As a kid, I had collected Indian head pennies and buffalo nickels in an empty pickle jar; that was the extent of my knowledge about coins. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I sent off my résumé with a covering letter. I remembered I answered a half-dozen ads in a similar fashion that weekend, and had no high hopes for any of them.
But two weeks later I received a letter from the numismatist asking me to come in for a personal interview. I was tempted to dash to the library and bone up on the history of coinage, but then decided it would be a waste of time. A few days of cramming would never convince him I was an expert. If he wanted to hire me, he’d have to live with my ignorance.
His name was Enoch Wottle, and he had a small, dusty shop on West 57th Street. It was really a hole-in-the-wall kind of place with one narrow, barred show window. The entrance was kept locked, and when I rang the bell, he peered at me from behind a torn green shade. I held up the letter I had received. He examined it carefully, then opened the door just wide enough for me to slip through.
He stared up at me, smiled, and said, “You’re hired.”
I worked for Enoch Wottle for almost three years, the two of us alone in that dim, cramped shop filled with locked glass cabinets and a safe in the back room as big and heavy as a bank vault. We started out as Mr. Wottle and Miss Bateson. Within six months we were Enoch and Dunk.
He was the dearest, sweetest man who ever lived. Pushing seventy, with a nimbus of snowy white hair surrounding his skull like a halo. He was terribly afflicted with arthritis, could hardly handle the coin tongs, which was why he had advertised for an assistant after working by himself so many years.
He had been a widower for twenty of those years, and now lived alone in a dinosaur of an apartment house just a block from his store. His only child, a son, was married and lived in Arizona. He was constantly urging the old man to come out and spend his remaining days in a hot, dry climate.
But Enoch resisted. His shop was his life, he told me, and giving it up would be the final surrender to age and mortality.
“Don’t you want to see your grandchildren?” I asked him.
“I see them,” he said. “Occasionally. I talk to them on the phone. I carry their photographs in my wallet.”
I don’t think he was a wealthy man, but I’m sure he was well-off. I know he was generous to me. I started out at just a little over minimum wage, but at the end of my three years with Enoch, I was doing very well indeed, had moved into a larger apartment with new furniture, and was buying my clothing and shoes at tall girls’ shops. Expensive.
Wottle’s was a strange sort of business. No off-the-street trade at all. But he had a faithful clientele, most of whom he served by phone or letter. So noble was his reputation and so trustworthy his judgment, that customers bought valuable coins on Enoch’s say-so, without ever seeing their purchases until they arrived by mail or messenger.
He, in his turn, bought from collectors, other commercial numismatists, or at coin auctions all over the world. Most of this by phone, mail, or cable. After a while I started making weekly deposits at the bank for him and saw how profitable Wottle’s Coin Shop actually was. He made no effort to minimize his success or hide it from me.
Although he dealt in all kinds of metal and paper money, tokens, and even a few medals, his specialty was ancient Greek coins, and most of his income was derived from buying, selling, and trading those little bits of minted gold, silver, copper, and bronze.
He taught me so much. I learned all about dekadrachms, tetrobols, and trihemitartemorions. (Try humming that last on your old kazoo!) I learned to distinguish electrum from purer forms of gold and silver. I even learned to judge between Extremely Fine and Very Fine, and between Fair and Mediocre. Close distinctions indeed.
Once Enoch tried to explain to me the fascination of those ancient Greek coins. It was a dusky November evening, and we were having a final cup of tea and a biscuit before closing up and going home.
He sat behind his battered desk in a wing chair so worn and burnished that the leather had a mirror gleam. He looked with quiet satisfaction at the glass cabinets containing his coins. The disks twinkled like imprisoned stars. He knew their history, and the men who had minted them, worked for them, fought for them, died for them. A wonderful people who lived short, harsh lives but never lost their capacity for joy or their love of beauty.
