Once again I made a resolution to be a better woman. Starting tomorrow.
I opened the door of my room, flipped on the light, and peeked in before entering. I half expected to find someone waiting for me in my room. Hopefully not someone behind the door with a knife or strangler’s noose. My life seemed to have become a subway station in which people flowed in and out.
No one was waiting for me, though someone had been there all right—a large envelope lay on my pillow.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it was a message from Lipton. Yuri, Lipton, and everyone else in Dubai seemed to have a key to my room. Now it was Lipton’s turn to invade my privacy.
Inside the envelope was an airline ticket to a town in Turkey called Sanliurfa. And a smaller envelope with twenty thousand dollars for my fee and another two thousand more in expense money. That was it. No hello or goodbye or “Here’s what you’re supposed to do” or even, “Gee Madison, would you like to take the assignment?”
Did Lipton plan to meet me in the Turkish town? Take the same flight and prepare me en route?
How many other people knew about the ticket and money? Had Yuri paid a visit to my room to check on messages? Nevsky? Karina? Any number of other people?
My head was spinning with questions.
I sat down on the bed and sighed. This time the money wasn’t a thrill. It would probably soon have my blood on it.
I felt helpless. Like Charlie McCarthy’s dummy, people pulled strings and my hands and feet flopped up and down as I padded to airports and foreign shores.
The devil was tempting me again.
Of course I would fly to Sanliurfa rather than Manhattan. Twenty thousand in cash. Up-front. No questions asked.
Lipton knew how to get to me.
The devil always knows our weakest spot.
20
I had the concierge print me a map of Turkey and some general information about Sanliurfa, called Urfa in everyday use, from the Internet before I left the hotel the next morning.
The name of the town meant “Glorious Urfa.” It was given the title because it was on the winning side of a revolution. In ancient times it was called Edessa. Either name worked for me.
I would be arriving without much to go on. Image of Edessa. Painted picture of Jesus. That much I knew. But what was I supposed to do at the Urfa airport—sit there until someone showed up to tell me what the next step would be? Start walking down the street, asking people if they’d seen the Image of Edessa lately?
Kooky thoughts like that flip-flopped in my head while I got dressed and packed.
I understood Lipton’s need for secrecy, for playing it close to his chest. Nevsky and daughter were not trustworthy. Maybe they were just realistic about Lipton. But did Lipton really expect me to fly to a town in Turkey … knowing exactly nothing?
Damn it … I needed to know who was on first base. I couldn’t just fly off blindly, money or no money.
What was expected of me once I reached the Urfa airport? Not that I would get there quickly—with no direct flight from Dubai, the route to Urfa would be hundreds of miles north to Ankara, the capital of Turkey, where I would spend the night at a hotel near the airport and board a plane south for Urfa the next morning.
I left behind the evening dress that I had charged to my room because I got worried that Nevsky would refuse to pay for it and the dress shop would end up taking the loss.
By the time I was in the limo in front of the hotel a sense of peace and calm suddenly came over me. I realized that it wasn’t Lipton just playing it close, but he enjoyed the power of leaving me dangling, hooked but not reeled in immediately.
It really boiled down to one thing. He was making me wait until the other shoe dropped.
I would leave Dubai without goodbyes, but I didn’t fool myself—if I looked behind me, I’d probably find a long line of people following me.
I’d definitely miss having a hotel room the size of a split-level Manhattan penthouse, riding around in a Rolls-Royce limo, twenty-four-hour room service … and fun in a spa with a couple of nice people with awesome bodies and souls.
On the way to the airport I had the limo stop at a bank, where I wire-transferred my money to the account in New York. No way would I try to get through airport security and customs packing twenty thousand dollars in cash.
My biggest regret was that by sending it to a bank instead of my freezer, I put “tracks” on the money, which meant I would have to report it to the IRS and pay taxes.
Oh, well, I suppose they built freeways and schools and bridges with the money, so it should be all right—but it really wasn’t because I needed the money more than the government did. I had worked harder for it, and was less wasteful handling it, too. I wondered how many political junkets to Tahiti I’d paid for with taxes over the years.
I also kept wondering about the lack of instructions from Lipton. I really wasn’t surprised to find him waiting in the limo when I came out of the bank. I got in and instantly discovered he had the air-conditioning turned down to arctic zone.
“You really like to make yourself a moving target, don’t you?” I said.
“An excellent way to put it, my dear. I shall have to keep that phrase in mind. Moving target. Very James Bondsy and all that. Tell me, did you enjoy your evening with those wonderful tennis players? Quite a charming brother and sister, aren’t they? Such a close relationship, I’m told.”
“Still kneeling at keyholes, Henri?”
He leaned closer and spoke in a confidential tone even though we were alone in the back of the limo and I’m sure he had his bug blocker on. “I’ve heard rumors that they sometimes seem a little more intimate than most siblings … if you know what I mean.”
He gave me a dirty old man leer.
I gave him a tight smile back. “You couldn’t help yourself, could you? You saw two naïve young people who knew nothing about antiquities and unloaded fakes on them.”
His leer turned to a smirk and I knew I’d hit the nail on the head.
