The Price of Inheritance

by Karin Tanabe

  “That’s embarrassing. Of all the things to steal.”

  “I know, but it definitely could have happened before with Iraqi and Afghani antiquities. Soldiers stealing stuff. Maybe even Tyler. How old was he when he went to Iraq?”

  “He was eighteen. Just out of high school.”

  “And when was he first deployed?”

  “Eleven or twelve years ago, since he’s twenty-nine now. 2002, 2003.”

  “The National Museum was raided in two thousand three, remember? It was looted.”

  “Of course I remember. That was the first thing that came to mind, but Tyler Ford? You met him. He is not an art thief. He’s like . . .”

  “He’s like what? You don’t really know him. I mean, you know him a little now, but maybe he was a very different person eleven years ago. What were you like eleven years ago?”

  “The same. Jane, I was exactly the same. I’m sorry, I just don’t see Tyler Ford as some art-thieving mastermind. Not to belittle his intelligence, but I don’t see it.”

  Jane looked at me with a worried frown. “The last thing I’m going to say is this: I don’t know how much you read about the raid of that museum—we were pretty young when it happened—but I don’t think the people involved were like, the head of the Met and art history professors at Princeton. So maybe don’t discount that dramatic theory just yet.”

  She had no idea.

  When we stood up and went inside the house, Carter took one look at my face and simply said, “I told you.”

  “You told me what, Carter?”

  “I told you to stay away from that guy. That’s why you’re here, aren’t you? And upset like this. It’s something about him.”

  “Yes, Carter. You’re so smart. It is something about him. You must feel very proud of yourself.”

  “You shouldn’t have been associating with any of those guys. Any of those base guys. You belong here, in this house, or you belong in New York in your old apartment, not living in some squat house hanging around with guys who picked the army over unemployment.”

  “The army is an entirely different military branch, Carter! What is wrong with you? Why do you know so little about this? Are you secretly Canadian or something?”

  “Canadian? Have you gone fucking insane? I don’t know about the military because I don’t jerk off to guys in uniform like you suddenly do. Are you hearing me, Carolyn? All that Christie’s crap screwed up your brain. And now you’re just rebelling. So what happened? Whose ass do I have to kick?”

  Jane looked at me and I just told my story again. When I said the word NCIS Carter’s face tightened. “This is real classy, Carolyn. Keep this up and the world’s your oyster.”

  “Shut up! Both of you. I can’t even handle this,” said Jane, standing up. “Carter, just go. Go drive around, go to Boston.”

  “Fine. Goodbye, Carolyn. I’m sure the lesbians will love you in prison.”

  Carter walked out the door, letting in the sunshine, and didn’t bother to close it.

  Jane looked at the door and didn’t walk over to shut it. We both knew there were big iron gates protecting Jane’s perfect multimillion-dollar world against the outside.

  “This sounds really bad, Carolyn,” she said, pouring us a glass of scotch to share. Jane and I always shared drinks. When we were teenagers, we always swore that when we were old alcoholics, we’d share one very large glass, so we might as well start now.

  “I know it does. But that piece. I swear to God I still don’t think it’s a precious Middle Eastern antiquity. There’s something wrong about it.”

  “Maybe it was glazed over.”

  “Maybe. But it’s more than just the glaze. I’ve sat through those auctions before in London. I’ve seen all the catalogues. And I used to handle some of it when I first got to Christie’s and worked in appraisals. It just doesn’t fit the norm.”

  “What about Max Sebastian from Sotheby’s? Could he have set off some sort of alarm about it but bypassed you?”

  “I don’t know. You’ve met him. I’d be surprised. He’s not an ethical choirboy when it comes to stolen goods. There was once a big mess with the sale of Nok terra-cotta heads from Nigeria at a London gallery. They were all stolen by grave robbers and brought to the U.K. on cargo planes. He owned the gallery, he knew how they were obtained, and he was going to let them sell anyway. The sale was stopped and his hands somehow remained clean, but lesson learned. Max is not the type to tip off the cops.”

