Moving Target (35 page)

Pretending reluctance, muttering, he stopped trying to pull her farther down the aisle. She planted her feet and looked past the shoulder of a worn tweed jacket to the page under discussion. He glanced at the page the gently crazed exhibitor was trying to sell to a customer who also wore an exhibitor’s badge. More exhibitors swapped goods at these events than sold them outright to walk-ins.

“I’d be willing to talk about a trade for your fourteenth-century leaf from a French Epistle Lectionary,” said the exhibitor. A smudged badge with the words
REGGIE SMYTHE
on it had been fastened crookedly to the man’s suit coat.

“I’ll bet you would be,” said the customer, unimpressed. “But if you throw in that damaged leaf from Chartier’s ‘Le livre des quatre dames’ we might have something to talk about.”

“Damaged!” Smythe stepped back as though he had been struck. His shaggy salt-and-pepper hair fairly bristled with disdain. “Only a cretin would consider the normal, beautiful marks made by the passage of time and use on vellum as damage.”

The other man shrugged. “If you haven’t moved either of these by closing time on Sunday, look me up. I’m over by the exit sign on aisle G.”

Smythe smiled grimly and turned to Erik and Serena, ignoring the other man who, despite his words, was still hanging around and looking at the leaf. “Lovely, isn’t it? Would you like to examine it more closely?”

“You sell anything yet?” came faintly from another aisle.

“No, thanks,” Erik said before Serena could speak. Then he thought, what the hell, nothing ventured nothing gained. Niall would faint at the almost direct approach, but Niall wasn’t here. “My aunt is an antiques nut. You have any early twelfth-century pages written in the Insular Celtic style? Secular, not ecclesiastical.” He spoke slowly, with the air of a man who has carefully memorized what he is supposed to look for.

“Secular? No.”

“How about any, uh, palimps—palimpsests?” Artfully he stumbled over the unusual word.

“Partial or entire?” Smythe asked, smiling genially.

“Either one is fine, I guess. She didn’t say.”

“Secular?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Age?”

“Hell, I don’t care,” Erik said easily, “but she’s excited about fifteenth-century illumination.” He shrugged. “I guess it’s nice enough, if you go for that sort of thing.”

Fifteenth-century illumination was the style he had found on all but one of the overwritten pages he had tracked down from the Book of the Learned.

“
Nice.
” Smythe winced. “Um, yes. Fifteenth-century illumination is considered by many to be the peak of the illuminator’s art.” He cleared his throat and ducked beneath the counter. He emerged with a cardboard carton. Inside, like pictures in colorful cardboard frames, there was a batch of vellum leaves of various ages, quality, and condition. “These,” he said, selecting quickly, “are what you’re looking for.”

Erik took the box, hefted it, and decided that it was time for his fallback position: screw subtlety. He ignored Smythe’s recommendations and began flipping through the framed leaves with a speed that said either he knew exactly what he was looking for or he didn’t care about what he was seeing. He left it to Smythe to decide which.

Serena waited until Erik was nearly through the stack before she gave up being polite and leaned in over his shoulder to see for herself the flashing bits of gold and color and calligraphy. When he felt her interest—and her warm breath on his neck—he commented on the pieces almost as quickly as he could flip through them. He had concluded he wouldn’t find anything important in this booth by playing dumb. Reggie was a bottom feeder.

“School exercise,” Erik said curtly about one crudely written page. “He had a long way to go for a passing grade.”

“Thirteenth century, not fifteenth.”

“Wonder who mixed his colors? Looks like he used urine instead of vinegar, and he’d been drinking too much milk.”

The leaf whipped by before Serena could do much more than register a rather sickly, faded green.

“Lampblack ink, not oak gall and iron. Wrong for the purported time and place. Matches the drawing, though. Inept.”

Smythe glanced at the leaf in question and didn’t argue. He had taken it in trade along with several quite nice fourteenth-century leaves. Win some, lose some.

“Idiot. He used gold paint before the other colors instead of after. Must have thought he was working with gold foil. Bet his teacher whacked his knuckles but good over that one.”

Two leaves whipped by, leaving the last one.

“Could have used a better lunellum,” Erik said, dismissing the last leaf.

