Skin of the Wolf (12 page)

“Fire? That seems so mundane.”

“Perhaps not mundane as much as elemental. Another of the effects of the microbe is an increased vulnerability to fire. We’re, shall we say, more flammable than you. Our longevity depends upon cellular regeneration. Fire destroys soft tissue. There’s nothing left to regenerate.”

“And this is a sentence your leadership would impose?”

“You look horrified, and quite rightly. Yes, they would, and yes, it’s horrifying. Our lives are precious to us. Our enhanced senses and literally all the time in the world to explore their uses—ending a fellow Noantri’s experience of that is a decision never taken without long and somber deliberation. But it has been done, and the knowledge that it has is usually enough to cause even the most apostate among us to reconsider his or her path.”

Michael rubbed his eyes and looked away, out the kitchen window. Spencer didn’t know what Michael was seeing, but he thought it was not the brick wall of the building behind Spencer’s home.

“All right,” Michael said. “I don’t know how to think about this, Spencer. I want to know more. I want to know everything. At the same time I wish I’d never heard any of it. My own secret, Edward’s . . . Now this . . . It’s enough, it’s too much. But I can’t deal with it now, no matter what. Right now, I’ve got to find my brother.” He stood.

Spencer remained seated. “I do understand,” he said. “I’ve had centuries to get used to my own Changed existence. I shan’t impose myself. Last night I insisted on accompanying you out of concern for your weakened physical state. You do seem to have recovered admirably. Perhaps at a later date we can discuss the particularities of your . . . situation. I continue to believe I have gifts I might be able
to put at your service, but if you’d prefer to carry on alone at this point, I can appreciate why.”

Michael regarded Spencer with an unwavering gaze, which Spencer met. “No,” Michael said. “No, if you’re willing, I think I’d rather you came.”

A
starched, unsmiling woman led Livia and Thomas through a series of oddly bare rooms and down four stairs into the blossom-scented air of a greenhouse. “Please sit.” The “please” notwithstanding, this was less an invitation than an order. “Leave that chair free for Mr. Lane. He’ll be along soon.” She turned and trotted briskly up the stairs with the air of the stepmother abandoning Hansel and Gretel in the forest.

Livia and Thomas found places to sit that did not include the chair for Mr. Lane. The damp jungle aroma and lush shades of green contrasted sharply with the gray, icy morning visible through the foggy glass.

Livia lay her coat beside her on the love seat and smoothed her hair. She no longer wore yesterday evening’s black cashmere skirt and heeled boots; now it was heavy wool tweed and sensible shoes, and a down parka. She had, after all, spent the night in a tree.

“You’re sure no one—um, nothing—came near?” Thomas had asked when he arrived, handing her a paper cup of steaming coffee.

“I’m not sure, no.” She’d sipped, unimpressed with the thin and bitter coffee but grateful for the warmth. Cold, like every other natural phenomenon with the exception of fire, was harmless to a
Noantri. Some of Livia’s people—those from, say, Scandinavia, or the high plateaus of Peru—enjoyed icy winds and blade-sharp air. Livia, however, was Italian. She skied in the Alps, she skated on frozen lakes, but those were lively events of short duration. Cold as a long-term encompassing environment was not to her liking, at all. “But,” she said, “I didn’t sense anything out of the ordinary. No sounds or smells I wouldn’t have expected in a wooded residential area like this.”

“Can you detect a wolf?”

“I’m not sure I could. I don’t have experience with their scent, the sound of their breathing, anything like that. But the birds and animals would have noticed, for sure, and I’d have felt that. And I can tell you no one, and nothing, entered the house.”

“You’d have sensed that?”

Livia grinned. “They have an alarm.” She finished the coffee. “I didn’t detect anything worrisome when I got here, no panic, no blood. He hadn’t come before I arrived and he didn’t come during the night. We’re ahead of him, if he’s coming here at all.”

Now soft footfalls alerted Livia to the approach of their host. She stood, and Thomas, following her lead, did the same. A white-haired man, slightly stooped, wearing a suit, a tie, and very thick dark glasses, stopped momentarily in the doorway, then grasped the handrail and slowly took the stairs down into the sunroom. “Bradford Lane.” He extended a hand in their general direction, shook sharply once with each of them, and said, “Please sit down,” employing the same “please” they’d heard earlier. He strode creakily but with determination to the empty chair.

“Thank you for seeing us this early, Mr. Lane,” Livia began.

“I’m an old man, Dr. Pietro. The old don’t sleep well. Calcification of the pineal gland. You’ll find out. So I don’t care how early it is. That explains why I’m seeing you but not why you want to see
me. You say you’re here for the Indigenous Arts conference, yet you were ten minutes from my house at eight in the morning. You can’t be staying near here because there’s nowhere to stay, so you must have come up to see me without knowing whether I’d even let you in. So whatever your business, you think it’s important. You mentioned my Ohtahyohnee but not your interest in it nor how you know it’s mine. Very cagey. Calculated to make me curious. Congratulations, it worked. Though I hope it doesn’t mean Estelle’s breaking my trust after so many years. I’d hate to have to start doing business with Christie’s. Enlighten me, please.”

