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Chapter 13

The next morning, the thin winter sunlight that spilled through the window onto the Christmas tree could not hold a candle to the glow that had shone there the night before. Alone in her bed, regarding the tree from across the room, Liz saw this, and told herself it didn’t matter. It was enough to enjoy the memory of Tom’s surprise.

Nor was Liz disturbed by Tom’s 3:00 a.m. exit. Picking up the brass monkey key chain on her night table, she turned it over in her hands and recalled how relieved she had been to find it, rather than an expensive gift, in the box. It was pleasant to discover Tom’s evident affection, but she was also aware she had never before then considered him as a potential date. This line of thinking led her to wonder if her pleasure in remembering last evening stemmed from receiving unexpected attention and treats or if she would have been attracted to Tom without them.

Then, too, she mused, while regarding the large bouquet leaning at an angle in her spaghetti pot, how differently the evening might have progressed had the enigmatic Dr. Kinnaird arrived at Gravesend Street before Tom did.

Kicking off her covers at the thought of two men surprising her with Christmas attention she had not sought, Liz gave her body rather more attention than usual in the shower, and while her hair was drying, she set about arranging Cormac’s bouquet in a hammered metal ice bucket. Clearing her desk of the pie-plate scraps, ice pick, and scissors, she set the bouquet upon it and stood back to study the effect.

But there was little time to linger. Although it was Christmas Eve day, Liz was scheduled to show up in the Banner newsroom, so she put on a snow-white angora sweater and doe-colored slacks, grabbed a plastic bag full of chocolate Santas, and donned her coat and gloves. Then, with a look over her shoulder at the tin star on the top of her Christmas tree, she smiled and left her house. As Liz crossed the short distance to her car, she noticed that the sunlight had fought and lost a battle with a sky full of clouds. The weather was unexpectedly mild, too. It looked like it would rain.

The raindrops that soon followed, splattering onto her windshield and soaking into the snow cover, might have dampened her spirits. But Liz was too intent on business to think along those trite lines. Instead, she pulled into an ugly strip mall made even less attractive by a huge sign with the words “EXTENDED SHOPPING HOURS!!” spelled out in large plastic letters set in slits on a vinyl signboard. The eyesore was also eye-catching, since it was elevated on the back of a flatbed truck.

Fortunately, the cellular phone shop was less mobbed than the toy store next door to it. If cell phones were in demand this year, those who shopped for them evidently did so at a more reasonable hour than did the last-minute toy crowd. Liz was disappointed to learn that although she could purchase a cell phone on the spot, thanks to the holiday, it would take forty-eight hours to activate it. Still, she made the purchase, and drove on to the Banner newsroom.

“How would you like to cover some hard news for a change?” Dermott McCann asked Liz as she handed him a chocolate Santa. “Mind you, you’re not getting the assignment thanks to this big bribe,” he added, unwrapping the candy and swallowing it in two bites.

“Where’re you sending me?”

“Poultry place in East Cambridge. Seems some guy dressed in a Santa suit ripped off a ton of turkeys in the early hours of the morning.”

Liz wrote down the address and, tossing holiday greetings and chocolate Santas to her co-workers as she passed by their desks, crossed the newsroom to her own desk. She used the phone book there to look up the address of the Arabic-speaking book dealer who had been recommended to her by Molly at Widener Library. As she had recalled, his shop was located in the same multi-ethnic neighborhood as the poultry place.

The neighborhood was alive with activity as Liz pulled the Tracer into a parking spot. While two Cambridge police officers decked the building and nearby parking meters with bright yellow plastic ribbon reading POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS, a harried-looking Portuguese butcher complained to a policeman in plain clothes, “It’s criminal, no? To take-a my turkeys like that!” The butcher rubbed his hands on his bloodied apron and added, “I just-a killed them this morning for the Christmas dinners. My sign, it tells-a the truth. ‘Fresh Killed,’” he read, pointing proudly to the bright yellow, hen-shaped sign jutting out from the building over his head.

“Good morning, Officer, and good morning to you, too, sir,” Liz said, addressing the policeman and butcher in turn. “I’m Liz Higgins of the Beantown Banner. Do you mind telling me what happened here?”

