"Skip the husband. Just a tiara. How about King Farouk? Would he be on that list?"

"What'd you say about Farouk?" Robelon asked.

Tell your client I'm on to him, I thought to myself. "I asked Graham what kind of collector he was."

"Something to do with Paige Vallis?" Hoyt wanted to know.

"No, no. Another matter altogether."

"One of the most bizarre collectors of all times. I mean," said Hoyt, "there were the usual high-end things. Famous jewels, postage stamps, rare coins-"

Robelon broke in. "Cars. Wasn't he the guy with the red cars?"

Hoyt nodded. "He had a passion for red cars. Bright, tomato red. Collected hundreds of them. Passed a law forbidding anyone else in Egypt from owning a red automobile, so when the soldiers saw a scarlet car speeding through town, they knew it was the king himself."

"Incredible."

"And antique weapons. Had a real thing for them."

"Like Andrew Tripping?" I said. Maybe Farouk was the inspiration for the scabbards, daggers, and scimitars that decorated his spare apartment.

"A little finer than Andrew's. And quite a cache. If you're really curious, you can check the old auction books. I think there were more than a thousand pages of cataloged items that Sotheby's put together, and those were only the things that Farouk couldn't get out of the country with him when he fled in fifty-two."

"Pornography?" I asked. Was there any sex offender twisted enough to kill for an original collection of erotic art, part of which Spike Logan thought was still in Queenie's apartment at the time of her death?

"Loads of it. But for some reason, that was all removed from the auction offerings just days before the collection went under the gavel," Hoyt answered. "The odd thing was that Farouk had piles of junk, too. Paper clips and labels from ketchup bottles, walking sticks and aspirin bottles. He's not my model, Alex. I prefer the more discerning pack rats, like Morgan."

"Autographed pictures of Adolf Hitler," said Robelon from behind me. "The fat old bastard collected those, too."

"How come everyone knows about Farouk except me?" I asked.

"Peter comes by it naturally," Hoyt said. "I think that's what attracted Andrew to him in college."

"My father's English," Robelon said. "Worked abroad for the government."

"In Egypt?"

"No, no. In Rome, actually."

"What does that have to do with King Farouk?" I asked.

"That's where Farouk died, in exile, in 1965," Robelon said.

"Let's put this case to bed. Then I'll buy the first round of drinks, Alex. Maybe we can get the truth out of my classmate here. Peter claims his father was just an attaché at the embassy. But Andrew swears Robelon senior was the most important British spook in Europe."

23

"Where has this day gone?" I asked Mike, who had settled in behind my desk. It was after six-thirty and the corridors were quiet and dark.

"Fill me in over dinner."

"Another time. I'll give it to you quickly. But I'm running downtown. There's a seven-fifteen service for Paige Vallis."

"I thought she's from Virginia?"

"Her body's being shipped down tomorrow for burial. But her boss organized a memorial for her tonight, at a little church on the Battery, and he invited me to be there. Did you speak to Squeeks? Anything new on the death investigation?"

"All quiet. You want a ride?"

"I'll walk."

"It's wet out there."

"I won't melt. Mercer's invited, too. He said he was going to be late getting there, but he'll take me home."

I closed up my office, telling Mike about my conversations with Peter Robelon and Graham Hoyt before again walking to the elevator. "So all these connections to Farouk and people who worked in the Foreign Service; do you make anything of it?"

"Conspiracy or coincidence, huh? You're always seeing some dark intrigue behind things like this. Me? I'm a coincidence man. Odd things just happen sometimes. Ingrid Bergman happens to walk into Humphrey Bogart's Casablanca gin joint. Farley Granger happens to share a train compartment with a stranger who agrees to murder someone for him. Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet happen to bump into Sam Spade while they're looking for-"

"Those aren't coincidences, Mike. They're plot devices. You're talking fiction and I'm talking real life."

"Hey, how many people do you need to have in a room to guarantee the chance that at least two of them would have the same birthday?"

"I don't know. Three hundred sixty-four."

"Ha! Twenty-three. At least two out of every twenty-three people will have exactly the same birthday. Statistical odds. A lot of life is coincidence."

We walked out the door and I turned right to go to Centre Street. "Wait a minute, blondie. I got a brolly in the car."

"I don't need it."

"Don't be stubborn."

I turned my collar up and crossed the street with Mike, waiting while he fished out his car keys and shuffled through the heavy assortment of police equipment that filled the trunk.

"So I'll give you a substitute Jeopardy! question, since you're standing me up tonight," he said. "Military history."

"I lose before we get started."

"The answer is from army basic training. Three things a soldier in uniform is instructed not to do," Mike said, finding an old black golf umbrella and trying to extricate it from beneath a fingerprint-dusting kit and orange jumper cables. "I'll spare you. Push a baby carriage, wear rubbers, and use an umbrella."

He pulled it out and opened it, straightening two of the bent metal spokes. "Ever go to an Army-Navy game on a rainy fall day?" he asked. "Sailors sit under their umbrellas, soldiers get soaked. Napoleon laughed at the British troops carrying umbrellas at Waterloo in 1815. Guess who won?"

I twirled it for him a few times and got back on course. "See you in the morning. Say hi to Valerie for me."

Office workers unprepared for the change in weather were scurrying toward the entrance to the subway station in Foley Square. I passed it by, cutting across City Hall Park to walk south on Broadway, which was better lighted than the less-trafficked and twisted side streets of the city's financial district.

The gaping hole behind the Trinity Church graveyard that has become known to the world as Ground Zero still took my breath away and turned my stomach whenever I thought about it or, as now, skirted its perimeter. I kept my head down, dodging pedestrians who moved northward as I sidestepped puddles to try to keep my feet moderately dry.

At Bowling Green, I took the fork to my left and trotted the last three blocks down Whitehall, as the showers fell more steadily.

I was at the very toe of Manhattan-the Battery-named for the row of guns that had once guarded this vulnerable tip of the early colonial settlement. The address Paige Vallis's boss had given to me, 7 State Street, was about the southernmost building on the entire island, but for the fortress of Castle Clinton.

It was hard to see numbers because of the dim street lighting, and I looked in vain for something that resembled a Catholic church. People raced by me on their way to the Staten Island ferry terminal and the express bus stop that would speed them to their homes in the outer boroughs. I doubled back to find a coffee shop and asked for more specific directions to the Rectory of the Shrine of St. Elizabeth Seton.

I climbed the staircase, fooled by the appearance of the original facade. The small chapel had been an early Federal mansion-a private home-built at the end of the eighteenth century. The slender Ionic columns and delicate interior detailing had survived two hundred years of commercial development all around it, and was now a small sanctuary named for America's first saint.