Artifact

by Gigi Pandian

  Lane sighed, and though his face remained stoic his eyes smiled at me.

  “Jones, you have got to be the most exceptional woman I have ever met.”

  “Don’t you dare get sentimental on me, I liked you just fine before. And that’s not the beginning.”

  “Shall I start with my father?” Lane said. “Isn’t that where one is supposed to start?”

  “Only if I was going to psychoanalyze you.”

  “Please don’t. But it makes sense anyway. My father did business overseas, so I spent most of my childhood in the American schools in too many European and Asian countries to count.”

  “Your foreign languages,” I said. “And the cigarettes Nadia liked.”

  “That’s why I understand that feeling of yours about not quite fitting in, not like you’re supposed to.” He tapped an unlit cigarette against his leg nervously. “It’s strange, telling the story of my life—the real one, I mean—to anyone.”

  A gust of wind shook the car. The night sky was clear above us, but clouds loomed in the distance.

  “I had a natural aptitude for linguistics,” Lane continued, “along with a natural skepticism of everything my father did. All of his wealthy associates cared more about their vacation homes and mistresses than their wives and children.”

  He paused and looked out into the night instead of facing me, seeming to search for what he wanted to say.

  “Superficially, I fit in everywhere I went,” he said, “picking up the language easily. You’d think it was something I should have been happy about. But I wasn’t. They were so contented to play by their rules, using morally questionable business practices to keep their yachts and their caviar coming. No one even likes caviar. They think they’re supposed to savor it, so they buy it and pretend to.

  “It was a game. Imitating their mannerisms, their accents, their speech patterns. By the time I left for college in England, I didn’t have any grand dreams of what to do with my life. All I had was bitterness.”

  “So you just decided to become a jewel thief?”

  “It wasn’t a conscious choice.” He rubbed his eyes, his lean fingers bumping up against the thick frames of his glasses in the process. “This isn’t easy for me, you know. For all I know you could turn me in.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Do I have any right to think that you wouldn’t?” He cast his eyes downward. When I squeezed his hand, he looked back up at me.

  “It wasn’t a conscious choice,” he said. “I flitted around to various groups, always pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Then I met a man. John. I guess you could call him my mentor. He showed me something more productive I could do with my talents.

  “I’m not going to lie to you and say I was altruistic—fighting the system to change the world, or being Robin Hood, or any nonsense like that. But I never stole from anyone who couldn’t afford it, and I never used a weapon—John taught me that—so I never hurt anyone, either monetarily or physically. I just helped myself. And got even with them.”

  It all made perfect sense from everything that I had seen in him. I didn’t want to forgive him, or make excuses for him. But I didn’t want to judge him either.

  “It happened without me realizing how far I’d come,” he said. “I was good. Good enough that I wasn’t afraid of getting caught. I assumed a different persona and was a completely different person in every city.

  “You know what it feels like,” he said. “Fitting in on the surface, but wanting something more, even if you can’t grasp what that something is.”

  “What did you steal?” I asked him. But I thought I already knew the answer.

  “Mostly jewelry. Sometimes art. But jewelry is easiest to sneak out of the country.”

  “That’s why you knew about this treasure—and what it was called!”

  “I’m afraid so. It’s not quite as bad as you make it sound, though. I hadn’t put it together until you brought me the photograph. No one had. Not scholars, and not people with, ah, other ideas in mind, either. There were vague rumors in certain circles of a piece of the Rajasthan Rubies existing, like there was speculation in academic circles that artwork showing the jewels might have depicted real jewelry, but nothing concrete—no proof—so I had to piece things together.”

  “But how did I find you in that office at Berkeley?”

  “My tiny little art history graduate student office? That really is my office.”

  “You really are a graduate student?”

  “Of course. I wasn’t faking that. I merely didn’t tell you how I came by the knowledge of jewelry and art that got me there.” He paused and tried to gauge my expression in the dim light.

  “You’re wondering why I gave it all up for the luxurious offerings of my thirty-five-square-foot graduate student office?”

  “It does make one wonder.”

  “France,” he said. “A few years ago.What happened in France is what made me get out.”

  He paused, struggling with himself again. “It’s a miserable story. What I was involved in was no longer so clear-cut. I had enough money by that point that I didn’t really need to—”

  “What did you do with all the money?”

  “I have it. It’s tucked away.”

  “You still have it?”

  “You’ll notice it comes in handy.” He indicated our rather extravagant car. “What, you didn’t think I was going to say I gave it all away to charity, did you? I’m not Robin Hood, remember?”

  “But you….”

  He waited for me to finish, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I wanted to kick him and comfort him, turn him in and protect him, watch him rot in jail alone and never stop holding him. None of these contradictory things could be expressed in words. Not by me at any rate.

