A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  Ari was sitting in the back, typing on his laptop, his gold-framed reading glasses perched on his nose. He was sending out a flurry of invoices. A sizable chunk of Wickston’s keep-the-lights-on revenue involved authenticity appraisals, certifying by expert opinion that an object matched a collector’s claim. Nick turned on his computer, intent on devising a clever entry for Wickston’s new Instagram feed; it was Ari’s idea to attract a younger audience to antiques. Under Nick’s stewardship they had racked up 406 followers, which Ari deemed legion and Nick knew was a virtual ghost town. Nick and Ari often sat for hours at either end of the shop without once speaking. The showroom was the one place where Ari didn’t play Schubert. It was often as silent as the moon, and the twenty feet of distance between them like twenty feet apart in outer space.

  Ari pushed back in his chair, drumming a pen against his desk.

  “We had a visitor this morning,” he announced. Ari waited eight pen taps to continue. “That hustler I was telling you about, the one who got his hands on van der Haar’s inheritance.”

  Nick’s fingers stiffened on the keyboard before he willed them into a pantomime of prolific typing. The news that Clay Guillory had come into the shop brought on conflicting waves of excitement and paranoia. Nick cursed himself for not getting in earlier so he could see the young man again.

  He turned his head and searched Ari’s expression for any sign that Clay had mentioned him. Nick hadn’t told Ari about their meeting outside the church. Now he worried that Clay had mentioned it and that Ari might be reading too deeply into that lapse, might be taking it as an intentional concealment—which, to be fair, it was. Nick stopped fake typing and managed to say in the most disinterested tone he could muster, “The murderer?”

  “What?” Ari asked while removing his reading glasses.

  “You said at the service that he might have killed Freddy for his money. You mean that guy? The murderer?”

  “I never actually said that,” Ari replied. “You did. But yes, that guy.” Ari opened a desk drawer and began rifling through it for some misplaced office supply. Gauging this reaction, Nick felt there was a good chance Clay hadn’t said anything about their encounter, which both reassured and disappointed him. Maybe Nick had left zero impression on him. Maybe the guy had forgotten him the second he turned his back.

  “Did he come about selling Freddy’s silver?” Nick couldn’t resist asking.

  Ari nodded with a smirk. “I’d been waiting to hear from him. He phoned this morning saying he was in the neighborhood. He walked in fifteen minutes later with a cardboard box containing five van der Haar antiques. He just happened to be in the neighborhood.” Ari rolled his eyes. “He’s in a hurry to sell. My guess is that if we hadn’t been open, he’d have taken the box straight to Christie’s.”

  Nick squinted a silent question, and Ari answered, “Of course I said I’d take a look. Your murderer is coming back on Thursday to retrieve his box.”

  Thursday. Nick would sit at his desk all day on Thursday. What was wrong with a harmless crush? Nick’s one-sided imaginary affair could still walk around on unicorn legs, now that he knew there would be a second meeting between them. He clicked on the computer’s calendar with stony professionalism and scanned the entry for Thursday. Ari had a lunch appointment with a prominent collector down from Boston.

  “Don’t you want to know what I think?” Ari asked. He reached under his desk and lifted a cardboard box bearing the name of an adult-diaper brand across its sides. Clay Guillory either had a lot to learn about presentation, or was using a savvy strategy to prevent a possible mugging when carting around a fortune in silver.

  “I’d love to take notes when you go through it,” Nick said sincerely.

  “Oh, I already examined them,” Ari answered with a shrug. “I mean, we’re talking about the van der Haars. I wasn’t going to let them sit under my desk collecting dust.” Ari opened the box to reveal five pieces wrapped in Wickston’s signature light-blue tissue paper, which meant he’d already packed them back up for the owner’s retrieval. Nick knew that wasn’t a good sign. Ari could spend weeks poring over the illuminating features of just one significant vessel. Then Nick realized he’d been slow on the take all along: the potential sale of five authentic van der Haar artifacts would have sent Ari dancing around the shop in ecstasy. Such a trove would have been priced in the millions.

  “No good?” Nick asked.

