“Perhaps, then,” Harper shouted back, “you could radio and have a local officer drop by the place …”

“All taken care of, darling,” Slade answered her abruptly. Then he looked out the window and muttered to himself, “Though why we should bother, I don’t know.”

Harper couldn’t hear what he said, but she answered him anyway. “Because,” she told him astringently, “Iago has been looking for the Rhinehart panels for twenty years. The only thing that’s kept him from finding them is that, in all that time, they haven’t changed hands. When Mormo got hold of the Madonna, it was reasonable for Iago to conclude that he might be able to get hold of the Nativity panel as well. Mormo was, after all, one of a few key fences of black-market art after the war. If the final panel had changed hands then, he might well have been aware of it. But if Mormo had had that knowledge, believe me, he would have told it at once. Since he didn’t tell, it seems logical the panel must have been traded by one of the other key fences. And there’s only one other such trader who’s been involved in these events from the beginning—one other who bid at the Magi auction. And Iago knows who that is as well as we do.”

She could not see Slade’s face, but she understood he was rolling his eyes. She could not hear his voice, but she imagined that he muttered, “Iago!”

She did not answer him again. She sat brooding, leaning on her stick, trying to ignore the siren.

And there is also the fact, she went on silently, that all this, all of it, must have begun with Spectre.

What ill wind had blown Iago into that Edgware Road cinema twenty years ago, she would never know. It was his talent, perhaps—as it was hers—to ride the tide of the Uncanny. Perhaps she herself had been in the same cinema on the same day—she could not remember. She only knew that Iago had been there. Five years after she had ruined his cult scheme. He must have been feeling quite fragile, poor lamb. His sense of destiny must have been growing precarious as he scrabbled and seduced among the lost of the earth, desperate to produce the offspring whose blood he needed, all the while realizing that one day, one day the precious blue stone itself would dwindle to nothing.

How that thought must have plagued him. No matter how much blood he got his hands on, one day, one day, the stone itself would be gone. And then the discoloration on his wrists would begin. And then the living decay.