by Emyl Jenkins
Please is right, I thought to myself. Me and Alicia? I stifled a laugh.
Even more fascinating than hearing Richie selling me, an eighteenth-century girl, to a fleeting media darling stuck somewhere in the 1920s but worth zillions of twenty-first-century dollars, was watching him work her. That was what he was paid to do; it brought in the high rollers and kept them coming back.
"We do have some great things coming up, looking at one right now. Perfect piece for your bedroom, on the nightstand, your dressing room, anywhere."
I wondered what he would say. "A cute little figurine that'll cost you a day's wages but would send a kid to an Ivy League school for a year or longer?"
He reached over and pulled the figurine closer to his side of the desk.
"It's an exquisite female figure, a dancer. Oh, 1926 or 1927 I'd say. No, it's not as finely modeled as your Chiparus `Miss Kita.' This one has more of a coy look, flirtatious, but at the same time sophisticated. Reminds me of you, Alicia," he said. His voice turned as smooth as silk. "I'll send you the photo and dimensions. Want it by e-mail or a hard copy? And by the way, speaking of `Miss Kita,' " Richie paused for effect. "I did a little checking. One recently sold just shy of $140,000. You got quite a steal."
I waited anxiously, hoping to hear how much Alicia had paid for hers, but I never found out. One thing I'll say, though. Richie didn't talk down to Alicia. She obviously knew her Art Deco stuff. More than I did, that was for sure.
The moment he hung up, I jumped right in.
"Look. The reason I'm asking about these figures is, well, I've come upon a whole group of them. The real ones. I'm sure of that."
"Oh?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
It wasn't the question I expected. "That's not relevant, is it?" I asked.
"Remember, provenance. If the figures are in Europe, it's one thing. If they're around the corner, that's something else."
"I'm not really free to say where they are." I smiled sweetly. "Appraiser-client confidentiality."
Richie shrugged and licked his lips. What choice did he have? He whipped out his overlaid silver and mother-of-pearl pen and began scribbling notes.
"Okay. How many are there?" he asked tersely. Richie's silky voice was gone. It was all business now.
I didn't like the sudden shift in our conversation. I had an urge to pick up the phone and call Peter. He'd know what to do. Damn. I hated it when I needed to rely on someone besides myself.
"How many did you say there are?" Richie asked again.
I swallowed hard avoiding giving him a straight answer. "Several."
"Come on, Sterling. What's several to you-three, four, ten, fifteen? Good Lord, how many? Couldn't have been but so many. Was it a collection? Couldn't have been in a shop. A museum?" He fired his questions at me, nonstop, his eyes cold. I could almost see his brain spinning around, all the while trying to wear me down. I wondered if he knew that the dollar signs were swelling in his eyes, more like Richie Rich, cartoon character, than Richardson Daniel, international auction house expert.
I stiffened. "Whoa." I held up my hands as quick as a Park Avenue traffic cop standing in the course of a speeding limo. I took a deep breath.
"Okay. Okay." Richie backed off.
He twirled his pen around and around in the air. Most people would have tapped it on the paper. But he didn't want to bend the 14K gold nib.
"I understand your responsibility to your client. But I'm assuming you've come to me because you want to dispose of them."
He didn't wait for me to answer.
"One thing we must be careful about. You don't want to overload the market. As you know, too many of one thing and not enough collectors-and the bottom drops out."
Considering the situation, I wondered whether I should say anything about the molds. I knew I shouldn't, but my curiosity was burning. Only I knew where the figures were.
"Very interestingly," I said slowly, "the owner also has some old molds of the figures. Original molds."
"Molds? Really, now." His voice and face showed his surprise, but he quickly regained a more casual demeanor. "Oh well, they wouldn't do anybody any good," Richie said flippantly. "There are already scores of repros and fakes out there. Even if you had the original molds to make the bronze bodies, you wouldn't have the ivory. And can't get it. That's one way I can tell the new figures. The faces and hands and the other parts that originally were made from ivory now are nothing but plastic or some other synthetic."
