Three Fates

butter-yellow kitchen with his granny’s chintz curtains at the window and the smell of summer grass dancing through them, he thought of just what he’d like to do to the woman who’d stolen the family symbol out of his foolish hands.
    “I don’t think we should wait to take step two,” he decided. “Tia won’t be back in New York for a couple weeks yet, and I don’t want to show up on her doorstep too soon. What we need to do now is work on unraveling that thread to the second statue.”
    Rebecca shook back her hair. “Some of us haven’t been spending their time kicking up their heels in foreign parts. I’ve done quite a bit of unraveling in the last few days.”
    “Why the hell didn’t you say so?”
    “Because you’ve been blathering on about your new Yank sweetheart.”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Becca.”
    “Don’t take the Lord’s name at my table,” Eileen said mildly. “Rebecca, stop deviling your brother and preening.”
    “I wasn’t preening. Yet. I’ve been searching on the Internet, doing the genealogy and so on. Day and night, by the way, and at great personal sacrifice. That was preening,” she said with a grin to her mother. “Still, it’s a big leap, as all we have to go on is Felix’s memory of what he read on the paper with the statue. The dip in the ocean washed the ink away, and we’re counting on him being clear about what he read before what had to be the most traumatic experience of his life. More, we’re counting on his veracity,” she decided. “And the man was, after all, a thief.”
    “Reformed,” Eileen put in. “By the grace of God and the love of a good woman. Or so the story goes.”
    “So it goes,” Rebecca agreed. “With the statue was a piece of paper, with a name and address in London. His claim that he committed it to memory as he thought he might stop by one night and ply his trade seems reasonable enough. More reasonable when I roll up my sleeves at the keyboard and find there was indeed a Simon White-Smythe living in Mansfield Park in 1915.”
    “You found him!” Malachi beamed at her. “You’re a wonder, Rebecca.”
    “I am, as I found more than that. He had a son, name of James, who had two daughters. Both married, but the one lost her husband in the second great war and died childless. The other moved to the States, as her husband was a well-to-do lawyer in Washington, D.C. They had three children, two sons and a daughter. They lost one son when he was just a lad in Vietnam, the other hightailed it to Canada, and I haven’t been able to get a line on him. But the daughter married three times. Can you beat it? She’s living in Los Angeles. She had one child with husband number one, daughter. I tracked her down, too, on the information highway. She’s living at the moment in Prague, with employment at some club there.”
    “Well, Prague’s closer than Los Angeles,” Malachi replied. “Couldn’t have just stayed in London, could they? We’re taking a leap of faith here, that the man White-Smythe had the statue to begin with, or knew how to get it. That if he had it, it’s been kept in the family, or there’s a record where it went. And that all being the case, we can finagle it out of their hands.”
    “It was a leap of faith when your great-great-grandfather gave his life jacket to a stranger and her child,” Eileen put in. “To my mind there’s a reason he was spared when so many were lost. A reason why that little statue was in his pocket when he was saved. Because of that, it belongs to this family,” she continued with her cool, unshakable logic. “And as it’s part of a piece, the others should come to us as well. It’s not the money, it’s the principle. We can afford a ticket to Prague to see if there’s an answer there.”
    She smiled serenely at her daughter. “What’s the name of the club, darling?”
     
     
    THE NAME OF the club was Down Under, and it escaped the sloppy slide down to dive due to the vigilance of its proprietor, Marcella Lubriski. Whenever the joint would start to waver, Marcella would kick it back up to level by the toe of her stiletto heel.
    She was a product of her country and her time, part Czech, part Slavic, with a drop of Russian and a whiff of German in the blood. When the Communists had taken over, she’d gathered up her two young children, told her husband to go or stay, and fled to Australia, as it seemed just far enough away.
    She’d had no English, no contacts, the