by Cari Z
Someone who wanted people to wonder about it, that’s who.
Corday headed for the box, and the rest of us gathered around her like a pack of flies hovering over a corpse. She held up the end of the gold necklace she was wearing, so long that it fell into her cleavage, and revealed a key. She opened each of the padlocks with slow, theatrical movements, the click of each device giving way, ratcheting up the tension in the room. These were dangerous men, men accustomed to brutality, but she was drawing them into her web. They were scarcely breathing.
Finally, the last lock released. She set it aside, then popped the clasps on the box. It wiggled in the air like a fish on a hook, awkward thanks to how she had it suspended, but she pulled the scepter from it with a flourish. The muscles on her arm stood out—it was heavy, I knew that from personal experience. The entire room was transfixed.
“Messieurs, je vous présente le sceptre de Mansa Musa, le grand roi du Mali, l’homme le plus riche du monde. Si le prix est correct, son histoire peut être la vôtre. Faites monter les enchères!”
“Gorgeous,” Minister Adjoukoua murmured. Men exchanged glances, stroked their chins, watched the avarice in their fellows’ eyes and compared it with what they felt inside. The scepter was indeed gorgeous, there was no doubt about that, no reason for them not to covet it. Owning it would be a coup, especially for someone like Adjoukoua. He wasn’t Malian, but he had a firm grasp of the importance of African art to the culture and prestige of the entire continent. Not to mention, a prize like the scepter would make a fantastic bargaining chip if he wanted to negotiate for, say, some or all of the Benin bronzes in the collections in Berlin or Hamburg, or even in the British Museum itself.
I could say nothing, do nothing. I could let them fight it out among themselves, watch them make Corday a very rich woman, and in all likelihood never see the scepter again. It would be lost to trading, to infighting, or perhaps to someone like the minister who would use it as more of a mace than a scepter.
Or I could do the only thing I had left, which was… well, be myself.
Our guard was distracted, gazing at the scepter with as much interest as everyone else in the room. I glanced over at Alex, who was already looking my way. Not yet, I willed him. Don’t go yet. Because I knew he was thinking it, but I had to try first.
“Est-ce que j’entends cinq millions d’euros?”
“Absolutely preposterous,” I said in full voice, the kind I used to use to get people’s attention across an auditorium. “After everything we went through to find it, to track you down, you have the gall to present that as the real thing? What, did you get cold feet back in France?” I felt the weight of almost twenty pairs of eyes on me—Corday’s alone would have turned me into ashes if they’d been able to. “Did you sell the real one in Marseille and then think you could fob this one off here? Is that how you show respect for your bidders, by disrespecting their heritage?”
“Have you gone blind since you chased after me from France?” Corday asked coldly. “This is the very same scepter you held in your hands, the very same one that you lost. It’s real.”
I looked at Minister Adjoukoua. “Sir, you have no reason to trust me but no reason to doubt me, either. You know my reputation.” God, I hoped it counted for something. “I cherish artifacts like this far too much to let a charlatan such as this woman cheapen them by trying to pass off a fake to you.”
“This is the real scepter of Mansa Musa,” Corday snapped. “Look at the gold, look at the engravings! It’s—”
“Still nothing but a clever fake,” I snapped right back. “I can see the machine marks in those engravings from here. What did you use to make it, a Dremel? There’s no way that’s hand-push technique, you should have gone more slowly. Now it’s just a waste of time and materials.”
One of the other men said something angry-sounding in French, to which Corday responded rapidly. I felt Alex tense beside me. Not yet. She hasn’t lost yet.
Corday rounded on me. “You think you’re clever?” she demanded. “Trying to play me like this? But neither African nor Islamic art are your specialties, Professor. You wouldn’t know a fake if I hit you across the face with it.”
“Chinese ceramics aren’t my specialty either, but I risked my career to point out a fake there,” I retorted. “And now I’m risking my life to do it again, because I will not have you sell these men a dummy.”
