Chapter 4

"Nineteen eleven," Wil said again, and this time he said it to the room.

Two hundred faces came around. The woman in pearls set her champagne down on a cocktail table without looking at it. The dealer in the bolo tie stood all the way up.

Reinhardt's hand stayed on Wil's chest, but his head turned, and Wil watched him do the arithmetic.

"You printed 1912," Wil said. "That came off a newspaper piece from 1968, and the man who wrote it never took the lid off. The builder's stamp is inside the swell box, under the third brace, in pencil. Nineteen eleven."

Marisol Beaudry's gavel hung an inch above its block.

"The fifth pipe is wrong in your notes too," Wil said. "It isn't original. I replaced it in 1974 with cypress out of the old chapel at Bayou Goula after the fire. That's why it stands proud - the bore's a thirty-second wider than the rest, and it always will be."

Somebody in the fourth row said, quietly, "That's right. That's right, the Goula fire was seventy-three."

Reinhardt turned back. His face had gone smooth again, which was worse.

"He's a picker," he said, to the room, pleasantly. "They do this. They come in with a story about a piece, and then they want a finder's fee. It's a shakedown with a nice accent."

"I don't want a fee."

"Then you want something." Reinhardt lifted his chin toward the left wall. "Dupree."

The security man came off the wall. He was older than Reinhardt, wide through the shoulders, and he took Wil's arm above the elbow with a courtesy that made it worse - a grip that said, I'm sorry about this, and also, I'm going to do it.

"Mr. Thibodeaux is trespassing," Reinhardt said. "Walk him to Canal Street."

Wil's wire-rim glasses slipped down his nose. He didn't fix them. He didn't pull his arm back. Two hundred people watched an old man in a paint-stained shirt get walked out of a room he had no business being in, and the shame of it went through him the way cold water goes through a screen door.

His right hand came out of his shirt.

In it was the fan of pink paper, thirty years thick, and he snapped it open like a hand of cards.