Hot Mahogany

16

Barton got up, went to his safe, opened it, opened a drawer inside and took out a small, suede pouch, closed with a drawstring. He came back and sat down, resting the pouch on his knee.

“After Franklin Roosevelt took office, in 1933, he took the country off the gold standard, in order to end the run on the banks and settle down the economy. All the gold coins were recalled and exchanged for paper money, and it became illegal to own gold coins, unless they were clearly rare and worthy of collecting. The last double eagles minted were the design by Augustus Saint-Gaudens; there were four hundred forty-five thousand five hundred minted, and they were dated 1933.

“Since gold coins were no longer circulated, all the Saint-Gaudens double eagles were melted down and converted to bullion. Two specimens were given to the Smithsonian. But somehow, examples of these double eagles began turning up here and there. It’s believed that a high-ranking employee of the mint kept twenty or more and replaced them with other double eagles, so that the accounts balanced, but nobody knows exactly how many were thus liberated.

“My engraver friend in San Francisco, whose name was Isaac Finkel, possessed a 1933 Saint-Gaudens double eagle. He wouldn’t say how he got it, but I think that probably a relative of his worked at the mint and managed to retain one before they were melted down. Isaac wanted me to sell it for him, and I agreed to do so, on one condition: Using his Saint-Gaudens as a model, he would cut a new die for the coin, strike two for me, and I would pay him one million dollars for it.

“Isaac did as I asked, and the resulting two coins struck were absolutely undistinguishable from his original coin. I sold one of the two coins, representing it as original, to a Japanese businessman who had something of a reputation for collecting the uncollectible, for three million dollars, and gave a million to Isaac.

“There were other examples about. A Philadelphia jeweler came into possession of nineteen of the Saint-Gaudens double eagles. He sold at least nine of them to collectors, and the government confiscated eight of those. The ninth apparently passed into the possession of King Farouk of Egypt, and when he was deposed it came onto the market. But when the U.S. Government made extensive efforts to recover it, it disappeared, and what with the Feds’ interest in the coins, dealers became reluctant to market them. In 2004, the Philadelphia jeweler’s daughter found her father’s other ten Saint-Gaudens among his possessions after his death, and she foolishly sent them to the U.S. Mint for authentication. I believe she may still be trying to get them back.

“But the most interesting story came when a British coin dealer turned up with the King Farouk Saint-Gaudens during the nineties in New York, where he tried to sell it to someone who turned out to be a Treasury agent.

“The government confiscated the coin, and the dealer promptly sued to get it back. During the lawsuit, which lasted for some years, the double eagle was deposited in the Treasury vaults at the World Trade Center. A couple of months before the 9/11 attacks the dealer and the U.S. Mint settled, agreeing to sell it at auction and divide the proceeds. The coin was removed from the vaults, monetized by the Treasury and sold at auction. It brought, including the buyer’s premium, seven million five hundred and ninety thousand dollars.”

“Holy shit,” Holly said.

“What happened to your two coins, Barton?”

“I kept them for many years, then sold one to a collector, for… well, shall we say, for something less than seven million dollars. I used the money – some of it, anyway – to buy the Goddard-Townsend mahogany secretary that Holly so admires.” He opened the suede pouch and emptied it into his hand. “This,” he said, holding a gold coin up between thumb and forefinger, “is the original Saint-Gaudens from Isaac Finkel.” He took Holly’s hand and placed the coin in it.

Holly weighed it in her hand, then gave it to Stone.

“So this is what seven million dollars looks like,” he said.

“Yes,” Barton replied, “give or take.”

“Barton,” Holly said, “how much did you pay for the secretary?”

“That shall remain my secret,” Barton replied, “but my investment in the piece is considerably more than the purchase price. You see, Isaac Finkel, by duplicating the Saint-Gaudens, had given me an idea. I had for years, with the help of two very fine cabinetmakers, been reproducing eighteenth-century pieces, small ones from old mahogany I had collected. You see it in the racks over there.” He pointed.

“And you made the other secretary from that wood?” she asked.

“I believe I told Stone that, but it is not so.”

“Then where did you get the mahogany?”

“Therein lies another tale,” Barton said. Having begun to tell the truth, he was obviously relishing his own stories. “I traveled to Central America in search of exactly the right mahogany. After moving about for several weeks and asking a lot of questions, I heard a story about an early-nineteenth-century shipwreck in a river not far from where I stood. The ship had been carrying a cargo of mahogany logs timbered upriver, and the logs went down with the vessel.

“I bought scuba equipment, hired a boat and began searching for the wreck. It took me nearly two weeks, but I found it. I managed to raise a magnificent log and transport it to a sawmill, where I had it ripped into lumber. I then went on a search for the biggest piece of furniture I could find. I found a huge sofa, and I built a crate for it from the mahogany lumber.”

“Why?” Holly asked.

“Because it was illegal to export old mahogany, since it was considered a national treasure. I shipped the sofa back to the United States in the mahogany crate. Some weeks later, I got a call from the shipping company saying that my shipment had arrived and that it would be delivered the following day.

“When the truck arrived here, I went out to greet it in a state of great excitement, and there, on the back of a flatbed truck, was the sofa. No crate.”

“What did you do?” Holly asked, transfixed.

“I went, to put it politely, apeshit,” Barton replied. “I got the head of the shipping company on the phone. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘that crate weighed so much that it would have cost another couple of thousand dollars to ship it to you, so we uncrated your sofa.’

“ ‘And where is my crate?’ I asked.

“ ‘Oh, some of my employees liked the wood and took it home.’

“I explained to the gentleman that, if he did not recover my mahogany at once, I would find him and do very bad things to him, and by God he did. It was delivered a few days later, and over the next year, we built our replica of the Goddard-Townsend secretary from that single, very old mahogany log.”

“What a story!” Holly said.

“Yes,” Barton agreed. “It’s a pity I can never publish it.”

“Barton,” Stone said, “you forgot an important detail in your story about the Saint-Gaudens double eagle.”

“Oh?” Barton asked innocently.

“What happened to the die that Finkel made for you? The one that the two replica double eagles were struck from?”

“Oh, that,” Barton said. “It was in a drawer of the secretary that was stolen.”

“I see,” Stone said. “And I think I’m beginning to get the full picture. And which of the secretaries was stolen? The original or the replica?”

Barton shrugged. “It hardly matters, does it?”