“Or because he had something to do first,” Elaine offered, “like make a phone call or look up an address.”
“Or smoke another cigarette,” I said, “or anything at all. There’s too much we don’t know and too many avenues for speculation.”
“Plus all the side streets,” TJ said.
We batted it back and forth a little more, and Elaine said he sounded to her like a man with something to hide, and her guess would be that he was a sex addict. That was a new term, she added, for what used to be just a guy who liked to party, or what earlier genera-tions had called a good-time Charlie, or a gentleman with an eye for the ladies.
That got us talking about how the world didn’t cut you much slack anymore, how yesterday’s pastimes were today’s pathologies. TJ finished his Coke and went home.
“Leo wouldn’t take any money,” I told Elaine, “and neither will I. Tonight’s not going to come out of Louise’s retainer.”
“The $500? Didn’t that get used up a while ago?”
“I’ve barely put a dent in it.”
“You’re a real hard-nosed businessman, aren’t you?”
“The money doesn’t really matter.”
“I know that, baby.”
“I just want to see if I can figure it out,” I said. “It shouldn’t be that hard.”
11
He holds the bronze letter opener in his hands, turns it over, runs a finger over the design in low relief on the handle. A pack of hounds are holding a stag at bay. It is, he notes, quite artfully executed.
The woman, every bit as artfully executed as the letter opener, stands patiently on the other side of the counter. He asks her what she can tell him about the piece.
“Well, it’s a paper knife, of course. Art Nouveau, probably French but possibly Belgian.”
“Belgian?”
“It’s signed,” she says. “On the reverse.” He turns it over and she hands him a magnifying glass with a staghorn handle. “It’s hard to see with the naked eye, or at least with my naked eye. See?”
“DeVreese.”
“Godfrey DeVreese,” she says, “or Godefroid, if you prefer. I’m not sure which he’d have preferred. He was Belgian. I had a bronze medallion of his for years, a gorgeous thing, a good three and a half inches in diameter.
Leopold the Second on one side, with a beard that was a hell of a lot nobler than the man sporting it. You know about Leopold the Second?” He grins easily. “I would suppose,” he says, “that he came between Leopold the First and Leopold the Third.”
“Actually his successor was his son, Albert. Leopold Three came a little later on. Number Two was the gentle fellow who ran the Belgian All the Flowers Are Dying
99
Congo as his personal fief. He treated the local residents as slaves, and he’d have had more respect for the inhabitants of an ant farm. Remember all those photos of natives with their hands chopped off?” What can she be she talking about? “It rings a bell,” he says.
“But he looked good,” she says, “especially in bronze. There was a horse on the other side, and he looked even better than Leo. It was a draft horse, one of those big boys you don’t see anymore outside of a Budweiser commercial. Except this one was a Percheron and the Budweiser horses are Clydesdales. The medal was an award from some sort of agricultural fair. Probably the turn-of-the-century equivalent of a tractor-pulling contest.”
“You still have the medallion?”
“I thought I was going to own it forever, but some horse collector spotted it a few months ago and away it went. I’ll probably never see another one like it.”
He turns the letter opener in his hands. It’s quite beautiful, and he likes the heft of it.
“You said turn-of-the-century?”
“I suppose DeVreese would have said fin de siecle. Or the equivalent in Flemish, whatever that might be. I can’t date it precisely, I’m afraid, but it would have to be late nineteenth or early twentieth century.”
“So it’s about a hundred years old.”
“Give or take.”
He tests the point with his thumb. It’s quite sharp. The blade’s edges are not. It will serve to open a letter, but you couldn’t slice with it.
You could stab, however.
“May I ask the price?”
“It’s two hundred dollars.”
“That seems high.”
“I know,” she says disarmingly.
“Do you suppose I could get a discount?” She considers this. “If you pay cash,” she says, “I could absorb the sales tax.”
