Page 19 of The Children of Eve

“Just in case of what?” asked Schroeder.

“Just in case I was asked to prove they weren’t originals.”

“And why would that be a problem?”

“Look, I travel a lot in Latin America. I love the people, the landscape, the food, but most of all, I love the history. I know it’s illegal to export pre-Hispanic artifacts without a license, though been offered the opportunity to acquire items under the counter more than once. I don’t know a regular visitor who hasn’t.”

“And you’ve never accepted?”

Bilas decided he’d said enough.

“Please,” he said, “just tell me what this is about.”

Schroeder and Flores surrendered the floor to Mr. Somber.

“My name is Morgensen,” he said. “I’m attached to the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, specifically the UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage. Mr. Bilas, it’s my opinion that only two of those Moche ceramics are replicas. The rest are originals.”

“That can’t be right,” said Bilas.

“I’m afraid it is.”

“But you said it was just your opinion. You could be mistaken.”

“I don’t believe so.”

Bilas shook his head in bewilderment.

“Huh,” he said. “Well, what do you know.”

“Actually,” said Flores, “we’re more interested in whatyouknow,specifically about a pair of Nazca mantas concealed behind the padding of your suitcase.”

Which was when Roland Bilas went from suspecting he might be screwed to knowing for sure that he was.

“I’d like to speak to a lawyer,” he said. “Right now.”

CHAPTERXV

Howie’s proximity to the highway meant that I was back in Scarborough in the time it took the radio to play only a couple of songs, none memorable enough to hum along with or offensive enough to turn off. Once home, I made a mug of instant coffee, took it to my office, and read through the material that Zetta Nadeau had provided about her missing boyfriend. It didn’t amount to much. Riggins had an account with a bank in Portland, but it contained only a few hundred dollars. I could try to have the account monitored, which would reveal when and where any withdrawals were made, but gaining access would be expensive and illegal, and I preferred not to go down that road unless absolutely necessary. The rest of the paperwork related to his employment at BrightBlown and not much else. I searched in vain for a photocopy of his driver’s license, and none of the paperwork, not even the BrightBlown material, included Riggins’s social security number. Either he’d stored the critical material—military discharge papers, birth certificate, photos, his dad’s old wristwatch, a lock of his mother’s hair—back at Zetta’s place and she’d missed it, or he was keeping it elsewhere. I was leaning toward the second option. Like Zetta said, Wyatt Riggins was a man who didn’t like to leave a trail.

Zetta had declined to give the Nokia to me, which was fine. Not much could be gleaned from it anyway, and maybe she was hoping Rigginsmight call, if only in an effort to establish whether anyone had found it. But I doubted the phone would ever ring again. The Nokia had served its function. It had alerted Riggins to an approaching threat, which raised two issues: first, the nature of that threat, and second, whether it was still heading in this direction.

Because if someone was hunting for Wyatt Riggins, Portland was the last place in which he’d been seen.

IN THE MARSHES,in the moonlight, Jennifer Parker listened. The children were calling out again, the same words repeated like an incantation or a summoning, howling like animals desperate to be found.

no, not that alone, she thought.

Desperate to be reunited.

CHAPTERXVI

In a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, two men had just finished dinner, consuming between them a massive cowboy rib eye with pepper sauce and sides. They were now making a pair of brandies last while waiting for their arteries to recover. They had also drunk two glasses of red wine—less than they might have preferred because they had business to conduct the following day, business that involved some driving, thinking, and negotiating, all activities better undertaken with a clear head.

Aldo Bern was, at best, ambivalent about St. Louis and tried to give it as wide a berth as possible, which was easy when a man put his mind to it. On the other hand, he did like Olive + Oak out in Webster Groves, which meant the city and its environs had at least one redeeming feature. If his sixty-plus years on earth had given Bern any insights worth sharing—and the older he got, the more he had his doubts—among them was that it was a whole lot harder to maintain a halfway decent restaurant than people seemed to think, and really hard to operate a great one. After centuries of trying, a man was still more likely to be served an average meal than a good one. Bern didn’t know whether Olive + Oak qualified as a great restaurant in the minds of those who measured the distance between the silverware to make sure it lined up and dined with a notebook to hand, but by his standards, it was damn fine.

As for his companion, Bern figured that he’d probably enjoyed the experience as well, though with Devin it could be difficult to tell. Devin Vaughn went through life like someone had severed his smile muscles, and he kept compliments to a minimum, but it was widely accepted that he was more highbrow than the criminal norm. Devin counted as cultured not only in the circles in which he and Bern moved—where reading more than the sports pages and the funnies qualified you as an intellectual—but also in wider society. Devin had a library that was more than a shelf long, collected art that didn’t involve dogs playing poker, and always dressed as though he was either going to or coming from somewhere more formal. He kept his shoes shined, his clothes pressed, and had never been known to wear denim, or not since he’d passed thirty. In the past, those habits had led some less-enlightened associates to question his sexuality, but nobody did that anymore. The ones who used to had learned their lesson fast, and at Devin’s hands.

A young woman passed their table, tightly packaged and barely old enough to drink legally. Bern’s eyes flicked toward her: he was only human, even if he could have passed for her grandfather. Mercifully, Devin’s eyes didn’t stray from the table. Since the breakup of his marriage, he’d begun sleeping with girls who’d been born only this century, an indulgence Bern hoped he’d tire of before too long, since the next step was marrying one of them. In the eighties, Bern had spent a few years on the West Coast working under Devin’s father, God rest his soul, when they were both younger men on the make, and a ready supply of coke could gain a man entry to all the best parties. The experience had taught Bern never to be a user, only a seller, and that while sleeping with much younger women was nice work if you could get it, marrying them was no course of action for a sensible man, not unless he aspired to bleed himself dry with future alimony payments.

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