The Moche Warrior

1

Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea, for the devil is come down unto you,“ the man thundered, arms uplifted, eyes fixed on some distant vision.

“Revelation 12:12,” I muttered to myself. I should know: I’d heard it many times in the three days since the neighborhood’s resident lunatic had staked out a small square of pavement right in front of my store, Greenhalgh and McClintoch by name, to proclaim the end of the world. When he wasn’t quoting the scriptures, he recited Shelley’s poem Ozymandias over and over, attacking with gusto the part where Ozymandias tells the mighty to look on his works and despair. I wasn’t sure which was worse, Shelley or Revelation.

“Revelation 12:12,” he boomed, and at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that my education in the apocalyptic texts was proceeding apace.

“First, a terrible fire,” he said, his voice dropping to a conversational tone as he tried to draw a small group of tourists into his circle. The besieged foursome edged their way cautiously past him. One could hardly blame them. He was dirty and unkempt, with the eyes of a true fanatic. “And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire,” he went on.

Revelation again, I thought.

“Revelation 15: verse 2,” he intoned. “Then men will die. The wages of sin is death,” he added.

“Romans 6:23,” I said. I couldn’t stop myself. The man was getting to me, however much I blamed society for its inability to deal compassionately with the mentally ill. He was, after all, driving away my customers. Tourist season, and people were avoiding that section of the street like the plague. And no wonder. Here I was hovering across the road, hoping for a distraction so that I could dash across the street and into the shop before he caught sight of me. If he saw me, I knew what would follow: Ecclesiasticus.

“All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman,” he yelled, spotting me at last. “Ecclesiasticus 25:19.”

I winced and quickly rushed past him, beginning to mount the steps to the shop door.

“The fault is yours,” he screamed, his finger pointing directly at me, his eyes fixed on mine as I backed up the last two steps and hurled myself through the door. The scales tilted in favor of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

“Are you all right, Lara? What is the matter with that dreadful man?” Sarah Greenhalgh sighed as I hurtled through the door.

“Off his meds, I’d say,” opined Alex Stewart, a retired sailor who is my neighbor and our indispensable help in the shop. “Or maybe it’s just the millennium,” he added. “Brings out some kind of primitive fear in us, I think. You’ve seen the papers, people all over the world worrying about signs in the heavens and everything. All the portents for a cataclysmic finale to life as we know it are there, apparently.”

“I just wish he’d find another piece of pavement to harangue everyone from,” I sighed. “He is so bad for business! I hate to call the police, though. He is kind of pathetic.”

In a way, though, as I think back on it, the man, although undoubtedly deranged, was right. Not in the strict chronological sense, perhaps. The man in our storage room was dead, murdered, before, not after, the fire. But for a time, the devil, or at least his earthly henchman, did walk among us, and, while it still hurts to admit it, I do have to assume some responsibility, some guilt, because in a way everything that happened stemmed from my inability to deal with a touchy personal situation.

The messy saga begins, in the police files at least, with the incident in which my shop got trashed and almost burned to the ground. But in my mind the story goes back a few months further than that, when Maud McKenzie up and died.

Maud was the resident eccentric in Yorkville, where Greenhalgh and McClintoch is located. She and her husband Franklin were proprietors of a strange little place from which they sold bits of everything, some antiques, some junk, called—God bless them—the Old Curiosity Shop. They lived above the store. Maud and Frank had been there forever, as far as I was concerned. The house in which the store was located had originally belonged to Maud’s family, and long after her family had sold and moved away, Maud and Frank were able to buy the old building back. They’d been there when Yorkville was a run-down city neighborhood, had watched it become the focus of the sixties culture when all the best coffeehouses and folksingers were there, and had weathered the times when the sixties turned ugly and the drug scene moved in. Then when Yorkville had its renaissance as a posh shopping area, they carried on much as before.

They were founders of a rather informal merchants’ association, more social club than anything, that several of us shopkeepers belonged to, getting together once a week at the Coffee Mill for what we called a street meeting. We coordinated our Christmas decorations, put together a fund for advertising the area, dealt with vandalism, the usual thing. But mainly we liked to gossip: who was renovating, who was going out of business, who was moving in. At one time, a few years earlier, when my husband Clive and I were splitting up and I had to sell the shop to pay him off, I’m sure I too was much the subject of discussion. We monitored the street as if our livelihood depended on it, which of course it did.

We were a tight little group, all friends, partly because none of us were in exactly the same business, and therefore not direct competitors. We had a fashion designer, a bookseller, a hairdresser, a craft shop owner, my antique furniture and design shop, and a linens shop. Newcomers were not excluded exactly. It just took a unanimous vote to get someone new in, and we didn’t choose to vote that often.

When Frank died, Maud carried right on. We could never figure out how she managed. Perhaps the shop did better than any of us guessed. There’s no question if you rooted around enough, there were treasures to be found there. But there didn’t seem to be much in the way of new merchandise moving into the shop after Frank died.

When Maud became a little, as she put it, unsteady on her pins, the coffee meeting moved to her place, each of us taking a turn bringing a carafe of coffee and some cookies. But then one day, my friend Moira and I went over to check on her because the shop didn’t open on time. Maud, who’d been prone to what she referred to as “spells,” was lying at the bottom of the stairs leading to her apartment on the second floor. A bad fall, the coroner concluded. A broken neck and fractured skull.

I think Moira and I both thought, as we discovered Maud lying there, that the neighborhood would not be the same again, ever.

Much to our surprise, Maud and Frank had had rather more money than we would have guessed. A very tidy sum, actually, just over a million dollars, not including the sale of the building and contents. The bulk of the money went to a couple of charities, the old building and its contents to a nephew in Australia we never knew they had, and there was a nice little fund set up with the stipulation that our coffee group— we were all individually named—should get together once a year for dinner in the restaurant of our choice for as long as we were able.

Conversation for the next little while focused almost exclusively on Frank and Maud.

“Where do you think all the money came from?” I wondered out loud, Moira having dropped in for a coffee before our respective enterprises opened for the day.

“Investments,” Moira, owner of the local beauty salon, ventured. “Once when I went over,” she went on, tapping the table lightly with her perfectly manicured nails, “Maud was working at her desk upstairs. Looked like bonds to me.”

“But you have to have money to invest!” I replied. “If personal experience is anything to go by, these places don’t make anyone rich.”

“Maybe they were just better at it than we are,” Moira said, including herself in this rather generously, since she is a very successful businesswoman.

I remember that day very clearly for some reason, looking around my shop, which was looking particularly nice, in my estimation, and thinking how content I was with my life for the first time in a while, how my universe was unfolding entirely satisfactorily. Business, if not brisk exactly, was steady. Sarah and I worked well together. She left the buying decisions up to me and so I got to take four extended buying trips a year to parts of the world I loved, while she, the born accountant, managed the shop very efficiently. We’d built up a nice roster of repeat customers who kept us going through the lean times.

On the personal side I had, I thought, a pleasant life. Partnerless for a year or so, I found that, despite thinking about the former love of my life—a Mexican archaeologist by the name of Lucas May—more than I would like to, and still occasionally having to resist the temptation to call him and beg him to come back to me, I enjoyed being single.

I got together with friends like Moira as often as I could, and one evening a week I took a course at the University of Toronto, usually about some aspect of ancient history or languages, partly because it was related to my business, but mainly because I was interested in it. I’d long since realized I’d never be a scholar, but I enjoyed knowing a little about a lot of things, and in particular learning about the history of the places where I went to do my buying.

I had some not very onerous surrogate parenting responsibilities for a young Maltese couple who were living in Canada while the young man, Anthony Farrugia, studied architecture. These duties I shared with a friend of mine, Rob Luczka, a sergeant in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, whom I’d met in Malta a year or two earlier and with whom I’d stayed in touch. The young Farrugias lived in a basement apartment in the house Rob shared with his daughter Jennifer and his partner Barbara. I looked in on the Farrugias from time to time, called Anthony’s mother about once a month to report, and, when I was in town, had Sunday dinner at the house with Anthony, his wife Sophia, and Rob and his clan. Life, if not overly exciting, was extremely comfortable.

“So what’s going to happen to Maud’s junk, do you think?” Moira said, interrupting my thoughts.

“The nephew in Australia has no interest in any of it,” Alex interjected. “The house is to be sold, and the contents auctioned off. Molesworth Cox,” he added, naming a swank auction house.

“Well, if you say so, Alex, then it must be true.” Moira laughed. “I don’t know how you do it, but you seem to know everything.”

Not quite everything, as it turned out. A “for sale” sign went up on the property soon enough, and the building was snapped up almost immediately by a man who was one of the larger property owners and landlords in the area. Shortly after that it was being renovated for a new tenant. For whom, exactly, the landlord wasn’t saying. He would only allow as how this tenant was upscale, exclusive and exciting, which didn’t tell us much. We all liked to think we were all of those things. Large hoardings hid the renovations from our view, try as much as we might to peer in. Even Alex Stewart couldn’t find out who the new tenant would be.

Then, with great fanfare, the hoardings came down and the shop was shown in all its glory, clive swain, designer, antiquarian, the sign said. My ex-husband, the rat, right across the street in competition with me!

From that moment on, my comfortable little world began to unravel.

“My goodness, some men are hard to get rid of! Hang around like dirty shirts!” Moira exclaimed.

“This is so awful,” I moaned. “I started the business in the first place,” I said, quite unnecessarily, since Moira knew this only too well. But I had to say it anyway. “The only reason he got into this business is because I was dumb enough to give him half when I married him. And he was such a jerk, insisting I sell the store to give him the money when we split. It was sheer luck I was able to buy back in again with Sarah. Now what does he up and do? Right across the street!”

Moira made sympathetic noises. “He certainly seems to be able to get women to take care of him, doesn’t he? First you, who figured him out and booted him out the door. So he takes up with this new woman—what’s her name, Celeste—who, let’s face it, buys him a store.

“I don’t think he’ll be much of a threat to you, darling,” she went on. Moira called everybody darling. “After all, he never did an honest day’s work in his life, now did he?”‘

That much, I thought, was true. Clive was a brilliant designer, and we’d been a good combination for a while. However, it didn’t take a genius to notice that soon after we were married and I’d given him a half interest in the shop as a wedding present, he’d taken to lying about hotel pools ogling young women in bikinis while I pressed a rented Jeep up steep mountain roads to get to the perfect wood carvers, or argued with customs agents in some hot, sweaty warehouse.

