Free More Deaths Than One by Pat Bertram

you.”
    “All right. When I finished eating that day,
Hsiang-li asked if I would do a favor for him. He had a delivery to
make at the Sheraton Hotel across the street, but he couldn’t leave
right then and had no one else he could trust. I agreed. He reached
under the bar for a parcel about the size of a brick, wrapped in
brown paper and tied with a string.”
    “Oh,” Kerry said, her voice flat. “I bet I
know what was in the package.”
    “I thought I did too,” Bob admitted.
    “And you took it anyway?”
    “I trusted him, so I gave him the benefit of
the doubt. A week later, he asked me to make another delivery,
which I did, but the third time I asked if the packages contained
drugs. ‘No drugs,’ he assured me. ‘Then what?’ I asked. ‘Stolen
merchandise?’ He smiled at me and said, ‘In a way.’ ‘In what way?’
I asked. I told him I’d been in the army for two years and had no
intention of spending any more time in mandatory confinement,
especially not in a Thai prison. He smiled at me again and said, ‘I
am glad to hear you say that. Come, I have something to show
you.’”
    “What?” Kerry asked when Bob paused. “What
did he show you? Was it stolen merchandise?”
    Bob held up a finger. “Hsiang-li unlocked a
door behind the bar. It led into a cool storeroom containing his
back stock of liquor, beer, and wine. He turned on the light,
stepped aside to let me enter, and locked the door behind us. A few
steps took him to a rack half-filled with dusty wine bottles. He
pressed a spot on the wall next to the wine rack at about knee
height. The entire rack swung out to reveal a solid metal door with
a combination lock on it, like the door to a bank vault. He fiddled
with the lock for a few seconds, then opened the door.”
    Seeing the rapt expression on Kerry’s face,
Bob feigned a yawn. “I’m tired. I think I’ll go to bed now.”
    “You can’t stop now,” she exclaimed. “That’s
not fair.” Then her mouth dropped open. She threw a pillow at him.
“You’re teasing me.”
    “A little.”
    She grinned impishly. “It’s those hidden
shal-lows again. I never know when they’re going to ooze to the
surface and amaze me. So, what was in the room?”
    “Antiques. Old pottery, Thai bronzes,
wood-carvings, porcelain figurines, jade Buddhas, heavy gold
jewelry. One display case contained several small, very old, highly
glazed figurines. All were the same color—pale tan with sepia
accents—and all looked as if the same long-forgotten artist had
made them. A few were realistic depictions of animals, like the
ornate elephant in full regalia, while others were fanciful
creatures such as unicorns, griffins, winged dragons pulling
chariots, and eagles with peacock feathers.”
    “They sound beautiful,” Kerry said.
    “They were. I wanted to ask Hsiang-li about
them, but he stared into the case with such a look of sorrow on his
face that I couldn’t intrude.”
    “Did you ever find out about them?”
    Bob nodded. “But not then. Hsiang-li roused
himself, and pointed out various porcelain bowls. Bencharong,
Sawank’alok, celadon.”
    Kerry tilted her head. “Celadon? Isn’t that a
pale green cracked glaze? I’ve seen it in import shops.”
    “You probably saw Thai celadon, a
repro-duction made by following the original Chinese method of
glazing with natural wood ash and firing it in a white heat kiln,
so it looks exactly the same as the ancient Chinese celadon.
Hsiang-li’s celadon bowls, however, were some of the original
pieces made in China. They were more than two thousand years
old.”
    “You never answered my question,” Kerry
said.
    “Which question?”
    “Was it stolen merchandise?”
    “No. All of it had been legally purchased
from legitimate dealers and people who needed money so desperately
they had to sell their family heirlooms.”
    “So what did Hsiang-li mean when he said that
in a way it was stolen?”
    “Because the people who bought it thought it
had