Double or Nothing (Daniel Faust Book 7)

by Craig Schaefer

  She chuckled and opened the lid of her laptop.

  “We can be a bit more precise than that. Interpol and the FBI both maintain a database, viewable by the public, of stolen art and archaeological relics. The FBI’s is a bit more robust, but we’ll try both. There’s also the Art Loss Register, private service, but the museum has a subscription and they’ve got half a million items in their database.”

  “Half a million?” I asked. “Art theft is that big a problem?”

  “When you say ‘art theft,’” she told me, “most people think of grand museum heists from the movies. The Thomas Crown Affair, that sort of thing. But there are countless thefts from private collections, antiquities stolen in transit, staged robberies for the purpose of defrauding insurance companies…by and large these crimes go under-investigated by the authorities, because they’re considered victimless.”

  “Sounds like I should get in on this action.”

  If looks could kill, Halima would have claimed the bounty on my head. I held up my hands.

  “Kidding, just kidding!”

  “For the sake of peace,” she said as she turned to her laptop screen, “I’ll pretend you are, even though we both know better.”

  A knock sounded at the door, half a second before it swung wide. Fredrika Vinter, queen bee of the Chicago occult underground, swept in with a sequined tote over one shoulder and a jet-black plastic bag dangling from one casually curled finger.

  “Dahling,” she swooned, leaning in to throw an arm around my shoulder and peck my cheek. Her lips were cold as ice.

  “Hey, Freddie, thanks—I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.”

  She passed me the plastic bag and I opened it on my lap. Everything I needed was inside: a few tiny bottles of oil, a packet of dried herbs, and a brand-new deck of cards. Red Bicycle Dragon Backs, my favorite brand.

  “It nearly was. I stopped by the Hermetic Inquiry in Wicker Park—Trevor is a tedious little pill of a man with the fashion sense of a naked mole rat, but he does stock the good stuff. As I was leaving, a rather striking young woman was coming in. More black leather than a fetish club on Friday night.”

  I winced. “Lemme guess. Tall, seriously Nordic, blond braid down to the base of her spine? Never says the word ‘I’?”

  “That’s her.” Freddie snapped her fingers at me. “‘This one’ wanted to speak with Trevor. ‘This one’ wanted to know if any out-of-towners or unusual customers came by that morning.”

  “Did he rat you out?”

  Freddie pulled back the chair beside me and snickered as she dropped into it.

  “Are you kidding me?” she said. “He knows I’d eat him. I would literally eat him. Only reason I haven’t done it by now is because I suspect he’s as tasteless as his wardrobe.”

  Halima was typing away, concentrating on her screen. “Show Dances the gun,” she murmured.

  I showed her the gun. Freddie gaped at it, slowly shaking her head.

  “Someone paid money for that,” she said. “You killed them, right? Please tell me you killed them.”

  “Here we go,” Halima said. “Found a hit in the FBI’s database.”

  She turned her laptop around to show us. The dagger on the screen mirrored mine, with a picture taken at a slightly different angle.

  “‘Incident Type: stolen,’” I read aloud. “Doesn’t really tell us much, does it?”

  Halima held up a finger and scooped up her desk phone, dialing fast.

  “Yes, good morning,” she said. “This is Dr. Khoury with the Field Museum in Chicago. Would it be possible to speak to someone regarding an item in the National Stolen Art File? We’ve been approached by a benefactor about a large estate donation, and I believe one of the objects in the lot might be stolen, but I need more information to be sure.”

  “My BFF,” Freddie said, “has skills.”

  Halima put the phone against her shoulder and whispered, “They’re having someone call me back. This may take a while.”

  I held up the black plastic bag. “I need to arm up. Don’t suppose there’s a broom closet or something around here where I can be guaranteed a few hours of privacy?”

  “Given that there are people coming to murder you,” Halima said, “I don’t think anyone can offer that guarantee at the moment.”

  Freddie stood up and offered me her hand.

  “I can. Time to get my favorite thief off the grid.”

