Gypsy in Amber

by Martin Cruz Smith

  ‘There you are,’ Isadore said. He was unconsciously dusting his pants as he walked. ‘Officer Swoboda will have to keep an eye on you, you understand. I don’t know what you think you’re going to find. Afterward, you’ll come up and see me?’

  ‘Thanks, Sergeant. I’ll just look around.’

  ‘You do that,’ Isadore said. Roman watched his round, disconsolate shape disappear through the door.

  Officer Swoboda, one of those who had forsaken the warehouse fight, a man counting the months to his pension, stood over Roman as he knelt beside the wrecked furniture. No attempt had been made to reassemble the antiques, just to lay corresponding pieces together. Roman could do nothing about the mutilated girl, but he could do something about this.

  ‘Excuse me, Officer, have you got any epoxy here?’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s department property.’

  Roman pulled a twenty from his money clip. The guard looked at the closed door dumbly. Roman rubbed the bill between his fingers so that it crackled. Officer Swoboda’s hearing proved to be his most acute sense. He fetched the tubes of epoxy and stood poised for any more errands.

  Roman ignored the policeman while he cleared an adequate working space. The silver was in the best shape, a small tea service by either Coney or the Huguenot Apollos Rivoire who changed his name to Revere. The slender spout had been badly crippled by the accident but was easily reparable. It was a charming set, and it was hard to imagine any collector with the taste to own it who wouldn’t come to tend to it alone.

  There was no way of writing off the pair of Queen Anne side chairs, no matter how badly one wanted the insurance money. They had lasted two centuries of fairly constant use because they were solidly constructed of heavy mahogany. The scratches were purely superficial. A quick inspection showed that even the drake feet were originals. On the other hand, there was little to put back together of an inlaid shelf clock. The works were displayed like a twisted skeleton through the shattered case. From the carving of the center plinth and finial, it wouldn’t have been the best example of Federal Massachusetts workmanship, but it was still a shame. Roman could picture it gonging madly to its death as it tumbled over the highway.

  Another fatal victim was a tambour desk. It took imagination to see what it must have looked like. A trim Hepplewhite from the shape and inlay work of a broken leg. The cherrywood veneer on the shelves was largely scraped off, and the tambour section with its delicate sliding doors had separated from the lower half of the desk from the impact of the collision. He examined the insides of the drawers, checking the joining. It was here as much as the exterior that the real craftsmanship could be found. To be a joiner two hundred years ago was to be a member of a skilled profession that looked down on carpentry as a doctor would look down on a quack. The dovetail joins had held firm with an integrity Professor Oliver would have admired.

  A box contained shards of Tiffany glass. A mediocre cut-down Windsor rocker was a tepee of turnings now. The sides and bottom of a dower chest gained Roman’s eye for ten minutes. It had the tulip and sunflower motif of Pilgrim Connecticut, square and innocent. Roman finished his examination with a feeling of disgust. He would have liked to find something incriminating about the Pilgrims.

  He looked up. Officer Swoboda was puzzling his way through the Daily News crossword with a well-used eraser.

  ‘That’s it?’ Roman asked. ‘That’s the lot?’

  ‘Yup.’ The cop didn’t look away from his work.

  Roman picked his jacket off the floor. It was dirty, and he was sweaty. The stubble on his cheek was a purple shadow. It took constant care to keep himself from looking like a mugger. He was halfway out the room on his way to Isadore when he remembered the pictures.

  ‘Wait. I saw something else. Big.’

  Swoboda got up to lock the door behind Roman. As he stood, a canvas dropcloth slid off his perch to the floor. His chair had been the battered top half of a highboy.

  ‘What about that epoxy?’

  Roman ignored him and dragged the rest of the dropcloth away. The whole highboy was there. In parts, but there. It was an unusual Chippendale with slender cabriole legs and ball-and-claw feet. A fanciful scroll top matched the crotch walnut veneer fronts and the engraved brass handles.

  ‘I’ll need it,’ Roman said.

