So far in our careers Blink and I had not exchanged a single word, but it was well known, to ourselves and others, that we were arch rivals. Why this was so I don't know, since our methods were diametrically opposed. One icon, for example, would not have titillated him, but if he could have found a collection of five or six hundred he would have whipped out a grimy checkbook and scribbled in as many thousands of dollars as were required, after which the trucks would arrive to whisk the icons away to north Jersey. There they apparently would go into vast warehouses, to be fed back onto the antiques market through a complex system of veins and capillaries.
Who the interests were that supplied Blink with the loot to write his smudged but perfectly cashable checks no one knew. All that was known about him was that he lived in a one-room apartment over a cathouse on Charles Street, in Baltimore. According to reliable witnesses, the oldest thing in the apartment was a television set dating from the late sixties.
At the moment he had every reason to hate me, since I had just bought the centerpiece from a collection of facon-de-Venise goblets owned by a retired general in Hilton Head.
Taking one piece out of a collection doesn't bother me. Collections are as numerous as clouds, and like clouds they form, break up, disappear, and form again. Blink immediately breaks the collections he buys, and in any case, nothing needs to stay in Hilton Head forever.
While I was casing the bric-a-brac in the front window I happened to notice a young woman standing with Tuck. She had her hands shoved deep in the pockets of a puffy blue down-filled jacket, and she was staring at me hotly. Either she was very angry in general, or she was very angry with me. If the latter, it could only be because of the icon tucked under my arm. The heat of her disapproval was so unmistakable that I looked away and spent more time inspecting a pewter beaker than was really necessary.
But when I looked her way again, she was still glaring at me, just as hotly. Tuck had his arm around her and seemed to be using all his considerable charm to get her out of her pet. For once, his considerable charm seemed to have no effect.
She was short and rather pretty, in a workaday way. So far as I could remember, a woman had never got mad at me over an icon, and I was curious. Perhaps her family had owned it and she had hopped to buy it back, in which case a deal could probably be struck.
I put on a mild look and strolled over to chat with Tuck.
"Howdy," I said, smiling at the young woman as I shook his hand.
Before either of us could say another word, she blushed, stopped looking angry, and merely looked disappointed, hopeless, and confused. Then she burst into tears, gulped a time or two, and ran out the door of the auction house, almost bowling over two astonished GS-12s, who had been standing there staring solemnly at a couch.
Tuck nodded in a bid on a rusty exercycle. He was evidently relieved that the storm had broken.
"You just bought the only thing she wanted," he said. "I got news for you. too. The fat man aint gonna buy it."
Boog likes to think he is as smooth and sinister as Sydney Greenstreet, a fantasy Tuck and I went along with, to a certain extent.
“The fat man has changed his mind before,: I reminded him. “Who was that girl?"
"A new dealer," he said. "Her name is Jean Arber. She's got a little store, out in Wheaton.
"My, my," he added, in tones of admiration. "That girl wants it when she wants it!"
I had the unhappy sense that I had just managed to bruise a kindred spirit.
Probably the young lady was just like me. When I see something like the icon, I want it. Sometimes the mere sight of such an object causes me to hyperventilate, out of fear that it will somehow slip out of reach.
I left the icon in the keeping of one of the floormen and stepped quickly outside, hoping to find the woman and make amends.
Sure enough, she was leaning against the window of a carry-out sandwich shop, heaving deep sighs and attempting to dry her cheeks. Her puffy blue coat rose and fell like a bsdloon, just from the sighs she was heaving.
When she saw me step out of the door she quickly turned away, but I didn't let that stop me.
"Miss Arber," I said, "could I talk to you for a minute?"
"Mrs.," she said, turning her face but not her body. It was an intelligent face, but dwarfed by the ridiculous puffy coat.
"Mrs. Arber," she added, "although I'm taking my own name back as soon as the divorce goes through."
"What's the name you're taking back?" I asked.
She looked at me solemnly. What makes my name any of your business, the look said.
I tried a smile. "Never be afraid to ask," I said. "It's a rule I try to live by."
Actually I was afraid to look at her for fear she'd start crying again, overcome by the memory of the icon. But I did look, that being another rule I try to live by. Women may get annoyed with you for looking at them, but they distrust you if you don't.
"Tooley," she said, with a last snuffle. "Jean Tooley."
"Jack McGriff'," I said, holding out my hand.
She looked at the hand as if she'd never seen one, but after a moment she shook it.
Chapter VIII
After the handshake there was an awkward pause, made slightly more awkward by the fact that the carry-out place whose window Jean Arber nee Tooley was leaning against was full of GS-12s, many of whom were staring at us as solemnly and dispassionately as if we had been a couch.
Like the ones in the auction, these GS-12s also wore beige trench coats and funny little woolen hats. Unlike the ones in the auction they had hot dogs or pastrami sandwiches in their hands, eating them dispassionately even as they directed the same dispassion at us.
"I hate those GS-12s," I said. "Would you like to take a walk?"
I don't think Jean Arber had noticed that her distress had provided fifty or sixty civil servants with something to look at during their lunch hour.
