The Price of Inheritance (6 page)

Yes, he had. It was one both Nicole and I had made about five times the day before.

“We agree wholeheartedly with that point, as we voiced yesterday,” Nicole said politely. “I can promise you that Christie's will put the best deal on the table. Along with the thirty-million-dollar guarantee, half of it paid to you upon signing, Christie's is very willing to lower our commissions, to waive certain fees, and to commit ourselves to really showcasing your work in the best way for it to sell.” I took out a rendering of Elizabeth's estate displayed in our showrooms along with a note from our graphic designer that was faxed to us just hours before.

“Your collection would have its own catalogue, which would go out to thousands of very important buyers,” I added.

“I like you both,” said Elizabeth, looking at us like we were rabid dogs about to chomp off her ankles. “And I know my husband was very fond of Louise, but Sotheby's has given some very good preliminary numbers, too, without even seeing the collection. So you'll understand why I gave them a loose verbal agreement last night.”

Had Sotheby's given over a $30 million guarantee? There was no way.

Nicole scribbled something on her notepad and I looked over and saw the word
bluffing
, scrawled in her tiny handwriting. She scratched it out while we kept talking.

Was Elizabeth bluffing? She could definitely be bluffing. She knew I couldn't just call up David and casually ask.

“We don't think that's the right decision,” I said firmly.

“We just made history with the Nicholas Brown. We also made history with the Richard Edwards Chippendale pier table when it went for four-point-six-two in 1990,” said Nicole.

“Yes, but that was 1990,” Elizabeth replied.

“But the Nicholas Brown was four days ago,” I pointed out. “I arranged that sale. Our record in American art is unquestionably superior to any of our competitors. We have the resources and the buyers and we will get you the dollar amount you deserve.”

Elizabeth stood up, so we both followed her lead and stood up in front of her. I was only five foot three but in the grand room, I felt even smaller, like a garden gnome.

Maybe Elizabeth had no intention of going with Christie's in the first place. Perhaps David was her best friend and he was actually in some guesthouse suite watching us writhe in our failure on a CCTV feed. He was probably screaming, “Another martini, Jeeves, and some unemployment forms for the girls! This is simply rich!” as he watched me try to control my urges to throw myself on my stomach in front of Elizabeth and beg her to go with Christie's because she knew my grandmother, because we both loved the great, strangely shaped state of Maryland, because
C
came before
S
in the alphabet. Anything! Perhaps it was time for me to fabricate some story about David Marcham being a closet pyromaniac who couldn't control himself and his little match collection around two-centuries-old mahogany?

Maybe it was because Nicole seemed to have thrown in her hand and was already talking to Elizabeth about people they knew in common in Maryland, but I blurted out, “Thirty-seven-million-dollar guarantee and a four-percent commission. Anything we make over thirty-seven, we keep. That's the best offer I can give you and it's an extremely good one.”

Elizabeth looked at me startled, her glassy green eyes not quite registering what I had just said.

“I'll also waive all fees. The insurance fee, the illustration fee. Everything. You and I both know David won't put that offer on the table even if you say we did. I shouldn't be putting that offer out. But I am. You'll lead the January sales. It's a very fast turnaround to get your estate ready by January but it seems very important to you—”

“It's a deal breaker,” Elizabeth interrupted me.

“Right, we will have everything ready for January, then. Absolutely guaranteed.”

Nicole was doing the math in her head as she looked at me looking at Elizabeth. She had clearly figured out how many million I had overpromised by and started to turn very pale and shook her head no at me. I ignored her and repeated the numbers.

An hour later, as I knew she would, Elizabeth signed our offer.

CHAPTER 3

W
hen Alex didn't return my calls for five days I started to worry. We had always been able to go days, sometimes weeks, without speaking to each other, but we never ignored each other's big life moments. This was the second time in twenty-two days that he had taken my happiness and shredded it with his silence.

He finally called me during the last week of September, but didn't apologize for the time lapse, for ignoring me, or for yet again letting me down when I needed support. He talked to me the way he'd always talked to me and we drifted back to laughing about summers in high school. When everyone we boarded with headed home and we were left to be wild teenagers in Newport. So I forgave him. I wanted familiarity and Alex always delivered that. I didn't have time to think about why I tolerated the rest of him because I, along with Nicole, Louise, and Erik Wagner, deputy chairman of Christie's America, had three months to get ready for the January sales.

My job became my everything. I stopped going out. I ate lunch and dinner at my desk. I talked to Jane Dalby only occasionally and very late at night, when I couldn't fall asleep. I sent the occasional text to my parents that said, “I'm alive, not to worry.” The rest of the time, I was at work. It was a very cold fall, even for someone used to six months of cold, and my walk to and from the subway became the only time I spent outside. The leaves turned from beautiful to brown, the number of tourists packed into Rockefeller Center thinned out a little before the holiday storm, and my world shrank to my apartment, my office, the deli where I bought coffee, and the occasional inside of a cab when I was too tired or too cold to wait for a train.

Elizabeth's estate, or the estate of Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson as it was called in the catalogue and in the press, was poised to bring in 70 percent of the January sale's revenue.

