windows along each wall.
There were maybe a dozen large tables in this sun-drenched space. On each was a battle scene from the Civil War. In each 4 3
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tableau there were scores of small, hand-carved wooden figurines engaged in battle. The individual soldiers — tending cannon, engaged in hand-to-hand combat, down and wounded, down and dead — were compelling. The figurines had been carved for maximum emotional effect. On one table there was a platoon of Negro Union soldiers engaging a Confederate band.
“Amazing, aren’t they?” Maya asked from behind me. “Mr.
Lee carves each one in a workroom in the attic. He has studied every aspect of the Civil War and has written a dozen mono-graphs on the subject. He owns thousands of original documents from that period.”
“One wonders when he has time to be a detective with all that,” I said.
For a moment there was a deadness in Maya’s expression. I felt that I had hit a nerve, that maybe Bobby Lee really was a fig-ment of someone’s imagination.
“Come into the office, Mr. Rawlins. Saul.”
We followed her past the miniature scenes of murder and mayhem made mythic. I wondered if anyone would ever make a carving of me slaughtering that young German soldier in the snow in suburban Dusseldorf.
m a y a l e d u s
through a hand-carved yellow door that was painted with images of a naked island woman.
“Gauguin,” I said as she pushed the gaudy door open. “Your boss does paintings too?”
“This door is an original,” she said.
“Whoa” came unbidden from my lips.
The office was a nearly empty, windowless room with cherry floors. Along the white walls were a dozen tall lamps with frosted glass globes around the bulbs. These lamps were set before as 4 4
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many floor-to-ceiling cherry beams imbedded in the plaster walls. All the lights were on.
In the center of the room was an antique red lacquered Chinese desk that had four broad-bottomed chairs facing it, with one behind for our absentee host.
“Sit,” Maya Adamant said.
She settled in one of the visitors’ chairs and Saul and I followed suit.
“We’re looking for a woman,” she began, all business now.
“Who’s we?” I asked.
This brought on a disapproving frown.
“Mr. Lee.”
“That’s a
“All right,” she acquiesced. “Mr. Lee wants —”
“Do you own this house, Miss Adamant?”
Another frown. “No.”
“Easy,” Saul warned.
I held up my hand for his silence.
“You know, my mother, before she died, told me that I should never enter a man’s house without paying my respects.”
“I’ll be sure to tell Mr. Lee that you said hello,” she told me.
“It was a double thing with my mother,” I said, continuing with my train of thought. “On the one hand you didn’t want a man thinking that you were in his domicile doing mischief with his property or his wife —”
“Mr. Lee is not married,” Maya put in.
“And on the other hand,” I went on, “being of the darker per-suasion, you wouldn’t want to be treated like a nigger or a slave.”
“Mr. Lee doesn’t meet with anyone who works for him,” she informed me.
“Come on, Easy,” Saul added. “I told you that.”
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Ignoring my friend, I said, “And I don’t work for anyone I don’t meet with.”
“You’ve taken his money,” Maya reminded me.
“And I drove four hundred miles to tell him thank you.”
“I really don’t see the problem, Mr. Rawlins. I can brief you on the job at hand.”
“I could sit with you on a southern beach until the earth does a full circle, Miss Adamant. And I’m sure that I’d rather speak to you than to a man named after the number one Rebel general.
But you have your orders from him and I got my mother’s demands. My mother is dead and so she can’t change