  * * *

  Cruising the city streets in a lipstick-red Ferrari wasn’t my idea of keeping a low profile. We rolled into the Fulton River District on the edge of downtown, northwest of the Chicago Loop. The neighborhood used to be a warehouse district, but time and new money had sanded down the rough edges. Now the warehouses had become condos, retro-styled towers offering skyline views for as much as a million dollars a pop.

  “We’re going to your place?” I asked her.

  Freddie smiled out at the city with her eyes shrouded behind black Aviators, her hands resting easy on the Ferrari’s wheel.

  “Oh, no. I love you, darling, but at the moment you’re hot in all the wrong ways. I’ve got someplace much more private in mind. And less likely to be attacked. I have some very expensive objets d’art in my loft, and I’d prefer they not be riddled by gunfire.”

  Our final destination was one of the few real warehouses left in Fulton, a crumbling brick fortress at the river’s edge. The Ferrari eased around back, down a narrow wooden-fenced alley, and Freddie tapped a remote clipped to the sun visor. A steel garage door thrummed as it rolled upward. We drove inside, parking in a small garage. The place was stripped down and anything but stylish. The garage door clanged shut as I got out of the car, and overhead fluorescents flickered to life.

  “Consider yourself lucky,” Freddie said. A key ring rattled as she unlocked a side door, leading the way deeper into the warehouse. “Usually when I take dates here, I’m the only one who leaves.”

  “Wait, you mean this is your—” I followed her across the threshold and got my answer.

  Beyond the garage, the warehouse was a labyrinth. Plywood walls rose up to create a tangled maze, with no clue as to how big it really was or what was waiting deeper inside. Off to my left, a standing light shone in a small open room. The beam was cast across a surgical table, fixed directly beneath a long hanging mirror.

  The table had buckles and straps. Restraints.

  “The word may be out of fashion,” she said, “but I’ve always been partial to ‘haunt.’ Has an elegant, gothy ring to it. Now then, you needed a cozy space with privacy and quiet. Let’s see what we can do, hmm?”

  A second door, locked and set with a tiny barred window, yawned into darkness. The room beyond was about the size of a walk-in closet with bare stone walls.

  “Freddie,” I said, “this is a holding cell.”

  “It’s a cozy space with privacy and quiet.”

  I gave her a dubious look. She pouted at me.

  “I’m offering my help,” she said. “Do you really think I’m going to lock you in there and do something nefarious? Caitlin is my BFF, darling. She’d never forgive me. And also I’m fond of you. That too.”

  “Right.” I held up the plastic bag. “I’d better get to work.”

  29.

  Some spells require books, elaborate notes, days of fasting and mental preparation. When it came to my cards, I’d done the rite more times than I could count. The ritual gestures, hooking and unhooking my fingers, tracing patterns in the air, were all second nature now. So was the stream of bastard Latin rippling over my lips as I opened the new deck. I fanned the cards, riffled and cut them, then crossed my legs and balanced them on my left knee.

  I shook a vial of essential oils, mixed to exact proportions and smelling faintly of red pepper, and dabbed it against my fingertip. Tracing a glyph on the face of each card, one at a time. The glossy pasteboard tingled against my fingers. Slowly the stack of cards migrated from my left knee to my right, one pile shrinking and the other�
�consecrated and trembling and awake—growing.

  Time slipped away from me. I slipped away from me.

  Nothing existed but the cards and the dance of my fingers, tracing patterns in oil that glowed hot scarlet in the dark. Finally, the last one joined the stack. I twirled my hand. The cards lifted, floating in the air, spinning around me in a joyous circle.

  I snapped my fingers and opened my palm. The deck landed home, gliding into my outstretched hand. Now I was ready for a fight.

  I knocked on the cell door. Freddie peered at me through the barred window.

  “No,” she said, “changed my mind. I’m keeping you.”

  “Freddie—”

  The door whistled open. “Fine, fine. Be that way. You’ve got places to go and people to see, anyway. Person to see.”

  “Halima called?”

  She checked her phone, bringing up a notepad app.

  “Let’s see…okay, the dagger was stolen from the Oriental Institute twelve years ago. Never made it there, actually. It was part of a touring exhibition, and the thieves stole it—plus a bunch of other random goodies—from the cargo container at the airport.”

