Chapter 2

Reinhardt walked him four steps back from the doorway into the vestibule, where the guest list lay open on a lectern and a young woman in black ticked names off with a silver pen.

"Name."

"Thibodeaux. Wilbur."

Reinhardt wrote it in the ledger, pressing hard enough to leave a shadow on the page beneath. He said it back once, flat, the way a man reads a label he intends to throw away.

"Mr. Thibodeaux. No invitation, no catalog, no black tie. You are standing in a room full of people who paid for the privilege." He capped the pen. "You're trespassing. I'll say that once more so the young lady hears it. Trespassing."

The woman in black kept her eyes on the list.

Wil didn't move his feet. Two hundred people behind him were laughing at something near the bar, and the chandelier light came down through the transom and lay across the herringbone in long gold bars. Somewhere in there was the console. He could almost hear it - the way cypress takes a room's tone, the way it goes quiet when the room goes loud.

"I'd like to see the accession card for Lot Twelve," he said.

"Consignor files are confidential."

"Then your catalog's wrong."

Reinhardt's smile stayed where it was, polished and empty. "The catalog says 1912. The catalog is correct."

"It says 1912 because somebody copied it off a newspaper piece from 1968," Wil said. "The builder's stamp inside the swell box says 1911. It's pencil, under the third brace, and nobody's going to see it unless they take the lid off."

The woman in black looked up.

Reinhardt didn't.

"You've been reading about the sale," he said. "People do. They come down here with a story and a hand out. It never works."

Wil put his hand back inside his jacket and felt the folded fan against his ribs.

"Look at the vitrine," he said.

"I'm looking at you."

"Look at the glass."

Reinhardt looked. On Lot 12's vitrine, taped at the corner where the light hit it, the red SOLD tag hung crooked.

Bidding on Lot 12 had not opened. It was not going to open for another twenty minutes.

Reinhardt turned back, and for the first time all evening the smile had to be reassembled.