Lempke’s hyena grin widened. The effect was troubling. His teeth were caked with crud and his breath was sour. In fact, everything about him suggested lack of sleep, if not some worse affliction. His bloodshot eyes rolled within a pudding of violet flesh, and his jaundiced cheeks were dusted with gray stubble. A tide of pimples swept out from his hairline and there was a pink rash extending from his shirt collar.

“No bounding about like wildebeests, not today, not whilst such a delicate artifact rests in proximity. You intrude on an auspicious afternoon! What you see before you is the grandest achievement of my career. Eighteen years I’ve worked with Scottish historians to protect this edifice from destruction, a destruction that simpletons of the Scottish Highlands insisted upon because of primitive, archaic superstition. Can you believe it, my boy busybodies? Those ignoramuses wished to destroy quite possibly the most important piece of architecture in all of Europe. I saved it. I did that. And now it’s right here in the Golden Valley.”

His fevered eyes began to swim with tears. Both Tub and I recoiled, hoping to evade contaminated spatter.

“Do you undereducated brats have the slightest idea what you’re looking upon?”

Tub dared to shrug.

“A bridge?”

Lempke’s cheeks slackened in mortification. Two hard tears rolled like ball bearings, one from each swollen eye, though he did not seem to notice. His horrified expression slowly screwed into one of mordant amusement.

“A bridge,” he mused. “Amusing. Not yet, my pubescent meddlers. You see, the head stone that connects the two halves…alas, it has yet to arrive.”

The assistant who cleared his throat had been standing there for some time. Lempke’s fingers loosened enough for Tub and I to extricate ourselves and massage our throats. Sweat dropped from the assistant’s face onto a stack of paperwork. He clicked a pen nervously.

“The head stone,” he said. “I’ve got news.”

“Out with it,” Lempke barked.

The assistant consulted a scrawled note. “Okay. The cargo was shipped to San Sebastián by mistake.”

“San Sebastián, Puerto Rico?” Lempke seethed.

The assistant gulped down his nervousness.

“San Sebastián, Spain.” While Lempke’s jaw fell open, releasing a stink, the assistant hurried on. “It should arrive there within a day and the historical society has been given instructions to reroute it to us immediately.”

Lempke’s whole face had gone the color of his rash. He raked jagged fingernails across his whitehead pimples.

“Explicit instructions?” he raged. “Were explicit instructions given? I know those boobs in San Sebastián. They’ll want a look. They’ll crack open the casing and say it happened during transport, just to get a peek, without even thinking about the lighting conditions under which they’re exposing the stone, the moisture in the air, anything! They’ll take photos. Flash photos!”

“Yes, explicit,” said the assistant. “I was very explicit—”