A Novel (18 page)

Ansveld's son was behind the counter, wearing a pair of heavily smoked lenses through which he was studying a tiny piece of aging luxorite set into a gold ring. He nodded to Dahria as we came in, but said nothing. The shop was full of an oppressive and musty silence, broken only by the stentorian ticking of a grandfather clock. Those luxorite pieces that were unshaded produced a hard, constant light that made the barred window on the street look dim in comparison. At the end of the counter, now under a shroud, was the great typewriter. It looked not so much discarded as dead.

I wasn't used to shops, doing most of my purchasing at stalls in markets and in street-corner deals, but the extent to which we were left to browse at our leisure seemed unusual and deliberate. I didn't know if it was because people couldn't be harassed into spending vast amounts or because in such a place, discussing money was considered vulgar. But no one spoke to us for ten minutes, and when they did, it was a primly dressed maid offering tea.

Dahria declined for both of us, and began a desultory conversation about the standard of workmanship in the jewelry settings and how tastes had changed over the last decade. Ansveld Jr. was polite but bored and just this side of irritated. Dahria changed that by asking for a hand mirror so that she could try out some earrings. The luxorite grains set in their crystal pendants were small but bright, an almost white light that, with a matching pin to be worn in the hair, gave her a halo. It would have been an arresting effect on anyone. On Dahria, it created an angel. Even Ansveld Jr. stopped what he was doing to admire her.

“How much?” she asked simply.

Most of the merchandise was not priced. If you needed to ask, you couldn't afford it.

“Eleven thousand for the set,” said Ansveld Jr.

No one flinched, but for my part, that took an effort.

“I could sell the pieces individually,” said the proprietor, “but it would be a shame to break up so unified a collection, so the cost would be higher.”

“Of course,” said Dahria. “Eleven thousand seems more than fair.”

This was a barefaced lie, but she carried it off with aplomb, and Ansveld Jr.'s eyes got hungry.

“One sees so little luxorite that isn't overly familiar these days,” she added, still considering her reflection critically. “The same recycled pieces moving from house to house. I find their circulating so unpleasantly common, don't you? Like they are stocks, or servants, or sacks of coal moving around a marketplace. Quite distasteful.”

“Indeed, madam,” said the proprietor, “the material deserves better.”

“I heard of a Lani boy, no more than a street brat, going from shop to shop only last week.”

“He came in here!” exclaimed Ansveld Jr., startled out of his professional decorum by outrage. “Ratty little creature with burned fingers. Insisted on waiting to see my father. Said he had luxorite to sell!”

“You sent him packing, I hope,” said Dahria, showing nothing.

“Twice! He loitered in front of the store until I had the police move him on. Can you believe the cheek?”

I turned fractionally away so there was even less chance of him seeing my face, but inside, I was burning with anger and questions I wanted Dahria to ask.

“Did he have any?” Dahria asked. “Luxorite, I mean.”

“Well, that was what was so extraordinary!” said the proprietor, leaning in conspiratorially. “He did. I saw it with my own eyes. A small piece, no more than a few grains, but quite brilliant.”

“You mean … new?” Dahria asked, and the excitement in her voice was real.

“I've never seen newer,” he said. “It was, I assume, stolen.”

Dahria shot me a glance and I risked a nod.

Press him.

“What did it look like?”

“Well, as I said, the crystal itself was barely larger than a pinhead, but its light was hard and pure, as close to a factor zero as I have ever seen. Even at only a few grains, it was quite brilliant. I'll never forget watching that scruffy little boy open his hands—” He mimed the gesture wistfully, remembering. “You could almost
hear
the light, it was so clean and clear!”

“A single stone?”

“Yes.”

“Would you have heard if someone in town had been robbed?” Dahria asked.

“The luxorite community is quite small, madam,” said Ansveld Jr. “It is the nature of things in a market with a static amount of tradable product. As you so shrewdly observed, much of what is for sale has been circulating for years, and most of it I know by sight. Given time and access to my records, I could produce a listing of the current location of ninety percent of the luxorite sold in the last thirty years. Some has been kept quietly in old families, but it is the glory of the mineral that it attracts attention. What the boy had, I would swear, was unknown to any dealer in the city.”