  “Worse than I even feared,” Ari confirmed. “I knew this kid was going to call, so I did my van der Haar homework. It’s impossible to go by the family estate records. The 1758 van der Haar inventory has more than fifteen thousand pieces of plate. They had doubles and triples of everything, and that’s just what’s on the books.” The antiquarian’s first line of defense was always the reams of historical paperwork—the wills and codicils, the death inventories and domestic account logs—that traced silver back through the centuries to its original purchase. Unfortunately, Freddy wasn’t the first van der Haar whose personal matters were ruled by the power of chaos. Ari explained that several van der Haar silver pieces now in venerable museums could be traced to their initial acquisition. But just as many could not. A multi-multi-multigenerational family like the van der Haars was a debris field of off-the-record gifts and snatchings, a silver teapot stealthily given to a nephew to avoid a death tax here, a silver snuffer stand sneaked from one sister to another there. Even a provenance geek like Ari gave up in clerical futility.

  That’s when it came down to the expert’s eye. Was the thing really the thing? The first time Nick heard Ari compare colonial American silver to the Wild West, Nick had thought, Uh, I doubt it’s quite that wild. But Ari had been right. Unlike England, which had long ordained a governing guild and five official hallmark stamps punched on every single piece of sterling, the United States never set a standard, never required a mark, and never assembled a regulating guild to keep track of its silversmiths. That’s why colonial American pieces were so much easier to fake. The only helpful evidence punched on an American item was its maker’s mark; occasionally even that identifier was absent.

  The closest thing that the United States had today to those five telling British hallmarks was stacked in Nick’s top-left desk drawer: Wickston’s dove-white 32-bond letterhead, which Nick fed into the printer to be spitted out as an authenticity report. It only needed the blue-ink scribble of Ari’s lasso-like signature. Ari was one of the few independent experts working on the East Coast who could bless an object as genuine or banish it to the halfway house of an uncertain past and future (“Hey, it’s still worth its spot price as a precious metal,” he often consoled a duped collector, “it’s just not a precious antique”). Ari claimed he spotted fakes in the most revered museum silver collections in the country. But it came down to professional opinion: his versus the curator’s. As Ari figured, better those forgeries existed in the eternal quarantine of a museum than floating around a sucker’s market.

  Ari unwrapped one of the van der Haar pieces from the tissue paper. “It’s a shame,” he muttered. “We all knew that Freddy had been selling family pieces privately for the past decade. He’d put one up for sale every few years, and a billionaire enthusiast would swoop in before it landed at the auction houses. They were authenticated over at Hawkes.” Hawkes had been, until it shuttered two years before, the last major competitor of Wickston in Manhattan. It had been owned by Dulles Hawkes, a plump sixtysomething with a whinnying British accent who was also a notorious cokehead; instead of hiding his addiction, he incorporated it into his persona to the point that his sweating, fidgety, dry-gulping demeanor was considered part of his eccentric personality. Nick found him depressing, one of the people who scoured the shine off New York, and he didn’t appreciate the way Dulles stared lustfully at him but never asked him a single question when they were left in a room together. Ari vouched for his basic decency—“Oh, Dulles is all right, and he’s always liked you, Nick.” Ari occasionally still used him as a second op
inion.

  “Were those previous pieces that Freddy sold authentic?” Nick asked, walking over to Ari’s desk.

  “I always thought they were a bit wonky myself, but they were just on the right side of okay. These are on the wrong side. Way over.”

  A large tankard emerged from the tissue, which Ari placed on the desk. It had the right color, a dull, flat, copper-rich gray, the very opposite of aluminum foil. It also had the right patination, a scarring acne of dings and scratches running around its base. To Nick’s untrained eyes, it looked authentic.

  Ari opened the lid and pointed to the SS maker’s mark punched on it. “That’s a warning right there. It’s only punched on the lid. Why not on the base of the tankard?” Ari lifted the vessel and held it out for Nick to intercept.

  “It’s lighter than I would have guessed,” Nick said.

  “Exactly! The lid and handle are heavier than the body. And if it’s really a Simeon Soumaine, like the punch attests, where is the ornamentation around the baseline? Why are only the handle and lid decorated? No, it doesn’t have Soumaine’s flair. He was a Huguenot, but he was influenced by the New York Dutch style of the 1720s.” Ari shook his head in flat rejection.

  “So it’s a fake?”

  “Definitely. I think the lid and handle may, just may, be real. It’s also been soldered on quite sloppily. Someone probably took an authentic lid and added it to an old, run-of-the-mill tankard base. It has the right marks, you could sell it in a photograph. But to hold it and to know Soumaine’s instincts . . .”