Well, all right then, thought Livia. “Sotheby’s hasn’t called you?”

“My pieces aren’t going to auction until tomorrow. Why would they call me?”

“They will, later in the day. They’re just being polite. I’m afraid the police may be calling, too. A woman was killed in Sotheby’s last night, Mr. Lane. Estelle Warner’s assistant. There’s some indication the killer was interested in some of the Native items, including your Ohtahyohnee
.
” Quickly, to be reassuring, she added, “Nothing was taken and nothing was damaged.”

Lane stiffened. “I— Killed? What do you mean, killed? Interested in the items, what does that mean? What happened?”

Astonishing, Livia thought, how it’s always the same. None of us, Unchanged or Noantri, can absorb the idea of unexpected death on first hearing. “What do you mean?” What could she mean? His mind was just playing for time. Such a human reaction.

“It’s not clear what happened. She was killed violently, in the storeroom where they keep items not on display yet. The police think it was a jilted lover, a stalker, something like that. Some of the boxes were open, including your Ohtahyohnee’s. They think that was accidental, that it happened in the struggle. I don’t agree, though.”

Bradford Lane sat silent a long time. “Don’t you?” he finally said. “And who are you to agree or disagree? Why are you delivering this news, and not Estelle? Dr. Pietro, you’d better tell me what’s really going on.”

“I’m an art historian and a friend of Estelle’s. I think that what happened at Sotheby’s has to do with your Ohtahyohnee
.
What the connection is,” she forestalled the question, “I don’t know. But I have to tell you, there’s been some talk around the conference about the mask’s authenticity.”

“Of course there has. No one’s ever seen anything like it.”

“That doesn’t make it real.”

“Its provenance does, though. I’m sure Estelle will show you that if she hasn’t already, which she may have done since she was willing to give you my name.”

“No, she wasn’t. That was something else I picked up at the conference. Deductive reasoning with some of my colleagues. It’s been quite a guessing game.”

“That’s ridiculous and I don’t believe you. It would be interesting to know why you’re lying, though.”

Livia said nothing.

“You got my name from someone, not from a guessing game.” Lane tapped the arm of his chair. “But as long as it wasn’t Estelle—and I’ll ask her later—I really don’t care.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Fine. The mask is real.”

“I have colleagues who don’t think so.”

“Then they won’t bid. But if rumors start in an effort to drive the price down, I can promise you I have lawyers who know their way around a slander suit.”

“You mistake me, Mr. Lane. I’d like the mask to be real and in
fact I think it is.” Thomas had started to stir uneasily as Livia strayed progressively further from the truth. “So would Father Kelly,” she said. “He’s also a historian, of the Church.”

“Are you?” Bradford Lane turned in Thomas’s direction. “And what’s your interest?”

“My interest,” Thomas echoed. He swallowed, and said, “Well, sir, I haven’t seen the provenance, either, but I understand it begins with a Jesuit.”

Oh, not bad,
thought Livia.

Lane barked a laugh. “And so you want to grab the Ohtahyohnee
for the Church? That’s a damn odd idea of repatriating. You priests, what an audacious crowd.”

“No, no,” said Thomas. “I mean, if it’s repatriated anywhere, shouldn’t it be to one of the Iroquois nations?” He radiated such an air of sincerity that Livia had to suppress a smile. “I’m only interested in Father Ravenelle.”

“Ravenelle? I don’t know anything about him. Too bad, dead end. All I know is that he gave the mask to a friend named Liam Hammill, whose family listed it in their household inventory forty years later and kept it, generation to generation, for the next two hundred and fifty years. Until I bought it in 1965. That’s three hundred unbroken years, which is usually provenance enough in this field. If the Iroquois want it, let them sue me.”

“Mr. Lane,” said Livia, “how can you be sure the mask you bought was authentic? Hadn’t been substituted?”

“In 1965? Are you really asking? I thought you were an expert. Here for the conference.”

“From Italy. My field’s tangentially related but there’s a lot I don’t know.”

“Ha!” Lane slapped the arm of his chair. “I knew it! I never heard of you and I’ve read pretty much everyone. What’s your real field?”

“Early representations of the Americas in European art.”

“Oh, God, such crap. It’s mostly awful, you have to admit.”

“Interesting to study, though. But the mask . . . ?”

