green and silver egg-shaped sculpture. At its base, two winged creatures stood with swords and shields raised high.
“Come closer, Jake,” Charlie said, moving toward the stage.
Yagamata was speaking to his guests: “As many of you know, I have given many gifts of art to museums both in Japan and in the United States.” He allowed himself a modest chuckle. “I thought you might like to see a little something I gave myself.”
The crowd tittered at the “little something.” Yagamata was showing off and enjoying it.
“I love art, and I love jewelry. So the jewelry-art of Carl Faberge is most attractive to me. When Faberge made imperial eggs for the family of the czar, he often enclosed a surprise.” Carefully, Yagamata lifted the lid of the egg and delicately pulled out what at first looked like a thick gold chain.
Moving closer, I saw it clearly, a miniature train, an engine, a tender, and five coaches of solid gold.
“The Trans-Siberian Railway Egg of 1900,” whispered Charlie Riggs, who knows everything worth knowing and a lot that isn’t.
“I don’t know if you can appreciate the incredible detail from where you are standing,” Yagamata said to the crowd. “One coach even has a miniature imperial chapel. There are tiny signs for ‘smokers’ and ‘ladies only.’ It is really quite special.”
Charlie made a harrumphing sound that he sometimes uses to clear his throat and his mind.
I nudged him from behind. “What do you suppose that thing cost?”
“You couldn’t buy it,” Charlie replied, testily.
“I know I couldn’t, but what do you suppose Yagamata spent?”
“He couldn’t buy it, either. Not if it’s the real McCoy.”
“You think it’s fake? Skim milk masquerading as cream?”
“Trust me, Jake. The original could not be bought. What I don’t understand is how anyone could afford to copy something so intricate. It would simply be too expensive to duplicate.”
Yagamata was still fondling his little gold train, and Charlie Riggs was still chewing over something I didn’t understand.
“Didn’t that magazine publisher buy a lot of those eggs?” I asked.
“Yes, Malcolm Forbes. But he bought them from private collections.”
“So, maybe Yagamata-”
“The Trans-Siberian Railway Egg is in the Armoury Museum in the Kremlin, and not in the gift shop, either. You can’t buy it, Jake, any more than you could buy Lenin’s Tomb. It belongs to the Russian Republic.”
Yagamata folded the train together. The cars fit snugly together by the minute gold hinges that connected them. He put the train back into the egg, and the egg into its red velvet box. The guests began gravitating toward the dessert table, where white-gloved waiters served chocolate eggs filled with white mousse and a raspberry for a surprise. I just love theme parties.
“Sometimes, Charlie, you make life too complicated,” I said to my old pal.
“I’m waiting,” Charlie said, “ arrectis auribus, with ears pricked up.”
“Sometimes, things are just the way they seem.”
“Meaning what?”
I seldom get anywhere quicker than Charlie Riggs, so I wanted to prolong the moment. “If Matsuo Yagamata wanted that shiny little choo-choo train and it wasn’t for sale, what do you suppose he’d do?”
Doc Riggs eyed me suspiciously but didn’t say a word.
“He’d just take it, Charlie. He’d steal the damn thing.”
4
You smell anything fishy?” Marvin the Maven whispered to Saul the Tailor.
“Vad you say?” asked Saul, fingering the part in his steel gray toupee and cupping a hand around his ear.
“The smell,” Marvin repeated, tapping his nose. “You can still smell, can’t you?”
Saul the Tailor sniffed the air and nodded. “Somethin’ ain’t kosher in Denmark.”
H. T. Patterson carried a brown bag to the clerk’s table and pulled out your everyday supermarket chicken. In the pale fluorescent light of the courtroom, the dead bird was pasty white. “At this juncture, without further ado,” Patterson began, in his hypnotic singsong, “the plaintiff wishes to offer demonstrative evidence, ipso facto, the deboning of a deceased fowl in order to facilitate the jury’s understanding of Professor Pennywhistle’s testimony.”
Translation: A farmer with a Ph. D. was gonna cut up a dead chicken.
“Time out, Your Honor!” I was on my feet. “We’ve had no notice of this. They’re going to perform-”
“A simple demonstration,” Patterson interrupted.
“An autopsy is more like it. It serves no purpose, none at all.
Either Chicken Prince has the exclusive right to use the term ‘Chickee Tender,’ or it doesn’t. The anatomy doesn’t matter.”
“Objection overruled,” said Judge Bricklin. “Let’s see what they’ve got, but move it along, Mr. Patterson.”
The clerk, a young Cuban woman with dyed red hair and three-inch fingernails, wrinkled her nose and tied an exhibit tag-plaintiff’s number twenty-seven-around the deceased’s drumstick. The bailiff opened the door to the corridor and ushered the witness down the aisle. Professor Clyde Pennywhistle toddled to the witness stand. He was a fifty-year-old cherub, portly and round-faced with a small mouth curved in a perpetual smile. His hair was a 1950’s flattop gone gray. He wore bifocals, and his eyes were slightly crossed behind the lenses.
H. T. Patterson ran sonorously through the professor’s background, all the way from working on a pig farm as a kid to professor of poultry science at Purdue. Patterson opened a gunnysack and pulled out a stainless steel instrument that looked like an upside-down funnel. “The deboning cone,” he told the jury gravely, as if it were the Holy Grail. On cue, the professor stepped down and walked to the clerk’s table, just a few feet from the jury box. With a sharp knife and a deftness that Charlie Riggs would admire, the professor made an incision down the back, peeled the skin off, and started carving away.
“This will just take a moment,” the professor said, expertly slicing through the shoulder joint, then pulling at the wing to tear the carcass apart. Then, with small precise movements, he pared some more, removing the breast. He held up a piece of the meat. “The pectoralis major, often called the chicken fillet…” Next he sliced off a strip of muscle, maybe an inch wide and six inches long.
The high-ceilinged courtroom was hot and stuffy, the ancient air-conditioning wheezing just to stir the soggy air. Even without decaying flesh on the premises, the courthouse usually smelled like a locker room after three-a- day practices in August.
I thought the professor made a mistake when he moved the deboning cone and the eviscerated chicken from the clerk’s table to the rail of the jury box. Juror Number Two, a Coral Gables housewife, seemed to be leaning backward, increasing what Dr. Les Weiner would call her horizontal zone from the professor and the poultry. Number Three, a commercial fisherman, didn’t seem to mind, but Number Five, an accountant in a three-piece suit, looked a tad green around the gills.
“The tenderloin, or pectoralis minor, pulls the wings down when the bird tries to fly,” Professor Pennywhistle explained.
Wafting across the courtroom along with the tepid air was the unmistakable smell of rotting tissue, and some of the spectators began to leave. Behind me, Marvin the Maven was fanning himself with his straw hat: “That ain’t no spring chicken.”
“The term ‘tenderloin’ came from the pork industry,” the professor droned on, oblivious to the odor, “then was borrowed by the turkey growers, and finally was adopted by the chicken industry, but it was Chicken Prince that gave the word ‘tender’ its specific commercial meaning…”
