A Deadly Shade of Gold by John D. MacDonald

end of the tab. But one thing clear, right now. You take orders. And if we make a recovery, of what Sam said was his, if we are convinced by then that it was his, then we split it down the middle."
    "That's what you're in this for?"
    "Certainly. That's why I said no thanks, when Sam invited me in."
    "I'm sorry, Trav."
    "I can tell you one thing. From what we know right now, if we handle ourselves well, if you follow orders, we can get close."
    Her right hand turned into a claw. "I would like that."
    "Close is all I can promise. Remember this, Nora. Sam was tough and quick and smart. You saw what he got out of it."
    "Don't. But... where is the starting point?"
    "Finding out just what it was that he thought was his. That's my job. While I'm doing that, you get Shaj set up so she can run the store on her own."
    Professor Warner B. Gifford was a fat, sloppy, untidy young man. He was not the tenant the architects had in mind when they had designed that particular building for Florida Southwestern.
    The building, I guess, was for dynamic scholastic living, for Communications courses, whatever they are, for machines to grade multiple choice questions, for that curious union of Madison Avenue, the N.A.M., foundation monies and the education of the preadjusted young which successfully emasculates all the factors thereof. It was a building to house the men who could turn out fabulous technicians with that contempt for every other field of human knowledge which only the truly ignorant can achieve. It was a place to train ants to invent insecticides.
    But Warner B. Gifford was unaware of that. They had given him a weatherproof cube to work in, and he had managed to make it look and smell like the back room of a London hock shop.
    He goggled vacantly through thick lenses in frames mended with Band-Aids. He committed all the small offenses he had no best friends to tell him about. He worked at a rickety little table amid piles of paper and unidentifiable junk, rank, scurfy, soiled and absolutely unconcerned with everything in the world except the expertise of taking one tiny fragment of the remote past and Page 31

    fitting it into another little fragment, and thereby filling that tiny gap in the continuity of the history of the human animal. If, in his total career, he could infect two or three other individuals with that same compulsion, I had the feeling he would be worth a round dozen of the tailored golfers who gave brilliant lectures which could have been printed intact in the Reader's Digest, and probably were.
    It had taken two hours to thread my way through the labyrinth of exotic specialties and find my way to him.
    "A what?" he said. "A what?"
    I found myself raising my voice, enunciating clearly, as though he were deaf. I described the little golden figurine with greatest care, and he looked pained at my layman's language. He grunted up off his straight chair and went over to a corner full of books and got down on all fours, giving the impression of a large sad dog digging a hole. He brought a big book back, sat down, riffled the pages, turned it to face me and laid a dirty finger against a photographic plate. "Like this, possibly?"
    "Very much like that, Professor."
    He went into a discourse, pitched in a penetrating monotone, and it took me a long awed time to realize that he was still speaking English.
    I stopped him and said, "I don't understand any of that."
    He looked pained and decided he had to speak to me in Pidgin English. We both needed a course in Communications. With each other.
    "Eight hundred years old. Um? Fired clay. National Museum in Mexico City. Gold is rare. Um?
    Spaniards cleaned it out, melted it into ingots, shipped it to Spain. Indian cultures moving, changing. Some used gold. Ceremonial. Open veins in mountains. Um? Low melting point.
    Easily worked. No damn good for tools. Pretty color. Masks, et cetera. Then conflict of cultures. Changed the meaning of gold. Cleaned them out, hunted it down. Torture,