“You don’t agree. You like those silly here-be-monsters paintings. Well, it’s your funeral. Indians weren’t a hot commodity in ’65, especially the Eastern tribes. Navajo silver, Seminole beadwork, maybe a little, but woodlands baskets, carvings, forget it. No one was collecting, just a few cranks like me. Before that—in the two hundred and fifty
years
before that—there was even less interest. I bought that Ohtahyohnee
from a Hammill who was clearing old family junk out of the attic. That was my collecting secret, in case anyone wants to know. Yard sales, fire sales, pawnshops, Goodwill. Why the hell the Hammills had even kept the mask, no one seems to know, except that the Irish never bury their dead and great-great-great-great-whatever-grandfather Liam had made it a point in his will that the thing was important. But the depreciated third-rate Hammill I came across no longer gave a damn. I hope Liam’s haunting him. Dr. Pietro, a lot of what I acquired over the years—and curated and preserved and saved from the landfill—were the kinds of things burned as primitive garbage by Europeans so they could substitute their own primitive garbage. Which is the long way of saying, for what I paid for that mask, it wouldn’t have been worth a forger’s time.”

“It is now. I’ve been told it’s estimated at seven million dollars.”

“Talk to Vincent van Gogh’s brother. There was no serious market for Indian art until about twenty years ago. I promise you, for the last twenty years I’ve known where that mask has been every minute
of every day. Now suddenly the market’s booming and I’m selling. Aren’t I a lucky man? And if you’re suggesting I could have had it forged myself, which of course I could have, I’ll throw you out.”

“I wasn’t,” said Livia. “There would be only two reasons to do that. One, to sell it twice. But though the Native art market has grown, it’s still a small world. You wouldn’t get away with a double sale of an item this unique and you certainly know that. The other reason would be to rake in your seven million dollars but still be able to enjoy the work yourself. I can’t help noticing, though, that your walls and shelves are pretty empty. For a man who’s supposed to be a major collector, there’s not much collection here.”

Livia caught Thomas’s eye as she said that. He nodded; he’d noticed, too, then. She glanced at Bradford Lane. He didn’t catch her eye. Or Thomas’s. Or, she realized, anyone’s, anymore.

“No,” Lane said, his voice dispirited. “Very little is left. As I’m sure you’ve discerned by now, I’m nearly blind. Another of the disasters of age.” He paused. “Whatever you say about the value of the Ohtahyohnee, I bought it for its beauty and I made time to admire it, and my other pieces, every day of my life. Until I was unable to see them any longer. After that, what was the point? I began selling things off. The Ohtahyohnee is among the last to go.”

“I’m sorry. It must be hard.”

“Oh, spare me the pity. I had a good run. I was whole until I was eighty-eight. How many people can say that? Frankly, the power of that Ohtahyohnee’s so tremendous I might still be holding on to it if we hadn’t had a fire in the house last year. Nothing was damaged, but it was a wake-up call. Fire’s every collector’s worst nightmare. You balance the risk of calamity against the joy of living with beauty. Then a lamp cord shorts and your house is burning and you realize
all that beauty could have been destroyed, and you? You haven’t seen any of it for years anyway. I called Estelle the next morning.”

“I’m so sorry,” Livia said again. “Not pity, just a statement of fact.”

“Yes, well, in that case, thank you. Now you’d better leave. Hilda will be here any minute to tell you I’m tired. I’m not. But I told her half an hour with you would be enough. I think it has been. Based on what you said, I’m likely to be dealing with Estelle and probably the police starting any minute now and after that I will be tired.”

“Mr. Lane, there’s one more thing.”

“Does there have to be?”

“I’m afraid so. As I said, I think whoever killed Estelle’s assistant was interested in your Ohtahyohnee
.
It’s possible he decided it’s not the authentic one, which would be why he left it behind. If so, he might come looking for the real one.”

“He might come here, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“And kill me, too, when he doesn’t find it?”

“That’s what I’m worried about, yes.”

Bradford Lane laughed. “He’s welcome to it! First, I find your reasoning faulty, but let’s say I accept it so we don’t prolong this conversation. In that case: second, I’m a rich old blind man living alone with a housekeeper. It’s possible someone might get onto the grounds but this house is protected like Fort Knox.”

“We got in.”

“If Hilda hadn’t liked your looks through the security camera you wouldn’t have. She’s an excellent judge of character. With, by the way, a pistol permit. And a pistol. And third, I’m an old blind man who finds being rich less and less of a comfort. I’m arthritic, I
have gout, I take nine pills a day. If I had the stones I’d kill myself but I’m a coward and Hilda won’t tell me where she keeps the gun. She’s very devout, you see. Makes a novena every day, or whatever the hell it is she does, and she thinks suicide is a sin. Ask me, mine would be a gift not just to myself, but to the world.”

“Sir—”

“Oh, put a sock in it, Father. I’ve heard the arguments and they’re all bunk. If this killer does get in, if he won’t believe there’s no other mask and if he gets angry enough about it to kill me, then bravo. And Hilda will shoot him, and bravo to her, too. Now, please leave. I’d like to sit here for a while and remember what it was like when the Ohtahyohnee hung on that wall. The moisture in here was good for the wood. Right there, it was. Now I can’t even see the wall anymore. Dammit. It’s a beautiful piece.”