The Resurrection Man by Charlotte MacLeod

getting them back, even going so far as to pay the bill without taking his usual two percent discount for cash on the barrelhead. It was not surprising, then, that Percy had followed his sire’s example and turned to Max when confronted by a similar emergency.
    His emergency wasn’t all that similar, actually; this time it wasn’t the value of the object, it was the principle. Nobody enjoys being robbed, but certified public accountants, especially high-class ones with large staffs and many fat-cat clients, are particularly sensitive to the clandestine removal of portable assets; even more particularly when the assets are their own and the removal has taken place from their own house while they were asleep upstairs. To say that Percy was wroth would have been to understate his condition by a considerable margin. Percy was mad as hell.
    He was not blaming his wife. Percy made that point more than once, leading Sarah, who’d come to see whether Max wanted more coffee and remained to eavesdrop, to suspect that Mrs. Percy was at her husband’s elbow hissing in his ear.
    And why shouldn’t she hiss? It was Anne, not Percy, who’d inherited from an aged aunt an ancestral portrait supposedly dating from the late eighteenth century. The portrait had presumably been done by an itinerant painter, it depicted a rosy-cheeked tot of perhaps five or six years, holding a battledore and shuttlecock in her left hand and balancing a green parrot about half her own size on the extended right forefinger. Precisely how so small a child could have sustained the weight of so large a bird on one diminutive digit was something Percy left Max to explain, Max was supposed to know about this sort of nonsense.
    Anyway, the painting was assuredly a true American primitive. At least Percy’s wife, Anne, was sure, and it was her painting and her money behind it. All Kelling wives had money in greater or lesser amounts. Percy would not have been attracted to a lesser, not that he was consciously mercenary but because that was the way his hormones worked. Even Max understood that it was just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl, although he himself had not done so.
    This did not come out in his conversation with Percy, of course. What did come out was that the painting, when handed over to Mrs. Percy Alexander Kelling by the executors, had been in sad shape. Confident that it was worth restoring, Mrs. Percy had asked advice from a friend who’d recently had her own great-grandfather cleaned and revarnished. The friend had recommended Bartolo Arbalest, and given Mrs. Percy his telephone number.
    Bartolo had come, seen, and conquered even Percy’s skepticism. He’d shaken his head sadly over the condition Mrs. Percy’s aunt had let such a fine painting get into. He’d confirmed its age within a few years of Mrs. Percy’s own estimate, he’d explained what needed to be done and how the work should be gone about. He’d named a fairly staggering fee that would include a hand-carved frame created expressly for the painting. This would put Mrs. Percy one-up on her friend, who’d settled for having the old one regilded. Mrs. Percy had signed his contract without a wince.
    The work had been done, not in haste but within a reasonable period. The child and the parrot had come through the operation far better than might have been hoped. The frame was not too fancy, not too blatantly gilded, it was exactly right for the painting. The entire effect had been so harmonious, so gracious, so well worth the expense that Percy himself had suggested demoting a competent but unexciting portrait of his father-in-law to the dining room and giving Anne’s ancestress the place of honor over the drawing-room mantel.
    But last night, regardless of locks, bolts, and bars, the house had been entered; the painting had been stolen. Nothing else had been taken, only the child and her parrot. Not the silver, not Mrs. Percy’s pearls, not even the Corot that had been