by Sonya Cobb
Harry, too, seemed to be getting the message. He stared at her over tented fingers, sharp creases etched between his eyebrows. Sophie suddenly felt sad, seeing the ruins of their friendship among the broken toys. Meeting Harry, she realized now, had been the best part.
“All right.” He sighed, picking up the tool bag. It made a heavy clanking noise. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but…”
Sophie shrank further into the couch. “Come to what?”
“Uncomfortable measures. I mean, bloody hell! The wife of a curator!” He grimaced and shook his hand back and forth as though he’d hit it with the hammer.
“What the hell are you talking about, Harry?”
“I’m turning you in.”
“Harry, stop it. What is this act you’re putting on?”
“Seriously. I’m going to the cops. Because you stole a beautiful Dutch masterpiece and tried to pawn it off on me, an honest dealer.”
“Honest dealer, my ass! We’re connected, you know. There are phone records.”
“Yes. You kept trying to embroil me in your dirty little scheme.”
Sophie blinked at him, struggling to comprehend the strange turn things had taken. “Anyway,” she said slowly, “you have no proof. And—and! May I remind you, you’re the one with the bowl.”
“Am I now?”
“Okay, fine, I’m sure you’ve given it to your collector guy by now. But they’ll find him.”
“Actually, darling, when I got the feeling you were having second thoughts about our arrangement, I decided to hold on to the tazza. As leverage. And now you’ve got it.” He drew the hammer out of the bag and spun it in his hands.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s tucked away. In your house. And you made the mistake of telling me where you hid it. I guess you were showing off. Thieves are such braggarts.”
“Here. In my house.”
“That’s right.” Harry cocked the hammer back, then tipped it forward so that it was pointing at Sophie. “Your house.”
Sophie burst out laughing. “You’re insane. Harry, it’s me! What are you doing? Can we talk about this like normal people, please?”
Harry let the hammer fall back into his lap. His body seemed to droop. “No, we can’t talk about it like normal people. It’s too late. My dad—he’s so pissed.”
“I thought your dad was dead.”
“‘Take care of it already, Harry. Quit fucking around, Harry.’ The pressure—bloody hell. I have to make things right.” Harry squared his shoulders. “Anyway, unless you bring me something soon, I’m going to have no choice but to call Agent Whatsit, Chandler, and tell him exactly where you’ve stashed that tazza.” He shoved the hammer into his bag and stood up. “I’m sorry. I hope it doesn’t go that way. But if it does…” He gave a halfhearted shrug. “Don’t get up, love. I’ll let myself out.”
***
She started with the powder room, since Harry had mentioned going in there. During the renovation they had peeled back the moldy carpet and chipped away the linoleum underneath, only to find that the wood subfloor was rotted through. Now Sophie got on her hands and knees and probed the spongy boards, searching for evidence that one had been lifted up and replaced. But the wood was so friable, it couldn’t be moved without dissolving into splintery fragments. Sophie hesitantly felt around behind the baby blue toilet, but found no hole, no box. Just powdered rust and strange bits of waxy fluff. Next she opened the boxy, vinyl-laminated vanity and felt around among the roach traps and air fresheners. She went to the basement to get a flashlight, then came back and shone it under the sink, searching for a cutout or some other sign of tampering. Finally she lifted the toilet tank lid; empty.
Standing in the small, fetid bathroom, running her dusty hands over the brittle wallpaper, Sophie silently cursed Harry. Who would ever have thought him capable of breaking into her house and threatening her like this? Sweet, excitable, boyish Harry with his relationship issues and alcoholic mother and his irresistible, hapless charm. It was ridiculous, the very thought of him climbing in her kitchen window in his Savile Row suit. Acting like some kind of lowlife thug. And what was all this nonsense about his client? Harry had money; he should be able to pay off a debt. It didn’t make any sense.
