Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  I tried to find some clothes that would fit Rasima, but she was six inches shorter than me and probably fifty pounds lighter. While she sat on a kitchen chair, lost inside my bathrobe, I sponged the worst of the mud from her jeans.

  Her story came out in nervous bursts: the release from prison, the text to Felix. “Plan A” meant he’d texted sixteen of her friends, who were standing by to help cover her escape from surveillance, all in blue paisley hijab. Her face lit briefly with laughter—that part had been scary but fun.

  “Felix and I, we finally connected at the end of the Blue Line, on Ninety-Fifth Street.” Her voice was soft, with a slight accent that was more French than Arabic. “We were very careful. He was wearing a kaffiyeh; I put on niqab.” She rummaged in her backpack and pulled out a black face cover to show me. “We acted like a very traditional Arab couple, which was not fun for either of us but meant people stepped away from us. We were too foreign, too unpleasing—we got more insults than I usually hear in hijab.”

  I could imagine, but I just nodded and put her jeans in front of a space heater to dry.

  “We were going to go to Felix’s apartment—my release was so sudden he hadn’t had time to collect his bag, with everything he needed for a journey. But when we reached his street, we saw a big SUV arrive. A man who looked like, I don’t know, every criminal who ever worked for Bashar, only three times as big, got out.

  “We knew they were coming for Felix, whether they were with ICE or the police, or the man who stole the Dagon from my baba. We decided to get the Dagon; we had put it with our models in the engineering lab—I told Felix it would be like the ‘Purloined Letter’—you know that story? Yes.

  “We waited at the lab, pretending to work, until everyone else left. That wait was agony. Every time the door opened, we were afraid it would be an immigration agent. But finally we were the last engineers in the building. And so we took the Dagon. We had made a shell for it. It sat among our materials like an uninteresting cube of tin. When we got outside, the criminal from the SUV was there; he grabbed us. He had a comrade, also enormous. They carried us into the SUV—we were like sacks of oranges, we were so—so weightless in their hands!”

  Her eyes flashed with remembered fury and fear. “And then, they thought we were too weak to fight, so they didn’t bother to restrain us. As they started to drive off, we kicked open the doors and jumped out. Felix fell. The car hit him. I wanted to stay for him, please believe that, but we couldn’t both be victims.”

  She started to weep then, her slight body shaking so hard that I feared she might injure herself. I put my arms around her, petted her, and said, “You did absolutely the right thing. You would not have survived a night in the hands of these monstrosities.”

  She drank her tea and calmed herself. “This kind of weeping, it wastes time. It wastes energy. I learned this when Bashar seized my baba and it is not good to forget this lesson now, when we are again in danger. Now I must bring the Dagon to my baba.”

  “You have it?” I gasped.

  “A special pocket inside my jacket.” She went to the chair where I’d draped her beige wool jacket and unzipped an inner pocket, then unfolded a figure wrapped in soft black cloth.

  When she set the Dagon on the kitchen table, the ancient gold gleamed like the noonday sun. The dishes and used tea bags looked sordid and dreary; I picked them up and put them in the sink and knelt to look at the fish-man. Despite the smallness of the figure—only about five inches—the scales on the carp covering the man’s head were individually incised. Its eyes were round, with the pupils clearly marked.

  The man was naked from the waist up, wearing a short skirt and laced sandals. He carried a bucket in one hand and a pinecone in the other.

  “He is sprinkling water on the seeds; he is guaranteeing a good crop to the king or noblewoman whose palace he guarded,” Rasima explained.

  She let me admire the figure for another few seconds, then restored it to her pocket, repeating that she had to take the Dagon to Tarik.

  60

  The Frozen North

  The land had looked green from the plane, but close up it was brown. Brown trees waiting for leaves; brown ground, where mud mixed with ice. Broken branches on the trails. The spruce and cedar canopy we’d seen from the air was above our heads.

  It was still winter in northern Minnesota, some fifteen degrees colder than in Chicago. If I got home—when I got home—I vowed never to complain about the cold again. Rasima and I had been walking for almost an hour, but it felt as though we hadn’t moved, except to pull our mud-caked boots out of one bog after another.