“He wanted it appraised?” asked Dahria, rapt.

“He said he was prepared to sell it,” huffed Ansveld Jr., “but without papers of provenance and certification of ownership, that was impossible. I told the police to take him in for questioning, but the brat escaped.”

Dahria hesitated, unsure what to ask next, and I, balancing on those absurd heels, gestured quickly toward the clock.

“When was this?” asked Dahria.

“Waterday of last week.”

The day before Ansveld Sr. showed up in the Drowning, looking for Berrit.

She considered this, and her gaze strayed once more to me, hovering unnoticed by the door. I nodded sequentially toward the other luxorite dealers in the street outside, then turned my attention to a silver-topped cane in a stand, so Ansveld wouldn't see how hard I was listening.

“And did he try to sell the piece to any of your competitors?” Dahria asked, managing to sound merely intrigued.

“Well, that's the curious thing,” said Ansveld Jr. reflectively. “So far as I know, he did not venture into any shop but ours. I spoke to my neighbors. Several saw him hanging around, but he made no attempt to enter. Most peculiar.”

“Indeed,” said Dahria.

“That's not for sale,” he said suddenly, addressing me.

“I'm sorry?” I said, half turning toward him but trying to shield my face.

“That cane,” he explained. “The one with the fussy little one-horn emblem on the top. It's not for sale. Someone left it here. I assume my father was supposed to be setting a stone in it. The handle is quite intricate.”

I nodded, mute, and moved away from the cane.

“So,” said Dahria, carefully steering his attention back to her. “Forgive my gossiping, but has anyone bought anything new lately? I long to know what everyone will be talking about.”

“Well,” he said with a hint of glee. “You didn't hear it from me, but I've heard that Dowager Eileen Hamilton will be unveiling a new necklace this evening at the opera. I hear it is very fine, bought the moment it went on sale at one of my less salubrious competitors over the road.
Macinnes,
” he said with sour astonishment. “If you can believe that. When times are hard, people don't always ask too many questions. Anyway, the dowager must have snapped it up in an instant because I never even got a whiff of it. I'm agog to see it.”

He was momentarily transformed, shifting from a rather stuffy little shopkeeper to a delighted enthusiast.

“Assuming I haven't already,” he added slyly.

“You think it's the same piece the boy had?” Dahria asked. “That she got it from him?”

“Not directly, I'm sure,” said Ansveld Jr. “But Macinnes may have lied about not dealing with the boy. If not, it's a remarkable coincidence.
Two
previously unknown pieces in the Bar-Selehm market!” He clapped his hands together with rapture.

“Sounds delicious,” said Dahria. “I'll keep my eyes peeled for more. These, I will, I'm afraid, have to think about,” she said, unhooking the earrings. “But you have such a charming emporium that I will not be able to keep away for long.”

She said it with such grace, with such beatific elegance born as much from wealth, beauty, and privilege as from the luxorite glow around her face, that he did not even seem disappointed.

“It's a lovely thing, luxorite,” he said musingly. “I work with it every day but it never loses its appeal, somehow. My father understood that.” He tried to smile, but some other powerful feeling, a deep sorrow, ambushed it, contorted it into a grimace that was hard to look at. His jaw set and his eyes, which had been laughing only moments before, shone with unshed tears.

“I'm sorry for your loss,” said Dahria, surprised and uncomfortable.

“We did not see eye to eye on many things, my father and I,” said Ansveld Jr. “We argued a great deal. I wish now … But he loved luxorite, and not only because selling it had made him a very wealthy man. It's funny, isn't it?” he added thoughtfully. “Everyone knows that if they live long enough, they will see their parents die, but it still comes as a surprise. Turns you into a child again.” He blinked and tried to smile. “I expect the feeling passes.”

“It doesn't,” I said, the words coming out without anything like deliberation.

