WHEN I SAY THE THICK OF AN AUCTION I MEAN IT LITERALLY: nothing short of an execution will pack a crowd tighter than the chance to buy something.
When I walked in the crowd was balled up around the auctioneer like Italians at a meat counter.
As usual—though it was just a normal junky auction, of the sort held regularly in the estate-clearance rooms of big city auction houses—every conceivable kind of person was represented in the crowd. Perhaps there were no grandes dames of the ilk of Harris’ mother, but excepting the crustiest of the upper crust, all America was there: ghetto mothers, hoping to get a wobbly table or a secondhand coat for a buck or two; lawyers in pinstripes, tired of lawyering; and bankers in camel’s hair coats, bored with their banks; junk dealers; antique dealers; scouts and hustlers of every description; pimps and whores, killing a little time before hitting the streets; young stockbrokers hoping to find a good sporting print to go over their fireplaces; old ladies in raggedy furs, with their eye on a demitasse service or a nice footstool covered in needlepoint; finally, wives—wives of all ages, weights, and shades of chic, from suburban mothers in down vests and parkas, looking for a serviceable baby bed or a set of Swedish carving knives, on up to elegant matrons from Georgetown or Chevy Chase, each of them hoping to find something decent to spend their husband’s money on.
Mixed in with the wives was the usual heavy concentration of doctors, the world’s most persistent bargain hunters, restlessly pawing through the junk in the hopes of finding something worth a hundred times what it would cost them.
As a regular of such gatherings, I might detest the doctors, but the group I feared was the wives. The doctors, however rich, seldom had the courage of their instincts when the bidding got hot; but the wives, however dumb, bid with the absolute courage that accompanies absolute boredom. Wives are the bane of every scout: they welcome challenge and will pay any price for something they have decided they want.
Actually, they just like the thrill of bidding. The crush and competition of the auction turned them on: all that greed is sexy. Their eyes would glow with passionate lights when they triumphantly secured, for five or six hundred dollars, some object any competent dealer would have sold them for two twenty-five.
If there was anything about this particular crowd that bespoke Washington it was all the pasty-looking civil servants, wandering around like newly risen zombies. They wore beige trench coats and cheap little woolen hats, and there were dozens of them, GS–5s to however high GSs go, men so circumscribed in their styles as to seem neither dead nor alive. They stared at the assembled junk without interest, lacking the fever of the doctors or the passion of the wives. So far as I could tell they were only there because they had to go somewhere on their coffee breaks or lunch hours.
Possibly one or two of them collected something exotic: the chess sets made from Ecuadorian Twaia beans, for example, but if so, whatever they were turned on by wasn’t there and they mostly just stood around in front of the worn-out armchairs or the indifferent chinaware, watching the bidding dully, as if it were a sporting event whose rules and purpose eluded them.
Somewhat to my surprise, Brisling Bowker, the owner of the auction house, was doing his own auctioneering when I walked in.
Brisling Bowker was a huge man, with a permanently pained demeanor not unlike Jackie Gleason’s.
I nodded hello to Tuck Tucker, Bowker’s amazing floor manager. Tuck was certainly one of the most formidable talents on the popcorn auction scene. When I walked in he was at the pay phone, taking one bid in his left ear while an old lady in a mink coat whispered another into his right ear. In the course of an all-day sale he would take and execute hundreds of bids, on everything from lawn mowers to verdure tapestries, gliding through the crush of the auction like a surfer who’s just caught a wave.
His job was to cover the floor, making sure the various hustlers and auction rats didn’t stuff a camera or an ivory or some other valuable object into a two-buck box of junky bric-a-brac. He flicked his bids with the éclat of a world-class Ping-Pong player, bidding with a wink, a whistle, a snap of his fingers, the lift of an eyebrow—and he always hit his lot, whether it happened to be a cracked tea service some little old lady had decided to go to $20 on, or a diamond bracelet a lobbyist thought might impress his girl friend.
Boog, who played auctions like some people play horses, reposed more trust in Tuck than he did in the President, the Chief Justice, and the leaders of both houses of Congress. Over the years Tuck had bought him everything from Amberina punch cups to Owo masks.
I would have dallied an hour or two in Bowker’s auction just to watch Tuck, but as it happened I had no immediate chance to do that. The icon came under the hammer just as I walked in.
The sight of it affected me like a big squirt of adrenaline. Brisling Bowker had just finished selling a couple of rusty push mowers and a barrelful of rakes and shovels to two hillbilly junk dealers who were probably planning to take them back to West Virginia and parlay them into a fortune.
Their lot sold for $4, and the lovely quadripartite icon was sitting there next to it, propped up between a worn-out washing machine and a pile of snow tires.
I would have liked a moment or two in which to try and figure out if it could be a fake, but I wasn’t going to get one.
“All right, now we have your icon,” Brisling intoned, in a voice replete with boredom.
Part of the boredom was real—selling push mowers and snow tires is not inspiring work—but most of it was calculated. Brisling looked ponderous, but he knew his work. He had been moving the junk along steadily, at the rate of three or four lots a minute, and it was plain he hoped to dispose of the icon without missing a beat.
“Do I hear forty dollars for your icon, now?” he asked, just as he happened to glance my way.
“Forty dollars,” I said loudly, tipping my hat.