Shell Game
Page 39
“We will give you five minutes,” Glynis said.
She was waiting for me when I got off the elevator on the fiftieth floor. She started to push me toward the offices, but I stopped to look at the wall. Soraude, Runkel and Minable’s name had been taken down.
“Good idea,” I said to Glynis, pointing at the empty space. “All the attention they’re getting from different international law-enforcement and securities monitors can’t be good for Crawford, Mead.”
“You don’t understand, Vic.”
“That’s why I’m here. I want to understand. I want to know what drove you to use Harmony to get my location to give to Kettie. I want to know why Dick was so deep in bed with him that they couldn’t unknot the bedsheets binding them together.”
A young associate passed as I was speaking. He looked so startled that Glynis almost tackled me to get me into Dick’s office, with the door shut.
I walked over to his desk and opened the drawer where I’d seen the goddess. She was gone now, but the cream stock note of thanks from Kettie was still there.
“What the fuck—” Dick began.
“Is she out at your house with that stone goddess, or did you prudently throw her out?” I leaned against the desk drawer, almost touching his legs in his ergonomic desk chair.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That is so lame, Richard. I can’t believe a litigator with your experience wouldn’t have a better line than the lamest ones used by perps since the dawn of time.” I unfolded a copy of the Treasures of Saraqib to the photograph of the goddess statue.
“Your pal Kettie bought her from Lawrence Fausson, knowing she was stolen. He liked bright shiny things, so he ripped her arms off to get at the golden serpents. He destroyed forty-five hundred years of history to get that gold snake he had in his ring. And then the statue didn’t appeal to him; its value had gone down. He gave it to you, a discard. That was your value to him. You did his dirty laundry, but he didn’t think you deserved more than his broken toys.”
Dick’s skin seemed to thicken and his breath came faster. “You can’t prove this.”
“I don’t think that matters,” I said. “Your work depends on trust. Maybe clients like Kettie trust you to cover up their crimes, but you must have other clients who trust you to follow the law and look after their interests with probity.”
“Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He dropped his face in his hands.
“What happened?” I asked. “Was being close to all those billions so exciting you overlooked what he was doing to get them?”
“It wasn’t like that,” he muttered.
“It never is,” I said. “Tell me what it was like.”
“We do some work for Kettie Enterprises around their leases and taxes here in Chicago.” He spoke to his lap. “He gave me a chance to invest in a property he was building in Jakarta, but the deal went south. I had mortgaged the house, but we—Teri and I—it was millions of debt. He showed me how to make some of it up with his penny stocks, but I was still in a hole. He said if I could get office space for his St. Matthieu lawyers, he’d forgive half of it. We did that—Glynis and I, I mean.
“When Reno came around looking for work, he’d made remarks more than once on the value of a good-looking piece—woman in a loan office.”
“And you thought, what better-looking piece of womanly ass had you ever seen than your beautiful niece,” I said, smiling savagely.
“That’s unnecessarily crude,” Glynis said.
“Necessarily crude when the boys say it, but bad when I do? Do you fill in for Miss Manners when she’s on vacation? Did either of you uncrude people know that the women who get to go to the Caribbean are picked because of their womanly pieces? Did it occur to you that your niece could use a little help and protection?” I kept my hands jammed in my trouser pockets so that I wouldn’t strangle him with his silk Talbott tie.
“She could look after herself,” Dick said. “She went out to Oak Brook when she first got here—she had a hell of a nerve, walking in on Teri, trying to give her a sob story.”
“Okay.” I stood up straight, suddenly tired of it all. “I know what happened, more or less, the information on the stock swindle Reno brought back with her, you in debt to the Russian mob. But what did you do to Harmony?”
“Nothing.” Dick looked up in surprise.
“Don’t ‘nothing’ me, Richard. Glynis took her to my home the Wednesday I flew to Grand Marais.”
“Oh, that.” He was back in his sullen, boy-hero-caught-shoplifting voice. “She’d been staying with Glynis. Kettie came to me, needing to know where you were. I figured he wanted it badly enough to forgive the rest of the debt. We haggled—twenty-five million down to seven! He loved every second of it, loved being a billionaire watching a man with a family sweat and beg over what was chump change to him.”
“Yes, you were hard put upon,” I agreed. “So hard put upon that you were willing to send Kettie after me, knowing he wanted to kill me.”
“I didn’t know that!” Dick cried. “He wanted to reason with you.”
“Right. Because he was such a reasonable guy. Tell me about Harmony.”
“She was pretty unstable, all over the place,” Dick said. “One minute she hated your guts, the next you were her and Reno’s savior. Anyway, she told Glynis the old guy would know where you were. We knew Dr. Herschel wouldn’t give us the time of day, but Harmony said Contreras had a soft spot for Harmony. So Glynis took her there. But then Harmony turned on me.”
