Vicious Circle

but in among the purveyors of overpriced, elegant tat there?s a sprinkling of people who are well worth getting to know: fanatics with insanely narrow areas of specialization like Belgian tea cozies of the Merovingian dynasty or left-handed field altars from the Spanish Civil War.

One of the biggest shops is Antik Ost, run by a distant relation of Pen?s whose name I have to look up and memorize again every time because it?s so damn long: Haviland Burgerman. He was my first port of call, and he cheerfully admitted that his knowledge of knives was more or less limited to which end you use to cut your cigar. But he pointed me across the street to Evelyn Caldessa?s, and Caldessa had the goods.

She was something of an antique herself. Her skin had that faint, pearly-white translucency of the very old, her features were finely sculpted, and her build was thinner than a stick. Looking at her, you felt reasonably sure she?d ring like bone china if you flicked her with your thumb. The scarf she wore tied over her long gray hair, peasant-style, gave her an Eastern European look, but her accent was pure prep school.

I intimated that I had something to sell, and that it fell within her area of expertise. ?A knife. I found it among some things that belonged to my uncle.?

?Belonged??

?He passed away.?

?Oh you poor thing.? Space of a single heartbeat. ?Let?s see it.?

I took out the cardboard tube, carefully slid the knife out into my palm, and handed it across to her hilt-first. She exclaimed under her breath when she saw it, then held it a long way away from her to get a better look. That blade didn?t look any nicer in daylight than it had in Soho Square after midnight. It was very much a weapon that was made for actual incision and slicing, in a context far from the Sunday roast.

?The blade is hollow-ground,? she said. ?That?s why it?s so thin and sharp?and also one of the reasons why it looks older than it is. A full hollow sacrifices everything to the one concern of getting the best edge. So it wears down fast, assuming it doesn?t break. The other reason it looks old is because it doesn?t have a bolster?most modern knives do.?

?A bolster??

?The thickened part just above the handle.?

?It wasn?t machine-milled, though,? I pointed out.

She looked up and gave me a dry, quizzical stare. ?What makes you think that?? she asked.

I pointed. ?When you turn it into the light, the reflections let you see the grind marks on the steel. They?re not evenly spaced.?

She nodded like a schoolmistress, satisfied that I?d done as well as I could with my limited understanding. ?That?s true,? she said. ?Although some machine-milled blades are hand-finished afterwards, for a variety of reasons.?

?Such as??

?Such as persuading the buyer that he?s getting a handcrafted item.? I slapped my hand to my forehead, Homer Simpson style, and she smiled dryly. ?Yes, it?s a dirty business. Stay out of it, dear heart, if you want to keep any illusions about human nature.? She ran her thumb along the edge of the blade, very carefully. ?This could have been hand-milled, just about, although if it was then it was done by someone with a very good eye. Thickness, you see: not the slightest variation along the whole blade. Possible to achieve by hand, but a lot easier with an electric mill.

?Now the wood . . .? She rubbed the handle appreciatively. ?That?s nice. Very nice. Amboyna burl. Southeast Asian. You?d never guess to look at the living tree that the heartwood would have that red luster to it. The bark is as gray as I am.

?But here?s the giveaway.? She tapped the design at the tang end of the blade?the delicate floral motif, which was the thing I was most interested in. ?Machine-etched,? she said. ?The electrolyte solution leaves a minute amount of staining on the steel, which gets worse over the course of a few years and then stabilizes unless there?s a fault in the steel itself or it wasn?t properly neutralized in the first place. In this case there?s a green sheen at the base of the major lines in the design?here. This was done with an industrial-standard etch-a-matic using copper and bronze electrolyte and a sodium-based neutralizer. It?s letting the side down, really, because overall this is a nice piece. But??she laid it down on the counter, reversed it, and slid it across to me??no more than fifty years old, in my opinion. And not worth as much now as it was when it was new.?

I tapped the heel of the blade. ?Have you ever seen this design before?? I asked her.

She frowned. Possibly she registered that as being an unusual question to come from a tragically bereaved nephew. ?No,? she admitted. ?Not on a knife blade, in any event. I recognize the actual plant, of course.?

?You do?? I was impressed. ?Why??