Minister Adjoukoua turned me to face him. He met my eyes and stared at me, hard. “Do you really think she’s lying about this scepter, or are you just trying to save your own life?” he asked.
“You already said you would do what you could to keep me alive,” I replied, utterly in earnest. “How could I possibly improve my situation by lying to you now?”
“He’s working for the man I stole it from!” Corday snapped. “Of course he’s lying now! He wants it for himself!”
“A thief is a thief, whether she steals oranges or diamonds,” the minister said slowly, turning back to face her. “You are already proven a thief, Mademoiselle. How can we trust that you are not out to thieve from us as well?”
Corday’s tawny skin was going pale. She knew she was in trouble—big trouble. I’d managed to cast enough doubt on her credibility that nothing she said now would be taken at face value. None of these men had even seen the scepter up close yet, but they were willing to be swayed into thinking it might be fake. There was no honor among thieves, clearly.
More shouts in French broke out, seemingly separating the crowd into people who wanted the auction to continue and people who wanted to leave. Corday took a step back, then another, and that’s when Alex made his move.
He spun toward Minister Adjoukoua’s bodyguard and pulled one of his own guns from the man’s belt—they hadn’t been taken or hidden after our capture, just worn openly like prizes—then turned and shot past Corday. Past—not at. If he’d been firing at her, he would have hit her. She didn’t have Fawkes for backup, and she knew she was vulnerable.
Well. Sort of vulnerable. She pulled a gun out from beneath her dress—good heavens, that was a thigh holster—and shot back at us.
Alex had already knocked me to the ground. One of Corday’s bullets took the minister’s bodyguard in the chest, and he fell back heavily to the floor. Minister Adjoukoua crouched down next to him, concern and fear on his face. The evaporating calm turned to wholesale chaos in seconds.
Two more men went after Corday, but she moved and fired as easy as breathing, the scepter slung over one shoulder while she shot with the opposite hand. The men went down. Someone else began firing—apparently, she hadn’t made it that hard to get a gun in here. Men struggled, shouting at one another. Over the fighting, the sound of sirens became audible. That was fast. Jean-Paul must have had someone in the police on standby.
“We have to go after Corday!” I shouted to Alex. “Before she gets away again!”
He grimaced. “I know, but we need to save ourselves first.” He paused, then cursed quietly. “And save that bastard Fawkes, God-fucking-damn him. Come on.” He got up first and helped pull me to my feet, then led the way out of the ballroom. About half the bidders were already streaming for their cars, more interested in evading the police than getting questionable revenge over what amounted to a waste of their time.
Alex pointed me down the hall to the right of the spiral staircase. “Find an open door and take cover. If I’m not back before the police arrive, just get yourself off the property and get back to Jean-Paul. I’ll find you later.” He pressed his hand tightly into mine for a moment, then ran toward the stairs. I reflexively closed my hand and headed down the hall, feeling a bit dazed. Open door, open door… two rooms down the door was indeed open. I stepped inside, and—
A long, strong arm wrapped around my neck, dragging me down into a chokehold. “Don’t. Move.” It was Corday, still dressed like an open wound and utterly furious, if the grip she had around my head was any indicator. The scepter lay on the floor at her feet, incong
ruously glorious against the filth. “I should have had Fawkes shoot you both in Marseille,” she hissed at me.
I tried to speak. “I—I’m so-sorry abo’ makin’ your work w’rthless, but—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, I’m not upset about the job!” she exclaimed. “Those can go bad for all sorts of reasons, it happens. But you killed Fawkes, and I will not forgive you for that.” Her grip tightened. “You make far more enemies than friends in this line of work, and people you can trust are the rarest friends of all. And you cost me mine.”
“H’ss… nah… d-ded….” I was barely able to get the words out. Fortunately, it seemed to be enough.
“What do you mean, he isn’t dead?” Corday asked, giving me a bit more room to breathe. “Why would a man like Alex Tucker, a man with a reputation like his, leave a danger alive at his back?”
“Because I asked him to,” I whispered hoarsely.
She was silent for a moment. “And he listened to you?”