  “But they’re not really the cops.”

  “They’re worse. Tyler could get a dismissal because of them if this is what they’re alluding to, or fines. Jail time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I googled it.”

  “Oh, goody, well then, it’s gospel.”

  Jane took the drink out of my hands and finished it.

  “Have you talked to anyone else but those two agents?”

  “No. I’ve talked to no one. Tyler wasn’t home and he didn’t answer his phone. I called on repeat. Ten times. I’m too scared to go to base and ask for him.”

  “Do you want to stay here for a while?”

  “I do, but I don’t think I should. I don’t want these NCIS guys to think I’m hiding under the cloak of privilege. They’re coming back to the store tomorrow to see the bowl. And I guess I have to give it to them. I can’t just refuse, can I?”

  “No, you can’t. They know you have it somehow, so you have to give it to them. Or cooperate, as they say. But they’re not after you; they just asked you some questions. They don’t care where you stay.”

  No, they probably didn’t, but I wanted to be exactly where Tyler would expect me to be.

  “I’m sorry to bother you with this, Jane,” I said, standing up to leave. “Apologize to Carter for me. And try to keep him from getting involved.”

  I smiled at her and walked out the open front door. The long walk to the gate felt good and I looked out toward the east, to the little house that used to be mine. I could see myself, running in the yard with Brittan and Jane, cradled in a world of ease.

  I walked slowly back up Bellevue toward my apartment. I tried Tyler again. This time, when I called, his phone was off. Before, it had rung and then went to voicemail; now it was just dead. I called again. Same thing. I thought about calling Hannah, but the agents hadn’t even placed her at the University of Hartford. I started running. I had forgotten my jacket at Jane’s and now I was stunned cold in my T-shirt and jeans, running past rows of houses that had been built for very genteel people. Carter was wrong. I didn’t belong in the Dalby house and my New York apartment felt like something that suited my former, untainted self. I belonged somewhere in the middle, a gray area I’d been fighting to avoid my entire life.

  When I got closer to my apartment I saw someone standing outside, but I knew it wasn’t Tyler. It was Greg LaPorte. As soon as I saw him I stopped moving. He was in a white button-down shirt tucked into pressed khakis and he looked very calm. Annoyingly calm. He turned and looked at me and started walking my way. I stood where I was, wanting him to run toward me, but he just sauntered.

  He looked at my face, my worry, and tried to take my hand. “They talked to you. I thought it would happen today.”

  “Greg. Jesus. Why didn’t you tell me anything first?” I put my head on his chest without thinking about it and started to cry.

  “I’m sorry, Carolyn. I’m sorry. I wanted to, but that’s not exactly protocol. Don’t worry, this isn’t about you. It’s about Ford and you’re just a small part of all of this. You’re not in any trouble.”

  “A small part of what? I still have no idea what’s happening to Tyler.”

  “Let’s take a walk,” Greg said, starting to move away from my apartment. “I don’t want to talk about it here and I’m not going to ask to come into your house right now. You would be r
ight to say no.”

  I looked at him helplessly. He nodded at his car, the burnt orange Jeep Wrangler that the man at Goodwill had first told me about, and I got in. We drove in silence, first back to William’s, where he got out and checked the door of the store to make sure I had locked it when I ran out, and then to Ruggles Avenue. We parked by the water, got out of the car, and headed toward the Cliff Walk. Part of it was closed to tourists because of storm damage, but everyone who lived in Newport ignored the thin rope and warning sign the town had strung up. Greg helped me climb under it and toward the rocks. This part of the walk had never been paved, and now that it was closed, it was almost secluded. I jumped to a big, slick gray boulder overlooking the ocean, one of the area’s best surfing spots when it was open, and sat down. I didn’t care if my shoes got wet or if I slipped and cut my hands. I wanted to feel something. Greg sat next to me and tried to take my hand, but I pulled it away from him, looked out to the water, and said, “Tell me everything you know.”

