Florian's Gate (3 page)

“You don't have any idea just how special you are, do you? I've never seen so many twisted definitions for honesty as I find in this trade.” She walked back over, patted his cheek. “Did you know you're already gaining a reputation?”

“Who says?”

“One the other traders would kill for, I might add. Of course, they treat the concept of honesty as something they can buy.” She chuckled, shook her head, turned back to the table. “What a true work of art. It deserves to go to a home where it will be appreciated, don't you think?”

“I wish I could afford to keep it,” he confessed.

“Don't worry. That too will come.”

“How can you be so sure?”

She did not look up. “Less than a year in this game, and already the word's getting out about you. Just be patient and don't give in to greed when the opportunity arises. How much for the table?”

“Five thousand. Pounds.”

She gave a single nod. “High, but fair. Set to allow me an honest profit, no need to argue or bicker or stomp around in pretended rage. And you don't carry another Jacobean piece
in the entire shop, do you? No, of course not. You really were holding it for me, weren't you?”

“The minute I saw it, I knew you'd flip.”

“I'm too old and set in my ways for any of that, I'm afraid. But I do love it and you are a perfect sweetheart to think of me.” She gave him a from-the-heart smile, another rare gem in this trade. “Now how about some of that coffee of yours? Still making it too strong?”

“I'm trying to get it to where it'll take the tarnish off my spoons,” he replied, leading her back upstairs. “I'm not quite there yet. The last batch melted the silver.”

“It's difficult for me talk about antiques without talking about my love of antiques,” she said, once they were back upstairs.

“You always say that when we start talking.”

“Well, it's true.” She accepted her cup, took a sip, made a face. “Good grief, Jeffrey. You're going to melt my inlays.”

“Too strong?” he asked politely.

“Pour some of this out and fill it halfway with milk. Maybe I'll keep my stomach lining.”

She watched him doctor her cup, took another sip, gave him a nod. “I do believe I'm going to be able to drink this batch without gagging.”

“Coming from you that's real praise.”

Betty settled back and began what for them was the favorite part of their time together. As she sat and sipped her coffee, he sat and drank her words.

“When you think of antiques in the United States, you have to ask yourself how the pieces got here. Some of the early items were brought over by wealthy families. We tend to see all of our ancestors as having arrived in rags, packed into the holds of sailing ships like cattle. For many, many people this just was not true.”

She stopped to taste her coffee. The cup was one of a set of Rosenthal, so delicate the shadow of her lips could be seen through the porcelain. On the outside was painted a pastoral
scene in the tradition of the early Romanticists; with either excellent vision or a magnifying glass one could make out genteel ladies under frilly parasols watching gentlemen in spats lay out picnics while being watched by smiling cows and prancing horses. In the background was a mansion in the best Greco-Italian-fairytale style.

“In most instances, the wealthier families traveled over with their own craftsmen. They intended to build their homes, you see, and skilled workers were as hard to find then as now. Once the main house was completed, these craftsmen would begin to make furniture.”

They were seated in the little office alcove behind the stairwell. Between the banister and his desk Jeffrey had set a nineteenth-century screen, whose three panels were inlaid with ebony and mother-of-pearl in a European parody of a Japanese garden scene. His desk was a real find, an eighteenth-century product that appeared to have been carved from one massive piece of fruitwood. Its front was curved to match the wood's natural grain, with the two drawers made from the panels that had been cut from those very places. The legs were slender and delicately scrolled, matched by four short banisters that rose from each corner of the desk top. They in turn supported thin panels no more than two inches high, carved to depict a series of writing implements—quill pens, inkstands, knives for sharpening, miniature blotters, tiny books.

“You have to think of American antiques in terms of where people settled, moving from the East to the West, and adapting as they went along,” Betty continued. “The same is true between the different settlements in the North and South. In the North you had Chippendale, you had Sheraton, you had craft shops where you found so-called manufactured pieces. These were mostly copies of styles originating in Europe, usually from either France or England, but lacking many of the really intricate details. American craft shops tended to go for higher quantities, you see. And there were fewer people
with the really refined tastes who would be willing to pay the outrageous sums required for delicate inlay work.”

At the front of the shop, beige lace curtains formed a backdrop that allowed in light, but also restricted the view of passers-by to the lone semi-circular sideboard standing in solitary splendor on the window's raised dais. The remainder of the shop was designed to create an air of genteel splendor. Pieces were placed with ample room to breathe, as Alexander Kantor had described it to Jeffrey upon his arrival. Recessed ceiling lights were arranged to cast the sort of steady glow that was normally reserved for art galleries, with their hue and brilliance individually set so as to best bring out the wood's luster. The whole shop smelled vaguely of beeswax polish and wealth.

“The big southern plantations occasionally had craftsmen so talented that pieces could be identified by their quality,” Betty went on. “If you hear of such articles going on the market today, they are usually sold as collectors' items or works of art. The prices would place them in your range, which for American antiques is very rare.”

The two back walls of his office space were decorated with original steel engravings, the prints so detailed as to almost look photographed. Beside his desk stood a set of antique mahogany filing drawers, probably used in the director's office of an old shipping company, as each drawer was embossed with a brass anchor and the sides had carvings of a compass face. In the ceiling corner above the filing cabinet swiveled a miniature video, which piped its continual picture to a security company located down the street. An enclosing barrier had been erected to the side of Jeffrey's writing desk in the form of mahogany bookshelves. They stood a full nine feet high, and were fronted by a series of miniature double doors, each the height of two shelves and containing hand-blown diamond-shaped glass set in brass frames. The shelves contained Jeffrey's growing collection of books on antiques.

