Florian's Gate (12 page)

“Sounds good, thanks.”

“Just give us a shout, we'll have us a look around, all right?” Andrew turned back to the group, asked, “Everybody here's met Kantor's whiz-kid, have they?”

There were a few greetings, a couple of genuine smiles, several calculating looks from very hard eyes. Jeffrey replied with a hello and a blank smile, and looked forward to getting away.

“Have you ever been into their shop?” Andrew asked the clan.

“Never had the pleasure,” a dealer in old silver replied.

“Generally they have this huge great mixture,” Andrew said. “Everything comes in, from the most darling little post-Impressionist etchings to great hairy stuffed baboons.”

“I missed the baboon,” Jeffrey said.

“Did you really? Probably before your time. Gave me such a fright, that one.”

“Must be quite the place,” Jackie sneered.

“ 'Tis, yeah. Sort of a flea market for the Bentley crowd, you might say.”

“More like a garage sale put on by the British Museum, from the sounds of it.”

“It's all right for some,” Jackie said. “We're sure not seeing the like.”

“No?”

He shook his head. “We're down forty percent on our takings this year. Watched three of our best customers go under the same week. Left me with this lot of paper and a letter from the bank saying I'll stand in line with the others to get paid. What rot.”

Most dealers made complaining about business a singular art form, but there was the ring of truth about what the tough little man said. The recession was hitting the antiques and art trades much harder than anyone expected. According to recent figures, the recession was biting into British business at the rate of nine hundred and seventy bankruptcies every
week
.

“Tough times, Jackie.”

“It is, yeah. Might have to pack it in.”

“You're joking.”

“I'm not, I tell you. Another year like the last one and we'll
be back to peddling from a pushcart. I'm glad the old man didn't live to see the day. Wish I hadn't.”

“It's tough for all of us,” the silver dealer said. “Well, the wolf's at the door. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to make an honest quid.”

“Me too,” Jeffrey said, nodding to the group.

“Here, lad,” Andrew said. “Mind if I join you?”

“Who's tending the store?”

“Got me an old dear, must be eighty if she's a day. Better with the clients than I'll ever be. If they try to talk her down, she grabs her ticker like the shock'll do her in. Shuts them up every time. What's brought you over, then?”

“I've got a chest here with a dealer.”

“Want to hear him do his pitch? That was a wise move, lad.”

One condition Jeffrey placed on dealers who wished to work with him on a regular basis was that he have the opportunity to hear them describe his piece to a potential buyer. It was one of the best possible learning tools, he had found. Some dealers hated it bitterly, accused him of trying to steal their customers. No one accepted it without a fight, and several had taken it up with Alexander. Jeffrey had been gratified to find the gentleman back him on something so totally unorthodox.

“So why did you complain when I asked you?” Jeffrey demanded.

Andrew gave a casual shrug. “Automatic, wasn't it. Anything to do with negotiations, you don't give in without a struggle. You should know that, lad.”

The dealer Jeffrey was to visit today was a leading authority on early Chippendale. He had accepted Jeffrey's condition as he would a dose of castor oil, then compromised by allowing Jeffrey to listen in while he was being interviewed by a magazine reporter. Jeffrey did not object. His goal was simply to hear how someone else described a piece for sale. Who the pitch was made to was immaterial.

The reporter was already there when he arrived. Jeffrey stood just outside the stall, pretending to be a buyer who was simply stopping for a gander. Andrew took the silent hint and stepped back a pace, greeting the stall owner across the way. The pair of them moved up behind Jeffrey, far enough back to be unobtrusive, close enough to hear what was going on.

The dealer ignored them entirely. He was a tall aristocratic man in his late fifties, with ruddy features and a patronizing tone of voice. “It is very difficult, this process of locating the right sort of antiques,” the dealer was saying. “One is forced to travel all over the world. There are just so few pieces available of the quality our clients demand.”

“He's laying it on over thick, don't you think?” a voice behind Jeffrey muttered.

“Not a bit,” Andrew whispered in reply. “The dear's just asked him where his stuff comes from, and he's telling her it's none of her business. Quite right too, if you ask me.”

The reporter was a fresh-faced young woman whose interest appeared genuine. She pointed to a tall piece with wood the color of a burnished red sunrise and asked with an American accent, “And what about that piece? Is that a sideboard?”

One of the men behind Jeffrey snickered quietly.

“Ah, no, well, that's a bureau cabinet, really.” The man's snootiness inched up another notch. Jeffrey kept his features immobile and recalled the time, three weeks after he had started working with Alexander, when he had asked a dealer with a blessedly short memory if a cherry-wood table wasn't eighteenth-century French. The man had looked at him as though he had just grown a second head, replied that it was a brand-new reproduction of an English Sheraton piece, and asked him if he had ever thought of taking up a different profession—accounting, perhaps.

Jeffrey leaned forward slightly, as the piece under discussion was his. It was also clearly the finest article in the man's collection.

“It was made in England in about 1760,” the dealer went on. “George the Third, which makes it of the Chippendale period, of course.”

“Of course,” the cowed young lady repeated, scribbling furiously.

“It's got a lovely color, I'm sure you'd agree. And wonderful architectural pediments.”

“Pediments?” she asked.

“Yes, pediments. Quite rare for a piece of such age, actually.”

Jeffrey understood both the reporter's confusion and the dealer's refusal to explain himself further. Like most professions, the world of fine woodworking had a technical vocabulary all its own. And like most such terms, it was difficult to explain one point without referring to other unknown factors. Jeffrey had several times approached the point of giving up and burning his books before it all began to fall into place.

