Jewel Trade - Teaser
Inside the Royal Ontario Museum, visitors ebbed and flowed like tides through the rooms and around the exhibits. Museum staff guided, directed and assisted where needed while bored guards tried to stay alert for inadvertent vandalism and unsupervised children on rampages.
A group of six Asian men and women, middle-aged to elderly, filed through the ticket purchase area and into the great hall at the center of the building. They clustered together, reading the banners and signs on the various exhibits, talking together, and after a few seconds, headed into the wing for temporary exhibits. The banner over that archway read, "Ancient Shipwreck: The Chinese Discovery of North America."
They threaded their way through the slow-moving lines of visitors drifting from display case to display case until they reached one labeled, "A Sailor's Personal Possessions." There, among mending needles made of bone, tiny votive statuettes of the sea goddess Ma Tsu and personal grooming articles, was a round bronze mirror, its back to the viewer. The back had been formed in the shape of a Taoist wheel, with a clear gem in the center. The label read, "bronze mirror used to ward off evil spirits when going ashore in a strange land."
The faces of all six men and women glowed greedily as they gazed at it. At the whispered word of one of the men, they linked hands and closed their eyes, their lips moving. The other museum guests, uneasy, stayed back from them and avoided that case. There were far more interesting displays in the room, anyway.
Had anyone looked closely, they would have seen the clear gem wink and flash though the museum lights were steady.
Outside, in a nearby alley off Bloor St., a body appeared.
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