Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 1. Whole No. 368, July 1974

A Chip of the Black Stone by Isaac Asimov[1]

Another vivid account of a monthly meeting of the Black Widowers Club... The honored guest this evening is a jeweler named Latimer Reed, and we are assured by the host, Geoffrey Avalon the patent attorney, that there will be no crime to solve, no mystery to unravel — but don’t you believe it! We guarantee you will be fascinated by the romantic story that unfolds...

Geoffrey Avalon, the patent attorney, stirred his drink and smiled wolfishly. His hairy still-dark eyebrows slanted upward and his neat graying beard seemed to twitch. He looked like Satan in an amiable mood.

He said to the Black Widowers, assembled at their monthly club dinner, “Let me present my guest — Latimer Reed, jeweler. And let me say at once that he brings us no crime to solve, no mystery to unravel. Nothing has been stolen from him; he has witnessed no murder, has involved himself in no spy ring. He is here, purely and simply, to tell us about jewelry, to answer our questions, and to help us have a good sociable evening.”

And, indeed, under Avalon’s firm eye the atmosphere at dinner was quiet and relaxed and even writer Emmanuel Rubin, the ever-quarrelsome polymath of the club, managed to avoid raising his voice. Quite satisfied, Avalon said, over the brandy, “Gentlemen, the postprandial grilling is upon us, and with no problem over which to rack our brains. — Henry, you may relax.”

Henry, who was clearing the table with the usual quiet efficiency that would have made him the nonpareil of waiters even if he had not proved himself, over and over again, to be peerlessly aware of the obvious, said, “Thank you, Mr. Avalon. I trust I will not be excluded from the proceedings, however.”

Rubin fixed Henry with an owlish stare through his thick glasses and said loudly, “Henry, this blatantly false modesty does not become you. You know you’re a member of our little band, with all the privileges appertaining thereto.”

“If that is so,” said Roger Halsted, the soft-voiced mathematics teacher, sipping his brandy and openly inviting a quarrel, “why is he waiting on table?”

“Personal choice, sir,” said Henry quickly and Rubin’s opening mouth shut again.

Avalon said, “Let’s get on with it. Tom Trumbull isn’t with us, so, as host, I appoint you, Mario, as griller-in-chief.”

Mario Gonzalo, a not-incon-siderable artist, was placing the final touches on the caricature he was drawing of Reed, one that was intended to be added to the already long line that decorated the private room of the Fifth Avenue restaurant at which the dinners of the Black Widowers were held.

Gonzalo had, perhaps, overdrawn, the bald dome of Reed’s head and the solemn length of his bare upper lip, and made over-apparent the slight tendency to jowls. There was indeed something more than a trace of the bloodhound about the caricature, but Reed smiled when he saw the result and did not seem offended.

Gonzalo smoothed the perfect Windsor knot of his pink-and-white tie and let his blue jacket fall open with careful negligence as he leaned back and said, “How do you justify your existence, Mr. Reed?”

“Sir?” said Reed, in a slightly metallic voice.

Gonzalo said, without varying pitch or stress, “How do you justify your existence, Mr. Reed?”

Reed looked around the table at the five grave faces and smiled — a smile that did not, somehow, seriously diminish the essential sadness of his own expression.

“Jeff warned me,” he said, “that I would be questioned after the dinner, but he did not tell me I would be challenged to justify myself.”

“Always best,” said Avalon sententiously, “to catch a man by surprise.”

Reed said, “What can serve to justify any of us? But if I must say something, I would say that I help bring beauty into lives.”

“What kind of beauty?” asked Gonzalo. “Artistic beauty?” And he held up the caricature.

Reed laughed. “Less controversial forms of beauty, I should hope.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his inner jacket pocket and, carefully unfolding it on the table, exposed about a dozen gleaming, deeply colored bits of mineral.

“All men agree on the beauty of gems,” he said. “That is independent of subjective taste.” He held up a small deep-red stone and the lights glanced off it.