“Richard, I have zero interest in your financial woes, but your nieces need years of expensive therapy. You will come up with the money, you and Glynis and Teri. All those bills will come here, and you will pay them promptly.”
“I can’t—you can’t—”
“I can, and I will. Your other choice is a public airing of this entire business, which will lead to your disbarment.”
I waited until he looked me in the eye and understood that I was implacable.
I didn’t think I would ever calm down again, but when I got to my office, Rasima and Felix were watching for me from the coffee bar across the street.
They were full of gratitude, of apologies for not trusting me with their story, of thanks for saving their lives and Tarik’s.
“My favorite poem of my father’s is ‘The Haunted House,’” Rasima said. “He wrote it in his head while he was in Bashar’s prison, and it’s a long allegory about what it means to be in prison and to be free. It’s full, too, of the demons and angels of Islamic legends. My favorite angel is Artiya’il; she removes depression and grief when they are more than we can bear.”
She handed me a framed parchment sheet, which she or Felix had illustrated with gold leaf.
I woke in the reaches of the night and wept at my weightlessness; a fever had broken. Artiya’il, you found me, lifting from me the weight of grief.
65
True Gold
My doorbell rang that night at midnight, just as I had fallen asleep. The dogs began to bark. The woman in 1B came into the hallway screaming at them. I pulled on my jeans and ran down the stairs, where Mr. Contreras and his neighbor were yelling at each other.
Peter Sansen was standing at the door. “I know it’s late, I know I should have phoned. I was going straight to my place, planning on calling in the morning—but somehow the taxi ended up here.”
“They do that.” I was grinning stupidly. “Maybe you should come upstairs.”
Mr. Contreras and the woman looked at us and abruptly shut up, returning to their respective apartments.
“You’re a hero in Amman,” Sansen said. “The recovery of the Dagon, your dispatching an artifact looter—they may want you to come to a state dinner sometime soon.”
He followed me into my bedroom and started to take off his clothes, but I went to the safe built into my closet and returned with the Dagon. He took it from me, his square hands gentle on the gold figure, his face alight with
awe.
The tail on the golden carp seemed ready to move, to sweep away all that was ill and evil in the world, while the arm raised with the pinecone offered a kind of benediction. Lifting from me the weight of grief.
Acknowledgments
Gil Stein, Professor of Archaeology at Chicago’s Oriental Institute, met with me as I began this novel, when he was the Institute director. His ideas and suggestions were invaluable, but the book has taken so many odd turns that he may not recognize either his Institute or the study of archaeology.
Lorraine Brochu, who worked on digs in Syria, was generous with ideas and advice as I tried to write about various characters’ passion for digging. The Dagon was her suggestion. She also advised me on Arabic usage.
Marta Ramirez was kind enough to correct the Spanish in the text. Luana Giorgini offered help with V.I.’s Italian. Marzena Madej helped explore the forest preserves in Cook County.
Eddie Chez, Stuart Rice, and a friend who prefers to be anonymous assisted me in sorting out the business practices of off-shore companies.
I have taken liberties with the Cook County forest preserves, making them denser and more mysterious than they appear in actuality. Weather was a problem in this novel: the winter of 2018 seemed unending, but I’ve made spring come to Chicago in early April and have arbitrarily set a date for the ice breakup in northern Minnesota. Thanks to my cousin, Barb Wieser, for guiding my treks along the Minnesota-Canada border.
St. Matthieu and the town of Havre-des-Anges are fictitious, as are all the characters in this novel. Hedge fund and real estate billionaires, along with offshore tax havens, exist in real life, but I don’t know any; all reference to such people and venues are completely imaginary. However, the Italian artist Antonella Mason, whose work V.I. has in her office, does exist, as do her brilliant paintings.
The Tribal Elders of the Anishinaabe Nation were most generous in giving me permission to set part of this novel in their sovereign land.
Finally, a special thank-you to my editors, Emily Krump and Carolyn Mays, for their thoughtful reading of this book. It is stronger for their advice.
About the Author
Hailed by P. D. James as “the most remarkable” of modern crime writers, SARA PARETSKY is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty previous novels, including the renowned V.I. Warshawski series. She is one of only four living writers—alongside John le Carré, Sue Grafton, and Lawrence Block—to have received both the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. She lives in Chicago with her husband.
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Also by Sara Paretsky
Fallout
Brush Back
Critical Mass
Breakdown
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Hardball
Bleeding Kansas
Fire Sale
Blacklist
Total Recall
Hard Time
Ghost Country
Windy City Blues
Tunnel Vision
Guardian Angel
Burn Marks
Blood Shot
Bitter Medicine
Killing Orders
Deadlock
Indemnity Only
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
shell game. Copyright © 2018 by Sara Paretsky. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Richard L. Aquan
Cover photograph © Joe Wigdahl / Alamy Stock Photo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition October 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-243589-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-243586-6
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