“Y’sss. Fwk’s ups-stairs. Th’ drug jus’ knocked him out.”
“Ah. I see.”
She might see, but she still wasn’t letting go. It was time to up the ante.
I pressed the muzzle of the tiny Kahr pistol Alex had passed to me in the foyer to her shin. “You won’t be able to run away if you don’t release me right now.”
For a long moment Corday didn’t move, and I thought she might just twist my head off and take a chance on my likely abysmal aim. My finger trembled on the trigger, but I didn’t pull.
“Fine.” She let me go, and I reached out and grabbed the scepter, dragging it toward me as I scrambled back toward the door. God, please don’t bend, please don’t dent, please please please. I was barely able to keep the gun trained on her as I examined the flower at the top of the artifact, which at first glance looked like I hadn’t managed to damage it. Whew.
Corday smiled at me. “You’re a very interesting man, Professor. I’m quite pleased I met you—before this, I didn’t think people like you existed outside of fiction.”
“People—like me?”
“Honorable fools,” she said gently. “And you might as well take that damn thing,” she added, nodding toward the scepter like I hadn’t just snatched it out from under her. “No one will buy from me right now, not after what you’ve done to my reputation. If Fawkes is alive, then you needn’t worry about me.”
“He, um.” The sirens were getting louder. “He might end up in a jail.”
Her smile widened. “That sounds like a lovely challenge. Now, you’d best leave before you end up in jail with him.”
“I—right.” I glanced behind me out the window in the hall. Those were definitely the police coming our way. I needed to go, now. Alex had said he would find me later, and I knew he meant it. I turned around again. “We could—” But she was gone, the only sign of her passage the tattered, fluttering drapes along the window at the back of the room.
Well, I knew a good idea when I saw one. I ripped one of the ancient drapes down and wrapped the scepter up, then left via the window myself. I headed for the back of the property, where there was a tall iron gate that led out to a small, private road. I climbed up and over the gate, silently bemoaning the state of my clothes—I had to look like the worst sort of foreigner right now, the kind that couldn’t take care of himself and made every other visitor around him look bad just by being there.
But I had the scepter. That was the most important thing. Well, almost the most important thing. I needed to get back to Jean-Paul—he was where Alex would probably be. I tucked the little gun in my pocket, then began the short but intimidating trek out to the main road, where I could loop around to the beach. Sirens still blared, and curious onlookers were walking out into the street, trying to get a handle on what was going on. More than a few of them stared at me, but I ignored their quizzical looks and just kept walking, like I had an appointment to be at and couldn’t afford to be detained. Fifty feet… ten feet… I got to the turn toward the beach, and almost stepped directly into another man’s chest.
I exhaled so hard I almost made myself light-headed. My whole body began to shiver, very faintly, and my eyes shut of their own accord. “Alex.”
“Thank fuck,” he muttered, pulling me into his arms for a brief but intense hug. “I thought I’d have to go back in there after you.” He made some space and looked at the bundle in my arms. “Where on earth did you find that? I was looking for Corday, but I didn’t see her anywhere.”
“I, ah, got it from her, actually.”
Alex’s eyebrow went up like a shot. “What, she just handed it over to you?”
“A bit, kind of. Not really.” I sighed. “She cornered me and was probably going to kill me, but when she found out Fawkes was alive, she let go of me, and I nabbed the scepter on the way out.”
“She let go of you just like that?”
“I might have threatened to shoot her in the leg if she didn’t?” I offered.
Alex stared at me in silence for a long moment, before finally throwing his head back and laughing. Really laughing—long, gut-busting laughs that were almost embarrassing to witness, particularly since I had apparently inspired them. “You—with the—oh my God, she must fucking love you,” he gasped. “To let you get away with—fuck, ha, wait—”
“I’ll have you know I was quite intimidating,” I said with a sniff, before cracking up myself a moment later. “No, but really, she was rather polite about it,” I finally got out after a minute. “Once she knew Fawkes was alive, she lost all interest in the scepter.”