James Drake, the organic chemist, cleared his throat and said with his usual mild hoarseness, “Do you always carry those things around with you?”

“No, of course not,” said Reed. “Only when I wish to entertain or demonstrate.”

“In a handkerchief?” said Drake.

Rubin burst in at once. “Sure, what’s the difference? If he’s held up, keeping if in a locked box won’t do him any good. He’d just be out the price of a box as well.”

“Have you ever been held up?” asked Gonzalo.

“No,” said Reed. “My best defense is that I am known never to carry much of value with me. I strive to make that as widely known as possible, and to live up to it, too.”

“That doesn’t look it,” said Drake.

“I am demonstrating beauty, not value,” said Reed. “Would you care to pass these around among yourselves, gentlemen?”

There was no immediate move and then Drake said, “Henry, would you be in a position to lock the door?”

“Certainly, sir,” said Henry, and did so.

Reed looked surprised. “Why lock the door?”

Drake cleared his throat again and stubbed out the remnant of his cigarette with a stained thumb and forefinger. “I’m afraid that with the kind of record we now have at our monthly dinners those things will be passed around and inevitably one of them will disappear.”

“That’s a tasteless remark, Jim,” said Avalon, frowning.

Reed said, “Gentlemen, there is no need to worry. These stones may all disappear with little loss to me or gain to anyone else. I said I was demonstrating beauty, not value. This one I am holding is a ruby — quite so — but synthetic. There are a few other synthetics and here we have an irreparably cracked opal. Others are riddled with flaws. These will do no one any good and I’m sure Henry can unlock the door.”

Halsted said, stuttering very slightly in controlled excitement, “No, I’m with Jim. Something is just fated to come up. I’ll bet that Mr. Reed has included one very valuable item — quite by accident, perhaps — and that one will turn up missing. I just don’t believe we can go through an evening without some puzzle facing us.”

Reed said, “I know every one of these stones and if you like I’ll look at each one again.” He did so, then pushed them out into the center of the table. “Merely trinkets that serve to satisfy the innate craving of human beings for beauty.”

Rubin grumbled, “Which, however, only the rich can afford.”

“Quite wrong, Mr. Rubin. Quite wrong. These stones are not terribly expensive. And even jewelry that is costly is often on display for all eyes — and even the owner can do no more than look at what he owns, though more frequently than others. Primitive tribes might make ornaments as satisfying to themselves as jewelry is to us out of shark’s teeth, walrus tusks, seashells, or birchbark. Beauty is independent of material, or of fixed rules of esthetics, and in my way I am its servant.”

Gonzalo said, “But you would rather sell the most expensive forms of beauty, wouldn’t you?”

“Quite true,” said Reed. “I am subject to economic law, but that bends my appreciation of beauty as little as I can manage.”

Rubin shook his head. His sparse beard bristled and his voice, surprisingly full-bodied for one with so small a frame, rose in passion. “No, Mr. Reed, if you consider yourself a purveyor of beauty only, you are being hypocritical. It’s rarity you’re selling. A synthetic ruby is as beautiful as a natural one and indistinguishable chemically. But the natural ruby is rarer, more difficult to get, and therefore more expensive and more eagerly bought by those who can afford it. Beauty it may be, but it is beauty meant to serve personal vanity.

“A copy of the Mona Lisa, correct to every crack in the paint, is just a copy, worth no more than any daub, and if there were a thousand copies, the real one would still remain priceless because it alone would be the unique original and would reflect uniqueness on its possessor. But that, you see, has nothing to do with beauty.”

Reed said, “It is easy to rail against humanity. Rareness does enhance value in the eyes of the vain, and I suppose something that is sufficiently rare and, at the same time, notable, would fetch a huge price even if there were no beauty about it—”

“A rare autograph,” muttered Halsted.

“Yet,” said Reed firmly, “beauty is always an enhancing factor, and I sell only beauty. Some of my wares are rare as well, but nothing I sell, or would care to sell, is rare without being beautiful.”

