“Okay. We do this my way. I had to learn the hard way. I had to learn patience and care.”
They announced my flight. She went down with me. At the gate she gave me a sister’s kiss, her dark eyes huge in her narrow face, eroded by loss. “As long as you’re not just kidding me along, as long a we really will do something, okay then, Trav. We’ll do it your way.”
New York, on the first day of March, was afflicted by a condition a girl I once knew called Smodge. This is a combination of rain, snow, soot, dirt, and wind. The black sky squatted low over afternoon Manhattan, and all the store lights were on, traffic braying, the sidewalk folk leaning sullenly into the weight of wind. There is a tax loophole in recent years which makes it possible for men to acquire tax-free fortunes by putting up the cheapest possible office buildings.
Like some hovering undisciplined anus, this loophole has excreted its garish cubes all over the Upper East Side. These are the buildings where they purposely build a roar into the heating and air conditioning systems to compensate for the tissue thickness of the walls. There, in a sterile and incomparable fluorescent squalor, in stale air, under low ceilings, are devised the creative ideas to amuse, instruct, guide, and convince an entire nation. This time I was in no mood for the newer, or pseudo-Miami hotel architecture, and took a single at an eerie little ugly old hotel I had stayed at long ago, the Wharton, on West 49th, in the first block off Fifth. Red stone, oak lobby, high ceilings and Victorian plumbing.
At two forty-five I ducked out of the sleety wind into the narrow entrance to the Borlika Galleries.
The display window was a tasteful arrangement of small items of carved bone and ivory, some of it touchingly quaint. I hunted in my dust-bin mind for that word for that sort of work, and found it. Scrimshaw. Hobby of sailors on the old sailing ships.
I pushed the door open and went in, wondering if I was dressed for the impression I wanted to make. My suit and raincoat were too lightweight for New York in March. No hat. Seagoing tan. Shirt collar slightly frayed. Scuffed shoes, now slightly sodden.
A cluster of bells jangled as I pushed the door open. It was a long narrow place, meagerly lighted. It had the collection smell, leather and dust, sandalwood and age. In a long lighted display case was an ornate collection of cased duelling pistols. On a long table to my right was a collection of primitive wood carvings.
A young man came toward me up the aisle from the back, with bone-pale face and funereal suit. It was a hushed place and he spoke in a hushed voice.
“May I help you?” He had taken me in at a glance, and he spoke with precisely the intonation which fitted my appearance, a slight overtone of patronizing impatience.
“I don’t know. I guess you sell all kinds of old stuff.”
“We have many types of items, sir.” He said the sir as though it hurt his dear little mouth. “We specialize in items of anthropological and archeological significance.”
“How about old gold?”
He frowned. He was pained. “Do you refer to old coins, sir?”
“No. What I’m interested in is old statues made of gold. Real old. Like so high. You know. Old gods and devils and stuff like that.”
It stopped him for a long moment. Finally he gave a little shrug. It was a long slow afternoon. “This way, please.”
He had me wait at a display counter in the rear while he went back into the private rooms behind the store. It took him five minutes. I guessed he had to open a safe or have someone open it. He turned on a pair of bright little lamps, spread a piece of blue velvet, tenderly unwrapped an object and placed it on the blue velvet. It was a golden toad, a nasty looking thing the size of my fist. It had ruby eyes, a rhino horn on its head, and a body worked of overlapping scales like a fish.
“This is the only object we have on hand at the moment, sir. It is completely documented and authenticated. Javanese Empire, close to two thousand years old.”
It had a look of ancient, sardonic evil. Man dies and gold endures, and the reptiles will inherit the earth.
“What do you get for a thing like this?”
He put it back in its wrappings and as he began to fold the cloth around it, he said, “Nine thousand dollars, sir.”
“Did you hear me say I didn’t want it, Charlie?” He gave me a baleful glance, a murmured apology, and uncovered it again.
“Lovely craftsmanship,” he said. “Perfectly lovely.”
“How did you people get it?”
“I couldn’t really say, sir. We get things from a wide variety of sources. The eyes are rubies. Badly cut and quite flawed, of course.”
“What would you people pay for a frog like this?”
“That wouldn’t bear any relationship to its value, sir.”
“Well, put it this way Charlie. Supposed I walked in off the street with this frog. Would I be one of those sources you said you use?”
It put the right little flicker of interest and reappraisal in his indoor eyes. “I don’t quite understand, sir.”
“Try it this way, then. It’s gold. Right? Suppose somebody didn’t want to get involved in a lot of crap, Charlie. Like bills of sale and so on. If he wants to make a cash deal, the easiest thing is to melt old frog down.”
“Heavens!” he said, registering shock.
“But maybe that way he cheats himself a little.”
“A great deal! This is an historical object, sir. An art object!”
“But if the guy doesn’t want any fuss, Charlie?”
His eyes shifted uneasily. “I suppose that if… this is just hypothetical, you understand… if someone wished to quietly dispose of something on a cash basis… and it wasn’t a well-known piece… from a museum collection, for example, something might be worked out. But I…”
“But you just work here, Charlie. Right?”
He touched the toad. “Do you care to purchase this?”
“Not today”
“Would you wait here, please?”
He wrapped it up and took it away. I had a five minute wait. I wondered what they did for customers. A little old man came shuffling out. He had white hair, a nicotined mustache, a tough little face. I don’t think he weighed a hundred pounds. In a deep bass voice he said his name was Borlika.
He peered up at me, his head tilted to the side, and said, “We are not receivers of stolen goods, mister.”
“Unless you’re damn well sure they’ll never be traced, old man.”
“Get out!” he bellowed, pointing toward the front door. We both knew it was an act.
I put my hand on my heart. “Old man, I’m an art lover. It’ll hurt me here to melt all the beautiful old crap down.”
He motioned me closer, leaned on the counter and said, “All?”
“Twenty-eight pieces, old man.”
He leaned on the counter with both arms and kept his eyes closed for so long I began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep. At last he looked at me and blinked as the gold toad would blink if it could and said, “My granddaughter is in Philadelphia today, doing an appraisal. In this area, you will talk to her. Can she see the pieces?”
“That can be arranged later. After we talk.”
“Can you describe one piece to me?”
I gave him a crude but accurate description of the sensual little man. His eyes glittered like the toad’s.
“Where can she find you this evening, mister?”
“I can phone her and arrange that.”
“You are a very careful man.”
“When I have something worth being careful about, old man.”
He wrote the phone number on a scrap of paper, told me her name was Mrs. Anton Borlika, and told me to phone after eight o’clock. When I got back to the hotel I checked the book. The listing was under her name, an address on East 68th which would place it close to Third Avenue.
With time to kill, I got a cab and kept it while I made a tour of inspection of the neighborhood. It was a poodle-walking area. At about five o’clock I found a suitable place about two blocks from her apartment. It was called Marino’s Charade. There was an alcove off the bar/lounge with a booth at the end, perfectly styled for maximum privacy. The night shift was on, and the boss waiter was happy to gobble up my ten dollar bill and promise that he would keep it empty from eight o’clock on.