It was the kind of store Emma would ordinarily have walked right past without even seeing. She pressed her face close to the barred gate to see better through the glass. Inside, the shallow space was packed tightly with bureauplats, armoires, and clocks. According to the hand-lettered sign in the window, the hours of H. P. Caraignac were Tuesday through Saturday, I I A.M. to 5 P.M. It looked as if the owner might be arriving any minute. Emma knew he wouldn’t.
She swallowed hard, wishing with all her might that Henri-Pierre had been simply someone who had happened to be on the ferry with her that day, not someone involved with Pépé’s murder.
The walk to Sotheby’s took less than fifteen minutes.
This auction house, too, looked nothing like what Emma had envisioned. It occupied a gray, almost industrial-looking box, except for the bands of windows that ribboned the front. At least the structure was large—it took up the entire block front.
Another uniformed doorman—this one in charcoal gray—held the door. This time Emma checked her coat and hat with a courteous attendant at the cloakroom directly inside the door. At the top of a short flight of granite stairs was a plush reception area, much like the one at Christie’s, though larger. The ceilings here were high, and vast galleries stretched off to either side. Behind a spacious catalog counter stood a young man and three young women, all of whom might have been hired for the quality of their appearance and wardrobes.
“I’d like to speak with someone about an antique Spanish gold artifact,” said Emma, feeling less nervous, knowing what to expect now that she’d done this once before.
“A piece of jewelry?” asked the young man, after taking her name.
“No. More of an objet de virtu. A collector’s item. Sunken treasure.”
The young man didn’t bat an eye. Apparently people came here with sunken treasure on a regular basis. He conferred with one of the women, then picked up a telephone. A short conversation ensued.
“You can see Mr. Pilkington on the third floor,” he said finally to Emma, putting down the phone. “Go down the stairs and around to the left for the elevators.”
Emma thanked him and followed his directions, going back to the front entrance and walking down a short hall to the single elevator. When she arrived on the third floor she found a quiet waiting area that had none of the drama of the salerooms downstairs. In fact, it looked just like any office. Like the area downstairs, the ceilings here were high. The walls were painted white.
Emma gave her name and took a seat as directed on a comfortable leather couch in front of a row of windows. The well-dressed woman next to her rested a hand on a framed painting she had turned to the couch so the image couldn’t be seen. A fellow in a heavy winter coat that he should have checked was seated on the other side. He had some kind of heavy metal casket-shaped box in his lap.
Several minutes passed. Then a tall, stout man appeared from a hallway. He had thick glasses in transparent frames and wore a slightly rumpled blue business suit. Not only was he the heaviest person Emma had seen at either auction house, he was also the oldest—well into his sixties, Emma estimated by his cottonwhite hair.
“Ms. Passant?” inquired the man of the general vicinity in a breathy, but resonant bass voice. He had a vaguely upper-class British accent and a second chin, considerably bigger and softerlooking than the first. It seemed to have replaced his entire neck.
“I’m Emma Passant,” said Emma, rising. “You’re Mr. Pilkington?”
“N. C. Pilkington,” said the man, presenting a huge pink hand to be shaken. “Given that this is our first acquaintance, you may have your single allotted guess as to what N. C. stands for and then you must leave me in peace. I have refused to tell anyone for the past forty-seven years and I shall not begin with you.”
“Nebuchadnezzar Cuthbert,” said Emma without missing a beat.
“Good for you,” said Pilkington, breaking into a delighted smile. “Wrong, of course, but very witty. I can’t tell you how weary I grow of all the Ned and Nats and Curts and Charleses. It was almost a relief last week when one of my wife’s odious relatives suggested Nut Cutlet. Nebuchadnezzar Cuthbert, indeed. Is two open, Karen?”
“Yes, Mr. Pilkington,” said the receptionist brightly. Like the people downstairs, she looked like something from the pages of Town and Country.
