by Karin Tanabe
“NCIS investigations always start with witnesses and then move on to the subject. I reported it, they talked to me, then you, I don’t know who else. When they’re done building a case, and if they have enough to build a case, then they’ll talk to Tyler. If he’s not talking to you now, then he must have been contacted.”
“Why did NCIS bite on this? Why do they believe you?”
“Someone I spoke to thinks the bowl was looted from the National Museum of Iraq in 2003. Tyler was part of one of the first units deployed in April. His unit was closest to the museum when it was looted between April tenth and April twelfth. Now it’s in his girlfriend’s bedroom. It doesn’t look good.”
I wanted to scream, I wanted to shake Greg until he changed his mind, said it was all a lie.
“Who thinks that? Max Sebastian?”
“I don’t think I’m at liberty to say. It doesn’t really matter at this point. You have to give it to them. I told them you had it.”
“Of course you did; you’re such a virtuous guy.”
Greg stood up and walked over to me, but I stopped him.
“No Americans were involved in the looting, Greg. Everyone said that. There have been books written about it.”
“Maybe they’re wrong.”
“Really? Eleven years of experts looking into the theft are wrong? It was actually masterminded by some eighteen-year-old American marine from Wyoming with a high school education? You think that kid orchestrated one of the most devastating raids of priceless artifacts in history?”
“I didn’t say he was the mastermind. Involved.”
“You’re wrong. That’s like assuming the shoeshine boy at the White House assassinated Kennedy.”
“Wow, for being in love with Ford, you sure don’t give him much credit. Maybe he’s smarter than you think he is. Or than I think he is, for that matter.”
I stood up and looked at Greg, sitting calmly next to me. “Stay away from me, Greg,” I said, my voice full of anger. “I mean it.”
Greg didn’t follow me down the rocks. I could feel his eyes on me, watching me to make sure I didn’t fall.
The agents came back to see me the next day and I gave them the bowl, reminding them that legally, as far as I knew, I owned it. They didn’t say a thing about Hannah working in a pottery studio. I didn’t understand how they were missing that link, but I wasn’t going to bring it up. The only thing I felt sure of in all of this was that Hannah Lloyd was not a coincidence.
Two days passed without a word from Tyler or Greg. I told William what had happened and he told me to keep coming to work, living my life, rebuilding what I had come to Newport to rebuild. But it wasn’t possible now. Every hour that drifted by without Tyler, or the promise that I’d see him, felt like ticking off minutes of nothingness. I would wake up at night and expect him to be next to me, to throw a reassuring arm around me, to make love to me, but instead I slept with fear. It had only been two months, and I was very aware of the time frame, but I was a goner. All I cared about was Tyler.
“No one is going to tell you what’s happening,” said Jane when I spent my third night without Tyler, next to her instead of alone. Carter was ignoring me to the best of his abilities, but Jane was there, just like she always was.
Another day went by and still nothing. I went to his empty house. I called his phone. I contacted the agents who wouldn’t return my calls and I drove to a base that refused to let me past the gates.
It was early May, but the weather was still cool and thick clouds hung over the town, holding back a storm that refused to break through. I piled on sweaters, kept my head down, and tried not to lose myself. It had been five days since I’d talked to Tyler. After a day of work, while William went to Hook Durant’s for me, I took the free tourist bus that ran around the historic downtown in spring and summer, ignored the scenery, the swell of sightseers, and let my heavy eyes close. When I got home, I fell asleep for an hour, holding my phone. When I groggily came to, I tried Tyler again, but the phone never even rang.
CHAPTER 13
Max Sebastian is in Newport.”
“Say that again.”
“Max Sebastian is here, in Newport, today.”
“How do you know that? Did you see him?” I put down the Pennsylvania Dutch stool I had been polishing, with far too much vigor, for the last hour.
“He called Jane. He wanted to meet with her while he was here. He’s always trying to get her to sell her grandmother’s Muhammad Haravi watercolor, which she’ll never do. She declined Max’s invitation and wasn’t sure if she should tell you or not. She thought you might get too upset. So while she thought about it, I decided to come here and tell you. I know how disturbed you are by all this and I’m aware that I haven’t been your, shall we say, strongest ally lately.”
I looked up at Carter standing in the doorway of William’s store.
Max Sebastian was here. After my attempts to contact him he was now in Newport and not because of me.
“It has to be for Tyler’s bowl. I’m sure he’s the one who came up with all the National Museum of Iraq garbage.”
“That’s what we immediately thought when he called Jane this morning.”
“This morning when?” I looked at my watch. It was almost four o’clock. Max Sebastian could have come and gone.
“Around ten.”
“What do you know about how NCIS works?” I asked Carter. “Do they have their own art crime team? Could they do any testing on the bowl? Date testing?”
“I have no idea. But that could be why Max is here. He’s the best, right? Maybe they brought him in to authenticate.”
Carter left the store after I thanked him and when he closed the door I thought about Greg. Max was definitely the someone he spoke to who thought it was looted from the National Museum of Iraq. No one knew the inventory of the National Museum better than Max. He probably had a firmer grasp on what the museum had than many people who worked there.
