chapter five:The Old Quarter

The tin sat on the third shelf of Eliza’s wardrobe, between a winter scarf and a pair of stunt gloves with the fingertips cut off. BISCUITS, said the lid.

Inside were three hundred and twelve in crumpled notes and a label in careful handwriting: STUNT FUND. DO NOT TOUCH. THIS MEANS YOU, VICTOR.

“She was saving for a helmet,” Rex said from the pillow. “And knee pads. And, I think, a very small explosion.”

“And I’m about to spend it on old things.”

“On treasure,” Rex corrected, and sat up straighter, which on a rabbit that size looked like a man clearing his throat. “Quest alert. Find one item whose true value is at least ten times its price. Reward: one hundred points and Appraisal level two. Refuse and you lose fifty points, and I will sulk.”

“I don’t have any points to lose.”

“I’ll sulk anyway.”

The Old Quarter market opened at dawn on Wednesdays, and by nine the lanes were thick with brass, brocade and people lying about both.

Eliza went in with a cap pulled low, a canvas bag over her shoulder and the walk of someone with nowhere particular to be. It was a good walk. It had taken her years to learn.

Rex did not walk. He floated at her ear, visible to nobody, and talked.

“Fake. Fake. Honest fake, I respect that. Fake pretending to be a fake. Oh, that one’s been aged with tea, how charming. Fake. Eliza, there’s a lot of fake.”

“Appraisal only works on what I can see,” she said under her breath, a woman consulting a bracelet. “So stop describing what I can’t.”

“I’m building atmosphere.”

She passed three stalls of jade, all green glass, and a man selling a “Ming” chamber pot that still had its price sticker from a hardware store. Somewhere past the noodle cart, the lane narrowed under a green tarp, and she stopped.

An old woman sat on an upturned crate behind a basket of tangled beads and a dented tin tray.

Beside her, a fat gray cat was eating from a brown bowl and looked deeply offended when Eliza picked it up.

The glaze was mud. There was a crust of something at the foot that had been, until recently, tuna. Eliza turned it over, and Rex went silent for the first time since breakfast.

“Longquan celadon,” he said at last, very softly.

“Southern Song. The brown is dirt and about eighty years of cat food. Under that, a pale green you would weep over. No repairs. No chips. Value, thirty-eight to forty-five thousand.”

Eliza kept her face perfectly dull. “How much for the dish?”

The old woman squinted at her. “Forty.”

“Thirty-five.”

“Forty. And what does the cat eat from?”

Eliza looked at the cat. The cat looked back with the calm of someone who had never lost an argument. In the end she paid forty for the bowl and five for the dented tin tray, and the old woman set the cat’s dinner on the tin with great ceremony, as if conferring a title.

“Quest complete,” said Rex, breathless. “One thousand times the price. A thousand. I need to lie down.”

“Forty for a cat dish,” said a voice.

The man at the next stall had been watching. He wore a linen jacket the color of oatmeal and a small gold pin shaped like a bell, and the sign above his awning read PRUITT FINE ANTIQUES in careful lettering. He was smiling at her the way people smile at a child who has bought a balloon.

“Miss, the market is full of people like you,” he said.

“Pretty, hopeful, and a month from crying. I’m only saying it because I’d hate to see you waste your money.”

“Mr. Pruitt,” said Eliza.

“Yes?”

“Your blue-and-white vase. At the front.” She nodded at the shelf. “May I?”

He spread a hand as if presenting the ocean. She walked over, still carrying the bowl, and Rex began to whisper in her ear like a man calling a boxing match.

“Foot ring, rubbed with tea. Glaze, thirty years old at the outside. And look at the mark.”

“The mark says Qianlong,” Eliza said, in an ordinary, conversational voice. A woman with a pram stopped to listen. “But the character for long is missing a stroke. Whoever painted it was copying from a photograph of a photograph. It’s a factory reproduction, Mr. Pruitt. A nice one. About the price of a decent lunch.”

Somebody laughed. Pruitt’s smile did not so much fade as get called away. A man in a brown cap leaned in to look at the vase, then at the mark, then at Pruitt.

“That’s,” said Pruitt, “a matter of opinion.”

“It isn’t,” said Eliza, kindly. “That’s why it’s so sad.”

The crowd had thickened. Pruitt’s ears went the color of boiled ham. He snapped something about people who read two articles and thought they were experts, and began shifting items on his shelf as though by tidying them he could take them back. It was while he was doing this, flustered, that he knocked his receipt book half off the table and onto the cloth.

Eliza had spent a lot of her life reading upside down. It was a skill, like any other.

The page lay open. Last week’s sales, in neat blue ink. The third line read: One Qianlong-style vase, blue and white. Sold to A. Sinclair. 180,000. And below it, in a small tidy hand, as if someone had been asked to mention it: Introduced by Mr. L. Hargrove.

A hundred and eighty thousand.

For a decent lunch.

She set the bowl down on the nearest crate before she could drop it. Pruitt had followed her eyes. He swept the book into his drawer, hard, and the smile he put on to cover it didn’t reach any part of his face.

“Mr. Hargrove,” Eliza said slowly. “He brought my father in himself?”

“I don’t,” Pruitt said, “discuss clients.”

“No. Of course.” She picked up the bowl again. It was warm from the sun and smelled faintly of tuna, and she held it more carefully than anything she had ever carried. “Thank you, Mr. Pruitt. I came to see which of us was wasting money. It’s very instructive.”

She walked back through the lane with the crowd parting and Rex whispering like a man at a funeral who is pleased with the food.

“Quest reward,” he said. “Appraisal level two, hundred points, and I thought you’d want to see this.”

A line of gold script scrolled across the inside of her eyelids.

Notice: Host’s father has paid a hundred and eighty thousand for a decent lunch. , L.Hargrove: banker. Son attends Saturday’s dinner.

Eliza stopped in the middle of the Old Quarter, a bowl in her arms and a cat’s dinner tray tucked under one elbow.

So that was what Saturday was for.