Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“Well.” Hobie removed his glasses. I could see his confusion in just how gingerly he was feeling around in the pause that followed, trying to shape his response. “What’s done is done. No point making it worse. But—” he stopped, and thought. “I don’t know who this guy is, but if he thought that chest was an Affleck, he has more money than sense. To pay seventy-five thousand—that’s what he gave you for the thing?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he needs his head examined, that’s all I can say. Pieces of that quality turn up once or twice in a decade, maybe. And they don’t appear on the scene from nowhere.”

“Yes, but—”

“Also, any fool knows, a real Affleck would be worth much more. Who buys a piece like that without doing their homework? An idiot, that’s who. Also,” he said, speaking over me, “you did the correct thing once he called you on it. You tried to refund his money, and he didn’t take it, that’s what you’re saying?”

“I didn’t offer to refund it. I tried to buy the piece back.”

“At a greater price than he paid! And how’s that going to look if he takes it to law? Which I can tell you, he won’t do.”

In the silence that followed, in the clinical blare of his work lamp, I was aware just how uncertain we both were how to move forward. Popchyk—napping on the folded towel that Hobie had set out for him between the clawed feet of a pier table—twitched and grumbled in his sleep.

“I mean,” said Hobie—he’d wiped the black off his hands, was reaching for his brush with a sort of apparitional fixity, like a ghost intent upon his task—“the sales end has never been my bailiwick, you know that, but I’ve been in this business a long time. And sometimes—” darting flick of the brush—“the edge between puffery and fraud is very cloudy indeed.”

I waited, uncertainly, my eyes on the Japanned chest. It was a beauty, a prize for a retired sea-captain’s home in backwater Boston: scrimshaw and cowrie shells, Old Testament samplers cross-stitched by unmarried sisters, the smell of whale oil burning in the evenings, the stillness of growing old.

Hobie put down the brush again. “Oh, Theo,” he said, half-angrily, scrubbing at his forehead with the back of his hand and leaving a dark smudge. “Do you expect me to stand around and scold you? You lied to the fellow. You’ve tried to put it right. But the fellow doesn’t want to sell. What more can you do?”

“It’s not the only piece.”

“What?”

“I should never have done it.” Unable to meet his eye. “I did it first to pay the bills, to get us out from under, and then I guess—I mean some of those pieces are amazing, they fooled me, they were just sitting out in storage—”

I suppose I’d been expecting incredulity, raised voices, outrage of some sort. But it was worse. A blow-up I could have handled. Instead he didn’t say a word, only gazed at me with a sort of grieved fubsiness, haloed by his work lamp, tools arrayed on the walls behind him like Masonic icons. He let me tell him what I had to, and listened quietly while I did it, and when at last he spoke his voice was quieter than usual and without heat.

“All right.” He looked like a figure from an allegory: black-aproned carpenter-mystic, half in shadow. “Okay. So how do you propose to deal with this?”

“I—” This wasn’t the response I’d anticipated. Dreading his anger (for Hobie, though good-natured and slow to wrath, definitely had a temper) I’d had all kinds of justifications and excuses prepared but faced with his eerie composure it was impossible to defend myself. “I’ll do whatever you say.” I hadn’t felt so ashamed or humiliated since I was a kid. “It’s my fault—I take full responsibility.”

“Well. The pieces are out there.” He seemed to be figuring it out as he went along, half-talking to himself. “No one else has contacted you?”

“No.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“Oh—” five years, at least—“one year, two?”

He winced. “Jesus. No, no,” he said, hastily, “I’m just glad you were honest with me. But you’ll just have to get busy, contact the clients, say you have doubts—you needn’t go into the whole business, just say a question has arisen, provenance is suspect—and offer to buy the pieces back for what they paid. If they don’t take you up on it—fine. You’ve offered. But if they do—you’ll have to bite the bullet, understand?”

“Right.” What I didn’t—and couldn’t—say was that there wasn’t enough money to reimburse even a quarter of the clients. We would be bankrupt in a day.

“You say pieces. Which pieces? How many?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? ”

“Well, I do, it’s just that I—”

“Theo, please.” He was angry now; it was a relief. “No more of this. Be straight with me.”

“Well—I did the deals off the books. In cash. And, I mean, there’s no way you could have known, even if you’d checked the ledgers—”

“Theo. Don’t make me keep asking. How many pieces?”

“Oh—” I sighed—“a dozen? Maybe?” I added when I saw the stunned look on Hobie’s face. In truth, it was three times as many, but I was pretty sure that most of the people I’d rooked were too clueless to figure it out or too rich to care.

“Good God, Theo,” said Hobie, after a dumbstruck silence. “ A dozen pieces? Not at those prices? Not like the Affleck?”

“No, no,” I said hastily (though in fact I’d sold some of the pieces for twice as much). “And none of our regulars.” That part, at least, was true.

“Who then?”

“West Coast. Movie people—tech people. Wall Street too but—young guys, you know, hedgies. Dumb money.”

“You have a list of the clients?”

“Not an actual list, but I—”

“Can you contact them?”

“Well, you see, it’s complicated, because—” I wasn’t worried about the people who believed they’d unearthed genuine Sheraton at bargain prices and hurried away with their copies thinking they’d swizzled me. The old Caveat Emptor rule more than applied there. I’d never claimed those pieces were genuine. What worried 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.