Blood risk

travelers, he took his suitcase into a telephone booth and drew the door shut. He dialed the office number of his family's banker on the off chance that the man might still be at work. President of the bank, he was still at his desk. Tucker licked dry lips, cleared his throat, wondered if there was any other way to handle this, decided there was not and identified himself, though not with the Tucker name.
        "Michael! What can I do for you?" Mr. Mellio asked. He was warm, sincere, concerned. Bullshit. In truth, he was an icy bastard and completely in the old man's tow. When he hung up in a couple of minutes, he would immediately dial Tucker's father and report, verbatim, what had been said. When you were a depositor of the position of the old man, bankers broke their professional codes and extended you certain extra services.
        "How long will you be in your office this afternoon, Mr. Mellio?"
        "I was just preparing to leave."
        "How early can you be there in the morning?"
        "A quarter past eight?"
        "Will you see me then?" Tucker asked.
        "What did you have in mind, Michael?"
        "I'd like to borrow against my inheritance." The statement was simple enough, though it was difficult to make. His father would be pleased to hear Mellio's report; Tucker's financial need, his first in more than three years, would make the old man's whole day.
        "Borrow?" Mellio asked, a banker who seemed never to have heard of such a thing. "Michael, need I remind you that by signing one small paper you may pick up your accrued allowances from the trust and-"
        "You needn't remind me," Tucker said sharply. "May I see you at a quarter past eight in the morning for a loan?"
        "Of course," Mellio said. "I'll leave word with the guards to admit you then."
        "Thank you, Mr. Mellio," Tucker said. He hung up. His forehead was dotted with perspiration, though he felt cold clear through. He wiped his face with a paper tissue, then opened the booth door, stepped out, picked up his suitcase and went outside to catch a taxi.
        The doorman at Tucker's building-Park Avenue in the eighties; he had a nine-room apartment complete with his own sauna; his father wondered most about his ability to maintain that-greeted him with a smile and his name, turned him over to the hallman inside, who inquired after the success of his business trip.
        "Well enough," Tucker said, though the words tasted bitter.
        He knew as soon as he entered his tenth-floor apartment that Elise was home, because the stereo system was carrying Rimski-Korsakov as interpreted by Ormandy's Philadelphia Orchestra, her favorite composer by her favorite orchestra. He controlled an urge to go looking for her and attended to important details first. At the wall safe in the living-room closet he put away the billfold that contained the Tucker papers, took out his own wallet and slipped that into his pocket. He closed the safe again and spun the dial. Then he went looking for Elise.
        On his way down the main hall, he stopped before the fragment of an early fifth-century Edo shield which had come into his possession only two months ago but which already seemed an integral part of the apartment. He and Elise had spent hours finding the right place for it and bracing it on the wall, and he had spent even longer examining it in detail, wishing that more than a ragged half of the beaten copper piece had survived. Of course, if the shield had come through the ages intact, it would have been far too valuable for him to afford it. As it was, he had paid close to forty thousand dollars for it and felt that the money was well spent. The oval shield, of well-worked copper trimmed in silver, inlaid with small pieces of hand-carved purest ivory, was the product of a nation of African dreamers who had lived on the east bank of the Niger River, constructing elaborate shields but rarely going to war, and it was exquisitely beautiful.
        Besides, the acquisition helped substantiate his cover as a freelance dealer in primitive art objects, a front which satisfied Elise and which his father found hard to crack. He really made little money from his dealing, but his records were a private matter between him and the IRS, and his father's investigators could never be sure what he cleared as an art dealer.
        He had paused before the shield as much to absorb some of its innate peace as to admire its