The Scarlet Ruse Read Online Free Page B

but it did."
    "I… I just don't know what I…" His voice got shaky. His face started to break up, and he brought it under control, but for a moment I could see just how he had looked when he had been a boy.
    "I'll think about it and let you know," I told him. It wasn't what I had opened my mouth to say. Meyer knew that. Meyer looked startled and pleased.

Chapter Three
    Meyer and I strolled through the golden sunshine of evening, and through the residual stink of the rush-hour traffic, now considerably thinned out. We walked a half-dozen blocks to a small, dark bar in an old hotel. Elderly local businessmen drank solemnly, standing along the bar, playing poker dice for the drinks. At first glance they looked like an important group, like the power structure. But as eyes adjusted to the dimness after the hot brightness outside, the ruddiness became broken veins, collars were frayed and dingy, suits cut in outmoded style, the cigar smoke cheap, the drinks especially priced for the cocktail hour.
    They talked about the market and the elections. Maybe once upon a time it had been meaningful. They had probably met here when they had worked in the area, when the area had been important, when the hotel had been shining new. So now they came in from their retirement at this time of day, dressing for the part, to nurse a couple of sixty-cent drinks and find out who had died and who was dying.
    We carried our drinks over to a table under a tile mural of an improbable orange tree.
    "So Fedderman got in a bind, a bad one, and he took Sprenger's money and bought junk and pocketed the difference," I said. "All along he knows there is going to be a day of reckoning, and because Frank Sprenger sounds hard case, it could be a very dirty day. If, by getting help, he can give himself the look of being a victim, he could save his skin."
    Meyer smiled. "I went down that road. It doesn't go anywhere. Not because he is an honest man, which I think he is, but because he is a bright man. He buys for old customers, not under any special agreement. They take his word on authenticity. He could slip junk into those collections, and there would be no recourse against him. He is bright enough to know that you don't fool around with the Frank Sprengers of this world. Maybe you shouldn't deal with them at all. He rationalizes by saying that what he does is honest. He likes action. Sprenger is a lot of action. Fedderman likes having big pieces of money to invest. He likes phoning London and talking to his friends at Stanley Gibbons."
    "How do you know him?"
    "Ten years ago I invented an economic indicator I called the Hedge Index. Activity in works of art, antiques, gold, silver, coins, rare stamps. I felt it could be done on a sampling basis. Fedderman was one of the people who agreed to help. He was absolutely candid. No tricks, no lies, no exaggerations. When I had the bugs ironed out, I ran the index for two years and then published a partial report. There was a direct correlation between rate of inflation and hedge activity, with the hedge activity being a lead indicator of major rises in the announced cost of living by about ninety days. It's been picked up by the big boys and refined. I wanted the kind of built-in warning they used to have in France. When the peasants started buying gold and hiding it, you knew the storms were coming."
    "Are they coming, O Great Seer?"
    "What do you think we are standing out in the middle of with neither spoon nor paddle? Anyway, I've dropped in on Hirsh when I've been in the neighborhood ever since I gave up running the index. I said something to him once about having a friend in the salvage business. It was in connection with a customer whose valuable collection had been stolen. That's why he phoned me when this came up."
    "If he's such a specialist and so bright, why isn't he rich?"
    "He's seventy-two years old. His wife died of cancer twenty years ago. He gives a lot of money for cancer research. Both his sons