“A what?” Serena asked, leaning in even more.

He took a breath that tasted of sweet woman. Above the scarf her neck looked as smooth as cream. It had felt just as rich on his tongue.

“A lunellum is the curved knife they used to scrape the hide clean,” he said absently, breathing deeply again, savoring her nearness, wondering if the scarf would mind being bitten. Gently, of course. The odd thought made him smile. “This vellum looks like it was chewed up and spit out.”

The exhibitor flinched but didn’t disagree. It was a truly ragged example of the art.

“The good news is that the illuminator was obviously still learning his trade, so a piece of good vellum wasn’t wasted on an incompetent artist,” Erik said.

He wondered if he was going to have to question Reggie outright about the sheet he had listed for sale on the Internet. Or maybe the sheet had already been sold.

Damn.

“So far these aren’t palimpsests so much as erased and written-over school exercises,” Erik said bluntly. “Do you have anything better or are you wasting my time?”

Without a word Smythe went to another box. This one was slimmer and the pages were stored flat within their cardboard frames. Smythe opened the box carefully.

Serena’s breath went out in a rush that stirred the hair near Erik’s ear and made his heart kick over in double time.

“Gorgeous,” she said. “Not my favorite style, but gorgeous all the same.” She looked at the sticker in the corner of the frame: $1,100.

Erik didn’t say a word. He simply speared the exhibitor with a glance. “What’s wrong with it?”

“What do you mean?” Smythe asked.

“Get real. This looks like the work of the Spanish Forger. If it is, you wouldn’t be hiding it in a box.”

The exhibitor cleared his throat and gave up hoping that this customer didn’t know a whole lot about illuminated manuscripts. “I thought it was, too, until I put it up against some originals. If one can call a forgery an original, that is.”

“Do you have any other pages like it?” Erik asked. “I like to have more than one to choose from.”

“No, not with me.”

“In your shop?”

Reggie tugged uselessly at his crooked name badge. “Actually, I don’t have any like this. I’ve sold one or two through the years.” To be precise, he had sold this page before, but he didn’t think it was necessary to be precise. No point in confusing the client.

Erik could have told him when and where the sheet had been sold before, but what he wanted to know was the oldest source. The first person to put the sheet on the market. That was the person he wanted to talk to. “Where did you get anything like this sheet in the beginning?”

“At the time, I was buying from a lot of estate sales, the kind that don’t have a real inventory because the goods aren’t worth the effort.”

“Can you remember the first time you saw a page like this?”

Reggie looked at Erik. “Young man, I’ve been in the business for thirty-five years. It’s hardly likely that I would remember a page as insignificant as this, is it?”

“Only if you got burned.”

“If I did, I didn’t know it at the time.” Pointedly, he went back to the page at hand. “I’m guessing this is a pastiche drawn from the Spanish Forger’s work. An angel from one page. A castle from another. A dragon from a third. A Madonna from a fourth. Excellent artwork, but not, I’m afraid, authentic. Quite a beautiful capital F, though, don’t you agree? Great depth and balance despite the, er, eclectic nature of the composition.”

“A forged pastiche of authentic forgeries,” Serena said under her breath. “I’m getting another headache.”

“What about the text beneath?” Erik asked.

“Secular. From what I can tell, it’s probably twelfth-century. That’s why I brought it out. This box is for, er, special buyers with particular needs.”

Erik wondered if “special” was another word for stupid. Or “dishonest.” But it wasn’t his problem. Finding out if this leaf had been cut from the Book of the Learned was. “Did you put it under a lamp?”

Smythe didn’t ask what kind of lamp. UV was the only one that made sense in this context. “Yes. There was a faint trace of an initial beneath. Another F, perhaps—or a B.”

Or an E and an S combined.

But Erik didn’t say it aloud. “Text?”

“No. This was probably cut from a practice sheet or from the extra sheets at the front or back of a manuscript.”

“Forgers do it all the time,” Erik agreed. “That way the vellum, at least, is the right age.”

“But if vellum was so valuable, why did the original owners waste it on blank pages?” Serena asked.

“Remember how pages came in those days, one full hide at a time?”

She nodded.

