Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“What,” he said, scanning over the heads of the crowd. “Do you see him?”

“Um—” throngs milling by the buffet, beds of cracked ice, gloved servers shucking oysters by the bucketful—“there.”

Hobie—shortsighted without his glasses—blinked twice and squinted. “What,” he said shortly, “him with the—” he brought his hands up to the sides of his head to simulate the two puffs of hair.

“Yes that’s him.”

“Well.” He folded his arms, with a rough, unpracticed ease that made me see for a flash the alternate Hobie: not the tailor-fitted antiquaire but the cop or tough priest he might have been in his old Albany life.

“You know him? Who is he?”

“Ah.” Hobie, uncomfortably, patted his breast pocket for a cigarette he wasn’t allowed to smoke.

“Do you know him?” I repeated more urgently, unable to stop myself glancing over at the bar in Havistock’s direction. Sometimes it was hard to get information out of Hobie on touchy matters—he tended to change the subject, clam up, drift into vagueness, and the worst possible place to ask him anything was a crowded room where some genial party was apt to wander up and interrupt.

“Wouldn’t say know. We’ve had dealings. What’s he doing here?”

“Friend of the bride,” I said—and received a startled look at the tone in which I’d said this. “How do you know him?”

Rapidly he blinked. “Well,” he said, somewhat reluctantly, “don’t know his real name. Welty and I knew him as Sloane Griscam. But his true name—something else entire.”

“Who is he?”

“Knocker,” said Hobie curtly.

“Right,” I said, after an off-balance pause. A knocker, in the trade, was a shark who charmed his way into old people’s homes: to cheat them of valuables and sometimes to rob them outright.

“I—” Hobie rocked on his heels, looked awkwardly away—“rich pickings for him here, that’s for sure. First-class swizzler—him and his partner as well. Smart as Satan, those two.”

A radiantly smiling bald man in a clerical collar was threading his way toward us; I folded my arms and tried to angle myself away from him, blocking his approach, hoping Hobie wouldn’t see and cut his story short to welcome him.

“Lucian Race. At least, that was the name he went by. Oh, they were a pretty pair. See—Havistock, or Sloane, or whatever he’s calling himself now, would chat up the old ladies and old gents too, get to know where they lived, drop in to visit… he’d hunt them out at benefit dinners, funerals, Important Americana auctions, all over the place. Anyway—” studying his drink—“he’d turn up to visit with his delightful friend, Mr. Race, and while the old dears were occupied… really, it was dreadful. Jewelry, paintings, watches, silver, whatever they could lay their hands on. Well,” he said on an altered note. “Long time ago.”

I wanted a drink so badly it was difficult for me not to keep glancing in the direction of the bar. Already I could see Toddy pointing me out to an elderly couple who were smiling expectantly at me, like they were about to totter over and introduce themselves, and obstinately I turned my back. “Old folks?” I repeated to Hobie, hoping to get a little more out of him.

“Yes—sorry to say it, but they preyed on some pretty helpless people. Anyone that let them in the door. And a lot of the old folks didn’t have much, they’d clean them out in one go but if there was real loot for the taking—? oh, they’d keep up the fruit baskets and the confidential talks and the hand-patting for weeks—”

The priest, or minister, or whoever he was, had seen that I was engaged and had held up a friendly hand—later!—as he edged past in the crowd, and I threw him a grateful smile. Was he the Episcopal bishop, Father What’s His Name, who was supposed to be marrying us? Or one of the Catholic priests from St. Ignatius that Mrs. Barbour had taken up with after Andy and Mr. Barbour died?

“Very very smooth. Sometimes they’d pretend to be furniture appraisers, offering free valuations, that’s how they’d get the foot in. Or, with the really dire cases—bedridden, daffy—they’d con the home health nurses, pretend to be family. Still and all—” Hobie shook his head. “Have you had anything to eat?” he asked in his changing-the-subject voice.

“Yeah,” I said, though I hadn’t, “thanks, but say—”

“Oh, good!” with relief. “There’s oysters over there, and caviar. The crab thing was good too. You never came up for lunch today. I left a plate of beef stew for you, some green beans and salad—you didn’t eat it, I saw it was still in the fridge—”

“What did you and Welty have to do with him?”

Hobie blinked. “Sorry?” he said, in his distracted way. “Oh—” nodding his head in Griscam’s direction—“him?”

“Right.” The holiday brightness of the room—lights, mirrors, fireplaces ablaze and chandeliers glittering—had given me a nightmarish feeling of being pressed in upon and observed from all sides.

“Well—” he looked away—they’d just brought out a fresh bowl of caviar; he was already half turned toward the buffet—and then relented. “He turned up in the shop with a load of jewelry and silver to sell, years back now, didn’t he. Family stuff, he claimed. Only, one salt-cellar—it was early, important, and Welty knew it because he knew the lady he’d sold it to. And he knew she’d been swizzled by a pair of knocker boys who’d conned their way in pretending to collect old books for charity. Anyhow Welty took the pieces on consignment and called the old lady and called the police. And me, well, on my end—” blotting his forehead with the flowered Liberty square from his pocket; his voice was so quiet I could barely hear him but I didn’t dare ask him to speak up—“eighteen months earlier I’d bought an estate from the guy, I should have known something was wrong, but—nothing I could put my finger on, not quite. Brand new building in the East Eighties—odd collection of Americana piled harum-scarum in the middle of the room, tea chests, banjo clocks, whalebone figurines, Windsor chairs enough to start a school with—but no rugs, no sofa, nothing to eat from, no place to sleep —well, I’m sure you would have had it figured before me. No estate, no auntie. Just a flat he’d rented on the fly to warehouse his ill-gotten gains. And the thing was too, and this is what threw me, I knew him by reputation because at the time he had his own little shop, just a storefront, real little bandbox actually on Madison not far from the old Parke-Burnet, very pretty place, appointment only. Chevallet Antiques. Some really first rate French stuff—not my bailiwick. Every time I ever went by there, it was closed, always used to look in at the window. Never knew who owned it until he contacted me about this estate.”

“And?” I said, turning my back yet again, telepathically willing Platt to stay away from me with the head of his publishing house whom he was triumphantly leading over to meet me.

“And—” he sighed—“long story short, it went to court, and Welty and I gave statements. Sloane—the delapidateur as Welty called him—had vanished into thin air by that time—shop cleared out overnight, ‘renovation,’ never opened again of course. But Race, I believe, went to jail.”

“When was this?”

Hobie bit the side of his forefinger and thought. “Oh, goodness, has to be—thirty years ago? Thirty-five, even?”

“And Race?”

His brow came down. “Is he here?” Scanning the crowd again.

“Not that I’ve seen.”

“Hair like this.” Hobie measured it with a fingertip, down below the nape of his neck. “Over the collar. Like the English wear it. English of a certain age.”