Moving Target

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Moving Target Page 28

by Elizabeth Lowell


  Serena waited until Erik was nearly through the stack before she gave up being polite and leaned in over his shoulder to see for herself the flashing bits of gold and color and calligraphy. When he felt her interest—and her warm breath on his neck—he commented on the pieces almost as quickly as he could flip through them. He had concluded he wouldn’t find anything important in this booth by playing dumb. Reggie was a bottom feeder.

  “School exercise,” Erik said curtly about one crudely written page. “He had a long way to go for a passing grade.”

  “Thirteenth century, not fifteenth.”

  “Wonder who mixed his colors? Looks like he used urine instead of vinegar, and he’d been drinking too much milk.”

  The leaf whipped by before Serena could do much more than register a rather sickly, faded green.

  “Lampblack ink, not oak gall and iron. Wrong for the purported time and place. Matches the drawing, though. Inept.”

  Smythe glanced at the leaf in question and didn’t argue. He had taken it in trade along with several quite nice fourteenth-century leaves. Win some, lose some.

  “Idiot. He used gold paint before the other colors instead of after. Must have thought he was working with gold foil. Bet his teacher whacked his knuckles but good over that one.”

  Two leaves whipped by, leaving the last one.

  “Could have used a better lunellum,” Erik said, dismissing the last leaf.

  “A what?” Serena asked, leaning in even more.

  He took a breath that tasted of sweet woman. Above the scarf her neck looked as smooth as cream. It had felt just as rich on his tongue.

  “A lunellum is the curved knife they used to scrape the hide clean,” he said absently, breathing deeply again, savoring her nearness, wondering if the scarf would mind being bitten. Gently, of course. The odd thought made him smile. “This vellum looks like it was chewed up and spit out.”

  The exhibitor flinched but didn’t disagree. It was a truly ragged example of the art.

  “The good news is that the illuminator was obviously still learning his trade, so a piece of good vellum wasn’t wasted on an incompetent artist,” Erik said.

  He wondered if he was going to have to question Reggie outright about the sheet he had listed for sale on the Internet. Or maybe the sheet had already been sold.

  Damn.

  “So far these aren’t palimpsests so much as erased and written-over school exercises,” Erik said bluntly. “Do you have anything better or are you wasting my time?”

  Without a word Smythe went to another box. This one was slimmer and the pages were stored flat within their cardboard frames. Smythe opened the box carefully.

  Serena’s breath went out in a rush that stirred the hair near Erik’s ear and made his heart kick over in double time.

  “Gorgeous,” she said. “Not my favorite style, but gorgeous all the same.” She looked at the sticker in the corner of the frame: $1,100.

  Erik didn’t say a word. He simply speared the exhibitor with a glance. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “What do you mean?” Smythe asked.

  “Get real. This looks like the work of the Spanish Forger. If it is, you wouldn’t be hiding it in a box.”

  The exhibitor cleared his throat and gave up hoping that this customer didn’t know a whole lot about illuminated manuscripts. “I thought it was, too, until I put it up against some originals. If one can call a forgery an original, that is.”

  “Do you have any other pages like it?” Erik asked. “I like to have more than one to choose from.”

  “No, not with me.”

  “In your shop?”

  Reggie tugged uselessly at his crooked name badge. “Actually, I don’t have any like this. I’ve sold one or two through the years.” To be precise, he had sold this page before, but he didn’t think it was necessary to be precise. No point in confusing the client.

  Erik could have told him when and where the sheet had been sold before, but what he wanted to know was the oldest source. The first person to put the sheet on the market. That was the person he wanted to talk to. “Where did you get anything like this sheet in the beginning?”

  “At the time, I was buying from a lot of estate sales, the kind that don’t have a real inventory because the goods aren’t worth the effort.”

  “Can you remember the first time you saw a page like this?”

  Reggie looked at Erik. “Young man, I’ve been in the business for thirty-five years. It’s hardly likely that I would remember a page as insignificant as this, is it?”

