The Looters (41 page)

I wasn’t about to stick around. I ran for the pathway at the back of the buildings, in the opposite direction the cabbie took. Behind me I heard the dull pops of weapons with silencers being fired from the alley. I was running as fast as I could in my disguise when my world exploded.

Knocked off my feet, I went down, stunned, lying facedown on gray brickwork pavement. I stared blankly at the brickwork. I thought I’d been hit by something, but I realized I’d been bowled over by a blast of air and noise.

I rolled over and sat up, looking back at the taxi. It was on fire. My brain was numb, but I knew immediately what had happened. Stocker’s machine-gun fire had ignited the tanker truck.

I struggled to my feet and staggered back to look for Coby. A blackened human form was wedged under the back wheel of the taxi. All I could clearly make out was the soles of the shoes.

The burning taxi blew. I wasn’t hit by debris, but the explosive sound caused me to spin around and keep going the other way.

My mind was swirling. I had enough sense left to know I had to get away and to take off the Babylonian robe. I held on to it as I came out of the walking path from behind the buildings.

I walked into a scene not dissimilar to the day Lipton’s gallery had been blown up—excited people asking one another questions about what had happened.

I pushed through the crowd and kept walking until I came to a subway station and stumbled down the stairs like a zombie. Without thinking, I tried to get by the gate without a ticket. I fumbled in my pocket and got out a ticket with a ride still on it.

As I boarded the first train that arrived, I had no idea as to where it was headed. I just sat down and stared blankly at the opposite wall. The car was almost empty.

No one had lived through the blast in that alley; I was certain of that.

Poor Coby. Even though he had a criminal mentality, he had never really tried to hurt me. Not even when I double-crossed him twice. I grieved for him, but something inside me kept my tears back. I felt stone dead, like I had no feelings left. Just numbness from the horror I’d seen. I had fallen for Coby. Another victim of loving the wrong person.

Stocker deserved to rot in a burning sewer in hell for eternity.

I hoped to God Gwyn survived the blast because she was in the SUV. I liked her. What I didn’t understand was, What was she doing with that crazy maniac bastard?

The subway had been heading downtown. I got out when it reached midtown and walked until I found myself in front of a car rental.

I needed to get distance between me and the city, to think things out. I wanted to give the mask back to Abdullah’s daughter, but right now I didn’t have the strength or courage to find my way to Jamaica Plains. I wanted to hide, to find some peace. Do some thinking. Figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Figure out what I was going to say to Special Agent Nunes if he asked me why I had robbed a museum and blown up part of the city.

R
OYAL
L
UST

In
The Divine Comedy
, Dante sees Semiramis (along with Cleopatra) among the souls of the lustful in the second circle of hell.

The image was drawn from her history as a woman who loved… with a vengeance.

Semiramis (Sammu-ramat) first came to royal attention when she became the mistress of a King Ninus, an Assyrian general who was besotted by her beauty. The general conveniently committed “suicide” so she could marry the king.

Said to have a voracious sexual appetite, she quickened her royal husband to the grave after he discovered she was enjoying sex with palace guards.

Upon seizing the throne, she became infatuated with Ara, the handsome young King of Armenia. Spurred by his rejection, she invaded Armenia.

The young king fell in a battle against her army in the Ararat Valley of what is now Turkey.

Grieving over his death, Semiramis beseeched the gods to bring him back from the dead.

The gods sent doglike creatures down from heaven to lick Ara’s wounds, bringing him back to life.

Chapter 66

Life had taken me from a park-view penthouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to a sleazy sex motel off the Jersey Turnpike.

I kept thinking about Coby. My body and mind had relaxed enough now to grieve over him. How could I have loved a man with a criminal mentality? I knew the simple but correct answer to the question: People don’t pick out who they choose to love.

Anyone who thinks a man or woman chooses who they love needs a reality check. Women who have led honest, faithful lives as mothers and wives have run off with motorcycle trash or bought guns and helped scumbag felons escape from jail. Men with good business sense have trashed their marriages and careers and run off with secretaries, babysitters, or the coworker in the next cubicle.