  “I didn’t turn myself in or give the money back to people who in effect stole it in the first place,” he said. “That wouldn’t have set things right. Those people didn’t deserve the things I took from them. But I needed to find my own peace with the world. I’m not happy about some of the art and jewels that ended up in private collections. So here I am, giving something back to the world.”

  “Saving history,” I said, “one artifact at a time.”

  “Well, now that you’ve made my life sound like a Hallmark card for art historians, I really have no choice but to return to a life of crime.”

  I swore.

  “Nervous humor,” he said, misinterpreting my outburst.

  “That’s not it,” I said. “That’s why you wanted to find the treasure!”

  “You don’t have to yell. I’m right here.”

  “You don’t want this to make your career,” I said, the truth hitting me. “You lied to me when you said that’s why you wanted to come to the UK. You don’t want to be famous, not even in your field. You want to hide. Your hair and thick glasses covering your memorable face, your clothes that blend into whatever environment you’re in. You don’t want to be remembered. You don’t want to find the treasure for yourself. You want to save it from them.”

  “I thought that was rather obvious at this point.”

  “Nothing is obvious at this point. And yes, I am aware that I’m yelling, thank you. You want to save the treasure from Rupert and Knox because they’re treasure hunters. You don’t know what the two of them will do with it, and you want to make sure the knowledge isn’t lost.”

  “Did you hear something?” Lane asked, whipping his head around. I supposed he was used to listening for faint noises in his line of work.

  “It’s my stomach,” I groaned. “I’m starving. We must have been here half the night.”

  “At least.”

  Sifting through my bag, I found a squished chocolate bar near the bottom. I offered Lane half. He declined, so I ate it myself.

  “Now that you’re d
one with your psychoanalysis and your candy, you can tell me what you think we’ll find inside the estate. I know you need to see something to be sure, but I won’t hold it against you if you’re wrong. I promise.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “There’s too damn much going on to keep my head straight to tell this right. All these distractions….”

  I trailed off.

  “Jaya?”

  “The distractions.”

  “You already said that.”

  “He wouldn’t, would he?” I mumbled.

  I couldn’t believe I didn’t think of it before now.

  “Lane, were you wondering why we were both sent on such pointless diversions today?”

  “To get us out of the way, obviously. Divide and conquer.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” I said, “but with all that’s going on, I didn’t have time to think it through. Think about it. Even if you were stuck in jail for a few days, I would have realized the library was a fake errand soon enough.”

  “The library? What library? I thought you took off because you said your ex made up some story about me being in on trying to kill him.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s why I was mad, but that wasn’t the diversion. I received a fake call from a librarian at the British Library in London saying they had some information for me, so I used it as a way to get away from here. I didn’t think Rupert would have made up something like that, but I didn’t want to believe that you were…that you could have...I needed to think.”

  “You mean there was another ploy meant specifically to get you out of the way?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That means the timing—”

  “I know,” I said. “That means the timing is important. But why now?”

  Lane swore. “I wasn’t arrested to keep me away from you and this situation,” he said. “Both of our diversions must have been meant to keep us away from something happening tonight.”

  “Tonight? Why tonight? They’ve been here for ages.”

  “But your ex hasn’t,” Lane answered, shaking his head. “You said he told you he was recuperating from the failed attempt on his life, but as soon as he was up to it he was going after the treasure. He knows he doesn’t have a lot of time since someone else is after it. He tried last night, but we were there and stopped him. So he had to make sure we’d be out of the way tonight.”

  “But he doesn’t know where it is,” I insisted. Then I groaned. “Oh, God. He thinks he does, though. We’ve got to get back to the dig. Lane, we haven’t been seeing what’s right in front of us this whole time.”

  “The cave,” Lane said.

  I nodded. “There’s something at the site of this dig that has nothing to do with any of the ancient inhabitants of Scotland. Not the Picts. Not fairies. Not the gods of legends. I had half of the explanation of the treasure figured out, but our diversions gave us the answer to another piece of the puzzle. Our Indian treasure, the Rajasthan Rubies, it’s not only here in Scotland or on the grounds of this estate, but hidden at the site of the dig.”

  “That’s why they’ve been digging at the cave right underneath the dig.”

  “We’ve already wasted too much of the night. We’ve got to get to the dig before it’s too late.”

  Chapter 40

  Lane drove to the dig. Fast. And to think he thought I had endangered our lives with my driving earlier that night. He wasn’t even attempting to drive on the road. We did pretty well until one of the tires skidded in a puddle of mud so deep I was sure we wouldn’t make it out. Lane knew how to handle a car. We eased out of the hole with only a minor lurch, but the engine stalled.

  “We can walk from here,” Lane said.

  I found a spot that didn’t look like it would be a precipitous climb down to the alcove. Though clouds had again covered the moon, the rain held off. I turned on my flashlight and we started the descent.

  “I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” Lane said from right behind me. “The original path we went down before is better.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. Right before my foot hit a patch of gravel.

