Fields Where They Lay, page 13
“Louder,” I said.
“We can’t keep taking all the time. Sooner or later we gotta give something back. What’ll it say for the tradition we leave behind, the tradition we learned, you from Herbie and me from my brother Arnold, if you got duffers like that kid running things? It’d be like magic would be if everybody forgot how to do the tricks, so you know, you can see the coin disappear or the guy always gets the card wrong. It’d be a disgrace to the memory of Herbie and Arnold and—and Robin Hood. A picnic for the cops. Don’t you feel like you owe something?” He fingered a big, old-looking blue-and-white bowl. “What does Ronnie think about old china?”
“How would I know?” I said. “I don’t even know which way she votes.”
“I think she’d like this,” Louie said.
“And why do you think she’d like this?”
“I got an eye for these things.”
“Why not a catcher’s mitt?” I said. “A collection of used fountain pens? You’ve barely met her.”
The bowl Louie was putting his fingers all over, like all the other stuff on the counter, was decorated with versions of the Chinese willow pattern: the fringe of willow trees, the lovers, the bridge they escaped over, the birds they were eventually turned into for their final escape. I looked up at the sign hanging on the wall, which read will o’ the wisp. The shop’s proprietor, a slender, blue-haired, chilly-eyed gentleman of sixty or so, wearing a very nice piece of amber that was actually too large to look good in a ring, was watching Louie through half-lidded eyed as though considering whether to call security.
“You know,” Louie said, twirling the bowl around to look at all sides, “You’ve forgotten what a cloud of gnats you were when I got here, just glooming along with your hands in your pockets and sneering at the holiday spirit. And now you, you met old Max or whatever his name was—”
“Sam,” I said.
“So you met old Sam, you got me them gloves, you did a nice turn for that Korean lady, you bought something great for Rina, and now you’re turning into the Junior I know. ’Cause you’re in the spirit. Come on, get this bowl for Ronnie. How much?” he asked the man behind the display.
A moment long enough for a count of three. “Three hundred and fifty dollars,” he said without getting up. “It’s chipped.”
I didn’t like his tone. I said, “How much if it wasn’t?”
He lifted his head just enough to look down his nose at me. “Quite a bit. It’s a relatively rare bowl, not thrift shop junk.” He looked past us at a substantial-looking lady bowed beneath the weight of shopping bags, who had been lured to the counter by the amazing blues. “Yes?” he said to the woman. “May I help you?”
I took the bowl from Louie and turned it over, then put it down, sharply enough to draw the proprietor’s eyes. “Fake,” I said. “Not Spode, despite the mark, not mid-nineteenth century. Junk, as you said, probably made around 1890 for sale to tourists at Brighton. Worth maybe twenty bucks.”
“Oh, an expert,” the dealer said, literally curling his lip, which looked like it had taken some practice. “Nothing beautiful is junk.”
“On the contrary. This is beautiful, or at least pretty, and it’s still junk. Why is it junk? Well, first, because it’s fraudulent. It’s been stamped with a fake maker’s mark to drive up the price. Second, it’s a stencil transfer—I mean, they all were—but this was cheap stencil transfer, and the stencil was torn. Here, this jagged line through the willow branches? That’s a tear.”
“Well,” the woman said, taking a step back.
“Even the beautiful little legend,” I said. “It’s hogwash. The lovers, the birds, the whole thing. This pattern was invented in England by pottery makers who were impressed by the blue the Chinese got by using cobalt in their pottery, but being English, they wanted something original, something better, something British. So they put together bits and pieces of a bunch of second-rate Chinese pictures, and someone came up with the fairy story that went with it. A marketing gimmick. There’s a poem from the period that tells you something about how the English felt about the Chinese: My willowware plate has a story/Pictorial, painted in blue./From the land of tea and the tea plant/And the little brown man with a queue. Another poem, used in an ad taken by one of the four hundred firms that cranked this stuff out like wool socks, described the Chinese as having Little pig-eyes and large pigtails/and a diet of rats and dogs and snails. Quaint from an 1850s perspective, I suppose. These days we’d be harsher.”