“I thought as much,” said Elizabeth when I called to tell her at 9
A.M.
sharp on the first Monday in December.

“I did, too,” I replied. After all the red tape had been peeled away, Elizabeth had told me more about her friendship with my grandmother. They'd spent time on a museum committee together and had formed a bond that Elizabeth seemed to regret losing.

“She was a fair bit older than me, you know,” she said as we changed topics from the upcoming auction to the familiar thread that linked us together. “But she was the kind of woman everybody wanted to know. She'd had a child just a few years before.”

“My father,” I pointed out. “He's an only child, so that's how I'm sure,” I explained.

“Is he now? That's too bad. Only children tend to develop a mild case of the crazies later in life.”

I had to agree. At times I felt like I already had an acute case of the crazies. The next time I went to the doctor he'd glance at my pupils and say, “It's the crazies! And you'll have them for life. Here's a pill, it will do nothing for you.”

“Is it true that by the time you were born, all the family money was gone?” asked Elizabeth, touching on a subject I tried very hard to avoid.

It was true, I told her. The Everett steel money was nearly depleted. My grandfather had lost a lot of it in his final years, when he was trying to make good business decisions with a mind that wouldn't allow them. And when my father married my mother, “a penniless academic,” according to my grandmother, she refused to give him what was left, since he had killed her hope of his marrying some heiress who could keep them living the life she had raised him in. She lived with us for thirteen years, promising my father would inherit what remained, but she gave it away instead, changing her will at the very end of her life and leaving half a million for my education and a little less for my parents, who, she stated, “were smart-asses enough to not need any more education.” I gave Elizabeth the very short version of the story.

For the last couple of weeks, talking to Elizabeth—who almost always spoke to me, rather than to Louise, Nicole, or Erik—I had started to think that she had known about me before Louise mentioned me. My name was in bold under Louise's and Erik's on our department website and I had been in the auction room in New York with her husband before. We all knew Adam Tumlinson, but Elizabeth had never been present at a New York auction. I started to wonder if her familiarity came from research rather than name recognition. If it did, it didn't really matter. Maybe it swayed her decision to go with Christie's, and if so, I was just lucky to have the right name.

•••

By the end of the first week in January, I felt like the world was releasing its grip a little. The auction was catalogued and organized and generating great buzz and Louise and Erik were absolutely fine with the guarantee we'd given Elizabeth. Even Nicole had forgiven me for the way I'd handled things in Houston, mostly because
Art in America
had valued the Tumlinson estate at $39 million, but speculated that it could hit $40 million.

So when I received a call on my office phone from an unknown number that afternoon, I answered it with a sprightly hello instead of letting it roll over to voicemail.

“Is this Carolyn Everett?” a man with a deep voice asked, mispronouncing my last name. He sounded very hesitant.

“Yes, it is,” I replied. He explained that he'd been transferred to both Louise and Erik but neither had answered their phone and he wanted to speak to someone in the American furniture department.

“Well, you can talk to me,” I said cheerfully. “How can I help you?”

“I don't know that you can, but I'll tell you what's what and then you can tell me if you can help me.”

“Okay . . . ,” I said, starting to regret that I'd picked up the call.

“My name is Richard Jones. I live down in Baltimore and I've got no real interest in American furniture.”

Wonderful. Thank goodness he called the American furniture department at Christie's then. Perhaps I should call up a butcher, introduce myself, and tell him I'm a vegetarian.

“But here's the thing. My sister Nina Caine, Nina Jones Caine, she's a librarian at Three Rivers High, that's here in Baltimore . . . and . . . well, she's very interested in American furniture. Has been since the sixties. She pays attention to all the buying and selling and stuff like that and she came around last night and showed me the magazine for your upcoming sale—”

“Is that one of our January catalogues, you mean? Your sister has a catalogue?”

I knew everyone our catalogues went out to and I was not familiar with the name Nina Caine, but they were for sale online and found in university libraries.

“Right, your catalogue. I don't know all the lingo, but what I do know is that Nina showed me the catalogue, the Property from the Collection of Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson catalogue, and she was very upset because right there on page seventy-three was a picture of a table she owns. Well, we own it because it was our mother's, but it's on page ­seventy-three of your catalogue and it's also in Nina's living room.”

It wasn't rare for Christie's to receive phone calls when catalogues came out about something being inauthentic, but the calls were usually nothing to be alarmed by, just people wanting to make a quick buck off the Picasso they had just “found” in their grandmother's attic. But it didn't happen in the furniture department.

“Could you send me a picture of your table?” I asked. “It's hard to take anything to the next step if we don't have a photo,” I explained.

“Trust me. You should take this seriously because Nina has that table.”

“Can you please just start by sending me a photo?” I asked, giving him my email address.

“Yes, I can send you a photo but don't you want to come down here to Baltimore and see it? You're about to sell a fake.”

I was less than two weeks away from our sale. I was working fourteen hours a day and I still felt like I was three months from being ready. The last thing I was going to do was take a train down to Baltimore to see some flea market table someone was trying to pass off as a Hugh Finlay, a furniture maker that rarely fetched prices higher than the low six figures.