I had to find him before he left Newport. I tried Greg’s phone, but it was off. I called the main number for Mardet and they said Greg was teaching for the next thirty minutes. I screamed to William, who was in the back doing inventory, that I was leaving and drove the route I had spent far too much time breaking speed limits on, toward the base.
When I got to the main gates I asked the guard to contact Greg LaPorte.
“He’s teaching at Mardet today. Did you try reaching him personally?”
“I have,” I said, knowing full well that they were not going to let me on base if I wasn’t someone’s guest.
“I think his phone is off and I have to see him, urgently. Could you leave a message and ask him to meet me here?” I asked.
I must have looked desperate because the guard called in and then told me to turn my car around and wait a few feet from base for Greg.
“You can’t be in this area and you can’t go on base without him. Just stay in my view and I’ll send him to you,” said the guard. I thanked him, did a U-turn, and parked my car illegally about ten yards from security. The only thing I could count on in this mess was Greg coming to see me when I needed him.
It was beautiful enough outside to roll down the windows, but I kept them up. I turned the radio off and sat there, staring ahead, in silence. How long had it been since Tyler and I had been on base, telling each other just enough to start falling in love? I thought back. It had only been two months. And in the short time before and after I had found him, I’d become infatuated with him, been afraid of him, fallen in love with him, believed in him, questioned him, and been disappointed and abandoned by him. I didn’t know which of those emotions was strongest now. Maybe fear.
I was overwhelmed with that fear when Greg came to see me, and because my windows were up, I didn’t hear him approaching the car. He knocked on the glass and I screamed. I looked to the left and saw him
still wearing the placid expression that I wanted to slap off when he told me about Tyler on the Cliff Walk.
I rolled down the window and told him to get in the car.
“Where are we going?” he said with an impish grin.
“We’re going to drive.” I headed south toward town on Farewell Street and let Greg smile like a marionette for the first five minutes. I didn’t know where to go so I turned onto Thames, passing the Blue Hen, and taking a left up Mill to Spring. I parked in front of St. Mary’s Church and let go of the steering wheel.
“Max Sebastian is in Newport,” I said, turning my head toward him and shutting off the ignition. “Can’t imagine you know anything about that.”
“I know everything about that, but you said you never wanted to see me again.”
“I remember what I said!” I screamed. “Obviously, I remember. But my current disdain for you is muted by the fact that you know a lot that I don’t. I’m not sure why that’s the case, but it is.”
“Because I’m on base. And also, I don’t have blinders on in regards to what Ford’s done.”
I hated the way Greg talked about Tyler. His superiority seeped out of him.
“Have those detectives talked to you again?” I asked.
“Just once.” Greg looked at me without a shred of guilt and said, “You may have pieced together by now that the person who believes that Tyler’s bowl was stolen from the National Museum in Iraq was Max Sebastian.”
I raised my eyebrows, too fuming to answer. Tyler’s bowl. That’s probably what Greg had been calling it to everyone who would listen. Say it enough and the world would start to believe him.
“When I reached out to Max, he didn’t say anything about the fact that you’d emailed him,” Greg said. “I didn’t know that until you told me when we were on the Walk. Max was very responsive and we had a few back-and-forths right away.” He spoke like Max was some old prep school buddy instead of an instructor he barely knew at Quantico.
“The detail that I’ve been wanting to tell you all day, but was afraid to because of our memorable last encounter, is that we, Max and I, spoke to NCIS together this morning. That bowl, the one you have, or had, Max was able to confirm that it was once in the National Museum of Iraq.”
I didn’t buy it. There was no way that Tyler was ever in possession of something from the National Museum of Iraq. It was impossible. Greg may have been giving it his stamp of approval, but I was not, even with Max involved.
“I don’t believe you.”
“It doesn’t matter what you believe now. Max confirmed it. He was in touch with the head of the museum, who sent a fax of their file. They have pictures of the bowl in their records. It was acquired by the museum on March twenty-fifth, 2003. It was never fully inspected but it was logged into their system. They have the record stating that they acquired it.”
Greg was smug. He was trying to come off as caring, helpful, the good cop to Tyler’s callous criminal, but it wasn’t working. He was too proud of what he’d done, catching Tyler in a lie and getting marvelous Max all the way to Newport. I didn’t want to know the rest. I turned away from Greg and looked at the church next to me. It was where John and Jackie Kennedy had married. I remembered walking past it when I was young and dreaming about Jackie’s fairy-tale day. Then when I got older I found out that Jack was already cheating on her and that she had to stand in a receiving line for three hours. The truth lost a lot of its luster with age.
“Why was it never inspected?” I asked Greg. I knew the answer, but I had to hear him say it for it to become real.
“It was stolen from the museum during the looting a few weeks later.”
“So let me try to understand something.” I put my hands in my lap and squeezed one with the other. “I contact Max Sebastian, nothing happens. You contact Max Sebastian and suddenly this bowl was part of the collection of the National Museum of Iraq and it was looted during the war. Don’t you find that a little odd? It’s not like we contacted him months apart. It had to be a matter of weeks.”