“Shall we go in here, Miss Passant?” said Pilkington, leading the way to the second of several small, bare rooms off a side corridor. Each room was big enough for only two chairs and a small countertop under the window.
“My favorite viewing room,” said Pilkington, closing the door. “It brings me luck. In this very spot I daresay I’ve seen more sets of wooden false teeth purported to have resided in the mouth of George Washington than has any other living individual. Now, what do you have for me today?”
“Just a question, I’m afraid.”
“Be not afraid, Miss Passant. All knowledge begins with questions.”
“It’s about a gold object. Something very unusual. You probably will never have heard of anything like it.”
“Ha!” declared the big man, clasping his hands beneath his chins theatrically. “How luscious to think that there is something new under the sun. Or at least something old that these tired eyes haven’t seen. You are doubtlessly wrong, of course. I am a veritable museum of esoterica. I have spent my life in the auction game, identifying bits of treasure and pieces of trash. I am the one to whom they direct all of the inquiries that do not fit into any neat category. What will happen to the silver-mounted coconuts and the ivory whist counters when I am gone? I wonder. And all those wooden teeth? Now tell me about your object.”
“It was found in the Caribbean, and I believe that it’s from the Spanish conquistadors. A gold ornament in the shape of a dragon. Very intricate and beautiful workmanship. It hangs from a long gold chain, also of great craftsmanship, and makes a whistling sound if you blow through it.”
Pilkington was already shaking his head.
“You see?” he said. “Here, you have me all primed for something unique, and what do you deliver? Yesterday’s newspaper.”
“You mean you’ve seen it?” Emma gasped. “You’ve seen the dragon?”
“I’ve seen several, actually. Not that they aren’t quite rare, mind you, but then the unusual is my call-and-trade. What you are describing is probably a badge of office.”
“A badge of office,” repeated Emma. “What exactly is that?”
“Do you know how generals and admirals nowadays have stars on their collars and scrambled eggs on their hats?” said Pilkington, squeezing himself gingerly into one of the cubicle’s little chairs and adopting a professorial tone.
“Yes?”
“Well, this is the same thing. The custom of carrying a whistle-and-chain insignia by naval commanders was prevalent in several countries to signify their rank and importance. Early in the sixteenth century Sir Edward Howard threw his overboard to avoid its capture by the French. The one you have described was probably made to order in China in the late-seventeenth or early eighteenth century with gold from Latin America. Several such badges of office have passed through these rooms, each with gold chains comprising thousands of patterned and faceted links. The serrated dorsal fins of the golden creature are often hinged and served as toothpicks. The tapering bodies end in an ear probe—quite basic were our ancestors, or at least the Chinese gave them the opportunity to be. It is also quite a useful whistle, which indeed was its ceremonial purpose.”
“I have reason to believe that something just like what you’ve described was stolen from my family,” said Emma. “Has anyone approached you with one to sell recently?”
Pilkington peered, owl-like, over the rims of his glasses.
“Stolen, you say? When did this occur?”
“I’m not sure exactly. Probably within the last month.”
“Whew,” he said, theatrically wiping imaginary sweat from his brow. “Thank goodness, we are in the clear. Th
e one we just sold was consigned back in July, though the auction didn’t take place until three weeks ago.”
“You sold a dragon like my grandfather’s three weeks ago?”
“I don’t know what your grandfather had, but ours was very handsome. Would you like to see a picture?”
“I’ve already taken up a great deal of your time, but yes, I would, very much.”
“Time is something I have a surplus of these days. Not many people come to see me anymore. Value is growing ever more standardized. Soon anything that does not fit into six or seven easily identifiable categories will be banished from the auction rooms forever, along with yours truly. Wait here a moment. I’ll be right back.”
