pools on the flagstones, and give a slick shine to Picasso's goat.
The goat was Leaphorn's favorite. When they were young and he was attending the FBI Academy, he had brought Emma to see New York. They had discovered Picasso's goat together. He had already been staring at it when Emma had laughed, and plucked at his sleeve, and said: 'Look. The mascot of the Navajo Nation.'
He had an odd sensation as he remembered this, as if he could see them both as they had been then. Very young, standing by this glass wall looking out into the autumn rain. Emma, who was even more beautiful when she laughed, was laughing.
'Perfect for us Dineh,' she'd said. 'It's starved, gaunt, bony, ugly. But look! It's tough. It endures.' And she had hugged his arm in the delight of her discovery, her face full of the joy, and the beauty, that Leaphorn had found nowhere else. And of course, it was true. That gaunt goat would have been the perfect symbol. Something to put on a pedestal and display. Miserable and starved, true enough. But it was also pregnant and defiant--exactly right to challenge the world at the entrance of the ugly octagonal Tribal Council meeting hall at Window Rock. Leaphorn remembered their having coffee at the museum cafe and then walking out and patting the goat. The sensation came back to him now--wet, cold metal slick under his palm--utterly real. He got up and hurried out of the museum into the rain, leaving the umbrella hanging forgotten on the chair.
Leaphorn took a cab to the Seventy-eighth Street address, got there a quarter of an hour early, and spent the time prowling the neighborhood--a territory of uniformed doormen and expensive dogs walked by persons who seemed to have been hired for the job. He rang the door chimes at eleven exactly. He waited on the steps, looking at the sky down the street. It would rain again, and soon--probably before noon. An old man, stooped and gray in a wrinkled gray suit, opened the door and stood silently, looking at him patiently.
'My name is Leaphorn,' he said. 'I have an appointment with Richard DuMont.'
'In the study,' the man said, motioning Leaphorn in.
The study was a long, high-ceilinged room down a long, high-ceilinged hall. A man in a dark blue dressing gown was sitting at the end of a long library table. Light from a floor lamp beside his chair reflected off the white of a breakfast cloth, and china, and silver.
'Ah, Mr. Leaphorn,' the man said, smiling. 'You are most punctual. I hope you will excuse me for not getting up to greet you.' He tapped the arms of the wheelchair in which he was sitting. 'And I hope you will join me for some breakfast.'
'No thank you,' Leaphorn said. 'I've eaten.'
'Some coffee, then?'
'I have never refused coffee. Never will.'
'Nor I,' DuMont said. 'Another of my vices. But seat yourself.' He gestured toward a blue plush chair. 'The woman at Nelson's told me you are hunting a missing woman. An anthropologist. And that murder is involved.' Du-Mont's small gray eyes peered at Leaphorn, avid with interest. Unusual eyes set in a pinched, narrow face under eyebrows almost identical in color to his pale skin. 'Murder,' he repeated, 'and a missing woman.' His voice was clear, precise, easy to understand. But like his face it was a small voice. Any background noise would bury it.
'Two pot hunters were killed,' Leaphorn said. Something about DuMont was unpleasant. Too much interest? But interest in such a man seemed natural enough. After all, he was a collector. 'Including the man who found my pot,' DuMont said, with what seemed to Leaphorn to be a sort of pleasure. 'Or so that woman at Nelson's told me.'
'We think so,' Leaphorn said. 'Ms. Marcy told me you would be willing to let me see the documentation he sent in. We want to know where he found the pot.'
'The document,' DuMont said. 'Yes. But tell me how the man was killed. How the woman is missing.' He raised his arms wide apart, his small mouth grinning. 'Tell me all of that.'
Behind DuMont, on both sides of a great formal fireplace, shelves formed the wall. The shelves were lined with artifacts. Pots, carved stone images, baskets, fetishes, masks, primitive weapons. Just behind the man, a pedestal held a massive stone head -- Olmec, Leaphorn guessed. Smuggled out of Mexico in defiance of that country's antiquities act.
'Mr. Etcitty and a companion were digging up an Anasazi ruin, apparently collecting pots. Someone shot them,' Leaphorn said. 'An anthropologist named Friedman-Bernal was specializing in this sort of ceramics. In fact, she was interested in this pot you bought. She disappeared. Left Chaco Canyon -- she worked there -- for a weekend and hasn't come back.'
Leaphorn stopped. He and DuMont looked at each other. The stooped, gray man who had admitted Leaphorn appeared at his elbow, placed a small table beside his chair, spread a cloth upon it, put a silver tray on the cloth. The tray held a cup of paper-thin china sitting on a translucent saucer, a silver pot from which steam issued, two smaller silver containers, and a silver spoon. The gray man poured coffee into Leaphorn's cup and disappeared.
'One doesn't buy merely the object,' DuMont said. 'One wants what goes with it. The history. This head, for example, came out of the jungles in northern Guatemala. It had decorated the doorway to a chamber in a temple. The room where captives were held until they were sacrificed. I'm told the Olmec priests strangled them with a cord.'
DuMont covered the lower part of his small face with his napkin and produced a small cough, his avid eyes on Leaphorn.
'And this Anasazi pot of yours. Why is it worth five thousand dollars?' He laughed, a small, tinkling sound. 'It's not much of a pot, really. But the Anasazi! Such mysterious people. You hold this pot, and think of the day it was made. A civilization that had grown a thousand years was dying.' He stared into Leaphorn's eyes. 'As ours is surely dying. Its great houses were standing empty. No more great ceremonials in the kivas. This is about when my pot was made -- so my appraisers tell me. Right at the end. The twilight. In the dying days.'
DuMont did something at the arm of his wheelchair and said: 'Edgar.'
'Yes sir.' Edgar's voice seemed to come from under the table.
'Bring me that pot we bought last month. And the documents.'
'Yes sir.'
'So stories are important to me,' DuMont said to Leaphorn. 'What you could tell me has its value here. I show