  He put his freckled hands in his lap and laced his fingers together. They looked dry and cracked.

  “It was something you said that night at Brittan’s when we were standing outside her house and it was so cold. You were shivering. Brittan was with Mason and it was just us. Remember, we walked around to the side, past the tennis court, so we could see the water.”

  He looked at me for some sort of emotional response but I didn’t say anything. The wind was blowing hard and I was freezing, but this time, I was not going to let Greg attempt to put a jacket around me in some feigned gentlemanly fashion.

  “That night, you asked me if I had known a lot of people who died in the war. I remember it really well because you asked very genuinely. Some people ask because they want to see if you’re all messed up from PTSD, or they just like all the gruesome crap, but you asked like it mattered. And I was going to answer, but you said that you’d tried asking Ford. That he wouldn’t tell you.”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “But you said that Ford told you his translator had died. The translator he’d had on all four tours.”

  I looked at Greg, my face confirming what he said.

  “We shared a translator on my only tour in Iraq, his third. His name is Hassan al-Bayati. You said Tyler claimed he’d been his translator four times, which he was. I checked. But he’s not dead. He lives in Baghdad. I still keep in touch with him here and there. He’s waiting to get a special immigrant visa with the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project. People have tried to kill him, because he worked with us, but Hassan’s not dead. As soon as you said it, I knew Ford was lying to you.”

  Funny, that was around the time I knew that Ford was lying to me, too.

  “Another person would have thought, no big deal, just a lie about someone I don’t even know. But I know Ford. I thought he was lying to me in Iraq about selling military weapons but I could never prove it.”

  “So what? So that nothing incident has prompted you to investigate every statement he makes?”

  “He lied to me then, Carolyn! He took out a loaded Beretta and held it in front of my face. He’s a lying sack of shit. I knew it then, but I couldn’t prove it until now. And you helped me. He stole that bowl. He didn’t get it from a translator.”

  For the first time since I’d lived in Newport, the water looked menacing. The blue sky seemed too low, like it was moving down, quickly, toward me, and Greg’s presence was suffocating.

  “Are you sure about the translator being alive?”

  “Absolutely. I spoke to him yesterday.”

  “But Tyler said—”

  “Ford must have been caught off guard by your question. And it was a believable answer if you didn’t serve with him in Iraq, or know about his fucked-up behavior there, or bother to check out his story. I’m the only one from base who was with him over there on his third tour. Good lie, just bad luck.”

  “But what’s the bad luck? If that bowl wasn’t a gift from his translator, which it could have been, then where did it come from?”

  “Well, that’s what I wondered when you said that.”

  “But why didn’t you ask me? You know I worked for Christie’s.”

  “Because you already said everything you knew. That night we met at the Blue Hen you said you thought it was worth something, but you didn’t know what. That’s why you wanted to meet Ford, right? So you could figure out where it came from, figure out how much it was worth. After that you were intending to sell it. Just get some info and make a couple thousand bucks. You just hadn’t counted on Ford being Ford.”

  “I wasn’t counting on anything. I just wanted to sell it. I had emailed Max Sebastian. He’s the—”

  “World’s leading expert on Arabic antiquities.”

  “Yeah. Why do you know that?”

  “I know him from Quantico. He taught a class on Middle Eastern history while I was on base, before my deployment. I don’t know him well, but I knew him well enough to contact him. I sent him pictures of the bowl.”

  “You’re the one who took those pictures?”

  “I took a few pictures of my Goodwill donation. Goodwill sells some of their best things online, to draw national buyers. I thought the bowl had potential for a bigger sale. I’ve been working with them for a long time. It’s a good cause.”

  “But there were several pictures! There was one of the bottom, too.”

  “Like I said, I thought they could sell it online. They can make a lot of money that way. I was trying to help them. I wasn’t trying to help someone like you make money.”

