Free Florian's Gate by T. Davis Bunn Page A

and fifteen thousand pounds to you, madam. Buyer one-eight,” he intoned as he wrote, naming the number on Sarah’s card. “Congratulations, madam. A lovely acquisition.”
    The sale had taken less than three minutes.
    ----
    Jeffrey raced up the stairs to the larger auction hall, where last week’s furniture sale had taken place. The assistant chief of their furniture division was a young man by the name of Trevor with a decidedly Oxbridge accent. He brightened immensely at Jeffrey’s arrival.
    â€œAh excellent, excellent. Mr. Sinclair, may I take this opportunity to introduce Professor Halbmeier from Bonn.”
    The man did not offer his hand. “I would like to know where you obtained this piece.”
    â€œI don’t know,” Jeffrey replied, bridling at his tone. “And if I did I wouldn’t tell you.”
    â€œYes, well, perhaps we might just have a look at it ourselves, shall we?” Trevor exposed a bland peacemaking smile to all and sundry. “The professor was just telling me that he was not familiar with the item.”
    â€œHow could I be? There was no record of anything from the Kaiser’s palace having survived.”
    â€œYes, it must be quite a shock. Shall we?” He drew the professor over, ran a hand along the top, said, “This is actually something we sold last week, as I told you on the phone.”
    â€œThat remains to be seen,” the professor replied ominously.
    â€œYes, well.” Trevor cleared his throat. “In any case, it’s by perhaps the greatest German cabinet maker, certainly the greatest neoclassic cabinet maker, a fellow by the name of Johann Gottlieb Fiedler. There are very, very few pieces by him still around. Wars and such, you know. Bombs tend to have a rather lasting effect on wood.
    â€œSo far as we know, there are three pieces by Fiedler in Berlin, one in the Wallace collection, and this particular piece that literally sprang to life before our very noses. Quite a bit of conjecture about where this one came from. Gave our verifications people quite a time, I don’t mind telling you.
    â€œWhat’s most interesting about it is the top, of course,” the young man went on. He ran a casual hand across a fitted stone block that had been made to sit on the chest’s upper surface as though growing from it. Its face was a geometric mosaic, designed from hundreds of thousands of tiny multicolored flecks of marble.
    â€œA lot of these are marbles that haven’t been known since antiquity. We think many of them were probably carved out of ancient columns, but our people have been able to come up with absolutely nothing certain. Quite frustrating, really. This bit in the center appears to be one piece, perhaps lifted from some early Roman vessel, and the rest was then designed around it. But it’s all conjecture.”
    The mixture of colors on the face was almost psychedelic—rich hues belonging more to semiprecious stones than to modern marble.
    â€œIn any case, we do know that it was made around 1780,” the young man continued. “Most probably for the Crown Prince of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm. The precise date hinges around whether one thinks he was arrogant enough to have it made before his uncle the Kaiser died.”
    The German official was not taking all this very well. In fact, he appeared to be building up a full head of steam.
    â€œOur man said the fellow positively wouldn’t have daredcommission it unless he was already the Kaiser,” Trevor blithely continued. “It was just so grand, you see. And there was no evidence that his uncle ever owned such a piece. It would have been a real case of one-upmanship, something he certainly couldn’t have afforded until the crown was already in his grubby little hands.”
    Trevor was too caught up in the tale to realize the effect his words were having on the bulbous gentleman beside him, who had begun to take