“The chest of drawers?” Jeffrey guessed.
“Precisely.”
“It sat in our front window for almost a month, you advertised it all over the world and then put it on the front cover of last week’s auction brochure. Why do you think he’s shown up now?”
“If the German bureaucracy is anything like our own, perhaps because they just heard of its existence,” the Christie’s man replied. “In any case, I understand you were planning to attend today’s auction. I was wondering if you might be willing to pop by afterward.”
“Why me? The piece is sold.”
“It appears that this chap has the power to block the sale, or at least make trouble for our buyer. You are aware that it is a German industrialist who placed the high bid.”
“I was at the auction.”
“Of course you were. Well, it appears that our caller intends to apply some rather crude pressure. Tax reviews covering the buyer’s previous five generations, or something of the sort. Very nasty, really.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“From the sounds of it, this chap intends to claim the high bid as his own. I suppose from our perspective, it’s not quite so important as it will be for our industrialist friend. At least somebody will be paying us.” He hesitated, then went on. “The gentleman asked some rather pointed questions. I thought it might be nice if you would help me clarify the matter.”
“There’s not a lot I can say besides the fact that Alexander found the piece and brought it here.”
“Yes, your man Kantor does attach a great deal of mystery to most of his pieces, doesn’t he? Still, it would be nice if you could come in and meet this chap.”
Jeffrey glanced at his watch. “My assistant should be here in about fifteen minutes. I’ll need to leave immediately, as my painting is one of the first lots. When is this guy showing up?”
“In about two hours.”
“Why don’t I meet you upstairs as soon as my item has sold?”
“Splendid. That really is most kind.”
He hung up the phone, and reflected that it would not be difficult to keep the antique’s origins a secret. Jeffrey knew very little about Alexander Kantor and even less about where his furniture came from. Almost nothing, in fact. Yet the mystery was somehow part of the man, and he liked Kantor intensely.
And the freedom—he liked that too. It was the sort of freedom that he would have dreamed of back when he had been working for McKinsey if only he had been able to imagine it. He had known several friends who had made the major move, risked it all and gone out on their own. They had all spoken of yearning for a freedom they did not have and could not have so long as they worked for someone else. Jeffrey had nodded and agreed and secretly envied them.
In the evenings spent watching traffic speed by in endless urgent streams beneath his high-rise Atlanta apartment window, Jeffrey had wished that he too had possessed the money and the ideas and the desire to go for broke. But nothing had called to him with an urgent tug of the heartstrings, challenged him sufficiently, or spoken to him with that sense of utter certainty, this is it.
Nothing, that is, until now. He did not own the business, but in many respects was already coming to claim it as partially his. Especially when Alexander took off on one of his unexplained tours.
The first such disappearance had occurred nine months before. After three months of working virtually day and night with Alexander, the gentleman had announced that he was leaving the next day on a buying trip.
“For how long?” Jeffrey asked.
“It is terrifically hard to tell about these things,” Alexander had replied. “But I would guess about three weeks.”
Three weeks alone. Jeffrey looked around the shop. The retail value of their stock at that moment was approaching four million dollars.
Alexander showed his usual perceptiveness. “It’s all yours.”
“What does that mean?”
“This will not work if I give it to you only halfway,” Alexander replied. “Clients will refuse to close a deal with you. They’ll assume you won’t have the authority to set prices. And three weeks is too long to leave the business without a signatory present.”
Jeffrey felt as though he’d been pushed over the cliff-edge. “What if I do something you don’t like?”
“If I felt there were even a slim chance, I would not be making this journey,” Alexander Kantor replied. “But if the unforeseen does occur, I assure you that it will only happen once.”
* * *
Jeffrey spent the time waiting for Katya to arrive, going through the morning mail, dusting furniture, doing anything to keep from thinking about the mystery that surrounded this strange young lady.
Katya had begun working at Priceless about a month before, when the regular shop assistant was called away by a family emergency. Jeffrey remained delighted with the arrangement, yet found it to be an exquisite torture. He loved the hours they spent alone together in the shop—she with her classwork, he with his catalogues and books—loved teaching her the rudiments of his newfound passion and profession. But it was so difficult being so close to her for so long, and having to resist the constant desire to hold her, caress her, tell her the thoughts that continually ran through his mind like a never-ending song.
He had met Katya on a bitter-cold November night, in the student’s canteen beneath the University of London’s central library. He had been granted temporary access through providentially meeting a librarian whose passion for antiques had known no bounds. In return for occasional guided tours of his shop and invitations to all the major antique fairs, Jeffrey had been given a visitor’s card—a boon slightly less common than a passkey to the Tower of London’s chambers for the Crown Jewels.
Jeffrey was not permitted to check out books, but within the library’s confines he had virtually unlimited access to a treasure trove of reference materials. He spent many a happy hour lost in richly pictured tomes, tracing the development of patterns and styles and inlays and jewelry and art.
