The faience amulets were placed among the bandages at the level of the heart, and they served to answer for the dead man when the dead man was asked a question he could not answer on his own, a function the catalogues call substitutive and which Howard Pell, of Pasadena, had explained for forty years to whoever came into the back room, explaining it always the same way, with the loupe in his hand, the loupe in a green felt case that had once belonged to a pair of binoculars, and the binoculars are gone. The back room looks onto a yard that borders the arroyo, where in summer no water has run since April, and the room has three shelves of pale wood, twenty-two shallow drawers, and under the window a wine crate with its nails redone, which is the crate the objects arrived in and which no one has ever thrown out because in this house the things a thing arrived in are kept.

Howard Pell is seventy-eight and has always read standing up, resting the book against the shelf, and this, he would say later, is why there is no armchair in that room, although his daughter gave him one, which is in the garage.

The news had reached him three weeks earlier from a trade bulletin that still comes to him by mail, four pages, thin paper, and it said that an antiquities dealer with a shop in Los Angeles between the sixties and the eighties had died in Arizona in two thousand nineteen, and it gave one line of biography and no photograph. That dealer was the man who used to bring things to his father in a wine crate, a man with big hands and his cuffs always buttoned, who had taught Howard Pell as a boy to hold objects from underneath and never by the rim. It is the only true thing he left him, together with forty-eight pieces, a receipt, and the habit of looking at faience against the light to see whether the green leans toward blue, which in the fakes it does not.

The receipt is from March nineteen seventy-four. It is made out to his father, it bears the stamp of a shop on South Lake Avenue that closed in nineteen eighty-six, it lists the pieces by group and not by number, and it names no country; it says the objects are his and does not say where they come from, which are two different things, and which in this house, for fifty years, have been the same thing.

His daughter had arrived at five, had set her bag on the kitchen table, and from there, without going into the back room, had told him the thing she had been telling him for three weeks, namely that no one was looking for him, that the seller was dead, that the receipt was in order, and that by making the call he would not merely be returning forty-eight objects but handing his grandfather's name over to a file that afterward never closes. On the last point she was right, because files of that kind stay open in order to identify the others, and it says so in the press releases.

Howard Pell had opened the crate at twenty past five.

At a quarter to six Howard Pell took off his watch, set it on the windowsill, and pushed his arm into the crate up to the shoulder, because packing straw is light on the surface and dense at the bottom, where fifty years of weight have pressed it into a kind of felt, and where, when you touch it, it does not make the rustle it makes higher up, it makes a shorter sound, a sound of cloth. And it was while feeling with his fingers for the inner corner of the lid, where wine crates carry the producer's mark and where sometimes they carry something else as well, that he found the label, glued on, yellowed, as wide as half a hand, with the wording of a shipment entered at the port of Long Beach and a date that was November nineteen seventy-four, that is, four months before the receipt that lay in the desk drawer and that for fifty years had been the only document in the house.

Four months is a distance that in a collection means nothing and in a file means everything.

He went out into the hallway with the label in his hand and the straw still on his sleeve, and in the hallway is the landline, a grey set his wife had wanted there because she said the hallway is the one place where nobody talks at their ease; and under the telephone was the card he had written three weeks earlier and put under a green faience amulet four centimetres tall, and on the card was a Wilshire Boulevard number copied from an article.

He dialed the number.

A woman answered who gave a name and an office, and the first thing she asked him was his own name, and the second was how many pieces; and Howard Pell said forty-eight, and he said it without counting, because he had catalogued them all by hand and the cards sat under the objects and not on top, and a man who has written forty-eight cards knows the number the way he knows his own address.

The woman had him repeat it, and then asked the period, and he began with the faience and the Late Period and the workshops of Saqqara, and the woman let him talk for a full minute before bringing him back to the form, which was a voluntary disclosure form, she said, and that is the definition they gave him over the phone of what he was doing.

From the kitchen, through the open door, his daughter had stopped moving things in the sink.

Then the woman asked him a question he had not prepared for, and it was not the one he had prepared for, which was where do they come from, nor was it the one he had feared, which was how much did you pay for them. It was a question that concerned the house and not the crate, and the people and not the faience, and that in the forty years of the back room no one had ever asked him.

Mr. Pell, who else knew.