The Price of Inheritance (32 page)

“But you don't hate me. You're going to still love me through all this because I need you to.”

Tyler's voice was steady, and smooth, his thin shirt tight around his upper back and shoulders. He looked settled, not like he'd been distressed or hiding out on base, panicking. I looked at him and hated the way his hair was cut so close to his head, detested the translucent blue of his eyes, the way his muscles flexed even when he wasn't moving, and I hated him for wearing the last shirt I had seen him in, like no time had elapsed at all, like nothing had changed.

“Why should I love you!” I screamed. “I loathe you. I loathe the very thought of you. It's
you
who is not in love with me. Is this how someone acts when they're in love? You are selfish. You are selfish to a point of embarrassment. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“I am ashamed of myself. I'm very ashamed of myself,” he said, moving closer to me again. “I have been for years. That's been part of the problem. Do you think I would have become this guy, Tyler Ford, Newport's inglorious bastard, if I thought I was a real great guy?” Even then, with that admission, his voice didn't rise, gliding toward me, unshakable.

“So tell me something about what's happening, Tyler,” I said, trying to calm myself down. I was starting to choke on my own tears. “Who are you? Who the fuck are you? You're supposed to be this asshole Newport playboy who sleeps with every girl under forty with slightly symmetrical features and scares the crap out of people and for a few short weeks, you end up being the best guy I've ever known. Then you turn out to be the best guy I thought I knew. You paint yourself to be this nobody from nowhere who never went to college and drank his way through high school. You make fun of this quirky little obsession I have with antiques and then you are the reason I'm getting harassed by NCIS—over what? Over an antiquity! Or not an antiquity. Is it a copy? Is it real? Or are you just fucking all of us over? I don't know what you are anymore. Right now I think you're a liar.”

“I am a liar,” said Tyler, coming even closer to me.

“How much do you know about art?”

“Not that much.”

“How much do you know about the art of the Middle East?”

“More.”

“How much do you know about theft?”

“A lot.”

I sat down on a chair and wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my white shirt. It was one that I used to wear all the time at Christie's, spun so thick that the sleeves wouldn't fray for the next hundred years.

“I know about Hannah,” I said. “I saw her yesterday.”

“Yeah,” said Tyler sitting on the end of an Italian Rococo sofa that was next to me. “I know. She called me.”

“Oh really? You answer her calls? Because you haven't picked mine up in nine days. Are you sure it's me you love?”

“I'm sure.” He didn't reach out for me or move from his chair; he just looked at me. I wanted his voice to rise, I wanted him to scream with me, but he was still and even, his body language irritatingly composed.

“What did she tell you?” I demanded.

“She told me that you were very smart. That you had, at two different times, owned the bowl I gave her to copy and the bowl she made me. And she asked me what I had done.”

I wiped my face on my sleeve again and tried to keep my voice from breaking. “I don't care what you told Hannah. I don't want you to talk to Hannah. I want you to tell me what you did.”

“Well, it's a long story.”

“Really, it's a long fucking story? How perfectly swell. How about you start telling it right now, immediately, from the beginning.”

“After I tell you everything, someone is going to be arrested.”

“You?”

“Maybe.”

“Hannah?”

“No.”

“Fine, who. Who is going to be arrested?”

“Max Sebastian.”

I felt my body go cold. Tyler knew Max.

“Max Sebastian? Do you know Max Sebastian?” I said, my voice rising in equal parts of surprise and anger.

“I do. I've known him since 2003, when he came to Quantico to teach a class on Middle Eastern history.”

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“I'm not. I'm not kidding, I'm not lying and I'm not keeping anything from you from this point on, so listen.”

I crossed my legs, glared at him, and listened. Max Sebastian was British. He had a very big job at Sotheby's. What the hell was he doing at Quantico all the time? Greg had met him and so had Tyler.

