The Witch of Babylon

“I’ll go when our business is concluded.”

Laurel patted his arm. “Nothing will be achieved by quarreling. There’s no point ending up with bad feelings.” Bad feelings? After all the deaths she’s caused, what version of reality is she working with?

Phillip opened his mouth to object but thought better of it. He went to the front door and punched a code into the locking mechanism on the wall. A lattice-like grid of brass dropped down over the front window. He ushered us into his spacious office, a plush affair. Furniture designed by Gehry, a Bakhshaish rug covering most of the floor, and a Tintoretto resting on an easel in a corner of the room. A flat-screen TV mounted on the wall opposite his desk was probably a marketing aid for his sales.

“Nice bling,” I said to Laurel.

She fingered the necklace. “An heirloom from Mina. Frankly, I think it suits me better.”

An heirloom she never wanted you to have.

Phillip closed the door and went to his desk. He got out a bottle of Rabelais cognac and poured snifters for the three of us.

“So,” I said, “a lot of this is guesswork, but I’ll bet I’m pretty close to the mark. Hal hung around on the fringes of the alchemy group but never made it as a central player. I suspect he didn’t know everyone’s identities. Ward was Saturn; Eris, Venus; and Lazarus, Mars. Shim was too damaged to become a full member. You, Phillip, were Mercury. I’d thought Jupiter at first, but you don’t have the creativity to run the whole show. Mina, the witch, was originally Jupiter. When she died you saw an opportunity, Laurel, and took over.”

She fiddled with her necklace again. “Guess I’ll have to take compliments wherever I can find them. How did you figure it out?”

“Eris had a Venus tattoo, and then in the Baghdad hotel room Ward rolled up his sleeves, revealing a tattoo on his arm too, a lowercase h with a cross on the vertical. The symbol for Saturn. You’d told me Hal was Saturn. In his letter to me Hal indicated five opponents. If he was Saturn, that meant he’d have to be including himself as one of them. A little too obtuse. Knowing Mina well, even if your relationship was conflicted, you were in an ideal position to control events. You were living in her house for Christ’s sake! Gip told me Hal had never planned to get back with you. He just agreed to let you stay at the Sheridan Square location temporarily, that’s all. Staff know every move the residents make. That’s how they keep their jobs.

“Once I got back to New York, a friend of mine broke the barriers hiding your identities and confirmed everything. So you had the connection with Ward, not Tomas. How did Ward fit in?”

“That preposterous man,” Phillip snorted. “Fancied himself some sort of grandee when he was no more than a cook and bottle washer for us. I’d occasionally broker some of his sales, that’s how I got to know him. He took all that alchemy business seriously, as did his band of criminals. Can you imagine? Shim, the monster Eris traveled with, actually blew himself up trying to make gold from lead. Did Ward show off his private ‘museum’? A mixed bag, the stuff in there. Several of the manuscripts were rare and he had a few nice Near Eastern objects, but in the main, it was pretty low grade, a good portion of it counterfeit.”

Flattery always worked with Phillip. “Smart of you, then, pitching Ward’s group first against Samuel, then Hal, and finally me, while you two hid behind them. And Tomas’s talented plan to annihilate them in Iraq took them permanently out of the picture. On home ground Tomas had a much better chance of defeating them. Once they were dead, nothing could be traced back to you. Quite impressive.”

“That is conjecture, Madison,” Phillip said. “You have nothing to base it on.”

I sipped my cognac and savored the subtle flavours. “Hanna Jaffrey, who I learned was much closer to Ward than he let on, failed to steal the engraving after Samuel discovered it. Lazarus and Shim eventually dealt with her. Lazarus tried to steal the engraving from the Baghdad museum during the looting, but Samuel had anticipated that so you missed out a second time. It must have been tremendously frustrating not to get it after so much effort.

“When my brother died and I was incapacitated in the hospital, you conscripted Hal to search our condo. That’s when everything really spun out of control. Hal lied. He said he’d found nothing, intending to sell the engraving and keep the proceeds for himself. Did he know what he really had?”