Drake said, “What else do you sell besides beauty and rarity?”

“Utility, sir,” said Reed at once. “Jewels are a way of storing wealth compactly and permanently in a way that is more independent of the fluctuations of the marketplace.”

“But they can be stolen,” said Gonzalo accusingly.

“Certainly,” said Reed. “Their very values — beauty, compactness, permanence — make them more useful to a thief than anything else can be. The equivalent in gold would be much heavier; the equivalent in anything else far more bulky.”

Avalon said, with a clear sense of reflected glory in his guest’s profession, “Latimer deals in eternal value.”

“Not always,” said Rubin. “Some of the jeweler’s wares are of only temporary value, for rarity may vanish. There was a time when gold goblets might be used on moderately important occasions, but for the real top-of-vanity the Venetian cut glass was trotted out — until glass-manufacturing processes were improved to the point where such things were brought down to the five-and-ten level.

“In the 1880’s the Washington Monument was capped with nothing less good than aluminum and, in a few years, the Hall process made aluminum cheap and the monument cap completely ordinary. Then, too, value can change with changing legend. As long as the alicorn — the horn of a unicorn — was thought to have aphrodisiac properties, the horns of narwhals and rhinoceroses were valuable. A handkerchief of a stiffish weave which could be cleaned by being thrown into the fire would be priceless for its magical refusal to bum — till the properties of asbestos became well known.

“Anything that becomes rare through accident — the first edition of a completely worthless book, rare because it was worthless — can become priceless to collectors. And synthetic jewelry of all sorts may yet make your wares valueless, Mr. Reed.”

Reed said, “Perhaps individual items of beauty might lose some of their value, but jewelry is only the raw material of what I sell. There is still the beauty of combination, of setting, of the individual and creative work of the craftsman. As for those things which are valuable for rarity alone, I do not deal with them; I will not deal with them; I have no sympathy with them, no interest in them. I myself own some things that are both rare and beautiful — own them, I mean, with no intention of ever selling them — and nothing, I hope, that is ugly and is valued by me only because it is rare. Or almost nothing, anyway.”

He seemed to notice for the first time that the gems he had earlier distributed were lying before him. “Ah, you’re all through with them, gentlemen?” He scooped them toward himself with his left hand. “All here,” he said. “Each one. No omissions. No substitutions. All accounted for.” He looked at each one individually. “I have showed you these, gentlemen, because there is an interesting point to be made about each of them—” Halsted said, “Wait. What did you mean by saying ‘almost nothing’?”

“Almost nothing?” said Reed, puzzled.

“You said you owned nothing ugly just because it was rare. Then you said ‘almost nothing.’ ”

Reed’s face cleared. “Ah, my luck piece, my charm, my talisman. I have it here somewhere.” He rummaged in his pocket. “Here it is. You are welcome to look at it, gentlemen. It is ugly enough, but actually I would be more distressed at losing it than any of the gems I brought with me.” He passed his luck piece to Drake, who sat on his left.

Drake turned it over in his hands. It was about an inch wide, ovoid in shape, black and finely pitted. He said, “It’s metal. Looks like meteoric iron.”

“That’s exactly what it is as far as I know,” said Reed.

The object passed from hand to hand and came back to him. “It’s my iron gem,” said Reed. “I’ve turned down five hundred dollars for it.”

“Who the devil would offer five hundred dollars for that?” asked Gonzalo, visibly astonished.

Avalon cleared his throat. “A collector of meteorites might, I suppose, if for any reason this one had special scientific value. The question really is, Latimer, why on earth you turned it down.”

“Oh,” and Reed looked thoughtful for a while. “I don’t really know. To be nasty, perhaps. I didn’t like the fellow.”

“The guy who offered the money?” asked Gonzalo.

“Yes.”

Drake reached out for the bit of black metal and when Reed gave it to him a second time, Drake studied it more closely, turning it over and over. “Does this have any scientific value as far as you know?”