Pilkington rose laboriously from his seat and exited, leaving Emma in a state of near shock. A second dragon appearing on the market within days of Pépé’s death was as improbable a coincidence as Big Ed Garalachek showing up at her hotel in San Marcos. This had to be the same dragon, which would mean that it couldn’t have been in the secret compartment in the model of the Kaito Spirit. But then why had the model been stolen? Or was it not stolen at all? Before Emma could figure out what to make of any of this, N. C. Pilkington had returned with two auction catalogs under his arm.
“Here we are,” he said, opening one of the catalogs to a fullpage picture.
Emma took the book and stared at the glossy color image. It was a gold dragon on a long chain, just as Bernal Zuberan had described, though what Emma had envisioned was much different from what she saw in front of her. This dragon looked smaller, somehow, yet more real than she had imagined, more like a fisherman’s bait than a monster. Its beauty came from its workmanship rather than its subject, yet the image was still powerful enough to send chills down Emma’s spine.
“How does it compare with yours?” said Pilkington.
“I don’t know,” said Emma. “I’ve never seen ours.”
“Then you will have a hard time finding it, I should think.”
“How much did this sell for?”
“Fifty-five thousand dollars, not including our commission.”
Emma felt strangely disappointed. Zuberan had speculated that the dragon could be worth a fortune. Fifty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money, but hardly a fortune. Was it the current price for two men’s lives?
“That’s all?” asked Emma.
“Well,” sniffed Pilkington, “considering the fact that the bullion value of the thing is in the neighborhood of eight thousand dollars, I don’t think it made too shabby a premium. There aren’t many collectors of seventeenth-century badges of office ready to battle it out at auction these days, you know. The last such badge we had on the block here carried an estimate of seventy-five to a hundred thousand and was passed. Even with all the hoopla about lost treasure, frankly I was relieved this piece sold at all.”
“Lost treasure? What treasure?”
“Oh, it’s all speculation really. I probably shouldn’t have allowed it into the catalog at all.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the notion that this badge of office might have belonged to the admiral-general who commanded the illfated Spanish plate fleet of 1690. Nine galleons of this fleet went down somewhere near Puerto Rico in a hurricane in that year. Each ship was carrying a huge cargo of treasure from the New World back to Spain—thousands of bars of silver, hundreds of pounds of gold. The admiral’s flagship, the Santa Maria de Espinal, was bringing up the rear, as was customary with Spanish flotillas. He presumably would have been wearing an impressive gold chain and badge of office.”
“What would such a treasure be worth?”
“Oh, hundreds of millions of dollars, no doubt. Of course, even if our dragon did belong to the commander of the Santa Maria de Espinal, it would not be much help in locating the lost treasure ships unless you knew where it had been found. But being a commercial-minded soul, God help me, I figured it wouldn’t hurt the sale to present this theory in the catalog as an amusing anecdote. It did provide a bit of publicity, though no one really took it seriously.”
Emma was almost afraid to breathe. What if there really was a treasure? Bernal Zuberan had said that Pépé had made a map to the spot where they had found the dragon. Could that be what all this was about? The map to a whole fleet of sunken ships filled with gold? Or was it just her idiot imagination running amok again? Pictures of her on a treasure chest doing high kicks for pirates sprang into her mind. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
Emma closed the catalog and looked at the date on the cover. The auction had taken place a full week before Jacques Passant’s death. Perhaps she had just been wrong about the sequence of events. Maybe Pépé had put the dragon up for sale himself this past July, and by so doing had set into motion a chain of events that had led to his—and Henri-Pierre’s—death.
“Who consigned this piece?” Emma asked in a quiet voice, bracing herself to hear her grandfather’s name. “Whom did it belong to?”
“Ordinarily I couldn’t tell you, you know,” said Pilkington. “Client confidentiality and all that. But in this case the provenance is a matter of public record. It was part of the collection of the late Esmond Dauber.”
“Esmond Dauber?” said Emma, startled. “Who was he?”