  “But you didn’t even recognize it when I showed it to you at the Blue Hen. You didn’t even remember giving it to Goodwill!”

  “Well, I remember now.”

  I looked at him, thinking about him kissing my head outside Jane and Brittan’s house, and shuddered. “Greg. You’re a captain in the United States Marine Corps. You teach at a Marine aviation school, you do charity work. You’re a smart guy. Why do you care about this?”

  “What you said bothered me. I’m not a fan. I think Ford’s a cocky son of a bitch, and yes, I like you, so there’s that. You know that. But ever since what happened in Iraq in 2005, I knew he was a liar and a thief. But no one else saw it. To every­one else he was Tyler Ford, a total hotshot, and a dick to women, but one of the most loyal guys out there. Don’t piss him off and he’ll always have your back. Piss him off, and he’ll still have your back. Well, that reputation is bullshit.”

  I didn’t answer. I dug my hands into the rocks until one of my nails bent.

  “In the Marines, well, in every branch of military, there’s something called a general order—there was one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. It covers conduct and prohibits members of the military from looting, stealing, taking trophies of war, all that crap. I mean, you can’t just go abroad and rape and pillage. If I’m right about the bowl, which I am, this is what will first happen to him. Ford will get an article ninety-two for breaking general order article one-B, which prohibits the taking or retaining of public or private property of an enemy or former enemy. He might get an article one-twenty-one, too, for larceny and wrongful appropriation.”

  Greg still didn’t know about Hannah. He was frothing at the mouth with details, so excited to steamroll Tyler. If he’d known about Hannah, he would have told me. I could not be wrong about her. Greg was wrong. He had to be. The bowl may not have ended up in Goodwill because Tyler’s translator died—but the end of his relationship with Hannah was a death of a different kind.

  I moved my shoes against the rocks and listened to them slide on the rough surface. “So say he does get these charges placed against him. Then what?” I asked without looking at Greg’s arrogant face.

  “Then he could get court-martialed. Maybe he could get a plea deal, but probably not. He won’t go into pretrial confinement; that really only happens if the guy is suicid
al or a flight risk or is going to cause great harm to other people.”

  “Will I be able to talk to him?”

  “Yes, definitely. Even though you’re a witness now. Pretrial confinement is usually reserved for big crimes. And preventing the subject from talking to witnesses usually happens in domestic abuse cases only. Murder. The heavy stuff.”

  “Still, he’s going to have to go to court because of this thing that you brought to Goodwill.”

  “I only brought it to Goodwill because he left it in the Goodwill boxes we have on base. Maybe he didn’t think anyone would notice him doing it, or that it would get bought by an art dealer who used to work at Christie’s, but the world doesn’t always work out in your favor, does it.”

  “I can’t understand why, if you say he stole it and that he knew it was worth something, he would donate it to Goodwill. That makes absolutely no sense.”

  “Maybe he wanted to get rid of it without destroying it. Maybe it was hot. Maybe someone knew he had it. I don’t know.”

  “Okay, so let’s say it is hot. You’re forgetting that I have it now. He’s let me just keep it on a bookshelf in my bedroom?”

  “Did he ever try to get it back?”

  “No. Not once.” But that was another lie. He had asked for it back repeatedly. “Let’s say the whole translator thing was a lie and he does get reprimanded.”

  “Reprimanded? He’s not going to a time-out. He could be dismissed. Officers don’t get dishonorably discharged; that’s just in movies. But the likelihood of him being dismissed, that could happen. He could get fined, six figures, per offense, and up to ten years in prison.”

  Everything was just suspicion right now, Greg’s hunch.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that your golden boy isn’t so golden, Carolyn.”

  I was positive that Greg had practiced that line in advance.

  “Does Tyler know anything about this yet? I can’t get in touch with him. I’ve tried, I keep trying, I can’t find him.”