First Gravedigger Read Free

call and want to know what about the spool table, anything on the Peter Cooper rocker, where’s your report on the Duncan Phyfe, how many spindles on that new Windsor chair. It wasn’t that we were all overworked; we weren’t. None of the other agents seemed to be straining unduly. Just me. I didn’t like what I was thinking.
    June Murray looked up from her desk when I walked into Speer’s outer office. She gave me a mouth-only smile and held out a sheet of paper, a photocopy of my evaluation of the Meissen figurine I’d examined about a week ago.
    â€œJune, you’re a lifesaver. I owe you one.” I gave her a winning smile with no noticeable effect. June was one of those just-average-looking women who through unstinting effort make themselves attractive. She had to look good, being in frequent contact with purchasers of beauty as she was. So she was always perfectly groomed. Always. I was willing to bet she put on make-up to take out the garbage. No, on second thought, there wouldn’t be any garbage in June Murray’s life. I started toward Speer’s door.
    â€œAh …”
    I stopped and looked back at her.
    â€œBetter not, Earl.” The tone was friendly. I took my hand off the doorknob and waited while she buzzed the inner sanctum. “Mr. Sommers is here.”
    I worked at keeping my face impassive.
    â€œHe says he’ll be with you in a moment,” June told me. “Have a seat.” I sat down and she turned back to her work.
    From where I was sitting I had a three-quarter view of her face, and I wasn’t surprised at the little smile that kept playing about her lips. By warning me, she’d kept me from putting my foot in it. I was supposed to remember that, add it to my account of favors owed. But the very act of warning me had reinforced her own authority, had made me acknowledge how much more in the know she was than I. She had controlled my movement. Some folks are quite ingenious at finding ways of putting other folks down.
    While others like the old ways of doing it: Speer kept me waiting twenty-five minutes. I didn’t even have the door closed behind me when he snapped, “Did you bring the Meissen evaluation?”
    â€œRight here.” I handed him the photocopy and took the chair facing him. The Meissen figurine was on his desk, a deliciously dainty Leda perched on the back of her oversexed swan.
    He waited until I was settled and then said, “Sit down.”
    The bastard. I’d been coming in here and sitting down without an invitation for seven years, and now all of a sudden he decides my manners need correcting? It was a junior executive’s trick, designed to embarrass the other fellow and put him at a disadvantage. Speer deliberately allowed an awkward silence to grow between us. I looked at that carefully barbered face and that sculptured white hair and those manicured hands and that impeccably tailored suit and wondered what it would take to make that dirty old man fall on his face.
    Speer pointed a long finger at the Leda. “It is your considered opinion that this is old Meissen?” His voice had a sarcastic edge to it.
    â€œYou’re saying it’s not?”
    â€œI’m saying look again.”
    I picked up the Leda; it felt heavy enough to be old Meissen. Old Meissen was eighteenth-century porcelain that weighed considerably more than the nineteenth-century reproductions of the same pieces (“new” Meissen). I turned the figurine over and looked at the mark: crossed swords, so that was all right. If it had said “Meissen,” ironically, there’d have been no doubt that this was the inferior stuff; “Meissen” was the mark used by a nineteenth-century factory that just happened to be located in the same German town that had produced the earlier, more valuable porcelain.
    The figurine had the right greenish tint to it, ever so slight; the later porcelains were generally