The question was, where had my little friend been for 1500 years? If he’d been well cared for in a museum, that might explain his relatively pristine condition. Or if he’d been hidden away somewhere, in a tomb for example. This might explain it. The Moche lived in the coastal desert, and arid conditions would limit corrosion.
For a while I just sat there looking at him. He was really sweet, if it’s possible to say such a thing about a little gold man on a pre-Columbian ear flare. His eyes bulged out of carefully cut eye sockets, and around his neck he had a necklace, ceremonial I would have thought, made up of tiny heads: owls most likely. Each of the beads had been made separately, then strung together, so they moved when you touched them. The scepter could easily be removed from his hand. His sturdy little legs showed muscle markings that were quite extraordinary. Under his nose was an ornament in the shape of a crescent, and it too moved when you touched it. I thought you could easily imagine the body under the garments, and that my little man could even be said to have a personality.
I reached my conclusion, and I couldn’t really explain why I hadn’t done so before this, except, of course, that I’d purchased it from a reputable auction house. The point was, no one could afford to make such a little masterpiece these days, replica or not. No one could afford to forge it, either. And even if someone had the patience and time and resources to do so, most of us couldn’t afford to buy it. The vase and the peanut might or might not be genuine. I didn’t have them anymore, so I couldn’t say. This little man, however, was genuine Moche, and Edmund Edwards had some explaining to do.
Before I left the museum, I went into the gift shop and bought a large pin in a Celtic pattern. I asked the saleswoman for a box—a big box—for it, saying it was a gift. She was very obliging in finding the right size box. On the steps outside, I put the brooch on my shirt and took the little gold man, carefully wrapped in tissue, and put him into the box with the card identifying it as a reproduction Celtic brooch. It wouldn’t fool anyone who knew anything whatsoever, but I was getting nervous walking around with this potentially very valuable antiquity in my purse.
By ten to twelve I was in position across the street and down a bit from Ancient Ways. It was a very warm August day in Manhattan, and it felt as if rain, perhaps a thunderstorm, would soon blow through. About five minutes to noon, an older man, grey of hair and unsteady of gait, shuffled down the street and opened the security gate with some difficulty. He had on way too many clothes for the heat of the day, as older people often do. It looked from that distance as if he had seriously arthritic hands and knees. He opened the door, but closed it immediately behind him, and the closed sign remained hanging in the door for several minutes.
Finally, at about twenty after twelve, he came and unlocked the front door, and turned the sign around to show the place was open for business. I crossed the street and entered.
Even by my standards of housekeeping, which let’s just say will never earn me a Nancy Neatness Award, the place was a mess. The carpet was old and worn, and quite frankly dirty. The desk at the back, where the old man sat, was covered in junk, papers strewn haphazardly about, coffee stains on his invoice book and everything else. He fit right in: His jacket looked as if it had gravy stains on the lapel, and his hair, what was left of it, was unkempt and unclean. Under his jacket, he wore a grey knit vest, a moth hole prominently featured. As I stood there, the phone rang, and the old man pushed stacks of paper around to find it. By the time he’d located it, on the floor under the desk, it had stopped ringing.
The merchandise was impressive enough, what you could see of it. Glass cases lined the walls, each of them packed with treasures. On top of each of the cases were various objects too large to be placed within: some very impressive African sculptures, including what looked to be a Benin bronze figure, and some really lovely wood carvings. There was no particular theme that I could see, except that everything was old, very old, and to my eye at least, authentic. In the middle of the room was a large table, also piled high with merchandise.
I idly picked up a small figure, a lovely little blue faience statue about six inches high, and had a closer look. It was, I knew, a ushabti, a representation of a deceased person, probably one of some importance, that would have been placed in an Egyptian tomb many hundreds if not thousands of years ago, to be a servant of sorts to the deceased. It is always fascinating to hold a few thousand years of history in the palm of your hand, but one always has to ask the question in these circumstances: Is it legal? I turned the figure over. On the back were tiny little numbers in black ink: museum catalogue number, I thought. Possibly deaccessioned, possibly not.
I turned toward the desk to see the proprietor’s eyes, almost hidden behind thick, thick glasses, focused on me. On the wall behind him were a couple of old prints and right over his head an extraordinary blade mounted on black fabric and framed in gold. It was not a knife as we know it, with a thin blade and handle. Rather it was one piece, almost bell-shaped, with a thick handle that led to a crescent-shaped blade. It was about six inches high, gold in color, with a string of tiny turquoise beads threaded through a hole in the handle. It was, I was almost certain, a tumi, a ceremonial blade used by the ancient peoples of Peru, perhaps for sacrificial purposes.
“Hi,” I said, moving over to the desk. “Are you Edmund Edwards?”
“Who wants to know?” he asked irritably.
I handed him my business card. I don’t know why I did that, exactly, other than that I felt I had to establish my credentials before proceeding. It was a gesture, however, that in retrospect I would come to regard with profound regret. The old man looked at the card very carefully, then peered back at me. “I’m a dealer from Toronto,” I said, just in case he was unable to read the card. “I’m in New York on a buying trip for a client of mine, who shall, if you don’t mind, remain nameless.”
“Anything in particular you’re interested in?” he asked, apparently satisfied.
“My client collects pre-Columbian art almost exclusively,” I replied.
“Big field. Hard to get. Expensive,” he replied.
“Money is no object here,” I said. He opened a small card case of the recipe box variety and thumbed laboriously through it, peering at each card myopically. The box was overstuffed, and at one point, as he tried to pull a card up, several of them flew up and scattered across the desk. Finally, he arose from his chair with some difficulty and shuffled over to the table in the middle of the room. There did not appear to be any particular system for cataloguing what he had, but he seemed to know where everything was. He started to look under the table, leaning heavily on the side of it, but wasn’t up to the task.
“Under there,” he grunted. “In the middle. The stone. Part of a stela from Copan. Nice piece.”
I bent down and pulled the object out from under the table. It was a very heavy stone piece, beautifully carved, and it was probably what he said it was, I decided: Maya, from Copan. I also decided that he shouldn’t have had it.
“Very nice,” I said, “but…”
“Or this,” he said, opening one of the glass cabinets and removing a splendid terra-cotta of an Aztec god, also probably authentic.
“Very nice as well,” I said. “However, my client has a specific interest. Moche. Anything Moche: terracotta, metals. Do you ever come across that kind of thing?”
“Very hard to get,” he mumbled.