She also suspected that the whole hidden-bowl story was a bluff. But what if Agent Chandler did show up at her door one day, warrant in hand, and walked straight to its hiding place? She tried to shoo the images from her mind: Lucy and Elliot watching their mother being led away in handcuffs; Brian packing up his office under the watchful eye of a security guard; lurid headlines; embarrassed friends, years later, avoiding her at the supermarket. And the house. She’d lose the house and the house would lose her. Someone else would move in and rip out the moldings, mantels, and fixtures, replacing everything with MDF and PVC, sheetrocking over her restorations and her dreams.
Sophie washed her hands and locked the bathroom door. She would just have to search everywhere. If it was here, she would find it. No one knew this house as well as she did.
She decided to proceed methodically, starting in the basement. She searched through bins of leftover tile, paint-encrusted window hardware, forgotten stuffed animals. She waded through piles of empty cardboard boxes, feeling for telltale heft, shaking out their Styrofoam peanuts and pawing through wads of newspaper. She opened the panniers on Brian’s touring bike, and pulled boxes of tools, pedals, and bike seats from the shelves of his worktable so she could feel around behind them. She shone a flashlight under the oil tank, then hauled a stepladder across the width of the basement, peeking into each bay of the ceiling, which had moldy plywood nailed across the thick, strapping joists. At the back of the house she poked her head into a dank crawl space, shining the flashlight into its cobweb-draped depths. She ran her hand along the top of an old metal cabinet that hung on the wall, steeling herself against the invisible grit and furry remains.
She found mouse droppings, old cockroach traps, several coins, and, stashed above the plywood between two joists, a bundle of fishing rods. Behind the washing machine she found one of her favorite bras, which probably wouldn’t fit anymore. She found screens for the third floor windows, and a box of beautiful antique buttons. But no tazza.
The next morning she tackled the kitchen. She hauled a ladder out of the basement so she could see on top of the seventies-era cabinets, which stopped a foot short of the ceiling. She nudged the refrigerator away from the wall, rifled through the cleaning products under the sink, and scooped armloads of Tupperware out of its cabinet. She looked in the freezer. She checked the oven.
But they were all too obvious, these hiding places. Harry had tools; surely he’d stashed the bowl where no one would stumble across it. Climbing back up the ladder, Sophie tapped the drop ceiling here and there, searching for cracks or holes. It was solid. She climbed down and inspected the edges of the linoleum floor. Glued tight.
That night, lying in bed, she combed through the house in her mind, making mental notes of radiator covers to lift, loose floorboards to check. When she finally slept, well after midnight, her brain jumped and skittered, continuing the search in her dreams, going up and down the ladder, back into the crawl space, back through bathroom’s sticky corners, over the cabinet tops, again into the crawl space, up the ladder again, down the ladder again.
The next day Brian came home and found Lucy and Elliot alone on the first floor playing “circus,” which involved Elliot walking the tightrope, otherwise known as the back of the sofa, while Lucy cracked a pretend whip. Sophie was on the third floor rummaging through suitcases. She’d only meant to run upstairs for a minute, just to check behind some boxes of photographs on a high shelf in the closet. But catching sight of the suitcases, she’d decided to go through them quickly, so she could cross the whole closet off her list. “What are you doing?” Brian asked breathlessly as
he carried Elliot up the stairs. “This guy almost took a header off the couch into the coffee table.”
“Sorry! Sorry,” said Sophie, shoving a garment bag back into the back of the closet. “I was…looking for something.”
“What?”
Sophie pushed the closet door closed. “What what?”
“What are you looking for?”
“A pair of shoes. I haven’t seen them since, um, Christmas.”
“Do you want me to ask Debbie?”
“No! Don’t worry about it, all right? Just, forget it.”
“Okay…”
Sophie pushed past him, ducking Elliot’s outstretched hands. “I’ve got work to do,” she muttered, and went to shut herself in her office.
Their marriage, she had long ago come to realize, was like the rim of a bowl, and the two of them traveled around it, sometimes coming together, sometimes apart, always on the same plane but not always close. These days they were both preoccupied, quiet, tired. Sophie knew they would come together again eventually; she just hoped it wouldn’t be at the bottom of the bowl.
