Free Hot Mahogany by Stuart Woods

holding a gold coin up between thumb and forefinger, “is the original Saint-Gaudens from Isaac Finkel.” He took Holly’s hand and placed the coin in it.
    Holly weighed it in her hand, then gave it to Stone.
    “So this is what seven million dollars looks like,” he said.
    “Yes,” Barton replied, “give or take.”
    “Barton,” Holly said, “how much did you pay for the secretary?”
    “That shall remain my secret,” Barton replied, “but my investment in the piece is considerably more than the purchase price. You see, Isaac Finkel, by duplicating the Saint-Gaudens, had given me an idea. I had for years, with the help of two very fine cabinetmakers, been reproducing eighteenth-century pieces, small ones from old mahogany I had collected. You see it in the racks over there.” He pointed.
    “And you made the other secretary from that wood?” she asked.
    “I believe I told Stone that, but it is not so.”
    “Then where did you get the mahogany?”
    “Therein lies another tale,” Barton said. Having begun to tell the truth, he was obviously relishing his own stories. “I traveled to Central America in search of exactly the right mahogany. After moving about for several weeks and asking a lot of questions, I heard a story about an early-nineteenth-century shipwreck in a river not far from where I stood. The ship had been carrying a cargo of mahogany logs timbered upriver, and the logs went down with the vessel.
    “I bought scuba equipment, hired a boat and began searching for the wreck. It took me nearly two weeks, but I found it. I managed to raise a magnificent log and transport it to a sawmill, where I had it ripped into lumber. I then went on a search for the biggest piece of furniture I could find. I found a huge sofa, and I built a crate for it from the mahogany lumber.”
    “Why?” Holly asked.
    “Because it was illegal to export old mahogany, since it was considered a national treasure. I shipped the sofa back to the United States in the mahogany crate. Some weeks later, I got a call from the shipping company saying that my shipment had arrived and that it would be delivered the following day.
    “When the truck arrived here, I went out to greet it in a state of great excitement, and there, on the back of a flatbed truck, was the sofa. No crate.”
    “What did you do?” Holly asked, transfixed.
    “I went, to put it politely, apeshit,” Barton replied. “I got the head of the shipping company on the phone. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘that crate weighed so much that it would have cost another couple of thousand dollars to ship it to you, so we uncrated your sofa.’
    “ ‘And where is my crate?’ I asked.
    “ ‘Oh, some of my employees liked the wood and took it home.’
    “I explained to the gentleman that, if he did not recover my mahogany at once, I would find him and do very bad things to him, and by God he did. It was delivered a few days later, and over the next year, we built our replica of the Goddard-Townsend secretary from that single, very old mahogany log.”
    “What a story!” Holly said.
    “Yes,” Barton agreed. “It’s a pity I can never publish it.”
    “Barton,” Stone said, “you forgot an important detail in your story about the Saint-Gaudens double eagle.”
    “Oh?” Barton asked innocently.
    “What happened to the die that Finkel made for you? The one that the two replica double eagles were struck from?”
    “Oh, that,” Barton said. “It was in a drawer of the secretary that was stolen.”
    “I see,” Stone said. “And I think I’m beginning to get the full picture. And which of the secretaries was stolen? The original or the replica?”
    Barton shrugged. “It hardly matters, does it?”

17

    That evening Barton took Stone and Holly to dinner in Litchfield, ten miles away.
    “I think you’ll like this place,” Barton said as Stone parked the car on the pretty street. “It’s called the West Street Grill.”
    He led them inside, where they