“He’d picked up on the idea that it had something to do with transforming base metals into gold. He knew the engraving was the Book of Nahum and realized how much money it would be worth.”

“So you used Ward and his people to keep the maximum pressure on me, harassing me, making me think I was running for my life. And they’d always known where I was because of the tracking device. You removed it to gain my trust, Laurel. By then I was confiding in you, so it wasn’t necessary anymore. All those crocodile tears you shed over Hal. What a shock it must have been when you found out he was peddling the thing.

“Eris confronted him. He lied again, only the second time he threw me into the mix. His game came at you out of left field.”

Laurel had been listening intently. “Latching onto you was our only option once we realized you genuinely did not know where the engraving was. Hal included some elements that only you would recognize, and we had no way of solving the game ourselves. Certainly not in a short time, anyway. It was easier to get you to do the work. Phillip thought you’d chase the engraving just so you could sell it, but I wasn’t so sure.”

I searched for any sign of guilt, a slight flush perhaps in her cheeks to suggest a hint of shame, but could find none.

“I must admit,” Phillip said, “it was rather fun watching you getting battered.”

“And yet here I am. I succeeded and you two failed. Were you actually going to go through the farce of an exchange at High Bridge Park?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Laurel said.

Phillip peeked over his glasses at Laurel like an impatient schoolteacher. “What’s the point of going on about this? We don’t owe him any explanations. We beat you at the game in the end, Madison. It’s your sour luck.”

“Humor me, Phillip. I’ve earned some answers, and unless you want a really nasty scene when you try to throw me out, I’ll get them.”

I turned back to Laurel. “You and Phillip set up a double sting, keeping Ward and his people occupied with stalking me. Unbeknownst to us you two also kept a check on Tomas. When he did an end run on me and picked up the engraving, you got lucky. How did you get it from him? Did you have a weapon?”

“Could you honestly picture me waving a gun around?” Laurel giggled. “Only a weapon of the monetary variety. Phillip had the connections, so we could get a much better price for the engraving. Tomas saw to reason quite rapidly. And we let him shoot a photo of it. That’s all he really needed. This was your own fault.”

“How’s that?”

Laurel tapped the rim of her glass. “You didn’t bother to tell us, John, about your plans to leave town. When you went to the Port Authority and Ward found out about it he freaked, thinking we’d pushed you too far and you were going to bolt. So we had to put the kidnapping into play. Tomas, on the other hand, actually believed you’d take the engraving to the FBI. If it weren’t for that, he might not have given in to Phillip and me.”

“While you kept Ward and Eris preoccupied with me, Tomas headed back to Iraq.”

“Hal wasn’t the only one who could stage a good trap.”

“I can see how Tomas gained, but what was in it for Ari?”

“Ari was never involved. Ward and his people were chasing a dream. Finding the treasure was also what Tomas most wanted. Both saw the engraving as primarily a means to an end.”

I threw back the rest of my drink and stood up. “After all the hardship I’ve gone through, the least you can do is show it to me.”

“Dear boy,” Phillip interjected, “we’re under no obligation to do anything.”

“Maybe you won’t have any choice.” He might be haughty but I hadn’t come empty handed. I had my finger on a trigger and it was still waiting to be squeezed.

Laurel patted his hand. Phillip actually blushed with pleasure. “There’s no point playing hardball, is there?” she said.

Phillip took a remote out of his desk and pressed a key. The TV screen slid silently to one side. Nahum’s engraving sat in a shelved recess beside a Michelangelo drawing and what looked like a Vermeer.

The engraving had the typical greenish hue of olivine basalt, its color deepening from exposure to oxygen over the ages. It hadn’t yet been cleaned. I could see reddish dust lodged in the impressions. That made sense. They wouldn’t clean it because the dust could be analyzed to confirm the tablet’s age and legitimacy.

I ran my hand over the eight-pointed stars Tomas had referred to. The piece had an air of majesty, as if