A Deadly Shade of Gold (8 page)

"Don't expect to buy them cheap, Betty."

"I would expect to pay a bonus over the actual gold value, of course. But you must consider this, too. We're one of the few houses in a position to take the whole thing off your hands. It simplifies things for you."

"The whole thing?"

"The... group of art objects. Did you say twenty-eight?"

"I said twenty-eight. Twenty-eight times the price of that frog would be...."

"Absurd."

"Not when you sell them."

"Only when you sell them to us, Sam."

In spite of all the feminine flavor, this was a very shrewd cool broad.

"If I sell them to you."

She laughed. "If we want to buy what you have, dear. After all, we can't buy things unless we have some reasonable chance of selling them, can we?"

"These things look all right to me."

"And you are an expert, of course." She opened her big purse and took out a thick brown envelope. She held it in her lap where I could not see it. She frowned down as she sorted and adjusted whatever she took out of the envelope.

Finally she smiled across at me. "Now we will play a little game, Sam. We take a photograph for a record of everything of significant value which goes through our hands. These photographs are from our files. There are fifty-one of them. So that we will know what we are talking about, I want you to go through these and select any that are among the twenty-eight you have."

"I haven't looked at them too close, Betty."

She handed the thick stack across to me. "Just do your best." They were five by seven photographs in black and white and double weight paper, with a semi-gloss finish, splendidly sharp and clear, perfectly lighted. In each picture there was a ruler included to show scale, and, on the other side of the figurine, a little card which gave a complex series of code or stock or value numbers, or some combination thereof.

I made my face absolutely blank, knowing she was watching me, and went through them one at a time. I felt trapped. I needed some kind of opening. Somewhere in the middle I came across the same little man I had seen, squatting on his crude lumpy haunches, staring out of the blank eye holes. I did not hesitate at him. I began to pay less attention to the figures, and more to the little cards. I noticed then that, written in ink, on most of them, were tiny initials in the bottom right hand corner of the little code card. I leafed back to my little man and saw that the initials in the corner were CMC. I started through the stack again, looking for the same initials, and saw that they appeared on five of the photographs. The figurines were strange some beautiful, some twisted and evil, some crude and innocent, some earthily, shockingly explicit.

I looked at her and said, "I just don't know. I just can't be sure."

"Try. Please."

I went through the stack and began putting some of them on the table top, face down. You have to gamble. I put nine photographs face down. I laid the stack aside. I looked at the nine again, sighed and returned one of them to the stack.

I handed her the eight of them and said, "I'm pretty sure of some of these. And not so sure of others."

I tried to read her face as she looked at them. The small mouth was curved in a small secretive smile. She had to show off. She handed me back three photographs. "These are the ones you're
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not so sure of, Sam?"

I registered astonishment. "Yes! How could you know that?"

"Never mind," she said, and slid all the photographs back into the envelope and returned it to her purse. "One more drink and let's order, shall we?"

"Good idea."

"Mr. Taggart, your credentials are in order. But I didn't know he would have so many."

"Who would have so many?"

"Oh, come now!" she said. "Couldn't we stop playing games now? He bought from us. Of course, he would have other sources, in the position he was in."

"Put it this way Betty. There was another party in the middle."

"You aren't acting as his agent, are you?"

"Why do you ask a thing like that?"

"I don't think you are completely the rude type you pretend to be, Sam. I can understand how, in the present circumstances, he might want to sell out through a clever agent. If you could prove you're his agent, we might see our way to being a little more liberal. After all, he was a good customer, long ago."

"If I knew his name, I'd try to convince you I was working for him."

"Politics creates a lot of confusion, doesn't it?"

"I don't even know what you mean by that."

"Then you are quite an innocent in this whole thing, and I shan't try to confuse you, Sam. Let me just say that I am personally convinced that the twenty-eight items are legitimate, and we would like to purchase them."

"For how much?"

"One hundred thousand dollars, Sam."