The lady with the bags was two stalls away, briskly heading east. “So,” I said to the dealer, “either you don’t know anything about what you’re selling or you’re doing what the English did, peddling a bunch of racist gimcrackery when you could be running an honest business, pointing out how pretty this thing is and selling it at a fair price. By the way,” I said, flicking a fingernail at the piece Louie had picked out, “this isn’t a bowl, it’s a tureen, and the chip is nothing compared to the fact that you don’t have the matching lid. Twenty bucks would be high. Merry Christmas.”
As we followed the lady with the bags, Louie said, “Mighta made you feel better, tearing him to microscopic pieces like that and spitting them around the room, but you still didn’t get anything for Ronnie.”
“It did make me feel better. I hate people like him. Incompetence makes me crazy.” I stopped and took a look around. The bazaar, once the ground floor of the old department store, was enormous, even chopped into booths as it was. It was impressive enough to prompt a moment of admiration for the baronial retailers who had envisioned these vast emporiums and gambled their fortunes and their futures on the possibility that people would change the way they’d shopped for centuries and patronize what they called department stores to suggest that there were departments for many kinds of merchandise. They were the original malls, in a way; Hudson’s in Detroit had been twenty-five stories high, four of them below the ground, the tallest store in the world at the time. But after more than half a century, the malls began to eat the department stores just as large galaxies swallow up smaller ones. And then the malls foundered, and now we were in the shell of a department store, housing the oldest form of capitalism, the bazaar.
Dead center in the echoing space rose the diagonal slash of the defunct escalator, the big red ribbon still closing it off. It was the double-wide kind, with one side going up and the other down. Across the way I spotted a stall beneath a nice vermilion sign reading remembrance of things past. It offered a potpourri of items from various decades, and I steered Louie toward it. The best way to get a bargain is to know what you’re looking at, and I was good at that with this kind of stuff.
“Okay,” I said as we walked. “The little amusement park went bankrupt, somebody fixed the bankruptcy sale so the original builders of this place could pick it up for nothing, and when they built it they economized unwisely. Was that where we were?”
“Yeah. They called it The Walnut Orchard. And because they used crappy materials it started to leak, the foundation cracked some, and the place got mold. Over five, six years, it turned into a loss leader. And then in 1994, bang, the Northridge earthquake. Every pane of glass in the place broke and the pipes for the sprinkler systems crimped and snapped and started to spray water. One of the pairs of outside doors, I forget which, was knocked off the vertical about an inch and the grate couldn’t be lowered all the way. Anybody could get in. Within a few days, the place was empty, just cleaned out by people getting the five-finger discount, and then the homeless started to move in.”
“Dead end,” I said.
“Yeah. About a year later, the place was bought by the Edgerton Partnership, LLC. Your boy Tip, then calling himself Yevgeniy, plus an Anatoly, a Lavrenty, a Rodion, which sounds like a radioactive mineral but is the guy in the pen up in Victorville, and an Igor. Gotta have an Igor. All former Russky mafiosos.”
“How did you get all this?”
“Some of it from Rodion, with more to come when I give him your money. He’s the one who tried to warn me off. The rest of it I paid for, mostly someone combing through real estate transactions and property records.”
“Okay. Sorry to interrupt.”
“Anyways, after the earthquake the bureaucrats were tearing their hair out. Whole blocks flattened, big apartment houses knocked cockeyed, bridges down, gas and water lines out all over the place. A million people looking for help from local government, and nobody to give it. So the Edgerton Partnership slipped in sideways and bought the place for, like, a handful of apples. Remember the one-two-three? One, property and building, worth zip at that point. Two, stock—merchandise—zero because it had all been boosted or turned to mildew. Three, goodwill, you gotta be kidding me. So they grabbed the place for a short song and then gave the bureaucrats a quick look at a renovation plan from a big-time structural engineering outfit, complete to code, with a codicil committing them to do more renovations if the code changed in the next thirty-six months. All wrapped up with a bow.”
