"Heirloom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

'Mr Grant?' I said.
'Yes?' He was struggling to lift down a brass-bound military chest.
'Mr Grant, I hate to have to say this, but if this stuff is any example of what you have to offer, then I suggest you pack it all up again and go. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is crap.'
He set down the chest and walked towards me. He was panting slightly from his exertions, and there was a decorative tiara of sweat across his forehead.
'These are simply make-weight items,' he said. 'You can have all these for nothing if you decide to buy the piece-de-resistance.'

'I wouldn't have paid you anything for them anyway,' I told him. 'Come on, Mr Grant, this is junk-shop fodder. Those torch(?)res don't even match. And what happened to that fat lady's left buttock? It looks like someone attacked it with a circular saw.'
Mr Grant nodded. He didn't seem to be denying how poor all these items were. But he didn't seem to doubt that I was going to take them, either. He stood there with his hands on his hips, regaining his breath, while I stared at him as meaningfully as I could and waited for him to say something.
Anything. In back of the house, I heard Sheraton barking as Jonathan chained him up in the yard.
'Listen - ' I began, but Grant lifted a single finger to interrupt me.
'When you see the piece-de-resistance,' he said, 'you'll change your mind.'
'All right,' I told him. 'Bring it out.'
'It's heavy. Why don't you step into the van with me and take a look?'
'What the hell is it? A busted ottoman? Really, Mr Grant, I can't - '
He looked at me, hands raised, his face wrinkled up into one of those expressions that says now then, now then, don't get excited.
I looked at the van again, and for some reason I felt a sensation of prickly coldness. That kind of butterflies-in-the-palms-of-the-hands feeling you get before a tough examination in school. I hadn't felt like this since the previous fall, when I'd attended an auction in Los Angeles of the porcelain collection that had once belonged to George Charovsky, the mass-murderer who used to live in La Jolla. Sara had coaxed me into bidding for a dancing shepherdess there, and I'd paid $875 for it. Three days later, I'd thrown it into the trashcan because I couldn't stand to have it around.
Let's just say that I'm sensitive to all things rotten. Rotten movies. Rotten paintings. And, more than anything - rotten people. People who mistreat their children, never take their dogs for a decent walk, and yell at their wives for no reason.
I'm not all that perfect myself. I drive badly. I snore when I'm asleep. I spank Jonathan when I shouldn't. But at least I believe in living, and letting live. You don't crap on my pumpkin-patch, and I won't crap on yours.
'Well?' asked Mr Grant, and waved his hand towards the open doors of the van.
I let out a tight, patient breath. 'All right, Mr Grant. But let's make sure that whatever it is you've got in there, it's worth looking at. I'm already ten minutes late.'
'Don't tell me you're usually so pressed for time,' he smiled.
'No,' I told him. 'I'm not. But it's Sunday, and so far you haven't impressed me at all.'
'I didn't intend to,' smiled Mr Grant. 'It's all part of the sales pitch.'
'Are you serious?' I asked him, as I took hold of the handrail, and hefted myself up into the back of the van.
'Never more so,' he replied. His voice was completely devoid of feeling. He held out his hand, and I helped him up.
His fingers were as dry as corn husks.
'It's right in front,' Mr Grant said, and led me through a narrow and awkward avenue of nineteenth-century chairbacks and battered Victorian tablelegs, until we had penetrated the furthest reaches of this mobile collection of unwanted junk, and reached the very front of the van.
In the corner, something was draped in a flour-sack.
Whatever it was, it was tall and narrow, and it was made out of dark Cuban mahogany. I could just see one of its sides, burnished and carved, and the wood had a dark glow about it that you rarely saw in furniture made after x 860.

'Can you take off the sacking?' I asked Mr Grant.
'Take it off yourself, if you want to take a look,' he told me.
I hesitated. 'What is it?' I asked him. One lens of his tiny sunglasses was shining blind and bright as a quarter. It was stifling in the back of his van, and I was sure I could smell flowers. Gardenias. Or maybe stock.
'It's a chair,' he said. 'Take a look.'
I reached out hesitantly and grasped the coarse fibre of the flour-sack. I felt an extraordinary feeling, as if I were about to tear somebody's clothes off. Then I dragged the sack away and dropped it on to the floor, and there it was. The chair from the Jessops' place at Escondido.
It was difficult to see very much in the darkness. Mr Grant had no torch, and no light rigged up; or else he wasn't going to switch it on, for reasons of his own. But I could tell at once that this chair was the real McCoy, a genuine and very unusual antique. There was something about it. A stateliness. A sense of proportion. And whoever had carved the back and the arms must have been some kind of furniture-making genius. There were snakes, and apples, and wolves' heads, and at the very crest of the chair, the face of a grinning creature that looked like a cross between a man and a sea-serpent. From what I could tell, the seat was upholstered in black leather.
'That's some chair,' I told Mr Grant. 'Can we see it in the daylight?'
'Sure. If you help me move all this other stuff, and lift it out.'
I turned back to the chair and peered at it closely. There was no question about it. It was carved mahogany, and very old.
I'd never seen anything quite like it in my life.
'Where did Jessop get it?' I asked Mr Grant, as. I helped him lift ten shield-back Chippendale chairs off the tail of the van.
'The chair? In Britain, I believe. He used to travel a great deal when he was younger. You ought to see some of the Italian antiques he's got out there at Escortdido. He has two architectural landscapes by Guardi.'
It took us almost a half-hour to clear the back of Mr Grant's van. By the end of that time, my driveway looked like a garage sale, and Sara had come out twice to complain. The third time she appeared, we were almost through, and I asked her to wait and see the chair.
'You've emptied all this stuff out for one chair?' she demanded.
'Sara,' I told her, 'it's something special. Just wait and see what you think of it.'
'I know what I think of our trip out to the animal kingdom,'
she said, holding up her wrist and pointing at her watch. 'It's almost a washout. Well -jou can explain it to Jonathan. Tell him we didn't go to the animal kingdom because of a chair. I'm not going to.'
'Will you just be patient?' I asked her. 'We're going to the animal kingdom, even if we have to go in the dark. But we have also to take a look at this chair. It's special.'
'God give me strength,' said Sara. 'I should have married a fish-market manager on the Embarcadero. At least he wouldn't be spending half of his precious Sunday afternoon buying pollock.'
Mr Grant paused, and stared at Sara carefully through his sunglasses. 'Mrs Delatolla,' he said, in that whispery voice.