"So I melt them, Betty. Maybe I can get that for the gold alone. Maybe more. I'm talking about a hundred and forty pounds of gold."

"A lot of trouble, isn't it, finding a safe place to melt them down, then smuggling the gold out, finding a buyer, trying to get your money without getting hit on the head?"

"I've had little problems like that before."

"This would be cash, Sam. In small bills, if you'd like. No records of the transaction. We'll cover it on our books with a fake transaction with a foreign dealer. It would just be a case of meeting
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on neutral ground to trade money for the Mente... the collection, with a chance for both parties to examine what they are getting."

"What did you start to say?"

"Nothing of importance. You're very quick, aren't you?"

"Money quickens me, Betty."

"I too have a certain fondness for it. That's why I don't part with it readily."

"You won't have to part with a single dime of that hundred thousand."

"What would I have to part with?"

"Let's say twice that."

"Oh, my God! You are dreaming."

"So are you, lady."

"I'll tell you what. If the other pieces are as good as the five we know, I will go up to one twenty-five, absolute tops."

"The other pieces are better, and one seventy-five is absolute bottom. Take it or leave it."

We ordered. We haggled all the way through the late dinner. She was good at the game. Over plain coffee for me, coffee and a gooey dessert for Betty Borlika, we worked our way down to a five thousand dollar difference, and then split that down the middle, for an agreed price of a hundred and thirty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars. We shook hands.

"Even if you were his agent, I couldn't give you a penny more."

"You'll get a quarter of a million when you sell them."

"We might. Over a period of years. There isn't an active market in this sort of thing, Sam. You saw the jeweled toad. We've had that for over four months. We have considerable overhead you know. Rent, salaries, money tied up in inventory."

"You'll have me crying any moment."

"Don't cry. You drove a very good bargain. How would you like the money?"

"Used money. Fifties and smaller."

"It will take several days to accumulate it, Sam."

"I haven't exactly got the little golden people stashed in a coin locker."

"Of course not. From my estimate of you, they are probably in a very safe place. How long will it take you to bring them here?"

"You just get the cash and hang onto it and I'll phone you when I get back to town. How will we make the transfer?"

"Do you trust me, Sam?" I could not get used to being called that. I kept seeing those pink teeth.

I returned her smile. "I don't trust anybody. It's sort of a religion."

"We're members of the same sect, dear. And that gives us a problem, doesn't it? Any suggestions?"

"A very public place. How about a bank? Borrow a private room. They have them. Then nobody can get rough or tricky."

"You are a very clever man, Mr. Taggart. Now we can forget it all until I hear from you again.

And could you order us a brandy? The deal is made. From now on it's social."

"Social," I agreed. Her eyes were softer, and her smile a little wider.

"You are a very competent ruffian, Sam. You give me problems. Did you know that?"

For the first time I could see that the drinks were working on her. "Not intentionally."

She frowned judiciously. "You know, I deal all the time with shifty shifty people. How many ways can a person be shifty? Not so many ways, Sam. It's like dancing. Ballroom dancing. It takes a few bars of music to get in step, and then you can follow every lead. But I stumble a little with you. You have contradictions, Sam. You look a little bit rough and sort of mild and sleepy and, excuse me, not too terribly sharp. I think I have you cased and then something else shows, and you go out of focus. Something quick and bitter and secretly laughing. Then I feel trivial and transparent. But I'm not!" She glowered at me. "Damn it, I'm not!"

"I know you're not, Betty."

I had seen the same thing happen with businessmen. The deal in process would sustain them, keep them alert and organized and watchful, and when it was settled, they would turn into softer more vulnerable mechanisms. The Betty Borlika of appraisals and bids, of dickering and expertise, had faded away. This was the woman of the bitten nails and the small petulant mouth, and blue Irish eyes slightly mazed, the young Irish widow, with a hidden uncertainty about the value of her goals and her attainments, driving loneliness underground with the pressures of her work.

