Page 44 - Unlikely Stories 1

Ladreque’s Last Case

occurring in organic compounds. Inevitably, the newer measures
were compared to the older, and in most cases agreed within
statistically acceptable deviations. It was a listing of some exceptions
to that concordance that caught Ladreque’s attention. One of them
was Maledicta’s Cherub in Flight.
He checked his files, and compared the date of the test to that of
the possible foiled theft. The microscopic shaving from the base of
the carving had been taken less than a month after the incident.
Ladreque shrewdly conjectured that the object had been selected for
dating in order to convince its insurer that it had not been a fake in
the first place; Maledicta’s flamboyant style was notoriously easy to
copy with power tools. The half-life of the radioactive carbon in the
sample had decayed at a rate indicating it had been absorbed into the
living wood about three hundred years earlier, as expected. But the
promethium count was way off, averaging only ten to twenty years of
age. The researchers had no explanation for the discrepancy other
than as an anomaly of the experimental conditions—other pieces
tested at the same time yielded the “correct” measurements.
Ladreque’s suspicious nature had been aroused. He started a new
file, accumulating information on every big-ticket art object meeting
either of two extremely unusual criteria: reported as disturbed in its
setting but apparently not removed from it; and displaying some
minor stochastic incongruity in a laboratory age test. There should
not, in his estimation, have been another case like the Maledicta
cherub, falling into both categories—but he found five. All were
highly valued and valuable works in Western museums, their total
worth in the tens of millions. Intrigued, Ladreque investigated each
of the “accidental” displacements in the minutest detail, arriving
finally at a pattern indicating criminal intent. In his view, an
extraordinarily talented band of thieves had executed the almost
impossible task of substituting unique works of art with copies
virtually identical to their models. The knowledge of specifications,
availability of materials, and skill of craftsmanship requisite to this
purpose were incredible. His theory had barely been given a hearing,
and now it was up to him to prove it.

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