  I hadn’t wanted her to come with me, but she refused to give me the Dagon unless I took her. “You mean well, Victoria, but you don’t understand. My baba sent me to Beirut to school to keep me safe, and it did keep me safe, but I didn’t see him for seven years. And ever since this American president has begun chasing immigrants, rounding us up like so many frightened sheep, my baba has had to be so careful who he talks to, where he sleeps, that I almost never see him anymore. I have to know he is safe. He needs to see me so that he knows I, too, am safe.”

  Tarik was in northern Minnesota, near the Canadian border.

  “Felix thought he could find a way through the wilderness so that my baba could come and go between Canada and the United States. He wanted my baba to be safe in Canada, but until I could be with him, my baba would not want to stay in Canada.”

  She made a sad face. “It could not be done. Everything was still half frozen and it was too—too overwhelming for him. For Tarik, I mean. Even Felix found it hard to hike through this arctic wilderness, and for Tarik to stay there by himself—he survived Bashar’s prisons, but to be cold and alone in a wilderness—Felix said he saw my baba would not be able to endure it.”

  With the help of the Anishinaabe Nation, Felix rented an unused house for Tarik in the Grand Portage Indian lands.

  “We hope my baba is still there, but communication is impossible. Everything that comes to me or to Felix, whether it is a text or an e-mail or perhaps even a paper letter, is monitored now by ICE. I can see when friends from Lebanon write me that someone has opened my mail. They left greasy fingerprints on the paper—I could barely bring myself to read the letter.”

  I stopped trying to argue Rasima out of going north and turned instead to figuring out how we’d get there. We couldn’t take a commercial flight: Rasima was on a BOLO for every law-enforcement department in the country, and I wasn’t far behind. My car might also be on a watch list, but if I rented one, I had an uneasy feeling Kettie would know—through Rest EZ he had access to credit monitoring software.

  A private jet would be nice. Dick could probably get one from his high-end clients. His firm probably owned a fleet, now that I thought of it. I sat up straighter: I had a client with a jet. He already knew part of the story.

  Darraugh Graham’s terse response was the same in the middle of the night as it was at a midafternoon meeting. He listened for two minutes, grunted that he was putting me on hold, and came back to tell me that a car would pick me up and get me to the DuPage county airport where the plane was docked.

  “Pilot will arrange a car to meet you in Grand Marais, take you where you want to go. I need the plane back here in two days, so if you’re not ready to come home, you’ll have to find your way on your own. Don’t let Kettie shoot it, not sure insurance covers WMD damage.” He hooted with laughter—that was apparently a joke.

  He hung up before I could thank him.

  It was almost five when we left my apartment. I pushed a note to Mr. Contreras under his door—I didn’t have the time or energy to explain my trip in person. Peppy barked sharply when she heard me, but didn’t rouse him—or more important, the woman across the hall.

  Darraugh’s driver was happy to take us to an all-night Buy-Smart on our way to the airport. I outfitted Rasima in hiking boots, clean jeans and underwear, a parka, almost all from the youth department. From a sale bin I g
rabbed some micro-spikes for our boots. I had my own winter gear stowed in a duffel bag along with a flashlight, extra batteries, two burner phones, water bottles, granola bars.

  During the flight, Rasima and I lay on couches, dozing, but at one point I asked her about Fausson.

  She smiled sadly. “Lawrence was my father’s friend in Saraqib. He admired Tarik’s poetry greatly and loved sitting with the men at night, smoking and talking about the history of the region, when Syria was a great power. After Bashar arrested my baba, Lawrence promised to look after the treasures of Saraqib. When the civil war began and the country started to crumble, Lawrence took the two most valuable treasures—the Dagon and the goddess—for safekeeping. They are small; they are easy to transport.

  “Of course, I wasn’t there—I was at the lycée in Beirut—but my baba told me when he reached Chicago, finally, two years after his release—I was here on a student visa and he found a way to me.”