  “Only if you got burned.”

  “If I did, I didn’t know it at the time.” Pointedly, he went back to the page at hand. “I’m guessing this is a pastiche drawn from the Spanish Forger’s work. An angel from one page. A castle from another. A dragon from a third. A Madonna from a fourth. Excellent artwork, but not, I’m afraid, authentic. Quite a beautiful capital F, though, don’t you agree? Great depth and balance despite the, er, eclectic nature of the composition.”

  “A forged pastiche of authentic forgeries,” Serena said under her breath. “I’m getting another headache.”

  “What about the text beneath?” Erik asked.

  “Secular. From what I can tell, it’s probably twelfth-century. That’s why I brought it out. This box is for, er, special buyers with particular needs.”

  Erik wondered if “special” was another word for stupid. Or “dishonest.” But it wasn’t his problem. Finding out if this leaf had been cut from the Book of the Learned was. “Did you put it under a lamp?”

  Smythe didn’t ask what kind of lamp. UV was the only one that made sense in this context. “Yes. There was a faint trace of an initial beneath. Another F, perhaps—or a B.”

  Or an E and an S combined.

  But Erik didn’t say it aloud. “Text?”

  “No. This was probably cut from a practice sheet or from the extra sheets at the front or back of a manuscript.”

  “Forgers do it all the time,” Erik agreed. “That way the vellum, at least, is the right age.”

  “But if vellum was so valuable, why did the original owners waste it on blank pages?” Serena asked.

  “Remember how pages came in those days, one full hide at a time?”

  She nodded.

  “The hide could be folded to make any number of smaller and smaller pages in multiples of two, four, or eight. Today printers still make pages in multiples, called gathers or quires, which means you end up with blank pages if the text doesn’t come out even.”

  She nodded again.

  “It happened more often in the past. A lot of times there simply wasn’t enough text to fill all the pages of a gather,” Erik said. “Or sometimes books were gathered but not finished. And sometimes the presence of blank pages at the front and back of a manuscript was a statement of the importance of the book itself. An early example of conspicuous consumption.”

  An old image came to Serena, twisting like a darkly glittering current through her memory. “You mean like a book cover of hammered gold set with rubies and sapphires and pearls and either rock crystal or badly cut diamonds? With designs that are—”

  Erik went still for an instant, then said across her words, “Yeah, just like the one we saw at the Huntington.” Before she could object that they hadn’t even been to the Huntington, he turned to Smythe. “Two hundred.”

  “Eight,” Smythe said automatically.

  “Try again. This isn’t worth shit to a collector.” Erik stroked the side of Serena’s cheek and slid his fingers beneath the silky scarf, silently asking her to play along. “I’m only buying it because my fiancée thinks it’s pretty and I forgot her birthday last week.”

  Serena bit the inside of her lip so she wouldn’t laugh out loud. Slowly she rubbed her cheek against his palm and batted her eyelashes at him like a good little fiancée. “You’re so sweet. But you don’t have to buy me anything. I meant it when I said I wasn’t mad.”

  “For you, da
rling, it’s a pleasure.” Erik dropped his hand and began flipping through the few leaves in the box. Nothing stirred his interest.

  “Five hundred,” Smythe said quickly, sensing a sale slipping away.

  “Two-fifty.”

  “Would you like it wrapped?”

  Erik nodded curtly, paid for the leaf in cash, and grabbed Serena’s arm. He pulled her a few steps away where no one could overhear them and demanded, “Where did you see a book cover with jewels and hammered gold?”

  Serena thought the clarity and intensity of Erik’s eyes would be really attractive if they weren’t aimed at her in something close to anger and accusation. But they were.

  “I—just an old memory, that’s all. Probably from school.”

  But neither of them believed it.

  “Was it a Baroque style, or full of fleurs-de-lis, or plain or fancy or—”

  “It was more Celtic than anything else,” she said. “Bold yet intricate. Like the initials E and S on my pages, but not the initials if you know what I mean.”