Soul mates came together without rhyme or reason. They just happened. And they weren’t always made in heaven. If they were, Gwyn’s attraction to Stocker had been the work of the devil.

Her choice was nuts, but I don’t believe it was voluntary. I’ve never blamed any of the people who get themselves into bad relationships. Love is not rational.

I’d heard the New Age word “karma” bandied about most of my life. But what exactly did it mean?

Fate? Destiny? Some sort of magnetic attraction?

Magnets have no choice in what they attract. Fate and destiny are a done deal—you are attracted to who your kismet bonds with.

Right at the moment, I didn’t know and didn’t care if cosmic forces were at work. I just knew that there was a vacant place in my heart now that Coby was dead. Bastard that he was, he was the bastard that I loved.

I cried myself to sleep with the john grunting and the whore faking ecstasy on the other side of the wall. And woke up from a nightmare of being in a dark room and having a man beside my bed. That much was a bad dream.

Getting a phone call from the dead was the real thing. I returned the call.

“You’re supposed to be dead!”

“Would I be calling you if I was? That was Stocker’s scorched body under the cab,” Coby said. “As he came up to the taxi, I rolled out the other side and made a dash behind the buildings. Stocker got it as he came forward shooting from the hip.”

“What about Gwyn?”

“She got away in the SUV. No doubt to put some distance between her and her partners now that we know she’s been double-crossing us. That tanker truck was parked at the station for the night, almost empty. It made a hell of a bang but just blew out some windows. Stocker really took it from the gas tank in the taxi. I think his bullets started the fire and then—boom!”

“You bastard. You’re really alive.”

“I’m glad to hear you’re overjoyed at my miraculous escape from the jaws of death. Not to mention we’re clean as to the museum job. It’s pretty certain your FBI pals will pin the museum heist on Stocker and that Viktor Milan guy who just keeps fading away the closer anyone gets to him. Must have been Milan that Stocker was after when he bought the farm in that alley. Hey—we’re in the clear, baby.”

He was right: I was bubbling with joy that he wasn’t dead. But that good news was now past history by at least thirty seconds. This man had lied to me repeatedly. And now I had the upper hand: the mask.

“Coby, listen carefully. You are one of those extremely rare criminals who are likeable. But you are still a criminal. And a liar.”

He started to reply and I told him to shut up.

“You’ve lied to me and lied to me and lied to me. It’s over, done with, kaput. Do you understand? No more lies.”

“Scout’s honor.”

“Shut up, you idiot. And listen.” I took a deep breath. “The mask is going back to the Iraqi museum. No arguments, no recourse. It’s going back. Period.”

“Maddy—”

“No, it’s going back. That’s a done deal. You’ve broken every promise you’ve made about the mask. This time I’m not listening to you. It’s going back to where it belongs.”

I heard tapping on the door. It sent my heart racing.

“Maddy—”

“
Somebody’s at my door
.”

“It’s me. Open the door.”

“What?”

“Open up.”

I closed my eyes. It couldn’t be. This couldn’t be happening to me.

The knocking on the door became more insistent. I refused to believe it. It wasn’t possible.

“Open the door, Maddy. I don’t want to have to kick it down. Neither one of us can afford to have the cops called.”

“How did you find me?”

“GPS device in the heel of your shoe.”

“You sonofabitch.”

“Just protecting our investment. We figured you’d never let us offer the mask back for a finder’s fee.”

“Of course not. It has to go back to Baghdad. I knew you were lying.”

“You see? It’s been a misunderstanding all the way along the line again. Now open the door before I kick it open.”

I didn’t fool myself with wishful thinking that the pervert at the front desk would help me if my door got kicked in. Or call the police. Not that I wanted the police called. But it would be nice if I wasn’t constantly at the mercy of every predator that came along.

I opened the door and faced his big grin. “You really are a bastard.”

“For sure. But let’s not dwell on the past. I have a couple of associates waiting that are eager to come in and break your neck. We need to get this over with before they decide they’d rather strangle you and hang than peacefully walk away with a five-million-dollar finder’s fee.”