  It seemed prudent not to ask what way he found.

  “Lawrence lost his scholarship—perhaps you know that?—and he found a job with Force 5 because so many of the men he met at the Syrian center worked with them. He liked a chance to speak Arabic. When Tarik arrived in Chicago, Lawrence got him a job with Force 5 as well—the pay isn’t terrible and they don’t ask for papers. Then they were sent to clean Kettie’s office and Lawrence saw all those artifacts he had—many of them stolen.

  “Lawrence wanted money. He had his fantasy of creating a big expedition to go to Syria or Iraq when the fighting ended. He started doing business with ISIS, imagining they would be his patrons. Kettie paid him to buy stolen objects he found on the dark web. Tarik thought it was terrible, but how could he report Lawrence and not be deported himself?

  “And then Lawrence did a wicked thing: he sold Kettie the Dagon and the goddess. He was keeping them safe, because often ICE would come to my building, even to my apartment, looking for illegals. They might find my baba or they might steal gold artifacts and claim we were smugglers.

  “My baba was cleaning in Kettie’s office the night Kettie gave a big party, showing off the Dagon. Tarik couldn’t believe it! He went to Lawrence, who said the money would help them go back to Syria and save more treasures. So Tarik waited until the party was over, pretending he had extra cleaning to do. He broke the case and took the Dagon with him—the goddess he didn’t see, although he looked for her. He made it to the Force 5 van just as they were pulling away and rode to the Syrian-Lebanese center.

  “The night watchman let him in—men often spend the night there if they are late getting off work—but the next day, Sanjiiya—the center’s director—made him leave. She was terrified that ICE would track him to the center and that everyone’s documents would be checked.

  “He didn’t dare carry the Dagon with him, so he put it into a hole in one of the pillars outside the front door.”

  I remembered the cracked stone and concrete at the Syrian center.

  “Those were two terrifying days, for him and for me, because I did not know where he was. He lingered among the homeless men near the L stop on Thirty-Fifth Street until a day when he saw me. And then Felix took him in, but suddenly Fausson was killed and Felix came under suspicion.”

  She brought the end of her hijab over her eyes, as if trying to hide herself from the memory.

  “Kettie thought Lawrence had stolen the Dagon back from him. He called Lawrence and demanded he give the Dagon back. He made Lawrence afraid, and so he told that Tarik had taken it. Then Kettie demanded that Lawrence tell him where Tarik was hiding. Lawrence knew that Felix and I were friends, down at IIT. He was desperate, looking for people who might give Tarik a roof for the night. He came to see me, pretending he was worried about Tarik. While I was making tea, he invaded my address book, the one I write by hand, and tore the page with Felix’s name from it.

  “The rest you know: we thought we could fool Kettie with a copy of the Dagon. I knew Mary-Carol Kooi because she used to come to the Syrian-Lebanese center in Palos, so we chose the Oriental Institute because we thought she would help. If our copy was in a museum and Kettie had to steal it out of the museum, he would believe it was real.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Youth, impetuosity, imagination, all mixed together but made lethal by Kettie.

  “The fun part was making the Dagon. We learned so much! The alloys they came up with five thousand years ago were so sophisticated.” She had sat up, eyes sparkling, but the light went out just as quickly.

  “I thought when I reached America and Tarik found his way to me that we would be safe. I know it isn’t as dangerous as Bashar’s Syria, but this man, Kettie, he is like an ISIS warlord himself. He has his own private army, he has so much money he can buy the government and get it to do what he wants. For me and Tarik, America is not the land of the free, but has the watchful eyes of a dictator. I can’t travel, can’t come and go as I wish, even though I have the right papers. And my baba, after being tortured for writing his poems, now he has to be in hiding.”

  When she finished speaking I lay back on the leather couch and slept. The pilot shook me awake when we’d landed and escorted us from the plane to a waiting Jeep Wrangler. He reminded us to text him when we were ready to return to Chicago, “or anywhere else. Mr. Graham said to take you where you need to go, but to make sure his plane is back at the DuPage airport in two days. And your driver will get you where you need to be while you’re on the ground here.”