  The old dowels were broken, and the double chest would never stand up again. He didn’t care. He would be the good embalmer and prepare it for its funeral. He spread milky epoxy onto a piece of the scrollwork and pressed it back onto the top.

  ‘I also need some skilled help,’ Roman told the guard. ‘If you’ll just hold this here.’

  He rigged supports from the chairs and typewriters to hold other parts of the highboy together as he did his pasting. The target of his energy soon started retaking its shape. The highboy was a graceful chest-on-chest, New England, about 1750, made from extra-light dried walnut. There was no other way the slender legs could have held under its height. He put the bottom back on a drawer.

  ‘It’s a shame you don’t love them,’ he could hear Oliver saying as he worked, the way the old man always talked as they repaired a cabinet together. ‘Think of the years and the art it took to make this.’

  ‘They’re only things,’ he would say in return. ‘Things are the gaja disease. Not for me.’

  ‘But such a beautiful disease.’

  The bottom apron of the brittle walnut chest had snapped off. Roman found it in a drawer. It had a boldly scalloped shell on it, with the open claw of the foot and the high scroll the final signature of a young, experimental Goddard highboy.

  ‘Hey, that’s kind of pretty,’ the policeman said.

  ‘John Goddard, Newport, Rhode Island, will be glad to hear that,’ Roman said. He pushed himself off the floor and straightened up. It had taken more than an hour of nonstop labor putting the highboy together, and he looked as if he’d put on his clothes straight out of the washer.

  ‘You done? You going to leave it like this? It’ll fall apart.’

  It seemed unlikely, but there might be the first stirrings of an appreciation in the policeman. Roman gave him the benefit of the doubt and another twenty-dollar bill.

  ‘Just stand still. If Sergeant Isadore asks where I am, tell him I had a case of Gypsy feet,’ Roman said on his way out.

  It was after a taxi and a shower and while he was shaving that he thought about the highboy. Since he needed three shaves a day to stay presentable, he spent a lot of time in front of a steamed mirror. He prided himself on the profitable concentration he’d developed during these periods of inactivity. The only danger was in forgetting the small scar on his neck.

  There was a chance Sergeant Isadore might think he put the highboy back together for fun. Maybe. In any case, it was the only excuse he could think of for spending so much time on the double chest. From the outside everything was normal. Even the nails in the pine backing were originals, hand-wrought flattened spikes. The drawers slid out easily on deftly repaired runners, and that was the first trouble. They shouldn’t have slid. The rope and padding he’d seen in the photograph should have held firm over the empty drawers all the way through the accident. Unless there were something in the drawers, something heavy rolling around and slamming against the front of the drawer until the rope broke. A sixty-pound torso would have done the job.

  Inside, the drawers were spotless. The dovetails interlocked as cleanly as fingers, or they had until very recently. Now each drawer had one or two dovetails gaping, warped out of contact next to other joins that were as tight as the day they were glued. He’d seen damage like it only once before, when a girl had stuffed an antique dry sink with solidified carbon dioxide, dry ice.

  Roman thought the policeman would finally catch on to the last thing he was doing, but he didn’t. While Roman was fumbling with the drawers, he accidentally ran the sharp metal bevel of his ring along the wood of each drawer’s sides and back. Inside the hardwood exterior of any antique the drawers were
made of soft pine and gouging the wood was a common method of determining whether wormholes were twisting and genuine or straight and artificial. The wormholes did something else. Their capillary action would soak up any stain that was washed off the surface of the wood. He found what he was looking for in the last drawer. The wormholes there were clotted with a rusty deposit. Roman knew the difference between blood and an oil stain.

  The razor took off the first layer of epidermis, then the second and the third, provoking a bright bud of red before he noticed that he’d run into the scar again.

  Chapter Seven

  Hoddinot Sloan’s house was in the Federal style. Neo-Virginian against the Massachusetts countryside, with fluted wooden columns and cornices in white on red brick, a row of french doors opening onto a well-tended garden, all of it hidden from the road leading to Newton by a line of elms. Hoddinot Sloan also seemed in the classic Federal style. A fine nose was balanced by white eyebrows. His blue eyes seemed irritated, but the distinguished gray hair was unruffled. His thin mouth was a blend of distaste and civility.