Technically Moira was right. Clive didn’t like to work. But he’d remarried, a wealthy woman by the name of Celeste, and she had more than enough money to hire people to do the work for him. I tried to make light of it, assuring Sarah, who must have wondered what she’d done in a previous life to deserve finding herself involved in this battle, that Clive would not be a problem.

The truth was, however, he could work hard when he chose to, and he’d been a ferocious adversary in our divorce proceedings. I considered him very much a threat, but more than that. I’d loved him once, we’d been married for twelve years, and seeing his name in elegant gold letters on the sign across the street was a constant reminder of something I considered a personal shortcoming, as if the failure of the marriage, and Clive’s behavior, was somehow due entirely to inadequacy on my part. I dreaded the inevitable first meeting, and my anxiety made me furious, both at Clive and at myself.

I tried to put as good a face on as I could, and made a point of carrying on much as usual, concentrating on the details and the routine of my life. There were the plans for my next trip to Indonesia and Thailand, and the handling of the latest shipment from Mexico. On the more social side, there was dinner at Rob’s house on Sundays, where as usual this time of year, Sophia, Jennifer, and I would sit on the back deck and watch Rob and Anthony barbecue, while Barbara, a perky blonde with a ponytail and gorgeous physique, and a shoo-in for the Martha Stewart award for perfect housekeeping should there ever be such a thing, passed exquisite little hors d’oeuvres and tossed salads of leaves and other ingredients I couldn’t even identify.

There was also the auction of Maud’s possessions at Molesworth Cox. I thought I’d attend to see if I could purchase some of Maud’s things, some stuff I could sell in the store, and a personal memento or two of Maud and Frank. I’d asked Alex to watch out for the auction notice for me.

Alex did one better and got me a copy of the catalogue, which he was perusing one day while I arranged a new window display, assiduously avoiding glancing across the street at Clive’s shop.

“Well, what have we here?” I heard him mutter. “Here, have a look, Lara. Is this what I think it is?”

I glanced at the catalogue and smiled. “Cape Cod,” I said. “Good work, Alex. I might not have noticed that.”

“Won’t Jean Yves be pleased?” he replied. “You’d better get there in lots of time for this one.”

“This one” was a set of six pressed glass water goblets, dating to the 1880’s, in the Cape Cod pattern, to be auctioned off the same day as Maud’s possessions. The Jean Yves in question was Jean Yves Lassonde, a French actor who’d come to Hollywood ten years earlier to make a movie, and had stayed in America, buying a farm in upper New York state and settling in. I’d met him a number of years earlier, back when Clive and I had been in business together, when Jean Yves had been in town making a movie.

He’d wandered into the shop, called McClintoch and Swain back then, and had loved the place. That first visit, he’d purchased a beautiful old mirror and an antique teak armoire which I’d arranged to have shipped to his farm. After that he dropped in whenever he was in town, and almost always bought something. On one visit, I’d sold him a very large carved oak refectory table from Mexico, complete with sixteen matching chairs with beautifully carved backs and nicely worn leather seats.

He’d joked at the time that he didn’t know what he’d do with such a large table when he’d only been able to find five antique goblets in a pattern he’d begun to collect: Cape Cod. Even though North American pressed glass was not my specialty, because he was such a good customer, and a really lovely person, I’d done some research on the subject and discovered that the molds for pressed glass were regularly passed across the U.S./Canadian border, and for a period of time the pattern might have been manufactured at the Burlington Glass Works on the Canadian side.

Armed with this knowledge, I’d been able to find a goblet at an estate sale outside Toronto, and I’d sent it to him with one of his shipments as a little gift from the shop. He’d been thrilled, as I knew he would be. He accepted the goblet as a gift, but insisted that, if I found any more, he wanted to pay for them. I’d come across two more after that, and he’d been able to find one himself, so now he had nine. Seven to go. And here in the Molesworth Cox catalogue were six of them. Jean Yves would be pleased indeed.

The day of the auction was hot and muggy, and I entered the august and cool premises with a sense of both relief and anticipation. I don’t buy much at auctions: Most of my buying is done direct from the craftsperson, or from my agents and pickers in various parts of the world. But there is nothing like an auction to get the adrenaline flowing and to bring out the competitive spirit in most of us.

Molesworth Cox brought a veneer of old-world class and sophistication to that competitive flame. An old British company, founded almost 150 years ago, when treasure from the far reaches of the Empire poured into London, it proudly displayed the escutcheons that heralded it as a purveyor of goods to Her Majesty the Queen and one or two of the lesser Royals. The company had expanded to North America several years earlier and had established auction houses in New York, Dallas, and Toronto. The Toronto establishment was located on King Street just a block or two from the towering bank edifices where a considerable amount of Molesworth Cox merchandise could be found gracing the boardrooms of these modern-day cathedrals where mammon reigns supreme.

The outside of the establishment was so discreet that you’d be inclined to miss it unless given explicit directions, just a subdued bronze plaque beside a quietly elegant door hinting at what was within.

The place still had an air of British Empire, carefully maintained, and it always reminded me of what I imagined a British club in India during the days of the Raj to be: lots of palm fronds; large windows shuttered against the sun and the heat; highly polished brass; dark wood; worn leather chairs; and strong, dark tea—Assam, perhaps—served in translucent china cups from an etched brass tray, the quiet smell of expensive cigar lingering in the air.

Visitors rang the doorbell to gain entry, and once inside found themselves in the viewing rooms, two on either side of a center hall. The rooms were painted in a dark, dark green, and Oriental carpets covered the floors. As I always do at an auction, I quickly surveyed the room, checking to see if there was anything of interest beyond the specific objects I was looking for. I found Maud’s things right away, and mentally settled on a couple of sterling silver frames for myself, and three pairs of old brass candlesticks for the shop.

The water goblets were in the second room, and as quickly as I could, I checked them out. Pressed glass is highly collectible these days, and the prices have reached the point where there are inevitably fakes around. They looked okay to me, and of course they had a Molesworth Cox certificate of authentication to back them up. There was a reserve bid of $175 on them, which was fine. Jean Yves was prepared to pay about $50 per goblet, and this left some maneuvering room.

Following my usual auction strategy, I spent as little time as possible on the objects I really wanted, feigning indifference, and then spent time looking at what I didn’t want, in this case a set of Royal Doulton china with an impeccable pedigree, having belonged at one time to the Duke of something or other, and purportedly commissioned especially for a visit to the Duke’s castle by none other than Queen Victoria. I don’t know what I think I accomplish with this mild subterfuge; I can’t imagine anyone bids high on objects because they saw me looking at them. Superstition, perhaps.

At Molesworth Cox, purchasers are required to register and establish credit, and once they have proved themselves worthy, are given a number and a paddle with that number on it. No unseemly yelling at M C. To make a bid, one merely raises one’s paddle with a hand sign for the amount if necessary, in as refined and dignified a way as possible.

I took my seat early, sitting as I usually do in the middle of the row toward the back and watched others take their seats in front of me. The usual suspects were there—about a dozen dealers, one or two of whom I knew by name, the others only by sight. I was a little disappointed to see Sharon Steele. She’s a dealer with an antique store on Queen Street West specializing in old glass, and I expected she too would be interested in the water goblets. There were also a few yuppie couples, an Arab businessman or two, and a few obviously wealthy Chinese. There was also Ernie, an older gentleman who had been at every auction I’d ever attended in this place, and someone I’d never seen buy anything whatsoever.

One person seemed rather out of the ordinary, and I’d never seen him here before, not that that meant anything. I noticed him only, I think, because he seemed rather out of his element. He was medium height and build, dark, his collar and cuffs were a little worn, his shoes a little scuffed, his greyish-green suit a little shiny, nothing that would look out of place anywhere but here, perhaps. He was nervous, and if anything, rather furtive. He kept his hands in his pockets, his eyes kept darting about the room, and from time to time his tongue would flick quickly out of his mouth and back. In the very bad habit I have of giving strangers nicknames, I mentally named him Lizard.

I half expected Lizard to leave when the time for the auction came, but he didn’t. In fact, he had obviously passed muster because he had a paddle, number nine, and he took a seat several rows ahead of me and off to the right.

Maud’s mirrors and candlesticks were to be the third and fourth items up for sale, and the goblets, the tenth. Bidding was brisk for the first few items, but I had little competition for Maud’s possessions and got both the frames and the candlesticks for what I considered a satisfactory price. I then sat back to wait for the goblets. Sharon Steele had not yet bid on anything, so I figured she was waiting for the goblets too. I knew her to be a conservative bidder, so I thought I stood a reasonable chance of getting what I wanted.

Sharon was number eighteen, I was twenty-three. When the goblets came up, opening with the reserve bid, a number of people put in bids, but by the time the bidding reached $230, only Sharon and I were in. The auctioneer seesawed between the two of us until we got to $300, Sharon’s bid. This was Jean Yves’s limit, but I raised her to $310 hoping that would be the end of it. It wasn’t. Sharon, it seemed, wanted these pretty badly too. By this time I was mentally calculating how much of a loss I was prepared to take. Jean Yves was a good, no, a great customer, and business wasn’t bad these days. But Sarah and I would never get rich, and as the saying goes, on a good month we could almost pay the rent.

As another saying goes, he who hesitates is lost.

The bidding hit $400, and for a few seconds I lost my nerve. Much to Sharon’s surprise and mine, someone farther back raised the bid to $450, and the gavel came down. “Sold to thirty-one,” the auctioneer said.

I was sitting dealing with my disappointment when a voice I knew only too well came from behind. “I think Jean Yves will be pleased with the goblets, don’t you?” the voice asked amiably.

Clive. I turned around to find my ex-husband, a smug expression on his face, sitting directly behind me. He was very elegantly attired, maybe Armani, I remember thinking—Moira would know—with very trendy little wire glasses and an expensive-looking haircut.

“Why are you doing this?” I hissed at him. He was stroking his moustache as I spoke, a gesture that at one time, I seemed to recall, I had found profoundly attractive, but which now just incensed me.

“Doing what?” he asked innocently. “I just thought I’d pick these up for Jean Yves. I was afraid Sharon would get them, so I leapt in.”

“You didn’t do it for Jean Yves. You did it for the same reason you opened up across the street from me,” I whispered, acutely conscious that people nearby were watching us, but too angry to care.