When Harry called, she was ready.
“I found it,” she said.
“Well, aren’t you the clever one.”
“You underestimated me. I am the resident champion of hide-and-seek.”
“Congratulations. Where was it, if I might ask?”
“You know where it was. You might be more interested in knowing where it is.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve hidden it in my flat. This is fun.”
“There’s a little spot on the Falls Bridge where the kids love to look at the river. We always bring something to throw into the water so we can watch it sink.”
“Where I come from they call that littering.”
“I think it’s time for us to go our separate ways, Harry.”
“Not quite yet, love. You see, I am still under a great amount of pressure to come up with another decorative item.”
“I’m afraid that’s your problem, Harry. Just pay him already. I don’t see why you need me.”
“He doesn’t want money, for Christ’s sake. He’s got plenty of that. He wants the goods. Objects. Masterpieces. Things you can’t buy in a store.”
“Tell him no, Harry. Use a firm voice. It gets easier with practice.”
“I don’t understand why you won’t help me,” he wheedled. “I thought we were friends. C’mon, love.”
“Friends!” she exclaimed. “What about Brian? What about my family? Would a friend ask me to do this to my family? Anyway, you’ve got nothing on me. I’m done with this.”
“Really. Then tell me where you found the tazza, and I’ll be on my way.”
“I’ll tell the cops everything. You’ll be in just as much trouble.”
Harry sighed heavily. “Make this a little easier on both of us, love. Pay another visit to hubby, slip into the galleries, nick me a little painting. Something petite. Dutch, if possible. Just do it, get it over with, and then I’ll come retrieve my tazza—which, I assure you, is very cleverly hidden in your home. All right? I promise. Pinky swear.”
“Harry.”
“Yes?”
“Fuck you.”
***
It was a bluff. It had to be. Harry was too confident that she hadn’t found it; he should have sounded more worried.
Sophie considered the veiled gaze of a suit of armor looming above her on a roped-off platform. Maybe Harry wasn’t as transparent as she’d always thought. She wished she could replay their phone conversation, to search for notes of bravado, or an edge of anxiety in his voice.
The armor had apparently been made for an overweight prince; the bulging torso’s delicately engraved decoration reminded her of the visit she and Harry had made to the Met together. Those were the days, she thought ruefully; when she and Harry had been on the same side; before he started playing his ridiculous game.
And who was this mysterious collector who had such a grip on him? Who could possibly have such a thirst for stolen artwork, which could never be shown off, left in a will, lent to a museum? From what she knew about collectors, only a portion of their pleasure came from the work itself. Most of them thought like decorators, imagining the long captions that would border photographs of their homes in Elle Décor. Others were investors, obsessed with auction results, watching values rise and fall with the avidity of hedge-fund managers. Then there were those who were simply in love with the art of collecting, determined to assemble a group of works that would become, in itself, a work of art, carefully edited to tell a cohesive story about a time, a place, a person. What all of them had in common, of course, was the desire for others to know what they had.
At this particular museum party, the collectors were an unlikely mix of NRA members and Renaissance scholars. Brian had insisted on coming to the event, which marked the opening of a show on Brunswick armors. He was looking for donors to fund the purchase of the Saint-Porchaire. It felt strange, standing there in her party dress, champagne in hand, stiff smile on her face. What she really needed to be doing was looking inside all the radiator covers, and then, maybe, in the chimneys. But she’d promised Brian she would come, and anyway, she did need to get away from the house. It was making her feel a little crazy.
The party was in a large, cathedral-like gallery whose enormous windows offered a view of the Schuylkill River as it tumbled into the city from the green depths of Fairmount Park. The room was populated by imposing figures dressed in flamboyant armor complete with rippling puffed sleeves, flared skirts, majestic capes, and decorative roping, all wrought in gilded steel. The inscrutable figures’ heads were fully enveloped in metal, giving them a menacing air; yet their outfits were decorated with twining leaves, lilies, loping animals, and graceful birds. The terrifying steel and florid decoration combined to form an eloquent expression of power.
