Chapter 5

For about four seconds, nobody in the room knew what they were looking at.

Then Reinhardt laughed - one short, clean note, the kind of laugh that tells a room what to think.

"Carbon copies," he said. "He's got fifty years of paper for a job he did once. Somebody's been telling him he's owed."

Dupree's grip loosened half an inch, embarrassed, then tightened again.

The woman in the fourth row leaned toward her neighbor. "Who is he?"

"A picker," the neighbor said. "From the parish, probably."

Marisol Beaudry had not struck her gavel. She stood at the podium with the microphone headset on and her reading glasses hanging from their chain, looking at the pink fan in the old man's hand with an expression that did not belong on an auctioneer's face. It looked like a woman doing arithmetic she had been told not to do.

"The donor on the accession card is anonymous," she said carefully. "The consignor's file is sealed. I can read the donor line into the record. That's all."

"Then that's all," Reinhardt said. "And we're done."

He turned to the room and gave it the smile he gave clients, and the room took it, because rooms do. Because it is easier to believe that a paint-stained man at the door wants money than to believe that a black-tie room has been wrong about something for fifty years.

"Lot Twelve's donor was Uptown money," Reinhardt said. "That's in the provenance file. The family asked to stay out of it. That's all this is."

"Bienvenus, surely," said a man near the back, comfortably. "They've given to every parish in the diocese twice."

"Something like that," Reinhardt said.

Wil's arm ached where Dupree held it. He looked at the pink fan in his own hand - thirty years of money orders, every one of them bought at the counter at the Algiers post office on Opelousas Avenue, every one filled out in the same slanted hand, every memo line the same two words. Nobody in this room had ever read one. Nobody had ever been meant to.

He had come here to make sure the console sold for what it was worth, and to hand over an envelope, and to be gone before the coffee went cold.

That plan had about ninety seconds left in it.

"Read the card," Wil said.

"The card's been read."

"Read all of it."

"Get him out of my room."

Dupree turned him toward the door. Wil went with it, because he had no leverage, and he had known that since he stepped off the ferry at Canal Street with wet shoes and four thousand dollars folded in his jacket.

The gallery's front doors opened.

Warm wet air came in off Royal Street, and with it a woman in royal purple, silver earrings catching the chandelier light, and the whole room stood up at once, because she was the guest of honor and she was late.

Cleo Baptiste stopped four steps inside the door.