Part 8:
I was wrong about that one. How wrong? Completely wrong. Spectacular failure. Don’t bring it up at conferences. He paused. But this isn’t that the Morgan Stern case had problems in the dimensional data that I explained away because I wanted to be right. This one, but the data isn’t asking me to explain anything.
It’s just sitting there looking at me. Ethan finished the sandwich. What does Voss say officially? Officially, she’s being appropriately cautious, but she called me at 10 last night to tell me that she’d spent 3 hours looking at the photoggramometry data and had decided she needed a glass of wine. That’s as close to confirmation as she gets.
That’s basically her popping champagne. James was quiet for a moment. There’s also the question of the Sterling Estates’s handling of this. How’s the daughter? Ethan considered it. guarded processing. Does she understand what we might be looking at in terms of value? Not fully. We haven’t talked numbers. You’re going to have to.
And she’s going to need legal counsel before any of this goes public. If the authentication holds, she’s sitting on something that’s going to attract serious attention from collectors, from institutions, probably from the press. I know who manages that for her. That’s her problem to figure out. Our job is the authentication.
Right. James paused. Ethan, how are you doing with this? The question was genuine enough that it caught him slightly off guard. He looked out the windshield at the front of his shop. The green sign, the chip in the paint at the corner. I’m fine. You spent 6 years fixing Civics and Corollas.
You stumble on to what might be the most significant automotive find in two decades. That’s I’m fine, James, because you can feel more than one thing about it, you know. I know. He paused. I’ll call you tomorrow. He got out of the truck and went to unlock the shop, and Marcus pulled in 30 seconds later, looking considerably more awake than usual. You look different, Marcus said.
Different? How? I don’t know. Like something happened. Something’s happening, Ethan said. I’ll tell you about it when I can. Marcus looked at him for a moment, then nodded with the easy acceptance of someone who’d learned not to push. “Cool. The Matt Silverado came in early, by the way.
The brake situation is worse than we thought.” “Of course it is,” Ethan said and went to look at the Silverado. He didn’t see Isabella Sterling for 9 days. She called twice during that period. once to ask about the timeline on the formal authentication. Once to ask a question about the Providence documentation that she could have asked James just as easily, but apparently didn’t.
He answered both calls with the same direct practical register he’d been using with her from the start, and she responded the same way. And there was nothing remarkable about either conversation except that at the end of the second one, she said almost as an afterthought. George told me you came back and looked at the car again after the assessment.
He had in fact gone back to the estate the previous Thursday during the day with better photographic equipment borrowed from a friend who did architectural work. Isabella’s assistant had arranged access, and he’d spent 3 hours carefully documenting every panel, every seam, every piece of surviving detail.
He hadn’t thought Isabella would necessarily know about it. I wanted better documentation, he said. I know. I saw the photographs you sent, Voss. A pause. They’re very thorough. I was thorough. Another pause. Thank you,” she said in a voice that suggested it cost her something small to say it. “It’s the work,” he said and meant it.
After he hung up, Marcus, who had been pretending not to listen from behind the open hood of a Subaru, said, “Is that the billionaire lady?” “She’s not.” He stopped. “Her name is Ms. Sterling.” “Right,” Marcus was grinning. “The billionaire. Get back to work.” The nine days were productive in the ways that mattered. Dr.
Voss received a preliminary response from the Stellarini archive. Not the full commission file, but a confirmation that a 1968 commission corresponding to the vehicle number existed in their records. That confirmation was the difference between a strong hypothesis and something that was beginning to look formally like a probable fact. Ethan drafted a progress summary and sent it to Isabella’s assistant.
He didn’t know if she read it herself or had someone summarize it for her. He assumed she read it because the follow-up questions that came back 2 days later were specific and detailed and showed an understanding of the process that didn’t come from having someone else explain it. She was paying attention that mattered.
What he hadn’t anticipated was the leak. He found out on a Thursday morning the same way he found out most things he hadn’t anticipated through a phone call from James Puit at an hour that indicated James was not happy. Someone talked, James said. Ethan sat down his coffee. What? There’s a piece on a collector’s forum, one of those authentication watch sites that the specialist community uses.
