Page 43 - Unlikely Stories 1

Ladreque’s Last Case

merely a sidelong glance. All the security devices spun off from the
last American jungle war were in place around the imputed target:
motion detectors, photoelectric cells, infrared sensors. Ladreque did
not expect those measures to be defeated when the attempt was
made; rather, their warning would be ignored, since what they were
guarding would not have been removed. Or so the others would
think—all those soi-disant experts with supercilious airs who had
dismissed Ladreque’s report and its conclusions.
His investigation had begun innocently enough, almost eighteen
months earlier, when he had been called to the scene of one of these
“accidental” alarm trippings. With British Museum personnel at his
side, he had examined the pedestal supporting Maledicta’s Cherub in
Flight, the Late Baroque sculptor’s unassailable masterpiece in
mahogany. The image of airborne angelic avoirdupois was present on
its pedestal, every feathery ringlet intact and in place—down to the
millimeter and milligram. It was slightly off-center and turned from
the position in which it had been carefully spot lit by the curators.
But that was clearly the result of a collision between the stand and a
utility cart carelessly pushed by a preparator working after hours. The
bells had rung, guards had come running; but the miscreant had
already fled the scene, observed only at the moment of the doors
closing on the service elevator used as a getaway conveyance. Upon
questioning, none of the museum personnel would admit to
culpability, nor would any of them put the finger on any of the
others. Ladreque made little of the incident at the time, but it came
back to his mind about a year later.
At that time, he was reviewing the literature on dating techniques
for an article he was writing for Popular Antiquities. The number of
elements whose isotopic decay could be used to establish the
approximate century and decade of the origin of the materials
constituting a manufactured object was increasing, and Ladreque
took it upon himself to keep up to speed on such developments.
Among the arcane accounts of research thus perused, he found a
curious item. Carbon 14, the first such test in wide use, had been
supplemented by more subtle measurements of rare-earth isotopes

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