The Price of Inheritance (15 page)

“I don't know. I guess I have been home a lot lately.”

“No harm in that.”

He unbuttoned his jacket and placed it on the couch, and for the first time since I had been with him, in the too bright lights of my apartment, I could really see his body, the way his biceps were almost bigger than his shoulders, how strong he was. He could have, physically, settled any score I had to settle in New York. But I wasn't the type to have any problems like that.

“Is that the bowl, there?” said Tyler, looking toward the bedroom at a wide bookcase, where the bowl sat on the top shelf.

“I brought it home last night. Verdict at the store is I should just keep it until we know more about it.”

“That's a good verdict.”

He motioned for me to sit next to him on the couch.

“Or you keep it until you give it back to me?”

I eyed him and his sly smile.

“I don't think that's going to happen.”

“How much longer are you staying in Newport?” he asked, resting his glass on his knee. I could see it leaving a small ring of water on the dark denim.

“I've got about ten days left. Then I need to go back to New York.”

“Why?” he asked. “Got a reason to run back so soon?”

“I don't know. I just told myself I would. I messed up, I gave myself a month to get over it, and then I'll try to fix it all again.”

“I'd like to see you as much as you'll let me in the next ten days,” he said. “Would you be okay with that?”

He put his glass on the coffee table, stood up, and before I could answer, he reached out his hand and pulled me up off the couch so I was standing in front of him. My head didn't even reach his shoulder. He walked us over to the wall by the front door and leaned against it. Still holding my hand, he pulled me close to him, put his other hand on my face, and kissed me, long, hard, perfectly. He pulled away and looked at me, ran his hands through my hair, to the back of my neck, and when he kissed me again, he grabbed me so tightly that my feet were barely on the ground. It wasn't just a kiss. It was a huge motion, some sort of physical wave that peaked with his mouth against mine, his tongue on my tongue, his body pressed hard against me. I put my hands on his arms, running them down his pressed white shirt, trying not to tremble. When he let go, I looked up at him and said, “You should go. Before I make any bad decisions, you should go.”

“What sort of bad decisions are you planning to make?” he asked me before he kissed me again. He didn't move his hands from my neck but pulled me toward him again. He ran his hand down my shoulder, stopping just above my chest. “I love bad decisions.”

“So I hear.”

“Oh yeah? You seem like a girl who's smart enough not to believe what everyone else says.”

“Sometimes people are right, though.”

He took a step back and looked at me.

“Two weeks, you said?”

“Not even.”

“Okay, then I'd like to take you out again tomorrow.”

Not wanting to seem like a girl who was never asked out on dates by men who acted like Tyler Ford, even though that was true, I told him Sunday, walked him to the door, and touched my tingling lips, swollen from him biting them. I hoped Tyler was the best bad decision I ever made.

CHAPTER 8

I
t had been two weeks since I'd emailed Max about the bowl and he still hadn't responded to me. Now that I had met Tyler, I desperately wanted the green and white bowl to be something valuable. I wanted to look up at him one night and say, “You'll never guess what I found out. . . .” Was there something about it that I wasn't seeing? Some signs pointed to it being a new piece, like the weight, but like William said, the intricacy of the design, the slant of the calligraphy, made me think otherwise. But I was not an expert and I still had no idea what the Hebrew writing on the bottom meant, nor did I have a confirmation on what Tyler pronounced the Arabic writing to be. I could have taken it to a mosque and a temple, but that seemed too dramatic. So as a child of academics, I decided to bring it to a bastion of learning.

Providence is not a pretty city. It is less than an hour away from Newport, but in beauty, it didn't belong in the same state. There were exceptions, and Brown University was one of them. I'd thought about applying to Brown when I was a senior, but it had always seemed a little too bohemian, the unpreppy, un-Ivy Ivy. Even now, the students walking across the quad had a good dose of hipster in their wardrobes. At Princeton, even before the term
hipster
invaded our lexicon, it was a dirty word. But now that I was older, I kind of liked the vibe of the place. It didn't seem like a school where people sold their souls to get into the right eating club.

The Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World was on George Street, which ran straight across campus. Blair Bari, a professor of Egyptology, archaeology, and art history, had agreed to meet with me. I had sent him an email a thousand words long describing the backstory, begging for his help. He had written back, “Yes. Tomorrow. Ten a.m.” That was the entire email. So he was a man of few words or polite phrases. He was still highly esteemed and making time to see me.

When I found Professor Bari's office, I knocked on the door and walked in after I heard his voice. He was sitting at a large wooden desk, which had bookshelves all around, and a granite relief fragment of a Nubian prisoner on one of them. He was wearing a polo and a sweater and a blazer and had the air-conditioning on. I didn't question his cooling methods and introduced myself.

“Carolyn Everett. I don't know you, do I?” he asked, taking off a pair of reading glasses. His black hair was thinning on the top but he had warm, inviting eyes. They were heavily wrinkled at his temples, showing years of squinting in the sun.