When she looked around and saw them she blushed and ducked down inside her puffy blue coat. I must say it made an effective shield. She was a small woman and when she chose to pop out of sight all that remained visible were her hands and her feet. The effect was so turtlelike that I laughed.
Then I impulsively grabbed the coat by the arm and hustled it a few doors down the street.
This effrontery caused her head to come back up. It rested on a very nice neck.
Unfortunately, Jean still looked miserable. So far my cheerfulness had had no effect. After all, I could afford to be cheerful. I had the icon.
"I hate it when I do things like this!" she said. "There's no excuse, you understand. I knew all along I wouldn't get it."
"Why not?" I asked. "After all, I might not have walked in just when I did. If I'd caught one more red light it would have made the difference.”
"No, I wasn't even the under-bidder," she said. "I only have seven hundred dollars to my name and I certainly shouldn't blow it on something like an icon."
"Why not?" I asked, having often spent my last seven hundred dollars on objects like icons.
Jean Arber looked guilty. "Because I've got two kids," she said. "Little kids. And Jimmy is not exactly regular with his child support."
"Oh," I said. I could see that kids put things in a different light.
"How high did you go?" I asked.
I still had hold of her arm and had begun to ease us down the street. Without her noticing it, we had begun to take a walk.
"Seven hundred!" she said, spilling a new freshet of tears onto the slick down coat. "I would have blown every cent of it! My kids could have been starving by next week!"
I was feeling better and better. At long last I had found a woman who was just like me. Kids or no kids, I would have done exactly the same thing.
As we were passing an office supply store Jean suddenly stopped and looked at herself in the window.
"I see a bad mother," she said glumly. "A very bad mother."
"Now, now," I said. "If your kids were really starving you could pawn
your coat. It's too big for you anyway."
She glanced at her image again. "What's wrong with this coat?" she asked, remorse over her deficiencies as a mother being replaced by a note of defiance.
"I don't think it's too big," she said, still looking. "It's down-filled."
"Right," I said, "and it fits you like a duck blind. All I can see is the top of your head."
She stopped looking at herself and looked at me.
"Well," she said, "you are unusually tall. Most of the people in my life are short."
Then she shrugged, and we continued our unacknowledged walk.
"Of course at the moment the only people in my life are my kids, which explains why all the people in my life are short," she said thoughtfully, as if she had just succeeded in explaining something that had been puzzling her slightly.
"I should have been firm with myself," she added, ducking her head inside her coat for a moment.
"Can you make yourself stop wanting something just by being firm?" I asked. "That's real self-discipline."
"It would be if I had it," she said, ruefully. "I don't have it. Instead of being firm I make up scenarios."
"What happens in the scenarios?"
She smiled, colored, became lovely. "I get whatever it is I want," she said. "Like the icon. All the people with more money than me get the flu and stay home, or else they get stuck in horrible traffic jams on Connecticut Avenue and don't arrive in time to bid against me."
We were walking past a large restaurant. Instead of being full of GS-12s it seemed to be full of high school kids from Wisconsin, come to see their nation's capital. The tour bus that had brought them was waiting outside the restaurant, waiting to take them back to Wisconsin.
"Have breakfast with me," I said. "It's your duty as a mother."
"Pardon me?" she said, indicating that the logic of the statement eluded her.
"I know your kind," I said. "In fact, I am your kind."
"Now you're telling me you're a mother?" she asked, looking amused.
"No, a buyer," I said. "Like you. Therefore I know perfectly well what you'll do if I turn you loose."
She waited curiously for me to tell her what she'd do.
"You'll run right back into that auction and buy something you don't really want, to make up for losing the icon."
It was not a particularly discerning remark, since that is what any auction-prone person would do, but Jean looked at me as if I were Sigmund Freud.
While she was looking I hustled her into the restaurant, which may well have contained every teenager in the state of Wisconsin.
Jean stared at me from the depths of her coat. She ordered coffee and Danish. I ordered a huge breakfast.
Now that we were alone and hidden from the world by several thousand teenagers, we both seemed to feel a little shy.
I put my hat on the table and Jean nervously reached out a finger and touched the albino diamondback hatband.
"That's beautiful," she said. "Is that from a rattlesnake?"
Then, even more nervously, she felt the sleeve of my doeskin jacket.
"Gosh," she said. "That's beautiful, too."
The feel of my sleeve seemed to cause the down-filled jacket to lose a few points. She unzipped it, but it still surrounded her, more or less like a duck blind.
"What would you have bought if I hadn't forced you in here?" I asked.
"I'd have bought a few trunks," she said. "They're really my favorite thing. Wooden trunks."
I should have guessed it. She had the look of a trunk person: delicate, wistful, a little withdrawn. I've known many trunk people and I'm convinced they accumulate trunks in order to have places in which to hide themselves away when the world becomes too much—as sooner or later it will.
However, I wasn't about to offer Jean Arber that analysis. Far better to offer her a trunk. It was clear she would be offended if I tried to give her the icon, so if I was going to ply her with anything it had better be trunks.
