The Price of Inheritance

by Karin Tanabe

  I opened the top drawer of his dresser, but everything looked totally normal. Boxers folded, socks paired. Nothing seemed out of character except that it was a house that had, by what I could tell, been empty for nine days and was now unlocked.

  I ran my hand against the edge of his bedspread and went back to smooth it out when I saw the crease I had left.

  When I went back downstairs I looked around the living room again. I didn’t know what I was looking for besides Tyler himself. Some sign that he was okay or that he had been home, but I didn’t have either. I saw the picture of Katie, just where it had always been, and close to it was the Bible I had looked at after I had spoken to Blair Bari. I walked over to it and examined the spine. The leather-bound King James Bible. I was afraid to touch it. It was from his mother. He’d taken it to Iraq. It felt sacred—too sacred for a stranger’s hands.

  I ran my finger very gently down the spine and thought about how Tyler had put me in this situation. If he had come to see me in the last nine days, done something besides leave me a note via the Finlay chair at Hook’s, then I wouldn’t be here. Feeling a small burst of anger, I took the book down from the shelf and as soon as I opened it, a picture fell out onto the beige rug. I leaned down and picked it up, trying not to smudge it. It was a family photo taken in a field in what I imagined was Wyoming. There was Tyler in his military uniform with his mother and his older sister. His mother had blue eyes and dark hair, deep wrinkles around her eyes, and was tall like him, but his sister had brown eyes and lighter hair. She was very pretty. Not as attractive as Tyler, but beautiful in a more innocent, made-in-the-Heartland way. They stood, with Tyler in the middle, against a white fence. I put the photo back inside the cover, feeling like I was leaving dirty fingerprints and traces of guilt all over it.

  I didn’t know what I would do if he came in. Apologize when I should have been screaming and I didn’t want to be in that position. I held the Bible in my hand, sure not to drop the picture again, and flipped back to Revelation. I moved slowly to the sections until I found 1:17: “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.” In Tyler’s Bible, in unsteady blue ink, the phrase “I am the first and the last” was underlined. I looked at it for a few moments, then quickly flipped through other sections to see if he had underlined anything else, but that was all. Just that passage in Revelation, the same one Blair Bari had spoken to me about when I showed him the bowl. With numb hands, I placed the Bible back on the shelf, made sure it was flush with the other books, rushed to the back door, and let myself out.

  I put in a few hours at William’s store that evening, staying late just like I promised.

  “Your punishment is inventory,” he said, handing me a flashlight. He straightened his navy blue blazer, undid his bow tie, and walked out the front door, locking it behind him.

  I didn’t mind staying late that night. I had so much to think about after what Hannah had said and what I’d seen at his house. I needed to talk to Tyler. I could do nothing until I spoke to him and until then, all I could do was replay Hannah’s words in my overloaded mind. She had made a fake base. Not only a fake base, but a weighted fake base. Few potters, I imagined, had ever been tasked with making an old bowl look new, but she had taken that upon herself. Or had he asked her to do it?

  Marble and a fake ceramic bottom with the same words in Hebrew. I thought about the words and the way she had said, “Of course I do,” when I asked if she knew what they were. I had never seen the pictures of the bowl from the museum’s archives, but maybe the words were different, or not there at all. But then I thought about Max. If there had been a discrepancy on that detail he would not have flown in.

  I took all these parts and tried to make them a whole as I sat on the floor in the back of the store, logging in what William had bought on a trip to Boston. There was a small table that reminded me a little of the Hugh Finlay stenciled pier table from Baltimore. I thought about that day sitting on the floor of Elizabeth’s sprawling Texas home with Nicole. My career was booming. I had just sold the most expensive piece of American furniture in history and I was poised to help acquire the country’s best private collection of American-made furniture before flying home to a perfect New York life. I missed walking in the park and the energy pumping from the city every season. I missed all the parties and events I used to attend because of Christie’s. And most of all, I missed the challenge of the job. I loved William’s but the chase was different when you were doing it for an antique store. Until recently. I sat and inspected and typed things in a spreadsheet and thought about everything that made New York perfect, until I admitted to myself that it hadn’t been perfect. My nerves, after a decade at Christie’s, had been shattered. Alex treated me like a call girl he could always run back to, and I was so consumed by work that the New York life I dreamed about was still out of my reach. I didn’t have anything there outside of Christie’s.

  I turned over the table that looked like the one from Elizabeth’s and examined the base. I thought about Hannah’s base, the false one she had created. What I couldn’t figure out was why that bowl. Why replicate something that, at best, was worth half a million dollars when there were so many other, far more expensive works out there? The Sacred Vase of Warka, a five-thousand-year-old piece found in the thirties in southern Iraq by German Assyriologists, had been stolen from the Iraqi museum. It was dated to 3000 B.C. and worth a fortune on the black market. Ten thousand other pieces were missing, and I was sure several thousand of those were worth more than the green and white bowl. Tyler’s bowl. There were also items that were much smaller and easier to smuggle that were stolen from the basement storeroom, including glass bottles, cylinder seals, and jewelry. Things so small that you could put them in your pockets and get on an airplane. That bowl, why Hannah was copying that particular object, didn’t make sense.