“Mr. Torrentino here claims his shop assistant, Lucarno, gave some guy dressed in a Santa suit twenty-seven birds this morning.”

“Fresh-killed! Put that in the pay-puh. Four and twenty fresh-killed turkeys, two ducks, and one goose,” the butcher said.

“Where’s Lucarno now? Why would he give away the turkeys?

“It’s turkeys, two ducks, and one goose. All fresh-killed. Not only the turkeys,” Mr. Torrentino said. “He’s a-went with the other policeman to the station. He’s a-gonna look at the mugs shots, like-a they have on the television.”

“To see if he can I.D. the thief,” the police officer interjected. “Kid claimed the Santa told him he was there to pick up the birds for charity.”

“Lucarno didn’t check with you before he gave them away?” Liz asked the butcher.

“That’s a-right. The idiot, he’s a-never asked me.”

“More a scam than a straightforward theft, then? Is that how you see it, Officer?” Liz asked.

“That about sums it up. Kid did chicken shit to prevent it, though. In fact, he helped load the birds into the van they were taken away in. He actually helped the birds fly the coop,” the officer smiled, obviously proud of his own joke. “And here’s the kicker—after all that, he couldn’t describe the vehicle!”

“May I quote you? Sorry, Officer, I didn’t get your name.”

“Sure you can quote me. And it’s Hurley. Detective Matt Hurley.”

“What’s with all the crime scene tape, then, Detective Hurley?” Liz inquired.

The policeman whispered in Liz’s ear, “Makes Mr. Torrentino here feel like something’s being done. Don’t ever let anyone tell you the Cambridge Police don’t have a heart.”

“Thanks, Detective. Will you give me a call if anything else develops?” Liz asked, handing him her card. “And by the way, do you know where Turkoman Books is located?”

“That way, past the gravestone yard, cigar shop, and curtain place. It’s upstairs, over a shop called Rosalita’s Notions.”

“Thanks, and Merry Christmas.”

“Yeah. You, too.”

After getting a few more details for her story, Liz retrieved an umbrella from her car and set out on foot to find Turkoman Books. With the raw drizzle intensifying into a pounding rain and the sodden snow banks oozing slush puddles, it might not have been a pleasant walk, but there was something oddly heartwarming about the plethora of Christmas lights and cheap decorations that ornamented the area. Even Empire Monument Works—a yard filled with shaped blocks of granite awaiting the names of the dearly departed to come—was strung with colored lights. Looking at one block carved in the shape of linked hearts with a cross—instead of Cupid’s arrow—piercing the pair on an angle, Liz told herself even gravestone merchants deserve a little holiday cheer.

The cigar shop outdid the monument yard in ornamentation, with a pair of plastic candy canes, illuminated from within, on either side of the doorstep and bubbling Christmas lights strung around the door and in the shop window. Here, cigar boxes and humidors formed a semicircular backdrop around a crèche complete with figures of the Holy Family.

The curtain shop, too, was dolled up for the holidays. Behind its expansive plate glass windows was a gaudy array of heavily embroidered curtain panels in shades of red, green, and gold. But that wasn’t all there was to see. Also packed into the display were a set of crisp white café curtains embroidered with poinsettias, shower curtains printed with a snowflake motif, and padded plastic toilet seat covers printed with Santas, snowmen, reindeer, and even an image of the Grinch from How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Finally, Liz came to Rosalita’s Notions, a tiny storefront with a window jammed with religious statuary, cut-glass candy dishes, gilt-edged tea sets, and silk flowers. All of the items were covered with a layer of dust so thick that it made the illuminated Madonna and Child look as if they were covered with volcanic ash. Now here was a home for that New York City cabdriver’s painting!

Liz knocked on the door next to Rosalita’s and, receiving no answer, looked around for a doorbell or buzzer. Before she found one, the door opened inward and she saw, standing in a dust-free, newly refurbished stairway, a small man with a warm smile.

“I’m looking for Turkoman Books and a man by the name of Faisal Al-Turkait,” Liz said.

“Then you’ve come to the right place and the right man. Let me show you into the shop.”

