Moving Target (36 page)

It had been all Heller could do to shut Smythe up before he started talking about his pet turtle and the sows at the dry cleaner who should go back on welfare instead of breaking the buttons off his shirts.

This kind of investigating was a lot easier than kneeling in rosebushes or cactus to take a close-up picture of the little woman with somebody other than her old man banging away between her thighs. Some operatives really got off on watching sex. Heller didn’t, unless the little woman was built or the guy was really hung. Then it was kind of fun to watch them bounce.

“You sell anything yet?”

The familiar words yanked Heller back to his present job. He looked down the aisle with a frown. Someone ought to put an elbow in that jerk’s throat. He must have asked that question a million times in the last fifteen minutes.

Heller’s stomach growled. He pulled a granola bar out of his jacket pocket and opened it. As soon as he bit into the stuff, he remembered why he preferred peanuts straight up rather than crushed with honey and whatever else his wife was selling as health food that week.

Maybe Erik would get hungry soon. The café across the lobby from the bar hadn’t been very full at all and the french fries had smelled good enough to eat.

Heller almost sighed. Someday he wouldn’t have to haul around whole grain and fake chocolate, and lust after french fries. Someday he would be on the same gravy train as Wallace. He would be getting steak and pussy whenever he wanted. If he got a couple thousand for breaking an arm here and there, then whacking some dude should be worth ten thousand, easy. Hell, twenty. He would be shitting in high cotton, as his dead granny used to say.

The next time Wallace offered to cut him in on the good stuff, he was going to say yes.

R
isa Sheridan smiled at the young dealer who was trying to impress her with his knowledge of illuminated manuscripts and sex. It was No Sale all the way, but he didn’t know it yet. She still had a few more questions to ask. She had better get some useful answers, too. Shane Tannahill wanted that gilded carpet page, which various people at the fair had already assured her was a contradiction in terms: carpet referred to painting and gilded was just a golden highlight. She simply had smiled and kept on asking.

If Shane wanted a gilded carpet page, she would get him a page where there was a lot more gold than colored paint and the design incised in the gold went from border to border. Her biggest problem was that she knew she wasn’t the only one doing the looking for him. Shane believed in the shark model of employee advancement: throw them all in the same pool and see which shark swims the longest.

She planned on being the last shark. What she didn’t know was how many other sharks Shane had thrown into the pool with her. All she knew for certain was that she wasn’t the only one he had sent after the page. There were a lot of sharks he could call on for help. Unfortunately, competitively speaking, she wasn’t the meanest shark in the pond; there were things she wouldn’t do to win. Not many, but enough so that she could look herself in the mirror long enough to put on makeup.

Not everyone Shane hired was so fastidious, which meant she had to be the quickest and the smartest.

“So, you’ve heard of some Insular Celtic pages,” she said, “but you don’t have any to show me?”

“Nothing that’s new to the market, but this is, like, a fine example of the time and period you want.”

She looked at the leaf with an interest she didn’t have to pretend. Her trained eye saw echoes of Celtic jewelry in every stroke of the illuminator’s drawing. The style of the designs alone allowed her to place the leaf within a half-century and a few hundred miles of its time and place of origin. But telling the earnest scholar across the glass case from her that he had missed placing the leaf by a century and a country wasn’t the way to get information from him. So she widened her eyes, licked the lips that seemed to fascinate men—for no reason that she had ever understood—and gave the young man an up-from-under-long-eyelashes look that was guaranteed to make him think with his dick.

“Is this like the pages you heard about?” she asked.

He wished it was. He really did. Almost as much as he wished he knew this lush-mouthed woman well enough to break some old civil laws about sex with her.

“Uh, no. They were painted. This is, like, drawn.” He pointed to the initial, which indeed had been rendered in red ink rather than paint. “But this kind of drawing is the hallmark of Insular Celtic style and, like, technique.”

“Then the other pages, the ones you heard about, wouldn’t be as valuable?” she asked, telling herself that she wouldn’t, really would not, start using, like, that word instead of, like, anything else.

