman and she’d made her own life. What did she need a baby for?
Peter asked her the next morning if she wanted to move in. She said yes.
The memory, as they flew in the helicopter across France, was so fresh that it made her ache. She couldn’t look at Peter for several minutes. She didn’t know if she wanted to hit him or tell him she loved him, beg him to take her back.
Tess’s phone vibrated. She took it out of her bag. It was Dmitri, she saw with relief. The helicopter was too noisy to hear and she saw that she’d missed three of his calls already. “Tess Burgess speaking.”
“Thank God I got through. Are you with Peter?”
“Yes, that’s right,” she said, surprised that he would know.
“And Lars is with you?” Dmitri asked. There was a fair amount of noise on his end, too. Sounded like he was driving. “He’s okay?”
“Fine, just busy. How are you?” She glanced back from the window to see Peter watching out of the corner of his eye, even as he continued to talk to Lars.
“I’ve got some weird information. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Not completely, no, but I’ve started the project,” she said. “I don’t have my laptop on hand or a connection, as you can probably hear. But the first spreadsheets are finished.” The spreadsheets bit was her code to Dmitri that she wasn’t fully free to talk.
“Got it. Look, listen to what Peter has to say. He’s g
ot an offer. Don’t tell him no, not right away.”
“Why not? That’s my first inclination.”
“Let’s just say his Belgian friend gets loose lips when he’s had a few drinks. I’ve got some information about the castle that you and Lars will find highly interesting. But if you turn Peter down cold, he’ll cut you off. You know what I’m talking about?”
“No, not really. I’m still missing the numbers from that last report.”
“Doesn’t matter, just trust me on this. Don’t tell him no. Not yet.”
They hung up. She caught a quick glance from Lars. He’d picked up the bit about the spreadsheets, too.
“I take it that wasn’t your friends at La Baux,” Peter said. “Spreadsheets and all that.”
“No, that was Columbia. I’m on sabbatical, but I told them I’d help with some budget stuff for a big exhibit from the Hermitage.” She’d stirred in a little truth to take the edge off her lie. “Where are we going, anyway? You said a short ride.”
“The Loire Valley.”
“What? That’s got to be 700 kilometers from here.”
“Not so far by air,” Peter said. “But yeah, we’ll have to stop and refuel, maybe stretch our legs.”
“Not impressed, Peter. Not at all. Why don’t you set us down at the next town and we’ll find our way back.”
“And leave your artifacts? Or is it all about sticking it to Borisenko?”
She fixed him with a stare. “And what’re the artifacts doing in the Loire, anyway? You knew I was in Arles, why not leave the stuff in the south?”
“I’ve rented a little place on the banks of the Cher. It was easier to bring it there than to warehouse it in Marseille or Arles.”
“Right, I’m not an idiot, Peter.”
“Tess,” Lars said. He reached from his seat and put his hand on her wrist. “It’ll be fine, you don’t work today. We’ll take the train back tonight.” He wanted those goods and worse, she could see, he was curious about Peter and what he was offering.
“Or my guy can fly you back in the morning if the two of you don’t mind spending the night,” Peter said.
Peter’s little place turned out to be a 17th Century Italianate chateau. It sat on an extensive estate next to the River Cher. Poplar-lined footpaths. Formal, walled gardens with fountains and perfectly trimmed hedges. Two horses in a field snorted and galloped across an impossibly green lawn as the helicopter swooped over the estate. The chateau itself was graceful curves and style, as beautiful now as it would have been three hundred years ago. She struggled to hold onto her anger, so tenderly nursed through the flight.
“Wow,” Lars said. “I mean, wow. Wish I had my camera.”
Tess looked back from the window to see Peter watching for her reaction. She returned a look of stone.
#
“It’s a war,” Peter said. “A castle, siege engines, desperate defenders. Sallies, retreats. Casualties.”
“You mean, like a reenactment,” Lars said. He wiped crumbs from his beard and pushed away his empty soup bowl. “Like those people who reenacted the Battle of Hastings for that BBC documentary.”
“You’re underestimating Peter,” Tess said. “Never do that.”
Her onion soup sat in front of her, cooling. To the side, duck pâté and bread, untouched. A woman in a trim suit brought a platter with three plates of croque monsieur. Just a simple sandwich of bread, cheese, and ham, but she had no doubt it would be delicious. She said nothing as the woman took her soup bowl, and refused to look at the food.
They ate lunch in the orangerie, a tiled room with a vast bank of windows that faced the south lawn as it dipped gently toward the river. There was a fountain topped by a cherub in the middle of the room, and potted orange trees dotted the room. A faint citrus smell hung in the air.
“Tess is right,” Peter said. “This isn’t a reenactment. There won’t be spectators, just participants. And the castle is real, no modern technology allowed in or around it. Imagine defenders, food running low, their numbers dwindling, the attackers pound the walls with their trebuchets.”
“Sounds delightful,” Tess said. “Especially the part where we all squat over garderobes and go for weeks without bathing. So what’s the angle?”
“The angle, Tess, is that people are trying to kill you.”