?Because I deal in antiques, dear. There?s always at least some degree of stylization in floral motifs, so they?re easy to memorize. And they?re very useful in identification, so it?s worth the effort. This is belladonna?deadly nightshade, to give it its more poetic name. You can tell by the asymmetrical leaf pairs.?

?Right, of course. Asymmetrical leaf pairs.?

?With the flower coming out of the larger leaf. Look.?

It was quite distinctive, now that she mentioned it. Pretty, too. ?But does it mean anything?? I demanded, looking her in the face.

She looked back at me, world-weary and a little disapproving. ?You?re not a policeman, are you, young man? I positively despise policemen. Rabid little rodents, the lot of them.?

?I?m not a policeman, Mrs. Caldessa.?

?Just Caldessa will do, thank you very much. Very well. I?ll get my book.?

The book was called Identifying Marks in Cutlery and Metalware, by Jackman and Pollard, it was dated 1976, and it was thicker than a telephone directory. Caldessa leafed through it with one hand, holding the knife in the other, and muttering to herself under her breath the whole time. There didn?t seem to be an index of any kind, although there were headings at the top of each page that consisted mainly of words like ?inflorescence? and ?lanceolate,? and numbers that might have been ranges of dates.

Finally she tapped a particular design, glanced from the page to the knife and back again a great many times, and looked up to fix me with a gaze of frank puzzlement.

?Tell me a little more about your uncle,? she suggested.

I shrugged apologetically. ?There is no uncle,? I admitted, telling her what she must already know. ?I swiped that knife from a couple of guys who were trying to perform amateur surgery on me with it. Now I?d love to know who they were.?

?Anathemata Curialis.?

?Not deadly nightshade? I thought you said??

?No, no. The organization that uses this design. It?s called Anathemata Curialis. Did you get a good look at the men who were trying to kill you??

?They weren?t men,? I said, remembering the feline shape that had chased me across Soho Square and shuddering involuntarily.

?That?s a very harsh judgment,? said Caldessa sternly. ?I?m not a believer myself, but I respect the opinions of others. Most of the time. Unless they?re ridiculous, like female circumcision.?

?Whoa. Wait a second. What are you telling me? That this is . . . ??

?A religious symbol. In effect, yes. If this knife actually belonged to the two men you mentioned, then they were Catholics. Jackman and Pollard, on whose opinion I have many times staked my reputation, identify the Anathemata Curialis as a wing of the Catholic Church.?

She beckoned me around the counter so that she could show me the relevant entry in the book, but seeing it in black-and-white didn?t really help much. I couldn?t make any sense out of this no matter whether I was reading it across, down, or diagonally. The Catholic Church hated and feared the undead with the same passion and enthusiasm they?d once reserved for people who said the world was round. Among the very few things I could tell you for certain about those two loup-garous was that they weren?t faithful and committed adherents to the Roman communion.

But pictures don?t lie. Or if they do, they don?t do it with such a straight face. I ran my eyes down the list. In among the names of Oxford colleges, regiments of defunct colonial armies, and arriviste aristos whose forebears had puckered up and gone down on long-dead kings, there was a single entry in italic type: ?Anathemata Curialis, Catholic Order, disc. 1882.?

?Disc?? I queried aloud.

?Discontinued,? said Caldessa. ?Nobody has made knives with that livery since 1882.?

?Well, now we know something that Jackman and Pollard don?t know,? I mused grimly. Caldessa raised an eyebrow and nodded, conceding the point.

Remembering my manners, I thanked her and asked her if I could pay her for her time, but she waved the suggestion away summarily. ?I honestly doubt you could pitch your price high enough to avoid an implied insult, dear. I?m a luxury commodity. If you ever have anything of real value to sell, you know where I am. And in the meantime, you can take this tawdry little gewgaw out of my sight.?

I put the knife back into its tube and went back out onto the street. It was the middle of the afternoon now, and the tourist crowd was thicker than it had been. Walking up toward Notting Hill Gate, I considered the logical next step?my older brother, Matthew?and tried to find reasons not to take it. If anyone could give me a labeled diagram of the innards of the Catholic hierarchy, it was him: he?s a priest, after all, and he loves his work. He?s a lot