“Only by virtue of its being meteoric,” said Reed. “I’ve brought it to the Museum of Natural History and they were interested in having it for their collection if I were interested in donating it without charge. I wasn’t. And I don’t know the profession of the man who wanted to buy it. I don’t recall the incident very well — it was ten years ago — but I’m certain he didn’t impress me as a scientist of any type.”

“You’ve never seen him since?” asked Drake.

“No, though at the time I was sure I would. In fact, for a while I had the most dramatic imaginings. But I never saw him again. It was after that, though, that I began to carry it about as a luck charm.” He put it in his pocket again. “After all, there aren’t many objects this unprepossessing that I would refuse five hundred for.”

Rubin, frowning, said, “I scent a mystery here—”

Avalon exploded. “Good God, let’s have no mystery! This is a social evening. Latimer, you assured me that there was no puzzle you were planning to bring up.”

Reed looked honestly confused. “I’m not bringing up any puzzle. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing to the story. I was offered five hundred dollars; I refused; and there’s an end to it.”

Rubin’s voice rose in indignation. “The mystery consists in the reason for the offer of the five hundred dollars for a valueless piece of iron. It is a legitimate outgrowth of the grilling and I demand the right to investigate the matter.”

Reed said, “But what’s the use of probing? I don’t know why he offered five hundred dollars unless he believed the ridiculous story my great-grandfather told.”

“There’s the value of probing. We now know there is a ridiculous story attached to the object. Go on, then. What was the ridiculous story your great-grandfather told?”

“It’s the story of how the meteorite — assuming that’s what it is — came into the possession of my family.”

“You mean it’s an heirloom?” asked Halsted.

“If something totally without value can be an heirloom, this is one. In any case, my great-grandfather sent it home from the Far East in 1856 with a letter explaining the circumstances. I’ve seen the letter myself. I can’t quote it to you word for word, but I can give you the sense of it.”

“Go ahead,” said Rubin.

“Well, to begin with, the eighteen fifties was the age of the clipper ship — the Yankee Clipper, you know — and the American seamen roamed the world till the Civil War and the continuing development of the steamship put an end to sailing vessels. However, I’m not planning to spin a sea yam. I couldn’t. I know nothing about ships and couldn’t tell a bowsprit from a binnacle, if either still exists. However, I mention it all by way of explaining that my great-grand-father — who bore my name, or rather, I bear his — managed to see the world. To that extent his story is conceivable. Between that, and the fact that his name was Latimer Reed too, I had a tendency, when young, to want to believe him.

“In those days, you see, the Moslem world was still largely closed to the men of the Christian West. The Ottoman Empire still had large territories in the Balkans, and the dim memory of the days when it threatened all Europe still lent it an echo of far-off might. And the Arabian peninsula itself was a mystic mixture of desert sheiks and camels to the West.

“Of course, the old city of Mecca was closed to non-Moslems and one of the daring feats a European or American might perform would be to learn Arabic, dress like an Arab, develop a knowledge of Moslem culture and religion, somehow participate in the ritual of the pilgrimage to Mecca, and return to tell the story. My greatgrandfather claimed to have accomplished this.”

Drake interrupted. “Claimed? Was he lying?”

“I don’t know,” said Reed. “I have no evidence beyond this letter he sent from Hong Kong. There was no apparent reason for him to lie since he had nothing to gain. Of course, he may merely have wanted to amuse my great-grandmother and shine in her eyes. He had been away from home for three years and had only been married three years prior to his sailing, and family legend has it that it was a great love match.”

Gonzalo began, “But after he returned—”

“He never returned,” said Reed. “About a month after he wrote the letter he died under unknown circumstances and was buried somewhere overseas. The family didn’t learn of that till considerably later, of course. My grandfather was only about four at the time of his father’s death and was brought up by my great-grandmother. My grandfather had five sons and three daughters and I’m the second son of his fourth son, and there’s my family history in brief.”