  I had read a lot about the robbery at the museum in the last nine days. Mobs of thieves had looted the building between April 10 and 12, 2003. American troops had been criticized for not guarding it, and the higher-ups had been under even harsher judgment for not ordering it to be protected, but many troops who were on the ground said that their first job was protecting life, not art. I understood that. Some global press didn’t, but most of us would protect a human over a vase. Even a very valuable vase. But it was devastation. One of the world’s oldest civilizations was stripped of its cultural heritage. Or as I and many others saw it, our collective cultural heritage. A recent article I had read, recent but still three years old, talked about 632 pieces from the museum being returned from the United States. Six hundred and thirty-two was nowhere close to the ten thousand that were missing. I imagined a majority of the pieces were in the United States. We were the largest art market in the world with a huge collector base.

  In the last thirty minutes I hadn’t logged anything for William. I was still staring at the legs of the pier table like I was waiting for them to wiggle. I clicked open the Excel spreadsheet I was working on and wrote, “far left inside leg, minor scratches,” and then flipped the table back over. When I raised my head, I realized that there was someone at the door. The motion sensor light we kept over it had turned on and even from the back of the storage room I could see it. I stood up and walked to the main room and through the glass I could just make out his face, his blue eyes, his revealing expression. He lifted his hand to knock but pulled it away when he saw me emerge from the back room. By the time I got to the door, unlocked it, and opened it, I was crying. He came in the store and put his arms around me. He was wearing the same thin white shirt he wore on the boat that day with the Dalbys. It smelled clean against my face. I let him pull me closer to him, his arms firmly around me, and I cried uncontrollably, the kind of crying you’re surprised your body can sus
tain for more than a few seconds. Everything about Tyler seemed bigger. His muscles felt thicker, his eyes wider, his presence more palpable. The part he played in my life had gone from starring role to all-encompassing.

  “I said soon,” he whispered into my ear as I flooded his shirt with tears. He ran his strong hands through my hair, down my cheeks, across my lips. I didn’t move my head. I said, “I hate you,” over and over again until he held me an arm’s distance away and said, “You can’t. I won’t let you.”

  That was enough to turn my elation at seeing him into anger. All the veins in his arms seemed to be jumping out of his flesh. I may have been in love with him but right now I hated every inch of that skin.

  “You do not get to do this!” I screamed, pulling away. I walked past him and closed the door to the store, sensing how my voice was going to travel into the street very quickly. “You do not get to be the one who comes to me, just like that, when you’re ready, when you want to. Nine days without one word from you! How dare you. You are a selfish bastard.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to get you involved any more than you already were.”

  “You’re sorry? Oh, well, thank you. Everything is fine now! One ‘I’m sorry’ and the world can go on turning. You’re acting like this is nothing, Tyler! Nothing! Like this is a dentist’s appointment!”

  “I’m not acting like anything,” he said, walking toward me. “I needed a couple of days to sort out a few things.” He pressed my arms to my sides and pulled me toward him, so close that I could feel his heart beat.

  “Oh. A few things. What did you need to do? Update your Netflix queue? Maybe pick some fantasy baseball team? Or did you have to, say, cover your tracks because you’re an art smuggler? Is that what you had to do? Did you have to, I don’t know, destroy evidence? Or see how you could pin the entire thing on me? Maybe tell NCIS that I wanted to sell a stolen piece of chintz on the black market to my billionaire buddies? But wait! There’s the kicker! Because it’s not a piece of chintz, is it. Since February, I happened to have something worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars on my bookshelf in my mold-infested apartment. But why would you tell me that? Not because you’re in love with me! Remember that speech, Tyler! It wasn’t very long ago, was it? ‘You should always jump when someone says jump.’ Well, let me tell you how much I regret jumping. I should have never, never gone looking for you!”

  “You’re worried,” he said, leaning down to kiss me. I pulled away before he could, so hard that his fingers left marks on my arm. He rested his hands on his slightly faded jeans, the ones he had been wearing the first night he walked into the store, when he had changed everything for me.

  “Worried? Worried? Oh no. Not at all. Why should I be worried! It’s just a day at the fair to have military police come to my door and seize my property. And then everyone I know tells me you’re a worthless piece of shit. Why would that cause me any worry? And to just blow another hole in it, you disappear! I haven’t seen you in nine days. Nine fucking days! I’ve been going crazy. I can’t sleep, I’m a zombie at work. William thinks I’m about to hang myself with some antique militia rope. I’ve been searching the town for you, and for what?! You haven’t been home, you don’t answer your phone. You abandoned me!”

  “But you don’t hate me. You’re going to still love me through all this because I need you to.”

