The Nest(32)

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


The first few weeks Tommy had The Kiss, he’d been elated. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to procure (that’s how he thought of it when he was forced to assign a verb to his actions: procure). The sculpture had appeared on his very last day of working the pile at the World Trade Center site, early April 2002. By that time, Tommy had been working the pile for seven straight months, since the early hours of September twelfth. As a retired firefighter (his lower back had betrayed him once and for all years earlier), he was one of the first to be cleared to work rescue and recovery. The cough he’d developed somewhere around week six was only getting worse and his daughter Maggie was apoplectic about him going there every day.

“Ma would have hated this. She would’ve wanted you to take care of yourself, to be here for me and my sisters, for your grandchildren,” she’d say, pushing more and more food in front of him. She’d taken to feeding others (everyone except herself) with an alarming zeal over the past seven months. She’d cook all day, layering the freezer with pans of lasagna and enchiladas, containers of chili and homemade soup, more than the family could possibly eat. Her hands were in constant motion. If she wasn’t cooking, she was scrubbing a pot or polishing flatware or zealously wiping down counters as if she were eliminating scurvy from a dangerously filthy ship. The furrow between her eyes never disappeared now. She’d delivered his first grandchild three months earlier and had already dropped the pregnancy weight and then some; there was a new slackness to her jawline. Her pretty brown eyes, always so engaged and eager, were often watery and bloodshot and unfocused. “You’re working yourself into your grave,” Maggie told her father.