The Goldfinch

“Must have been.”

“That sort of thing happened at several clubs out there. Like during big tournaments and stuff—he’d sneak into the locker room and steal whatever he could get his hands on. Then, maybe college by then—oh, darn, where was it, not Maidstone but—anyway, Cable had a summer job in the clubhouse helping out at the bar, ferrying home old folks too blotto to drive. Personable guy, good talker—well, you know. He’d get the old fellows talking about their war stories or whatever. Light their cigarettes, laugh at their jokes. Except sometimes he’d help the old fellows up to the door and the next day their wallets would be missing.”

“Well, I haven’t laid eyes on him in years,” I said curtly. I didn’t like the tone Platt had taken. “What’s he doing now, anyway?”

“Well, you know. Up to his old tricks. As a matter of fact, he sees my sister from time to time, though I certainly wish I could put a stop to that. At any rate,” he said, on a slightly altered note, “here I am, keeping you. I can’t wait to tell Kitsey and Toddy I’ve seen you—Todd especially. You made quite an impression on him—he speaks of you all the time. He’ll be in town next weekend and I know he’ll want to see you.”

v.

INSTEAD OF TAKING A cab I walked, to clear my head. It was a clean damp spring day, storm clouds pierced with bars of light and office workers milling in the crosswalks, but spring in New York was always a poisoned time for me, a seasonal echo of my mother’s death blowing in with the daffodils, budding trees and blood splashes, a thin spray of hallucination and horror (Neat! Fun! as Xandra might have said). With the news about Andy, it was like someone had thrown an x-ray switch and reversed everything into photographic negative, so that even with the daffodils and the dogwalkers and the traffic cops whistling on the corners, death was all I saw: sidewalks teeming with dead, cadavers pouring off the buses and hurrying home from work, nothing left of any of them in a hundred years except tooth fillings and pacemakers and maybe a few scraps of cloth and bone.

It was unthinkable. I’d thought of calling Andy a million times and it was only embarrassment that had kept me from it; it was true that I didn’t keep up with anyone from the old days but I did bump into someone from our school every now and again and our old schoolmate Martina Lichtblau (with whom, the year before, I had had a brief and unsatisfying affair, a total of three stealthy fucks on a fold-out sofa)—Martina Lichtblau had spoken of him, Andy’s in Massachusetts now, are you still in touch with Andy, oh yeah, just as humongous a geek as ever except he plays it up so much now it’s almost, like, kind of retro and cool? Coke bottle glasses? Orange corduroys and a haircut like Darth Vader’s helmet?

Wow, Andy, I’d thought, shaking my head fondly, reaching over Martina’s bare shoulder for one of her cigarettes. I had thought then how good it would be to see him—too bad he wasn’t in New York—maybe I’d call him some time over the holidays when he was home.

Only I hadn’t. I wasn’t on Facebook for reasons of paranoia and seldom looked at the news but still I couldn’t imagine how I hadn’t heard—except that, in recent weeks, I’d been worried about the shop to the point I thought of little else. Not that we had worries financially—we’d been pulling in money almost literally hand over fist, so much money that Hobie, crediting me with his salvation (he’d been on the verge of bankruptcy) had insisted on making me partner, which I hadn’t been all that keen on given the circumstances. But my efforts to put him off had only made him more determined that I should share in the profits; the more I tried to brush off his offer, the more persistent he grew; with typical generosity, he attributed my reticence to “modesty” although my real fear was that a partnership would shed a certain official light on unofficial goings-on in the shop—goings-on that would shock poor Hobie to the soles of his John Lobb shoes, if he knew. Which he didn’t. For I’d intentionally sold a fake to a client, and the client had figured it out and was kicking up a fuss.

I didn’t mind giving the money back—in fact, the only thing to do was buy the piece back at a loss. In the past, this had worked for me well. I sold heavily altered or outright reconstructed pieces as original; if—out of the dim light of Hobart and Blackwell—the collector got the piece home and noticed something amiss (“always carry a pocket light with you,” Hobie had counselled me, early in the game; “there’s a reason so many antique shops are dark”) then I—grieved at the mix-up, while stalwart in my conviction that the piece was genuine—gallantly offered to buy it back at ten percent more than the collector had paid, under the conditions and terms of an ordinary sale. This made me look like a good guy, confident in the integrity of my product and willing to go to absurd lengths to ensure my client’s happiness, and more often than not the client was mollified and decided to keep the piece. But on the three or four occasions when distrustful collectors had taken me up on my offer: what the collector didn’t realize was that the fake—passing from his possession to mine, at a price indicative of its apparent worth—had overnight acquired a provenance. Once it was back in my hands, I had a paper trail to show it had been part of the illustrious So-and-So collection. Despite the mark-up I’d paid in repurchasing the fake from Mr. So-and-So (ideally an actor or a clothing designer who collected as a hobby, if not illustrious as a collector per se) I could then turn around and sell it again for sometimes twice what I’d bought it back for, to some Wall Street cheese fry who didn’t know Chippendale from Ethan Allen but was more than thrilled with “official documents” proving that his Duncan Phyfe secretary or whatever came from the collection of Mr. So-and-So, noted philanthropist/interior decorator/leading light of Broadway/fill-in-the-blank.

And so far it had worked. Only this time, Mr. So-and-So—in this case, a prize Upper East Side swish named Lucius Reeve—was not biting. What troubled me was that he seemed to think that, A: he’d been taken on purpose, which was true, and, B: that Hobie was in on it, was in fact the mastermind of the whole scam which could not have been farther from the truth. When I had tried to salvage the situation by insisting that the mistake was wholly mine—cough cough, honestly sir, misunderstanding with Hobie, I’m really quite new at this and hope you won’t hold it against me, the work he does is of such a high quality you can see how sometimes these mix-ups happen, don’t you?—Mr. Reeve (“Call me Lucius”) a well-dressed figure of uncertain age and occupation, was implacable. “You don’t deny that the work is from James Hobart’s hand then?” he’d said at our nervewracking lunch at the Harvard Club, leaning back slyly in his chair and ru

“Listen—” It had been a tactical mistake, I realized, to meet him on his own territory, where he knew the waiters, where he did the ordering with pad and pencil, where I could not be magnanimous and suggest that he try this or that.

“Or that he deliberately took this carved phoenix ornament from a Thomas Affleck, from a—yes yes, I believe it is Affleck, Philadelphia at any rate—and affixed it to the top of this genuinely antique but otherwise undistinguished chest-on-chest of the same period? Are we not speaking of the same piece?”

“Please, if you’d only let me—” We’d been seated at a table by the window, the sun was in my eyes, I was sweating and uncomfortable—

“How then can you maintain that the deception was not deliberate? On his part and yours?”

“Look—” the waiter was hovering, I wanted him to leave—“the mistake was mine. As I’ve said. And I’ve offered to buy the piece back at a premium so I’m not sure what else you want me to do.”