Those old bits of metal he loved were at once a link to the past and a promise of the future. In a way he could not define, Enoch Wottle saw his coins as proof of immortality. Not his own, of course, but of the human race. When great thoughts had been forgotten, great wars ignored, great art scorned, and monuments of stone crumbled to dust, money would survive.
That evening I think he infected me with his passion.
It couldn’t last. His arthritis became progressively worse. And then came the summons from the landlord. The entire block, including Wottle’s Coin Shop, was to be demolished so that a luxury high-rise could be erected. It was time to go. Enoch was not bitter—or claimed not to be.
“Off to Arizona,” he said, trying to smile. “I’ll close up and sell my stock to Fletcher Brothers on Lexington Avenue; they’ve been after me for years. The important thing is—what are we going to do with you?”
I kissed his cheek and held him tight.
What he did for me was beyond expectations, even my most fantastical hopes. Three months’ salary as severance pay; a gift of his cherished library, including rare and gorgeously illustrated volumes on Greek coinage; all his catalogues of coin auctions of the past several years.
Best of all, he made several impassioned phone calls to old friends, and by the time I put him on the train to Arizona (he refused to fly), he had obtained a promise of a job for me with Grandby & Sons, the old, respected auction house on Madison Avenue. I was to work in the estate and appraisal department as resident numismatist.
And that was where my Great Adventure began.
2
“MY NAME IS FELICIA Dodat,” she said, looking up at me in amazement. “It is spelled D-o-d-a-t, but pronounced Do-day. Please remember that. I will supervise your work at Grandby and Sons.”
I nodded brightly. I loathed her on sight. She was everything I could never be: petite, shapely, and dressed with a careless elegance that drove me right up the wall. She was dark, with a bonnet of black hair as soft as feathers, olive skin, brilliant makeup. I could understand why men might drool over her, but I dubbed her a bitch from the start.
“You will be responsible for all coin appraisals,” she said sharply, tapping blood-red talons on her glass-topped desk. “Occasionally it may be necessary for you to go out of town to appraise an estate. You understand?”
Again I nodded, beginning to feel like one of those crazy Chinese dolls with a bobbing head.
“Unfortunately, our space is limited, and I cannot assign you your own office. You will have to share with Hobart Juliana, who handles stamps, autographs, and historical documents. I should tell you at once that he is gay. Does that offend you?”
“Not at all.”
“Good. Then let’s get you settled in so you can go to work at once.”
Sweet lady. I tramped after her down a long decorated corridor furnished with raddled settees, end tables with cracked marble tops, and oil paintings of dead fish. She stopped before a solid oak door equipped with a small judas window.
“This will be your office,” Felicia Dodat said severely. “Since you and Hobart will be examining valuable consignments at your desks, this door is always kept locked. Is that clear?”
My nodding was giving me vertigo.
She rapped briskly. In a moment the judas was opened, an eye peered out at us. The door was unlocked, swung open.
“Hobart,” my boss said, smiling winsomely, “this is your new roommate, Miss Mary Lou Bateson. I’m sure the two of you will get on just marvelously. Show her the ropes, will you, dear?”
Then she was gone, I was inside, the door locked again. H
e turned to me and said, “My name is Felicia Dodat. It is spelled D-o-d-a-t, but pronounced Do-day. Please remember that.”
It was such a perfect impersonation in tone and manner that I cracked up. He smiled and held out his hand.
“Hobie,” he said.
“Dunk,” I said.
“Dunk? As in doughnut in coffee or basketball in hoop?”
“Basketball,” I said.
“Ah. Well…welcome to the zoo.”
He had a little coffee-maker next to his desk, and we each had a cup. Mine paper and his a porcelain mug with DOWN WITH UP printed on the side.
“You better bring in your own mug,” he advised. “About the boss, she’s a pain in the ass—as you’ve probably noticed—but she can be dangerous, too, so do try to get along. She handles estates and appraisals, so she’s a power to be reckoned with. Got a lot of clout with god.”
“God?”