It hadn’t occurred to me until he mentioned the tennis players that he had been behind the antiquities swindle. I should have guessed it—selling reproductions as real artifacts was a natural for a man who made a fortune selling stolen antiquities. Manufacturing “antiquities” when his sources for real artifacts ran dry was the obvious next step for him.
I shook my head. “They weren’t very good, you know. I’ve seen better fakes in pawn shops. What do you have going here, Henri? A factory with native craftsmen manufacturing knockoffs you pass off as the real McCoy?”
“Of course not. The sheik of Dubai would never permit it. He doesn’t need the money. The factory’s in Pakistan. And you’re right, the pieces were not perfect … but good enough for people with more money than taste. But in terms of your new friends, there’s an old saying that you can’t cheat an honest person. Those two thought they were buying rare antiquities at a bargain price because they were stolen goods. Had they been honest and refused to compound a felony…” He shrugged.
My jaws went tight and my ire took a spike. “I don’t care about them, they can afford the loss. But Mesopotamia is a cradle of Western civilization. The Baghdad Museum housed archeological treasures that are irreplaceable.”
“I get so tired of that bunk about the looting. It was the Iraqis themselves who did most of the damage to their own museum. They’re fortunate a few of the pieces made it to the West, into museums and to collectors who will—”
“Who will enjoy treasures stolen from someone else. What the looters took has been compared to the burning of the great Library of Alexandria that housed the accumulated knowledge of the ancient world. The fact that you’re still making a profit off it just makes me want to drive a stake through your heart.”
His eyebrows shot up in mock surprise. “Such venom from an old friend. Such high ideals. But that’s always been your problem, hasn’t it, Maddy? You’ve chased art with the other wolves but you�
��ve always tried to hold yourself up to a higher standard of integrity. And what has it gotten you? You may care about artifacts as if they were your children, but to the rich collectors you serve, the pieces in their collection aren’t members of the family but bloodless trophies—and the collector with the most trophies wins.”
He gave me an instant headache. I really wished I could have pushed him out the car door and watched trucks roll over him. Worst of all, I knew he was right. As much as I loved the things money could buy, I didn’t have it in me to play dirty with art. I instinctively knew it was a fault that would keep me poor and angry the rest of my life.
He handed me a phone. “We’re approaching the airport, so let us conclude our business.”
At first I thought it was an ordinary cell phone, but then recognized it as a satellite phone—a type of phone that could be used about anywhere on the planet. When I was a curator I used one traveling to foreign places where cell phone coverage was iffy or didn’t exist.
“It’s been blocked so it only receives calls,” he said.
“Okay…” Receive-only meant Lipton would be able to contact me at will, wherever I was—but didn’t want me to contact him. No doubt it was some clever way to prevent the police from tracing him if I was cooperating with them. “What if I have to make calls myself?”
“Pick up one of those disposable phones they sell at airports. But don’t make any calls that would permit Nevsky or anyone else to track you. The patriarch isn’t just a collector, his position in Russia is literally as head of a state-within-a-state. I have no doubt church members holding Russian spy communications jobs could easily track calls for him, so I made the satellite phone receive-only to ensure that we only have brief conversations.”
“With you doing all the talking. What am I supposed to do in Urfa?”
“You’ll be met by a gentleman named Vahid, my representative. He will meet you with a limo and give you instructions.”
“That’s it? I’m just a pawn to be handed to the next player?”
“Vahid’s role is limited to driving you to a meeting.”
“Meeting with who?”
“A scholar who knows the history of Edessa and the Image. It’s all arranged, you don’t have to concern yourself with the how and why. I’ve taken care of everything.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Remember, there are only two of us in this quest. Vahid is just a messenger and transportation. You are not to discuss our business with him, any more than you are to discuss the results with Karina or anyone else. I presume she made you a proposition and you were polite when you turned it down?”
“Presume anything you like. I have a short list of people who need to know things—and you’re not on it.”
He chuckled. “Touché, my dear.” He rubbed his hands with glee. “We’ll be making a killing on this assignment. When we are back on top, we shall do more great things together. For now, we must watch our backs so the prize is not grabbed from us.” He shook his head. “So much greed in this world…”
I stopped short of gagging. It must be wonderful for narcissistic bastards like Lipton who are so caught up in their own world that they don’t know what’s going on around them.
The lack of information he provided me served two purposes, of course. It helped to make sure I didn’t leave a trail of bread crumbs leading to the prize—and it ensured that I had just enough information to do my job without having enough to fight back.
“Karina is a puzzle,” he said, breaking a period of silence between us. “I sometimes get the feeling that she is playing her own game. But perhaps it’s only a child wanting to prove herself to a parent.”
My instinct was that Karina did indeed have her own game going. What it was, I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to get snarled in it, either.
“Always keep in mind, my dear, that we’ll lose any leverage we have to get our money if they know too much. There’s so few people you can trust in this world, isn’t there.”
I nodded. “I know what you mean. I really hate the idea of working with someone I can’t trust … again.”
He gave me an amused look.
A cat tormenting a mouse before he rips apart the little guy. He was playing with me, of course.