“Ah, Esmond,” said Pilkington with a deep sigh. “There won’t be another like Esmond very soon—at least not another with so much money. He was a wonderful old coot. Collected functional gold objects. Letter openers. Nutmeg graters. Thimbles. Anything, really, as long as it was gold, had some functional purpose and was beautiful. He bought many of his things here, I’m happy to say, though he would go to the ends of the earth for an interesting piece. You’d be amazed at the things that people have made out of gold over the centuries.”
“I don’t understand,” said Emma. “Did he know about this theory of a treasure?”
“Oh, yes. But couldn’t care less. To him the thing was just a useful thing made of gold. As I said, when you blow through it, you really do get a very nice whistle.”
“When did this Esmond Dauber die?”
“About a year ago. His delightful widow graciously consigned the entire collection to us. The jewelry department got much of it. The table items and gold flatware are going through our silver department—a bit in the present sale, though most will have to wait until May. If you’re around next month, however, you will be able to bid on Esmond’s snuff boxes. They are the real prizes of the collection as far as I’m concerned, and I shall be wielding the hammer.”
With obvious pride Pilkington handed Emma the other catalog he was holding. Emma opened it to a page with a photograph of a sober-looking man in a three-piece suit identified in the caption as Esmond Dauber. On the adjacent page was a picture of a woman with the shoulders of a fullback and the face of a hatchet. Beneath this were a few paragraphs under the headline HOMAGE TO A COLLECTOR, signed Henriette Tawson Dauber, New York City.
“How long was the dragon in Mr. Dauber’s collection?” asked Emma, leafing through the pictures of gold boxes and of the monarchs and military heroes for whom they had been made. Nothing seemed to make sense anymore.
“I really have no idea.”
“I’d like to talk with his widow, this Henriette Dauber. Is it possible to get her address?”
“I’m sorry,” said Pilkington, opening the door of the viewing room to signify that their meeting was at an end. “That kind of information we really cannot give out.”
“You’ve been very kind,” said Emma, following him out into the reception area. “This was very informative.”
“We try to be of help. I shall keep my eyes open and alert you if another dragon badge should appear. Obviously this couldn’t have been the one that was stolen from you. Where may I reach you?”
Emma gave N. C. Pilkington Charlemagne’s number in San Francisco and thanked him again. Then she took the elevator back downstairs to the lobby, where a guard directed her to a bank of telephones. It w
as time to bring in the professionals.
“Poteet,” answered the familiar short, fat, bald voice when Emma finally reached the proper extension at the San Francisco Police Department.
“It’s Emma Passant, Detective Poteet. I took your advice and went on a trip.”
“Oh?”
Emma launched into a summary of what she had learned on San Marcos: about the golden dragon; how it had been smuggled off the island in a secret compartment of the Kaito Spirit—the very model that had disappeared off her grandfather’s bedroom dresser; how a suspiciously similar dragon had come up for sale at Sotheby’s barely a week before Jacques Passant’s murder; how Pilkington had possibly traced the artifact to a sunken treasure fleet worth millions; how Jacques Passant had once made a map to what might be the very spot where it was located.
Poteet did not say a word throughout her entire story. He waited a full five seconds after she had finished before he finally spoke.
“That’s very interestin’, Miz Passant.”
“It’s more than just interesting, I think,” said Emma. “It provides a motive for Pépé’s murder—a reason why it was not just a random mugging.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said about the flagship of the Spanish treasure fleet of 1690?”
“I heard. I just don’t see the relevance.”
“The relevance is the map my grandfather made to the treasure.”
“The map your grandpa made was to where the gold dragon thing and one little coin was found, if I heard you correctly. There’s no proof there was ever any treasure.”
“My grandfather told me he couldn’t go back to San Marcos because he had stolen the greatest treasure of the sea. A map could have been what was in the secret compartment of the model boat. That would explain why it was stolen. Why he was killed. A map to such a treasure would be worth killing for.”
The Girl Who Remembered the Snow Page 22