  61

  Assault from Above

  Our driver was a short, stout woman named Lenore Pizzola. She said she’d lived in the area for over twenty years; she could hook us up with any supplies or destinations we wanted in the north woods.

  While Rasima settled into the Jeep’s backseat, I stood outside to make phone calls from one of my burners. I called Lotty first.

  Felix had fractured a bone in his skull but it was a mild break with no apparent brain damage; he did have concussion and couldn’t remember the previous night’s events, including how he’d ended in the road, but he’d broken his shoulder in his escape.

  “Tell him his friend is well. We’re going to the same poetry reading he attended last month.”

  My next call, to Mr. Contreras, wasn’t nearly as pleasant.

  “Doll, if you never want to talk to me again I wouldn’t blame you. This strange lady arrived about eight in the morning, but she had Harmony with her, so I thought she was okay, thought maybe she was your ex’s new wife. She said they was worried about you, and Harmony said I could tell them where you was.

  “Well, I hadn’t been up but maybe five minutes, had just put the coffee on, and only had that bathrobe you gave me over my altogethers, so my wits wasn’t what they should be.

  “I said I expected you were still in bed, because if you was out running you would’ve taken Peppy, and she said you’d disappeared off the map. And then she saw the note you left me—doll, I swear on Clara’s grave I didn’t even know it was there.” Clara had been his beloved wife, dead now for almost thirty years.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You would never betray us, I know that.”

  “But she grabbed it, and off she went, taking Miss Harmony with her. So I don’t know where you are or what you’re up to.”

  I told him where we were. I didn’t try to explain about the Dagon but told him Felix had been injured and that we were looking for someone who could clear him once and for all of Lawrence Fausson’s murder.

  I reassured Mr. Contreras as best I could, but I was rattled. I tried not to show it when I got into the front seat next to Lenore, but twisted around to talk to Rasima.

  “I spoke to the doctor; your brother will be fine. He has a broken shoulder and mild concussion—maybe he’ll learn that skateboarding in the street requires a helmet and shoulder pads.”

  “That is good news.” She smiled radiantly.

  “I also spoke to your grandfather. He’s unhappy that we left without saying good-bye.” I paused
to make sure she knew whom I meant.

  “Oh, I am glad the dogs didn’t wake him,” Rasima said quickly.

  “One of your aunts apparently stopped by and read the note we left for him. You know what a busybody she is—she may get your uncle to bring her up here, so if we want to get in any serious hiking, we’d better do it before they arrive.”

  “You’re here to hike?” Lenore Pizzola asked. “I can drop you at any of the trails and come back for you later.”

  “It would be better if we rented our own car or SUV so we could move to different trails without having to wait for you,” I said.

  “No real car rental places around here,” Lenore said. “There’s me, with this Jeep, and Mike Norgaard, he has a Land Rover, but he does like me, hires himself out with the car. I guess I could drive you down to Duluth if you want to rent something of your own there, but if you’re worried about needing to wait around for me, don’t: your company hired me for two days and I’m at your disposal.”

  Rasima nodded at me: best do it. She pulled a piece of paper out of the pocket that housed the Dagon and handed it to Lenore.

  “Cowboys Road, half a mile past the Portage Trailhead?” Lenore stared at us. “You gals sure? That’s wilderness, and not to judge a book by its cover, but you neither of you looked equipped for wilderness hiking. Ice only broke on the Pigeon five days ago, and the trails are slick mud with ice and rocks mixed in.”

  Rasima bit her lip and took the paper back, studied it for a long minute, then nodded. “Yes. That’s what we want. We’ll see when we get there how strong we are.”

  Lenore looked us over again, shook her head, but put the Wrangler into gear. The first part of the route ran next to Lake Superior. It was beautiful, with the surface shimmering silver pink in the morning sun, but it felt alive and threatening. Michigan is not a tame lake, but Superior looked as though it could rise from its shore and swallow us.