The Goldfinch

But despite my cool tone, I had been in a froth of anxiety, anxiety that had not been relieved by the fact that it was twelve days later and Lucius Reeve still had not deposited the money that I’d given him—I’d been checking at the bank right before I ran into Platt.

What Lucius Reeve wanted I didn’t know. Hobie had been making these ca

I had admired Hobie’s changelings for years and had even helped work on some of them, but it was the shock of being fooled by these previously-unseen pieces that (to employ a favored phrase of Hobie’s) filled me with a wild surmise. Every so often there passed through the shop a piece of museum quality too damaged or broken to save; for Hobie, who sorrowed over these elegant old remnants as if they were unfed children or mistreated cats, it was a point of duty to rescue what he could (a pair of finials here, a set of finely turned legs there) and then with his gifts as carpenter and joiner to recombine them into beautiful young Frankensteins that were in some cases plainly fanciful but in others such faithful models of the period that they were all but indistinguishable from the real thing.

Acids, paint, gold size and lampblack, wax and dirt and dust. Old nails rusted with salt water. Nitric acid on new walnut. Drawer ru

A more practical or less scrupulous man would have worked this skill to calculated ends and made a fortune with it (or, in Grisha’s cogent phrase, “fucked it harder than a five-grand prostitute”). But as far as I knew, the thought of selling the changelings for originals or indeed of selling them at all had never crossed Hobie’s mind; and his complete lack of interest in goings-on in the store gave me considerable freedom to set about the business of raising cash and taking care of bills. With a single “Sheraton” sofa and a set of riband-back chairs I’d sold at Israel Sack prices to the trusting young California wife of an investment banker, I’d managed to pay off hundreds of thousands in back taxes on the townhouse. With another dining room set and a “Sheraton” settee—sold to an out-of-town client who ought to have known better, but who was blinkered by Hobie and Welty’s unimpeachable reputations as dealers—I’d gotten the shop out of debt.

“It’s very convenient,” said Lucius Reeve pleasantly, “that he leaves all the business end of the shop to you? That he has a workshop turning out these frauds but washes his hands of how you dispose of them?”

“You have my offer. I’m not going to sit here and listen to this.”

“Why then do you continue to sit?”

I did not for one instant doubt Hobie’s astonishment if he learned I was selling his changelings for real. For one thing, a lot of his more creative efforts were rife with small inaccuracies, in-jokes almost, and he was not always so fastidious about his materials as someone turning out deliberate forgeries would have been. But I had found it very easy to fool even relatively experienced buyers if I sold about twenty per cent cheaper than the real thing. People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn’t want to see. I knew how to draw people’s attention to the extraordinary points of a piece, the hand-cut veneer, the fine patination, the honorable scars, drawing a finger down an exquisite cyma curve (which Hogarth himself had called “the line of beauty”) in order to lead the eye away from reworked bits in back, where in a strong light they might find the grain didn’t precisely match. I declined to suggest that clients examine the underside of the piece, as Hobie himself—eager to educate, at the price of fatally undermining his own interests—was only too quick to do. But just in case someone did want to have a look, I made sure that the floor around the piece was very, very dirty, and that the pocket light I happened to have on hand was very, very weak. There were a lot of people in New York with a lot of money and plenty of time-pressed decorators who, if you showed them a photo of a similar-looking item in an auction catalogue, were happy to plump for what they saw as a discount, particularly if they were spending someone else’s money. Another trick—calculated to lure a different, more sophisticated customer—was to bury a piece in the back of the store, reverse the vacuum cleaner over it (instant antiquity!) and allow the nosy customer to ferret it out on his or her own—look, under all this dusty junk, a Sheraton settee! With this species of cheat—whom I took great pleasure in rooking—the trick was to play dumb, look bored, stay engrossed in my book, act as if I didn’t know what I had, and let them think they were rooking me: even as their hands were trembling with excitement, even as they tried to appear unhurried while rushing out to the bank for a massive cash withdrawal. If the customer was someone important, or too co