“Died under unknown circumstances,” said Halsted. “There are all sorts of possibilities there.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Reed, “family legend also has it that his impersonation of an Arab was detected, that he had been tracked to Hong Kong and beyond, and had been murdered. But there is no evidence whatever to support that. The only information we have about his death was from seamen who brought a letter from someone who announced the death.”

“Does that letter still exist?” asked Avalon, interested despite himself.

“No. But where and how he died doesn’t matter. The fact is, he never returned home. Of course,” Reed went on, “the family has always tended to believe the story, because it is dramatic and glamorous, and the story has been distorted out of all recognition. I have an aunt who once told me he was tom to pieces by a howling mob of dervishes who saw through his imposture in a mosque. She said it was because he had blue eyes. All made up, of course, probably out of a novel.”

Rubin said, “Did he have blue eyes?”

“I doubt it,” said Reed. “We all have brown eyes in my family. But I don’t really know.”

Halsted said, “But what about your iron gem, your luck piece?”

“Oh, that came with the letter,” said Reed. “It was a small package actually. And my luck piece was the whole point of the letter. He was sending it as a memento of his feat. Perhaps you know that the central ceremony involved in the pilgrimage to Mecca are the rites at the Kaaba, the most holy object in the Moslem world.”

Rubin said, “It’s actually a relic of the pre-Moslem world. Mohammed was a shrewd and practical politician, though, and he took it over. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.”

“I dare say,” said Reed coolly. “The Kaaba is a large irregular cube — the word ‘cube’ comes from ‘Kaaba,’ in fact — and in its southeast corner about five feet from the ground is what is called ‘the black stone,’ which is broken and held together by metal bands. Most people seem to think the black stone is a meteorite.”

“Probably,” said Rubin. “A stone from heaven, sent by the gods. Naturally it would be worshiped. The same can be said of the original statue of Artemis at Ephesis — the so-called Diana of the Ephesians—”

Avalon said, “Since Tom Trumbull is absent, I suppose it’s my job to shut you up, Manny. Let our guest speak.” Reed said, “Anyway, that’s about it. My iron gem arrived in the package with the letter, and my great-grandfather said in his letter that it was a piece of the black stone which he had managed to chip off.”

“Good Lord,” muttered Avalon, “if he did that I wouldn’t blame the Arabs for killing him.”

Drake said, “If it’s a piece of the black stone, I guess it would be worth quite a bit to a collector.”

“Priceless to a pious Moslem, I should imagine,” said Halsted.

“Yes, yes,” said Reed impatiently, “if it is a piece of the black stone. But how are you going to demonstrate such a thing? Can we take it back to Mecca and see if it will fit into some chipped place, or make a very sophisticated chemical comparison of my luck piece and the rest of the black stone?”

“Neither of which, I’m sure,” said Avalon, “the government of Saudi Arabia would allow.”

“Nor am I interested in asking,” said Reed. “Of course, it’s an article of faith in my family that the object is a chip of the black stone, and the story was occasionally told to visitors and the package was produced complete with letter and chip. It always made a sensation.

“Then sometime before World War One there was some sort of scare. My father was a boy then and he told me the story when I was young, but when I considered it after growing up, I realized that it lacked substance.”

“What was the story?” asked Gonzalo.

“A matter of turbaned strangers slinking about the house, mysterious shadows by day and strange sounds by night,” said Reed. “It was the sort of thing people would imagine after reading sensational fiction.”

Rubin, who, as a writer, would ordinarily have resented the last adjective, was too hot on the spoor on this occasion to do so. He said, “The implication is that they were Arabs who were after the chip of the black stone. Did anything happen?”

Avalon broke in. “If you tell us about mysterious deaths, Latimer, I’ll know you’re making up the whole thing.”

Reed said, “I’m speaking nothing but the truth. There were no mysterious deaths. Everyone in my family since great-grandfather has died of old age, disease, or unimpeachable accident. No breath of foul play has ever risen. And in connection with the tale of the turbaned stranger, nothing at all happened. Nothing! Which is one reason I dismiss the whole story.”