“You and your buddies are the scum of the earth.”

He clutched his chest. “God… that… hurt. Now give me the mask.”

He stepped into the room, making me give way.

“Bastard.” It was the only word that kept coming to my tongue.

“Can we get beyond the personalities?”

The mask was on the dresser. I swear, the bitch was leering at us.

“Ah, the queen herself.”

I shot for the dresser and Coby caught me. “You don’t want my pals coming up. They blame you for Gwyn, too.”

“What did I have to do with Gwyn?”

“Everything went to hell after you entered the picture. Even Stocker got crazier than he was before.”

“Blame her.” I pointed at the mask. “Not me.”

He took the mask off the dresser. I reached for it and he put it behind his back.

“Maddy, give it up; it’s not going to happen. You can’t believe we robbed the museum in Baghdad while armies clashed and robbed a museum in New York while security cameras rolled just to let you give it back?”

“You don’t understand what you’re doing. You haven’t grasped it yet. There’s a curse on the mask.”

“There’s five million dollars on the mask.”

“You’ll never see the money and even if you did, you’ll never live to spend it. The curse is real. Walk out of here with that mask and it’ll get you.”

He kissed me. Long and hard. The press of his lips against mine made me want more.

“I’ll be back. With plenty of money for us.”

“I don’t want your blood money.”

“I’m going to take you back to Europe. We’ll buy a yacht and sail the Mediterranean and—”

“Rob antiquities from shipwrecks?”

He patted my tush.

“Helluva idea. We’ll do that, too.”

I started to call him a bastard again as he left, but instead I leaned against the door frame and watched him go. Hopeless. He would never be, well… normal. He had gone to the dark side of art and would never come back. But my heart was still with him. And I knew that in his own mind he wasn’t taking something from me. He was, as he put it, preserving an antiquity, and making a handsome profit to boot.

“Damn you,” I whispered.

I gathered up my stuff. I left behind my shoes that alerted a satellite somewhere in space where I was and walked out barefoot. I was tired of leaving a trail.

Pulling out of the parking lot, I followed roads that led back to the turnpike. For the first time since I raised the paddle to place a $55 million bid, I felt at peace. My conscience had been bothering me for so long. It was finally going to be put at ease.

So much had happened since the day a taxi driver named Abdullah walked into the museum and accused me and everyone else of being less holier than thou. And he was right. He was the towel head, the camel jockey, and we were materially superior for having the cars, homes, and other economic miracle of Western society. But we were the thieves of his culture.

True, I didn’t know the mask was part of the looting of his country’s national museum. And most of the harm to the museum and other antiquity sites came from the Iraqis themselves. If I had known the mask was stolen, I would never have urged Piedmont to buy it. But I was also careful to look the other way.

What I didn’t do expressly I did by not looking askance at something that was too good to be true. I sinned by omission.

But that was over, now.

What was that about life being a circle? All your bad deeds come back to bite you? That’s why I had to return that bitch queen back to Iraq. She was truly the Whore of Babylon. And she wasn’t going to let me live in peace until she was back in her own country, playing hell with those poor people.

I didn’t know how that would affect Iraq, but right now I had my own skin to save from her dark curses.

Once I was over the bridge and five minutes from my destination, I made a call. It was late, but it was never too late for good news.

“I have something for you,” I told Abdullah’s daughter. “I need you to come down to the street in front of your apartment.”

What I had for her was the death mask of Semiramis.

We had entered the museum with two fake masks. Gwyn had one to make the exchange. I had one in an inside pouch of my robe, intending to use it later to make a switch for the real one.

Gwyn slipped me her fake and I gave it to Angela.

I left the museum with two masks: the real one and the fake that was inside the robe pouch.

I carried the robe into the motel room with me and put the fake mask on the dresser after I realized I still had it.

Coby took the fake mask.

Semiramis herself, or at least the real impression of her face after death, was in the glove compartment of the rental car. I had left it there when I went into the motel. Hoping I’d left bad luck behind.