It was smuggling that got the stuff out of Egypt, Dolly. A crooked operation. Crooked as all hell."

The speaker's voice was faint and wheezing, a crippled, dying sound, issuing from a shrunken figure in an old hospital bed tucked away in one corner of a wide corridor in a timeworn building. Crowding being what it was these days here at County, the corridor was doing duty as a ward.

A window nearby was propped open a few inches, letting in the smells of dust and warmth and weeds, automobiles and pavement. Beyond heavy screening and thick dirty glass, the city lay in a summer afternoon's warm blur of sights and sounds.

The young woman in sole attendance on the old man leaned a little closer in her chair. She had the look of one grown accustomed to bewilderment, and her appearance suggested she had been summoned to this bedside without much time for preparation. Her youthful face, and her outfit of old jeans, old sneakers, and a new pullover shirt with the initials of Thomas More University emblazoned on the front, strongly suggested the beginning college student.

In soft, weary tones she said: "Take it easy, Gramp. It's all right if you don't tell me. Everything will work out."

Wrinkled eyelids opened in a jaundiced face. Where once had grown a neat theatrical beard, carefully trimmed and tended, now showed only irregular gray stubble. The gray head on the clean pillow shook back and forth, slowly but vehemently. The exhausted voice rose louder. "Got to tell you, Dolly... the whole secret... worth a fortune. More..."

Words faded in a breathless mumble, but the anxiety on the old man's face was plain. It had been building for several hours.

Dolly had been treated to this suggestion of a fortune several times in those several hours, since the beginning of her day's bedside vigil, otherwise pretty much a repeat of yesterday's. Once before, about two hours ago, her grandfather had spoken incoherently about smuggling, and Egypt. But so far there was no evidence the talk was anything but delirium.

Still, the young woman wanted to be sure, and she wanted to be fair, and by nature she was kind. "All right, Gramp. Tell me if you have to, whatever it is. Take it slow, easy. I'm right here. I'm listening."

The gasping voice slowly became intelligible again. "... little statues..."

"'Statues,' Gramp?"

"... once they were in this country, got stolen again, y'see. By some stupid bastards, didn't even know they were antiquities. Sold 'em off any way they could...."

A nurse came by, practical heels soft on the worn hard floor. She smiled impersonally at the young woman as she felt briefly at the old man's wrist, before moving on to the next bed, a few yards down the corridor. There was still a small bandage on the back of the old man's hand, where the IV had been disconnected an hour ago.

Keeping quiet while the nurse was near had given him a chance to store up a little breath. When her firm step had passed, he went on, a little more strongly.

"I went through all kinds of hell, Dolly, to get a list of names, final purchasers. You wouldn't believe... but you find it, and it's all yours. I'm done for. Don't tell Tamarack, or Dickon. They're... no good. Neither of 'em. Cheat you blind."

The old man frowned and shook his head and closed his eyes. "Project I've been trying to do with them... won't work. I never should've... but I wasn't altogether crazy. Real secret... is here." He gestured feebly toward his tiny bedside table. At the moment the tabletop held nothing at all except a half-filled carafe of water capped with an inverted plastic tumbler, and a thick paperback novel, looking tired and worn enough to have been borrowed from the hospital library. To Dolly the faded, creased cover suggested some kind of historical romance. The author's name was not one she recognized.

"Sure, Gramp. Lie back, take it easy."

But Gramp was ignoring orders, reaching out for the tattered paperback. His trembling fingers snatched from it a scrap of paper that had been doing duty as a bookmark. This he held out to his granddaughter.

"S'good way t' hide things... in plain sight." The old man lay back wearily, seeming well satisfied at having managed one last successful deception.

Accepting the scrap of paper, Dolly stared at it, still not comprehending. One side was blank. The small space available on the other side was crowded with four names, four corresponding addresses, cities and streets and house numbers, all hand-printed in small, neat characters. She could recognize Gramp's script, as it had been before his body had finally betrayed him. One of the addresses was right here in Chicago, the others scattered across the western United States. It was possible, she thought, that her grandfather had once had a connection with someone in Carmel, California -- she seemed to remember that Clint Eastwood had once been mayor there.

"What are these, Gramp? Names of people who bought the statues you were telling me about?"

There was no answer.