“You don't. I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to meet with me, especially since you don't know me.”

“Well, your email was interesting,” he said, folding his hands on his desk. “The Goodwill. I liked that part of the story the best. The Goodwill. I don't think I've ever put one toe inside the Goodwill. Is that where all the good artifacts can be found these days?”

“I don't think so. It's more like a needle-in-a-haystack situation over there except the haystack is a lot of discarded bric-a-brac and used clothing.”

“Bric-a-brac. How fascinating.” He looked up at me and waved me in. “Sit down, sit down, please.”

I took a seat in the navy blue leather chair opposite his desk and put my bag on the floor.

“So you were at Christie's for many years, you said.”

“Yes, I was,” I said, crossing my legs under my wool skirt. “I was there for ten years, full-time for eight.”

“I think I read an article about you last month. American furniture. Some sort of big bad Baltimore slipup?”

I froze. Of course this man had googled me. Why wouldn't he. He wasn't just going to let any old fool take up his office hours. Except I wasn't any old fool. I was a notorious young fool.

“Between you and me, the people over there have always scared the dickens out of me. So uptight!” he said jovially.

I tried unsuccessfully not to laugh. “They really are pretty uptight sometimes. But very smart and polished.”

“Smart and polished, of course, of course. Not like the rest of us, who go digging on our hands and knees for the good stuff. We're barbaric!”

“I think you're just more adventurous,” I offered.

“Well, you look like the adventurous type, Miss Everett. You have very interesting coloring. If I were a painter I would very much like to paint you. That smattering of freckles across your nose with those dark wide eyes and the flowing light hair. Very striking. You look Finnish. Are you Finnish?”

“Thank you for the nice compliment. I don't think I'm Finnish. Everett is derived from the Germanic Eberhard, I believe.”

“Too bad. I love Finland. Wonderful fish.” He lifted his fingers to his lips and smiled.

Perhaps I had picked the wrong professor at Brown. I wondered if he'd notice if I stood up and backed away slowly.

“Before I take a look at this vessel you've brought up, can you tell me about it? I'd like some background before I actually see it.”

I should have told him to just read the ridiculously detailed email I'd sent him, but he had been kind enough not to throw me out of his office because of my Christie's history, so I told the story again, slowly.

“So this piece,” he said when I was done, “went from an Iraqi translator to an American marine, to the naval base in Newport, to Goodwill, to an unsanctioned auction in Narragansett, to you.” He pushed his chair back from his desk a little and looked at me.

“Not the most linear path, but that's it.”

“And you doubt that it's more than fifty years old because . . .”

“I'm no expert, at all, which is why I contacted you, but I used to do appraisals at Christie's and occasionally I got to handle ceramics. I want the bowl to be worth something, like five figures. Part of me thinks it is. But every time I pick it up, I think it's too heavy to be old. It's in impeccable shape and the glaze is very even. The colors are not muted in areas as you'd expect them to be with ancient firing techniques, and the Arabic script inside isn't heavily stylized even though it has an interesting slant. The only thing that's very strange is that on the base of the bowl, there is writing in Hebrew. I was hoping you might tell me what it says. That and the Arabic in the middle. The previous owner told me it was something like ‘God heals the believers.' ”

“There's writing in Arabic in the bowl and Hebrew on the bottom of the bowl?” asked Blair, running his hands along his temples and thick black eyebrows.

“That's right.”

“Well, now I'm itching to see it. Get it up here,” he said, slapping his hand on top of his desk. I reached into my bag, pulled it out, and put it in front of him.

He turned it around a few times, picked it up and looked at the bottom, put his face almost inside of it to read the Arabic script, and then turned it around again.

“You're not too far off on the Arabic. It says
wa yashfi sudoora qawmin mumineena,
which means ‘And God shall heal the breast of the believers.' It's from the Surah at-Tawbah, the ninth chapter of the Quran.”

“A verse from the Quran—that's probably adorned pottery for centuries.”

“Yes, definitely, at least from the seventh century, when the Quran was revealed to Muhammad, to today.”

He turned the bowl around and looked at the bottom. “Do you know what this says?” he asked without looking up at me.

“I do not.”

“This says ‘first and the last.' ”

“That's all it says?” I asked, leaning toward the desk.

“Yes, ‘first and the last,' that's all.”

“Do you have any idea what that could mean?”

“Well, if it were not etched on the bottom of a bowl with a clear passage from the Quran on it, I would think it was referring to Jesus Christ.”

“As in Jesus is the first and the last.”

“Right. King James Bible, Revelation 1:17: ‘And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.' ”

I had a decent knowledge of the Bible from school and church growing up, but I had never heard that passage.

“It's when John the Apostle was exiled to the island of Patmos,” Blair explained. “Now some historians have rejected the notion that it was John the Apostle and believe it was a man referred to as John of Patmos. Either way, it's the unveiling of Jesus Christ to John.”