“You did it to spite me,” I went on. “Why? I gave you half the money for the store, and surely Celeste has enough money to keep you in style,” I hissed.

“But it was never the money, my darling. I just need a chance to express my creativity,” he said.

Yeah, right, I thought. “I’m not your darling,” I sputtered, getting up from my seat and heading for the door.

By the time I’d climbed over the legs of several people sitting between me and the aisle, the tears of rage I was determined not to show pricking at the back of my eyes, the bidding on the next item had already begun. As I was about to stumble out the door at the back of the room, I saw someone lurking—there is no other word for it—behind a potted palm. I could not imagine what he was doing there. He didn’t appear to have a number, and he looked, if anything, even more out of place than Lizard. He was dressed completely in black, and he was concentrating very hard on the bidding that was going on. As I went by his hiding place, he turned, his concentration broken by my passing, and for a moment he stared right at me. It was all I could do not to gasp out loud. His eyes were very dark and hooded, and the backs of his hands were covered in dark hair. For some reason I cannot explain, something about the way he held his arms out from his body, almost like pincers, reminded me of a crab, or perhaps an enormous black spider, and a poisonous one at that. His eyes held mine for a second or two, and then he turned back to the bidding.

Intrigued, I turned back as well. The bidding was getting really competitive, and two parties were battling it out for something, number nine and number thirty-one: Clive and the Lizard.

The item that was being auctioned was a box of small objects that had not been claimed in customs and was therefore on the block. I’d seen it on my quick survey before the auction began. I really hadn’t taken much notice of it, and in my haste to get out of the place, I hadn’t heard the description of it from the auctioneer. My vague recollection was that there was a fair amount of junk in the box, and maybe a couple of things that looked interesting, although nothing I cared about.

But I knew which object held Clive’s attention: a small carved jade snuff bottle. Collecting was one of Clive’s passions, and on a scale of one to ten, snuff bottles would score a nine point five with him. He had an impressive collection which at one time we’d displayed on the shelf beneath a glass coffee table in our living room. I’d managed to find a few nice ones as Christmas and birthday presents, and he’d invariably been pleased with them.

The bidding was getting quite hot and moving up fast. Lizard, when he wasn’t holding up his paddle, was casting desperate glances back toward Clive. The price continued to rise. Clive was leaning forward in his chair, and Lizard was mopping the sweat from his brow; he wanted the box that badly. But it was clear that Clive had the resources, Lizard did not.

As the gavel was about to come down on his bid, smelling victory and convinced he had won, Clive leaned toward a pretty young woman sitting next to him and whispered something to her.

And then, on impulse, I did to Clive what he had done to me. I held my paddle up, and before he knew what was happening, I found myself the proud owner of a box of junk that was suddenly worth, by my own action, $990. It was a malicious thing to do, to say nothing of infantile, reckless, and even foolhardy.

It was also one of the worst mistakes I have ever made.

2

Clive got them!“ Moira shrieked. ”How awful!“

We were sitting in the little office at the back of the store, just after closing, contemplating the wretched box of junk I’d purchased. As we did so, Diesel, an orange cat who holds the title of Official Shop Cat, leapt up on the table and stuck his nose in the box. After a moment or two of poking about, he looked up and, giving me a look of pure disdain, stalked off to more interesting and rewarding activities. “Dumb, I know,” I said to the little beast’s retreating back.

My moment of triumph at having wrenched the snuff bottle away from Clive was very short-lived. In fact, I didn’t make it out of the building. The feeling lasted only until I used my personal credit card (how could I charge this moment of madness to the shop?) to pay for it. The $1000 tab, $990, to be precise, put my credit card perilously close to the limit, and I skulked back to the store in despair.

An hour or so later, Moira appeared, her dark hair in a sleek and sophisticated new hairdo, dressed in a long grey cotton sweater with matching leggings. She looked spectacular, as usual, and I had the feeling she had a date, but she said she’d just been passing by and decided to drop in. I had my suspicions that Alex, sensing my gloom, had called her, but neither of them said anything.

“I think what you really have to do,” Moira said, after a few minutes of quiet contemplation on both our parts, “is to get someone to make this jade thingy into a pendant of some sort which you’ll wear every day. Every single day,” she added, “while you parade up and down in front of Clive’s store.”

I had to laugh. “That’s better,” she said. “Now let’s see what else you’ve got here. Maybe there’ll be a treasure and you’ll get to recoup your losses.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “If there’d been something of value here, Molesworth Cox would have found it and pulled it out for a separate sale, wouldn’t they?”

“You never know,” Moira insisted. “Let’s look. What do you figure you could get for the snuff bottle?”

“Four, maybe five hundred, tops,” I said.

“See, we’re halfway there,” she said. “Only five hundred or so to go.”

We began to delve into the box, the contents of which were not, in my opinion, worth anything near what I’d paid, even allowing for a generous $500 for the jade bottle. Undeterred, Moira rummaged around.

“Isn’t this cute?” she said, pulling a small object out of the box. We both stared at it. Moira often used words like cute and thingy, and some people made the mistake of assuming she wasn’t too smart. In fact, she’d enjoyed a private school education, finishing school in Switzerland, and a couple of years at Cornell before she thumbed her nose at her snotty family and went off to become a hairdresser. Now she owns one of the smartest and most successful salons in the city. Over the past year or two, since I’d been back in the shop, she’d become a really good friend.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It looks like… a peanut. A silver peanut,”‘ Moira said. I rolled my eyes, and we both collapsed laughing. It did, indeed, look exactly like a peanut, and it was approximately life-size. I felt the weight of it in the palm of my hand.

“Actually,” I said, after a moment or two, “I think it’s real silver, and possibly old. The workmanship is excellent. It’s so real-looking, you can almost imagine breaking it apart and finding the two little nuts inside. And look, here,” I said, pointing to a tiny hole in each end, “I think it must be a bead.”

“See, what did I tell you?” Moira said. “A treasure. Hard to say if there’s a market for a single silver peanut, though,” she added, and we both laughed again. I was happy to find I was beginning to see the humor in all this.

“At least it’s not plastic like these,” Moira said, pulling out a string of beads that would have made someone in the sixties proud. I sighed. “Or ugly like this,” she added, displaying a particularly awful brooch.

“No wonder this wasn’t claimed in customs,” I moaned. “It wouldn’t be worth the trip to pick it up!” I said, opening a wooden box. Inside, carefully packaged in straw, was a flared bowl or vase, about six or seven inches high. On the inside of the flare was drawn, in beautiful detail, a serpentlike creature, which undulated around the rim. On the outside, below the flare, another fine line drawing had a quite fantastic scene in which elaborately clothed figures, some of them quite human looking, others with the heads of birds and animals, wrapped around the stem.

“Wow. That’s beautiful!” Moira exclaimed as I carefully lifted it out of the protective packaging. “What is it? It looks very old.”

“It does,” I agreed. “However…” I turned the bottom of the pot toward her, so that she could see where the words hecho en Peru—made in Peru—had been etched into the clay.

“And then there’s this,” I said, holding up a small card which I translated for her. “Replica of a pre-Columbian flared vase,” I read. “Made in Campina Vieja, Peru, which, if my Spanish serves me well, means old small farm. A small town, I expect.”

She laughed. “It’s a good thing I’m not in your business,” she said. “This might have fooled me.”

“Well, it might fool just about anybody,” I said. “The thing about replicas, you see, is that unlike reproductions, which are essentially copies, replicas are made to exactly match whatever is being copied: same materials, same method of manufacture, everything. In fact, sometimes when a replica is made, a mistake is deliberately put in it somewhere, so that it will not be taken for the original, should the documentation that identifies it as a replica get separated from the work. It’s possible here, for example, that one of the lines of the drawing is different from the original. Replicas are very costly to make, by and large, but pre-Columbian works are so valuable that I would think it might pay to make one. And at least in this case, it is clearly marked as such, and not the work of the unscrupulous among us who have a short lapse of memory, shall we say, and forget to put the hecho en Peru on the bottom.”

“That’s when tourists pay way too much for what they think is an authentic pre-Columbian piece, and then try to smuggle it back home wrapped in their dirty underwear, I suppose,” Moira said. “What is it a replica of, do you think? It says Peru, so Incan perhaps?”

“I’m not sure. As you well know, I studied Meso-american history for a while, the Maya in particular, but I can’t say this is like anything I’ve seen. The fact that it’s made in Peru might make it Incan, but I really don’t know. Maybe I’ll do a little research, just for fun, when I’ve got a minute.”

“Could you ask Lucas about it? He should know about Peruvian stuff, shouldn’t he?” Moira asked, rather coyly I thought. She’d always liked my former partner, Lucas, and thought he and I should get together again. In her mind, I’d broken off the relationship, when in fact, he was the one who’d ended it a year earlier. He couldn’t do his patriotic duty for Mexico and maintain our relationship, he’d said. In Moira’s world, this was a mere technicality, however.

“He’s an expert on the Maya, Moira, not Peru. And it’s over, okay?”

“Whatever,” Moira said. Nothing short of a total reconciliation would satisfy her, I concluded. As irritating as this occasionally was, it was also sort of endearing. “Well, whatever it is, could you sell it in the shop?” she went on, turning the vase in her hands. “I think it would look good with the type of stuff you sell. You carry pre-Columbian reproductions from time to time, don’t you?”

“I do and it would,” I conceded. “It would fit in very well, in fact. But what would I charge for ,it? Do you think I could get five hundred by any chance?”

“Probably not,” Moira replied. I made a face at her. “Gotta go,” she said, rising from her chair. “Date. A new man. Do you think he’ll be The One?”

“Probably not,” I said, mimicking her.

She laughed. “Come on over to the salon. I’ll treat you to a free haircut next time you’re in. And it should be soon,” she said, reaching over and pulling a long piece of hair down in front of my eyes.

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s very nice of you.”

“What are friends for?” she replied. “And you can do something for me when I bomb out, as usual, with this guy.”

“You don’t bomb out, Moira, you dump them,” I said. “But I’ll be here.”