  Made sense that the crime was local. The knife had probably been circulating the Chicago underworld ever since, serving as rolling collateral. “And before that?”

  “My BFF Halima, being brilliant and resourceful, found the archaeologist who led the original dig. You’re looking for one Dr. Adrian Gladstone who, joy of joys, is currently a faculty member at the University of Chicago. Nobody in the world can tell you more about that dagger and where it came from.”

  “Can you give me a lift?”

  She jangled her keys in her hand.

  “Like you have to ask?”

  * * *

  Freddie dropped me off at the edge of campus. Halima’s research, and my card-work, had taken most of the day. Now the clock was pushing past ten, the sun a warm memory, and last night’s thin sliver of moon had gone full dark.

  “I’ll hang on to your luggage for you,” Freddie told me. “Call me when you need a pickup.”

  “You’re not coming with?”

  “Darling, when you don’t have a moving target on your back, I’ll be seen with you anywhere. Until then, I’m afraid our little dalliances must be a bit more circumspect.”

  The campus was an odd mishmash of architectural styles. Grand Gothic arches, looking more like a cathedral than a college, rubbed shoulders with modern office buildings. The Joseph Regenstein Library was almost brutalist: a lumpy beige stone fist where narrow windows squeezed between mismatched and uneven blocks. Behind it, the new library extension was a glass-shrouded geodesic dome. A clash of times and worlds.

  Just inside the door, a security guard asked for my pass.

  “I’m just looking for Professor Gladstone,” I said. “I asked over at Haskell Hall and they said he should be here.”

  “Still need a pass,” he told me.

  I slipped him a folded twenty. The guard made it disappear, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Last I saw him, he was in the Grand Reading Room. That’s the new extension; head all the way back.”

  I passed from the old world into the new through a glass-walled tunnel. The tunnel opened onto the reading room, and it had earned the word “grand.” A vast room lined with silent and warm wooden tables, all beneath the steel spiderweb struts of the geodesic dome. The dome wasn’t a perfect half sphere: it twisted and coiled at the far end of the oval chamber, making me think of a mollusk’s shell.

  A few students were scattered around the tables and burning the midnight oil, maybe ten or eleven in a space built for nearly two hundred. I spotted Gladstone right away, recognizing him from his profile on the university website. Fiftysomething, with a sandy blond comb-over and wire-rimmed glasses. He was engrossed in a fat hardcover, his face hovering a foot from the page. He didn’t even notice when I pulled up a chair across from him. Then I knocked lightly on the table and he gave a little start.

  “Professor,” I whispered, “I need a moment of your time. Might need more than that, actually. We’ll see how it goes.”

  “I’m…sorry?” He squinted at me, keeping his voice soft. “Have we met?”

  I unfolded the photograph of the dagger and set it on top of his open book.

  “You found this knife on an archaeological expedition, back in ’98. Twelve years ago it went missing from a cargo container.”

  He tilted his head, thinking back. Then he tapped the photo and smiled. “That’s right, the Teotihuacan dig! Has the dagger been recovered?”

  “You could say that. So, this Teot…this place I can’t pronounce. What can you tell me about it?”

  He chuckled. “More time than we have, the library is only open until midnight. Are you a student, Mr.…?”

  “Let’s just say the dagger may have been found, and I’m trying to authenticate its provenance.”

  “You’re a museum curator?” He gave me a closer look. “No. I’m guessing a field agent for an antiquities dealer.”

  “Again, you could say that. Please, Professor, indulge me. Tell me about the dig. Just the broad strokes.”

  He shrugged, easing back in his chair.

  “Well, it’s a fascinating site. Not actually Aztec in origin. Teotihuacan is a Nahuatl word that means ‘birthplace of the gods.’ It was a vast city with a towering step pyramid, but by the time the Aztecs settled in the region, it had been completely abandoned by its creators. We think the builders were Toltec or Totonac, but honestly, we don’t know for certain.”

  “So…how old is this city?” I asked.