  ‘Will you please explain your mission again?’ he asked politely as he barred the door.

  ‘Certainly. The Metropolitan Museum is compiling a study of the best private collections of early American furniture. This is for the unlikely event of part of the museum’s collection being destroyed, but you know how things are in New York. If something of this nature happens, the museum wants to know exactly where it can replace damaged articles. Naturally, your name came up. I called a few times, but your line was busy. Since I was in this part of the country, I thought I’d take a chance and drop in anyway.’

  Sloan looked his visitor over warily. He definitely didn’t look as if he were connected with any museum. With the Mafia, more likely. Sloan had never seen such dark eyes. The pupils were so large there was almost no room for the whites. The man’s complexion had an unsettling tone somewhere between chocolate and red wine. His suit bunched up over a laborer’s shoulders. Not the sort of man who was interested in antiques, unless he was Armenian; that could be it. Though Armenians were only good with rugs, he believed.

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Grey. Roman Grey.’

  It wasn’t always Grey, Sloan decided.

  ‘You have a letter or some identification?’

  ‘Of course.’ Roman took an envelope from his jacket and handed it to Sloan. The first thing Sloan did when he took the letter out was to check the letterhead. It actually was from the museum, a surprise, and repeated what the man had said and asked for any cooperation. It was signed by the director of the museum’s American Wing.

  ‘Oh, come in, come in,’ Sloan said reluctantly. He read the letter a second time as Roman entered the foyer. The interior of the house matched its outside with cream gray moldings, a grandfather clock by Willard, a complete set of four matched side chairs, the patina of old furniture and old money. Sloan eyed his visitor apprehensively as if he expected him to seize the clock under his arm and bolt through the door.

  ‘You know something about antiques?’ Sloan asked.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Really,’ Sloan said, not bothering to hide his doubt. ‘You don’t mind if I call the museum to check this letter, do you?’

  ‘Please, go right ahead.’

  Sloan didn’t usher Roman into the living room; he just motioned him in with a jerk of his gray locks. It was clear he wanted to keep an eye on the intruder. The letter went into Sloan’s tweed jacket like evidence. Roman stationed himself in plain view beside the fireplace and admired the mantel’s plaster carving. What did a room like this do for Sloan, he wondered. Set him off from the rest of the world, just where he wanted to be.

  Sloan redialed with some exasperation and finally slammed the phone down. ‘Some idiotic recording. The offices are closed, and they’ll be closed all weekend.’

  ‘That’s too bad, but it’s always like that on Fridays. And everyone’s away on vacation, you know,’ Roman said. He’d held his breath for only a second during Sloan’s call.

  ‘Too bad for you,’ Sloan said. ‘This will have to wait until next week at the soonest then. Besides, I am personally in no mood to have a stranger snooping around my house. If I felt like meeting people, I’d be in New York for the Armory Show this instant.’

  ‘Yes. I was rather surprised that you weren’t.’

  Sloan hesitated, not sure whether the question was impertinent. ‘I would be if some moron hadn’t rammed into the truck carrying my exhibit and destroyed the lot. So you’ll have to excuse me.’

  The distinguished head jerked toward the front door. Roman looked around the room. If he didn’t get in now, he never would. The phone call on Monday would finish him.

  ‘I can understand your being upset,’ he said as he moved slowly to the foyer. ‘The more one appreciates fine antiques, the more one is hurt by their thoughtless destruction.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Sloan said impatiently.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Roman said, ‘is how a man of your obvious good taste could put a récamier in this room. It’s like putting a grand piano on a raft. Weights down that corner of the room a little bit, don’t you think?’

  Sloan froze with his thin mouth open during the first part of Roman’s comment. The well-groomed hair bristled. By the time Roman was finished, though, the collector’s eyes were mobile and curious.

  ‘I know what I think,’ Sloan said. ‘Perhaps you should elaborate on your odd remarks.’

  ‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean to offend.’ Roman smiled broadly. This was the time to turn on the charm. ‘It simply struck me that way. But look at this marvelous Sheraton side chair you’ve selected to go by the window. The airiness of the center splat carving, the reeded legs and spade feet make it look as if it could float. The New York cabinetmaker who created it might have made it for this room. And then this récamier. It may just be my prejudice, but I think that the Empire style was a mistake, the worst one Napoleon ever made. Where could a daybed get such delusions of grandeur? The styles of Egypt and Rome don’t mix, and it doesn’t matter how much good mahogany you waste trying. It’s a shame that American furniture makers had to pass through an uninventive phase like this.’

  Sloan listened intently. ‘Very forthright of you, Mr Grey. Since you are so interested, perhaps you’d tell me whether the paint and gilt on the récamier are original?’

  Roman nodded and lowered himself to the floor. He could see Sloan raising a corner of his mouth wryly. A line of sphinxes ranged along the apron of the sofa keeping their secret to themselves. This was the part where he was supposed to run his hand over the finish and make a guess. Instead, a penknife appeared in his hand. The tip of it followed the gilt around the blocky leg of the récamier underneath. Quickly, before Sloan could have second thoughts, he gouged a tiny sliver of the gilt out, holding it as if it were on a tray while he got to his feet and then put the blade on his tongue. He closed his mouth and rolled the flake against his palate. When he was satisfied, he rubbed his tongue with a handkerchief.

  ‘It’s the original, but it’s not gilt. To begin with, it’s a Boston récamier, and Boston furniture makers always were restrained in their use of gold, so I had my doubts. No, it’s orpiment. Lovely yellow, but it hasn’t been used for some time because it’s poisonous, a sulfide of arsenic. Lasted as well as it has because it’s in Venice turpentine. Since the orpiment is original, I think we can assume that the paint underneath is also.’

  ‘Amazing,’ Sloan said, genuinely impressed. His estimate of his visitor was going through some rapid changes. ‘It took me a week to come to that conclusion. A friend left it for an opinion, and this reaffirms what I thought. And what you said about the Empire period, I quite agree with. Napoleon was a nasty man, and he inspired a nasty style. Amazing, though. I never saw that done before. Have you been poisoned by any chance?’

  Roman smiled. Sloan was a good deal warmer than he had been before. ‘No. I would appreciate some w
ater to wash my mouth out, however.’

  ‘Naturally, naturally,’ Sloan said. ‘While I get it for you, let me show you to the rose garden. There are a couple Houdon bathers there you might enjoy. This way.’

  The rose garden was on the other side of the house, the shady side so that the flowers could last out the summer. Roman eased himself into an iron chair facing the marble bathers and thinking about Hoddinot Sloan. If the fish was not on the hook, he was very interested in the bait.

  ‘Here we are.’ Sloan emerged from a door farther down the house at what must have been the kitchen. He was bearing a salver with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. ‘Might as well wash our mouths with a good year.’ He set the tray down on the table between them. ‘What do you think of the bathers?’

  ‘Much more attractive than Madame Récamier.’

  Sloan laughed. Real teeth, Roman noted. For a man in his late fifties Sloan kept himself up as well as his house.

  ‘That was quite a trick. Where did you pick it up?’ Sloan asked. It was meant to sound like a cross between curiosity and congratulation instead of envy.

  ‘Simply an old method,’ Roman told him. ‘The difficulty is in differentiating from the other sulfides used in painting. Of course, arsenic has a definite taste of its own. Excuse me.’ He spit a mouthful of Vouvray onto the grass.

  ‘Bitter almonds, isn’t it?’ Sloan said.

  Roman nodded. ‘Something like that. How did you know?’

  ‘Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year,’ Sloan confessed with a touch of pride. ‘I just wish some of them were harder to figure out. But about this problem with the sulfides, are there any other ways of finding out which is which?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Putting a sample into a spoon and holding a match underneath is one way. The smells are often quite characteristic. And as a last resort, you can burn it. I’m sure you can read a flame for pigments or zinc.’