Page 47 of The Furies

“One.”

Two, but my dead daughter was none of her concern.

“A boy or a girl?”

“A girl. You were telling me about the coin.”

She accepted that this was as much as she was going to get from me, or not without further concessions on her part.

“Yes, I was, wasn’t I?” She lifted her head and rubbed the palm of her right hand with her thumb. “I held it, you know, but not for very long. I didn’t want to.”

“Why was that?”

She raised her right hand, displaying the palm. Even in the lamplight, I could see the tiny white blisters on her skin.

“I can’t get rid of them,” she said, “and they itch. I think I’ll have to see a doctor, but what will I tell him? That I held an old coin for a couple of seconds before dropping it on the floor? That a presence manifested itself in those seconds, a presence that resembled the image on the coin, except viewed through mist, and afterward my skin began to blister? That I now have nightmares about contamination and disease, of the pustules bursting and small black worms emerging from the wounds?”

She closed her hand and placed it on her lap. Her eyes were very wide.

“What is the coin, Ms. Towle? Why is it so important?”

“It may not always have been a coin,” she said. “Egon thinks it might have had another form at one point—a small effigy, or an amulet—before being turned into a coin. In the end, it doesn’t matter. The shape may change, but its nature never does. It’s both a disease and a remedy. It’s a toxin and an antidote in one. It’s not the coin that’s important, so much as what it’s supposed to buy.”

“And what’s that?”

“Time,” she said. “An extension of your years. Because the coin wards off death.”

“Eternal life?”

She laughed.

“No, not that—and who would want it anyway? You look skeptical, and it’s an expression your face settles into without difficulty.”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“Certainly. Nothing is eternal. Even God will vanish when no one is left to speak His name. Call it longer life, or a delayed death: years, decades. That would be enough for many. I know people who’d sell their souls for just an extra day.” She paused. “My mother wouldn’t have, but I’d have sold mine for one more day with her.”

She kept her eyes fixed on the table, like a woman peering into a stagnant pool to gauge the depths of her own regret.

“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” I said.

“Isn’t there always? I thought I’d be married by now, but I’m not. I hoped to have children, but it didn’t happen. I wanted my mother to keep on living, but she died. Life is written after the ‘but.’ The rest is just what might have been.”

She wiped her eyes, even though they’d barely betrayed her.

“I’m a fool,” she said. “Raum Buker rolls up here, and I take him to my bed. You arrive at my door, and I spill my guts to you. My brother is a thief, and brings his tribulations down on me. Damn all you men. I’m better off alone.”

I wasn’t about to disagree, and any straw poll of unhappy women would also have come down on her side. Men could be poor advertisements for their sex.

“The coin is its own price,” said Eleanor, “or so Egon says, because that’s the myth surrounding it. The coin infects, but it also staves off the consequences of the infection. It corrupts, but as long as you hold on to it, you’ll slow the decay. But lose the coin and you’re lost, too. The sands in your hourglass fall faster, your weakened system is exposed to the damage of the years, and the contamination begins to make itself felt. And all the while, whatever haunts that piece of metal starts looking for a new host as the old one begins to wither.

“If the coin isn’t taken up again, the presence lies dormant, and waits to be rediscovered. So it’s a fairy tale, although not one I’d want to tell a child, and most collectors had dismissed the story, even while they believed in the coin’s existence—because it’s changed hands in the past, although not since early in the last century, or not that anyone could swear to. The collector in Athens figured out that Kepler had the coin, and he wanted it. Egon and Raum were willing to get involved, because even if it turned out not to be the case, the rest of Kepler’s collection would be worth the effort and risk involved.

“But they did find the coin, and if its history is all just so much baloney, there are still men who will pay a lot of money for it because it’s old and uncommon. Egon is convinced it’s the only one of that design ever to have been struck. To the right buyer, it’s worth a low- to mid-six-figure sum, and that’s before you add the value of whatever else Egon and Raum took from Kepler.”

“But the Athens collector wanted the coin,” I said, “or am I misunderstanding the arrangement? He had no intention of selling it, just adding it to his own collection.”

“Which is why Egon and Raum double-crossed him,” said Eleanor. “They calculated that by the time they disposed of their share, allowing for the vagaries of the market and what Egon always refers to as ‘thief’s depreciation,’ they might be splitting two hundred thousand between them, if the stars aligned. They wanted more, and had a dealer lined up to take on the sale.”

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