Free The Price of Inheritance by Karin Tanabe Page A

the January sale, I emailed Nina and told her I would meet her and her brother to look at the table the following day. It would take all day to go to Baltimore and back, but the certainty with which Richard Jones had spoken was haunting me. In 2000, Christie’s and Sotheby’s pleaded guilty to fixing sellers’ commissions and integrity was something we were all trying to push to the forefront. I had to make sure nothing from under the surface was going to boil up and ruin the auction.
    I hadn’t spent much time in Baltimore. I focused more on New York and New England when it came to acquisitions, but Nicole had a real interest in mid-Atlantic and southern furniture. I thought about showing her the picture. She knew Hugh Finlay better than anyone in the department. But she had been leaving the office at midnight and was more stressed than I had seen her in the past five years. I couldn’t pile on the panic, especially for something as small as this. So I headed to Penn Station alone and boarded the regional train south.
    The train flew by Newark, central New Jersey, and northern Maryland and I sat with my piles of provenance documents for all the Hugh Finlay pieces that the Tumlinsons had ever bought or sold. I read them over. When I went bleary-eyed, I turned to the latest issues of Baer Faxt and Kovels’, and then went back to the papers. There was no way, I concluded. No way that Elizabeth’s table had any provenance issues.
    I exited the train at Baltimore’s Penn Station and took a cab toward the Inner Harbor. Baltimore, it turned out, was charming in the way that things without the sheen of money can be. It had life, if not wealth. There were pockets of affluence, I imagined—all those Hopkins doctors, and people like the Tumlinsons—but they weren’t on the beaten path. One of the things I loved about American furniture was that it was beautiful without being showy and the people who collected it liked solid, traditional things, not the gild and the glitz of furnishings from France, Austria, and Italy.
    A few minutes too early to meet Nina and Richard, I watched men and women in thick coats walk their children in the direction of the Science Center and looked out across the redbrick plaza. I was meeting them at a restaurant called the Rusty Scupper, which sounded like a place that served canned worms with a side of fish heads, but it was actually very nice. I wasn’t going to go to a stranger’s home, because it was already unorthodox for me to meet them in Baltimore, rather than having them come to the Christie’s office or at the very least New York. Instead, they assured me they’d bring the table in their car and I could take a look at it. I sat down at an elevated bar table by the window, which looked out toward the boats docked just a few feet in front of it and the rectangular, squat office buildings on the other side of the harbor. Two minutes later I ordered a bottle of water and the waiter barely had it poured when a stout African-American man in khakis and a black down parka and a petite woman in a red wool coat approached me.
    â€œAre you Carolyn?” asked the man, without even a hint of a smile.
    â€œI am,” I said, trying to look equally unhappy. I put out my hand and shook his and his sister’s. They sat down across from me, and without opening their menus, thanked me for coming down.
    â€œIt’s my pleasure,” I replied, urging them to order something. “We always take any concerns of provenance or authenticity very seriously.”
    â€œOh, this is not a question of authenticity,” said Nina. She had smooth skin, despite her age, and just a swipe of red matte lipstick on her downturned lips. She must have been in her late fifties or early sixties, but because of her skin, small frame, freckles, and the way she carried herself—like a teacher whose class you never dared mouth off in—she looked younger.