“I kind of doubt that, but I’ll take it,” Alex said. “Let’s get back to Jean-Paul, okay? We can figure out our next move from there.”
“Authentication,” I said immediately. “I’ve got a contact at the University of Ghana in Accra who’s an expert at dating artifacts using the VIMP method—that’s the voltammetry of immobilized particles, it’s the least invasive way of measuring the age of something made from metal, and it doesn’t take all that long, so we should be able to—”
“So you’re saying we need to go to Ghana,” Alex asked as I stopped to breathe.
“Ideally, yes.”
“Okay, then.”
Armed with a concrete goal, Alex was ruthlessly efficient. An hour after escaping the mansion, we were both clean and fed. An hour after that we were through the border, without a single glance into our bags or any delay in getting a visa. Jean-Paul seemed to know a lot of the border guards, and a nod from him was as good as a free pass.
By evening I was armed with a copy of Professor Gavua’s VIMP results for the scepter—I had done the swab myself, to keep the number of people who knew what we were handling at an absolute minimum, but he had done all the processing, and the data was encouraging. The copper used in the collars was estimated to date from around the year 1400, plus or minus fifty years, and while that wasn’t absolutely concrete proof that the scepter was real—another artifact of similar age could have been deconstructed to make it, for example—it was solid enough that I was comfortable with my initial evaluation.
Now all that was left was… to go back home and hand it over. To Mr. Ashad, but also to Gerard. And then to the British Museum, and after that who knew whether it would ever get back to Mali, where it belonged?
You can’t help anyone from a position of powerlessness, I reminded myself as I lay on the queen-sized bed that Alex and I were sharing in our hotel that night, a short drive from the Accra airport. We would fly back to London tomorrow morning. Restore your name, and you restore your ability to fight. It was rather a cold comfort, but the only one I had right now. By tomorrow evening, the job would be over. No more scepter, and no more Alex, either.
I listened to him move about in the bathroom, probably shaving—he liked to present a neat front to the world, and he hadn’t been able to shave for several days. If I could classify myself as reluctant to hand over the scepter, then I was positively hamstrung at the thought of saying
goodbye to Alex. I had never felt this way with anyone before, not in my entire life—this scintillating combination of challenged and appreciated, of falling for and falling with. He didn’t leave me wondering what he felt or force me to play dominance games just to defend my space. He was… and I was….
Well, it didn’t matter. He was going to be leaving soon. I knew it; he knew it. There was no point in bringing it up. I would be better off enjoying what we had for as long as we had it, which to my mind was for approximately another twenty-four hours. I spared a moment to wish I wasn’t so exhausted—one night of intimacy wasn’t enough—but I was about to pass out, a day of adrenaline-fueled activity and emotional upheaval leaving me wrung like a rag.
I didn’t even realize I’d shut my eyes until I felt Alex’s hand on my shoulder, not a touch meant to jostle, just to reassure. “Hmm… my turn?” I asked sleepily. I needed a shave as well, but the bed was so comfortable….
“You can take your turn in the morning,” he assured me. “Go to sleep, Mal. I’ll keep an eye on things.”
I knew he would too. The scepter, stowed safely in a new hard-sided suitcase, was as secure as it could be without the trappings of a museum or a safe. No one was after us; no one was hunting it. We could finally rest.
I drifted off, comforted by the warmth of his hand and the steady in-and-out of his breathing next to me.
Chapter Thirteen
IT WAS raining when we got back to London.
Of course it was raining. It could be sunny for a week and then the day I got there, the rain would move in. I didn’t get to see England when the sun was shining, that was just the way it was. I’d been there seven times, and I’d never had more than half a day of clear skies before the clouds rolled in.
It was only midday, so we couldn’t just give up and go to bed, either. We had a job to wrap up, and fast, because tomorrow was the opening of the exhibit—a soft opening, museum employees and trustees and board members only, but still, that was the deadline to hit. Mal had already called up Gerard to let him know when we’d be back, and we were set to meet with him and Mr. Ashad that evening.