He gave me a look that was surprised, even indignant, but he couldn't keep it up. “No,” he said, managing the saddest smile I had ever seen. “I didn't really think it would.”

 

CHAPTER

17

“YOU WERE RIGHT,” GASPED
Dahria as soon as we had gotten a safe distance from the shop. “This is fun!”

She fanned herself extravagantly. She had given me a shrewd look at my strange connection with the shopkeeper over his absent father, but said nothing, and if I had seen something like understanding in her face, she had pushed it down and laced it up tight as her corset. Now she was beaming, and I, far from clear about our relationship, let the moment go, turning instead to the mystery at hand.

“So Berrit had a fragment of luxorite,” I mused, “but the Beacon hadn't been stolen yet, and no one reported any thefts, so where did he get it?”

“The boy must have had connections to dealers or thieves,” said Dahria.

“If so, they were new connections,” I said. “He was nobody in the Westside gang. He said he had friends in high places, but if so, he made those friends recently, right around the time he was traded to Morlak.”

“So we talk to this Morlak fellow,” said Dahria.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?” she demanded.

So Willinghouse hadn't told her. I thought for a moment, took a breath, and related what Morlak had tried to do. She stared at me, horrified, disgusted by a version of the world she had barely known existed. When I was done she said nothing, but I thought her sense of me had changed.

“I could speak to this Morlak without you,” she said at last.

“I don't think so,” I said.

“I'm capable of thinking for myself, you know!” she snapped. “I don't need you spoon-feeding me.”

“I just don't think he will respond to someone of your breeding,” I said carefully.

“And I think you just like being in charge for once,” she shot back.

“You're proposing to walk over to the headquarters of a street gang in the Numbers District dressed like that?” I demanded, my exasperation getting the better of me. “If you got out with merely a mugging, you'd be lucky.”

“So what would you have us do?”

I considered the street. I thought of Billy the pickpocket, and nodded toward Macinnes's place, where Dowager Hamilton had purchased her mysterious necklace. “Get me a half hour with the scullery maid in there.”

“How?”

“Any way you like,” I said. “You're in charge. And when we're done there, I suggest we get tickets for tonight's opera. It turns out I'm available.”

*   *   *

MACINNES'S SHOP, THOUGH ACROSS
the road from Ansveld's, was an entirely different kind of establishment. Though it justified its position on Crommerty Street through the sale of luxorite, it was clear that most of its trade was more mundane. Inside, it was less the elegant showroom we had just left and more a glorified pawnshop, dealing in watches and knives, firearms and pewter, porcelain and assorted statues, mostly plaster. Everything was kept inside metal cages, and though the merchandise was not so rich as at Ansveld's, the security measures were more conspicuous. A guard with a pistol and truncheon at his belt considered us closely as we entered. Despite the presence of luxorite—much of it amber and fading—parts of the shop stood in deep gloom, and large candles had been positioned around the store to make up for the absence of windows. A
NO COLOREDS
sign on the counter matched one in the shop window, but when I gave it a querulous nod, Dahria shook her head minutely.

A short man in shirtsleeves and a bowler hat, attracted by the ringing of the bell over the door, sauntered out from a back room and watched us appraisingly.

Dahria drew herself up, staring down the security guard, and led me to a corner cabinet, pulling me in close by my sleeve with one hand as she reached for the oversized candle with the other. To my astonishment, she proceeded to tip the candle toward me, spilling hot wax all down the front of my dress.

“Good gods!” she exclaimed contemptuously. “You clumsy wretch! Look at your pinafore! Why can't you watch what you are doing?”

The man in the hat began to bustle toward us. “Now, ladies,” he was saying. “Is there something I can do to help?”

“You can get the wax off this dress immediately!” Dahria announced with breathtaking arrogance.

“Not really my department,” said the man, who I took to be Macinnes himself. “I'm sure when you get home—”

“You think I'm going to walk through the street with a maid looking like this?” Dahria exclaimed, gesturing up and down my spattered pinafore. “See to it, man!”