Gonzalo said, “Did anyone ever attempt to steal the chip?”

“Never. The original package with the chip and the letter stayed in an unlocked drawer for half a century. No one paid any particular attention to it and it remained perfectly safe. I still have the chip, as you saw,” and he slapped his pocket.

“Actually,” he went on, “the thing would have been forgotten altogether but for me. About 1950 I felt a stirring of interest. I don’t have a clear memory why. The nation of Israel had just been established and the Middle East was much in the news. Perhaps that was the reason. In any case, I got to thinking of the old family story and I dredged the thing out of its drawer.”

Reed took out his iron gem absently and held it in the palm of his hand. “It did look meteoritic to me but, of course, in my great-grandfather’s time meteorites weren’t as well known to the general public as they are now. So, as I said earlier, I took it to the Museum of Natural History. They said it was meteoritic and would I care to donate it. I said it was a family heirloom and I couldn’t do that, but — and this was the key point for me — I asked them if there were any signs that it had been chipped off a larger meteorite.

“The curator looked at it carefully, first by eye, then with a magnifying glass, and finally said he could see no sign of it. He said it must have been found in exactly the condition I had it. He said meteoritic iron is particularly hard and tough because it has nickel in it. It’s more like alloy-steel than iron and it couldn’t be chipped off, he said, without clear signs.

“Well, that settled it, didn’t it? I went back and got the letter and read it through. I even studied the original package. There was some blurred Chinese scrawl on it and my grandmother’s name and address in a faded angular English. There was nothing to be made of it. I couldn’t make out the postmark but there was no reason to suppose it wasn’t from Hong Kong. Anyway, I decided the whole thing was an amiable fraud. Great-grandfather Latimer had picked up the meteorite somewhere, had probably been spending time in the Arab world, and just couldn’t resist spinning a yarn.”

Halsted said, “And then a month later he was dead under mysterious circumstances.”

“Just dead,” said Reed. “No reason to think the death was mysterious. In the eighteen-fifties life was relatively brief. Any of a number of infectious diseases could kill. Anyway, that’s the end of the story. No glamor. No mystery.”

Gonzalo objected vociferously at once. “That’s not the end of the story. What’s the bit about the offer of five hundred dollars?”

“Oh, that!” said Reed. “That happened in 1962 or 1963. It was at a dinner party and there were some hot arguments on the Middle East and I was taking up a pro-Arab stance as a kind of devil’s advocate — it was before the Six-Day War, of course — and that put me in mind of the meteorite. It was still in the drawer and I brought it out.

“I remember we were all sitting around the table and I passed the package and they all looked at it. Some tried to read the letter, but that wasn’t so easy because the handwriting is rather old-fashioned and crabbed. Some asked me what the Chinese writing was on the package and of course I didn’t know. Just to be dramatic, I told them about the mysterious turbaned strangers in my father’s time and stressed great-grand dad’s mysterious death, and didn’t mention my reasons for being certain it was all a hoax. It was just entertainment.

“Only one person seemed to take it seriously. He was a stranger, a friend of a friend. We had invited a friend, you see, and when he said he had an engagement, we said, well, bring your friend along. That sort of thing, you know. I don’t remember his name any more. All I do remember about him personally is that he had thinning red hair and didn’t contribute much to the conversation.

“When everybody was getting ready to go, he came to me hesitantly and asked if he could see the chip once more. There was no reason not to show it to him again. He took the meteorite out of the package — it was the only thing that seemed to interest him — and walked to the light with it. He studied it for a long time. I remember growing a little impatient, and then he said, ‘See here, I collect odd objects. I wonder if you’d let me have this thing. I’d pay you, of course. What would you say it was worth?’

“I laughed and said I didn’t think I’d sell it and he stammered out an offer of five dollars. I found that rather offensive. I mean, if I were going to sell a family heirloom it surely wouldn’t be for five dollars. I gave him a decidedly brusque negative and held out my hand for the object. I took such a dislike to him that I remember thinking he might steal it.

