Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  “Her father is a poet,” I said. “I suppose you know that? Does he live here with Rasima?”

  A cautious exchange of glances. “You really not with ICE?” the boldest said.

  “I really am not with ICE. You can call the lawyer, or you can look me up online and see the kind of work I do.” I handed them cards with my website address. They studied them before tucking them into their jeans pockets.

  Hania looked around. “He was here sometimes but he’s illegal.”

  “When did you last see him?” I asked.

  They hunched their shoulders; they didn’t watch for him, they couldn’t say.

  “Maybe more than two weeks,” Raina said, “because those men just now, they were trying to shame Rasima about being in the apartment without a—a wasi.”

  “Wasi?” I asked.

  “A minder,” Hania translated. “A man or an old woman who would be taking care of her.”

  “A man who would give her orders,” Raina said. “But Rasima isn’t wanting a man to give her orders.”

  “Yeah, but when those guys saw her with Felix, I thought they were going to kill both her and him,” Hania said. “So maybe it would be better if she had a wasi.”

  The thought silenced all of us; no one spoke again until the elevator arrived. Once we were on board, the girls retreated into their own world, speaking in Arabic, not about me, I thought, since they were giggling and punching each other.

  Apartment hallways smell like the cooking of the residents. No overboiled cabbage as I followed the letters on the fourth-floor doors, but sharp spices. I could pick out the cardamom and cloves, but the rest were too subtle for me.

  Apartment P was locked, without crime scene tape. My picks are getting to be obsolete with all the new electronic door locks, but this building was old, and the lock still had the kind of tumblers I could handle.

  It was a small place, one large main room with a desk, a pullout couch, prayer rugs, and a wall of books, mostly in Arabic. The one bedroom clearly belonged to Rasima—engineering textbooks had been tossed onto the narrow bed, as if dumped after being shaken for documents.

  The law hadn’t touched a shelf holding miniature gears and pulleys. These were like the careful work I’d seen at Felix’s, but more domestic—an elaborate pulley turned the handle of a wringer on an open washing machine, foot pedals moved a carpet sweeper. I longed to pick them up and play with them, but I didn’t want to add to the damage created by law enforcement.

  The girls had exaggerated when they said ICE had trashed the place. Besides the disruption in Rasima’s bedroom, they’d pulled papers out of drawers, books off shelves, and flung clothes onto the closet floor, but it wasn’t nearly the mess the wreckers had created in Reno’s apartment: the feds had reassembled the sofa bed in the living room, sort of, and hadn’t emptied spices or flour in the kitchenette in the corner.

  They’d knocked over the family photos on the desk in the main room. I picked them up and studied them: big family gatherings where Rasima was one small girl among many children, distinguishable even when young by her narrow face and deep-set eyes. Rasima in a school uniform, clutching the hand of a slightly older boy, and in another, both children with their parents. Pictures of a courtyard in the middle of a square of small houses, pictures of a man working on a bicycle chain. I took a picture of that one—Tarik Kataba in the days before Assad’s prison and the Syrian civil war, grinning happily at the camera.

  I set the photos back up on the desk, adjusting the edges where pictures had become dislodged, then picked up the papers from the floor and sat on the daybed to examine them. Some were in Arabic, which surprised me—I assumed the feds would have taken everything in Arabic to sift for proof of terrorism. The rest were the ordinary detritus of life, receipted bills, unpaid bills, a notice to Tarik from Force 5:

  Dear Valued Employee,

  Because you have missed your shift two nights in a row, we are taking you off our work register. To return to work you must go to our offices on Milwaukee Avenue and file your paperwork again.

  By this point, I wasn’t surprised to see that Kataba had worked for Force 5, although the confirmation was valuable. I looked at the postmark on the notice: almost a week before Fausson’s body had turned up in the forest preserve.

  Felix had blurted out Where’s he from? to Lieutenant McGivney. It looked to me as though he was afraid that the dead man might have been Kataba. The poet had disappeared, and Rasima and Felix were scared about what had happened to him—I guessed.

