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The Price of Inheritance: A Novel - Softcover

Tanabe, Karin

 
9781476758602: The Price of Inheritance: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1476758603 ISBN 13: 9781476758602
Verlag: Washington Square Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

In this enthralling new novel from the author of The List (a “smartly paced and dishy debut,” Publishers Weekly, starred review), a young woman working in the high-end art world stumbles upon a rare antique—and an irresistible man with a dark past.

After eight years in the American Furniture department at Christie’s, twenty-nine-year-old Carolyn Everett is a rising star. But one wrong decision and a scandal leaves her unemployed and broken. Desperate to piece her life back together, Carolyn leaves New York City to work in a tiny antique store in Newport, Rhode Island.

One day at a small county auction, she discovers a piece of Middle Eastern pottery, which she purchases for twenty dollars on a hunch. Curiosity sends her on a mission to find its original owner, and she eventually winds up in the town’s United States Navy Base—and in a relationship with notorious womanizer Marine Sergeant Tyler Ford, who claims the relic came to him as a gift from his translator during the early days of the Iraq War. From two different worlds, Tyler and Carolyn become obsessed with the mysterious relic—and each other—until the origin of the art comes under intense scrutiny and reveals a darker side of Tyler’s past. Carolyn still feels like there’s more to the story, but can she risk attaching herself to another scandal—and does she truly know the man she’s fallen in love with?

The Price of Inheritance is a rare find of a novel. Engaging, suspenseful, and full of intrigue, it delves into the elite world of big bucks deals and dangerous black market promises, where one woman must decide whether she’s willing to gamble her greatest asset—her heart.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karin Tanabe is the author of A Woman of Intelligence, The Gilded Years, The Price of Inheritance, A Hundred Suns, The Diplomat’s Daughter, and The List. A former Politico reporter, her writing has also appeared in the Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and The Washington Post. She has made frequent appearances as a celebrity and politics expert on Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and The CBS Early Show. A graduate of Vassar College, Karin lives in Washington, DC. To learn more visit KarinTanabe.com.

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The Price of Inheritance

CHAPTER 1

It starts in my ears. A slight ringing that fades in and out like a faint Morse code signal. Then my heart takes off. It beats and thumps and pounds so loudly I’m sure the people next to me can hear it. I smile and laugh nervously. I think about reassuring the worried-looking man to my right that I’m sane; it’s just a little heart murmur and I’m not in need of a Xanax or an EKG. But nothing can stop the rush of adrenaline, anxiety, and animal-like sweating. My palms start to clam up, from the tips of my fingernails to my wrists. They become damp, soaking even, as the bids in the auction room start low—low in billionaire-speak—and soar up in minutes. I want to join them, calmly dishing out seven figures for that Chippendale armoire handmade by craftsmen in the eighteenth century, like it’s as routine as buying a latte. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to get the super-rich to buy, and as the room buzzes with the sound of moneyed voices, I know my job is almost done. But that doesn’t calm me down.

The bids rise as a waterfall of sweat swims down my back. I’m so sticky I could keep a fish alive in my shirt. I’m sure I look crazy, but I try to smile through my adventures in perspiration. The auctioneer’s sophisticated voice works its way rhythmically through the crowd and hands go up and down like a rich person’s version of Whac-A-Mole. Then, finally, only the most determined bidders wave their paddles in the air—some tentative, some powerful, others unnaturally relaxed as they bid with someone else’s money. Then, a pause. A single hand rises in the crowd, the auctioneer acknowledges the final bidder, and the hammer hesitates, then firmly falls. The mahogany hits the podium. And just like that, someone very rich and rather sentimental has spent millions of dollars, dirhams, yuan, or pounds on a painting, a table, a coin collection, dueling pistols, or an old pair of Kennedy underwear.

After ten years of the money-fueled adrenaline fest, I knew what to expect when I walked into the Christie’s saleroom in New York on September 13 at 6:30 P.M. As soon as my leather soles squeaked through the institution’s glass doors on the periphery of Rockefeller Center as a nineteen-year-old intern, I vowed to never leave Christie’s, and I hadn’t. For the last decade I’d been assisting, and then appraising and finally acquiring lamps in the shape of boats, clocks in the shape of birds, and desks made by men who loved powdered wigs. And all that—along with a few good connections—had led me to today.

