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Lieutenant Tracy sighed. Then, with an edge in his voice like cold steel, he said, “Dr. Jackson, we can go at this two ways. We, in your presence, can question the staff in a very casual way. Or you can call the dean and the lawyers. I then go and obtain search warrants. I bring in a squad of investigators. We turn the place upside down. We maybe take you in for questioning. The public has a right to know, so we have to issue statements. The media circus starts. People talk. Rumors spread.”

Dr. Jackson got the point.

For all that we came up with precious little. A staff party in June had been catered by the Jade Stalk Restaurant. There had been leftovers, including little tubs of soy sauce, which, as everyone knows, have a shelf life comparable to that of salt.

In the end we agreed it was no breakthrough, but another important confirmation of what we already suspected. And there seemed little that we could do in a practical way. Issue a public health warning or a recall of all local soy sauce? That, surely, would only create a panic. Our “lead” had dwindled to a long shot, which the lieutenant said he would follow up.

On the way back to my office, he told me that Celeste Tangent had been seen several times entering the gift shop associated with the Green Sherpa during the past week or so. It probably meant nothing, he said. But he suggested that I drop by there some time inconspicuously and get a sense of the place. He had heard the FBI had been interested in its owner, one Freddie Bain, for some time. But then, the feds never tell the locals anything.

I agreed to, but with more a sense of foreboding than alacrity, a sense I couldn’t really explain to myself.

28

It swear that the Christmas glitter gets gaudier by the year. It really ought to be called “the Shopping Season.” I was acutely aware of the prevailing incandescent banality when, with Diantha accompanying me as a kind of cover, I visited the Nepalese Realm late this afternoon to do a little sleuthing as requested by Lieutenant Tracy. I didn’t tell her very much as to what I was about, but said I was curious about the gift shop that forms part of the Green Sherpa restaurant. We had, in fact, some shopping to do. But what can you give, alas, to someone you love who is dying?

According to its squib in the Yellow Pages, the shop trades in “imported spices” and “the art and artifacts of Nepal.” Both the restaurant and the shop, sharing a single awning, are located in Clipper Wharf, a renovated part of the old harbor, which, truth be told, had a good deal more charm when it was the haunt of fishermen with their boats, tackle, and smells. Now redbrick and boutiques with signs painted in old lettering on weathered board are starting to predominate.

“It’s all so terminally cute,” Diantha observed after we had parked and were strolling along. Her tone and words gave me a turn. It was exactly the kind of thing Elsbeth would have said.

I agreed, but pointed out that large trawlers, small freighters, and oceangoing barges still docked nearby.

We wandered into the shop like shoppers, glancing over the collection of what seemed to me an ordinary mishmash of orientalia — lacquered bowls, painted screens, batik prints, and a large selection of decidedly aromatic spices. The wrong note, if there was one, lay in the fact that, despite the season, we were the only customers in the store save for an older woman who looked like a street person.

We hadn’t been there long when the proprietor came out of the back room and approached us. I noticed again how his closely barbered hair gave him an old-fashioned Germanic look. I also noticed, above the not unpleasant reek of spices, the distinctive musk of his cologne. He had been in the room with the green baize door. I was sure now he belonged to the Société.

This time I remarked the way his tawny eyes shifted about with the animation of a predator, even as he said, “Mr. de Ratour, how gratifying that you should visit us.