“Just let’s take a look at it, is all I’m sayin. We just need to compare it with the picture, make sure it’s the same thing we’re talking about. These people are offering a whole lot of money.”

“I got money.”

For the first time, Larry Crane’s temper frayed.

“Well I sure as fuck don’t,” he shouted. “I got shit, King, and I’m in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble can an old goat like you get into?”

“You know I always liked to gamble.”

“Ah, Jesus. I knew you was the kind of fool thought he was smarter than other fools, but the only folks who should bet on horses are those who can afford to lose. Last I heard, you weren’t exactly high on that list.”

Crane took the insult, absorbing the blow. He wanted to lash out at the King, to beat his head against the pine-fresh dashboard of this Scandinavian piece of shit, but doing that wouldn’t get him any closer to the money.

“Maybe,” he said, and for a few moments Crane allowed his selfhatred, so long buried beneath his hatred of others, to shine through. “I never had your smarts, that’s for sure. I married bad, and I made bad decisions in business. I ain’t got no kids, and could be that’s for the best. I’d’ve screwed them up too. I figure, all told, I got a lot of what I deserved, and then some.”

He released his grip on the King’s arm.

“But these men, they’re gonna hurt me, King. They’ll take my house, if they can get it. Hell, it’s the only thing I have left that’s worth anything, but they’ll cause me pain along with it, and I can’t handle no pain like that. All I’m askin is that you take a look at that thing you got to see if it’s a match. Could be we can cut a deal with the folks that are lookin for it. It just takes a phone call. We can do this quiet, and no one will ever know. Please, King. Do this for me, and you’ll never have to see me again. I know you don’t like me bein around, and your wife, she’d see me burnin in the fires of hell and she wouldn’t waste her sweat to cool me down, but that don’t bother me none. I just want to hear what this guy has got to say, but I can’t do that unless I know that we have what he’s lookin for. I got my part here.”

He removed a greasy brown envelope from a plastic grocery bag that lay on the backseat. Inside was a small silver box, very old and very battered.

“I never paid it much mind, until now,” he explained.

Even seeing it there, in the driveway of his own house, gave the King the creeps. He didn’t know why they had taken it to begin with, except that some voice in his head had told him it was strange, maybe even valuable, the first time he’d laid eyes on it. He liked to think he’d have known that, even if those men had not died trying to keep it for themselves.

But that was in the aftermath, when his blood was still hot; his blood, and the blood of others.

“I don’t know,” said the King.

“Get it,” whispered Larry. “Let’s put them together, just so we can see.”

The King sat in silence, unmoving. He stared at his nice house, his neatly kept lawn, the window of the bedroom he shared with his wife. If I could undo just one element of my life, he thought, if I could take back just one action, it would be that one. All that has followed, all the happiness and joy, has been blighted by it. For all the pleasure I have enjoyed in life, for all of the wealth that I have amassed and all the kudos I have gained, I have never known one day of peace.

The King opened the car door and walked slowly to his house.

Private Larry Crane and Corporal Mark E. Hall were in real trouble.

Their platoon had been on patrol in the Languedoc, part of a joint effort with the British and Canadians to secure the southwest and flush out isolated Germans while the main U.S. force continued its eastward advance, and had wandered into a trap on the outskirts of Narbonne: Germans in brown-and-green camouflage uniforms, backed up by a half-track with a heavy machine gun. The uniforms had thrown the Americans. Because of equipment shortages, some units were still using an experimental two-piece camouflage uniform, the M1942, which resembled the clothing routinely worn by the Waffen SS in Normandy. Hall and Crane had already been involved in an incident earlier in the campaign, when their unit opened fire on a quartet of riflemen from the Second Armored Division of the Forty-first who had become cut off during bitter fighting with the Second SS Panzer Division near Saint Denis-le-Gast. Two of the riflemen were shot before they had a chance to identify themselves, and one of them had died of his wounds. Lieutenant Henry had fired the fatal shot himself, and Mark Hall sometimes wondered if that was why he allowed the troops advancing out of the darkness crucial moments of grace before ordering his own men to open fire. By then, it was too late. Hall had never before seen troops move with the speed and precision of those Germans. One minute they were in front of the Americans, the next they were dispersed among the trees on both sides of the road, quickly and calmly surrounding their enemies prior to annihilating them. The two soldiers buried themselves in a ditch as gunfire exploded around them and the trees and bushes were turned to splinters that shot through the air like arrows and embedded themselves in skin and clothing.

“Germans,” said Crane, a little unnecessarily, his face buried in the dirt. “There ain’t supposed to be no Germans left here. What the hell are they doing in Narbonne?”

Killing us, thought Hall, that’s what they’re doing, but Crane was right: the Germans were in retreat from the region, but these soldiers were clearly advancing. Hall was bleeding from the face and scalp as the fusillade continued around them. Their comrades were being torn apart. Already only a handful were left alive, and Hall could see the German soldiers closing in on the survivors to finish them off, twin lightning flashes now gradually being revealed as the need for duplicity was eliminated. Hall could see that the half-track was American, a captured M15 mounted with a single thirty-seven-millimeter gun. This was no ordinary bunch of Germans. These men had a purpose.

He heard Crane whimpering. The other man was so close to him that Hall could smell his breath as Crane cowered against him in the hope that Hall’s body would provide some cover. Hall knew what he was doing, and pushed the younger man hard.

“Get the fuck away from me,” he said.

“We got to stick together,” pleaded Crane. The sounds of gunfire were becoming less frequent now, and those that they heard were single bursts from German machine guns. Hall knew they were finishing off the wounded.

He started to crawl through the undergrowth. Seconds later, Crane followed.

Many miles and many years away from the events of that day, Larry Crane sat in an air-conditioned Volvo rubbing his fingers on the cross carved into the box. He tried to remember what the paper that it once contained had looked like. He recalled taking a look at the writing on the fragment, but it was unreadable to him, and he had rejected the fragment as worthless. Although he did not know it, the words were Latin, and largely inconsequential. The real substance lay elsewhere, in a set of tiny letters and digits carefully drawn into the top right-hand corner of the vellum, but both the King and Larry Crane had been distracted by the illustration upon the page. It looked like a design for something, a statue of some kind, but neither man had ever understood why anyone would want to make a statue like this, using what looked like pieces of bone and dried skin scavenged from both humans and animals.

But somebody wanted it, and if Larry Crane was right, they were prepared to pay handsomely for the pleasure.

The two soldiers were wandering aimlessly, desperately trying to find shelter from the strange, unseasonable cold that was settling in, and from the Germans who were now presumably combing the area for any survivors to ensure that their presence was not communicated to superior forces. This was no last-ditch assault, no futile German attempt to force back the Allied tide like the actions of some Teutonic King Canute. The SS men must have parachuted in, maybe capturing the half-track along the way, and Hall’s belief that they had some seriously dark purpose for doing so was reinforced by what he had witnessed as he and Crane retreated: men in civilian clothing emerging from cover, shadowing the half-track and apparently directing the efforts of the soldiers. It made no sense to Hall, no sense at all. He could only hope that the path he and Crane were taking would lead them as far away as possible from the Germans’ prize.