Sighing, he memorized the pouting curve of her lower lip. “Actually, they’re, like, more valuable, because they’re more rare. If they’re, like, real.”

“Real? As in authentic?”

“Yes. It’s always, like, a question when utterly new material comes on the market. Especially . . .” His voice faded as he belatedly remembered that he was supposed to be selling manuscripts today, not lecturing to graduate art historians about the duties and pitfalls of becoming a curator to private collections. He smoothed a hand over hair that was already becoming distressingly thin. Like his mother’s brother, he was going to be bald by thirty-five. “New material always, like, raises new questions.”

“So Warrick is trashing the pages?” she said, reading between the lines.

He hesitated, then shrugged. Obviously, he wouldn’t be the first to bring up the House of Warrick’s discreet and damning warning about the pages. “Among others.”

“Really? Who else has seen them?”

“No one. But if Norman Warrick says the pages should be, like, approached with great care, well, no one is going to stand up and say otherwise. Whoever owns those pages will have, like, a hard time selling them.”

She smiled. Shane would be glad to hear it, because it would bring the price down and scare off other buyers. But she wouldn’t tell him yet. She would let him sweat.

Not that a man as rich as Shane ever cared about money. Or anything else, for that matter.

“Thanks for your time,” Risa said. “You’ve taught me a lot. I’ll look at Insular Celtic pages with, like, a whole new appreciation now.”

“If you have any more, like, questions, I’d be, like, happy to . . .”

She waved without looking back.

He stared longingly after her. It wasn’t until she merged with the crowd around the multimillion-dollar Book of Hours that the young scholar realized that he had been, very gently, taken in by the woman with the lush, brain-numbing mouth.

Anyone who already knew about Warrick’s distaste for the newly discovered pages didn’t need, like, help picking out a really nice example of early-twelfth-century British illumination in the archaic Insular Celtic style.

P
eople are still jammed around the book,” Serena said as she watched the discreet shoving match that resulted from people trying to get closer to the fair’s multimillion-dollar attraction.

Erik didn’t look up. He appeared to be concentrating on a selection of leaves from an Italian lady’s Book of Hours, but his attention was on two men in suits who sat with their chairs against the wall. Their bodies were turned toward each other and they leaned close together, as though to shut out the rest of the room. The men must have believed the low rumble of background noise in the ballroom would cover their conversation. In most cases, it would have. But Erik had exceptional hearing and the man who was doing the selling had the kind of voice that carried.

“. . . to pay a million. She doesn’t know what she has. There hasn’t been anything of this quality since the Book of Kells.”

“Are you certain she doesn’t know?”

“If she did, she would have a multimillion-dollar price tag on it, wouldn’t she? It’s a repeat of that fine Italian Gospel last year. One inheritance. One dumb heir. One good buy for us.”

“Yes, but—”

“Look,” he cut in, “anyone who doesn’t appreciate what they own doesn’t deserve to own it. If she takes a few thousand dollars for a multimillion-dollar piece of art, well, that’s the price she pays for being a cultural moron.”

“As long as it’s legal.”

“No problem. They haven’t managed to pass laws against being stupid yet.”

Neither of the men mentioned ethics, because neither of them was interested.

“So you think you can get the manuscript for a few thousand?”

“Maybe. I might have to go as high as a hundred thousand, because she’s being coy and saying she doesn’t have the whole thing but word is that she does. She’s just milking the price. You front the cash and I’ll take twenty percent of the resale.”

“Fifteen. And that’s half again what a finder’s fee would be.”

“Yeah, but without me you—”

“Fifteen,” the money man cut in impatiently.

“Okay. Fifteen. But I’ll need the money fast. Word is already out about the leaves she sent to Warrick.”

“Yeah. And the word I’ve heard is that they’re fake.”

“Fake, schmake. My source says they’re solid gold.”

“Who’s your source?”

“Same as always.”

“Yeah? Who’s that?”

“A little bird.”

Erik was still looking at an illustration of a fifteenth-century artist’s idea of what the Epiphany looked like when one of the two men strode past in a hurry. It was the man whose voice carried so well, the one who talked to little birds.

