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Then, too, there was the matter of his appearance He was not in any state to walk openly aarments and unkempt hair They would think him one of the unfortunates who haunted their roadways and parks, and hurry away or sued Not when his shaht send hie

Thierry knehere the museum was, thanks to a folded paper he had found in one of the tourist kiosks located around the city Even in France, he hadn’t approved of the e" In his view, it was too much One did not build a castle only to hand out plans of how to breach its walls Yet the paper offered uided hih the side streets up to the very steps of the place itself He parked in an alley a block away and walked down to it

With each step, he looked for his little cat of a wo she would not be Jema Shaw

If one did not have the paper or know that the Shaw Museum housed Greek and Roman antiquities, one only had to look at the outside of the place It was miniature replica of the Parthenon in Athens

While he had been waiting in the alley, Thierry had taken tiht to speak, read, and write English during his years in the Temple From the information offered, it appeared that the Shaw Museum had been created to house the artifacts recovered by Jas in the Mediterranean

Jein, who had brought back statuary that eventually became known as his "marbles" from Greece Indeed, Shaw had made more than two hundred forty trips to Greece and the surrounding Mediterranean to explore obscure sites and retrieve what the paper na the artifacts back to America, he had commissioned a team of experts to restore and preserve what he had recovered The museum had been built to display the fruit of the co the vast collections in his native Louvre, found Shaw’s efforts rather odd Americans were endlessly fascinated with themselves, and took far more interest in their own rebellious, pithy history than that of the rest of the world Why had Shaw gone to Greece and Italy to dig through theirs?

The museum offered three collections of Greek, Roes spanned six thousand years of the respective civilizations’ histories Much of the artifacts apparently were unusual statuary, teious and iconic objects The paper assured his had been analyzed with more care than any that had ever been recovered in the history of his field, and that the arded as one of the finest privately owned collections of Mediterranean antiquities in the Western world

Perhaps the ht as he reconnoitered the building Whatever Ja, he had left no ancient stone unturned in looking for it

His sharp eyes caught the sight of a petite, dark-haired wo to the front of the ht She went past two lanced at her

Jema Shaw

Thierry paralleled her movements as she went fro papers from different offices She passed directly in front of a wo ave her no notice

Thierry frowned These people were not ignoring her They were behaving as if they didn’t see her at all Yet it was natural, even for humans, to look at anyone who cahter; she owned this property, and employed all these people Where was their deference?

He could not enter theto the paper it had closed twenty minutes before his arrival There were phone numbers printed for h Jema’s na the one for administration The phone would enable hi l’attrait on her again

Seeing the grandeur of the Shaw Museum also helped Thierry understand the notation in the file a little better Jema Shaas a woman of wealth and consequence The Kyn were always careful to avoid such people Fame and fortune drew too much attention to those who possessed them, and by extension, anyone around theht

In America a pay phone waited on virtually every corner, and Thierry found one in a shadowy spot across from the museum He was not familiar with American coins, so he fed a handful of them into the slot provided for pay four times, and then a male voice answered, "Shaw Museum security"

"I would speak with Jema Shaw," Thierry said quickly "This is Henri Dubeck from France" The Dubecks had been in service to the Durands; Henri had been the cousin of the Durand family’s tresora He had first introduced Thierry to the Louvre, where he had worked as an assistant curator