After she left, I took a closer look at the contents of the box. Right at the bottom there was a smaller version of the wooden box that had contained the vase. This one too had a card declaring the contents to be a pre-Columbian replica. The object was round, about two to two and a half inches in diameter, made of what looked to be gold and a turquoise stone of some kind. In the center was the tiny figure of a man with an elaborate headdress, carrying a scepter or something, and what appeared to be a shield. The scepter could actually be removed from his little gold hand, and a string of beads around his neck were each individually made. The rim of the circle was surrounded by the smallest gold beads. On the back of it was a rather hefty post. This time I thought I knew what it was. It would be one of a pair of ear ornaments—ear flares they are sometimes called—used by pre-Columbian peoples of Mexico, Central America, and presumably South America too. The workmanship, even for a replica, was really quite extraordinary, and promising myself I would take some time to look into it, I rewrapped it in tissue and set it carefully in the desk drawer.

The vase, I decided, would sell. I thought I’d try a price of $150—the drawing was exquisite, and it would make a very unusual decorative item for someone. I found a good place for it on a coffee table, where it could be seen all round for maximum effect, and propped the card, with my handwritten translation, against it. The peanut I decided to keep, to clean it up and thread it onto a very fine silver chain I had, to wear around my neck as a reminder of my impulsiveness. Perhaps next time I went to an auction, I should wear it, I thought. On a more positive note, it would make a very interesting piece of jewelry, a bit of a conversation piece.

The snuff bottle? I would have to decide what to do with that.

As I put the box away, I caught a glimpse of a piece of paper wedged between the packing material and the side of the box. I carefully extracted it and found a letter, written by an Edmund Edwards, proprietor of something called Ancient Ways in New York, to a gallery in Toronto I’d not heard of, although that didn’t mean anything. Toronto is a big place. It was called the Smythson Gallery, and the proprietor according to this letter was someone called, appropriately enough, A. J. Smythson. The letter was all very formal, befitting a gallery that had affiliates in London, Tokyo, Bonn, and Paris, as the letterhead discreetly informed you. Mr. Edwards sent his regards to Mr. Smythson, said that he hoped the merchandise had arrived in good order, and that, since many other objects were available, he also hoped to be of service in the future. The letter was dated just over two years earlier. On a whim, I looked up the Smythson Gallery in the phone book, but it wasn’t listed, nor was there an A. J. Smythson, although there was something familiar about the name, and the rather unusual spelling. Perhaps the gallery had closed, which would explain why the box was never picked up in customs. In any event, I decided, it was really no affair of mine, so I tossed the letter into the wastebasket.

The next few days more or less went back to normal, except for two things. One was that the security alarm took to going off in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. On two separate nights, and twice on one of them, I had to pull on jeans and a sweatshirt, and drive to the shop to meet the police. Neither time was there any indication of anything unusual. The following night, the alarm went off only once, but this time the policeman told me I’d be sent a bill for his services because there’d been one too many false alarms. I had the security company come to check out the system, but they told me it was operating just fine.

The other aspect of the week that made it a bit different from the norm was that I spent every spare minute dreaming up horrible things to do to Clive. These ranged from taking a hammer and smashing his beloved little jade bottle to powder right before his eyes, heaving a rock or two through his sophisticated front window display, or spray-painting his Armani suit. I did none of the things I imagined, of course.

Well, one: I called the police and had his spanking new BMW, which he persisted in parking illegally, towed. It was particularly satisfying to watch him sprinting down the street in a futile attempt to catch up to his car. It’s amazing, really, the depths to which we sink in dealing with an ex-spouse.

The trouble with this small victory, of course, was that while at the time it struck me as a masterful stroke, it merely escalated the conflict. He’d taken the goblets, I’d taken his snuff bottle. At that point we were more or less even. But I couldn’t let it alone, I was still so angry. In my heart I knew, of course, that there must still be something unresolved in that relationship, even though a few years and another love had gone by. It didn’t take a psychiatrist to figure that one out. But I kept going anyway, as petty as I knew it to be. And knowing only too well just how immature Clive was, I knew he’d figure out who had the car towed and would find a way to retaliate.

I didn’t have long to wait.

A few days after the car incident, Clive swept into the store. “Just coming to say hello to my neighbors,” he said. “The place looks very nice, Lara. And this must be your new partner. Sarah, is it?”‘ he said in his most charming voice.

Sarah murmured something polite, then disappeared in the back, wisely not wishing to be part of this little scene. I smiled weakly, then went to assist a customer in the second showroom. I heard Clive wandering around in the front room. In a few moments I heard him talking to an old customer of ours. “George!” he exclaimed. “How nice to see you again. Still collecting New World santos?” he asked. I heard George murmur a reply. “I have one you really must see, quite exceptional,” Clive went on. There was a pause. “Right across the road, George.” I could picture Clive pointing across the road, and I excused myself for a moment from my customer. But it was too late. Clive, his arm on the shoulder of one of our oldest clients, was steering him over to his shop. He’d stolen a good customer right from under my nose.

It was not until the next day that I noticed that the silver peanut was missing. I’d been working on it a bit in the shop, and I thought I’d left it either on the desk in the little office or in the small drawer behind the front counter. But it was in neither place and a search of the whole shop turned up nothing. There was, in my mind, only one possible explanation. I marched across the street.

“I didn’t think you’d stoop so low as to steal something, Clive,” I huffed. “An auction is one thing, but this petty theft—”

“What are you talking about, Lara?” Clive replied. “Surely taking a customer away is not theft. Why don’t we call it healthy competition?”

“I’m not talking about George. I’m talking about the peanut,” I replied, knowing as the words came out of my mouth that I sounded like an idiot.

“The peanut,” Clive sighed. “My God, Lara, you really are losing it. Take a vacation or a Valium or something. There’s nothing wrong with my setting up shop across the street. Why do you think the big shopping malls have competitors at either end? Why are whole streets lined with stores selling the same kind of merchandise? Because it’s good business, that’s why. With you and I both here, this could end up being the antiques center of the city. There’s business enough for both of us. So please stop this nonsense about peanuts!”

I just looked at him. “Come on,” he wheedled. “Let’s kiss and make up. Or shake hands at least. We were a good team once, weren’t we? We’re even on the auction, and I’ll forgive what you did to my car, if you’ll forgive the abduction of George.” He held out his hand. After a second or two, somewhat reluctantly, I took it.

“Welcome back to the neighborhood, Clive,” I said.

“That’s better,” he said. I mentally pictured myself spray-painting his lovely beige suit purple. It helped a lot.

There didn’t seem to be any more to be said, and so I turned to go. “I don’t suppose you’d sell me the snuff bottle?” he said.

“Sure,” I replied. “Eleven hundred dollars.”

He laughed. “Three,” he said to my retreating back. I kept going.

“Okay, okay,” he called after me as I crossed the street. “Four hundred, make that four fifty if you’ll throw in the rest of the stuff in the box.”

I ignored him.

The next few days were quiet, if you don’t count the arrival at our front door of the resident nutbar with his news of impending doom. In fact, his presence made the store so quiet that Sarah decided to take a few days vacation, right in the middle of tourist season, leaving the shop to the care of Alex and me. I heard nothing more from Clive. I still didn’t trust him, in fact I never would, but so far the cease-fire seemed to be holding. There was no sign of the peanut. Alex and I both looked for it, and I still was not entirely convinced Clive hadn’t taken it, holding it hostage for the snuff bottle or something. But Clive said no more on that subject, and finally I had to conclude it had been stolen. Shoplifting is a disagreeable fact of life when you own a store, and the peanut would be very easy to snatch, particularly if I had been careless enough to leave it out on the counter, which I supposed I must have done. Just in case, though, I took the little gold and turquoise ear ornament home with me while I decided what to do with it.

One evening, my little group of friends decided to get together for a drink. We went to the bar in the Four Seasons, just down the street from our shops. Moira, who changes her hairdos and her men the way the rest of us change socks, brought her new man, whose name was Brian. Brian was subjected to a baptism of fire, if ever there was one. Elena, the craft store owner who rather fancies herself as an amateur therapist, did a snap psychological profile of him to his face; Dan, tall, thin, scholarly, the perfect bookseller, interrogated him about his reading habits; and Moira and I talked shop most of the time. Brian seemed very nice, but had he asked me, I wouldn’t have held out much hope for him.

It was a pleasant outing for me, until Clive arrived and pulled up a chair, leaving me wondering if this was coincidence, or if one of the group, a traitor, had invited him. After a few minutes of watching him being charming, ingratiating himself with my friends, most particularly Moira, I decided it was time to go, and headed for my car. Only then did I realize I’d left my keys—car, home, shop, all of them—at the store. I was damned if I was going back into the bar to ask for help with Clive there.

I looked at my watch. The store was open until eight, and it was now about eight-thirty. With any luck, if it had been a bit busy, Alex would still be there, doing the paperwork, putting the cash in the safe, and generally straightening up the place.

I went first to the main door. The shop was dark, and since it was just twilight it was difficult for me to see in, particularly since we had a metal gate that we pulled in front of the glass doors when we closed as an extra security precaution. Disappointed, I turned to leave. Perhaps, I hoped, Alex had found the keys and, not knowing where I’d gone for a drink, had taken them home with him. He lived just three doors from me, so I would be all set. I’d cab it to Alex’s and leave my car in the parking lot overnight.

Just then, I heard a clunk against the door behind me. I turned back in time to see Diesel pawing at the glass in some agitation. I went back to the door and tried to peer in. Diesel turned and disappeared into the gloom, but I could see him framed against the light from the small window in the back door opposite me, circling and circling in the middle of the room.

Gradually my eyes adjusted, and I saw what had upset Diesel. Someone—it could only be Alex—was wandering erratically around the store. I rattled the gate as hard as I could, but it wouldn’t budge, and Alex, if that was who it was, did not appear to notice me. There had to be something seriously the matter with him. I ran down the alleyway beside the shop and around to the back door. It too was locked.

There was a wrought iron chair and table out on a tiny patio where we occasionally take a coffee or lunch break. I picked up the chair and heaved it at the back door. The glass in the little panel in the door shattered, and I was able to reach through the small opening and unlock the door. Instantly the alarm went off, but I didn’t stop. I figured that would bring help faster than a phone call. I raced up the four steps to the main floor.

It was, as I had feared, Alex. He was wobbling a little, almost staggering, and muttering to himself. A stroke, I thought. He’s had a stroke or something. But then I noticed there was blood in his hair, and a bruise was forming on the side of his head above one ear. He’s fallen, I concluded, and hit his head.

I went over to him, being careful not to startle him. “What happened, Alex?” I said, taking his arm as gently as I could. He looked toward me, but his eyes were not focusing properly. “Let’s go,” I said gently. “I’m going to take you to the doctor, okay?”

