Shell Game Page 12

  “Someone delivered it in person, but it must have been in the middle of the night,” she said. “I asked the people in the mail room—the guard found it outside the front door when he arrived to unlock it.”

  “It can’t have come from Fausson,” I said. “He’s been dead for a week now.”

  Whoever dropped it off took an enormous chance that it wouldn’t be stolen. I suppose they could have lurked nearby to make sure only someone going into the Institute picked it up.

  “I want to take this to the police to see if they can get prints from it, but you and Mr. Sansen would have to be printed. Did anyone else handle it?”

  “The guard who unlocked the door and the clerk who delivered our mail this morning. Probably other people in the mail room.”

  “I don’t think we’re ready for police or fingerprints,” Sansen said, “but you raise a good point, Ms. Warshawski. We’ll put it in a box to keep anyone else from handling it.”

  I was going to argue the point: if it matched the calligraphy on the paper in Fausson’s pocket, then the prints could tie back to Fausson’s killer. But Felix’s phone number was on a scrap in the sheriff’s evidence lockup in the county headquarters in Maywood. Chicago cops would come to the Oriental Institute. By the time the two jurisdictions shared information, Felix might be a grandfather himself. Or more likely in prison for Fausson’s murder.

  Van Vliet made a call on her cell phone, asking the person at the other end for a nineteen-inch E-flute drop front, and then looked sternly at me. “If we need more professional advice on detection, we’ll be in touch. Thank you for coming in.”

  I didn’t take the hint. “If you need advice more professional than mine, you’d better call the cops. The cloth wrapping says it’s someone who wants to make sure you know there’s a Syrian connection.”

  “That doesn’t narrow the field,” Sansen said. “There are many people at the OI, at this institute, me included, who’ve spent decades in Syria. We all know a lot of Syrians, Lebanese, and Egyptians, along with Western scholars.”

  “Do you think this piece came from your dig at Tell al-Sabbah?”

  “That is what the director and I were discussing when you arrived,” Van Vliet said, reluctantly. “Neither of us has seen such a figurine before. We’ve encountered this image only in bas-reliefs and castings, sometimes in clay.”

  A woman in jeans and a sweatshirt with a mummy on it came in, holding a large gray box—the nineteen-inch E-flute drop front, I supposed. Van Vliet asked her to make a label, identifying the contents as the shipping container for the fish-man figurine.

  “Date, context, as if we were in the field.” She picked the box up by the edges and gently eased it into the E-flute.

  The woman nodded and took the box away.

  “Is this figurine valuable?” I asked.

  Van Vliet made an impatient gesture. “Valuable to whom? To me, if it is authentic, it is a remarkable piece, but not valuable, because it has no provenance. The museum here at the Institute can’t possibly display it. We don’t know if it’s stolen, we don’t know if it’s even Sumerian. It might be a copy made by a later artisan who was enamored of the fish-man idea. It could be from Turkey or some other place where the Sumerians established colonies. If it was stolen, was it last month, or last century? So for me, personally, it is a fascinating object but not valuable.”

  Van Vliet was doing a good job of making me realize how inadequate I would be at tracking ancient statues.

  “We maintain databases of artifacts with other museums around the world,” Sansen added in a kinder tone. “We can’t query Syrian museums these days, for obvious reasons, but we can find out if anyone has a piece like this, or if a piece like this is on an international stolen objects watch list.”

  That did sound like my exit line. I stopped at the doorway to ask about Fausson’s next of kin. “Who can I ask about Fausson’s personnel file?”

  “He wasn’t on staff,” Van Vliet said sharply.

  “He was a student, right? He had to fill out forms. Someone on this campus has a record of his date of birth and mother and so on.”

  Sansen nodded grudgingly. “Mary-Carol Kooi can help you. She does some administrative work to augment her fellowship. Up the hall, fourth door on your right.”

  As I walked away I heard Van Vliet say, “Why did you give her permission to poke her nose into our affairs, Peter? You were the one who didn’t want any calls to the police, after all.”

  I paused long enough to hear Sansen say, “Since when does a museum turn down free professional help, Candra?”