I paid the check and helped her into her cape. The place was nearly empty. On the way out we stopped at the bar, at her suggestion, for another brandy.

"I came down here and got a small job," she said. "Betty O'Donnell, curator of practically nothing. Scut work at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. I lived in the Village and dressed the part. Hairy stockings and ballet slippers. And I answered the Borlika ad. I worked there almost a year and then married Tony." She turned and stared up at me. "You see, my best professional asset is a hell of a fantastic memory Sam. I can read an illustrated catalogue of a sale, and if five years later I come across something that appeared in that catalogue, I can recognize it, identify it, classify it, and remember what it brought at auction." She shook her
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head as though puzzled. "And I don't even have to work."

"What do you mean?"

"Maybe you read about it. It was such a weird accident it was in papers all over the country.

High up on one of those crappy buildings they were building, a slab of some kind of imitation stone gunk came out of a sling and fell and hit a cornice and ricocheted across Park Avenue and smashed Tony dead. It was a nice day. He'd decided to walk. A lot of money came out of that, Sam. An awful lot. But I should work at what I'm good at, shouldn't I?"

"Of course."

She put her empty glass down. "It's such a family thing, you know. I'm a Borlika. I'm caught in it.

Probably forever. At least it isn't, for God's sake, a chain of laundries. Beautiful things, Sam.

Beautiful lovely things to buy and sell."

We went out. It was well below freezing, and the sky had cleared, the high stars weak against the city glow. The sidewalks were dry. We walked to her place, her tall heels tocking, her arm hooked firmly around mine.

"You don't say anything about yourself Sam."

"Nothing much to say. I keep moving. I hustle a little of this and a little of that. I avoid agitation."

"When this is over, what will you do?"

"Bahamas, maybe. Lease a little ketch, ram around, fish, play with the play people. Drink black Haitian rum. Snorkel around the coral heads and watch the pretty fish."

"God! Can I sign on?"

"As cabin boy? Sure."

We arrived at her place. Three stone steps up to the street door. "Nightcap time?" she said as she got her key out.

"If it doesn't have to be brandy"

"Right. The hell with brandy."

The elevator was a little larger than a phone booth. It creaked and juggled and shimmied upward, taking a long time to reach the fourth floor. She had become very animated and chatty, posing her face this way and that as though I held a camera aimed at her, talking as though we were recording it all. Women act that way on television commercials.

Her apartment was big. She bustled about, turning on strategic lighting, tossing her cape aside.

Modern paintings, lighted by spots, made big bright explosions on the walls. A complex wire sculpture on a low pedestal was lighted in such a way it threw a huge mysterious shadow form on a far wall.

"In spite of all the Borlikas," she said, "my personal tastes are contemporary. I happen to feel that...." The phone started ringing. She excused herself, started toward it, then went into the bedroom and closed the door. The phone stopped. She came back out a few moments later, brisk and chatty.

She opened a small lacquered bar and scurried off to the kitchen to get cubes. I made us two tall highballs. She took me on a circular tour of inspection of the paintings and sculpture, lecturing like a museum guide.

Then she said, "I do have one little collection of eighteenth century art. Come along." With a brassy and forlorn confidence she marched me into her bedroom. It was more persuasively feminine than I would have guessed, canopied bed, pastel ruffles and furry rugs. She turned on a display light which illuminated a dark blue panel in the bedroom wall. In random arrangement against the panel were a dozen or so delicate little paintings, most of them round, a few of them oval, all framed in narrow gold, all a little smaller than saucers.

"French," she said. "Metallic paints on tortoise shell. It was a precious little fad for a time. They are quite rare and valuable."

"Very nice," I said.

"Look at them closely, dear," she said, with a mocking smile.

I did so, and suddenly realized that they were not what they appeared to be, not innocent little scenes of life in the king's court. They were not pornographic. They were merely exquisitely, decadently sensual.