  “Twenty-one hundred years or so. We believe it was founded around one hundred years BC. Now, that said, my dig took place in an untouched and deeper strata of the ruin than most. Much of the area has become a modern tourist attraction, and you have to go far afield to get any work done. This spot, I theorized, was occupied by the earliest settlers, even before the city’s founding. That’s where we found quite the treasure trove: this knife, an exquisitely preserved jade bowl, a set of tall obsidian mirrors…clearly a ceremonial site, but nothing matched up with what we knew about Totonac or Toltec religious practices. A delightful anomaly.”

  “Okay,” I said, “here’s the important part. This dagger. You’re saying it was buried in that dig site for at least two thousand years? Untouched?”

  He smiled. “Well, unless someone dug it up, then put it back without disturbing a stray grain of dirt…yes, that’s a safe statement.”

  I took out my phone.

  “You can’t make calls in here,” Gladstone whispered. “This is a library.”

  “I’ll be quick.”

  Caitlin picked up on the second ring. “Daniel? Are you all right?”

  “Safe as I can manage. I’m sitting with the guy who found the knife in Mexico. Do we know how old Naavarasi is? Or how long she’s been visiting”—I paused, glancing at the professor—“these parts?”

  “By ‘these parts,’ meaning Earth? Not sure on either count. But her rights as a baron of hell began when she received her title. That was…nine hundred years ago, perhaps?”

  “Well, the good professor can vouch that the knife was buried in historic dirt for the last two thousand years,” I said. “That just leaves a gap of twelve years when it was floating around the Chicago underworld, and if we can buy a little time, I guarantee I can trace every minute of it.”

  Caitlin’s sigh of relief gusted over the line. “We’ve got her. Bring this professor to me. I need him to testify before multiple authorities from my court and from hers. I’ll call Royce to bear witness—he’s no friend of Naavarasi’s. It galls me to say it, but I may even call Nadine.”

  “I’ll be on the next flight out. So, in regards to his safety…”

  “He won’t be harmed,” Caitlin said. “And he’ll be suitably rewarded. After all, he’s saving my consort’s life. Come home, Daniel.”

  I hung up and turned to Gladstone.

&
nbsp; “I’d really like to know what this is about,” he whispered.

  “It’s about an all-expenses-paid vacation to sunny Las Vegas, Nevada,” I told him. “You, a penthouse suite, Michelin-starred cuisine—”

  “I don’t gamble.”

  “Feh. Gambling? Forget about it. Think of the shows. Do you like magic? Topless dancers? Wanna see magicians do things with topless dancers? Thing is, Professor, some friends of mine really, really need to hear about your dig, straight from the horse’s mouth. You’ll be paid for your time. And paid well.”

  He shifted in his chair, buckling under the pressure of the hard sell.

  “I suppose I could clear some time in my schedule next month,” he said, “but I really need more information—”

  “Ah, see, that won’t work for us. It’s more like ‘you and me on the next flight to Vegas.’ Time’s a factor here.”

  “I couldn’t possibly,” he said.

  I sighed. Time for the hard sell to get a little harder. I slid back my chair and stood up.

  “This is kind of a carrot-and-stick situation,” I said, “and while I prefer to use the carrot…”

  I caught a glint in the corner of my eye. Something gleaming, far beyond the geodesic dome, out along the campus rooftops.

  Then a glass pane shattered, broken shards crashing down onto the polished floorboards. A sniper’s bullet plowed into the table between us and kicked a confetti rain of shredded paper into the air.

  30.

  “Down!” I shouted. Students ran, screaming, throwing their hands or their books over their heads as they stampeded for the exit. Professor Gladstone dove under the reading table. I ducked down beside him, eyes sharp, looking for anything I could use. The reading room was a sniper’s paradise, one vast open floor under glass. Maybe we could dart from table to table, but that was a hell of a risk. The sniper knew exactly where we were; he’d be watching through his scope, just waiting for us to poke our heads out.

  “Why are they trying to kill me?” he squealed, cupping his hands over his head.

  “They’re not,” I told him. “They’re trying to kill me. So stay close.”