  That didn’t sound as though they were trying to hide, from the cops or from me.

  When I went into Mary-Carol Kooi’s office and introduced myself, she said yes, Peter Sansen had just sent her a text, she’d pull up Fausson’s record for me. “Peter said he’s the man who was murdered out in the forest preserve last week?”

  “All the local news outlets put the reconstructed face out on their websites. You didn’t recognize him?”

  “I can’t stand to watch the news, it’s all so horrible,” Kooi said. “Every time they show another site in Syria that’s been bombed to oblivion, my heart breaks into new pieces. And every time they babble on about immigrants and ISIS I get too angry to watch. Do you know our stupid invasion of Iraq forced millions of Iraqis to flee? Over a million ended up in Syria. No wonder the country started falling apart. We want to put up walls or expel Muslims, and we created the biggest immigrant crisis in recent history all by ourselves.”

  She stopped and gave a self-conscious laugh. “Sorry. I get carried away. What was Lawrence doing out in a forest preserve? I thought he only liked desert hiking.”

  “He was murdered elsewhere; his body was moved there after he died. But we have zero information on him; that’s why I badly need to talk to someone he might have been close to.”

  I gave her my phone number to text the file to me. “Professor Van Vliet said he’d lost his graduate fellowship, but did he come to the Institute when he got back to the States?”

  “I think he came to see Candra van Vliet a few times, but that wasn’t recently. He might have been arguing about his fellowship.” She reddened. “I wasn’t eavesdropping, but . . . I was passing her office and heard shouting, and . . .”

  “Everyone stops to listen to a quarrel,” I said. “It’s not eavesdropping, just our biology.”

  Kooi made a face. “Maybe. Lawrence seemed to think he’d given her enough help on one of her papers that she should restore his fellowship.”

  I made a note of that, but I couldn’t tell if it was important or not. “He got everyone to call him ‘Lawrence,’ not ‘Leroy’?”

  “Not just that, but it had to be ‘Lawrence,’ never ‘Larry.’ Candra called it an annoying affectation, but he was so young—immature in a particular way. As if he still wanted to live in a make-believe world, where he got to dress up in Arab clothes and play being T. E. Lawrence.”

  I nodded: the checkered headcloth and the way he’d worn his hair, parted far down on the right side—it was as if he had decided to dress up as Lawrence of Arabia for Halloween.

  I asked Kooi if she’d been to Fausson’s apartment on Higgins Road.

  When she bristled defensively, I said, “He had a picture up on the wall, I guess of your dig at Tell al-Sabbah, and you were one of the people in it, so I was hoping you knew him well enough to talk about him.”

  I pulled out another print of the photo in Fausson’s bedroom and handed it to her. Mary-Carol got up to look at it.

  “Oh, my.” Kooi’s face lit up. “That’s Khaddam.” She pointed at one of the Middle Easterners next to Fausson.

  “He was like an old-fashioned sage—he knew the weather by the taste of the wind, and he was wrong only once that I can remember. When we had a sandstorm, he knew it was coming days before it hit and showed us how to tie up our clothes and protect our water supply.”

  Her bright expression turned to wor
ry. “I hope he’s surviving. It’s impossible to get news about any of our people.”

  “Fausson has a picture on his Facebook page that includes you with a group of mostly Middle Easterners. Were they people you worked with in Syria?” I handed her the print I’d downloaded from Fausson’s site.

  Kooi frowned over it. “Oh, that—no. For a while I was going to this one Syrian community center to speak Arabic. They have classes in language and culture so that their kids can grow up speaking it, or at least hearing it, and I was trying to keep up with my Arabic, but it’s out in Palos, and the commute was more than I could handle. Lawrence’s Arabic was so good the Syrian parents actually had him coaching some of the teens in poetry.”

  She pointed at the same figure Candra van Vliet had noticed. “That’s Tarik Kataba. Lawrence used to brag about knowing him.”

  “The center is in Palos?” I said. “Fausson’s body was found in a forest preserve near there. Would he have run afoul of someone at the center?”