Just beyond the portly armor, Sophie could see a tall blond woman in a gray silk dress and silver fur stole. She was talking to Ted, who was nodding vigorously between slurps of champagne. “That’s Maura Pfeiffer,” Brian said in her ear. “She’s interested in the Saint-Porchaire.”
“Who is she?” asked Sophie.
“Ex-wife of some sports…person. She lives in a palace on the Main Line. Her entire first floor comes from a castle in Italy. She literally skinned the thing and put it in her house—walls, ceilings, floors. It’s incredible.”
Ted beckoned them over, and introductions were made. Maura greeted them with practiced warmth, then brightened when she realized who Brian was.
“Is it true?” she asked him, her eyes wide, her high forehead immobile. “You found a Saint-Porchaire? A real one?” Her voice sounded the way Sophie imagined her stole felt.
“All true. I’ll be presenting the photographs at the committee meeting on Tuesday. I hope you’ll be there.”
“Well, of course. I wouldn’t miss it. It’s extraordinary. Do you know Rob Moffett has one in that monstrosity of a house?”
“I know,” answered Brian with a pained smile. “He’s bequeathed it to the Met.”
“Bastard. He’s a mean bastard, you know,” she said to Sophie, nudging her with the back of her hand. “Stingy. No loyalty. Listen, Brian, I want to buy that piece for you. I’ve heard it’s better than Rob’s, and I want to show him a thing or two.”
“Well!” exclaimed Ted, sloshing his champagne.
“How much does that woman want? Never mind. We’ll talk about that later. Now listen. I want my name all over this. I want Rob to know exactly who got this for you. All right?”
“Of course,” said Brian. “We’ll do a press release, a party…”
“Good. But it’s got to have my name everywhere. Prom-inently.” She nudged Sophie again. “A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.”
Later, Ted explained that there had bee
n some unpleasantness recently between Rob Moffett and Maura Pfeiffer, and she’d been throwing her money around in pointed ways. “But we’re not here to question anyone’s motives, ha-ha,” he said, patting Brian’s arm. “Let’s just make a big deal over her on Tuesday, make a big announcement at the end of your presentation. Larry Weber will probably be fit to be tied, but too bad. I’ll find something else for him to buy.”
Competitive philanthropy was a sport practiced vigorously by this crowd. Looking around her, though, Sophie couldn’t find anyone besides museum staff who was under the age of sixty—despite many laudable efforts to look that way. The Young Friends of the Museum were legendary for their parties, but she wondered if they’d been bred for a lifetime of collecting and giving, and flaunting, the way these last members of the old Philadelphia guard had been.
Brian had been pulled away by the director of development, so Sophie wandered into the next gallery on her own. Here, dozens of pistols and rifles were suspended between glass, creating the illusion that partygoers were walking through a cloud of floating firearms. Contemplating their ornately inlaid stocks and engraved barrels, Sophie wondered, why bother? They were instruments of death, no matter how you decorated them. She remembered the gun she’d glimpsed on Agent Chandler’s hip: black, ugly, plastic. It certainly wasn’t meant as decoration.
Sophie shuddered and pushed her way out of the gallery into the tapestry hall. She wandered toward the European Art wing, placing her champagne glass on the tray by the entrance. There was only one other glass on the tray.
She walked through the maze of period rooms, moving more slowly than she had on her last visit, smiling blandly at the bored-looking guards. Passing through a Parisian hotel, an English country manor, a Fifth Avenue townhouse, Sophie felt dwarfed by the soaring painted ceilings and looming chandeliers. On this visit, her gaze no longer focused on cooler-size objects, Sophie was struck by the melancholy vastness of the rooms. Each click of her heels fluttered quickly into nothingness. In these houses, she imagined, inhabitants must have floated like dust motes, passing only momentarily into existence as they bobbed through a ray of window light.
