The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,216

designer who collected as a hobby, if not illustrious as a collector per se) I could then turn around and sell it again for sometimes twice what I’d bought it back for, to some Wall Street cheese fry who didn’t know Chippendale from Ethan Allen but was more than thrilled with “official documents” proving that his Duncan Phyfe secretary or whatever came from the collection of Mr. So-and-So, noted philanthropist/interior decorator/leading light of Broadway/fill-in-the-blank.

And so far it had worked. Only this time, Mr. So-and-So—in this case, a prize Upper East Side swish named Lucius Reeve—was not biting. What troubled me was that he seemed to think that, A: he’d been taken on purpose, which was true, and, B: that Hobie was in on it, was in fact the mastermind of the whole scam which could not have been farther from the truth. When I had tried to salvage the situation by insisting that the mistake was wholly mine—cough cough, honestly sir, misunderstanding with Hobie, I’m really quite new at this and hope you won’t hold it against me, the work he does is of such a high quality you can see how sometimes these mix-ups happen, don’t you?—Mr. Reeve (“Call me Lucius”) a well-dressed figure of uncertain age and occupation, was implacable. “You don’t deny that the work is from James Hobart’s hand then?” he’d said at our nervewracking lunch at the Harvard Club, leaning back slyly in his chair and running his finger around the rim of his club soda glass.

“Listen—” It had been a tactical mistake, I realized, to meet him on his own territory, where he knew the waiters, where he did the ordering with pad and pencil, where I could not be magnanimous and suggest that he try this or that.

“Or that he deliberately took this carved phoenix ornament from a Thomas Affleck, from a—yes yes, I believe it is Affleck, Philadelphia at any rate—and affixed it to the top of this genuinely antique but otherwise undistinguished chest-on-chest of the same period? Are we not speaking of the same piece?”

“Please, if you’d only let me—” We’d been seated at a table by the window, the sun was in my eyes, I was sweating and uncomfortable—

“How then can you maintain that the deception was not deliberate? On his part and yours?”

“Look—” the waiter was hovering, I wanted him to leave—“the mistake was mine. As I’ve said. And I’ve offered to buy the piece back at a premium so I’m not sure what else you want me to do.”

But despite my cool tone, I had been in a froth of anxiety, anxiety that had not been relieved by the fact that it was twelve days later and Lucius Reeve still had not deposited the money that I’d given him—I’d been checking at the bank right before I ran into Platt.

What Lucius Reeve wanted I didn’t know. Hobie had been making these cannibalized and heavily altered pieces (“changelings” as he called them) for virtually his whole working life; the storage space at Brooklyn Navy Yard had been crammed full of pieces with tags going back thirty years or more. The first time I’d gone out by myself and really poked around, I’d been thunderstruck to discover what looked like real Hepplewhite, real Sheraton, Ali Baba’s cave spilling with treasure—“Oh Lord, no,” said Hobie, his voice crackly on the cell phone—the facility was like a bunker, no phone reception, I’d gone straight outside to call him, standing on the windy loading dock with one finger in my ear—“believe me, if it was real, I’d have been on the phone to the American Furniture department at Christie’s a long time ago—”

I had admired Hobie’s changelings for years and had even helped work on some of them, but it was the shock of being fooled by these previously-unseen pieces that (to employ a favored phrase of Hobie’s) filled me with a wild surmise. Every so often there passed through the shop a piece of museum quality too damaged or broken to save; for Hobie, who sorrowed over these elegant old remnants as if they were unfed children or mistreated cats, it was a point of duty to rescue what he could (a pair of finials here, a set of finely turned legs there) and then with his gifts as carpenter and joiner to recombine them into beautiful young Frankensteins that were in some cases plainly fanciful but in others such faithful models of the period that they were all but indistinguishable from