Free Utz by Bruce Chatwin Page B

woman in a red wig sat fingering an emerald bracelet. Beyond her, a Lebanese dealer in antiquities was protesting the authenticity of a corroded bronze animal. His client, an excitable young man in spectacles, denounced it as a fake.
    Utz heard the young man say ‘Archifaux!’ — and trembled.
    Perhaps Dr Frankfurter had also sold him a fake? His fingers tore at the tissue-paper. He scrutinised the object with a pocket-magnifying glass – and breathed again.
    â€˜Out of the question! It has to be genuine!’
    The spaghetti was a marvel. Pulchinella’s nose was a marvel. The enamels surpassed in subtlety the colours of Meissen. He had done the right thing. It was cheap. Cheap, when one thought of it. Besides, he adored it! And when the time came to return it to its stainless-steel coffin, he hesitated.
    â€˜No,’ he told himself. ‘I cannot leave it here.’
    Thus, when others were bent on smuggling out of Czechoslovakia, in diplomatic bags or a foreign friend’s suitcase, any article of value they could lay their hands on — a snuff-box, an ancestral decoration, or a vermeil dessert service, fork by fork – Utz embarked on the opposite course.

‘I smuggled it in ,’ he whispered.
    He was standing in the middle of the room, roughly equidistant from the lynx and the turkey-cock. I rose to join him, almost barking my shin on the corner of the Mies van der Rohe table. ‘The Spaghetti Eater’ stood on the central shelf, to the right of Madame de Pompadour.
    â€˜Marta,’ Utz called.
    The maid came in with a fresh plate of canapes: but the moment she took stock of our position, she withdrew to the kitchenette and, reaching for a couple of aluminium saucepans, began to bang them together like cymbals.
    â€˜They cannot hear us now,’ he said, standing on tiptoe. He had put his mouth to my ear.
    â€˜Are they listening?’
    â€˜All the time!’ he sniggered. ‘There is a microphone in this wall. One in that wall. Another in the ceiling, and I know not where else. They listen, listen, listen to everything. But this everything is too much for them. So they hear nothing!’
    The saucepans clattered like the noise of a pneumatic drill. From under our feet there was another noise, of a stick or broom-handle being thumped against the ceiling of the apartment below, presumably by the furious soprano.
    â€˜Some days,’ he continued, ‘they call me and say “Utz, what are you doing over there? Breaking porcelains?” “No,” I say. “That is Marta cooking supper.” One of them, I have to say it, is a very humorous person. We are friends.’
    â€˜Friends?’
    â€˜Telephone friends. We now learn to like each other. That is correct, no?’
    â€˜If you say so.’
    â€˜So I say it.’
    â€˜Good.’
    â€˜Good,’ he repeated. ‘Now I will ask you questions.’
    Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . .
    â€˜How much would cost today a Kaendler harlequin in auction sale in London?’
    â€˜I’ve no idea,’ I said.
    â€˜Really?’ he frowned. ‘You know porcelains so nicely and you don’t know prices.’
    â€˜I’d be guessing.’
    â€˜Go on,’ he giggled. ‘Guess it.’
    â€˜Ten thousand pounds.’
    â€˜Ten thousand? How much that in dollars?’
    â€˜Not quite thirty thousand.’
    â€˜You are right, sir!’ Utz closed his eyes. ‘Last one sold twenty-seven thousand dollars. That was in America. Parke-Bernet Galleries. But it was broken as to the hand.’
    Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang! . . .
    â€˜So how much the Augustus Rex vases?’
    I cannot recall the size of the figure I mentioned. Certainly, I thought it high enough to give him pleasure. But he looked dismayed, bit his lip, and said, ‘More! More!’
    A single vase had fetched more in Paris,