He put his pen down, carefully, and clasped his hands together. I could see his knuckles go white. His face remained calm.
"On the other hand, it could be interesting to have a couple of the old molds for historical purposes. They surely wouldn't be worth anything-except to some museums, and how many can they display?" he asked parenthetically, his tone casual and practical. "So, let's say your client is ready to sell some figures-and, oh, throw in a few molds just for good measure."
"I'm not sure if my client is ready to sell."
"Testing the waters, eh?" Richie cleared his throat, ripped off the sheet of paper he'd been scribbling on and put it in the center drawer of his desk. He stood up, went to the door, and closed it. He returned to his desk, sat down, and stared straight at me with his moonstone blue eyes.
"I'll make it worth your time to bring them to me. But only one or two figures at a time. Can't flood the market. And a couple of the molds that we might try selling to a museum or," he said nonchalantly, "to a collector with a historical bent."
Richie stopped abruptly, and ground his teeth together. "This is tricky, you know. Those molds, those molds." He shook his head nervously. "They can't get in the wrong hands. Not if they're the true, original molds. That would blow the market wide open." His eyes narrowed. "We'll have to do this together, Sterling," he said, more calmly. "Can't have any duplication or even close facsimiles of the figures in the same auction."
Methodically he rolled his eyes toward the phone. "Of course," he began softly, the corners of his mouth slowly curling upward, "there are also private collectors."
"Of course," I acquiesced, numbly repeating his words to be sure I had heard him correctly, "private collectors." So he was thinking about cutting the auction house out on this deal, was he?
I stood up. I didn't want to hear any more. I had a lot of thinking to do.
"So," Richie said, pleased as punch, "seems like you might have brought me something after all."
Following my lead, Richie started toward the door. He placed his hand on the knob and left it there.
"Not bad for a day's work? So when are you going back? Is it Virginia or North Carolina? Been too long since I've seen you. Can't remember. It is Virginia, isn't it? Say, how about dinner tonight?"
Don't think that I'm so honest that for about one-tenth of a second I wasn't tempted to take him up on the offer. Rack of lamb in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons? Noisettes of organic Niman Ranch pork at Chanterelle? Miso-glazed Chilean sea bass at 71 Clinton Fresh Food? No telling where Richie might take me to wine and dine-all the while pumping me for information.
"Thanks. I really wish I could, but you know how it is when you don't get to the city often." I said sweetly and a tinge regretfully.
"Sure. Oh, of course! How forgetful of me, the auction starts tonight."
Richie finally opened the door. We stepped into the hall.
"You got me so excited thinking about this new prospect that I forgot why you're here," he said. "Anything I can do for you? Have a seat reserved for you? It's going to be a big crowd. The lookers have certainly flocked in for the preview, and the girls manning the desk tell me they're swamped with absentee and phone hid requests."
"One thing you can do," I said, taking Richie up on his offer while he couldn't back out. "Do you have the catalog of your last Deco sale? I'd like to study the prices and bring myself up to snuff. It's sort of embarrassing to have come upon such a treasure and not know as much as I should."
/> Richie stepped back into his office, took two, then three, catalogs from the bookshelf and flipped through the pages. "These will keep you busy for a while. And by the way," he said, opening one to a full-color photograph of a large bronze figure of a hare-chested male in blousy pants standing on a marble base and holding a bow and arrow. "See if you have one like this `The Archer' by Alex Kelety-$186,700. Alicia bought it for the front entrance of her pool house."
I thought of Sol's four-hundred-dollar "Scheherazade."
"Hope your hand gets better," I said.
Chapter 10
Dear Antiques Expert: I recently tried to purchase an ivory figure in an English antiques shop. When the owner realized I was American he wouldn't sell it to me. When did it become illegal to have ivory?
The story behind that law goes back to the 1920s and 1930s. During the height of the Art Deco era, 60,000 or more ivory tusks were shipped yearly from the Belgian Congo to Liverpool. From just one tusk, scores of heads, torsos, legs, and other body parts used in the Art Deco figurines were carved. The ivory was inexpensive, but millions of elephants were being killed. Realizing how severely the elephant population had dwindled, the 1989 Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species made it illegal to trade in ivory, and America accordingly banned the importation of ivory.