“I got to know Max pretty well during his first visit to base. I liked him. He was the first British person I had ever met and even without the accent, I'd never met anyone like him. He was refined, well dressed, well spoken, well everything. One night, right before I was being deployed, he asked me to go out drinking. We got along pretty well and he asked if I wanted to see New York. I'd never been there before and he offered to take me, to pay for the trip. Other people had gone home to say goodbye to parents, friends, but I figured it was one of those God-bless-America kind of moments and I went. It was in New York that he asked me if I would be interested in making money while I was in Iraq. I asked him what kind of money and he said, pretty good money.”

“What is pretty good money to an eighteen-year-old from Wyoming?”

“Four hundred thousand dollars.”

“Four hundred thousand dollars. That's good money to anyone.”

“Yes, it is. And it was very good money to me then.”

“What did he ask you to do?”

“Well, I thought that he was going to ask me to kill someone. I really did. I was eighteen, I'd watched a lot of movies.”

“But he didn't . . .”

“No. He asked me to meet someone while I was in Iraq and to bring something back for him. He knew which unit I was in. He knew that I worked with supply helicopters. I was the perfect middleman for him. I was young, too stupid to question what I was doing, and could get through a lot of security easily.”

“What did he ask you to bring back?”

“He didn't tell me then. He said it was nothing illegal. No weapons, no drugs.”

“Not illegal. That's bullshit. There's a lot more that's illegal than just weapons and drugs.”

“Right, but it made me less worried.” Tyler cleared his throat and looked at me watching him in a total panic. I knew what he was going to say next. I watched him shift his weight on the sofa. He was too big for the piece and looked out of place in the store, and suddenly, in my life.

“I won't bore you with every detail, but I became a middleman for Max. He had orders from collectors in the U.S. and the U.K. Specific objects from the museum that they wanted. He had people inside the museum, he had runners from the museum to base, and then he had people on base to bring everything back to the U.S.”

Tyler sat back uncomfortably, as if telling this story, out loud, maybe for the first time in his life, had stiffened him, pulled a little more of his youth away from him.

“You're saying that Max Sebastian, the world's leading expert on Middle Eastern antiquities, is a thief.”

“No. A thief is someone who steals cell phones in the subway. Max Sebastian is the head of the biggest ancient art theft ring in the world.”

I thought about the two bowls. The one Tyler had given to Goodwill and the copy that Hannah made. Had Max even done TL testing on the bowl that NCIS took from me? Did he have the fake that Hannah made? Had he switched them? How did he know that I had the original? I asked Tyler and he said, “I'll get to that.”

“Is this all true? Max Sebastian? He's in his fifties. He's so posh—”

“Yeah, and he's a fucking criminal.” Tyler's voice rose for the first time that evening.

I twisted my hands in my lap and looked up at him, thinking about the way he looked at me the first day we met.

“That bowl, the one I bought from Hook's auction, that was the real bowl. The one from the National Museum.”

“Yes, it was.”

“But you were never in the museum?”

“No, I never even got close. A man, whose real name I never knew, gave it to me, along with several other things. I hid them for the rest of my deployment and six months later, I brought it all home in medical equipment bags. I met one of Max's guys in New York, gave him everything, and he gave me money, in cash, and deposited it in several different bank accounts.”

“What did you do with the money?”

“I spent some.”

“Some. What did you do with the rest?”

“Guess.”

“I'm guessing your mother no longer lives in a twenty-thousand-dollar house.”

“She doesn't.”

“Do you know how illegal that is?”

“Of course. But I didn't understand the bigger picture for a long time.”

“And now you do.” His calmness was choking me. The way his blue eyes bore into me, his unemotional delivery, his sex appeal that was ever present, I wanted to push it all away. He didn't deserve it.

“I'd like to think I do,” he replied. “But back then, I didn't. I really was a kid who wanted a challenge and money. At that age, I needed to be challenged. I had a lot to prove.”

