Hot Mahogany

5

Barton Cabot was running his hands through his pockets, and after a moment, he came up with a key. “The barn,” he said, turning toward the large outbuilding.

Stone followed him, wondering what the hell was going on. Barton ignored the large barn doors and went instead to a large door on the side of the structure facing the house. He inserted the key in the lock and turned it, but before he opened the door he turned toward Stone.

“Very few people have ever been inside my barn,” Barton said.

Stone shrugged. “If you don’t want me in there, I won’t go in.”

Barton went inside. “Close the door and lock it behind you,” he said.

Stone stepped into an elegant vestibule and reached for the door. To his surprise, it was made of steel and very heavy. He pulled it shut and turned the lock.

Barton opened another door with his key. He passed through it, giving Stone the same instructions.

Stone locked the second door behind him and turned to find himself in nothing resembling a barn, but a large workshop. On one side of the shop was a wall filled with hand tools that seemed to be very old, over a long workbench. He noticed that there didn’t appear to be any power tools. The air was cool and damp. “This isn’t a barn, is it, Barton?” Stone asked.

“No. There used to be a barn on this site, but I tore it down, constructed this building, then reassembled the old barn around it.”

“That’s amazing,” Stone said, “but why?”

“To make antique reproductions and to preserve the wood with which they are made. It’s temperature and humidity controlled.” He led the way to the end of the room and pointed to a wall of racks containing pieces of mahogany and walnut, seemingly from deconstructed furniture. “When I get a piece that’s beyond restoration I conserve the wood,” Barton said. “I’ve been doing this for more than twenty years. I’m a very good woodworker, myself, and I employ two other men who are more highly skilled than I. My greatest value is my eye.”

“Do you sell your pieces as reproductions or as originals?” Stone asked mildly, as if the question were not an insult.

“Depends,” Barton said. “The reproductions we make are from woods of the period and are made with tools, glues and stain formulas of the period. If they stood side by side, it would take a very great expert to pick the original. Viewed singly, hardly anyone alive could authoritatively call one of my pieces anything but an original.”

“Then your pieces must be very valuable,” Stone said.

“You have no idea,” Barton replied. He walked the length of the room and opened another door. “My garage,” he said, looking through the door. “My van is gone.”

“Should it be there?”

“Will you drive me to Danbury? I must buy a new van.”

“Has your van been stolen?” Stone asked.

“I can think of no other reason why it would not be locked in the garage,” Barton replied.

“Then why don’t we report it to the police? Perhaps it will be recovered; then you won’t have to buy a new one.”

“Two reasons,” Barton said. “One: If the van was stolen, I don’t want word to get out, particularly not to the police; two: If the van was stolen, it is probably at the bottom of the East River and, thus, useless to me.”

“I see,” Stone said. “Or I think I see.” He threw up his hands. “Or maybe I don’t see.”

“If the van was stolen, something very valuable was inside,” Barton said.

“What was it?” Stone asked.

Barton didn’t reply. Instead, he went to a cabinet and opened the double doors, revealing a safe, which he opened. He pulled out an inside drawer, removed a key, then crossed the room to a larger pair of doors. He unlocked them and swung them wide open, revealing a closet perhaps eight feet wide and twelve feet high. Inside, the rear wall was hung with still more antique hand tools. “Give me a hand,” Barton said.

“A hand at what?”

“Go to the right side of the wall. There’s a handle, see?”

Stone found the handle.

“There’s one on my side, too. Take hold of yours and pull with me.”

Stone did as he was asked. To his surprise, the rear wall slid out on wheels. Gently, they rolled the wall into the room, a good four feet from the front of the cabinet.

“Now,” Barton said. He stepped behind the wall and flipped a switch. Lights came on.

Stone walked behind the wall and found that it hid a large compartment, in which rested what appeared to be a mahogany secretary, perhaps seven feet tall and four feet wide. It was gorgeous. The soft light brought out tones in the wood that made it extraordinary. “That’s the most beautiful piece of furniture I’ve ever seen,” he said.

“And well it should be,” Barton said. “Help me close it up again.”

Barton switched off the lights, and they moved the wall back into the cabinet. He locked the cabinet and returned the key to the safe, then locked that. “Let’s go into the house,” he said.

Stone followed him out of the barn, and Barton locked the steel doors behind them. He led the way to the house and used the barn key to open a door. They emerged into a modern kitchen, and Barton continued through that room into a handsome study, paneled in old woods, with leather furniture. “I bought this room from a country house in the north of England and reassembled it here,” he said.

“It’s lovely,” Stone said.

“I need a drink.” Barton said, opening cabinet doors to reveal a well-stocked bar. “Would you like something?”

“Thank you, no,” Stone said. “Too early for me.”

Barton poured himself a Scotch, then took a match from a box and lit the fire that had already been laid in the fireplace. “Have a seat,” he said, “and I’ll tell you a story.”

Stone sat down on the leather couch, and Barton took a chair.

“In the mid-eighteenth century a very fine firm of cabinetmakers in Newport, Rhode Island, called Goddard-Townsend, were making some of the finest furniture in colonial America. The traders and sea captains who populated Newport would bring back mahogany logs from the Caribbean and South America that were nothing like those available today. They were dense and fine-grained, not the spongy, forced-growth trees that make up plantations now, and the furniture of which they were made glowed and smiled at the viewer in a way that can no longer be reproduced. All the best of that wood was gone by the end of the eighteenth century.

“Goddard-Townsend, during the seventeen fifties and sixties, made, among other pieces, a series of mahogany secretaries – probably no more than six or seven. One of these pieces was made for the esteemed Brown family of Newport – Brown University, among other things, was named for them. The piece remained in the family from that time until the late nineteen eighties, when the patriarch, John Nicholas Brown, died. They then emptied out their house in Newport, Harbor Court, and sold it to the New York Yacht Club, which turned the house into their Newport headquarters.

“In 1989, the Brown family put the secretary up for auction at Christie’s. I think they thought it might bring a few hundred thousand dollars. It brought twelve point one million dollars, becoming the most expensive piece of American furniture ever sold at auction.”

Stone blinked at the price. “That’s staggering,” he said.

“I expect it staggered the Browns, too,” Barton said. “Four years ago I came into possession of one of the other Goddard-Townsend secretaries. It had passed through the hands of several families over the centuries, and I bought it privately from a family who were, perhaps, not entirely acquainted with its value. I won’t tell you what I paid for it, but I think that its value at auction will have increased greatly since the Brown secretary was sold in 1989. There are more billionaires around now than then, and they all seem to want eighteenth-century American furniture. The secretary you just saw could very well bring double that of the 1989 sale, if I can establish a good provenance, which is problematical.”

Stone tried to get his mind around that number.

“I brought the secretary here, and my people and I set out to reproduce it. With considerable effort I located some good mahogany. We matched the grains closely to the original and went to work. The project took us more than a year, and when we were finished we had two virtually identical secretaries.”

“Barton,” Stone said, “is the secretary I just saw in your barn the original or the reproduction?”

Barton ignored the question. “Stone, there are people out there who would kill for this piece of furniture,” he said. “I know, because they nearly killed me. Perhaps they think they did.”

“Barton,” Stone said, “please answer my question: Is that secretary the original or the reproduction?”

Barton sighed and took a swig of his Scotch. “I don’t know,” he said.