The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [34]
“I’m warnin’ ya,” Max said. “I don’t want ya in here buyin’ stuff cuz it looks good with the wallpaper, cuz it fits in with the color of the fuckin’ carpet.”
“Guess we’re not off to a great start, here, huh?” Charlotte countered with a smile. “Fact is, I don’t care how you feel about me or my profession. I’m here to buy for my best client.”
“Sorry, sorry,” he said. “Guess I’m just not used to customers. Go ahead. Take a walk. There’s more stuff downstairs.”
“Thanks,” Charlotte said, resisting the impulse to race toward the back and begin exploring. Thirty minutes later, tiptoeing around a painted Venetian chest, its lacquered red Chinoiserie faded pink with age, her eyes lit up at the sight of a ten-foot wooden cassa panca. The back of the Italian bench/chest was painted with figures of Botticelli-like full bodied women and bearded men in velvet robes. It was a fantastic piece. Pavel, her Russian, would love it.
The lights blinked twice. “Hey!” Max shouted. “Ya still alive?”
“Sorry, Max. I got lost,” Charlotte answered, taking a last lingering look at the piece. “I’m coming.”
“So whaddya lookin’ at?” he said with a squint as Charlotte appeared from downstairs, wiping the dust off her hands. Charlotte told him.
“Well, whaddya know!” he said, “The lady’s got taste.”
“Don’t bother with the flattery, Max. It’s wasted on me.”
“Last person looked seriously at that piece was Eye-talian. A Roman dealer buyin’ for some fancy-pants movie actor on Lake Como.”
George Clooney. Charlotte thought. “Here’s the thing, Max. I’m going to pay you what it’s worth. I’m not even going to haggle.”
She could see the glee in his eyes. “And all I want in return is the truth. I want to know everything there is to know about the provenance, the whole history, OK? Where you got it, when, from whom, everything.”
“OK. How’s 600 Gs sound to ya?”
He was testing her. “Five hundred sounds better.”
“Jeez. That’s just about right. But you’d pay another hundred if you was buyin’ it in Europe.”
“So let’s split the difference. I’ll give you an extra fifty,” Charlotte replied, eyeing the bottle of Old Grand-Dad bourbon behind him.
“Shall we open it? Seal the deal?” asked Max.
“Sure. But I’m going to have to bring down my client. He’s here next week. And you’ll have to be nice to him, Max.”
“No problem,” Max said, blowing the dust off the bottle.
Over the next hour and two neat shots of bourbon, Charlotte listened, raptly, to the story of the chest. It was what Max (and all dealers) euphorically called “a sleeper.” A sleeper was a piece that nobody recognized for what it really was and that could be worth hundreds of times more than what a dealer paid for it. Max had seen the cassa panca at an auction preview up at Sotheby’s in the late ’90s. Part of a collection from the estate of Iris Love, it was listed at an estimate of $10,000 to $15,000.
“When I first seen it,” he said to Charlotte, rubbing his hands together in delight, “I couldn’t believe it. It was like recognizin’ some long lost relative you thought was dead.” Unlike the experts at Sotheby’s, who were only able to trace the piece back to the 1960s when Love had purchased it from a Paris dealer, Max knew more. Max had a photographic memory.
“It’s 16th century, Charlotte. It was in the Ruspolli Palazzo in Rome!” He’d seen a photo of the piece in a vintage auction catalogue he was thumbing through on one of his many sleepless nights.
“I go back to the store that afternoon,” Max said, throwing his head back and swallowing the last shot of bourbon, “And I pray. I wait for the day of the auction, hopin’ to God nobody else recognizes it for what it really is.”
Sure enough, Max got lucky. “It went for $9,500 plus the 10% buyer’s premium,” he said, raising his fist, triumphantly. “I had some guy from the Getty here to look at it two years ago. But they couldn’t afford it.”
“Their loss, my gain,” Charlotte