“Stanton Grandby. Who owns the whole caboodle. He and his multitudinous family. He’s the great-grandson of Isaac Grandby, who founded the house way back in eighteen hundred and something. You’ll meet him eventually, but Felicia Dodat is the one you’ve got to please. The office gossip is that dear Felicia has something going with Stanton Grandby. We all keep asking, ‘Does Felicia do dat?’ ”
He gestured about our office, which seemed enormous to me after three years in Enoch Wottle’s cubby. Hobie pointed out that we’d each have a window, overlooking a splendid airshaft. Each a massive desk, pine worktable, wooden file cabinets, glassed-in bookshelves. All a wee bit decrepit, but serviceable nonetheless.
“What happened to my predecessor?” I asked.
“Fired,” Hobie said. He looked at me. “I don’t mean to put you down, Dunk, but I fear she was just a bit too attractive. God was showing interest, and Madam Dodat took offense.”
“Oh-ho,” I said. “Like that, was it?”
“Just like that.”
“Well, Felicia has nothing to fear from me.”
“She would,” he said, “if god had any sense.”
“That’s the nicest compliment I’ve had in years,” I told him, and we smiled at each other, knowing we’d be friends.
Grandby & Sons dated from 1883—and so did most of the furnishings. We may have been installed in an elegant townhouse on Madison Avenue, just south of 82nd Street, but the place looked like a recently opened time capsule: velvet drapes, Tiffany lamps, Victorian love seats covered with moiré, and ornate clocks, chinoiserie, and mind-boggling objets d’art that had been purchased outright as part of estates and had never been sold.
Another office joke was that everything in Grandby’s was for sale except the loo. Not true, of course. But I admit the surroundings were somewhat discombobulating. All that old stuff. It was like working in a very small Antwerp museum.
But I loved Grandby & Sons, and my career went swimmingly. I learned a lot about my new profession, didn’t make any horrible mistakes, and was able to contribute my share to the bottom line by bringing to auction a number of coin collections from old customers of Enoch Wottle.
Although nowhere near as large and splendid as Sotheby’s or Christie’s, Grandby’s really was a pleasant place to labor, especially for Hobart Juliana and me in our locked office. We were very small specialists, since most of Grandby’s sales were paintings, sculpture, drawings, silver, prints, jewelry, antique weapons and armor—things of that sort. Coins and stamps came pretty far down on the list; there was no great pressure on us to show big profits.
So we were pretty much left with our tongs, loupes, magnifying glasses, and high-intensity lamps. A casual observer, admitted to our sanctum, would have thought us a couple of loonies: Hobie studying a scrap of gummed paper, and me examining a tiny chunk of bruised metal. Both of us exchanging muttered comments:
“Look at that watermark!”
“It’s been clipped; what a shame.”
“Unperforated; that’s a blessing.”
“Roman copy.”
“They will use hinges.”
“Silver hemidrachm of the Achaean League. Very nice.”
Occasionally we would get so excited with a “find” that Hobie would summon me over to his worktable to take a look at an expertly forged signature of Herman Melville, or I’d call him to my side to admire the exquisite minting of a tetradrachm that dated from 420 B.C. and showed an eagle with wings spread, and a crab on the reverse.
I suppose we were a pair of very young antiquarians. All I know is that we shared an enthusiasm for the past, and liked each other. That helped to make our work pleasurable. Sometimes we went out to dinner together—but not often. Hobie’s live-in lover was insanely jealous and suspected him of harboring heterosexual tendencies. He didn’t.
Hobie was a slight, fair-haired lad with a wispy manner and a droll sense of humor. He dressed beautifully, and gave me some very good advice on clothes I might wear to minimize my beanstalkiness. I reckoned he and I got along so well together because the world considered us both bizarre creatures. For different reasons, of course. We had a kinship of discrimination—but our friendship was real.
I had been at Grandby & Sons for a little more than two years when one morning—late April, rainy and gusty: a portent!—I was summoned by Felicia Dodat. She was wearing a particularly oppressive perfume, flowery and sweet, and her office smelled like a greenhouse.
