On a trip to Istanbul, Victoria is introduced to his vacationing older brother and family elder, Mashe.
“Akram was different around Mashe. Weak. No spine.” Her voice tightens. “Mashe… how would you say?… He asserts himself. We fight over something unimportant. Imagine how I feel when Akram takes brother’s side.”
“A fight?”
“As territorial as dog is Mashe. I needed hair dryer. This is all!”
“He got angry over a hair dryer? You’ve lost me,” Knox says.
It pains her to talk about it. “I went into his room, you see? This is where hair dryer was to be found. On bed is ring. Stupid plastic ring. I look at this ring. It is blue. Has different family name. I ask him about this ring with different name. He makes explosion. Yes?”
“What kind of blue ring? Turquoise? A gem stone?”
“I tell you! Plastic ring! Worthless. Ugly. Very big,” she says, spinning several of her own rings on her fingers.
“His name was engraved?” Knox’s interest is heightened.
“Labeled. Like hospital bracelet. Not decorative ring. Functional. Not his name. Different last name. No big thing. Correct? Just on bed with keys. Wallet.”
“A blue plastic ring.”
“Are you listening?”
“I am,” Knox says. “It was big. It had a name on it. He was upset you had seen it.”
“Upset? He did not mention the ring, but he grabbed it up like a gambler with the die. Pocketed it. Exploded, shouting about how a man’s room is private, about how I had no permission to intrude upon his privacy. It is cultural.” Her expression changes to astonishment. “I am telling you these things, but I do not know your name. Is it Knox or Chambers?”
“Chambers” was the name he used on the FedEx package. He assumes she has discussed him with Akram, that the use of two names won’t surprise her given the fact that he was trying to smuggle out art. They’ve reached a tipping point. The ring, the argument with Mashe — it holds significance. His skin prickled with sweat tells him so. Close.
“Knox.” The truth is easier to defend.
“In our culture, John Knox, even Jordanian women…” She doesn’t complete the thought.
He needs to move her away from the ring’s importance. Doesn’t want her connecting the dots the way he has. “It caused a rift. Between you and Akram.”
She assays him. Her eyes grow nervous. “I will be watching you, and I will turn you over to the ministry without a second thought. Do you understand?”
“Mashe is the collector. I need to know it all.” He pauses. He’s gone too far. Decides on a more direct approach. “The last name on the ring, for instance. Something… it would allow me… I could run a credit check against that name. My accountant is here in Istanbul.” He tries to seed his operational cover; hopes Victoria might pass this tidbit about Grace along. “She will run the credit check, do background. You don’t sell this particular work without a firewall in place. You understand?”
“Perfectly.”
“You don’t approve.”
“I am art dealer, Mr. Knox. You are art smuggler. The enemy.”
“The competition.”
“Same things,” she says. “A divorce, perhaps. Adoption following a remarriage? It was never explained to me. Akram would not discuss it.”
Knox tries not to hide his confusion.
“Okle is the mother’s family name,” she says.
“Both brothers took their mother’s maiden name? Doesn’t sound like a remarriage to me.”
“The name on the ring. Mashe—”
“Melemet,” Knox says. The ring, “labeled like a hospital bracelet,” holds significance. Is Mashe Melemet a medical doctor on some kind of mission? Based in Iran? His brain spins, seeking out the most outrageous possibilities. An MD whose patient list includes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
Knox recalls Grace mentioning that Mashe’s investments were heavily weighted toward scientific companies. He sees Mashe Okle in a new light.
“How could you know this? How could you possibly know this?”
Knox chides himself for always needing to prove he’s a step ahead. His mind races, looking for an out.
“A man named Melemet was the owner of the Jordanian restaurant prior to Akram. Records show he sold it for a third of its value. I never understood that transaction — but now I see: it was Akram selling it to himself after he changed his name. Simply updating the new name on the property would have left too easy a trail to follow.”
“Who are you, Mr. Knox?”
“John.”
She nods demurely.
“One cannot be too careful,” he says.
“Nor too thin, nor too rich.”
He appreciates the attempt. Grace is humor-challenged, pragmatic and grounded in fact. The few attempts she makes at jokes register with Knox as lame clichés. As with so many people, she’s at her funniest when it comes unintentionally. Why he’s thinking about her is beyond him.
“You and Akram. Were serious?”
“Was I sleeping with him?”
Together they stop and appreciate a trio of intricately inlaid tables. The style is too busy for Knox’s taste, but there’s no dismissing the artistry. Why, he wonders, is such detail only seen in coastal Mediterranean cultures? Turkey. Morocco. Libya.
She says, “As if it is any of your business.”
“As if.”
“You wish to make it your business. Our business.” She establishes eye contact. All knowing. Serene. “It makes things messy.”
He’s thinking bedsheets. She is not.
“Ten percent. I am expecting six figures U.S.”
He coughs. “Low fives if we’re lucky.”
“I call the ministry now? I believe they will be interested in what Mr. Obama is hiding.”
“I think we can hold off on that.”
“You would not like Turkish prison, Mr. Knox.”
He remembers saying the same thing to Dulwich. What happened to a week of pay-per-view movies in the hotel and a five-minute meet-and-greet?
22
Grace has to see his face when she tells him. Though she’s unsure when competition became an integral part of her relationship with Knox, she nonetheless cannot resist a chance to put a hash mark in her column.
She video-Skypes his phone. When he doesn’t answer, she sends a text. Five impatient minutes later, Knox answers her video call. He looks tired.
“We could not have been more wrong,” she says, enjoying the look of confusion overtaking his face. It’s a handsome face, though she hopes he doesn’t know she sees it this way. “Actually,” she confesses, “you were close. In some ways, close.”
“You’re enjoying this way too much,” Knox says.
“The brother’s blue plastic ring is a Landauer dosimeter ring. Science, yes. However, a specific medical—”
“Hazmat. Dosimeters measure exposure to toxins—”
“And radiation,” Grace says, interrupting. “Landauer manufactures radiation dosimeters. In this case, a finger ring that carries your identity, as your lady friend said.” She enjoys needling Knox about his promiscuity; though she’s plucked the occasional businessman off a bar stool, she’s not proud of it. Currently her sex life is dismal to nonexistent. She is far more conservative than Knox, but that doesn’t take much. It also means she doesn’t see him as competition to her current life plan, which includes great financial gain and — eventually — her own security company. Rutherford Risk has paid too little attention to cyber crime and financial malpractice, two areas on which she would like her investigative company to focus. She cannot compete, nor would she, with Knox in the field. She considers it a symbiosis, mutualism more than parasitism, but if necessary she can see herself learning from him and draining him of his knowledge at his own expense, like a tick.