A lobby attendant at Parke Bernet directed me to the second-floor gallery where Friday’s African and Oceanic art was on display. I found Chance in front of a set of glassed-in shelves housing a collection of eighteen or twenty small gold figurines. Some represented animals while others depicted human beings and various household articles. One I recall showed a man sitting on his haunches and milking a goat. The largest would fit easily in a child’s hand, and many of them had a droll quality about them.

“Ashanti gold weights,” Chance explained. “From the land the British called the Gold Coast. It’s Ghana now. You see plated reproductions in the shops. Fakes. These are the real thing.”

“Are you planning to buy them?”

He shook his head. “They don’t speak to me. I try to buy things that do. I’ll show you something.”

We crossed the room. A bronze head of a woman stood mounted on a four-foot pedestal. Her nose was broad and flattened, her cheekbones pronounced. Her throat was so thickly ringed by bronze necklaces that the overall appearance of the head was conical.

“A bronze sculpture of the lost Kingdom of Benin,” he announced. “The head of a queen. You can tell her rank by the number of necklaces she’s wearing. Does she speak to you, Matt? She does to me.”

I read strength in the bronze features, cold strength and a merciless will.

“Know what she says? She says, ‘Nigger, why you be lookin’ at me dat way? You know you ain’t got de money to take me home.’ “ He laughed. “The presale estimate is forty to sixty thousand dollars.”

“You won’t be bidding?”

“I don’t know what I’ll be doing. There are a few pieces I wouldn’t mind owning. But sometimes I come to auctions the way some people go to the track even when they don’t feel like betting. Just to sit in the sun and watch the horses run. I like the way an auction room feels. I like to hear the hammer drop. You seen enough? Let’s go.”

His car was parked at a garage on Seventy-eighth Street. We rode over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and through Long Island City. Here and there street prostitutes stood along the curb singly or in pairs.

“Not many out last night,” he said. “I guess they feel safer in daylight.”

“You were here last night?”

“Just driving around. He picked up Cookie around here, then drove out Queens Boulevard. Or did he take the expressway? I don’t guess it matters.”

“No.”

We took Queens Boulevard. “Want to thank you for coming to the funeral,” he said.

“I wanted to come.”

“Fine-looking woman with you.”

“Thank you.”

“Jan, you say her name was?”

“That’s right.”

“You go with her or—”

“We’re friends.”

“Uh-huh.” He braked for a light. “Ruby didn’t come.”

“I know.”