DID YOU SAY A WAREHOUSE FULL OF BASKETS?” I ASKED.
“That’s right,” Freddy said. “Approximately 190,000 baskets, representing virtually all cultures and all periods.”
I love baskets, almost indiscriminately. I like the cheap bright basketry of Mexico, and the somber expensive basketry of the Apaches. I’ve also seen some wonderful Peruvian baskets, but in all my scouting I may have now owned 150 baskets, surely no more. Now I was being offered 190,000.
“The Booger-man mentioned that you know baskets,” he said. “He thought you might be able to take them off our hands.”
Freddy never stopped smiling, but his smile had nuances, cadences almost. Sometimes he smiled the smile of the inscrutable Oriental, at other times the smile an old Princetonian might adopt when confiding in a slightly doltish friend.
“Is there a price?” I asked.
“The price is four million,” Freddy said. “I think when you’ve seen the baskets you’ll find it a bargain.”
I could easily believe that, since one really good American Indian basket, from almost any tribe, will bring anywhere between $1,500 and $10,000 dollars these days.
“Are you interested?” Freddy asked.
“Yes,” I said, reduced to a monosyllable by the audacity of it all.
Of course even my monosyllable was a bluff. I didn’t have $4 million, or even a significant fraction thereof.
Besides that, I didn’t have any place to put 190,000 baskets. The volume buy had never been my style. It was Big John’s style. My style was to buy the solitaries, such as the single best Sung vase in the ’77–’78 auction season, for example. Or the only known Brancusi hood ornament. Or, possibly, the boots of Billy the Kid.
Nonetheless Freddy has just offered me an opportunity to fulfill one of the great scouting fantasies: getting inside the Smithsonian warehouses. It was a chance not to be missed.
“How do I get a look at them?” I asked.
“You want to see a man named Hobart Cawdrey,” he said. “He’s in the Department of Transportation, extension 1000. Easy to remember. I suggest you call him tomorrow. Things are beginning to move.”
It seemed odd to me that a man responsible for the fate of 190,000 baskets would be in the Department of Transportation, but then what did I know?
“I’ll call him tomorrow,” I promised.
Freddy shook my hand again, still smiling. “I hope it works out,” he said.
It had all seemed kind of odd. We had stood there surrounded by some of the most famous journalists in America and talked openly about the sale of part of a great national institution. Any passing journalist could have heard us—even a deranged stringer like Eviste. And there was another thing to consider: what my purchase would do to the basket market.
That question at least had an obvious answer. The basket market would be finished for a generation. It would suffer the fate the Boy Scout knife market had suffered when Big John bought the warehouse in Poughkeepsie. All the basket scouts I knew, and I knew some good ones, would have to find new careers.
It was a sad thought. As people tend to resemble their pets, so scouts come to resemble the objects they scout for. Basket scouts are among the nicest people I know. They tend to be simple, spare, graceful, unaggressive. They have a kind of dry quiet humor that I like.
“You better watch out,” Boss said. She had come up behind me and seemed to be regarding me with a motherly eye. It annoyed me a little, that she was looking so motherly.
“I’m watching out,” I said.
Boss smiled. Worse still, she ruffled my hair.
“You’re cute when you’re huffy,” she said. “What time does Cindy let you out in the morning?”
“I do as I please,” I said, wishing I could think of something wittier or more original to say.
“I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, but it ain’t me you’re fooling,” she said. “I’m going out to see Cyrus in the morning. He’s selling his second-best horse farm. You could come if you can talk Cindy into letting you out.”
Boss was a master of the taunt. It is not exactly a rare skill, among women, but she had developed it to a very high level of subtlety. At times I tended to forget that she employed both of my former wives, and thus knew more than most about my behavior with women.
“Did you mean Cyrus Folmsbee?” I asked, remembering that he was supposed to be the power behind the sale of the Smithsonian.
“Yeah, Cyrus,” Boss said. “You better come and meet him before you let Boog and Freddy get you in trouble. Cyrus is no one to fuck around with. Come by about nine, if you can get loose.”
“I can get loose,” I said.
Boss looked amused. “We’ll see about that,” she said.