“The hide could be folded to make any number of smaller and smaller pages in multiples of two, four, or eight. Today printers still make pages in multiples, called gathers or quires, which means you end up with blank pages if the text doesn’t come out even.”

She nodded again.

“It happened more often in the past. A lot of times there simply wasn’t enough text to fill all the pages of a gather,” Erik said. “Or sometimes books were gathered but not finished. And sometimes the presence of blank pages at the front and back of a manuscript was a statement of the importance of the book itself. An early example of conspicuous consumption.”

An old image came to Serena, twisting like a darkly glittering current through her memory. “You mean like a book cover of hammered gold set with rubies and sapphires and pearls and either rock crystal or badly cut diamonds? With designs that are—”

Erik went still for an instant, then said across her words, “Yeah, just like the one we saw at the Huntington.” Before she could object that they hadn’t even been to the Huntington, he turned to Smythe. “Two hundred.”

“Eight,” Smythe said automatically.

“Try again. This isn’t worth shit to a collector.” Erik stroked the side of Serena’s cheek and slid his fingers beneath the silky scarf, silently asking her to play along. “I’m only buying it because my fiancée thinks it’s pretty and I forgot her birthday last week.”

Serena bit the inside of her lip so she wouldn’t laugh out loud. Slowly she rubbed her cheek against his palm and batted her eyelashes at him like a good little fiancée. “You’re so sweet. But you don’t have to buy me anything. I meant it when I said I wasn’t mad.”

“For you, darling, it’s a pleasure.” Erik dropped his hand and began flipping through the few leaves in the box. Nothing stirred his interest.

“Five hundred,” Smythe said quickly, sensing a sale slipping away.

“Two-fifty.”

“Would you like it wrapped?”

Erik nodded curtly, paid for the leaf in cash, and grabbed Serena’s arm. He pulled her a few steps away where no one could overhear them and demanded, “Where did you see a book cover with jewels and hammered gold?”

Serena thought the clarity and intensity of Erik’s eyes would be really attractive if they weren’t aimed at her in something close to anger and accusation. But they were.

“I—just an old memory, that’s all. Probably from school.”

But neither of them believed it.

“Was it a Baroque style, or full of fleurs-de-lis, or plain or fancy or—”

“It was more Celtic than anything else,” she said. “Bold yet intricate. Like the initials E and S on my pages, but not the initials if you know what I mean.”

“Could you draw it?”

“I could try. Why?”

“How old is your memory? As old as the memory of the intertwined initials?”

She quickly saw his point. “You think I saw this cover at the same time.”

“I think if I put all that work into a manuscript, I or one of my descendants might just decorate the hell out of it as a way to prove its importance.”

Serena closed her eyes and tried to recall the memory more clearly. The harder she tried, the more vague the memory became. She made a sound of frustration rather like an angry cat. “I’m sorry. I can’t help any more than that. I just can’t see it.”

He wanted to push her but sensed it wouldn’t do any good. “Let’s look at some more leaves. Maybe it will jog your memory.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“We’ll search the databases at Rarities.”

“What if—”

“What if we die tomorrow?” he cut in impatiently, then wished he had bitten his tongue instead.

“You’re so comforting.”

“Yeah,” he said, disgusted. “A regular snuggly bear.” He gave her a fast, fierce kiss. “Come on. There’s a lot of crap to look at and not much time.”

“Before we die?” she shot back sardonically.

He didn’t answer. He had just seen someone who looked like the file photo of Ed Heller.

H
eller was pretty sure Erik North had made him. Wallace had warned him that Erik was tricky, but Heller hadn’t believed it. Chrissake, the guy was a friggin’ scholar. Even worse, a nancy-boy artist. Wallace must have been half-asleep to get caught on that cliff.

But Heller had to admit that Erik had real quick eyes.

The good news was that all Heller had to do was make a log of who Erik and Serena met at the fair, interview anyone they talked to without making any fuss, and tuck the targets in bed at the Retreat. Same thing tomorrow. No sweat. The dude with the bad hair—Smythe, Reginald, called Reggie, white male, Caucasian, about fifty years old, Boston residence, divorced—had been more than happy to talk about anything, including what he had just sold to the young man who knew a lot more about manuscripts than he had let on at first.