Her voice on the phone, flat as only Boston can make it, had not prepared me for the woman. She was in her late twenties, black Irish, with blue eyes and milky skin, slightly overweight, dressed in a conservative suit, a big grey corduroy rain cape, droplets of the night moisture caught in her blueblack hair. As she walked along the alcove toward the booth I stood up and said, “Mrs. Borlika?”
“That’s right,” she said, slipping the cape off. I hung it up. “You made yourself easy to find, Mister…”
“Taggart. Sam Taggart.” I watched for reaction and saw none.
She smiled and smoothed her suit skirt with the backs of her hands and slid into the booth. “Betty Borlika,” she said. “Have you eaten? I had a nasty sandwich on the train.”
“Drink first?”
“Of course.” The waiter appeared, took our drink order and hastened away.
“How were things in Philadelphia?”
She made a face. “I had three days of it. Thank God somebody else was doing the paintings. There must have been five hundred of them. Fifty years of miscellaneous collecting. Barrels, actual barrels of ikons. Temple bells. Chinese ivory. You have no idea.”
“You know what all that stuff is worth?”
“Enough to give it an appraisal the tax people accept. I wouldn’t say I missed it by far.”
With all her friendly casualness, I knew I was getting a thorough inspection. I returned the favor. No rings on the ring finger. Plump hands. Nails bitten down. Plump little double chin. Small mouth, slightly petulant.
“You buy any of the stuff?”
“There are three lots we’ll bid on, when it goes to auction. You see, Sam, a man with no taste and a lot of money and a lot of time will acquire good things when he deals with good dealers.” It came out “acquah” and “dealahs.”
“I have a pretty good range,” she said. “I have a museum school degree and seven years of practical experience.” She sipped her drink, looking at me over the rim of the glass.
“Your husband do the same kind of work?”
“He used to. Before he died.”
“Recently?”
“Three years ago. His father and his uncle are active in the business. And his grandfather, of course. His father and his uncle are abroad at this time.”
“Or I’d be talking to them?”
“Probably.”
“I like it this way better.”
“You won’t get a better deal from me than you would from them.”
“If we deal.”
“Is there any question of that, Sam?”
“There’s a lot of questions, Betty. Right now there’s two real good gold markets. Argentina and India. And safer for me that way.”
“Safer than what?”
“Than making any kind of deal with something… not melted down.”
She scowled. “God, don’t even say that.”
“This stuff isn’t hot in the ordinary sense. But, there could be some questions. Not from the law. Do you understand?”
“Possibly.”
“Another drink?”
“Please.”
When the waiter was gone, she said, “Please believe me when I say we are used to negotiating on a very confidential basis. Sometimes, when it’s necessary, we can invent a more plausible basis of acquisition than… the way something came into our hands.” She smiled broadly, and it was a wicked and intimate smile. “After all, I’m not going to make you tell me where you got them, Sam.”
“Don’t expect to buy them cheap, Betty.”
“I would expect to pay a bonus over the actual gold value, of course. But you must consider this, too. We’re one of the few houses in a position to take the whole thing off your hands. It simplifies things for you.”
“The whole thing?”
“The… group of art objects. Did you say twenty-eight?”
“I said twenty-eight. Twenty-eight times the price of that frog would be…”
“Absurd.”
“Not when you sell them.”
“Only when you sell them to us, Sam.”
In spite of all the feminine flavor, this was a very shrewd cool broad.
“If I sell them to you.”
She laughed. “If we want to buy what you have, dear. After all, we can’t buy things unless we have some reasonable chance of selling them, can we?”
“These things look all right to me.”
“And you are an expert, of course.” She opened her big purse and took out a thick brown envelope. She held it in her lap where I could not see it. She frowned down as she sorted and adjusted whatever she took out of the envelope.
Finally she smiled across at me. “Now we will play a little game, Sam. We take a photograph for a record of everything of significant value which goes through our hands. These photographs are from our files. There are fifty-one of them. So that we will know what we are talking about, I want you to go through these and select any that are among the twenty-eight you have.”
“I haven’t looked at them too close, Betty.”
She handed the thick stack across to me. “Just do your best.” They were five by seven photographs in black and white and double weight paper, with a semi-gloss finish, splendidly sharp and clear, perfectly lighted. In each picture there was a ruler included to show scale, and, on the other side of the figurine, a little card which gave a complex series of code or stock or value numbers, or some combination thereof.
I made my face absolutely blank, knowing she was watching me, and went through them one at a time. I felt trapped. I needed some kind of opening. Somewhere in the middle I came across the same little man I had seen, squatting on his crude lumpy haunches, staring out of the blank eye holes. I did not hesitate at him. I began to pay less attention to the figures, and more to the little cards. I noticed then that, written in ink, on most of them, were tiny initials in the bottom right hand corner of the little code card. I leafed back to my little man and saw that the initials in the corner were CMC. I started through the stack again, looking for the same initials, and saw that they appeared on five of the photographs. The figurines were strange some beautiful, some twisted and evil, some crude and innocent, some earthily, shockingly explicit.
I looked at her and said, “I just don’t know. I just can’t be sure.”
“Try. Please.”
I went through the stack and began putting some of them on the table top, face down. You have to gamble. I put nine photographs face down. I laid the stack aside. I looked at the nine again, sighed and returned one of them to the stack.
I handed her the eight of them and said, “I’m pretty sure of some of these. And not so sure of others.”
I tried to read her face as she looked at them. The small mouth was curved in a small secretive smile. She had to show off. She handed me back three photographs. “These are the ones you’re not so sure of, Sam?”
I registered astonishment. “Yes! How could you know that?”
“Never mind,” she said, and slid all the photographs back into the envelope and returned it to her purse. “One more drink and let’s order, shall we?”
“Good idea.”
“Mr. Taggart, your credentials are in order. But I didn’t know he would have so many.”
“Who would have so many?”
“Oh, come now!” she said. “Couldn’t we stop playing games now? He bought from us. Of course, he would have other sources, in the position he was in.”
“Put it this way Betty. There was another party in the middle.”
“You aren’t acting as his agent, are you?”
“Why do you ask a thing like that?”
“I don’t think you are completely the rude type you pretend to be, Sam. I can understand how, in the present circumstances, he might want to sell out through a clever agent. If you could prove you’re his agent, we might see our way to being a little more liberal. After all, he was a good customer, long ago.”