The wound looked a lot better now, but that’s only because of how bad it had looked before.
“Sure,” I said, and motioned for her to sit down across from me.
“Does it still hurt?”
You can’t visit a prisoner without getting invited first. For that to happen, she had to write to me. She wrote again and again. I ignored her notes for a while, but there were things I wanted cleared up, things I needed to know. Besides, as I said, prison was boring. And Ellen was many things but never boring.
“Sometimes it hurts,” I said. “The scar tissue’s still pretty sensitive.”
Only a few other tables were occupied, nowhere near us, people in their intimate conversations. The guard had returned to the corner near the gate. He watched over us all but gave us our space.
“Tell me how you knew,” she said.
Yes, the desperation was real. She had lost everything, and to make it worse she still didn’t know how she had lost.
“This is a really good place to watch birds,” I said, looking around. “I should get a birding book. I need to bone up.”
“I assume you know by now what it’s worth,” she said.
I shrugged off her question. Of course I knew. While out on bail before my sentencing, I’d found a Rutgers anthropology professor willing to chat with me in his office long enough to refer me to a colleague in art history who moonlighted as an antiques appraiser. Rutgers is a vast university, and no one seemed to question my claim to be pursuing a master’s degree in American history with a special interest in the Revolutionary War period.
“Honestly, there would be very little to compare it to,” the art history professor told me once I had located her office deep within the windowless bowels of her department. Our conversation was all hypothetical, of course. The three Revere bells, after all, were all presumed destroyed or lost. But what if one of the bells were ever found?
“An object like that would shimmer with history,” she said, her own eyes shimmering at the very idea.
She explained that Paul Revere was known as a silversmith and bell maker but was not known to have made bells from silver. There were rumors, though, of him making a few inkwell bells over the years—and for a bell that small he would have had to use a metal like silver. But all the known bells made by Paul Revere were large—for churches and schools—and made of copper and tin. “So this would be an extraordinary find,” the professor said. “It would be the only confirmed silver bell that Paul Revere made. Then add to it its historical significance. The Midnight Ride?” She reclined in her chair as if she’d just finished a satisfying meal. “Such a bell would be historical magic.” I remained quiet, giving this appraiser time to appraise. “At a bare minimum, I would think five, maybe eight million dollars at auction.” She sat up again. “But really the sky’s the limit on this one.” Then she shook her head as if erasing even the fantasy of coming across such a treasure.
“When did you decide to use me?” I asked Ellen now. I’d had plenty of time to reflect on this question and was no closer to an answer.
“Hey, don’t forget—you found me. You chased me down. You came to my school. You couldn’t be told no.”
Maybe. Or maybe that had all been part of her plan. Had she recognized me in Atlantic City and done the Greek deal just badly enough for me to spot it but well enough for me to be amazed? Or had her plan started earlier? Had Ace tipped her off to our presence at that Atlantic City game? Had he and Ellen been working together to reel me in? Ethan, too? Late at night, in my cell, I entertained all possibilities—that Ace was smarter than he let on, even that Brock McKnight, my competent attorney, could have been behind the whole thing from the moment he first joined me in the elevator at that Newark reception. Had my desperation and loneliness been so apparent? Had I come across so much like a sucker? I wondered sometimes if Brock had been Ellen’s connection for selling the Revere bell once it was stolen. My speculations would eventually circle back toward the probable, but prison gives you time to weave and reweave conspiracies of infinite design. And just when my theories would start to seem unreal and far-fetched, I would remember that the bell was real, and everything would seem possible once again.
“You have to tell me how you figured it out,” she said.
“Figured what out?” I asked.
She scratched at her neck as if she had a bug bite. “Why weren’t you watching the TV along with everyone else?” That was when she’d stolen the bell from the small safe hidden behind the painting of the blue heron. While everyone else was staring at the TV screen, watching me deal the cards in slow motion, she was stealing the bell. “How could you not watch the TV?” she asked. “You, more than anyone, should have wanted to see exactly where your Greek deal fell apart.”
And here was the dilemma I’d been facing ever since granting Ellen her visit here. Some secrets are simply too good for the magician to reveal to anyone. But was I a magician any longer? Ever since that poker game in Atlantic City where I’d first laid eyes on Ellen, I felt myself becoming something else, something new, a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. And now all I had to do was look around and I had my answer. I had only to remember where I was, in this temporary prison from which in just under two hundred days I would flutter away.
There was no need to keep my greatest secret from Ellen. As she herself once told me, the real suckers know they’ve
