Magic Terror. Peter Straub

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СКАЧАТЬ charge of essential recognition before they moved on.

      Obeying an impulse still forming itself into thought, N left his car and walked under the arches to the window of the antique store. It was about twenty minutes before closing time. M. Hubert was tapping at a desktop computer on an enormous desk at the far end of a handsome array of gleaming furniture. A green-shaded lamp shadowed a deep vertical wrinkle between his eyebrows. The ambitious Martine was nowhere in sight. N opened the door, and a bell tinkled above his head.

      Hubert glanced at him and held up a hand, palm out. N began moving thoughtfully through the furniture. A long time ago, an assignment had involved a month’s placement in the antiques department of a famous auction house, and, along with other crash tutorials, part of his training had been lessons in fakery from a master of the craft named Elmo Maas. These lessons had proved more useful than he’d ever expected at the time. Admiring the marquetry on a Second Empire table, N noticed a subtle darkening in the wood at the top of one leg. He knelt to run the tips of his fingers up the inner side of the leg. His fingers met a minuscule but telltale shim that would be invisible to the eye. The table was a mongrel. N moved to a late-eighteenth-century desk marred only by an overly enthusiastic regilding, probably done in the thirties, of the vine-leaf pattern at the edges of the leather surface. The next piece he looked at was a straightforward fake. He even knew the name of the man who had made it.

      Elmo Maas, an artist of the unscrupulous, had revered an antiques forger named Clement Tudor. If you could learn to recognize a Tudor, Maas had said, you would be able to spot any forgery, no matter how good. From a workshop in Camberwell, South London, Tudor had produced five or six pieces a year for nearly forty years, concentrating on the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and distributing what he made through dealers in France and the United States. His mastery had blessed both himself and his work: never identified except by disciples like Maas, his furniture had defied suspicion. Some of his work had wound up in museums, the rest in private collections. Using photographs and slides along with samples of his own work, Maas had educated his pupil in Tudor’s almost invisible nuances: the treatment of a bevel, the angle and stroke of chisel and awl, a dozen other touches. And here they were, those touches, scattered more like the hints of fingerprints than fingerprints themselves over a Directoire armoire.

      M. Hubert padded up to N. ‘Exquisite, isn’t it? I’m closing early today, but if you were interested in anything specific, perhaps I could …?’ At once deferential and condescending, his manner invited immediate departure. Underlying anxiety spoke in the tight wrinkles about his eyes. A lifetime of successful bluffing had shaped the ironic curve of his mouth. N wondered if this dealer in frauds actually intended to go through with the arms deal after all.

      ‘I’ve been looking for a set of antique bookcases to hold my first editions,’ N said. ‘Something suitable for Molière, Racine, Diderot – you know the sort of thing I mean.’

      Avarice sparkled in Hubert’s eyes. ‘Yours is a large collection?’

      ‘Only a modest one. Approximately five hundred volumes.’

      Hubert’s smile deepened the wrinkles around his eyes. ‘Not so very modest, perhaps. I don’t have anything here that would satisfy you, but I believe I know where to find precisely the sort of thing you are looking for. As I stay open on Sundays I close on Monday, but perhaps you could take my card and give me a call at this time tomorrow. May I have your name, please?’

      ‘Roger Maris,’ N said, pronouncing it as though it were a French name.

      ‘Excellent, Monsieur Maris. I think you will be very pleased with what I shall show you.’ He tweaked a card from a tray on the desk, gave it to N, and began leading him to the door. ‘You are here for several more days?’

      ‘Until next weekend,’ N said. ‘Then I return to Paris.’

      Hubert opened the door, setting off the little bell again.

      ‘Might I ask a few questions about some of the pieces?’

      Hubert raised his eyebrows and tilted his head forward.

      ‘Is your beautiful Second Empire table completely intact?’

      ‘Of course! Nothing we have has been patched or repaired. Naturally, one makes an occasional error, but in this case …?’ He shrugged.

      ‘And what is the provenance of the armoire I was looking at?’

      ‘It came from a descendant of a noble family in Périgord who wanted to sell some of the contents of his château. Taxes, you know. One of his ancestors purchased it in 1799. A letter in my files has all the details. Now I fear I really must …’ He gestured to the rear of the shop.

      ‘Until tomorrow, then.’

      Hubert forced a smile and in visible haste closed the door.

      Ninety minutes later the Mercedes passed beneath the streetlamp at the edge of town. Parked in the shadows beside a combination grocery store and café a short distance up the road, N watched the Mercedes again wheel sharply left and race back into Mauléon, as he had expected. Hubert was repeating the actions of his dry run. He started the Peugeot and drove out of the café’s lot onto the highway, going deeper into the mountains to the east.

      Barely wide enough for two cars, the winding road to the auberge clung to the side of the cliff, bordered on one side by a shallow ditch and the mountain’s shoulder, on the other a grassy verge leading to empty space. Sometimes the road doubled back and ascended twenty or thirty feet above itself; more often, it fell off abruptly into the forested valley. At two narrow places in the road, N remembered, a car traveling up the mountain could pull over into a lay-by to let a descending car pass in safety. The first of these was roughly half the distance to the auberge, the second about a hundred feet beneath it. He drove as quickly as he dared, twisting and turning with the sudden curves of the road. A single car zipped past him, appearing and disappearing in a flare of headlights. He passed the first lay-by, continued on, noted the second, and drove the rest of the way up to the auberge.

      The small number of cars in the wide parking lot were lined up near the entrance of the two-story ocher building. Two or three would belong to the staff. Canny little M. Hubert, like all con men instinctively self-protective, had chosen a night when the restaurant would be nearly empty. N parked at the far end of the lot and got out, the engine still running. His headlights shone on a white wooden fence and eight feet of meadow grass with nothing but sky beyond. Far away, mountains bulked against the horizon. He bent down and stepped through the bars of the fence and walked into the meadow grass. In the darkness, the gorge looked like an abyss. You could probably drop a hundred bodies down into that thing before anyone noticed. Humming, he jogged back to his car.

      N turned into the lay-by and cut the lights and ignition. Far below, headlights swung around a curve and disappeared. He straightened his tie and patted his hair. A few minutes later, he got out of the car and stood in the middle of the road with the satchel under his arm, listening to the Mercedes as it worked its way uphill. Its headlights suddenly shot across the curve below, then lifted toward him. N stepped forward and raised his right arm. The headlights advanced, and he took another step into the dazzle. As two pale faces stared through the windshield, the circular hood ornament and toothy grille came to a reluctant halt a few feet short of his waist. N pointed to his car and raised his hands in a mime of helplessness. They were talking back and forth. He moved around to the side of the car. The window rolled down. M. Hubert’s face was taut with anxiety and distrust. Recognition softened him, but not by much.

      ‘Monsieur Maris? What is this?’

      ‘Monsieur Hubert! СКАЧАТЬ