Free The Gallery of Lost Species by Nina Berkhout Page A

put one in my pocket and returned everything else to the hat box.
    I went to the pantry to marvel at Viv’s costumes—I was too fat to try any on—but they were all gone. The small, vandalized space was empty and dirty. Constance must have sold off the dresses to Viv’s competitors or shredded them with a knife like she’d sworn to do. The trophy cases had been cleared out too.
    The following day, I told Omar about Nick Angel and showed him my finding.
    â€œWhere’d you get that?”
    â€œMy sister.”
    â€œThat’s nose candy. Blow.”
    â€œHow would you know?”
    â€œMy mom’s ex made me bag it. When she found out, she rammed her rifle into his crotch and kicked him out.”
    I grabbed the miniature zip-lock from Omar and shoved it into my pocket.
    â€œPut that back where you found it,” he told me.
    â€œThis is Nick’s doing. He’s a pig.”
    â€œYou could poison him with lye.” We mixed lye into our cleaning agents for the coins. “Use a dropper on the coke,” Omar went on, “then return it to its place. The cops will think bad street drugs killed him.”
    I contemplated Omar’s proposition, wondering if I could get away with it. “What if my sister snorts it?”
    â€œI didn’t say it wouldn’t be risky.”
    He walked around the cases in deep concentration. He paused at one of them as if something hit him, and motioned me over. I could hear Serena banging around upstairs. She’d gone up a half-hour ago to prepare us tea and biscuits. She did that a lot lately and didn’t come back down because her phone rang so often.
    Omar drew my attention to a tetradrachm showing a man wearing a lion’s skin on his head.
    â€œSee that guy? That’s Hercules.”
    â€œYour mom has taught me a few things, for your information.”
    â€œActually, it’s Alexander the Great. He was the first one cocky enough to present himself as a demi-god on his coinage.”
    â€œWhat’s your point?”
    â€œKnow how he died?”
    â€œI forget.”
    â€œBy his own hand. He was the toughest hero around. He won all his feats, including killing the Hydra serpent. Then he had to cross this river with his wife Deianira. A centaur named Nessos was there and tried to rape her. Hercules shot an arrow that he’d dipped in the Hydra’s blood at Nessos. As the centaur lay dying, he saturated a cloth in his wound and gave it to Deianira, telling her that if she made an elixir with it, she’d guarantee her husband’s affection forever.”
    â€œFascinating.”
    â€œTime passed. Hercules was a cheater. When he strayed, Deianira recalled the antidote for lost love. She doused her husband’s shirt in the elixir and dried it. Hercules threw on the tunic and was consumed in agony.” Omar was getting worked up, his eyes widening. “He built his own funeral pyre and jumped into the flames!”
    â€œWeird, but whatever.” I worried the thought of fire might provoke a seizure, but Omar only looked exasperated.
    â€œMy point is, it was his own poisoned arrow that killed him.”
    â€œSo buy a bow and arrow?”
    â€œGive Nick Angel as much drug money as you can. Eventually he’ll overdose.”

FOURTEEN
    I N AN ATTEMPT TO bring our crumbling family together, my father bought us a membership to the National Gallery on Sussex Drive.
    During the late eighties, he’d monitored the construction of the glass showpiece from his brown tower on the other side of the bridge. He disapproved of the Museum of Civilization going up simultaneously, steps away from his office and on his side of the river. A Disney of replicas, he called it.
    My father was one of ten thousand civil servants working at Place du Portage in Quebec, near the confluence of the Gatineau and Ottawa rivers. Place du Portage was a complex consisting of four towers occupying a city block. My