“Legal y obtained and transported, of course.”

“There’s a huge black market in il egal antiquities,” I said.

“Colossal,” Ryan agreed.

Synapse.

“You think Ferris was involved with the Masada bones?”

Ryan shrugged.

“And that got him kil ed?”

“Kessler thought so.”

“Have you tracked Kessler down?”

“I wil .”

“Could al be coincidence.”

“Could be.”

I didn’t think so.

8

RYAN WOKE ME SHORTLY AFTER SIX FOR SOME PRE-SUNRISE BONDING.Birdie slipped from the bedroom. Down the hal , Charlie squawked a line from Clarence Carter’s “Strokin’.”

While I showered, Ryan toasted bagels and made coffee. Over breakfast we discussed the cockatiel’s reeducation process.

Though unmentioned on the occasion of our Yuletide exchange, I’d quickly noted Charlie’s unorthodoxrépertoire noir. Upon questioning, Ryan had admitted that our feathered darling came to him via a vice squad raid on a female enterprise. The ladies’ taste had been lusty, and the bird had absorbed.

For months I’d been working to redirect Charlie’s musical and oratorical talents. With mixed results.

At eight, I popped in a cockatiel-training CD and Ryan and I rode together to L’édifice Wilfrid Derome. He headed to thecrimes contre la personne squad room on the first floor, and I took the LSJML elevator to the twelfth.

After shooting close-ups and composing a summary report, I told LaManche that the remains in my possession could be released to the Ferris family.

Though burial had taken place while I was in New Orleans, arrangements had been made for placement of the cranial fragments in a coffin-side pit.

At ten-thirty, I phoned Ryan. He said he’d meet me in the lobby in five. I waited ten. Bored, I slipped into the cafeteria for a Diet Coke roadie. At the counter, I made an impulse buy of Scottish shortbreads. One never knew.

Ryan was waiting when I returned to the lobby. Popping the soda, I stashed the cookies in my shoulder bag.

For twenty-seven years Avram Ferris had run his import business out of a light-industrial park off the autoroute des Laurentides, midway between Montreal island and the old Mirabel airport.

Constructed in the seventies, Mirabel was envisioned as Montreal’s once-and-future aviation jewel. Though thirty miles out, a high speed rail line was to connect the airport with the city center. Lickety-split. You’d be at the gate!

The rail line never happened.

By the early nineties the commute was intolerable and getting worse. Sixty-nine bucks for a taxi downtown.

Frustrated, officials final y threw in the towel and mothbal ed Mirabel in favor of its geographical y friendlier rival. Mirabel now gets cargo and charters. Al other domestic, North American, and international flights arrive and depart Dorval, recently rechristened Pierre El iott Trudeau International.

Avram Ferris didn’t care. He’d started Les Imports Ashkenazim near Mirabel, and that’s where he’d kept it.

And that’s where he’d died.

He’d lived in Côte-des-Neiges, a middle-class residential neighborhood tucked behind the Jewish General Hospital, just northwest of le centre-vil e.