The last time the famed Nicholas Brown Chippendale Mahogany Block-and-Shell Carved Desk-and-Bookcase sold at auction was in 1989 and it went for $12.1 million, a world auction record for American furniture. All the art journalists wrote about it. And everyone agreed that the desk, crafted by the Townsend-Goddard School of cabinetmaking in Newport, Rhode Island, was worth the astronomical price. There was plenty of buzz around the sale, and no one thought it would sell again for decades. But they were wrong.

Thanks to a tip about a family’s failed investments from a collector whom I’d worked with for years, I’d made two trips to the Cayman Islands in six months and one to Boston to convince Jack Davidson, the fickle heir of an old Massachusetts family, that yes indeed he should sell his prized desk to help pad his bank account. And I convinced him that only my distinguished place of employment, Christie’s, could get him a higher price than the eight figures he’d paid five years ago.

To keep Jack from contacting rival Sotheby’s while we wined and dined him, I’d immediately made a $12 million guarantee. Every dollar above $12 million that the piece brought in would be split by Jack, the seller, and us, the auction house. I’d also promised him prime placement on the cover of our September auction catalogue, skybox tickets to the Boston Red Sox, and a ninetieth birthday party for his father at the Christie’s headquarters in New York. I assured him that he and his third wife would be put up at the Plaza in the F. Scott Fitzgerald suite for the weekend, and that I’d personally take his youngest daughter to the American Girl store and to lunch at Delmonico’s. “Around strangers, she only eats condiments,” he’d warned, pushing back his dapper mop of brown hair and giving his diabolical seven-year-old daughter a wink and several packets of ketchup before heading back to the hotel.

Before I showed Jack the mockup of our catalogue—which I’d had the graphics department put together in twenty-four hours—I tied it with a linen bow handmade in Nantucket and spent thirty minutes starching and ironing it until it could barely be knotted. American furniture is mostly bought and sold by Americans. But this cabinet was a record breaker. I knew collectors in Russia, Asia, and the Middle East would be interested; it was something we had to have.

The courting we did in the American furniture department to woo estates was nothing compared to what went on in the bigger departments—Old Masters, Impressionist, Contemporary. I wanted Jack Davidson to build a relationship with Christie’s, and as soon as his beloved father, Paul Davidson, died, I wanted him to think of no one but Christie’s when he sold his estate. So a big-dollar promise was made and now I had to deliver on it. We both knew there was no guarantee I could keep my word. Worst-case scenario, it wouldn’t sell for $12 million and Christie’s would own the piece. I would be branded a failure and the next decade would see me selling plastic chairs in church parking lots.

I woke up on auction day in my tiny apartment on East Fifty-Ninth Street and pushed back the covers an hour before sunrise. I went through the same ritualistic motions on every big auction day as I tried to steady my racing mind. I picked up the New York Times and the front-page headline read: “Economy in shambles. Never spend another dime! Move to burgeoning New Delhi,” or something like that. But I was ignoring the pessimists. Those grizzly economists always saw the champagne glass half empty and there were lots of rich people left counting Bentleys and Picassos between their spoonfuls of fish eggs. I knew it was wrong to ask God for large sums of money to be spent on ludicrously expensive furniture, so I didn’t pray. Audibly, anyway. Instead, I walked. It was the same every time my department had an auction. My alarm went off at 5:30 A.M., I ate an entire bar of dark chocolate and three organic breath mints, and then I hit the pavement for an hour.

The morning of the desk auction, or Chippendale Day, as I’d been calling it during nervous phone calls to my therapist, I headed toward the park. I would start by strolling around the edge, the empty streets full of historic buildings inhabited by the extremely wealthy, and then, when the sun started to rise, I would turn into the park, watch the orange rays cover Manhattan, and sweat out a tiny portion of my nerves in the city’s cloud of green.

I walked twenty-three blocks, watched the yellow cabs race by, and climbed up and down the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. All I could think about was money. Specifically, $12.2 million. I’d be happy with that. Not thrilled, but happy. I sat down on the steps, letting the morning wind slap my pale face, and stretched out my arms. In the next hour, I would wash, dry, brush, powder, and paint myself...

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Verlag
Washington Square Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476758603
ISBN 13 
9781476758602
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
AA Utrecht
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Niederlande