  The flashlight flew out of my hand as I stuck out my hand to steady my fall, in an attempt to stop the tumble turning into a full-blown slide down the rocky slope. My other foot left the ground. A strong hand grabbed my wrist.

  The action prevented me from slipping down the steep hillside, but Lane had taken hold of me with such force that he lost his balance and fell. He fell backwards, but he didn’t plunge down the steep path. His hand remained locked on my wrist, and he grunted as I fell on top of him.

  I tried to turn around to face him, leading to another groaning sound.

  I turned around carefully. “Your glasses!”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I don’t need them.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I need something for my vision. I thought glasses were a nice scholarly touch—ouch—but I have contact lenses in my pocket.”

  I tried to stand up, but he held me there.

  “Please be careful, okay?” he said. Then without warning he pulled me closer to him in a sweeping motion, and brought my lips to his for an intense moment. He believed me about the urgency of the situation, though. He let me go quickly and stood up.

  “I lost the flashlight,” I said.

  “I don’t think it matters. Look.”

  He was right. The faintest rays of light were already starting to appear on the horizon.

  “The sun comes up early here in the summer,” he said.

  “We wasted that much time? Come on, we need to hurry. Do you need your contacts in to climb down?”

  Lane shook his head, and we moved quickly. As the sun began to peek more strongly over the horizon above the sea and below the layer of clouds, we entered the cave.

  Rock debris made it immediately clear that someone had been here since the night before. We made a quick inspection of the cave and determined that whoever it had been wasn’t there now. We were too late.

  What would I have done if I had encountered someone? I was fairly certain Rupert had been there digging, but what if I’d been wrong?

  I took a closer look around the inside of the cave while Lane was putting in his contacts. The only sign of activity was a gaping hole in the rock directly next to the entrance. With his vision restored, Lane came up to me and more thoroughly inspected the crudely dug hole.

  “He didn’t find anything,” he said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “From the way the rock is cut,” he said. “Nothing has previously been carved out as a hiding place. He’d know that if he knew what he was doing. You said he finished a PhD in archaeology? It’s possible something may have been wedged into the natural formation, but he couldn’t have found much.”

  I stepped back and looked him over. He was a whole new man without his glasses. He ran his fingers over the rock’s surface.

  “What would you have done if we’d found someone here?” I asked.

  Lane turned and looked up from the shattered rock face.

  “Played it by ear,” he said, shrugging. “That’s all you can do in a situation like this.”

  I wandered toward the smaller entrance of the cave as Lane continued to inspect the freshly dug hole. I stepped through the small second opening, out onto the sunlight on the rock. I discovered to my horror that we were wrong about no one else being there. I called out as I rushed forward.

  Knox’s body lay askew on the jagged black rocks. His head was bashed in, and blood trickled onto the rock, wet with seawater beneath him.

  Chapter 41

  I ran as far forward as I could without slipping and bashing my own head. I stopped at the edge of the large flat rock, then carefully stepped onto the smaller uneven rocks at the water’s edge, so I could reach Knox. I kn
elt at his side and felt for a pulse at his neck. If the gash on his head or the vacant expression in his open blue-gray eyes hadn’t been enough, the lack of a pulse gave me the definitive answer that he was dead.

  I couldn’t pull my eyes from Knox’s face. His hair was streaked across his forehead, wet with a combination of water from the misty sea air and blood. He looked so familiar, like he should open his eyes at any moment. I don’t know what I had expected—that he would look like a mannequin once his breath had left him? In a way it was even more upsetting than when I had thought Rupert was dead. Even worse was my feeling that I might have been able to prevent this. If I had stayed and talked to Knox, he might not have come out here. He might not be dead. Why had I acted so rashly?

  I didn’t realize I was grasping Knox’s shirt collar until I felt Lane’s hands pulling me back.

  “You’ve got blood on you,” he said after he dragged me back onto the stable flat rock.

  I looked down at the thick red substance on my hands and the sleeves of my coat. “I know.”

  “This won’t look good.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “We can’t go to the police.” He said it matter-of-factly, but his voice wasn’t callous. It could have been the wind, but I thought I detected a slight unsteadiness. I found myself shaking as I looked down at Knox. It wasn’t from the chilled air swirling around us.

  “They’d figure it out eventually,” I said. “Since I didn’t do anything.”

  “There’s nothing we can do for him now. All it would do is get you tied up while we could be straightening out the last of this mess.”

  I sat down on the rock. Lane pulled me back up. “Not here,” he said. “We have to get out of here.”

  “But—” I began, gesturing toward Knox’s lifeless body.

  “High tide is receding now,” he said. “The water won’t have a chance of reaching him for half a day. We’ll come back if no one has found him by then.”

  I stared up at him.

  “It’s one of those things you learn to pay attention to,” he said. “It came in very handy during one job.”