Page 45 - Unlikely Stories 1

Ladreque’s Last Case

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
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

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