  Fausson and Kataba had known each other in Syria. They reconnected in Chicago, which made it likely that Rasima also knew Fausson. I was afraid that made it plausible that Felix also had known him, unless his relationship with Rasima was very new.

  Rasima was in detention because ICE wanted to find her father. I thought again of the hundred-dollar bills under Fausson’s floor. Maybe the cruds who’d shot at me really had been federal agents, but what was Fausson up to? Currency smuggling is an electronic business these days, but I suppose small-time hoods still did it the old-fashioned way, with actual bills. Or could Fausson traffic in refugees? I hadn’t even thought of that, but given his attachment to his Syrian friends, he might be raising money to help bring people into this country. Tarik and Rasima, for instance.

  I couldn’t make sense of any of it, but I was getting hungry, which made it harder to do keen analytical work.

  Before leaving the building, an impulse to help Rasima made me go into her bedroom to tidy up the engineering books. Among them was a small pamphlet, printed on shiny cheap paper in English and Arabic—Treasures of the Saraqib Museum. The museum building was on the cover, a whitewashed structure of brick or stone, about the size of a small house.

  The treasures inside came from the Tell at Ebla, the text told me. The first few pages were in black and white—photos of figurines of cows and goddesses and bulls, some jewelry, a number of clay tablets, a few ivory pieces. The pamphlet fell open to a two-page spread with staples down the middle. There was a single photograph, in color, of the body of a man with the head of a fish.

  36

  Treasures of Saraqib

  At a diner near where I’d parked I ordered a bowl of tomato-chickpea soup, but it grew cold while I frowned over the centerfold in Treasures of the Saraqib Museum. In the photograph, you could see that the figure was of a giant fish embracing a man, rather than a man with a fish’s head. The fish head covered the man’s head like a headdress, leaving the man’s eyes and nose visible. The fish’s body was draped across his neck and back, with the tail hanging below his waist.

  The man was naked except for a short skirt made of fish scales. He wore wrist guards and held something knobby in his left hand. I squinted—it looked like rows of teeth. In his right hand he carried what looked like a purse. When I met with Peter Sansen at the Oriental Institute this evening I’d ask him about it.

  In the photo, the statue gleamed more golden than bronze, but as far as I could tell, it was identical to the piece I’d seen in Candra van Vliet’s office Monday morning.

  Dagon, Peter Sansen had called it. I looked it up online. Dagon apparently wasn’t a god of fishing but of agriculture. He guaranteed fertile fields and had been worshipped in a part of ancient Sumer called Ebla. Until the recent mayhem in Syria, Ebla had been an archaeology mecca. It was near the modern town of Saraqib, where Lawrence Fausson had met the poet Tarik Kataba.

  “You’re not eating; soup is no good?” The waitress had appeared at my elbow.

  I assured her it was delicious, but she was solicitous; it wasn’t good cold, she’d bring a fresh bowl. When it came, I ate it quickly, to forestall her concern, and ordered a coffee.

  Rasima or her father must have brought the treasure out of Saraqib to keep it safe from the ISIS looters. They had delivered it to Candra van Vliet in the middle of Sunday night. No, Rasima was already in custody. Her father, perhaps? The Syrian poet trying to safeguard his country’s treasures? Or Fel
ix, trying to help his lover.

  I drummed my fingers on the diner counter. My impulse was to race back to the IIT to confront Felix, but I couldn’t think what purpose that would serve. Did it matter if it had been Felix or Tarik Kataba who’d delivered the Dagon to the Oriental Institute? The more important question, after all, was: Who had wanted it badly enough to break in and steal it?

  There was one other color photo in the pamphlet, the statuette of a horned woman holding snakes in her outstretched hands. The figure looked contemporary, the hair short with a circlet around it. In the photo, she looked greeny brown, with rouged lips. I looked at the black-and-white photos on the pamphlet’s other pages. Clay tablets, rings, a necklace, some figurines. Also a small stone lion. I knew that lion, or one like it. I squinted at it. Part of the right forepaw was missing. It had been sitting on Lawrence Fausson’s desk when I went into the apartment last week.