“He handed it back reluctantly enough and I remember looking at the object again to see what might make it attractive to him, but it still seemed what it was, an ugly lump of iron. You see, even though I knew its point of interest lay in its possible history and not in its appearance, I was simply unable to attach value to anything but beauty.

“When I looked up he was reading the letter again. I held out my hand and he gave me that, too. He said, ‘Ten dollars?’ and I just said, ‘No.’ ”

Reed took a sip of the coffee that Henry had just served him. He said, “Everyone else had left. This man’s friend was waiting for him — the man who was my friend originally, Jansen. He and his wife were killed in an auto accident the next year, driving the very car at whose door he stood then, waiting for the man he had brought to my house. What a frightening thing the future is if you stop to think of it. Luckily, we rarely do.

“Anyway, the man who wanted the object stopped at the door and said to me hurriedly, ‘Listen, I’d really like that little piece of metal. It’s no good to you and I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it. How’s that? Five hundred dollars. Don’t be hoggish about this.’

“I can make allowances for his apparent anxiety, but he was damned offensive. He did say ‘hoggish’ — I remember the exact word. After that I wouldn’t have let him have it for a million. Very coldly I told him it wasn’t for sale at any price, and I put the meteorite which was still in my hand into my pocket with ostentatious finality.

“His face darkened and he growled that I would regret that and there would be those who wouldn’t be so kind as to offer money. Then off he went — and the meteorite has stayed in my pocket ever since. It is my ugly luck piece that I have refused five hundred dollars for.” He chuckled in a muted way and said, “And that’s the whole story.”

Drake said, “And you never found out why he offered you five hundred dollars for it?”

“Unless he believed it was a chip of the black stone, I can’t see any reason why he should,” said Reed.

“He never renewed his offer?”

“Never. It was over ten years ago and I have never heard from him at all. And now that Jansen and his wife are dead, I don’t even know where he is or how he could be located even if I decided I wanted to sell.”

Gonzalo said, “What did he mean by his threat about others who wouldn’t be so kind as to offer money?”

“I don’t know,” said Reed. “I suppose he meant mysterious turbaned strangers of the kind I had talked about. I think he was just trying to frighten me into selling.”

Avalon said, “Since a mystery has developed despite everything, I suppose we ought to consider the possibilities here. The obvious motive for his offer is, as you say, that he believed the object to be a genuine piece of the black stone, of the Kaaba.”

“If so,” said Reed, “he was the only one there who did. I don’t think anyone else took the story seriously for a moment. Besides, even if it were a chip of the black stone, and the guy were a collector, what good would it be to him without proof? He could take any piece of scrap iron and label it ‘chip of the Kaaba,’ and it would do him no less good than my piece of iron.”

Avalon said, “Do you suppose he might have been an Arab who knew that a chip the size of your object had been stolen from the iron stone a century before and wanted it out of piety?”

“He didn’t seem Arab to me,” said Reed. “And if he were, why was the offer not renewed? Or why wasn’t there an attempt at taking it from me by violence?”

Drake said, “You say he studied the object carefully. Do you suppose he saw something that convinced him of its value — whatever that value might be?”

Reed said, “How can I dispute that? Except that whatever he might have seen, I certainly never have seen. Have you seen anything?”

“No,” admitted Drake.

Rubin said, “This doesn’t sound like a mystery we can possibly solve. We just don’t have enough information. — What do you say, Henry?”

Henry, who had been listening with his usual quiet attention, said, “I was wondering about a few points.”

“Well then, go on, Henry,” said Avalon. “Why don’t you continue grilling the guest?”

Henry said, “Mr. Reed, when you showed the object to your guests on that occasion in 1962 or 1963, you say you passed the package around. You mean the original package in which the letter and the meteorite had come, with its contents as they had always been?”

“Yes. Oh, yes. It was a family treasure.”

“But since 1963, sir, you have carried the meteorite in your pocket?”

“Yes, always,” said Reed.

