“No.” Tomas’s voice dropped, and I sensed we were finally getting down to it.
“Why not?”
Tomas’s voice was barely a whisper, his black eyes leveled at me. “You must admit I’ve been forthcoming with you, John Madison. Now it’s your turn. If you have some kind of lead I want to hear it.”
“Nothing concrete yet. I haven’t had a chance to follow anything up.”
“I expect to be kept informed. It’s the property of my country.”
“It will go back to Iraq through the proper channels.”
Keeping a lid on his temper seemed to be more and more of a challenge for Tomas. “My experience with valuable antiquities is that things can get derailed even through what you people call proper channels. An original book of the Bible? This would be something hard to let go of, especially when there’s no proof of where it came from. Samuel trusted me. You should too.”
Was he suggesting I intended to sell it myself, in the same breath as he invoked my dead brother? What a prick. I certainly wasn’t prepared to just hand it over to him. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” I said icily. “Let’s see whether I can find it first.”
We ended in a stalemate. Clearly, neither of us had any intention of volunteering more information. He checked his watch and said he had to go, scrambling to pick up his backpack. He scribbled a number on his business card and stood up. “You can call me at this number. The bill’s taken care of. How do I reach you?”
I gave him my email address and phone number. After he left I waited for a minute or so before following him. Rounding the corner onto Second Avenue, I spotted him leaning into a car, his arm resting on the open window of the driver’s side, talking to whoever was inside. He walked around to the passenger side and got in. The driver gunned it and took off. I walked away knowing he’d given me only a sliver of the truth. But I was determined to get the whole story.
Nine
I’d planned to head for home and take another shot at the puzzle, but a better idea surfaced and I ventured instead back to Hal’s townhouse on West Twentieth. The street felt relatively safe, with people coming home from the restaurants sauntering along the sidewalks. It was a perfectly unremarkable evening. And yet the feeling of something malevolent at my back crept over me again.
I leaned against the iron fence of the school opposite Hal’s house and surveyed my surroundings. St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, with its handsome gray limestone, bright red doors, and graceful clock tower, lay just to the west. The tall, black iron church gate stood open, as it often did when some arts or music group had an event on. Beside the church was the brick facade of the Atlantic Theater.
Seeing nothing out of place, I crossed the street to Hal’s townhouse. It was a typical four-story home, less elaborate than most, with a plain stucco finish in faded rose and black trim. The first floor was at street level, not half a story up as in the grander brownstones. Yellow police tape stretched in an X over the front door. I glanced around to make sure no one was watching and punched in the numbers to the lock code. Peter had once installed a much more elaborate security system, but Hal had let it drop, along with a lot of other things he could no longer afford. The door clicked open and I slid under the tape, closing the door behind me.
I’d decided to come because there had to be some kind of trail among Hal’s papers pointing to the hiding place, even an outside chance he’d actually stashed the engraving in a location I knew about.
The interior was dim, but I knew the place as a hare knows the dark tunnels of its warren. I moved around the ground floor, the rooms still reeking of booze and weed from last night’s party, and made sure the windows and doors were locked. I was glad to see the police had done their job well. Everything appeared secure on the second floor too. A stale smell hit me as I passed by Peter’s bedroom, with its accumulation of spilled food, dust, and nocturnal accidents. Hal had been no housekeeper. He’d probably not even bothered to change the bedclothes after his father went to the nursing home.
Hal’s study occupied a windowless alcove midway on the second floor, so I had no concerns about clicking on the desk light. The room was furnished with a heavy, Dutch-designed oak desk, no doubt belonging to one of his illustrious ancestors, and a matching wooden chair. An IKEA bookshelf stood in odd contrast against a side wall, crammed with tomes on philosophy, physics, and game theory. I rooted through them and found several volumes on alchemy.
The walls had been stripped of the valuable paintings, pale rectangles signaling their absence. The one picture left, a Durer reproduction print titled
Hal’s laptop was missing. I hunted around his papers, looking for some kind of trail pointing to the engraving’s hiding place. Just as I’d guessed, a copy of the first notice from Teras Distributing sat near the top of an unruly pile littering his desk. Clipped to the letter was a note from Walter Taylor, a cultural attache in Jordan and an old friend of Samuel’s.
Samuel, I’ve sent your package through our diplomatic carrier as you asked. It should arrive at Teras Distributing in June. If I didn’t know you so well, I’d say all that arak you’ve consumed over the years has finally taken its toll. But seriously, you may well have uncovered a rare find. What a fitting denouement to your career. Let’s discuss this further when I’m back home on terra firma. Keep some gin on ice for me. Don’t even think about returning to Iraq, my friend. The place is set to detonate.
So Samuel had confided in someone other than his assistants. In Jordan it would be after three in the morning. I’d have to put off calling Taylor for now.
Stuck in a drawer was a computer printout:
Neo-Assyrian stone engraving originating from Kuyunjik mound, Nineveh. Seventh century
B.C
. Full description upon expression of interest. Rare antiquity.
A contact number underneath had been scratched out. A draft, perhaps, of the advertisement Hal circulated to sell the engraving. So amateurish. No legitimate dealer would touch an item like that without at least a full description, an indication of the value, and some guarantee of provenance. If Hal thought he could get away with a sale, he was crazy. Whatever address he came up with, Interpol could trace it in minutes. He might as well have put up a billboard in Times Square. Ever since the Baghdad Museum was trashed they’d been watching all the Iraqi-origin stuff closely. His lack of judgment was stunning.
For the next half hour I pawed through the rest of Hal’s bills and letters. He was far deeper into credit than I’d realized, letting even basic things like phone and cable payments slip. I pitied him. The months before he died must have been dismal.
When I found nothing in Hal’s desk I climbed the stairs to the top floor. Almost all of it was taken up with the place I called the vanishing room. It had been used by Hal’s grandfather for fencing practice. “His fencing teacher was badly wounded, right over here.” More fable than reality. I remember Hal relating this story with gusto when we were boys and me staring hard at the floor, trying to spot old bloodstains among the grooves of the blond hardwood, imagining the fencing master falling, his sword clattering to the floor, a flare of crimson on his white shirt, the way it happened in
The slatted wooden blinds on the two front windows were closed, so I could safely turn on a wall light. It cast a soft buttery glow, the light glancing back from the mirrors. The room was bare of furniture; I’d never known it to have any aside from the cabinets flanking the rear wall where Peter had housed the bulk of his collection. On the front wall beside the window, fencing masks and swords hung from a custom-made rack—lightweight dry foils, epees, and the deadlier sabers. Hal and I were caught playing with them once and were banished from the room for months afterward.
The cabinet shelves were bare now and thick with grime. I groped for the switch hidden in a curl of decorative wood at the top of the first cabinet and heard the snap of the lock releasing. The back slid behind its neighbor, revealing a large closet. I felt a surge of anticipation—I was almost certain Hal would have stored the engraving here, as his father had with his most precious pieces. A couple of large cardboard boxes sat against the back wall of the closet, their flaps open. The boxes were empty. I swore out loud.