  The lion, the fish-man—what treasure of Saraqib would show up next? And exactly what was Fausson’s role in them? Thief, middleman, protector?

  But if he’d spent the two years after he left Syria collecting artifacts to sell, where was his hoard? I’d been to his apartment an hour ahead of the shooters; other than the lion, he hadn’t kept statues or clay tablets there, not unless he’d torn up floorboards throughout his apartment to create caches.

  Apartments often had storage lockers in their basements. Fausson could have used one of those, but I was betting on an outside locker—he needed to control access to his treasures, and an apartment basement wouldn’t be secure. Always assuming he had treasures to store.

  I called Niko Cruickshank, to see if he’d found anything else on Fausson’s hard drive—such as the address of a storage locker.

  “I’m recovering part of his address book,” Niko said, “but it’s a jumble of names in English and Arabic and I can’t match them to e-mail or phone. I have sentences here and there from documents; I’m compiling a file, which I’ll send you, but it’s pretty much gibberish. How much money do you want to spend, Vic? I’ve already put in eighteen hours.”

  At one-fifty an hour, that was $2,700. I was bleeding money on family matters. “See what you can retrieve in another six,” I said finally. “Addresses and money are what I’m most interested in.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Niko said, “but there’s not a lot here. You should have used something else as a shield, not the hard drive.”

  “That would have been my spine, Niko. In which case you’d be giving your information to my ghost.”

  “You’re my favorite client, Warshawski. No one else has your sense of humor.”

  “It wasn’t meant as a joke,” I said, but he hung up.

  I paid my bill, adding the price of the first bowl of soup to the tip. As I climbed back into my car, I tried to remember what else I’d seen in Lawrence Fausson’s apartment last week.

  The drama and trauma of escaping the shooting had dominated my memory. I leaned back in my car seat, picturing the apartment. I’d entered and had been overwhelmed by the aerial photo on the wall. I’d gone into the bedroom and found the book by Candra van Vliet. Receipts next to the bed for the Damascus Gate on Austin. I’d been in the closet, riffling through Fausson’s clothes. No keys there or in his desk drawers.

  If he’d carried all his keys with him, whoever killed him had the keys. Unless they’d fallen out of his pocket when he’d been dragged through the woods.

  A trip to the squirrel home in Cap Sauers Holding would take whatever was left of daylight. Anyway, it was a job for a team of trackers, not one weary solo op.

  Lieutenant McGivney with the sheriff’s police had a team of trackers, if he felt like sending them into the woods. I thought about how to couch the conversation.

  McGivney greeted my call with a rough grunt. I guess that was a step up from Felix’s surly “Now what?”

  “Did ICE tell you what they found in Lawrence Fausson’s apartment?” I asked.

  “ICE?” he echoed. “What the hell were they doing in there?”

  “They don’t confide in me,” I said primly. “I thought they might share with a fellow law officer.”

  He snorted. “The day that anyone from Homeland shares as much as a football score with local LEOs is the day pigs fly. How do you even know they were there?”

  “It came up in conversation with a local reporter,” I said, figuring McGivney didn’t need to know I was the one who mentioned it to Murray Ryerson. “Shots were fired in Fausson’s building; the shooters claimed they were with ICE.”

  McGivney digested that. “‘Claimed’? Anybody see ID?”

  “If I knew I’d tell you. I don’t know. Don’t know if they were agents or home invaders, don’t know if they were men or women, how many there were, how they got into the building, how many shots were fired, or even if anybody inside the building was hurt.”

  “So you got squat but you’re calling me for a reason. Which is?”

  “I hoped you’d heard from ICE. I hoped they’d found Lawrence Fausson’s keys, and that they would have shared that knowledge with you. Unless you already had them, that is.”

  “Why do you want Fausson’s keys? You want my sanction to go into the apartment? Why do you need that when Martha Simone can get you a court order to let you in?”

