“Stay here,” Tommy said. “I’ll get her number. It’s in the back.” He moved down the hallway to the back of the apartment where Jack could see a kitchen. The dog followed him, snorting. Jack looked through the open pocket doors into the living room. The furniture looked like castoffs, what Jack thought of as the divorced-man’s special. Two overstuffed flowery and worn sofas probably bestowed by a concerned female relative or friend. A sagging wicker bookcase, which housed a bunch of true crime paperbacks, out-of-date phone books, and an abandoned glass fish tank one-quarter full of loose change. The coffee table was covered with a pile of New York Posts turned to completed Sudoku puzzles.
A fairly decent pedestal table, something that must have sat in a much nicer room at one time, was covered with an assortment of framed family photos. Jack stepped into the living room to look at the table. Nice but not old. He surveyed the photos, lots of pictures of someone he assumed was the ex-wife and various family tableaux: weddings, babies, kids in Little League uniforms with gap-toothed grins holding bats half their size.
He could see through to the dining room, which was empty except for a plastic collapsible table surrounded by a few folding chairs and, oddly, in a dark corner of the room a sculpture sitting on top of a small wooden dolly on wheels. Jack thought he recognized the familiar shape of Rodin’s The Kiss. Figures, he thought, as tacky as everything else in the place, probably ordered from some late-night shopping network meant to woo the guy’s divorcée dates.
Jack could hear Tommy in the back, opening and shutting drawers, rifling through papers. Jack quietly approached the statue. There was something off about the Rodin reproduction, which was polished to a sheen. As he got closer, he could see it was badly damaged. The original cast had probably been nearly two feet high, but it had lost at least six inches off its base. The right side of the man’s upper body was missing, his disembodied hand still partly visible on the woman’s left thigh. The woman sitting partially on his lap was mostly intact, except for her right leg, which seemed to have melted below the knee. Melted? Jack thought. Was it plastic?
He gave the thing a little shove; the sculpture didn’t move, but the wheels of the dolly did. So that’s why it was on wheels, it was heavy. There were deep gouges in the surface of the metal. Jack realized he was looking at a badly damaged bronze cast of Rodin’s The Kiss. This in itself wasn’t all that rare—there were quite a few on the market, some valuable, some not, depending on where and when they’d been forged. One of Jack’s best customers collected Rodin and Jack had sourced some bronze castings for him over the years. The most valuable were the so-called originals produced by the Barbedienne foundry just outside of Paris. Authenticating them was a nightmare. If there was a foundry mark, he knew where it would be, but there was no way he could turn the thing over himself.
“What are you doing in here?” Tommy said. Jack looked up to see Tommy standing in the doorway, a stained and wrinkled Post-it in his hand. He looked pissed.
“I was admiring your piece,” Jack said. “It’s a good casting. Where did you get it?”
“It was a gift.” He handed Jack the paper. “Here’s Stephanie’s number, the phone’s in the front hall.”
“What happened to it?”
“It sustained some damage during an unfortunate incident.” Tommy pointed to the front hall, but Jack could see his hand tremble a bit. “Phone’s in there.”
“What kind of accident?”
“Fire.”
“The scratches didn’t come from a fire, though,” Jack said, walking around the sculpture. “And for bronze to actually melt, the fire would have to be incredibly hot, incredibly strong.”
“Yeah, well I’m an ex-firefighter,” Tommy said. “I’ve seen fire do some pretty unbelievable things.”
“So you recovered this from a fire?”
“That’s not what I said,” Tommy said.
Jack squatted and knelt before the statue “Did you say this was a gift?”
Tommy walked to the front hall, praying Jack would follow him. Now he was the one with telltale sweat on his upper lip and brow. What had he been thinking, letting this guy into his house? “I’m calling Stephanie for you right now,” Tommy said.
The damage to the statue was tugging at Jack; something about it felt significant. He started to feel a familiar tingling in his fingers and at the back of his neck, a feeling he’d learned to trust when trolling through flea markets and estate sales and antique shows, a little tick tick tick that alerted him he might have found something of value among the piles of crap. In the front hall, Tommy was standing with the receiver to his ear. Jack stepped out of Tommy’s line of sight and quickly took a few surreptitious pictures of the cast with his phone.
“No answer,” Tommy said. “I’ll tell them you stopped by. If there’s nothing else I can do for you—”
“Nothing else,” Jack said, walking into the front hall, eager now to get home and make a few calls. “You’ve been very helpful.”
Tommy opened the door. Jack gave a quick wave to the dog who was standing like a sentry next to Tommy and who followed him as he walked down the short path and unhooked the gate. As the gate clicked behind him, he turned and bent a little at the waist, referencing the only Frank Sinatra tune he could summon. “I’ll be seeing you, Frank,” he said, causing the dog to growl and leap up and bark madly at Jack’s back until he was completely gone from sight.
CHAPTER ELEVEN