I had to laugh. “That’s better,” she said. “Now let’s see what else you’ve got here. Maybe there’ll be a treasure and you’ll get to recoup your losses.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “If there’d been something of value here, Molesworth Cox would have found it and pulled it out for a separate sale, wouldn’t they?”
“You never know,” Moira insisted. “Let’s look. What do you figure you could get for the snuff bottle?”
“Four, maybe five hundred, tops,” I said.
“See, we’re halfway there,” she said. “Only five hundred or so to go.”
We began to delve into the box, the contents of which were not, in my opinion, worth anything near what I’d paid, even allowing for a generous $500 for the jade bottle. Undeterred, Moira rummaged around.
“Isn’t this cute?” she said, pulling a small object out of the box. We both stared at it. Moira often used words like cute and thingy, and some people made the mistake of assuming she wasn’t too smart. In fact, she’d enjoyed a private school education, finishing school in Switzerland, and a couple of years at Cornell before she thumbed her nose at her snotty family and went off to become a hairdresser. Now she owns one of the smartest and most successful salons in the city. Over the past year or two, since I’d been back in the shop, she’d become a really good friend.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It looks like… a peanut. A silver peanut,”‘ Moira said. I rolled my eyes, and we both collapsed laughing. It did, indeed, look exactly like a peanut, and it was approximately life-size. I felt the weight of it in the palm of my hand.
“Actually,” I said, after a moment or two, “I think it’s real silver, and possibly old. The workmanship is excellent. It’s so real-looking, you can almost imagine breaking it apart and finding the two little nuts inside. And look, here,” I said, pointing to a tiny hole in each end, “I think it must be a bead.”
“See, what did I tell you?” Moira said. “A treasure. Hard to say if there’s a market for a single silver peanut, though,” she added, and we both laughed again. I was happy to find I was beginning to see the humor in all this.
“At least it’s not plastic like these,” Moira said, pulling out a string of beads that would have made someone in the sixties proud. I sighed. “Or ugly like this,” she added, displaying a particularly awful brooch.
“No wonder this wasn’t claimed in customs,” I moaned. “It wouldn’t be worth the trip to pick it up!” I said, opening a wooden box. Inside, carefully packaged in straw, was a flared bowl or vase, about six or seven inches high. On the inside of the flare was drawn, in beautiful detail, a serpentlike creature, which undulated around the rim. On the outside, below the flare, another fine line drawing had a quite fantastic scene in which elaborately clothed figures, some of them quite human looking, others with the heads of birds and animals, wrapped around the stem.
“Wow. That’s beautiful!” Moira exclaimed as I carefully lifted it out of the protective packaging. “What is it? It looks very old.”
“It does,” I agreed. “However…” I turned the bottom of the pot toward her, so that she could see where the words hecho en Peru—made in Peru—had been etched into the clay.
“And then there’s this,” I said, holding up a small card which I translated for her. “Replica of a pre-Columbian flared vase,” I read. “Made in Campina Vieja, Peru, which, if my Spanish serves me well, means old small farm. A small town, I expect.”
She laughed. “It’s a good thing I’m not in your business,” she said. “This might have fooled me.”
“Well, it might fool just about anybody,” I said. “The thing about replicas, you see, is that unlike reproductions, which are essentially copies, replicas are made to exactly match whatever is being copied: same materials, same method of manufacture, everything. In fact, sometimes when a replica is made, a mistake is deliberately put in it somewhere, so that it will not be taken for the original, should the documentation that identifies it as a replica get separated from the work. It’s possible here, for example, that one of the lines of the drawing is different from the original. Replicas are very costly to make, by and large, but pre-Columbian works are so valuable that I would think it might pay to make one. And at least in this case, it is clearly marked as such, and not the work of the unscrupulous among us who have a short lapse of memory, shall we say, and forget to put the hecho en Peru on the bottom.”
“That’s when tourists pay way too much for what they think is an authentic pre-Columbian piece, and then try to smuggle it back home wrapped in their dirty underwear, I suppose,” Moira said. “What is it a replica of, do you think? It says Peru, so Incan perhaps?”
“I’m not sure. As you well know, I studied Meso-american history for a while, the Maya in particular, but I can’t say this is like anything I’ve seen. The fact that it’s made in Peru might make it Incan, but I really don’t know. Maybe I’ll do a little research, just for fun, when I’ve got a minute.”
“Could you ask Lucas about it? He should know about Peruvian stuff, shouldn’t he?” Moira asked, rather coyly I thought. She’d always liked my former partner, Lucas, and thought he and I should get together again. In her mind, I’d broken off the relationship, when in fact, he was the one who’d ended it a year earlier. He couldn’t do his patriotic duty for Mexico and maintain our relationship, he’d said. In Moira’s world, this was a mere technicality, however.
“He’s an expert on the Maya, Moira, not Peru. And it’s over, okay?”
“Whatever,” Moira said. Nothing short of a total reconciliation would satisfy her, I concluded. As irritating as this occasionally was, it was also sort of endearing. “Well, whatever it is, could you sell it in the shop?” she went on, turning the vase in her hands. “I think it would look good with the type of stuff you sell. You carry pre-Columbian reproductions from time to time, don’t you?”
“I do and it would,” I conceded. “It would fit in very well, in fact. But what would I charge for ,it? Do you think I could get five hundred by any chance?”
“Probably not,” Moira replied. I made a face at her. “Gotta go,” she said, rising from her chair. “Date. A new man. Do you think he’ll be The One?”
“Probably not,” I said, mimicking her.
She laughed. “Come on over to the salon. I’ll treat you to a free haircut next time you’re in. And it should be soon,” she said, reaching over and pulling a long piece of hair down in front of my eyes.
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s very nice of you.”
“What are friends for?” she replied. “And you can do something for me when I bomb out, as usual, with this guy.”
“You don’t bomb out, Moira, you dump them,” I said. “But I’ll be here.”
After she left, I took a closer look at the contents of the box. Right at the bottom there was a smaller version of the wooden box that had contained the vase. This one too had a card declaring the contents to be a pre-Columbian replica. The object was round, about two to two and a half inches in diameter, made of what looked to be gold and a turquoise stone of some kind. In the center was the tiny figure of a man with an elaborate headdress, carrying a scepter or something, and what appeared to be a shield. The scepter could actually be removed from his little gold hand, and a string of beads around his neck were each individually made. The rim of the circle was surrounded by the smallest gold beads. On the back of it was a rather hefty post. This time I thought I knew what it was. It would be one of a pair of ear ornaments—ear flares they are sometimes called—used by pre-Columbian peoples of Mexico, Central America, and presumably South America too. The workmanship, even for a replica, was really quite extraordinary, and promising myself I would take some time to look into it, I rewrapped it in tissue and set it carefully in the desk drawer.