  It was my turn to pause while I went back over my conversations with McGivney. Simone had told the state’s attorney she had an investigator digging into Fausson’s associates; McGivney had made the leap, but it was a reasonable guess.

  “From what I hear, Fausson’s apartment didn’t have a lot of value in it. If he brought anything back from the Middle East with him besides his books of Arabic poetry, it would be in a storage locker. I suppose he could have rented—”

  “What do you mean?” McGivney demanded. “What did he bring back from the Middle East?”

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant. That’s why I’d like to find his keys, see if he rented a locker somewhere.”

  “But you have evidence of something. Was he a smuggler? What did he smuggle? Drugs?”

  “It’s true he spent a lot of time in the Middle East, including Afghanistan, but he flew home on commercial flights, and it’s not that easy for a single person to bypass customs, immigration, and so on with a suitcase full of heroin.”

  “How do you know? About the flights, I mean.”

  Hell. I knew because I’d seen Fausson’s passport in his apartment. In all my years at the public defender’s, I had pounded on my clients to answer only the question asked, not to babble and volunteer information. I’d gotten out of practice.

  “I talked to his old professors and colleagues. Any law officer could do the same. I guess I’ll get a team together and go back to Cap Sauers Holding, see what we can find with a metal detector.”

  “It’s still an active crime scene,” McGivney said sharply.

  I laughed. “You been out there lately, Lieutenant? I went looking at it a couple of days ago and the tape is down, helping litter the woods. If you want to preserve your scene, best take your deputies away from bird-dogging Felix Herschel and put them in the forest preserve.”

  “So that was you at the Herschel boy’s apartment this morning.”

  “Young man,” I corrected. “And I don’t see that it’s a big secret.”

  “What were you looking for at the crime scene, anyway, Warshawski?”

  “Whatever I could see. Which was squirrels, rotting logs, and litter.”

  At the other end of the phone, McGivney was giving orders to someone; when he came back on the line it was to ask for the names of Fausson’s old professors and colleagues.

  “Lieutenant, I found these people through asking questions with an open mind. Yours is closed: you’re sure Felix Herschel is guilty because his phone number was in Fausson’s pocket, and because he’s a Canadian who crossed the Boundary Waters into Canada. Let me know when you’re looking seriously for credible suspects and I’ll be glad to share what I’ve learn
ed through unpaid hard work.”

  I hung up as McGivney peppered me with questions. Brava, V.I. You know as much as when you called him. Well, perhaps I had a tiny piece of negative knowledge—the county didn’t have Fausson’s keys.

  37

  Batwoman

  I was on my way to my office when Marilyn Lieberman called from Arcadia House. My heartbeat spiked.

  “What’s going on? Did someone find Harmony?”

  “No. But she’s making herself sick over this necklace. I know it’s a long shot in a Chicago park, but you said you’d try to look for it. She says Clarisse gave one to her and one to Reno when they graduated from junior college; the locket has pictures of Clarisse and Henry?”

  “Her foster parents,” I said. “I’ll ask at the Town Hall District, but it’s a very long shot.”

  I was south of the district headquarters by then, and south of where we’d been attacked in the park. I got off the drive and turned back north. I was able to find parking near the underpass where I’d found Mitch, so I started there, walking slowly, shining my flash along the gutters. I even risked death by lying flat and peering into the drain at the edge of the underpass while cars honked at me; one driver stopped to swear at me.

  The attack had happened quickly; people think trauma embeds a picture on the brain, but it’s usually the opposite. You don’t remember clearly. I went back to the hill where I’d been standing and then tried to retrace my steps to the exact spot where Harmony had been struggling.

  Several joggers stopped to ask what I’d lost. After an hour I had to give up. I paid a courtesy call on the Town Hall station, but didn’t have any luck there with lost and found. I put a message on the park district’s Facebook page, offering a substantial reward if the pendant and chain were returned, although my expectation was of wasting time checking bogus claims.

  Back in my car, I called Marilyn Lieberman to report my failure. “Do you need me to talk personally to Harmony?”