“Sell anything yet?” the man asked over Erik’s shoulder.

“No,” said the proprietor, a young woman named Marianne who was watching Erik from the corner of her eye. “You?”

“Hell, no. Nobody buys at affairs like this. We’re just a free floor show.”

When the man cut over to another aisle and began querying every other proprietor about sales, Erik looked up. “Who was that?” he asked Marianne.

“V. L. Stevenson. He has a booth down by the front, but he’s never in it.”

“Probably why he hasn’t sold anything,” Serena said.

Marianne’s eyes said she would just as soon Erik had been alone, but her voice was polite. “You’re probably right. Most proprietors will share duties with nearby booths, but . . .” She shrugged and didn’t say the obvious—with a wanderer like V. L. Stevenson, sharing was a fool’s game. She leaned closer to the page Erik was studying and pointed at a picture with a blush-pink fingernail. “The interesting part of this manuscript, in addition to its use of gold foil, is the fact that it is one of the earliest known examples in which the Pepysian model book was used for the decoration.”

“What’s that?” Serena asked.

“Medieval clip art,” Erik said. “It was a book of sketches of birds and such that illuminators and miniaturists copied from when they were decorating manuscripts.”

“No such thing as copyright back then.”

“No need. Copying was a requirement if there was to be any spread of literacy or religion at all. Before page numbers, the illuminated capitals and miniatures served as a way to remember which page a particular sermon began on, so the decorations got copied, too.”

“Before mechanical printing, it was an honor and a duty to make your manuscripts available to less fortunate religious orders,” Marianne said. “Rich monasteries would loan out their books to be copied by poorer monasteries who couldn’t afford to commission such expensive works from scratch.”

Serena looked at the leaf. It was colorful enough, but to her eye badly composed. The birds looked like they had been haphazardly glued in place to keep from falling off the page.

“Then the printing press came along,” Erik said, turning to another leaf. This one was less colorful. Red initial capitals only on important sections. “That ended the need for hand copying. By modern times, people were sneering at copies as inferior, but before that originality wasn’t prized. Quite the opposite. It was suspect.”

“Makes sense,” Serena said. “Most of the first books were religious, and in religion, originality is another name for heresy.”

Erik grinned and ran his fingertips over her long red braid. “Quick, aren’t you?”

“Quick enough to rap your knuckles if you go after my scrunchie,” she said, referring to the twist of elastic and cloth that secured the end of her braid. She was discovering that he loved unraveling her hair. “You mess my braid up, you put it back together.”

“I’ll look forward to it.” Smiling, he turned to Marianne. “This manuscript is interesting but it doesn’t quite meet my needs. Do you have any palimpsests, particularly any from the fifteenth century? Miniatures and capital letters are preferred.”

“Sorry. Our specialty is entire manuscripts. Have you tried Reggie Smythe?”

“Yes.”

She frowned and looked around the room as though for inspiration. “Oh, of course! Albert Lars. Down at the end of aisle J. He has a huge collection of illuminated singulars and oddities.” She wrote quickly on a business card. “If you can’t catch him in his booth, try this number. He does a lot of after-hours showings.”

“Thanks, I will,” Erik said warmly.

He meant it. He didn’t want to make Ed Heller’s work any easier than he had to, and he had begun to think no one would recommend good old Bert to him, thus giving him an excuse to pursue the other dealer who had a known connection in the past to some pages from the Book of the Learned. Maybe Heller would miss the connection. Maybe not. It was worth a try.

Erik pocketed the card and began working his way slowly toward aisle J, talking with proprietors and staff all along the way, hoping Heller’s hand would go numb from taking notes on whom they had talked to and what had been said. By the time they got to aisle J, Serena’s eyes were looking a bit glazed.

“Okay. I think I have it now,” she said. “They’re called miniatures because they were originally done in red paint, which was called minium.”

“Right. Thus,
miniaturist
—one who paints in red. Then the other colors came along. The name didn’t change but the meaning did.”

“Got it. Miniatures are independent of the text rather than part of it like capital letters. In fact, miniatures might not have anything to do with the text at all.”