  Kooi drew herself up to her full height, about five foot two. “If you’re trying to suggest that ISIS is active in the Syrian refugee and immigrant community, then you’re as bad as ICE. Do they farm out their investigations to private contractors, like they did with Blackwater in Iraq?”

  I tried not to grind my teeth, at least not audibly. “People run afoul of each other all the time, and even, sad to report, murder each other, without being part of ISIS, the Nazis, the KKK, or any other extremist group. Maybe Fausson stole someone’s girlfriend or first edition of Kataba’s poems. Lesser insults than that have inflamed passions to the point of murder. Did Fausson tend to make the people around him angry?”

  When Kooi flushed and hesitated, I added, “The way Professor Van Vliet spoke about him, I got the feeling he’d annoyed her.”

  “You’re not saying Candra killed him, I hope!” Mary-Carol exclaimed.

  My sleepless night and worry about Harmony were making me clumsy. “I’m doing a great job of annoying you, and I’m not part of a terrorist group. Nor part of ICE. Let me try again. You knew Mr. Fausson, I didn’t. What was he like? He obviously loved archaeology, or at least he loved the place in Syria where you were digging. But did he annoy his fellow diggers? Did he upset people like Mr. Khaddam?”

  Kooi gave a reluctant smile. “No, no: Khaddam and the other men in the village, they liked Lawrence to hang out with them. It was like a coup for them, you know—an American who listened to them and wanted to learn the local customs.”

  “Surely that isn’t why the Institute ended his fellowship,” I said.

  Kooi scowled at the pictures I’d handed her, not angry, just debating with herself. “Peter seems to think you’re okay. I guess it’s okay if I tell you what I know.”

  21

  Lawrence of Chicago

  Mary-Carol agreed it would be easier to talk over lunch, away from the Institute. We went to an indie place across the street, where the lunchtime crush meant a long wait for coffee and food.

  It was hard to stay focused on questions and answers on my lone-banana breakfast. I heard that fasting is the new fad in Silicon Valley: apparently the competitive engineers out there think the no-food diet enhances creativity. They compete to see who can go the longest without food. I guess that’s why I’m a detective, not an engineer. Only an iron discipline kept me from stealing food from the adjacent table while I waited for my own order.

  “Lawrence got a job as a janitor when he came back,” Mary-Carol said. “He was such a weird guy, I almost thought he took menial labor to shame Candra and Peter Sansen. You know—the Oriental Institute only prepares you to clean toilets.”

  Although she didn’t know where he’d worked, Kooi said she thought it was for a big industrial firm. “A lot of the Syrians out at the Palos Center do that work, since you don’t need English and a lot of places like that don’t ask about your papers. Lawrence probably liked pretending to be a Syrian refugee himself.”

  “It doesn’t sound as though you liked him,” I said.

  She flushed. “I’m sorry—I know he’s dead—I did like him, when we were in the field, but when I saw him in Chicago he seemed to have a chip on his shoulder.”

  I asked for a contact at the Syrian community center, at which she bristled: I couldn’t put the refugees and immigrants who met there at risk.

  “I don’t know you,” Kooi protested. “I could be betraying—”

  “Palos isn’t a big place,” I said wearily. “I can find the center easily. A contact would be a help, but it’s not essential.”

  Kooi sighed, as if she’d admitted defeat in a larger battle, but she gave me the names of the woman who ran the center and the man who organized the language classes.

  My omelet arrived and I began to feel more human. We ground through my questions: Fausson didn’t have a family, according to the records in Mary-Carol’s office. He’d listed Candra van Vliet as his next of kin. He’d grown up in New Mexico; his parents had been linguists who worked with the Hopi, studying their language. He’d been in college when his parents’ small plane had crashed in the Santa Fe National Forest, killing them both.

  “He felt closer to Van Vliet than she to him, apparently,” I said. “What went wrong in Syria?”

  Mary-Carol Kooi stirred her soup so violently that tomato splotches flew onto the table. “Candra said he wasn’t cut out for fieldwork. It made me angry at the time. Lawrence loved artifacts and knew more about them than anyone on the dig, except Candra, of course. It wasn’t until later that I realized she was right, that he didn’t have the discipline to stick with the hard work.”