“Does that mean, sir, that you no longer have the letter?”

“Of course it doesn’t mean that,” said Reed indignantly. “We certainly do have the letter. I’ll admit that after that fellow’s threat I was a little concerned, so I put it in a safer place. It’s a glamorous document from the family standpoint, hoax or not.”

“Where do you keep it now?” asked Henry.

“In a small wall safe I use for documents and jewels.”

“Have you seen it recently?”

Reed smiled broadly. “I use the wall safe frequently, and I see it every time. Take my word for it, Henry, the letter is safe — as safe as the luck piece in my pocket.”

Henry said, “Then you don’t keep the letter in the original package any more.”

“No,” said Reed. “The package was more useful as a container for the meteorite. Now that I carry that object in my pocket, there was no point in keeping the letter in the package.”

Henry nodded. “And what did you do with the package, sir?”

Reed looked puzzled. “Why, nothing.”

“You didn’t throw it out?”

“No, of course not.”

“Do you know where it is?”

Reed frowned and paused. He said at last, “No, I don’t think so.”

“When did you last see it?”

The pause was longer this time. “I don’t know that, either.”

Henry seemed lost in thought.

Avalon said, “Well, Henry, what do you have in mind?”

Henry said, “I’m just wondering” — he quietly circled the table removing the brandy glasses — “whether that man wanted the meteorite at all.”

“He certainly offered me money for it,” said Reed.

“Yes,” said Henry, “but first such small sums as would offer you no temptation to sell it, and which he could well afford to pay if you called his bluff. Then a larger sum couched in such deliberately offensive language as to make it certain you would refuse. And after that a mysterious threat which never materialized.”

“But why should he do all that,” said Reed, “unless he wanted my iron gem?”

Henry said, “To achieve, perhaps, precisely what he did, in fact, achieve — to convince you he wanted the meteorite and to keep your attention firmly fixed on that. He gave you back the meteorite when you held out your hand for it; he gave you back the letter — but did he give you back the original package?”

Reed said, “I don’t remember him taking it.”

Henry said, “It was ten years ago. He kept your attention fixed on the meteorite. You even spent some time examining it yourself and during that time you didn’t look at him, I’m sure. Can you say you’ve seen the package since that time, sir?”

Reed shook his head slowly. “I can’t say I have. You mean he fastened my attention so tightly on the meteorite that he could walk off with the package and I wouldn’t notice?”

“I’m afraid you didn’t notice. You put the meteorite in your pocket, the letter in your safe, and apparently never gave another thought to the package itself. This man, whose name you don’t know and whom you can no longer identify thanks to your friends’ death, has had the package for ten years with no interference. And by now you could not possibly identify what it was he took.”

“I certainly could,” said Reed stoutly, “if I could see it. It has my great-grandmother’s name and address on it.”

“He might not have saved the package itself,” said Henry.

“I’ve got it,” cried out Gonzalo suddenly. “It was that Chinese writing. He could make it out and he took it to get it deciphered with certainty. The message was important.”

Henry’s smile was the barest flicker. “That is a romantic notion that had not occurred to me, Mr. Gonzalo, but I don’t know that it is very probable. I was thinking of something else. — Mr. Reed, you had a package from Hong Kong in 1856 and at that time Hong Kong was already a British possession.”

“Taken over in 1848,” said Rubin briefly.

“And I think the British had already instituted the modern system of distributing mail.”

“Rowland Hill,” said Rubin at once, “in 1840.”

“Well, then,” said Henry, “could there have been a stamp on the original package?”

Reed looked startled. “Now that you mention it, there was something that looked like a black stamp, I seem to recall. A woman’s profile?”

“The young Victoria,” said Rubin.

Henry said, “And might it possibly have been a rare stamp?”

Gonzalo threw up his arms. “Bingo!”

Reed sat with his mouth open. Then he said, “Of course, you must be right — I wonder how much I lost.”

“Nothing but money, sir,” murmured Henry. “The earliest British stamps were not beautiful.”