“Can’t,” he said finally, the first intelligible words I’d heard him say. “Not finished. Something I have to do.” He mumbled incoherently for a moment, then said, “I have an account to settle with…” He looked confused. “With someone,” he said vaguely.

“I’m sure it can wait until later,” I said soothingly. “Now you just come along with me.” It was hopeless though. He wasn’t going to leave. I knew I would have to get help. I gently eased him into a chair and headed for the desk.

Throughout our conversation, if you can call it that, the alarm was making a terrible racket, which struck me as a bit odd. I didn’t think Alex would have set the security system until he was ready to leave the shop. The reason for the alarm would soon become clear.

As I reached for the phone, there was a roar, then a crash, and I was thrown backward as the storage room door just a few feet away from me was blasted off its hinges. Dense, black smoke filled the air. The sprinkler system activated. There was smoke, there was water, Diesel was circling my legs, howling in terror, the alarm rang on and on. Fire, I thought, it’s the fire alarm.

But it was even worse than that. Crumpled just inside the storage room was a man. He lay on his side, his back to me, knees drawn up a little, not quite in a fetal position, and his hands had been tied behind his back. I couldn’t see his face, and I couldn’t bring myself to look. He did not move at all. I thought I could see blood, though, on the side of his neck and his hands. For a second, I had this vision of a man on his knees, begging his executioner to spare him, then falling over into the position in which he now lay.

I had a decision to make, and I made it. I couldn’t get all of us out. I left the man in the storage room, who was, I reasoned, almost certainly dead, and grabbing Alex, who was now unconscious, heaved him up into my arms like a child. Yelling at Diesel to come with me, I tried to make my way to the back door. I couldn’t see where I was going, and I started to choke and gag. I hit my shins on some furniture, ran into the side of something, and, still holding Alex, fell to my knees. Down low, the air wasn’t quite so thick, and I could see a tiny shadow just ahead of me. It was Diesel. I pulled Alex up on my back, his arms draped over my shoulders, and, following the cat, crawled to the back steps, then to safety, the sound of a distant siren moving toward us.

“Help’s coming, help’s coming,” I said over and over to Alex’s unconscious figure until the police and firemen arrived.

3

What would follow were some of the blackest days of my life.

I spent the night in the hospital, under observation, it was explained to me, because of all the smoke I’d inhaled. Being under observation extended beyond the medical, I quickly ascertained, to the presence of a policewoman by the name of Constable Margo Chu, who, having little if anything to say for herself, sat in the only chair in the room, leafing through fashion magazines by the hour.

I was a mess, as even the most cursory exploration and a mere glance in the bathroom mirror made clear. My knees looked like raw meat, a gash on my left hand had required several stitches, and with a severe muscle spasm in my back, and ribs sore from coughing, I could barely stand up straight.

Nevertheless, I was still much better off than Alex, who drifted in and out of consciousness, the result of a bad concussion. His condition was described as “guarded,” whatever that means. I knew what they were worried about. I’d overheard the nurses talking about him: swelling of the brain.

I kept seeing him in the ambulance, the mask over his face, and tubes running from his arms. He was so still, his face the color of chalk: the man who’d befriended me after my divorce, a kind of second father to me, who’d made me feel at home in a new neighborhood, looked after my house while I traveled, who was indispensable now, in the shop, and who, more than anything else, was my friend, in such distress.

And that other fellow, who was he? What was he doing there? Was this a robbery gone wrong? Who had done what to whom? Had the man in the storage room hit Alex? It could not possibly, knowing Alex, have been the other way around. And if he had hit Alex, what then had happened to him? He hadn’t tied his own hands behind his back. My head hurt thinking about it, and none of it made any sense.

I was allowed to leave the hospital late the next morning. I asked to see Alex before I left, but they wouldn’t let me. He was in intensive care, and only relatives were allowed in. I pointed out that I was the closest thing to a relative he had, but even then they suggested I come back the following day and they’d consider my request. PC Chu drove me home, where Moira was waiting for me. She bustled around very efficiently, getting me settled in my favorite armchair, bringing me lunch, and trying to make me laugh.

“In case you’re too traumatized to figure it out,” she said, “the tempura shrimp, the California rolls, and the yellow fin tuna sushi are for you. The yuppie deluxe, organic, gourmet cat food in this lovely jar with the darling little hat on it is for Diesel. You may share the single malt scotch.”

I tried to smile to please her, I really did, but gave it up. I felt close to tears most of the time, and anyway my face, like every other part of my body, hurt. And there was much to be done.

“I’ve got to get up,” I said. “I have to clean up the shop: I can’t leave it all to Sarah, and we’ve got to get back in business. We can’t afford to be closed for long.” I tried to stand up.

“No. Listen,” Moira said, pushing me back. “Your friends are on this. You can’t get into the building, anyway. The police won’t let you. As soon as they do, we’ll get a group together and do whatever needs doing. Sarah will be back soon. Until she gets here, the rest of us will pitch in.”

I thought about that. “What do you mean, the police won’t let me in? Why not?” I demanded. “It’s my shop!”

“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I expect they have to investigate things, and don’t want a lot of people getting in the way. I’m sure that’s it.”

Moira tried very hard to get me to rest, but I couldn’t. I decided that I would call my insurance adjuster and arrange to have him meet me at the store the next morning, by which time, I was sure, I’d be up and around. I’d been dealing with the same insurance company for years, had never had a claim, and did not expect any problems.

The person I usually dealt with was not in, but I was referred to an agent by the name of Rod McGarrigle. Rod and I did not hit it off. In the first place, he had a rather distracted air about him. I had the impression that he was doing something else while talking on the phone to me, because from time to time I could tell that he put his hand over the mouthpiece while I was talking to him. His answers to my questions about coverage, the possibility of payment for lost business, and so on were discouragingly vague.

Finally, in exasperation, I asked him bluntly, “Am I or am I not covered for this?”‘

“You are covered for this, Ms. McClintoch,” he replied, “unless, of course, you, your partner, or anyone in your employ is found to be guilty of a felony.”

A felony. How nice. “Then I will expect payment promptly,” I said tartly before hanging up in his ear.

I told Moira what he’d said, and she made sympathetic noises, but she changed the subject immediately and began to tell me droll little stories about how Brian had been traumatized by meeting her friends the previous day. I gathered the relationship had not survived drinks with her friends, but she didn’t seem perturbed about it. Even in my painkiller-induced grogginess, I was beginning to wonder what exactly was going on that I was missing. It did not take long to find out.

PC Chu went off duty soon after that but was immediately replaced by PC Mancino, a fresh-faced young man who insisted upon calling me ma’am, and who told me several times how proud he was to have worn blue, to use his expression, for seven years now. I took this to be his way of telling me that he was older and more experienced than he looked.

Shortly thereafter he was joined by his sergeant, Lewis he said his name was, and if he had a first name, he didn’t reveal it. He struck me as a man who had no perceptible imagination or sense of humor, and who was on top of that a stickler for detail. He began by asking Moira to leave, which she did, reluctantly, telling him she would return in forty-five minutes, implying by her tone and her glance that he should be gone by the time she got back. Moira is not to be messed with, I’ve learned, and as Sergeant Lewis seemed in imminent danger of finding out for himself.

Lewis talked in phrases punctuated by emphasis rather than sentences, almost as if he thought he was restricted to a finite number of words in his lifetime and didn’t want to run out before his final exit. He also had a disconcerting habit, whether by design or just because his mind worked that way, of asking questions in what appeared to be an entirely random order. He asked, in my opinion, an inordinate number of questions about where I’d been from 7:35 on, and with whom, and what I had done from the time I’d left the bar in the Four Seasons until the police and fire truck had arrived at the shop. None of my answers seemed precise enough to satisfy him. PC Mancino took laborious notes.

I told him in great detail about drinks in the bar, who had been there, when people had arrived, and then added, “I’m sure my friends can confirm all of this for you.”

“Taken their statements already,” he replied noncommittally.

“All right, then,” I said. Why exactly would he need to do that? I wondered. Only minutes into the interview and I was beginning to realize that Lewis and I were not going to get along. Here one of my dearest friends has been badly hurt, I said to myself, some stranger has ended up dead in my store, which just happens to be in flames at the time, and this fellow wants to know how many drops of vermouth there were in my martini and where I parked my car.

“Southwest corner Yorkville and Avenue Road. Then what?”

“I realized I’d forgotten my keys, left them at the shop, so I went back hoping to catch Alex before he left. As I’ve already told you,” I added. This was the third time he’d asked for some clarification on a matter I considered perfectly straightforward.

“These your keys!” Lewis asked, oblivious to my dislike, pulling a black-and-white photo of a key ring from his briefcase.

I nodded.

“Sure?”

“I can’t imagine they would be anyone else’s. The key ring’s a gift from a friend in Mexico. It’s silver, and an unusual design—the Chac Mool from Chichen Itza.”

I looked over at the puzzled PC Mancino. In seven years of wearing blue, he had not encountered the Maya/Toltec city of Chichen Itza, nor the angry god that guards one of the temples. I spelled both for him. He blushed.

“Keys all there?”

“I think so: house, Alex’s place, Moira’s, car, shop door—same key opens the back and the front doors— warehouse, storage room. That’s it. Yes, all there.”

“Partner out of town, is she?” he asked, taking one of those little mental leaps I found so hard to follow.

“Yes. She’s gone on a wilderness camping trip in Algonquin Park with her friend and his two sons. She’ll be back tomorrow or the day after.” There I was being imprecise again. He scowled.

“Business been good lately, has it?”

“Fine. Yes.”

“Don’t owe a bit of money or anything, do you?”

“No, as a matter of fact, we’ve actually turned a small profit the last few months.” I could predict the next question, and sure enough, out it came.

“Insured, are you?”

“Yes, of course.”

It didn’t take a genius to figure out where he was going with this one: insurance fraud. Maybe that explained why Rod McGarrigle had been so evasive. But it was much worse than that.

“Then what?”

“Then what, what?” I asked, baffled by all the mental hopping around Lewis was doing.

He looked at me as if I were of subnormal intelligence and said, “What did you do after you realized you’d left your keys behind?” He clearly resented having to use all those words to get me back on track.

I told him how I’d gone to the shop, peered in the front door, realized something was wrong and gone round to the back to try to get in.

“Door locked, was it?”