“Most of the affordable fine pieces came from the northern
craft shops, since many were manufactured in lots and not as single pieces. This meant that as the professional class developed, their front hallways and living areas had tables and cabinets and sideboards imported from somewhere up north.”

Set in the ceiling corner across from his office alcove was a round convex mirror, through which Jeffrey could watch the entire shop while seated at his desk. Keeping half an eye always on the store was by now old habit, although the front door—the shop's only entrance—was always double locked. Entry during office hours was possible only once he pressed the release button by the banister, then walked forward to personally throw the latch and open the door. Even with all the smaller items safely locked in the pair of Edwardian glass-fronted jeweler's cabinets, unless it was with a very trusted client like Betty, Jeffrey never sat down with a customer in the store. Never.

“When I was a little child my mother used to take me on what she called her buying trips. I was the only girl, and I had four older brothers. When we went off together like that it was the only time in those early years when I felt as if I could just enjoy being a girl.”

Betty talked with a soft southern accent which had been gradually whittled away by years of trading all over the East Coast. Her shop had been located on Boston's Beacon Hill for more than three decades, but her work took her from Texas to Canada and back several times a month. Her shop was the source of only a fraction of her income. Auction houses called on Betty to identify unknown pieces. Interior decorators in ten states had her on retainer to seek out antiques that would fit into the residences and executive offices and fine hotel lobbies they were hired to adorn. Wealthy households would ask her to keep a look out for something to fill an empty space. Something elegant, they would often say, not knowing themselves what they wanted besides the status of owning an almost-priceless one-of-a-kind. Something expensive. Betty had a way of listening that bestowed respect
upon such a customer, and that was what many wanted most of all. Respect.

“I was raised in Virginia—I believe I told you that before. My parents were what you would call middle class, and there were not a lot of antiques that had been handed down. When my mother and I went off to buy, we were looking for pieces that would go into our own home. Those were some of the happiest days I have ever known, getting up early and traveling off to some country antique store or a market somewhere, just me and my mother, eating in nice restaurants and talking girl-talk. Very precious memories. My love of antiques started right then and there.”

Betty was a smallish woman who carried herself so erect that she appeared much taller than she was. She dressed with an artist's eye, conservative in color and extravagant with materials. Today she wore a midnight-blue crepe-de-chine silk dress with a matching cashmere jacket, and for a necklace had a small antique pocket watch hung from a gold rope chain.

“My mother did not have a lot of money. Most of what she spent on antiques she saved from her weekly shopping, putting it in a little pewter sugar bowl until it was full, and then off she'd go. Back then there were not many antique shops. This was back in the mid-thirties, just as the Depression was lifting. Times were very hard, even for a relatively well-off family like mine, and this was really her only diversion.

“A lot of black people in the rural areas had been given furniture and cut-glass bowls and even some crystal from the homes where they had worked. Back in the twenties, as people became wealthier, they wanted to discard these old things and buy something new and store-bought. That was what it was called in the South, although most of the rural families purchased from catalogs—store bought goods.

“My mother was a very sweet person, and during the very hard times had organized a church group to help the poorest of these families with food and children's clothes and medicine. People remembered her kindnesses, and now that she
had some money and wanted to buy these old things, they would try to help her. So she would drive down these country roads, often nothing more than dirt tracks, and someone would come out on the front porch and say that so-and-so had a pretty piece of pressed glass or a chiffarobe or flow-blue, which was a special kind of pottery china with a pretty blue design on it, and they needed money and wanted to sell it.

“I bought my very first antique in that way. It was a little blue chicken of hand-blown glass that you could open up and keep candy in. A woman let us go up into her attic and go through a trunk filled with old glass wrapped in old newspapers, and she let me buy that chicken for twenty-five cents. It had probably taken me six months to save up that many pennies—money was still very hard to come by, especially for a child. I still have that piece. It sits on its own special little shelf in my kitchen.”

The phone gave its querulous demand for attention. “Excuse me.” Jeffrey picked up the receiver, was greeted with distant hissings and pops. “Priceless Limited.” There were a couple of crackling connections. “Hello?”

“To whom am I speaking, please?” The voice was cheerful and heavily accented, the words fairly shouted.

Jeffrey raised his voice in reply. “This is the Priceless antique shop. Can I help you?”

“Jeffrey?” The gentleman's unspoken laughter called above the line's crackling. “Do I have the pleasure of speaking to Jeffrey Allen Sinclair?”

“Yes.” Jeffrey tried to place the voice, came up blank. “Who is this?”

“Ah, an excellent question. Who is this indeed?” The laughter broke through, a most appealing sound. “I fear you will have to ask that of our friend Alexander. How are you, my dear boy?”

“I'm all right,” he said, giving Betty an eloquent shrug.

“Splendid. That is absolutely splendid. Alexander has
spoken so much about you I feel we are already the best of friends.”

“He has?”

“Indeed, yes. Has Alexander arrived?”

“Not yet.” Jeffrey was almost shouting the words. “He's supposed to be here the day after tomorrow.”

“No matter. Please, Jeffrey, do me the kindness of passing on a message to Alexander. Would you do that?”

“Of course.”

“Splendid. Splendid. Tell him the shipment is ready. Do you have that?”

“Got it.”

“Excellent. And now, my dear boy, I bid you farewell. I do so hope that we shall have an opportunity to meet very soon. Until then, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you always.”

Betty watched him hang up the phone, said, “That sounded curious.”

Jeffrey scribbled busily, replied, “I get all kinds of weird calls a week or so before Alexander arrives. I've stopped worrying about them.”

“Or wondering?”

He stripped out the page and stuffed it in an already bulging folder. “I don't think I'll ever get that casual.”

She handed back her cup and motioned toward the lead-paned bookshelves. “Do you mind?”