Free The Investigations of Avram Davidson by Avram Davidson Page B

chair.
    â€œAnother terrible flood, sir—”
    â€œOh, damn that! Besides, I’ve already heard it from the houseman. What news? ”
    â€œYes, sir, I understand, sir. Pray excuse me. Ah. Mr. Harari has bought the bronze camel-bells. All of them. He says he can use many more. Camel-bells are popular now—in Israel, he says. They hang them on the walls.… Why, sir?”
    â€œWho cares why? Let them hang them around their necks, if they please, as long as they buy them. What else?”
    â€œThe parchment sanjek -map.”
    â€œGood, good.” Mr. Carpius moved slightly a De Lusignan–period dagger which lay near the edge of a table. “What else?”
    â€œAnd all six of the silver denarii of Tiberius, sir.”
    â€œ Ex -cellent! I am very pleased, Paul,” Mr. Carpius said benignly. Paul writhed in gratification. A sudden afterthought struck his employer. “At the prices marked?” he snapped.
    â€œOh, yes, sir!” Paul assured him, in haste. “Minus the usual ten per cent deduction for dealers,” he added nervously; but Carpius waved aside the usual ten per cent deduction.
    â€œThat’s all right.”
    â€œAnd you, sir, Mr. Carpius? Did you have good luck?”
    Mr. Carpius’s heavy, square face, usually pink, now darkened to a mulberry-red. He scowled, and clenched his teeth.
    â€œNo, damn it! I didn’t.” Paul backed away and began to arrange a trayful of strings of amber beads, the sort which pious Moslems use to recite the nine-and-ninety Attributes of the Almighty, beginning with His Compassion, a quality in which Mr. Carpius was lamentably deficient. “Let them alone!” Carpius barked. Paul dropped one, then fell to his knees.
    After swallowing what seemed to be something large and dry, and beating his stubby-fingered hand on his knee several times, Carpius finally composed himself.
    â€œI arrived there with the twenty pounds that Yohannides had agreed on,” he said, “although I was naturally prepared to go much higher. The situation appeared made to order: the chapel had been closed for so many years he’d had to break the lock to get in. The place hadn’t been entered since the Diocese leased the estate to the Agricultural Department before the First World War. Imagine it!”
    Carpius leaned forward, furious, then went on: “An ikon of Saint Mamas riding his lion, Eleventh Century work, and the silver cover, showing details of his life, from the reign of Isaac Comnenus, the last Greek ruler of Cyprus! Fabulous! Priceless! One dare hardly estimate the value.… I should have forced him to let me take it away the first time I saw it. A petty clerk in the Agricultural Department, how dared he refuse to trust me? And what happened when I got back there, after driving to the end of the island? It was gone!
    â€œI could have throttled him. ‘What do you mean, gone? You’ve sold it, you scoundrel!’ I said. But by and by I saw that he was telling me the truth. The Bishop took it! ‘For safekeeping’! For forty years the Bishops didn’t even know it was there, didn’t think about it, care about it—now, just when I take an interest, so does the Bishop.… What we need Bishops for at all is something I can’t see. It is just this sort of thing which causes anti-clericalism.”
    Carpius sat back, breathing heavily, while Paul hardly breathed at all. Gradually the angry color ebbed from the antique dealer’s face.
    â€œTomorrow,” he said calmly, “I shall see what can be done about arranging to have it stolen. If nothing can be done—and, sometimes, alas, such is the case—I shall be obliged,” he sighed, “to offer to sell it on commission.”
    He rose, flicked on the lights, and walked over to the windows. He removed a small painting of a meditative bull in a peeling gilt frame and replaced it with a set of ivory and