The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,217

the real thing.

Acids, paint, gold size and lampblack, wax and dirt and dust. Old nails rusted with salt water. Nitric acid on new walnut. Drawer runners worn with sandpaper, a few weeks under the sun lamp to age new wood a hundred years. From five destroyed Hepplewhite dining chairs he was capable of fashioning a solid and completely authentic-looking set of eight by taking the originals apart, copying the pieces (using wood salvaged from other damaged furniture of the period) and re-assembling them with half original and half new parts. (“A chair leg—” running a finger down it—“typically, they’re scuffed and dented at the bottom—even if you use old wood, you need to take a chain to the bottom of the new-cut legs if you want them all to match… very very light, I’m not saying whale the hell out of it… very distinctive patterning too, front legs usually a bit more dented than the back, see?”) I had seen him reconfigure original wood from a practically-in-splinters eighteenth-century sideboard into a table that might have been from the hand of Duncan Phyfe himself. (“Will it do?” said Hobie, stepping back anxiously, not appearing to understand the marvel he had wrought.) Or—as with Lucius Reeve’s “Chippendale” chest-on-chest—a plain piece could in his hands become by the addition of ornament salvaged from a grand old ruin of the same period something almost indistinguishable from a masterwork.

A more practical or less scrupulous man would have worked this skill to calculated ends and made a fortune with it (or, in Grisha’s cogent phrase, “fucked it harder than a five-grand prostitute”). But as far as I knew, the thought of selling the changelings for originals or indeed of selling them at all had never crossed Hobie’s mind; and his complete lack of interest in goings-on in the store gave me considerable freedom to set about the business of raising cash and taking care of bills. With a single “Sheraton” sofa and a set of riband-back chairs I’d sold at Israel Sack prices to the trusting young California wife of an investment banker, I’d managed to pay off hundreds of thousands in back taxes on the townhouse. With another dining room set and a “Sheraton” settee—sold to an out-of-town client who ought to have known better, but who was blinkered by Hobie and Welty’s unimpeachable reputations as dealers—I’d gotten the shop out of debt.

“It’s very convenient,” said Lucius Reeve pleasantly, “that he leaves all the business end of the shop to you? That he has a workshop turning out these frauds but washes his hands of how you dispose of them?”

“You have my offer. I’m not going to sit here and listen to this.”

“Why then do you continue to sit?”

I did not for one instant doubt Hobie’s astonishment if he learned I was selling his changelings for real. For one thing, a lot of his more creative efforts were rife with small inaccuracies, in-jokes almost, and he was not always so fastidious about his materials as someone turning out deliberate forgeries would have been. But I had found it very easy to fool even relatively experienced buyers if I sold about twenty per cent cheaper than the real thing. People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn’t want to see. I knew how to draw people’s attention to the extraordinary points of a piece, the hand-cut veneer, the fine patination, the honorable scars, drawing a finger down an exquisite cyma curve (which Hogarth himself had called “the line of beauty”) in order to lead the eye away from reworked bits in back, where in a strong light they might find the grain didn’t precisely match. I declined to suggest that clients examine the underside of the piece, as Hobie himself—eager to educate, at the price of fatally undermining his own interests—was only too quick to do. But just in case someone did want to have a look, I made sure that the floor around the piece was very, very dirty, and that the pocket light I happened to have on hand was very, very weak. There were a lot of people in New York with a lot of money and plenty of time-pressed decorators who, if you showed them a photo of a similar-looking item in an auction catalogue, were happy to plump for what they saw as a discount, particularly if they were spending someone else’s money. Another trick—calculated to lure