“What did you buy, a key or a baggage check?”
Holloway looked at him sharply. “A key. I suppose this is all familiar country to you, but it’s new to me, brand new, and needless to say, I’m hoping that nothing remotely like it ever happens again.”
They entered the crowded building. Holloway had been fingering something in one of his pockets, and now he brought out a key to a coin locker. They began looking for the matching number, finding it finally in a secluded corridor on the lower level, near the incoming baggage carousels.
Holloway made a sound as though he had been rabbit-punched without warning. The door of the locker was sprung.
He pulled it open, looked inside, and said “Shit!” in a booming voice. “I’ve been fooled.”
He slammed the door furiously. It clanged open, shut, open again.
Shayne motioned him aside and examined the lock. The thin metal covering the bolt had been pried out with an edged tool, probably an ordinary screwdriver, and then the bolt had been forced back — a crude, unprofessional job.
Holloway, blowing, had one hand over his heart, as though to keep it from battering its way out.
“The situation’s still the same,” Shayne said. “Two people are still missing. The only difference is that you’re out some money. How much did it cost you?”
“Thirty-eight thousand.”
“I’d better hear about that.”
“A drink—”
“We have a choice of some noisy bars. Or if you want privacy I have booze and ice in my car.”
“Shayne, that letter was authentic! I know the girl, I know how she expresses herself. Somebody else found out about it and beat us to the locker.”
“There’s been a lot of breaking and entering out here lately.”
At the end of the corridor, still dwelling on the unfairness of what had just happened, Holloway started in the wrong direction. Shayne set him right. With a visible effort, the smaller man tried to get back inside his usual public personality. It returned gradually — the cocky walk, the tipped head, the cold stare.
“Are you going to help me get to the bottom of this, Shayne?”
Shayne didn’t answer.
They left the building. It was a long, zigzag walk to where Shayne had left his Buick. Holloway started several questions, but a look from Shayne stopped him before he went all the way to the question mark.
Shayne made drinks.
“I’m going to tape this conversation,” he said. “Don’t let it bother you. I may want to check on something later. Pre-Columbian art has never been one of my main subjects.”
Holloway was drinking straight Scotch without ice. He finished the first shot and Shayne refilled his glass.
“I’ve never been much of a drinker, either,” Holloway said. “I’m making up for it today. I suppose you have some agreement with Frieda about splitting the fee.”
“I’ll deal with you direct. The fee is ten percent of the selling price of the mask, on recovery of the fragment.”
Holloway flinched. “That’s high.”
When Shayne didn’t dispute this, he went on, “Unless you don’t recover, in which case I get ninety percent of nothing. Do you know how much we’re talking about, in round numbers?”
“Your ex-wife suggested half a million.”
The overgrown eyebrows went up and down. “You’ve been to Maxine!”
“Meri’s been in touch with her. They exchanged views about Professor Holloway and Toltec masks. Frieda was beginning to think that instead of starting for Fort Myers, Meri really started for Seminole Beach.”
Holloway brought his hand in smartly against his leg. “A conspiracy of women! Maxine. She’d like nothing better than to cut me into bite-size pieces and feed me to the sharks. I’m fed up with that entire sex.”
“How close did she come to the price?”
“A bit low,” Holloway said with a glint of satisfaction. “Not five hundred thousand. Six. Not that it means a thing unless I can deliver, but the mere fact that the offer has been made is a tremendous achievement. I won’t pretend that I’m indifferent to money. It’s a nice thing to have. But I think what gives me the most pleasure is that this puts the art of our hemisphere on a competitive basis with European easel painting, at long last. And I did it all with my little hatchet. Everything clicked, click, click, click. The Carpenter Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana — do you know it? They’ve had a fabulous new bequest from the Carpenter family, and my mask is the piece they need to put them up with the leaders. And now.” He gestured. “That bitch — those two bitches — Meri, Maxine—”
He drank.
“How much is it worth without the missing piece?”
“Peanuts. I’d hardly recover expenses.”
“Can you make the sale legally?”
“No problem. And would you mind turning off your tape recorder?”
Shayne snapped a switch on the dashboard.
Holloway continued, “I bought it from a Bogota dealer who frequently acts as broker for collectors in Colombia and Venezuela. The old landholding families are chronically short of cash. Estates have to be settled. I’ve used this man before, and he’s completely trustworthy. His principal’s grandfather purchased the mask on a trip to Mexico early in the century. And so on and so forth. Naturally this has all been trumped up out of nothing, to circumvent certain quibbling requirements controlling the international transport of art objects. Everybody knows I dug up the mask in Yucatan last winter. By everybody, I mean everybody in the art world. My Columbia man gives me a provenance for the piece in return for his commission on a fictitious sale. I paid duty, on a declared valuation of thirty-five hundred. And God, it’s a lovely thing, Shayne.”
“Frieda showed me a picture.”
“But when you actually see it! We were looking for a temple site that was reported by a Peabody expedition in 1910, but never surveyed or developed. We did considerable floundering around, and never did find it. A few broken stellae, a ballcourt. The weather was bad and our helicopter pilot couldn’t come for us, so to keep the men occupied, I had them do some random probes where one of the chicleros thought he’d seen stone work. And when the mask came up, Shayne—”
He paused, seeing the scene again as it happened. “It lit up the jungle. That was a holy experience for me. Really. In fragments, of course. I washed them in the river and fitted them together. Complete! A breathtaking thing. All right. I’ve found an object or two over the years, and I recorded them all dutifully and I have letters of thanks and acknowledgment from the National Museum of Anthropology, from the Parco de La Vente. I’ve framed the letters, and as for the objects — some jade vases, a fine ornamental urn — they’re in some dusty basement, jumbled together with hundreds of other pieces. And I made a vow, Shayne, when I looked at the mosaic mask glistening with drops of river water, that this one was going to be different. All the currents of my life came together. And what happened? Meri happened! I had to involve myself with a confused, neurotic girl. I realize now that I should have had nothing to do with her at all, or I should have been more attentive. She wanted the day to revolve around her. She liked to be made love to at odd hours, in odd places. She wanted me to jog. I have achieved a certain position in the academic community, and can you picture me jogging around the streets of Coral Gables wearing a sweat-suit? I said no to a few other things as well. She became huffy, and off she went, taking the fragment with her. I had some murderous thoughts. Visions of smashed cars, ambulances, corpses at the side of the road.”
He covered his glass when Shayne offered the bottle again.