“Very impressive for a bunch of thugs.”
“Except it was all bogus. Even the stationery from the engineering company. Printed special. What with the quake, they figured nobody would have the time to double-check, and no one did. So the whole place cost them, including fixing it up—guess how much it cost.”
“How much for the land?”
“Less than two hundred K.”
“Boy. Okay, I’m going to say about twelve million.”
Louie’s mouth did a disappointed shift to the left. “Pretty close.”
“Most of it for getting things back to vertical, probably.”
“So they got it open again in 1997,” Louie said. He sounded a little sulky that I’d deprived him of his big finish.
I stopped in front of the booth that had caught my eye from across the room and picked up an oval object, the color of cream with a little lemon in it, about four inches long and two and a half wide. “How old?”
The young woman in the booth had a cascade of copper-colored hair pouring out of a knit cap and freckles that reminded me of Wally’s, up in the surveillance center. “Made about 1890,” she said. “Brought into the country in the 1940s, so it’s legal on both counts.”
“What counts?” Louie said. “And what is it?”
“It’s ivory,” I said. “It’s against the law to buy or sell anything made out of Asian elephant ivory that’s less than a hundred years old or that was brought into the country later than about 1980. This could be what they call marine ivory, taken from a walrus tusk, but you still want to be careful. What it is, is a small carving called a netsuke, made either by a professional artist or a fisherman.”
“What it looks like,” Louie said, “is a clam. With a string around it.”
“Look.” Before I opened it, I said to the woman, “Obviously, the cord isn’t original.”
“No, but it’s handwoven, from the period. More or less. I get them from a woman who sells antique kimonos. It’s strong enough, if that’s what you’re thinking about.”
“So look,” I said again to Louie, and I opened the shell. Carved inside was a tiny palace, stairways and doorways and minute windows. “Not a fisherman,” I said. “They mainly did seascapes, underwater scenes.”
“Wow,” Louie said. “It’s so weensy.”
“How much?”
“Four hundred fifty,” the woman said. “I’ve got a certificate saying that it’s more than a century old, but it’s in Japanese.”
“That’s okay. I’ll trust you. Can you bag it up?”
“Sure.”
I passed five hundreds across to her and said, “Keep the change, and merry Christmas.”
Louie said, “Who’s it for?”
“Ronnie,” I said. “It’s perfect. It’s beautiful, it’s rare, and if there’s one thing in the world Ronnie Bigelow knows how to do, it’s clam up.” I’d said it without thinking, and as I heard it aloud, I felt a little cramp of guilt.
“It was all Tip,” Louie said.
“Call him Vlad,” I said. “Tip is just too silly.” We were heading for the doors leading into the central area of the mall. I had a good start on my Christmas in my bags.
“He scouted the deal, according to Rodion, he found the property, he sold it to this little band of gangsters, talked them into the whole thing. He handled the fake docs, hired the shyster lawyers, did the incorporation, all of it.”
“Were they eager?” A stand with some nice-looking books caught my eye and I slowed.
“Not so much. Rodion says a couple of them felt like it was too far out of their yards, if you know what I mean. Kind of a stretch from breaking thumbs and shipping women all over the place. And a couple of them had heard somewhere that malls were on the fade. But Vlad kept banging away at it, saying how it would position them to get at big, legit money in the long run. Kept saying it would ‘open the vaults at Bank of America,’ kept reminding them that they never would have put that toll road in if he hadn’t scared the shit out of everybody who lived there. When they were building the road, Rodion said Tip actually turned up a couple times with bulldozers, started knocking down the houses next door, the ones they already bought, to prove they meant business. Cut down every tree on the street once.”
I picked up a nice hardcover copy of Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord and opened it to find it was a first edition. In pencil it had been priced at $3.00. “They must have made a bundle on the road.”