  “What? Cooking and cleaning, those kinds of things?”

  “No, no. We all pitched in, some more than others, of course, but even if Lawrence had wanted to be a lion king, so to speak, Candra wouldn’t have tolerated it. But he loved showing newbies the ropes.

  “When I first got out to the field, I turned to him because he had such great morale when we contracted shigellosis or pined for a real bath. One of the older women told me she could tell the newcomers a mile off by how they reacted to Lawrence.”

  Mary-Carol blushed painfully. “And you might as well know before you ask, we were lovers for a while. Not long, nothing lasted long there, except the land itself, of course, and the pottery shards. . . .”

  Her voice trailed off; she was remembering her time in the desert, the affair with Fausson, when life had been physically hard but emotionally pleasing.

  “Where did Fausson lack discipline?” I prodded her.

  “The finicky work—pick a shard out of the ground, brush it off, see if you can fit it with another shard someone else found nearby—he, well, he shirked his share, to be honest. I was defending him for the longest time, I didn’t want to feel like I’d been a fool for sleeping with him, of course, but I finally had to agree with Candra and the others.

  “What Lawrence wanted was a big find, a tomb with intact pottery and statuary, something that would get him an international name fast. He used to leave Tell al-Sabbah, go off in the desert with a local guide, like Khaddam, or even once or twice with Kataba, and be gone for days. You have to be a team player if you’re part of a dig.”

  I thought of the money hoard in Fausson’s apartment. “He stayed on in the Middle East for two years after the rest of you came home, traveling to most of the Arab countries. Do you think he’d found his tomb and was selling the contents around the region?”

  Mary-Carol seemed shocked at the suggestion. “But the provenance! He would never dismantle a tell. He placed too high a value on the history. You never knew him, but you feel free to accuse him of a serious crime!”

  “Lawrence lived very frugally, but he had a lot of cash. I wondered if he sold artifacts that he’d brought back with him.”

  “He wouldn’t!” Kooi was vehement. “It would be sacrilege.”

  “He’d lost his fellowship; he had to change his expectations,” I suggested.

  “He could h
ave been finding a rich sponsor,” Kooi said. “All that time he stayed on in the Middle East after Candra left, he could have found someone. Those oil and mineral sheikhs have money to burn but no glory. Their name on a big find would excite them.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw Omar Sharif, heat shimmering around his flashing black eyes, riding his camel in Lawrence of Arabia.

  “Word of something like that would get around,” I objected.

  “Not with all the wars going on over there,” Mary-Carol said. “He’d keep a new dig a secret as long as possible to protect it from looters. Why are you trying to connect his death to archaeology, anyway? How do you know he wasn’t attacked by gangbangers?”

  “He died from a deliberate beating,” I said. “Not a random jumping by strangers. His body was found in a forest preserve not far from Palos.”

  When that sank in, Mary-Carol was angry. “That’s an outrageous accusation, that the Syrians killed him.”

  “I’m not saying it, especially since I only learned about the Syrian center from you five minutes ago. But it suggests a connection to his work in Syria. Someone he met, something he saw—could he have been blackmailing someone?”

  “Even if I could imagine Lawrence doing such a thing, no one in the Syrian immigrant community could afford to pay off a blackmailer.” Kooi was scornful. “No one in the Oriental Institute, either, for that matter. And Candra, she has money, but she would never give in to blackmail.”

  “Professor Sansen wondered if Mr. Fausson had sent the artifact that showed up at the Institute this morning,” I said. “That bronze fish-man. The timing isn’t right—it was delivered by hand, and Fausson’s been dead for a week—but could it have been something he found?”

  “That’s the whole point about Lawrence,” Mary-Carol said. “He wouldn’t have dug up something like that and sent it off without documenting its provenance, especially if it could get him the recognition he wanted. You didn’t find photos or documents like that with the money, or in his computer?”

  His computer. I’d forgotten it in the middle of the drama around Harmony and Reno.