  Ari grabbed the tankard and swathed it in the tissue.

  “It’s the same story with the sauceboat, the porringer, the plate, and the punch bowl that your murderer brought in,” he continued. “Each one is wrong for a different reason. One’s trying to pass itself off as a Myer Myers, for fuck sake!” Myers was a Jewish eighteenth-century New York silversmith particularly close to Ari’s heart.

  “You don’t think my murderer—” Nick winced. He wasn’t my murderer, he was the murderer, Freddy’s murderer, except he wasn’t even a murderer, was he? Clay hadn’t actually killed the old man. Or had he? Nick had no idea. He started over. “You don’t think Clay is responsible for making these forgeries, do you?” How many crimes were they going to pin on this guy on a Monday afternoon?

  Ari hummed skeptically. “It might have been him. It could very well have been Freddy. But it could also have happened a hundred years ago and entered the van der Haar household by error. The collections of all wealthy families are riddled with forgeries. The robber-baron clans of the nineteenth century were even worse, because they were such compulsive shoppers and would buy anything shiny.”

  Ari tapped the box on his desk. Nick knew he was expected to carry it down to the storage room for security. The quickest way for forgeries to become real was for them to be lost or stolen. The insurance would have to cover what it might have been instead of what it really was.

  “But,” Ari remarked, “the tankard was the most obvious phony of the five. The others are slightly more passable. I’m not sure your murderer could have pulled off that caliber of counterfeiting.”

  “He’s not my murderer!” Nick snapped. “Stop calling him that!” He hated his voice when it flailed into high registers. It was the nine-year-old in him screeching around the playground fearing being pelted with a ball, the fifteen-year-old skittering away from school bullies in tears—they had written F-A-G in marker on his shirt and sent him back out into the world correctly labeled. That shriek brought all of those sad, earlier renditions of Nick into brief existence.

  Nick quickly redirected the conversation. “So what will stop Clay from picking up this box and walking it over to the auction houses to try his luck there?”

  Ari sat down in his chair and crossed his legs. He was beautifully dressed today, in a checkered black-and-white shirt with a gray knit tie fastened by a gold clip. There was an emerald chip embedded in the tie clip, and as Ari shifted in his seat, a tiny dot of raw green winked on his chest. The sobbing fifteen-year-old that Nick had been would have done backflips down the school hall knowing he’d one day have this gorgeous man to fondle and kiss any time he felt like it. Well, almost any time. Ari prohibited sexual activity during work hours, which was irritatingly when (and probably why) Nick wanted it most. He grabbed the cardboard box from the desk and pressed it against his stomach.

  “I don’t think even the auction houses will accept those pieces,” Ari replied. Ari was convinced that auction houses set a considerably lower bar for authentication. “Now that Dulles is retired, what they’ll probably do is call here to ask if I’ve ever encountered them.”

  “And you’ll tell them the truth?”

  Ari shot him an incredulous look. “Of course I will. Not only out of professional courtesy but because they’re fakes!”

  “So the guy won’t be able to sell them anywhere?”

  “No, not through the normal channels. Not in New York.”

  Nick felt sorry for Clay Guillory and the adult-diaper box of silver in his hands. He could imagine Clay thinking he’d gotten so close to a windfall—more than a million dollars in possible sales—only to be told that his inheritance was a mirage. At least Clay had gotten Freddy’s brownstone. Houses couldn’t be faked.

  Ari glanced up at Nick and said pointedly, “Why don’t you tell him I’m happy to look at any other pieces that Freddy owned. Each one is its own case.”

  Nick laughed. “Why don’t I tell him? What do you mean?”

  Ari picked up his pen and tapped it on the desk. “He’s coming back at noon on Thursday. I won’t be here. I have my lunch with old Ebershire from Boston.”

  Nick could feel his cheeks going red. He lifted his knee against the bottom of the box to secure his grip. “Ari, I can’t! I can’t tell him his inheritance isn’t worth anything.” His voice was threatening to crack again.

  “Why not?” A corner of Ari’s upper lip was rising slightly. “I’m writing a comprehensive report. All you have to do is hand it to him. If he persists, tell him we’re not confident about their authenticity and we wouldn’t be willing to procure a buyer. That’s all you have to say. Honestly, how hard is that?”

