Florian's Gate (7 page)

Just as they arrived at the curb a black London taxi rumbled by, its ‘vacant' light glowing. Jeffrey's arm shot up automatically, leaving him faced with the dilemma of either telling it to go on or going himself.

Instead he turned to her, and found the same achingly open gaze resting on his face. He said, “You've really got to let me take you home.”

She neither replied nor hesitated, but rather gave the driver a Kensington address and climbed in the back.

It was enough to open the gates. “You have an accent I can't place,” he said. “Are you British?”

“American.” Her voice was so soft he had to lean closer; she did not shy away. “I've lived here since I was nine.”

“Here in London?”

“No, Coventry. Do you know it?”

“Not well. I attended an auction there once.” Coventry was about an hour from London, one of countless industrial British towns with all the charm of a construction site on a rainy day. Virtually demolished by German bombers in World War II, it had been rebuilt in hasty uniformity as a settlement for factory workers. Its endless rows of semidetached houses looked like products of a second-rate production line.

“What kind of auction?”

“Antiques. I run an antiques business.”

“Here in London?”

“Yes.”

“Then you're not a student at the university?” She seemed disconcerted.

“No. Why, is that bad?”

“I don't know,” she replied. “I don't even know what I'm doing here.”

“Sharing a taxi,” he replied. The taxi stopped in front of a nondescript row-house in dire need of better care. A long metal plate of buzzers indicated that the three stories had been split into a rabbit-warren of tiny student flats. “Listen, there's a cafe across the street. Can't we go in for a couple of minutes?”

“I really don't think I could stomach another coffee just now.”

“The drink is incidental. I just want to talk a little longer.”

She gave the tiniest hint of a smile. “All right. But just a few minutes. I have a lot of work still to do tonight.”

The place was cramped and cluttered and smoky as only a poorly ventilated London cafe could be. Jeffrey led her to the only free table and went back to the counter for a couple of teas. He said on his return, “You don't have to drink this.”

Their conversation flowed more smoothly. She had a way
of asking the smallest of questions, and then listening with such absorption that he felt able to tell her anything. He found himself talking at length about his family, Alexander, his departure from America.

“So,” she said, absently stirring her cup, “did you leave a lady pining for you back in America?”

“I had a girlfriend in Atlanta,” he confessed, wondering what there was in those unfathomable gray-violet eyes that invited an honesty he had not known with some girls even after months together. “But she ditched me, not the other way around.”

“And how long have you been separated?”

“Personally about seven months. Now that I look back at it, though, I'd have to say we were emotionally separated since the second day I knew her.”

She showed no reaction whatsoever. “Wasn't it hard, going out with someone you didn't love?”

“As far as I knew at the time, everything was fine. It hadn't occurred to me that there could be something more.” He searched those unreadable eyes, said, “Not then, anyway.”

“That is so like a man,” she said quietly. “So sure the next pretty face is his dream come true, the girl designed to fulfill his every wish and give him perfect happiness.”

“I can always hope,” he replied, thinking to himself, I've never felt like this before in my entire life. “What about you? Have you been someone's perfect happiness before?”

“You'd have to ask them. I could never tell you that myself.”

“So there've been others,” he said, hating them all.

“Other what? Other men? Look around you. The world is full of other men.”

“You know exactly what I meant,” he said sharply.

She turned contrite. “You're right. I should not have said that and I'm sorry. I've always had difficulty talking about myself.”

“Does that mean I shouldn't ask?”

The hint of smile returned. She shook her head. “You just need to hide behind something after you do.”

He made a motion as to duck behind the table. “So I'm asking.”

“About other men?” Her eyes blossomed like petals of a flower made from violet gems and purest smoke, opening and revealing depths that Jeffrey could only wonder at.

“Somebody has hurt you very badly.” It was not a question.

A little girl within her eyes cried to his heart. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“It wasn't what you think,” she said, her voice a fragile wind blowing words and sadness through the gaping wound in his heart. “It wasn't a lover. I haven't, I've never . . .”

The sorrow filled him with a selfless compassion he had never known before. He reached across the table, took her hand in both of his. She looked down, studied it with eyes that spilled their burden over both of them. “It wasn't a lover,” she repeated.

A jangle of boozy laughter from a nearby table shattered the moment. They both started back, pulling away from the shards of emotion that sprinkled around them. She looked at him and was comforted to find a smile waiting for her.

They left the cafe and walked the short distance to her doorway in silence. She hesitated at the bottom step, reluctant to go inside.

“I'd really like to see you again,” Jeffrey said. “Could I invite you to dinner?”

“If you like.”

“I'd like very much. How about tomorrow?”

“All right. What is your name?”

“Jeffrey.” The openness of her gaze left him aching to hold her. “And yours?”

“Katya.”

Then she was up the stairs so fast that his words, that's a beautiful name, were said to empty space. He watched her
enter the door without a backward glance, and wondered why his heart suddenly felt such exquisite pain.

Jeffrey heard Katya's gentle tap on the front window only because he was listening for it. He walked toward the front door, where she stood laden down with a half-dozen books. He opened the door, asked, “Are you planning to move in for a week?”

“I thought I would work on my research if there was any free time.”

He took the books from her and carried them back to the alcove. “I bet you didn't stop for lunch. I left an extra sandwich in the fridge for when you get hungry.”

Katya followed him with solemn eyes. “Thank you, Jeffrey.”

“Here, let me take your raincoat.” He pointed to the silver serving dish. “Baby's just been fed and changed.”

Katya bent over, touched the tiny form with one gentle finger, cooed softly.

Jeffrey watched her, smiling at the way Ling cuddled to her finger. “Who would have thought there could be so much love in a little bundle of fluff?”