“Maybe he didn’t pay any attention to it until two people contacted him about the same object. That was probably enough to get him to start looking.”
“You who has all the answers. Tell me one thing. Where has Tyler been through all this? Because he is certainly not with me.”
“He’s on base. I don’t think he’s left since it started. I’ve seen him a few times, but we haven’t spoken.”
“Because he would spit in your face.”
“He’s a little more reserved than you are.”
“Oh yeah? That’s not what everyone told me. Weren’t you and your friends warning me every chance you got? Worried that I’d be the next Hannah Lloyd.”
Hannah. Greg still hadn’t said anything about Hannah. NCIS had to have pieced together that Hannah was a potter. They couldn’t be missing that very important link. If they were talking to witnesses, their reach must have gone beyond me and Greg.
I rolled down the windows and let the voices and laughter from the tourists walking from Thames Street to Bellevue move through the car. I wanted so badly to be one of them, just a girl without a care in the world who went to Newport simply to vacation.
“I want to see Max,” I said firmly. “You know he’s here; you must know where he is.”
“He’s not in Newport.”
“Then where in the hell is he, Greg? You’re his sudden soul mate. Tell me where he is.”
“He’s in Providence for the day. He’s doing something called a TL test on the bowl.”
I turned to Greg, feeling my face flush.
“Max Sebastian is doing a thermoluminescence test? You cannot be serious.”
“I am. Thermoluminescence, is that a TL test? He specifically said TL test.”
“Yes, that’s the most definitive test you can do to date-stamp pottery. But why is he bothering! The museum in Iraq may not have had the opportunity to properly test it themselves but if it’s even three hundred years old, it wouldn’t be worth half a million. Max never goes to this much trouble for a single object. It’s not even from an important estate!”
“But it’s a crime. It will be in all the papers. Three years after Operation Iraqi Freedom ends, eleven years after the museum was raided, objects that were looted are still turning up and in the hands of marines in the United States. Max probably wants the press.”
Of course he did. Max would glue himself to a camera lens if he could with his overly done Cambridge accent and Dunhill suits. But to go to the trouble of TL testing? Blair Bari hadn’t even considered it. He handled it for a matter of minutes and ruled it out. The difference was that Max now knew it had been in the museum, because Max had access and connections that no one else had. It seemed that was all it took.
“Will they really be able to date it?” asked Greg.
“Definitely. It’s one of the only methods that can get you in a hundred-year window. TL is just the light that some minerals emit when they’re heated following irradiation. It’s all about light. If you compare the light output that the bowl, or whatever you’re testing, produces and compare it to commonly known doses of radiation produced naturally by the object, you can tell how much radiation the piece has absorbed. When the piece was originally fired, it would have been stripped from all its TL. So TL at zero. You then have to measure the accumulated dose and break it down per year. You drill out a tiny part. But it’s really small, like five millimeters, and they’ll do it from the base.”
I looked at Greg, repulsed by the satisfied expression on his face, and watched him stand up to leave. “I’ll try to connect you with Max. Drop me back at base and I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything. He’s not leaving tonight.”
But Max did leave that night. Greg called me to tell me that he hadn’t heard from Max that evening and didn’t the following day, either.
> I woke up early the next day. It was a perfect mid-May morning in New England. No humidity, all sunshine, and everyone in town trying to figure out how they could spend the day outside. It was the weather you boasted about if you were from the Northeast. The good weather made me panic. It was like the world was tumbling peacefully forward while I’d stopped following. It had been eight days since I’d seen Tyler. I was overwhelmed with thoughts that all started with “If he really loved me . . .” but I knew it wasn’t fair. He could have been told not to contact me. But what seemed more likely was that he didn’t want to contact me.
I took out the pictures of the bowl that I had sent Max and laid them on the floor again. I sat there and willed some sort of new thoughts, for some marking on the thing to expose its story, but I still saw nothing. I had meant to ask Greg if Max had said anything about the words on the bottom, but I’d been too taken aback by the fact that Max was bothering to TL-test it at all.
I’d tried calling Max again. I’d tried to contact him four times yesterday, hoping he might take my calls because of Greg, but still nothing. No response to any attempts I made from phone messages, to emails, and even one relayed by an assistant. Max Sebastian did not want me involved.
I thought about him in Newport and why he bothered to come in the first place. If he’d gone back to London, that meant that he’d finished TL testing. I knew getting the results from the military was a reach, so I called Blair Bari. TL testing was a process, and not a cheap one. If Brown had done it for Max, he could have been involved.
The phone rang three times before Blair’s voice came on the line. I said my name in the rushed, nervous tone I’d gotten used to using that week and he responded warmly.
“You are calling about Max Sebastian.”
“Of course I am. Were you involved at all with his TL test of the bowl?”
“I could have been.”
Yes, and I could have been born with a tail. Blair Bari was supposed to be the voice of reason in this. My confidant.
“Can you tell me anything about it?”