“If you could just send me a photo . . . that's how we start everything in the auction world,” I repeated. “If we can't see it, we can't do much with it.”

I let Richard go and spent the rest of the day and evening refreshing my email, but nothing from Baltimore came through. I happily let the call go as some petty, highly original criminal trying to make a buck and I set my mind back on Elizabeth's sale. When I helped consign the Nicholas Brown I had a little bit of luck thanks to the tip. Jack had changed his mind a few times as the American economy continued to rapidly tank, but I'd paced him through that. He was a seller who was ready to sell. Elizabeth was different. Elizabeth's estate was a very tough get but presented one hundred twenty-seven chances for historic sales.

It wasn't until three days later that I got the picture that Richard from Baltimore had promised me. It came to my Christie's email address from his sister Nina along with a message saying she was absolutely positive that the one in the collection of Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson must be a replica or a fake. But she was wrong. It wasn't a piece that we'd known Elizabeth had for years, but we had inspected it in Texas and it was no mistake.

We were now ten days from the sale, and it had taken them seventy-two hours to send me a photo. I refused to pay attention to these people. It was without question a Hugh Finlay stenciled pier table made in Baltimore in the early nineteenth century. There was no hole in the provenance on that piece. It had been in the Tumlinson family for generations and they had two other Finlay pieces, which could be traced to the same decade. One was a Federal mahogany sofa, which had been reupholstered. It was bought at auction in 2006 from a prominent family who had been in South Carolina since the early eighteenth century. It had never been owned by anyone else besides them and the Tumlinsons and was estimated between $190,000 and $200,000. The other was a round tea table built around 1790, which had been in the Tumlinson family since it was bought by Adam's great-grandfather, James Tumlinson, in 1817. Adam's family came to Baltimore aboard the
Dove
in 1634 and just shy of 30 percent of Adam and Elizabeth's collection had been passed down exclusively from family. They'd even had pieces sell, through Christie's, that had the exact same provenance as the pier table. Three of those Hugh Finlay pieces all sold in the early nineties. Hugh Finlay kept meticulous records. And James Tumlinson appeared in his records. That was as good as it got.

I shouldn't have been anxious. I knew the Impressionist and Modern Art department received calls like this frequently. The only thing that was worrying me was that we didn't. I had never gotten a call about a fake and it was something I thought I was immune to in my department. When I got into bed that Thursday night, I knew sleep was not in my immediate future. My nerves were shaky and I couldn't stop thinking about Baltimore. After two hours of restlessness, I got out of bed and sat on the small Queen Anne walnut side chair that I had spent three months' salary on during my first year at Christie's. It was the only thing I had ever bought at auction and it only made me love the world of buying and selling and bidding and winning and losing even more.

I pulled open the metal window next to the chair and let the freezing night air in. I didn't have a very good view, but I liked my bad view best at night, when everything, including the insides of the buildings, was still. It was in that chair that I eventually fell asleep with my feet propped up on my bed, and when I woke up that morning at six, I was clinging to my quilt, which I had managed to rip off the bed, and my nose felt like a Popsicle screwed onto my face. I'd probably contracted seven different strands of the cold virus and even an hour-long shower couldn't warm me up.

It was while sitting on a bar stool, eating a green pepper and cheese omelet as the sun rose, that I first felt real anxiety about the phone call from Baltimore. The thing about the Hugh Finlay table was it had such a unique look. It was marbleized, grained, and stenciled. It had gold leaf inlay and stood out because of the level of detail. I pulled a Christie's folder toward me and opened it, taking out a color print of the picture the woman in Baltimore had sent me. It looked a lot like Elizabeth's. I stared at it with a brass magnifying glass. It looked exactly like Elizabeth's.

I turned the piece of paper upside down and looked at the legs. The photo looked old, but the table appeared to be in great condition, just like Elizabeth's was. I pushed it across the counter and swirled my eggs around the plate. Why was I so worked up? There were dozens of ways to doctor an image. It had to be inauthentic. This was just another crazy person trying to make a buck. I tried to convince myself of that as I finished my cold, runny eggs and all I could come up with was, why this piece of furniture? It was not where the money was. Why wasn't this woman trying to scam the Impressionist department? Or if she was furniture obsessed, why not pick something that was worth a lot more? Something with less detail yet more value? If someone were skilled enough to fake early nineteenth-century furniture, why would they waste their efforts on a small pier table? This was ridiculous. I threw my plate in the sink, not caring if the egg remained solidified there for a year. I hated myself for picking up that call.

On Saturday, more than a week after I had drunk in my office with Nicole on New Year's Eve while we worked, and only eight days away from the January sale, I emailed Nina and told her I would meet her and her brother to look at the table the following day. It would take all day to go to Baltimore and back, but the certainty with which Richard Jones had spoken was haunting me. In 2000, Christie's and Sotheby's pleaded guilty to fixing sellers' commissions and integrity was something we were all trying to push to the forefront. I had to make sure nothing from under the surface was going to boil up and ruin the auction.