Then his brief opening to the recollection shut tight, and it was Bolivia that evaporated from thought. He had continued to the market for the item he wished to pick up before calling on his governmental contact at city hall.

Once there he had gone directly to a merchant of charms and ritual medicines known among the circumspect for his choice stock, transported from around the continent in defiance of endangered species and antiquities laws that intimidated others—all of it stored in barrels, baskets, cartons, crates, burlap sacks, even rusted cans arranged beneath his stall’s straw canopy. He trafficked in back-room merchandise while lacking a back room, pawned smuggled hides and relics with his left hand, and common medicinal powders and charms with his right . . . sometimes shuffling items from one hand to the other.

That this merchant was an ace of the swindle just gave bargaining with him a crisp edge. His combination of guile and brazenness merited appreciation and kept the man in the white suit’s own cunning instincts honed.

The dealer sat in his simple kaftan behind a wide display board mounted on loose foundation stones, and cluttered with animal skulls, horns, and hooves. Carved wooden masks hung from one of the thick canopy poles, bunches of desiccated lizard and mammal cadavers from another.

He acknowledged his customer with a quick smile of recognition.

“Je suis heureux de vous voir.”

“Merci, vous êtes trè‘s aimiable.”

Their polite exchange of greetings out of the way, the man in the white suit had been specific about what he wanted to acquire, and the merchant was quick to declare he could provide it. Indeed, the desired commodity was not, strictly speaking, black market; legalities only discouraged the practice by which it was obtained and put it in short supply. He had turned from his display board, knelt on his haunches, and then begun moving and shifting the containers, taking occasional furtive glances over his shoulders at passersby. The man in the white suit kept an observant eye on him. Soon the merchant located the carton he’d been seeking, unfolded its flaps, pulled a coffee can from inside, took off the can’s plastic lid, and extracted a sealed plastic bag that had been folded double and packed in sawdust.

He blew bits of shaved wood off the bag as he got back to his feet and returned to his customer.

“It is in here,” he said. “Forty years old, maybe older. There aren’t many to be found these days. It is valued by collectors—”

The man in the white suit had stared him into silence.

“I am not a collector,” he said and held out his hand. “You will vouch for its place of origin?”

“The highlands in western Kenya, near Lake Victoria.”

“I see. It is Gusii, then.”

“Yes. From a warlord, I am told.”

“By who?”

“The omobari omotwe himself,” the merchant said. “He still lives to curse those Red Cross and missionary doctors who stole his patients.”