“In Urfa, you should wear dark clothes, long skirts, blouses that cover your neck, and a headscarf. You don’t want to stand out.”
“I thought women didn’t wear headscarves in Turkey anymore.”
“Many of them still do and you won’t stand out so much as a Westerner if you dress conservatively. Urfa is quite an interesting city, but not a cosmopolitan metropolis like Istanbul. Many people there still follow the old traditions.”
He pursed his lips. “It is unfortunate that our client is a Russian. As you know, these Russians are a particularly tough and tenacious breed. They have to be—they’re a product of a harsh land that only ferocious bears and wolves thrive on—as Napoleon and Hitler discovered when they fought them. They need me at the moment because I have contacts going back forty years in the Middle East, but one misstep and they will…” He made a cutting motion across his throat.
His eyes were laughing. He was playing me again.
I turned and looked out the window, holding back my anger.
He leaned toward me with one of his smiles that radiated sincerity. “Fortunately, honor and loyalty are very important among the followers of Islam in Arab and Turkish lands. These people will not betray me for love or money, because we have broken bread many times over the decades.”
“Then why do I have to be so secretive with your friend Vahid?”
He gave a deep sigh. “Because even one’s blood brothers are occasionally tempted by filthy lucre.”
After Lipton’s “death,” it came out that during his heyday as the world’s leading dealer of antiquities he had a network of unscrupulous dealers who obtained contraband pieces and smuggled them to him. It wasn’t hard—thousands of sites around the Mediterranean and Middle East provided a steady flow of looted artifacts to auction houses in London, New York, and Hong Kong. Lipton wasn’t the only dealer in the racket—he just happened to have had a lock on the best pieces.
With his history, I was reasonably certain that Lipton’s “blood brothers” in the Middle East were contraband dealers whose relationship to him had more to do with sharing booty than bread.
When I was a museum curator buying multimillion-dollar pieces, I did what every other curator did—I looked the other way and accepted the ownership histories of suspect artifacts as if I really believed what I was reading were true. And, as Lipton pointed out, there was even high moral ground for museums to buy suspect pieces … so many of the antiquities came from third world countries where they were at risk of being destroyed through looting, abuse, ignorance, or simply the ravages of unchecked Mother Nature. I could tell myself that I was rescuing pieces from destruction, but the truth was that because there were so few good pieces and so much competition, my job security was on the line.
As Lipton pointed out, my downfall was always trying to do the right thing in the end. Call it a serious fault or a guilty conscience, I couldn’t help being who I was.
* * *
AFTER I GOT out at the airport and the driver gave me my carry-on, my only piece of luggage, Lipton rolled down the limo window and said, “I hope you have a pleasant trip, my dear.”
“You don’t want to know what I wish for you, Henri.”
Wild animals ripping off his flesh was just the beginning of my dark fantasies about what I’d like to see happen to him. Taking a pair of sharp scissors and cutting off his …
I shook my head. I had to stop the homicidal thoughts. Bad karma. I was probably attracting negative things to me just by thinking about revenge on the bastard.
I gritted my teeth as I walked into the terminal. I needed to do something about my attitude when I got back home. Obviously it needed a serious overhaul if I could so easily be led a
round by the nose by an old thief like Lipton and a young cop like Yuri.
Aboard the plane, I deliberately walked the length of the plane. I didn’t see Yuri, but I still had no illusions that I had gotten out of Dodge without him knowing it.
I was reasonably certain there was a long parade of people following me. Too many people had too many fingers in the pie.
The way things were going, I wouldn’t be surprised if Yuri met my flight when we landed in Urfa.
Stranger things had already happened in this desert kingdom which sported a ski slope, an igloo nightclub, robotic camel jockeys, and man-made islands.
City of Prophets
Image of Edessa
When Hannan, the keeper of the archives, saw that Jesus spoke thus to him, by virtue of being the king’s painter, he took and painted a likeness of Jesus with choice paints, and brought it with him to Abgar the king, his master. And when Abgar the king saw the likeness, he received it with great joy, and placed it with great honor in one of his palatial houses.
—DOCTRINE OF ADDAI (C. A.D. 400)
21
Urfa, Turkey
A man was waiting for me when I came into the main terminal. He wasn’t holding a sign with my name on it, but I was the only American woman in sight, so it was a no-brainer. Besides, he obviously knew who I was—he stepped in front of me and stood there grinning.
He gave me a broken, nicotine-stained smile and pounded his chest with one fist. “Vahid.”
I almost said, “Me Jane,” but just muttered a polite, “Hello.”
He needed a bath, shave, and tailor. Some deodorant would’ve helped, too.
I read somewhere that a man’s sweat could be a sexual turn-on for women. The Internet-blog psychologist who came up with that theory hadn’t sat next to Vahid in a hot SUV.
That’s what my “limo” waiting at the curb was—a battered, dusty Toyota Land Cruiser that smelled of tobacco and sweat—deep-fried medium rare. The battered vehicle looked like it had gotten on the wrong side of a Middle Eastern gun battle with terrorists more than once. Or more likely, got banged up in the backcountry where Vahid probably looted archeological sites for Lipton.
The Shroud Page 13