That particular evening he remained hunched over his book on early Biedermeier furniture for so long that it had taken both hands to unclench the cramp in his neck. His kneading and silent groans were stopped by the realization that two of the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen were holding him fast.
Her face was formed around cheekbones so pronounced and upraised as to give her eyes an almost Oriental slant. Yet the eyes themselves were a startling grayish-violet, with irises whose depths seemed to invite him in, drawing him further and further still, until before he knew what was happening he was on his feet and walking over to her table.
She greeted his approach with neither smile of welcome nor frown of refusal; rather she watched him with a look of utter vulnerability, a helplessly open gaze that had his heart pounding by the time he stopped and looked down and said, “May I join you?”
Her voice was as light as a scented summer breeze. “I was just going back upstairs.”
“May I walk with you?”
“To get my things, I mean. I have a bus in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ve been sitting too long anyway. May I accompany you?” He sounded so formal, so silly to his own ears. His usual well of casual banter was sealed off by this unblinking gaze of vulnerability. He had the impression that if he held out his hand, this strange young woman would have been forced to take it, a victim of whatever left her unable to hide her heart. Instead he was content to stand above her, gaze down into the endless depths of two star-flecked eyes, and know that he was lost.
They left the smoky student din behind them, stopped to pick up her coat and books, and entered the startlingly crisp coldness of early November dark. From time to time Jeffrey searched a blank and empty mind for words and came up only with the fear that once they reached the street, this spell would be broken, this moment lost, this woman forever gone. His heart hammered with a fury that left his legs weak and his tongue stilled.
Just as t
hey arrived at the curb a black London taxi rumbled by, its ‘vacant’ light glowing. Jeffrey’s arm shot up automatically, leaving him faced with the dilemma of either telling it to go on or going himself.
Instead he turned to her, and found the same achingly open gaze resting on his face. He said, “You’ve really got to let me take you home.”
She neither replied nor hesitated, but rather gave the driver a Kensington address and climbed in the back.
It was enough to open the gates. “You have an accent I can’t place,” he said. “Are you British?”
“American.” Her voice was so soft he had to lean closer; she did not shy away. “I’ve lived here since I was nine.”
“Here in London?”
“No, Coventry. Do you know it?”
“Not well. I attended an auction there once.” Coventry was about an hour from London, one of countless industrial British towns with all the charm of a construction site on a rainy day. Virtually demolished by German bombers in World War II, it had been rebuilt in hasty uniformity as a settlement for factory workers. Its endless rows of semidetached houses looked like products of a second-rate production line.
“What kind of auction?”
“Antiques. I run an antiques business.”
“Here in London?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re not a student at the university?” She seemed disconcerted.
“No. Why, is that bad?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”
“Sharing a taxi,” he replied. The taxi stopped in front of a nondescript row-house in dire need of better care. A long metal plate of buzzers indicated that the three stories had been split into a rabbit-warren of tiny student flats. “Listen, there’s a cafe across the street. Can’t we go in for a couple of minutes?”
“I really don’t think I could stomach another coffee just now.”
“The drink is incidental. I just want to talk a little longer.”
She gave the tiniest hint of a smile. “All right. But just a few minutes. I have a lot of work still to do tonight.”
The place was cramped and cluttered and smoky as only a poorly ventilated London cafe could be. Jeffrey led her to the only free table and went back to the counter for a couple of teas. He said on his return, “You don’t have to drink this.”
Their conversation flowed more smoothly. She had a way of asking the smallest of questions, and then listening with such absorption that he felt able to tell her anything. He found himself talking at length about his family, Alexander, his departure from America.
“So,” she said, absently stirring her cup, “did you leave a lady pining for you back in America?”
“I had a girlfriend in Atlanta,” he confessed, wondering what there was in those unfathomable gray-violet eyes that invited an honesty he had not known with some girls even after months together. “But she ditched me, not the other way around.”
“And how long have you been separated?”
“Personally about seven months. Now that I look back at it, though, I’d have to say we were emotionally separated since the second day I knew her.”
She showed no reaction whatsoever. “Wasn’t it hard, going out with someone you didn’t love?”
“As far as I knew at the time, everything was fine. It hadn’t occurred to me that there could be something more.” He searched those unreadable eyes, said, “Not then, anyway.”
“That is so like a man,” she said quietly. “So sure the next pretty face is his dream come true, the girl designed to fulfill his every wish and give him perfect happiness.”
“I can always hope,” he replied, thinking to himself, I’ve never felt like this before in my entire life. “What about you? Have you been someone’s perfect happiness before?”
“You’d have to ask them. I could never tell you that myself.”
“So there’ve been others,” he said, hating them all.
“Other what? Other men? Look around you. The world is full of other men.”
“You know exactly what I meant,” he said sharply.
She turned contrite. “You’re right. I should not have said that and I’m sorry. I’ve always had difficulty talking about myself.”
