Damn Mundin, she thought Wonderingly … for she had never damned a man for failing to pay attention to her .before.
It was three days before Norma’s boredom overbalanced the common-sense view about people talking into nightsticks; and it might not have done it then if Miss Elbers hadn’t had to take a day off with periodic functional disturbances.
Miss Elbers was the clerk whom Norma had observed talking into a flowerpot.
The vase was on Miss Elbers’s desk still; Norma made several trips through the room, peering at it inconspicuously. It looked very much like any other vase with flowers in it.
But she was bored. During the coffee break she photographed it from several angles; a Chinesey thing some eight inches tall. Even then, it took another three days before she got around to taking the photographs to a bric-a-brac dealer with Chinesey things in his window.
He said promptly, “I don’t want it, lady. It’s a copy, and they copied it wrong.”
She handed him money. He looked surprised, but he explained, “It’s a copy of a very well-known piece, a Chinese funerary jar. If memory serves——” and it obviously, pride-fully did “—from the Fairy Kiln of Wu Chang, near Soo Chou. The proportions of this copy are good, and so are the colors. But the characters on the four medallions and on the band around the shoulder are wrong. Funerary jars always have the characters for ‘never,’ ‘mountain,’ ‘aging,’ and ‘green.’ I don’t know what these characters on the copy are, but they aren’t the right ones. I guess you got stuck.”
“Thanks,” she said thoughtfully.
Further inquiry turned up the name of a man who could translate the characters for her. A professor at Columbia.
She caught the man wiping bis television makeup off in his office. He gallantly assured her it would be a pleasure. He wrinkled his brows over the photographs and finally said:
“It’s gibberish. Not Chinese of any period, 111 swear to that. Here and there a piece of a character looks like something or other, but that’s as far as the resemblance goes. One can easily imagine the layman being fooled, of course. Does it matter? After all, somebody simply faked a vase, and did a poor job of decorating it. Though why he didn’t copy authentic characters I don’t understand.”
“I do,” Norma Lavin whispered, her face bloodless.
Ryan and Mundin and her brother shifted impatiently as she tried to explain:
“They must be printed circuits. Maybe the crackle in the glaze is metallic—an antenna. There must be transistors and little silver-acid batteries and God knows what in the body of the thing. We could X-ray it—but anybody who’d make a communicator like that would probably have it booby-trapped.”
Mundin asked slowly, “Have you handled the thing?”
“No!”
“Norma’s right,” Ryan said. “Work through the clerk. The gadget’s dynamite. Don, find out who she is.”
Don Lavin went to his files. Mundin exploded, “Damn it, I’m not convinced. This thing coming right in the middle of our whole campaign—are Haskell Arnold and his crowd that smart?”
“No,” Ryan said gravely. “Not Haskell Arnold and his crowd.”
“Here it is.” Don Lavin produced a card. “The clerk’s name is Harriet Elbers. Single, twenty-six, B.B.A. from Columbia, corporate-case researcher for Choate Brothers three years, discharged hi staff reduction on closing a case. Um, efficiency rating high, yes, contract status standard—uh—nothing much else about her. Lives with widowed mother.”
“Fine-sounding girl,” Ryan said dispiritedly.
“Ryan, if it isn’t Arnold——”
Ryan looked at Mundin and shrugged. “Who? Who but Green, Charlesworth? Arnold wouldn’t play it this way. He’s a slugger, nothing else. Green, Charlesworth—they’re judo experts. They wait until we’re charging full speed ahead\and then they stick one foot out and we go crashing and break our
necks. Or—they don’t. As they think appropriate. I tangled with them once. You may recall my recent career.”
Mundin said, “One thing’s for certain. We’ve got to buzz Hubble, Nelson, and Coett on this. That’s orders; and they’ve been putting up the cash.”
“Sure,” said Ryan absently. He was staring at the flower vase on his own desk.
The three money-men weren’t scared; they were petrified.
Coett said in a rage, “By God, those bastards! Letting us run along like idiots, spending money like water!”