Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

gold?”
    “The two on the right are.”
    “Kinda small, aren’t they?”
    “They were probably a votive offering—a way of giving something to the gods so that the gods would listen to your prayers.”
    Cherelle chewed on the corner of her mouth and wondered what the bits and pieces in the case were worth.
    Risa watched her friend’s expression. In many ways Cherelle was a good test audience for the articles. “What do you think?”
    She shrugged. “This stuff is like an old whore. Same equipment as a young one, but with the kind of mileage that really cuts the price.”
    Risa looked at the battered metal arc that probably had been damaged by the same farmer’s plow that had unearthed the treasure in the first place. The other items showed nicks, dents, bends, warps, irregularities, and outright breakage that troubled modern eyes accustomed to new, machine-made jewelry.
    But to Risa’s eyes every mark was priceless, for it told of each artifact being made, worn, passed from one generation to the next, buried, and dug up again. Each piece had a tantalizing history. She’d often daydreamed of what stories the jewelry could tell.
    “When you’re between fifteen hundred and three thousand years old,” Risa said, “you show it.”
    Cherelle’s head snapped around toward Risa. “What?”
    “Fifteen to thirty centuries.”
    She swallowed her gum in surprise. “Holy shit.”
    Risa smiled wryly. That was one way of putting it. “Yeah. A long time.”
    “I suppose that makes it worth more, huh?”
    “More than its weight in ordinary gold? Oh, yes.”
    “How much more?”
    “It depends on a lot of things.”
    “Like?” Cherelle pressed.
    “Age, rarity, artistry, and provenance—that’s where it came from and how well documented it is.”
    “Documents, huh?” Cherelle chewed the corner of her mouth some more. That could be a big ol’ bitch of a problem. “All this stuff came with papers?”
    “Actually, most of it was dug up at some time in the past by the ancestors of the titled men and women who sold off parts of their inheritance in order to keep the rest. Others came from museums that were cleaning house. Some were probably stolen by people who found them and didn’t tell the landowner.” Risa shrugged. “But it all happened so long ago in the past that it doesn’t matter anymore.”
    “How long does that take?”
    Risa smiled. “At least a hundred years. The more hundreds, the better the provenance, the higher the price.”
    Cherelle went back to chewing on her mouth. She didn’t have a hundred years. Hell, she probably didn’t have a week before Socks wheedled Tim’s gold out of him. “So who bought the stuff before it had all the paper to go with it?”
    “People who wanted the objects more than they wanted to display them publicly. Collectors, in a word.”
    “Like your boss?”
    Risa’s mouth turned down. “Not if I can help it. Everything I show to him is legal.”
    A small smile played around Cherelle’s lips. “But you’re not always the one showing stuff to him, right?”
    Risa shrugged.
    “Hey, baby-chick. Take the frog-sticker out of your ass. This is your mama-chick, remember? We used to boost more stuff in a week than this here glass box could hold.”
    “Yeah. And I was so scared the whole time that I couldn’t spit.”
    Full, husky laughter poured out of Cherelle, making her look almost young again. “Those were the good times, weren’t they? Heat thick enough to walk on and cold drinks swiped from Old Man Burlington’s cooler. We’d shinny up that big ol’ oak in front of your aunt’s trailer and freeze our brains slugging icy Coke, and we’d stay up there till dark wishin’ we was boys so we didn’t have to come down to pee.”
    Risa laughed at the memories. Cherelle was right. Those were the good times, when life was a long, hot summer filled with mischief and laughter and dreams.
    “But we always had to come down, didn’t we?” Cherelle asked with a hard twist to her mouth. She looked through the smudges she had left on the glass and sighed deep enough to haze the surface. “So how much is this all worth? A couple hundred? A thousand?”
    “Dollars?”
    Cherelle gave her a look from the old days, the one that said, Baby-chick, if you so smart, why you so dumb!
    Risa smiled. “Lots of thousands.”
    Cherelle’s breath hitched, then smoothed. “Like twenty?”
    “More like hundreds.”
    It was an effort to breathe. After a moment,