Thai Die (4 page)

“I understand,” he said. “Well, the old rag kept it safe across the ocean, anyway. And now its long journey is almost over.” He touched it gently on top of its head.

Doris pushed her little towel into a pocket. “I’m glad it arrived safely.”

“So am I. I’ll walk you to the door.” He came out from behind the counter and stayed at her elbow as they crossed the gray wooden floor, touching her lightly on the back as if to hurry her on her way.

“Good-bye,” she said as she walked out, but he had the door shut before she finished the phrase and was turning the sign in the window to white-on-black CLOSED.

Doris hustled up the street, an icy wind flapping her coat at the back of her legs as if it, too, wanted her to hurry.

I wonder what the rush is
, she thought breathlessly, as she dug in her purse for her keys.
Maybe he wants me gone before the buyer comes in because he’s going to renege on the deal. The way he looked at the statue, as if he were hungry and it were a Quarter Pounder, I’ll bet he wants to keep it for himself or sell it for a higher price to somebody else. I’ll bet he plans to tell the buyer I delivered the wrong statue—but that plan may be wrecked now because I saw it, and other people saw it, too
.

She found her keys, unlocked her car door and climbed in, shivering, stamping her feet on the floor in front of the brake pedal.
What if the statue isn’t a copy but the real thing, and he doesn’t want any strangers looking at it, because they may guess? Or maybe there’s something wrong with this whole deal, and bringing it into the United States is illegal because . . . because there are
drugs
hidden inside it!
Her eyes widened.
Or
gem-stones! Thailand was famous for its sapphire and ruby mines.

She froze, holding the key in the ignition, and her fingers trembled as she frightened herself with more and more scary notions. But hold on, if there were something tricky about this deal, maybe it was a good thing she had shown the Buddha to the Monday Bunch. When there was trickery afoot, eyewitnesses could be wonderful.

She started her car and checked to see if the street was clear. Up the block, she saw a woman get out of an enormous, dark green Hummer parked right in front of Fitzwilliam’s. It was so high the driver had to reach down with a booted toe to touch the pavement—and she was a tall woman. She wore a long black-leather coat and a mink hat pulled down over her eyes. She lifted the collar of the coat to cover her face as she came around the front of the vehicle. She hurried to the door of Fitzwilliam’s and rapped on it. To Doris’s surprise, it opened at once and she went inside.

Oh, of course,
thought Doris,
that must be the buyer.
So apparently he wasn’t going to get to keep it for himself, if that had been his plan.

As Doris pulled away from the curb, she glanced again at the Hummer. It’s as big as a pickup truck, she thought, wondering why someone needed a vehicle designed to carry troops into battle.

Doris wondered how much Mr. Fitzwilliam was going to charge the tall woman for the statue. David Corvis, the exporter in Bangkok, had told her that in America its value was about $800 wholesale. She figured that if her other fears weren’t real—and the thing wasn’t stuffed with drugs or gems—Mr. Fitzwilliam probably had at least doubled that price. Was $1,600 enough to close the shop to other customers while the transaction was enacted? She didn’t know. Maybe it was worth more than that—a lot more than that. Perhaps Mr. Corvis had lied to her, telling her the Buddha was worth far less than it actually was so she would not be tempted to steal it. Doris decided not to be insulted by that; after all, Mr. Corvis hardly knew her. But if the statue really was very old, then its price might be . . . Well, actually, she had no idea.

She took Kellogg Boulevard back up past the Cathedral of St. Paul, then over and back on the freeway. Traffic had thinned, since it was past rush hour, and she was in Excelsior in about half the time it had taken her to get to St. Paul.

Rather than go up to her apartment, she went into Crewel World. Godwin was behind the checkout desk, writing up an order. He looked over as the door sounded its two notes, and his face lightened.

“Oh, my God, Doris! You look
fabulous
!” He dropped the paperwork and came for a closer look, holding out his hands. He took hers and spread them wide, dropped one and turned her around. “Simply fabulous!” he pronounced.

Doris could not help simpering, just a little. “Thank you.”

He stepped back to give her a more thorough up-and-down look. “Hair, check. Face, check. Hands, check.” Doris had, in fact, undergone some serious massage therapy in addition to three separate manicures to soften and shape her hands and nails. That Godwin should have noticed this improvement at first glance was a tribute to his interest in physical details—and his friendship with her. “Also, you are down what, fifteen, maybe twenty pounds?”

