The Goldfinch (82 page)

I suppose I’d been expecting incredulity, raised voices, outrage of some sort. But it was worse. A blow-up I could have handled. Instead he didn’t say a word, only gazed at me with a sort of grieved fubsiness, haloed by his work lamp, tools arrayed on the walls behind him like Masonic icons. He let me tell him what I had to, and listened quietly while I did it, and when at last he spoke his voice was quieter than usual and without heat.

“All right.” He looked like a figure from an allegory: black-aproned carpenter-mystic, half in shadow. “Okay. So how do you propose to deal with this?”

“I—” This wasn’t the response I’d anticipated. Dreading his anger (for Hobie, though good-natured and slow to wrath, definitely had a temper) I’d had all kinds of justifications and excuses prepared but faced with his eerie composure it was impossible to defend myself. “I’ll do whatever you say.” I hadn’t felt so ashamed or humiliated since I was a kid. “It’s my fault—I take full responsibility.”

“Well. The pieces are out there.” He seemed to be figuring it out as he went along, half-talking to himself. “No one else has contacted you?”

“No.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“Oh—” five years, at least—“one year, two?”

He winced. “Jesus. No, no,” he said, hastily, “I’m just glad you were honest with me. But you’ll just have to get busy, contact the clients, say you have doubts—you needn’t go into the whole business, just say a question
has arisen, provenance is suspect—and offer to buy the pieces back for what they paid. If they don’t take you up on it—fine. You’ve offered. But if they do—you’ll have to bite the bullet, understand?”

“Right.” What I didn’t—and couldn’t—say was that there wasn’t enough money to reimburse even a quarter of the clients. We would be bankrupt in a day.

“You say pieces. Which pieces? How many?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t
know?
”

“Well, I do, it’s just that I—”

“Theo, please.” He was angry now; it was a relief. “No more of this. Be straight with me.”

“Well—I did the deals off the books. In cash. And, I mean, there’s no way you could have known, even if you’d checked the ledgers—”

“Theo. Don’t make me keep asking. How many pieces?”

“Oh—” I sighed—“a dozen? Maybe?” I added when I saw the stunned look on Hobie’s face. In truth, it was three times as many, but I was pretty sure that most of the people I’d rooked were too clueless to figure it out or too rich to care.

“Good God, Theo,” said Hobie, after a dumbstruck silence. “
A dozen pieces?
Not at those prices? Not like the Affleck?”

“No, no,” I said hastily (though in fact I’d sold some of the pieces for twice as much). “And none of our regulars.” That part, at least, was true.

“Who then?”

“West Coast. Movie people—tech people. Wall Street too but—young guys, you know, hedgies. Dumb money.”

“You have a list of the clients?”

“Not an actual list, but I—”

“Can you contact them?”

“Well, you see, it’s complicated, because—” I wasn’t worried about the people who believed they’d unearthed genuine Sheraton at bargain prices and hurried away with their copies thinking they’d swizzled me. The old Caveat Emptor rule more than applied there. I’d never claimed those pieces were genuine. What worried me was the people I’d deliberately sold—deliberately lied to.

“You didn’t keep records.”

“No.”

“But you have an idea. You can track them down.”

“More or less.”

“ ‘More or less.’ I don’t know what that means.”

“There are notes—shipping forms. I can piece it together.”

“Can we afford to buy them all back?”

“Well—”

“Can we? Yes or no?”

“Um—” there was no way I could tell him the truth, which was No—“it’s a stretch.”

Hobie rubbed his eye. “Well, stretch or not, we’ll have to do it. No choice. Tighten our belts. Even if it’s rough for a while—even if we let the taxes slide. Because,” he said, when I kept looking at him, “we can’t have even one of these things out there purporting to be real. Good God—” he shook his head disbelievingly—“how the hell did you do it? They’re not even good fakes! Some of the materials I used—anything I had to hand—cobbled together any which way—”

“Actually—” truth was, Hobie’s work had been good enough to fool some fairly serious collectors, though it probably wasn’t a great idea to bring that up—

“—and, you see, thing is, if one of the pieces you’ve sold as genuine is wrong—they’re
all
wrong.
Everything
is called into question—every stick of furniture that’s ever gone out of this shop. I don’t know if you’ve thought about that.”

