When he returned to the ship, he took the stairs instead of the lift, still trying to remember where he had seen the style of the tiny vase.
"You look cheerful!" Tia said, relief at his safe return quite evident in her voice.
"I feel cheerful. I picked up some artifacts on the black market that I'm sure the Institute will be happy to have." He emptied his pockets of everything but the 'perfume bottle' and laid out his 'loot' where Tia could use her close-up cameras on the objects. "And this, I suspect, is stolen," He unwrapped the kachina. "See if you can find the owner, will you?"
"No problem," she replied absently. "I've been following your credit chit all over the station; that's how I figured out how to keep track of you. Alex, the two end skulls are forgeries, but the middle one is real, and worth as much as everything you spent tonight"
"Glad to hear it" He chuckled. "I wasn't sure what I was going to say to the Institute and Medical if they found out I'd been overtipping and buying rounds for the house. All right, here's my final find, and I have a load of them coming over tomorrow. Do you remember what the devil this is?"
He placed the warped little vase carefully on the console. Tia made a strange little inarticulate gargle.
"Alex!" she exclaimed. "That's one of 'Sinor's' artifacts!"
He slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Of course! That's why I couldn't remember what book I'd seen it in! Spirits of space, Tia, I just made a deal with the crewman of the ship that's running these things in for a whole load of them! He said, and I quote, 'the bosses only wanted the bigger stuff. They're not really artifacts, they're from some failed human art-religious colony'."
"I'm calling the contact number Sinor gave us," she said firmly. "Keep your explanations until I get someone on the line."
Tia had been ready to start sending her servos to pick lint out of the carpet with sheer nerves until she figured out that she could trace Alex's whereabouts by watching for his credit number in the station database. She followed him to three different bars that way, winding up in one called 'Rockwall', where he settled down and began spending steadily. She called up the drink prices there, and soon knew when he had made an actual artifact purchase by the simple expedient of which numbers didn't match some combination of the drink prices. A couple of times the buys were obvious; no amount of drinking was going to run up numbers like he'd just logged to his expense account.
She had worried a little when he didn't start back as soon as the bar closed, but drinks kept getting logged in, and she figured then, with a little shiver of anticipation, that he must have gotten onto a hot deal.
When he returned, humming a little under his breath, she knew he'd hit paydirt of some kind.
The artifacts he'd bought were enough to pacify the Institute, but when he brought out the little vase, she thought her circuits were going to fry.
The thing's identification was so obvious to her that she couldn't believe at first that he hadn't made the connection himself. But then she remembered how fallible softperson memory was...
Well, it didn't matter. That was one of the things she was here for, after all. She grabbed a com circuit and coded out the contact number Sinor had given her, hoping it was something without too much of a lag time.
She could not be certain where her message went to, but she got an answer so quickly that she suspected it had to come from someone in the same real-space as Lermontov. No visual coming through to them, of course, which, if she still had been entertaining the notion that this was really an Institute directive they were following, would have severely shaken her convictions. But knowing it was probably the Drug Enforcement Arm, she played along with the polite fiction that the visual circuit on their end was malfunctioning, and let Alex repeat the details of the deal he had cut, as she offered only a close-up of the little vase.
"Go through with it," their contact said, when Alex was done. "You've done excellent work, and you'll be getting that bonus. Go ahead and receive the consignment; we'll take care of the rest and clear out the debits on that account for you. And don't worry; they'll never know you weren't an ordinary buyer."
There was no mention of plague or any suggestions that they should take precautions against contamination. Alex gave her a significant look. "Very well, sir," he only said, with carefully formality. "I hope we've accomplished something here for you."
"You have," the unknown said, and then signed off.
Alex picked up the little vase and turned it around and around in his hands as he sat down in his chair and put his feet up on the console. Tia made the arrangements for the two messengers to come to the ship for the credit chits and then to the bar for the pickups, fortunately, not at the same time. That didn't take more than a moment or two, and she turned her attention back to Alex as soon as she was done.
"Was that stupid, dumb luck, coincidence, or were we set up?" she asked suspiciously. "And where was that agent? It sounded like he was in our back pocket!"
"I'm going to make some guesses," Alex said, carefully. "The first guess is that we did run into some plain good luck. The Quiet Man had tried all the approved outlets for his trinkets, outlets that the Arm doesn't know about, and found them glutted. He was desperate enough to try someone like me. I suspect his ship pulls out tomorrow or the next day."
"Fine, but why go ahead and sell to you if he didn't know you?" Tia asked.
"Because I was in the right bar, making all the right moves, and I didn't act like the Arm or Intel." Alex rubbed his thumb against the sides of the vase. "I was willing to go through the barkeep to pay, which I don't think Intel would do. I had the right 'feel,' and I suspect he was watching to see if any of his buddies got picked up after they sold to me. And lastly, once again, we were lucky. Because he doesn't know what his bosses are using the phony artifacts for. He thought the worst that could happen is a wrist-slap and fine, for importing art objects without paying customs duty on them."
"Maybe his bosses aren't using the artifacts for smuggling," she pointed out, thinking out all the possibilities. "Maybe they are just passing them on to a second party."