“Seventeen,” she said. “I ate and ate over there, but the food is so healthy, the weight just slid off.”

“I can see Bangkok in my future,” said Godwin, laughing.

Betsy came out from the back. “Oh, hi, you’re back! I thought that was your voice. So, tell us all about it. Was the antiques store nice?”

Doris told them about taking the statue over there. She described Mr. Fitzwilliam and how he reacted when he saw she’d opened the box. “He wanted to know where I opened it and who got a look at it. He seemed about as scared as he was angry.”

She saw how Betsy was looking at her and quickly added, “But he calmed down when he saw it wasn’t damaged.” She reached into her coat pocket. “He even gave me back the towel I wrapped it in,” she said, offering it to them for inspection.

Godwin said, “Ooooooh, let me see.” He took the towel and studied the cross-stitching at one end. “Very nice,” he said, nodding.

“What else happened?” asked Betsy, impatient with Godwin’s tangent.

“Well, he walked me to the door and turned his sign to ‘closed’ behind me, but when I got back to my car I saw this woman get out of a big green Hummer and go up to knock on the door. I kind of think she was waiting in the car for me to leave. Mr. Fitzwilliam was waiting, too, because he opened right up and let her in, which I thought was kind of odd.”

“So what do you conclude from all this?” Betsy asked.

“Well, it made me wonder if the statue isn’t worth a lot more than Mr. Corvis said it was when he gave it to me in Bangkok.”

“How much did he say it was worth?” asked Godwin, his attention drawn at last from Doris’s stitching.

“Two hundred there, maybe eight hundred here. Wholesale, I think he said.”

“I wonder what Fitzwilliam’s markup is,” said Betsy.

“He might be charging three or four thousand for it,” suggested Godwin. “It’s not like the buyer can decide that’s too much and go to a different store that charges less.”

Betsy said, “Yes, and three or four thousand dollars might be a lot of money to an antiques dealer who usually deals in sums a lot smaller than that.”

“I’m also thinking it might be a really ancient statue, not the copy he said it was,” noted Doris.

“Isn’t it illegal to bring something really ancient out of a country?” Godwin asked.

“It is in Thailand,” said Doris. “I went to a market there that had old things for sale, and I was warned against buying a bronze statue I liked because of that law.”

Betsy said, “So if it’s really old, it might not be in this country legally. On the other hand, if this were really an ancient statue, it would be worth a great deal more than three thousand.” She made a gesture of agreement at Doris. “So you could be right, it might be worth much more than Mr. Corvis said. And what they’re doing is theft, even if Mr. Fitzwilliam—and his customers—are buying it legally. Just like paying U.S. currency for street drugs doesn’t make them legal.”

Doris asked, “But what about me? Have I broken the law, too?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Betsy. “It’s more like you were bamboozled.”

“I’d prefer to think he made a cat’s paw of you,” said Godwin. “
Bamboozle
is a ridiculous word. It sounds like something you do with a set of drums.” He had a thought. “What if he does this a lot? Tell me, was his shop very luxurious?”

“No,” said Doris. “Kind of the opposite. Sort of.”

“What do you mean ‘sort of’?”

“Well, it wasn’t one of those places that calls itself an antiques shop but really is a secondhand store. This one had some gorgeous antique furniture and some beautiful old dolls. You know, the kind with porcelain faces and long dresses covered in lace. But it also had some toys that were broken, like a pedal car with only three wheels and an old tricycle without a seat. I don’t really know how to rate a store like that.”

“Mr. Fitzwilliam sounds like a bad businessman,” Godwin said. “Mixing nice things with junk.”

“Maybe not,” said Doris. “I don’t know anything about antiques, so maybe the things I thought were junk were really rare and costly. But anyway, there’s no need to make a big deal about it. This was an adventure, it’s over, and it’s not my problem any more. I did what I was asked to do, Mr. Fitzwilliam thanked me, and the statue is probably already in the hands of the buyer, so that’s the end of it.”

She turned to go. But Betsy said, “Just a second. Have you seen the latest edition of the
Excelsior Times
?”

“No, why? Oh, has it got a picture of me in it?”

