Monday, August 27
2200 hours
Lake Charles, Louisiana
“How come a man like you, can afford to buy all this stuff, you don’t buy yourself a decent set of teeth?” said Sonny, tired of watching the man’s cheeks fold in on themselves and his lips ride up into his nose. “Not right, a man in your position, living in a place like this.” Sonny made a gesture to bring in the house, the big dock down at the beach running out into the bay, the huge Chris-Craft bumping up against the pilings out there.
Zeev smacked his lips again. The sound made Sonny’s skin go ripple and chill all the way down to his belt. “Damn it, Zeev”—he pronounced the man’s name Zeef—“you stop that. You just do it to put my nerves on edge, get me to take a lower price.”
“You’re lucky I’m dealing this at all. You tell me, Sonny, why is it you can’t seem to carry out a simple operation lately without killing some poor man who happens to be in your way?”
There was nothing to say. What had happened was what had happened. Zeev sat back in his Castro convertible and pressed the button that made the thing vibrate. His huge fleshy body rippled like a bowl of water. Zeev’s fat white feet stuck out of the bottom of his red silk bathrobe like the south end of a snail.
Gold coins arrayed themselves in front of him on a green felt table like regiments. Stamp cases were piled up on his left. A couple of reference books sat open on their spines, and Vivaldi was coming from a stereo console on the far side of the room. A silent man wearing a yarmulke sat on a high-back chair at the door, an Uzi in his hands, his face a stone mask. Zeev waved a pale fat hand over the table, over the gold and the tinted paper squares, taking it all in and yet somehow diminishing it at the same time.
Smack smack smack. Sonny held his peace. The time had come for a price, and Sonny needed the money.
“Little of this can be … salvaged. The insurance firm has been most uncooperative. People are watching the dealers. Sotheby’s has made it clear they want none of it. What would you have me do with it? Add it to my collection? I think you might be advised to take this to someone a little less … scrupulous.”
Sonny watched Zeev in the half-light from the overhead lamp. Zeev let his eyes close slowly and opened them, his pink tongue sliding wetly across his red lips. A dusting of fine white powder lay on his rounded cheeks like mold on a stone. Sonny wouldn’t have been surprised to see Zeev’s tongue flick out to catch a fly in mid-flight.
“Yeah? Who do you suggest? Fabrizzi, in Denver? I’m going there tomorrow.”
“Fabrizzi would cheat you, Sonny. Perhaps … Mr. Joshua in St. Louis has expressed some interest. Leave this with me. If I realize something on the shipment, I will call you. On consignment, as it were?”
Sonny relaxed. Zeev wanted it. All that was left was the price. “No. Maybe I’ll just take it, melt it down. There’s about twenty pounds of solid gold there. I’ll just melt it into ingots and move it over the counter. Yeah, that’s safer.”
Zeev’s heavy-lidded eyes glittered in the lamplight.
“You have no sense of history, Sonny.” He leaned forward, huffing with the effort, extending a white hand. He picked up a single dented and twisted coin with a brutal face on the obverse.
“Caligula. Little Boot. The first modern man—a man who understood the fundament of life: that sensation is all. This coin was in Rome when he had his grandmother poisoned. Perhaps some grain merchant had it from a centurion.” Zeev put it to his nose and drew a long breath. “Smell it—you can smell the Tiber in it. Hear the voices in the streets. Over there, on the mantel, I have a piece of pottery from Judea. Picture the potter at his wheel, strong brown hands turning the clay, a simple earthen vase rising up between his hands. He is talking, speaking Aramaic to his wife. Say, there is talk of this man they have crucified in Jerusalem. The potter speaks close to the clay as it turns, his wife in the doorway. At her back the white sun of Judea burns. The air is heavy with the scent of sandalwood and woodsmoke. Children dead two thousand years play in the square. Women are drawing water. The sound of this is sinking into that clay, like grooves on a recording. Someday they will find a way to release the sound hidden in ancient clay jars. We will play them like records, listen to ancient voices and winds, hear music and songs thousands of years old. This coin comes to us like an arrow from the past. Its presence here is a miracle. Sonny, you have no head for this. This coin is not antiquity. We are antiquity. We are the elders. This coin, that piece of clay, they come to us from the youth of our world.”
“Yeah, I’m just one in a long line of thieves. And every thief who ever stole this coin wanted a fair trade for it. If you give such a damn about tradition, pay up like a man—pay up the way a thousand men before you have paid up when the thief brought it to him. Stop trying to cheat an honest thief.”
Zeev laughed, a liquid turbulence in his heavy body. The red silk slipped away from his calf, revealing his white leg all the way to his thigh. Sonny looked away.
“You make a point, Sonny. You make your position. Fair enough. Let us say … a hundred thousand?”
Sonny smiled at Zeev, a wolfish gleam in the dim light. Sonny’s teeth were wet and white, his face strained and thin. He had lost weight in the last two weeks.
“Let’s say three hundred thousand. Fabrizzi would give me that.”
“Take it to him then, and hope he won’t just kill you and keep it for himself. Fabrizzi is a slug.”
“This is horse shit. I need three. What about it?”
Zeev turned the coin in his fingers, watching the light on its burnished surface.
“Let’s be concise. Let us say … two?”
“It’s worth a half million.”
“Puerile. Nothing is worth anything if no one will buy it. That’s what value means, Sonny.”
“No. Value is what someone will do for something. My brother died for an oil painting.”
“You described it. Too bad you lost that. I think it was the little Seurat, ‘Peasants Driving Stakes.’ The Loebs had it in New York, or so I thought. Perhaps this Saltell person had it stolen from them. Strange, isn’t it? How the finest things an artist can do, the attar of his soul expressed by force, becomes a commodity for trading. It’s quite exquisite when you think of it. How corruptible it is. Van Gogh died in penury. His paintings are bought by Japanese corporations with no faith in the American dollar. Your brother had a good eye. I hope that when he was shot, the painting wasn’t damaged in any way. Such a pretty work, if I recall it.”
“Three hundred thousand, Zeev. I’m sick of this talk.”
“Very well,” said Zeev, raising a hand to the man at the door. “You have an emotional attachment. I respect that.”
“Cash.”
Zeev raised his hands in a supplicating gesture, his eyes on the heavy wooden beams above him. A black night with stars rode above the beams through the glass. The smell of pines came in through the open door as Zeev’s man left.
“Vulgar. You stink of the street, Sonny.”
“True,” said Sonny, walking away. Zeev never looked up. When he reached the door, Zeev was running his pink tongue over the gold coin, tasting it.