  “Could you draw it?”

  “I could try. Why?”

  “How old is your memory? As old as the memory of the intertwined initials?”

  She quickly saw his point. “You think I saw this cover at the same time.”

  “I think if I put all that work into a manuscript, I or one of my descendants might just decorate the hell out of it as a way to prove its importance.”

  Serena closed her eyes and tried to recall the memory more clearly. The harder she tried, the more vague the memory became. She made a sound of frustration rather like an angry cat. “I’m sorry. I can’t help any more than that. I just can’t see it.”

  He wanted to push her but sensed it wouldn’t do any good. “Let’s look at some more leaves. Maybe it will jog your memory.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “We’ll search the databases at Rarities.”

  “What if—”

  “What if we die tomorrow?” he cut in impatiently, then wished he had bitten his tongue instead.

  “You’re so comforting.”

  “Yeah,” he said, disgusted. “A regular snuggly bear.” He gave her a fast, fierce kiss. “Come on. There’s a lot of crap to look at and not much time.”

  “Before we die?” she shot back sardonically.

  He didn’t answer. He had just seen someone who looked like the file photo of Ed Heller.

  Chapter 50

  Heller was pretty sure Erik North had made him. Wallace had warned him that Erik was tricky, but Heller hadn’t believed it. Chrissake, the guy was a friggin’ scholar. Even worse, a nancy-boy artist. Wallace must have been half-asleep to get caught on that cliff.

  But Heller had to admit that Erik had real quick eyes.

  The good news was that all Heller had to do was make a log of who Erik and Serena met at the fair, interview anyone they talked to without making any fuss, and tuck the targets in bed at the Retreat. Same thing tomorrow. No sweat. The dude with the bad hair—Smythe, Reginald, called Reggie, white male, Caucasian, about fifty years old, Boston residence, divorced—had been more than happy to talk about anything, including what he had just sold to the young man who knew a lot more about manuscripts than he had let on at first.

  It had been all Heller could do to shut Smythe up before he started talking about his pet turtle and the sows at the dry cleaner who should go back on welfare instead of breaking the buttons off his shirts.

  This kind of investigating was a lot easier than kneeling in rosebushes or cactus to take a close-up picture of the little woman with somebody other than her old man banging away between her thighs. Some operatives really got off on watching sex. Heller didn’t, unless the little woman was built or the guy was really hung. Then it was kind of fun to watch them bounce.

  “You sell anything yet?”

  The familiar words yanked Heller back to his present job. He looked down the aisle with a frown. Someone ought to put an elbow in that jerk’s throat. He must have asked that question a million times in the last fifteen minutes.

  Heller’s stomach growled. He pulled a granola bar out of his jacket pocket and opened it. As soon as he bit into the stuff, he remembered why he preferred peanuts straight up rather than crushed with honey and whatever else his wife was selling as health food that week.

  Maybe Erik would get hungry soon. The café across the lobby from the bar hadn’t been very full at all and the french fries had smelled good enough to eat.

  Heller almost sighed. Someday he wouldn’t have to haul around whole grain and fake chocolate, and lust after french fries. Someday he would be on the same gravy train as Wallace. He would be getting steak and pussy whenever he wanted. If he got a couple thousand for breaking an arm here and there, then whacking some dude should be worth ten thousand, easy. Hell, twenty. He would be shitting in high cotton, as his dead granny used to say.

  The next time Wallace offered to cut him in on the good stuff, he was going to say yes.

  Chapter 51

  LOS ANGELES

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  Risa Sheridan smiled at the young dealer who was trying to impress her with his knowledge of illuminated manuscripts and sex. It was No Sale all the way, but he didn’t know it yet. She still had a few more questions to ask. She had better get some useful answers, too. Shane Tannahill wanted that gilded carpet page, which various people at the fair had already assured her was a contradiction in terms: carpet referred to painting and gilded was just a golden highlight. She simply had smiled and kept on asking.

