“She’s a goddamn thief. What else is there?”

“She’s not a thief,” he says. “Not the way you think.”

“The hell she isn’t.”

“Otto, since the invasion, there has been widespread looting of museums in Iraq.”

“Why is everyone talking to me about Iraq?”

“It’s probably the most extensive looting since the Nazis cleaned out Europe. There is no computerized inventory system, you know, so it’s hard to get an exact total, but we’re talking maybe one hundred thousand items.” He stops to let that make an impact. It does. “The works are smuggled out and sold in first-world art markets. Mostly England and America. The entire country’s heritage—the history of the cradle of civilization—is being stolen. The only comparable thing in this country I can think of would be if someone stole the Declaration of Independence or the Liberty Bell. If those items were nine thousand years old, that is.”

“The Liberty Bell is too big to steal.”

“Not if you have an army.”

“What does that mean?”

“Otto, in World War Two it was the German army. This time it’s American.”

“Impossible,” I say. “There’s got to be some sort of resolution or something.”

“There is one. UN Resolution 1483. It specifically protects Iraqi art.”

“Well, there you go. See?”

“You don’t know much about the world you work in, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“That resolution is window dressing. It’s enforced as often as jaywalking. And it didn’t stop them from loading up the Saqueador.”

“The what?”

“Saqueador. It’s a Portuguese freighter. It’s loaded with stolen Iraqi art in US diplomatic containers, so they’re unsearchable. Unseizable. There’s maybe twenty thousand works. A huge, huge portion of Mesopotamia’s cultural artifacts. It’s basically a floating museum of stolen history.” He clears his throat. “It was bound for a US port but never made it. No one knows where it is, but it’s out there somewhere. And everyone wants it. The difference is the DOD wants to sell its contents to the highest bidder and Charlie wants to return them.”

“I haven’t heard anything about this on the news.”

“Why would you?”

I hunker down in my seat, hoping for a skepticism that doesn’t come.

“I don’t honestly care about Iraqi art right now. I’ve got more immediate problems. I owe Deke hundreds of thousands of dollars that I don’t have. I am a fugitive. I can barely move my damn leg. And I just found out that the woman I love is actually—surprise surprise—the thief who is responsible for it all, so pardon me if I don’t give one single flying philharmonic fuck about Iraqi art.”

Jagjeet ignores this. He continues telling me the story I don’t want to hear.