by Lyn Hamilton
“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 goin
g 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.
Spider
The burial ceremony is soon to begin. All is in readiness. The Great Warrior’s body is prepared, clothed in a shirt woven of the finest white cotton, his face painted red, color of blood, color of life.
In the huaca, the chamber is completed, walls lined with adobe bricks, the thick boards of the coffin floor already in place.
The others who will go with him on his journey, the women, dead long ago and bone brittle in their shrouds and cane coffins, are taken from the palace. Soon they will be placed in the tomb.
The fishermen and the sea lion warriors have come in from the sea with their spondylus shells and their offering vessels. They assemble at the foot of the huaca, in the great courtyard, surrounded by the murals of a thousand other ceremonies.
The procession of llamas, backpacks laden with conch shells, draws near. Iguana awaits them. The plumes of his bird headdress shimmer, his lizard face and almond eyes are watchful. The Decapitator also waits.
5
I was in Manhattan before ten the next morning. I’d left a brief note for Moira, walked out to Parliament Street, and hailed a cab for the airport. There I’d taken all the money the bank machine would let me have, not nearly enough as it turned out, and caught the first flight of the day to New York, boarding at the last minute and feeling like a fugitive, which I guess I was in some ways.
I suppose, looking back on what I did from that moment on, that a stranger could be forgiven for thinking that I, not Alex, was the one with the serious bump on the head. Be that as it may, irrationally or not, I did the only thing I could think of. I went to find the origin of the box of objects that I was convinced was at the root of all my problems. I had packed only a small carry-on bag, fully intending to be back in Toronto by early evening, before anyone, most particularly Sergeant Lewis, had noticed I was gone.
Ancient Ways Gallery was located on the West Side, close to the American Museum of Natural History. Cautiously I had the cab drive past it (there was no sign of life at the place at this hour) and then let me out at the museum. I’d called from the airport: A recording told me gallery hours were noon to six Tuesday to Friday, noon to five on Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday.
&
nbsp; Partly to kill time, and partly to do research—I was not, after all, in Manhattan to take in the sights—I went into the museum and headed for the Americas section.
The card had said that the stolen pot was a pre-Columbian replica. That covered a lot of territory. Even the words “made in Peru” on it didn’t narrow it down completely. The only Peruvian pre-Columbian civilization I knew anything about was the Inca, but I knew enough to understand that there had been lots of civilizations in that part of the world before the Inca empire had its heyday. I worked my way quickly through the Mexican and Central American sections, pausing just long enough to confirm that the pot, as I remembered it, didn’t fit there. The artifacts from South American cultures were located at the end of the section.