A cabinet's pediment was the ornate carving above the cornice, the molding that framed the top. If the antique rose above the level of simple furniture and sought to be a work of art, as was the case here, the cornice often rested upon a horizontal section, called a frieze, which was either inlaid or carved or both. Thus an elaborate item might be crowned in stages, rising from the upper framework, or carcase, to the frieze, then the cornice, then the pediment.

Jeffrey had spent over a week memorizing the more than two-dozen most common styles of pediments. These were most important to a dealer, as they were oftentimes the first indication of where and when the antique was made.

The Chippendale period was usually identifiable by what was called a broken pediment, which basically looked like the roofline of a house with a chunk bitten out of the middle peak. Ornate articles often had pierced carvings rising from this central gap.

“This item still has vestiges of the maker's label inside the top drawer,” the dealer was saying. “Not enough to identify
it, unfortunately, but enough to establish in our mind that it was made by a man of importance who prized his work enough to put a label in it.”

This, Jeffrey knew, was pure conjecture and would not hold water with a serious collector. For all they knew, it was a fragment of an old map or will or anything else important enough to be varnished into a safe and relatively secret place. But it sounded good, and the young lady ate it up.

“This also has all the original cast brass handles and features. Very nice fitted interior. Newly lined in silk.”

“What kind of wood is this?”

“Mahogany. One of about two hundred kinds, actually. Cuban or Honduran, we have decided. It was used quite a lot in that period by the better English cabinetmakers. Excellent quality, I'm sure you'll agree.”

“And the price?”

“Thirty-eight thousand pounds.”

The young lady gaped. Jeffrey bit back a smile. That was the litmus test of a raw beginner—inability to disguise shock over prices.

“What is very difficult for some people to understand,” the dealer said, somewhat testily, “is that this piece is exceptional precisely because of such details. The pediments, the original handles and cleats, all these add tremendously to the value.”

“As does a good case of the blarney,” muttered the voice behind Jeffrey.

“What happens if a piece comes in that has been refinished?” asked the young lady.

“You buy it for a song and then you lie,” the voice offered quietly.

“Ah, well,” the dealer replied. “If a piece is ruined, then that is it. Once an article like that has been stripped and repolished, no amount of work will ever restore the color or the surface patina.”

“Lucky for us there's a world of fools with money to burn who don't
know the first thing about patina,” the voice murmured.

“It's very difficult to make a generalization, though,” the dealer continued. “It depends on the damage to the article. I mean, some things can be restored and some can't. If you don't know what you're doing, you can spend a lot of money on restoration and have absolutely nothing to show for it.”

Jeffrey decided the talk was winding down. He nodded to the dealer, who continued to ignore him, and turned away. Andrew followed him. “There's a few of us gathering at the Audley tonight, lad. You ought to stop by.”

“What for?”

Andrew smiled at his directness. “You're getting to be known as a real mystery man. Couldn't hurt to show the face now and then, let people know you're actually human.”

“I feel as if I'm under attack every time I meet these people.”

“Yes, I suppose you are. No more than the rest of us, though.” Andrew patted his shoulder. “Give it a thought, lad. If you're going to make this lot your own, it might be time to widen your circle a little.” He gave Jeffrey a friendly nod and wandered off.

The remainder of the afternoon was spent preparing for Alexander's arrival the next morning, dealing with the occasional customer, and knowing the exquisite frustration of Katya's silent presence. When they were alone like this, they shared the cozy shelter of the little back office. Katya set her work on a small satinwood table beside his bookshelves. He sat at his desk and compiled notes, made calls, carefully went through his accounts for the past month, and rewarded himself with glances at her.

He yearned for the chance to tell her that her silence appealed to him, that somehow it created a tenderness in him that he had never known before, an awareness of her fragility that seemed to cry out for his protection. But he could not speak of it because she would not let him.

At a dinner together two weeks before, Jeffrey had almost admitted defeat. He had sat across from her, and wondered if perhaps it wasn't time to let her go. Six months of futility was enough.

Katya chose that moment to look up. She sensed the change within him, and reacted with a look of real fear before saying, “You've never told me about your family.”

“I've tried,” he replied. “Several times. You never seemed to care.”

“I'm listening now.”

He started to tell her, that's not what I said. Instead he replied, “My family revolved around my father's business life. I was what you'd call a product of the American corporate culture. The way my father told it, Old MacDonald was president and chairman of the board of the E.I.E.I.O. Corporation.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“He had his Moo-Moo Division over here, see. And the Oink-Oink Division over there. And the Quack-Quack Division was stuck out back by the lake because they never could get out of the red.”

“Did your family belong to a church?”

“For the last eleven years my family has lived in Jacksonville, Florida. That means I'm Baptist. Back home, either you're a retired Yankee or you're a Baptist or you're dead. And if you're dead, then you're a dead Baptist.”

“My mother and I belong to an Anglican church,” Katya said. “It's sort of like the Episcopalian church in America.”

“I've always thought of Episcopalians as sort of Catholic lights. You know, all the fun but only half the guilt.”

“There's a real revival going on within the Anglican church in this country,” Katya persisted. “It's really meant a lot to me, being a part of this upsurge in the Spirit.”

Jeffrey nodded, worked at keeping a casual tone. “So when were you saved?”

She looked deep at him. “The same time as you, Jeffrey. About two thousand years ago.”

“We used to have this preacher, a professional auctioneer during the week. I never heard anybody talk so fast in my life. He'd take ten minutes to get cranked up, like a jet engine winding up before take-off. His face would get all red and swollen, then he'd blast off, and all we'd see was a trail of fiery smoke in the sky. He'd start in Genesis and fly right on through to the maps. In an hour. Every week.”

Her gaze remained steady and searching. “Why do you make a joke out of everything?”

Because I love to see your smile, he thought, but could not bring himself to make such a confession. “Maybe because the truth is so boring.”

“Try me.”

“You sure?”

“If I wasn't I wouldn't ask.”