“Does that mean I shouldn’t ask?”
The hint of smile returned. She shook her head. “You just need to hide behind something after you do.”
He made a motion as to duck behind the table. “So I’m asking.”
“About other men?” Her eyes blossomed like petals of a flower made from violet gems and purest smoke, opening and revealing depths that Jeffrey could only wonder at.
“Somebody has hurt you very badly.” It was not a question.
A little girl within her eyes cried to his heart. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“It wasn’t what you think,” she said, her voice a fragile wind blowing words and sadness through the gaping wound in his heart. “It wasn’t a lover. I haven’t, I’ve never . . .”
The sorrow filled him with a selfless compassion he had never known before. He reached across the table, took her hand in both of his. She looked down, studied it with eyes that spilled their burden over both of them. “It wasn’t a lover,” she repeated.
A jangle of boozy laughter from a nearby table shattered the moment. They both started back, pulling away from the shards of emotion that sprinkled around them. She looked at him and was comforted to find a smile waiting for her.
They left the cafe and walked the short distance to her doorway in silence. She hesitated at the bottom step, reluctant to go inside.
“I’d really like to see you again,” Jeffrey said. “Could I invite you to dinner?”
“If you like.”
“I’d like very much. How about tomorrow?”
“All right. What is your name?”
“Jeffrey.” The openness of her gaze left him aching to hold her. “And yours?”
“Katya.”
Then she was up the stairs so fast that his words, that’s a beautiful name, were said to empty space. He watched her enter the door without a backward glance, and wondered why his heart suddenly felt such exquisite pain.
* * *
Jeffrey heard Katya’s gentle tap on the front window only because he was listening for it. He walked toward the front door, where she stood laden down with a half-dozen books. He opened the door, asked, “Are you planning to move in for a week?”
“I thought I would work on my research if there was any free time.”
He took the books from her and carried them back to the alcove. “I bet you didn’t stop for lunch. I left an extra sandwich in the fridge for when you get hungry.”
Katya followed him with solemn eyes. “Thank you, Jeffrey.”
“Here, let me take your raincoat.” He pointed to the silver serving dish. “Baby’s just been fed and changed.”
Katya bent over, touched the tiny form with one gentle finger, cooed softly.
Jeffrey watched her, smiling at the way Ling cuddled to her finger. “Who would have thought there could be so much love in a little bundle of fluff?”
“I was thinking about our little bird in church this morning,” she told him. “But now I wonder if maybe I wasn’t thinking about myself.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you’re hurt, you think you have to protect yourself against everything.”
He set the bowl down on a satinwood side table. “Who hurt you, Katya?”
“Such a little bird,” she went on quietly. “He must have been so scared when we tried to help him. He didn’t know who we were or what we were doing.”
Jeffrey reached up and stroked the silken hairs at the nape of her neck.
“But we made him feel safe, and he’s learned to trust us.”
“Who hurt you?” he repeated.
“That doesn’t matter now. You didn’t know who or what hur
t this little bird either, but you still helped him.”
“I need to know.”
She looked at him with desperate appeal. “I can’t tell you just now.”
“When you trust me enough,” he conceded, and wondered if the time would ever come.
* * *
There were only three Rolls Royces and one Bentley parked outside Christie’s when Jeffrey arrived—it was still a little early. The porter stood as always, dressed in his formal gray uniform, facing the entrance with his back to the street. Within the portals, all was elegant light wood and beige carpet and discreetly armed security guards. Overly thin women wearing too much jewelry spoke in tones of cultured snobbery. They were accompanied by men with fruity voices and diction that made them sound as though they were speaking around a mouthful of marbles. Jeffrey counted seven double-breasted navy-blue blazers in the front foyer alone.
Just prior to Jeffrey’s arrival in London, the bottom had dropped from the high-end art and antique markets with a speed and force that left the art world shell-shocked. Although a recovery was currently under way, this instability made Jeffrey’s pricing and sales decisions doubly difficult. Alexander left him with such sweeping powers that on some mornings he entered the shop wondering if at the end of the day he would still have a job.
His biggest problem came from the enormous variety of pieces they handled. In-depth study was impossible. There was no predicting from where the next piece would originate—what era, wood, country, or style. Most of their business came from furniture, yet a significant portion covered virtually the entire spectrum of antiques—from jewelry to crystal, plates and watches, boxes and lace and chests. It was easier to predict what the next incoming piece would not be.
They handled no guns or weapons of any sort. Alexander viewed such items with a genuine loathing, and referred to weapons specialists as historians of murder and mayhem.
There were few world-renowned painters among the art that they either sold directly or placed under the hammer. Most of the works they handled were from second-level painters, those often found in museums yet not known outside a relatively small circle. Jeffrey either used a professional evaluator for setting the prices of those which he chose to hang in the shop, or passed them on to Christie’s.
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