Chapter 3

The Vleeshuis opens at ten. I’m there at ten, which means I’m the first person through the door behind a school group that takes up the entire entrance hall and has to be navigated around with the patience of someone who has somewhere specific to be. The archive is on the upper floor, away from the permanent collection, in a room that smells correctly of old paper and inadequate heating. The archivist is a small, precise man named Wouters who has helped me before and greets me with the expression of someone who is pleased to see a familiar face and is not going to say so.

I show him the rubbing of the maker’s mark.

He looks at it for a long time without speaking, which is either a good sign or a professional habit. Then he asks me to wait and disappears into the stacks. I sit at the long table and look at the mark in my notebook — the crowned letter, the pellet beneath — and try to place it by instinct the way I sometimes can. Nothing comes. The guild records for Antwerp silver are extensive but uneven: the great masters are documented, the minor ones are gaps, and the gaps are where the interesting objects live.

Wouters returns with two folders and a photocopied plate from what looks like an unpublished catalogue raisonné. He sets these in front of me without comment and goes back to his desk.

The plate shows a group of marks from a documented but minor guild warden’s period, roughly 1660 to 1680. My mark is not among them. The folders contain index cards, handwritten, some in Dutch and some in French, cross-referencing maker’s punches against known objects in Belgian institutional collections. I work through them methodically, which takes ninety minutes and produces one partial match — a mark from a silversmith recorded only as M. Verbeke, meester 1671, whose crowned-V punch has a similar structure to the crowned letter on my cellar but is not the same device.

I photograph the index card and note the reference. It is something. It is not enough.

On my way out I stop at Wouters’s desk and ask if he knows of any scholarship on unregistered provincial silversmiths working in the Antwerp orbit in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. He considers this with the seriousness it deserves and gives me two names: a retired professor at the University of Ghent who has done unpublished work on guild periphery craftsmen, and a dealer in Brussels who handles nothing but Flemish silver and is, Wouters says carefully, very knowledgeable. I write both names down. I will make calls this afternoon.

First, I need to go back to the auction house.

* * *

I have a reason. The reason is that the provenance document lists the consigning estate’s legal representative as a firm called Verhoeven & Partners, which is a Brussels address I found in the footer of the covering letter, and I want to know whether Meneer Claes will tell me anything further about that relationship if I ask him in person rather than in the paperwork trail I’m supposed to be following quietly. This is a thin reason. It is the reason I have.

The drive out is the same as before — flat agricultural land, the occasional barn, the kind of Belgian countryside that is quietly beautiful if you’re not thinking about something else and which I am always thinking about something else. I park in the same car park. The grey Opel is there again, same spot, which I note and set aside. I have been to this auction house four times in two years and the grey Opel has been here twice. Some cars just live in car parks. I walk inside.

The post-sale quiet has settled over the building. The main hall has been cleared of chairs and is being swept by a young man with headphones in who doesn’t look up. A woman I don’t recognise is at the front desk, which is inconvenient. I ask for Meneer Claes.

She says he’s in a meeting.

I say I’ll wait.

There are four chairs near the entrance and a rack of catalogues from previous sales going back several years. I take a chair and a catalogue from 2019 and begin reading it with genuine attention, because old catalogues are how you track patterns — what an auction house was selling four years ago tells you something about the networks they move in and the vendor relationships they maintain. The 2019 catalogue is unremarkable. Flemish furniture, some decent silver, a group of Delftware that was underestimated and probably went to a dealer I know in Middelburg.

I am on the third catalogue when the woman at the desk changes. The new woman is older, more senior in the way she carries herself, and she has come from the direction of the back offices. Behind her, visible for a moment through the door before it closes, is Meneer Claes — and with him, someone else.

The someone else is a woman I don’t recognise. She’s perhaps forty-four, forty-five, in a dark coat that is good quality and not new, with the kind of face that is arranged into professional neutrality with enough practice that the neutrality itself becomes readable as a type. She is asking Claes something and he is answering it with his body angled slightly away from her, the same lean I noticed when he spoke to me — the lean of a man who finds the conversation inconvenient but cannot say so. Whatever she is, she is not a buyer.

The door closes. I put the catalogue back.

The older woman at the desk asks if I’ve been helped.

I ask again for Meneer Claes. She tells me he’s unavailable today and can she take a message. I leave my card with a note on the back asking him to call me regarding the provenance file for lot 62, and I add, as an afterthought, a question: could he confirm the full name of the consigning estate, as I need it for my own records. This is the kind of request that is either ignored or answered by a junior member of staff who doesn’t know they shouldn’t answer it. It costs nothing to ask.