  “That is hard. Shouldn’t you be the one to—”

  “I think you can do it.” Ari patted Nick’s leg. “I have faith in your ability to hand him an envelope.”

  No one, not even a child, likes to be talked to like a child. Nick caught something new in Ari’s face, something he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen before. It was in the shape of his eyes and in the tight, uncooperative muscles of his jaw. Nick thought what he saw in Ari’s face was jealousy. Perhaps Clay had mentioned their run-in on the church steps. Maybe he’d even complimented Ari on how overly friendly his boyfriend was. It occurred to Nick that Ari might have been waiting all of this time for him to admit that he’d already met Clay. It was too late now to confess without making the whole minor episode sound bigger than it was.

  “If that’s what you want, fine,” Nick said lightly. “I’ll give the murderer the news.” He carried the box down to the basement.

  Chapter 4

  Everything in Venice was dripping. Water leaked from the battered white awnings of Campo San Barnaba and from the postcard racks standing sentinel by the corner tabaccheria and from the noses of statues peeking from the shadows of a church. The shower had lasted less than two minutes, and already the sun glazed the cobblestones a blinding white.

  Clay had hoped for warmer weather. He wanted Nick to witness how Venice purred with possibilities in the Adriatic heat. But there were also merits to a chilly afternoon. It warded off an additional layer of tourists that made the narrowest alleys nearly impassable. In the stranglehold of dry, hot days, visitors clotted the streets like human glue, and cruise ships barged into San Marco’s Basin with horns that blasted louder than any church bell. The invasion always intensified with the temperature. At least that had been Clay’s experience ever since he’d firs
t fallen in love with the city four years ago.

  He hauled Nick’s heavy suitcase over the uneven cobblestones, its rattling wheels mimicking the sound of suburban garbage cans dragged to the curb. Wheelie suitcases had become the unofficial soundtrack of Venice, a city that had triumphed for millennia on the very absence of wheels. Clay tried to lift the bag to quiet the noise, but he could only carry it ten feet before his muscles gave out.

  “What exactly do you have in here, Nicky?”

  “Everything,” Nick admitted meekly.

  “Right down to the pots and—” Clay cut himself off. He didn’t want to mention pots or pans or any other metal vessel, fearing it might remind Nick of Ari and his life back in New York. Thankfully, Nick seemed oblivious. His eyes were too busy darting like uncaged birds over the wonders of the Dorsoduro neighborhood. As they passed a scaly wooden boat parked on the side of the canal selling vegetables, Nick stopped in his tracks. His mouth hung open. Nick’s display of absolute wonder struck Clay as charmingly old-fashioned. Today, most people simply reached for their phone to take a picture. Three Americans stood behind Nick doing just that, letting their tiny machines digest the world for them. But Nick shook his head and stammered, “My god! Fresh tomatoes right off a boat! It’s like, it’s like . . .” No comparisons were forthcoming.

  It was a secondhand high to watch a first-timer take in the city. “Come on, there’s plenty more of that,” Clay promised. He knew that encouraging Nick’s love of Venice was a way of encouraging Nick’s love of him too. It was like bringing a boyfriend back to your hometown—and since they’d met in Clay’s hometown of New York, Venice was the only substitute he had. Nick’s gaze drifted over every balcony and scurried down each alley, while Clay’s eyes remained on Nick. He still couldn’t believe he’d turned up. Nick had made good on his word, blown everything up with Ari, and now here he was with his dark-blond hair slicked with rain and dressed in a mismatched suit like the pickings of a color-blind poker champion. Clay had misjudged Nick from the very beginning. The day they’d met outside Freddy’s memorial service, Clay took Nick to be another predictable cute white kid from the Midwest who dated adult replicas of the jocks and stoners they’d lusted after in high school. Clay was fairly certain that whatever Nick’s freshman class looked like in Dayton, versions of Clay were in short supply. When Nick told him that he was dating Ari Halfon, Clay’s bias cooled by only a few degrees. It always seemed to him that there was a failure of imagination at work when two attractive people became a couple. You couldn’t blame someone for being beautiful, but you could glean a petty narcissism behind their need for a mate as pretty as themselves. It was as if they couldn’t be bothered to delve into the deep, jarring jumble of the world. The deep, jarring jumble was where Clay proudly lived. But he’d been wrong. Nick had proved himself full of surprises, and here he was in Venice, just as he’d promised.