“Er—” I had thought about it, plenty. I had thought about it pretty much without stopping ever since the lunch with Lucius Reeve.

He was so quiet, for so long, that I started getting nervous. But he only sighed and rubbed his eyes and then turned partly away, leaning back to his work again.

I was silent, watching the glossy black line of his brush trace out a cherry bough. Everything was new now. Hobie and I had a corporation together, filed our taxes together. I was the executor of his will. Instead of moving out and getting my own apartment, I’d chosen to stay upstairs and pay him a scarcely-token rent, a few hundred dollars a month. Insofar as I had a home, or a family, he was it. When I came downstairs and helped him with the gluing up, it wasn’t so much because he actually needed me as for the pleasure of scrabbling for clamps and shouting at each other over the Mahler turned up loud; and sometimes, when we
wandered over to the White Horse in the evenings for a drink and a club sandwich at the bar, it was very often for me the best time of the day.

“Yes?” said Hobie, without turning from his work, aware that I was still standing at his back.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to go this far.”

“Theo.” The brush stopped. “You know it very well—a lot of people would be clapping you on the back right now. And, I’ll be straight with you, part of me feels the same way because honest to goodness I don’t know how you pulled off such a thing. Even Welty—Welty was like you, the clients loved him, he could sell anything, but even he used to have a devil of a time up there with the finer pieces. Real Hepplewhite, real Chippendale! Couldn’t get rid of the stuff! And you up there, unloading this junk for a fortune!”

“It’s not junk,” I said, glad to be telling the truth for once. “A lot of the work is really good. It fooled me. I think, because you did it yourself, you can’t see it. How convincing it is.”

“Yes but—” he paused, seemingly at a loss for words—“people who don’t know furniture, it’s hard to make them spend
money
on furniture.”

“I know.” We had an important drake-front highboy, Queen Anne, that during the lean days I’d tried despairingly to sell at the correct price, which on the low end was somewhere in the two hundred thousand range. It had been in the shop for years. But though some fair offers had come in recently I’d turned them all down—simply because such an irreproachable piece standing in the well-lighted entrance of the shop shed such a flattering glow on the frauds buried in back.

“Theo, you’re a marvel. You’re a genius at what you do, no question about it. But—” his tone was uncertain again; I could sense him trying to feel his way forward—“well, I mean, dealers live by their reputations. It’s the honor system. Nothing you don’t know. Word gets around. So, I mean—” dipping his brush, peering myopically at the chest—“fraud’s hard to prove, but if you don’t take care of this, it’s a pretty sure thing that this will pop back and bite us somewhere down the road.” His hand was steady; the line of his brush was sure. “A heavily restored piece… forget about blacklight, you’d be surprised, someone moves it to a brightly lit room… even the camera picks up differences in grain that you’d never spot with the naked eye. As soon as someone has one of these pieces photographed,
or God forbid decides to put it up at Christie’s or Sotheby’s in an Important Americana sale…”

There was a silence, which—as it swelled between us—grew more and more serious, unfillable.

“Theo.” The brush stopped, and then started again. “I’m not trying to make excuses for you but—don’t think I don’t know it, I’m the very person who put you in this position. Turning you loose up there all on your own. Expecting you to perform the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. You are very young, yes,” he said curtly, turning halfway when I tried to interrupt, “you are, and you are very very gifted at all the aspects of the business I don’t care to deal with, and you have been so brilliant at getting us back in the black again that it has suited me very, very well to keep my head in the sand. As regards what goes on upstairs. So I’m as much to blame for this as you.”

