The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,240

me was the people I’d deliberately sold—deliberately lied to.

“You didn’t keep records.”

“No.”

“But you have an idea. You can track them down.”

“More or less.”

“ ‘More or less.’ I don’t know what that means.”

“There are notes—shipping forms. I can piece it together.”

“Can we afford to buy them all back?”

“Well—”

“Can we? Yes or no?”

“Um—” there was no way I could tell him the truth, which was No—“it’s a stretch.”

Hobie rubbed his eye. “Well, stretch or not, we’ll have to do it. No choice. Tighten our belts. Even if it’s rough for a while—even if we let the taxes slide. Because,” he said, when I kept looking at him, “we can’t have even one of these things out there purporting to be real. Good God—” he shook his head disbelievingly—“how the hell did you do it? They’re not even good fakes! Some of the materials I used—anything I had to hand—cobbled together any which way—”

“Actually—” truth was, Hobie’s work had been good enough to fool some fairly serious collectors, though it probably wasn’t a great idea to bring that up—

“—and, you see, thing is, if one of the pieces you’ve sold as genuine is wrong—they’re all wrong. Everything is called into question—every stick of furniture that’s ever gone out of this shop. I don’t know if you’ve thought about that.”

“Er—” I had thought about it, plenty. I had thought about it pretty much without stopping ever since the lunch with Lucius Reeve.

He was so quiet, for so long, that I started getting nervous. But he only sighed and rubbed his eyes and then turned partly away, leaning back to his work again.

I was silent, watching the glossy black line of his brush trace out a cherry bough. Everything was new now. Hobie and I had a corporation together, filed our taxes together. I was the executor of his will. Instead of moving out and getting my own apartment, I’d chosen to stay upstairs and pay him a scarcely-token rent, a few hundred dollars a month. Insofar as I had a home, or a family, he was it. When I came downstairs and helped him with the gluing up, it wasn’t so much because he actually needed me as for the pleasure of scrabbling for clamps and shouting at each other over the Mahler turned up loud; and sometimes, when we wandered over to the White Horse in the evenings for a drink and a club sandwich at the bar, it was very often for me the best time of the day.

“Yes?” said Hobie, without turning from his work, aware that I was still standing at his back.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to go this far.”

“Theo.” The brush stopped. “You know it very well—a lot of people would be clapping you on the back right now. And, I’ll be straight with you, part of me feels the same way because honest to goodness I don’t know how you pulled off such a thing. Even Welty—Welty was like you, the clients loved him, he could sell anything, but even he used to have a devil of a time up there with the finer pieces. Real Hepplewhite, real Chippendale! Couldn’t get rid of the stuff! And you up there, unloading this junk for a fortune!”

“It’s not junk,” I said, glad to be telling the truth for once. “A lot of the work is really good. It fooled me. I think, because you did it yourself, you can’t see it. How convincing it is.”

“Yes but—” he paused, seemingly at a loss for words—“people who don’t know furniture, it’s hard to make them spend money on furniture.”

“I know.” We had an important drake-front highboy, Queen Anne, that during the lean days I’d tried despairingly to sell at the correct price, which on the low end was somewhere in the two hundred thousand range. It had been in the shop for years. But though some fair offers had come in recently I’d turned them all down—simply because such an irreproachable piece standing in the well-lighted entrance of the shop shed such a flattering glow on the frauds buried in back.

“Theo, you’re a marvel. You’re a genius at what you do, no question about it. But—” his tone was uncertain again; I could sense him trying to feel his way forward—“well, I mean, dealers live by their reputations. It’s the honor system. Nothing you don’t know. Word gets around. So, I mean—” dipping his brush, peering myopically at the chest—“fraud’s hard to prove, but if you don’t take care