“Well, sort of,” said Godwin, picking up a copy and opening it to an inside page. “And three paragraphs’ worth of story.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?” asked Doris, reaching for the paper. The published photograph had been taken from a rear angle that showed off her new curls but did little more than suggest she had cheekbones somewhere around in front. The focus of the photograph was the stone carving of the Buddha, sitting on the table. One of Doris’s hands was visible, holding an end of the rag, its raveled end hanging from her fingers.

“Oh, no!” said Doris. “The only photograph they published was of the back of my head!”

Betsy said, “That’s because the paper’s in black and white. All the pictures the reporter took of the fabric wouldn’t be any good without color.”

“Besides,” Godwin pointed out, “now you have a picture of the statue, the one thing you didn’t get to keep.”

“That’s true,” Doris admitted. She quickly read the story, which as usual for a newspaper story had almost as many errors as facts. Her name was given as Lois Valentine, and the article said that she’d spent two weeks in Thailand and that she’d brought the statue home for a friend named David Korvish.

Doris made a sound like
Bssshhh!
and tossed the paper onto the library table.

“No, no!” said Godwin. “You should keep this. Put it in the scrapbook you’re going to make about your trip.”

Doris went to pick it up, then saw a rumpled green cloth on the table. “Hey, that looks like the rag the statue was wrapped up in.”

“It is,” said Betsy. “I hope you don’t mind that I rescued it.”

“Why should I? But what do you want with it? It’s just a dirty old rag.”

“Yes, but it’s an old
silk
rag,” said Godwin, going to the table. “And look, that’s embroidery on it. Betsy’s been thinking maybe she can clean it up somehow.”

Doris came closer. “It’s embroidered? Well, so it is! And I can see now it was probably beautiful when it was new. But it’s all ragged along that edge, plus it looks like someone used it to wash windows.”

“Yes, it’s in bad shape,” said Betsy. “That’s one reason I haven’t done anything with it yet. I don’t want to ruin it completely.”

“Do you think it’s really old?” asked Doris. “Maybe it’s an antique.”

“No, I don’t think so. I’ve seen old silk, and old silk shatters—that’s what they call it when it splits up and down the warp. And you can see there’s no shattering on this.”

“Maybe it’s not really silk,” said Godwin.

“Maybe it’s not,” agreed Betsy. “But if it is, it’s probably less than fifty years old. I’m going to go looking on the Internet for ways to clean it. There’s no rush, which is a good thing because we’ve been really busy lately.”

Godwin leaned over the piece and sniffed. “It doesn’t have mildew, anyway. The embroidery is wonderful, and I love the pattern, so exotic.” The piece was rectangular, much longer than it was wide, and it featured stylized versions of birds and animals embroidered in what might be Celtic style. “I wonder what kind of bird that’s supposed to be,” he said, touching a leggy creature with a pointed beak and the merest suggestion of a long, curly tail. “It looks like a cross between an ostrich and a molting peacock. And what do you think, this one’s a tiger?” Along with pink flowers on curling vines, the animals went up and down the cloth, facing one another in mirror images.

Doris came to look over his shoulder. “But what about that frayed end?”

Godwin said, “Oh, we can just cut off loose threads and then a
little bit
of the end and turn a hem. The pattern doesn’t run off into the frayed part, so it’ll hardly be noticeable.” He ran a finger over the surface of the embroidery. “Nice feel. It’s all done in chain stitch.”

Doris bent for a closer look. “I think it’s going to be a lot of work,” she said. “Look right there, for example, the embroidery threads are broken. How could you fix that? Plus, you couldn’t match the colors exactly. And the stitching is so beautifully done, every stitch exactly the same—that will be hard to imitate.”

“We can do it,” Godwin said with his usual show of confidence.

Doris smiled at his assumption of a share in the project. “Good luck.”

She went upstairs to her apartment and put the little towel into her bathroom. Then she continued with the placement of her souvenirs. Elephant-headed Ganesha had been easy to place, he sat on the desk next to her laptop. The hat would make a nice lampshade; she’d take it to Leipold’s tomorrow. She went through her apartment holding up the silks, changing her mind every five minutes as she tried to decide on which wall to hang them, smiling to herself. Her little apartment was going to look like an upper-class Thai home when she was through.