'Here we go, then.'
He pulled the two-seater to the curb.
'This is a no-parking zone,' she said.
'Right. And the meter maid who usually works this stretch is one of my
students. Orinda? Short, built like a fireplug? Be hell to pay in
class if she had my motorcar towed.' He smiled.
The building they parked in front of was another of those sixteenth-or
seventeenth-century things with columns and dormered windows and all,
not particularly large or imposing, but stately enough.
They walked up to the front. A uniformed, but unarmed, guard saw them,
tipped his hat, and said, 'Morning, Mr. Stewart.'
'Hello, Bryce. Lovely day.'
Toni looked at him.
'Come here a lot, do you?'
'Now and then.'
There was a brass plate on the wall next to a pair of tall wooden
doors, and Toni saw that they were about to enter the London Museum of
Indonesian Art.
Ah.
She happened to notice a list of the board of directors for the museum
posted just inside the door, and prominent on the list was the name
'Carl Stewart.'
She looked at her companion.
'You're on the board of directors here?'
He shrugged.
'My family contributes to various foundations and such. Give enough
money, they put your name up somewhere. It's nothing, really.'
'Place seems to be empty except for us,' she said.
'Well, that is one of the perks of having your name on the wall.
They'll open a bit early for you.'
When she'd first met Stewart, just after going to his silat school in a
bad section of town, she'd used her access to the local computer nets
to check him out. His family was more than well-off, a thing he had
not mentioned.
The rich were different, and not just because they had more money.
'This way.'
She followed him down a corridor with shadow puppets mounted on the
walls, and into a room at the end.
'Wow,' she said.
All around here, in freestanding glass cases, or in clear-fronted
cabinets against the walls, were scores--hundreds--of krises. Some
were in wooden sheathes, some out, revealing a multitude of shapes and
patterns of whorled steel in the blades.
'Wow,' she said again.
'Impressive, isn't it? The largest collection of such daggers outside
of Indonesia.'
Toni nodded absently, looking at a seven-waved black steel blade with
inlaid lines of gold outlining the body of a dragon whose tail
undulated all the way up to the weapon's point. The dragon's head was
at the base of the blade, opposite the longer side of the asymmetrical