“Really kill you?” she asked. “As in, pitch you from the tower or sever your head between the third and fourth vertebrae?”
“No, of course not. But—”
“Then you’re still just describing a super-elaborate reenactment.”
“No,” Lars said. He shook his head. “I think I see where he’s going with this. It’s something real, isn’t it?”
Peter leaned forward and a glint came to his eyes. “Exactly. Real risk, real rewards. Sure, we’ll put in safeguards to keep it from turning into a bloodbath, but after that, it’s just what you can do with your own strength and wits.”
“How do you keep the police from stopping you, or it turning into a media circus?” Lars asked.
“That’s easy enough,” Peter said. “A bit of money, those things have a way of resolving themselves. The whole thing, including remodeling the castle, won’t cost more than ten, fifteen million dollars.”
“Is that all?” Tess asked. “You could practically dig that out of the couch cushions.”
“Exactly. The cost is trivial.”
“Is this what replaced the ziggurat?” she asked. She turned to Lars. “He had this complaint that the modern world was producing nothing of lasting value. Where is our Parthenon? Our Great Wall? Our pyramids? So he was going to build this six hundred foot ziggurat, in Kentucky, of all places. Put in all sorts of weird symbols and geometric stuff, and he wouldn’t explain what it meant. Kind of like a modern Stonehenge, keep people guessing. What would that cost? A couple of hundred million? His version of ‘turn here to see the world’s largest ball of twine.’”
She purposefully made it sound as silly as possible. Yet, surprisingly, Peter said nothing in defense. Maybe he was letting her exhaust her anger. If so, he underestimated her.
“An authentic battle, huh?” Tess continued. “You know what it reminds me of? You ever see that movie Red Dawn?”
The two men shook their heads. Wasn’t surprising. It was a purely American film.
“It’s about the Soviets taking over the U.S. and a bunch of high school kids wage a guerrilla war. My little brother and his friends used to go into the canyons and play Red Dawn. They planned how they’d wage a brilliant campaign behind enemy lines and bring the Soviet war machine to its knees. This sounds like your version of Red Dawn. Bunch of teenage kids playing at war. Only I bet your friends are all billionaires, aren’t they? I just can’t believe you have enough rich, crazy friends to stage a war.”
“There are only fourteen of us,” Peter said, “the rest I’m paying good money to bring onboard. We’ve got some ex-contractors, bodyguards, medieval experts like you guys, some hardcore hobbyists. There will be roughly 150 participants in all, so it won’t be a big battle.”
“That’s more than enough to keep things exciting,” Tess said.
“I could have had twice that many, easily. It’s dangerous work, but exciting, and I’m paying well. Lars, your offer is seventy-five thousand dollars a week. Tess, you’d get a hundred.”
Tess blinked. “So this is like a job interview? I’m not going to be your employee, Peter. God.”
“I missed you, too, Tess,” Peter said.
“Do you know how much you hurt me? I came home and you were gone. And Nick, too. We had one fight and you just packed up and left the country. One fight.”
“It was a lot more than that, Tess. Of course you know that.”
“Relationships end, I know that. But what about Nick? I loved that boy. And he loved me, too! You brought us together. We didn’t ask for that. But you put us together and then…” Her voice trailed off and she fought to stay in control of her emotions. “What you did
, Peter…it was beyond cruel.”
“Nick’s here, Tess, he wants to see you.”
“Oh, god. He is? Oh. No, not yet. No, I have to think about it first. I can’t…not again.”
Tess pushed away from the table and then was out the door and across the lawn. It had looked so warm from inside the orangerie, but a chill breeze swept in from the east. Winter was on its way and would soon overwhelm even the gentle climate of central France.
She imagined Peter’s castle. It would be dark and forbidding. Brooding, even. A defiant wedge of stone, pounded by the elements.
Chapter Twelve:
Nick ran across the lawn, calling, “Tess! Tess!” She looked up, felt something break free inside her and then was running to sweep him up. He was grinning with his big, liquid eyes. His dark hair was curlier than ever.
He gripped her tight and she could feel the furious pounding of his heart from the run. A bit of snot on her neck from an un-wiped nose.
“Oh, you look so big. You’re six now. I can’t believe it.”
He’d preferred English just six months ago, but now he answered in French, though he seemed to understand what she’d said well enough. “You missed my birthday party, why didn’t you come? We had ice cream in the Tour Eiffel.”
“Papa and I had a fight.”
“Why? Was it about the puppy?”
“The what?” She remembered something about a puppy and a discussion of housebreaking and who would be responsible for taking care of it when they were both gone. Nothing like a fight, but hadn’t that been just a day or two before she came back from school to discover the place empty?
“No, it wasn’t that silly puppy.”
“You know what I told Papa Noël to bring me for Christmas?” he asked.
“A puppy?”
“A what? No, a new engine for my train.”
“Do you have a train?” she asked. “Here at the chateau?”
“You didn’t see it? They have a real train here, it’s little and I can drive it myself, a real train. Didn’t you see it?” Nick squirmed and she had to put him down.