“MCI,” Louie said, “Money Coming In. And in, and in. So much they didn’t know what to do with it. And Tip—sorry, Vlad—kept hammering at respectability, backing political candidates, owning mayors and stuff.”
To the kid behind the counter, who was reading a comic book, I said, “This is a first. Did you know that?”
“A first what?” he said.
“Where did you get it?”
“My gramps. He died and left thousands of the things. We don’t want them, and we can’t sell his house until we clear it out.”
“Tell you what. I’ll give you twenty for this if you’ll promise to email me and let me come look through the books before you cart them all away. Maybe I can take a bunch off your hands.”
“Twenty? You got it.”
I wrote down my email address and gave him the twenty. I put the book into the bag with Rina’s bracelet. “Present for me,” I said to Louie.
“Twenty,” he said as we walked away. “Generous guy.”
“Used first edition usually runs fifty to seventy-five, a hundred in fine condition, maybe three-fifty to four hundred signed. This one is very nice and it’s signed. If his gramps has a house full of these, I’ll either make a fortune or get a lot of nice books, or both. Okay, to get back to the story, Vlad talked them into it.”
“Yeah, it was all on him. He was where the whole thing came to a point, you know, like how a woman in spiked heels weighs more than an elephant?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“You know, down at the point, the tip of the heel, whatever the hell you call it. She’s putting more, uhhh, pressure on the floor, per square inch, I mean, than an elephant.” He spread curved hands to suggest the existence of something large between them. “With big, flat feet.”
“Got it.”
“So the point of their pressure, these guys’ pressure, was aimed between Vlad’s eyes. He had his, you know, his credibility riding on it. And when you lose your credibility with these guys, it’s not like you’re in for an unkind word. And I mean, look around, you can see it’s not turning out so good.”
“He got his country club and his fancy name.”
“Yeah, but Rodion says he’s walking on eggs. If this place isn’t doing good, and how could it be, he might be in line for open-heart surgery, maybe in some car someplace. Which leads me to the other thing I learned from Rodion, who says Vlad is the reason he’s in jail, that he was sold to the cops to keep him from bringing the whole partnership down. Rodion was trying to force a sellout even then, more than a year ago. He says most of the partners want out. Seventeen, eighteen years now, with no real payoff, they want to unload the place as soon as Christmas is over, and that Vlad’s pissing blood about it. Says that even considering how cheap they got it, they’ll barely break even, if they can sell it at all.” He looked around. “Which is a good question.”
“That’s interesting, I said, because—” I broke it off, staring. Mini-me, still in his ventriloquist dummy’s outfit. He was obviously following me, but something to his right had snagged his attention. Maybe he felt my stare because he turned, caught me looking, froze, and then wheeled around and started to walk away. I said to Louie, “I’m going this way,” and began to follow him. For a few yards, Mini-me dawdled along as though unaware I was back there, but then he turned his head, caught sight of me, and picked up the pace.
“I need to talk to this guy,” I said. “Hold these, okay?” I shoved my packages at Louie and shouted, “Hey!” at Mini-me, and he responded by breaking into a run, dodging between the people in the aisles. I had figured he’d head toward the entryway into the mall, where he might be able to lose himself in one of the stores, but instead he was pushing his way in the opposite direction. I said, “Stay here” to Louie, who’d chased after me with the bags, and took off after him.
It was as though I’d reached out and tapped him on the shoulder. His head swiveled back again, and this time I saw panic in his face. He stretched an arm to his right, grabbed the inside edge of a table full of glassware, and tilted it into the aisle. The table tottered and toppled forward, its cloth sliding off and taking the glassware with it. The merchandise hit the floor with a musical crash, sending up a sparkling cloud of glass fragments. By the time I’d cleared the fallen table with a leap and shoved my way through the people who had turned to gape at it, Mini-me had sprinted straight through the big red ribbon, leaving it dangling like a torn flag, and was charging up the motionless escalator.