FOR YEARS BEFORE she died, Mother chanted a litany. "I'm worried, I'm confused, I'm worried," she said. Day and night. Night and day. It drove me crazy at the time. Now I understood how she felt. And I still had my wits about me. I was disappointed, mad, hurt, betrayed. Never, in all my years of appraising had I been so blatantly asked to take a bribe. Did I appear so stupid to Richie that he thought I'd go for his scheme? Did I look that dishonest myself? Back home I would've said, "Hey! I didn't just fall off the turnip truck."
What to do now? Call Peter, call Sol Hobstein?
At the hotel, calling Sol, I wondered just what my chances of finding him would he at 10 A.M. on a Friday. I knew nothing about his habits, what his day would hold. But luck was on my side and he picked up. I told him I'd be there as soon as I could.
Even in the bright day-after-a-snow sunshine, Winston Place looked the same. Dark. Inside, the building wasn't much brighter in daylight than nightfall. We walked back to Sol's office, passing rows of boxes. "What are these, anyway?" I said.
"Eh. They come and go. Change now and then. Never paid them any mind. I rent the space out to the guy next door. He and some of his friends use it for additional storage. I don't need it anymore."
"So you own this building?"
"Bought it at a good price back in the seventies," he said. "The guy upstairs had some sort of mail-order service, and I had a small sewing business here on the first floor-women's lingerie. Slips mostly. Don't wear them anymore, do you?" He laughed his coughy laugh. "When he gave up his business, nobody moved in upstairs. That's when I bought the building. I never did use the whole place. But I was glad to have the basement for the figurines. You're only the third or fourth person ever to go down there, other than Joey and my wife. She died years back. We had no children. Joey's like my boy."
"How is Joey?" I asked.
"He's okay. He's little, but he's tough. A good spirit with a good heart to match." With that, Sol dismissed the whole incident. "So, what did you want to see me about?" he asked cheerfully.
"It's two things really. The figures and the molds," I said.
Sol chuckled. "Well, that's all I have, young lady."
I smiled. "Let's start over with some questions. You're putting the figures back together one by one, right?"
Sol fished around on his desk until he found the same crushed pack of cigarettes he had retrieved yesterday. I wondered how long they had been there. Just as he had yesterday, he put one in his mouth and let it dangle there, unlighted.
"Yes."
"How many would you say you have"-I paused, looking for the right word-"assembled?"
"I haven't been doing it for long. For years the memories were too unsettling. At one time I even thought about destroying them. Just throwing the boxes out for the trash. Never even opening them up." He looked at me. "But I couldn't do that either. And so they sat. Just like me. Guess I wasted a lot of years.
"We all do the best we can at the time," I said.
"What's done is done," he said, drawing an end to those thoughts. "How many?" He began drumming his fingers on the desk one by one, counting as he did so. "Including the ones you saw downstairs, maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven, oh ... thirty or so, all total."
"Have you sold all of the figures-other than the ones that I saw yesterday-that you put together?"
"Most are gone, yes. Do I have any more ready to sell? Right now, no." He took the cigarette from his lips and laid it on the desk. "You see, I didn't sell them all. Some I have given to friends, or what friends I have left. I'm old, you know." He looked at me, disheartened. "It's such a had habit, you know, growing old." Sol began one of his coughing spells that I'd come to expect but still found painful.
Old age were never kindly, Mother whispered in my ear.
"I understand," I said to dear Sol, waiting for him to regain his composure. "You know, when we spoke over the phone, all you'd tell me was that you had some molds, not what kind of molds. Truthfully, I know more about seventeenth-century Delft pottery than I do twentieth-century sculpture. I feel I should tell you that you have the wrong appraiser, except for one thing. I am honest. I do care about the sculptures. And you.
He brightened. "Honesty. That's all I ask."
"Do you realize that the figures you are assembling are worth much more money than the molds?"