  If Shane wanted a gilded carpet page, she would get him a page where there was a lot more gold than colored paint and the design incised in the gold went from border to border. Her biggest problem was that she knew she wasn’t the only one doing the looking for him. Shane believed in the shark model of employee advancement: throw them all in the same pool and see which shark swims the longest.

  She planned on being the last shark. What she didn’t know was how many other sharks Shane had thrown into the pool with her. All she knew for certain was that she wasn’t the only one he had sent after the page. There were a lot of sharks he could call on for help. Unfortunately, competitively speaking, she wasn’t the meanest shark in the pond; there were things she wouldn’t do to win. Not many, but enough so that she could look herself in the mirror long enough to put on makeup.

  Not everyone Shane hired was so fastidious, which meant she had to be the quickest and the smartest.

  “So, you’ve heard of some Insular Celtic pages,” she said, “but you don’t have any to show me?”

  “Nothing that’s new to the market, but this is, like, a fine example of the time and period you want.”

  She looked at the leaf with an interest she didn’t have to pretend. Her trained eye saw echoes of Celtic jewelry in every stroke of the illuminator’s drawing. The style of the designs alone allowed her to place the leaf within a half-century and a few hundred miles of its time and place of origin. But telling the earnest scholar across the glass case from her that he had missed placing the leaf by a century and a country wasn’t the way to get information from him. So she widened her eyes, licked the lips that seemed to fascinate men—for no reason that she had ever understood—and gave the young man an up-from-under-long-eyelashes look that was guaranteed to make him think with his dick.

  “Is this like the pages you heard about?” she asked.

  He wished it was. He really did. Almost as much as he wished he knew this lush-mouthed woman well enough to break some old civil laws about sex with her.

  “Uh, no. They were painted. This is, like, drawn.” He pointed to the initial, which indeed had been rendered in red ink rather than paint. “But this kind of drawing is the hallmark of Insular Celtic style and, like, technique.”

  “Then the other pages, the ones you heard about, wouldn’t be as valuable?” she asked, telling herself that she wouldn’t, really would not, start using, like, that word instead of, li
ke, anything else.

  Sighing, he memorized the pouting curve of her lower lip. “Actually, they’re, like, more valuable, because they’re more rare. If they’re, like, real.”

  “Real? As in authentic?”

  “Yes. It’s always, like, a question when utterly new material comes on the market. Especially . . .” His voice faded as he belatedly remembered that he was supposed to be selling manuscripts today, not lecturing to graduate art historians about the duties and pitfalls of becoming a curator to private collections. He smoothed a hand over hair that was already becoming distressingly thin. Like his mother’s brother, he was going to be bald by thirty-five. “New material always, like, raises new questions.”

  “So Warrick is trashing the pages?” she said, reading between the lines.

  He hesitated, then shrugged. Obviously, he wouldn’t be the first to bring up the House of Warrick’s discreet and damning warning about the pages. “Among others.”

  “Really? Who else has seen them?”

  “No one. But if Norman Warrick says the pages should be, like, approached with great care, well, no one is going to stand up and say otherwise. Whoever owns those pages will have, like, a hard time selling them.”

  She smiled. Shane would be glad to hear it, because it would bring the price down and scare off other buyers. But she wouldn’t tell him yet. She would let him sweat.

  Not that a man as rich as Shane ever cared about money. Or anything else, for that matter.

  “Thanks for your time,” Risa said. “You’ve taught me a lot. I’ll look at Insular Celtic pages with, like, a whole new appreciation now.”

  “If you have any more, like, questions, I’d be, like, happy to . . .”

  She waved without looking back.

  He stared longingly after her. It wasn’t until she merged with the crowd around the multimillion-dollar Book of Hours that the young scholar realized that he had been, very gently, taken in by the woman with the lush, brain-numbing mouth.

 

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