Free Magic Terror by Peter Straub

entered the antique store. He finished the last of the cheese, neatly refolded the wrapping paper, and stuffed it into an exterior pocket of the case. In the slowly gathering darkness, lights went on here and there.
    There were no Japanese golfers in Basque berets. The backpackers devoured
croque monsieurs
and trudged away, and the couple pushed the stroller toward home. An assortment of tourists and regulars filled half of the tables beneath the umbrellas. A man and a woman in sturdy English clothing went into Hubert’s shop and emerged twenty minutes later with the elegant woman in tow. The man consulted his watch and led his companions away beneath the arcades. A police car moved past them from the top of the square. The stolid man in the passenger seat turned dead eyes and a Spam-colored face upon N as the car went by. There was always this little charge of essential recognition before they moved on.
    Obeying an impulse still forming itself into thought, N left his car and walked under the arches to the window of the antique store. It was about twenty minutes before closing time. M. Hubert was tapping at a desktop computer on an enormous desk at the far end of a handsome array of gleaming furniture. A green-shaded lamp shadowed a deep vertical wrinkle between his eyebrows. The ambitious Martine was nowhere in sight. N opened the door, and a bell tinkled above his head.
    Hubert glanced at him and held up a hand, palm out. N began moving thoughtfully through the furniture. A long time ago, an assignment had involved a month’s placement in the antiques department of a famous auction house, and, along with other crash tutorials, part of his training had been lessons in fakery from a master of the craft named Elmo Maas. These lessons had proved more useful than he’d ever expected at the time. Admiring the marquetry on a Second Empire table, N noticed a subtle darkening in the wood at the top of one leg. He knelt to run the tips of his fingers up the inner side of the leg. His fingers met a minuscule but telltale shim that would be invisible to the eye. The table was a mongrel. N moved to a late-eighteenth-century desk marred only by an overly enthusiastic regilding, probably done in the thirties, of the vine-leaf pattern at the edges of the leather surface. The next piece he looked at was a straightforward fake. He even knew the name of the man who had made it.
    Elmo Maas, an artist of the unscrupulous, had revered an antiques forger named Clement Tudor. If you could learn to recognize a Tudor, Maas had said, you would be able to spot any forgery, no matter how good. From a workshop in Camberwell, South London, Tudor had produced five or six pieces a year for nearly forty years, concentrating on the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and distributing what he made through dealers in France and the United States. His mastery had blessed both himself and his work: never identified except by disciples like Maas, his furniture had defied suspicion. Some of his work had wound up in museums, the rest in private collections. Using photographs and slides along with samples of his own work, Maas had educated his pupil in Tudor’s almost invisible nuances: the treatment of a bevel, the angle and stroke of chisel and awl, a dozen other touches. And here they were, those touches, scattered more like the hints of fingerprints than fingerprints themselves over a Directoire armoire.
    M. Hubert padded up to N. “Exquisite, isn’t it? I’m closing early today, but if you were interested in anything specific, perhaps I could . . . ?” At once deferential and condescending, his manner invited immediate departure. Underlying anxiety spoke in the tight wrinkles about his eyes. A lifetime of successful bluffing had shaped the ironic curve of his mouth. N wondered if this dealer in frauds actually intended to go through with the arms deal after all.
    “I’ve been looking for a set of antique bookcases to hold my first