Although many of the books that lined the walls were old, the clean, well-lighted environment they were housed in formed a sharp contrast with the notions shop downstairs. Here, the odor of old leather bookbindings blended pleasingly with the aroma of recently brewed coffee. Motioning his visitor into a chair, the proprietor of Turkoman Books said, “Let me give you a cup of coffee. Then we can sit and you can tell me about the library you represent and discuss the books you’re looking for.”

“This is delicious,” Liz said of the strong brew. “But I don’t want to mislead you, Mr. Al-Turkait. I’m not a librarian and I’m not here to purchase numerous books.”

“Ah, then I have the rare pleasure of welcoming a browser!” the book dealer said. “You see, the vast majority of my business consists of acquiring books on demand for academic and research libraries. I take it you are a scholar then?”

“I wish I were! As it happens, I would be incapable of browsing here, unless it were for an Arabic–English dictionary. I have familiarity with neither Arabic nor any other Middle Eastern language. I came here to ask if I might hire you to translate a book title and a list of words for me. I’m rather certain they’re written in Arabic.”

“Let’s start with the list of words. How long is it?”

Liz pulled the Xeroxed copy of the list out of her bag and showed it to him.

“I cannot take your hard-earned money for such an easy task. This list and the title of one book? It’s nothing.”

“No, really, I’d be happy to reward you for your valuable time.”

“I agree time is valuable, but the value of it is not always to be measured in money. Here it is, the beginning of the Christmas holiday, a day I fully expected to spend entirely on my own. Not because, as you may assume, I am Muslim. On the contrary, I am a Christian Arab. There are millions of us, you know. I’m alone because my only daughter is abroad on a work-study project. She is a college student,” he added proudly, pointing to her photo on his desk. “I’m a widower, and the rest of my family is in Tikrit—that’s in northern Iraq.” Looking around his shop, the book dealer went on, “I kept the shop open today because it gives me something to do. There is always correspondence to catch up on. But I never thought I’d be welcoming a customer, and one who must have a story to tell, since it would only take something important, worrying, or complicated to bring a lovely lady like yourself into a hole in the wall like this the day before Christmas. Especially with a mere grocery list to consult me about.”

“I realize there’s a grocery list on one side of the paper, but it’s the Arabic writing on the other side that I need you to translate for me,” Liz said.

“That’s just what I am telling you. The Arabic writing is also a grocery list, you see. It lists exactly the same things in Arabic, and in the same order, as it does in English. Look here: This word, tuffahah, it means ‘apple.’ One apple. For apples in general, we say tuffah. For two apples, we say tuffahtayn. This Arabic word, mishmish, means ‘apricot.’ This word teen means ‘figs.’ And, here, tukki, that means ‘wild berry.’ It looks like someone has a taste for fruits.”

The grocery list might not have been very helpful, but at least something remained to be learned from the book dealer. “I still have the book title for you to translate, if you wouldn’t mind,” Liz said, taking out the photo of the Johanssons’ living room with the open book splayed on the armchair.

The book dealer’s demeanor changed. But he retained a polite tone as he said, “This is a strange way to inquire about a book title and, perhaps, a less honest approach than I would have expected from a polite lady like yourself, to involve me in something I should not involve myself in. This is a police photo, is it not?” he said, holding the eight-by-ten-inch picture at arm’s length.

“You were correct, Mr. Al-Turkait, when you said it is a complicated, worrying story that brings me into your shop the day before Christmas. And you deserve to know the background of my inquiry. Will you please let me fill you in?”

Setting down the photo and fetching more coffee for them both, Faisel Al-Turkait sat without a word while Liz told him how the list had been found in a New York City cab, how the cab and a few photos were all she had to go on regarding Ellen Johansson’s outing, and how the cabdriver had gone missing, too. “I’ve been grasping at straws,” she concluded.

“But sometimes that’s the only way to find the needle in the haystack,” Faisal Al-Turkait said. “Perhaps you’ve found one such needle here,” he added, picking up the photo. “The title of this book translates to Slang and Common Arabic Expressions for Foreign Service Officers. It’s edited by Martin Holmesby.”

“The British intelligence expert who’s always commenting on problems in the Middle East!” Liz exclaimed, meeting the book dealer’s eyes.

“Your taxi driver may be an average guy, but perhaps your lady is a spy,” he said.