Vicious Circle

“But here’s the giveaway.” She tapped the design at the tang end of the blade—the delicate floral motif, which was the thing I was most interested in. “Machine-etched,” she said. “The electrolyte solution leaves a minute amount of staining on the steel, which gets worse over the course of a few years and then stabilizes unless there’s a fault in the steel itself or it wasn’t properly neutralized in the first place. In this case there’s a green sheen at the base of the major lines in the design—here. This was done with an industrial-standard etch-a-matic using copper and bronze electrolyte and a sodium-based neutralizer. It’s letting the side down, really, because overall this is a nice piece. But”—she laid it down on the counter, reversed it, and slid it across to me—“no more than fifty years old, in my opinion. And not worth as much now as it was when it was new.”

I tapped the heel of the blade. “Have you ever seen this design before?” I asked her.

She frowned. Possibly she registered that as being an unusual question to come from a tragically bereaved nephew. “No,” she admitted. “Not on a knife blade, in any event. I recognize the actual plant, of course.”

“You do?” I was impressed. “Why?”

“Because I deal in antiques, dear. There’s always at least some degree of stylization in floral motifs, so they’re easy to memorize. And they’re very useful in identification, so it’s worth the effort. This is belladonna—deadly nightshade, to give it its more poetic name. You can tell by the asymmetrical leaf pairs.”

“Right, of course. Asymmetrical leaf pairs.”

“With the flower coming out of the larger leaf. Look.”

It was quite distinctive, now that she mentioned it. Pretty, too. “But does it mean anything?” I demanded, looking her in the face.

She looked back at me, world-weary and a little disapproving. “You’re not a policeman, are you, young man? I positively despise policemen. Rabid little rodents, the lot of them.”

“I’m not a policeman, Mrs. Caldessa.”

“Just Caldessa will do, thank you very much. Very well. I’ll get my book.”

The book was called Identifying Marks in Cutlery and Metalware, by Jackman and Pollard, it was dated 1976, and it was thicker than a telephone directory. Caldessa leafed through it with one hand, holding the knife in the other, and muttering to herself under her breath the whole time. There didn’t seem to be an index of any kind, although there were headings at the top of each page that consisted mainly of words like “inflorescence” and “lanceolate,” and numbers that might have been ranges of dates.

Finally she tapped a particular design, glanced from the page to the knife and back again a great many times, and looked up to fix me with a gaze of frank puzzlement.

“Tell me a little more about your uncle,” she suggested.

I shrugged apologetically. “There is no uncle,” I admitted, telling her what she must already know. “I swiped that knife from a couple of guys who were trying to perform amateur surgery on me with it. Now I’d love to know who they were.”

“Anathemata Curialis.”

“Not deadly nightshade? I thought you said—”

“No, no. The organization that uses this design. It’s called Anathemata Curialis. Did you get a good look at the men who were trying to kill you?”

“They weren’t men,” I said, remembering the feline shape that had chased me across Soho Square and shuddering involuntarily.

“That’s a very harsh judgment,” said Caldessa sternly. “I’m not a believer myself, but I respect the opinions of others. Most of the time. Unless they’re ridiculous, like female circumcision.”

“Whoa. Wait a second. What are you telling me? That this is . . . ?”

“A religious symbol. In effect, yes. If this knife actually belonged to the two men you mentioned, then they were Catholics. Jackman and Pollard, on whose opinion I have many times staked my reputation, identify the Anathemata Curialis as a wing of the Catholic Church.”

She beckoned me around the counter so that she could show me the relevant entry in the book, but seeing it in black-and-white didn’t really help much. I couldn’t make any sense out of this no matter whether I was reading it across, down, or diagonally. The Catholic Church hated and feared the undead with the same passion and enthusiasm they’d once reserved for people who said the world was round. Among the very few things I could tell you for certain about those two loup-garous was that they weren’t faithful and committed adherents to the Roman communion.

But pictures don’t lie. Or if they do, they don’t do it with such a straight face. I ran my eyes down the list. In among the names of Oxford colleges, regiments of defunct colonial armies, and arriviste aristos whose forebears had puckered up and gone down on long-dead kings, there was a single entry in italic type: “Anathemata Curialis, Catholic Order, disc. 1882.”

“Disc?” I queried aloud.

“Discontinued,” said Caldessa. “Nobody has made knives with that livery since 1882.”