Chapter 115: Lot Forty-One

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 115: Lot Forty-One

The auction was in a converted bank on the east side and you got in with a letter, not a ticket.

Iris had two.

"It's not black market," she said, in the car. "That's the first thing people assume and it makes them behave badly when they get inside. It's an estate sale. Everything in that room is legally owned by somebody who is legally selling it. The reason it's invitation-only is that half the lots would be illegal to use and nobody wants that written down."

"What's the other half?"

"Junk. Genuine, expensive junk. There's a man who's been buying Kaelmoor memorabilia for thirty years and every piece of it is fake."

The floor was full of money and it dressed like it.

Cole, in a hoodie, got looked at four times on the way to his seat and stopped registering it after the second.

"Row eleven," Iris said. "Middle. You want people to have to turn around to see you."

"Why?"

"Because two-thirds of bidding is who's watching whom, and if nobody can watch you comfortably they stop doing it. Sit."

He sat.

He'd come for Lot 52.

A ledger. Eight pages, water-damaged, listed in the catalogue as administrative record, industrial, c. 1961, provenance uncertain — which was how you described something when you knew exactly what it was and had decided not to say.

Halvern Textiles. The year Elowen's name came off the payroll.

Estimate: two to three thousand. Iris had put nine in an account for him and had refused to discuss the terms of it.

"There's a problem," she said, during Lot 30.

"What."

"Third row. Grey suit, bad haircut, sitting like his shoes hurt." She didn't point. "Devrin Kallsted. Collector. He's got the Kaelmoor thing I mentioned — thirty years of fakes."

"So?"

"So he's been looking at you since you sat down, and he's got a catalogue open to page nine, which is your ledger."

Cole watched him for the next four lots.

Kallsted didn't bid on any of them. He turned to look at Cole eleven times, which Cole counted, and each time he did it he touched the corner of his catalogue.

"He doesn't want the ledger," Cole said.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"He's got it circled."

"He circled it after he saw me looking at page nine." Cole leaned back. "He wants to beat somebody. He's been coming to these for thirty years and buying fakes and I'd bet everything in that account that he's never once been in a bidding war he won cleanly."

Iris turned her head very slightly.

"What are you going to do?"

"Something petty."

LOT 41. A pair of resonance-dampening cuffs, Ministry issue, decommissioned 1988. Non-functional. Estimate four hundred.

Cole raised his hand at five.

Kallsted's head came round like a dog hearing a bag.

"Six," Kallsted said.

"Nine," Cole said.

There was a small ripple through row eleven. The auctioneer, who had been having a slow evening, sat up.

"Ten," said Kallsted.

"Fifteen."

"Twenty."

Cole let a beat go by. Just one. Long enough for Kallsted to feel the room turn toward him.

"Twenty-two," Cole said.

"Twenty-five!"

Cole looked at the cuffs, on their little velvet tray, non-functional, decommissioned in 1988, worth four hundred dollars.

Then he looked at Kallsted, and shrugged, and put his hand down.

"Sold — twenty-five thousand, to the gentleman in the third row."

Kallsted was still glowing eleven minutes later when Lot 52 came up.

"Eight pages, industrial administrative record, circa 1961. Do I have two thousand?"

Cole raised his hand.

Nobody else did.

"Two thousand — two thousand once — sold, to the young man in row eleven."

Kallsted did not turn around, because Kallsted was busy being congratulated by two people about a pair of handcuffs that had cost him the price of a car.

Iris put her chin in her hand.

"That was disgusting," she said.

"Thank you."

"I mean it as a compliment and I want you to know it's an uncomfortable one."

He got the ledger in a folder at the collection desk from a woman who did not look at his face.

Eight pages. Names, hours, wage rates, initials in the margin where a supervisor had signed off.

Page six: E. Marrow — 44 hrs. Struck through. Re-entered. Struck through again.

And in the margin, in handwriting Dana would confirm against three separate documents inside a week — the same hand as the Kaelmoor ledger, the same hand as four redactions in the Ministry archive, the same neat, unhurried, four-hundred-year-old hand:

retained pending.

They were nearly at the doors when a man stopped in front of them.

Not Kallsted. Older, heavyset, a lanyard that said STAFF and a suit that said otherwise.

"Mr. Vale."

"That's me."

"There's a gentleman who'd like a word. Private room, second floor." He hadn't looked at Iris once. "Two minutes."

Cole checked his watch.

"I've got two minutes," he said, and to Iris: "Wait in the car. I'll be quicker than the queue."

Iris looked at him for a second longer than she needed to.

Then she went to the car.

He came out four minutes later.

"That was four minutes," Iris said.

"Stairs."

"What did he want?"

"Kallsted's insurance guy." Cole got in and pulled the door shut. "Wanted to know if I'd contest the provenance on the cuffs. Apparently there's a form."

"There is no form."

"That's what I said."

Iris pulled out into traffic.

"You're in a good mood," she said.

"I bought a ledger for two grand and watched a man spend twenty-five thousand dollars on handcuffs that don't work."

"Mm."

She drove.

At home, Vesper read page six four times and then put her hand flat on it.

"Retained pending," she said. "Pending what?"

"Don't know."

"That's not a note about a worker. You don't write 'retained' about a person who's at their machine, you write it about a thing you've decided to keep." Her voice had gone somewhere careful. "They wrote that about her in 1961, and the name came off the payroll four months later, and forty-one years after that a woman with my face was standing in the middle of Kaelmoor the night it went quiet."

Nobody said anything.

Cole sat at the table with the folder between them and did not say the other thing.

In a private room on the second floor of a converted bank, a man in an expensive suit sat for some time after the door had closed.

Then he took out a phone that was not his usual phone and sent four words, and put it away, and went back down to the floor to congratulate Devrin Kallsted on a magnificent acquisition.

[End of Chapter 115]