“Yes. I used a chair to smash the window. Come to think of it, the chair was lying on its side close to the door. It had been knocked over.”

“Wind?”

“I don’t think so. It’s wrought iron and pretty heavy.”

“And then?”

“I reached through the broken window, pushed the bar, and got the door open, and went over to Alex.”

“Who was where, exactly!” Lewis went on. Clearly my answers were not yet precise enough.

“Wandering around in a daze,” I replied.

“His precise position?”

“Near the tan sofa.”

“Near?”

“In front of it. A couple of feet, more or less, in front of it.”

“His appearance, in detail?”

“Dazed, as I said. He had a cut over his left ear, and he was sort of staggering around.”

Lewis winced. He didn’t like expressions like more or less and sort of, I could tell, but at this moment I was too tired and sore to care.

“Say anything?”

“I think I asked him what happened, and then suggested he leave with me,” I replied, misunderstanding the question.

“He say anything?” Lewis asked, impatient at my inability to answer the question he was asking.

“He was babbling really. The only coherent thing he said was something about not being able to go because he had some unfinished work, an account he had to settle.”

For a second or two both policemen sat motionless, Mancino with his pen poised over his notebook, Lewis looking like the proverbial cat that had swallowed the canary. I looked from one to the other. Knowing Alex, it had simply never occurred to me that there was more than one way of interpreting what he’d said. Lewis, I knew right away, also thought there was only one interpretation, and it was not the same as mine.

“You can’t think Alex is to blame for this,” I gasped. “He would never do such a thing.”

“Exact words?” Lewis said finally.

“He was worried he hadn’t got all his work at the shop done!” I exclaimed. “That’s all.”

“Exact words?” Lewis repeated.

“He said, ”Not finished. Something I have to do. I have an account to settle with someone,“ ” I replied reluctantly. “It’s an old-fashioned expression, settle an account,” I added, horrified at the direction this conversation was taking, and upset that my report would reflect so badly on him. “Alex is getting on a little, and he’s lived all over the world, and he uses some rather quaint expressions. It means pay a bill. He’s been looking after the finances while my partner is away.”

“Known Mr. Stewart long, have you?” Lewis said, this time very quietly.

“Long enough,” I retorted. “About four years, long enough to know that he would never hurt a flea.”

Lewis said nothing. Mancino scribbled furiously.

“Have you figured out precisely what that other person was doing in my store?” I asked, anxiety making me belligerent as I desperately tried to get the investigation back on what I saw to be a more reasonable track. “Did he break in, not realizing Alex was still there? We don’t keep much cash in the shop, just a small float in the safe in the tiny office behind the front desk. Most people pay by credit card these days, so there’s rarely a large amount of money in the shop, but a thief wouldn’t necessarily know that,” I rattled on.

How had the thief got in? I wondered as I spoke. While the shop was open, perhaps, hiding in the storage room and then surprising Alex? Once the store was closed, both the front and back doors were locked. The back door was always locked: It had a panic bar for ease of exit but locked automatically behind you. It had been locked when I got there, that I knew for certain.

And the fire? We didn’t keep all that much in the storage room. We had a warehouse several blocks away where we kept the bigger pieces of furniture until there was room on the floor. The storage room contained some of our records, a place for our coats, and some of the smaller decorative items which we kept there to replace objects as they were sold. We didn’t keep anything flammable, and I couldn’t imagine how a fire could have started. Did that mean the fire had been deliberately set? Was the thief trying to cover his tracks? Was he even trying to make sure Alex could never identify him? It was a horrible thought.

My thoughts turned back to the present, and I found Sergeant Lewis watching me carefully. “So,” I said, “was it a robbery?”‘

“One possibility,” Lewis said.

I told him about the security alarm going off three times in the previous week. “I thought they were false alarms, but now I’m not so sure,” I said, pressing on despite his refusal to tell me anything. “Do you think someone was trying to break in then? Was the fire deliberately set?”

Lewis ignored me. Suddenly he leaned forward.

“Know this person?” Lewis asked, taking an eight by ten black-and-white photo out of his briefcase and setting it before me. If he’d wanted to shock me, he was very successful. It was the dead man in the store, photographed in such a way that I could see his face, his hair singed and one cheek burned, a dark ugly line on his neck. I gasped. Lewis waited.

“No!” I finally blurted out. Technically that was true, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be hooked up to a polygraph at that very moment.

“Certain?”

I nodded. There was no question I was being a trifle too literal here. I really didn’t know who the victim was. But I had seen him before. The problem was, every time I opened my mouth, I seemed to implicate Alex: Surely Lewis would never have suspected Alex if I hadn’t said what I had. I determined I would have to be very careful what I said from now on. Volunteering more than was asked for was not a good idea, it seemed.

“You know who he is?” I asked, adopting Lewis’s particular style of speech as my own.

It was his turn to nod. “Then why ask me?” I responded.

“Turned up in your storage room for starters. A little crispy have to say, but recognizable. Ever been to Peru?” he asked without missing a beat.

Now why did that question not surprise me? “No,”‘ I replied.

“Ever done business with anyone in Peru?”

“Again, no.”

“Any reason to be dealing with someone in Peru, in an official capacity or otherwise?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Your friend Stewart has, I expect,” he countered.

I didn’t reply, cautiously deciding to take this as a question, not a statement.

“Seen there, has he?”

“He may have,” I replied. “I don’t know. He was in the merchant marine for twenty years. He went a lot of places.”

“Merchant marine, was it? Down on the docks, I expect. Lots of things go down around the docks. Went to Peru. Not so long ago, either,” he replied evenly. “Purser too. Dealt with customs officials very likely.”

What was I supposed to infer from that? Lewis’s elliptical references were definitely getting on my nerves. “What do you think happened that evening?” I said, forgetting my determination to keep quiet. “Alex tied this guy up, killed him, set fire to the place and then bopped himself on the head? So badly he has a concussion, I might add?”

“Strange, I grant you. But more likely than the other way around, wouldn’t you say? No sign of anybody else there,” he said, raising his head and looking right at me. Mercifully I heard the door open, and Moira came in.

“So you’ve never seen him?” Lewis persisted, pointing once more to the photo of Lizard.

There didn’t seem to be any way around this very direct question. To say yes now, however, after I’d said I didn’t know him, would make me look as if I was hiding something, maybe covering for Alex. “No,” I lied.

Lewis looked at me for several seconds, then turned to Mancino. “That’s it, then. We’ll be off. We’d like you to come to the store with us tomorrow morning to see if there’s anything missing. We will be pursuing various lines of enquiry.”

“You do that,” I said in as authoritative a manner as I could muster. Then I just hung in until the two had left before bursting into tears. Moira was horrified, of course. She thought they’d been badgering me, and maybe they had. I couldn’t tell her though.

Lizard. It was the man I’d rather facetiously called Lizard, the man who had dueled it out with my ex-husband for a jade snuff bottle at Molesworth Cox.

Dead, burned, in my store. Was it another of Clive’s little pranks that had gone very wrong? Had he sent someone to steal the snuff bottle? He’d been prepared to pay enough for it. Top price, actually, and I’d refused. Lizard had wanted the box too, very, very badly. But if he’d broken into the shop, how had he been killed? Not by Alex. Even leaving aside the fact that he would never do such a thing, Alex was barely conscious. So who else was there?

More to the point, what had I done? Rather than helping the police with their investigation, I’d actually lied about knowing Lizard. Now what?

I called my lawyer. She was vacationing on Maui for a week.

I called Rob Luczka. “Answer the phone,” I ordered, as it rang and rang. I knew he and Barbara had been in Montreal visiting her sister, but I was praying they’d returned.

“Hello,” he said at last.

“You’re home,” I said, relieved.

“Just got in,” he said. “What’s up?”

“ T really need your help. The most awful thing has happened.” I started to tell him about Alex, the body, and the fire.

“I’ll be right there,” he said, interrupting me. I heaved a sigh of relief. While Rob and I occasionally seem to inhabit different planets, I consider him to be a friend, and despite the occasional round of bickering from time to time, usually over what I see to be his rather black-and-white view of events, I hope he feels the same about me. It made me feel better knowing he was on his way over.

Less than half an hour later we were ensconced on my back deck with a pitcher of iced lemon tea. It was a beautiful warm summer evening, and more than anything else I just wanted to sit there and enjoy it and not think about what had happened. After discussions about the weather, Montreal, and the Blue Jays, Rob gently turned the conversation around to the subject at hand. He was very sympathetic until I got to the part about the photo of Lizard.

“I told Lewis that I didn’t know the person in the photo, but in fact, while I don’t know exactly who he was, I have seen him before, at an auction at Moles-worth Cox.” I hesitated, hearing his sharp intake of breath. “I thought they were accusing Alex of something awful, and me of arson, insurance fraud, and my hand hurt and I had a headache,” I rattled on. Even to my own ears, I sounded like a whiny brat.

“This is murder we’re talking about here, Lara. How do you think it will look for you and Alex if— make that when, not if—the police find out you had seen the victim, that you lied?”

“I was thinking maybe I could say I’d had a brain wave or something, a sudden return of memory. I was in shock, you know, after the event…”

Rob looked at me as if I’d just crawled out from under a rock. He was absolutely furious. His jaw was clenched so tightly I thought his teeth would crumble. “So you’re planning to pile lies on top of lies, are you? You think this is quite all right to do?”‘

“Spare me the lecture, Rob,” I shot right back. “I made a mistake, okay? Most people do that from time to time. Maybe not you, of course. Maybe not that Ms. Perfect you live with. But most of us do. I don’t want a speech about ends never, ever justifying means, or on the duties and responsibilities of a citizen or whatever. I’m asking you for advice on what to do about this situation, how to help Alex and get out of this mess.”

After what seemed an eternity, he spoke very quietly. “ T will have to tell them what you have told me.”‘ I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for his daughter Jennifer, who I knew was subjected to this particular strain of morality a lot, and who suffered from it.

“Even if it looks bad for Alex too? Rob,” I pleaded, “ T thought you were my friend. I asked you for help as a friend.”

He stood up. “I am a policeman, first and foremost,” he said. “If you didn’t want me to report it, then you shouldn’t have told me.” He started to walk away.

“Well, maybe you don’t have your priorities straight,” I said to his rigid back. He kept walking. “Maybe life is not quite as neat as you think it is,” I continued.

