His murmured accent sounded strange, the singsong Spanish native to Monterrey. The peddler hadn’t been in Mexico City much longer than me, and he glanced at Chance curiously from heterochromatic eyes. “Lo siento, Señorita Solomon. Usted está generalmente abierta a esta hora.”

Chance probably wouldn’t know Alvarez was just observing that I’m usually open at this hour. I knew a flicker of satisfaction while I conducted business in functional Spanish. I’ll never be a poet in this language, but I was capable of making an offer for whatever Señor Alvarez had in the sack. It’d be good too. In the eleven months he’d been bringing odds and ends to my shop, I’d noticed he had a knack for finding things I wanted.

Today he’d brought me a pair of gorgeous silver candlesticks crafted in Taxco. When I recognized the artisan’s mark, I knew they’d fetch two thousand pesos in an antiques auction, not that they’d ever see such a thing. Unless I was grievously wrong, they’d wind up gracing the dining room of an elderly lady from New Hampshire, who would reckon them a steal next week at a thousand pesos and rightly so.

We haggled a little because he had some idea of their worth, but in the end, he took four hundred and an ice-cold Coke. “Thank you for your time and again, I am sorry for the interruption,” Señor Alvarez said in his schoolmaster’s Spanish, letting himself out.

I followed, turning the bolt behind him as a precaution. The peddler was already too curious about Chance, who stood quiet during the negotiations, but I could tell he didn’t like being out of the loop. Without speaking, I snagged my drink and passed through an arch that led to my private staircase at the back of the building.

I have a small apartment that occupies the second and third stories above my shop. Sometimes it looks as if my junk is overflowing from downstairs because I don’t respect the fire safety code and I store stuff in the stair—well, line the walls with opened crates and stacked paintings.