"How can that be?" His face showed his disappointment first, then his disbelief. "With the molds someone can make new figures."
"But do you know how much the old figures, the ones you have here ... the ones you have the parts for ... are selling for?"
"Joey has no trouble getting one, two, four hundred dollars for them. But take a mold and make more figures and sell those for fifty or seventy-five dollars, and then you're talking money. Real money," Sol insisted, growing impatient with me, as if I couldn't do the math. "I told you. Kidders will be interested."
"Kidders hasn't seen them, have they?"
"I told you, only family-and you. That's why I need you. So I know what to ask when I take my deal to Kidders."
The only thing I disliked about being an appraiser, other than listening to people tell me about their things at cocktail parties, was having to disappoint people. And Sol, like many older people, had the value of his things backward, thinking that one thing was a giveaway and the other was valuable, when it was just the reverse. That was one reason why it was so pitifully easy to bilk the elderly.
Chances were, Sol was not going to believe the facts that I'd just picked up from Richie. Knowing that the figures he had assembled could bring thousands of dollars would be of little consolation; he was obsessed with the molds.
"Let's look at the bright side first," I began gingerly. "Just one of the figures, one of your simple ones, will probably sell for eighteen to twenty-two hundred, maybe even three thousand dollars."
I pulled one of the catalogs and opened it so Sol could see. I turned to a page showing figurines typical of those I'd seen in his basement-exotically costumed women in provocative poses.
"A rarer one will bring ten thousand on up. But I can't tell you right now which ones of yours are the low thousanddollar figures, and which are the ten-thousand-dollar ones." I was careful not to mention the six-figure prices the rarest ones could bring. "Trust me, please, when I say that I feel certain that you're going to get a great deal of money for the figures themselves. You are going to be very, very rich, Mr. Hobstein."
Sol listened to me without comment or coughing. He glanced at the pictures with only vague, fleeting interest.
"You see," I continued, "not only do you have great objects, you have a great story here. Their provenance-where the figurines came from-that's
a story in itself. Your grandparents. Your parents. How you brought all those parts and pieces here so long ago, and only now have opened the boxes after so many years." I laughed cheerfully. "Why I expect you might hear from Wendy Moonan or John Berendt once the word gets out."
"Who are they?"
"Oh." Of course he wouldn't recognize their names. "Wendy Moonan writes about antiques for the New York Times. John Berendt wrote a hook about an antiques dealer," I explained.
"I was well read once," Sol said earnestly, quickly adding, "but can't say I would have read anything about antiques, even then. But Sterling, the molds, they-"
"Sol. The thing about the molds is that there are already copies being made of these figures-not from old moldsfrom molds people have made from buying the figurines and making new molds to reproduce them."
"Kidders?" he asked between wheezes, a worried look on his face.
"No. Not Kidders. But that aside, the manufacturers- whoever they are-can still make the metal parts out of bronze, but these days they can't get the ivory to make the ivory parts. So even if a company did have an old mold and used it, the new figure wouldn't be the same."
"But I have ivory," Sol said indignantly, his jaw stubbornly thrust forward. "If Kidders or someone wants ivory, I have it. I'll sell it."
"You have ivory? How?"
"When my family packed up the figures and molds, they packed the ivory as well. Little pieces. Parts of big tusks." Sol frowned and began rubbing his forehead. "I seem to remember something about selling some ivory. Maybe in the thirties? It got old and brittle. Ahhh. Yes." He lowered his hand from his brow. His gentle eyes sparkled as yesterday's life came clear. A better time for him than the present, I was sure.
"Yes, Yes. Now I remember," he said excitedly. "It was another sculptor who had some ivory that was old and had become brittle. Ivory needs moisture," he said to me in a teacherly way. "My family always kept ivory wrapped in the softest bunting. Father had extra ivory. Beautiful, white ivory. He shared his. He was that kind." Sol, happy in the memory, smiled gently. "And then, before the war, when we were packing up the figures to hide them, Father said to me, `Wrap the ivory carefully. It mustn't dry out.' I did as he instructed."