"Hey, I've got a wonderful trunk in my car," I said, thinking of my brass-bound traveling trunk. It was one of my favorite possessions, but then again it was hardly the only brass-bound traveling trunk in the world. Every rich Englishman of the nineteenth century had one, not to mention all the Continental nobility.
I could easily get another, and possibly a better, traveling trunk, but there was no guarantee I could get Jean Arber at all. She was looking at me with the quiet wariness that is characteristic of trunk people.
Nonetheless, thirty minutes later I sold her my little trunk for only two hundred of her precious dollars. Fortunately her wariness was not as strong as her need for beautiful things.
"Oh, gee!" she said, when she saw that trunk. It was a lovely trunk, but then it caused Jean to smile her lovely smile.
By happy coincidence her beat-up old camper—a relic of her marriage, as she said—was parked right behind my
Cadillac, in front of a row of gay burlesques, porn theaters, and cut-rate liquor stores. A number of black dudes in pimp clothes were eyeing my car respectfully.
I had of course taken the precaution of removing the Valentino hubcaps, and also a graceful little Brancusi hood ornament I had acquired in Scottsdale. Brancusi had made it for a rich and titled Lesbian who had had the eventual misfortune to die in Phoenix.
Jean was too delighted with her trunk to pay much attention to my car. She continued to smile while we put the trunk in her camper, but, as her pen was poised to write the check, the smile was briefly replaced by a look of mild suspicion.
"Are you just doing this because I got so upset about the icon?** she asked.
"Which would you rather have if you had to choose?" I asked. "The icon or the trunk?*'
The pen remained poised. "I am normal in some respects," she said. "I'd rather not have to choose."
She smiled a slightly more subdued smile.
"I'd rather be able to buy everything I want, like you do," she said. "You're pretty lucky, you know. Not everyone can indulge themselves that way."
"When can I come see your shop?"
She frowned. "Do you really want to?" she said. "I don't think I have anything that's in your class."
Naturally I really wanted to, in order to see more of her. Selling her the trunk had been a way of forging a small link.
"I was thinking of coming this afternoon," I said.
She peered at me from the blue depths of her coat for a moment.
"O. Kay," she said slowly, making it into two words. Then she wrote the check.
"You don't believe in letting any grass grow, do you?" she asked.
I just smiled.
"Okay," she said, more briskly. "The address is on the check. But if you come after three you better be prepared to deal with a couple of real kids.”
Then she climbed into the camper and eased away, driving very cautiously, with both hands on the wheel.
While I was watching her, a pimp in a pearl-white suit came up and tried to buy my Cadillac.
"Oh, come on, man!" he said, when I demurred. "Don't you see? It matches my threads."
Chapter IX
Impressed as I was with Jean Arber, making her acquaintance had not left me entirely bereft of professional instincts. Blink Schedel was in Washington, and it was not likely he had come solely for the pleasure of leaning on the Coke machine. If he was there, it meant he was onto something, and I wanted to know what.
Besides, my other set of instincts—those that guided me, so to speak, through the swap-meets of love—suggested that it would not do to crowd Jean too hard. Better to let her have a few hours to herself, to contemplate all the beautiful things I might have, not to mention the extraordinary trunks I could procure.
I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. A
nd some want things a lot worse than they want love.
By good luck, when I returned to the auction the first person I encountered was Brisling Bowker himself. He had finished his stint as auctioneer and was standing at the front of the auction room, lord of all he surveyed.
Specifically, what he was surveying was one of his minions attempting to auction the fixtures from a bankrupt pet store. The pet fixtures consisted mostly of cages for rabbits and hamsters, whose smell lingered after them. The rabbits and hamsters might have gone on to happy homes, but their cages stank like shit, which is perhaps why the minion had so far only been able to raise a bid of $16 for the fifty or sixty cages, plus several packs of unused kitty litter.
Brisling watched the proceedings impassively, out of frosty gray eyes, outwardly unmoved when his minion ceased prodding the unresponsive crowd and sold what was left of a pet store for $16.
Some auctioneers are mesmerized by the ebb and flow of their own junk, and will watch it for hours, as beach goers watch waves, but Brisling was not so easily mesmerized. His frosty eyes restlessly scanned the crowd, keeping tabs on the suckers, the thieves, and the scroungers. Some of the latter were perfectly capable of discreetly chipping a teapot or tearing the fabric on an armchair in the hopes of getting the object a little cheaper.
"I thought Texas was a big state," he said, glancing at me. "How come you can't stay in it?"
"Not enough icons down there," I said.
He looked distant and uninterested. For him the icon had become as remote as World War I, although it had been propped up ten feet from us less than an hour before.
"I’ve been told it's Byelorussian," I said.
He looked at me as if I were a complete idiot.
"Armenian," he said.
In truth, I wasn't very interested in the icon myself, anymore. Something more interesting, namely Jean Arber, had popped into view. I can be fickle, but not so fickle as to forget Blink Schedel.
"I guess the Smithsonian must be for sale," I said. "Otherwise Blink wouldn't be up this early."
Brisling, normally as stolid as a sleeping walrus, looked as if he'd just been harpooned.