Following Hobie’s advice, I had kept my relationship with dear Felicia on a cool, professional basis. We were warily cordial with each other, and if she was occasionally snappish, I laid that to the pressures of her job. She never joked about my formidable height, but she had a way of looking at me—her eyes starting at my feet, then slowly rising as if she was examining Mt. Everest—that I resented.
“Do you know a man named Archibald Havistock?” she demanded.
“Havistock? No, I’m not familiar with the name.”
She gave me one of her dagger glances. “He owns what seems to be a very large, valuable collection of antique coins. Almost five hundred items with an insured value of two million. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of him.”
“Miss Dodat,” I said, as patiently as I could, “no one knows the names of the world’s biggest coin collectors. For security reasons they buy and sell only through agents, attorneys, or professional coin dealers. You never see their names mentioned at auction or anywhere else. Sometimes they’re known in the trade by nicknames. ‘Midas,’ for instance, is a Saudi Arabian sheikh. Nobody knows who he is. A woman called ‘The Boston Lady’ is reputed to own one of the finest collections of antique Greek coins in the country. ‘The Man from Dallas’ is another. These people work very hard to keep their names secret. When you possess that much wealth in portable property—a two-million-dollar collection of antique coins could be carried off in a small, brown paper bag—you don’t wish to have your name and address publicized.”
“Why don’t they put their coins in a bank vault?”
I looked at her in astonishment. “Because they want to look at them, touch them, dream over them. Most of these people don’t invest in antique coins for profit. They’re hooked on the beauty, history, and romance of the mintage.”
She made a gesture, waving away everything I had said as of no importance. “Archibald Havistock,” she repeated. “He wishes to put his entire coin collection on the block or sell outright. I’m sure he has contacted Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and probably other houses as well. I have here a copy of his insurance inventory. I want you to go over it very, very carefully and give me an accurate estimate of what you feel Grandby’s might earn if the collection was consigned to auction or whether we’d be better off buying outright.”
“Miss Dodat, I can’t do that without making a physical examination of the coins. Even an insurance inventory can be inaccurate. Values in the coin market change rapidly.”
“Then make arrangements to see them,” she said crossly. “He lives in Manhattan, so it shouldn’t be difficult. Here—it’s all yo
urs. I’ll expect your report within a week.”
She held a folder of documents out to me. I took it and tried to smile, wondering if I should curtsy. I started out.
“By next Friday!” she cried after me.
Hobie was down in Virginia, appraising the value of a stamp collection left to his heirs by a recently deceased nonagenarian. Grandby’s provided this service to executors for a fee even though we might not be selected to offer the property at auction or be given the opportunity to buy outright.
So I had the office to myself that morning. I poured a mug of black coffee—my mug had I TAKE CANDY FROM STRANGERS printed on the side—and started going over the inventory of Archibald Havistock’s coin collection.
In my business, there are collectors and there are accumulators. The former are people of taste and discernment, who have an educated knowledge of the history, provenance, and intrinsic value of what they acquire. Most of all, they buy through love. Accumulators are greedy addicts who buy everything, without regard to rarity and condition, and are only concerned with the bottom line (catalogue value) of their collections. Which often turns out to be woefully inflated when they try to sell.
It was immediately obvious to me, studying the inventory, that Archibald Havistock was a very discriminating collector indeed. His list included some real beauties, but the insurance estimates were dated four years previously and did not allow for inflation or the recent runup in antique coin values.
The gem of the collection, a real museum piece, was a silver dekadrachm dating from about 470 B.C. It was a famous coin, one of great classics of Greek mintage. It was called the “Demaretion” and judged as being in Extremely Fine condition. I consulted my catalogues and discovered the most recent Demaretion in similar condition to come on the market had sold for almost a quarter of a million dollars. The value in the insurance inventory was given as only $150,000. I felt Grandby’s could auction this coin for a possible $350,000.
I read the covering letter addressed to Grandby & Sons, picked up the phone, and called Mr. Archibald Havistock.
The Tenth Commandment Page 43