I had stumbled upon a piece of pottery that combined all my weaknesses in art history. I spoke French, not Hebrew or Arabic. I had studied the Bible with the muted passion of a teenager. I certainly couldn't quote from Revelation like Blair.

“All this is an educated guess, you understand,” he said, righting the bowl. “It's just when you see those words, ‘the first and the last,' you have to think of Jesus Christ. There may be another Bible passage that refers to him as the first and the last, but that's by far the most well-known.”

“But what is that doing on the bottom of a bowl that is adorned with a Quranic verse?”

“I have no idea. You said this belonged to a marine in Iraq. Maybe he was deeply religious and his etching it into the bottom was a small sign of protest against Islam.”

I thought about Tyler's bedroom habits. The man was not deeply religious. And if he was, he was awfully good at hiding it. Plus, he said he was Lutheran. There was no way he could write in Hebrew.

“I don't think that's it. And what about the fact that it's written in Hebrew? The Book of Revelation is the New Testament. Most Jews don't subscribe to the New Testament.”

“Most don't. A few do.” He turned around and pulled a book from his mahogany bookcase called
The Jewish Annotated New Testament
. “It's not impossible.”

“I haven't felt this confused in a long time.”

“But isn't that what makes this line of work so interesting?”

“I suppose it is, yes.”

“I've spent many years of my life looking at pieces that some people wanted to just throw in a heap of garbage but later revealed themselves to be much more.”

Blair smiled at me and held the bowl in both his hands. “I can see why you bought this. It's a very striking piece. The vegetal motifs, the way they're painted, it's reminiscent of Chinese porcelain but with a distinctive Muslim style. This style grew in popularity in the Middle East during the Abbasid period. The ninth century.”

“Do you think it's from the Abbasid period?” I asked dubiously. William had said the same thing.

“You certainly don't; that's rather obvious,” Blair said, turning it around again.

“I would love it to be, but feel it. Doesn't the weight bother you?”

Blair flicked the pot with his fingers and we both listened to the high-pitched sound that rang out when he did.

“The weight and that right there. From that sound alone I don't think it's more than a hundred years old. The design is in the style of the ninth century, one that stayed popular for many centuries after, but the craftsmanship, it's not in line with what we find from that period. If I had any doubt, I would submit it for thermoluminescence testing. That process is the most accurate. Heat an already fired piece and test the amount of light that is emitted. You can also detect restoration materials that way. But I'm ninety-nine percent certain it's not worth our time.”

“Ninety-nine?”

“Well, you can't ever be one hundred percent certain about anything, can you?”

“I guess not.”

“This world was built on the wonderful notion of the gray area.” He picked up the bowl again and handed it to me. “I wish it was worth millions. But pottery seldom is.”

“I know, ceramics are so hard to identify. I'm glad it wasn't my field of expertise at Christie's. I'm afraid I would have made many more mistakes.”

He looked at me as I stood up from the chair and reached across the desk to shake his hand.

“It could be some sort of encrypted message,” he said, looking up at me. “It could be the doodling of a Jew for Jesus with a good pocketknife and it could be nothing at all. Maybe someone who spoke Hebrew decided it was the first and the last time they were going to hold a piece of Islamic pottery.”

“Blair, don't keep going. You're just going to confuse me more.”

“I'm sorry. And I'm sorry I couldn't be more helpful. I say put that nice bowl on your dining room table and enjoy it for what it is. Something lovely to look at.”

“I'll take that advice. Thank you again for your time.”

As I stood, Blair looked hesitant.

“You know what the most interesting takeaway from this entire conversation is?”

I shook my head no.

“That line. That biblical passage. It's from the Book of Revelation. Maybe it's a message about how this bowl will reveal something for the owner. Or maybe it was some code used in war. I know this sounds more like I'm talking about a war that happened before computers and cell phones and technology, but if you were trying to send a message that no one could download or copy, maybe this would be the way to do it.”

“Do you really think it could be something like that?” I asked, looking at the bottom again.

“Maybe I'm just an old man who likes mysteries.”

“It is interesting, though, the Book of Revelation of all the books.”

“Like I said, that could be a stretch, too. But if it's not, then yes, it is interesting.”

I thanked him again for his time.

When I got back to Newport, I stopped by a bookstore and bought both the Quran and the Bible. The shopkeeper probably thought I was having a religious awakening. With a mix of the Internet and my hard copies, I researched the phrase Blair had cited, “first and the last,” and found it several times in Revelation. It was in the passage that Blair had recited rote and it was also in Revelation 22:13: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” It appeared again in Revelation 1:11: “Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia.” I understood why Blair immediately said the phrase was referring to Jesus. But Revelation was perhaps the most contested book in the Bible. Thomas Jefferson kept it out of the Jefferson Bible and many scholars wrote it off as hallucinatory prophecy.