“Hobie, I swear. I never—”

“Because—” he picked up the open bottle of paint, looked at the label as if he couldn’t recall what it was for, put it down again—“well, it was too good to be true, wasn’t it? All this money pouring in, wonderful to see? And did I inquire too closely? No. Don’t think I don’t know it—if you hadn’t got busy with your flim-flam up there we’d likely be renting this space right now and hunting for a new place to live. So look here—we’ll start fresh—wipe the board down—and take it as it comes. One piece at a time. That’s all we can do.”

“Look, I want to make it plain—” his calmness harrowed me—“the responsibility is mine. If it comes down to that. I just want you to know.”

“Sure.” When he flicked his brush, his deftness was practiced and reflexive, weirdly unsettling. “Still and all, let’s leave it for now, all right? No,” he said, when I tried to say something else, “please. I want you to take care of it and I’ll do what I can to help you if there’s anything specific but otherwise, I don’t want to talk about it any more. All right?”

Outside: rain. It was clammy in the basement, an ugly subterranean chill. I stood watching him, not knowing what to do or say.

“Please. I’m not angry, I just want to be getting on with this. It’ll be all right. Now go upstairs, please, would you?” he said, when I still stood there. “This is a tricky patch of work, I really need to concentrate if I don’t want to make a hash of it.”

xvii.

S
ILENTLY
I
WALKED UPSTAIRS
, steps creaking loudly, past the gauntlet of Pippa’s pictures that I couldn’t bear to look at. Going in, I’d thought to break the easy news first and then move along to the showstopper. But as dirty and disloyal as I felt, I couldn’t do it. The less Hobie knew about the painting, the safer he would be. It was wrong on every level to drag him into it.

Yet I wished there were someone I could talk to, someone I trusted. Every few years, there seemed to be another news article about the missing masterworks, which along with my Goldfinch and two loaned van der Asts also included some valuable Medieval pieces and a number of Egyptian antiquities; scholars had written papers, there had even been books; it was mentioned as one of the Ten Top Art Crimes on the FBI’s website; previously, I’d taken great comfort in the fact that most people assumed that whoever had made off with the van der Asts from Galleries 29 and 30 had stolen my painting, too. Almost all the bodies in Gallery 32 had been concentrated near the collapsed doorway; according to investigators there would have been ten seconds, maybe even thirty, before the lintel fell, just time for a few people to make it out. The wreckage in Gallery 32 had been sifted through with white gloves and whisk brooms, with fanatic care—and while the frame of
The Goldfinch
had been found, intact (and had been hung empty on the wall of the Mauritshuis, in the Hague, “as a reminder of the irreplaceable loss of our cultural patrimony”), no confirmed fragment of the painting itself, no splinter or antique nail fragment or chip of its distinctive lead-tin pigment had been found. But as it was painted on wood, there was a case to be made (and one blowhard celebrity historian, to whom I was grateful, had made it forcefully) that
The Goldfinch
had been knocked from its frame and into the rather large fire burning in the gift shop, the epicenter of the explosion. I had seen him in a PBS documentary, striding back and forth meaningfully in front of the empty frame in the Mauritshuis, fixing the camera with his powerful, media-savvy eye. “That this tiny masterwork survived the powder explosion at Delft only to meet its fate, centuries later, in another man-made explosion is one of those stranger-than-life twists out of O. Henry or Guy de Maupassant.”

As for me: the official story—printed in a number of sources, accepted as truth—was that I’d been rooms away from
The Goldfinch
when the
bomb went off. Over the years a number of writers had tried to interview me and I’d turned them all away; but numerous people, eyewitnesses, had seen my mother in her last moments in Gallery 24, the beautiful dark-haired woman in the satin trenchcoat, and many of these eyewitnesses placed me at her side. Four adults and three children had died in Gallery 24—and in the public version of the story, the received version, I’d been just another of the bodies on the ground, knocked cold and overlooked in the hubbub.