“Ask Jennifer what she thinks,” I called as he reached the gate. It was a low blow. I heard the gate latch firmly behind him.

4

It took me a while to figure out what was missing, in part because the shop was such a mess, but also because it was not what I expected.

Constable Chu was back on duty the next morning and drove me to the shop. I was grateful for the lift, because I hurt even worse that day than I had the day before. I felt as if it would take a shoehorn to get me behind the wheel of my own car.

I had been dreading this moment, not just because I was frightened at what I would find, but also because I was worried about what to say to Sergeant Lewis. The question was, had Rob told him about Lizard or not? If he hadn’t, then perhaps I could try my memory-coming-back-to-me story, but if he had, then saying that would only make it worse.

I was feeling terrible about Rob. I knew that I had done to a friend something that one should never do: put him in an unconscionable position. I wanted to call and apologize, but he had been so angry I was afraid to. I had thought a lot in the wee small hours of the morning about why I had been acting so childish of late. I am no spring chicken after all. In fact I am old enough to have grown children of my own instead of behaving like an infant. I could operate a business reasonably efficiently, travel all over the world without a qualm, but when my ex-husband moves in across the road, I go slightly nuts. Clive was right. It was time for me to get a grip.

But how, exactly?

A mixture of smells greeted my nostrils as I stepped in the door: part doused campfire, part wet dog, and partly, to my hyperactive imagination, the odor of death. I pointed out the spot where I’d found Alex to Constable Chu, then looked around as she made notes.

The fire itself had done surprisingly little damage. The storage room door had blown out, and it and the frame were badly singed, the walls in that area marked by smoke stains. The sprinkler system had done what it should and put out the blaze very quickly.

The water damage was something else, however. Already the paint on some of the antique wood pieces was beginning to peel away, and watermarks were showing up on everything. The sofas were absolutely sodden, and the carpets on the floor, some really lovely old kilims I’d picked up on a hair-raising trip through Pakistan a few months earlier, squelched as I walked over them. I desperately wanted to get an industrial cleaner in, but the doors were still barred by yellow police tape. If we weren’t allowed in soon, nothing would be salvageable. I could have cried.

Lewis arrived. “Anything missing?” he said in his usual succinct manner.

I looked around. The store is a bit of a barn really, just one large room with a teeny office behind the front desk, the storage room at the back, and another small showroom off to the right. In order to make the merchandise look more inviting, we had room arrangements in several areas of the shop: a dining table and chairs with places set, a candelabra hanging from the ceiling above; a living room arrangement against one wall, with a sofa, side chairs, end tables, coffee table with accent pieces on it, and perhaps a wall hanging or a carved mirror behind the sofa.

When someone bought an item, we rearranged the setting so that it wouldn’t look bare. In other words, our merchandise was constantly in motion. Alex would have known exactly where everything was, but it would take me days to make a complete inventory. In any event, I did my best to have a careful look around.

I started with the office where I had left the jade snuff bottle. Much to my relief, and somewhat to my surprise, it was still there. It had been tossed into a corner along with the contents of the three drawers in the desk, but it was not damaged in any way that I could see. The safe was still locked. The place was a mess, but I couldn’t see anything missing.

I forced myself to go and look in the storage room. That room was pretty well a write-off. I could see the chalk outline on the floor where Lizard had been found.

“There’s nothing missing in the office that I can find,” I said to Lewis, giving him a progress report. I looked toward the storage room. “Did he burn to death?”‘ I asked, my voice shaking, and thinking what a really horrible way that was to die.

“Garroted. Wire pulled so tight, it cut into his neck.

Burned too, and locked in just to make sure. Somebody wanted him dead.“ Lewis paused. ”Your keys too. In the storeroom door. Locking him in. Not necessary. Wasn’t going anywhere.“ Before I could respond to that implied accusation, he concluded, ”Keep looking.“

Horrified, I carried on as instructed. A jewelry case at the front desk had been opened and the contents jumbled up. There were a few nice pieces in there, but as far as I could tell, nothing was missing there either.

I was perplexed. I’d thought that Lizard was interested in the snuff bottle: It was the only thing of any value in the box from the auction. But it was still there. So what else could it be? On the assumption that it was no coincidence that I’d taken the objects he’d wanted at Molesworth Cox, I thought about the contents of the box.

I turned back to the main room. The vase, the reproduction pre-Columbian piece with the lovely serpents on the rim, was missing. I spent almost an hour going over the place, in case Alex had moved it while I was out, but it was the only thing I could find that was gone.

I was afraid to tell Lewis that only a strange-looking vase from Peru was missing. If it wasn’t robbery, then he’d go immediately to some other theory, one I was certain I wouldn’t like, and one that would not be good for Alex. Remembering my commitment to myself of the night before, I decided I had to tell him regardless. It occurred to me that if I did it right, I might be able to set him on the right track in his investigation.

“There’s only one object that I can see that is missing,” I told him. “It is a vase, about six and a half inches high, and it is a reproduction pre-Columbian ceramic made in Peru. It was quite lovely, actually. I got it in a job lot at Molesworth Cox, the auction house, a couple of weeks ago.” There, I’d told him about the auction. Maybe he could take it from there.

But no. “Fake, is it? Look again,” he said. “Can’t imagine someone taking a fake Peruvian pot and leaving the jewelry and money, can you? Unless, of course, there was a reason other than robbery.” It was the longest sentence I’d heard him utter, and I didn’t like what he was implying any more than when he’d hinted at it the first time.

After another hour of looking about, Lewis let me leave. PC Chu drove me home. She told me I’d be asked to come in to headquarters to sign a copy of my statement.

My house seemed very quiet and very lonely. I checked my answering machine to hear Moira telling me in a motherly way not to forget to take my pills and to be sure to have something to eat. Sarah had called from a phone booth on the edge of Algonquin Park to say she’d been delayed and wouldn’t be back for another day. She apologized for calling me at home rather than the shop, but she said she hadn’t been able to get through to the store. “Maybe there’s a problem with the phone, or maybe I dialed incorrectly,” she said. There’s a problem with the phone, all right, I thought. It’s been trashed, burned, and doused. I was not looking forward to telling her about what had happened. There was a message from a friend and colleague, Sam Feldman, telling me how sorry he was to hear about the store, but no message from Rob.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from many of my colleagues and friends, but perhaps I couldn’t blame them under the circumstances. It was possible, of course, that people were giving me time to recover. But I was more than a little concerned that people, people I considered friends, were out there wondering if indeed I had arranged for the fire at Greenhalgh and McClintoch. The newspaper reports seemed a little ambiguous on the subject, I would have to say.

I began having rather morose thoughts about the future, along the lines of maybe if this doesn’t get cleared up soon everybody will be crossing the street to avoid having to talk to me. I knew if I stayed at home by myself I would get really depressed, so I decided to pull myself together and go out. I’d imposed on Moira too much already, but Sam Feldman had been nice enough to call, so I thought I’d pay him a visit.

Sam and I had met years before when I’d taken a conservation course he’d given at the University of Toronto. At the time he was a museum director, but later he decided to go commercial, as he described it, and opened a gallery on Queen Street West. His museum had specialized in eastern antiquities, and he’d been very helpful in sharing his contacts in that part of the world when I branched out and started buying there. In return, I’d given him advice on setting up shop, and we’d stayed in touch. I liked Sam: I always found him funny and articulate, and I thought a visit with him would cheer me up.

I carefully eased myself behind the wheel of my car and headed down for Queen Street. Sam was there, along with his young assistant. “Hi,” I said. “Thanks for your message. I’m a bit at loose ends, so I thought I’d see if you had time for a coffee. Do you think you could drag yourself away?”

“From what?” he asked wryly, gesturing around the room. “Do you see customers? Do you see a single customer? For this I left a low-paying but steady job in a museum? Where shall we go?”

We left his assistant—Janie, he called her—and headed for Starbucks. “I guess you were implying business is not exactly great,” I said.

He laughed. “Oh, it’s okay. No fame and fortune, though. But I always thought I’d like working for myself, and I do. Sorry about your place. Dreadful thing. Insured?” I nodded. “Good,” he said. “You’ll let me know if there is anything I can do.” I smiled my thanks.

We chatted awhile, and then it struck me that Sam might indeed be able to help with something, by way of information. “Would the name A. J. Smythson and the Smythson Gallery mean anything to you?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “Surely you remember too.”

“The name sounds familiar, but I can’t really recall why,” I said. “So tell me. I can tell from the expression on your face that there’s a good story here.”

“It’s quite a tale, all right, but good isn’t exactly the word,” he replied. “In fact it is precisely the wrong word. Smythson, Anton James Smythson—his friends, I wasn’t one of them, called him A. J.—was an art dealer on King Street West. He had his gallery in one of those industrial buildings that are being converted in that old part of town. He lived in a fabulous loft over the store.

“He was very successful, in a way I am coming to realize I never will be. He threw the most extravagant openings for his artists, and I attended several. A little collegial schmoozing, you could say. His gallery was only a few blocks from mine. Champagne, caviar, oysters. Only the best. But the parties in the gallery were nothing compared to the private parties he threw in his loft. These were unbelievable. I only got invited to one, but it was spectacular: flowers everywhere, fabulous food, witty entertaining guests, movie stars, politicians, all the glitterati.

“Really, he had it all. Lovely stone cottage in the country, winter residence in San Miguel de Allende. He also had good taste. Make that exceptional taste. The paintings he owned personally in his loft were to die for.” He paused. “Actually that is an entirely inappropriate expression considering what happened, forgive me. But he had a couple of Rothkos in the dining area of the loft that I would have given my eyeteeth for.

“Unfortunately he also had a few weaknesses. One in my mind was that he was just a little too successful. This may sound like sour grapes; I mean no one is ever likely to call my gallery a huge success, but when you’re in the business we are, you have to be careful not to accept stolen goods. It’s easy enough to do, and it is done. You and I both know that. You know that when you’re buying antiques in the East, for example, you have to make sure that they are not national treasures, that they have an export permit.” I nodded.

“It’s easy enough to be fooled, of course. I recall when I was collecting for the museum, someone brought me some very exceptional silver pieces. Very old, Persian, about thirteenth century. I was desperate to add them to the collection. You know the rules as well as I do. Canada is a signatory to various UNESCO conventions on trade in art and artifacts, and particular agreements with various countries, and it was therefore necessary for me to ensure that these objects had left Persia, or Iran, before Canada signed the agreement with that country.

