“Never heard of it.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s one of the smallest of the Slavic nations, north of Czechoslovakia. For all I know it was a part of Poland at one time; most of those countries were. The point is, it’s a nation on the other side of the iron curtain, so of course we were somewhat startled to get this order from them. The satellite nations are encouraged to deal with the Soviet Union, you know.”
“No news reports,” Parker answered. “Just tell the story.”
“I’m trying to give you the background.”
Harrow was beginning to get petulant. Parker shrugged. Over on the bed, Bett was smiling dreamily at the ceiling.
“It’s turned out,” said Harrow, plunging on with his story, “that this was one of the de-Stalinization periods and Klastrava was taking advantage of the milder climate to do some of its purchasing in the more competitively priced Western market. Needless to say, we never sold them any more planes, but in the process of that sale I met a gentleman named Kapor, from the Klastravian embassy. What Kapor’s normal duties are I don’t know, but at the time he was handling the negotiations for the sale of the planes. I met him, as I say, and we discovered we had quite a bit in common—”
This set the daughter to laughing again, and Harrow glared at her. Then, before Parker could say anything to hurry him along, he went quickly back to his story. “At any rate, he was a house guest in my home two or three times, and once or twice when I was in Washington he invited me to stay with him. And it turned out that he too has a small collection of statuary, but of no particular value. However, his collection did include an alabaster figure of a weeping monk, approximately sixteen inches high.”
Harrow smiled broadly, and rubbed his hands together. “I suspected what it must be at once, and learned that Kapor had no idea that it was anything more than an interesting piece of early-fifteenth-century statuary. I also discovered where he’d bought it. I made discreet inquiries, and gradually pieced together this little monk’s history, working backward, or course, to its original home in Dijon.”
“I don’t need all that,” Parker interrupted. Harrow seemed ready to play the romantic all week.
“Let him go, Chuck,” Bett said. “He’s just bubbling over to tell you all about it.”
“The information cost me quite a bit,” Harrow added defensively. “At one point, I even had to hire a French private investigator to check on a piece of information for me.”
Parker shrugged.
“At any rate,” said Harrow, hurrying now in an attempt to keep Parker from interrupting, “this particular statue was one of those looted in 1795, when revolutionaries desecrated the tomb. Who stole it I have no idea, but it did turn up in Quebec as a result of the Rebellion of 1837. Economic reprisals against one Jacques Rommelle, a follower of Louis Joseph Papineau, forced him to sell most of his possessions and move to Nova Scotia. Among the household goods sold was this small alabaster statuette. Rommelle had a knack for aligning himself with the wrong people. He’d left France for Canada in 1795, primarily because he was one of the strongest supporters of Robespierre. It’s possible Rommelle personally stole the statue from Dijon, but unlikely, because he’d lived most of his life in Rennes, which is in Brittany, on the other side of France. I think it more likely that the original looter was killed during the Terror, and that Rommelle was the second owner.”
He paused, cleared his throat, rubbed his hands together briskly, and smiled. “There’s such a fascination in this,” he said. “At any rate, Rommelle sold the statue in 1838, to a dealer named Smythe. Smythe didn’t manage to resell it, and when he died in 1852, his business was inherited by a grandson who had emigrated to the United States and was at the time living in Atlanta. The grandson sold most of what he’d inherited but he did hold on to a few items he liked, among them the statue of the weeping monk, but it was stolen by a Captain Goodebloode, a Union cavalry officer in 1864, when General Sherman’s army captured the city. Captain Goodebloode brought the statue to Boston, where it remained in the family till 1932, when the Goodebloode finances were depleted by the depression, and the contents of the ancestral house were sold at auction. A Miss Cannel purchased the statue in Boston and brought it home to Wittburg, a small town in upstate New York, where, for some reason best known to herself, she was attempting to set up a museum. If she’d had the wit to hire a professional curator, of course, the game would have been up right then, but this was a one-woman museum, and Miss Cannel apparently had more money than sense. At any rate, the statue went into the museum and when Miss Cannel died in 1953, the entire contents of the museum were sold to various dealers. One of them, in 1955, sold the statuette to Lepas Kapor. Finis.”
Harrow looked back and forth from Parker to his daughter, beaming and happy. “A fascinating history,” he said, dwelling on the words, “a fascinating history. A bloody revolution, a somewhat less bloody rebellion, a civil war, an economic crash — all have touched this small statue and influenced its destiny. It has traveled from France to Canada to Atlanta to Boston and to a provincial upstate New York town. Now it is in Washington. It has been stolen at least twice, and possibly three times, and now it is to be stolen again. A fascinating, fascinating history.”
“Yeah,” said Parker. He lit a cigarette and threw the match toward an ashtray. “The point is, you want me to get it for you.”
“Exactly. I will give you, of course, full particulars—”
“What’s in it for me?”
“What? Oh.” Harrow looked puzzled for a second, but now he smiled radiantly. “Of course, you expect to be paid. You’ll get the gun, for one thing, and a certain sum of money.”
“What sum?”
Harrow sucked on his cheek, studying Parker’s face. Finally, he said, “Five thousand dollars. In cash.”
“No.”
Harrow raised his eyebrows. “No? Mr. Willis, I consider the gun to be the major item of payment. Any cash would be in the nature of a bonus.”
“Fifty thousand,” Parker said.
“Good God! You aren’t serious?”
Parker shrugged, and waited.
“Mr. Willis, I could buy the statuette for little more than that. I’ve told you, the present owner has no idea—”
“You can’t buy it at all,” Parker said, “or you would.”
“Well.” Harrow pursed his lips, glanced with an aggrieved look at his daughter, sucked on his cheek again, drummed his fingers on the book in his lap. “I’ll go to ten thousand, Mr. Willis. Absolutely my top offer. Believe me, the statuette is worth no more than that to me.”
“I’m not bargaining,” Parker replied. “Fifty thousand or get out.”
“And shall we go to the police, Mr. Willis? Shall we go to the police?”
Parker got to his feet, went over to the closet, and took out a suitcase. He opened it on the bed and turned to the dresser.
Harrow said, “Very well. Twenty-five. Half now, and the balance when you get the statuette.”
Parker opened the top dresser drawer and began transferring shirts to the suitcase.
Harrow watched him a minute longer, and Bett watched them both. The father was frowning, the daughter smiling.
“Thirty-five.”
Parker started on the second drawer.
“Damn it, man, we have the gun!”
Bett said, “Give up, Dad, he won’t change his mind.”
“Ridiculous,” Harrow said. “Absurd. We have him over a barrel.” He frowned in petulance at Parker. “All right. All right, stop that asinine packing, you’re not fooling anyone.”