Running Dog Read Free

all collect,” she said.
    “Just a pastime. Line, grace, symmetry. Beauty of the human body. So on, so forth.”
    “Do you spend a lot of money, collecting?”
    “Fair amount.”
    “You must know quite a bit about art.”
    “I took a course once.”
    “You took a course once.”
    “I learned enough to know that Lightborne’s better stuff is kept under wraps.”
    “What can you tell me about Lightborne that he wouldn’t want to tell me himself?”
    Selvy smiled and walked away. Later, when most of the people had gone, Lightborne talked with Moll in his living quarters. He answered all her questions, explaining that he got started in the business in 1946 when he was down and out in Cairo and managed to come into possession of a ring depicting the Egyptian god of fertility, highly aroused. He sold it to an ex-Nazi for a pretty sum and eventually learned that it ended up on the finger of King Farouk. After that, one contact led to another and he traveled through Central America, Japan, the Mideast and Europe, a worldwide network, buying and selling and bartering.
    “What about your friend Selvy? I’m curious. He doesn’t look quite the type. What’s his collection like?”
    “My lips are sealed.”
    “What do you mean?” she said.
    “Some people are here to look. Some to buy. Some to buy for others.”
    “Fronting.”
    “Sure.”
    “Buying on behalf of a person or group that doesn’t want his, her or its identity known to the world at large.”
    “That’s grammatically very clumsy but otherwise correct,” Lightborne said.
    “Do you know who Selvy buys for?”
    “Actually I only suspect.”
    “Someone I may have heard of?”
    “Selvy’s been on the job three months or so. Fairly good at it. Has a basic knowledge.”
    “That’s all you’re saying.”
    “It’s a business full of rumors, Miss Robbins. I get word about things sometimes. So-and-so’s turned up a bronze statuette in some sealed-off church cellar on Crete. Hermaphrodite: Graeco-Roman. I hear things all the time. I get word. The air is full of vibrations. Sometimes there’s an element of truth. Often it’s just a breeze in the night.”
    Glen Selvy stuck his head around the edge of the partition to say goodnight. Lightborne asked him in for coffee, which was perking on a GE hotplate in a corner of the room. Selvy checked his watch and sat in a huge dusty armchair.
    “My man in Guatemala tells me to expect choice items this trip.”
    “About time,” Selvy said.
    “Dug up from tombs with his own two hands.”
    “He’s found more tombs, has he?”
    “The jungles are dense,” Lightborne said mysteriously.
    “My principal is certain your pre-Columbian stuff is fake. Do you want to hear what he has to say about the handicraft?”
    “Tell him this trip.”
    “This trip it’s different.”
    “Different,” Lightborne said.
    He poured three cups of coffee. Moll believed she detected an edge of detachment in Selvy’s voice and manner. His reactions were just the tiniest bit mechanical. It was possible he was deeply bored by this.
    “In the meantime,” Lightborne said, “I can show you a lady with an octopus.”
    “Another time.”
    “It’s a porcelain centerpiece.”
    “Seriously, anything stashed back here? If not, I’m off.”
    “You say seriously. Did I hear you correctly?”
    “You heard.”
    “I was telling the young lady about rumors. The part rumors play in a business like this. Six months ago, for instance, I heard a rumor about an item that could prove to be of interest to any number of people, including your employer perhaps. The odd thing about this rumor is that I first heard it about thirty years ago, originally in Cairo and Alexandria, where my list of acquaintances was colorful and varied, and later the same year, if memory serves, after I went to Paris to live. The item in question was the print of a movie. To be more exact, the camera original.”
    Lightborne offered sugar, wordlessly.
    “I was telling