“War wasn't enough for you? Because the Marine Corps really does it for most people. But not you, right? You're Tyler fucking Ford. You can't just go to war; you decide to be part of a major international art smuggling ring, too. What a beautiful challenge.” I gripped the arms of the chair I was sitting in until my hands hurt. I let go and slammed them on my lap. “There was an amnesty program, Tyler!” I yelled. “Do you understand that? The museum had an amnesty program. You could have turned it in! Or had an Iraqi turn it in for you. There would never have been criminal charges. Nothing. You could have reported Max. Been a hero who helped save the museum instead of being part of the looting. But no. And now, what could happen?”

“A lot has already happened.”

“Oh, well, I know what's happened to me! That much I know. And I know what I figured out from your stupidity, or Hannah's stupidity, even Max's. But I've got a few holes, so why don't you go ahead and fill me in.” I crossed my arms. My emotions had been running erratically but for now, they'd screeched to a halt somewhere in the realm of furious.

“I'll tell you as much as I know, but there was a lot I never knew.”

“I'll take what you've got.” Tyler reached for my hand, trying to remind me of our intimacy, but I refused to let him touch me. He leaned back on the couch and waited until I looked at him.

“When I brought everything back to one of Max's . . . associates in New York, he took it—”

“How much was there?”

“A lot. Carolyn, sit there, listen, ask me questions later.”

“Because you're controlling this show.”

“Yes, right now, I'm controlling this show. And though you probably think differently, I wasn't controlling that show. Until now.”

I looked at Tyler, the outline of his Marine Corps tattoos coming up from under his shirt. I thought about his Silver Star, how he would never have gotten it if they knew. Maybe he would have only done one tour. Maybe he wouldn't even have completed it.

“I gave everything to a man in New York. We met in a hotel room. We both carried plain black luggage, we switched it, I had my money, that was it. Except that he told me to keep that bowl.”

“The bowl? The green and white bowl.”

“Yes. He told me to keep it because there was a money problem with the buyer and he didn't want it on him because it was stolen.”

“But he wanted you to keep it. How ethical.”

“I think I made it pretty clear that Max Sebastian and everyone he works with are about as unethical as you can get. The man, again, whose real name I never knew, threw some more money my way, and I agreed to keep it until he told me he needed it.”

“So you never knew these other men's real names but you knew Max. The top of the top.”

“Yeah, I did. He's smart enough to know that someone like me would not have responded well to one of his circle. People I usually dealt with were not the Max Sebastian type. And I, and whoever else he had in the American military, were essential to his plan. He needed to get things back to New York and he was smart enough to know how much could be found by customs agents when badly concealed.”

“Did anyone ever ask for the bowl?”

“Not for years. Not until last December.”

“December! Last December? That's when you asked Hannah to make you a copy.”

“Right. Somewhere between 2003 and last December, I grew up. What I'd done was getting to me and I didn't want to be a part of it anymore. I couldn't fulfill the agreement I made eleven years ago. I think what attracted me to Hannah in the first place, besides the obvious, was that she loved this stuff. I'd never really thought about it before her. Even when I brought it all back from Iraq, I didn't think of it as anything but a bunch of old junk from a museum that had the fingerprints of Saddam Hussein's regime all over it. My opinion of all that changed because of Hannah.”

My throat felt like it was closing as I heard him repeat her name. I abhorred that she was a part of this.

“But why did you have to get her involved?” I asked, fighting back the current of jealousy.

“Because I needed her to be. I couldn't do what I wanted to do without Hannah. By that time, I knew a lot about forgery. If she didn't think she had an original, she was not forging anything. I even told her not to make the copy very good.”

“But she made it perfectly.”

“Yeah, she did. And I knew she would.”

“Did the original bowl, the one from the museum, the one I had on my crappy bookshelf, have the Hebrew writing on the bottom?”

“Yes. Exactly the same as you know it to be.”

“Did you know that she put a fake base on the original? A new base on an old piece.”