Page 5 of A Life Imagined
The man’s agitation transformed into eagerness, and he hurried away.Moments later, he returned, hauling a large crate on a moving dolly, and placed the crate on the floor in the middle of the warehouse.
“I don’t know what he expected me to do,” Elise complained after the driver had left.“Move it myself?”She bent to remove the packing slip.
“Tell Vicente he’s not in Mallorca anymore.If he wants more than a half hour for lunch, he can find another job,” Mathias said.“And on the subject of useless saps, I need you to find another contractor for our American outbounds.”
Elise looked up from scanning the sheet of paper in her hand.“I thought we liked Charles.”
“Not anymore.”Mathias moved to retrieve the crowbar leaning against the wall.
“It’s the Majapahit earthenware figures!”Elise exclaimed, holding up the packing slip with a bright smile.“I’ve been waiting weeks for these.”
They’d purchased the series from a dealer in Indonesia.Mathias hadn’t been thrilled about straying from their usual avenues of procurement, but Elise had proven insistent, enamored by the old man and his emporium of ancient sculptures.She’d authenticated the pieces remotely and vouched for them herself.Still not convinced, Mathias figured it was a good opportunity to take her down a peg or two.Elise benefited from the occasional hard knock, and he enjoyed the brief peace that followed a tumble.
Using the crowbar, he levered open the lid of the crate and pushed it to the floor.He reached in, pulled out one of the figurines, and removed the protective wrapping.Mathias turned it over in his hand and frowned.Something was off.He inspected the seam down the side of the clay to find it uneven.He brushed his fingers along the bottom of the crate, and they came away with the lightest dusting of white residue.Shit.
“Wait—they don’t look like the ones he showed me.”Elise stepped over to examine the crate’s contents, and her face went white.“I… I think they’re replicas.”She glanced at him with a horrified expression.“I should have flown out to inspect them in person.”
“That’s the least of our worries.”Mathias picked up the discarded crowbar and smashed it into the head of one of the figures.
“Jesus!”Elise cried.“How are we supposed to send them back—” She stopped abruptly when the plastic-wrapped chunks of white powder tumbled from the broken statue.“Is that…?”
Mathias picked up one of the packets and weighed it in his hand.“Someone’s using us to import their stash.”
It was a familiar tactic.The seller employed an unsuspecting middleman to bring the drugs into the country, and then an eager buyer magically appeared on the other side, providing a solution to their unfortunate predicament.Both the seller and the buyer were in on it, leaving the importer to shoulder all the risk.With the amount of money the importer had dropped on the shipment—and no chance of recovering it—of course they’d jump at an offer to take the counterfeit pieces off their hands.
Elise stood chewing on her lower lip.“What should we do?”
Mathias did a quick tally in his head, the number of bags multiplied by the number of clay figures.It wasn’t a trivial amount, that was for sure.This wasn’t some two-bit operation.They were dealing with a big player—a group familiar with moving significant volume through the European market.
“Hold off on axing Charles,” Mathias said, dropping the packet and lifting the crowbar.“We’re going to need him a little while longer.”
Chapter Three
Rayan came home to find the house empty, which was odd as it was almost eight.When Mathias worked late, the man forgot to eat, and then he returned home irritable and impossible to deal with.
Rayan flicked on the light in the kitchen and took out cured ham and cheese from the fridge.There was bread left over from breakfast, which he cut into slices and used to assemble two simple sandwiches.He ate one standing at the counter and placed the other into a small paper bag.In the hallway, he pulled on his jacket and shoes and headed back out in the direction of the warehouse.
It was a short walk from the house, and as Rayan drew closer to the building, he saw the lights were on inside.He made his way to the staff entrance and was about to turn the handle when the door swung open and Elise appeared, her face drawn and shoulders sagging.She let out a yelp and clutched her bag tightly against her chest, her car keys gripped between the fingers of her other hand.He hadn’t expected her to be there.Most days she was gone by five.
“Rayan,” Elise said, quickly masking her terror.“Sorry.I’m always a little jumpy after dark.”
“I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
She pocketed her keys and held open the door then followed him back inside.“Oh no, don’t worry,” she said, returning to her usual buoyant tone, which he knew set Mathias’s teeth on edge.“He’s in the office.”She led the way as if Rayan had never been there before.
He’d only spoken with Elise a handful of times since Mathias had brought her on as his appraiser.They’d first met after he’d shown up at the warehouse unannounced one afternoon.Elise was consulting an auction catalogue with Mathias at his desk when Rayan walked in.He’d expected Mathias to be annoyed, but he simply looked up and said, “Rayan, this is Elise Dumont.”She’d stepped over to eagerly shake his hand, and that was the extent of their introduction.It was Mathias in a nutshell—he didn’t feel he owed anyone an explanation.
Since their move to France, Rayan had found himself navigating uncharted territory.There was an openness about their living situation, though they maintained a shroud of caution that had followed them from Montreal.They were still careful around each other in public, but for the first time in Rayan’s life, the prospect of being seen didn’t carry with it a heavy sense of dread.Whether that was true for Mathias, he couldn’t be sure.In either case, the caution remained.He only visited Mathias at the warehouse in the evenings, sometimes in an effort to lure him home but more often to see his most recent acquisitions.
While Mathias had little interest in the pieces he collected for his clients, Rayan found them fascinating.One would think—considering the man’s line of work—their house would resemble a gallery.But Mathias almost never brought anything home, and if he did, it was for purely practical purposes.An August Endell coatrack stood by the door because the house didn’t have a closet in the entranceway.A set of Carolean dining chairs—so intricately carved they could have belonged in a museum—were used to prop up Mathias’s feet when he read the paper at the kitchen table.It was a riddle, attempting to figure out why a particular item had caught Mathias’s interest.
One day, a silver frame decorated with tiny ornamental vines had appeared on the living room bookshelf.Rayan knew without asking that it was absurdly expensive and might have once belonged to a Bavarian prince or Swiss countess.Yet the frame, despite its obvious value, was rendered insignificant by what had been placed inside: the photo of Rayan with his brother and their mother.It was the photo Rayan had kept for years inside the book she’d given him.At moments when her face had grown blurry in his memory, the features no longer clear, he would take the photo out and study it carefully, angry at himself for forgetting.He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that, so he hadn’t been sure when the photo had been spirited from the pages of Saint-Exupéry’s memoir to a frame in their living room.But he had no doubt who’d done it.
Fortunately for Rayan, that evening Elise seemed distracted enough to carry the conversation on her own.“We’ve been trying to make a dent in cataloguing the pieces from this latest trip.You should see some of the stuff we found.The deliveries are starting to trickle in, and the paperwork’s all over the place.You know how it is with estate sales and small-town dealers—things always seem to get misplaced.”
He didn’t know the first thing about estate sales or small-town dealers, but that didn’t seem to matter much to Elise.
“And then there’s the Louvre next week.They’re selling a small collection of pottery shards from the Cour Napoleon excavations, and one of my old colleagues has promised us a preview before everything goes to auction.Some of the shards date back to the thirteenth century.”