Outside, in the car park, I sit on the low wall rather than getting into my car. The afternoon has turned grey and cool and there is the smell of rain coming in from the west. The woman in the dark coat exits the building four minutes after I do. She doesn’t see me immediately — she’s looking at her phone, walking toward a dark blue Volvo parked in the row nearest the building, which is where people park when they don’t expect to stay long. Then she looks up and sees me and there is a pause so brief it barely registers, the kind of pause that means: I notice you, I am filing you, I am not going to indicate that I am doing either of these things.

She gets in the Volvo.

I have seen that pause before. It belongs to a category of person that includes investigators, journalists, and serious dealers. The coat and the Volvo and the way Claes was leaning away from her suggest the first category. The question she was asking him — I didn’t hear the words but I read the rhythm of it, steady, specific, not the rhythm of someone making conversation — suggests the same.

The Volvo pulls out of the car park and turns toward Ghent.

I sit on the wall for another minute. The rain arrives, light and cold, and I get into my car.

* * *

She has been tracking something, I think, on the drive back. Not the salt cellar — the salt cellar is mine, freshly sold, not yet a known quantity to anyone except me and Claes and the telephone bidder who lost. Something else that brought her to this particular auction house in this particular week, something that put Claes into that lean.

I don’t know who she is. I know the type. I know the way she looked at me before she decided not to look at me, and I know that decision was made in under a second, which means she has practice at making it.

This is useful and not useful in equal measure.

I call the retired Ghent professor from the car, using the number Wouters gave me, and reach a voicemail in Dutch and French that instructs me to leave a detailed message, which I do. Then I call the Brussels dealer, whose name is Adriaan Smits, and he answers on the third ring and is immediately, almost aggressively helpful in the way that dealers are when they scent a consultation fee. I describe the mark — crowned letter, small pellet, rectangular punch, four by six millimetres — and there is a silence on the other end of the line that is not the silence of someone thinking but the silence of someone deciding how much to say.

“Could be Verbeke,” he says, eventually.

“I found Verbeke in the Vleeshuis index. The punch geometry is similar but the letter is different. Verbeke was a crowned V. This is a B or an R.”

“There was a son,” Smits says. “Or a nephew. I’d have to look.”

I ask him to look and give him my number. He says he’ll be in touch. He says this with the confidence of a man who has been in touch before and knows it leads somewhere, which means he probably has something and is pricing it in his head before he tells me.

I put the phone on the passenger seat.

The rain is heavier now. I take the ring road and the ring road is exactly as hateful as I anticipated and I sit in it for twenty minutes thinking about the woman in the dark coat and the way Claes leaned away from her and the crowned letter on the foot of the cellar and the typeface on the provenance document, and by the time I reach the Noorderlaan the thoughts have arranged themselves into an order that is not yet a shape but is beginning to want to be one.

* * *

I call Tak from the storage unit at seven. He is in the middle of something — I can hear voices in the background, the particular ambient sound of a restaurant — and he steps outside to take the call, which means he saw my number and knew it was worth stepping outside for.

“Anything?” he says.

“Possibly Verbeke. A son or a nephew. The Brussels dealer is looking.”

“Verbeke is documented?”

“Peripherally. The mark doesn’t match but the family connection might explain a variant punch. If the nephew trained under the father but registered independently —”

“Rowan.”

“What.”

“There was someone else at the auction house.”

I haven’t told him about the woman yet. I consider how he does this — the way he locates the thing I haven’t said. “A woman in a dark coat. She was interviewing Claes. Or questioning him. The dynamic was investigative.”

“Did she speak to you?”

“No. She looked at me for about half a second and decided not to.”

“But she looked.”

“Yes.”

A pause. Behind him I can hear the muffled warmth of the restaurant, someone laughing. “And you’ve been thinking about her all day instead of the mark.”

This is not entirely accurate. “I’ve been thinking about both.”

“Mm.” He doesn’t say anything else about it. This is also one of the things about Tak — he knows when a thought needs to be left where it is. “Call Smits back tomorrow if you haven’t heard. Dealers sit on things.”

“I know.”

“Eat something tonight.”

“There’s food,” I say, and this time it’s actually true — I stopped at the Delhaize on the Carnotstraat on the way back, a small act of premeditation that Tak would find satisfying if I told him about it, which I don’t.

“Good,” he says, as if he knows anyway.

After I hang up I stand at the wall for a while. There are three things pinned to it now: the mark rubbing, the index card photograph from the Vleeshuis, and a printed copy of the provenance document with the typeface anomalies circled in pencil. Three things. Not enough for a shape. Enough for a direction.

The salt cellar is on the workbench under the lamp. It has the quality that some objects have of being present in a room in a way that exceeds their physical size. I don’t know if this is the object or the problem or both. Mostly I think it’s both.

I eat standing at the workbench and look at it while I do, and I think about a woman in a dark coat who looked at me for half a second and filed me away, and I think about Claes leaning backward, and I think about the weight.

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