“I was thinking about our little bird in church this morning,” she told him. “But now I wonder if maybe I wasn't thinking about myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you're hurt, you think you have to protect yourself against everything.”

He set the bowl down on a satinwood side table. “Who hurt you, Katya?”

“Such a little bird,” she went on quietly. “He must have been so scared when we tried to help him. He didn't know who we were or what we were doing.”

Jeffrey reached up and stroked the silken hairs at the nape of her neck.

“But we made him feel safe, and he's learned to trust us.”

“Who hurt you?” he repeated.

“That doesn't matter now. You didn't know who or what hurt this little bird either, but you still helped him.”

“I need to know.”

She looked at him with desperate appeal. “I can't tell you just now.”

“When you trust me enough,” he conceded, and wondered if the time would ever come.

There were only three Rolls Royces and one Bentley parked outside Christie's when Jeffrey arrived—it was still a little early. The porter stood as always, dressed in his formal gray uniform, facing the entrance with his back to the street. Within the portals, all was elegant light wood and beige carpet and discreetly armed security guards. Overly thin women wearing too much jewelry spoke in tones of cultured snobbery. They were accompanied by men with fruity voices and diction that made them sound as though they were speaking around a mouthful of marbles. Jeffrey counted seven double-breasted navy-blue blazers in the front foyer alone.

Just prior to Jeffrey's arrival in London, the bottom had dropped from the high-end art and antique markets with a speed and force that left the art world shell-shocked. Although a recovery was currently under way, this instability made Jeffrey's pricing and sales decisions doubly difficult. Alexander left him with such sweeping powers that on some mornings he entered the shop wondering if at the end of the day he would still have a job.

His biggest problem came from the enormous variety of pieces they handled. In-depth study was impossible. There was no predicting from where the next piece would originate—what era, wood, country, or style. Most of their business came from furniture, yet a significant portion covered virtually the entire spectrum of antiques—from jewelry to crystal, plates and watches, boxes and lace and chests. It was easier to predict what the next incoming piece would
not
be.

They handled no guns or weapons of any sort. Alexander
viewed such items with a genuine loathing, and referred to weapons specialists as historians of murder and mayhem.

There were few world-renowned painters among the art that they either sold directly or placed under the hammer. Most of the works they handled were from second-level painters, those often found in museums yet not known outside a relatively small circle. Jeffrey either used a professional evaluator for setting the prices of those which he chose to hang in the shop, or passed them on to Christie's.

Occasionally an etching or sketch or watercolor or pastel arrived that took his breath away. The first items he took to Christie's—the first time he had ever entered an auction house in his life, for that matter—were six hand-sized studies of the same woman's face. They were drawn with an astonishing minimum of line and shading, yet were vivid in their portrayal of pensive sadness. The agents at Christie's confirmed that they were by Monet, and treated Jeffrey with the utmost of practiced respect as they pried his reluctant fingers free.

The Priceless shop sold no sculpture at all. There was nothing from genuine antiquity—ancient Greece, Rome, Phoenicia, or Egypt. There were few tapestries, almost no crystal, and nothing at all from the Far East.

In short, Jeffrey had almost nothing upon which to base a valid guess as to where their stock originated.

Other dealers dubbed their shop the West End Jumble Sale, and stopped by often to search and wonder and ask the occasional indirect question. Jeffrey found it easy to offer the dealers a blank face in reply.

Everyone wondered at Alexander Kantor's sources. It was only natural; so did Jeffrey. He had been around enough of the high-end shops and auction houses to know that variety and quantity was almost never combined with quality. An entire estate sold through a single dealer was such a rarity that word spread far and wide long before the last item was sold. Yet Alexander Kantor had continued to handle quality
most dealers could only dream of. He had done so for four decades, and no one was the wiser.

Especially not Jeffrey.

On slow days, Jeffrey would find himself cataloging the room and the items he had placed elsewhere, and wonder at their incredible diversity. French Napoleon III vied with Italian Rococo, Russian icons with German Romance paintings, rosewood with oak, satin finishes with gilt—and almost all of it of exceptional quality. There was no possible way that one estate could have contained such a diversity. There was no logical explanation as to how Kantor could disappear for weeks or months at a time, leaving no phone number or forwarding address, and return in total secrecy time after time with such antiques.

The Christie's auction chamber is not particularly impressive—a long high-ceilinged hall with wooden floor and cloth walls of an unremarkable beige. There are padded folding seats for perhaps a hundred and fifty, most of which that day were full. The auctioneer's dais is placed very close to the first row, and raised so high that the auctioneer, a bland gentleman as gray as his suit with a permanently fixed smile and a two-tone voice, has to lean over the ledge in order to focus on the closest patrons. He holds a small handleless wooden stamp with which he smacks the dais smartly to close a sale.

There was a constant silent scurrying behind the dais as Jeffrey entered and seated himself. The lobby-sized back chamber was filled to overflowing by canvases neatly stacked and numbered and turned to face the closest wall. At the rear of this chamber, a door opened to a vault-room used to house paintings not on display. The austere main hall itself was lined with pictures too big to be carried to the bidding table. With the smaller pictures, one of the innumerable red-aproned assistants would hoist the painting onto the baize-covered table set to the right of the auctioneer, and hold it in utter stillness
until the bidding ended. Larger pictures were indicated by an assistant standing beneath its place on the wall.

A board set high in the corner beside the auctioneer gave each bid in five different currencies. The moneys listed were determined by those being bid for a particular piece; if a telephone bidder was working with a Danish client, then one listing would be in kroner. If a visiting bidder from Italy made himself known as he entered, then all prices would be listed in lira. A woman at a desk directly beneath the auctioneer's dais typed both the new bids and the currencies required into a computer hooked to the board. When the bidding came fast and furious, the numbers moved in a continual blur.