“I asked the person who had brought the objects for that proof. The person was not asking for money, incidentally, which is just as well because the museum, in fact most museums, have no acquisitions budgets anymore, and they rely on donations. The person merely wanted a tax receipt for them. Easy enough to do. This person—who shall remain nameless— showed me some documents that indicated that the pieces had been in New York in the late 1950s, which technically meant that we could accept them. But you and I both know that all kinds of stuff came out of Iran when the Shah was deposed, and a lot of the old, wealthy families hightailed it out of the country with the family treasures. I decided in all conscience I had to do some more checking. I did, and in a way I’ll forever regret it, because I found that the objects had been in Iran until after the Shah left in 1979, and that the New York documentation was false. I could have accepted the counterfeit proof. If it ever came out, which it probably wouldn’t, anyone would have thought I’d just been fooled. But I didn’t. I know I did the right thing, but it was not an easy thing to do.

“I tell you all this only by way of saying that I always had the impression that Smythson wouldn’t have gone that extra mile to check. That’s all I’m saying. Maybe it went further than that, and he knowingly handled illegal goods, but I have absolutely no firsthand knowledge that this was the case. When I went to his apartment for that party, some of the objects I saw there—really, really exquisite—were things I wasn’t sure he should have had. I couldn’t prove anything, of course, and I didn’t even try. Live and let live, you know. But after that evening, whenever I shook his hand, I had the feeling I’d been slimed.

“This is getting to be a long story. And now the part I’m sure you will remember. Smythson had at least two other weaknesses: cocaine and beautiful young men.”

He hesitated for a second or two. “We’ve never discussed it, but I assume you may have noticed I’m gay,” he said.

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, Smythson had a bit of a reputation in the gay community. How do I put this delicately? He liked the rough stuff. He did the whole bathhouse thing. In the end he was found with his pants down, literally. The police were not too forthcoming on the details, but I gather it was pretty gory. The theory was that he’d taken the wrong beautiful young man home. There was lots of cocaine in his blood too, so the other theory was that it was a drug deal gone bad.”

“I do recall now,” I exclaimed. “It was much in the news for a couple of days, but I don’t recall hearing they caught whoever did the deed.”

“They never did. I have a theory, of course, of my own. I think it could have been either the drugs or the sex. But I also think it could have been the art, and, being a member of the gay community myself, I think the police leapt to the conclusion they preferred. Not that they didn’t have reason to reach that conclusion. He’d been in trouble before, possession of drugs, not selling, and he got off on a technicality, but the record was there. But I’ve always felt that the bias was there too. In other words, it was a prominent gay man, so it had to be sex and drugs, if you see what I’m saying, so they didn’t look at anything else. And maybe the hint of an idea that he’d gotten what he deserved.”

“I don’t suppose one of the investigating officers was named Lewis,” I said sarcastically.

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “Why do you ask?”

I told him about my conversations with Sergeant Lewis, and about his elliptical way of speaking and his insinuations. “It’s not so much what he says as how he says it that bothers me,” I said. “He thinks Alex is guilty of something, but he never comes out with it.”

“I can imagine your Lewis fellow doing the investigation into Smythson’s murder.” Sam paused, then leaned forward in the way I’d described Lewis and said, “Bit of a poufter, was he?”

“Which bathhouse exactly!” I countered.

“Precisely how much cocaine?” Sam said.

I smiled at him. “You’ve cheered me up, Sam, as you always do, even though you were making a serious point here. Thanks for your help.”

He looked at me. “I don’t suppose you can tell me why you were asking about Smythson.”

“I’m not sure exactly. Smythson was supposed to be the recipient of something that ended up in my shop and now has gone missing. I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but I was just wondering. The stuff wasn’t picked up in customs, which could have been because he was dead by the time it arrived. It was sent a little over two years ago if I recall.”

“He died around that time, I’d think,” Sam said. “Was it something old? An antiquity? I always thought he might be in the illegal antiquities market.”

I described the vase to him. “It was a replica,” I added.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“I think so. It had hecho en Peru etched in the clay on the bottom, and there was a card with it that clearly identified it as such.”

“Sounds fairly definitive,” he said. He looked at his watch. “My goodness, I have to run. I actually have a customer who made an appointment to come in. Can you imagine? A real customer.” He laughed and shook my hand, and we went our separate ways. He’d given me a lot to think about.

On my way back home I stopped in at the hospital to try to see Alex. This time I persuaded the nurse that I was Alex’s stepniece and should be allowed in to see him. They told me his condition was now considered stable, and while he had suffered some memory loss, he was reasonably alert. I edged past the policeman at the door and tiptoed into the room.

He was asleep, I thought, and for a minute or two I stood just watching him. He looked so pale, and frail, and small. Alex is not a large man, but he has always seemed larger than life to me. He’s not young; he retired a few years ago, but he has such energy and he is interested in absolutely everything. In the early days of my divorce, when I first moved into the neighborhood, he took me under his wing. He specializes in lost souls, I believe, and at the time I was clearly one of them. I hated to see him looking so frail and so old.

He stirred. “Lara,” he exclaimed. “How good of you to come!”

“I would have come sooner,” I said. “They wouldn’t let me in. I’ve told them I’m your stepniece,” I added.

He grinned. It was wonderful to see it. “I’ve always felt we were related in some way.”

“Alex,” I said. “What happened?”

“I’m not doing all that well at remembering,” he said slowly. “The police have been here. They asked me a lot of questions. I can recall locking the front door at eight, and then going into the office to close things up.” He paused for a moment, and I was afraid he was dozing off again.

“Your keys,” he said finally. “I can remember seeing your keys on the desk, and realizing you’d forgotten them. Then… what did I do then?” he asked softly, almost to himself.

“I phoned. I phoned Moira’s salon to see if they knew where you had gone, but it was closed. I thought you’d discover the keys soon enough, so I propped the back door open with the chair, so you could get in. I was afraid that I wouldn’t hear you in the office, and I thought it would be okay to leave the back door open.

“I was wrong,” he said. “I vaguely recall thinking I had heard something in the showroom, and I can recall getting up to take a look. I’m afraid,” he said very quietly, “I’m afraid I remember nothing after that, as hard as I try.”

“That’s okay, Alex. It explains how whoever it was got in.”

“Was a lot taken?”

“Hardly anything at all.”

“Then why?”

“Good question, Alex,” I said. “Perhaps something scared him or them off before they could take anything.” I wondered if he knew about the body. I was determined not to be the one to tell him, at least not while he was in such bad shape. He began to nod off again, and the nurse came and signaled to me that it was time to go.

As I turned to leave, he stirred again. “I’m afraid I have let you down very badly, Lara,” he said. “You entrusted the shop to my care, and I have let you down.” His hands trembled as he spoke.

“Alex!” I exclaimed. “Don’t you ever think that. Ever. It was not your fault. And I promise you we’ll be back in business in no time. We are not quitters, you and I. So get better and get out of this place, as fast as you can. We have lots to do.”

He smiled very slightly. “No, we’re not quitters. I’ll be back at work in no time,” he said.

I’d thought then of telling him about Lizard, of asking him if there was anything I should know about the events of that evening that he hadn’t already told me, whether or not he’d ever been in Peru. In the end, though, I decided that you have to trust both your friends and your instincts. I could not bring myself to consider that he was even remotely connected to any of the recent events.

“Need anything? Anything I can bring you?” was all I said, but he had already fallen asleep. I limped out of the room as quietly as I could.

I had much to think about that evening. Through a set of rather silly circumstances, I’d become the owner of a box of objects, sent in the first instance by someone by the name of Edmund Edwards in New York to A. J. Smythson in Toronto. Smythson hadn’t received it, perhaps because he was dead. And he was murdered, possibly because of his lifestyle, but also possibly because he may have dealt in the black market in antiquities.

The box had made its way to Molesworth Cox, where it went on the auction block. Two people went after it, had wanted it very, very badly: Lizard and Clive. I got it, they didn’t. Lizard, if I was reading Lewis’s questions correctly, was from Peru. Lizard might even, I surmised, be a customs agent, since Lewis had mentioned that as well. That meant it was not the snuff bottle he was after, but the replica pre-Columbian vase, now missing, and possibly the ear spool, also a replica, I had hidden away at home.

But Lizard was dead. Murdered. That left Clive. I knew he wanted the snuff bottle, but hadn’t he raised his offer considerably if I’d throw in the rest of the contents of the box? And hadn’t the peanut disappeared about the time Clive had been in the shop? I might not be prepared to think ill of Alex, but the same did not hold true about Clive.

I brooded on that for a while. The fact is, though, that in those moments when I’m being brutally honest with myself, which I have as infrequently as the next person, I know that Clive is not quite the ogre I make him out to be and that it is a lot easier to be angry with him than to think about why our marriage failed. I know that the reason he lost interest in the shop early in our marriage, the reason he fought me so fiercely for it during our divorce, and why he forced me to sell it to give him half the money, and maybe even why he’d set himself up in business right across the street was that he always felt I’d loved the shop more than I’d loved him. And maybe I had.

Clive might be up to stealing the odd customer away, but he would not have murdered to get something. Not ever. The fact that he had been interested in the box was, I decided, immaterial. Something much more sinister than Clive was capable of was going on.

On a more mundane level, even with Alex and Clive out of the equation, cleared of any wrongdoing as I was convinced they would be, as long as there was a police investigation under way, my insurance company was not going to pay up, and if they didn’t pay soon, we would go bankrupt.

If that happened, my dear friend Alex would never forgive himself, no matter what I said to him. I took the gold and turquoise ear ornament out of my bag and, unwrapping it carefully, turned it over and over again in my hand. It was the only lead I had, that and a letter from a gallery in New York written to a dead man.

Well, I thought, I told Alex I’m not a quitter, and I’m not. I was not going to sit around waiting for the worst to happen. I picked up the telephone and called Rob’s house. I got the answering machine. I told it everything I knew to this point: the stuff about Smyth-son, my silly bid at the auction, my lingering feelings about Clive, my anxiety about Alex and the store, and how I was afraid my words were being used to condemn him, my curiosity about the vase, the peanut, everything. And as the beeps sounded when my time on the answering machine was running out, I said how sorry I was about the position I had put Rob in. I wondered if he’d hear that part before the machine cut me off. I hoped he would.

Then I picked up the telephone again and called American Airlines.