  Tyler’s voice was steady, and smooth, his thin shirt tight around his upper back and shoulders. He looked settled, not like he’d been distressed or hiding out on base, panicking. I looked at him and hated the way his hair was cut so close to his head, detested the translucent blue of his eyes, the way his muscles flexed even when he wasn’t moving, and I hated him for wearing the last shirt I had seen him in, like no time had elapsed at all, like nothing had changed.

  “Why should I love you!” I screamed. “I loathe you. I loathe the very thought of you. It’s you who is not in love with me. Is this how someone acts when they’re in love? You are selfish. You are selfish to a point of embarrassment. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “I am ashamed of myself. I’m very ashamed of myself,” he said, moving closer to me again. “I have been for years. That’s been part of the problem. Do you think I would have become this guy, Tyler Ford, Newport’s inglorious bastard, if I thought I was a real great guy?” Even then, with that admission, his voice didn’t rise, gliding toward me, unshakable.

  “So tell me something about what’s happening, Tyler,” I said, trying to calm myself down. I was starting to choke on my own tears. “Who are you? Who the fuck are you? You’re supposed to be this asshole Newport playboy who sleeps with every girl under forty with slightly symmetrical features and scares the crap out of people and for a few short weeks, you end up being the best guy I’ve ever known. Then you turn out to be the best guy I thought I knew. You paint yourself to be this nobody from nowhere who never went to college and drank his way through high school. You make fun of this quirky little obsession I have with antiques and then you are the reason I’m getting harassed by NCIS—over what? Over an antiquity! Or not an antiquity. Is it a copy? Is it real? Or are you just fucking all of us over? I don’t know what you are anymore. Right now I think you’re a liar.”

  “I am a liar,” said Tyler, coming even closer to me.

  “How much do you know about art?”

  “Not that much.”

  “How much do you know about the art of the Middle East?”

  “More.”

  “How much do you know about theft?”

  “A lot.”

  I sat down on a chair and wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my white shirt. It was one that I used to wear all the time at Christie’s, spun so thick that the sleeves wouldn’t fray for the next hundred years.

  “I know about Hannah,” I said. “I saw her yesterday.”

  “Yeah,” said Tyler sitting on the end of an Italian Rococo sofa that was next to me. “I know. She called me.”

  “Oh really? You answer her calls? Because you haven’t picked mine up in nine days. Are you sure it’s me you love?”

  “I’m sure.” He didn’t reach out for me or move from his chair; he just looked at me. I wanted his voice to rise, I wanted him to scream with me, but he was still and even, his body language irritatingly composed.

  “What did she tell you?” I demanded.

  “She told me that you were very smart. That you had, at two different times, owned the bowl I gave her to copy and the bowl she made me. And she asked me what I had done.”

  I wiped my face on my sleeve again and tried to keep my voice from breaking. “I don’t care what you told Hannah. I don’t want you to talk to Hannah. I want you to tell me what you did.”

  “Well, it’s a long story.”

  “Really, it’s a long fucking story? How perfectly swell. How about you start telling it right now, immediately, from the beginning.”

  “After I tell you everything, someone is going to be arrested.”

  “You?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Hannah?”

  “No.”

  “Fine, who. Who is going to be arrested?”

  “Max Sebastian.”

  I felt my body go cold. Tyler knew Max.

  “Max Sebastian? Do you know Max Sebastian?” I said, my voice rising in equal parts of surprise and anger.

  “I do. I’ve known him since 2003, when he came to Quantico to teach a class on Middle Eastern history.”

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “I’m not. I’m not kidding, I’m not lying and I’m not keeping anything from you from this point on, so listen.”

  I crossed my legs, glared at him, and listened. Max Sebastian was British. He had a very big job at Sotheby’s. What the hell was he doing at Quantico all the time? Greg had met him and so had Tyler.

  “I got to know M
ax pretty well during his first visit to base. I liked him. He was the first British person I had ever met and even without the accent, I’d never met anyone like him. He was refined, well dressed, well spoken, well everything. One night, right before I was being deployed, he asked me to go out drinking. We got along pretty well and he asked if I wanted to see New York. I’d never been there before and he offered to take me, to pay for the trip. Other people had gone home to say goodbye to parents, friends, but I figured it was one of those God-bless-America kind of moments and I went. It was in New York that he asked me if I would be interested in making money while I was in Iraq. I asked him what kind of money and he said, pretty good money.”

  “What is pretty good money to an eighteen-year-old from Wyoming?”

  “Four hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Four hundred thousand dollars. That’s good money to anyone.”

  “Yes, it is. And it was very good money to me then.”

  “What did he ask you to do?”

  “Well, I thought that he was going to ask me to kill someone. I really did. I was eighteen, I’d watched a lot of movies.”

  “But he didn’t . . .”

  “No. He asked me to meet someone while I was in Iraq and to bring something back for him. He knew which unit I was in. He knew that I worked with supply helicopters. I was the perfect middleman for him. I was young, too stupid to question what I was doing, and could get through a lot of security easily.”