Part 6:
Then what’s your job? He thought about it. To make sure the right people see it, he said. The team arrived on a Tuesday morning in late November. Dr. Voss flew in from Vienna, accompanied by her photoggramometry colleague, Dr. Henrik Strauss. James Puit drove up from Boston the night before and met Ethan for coffee at 7 in the morning, looking like a man who’d been thinking hard about something for three weeks.
“Tell me you didn’t drag me out here for nothing,” James said. “When have I dragged you out for nothing?” “Never. That’s why I’m nervous.” Isabella Sterling met them at the estate gate with a formality that Ethan recognized as a kind of protection. She was keeping herself controlled, not quite detached, because the alternative was feeling too much about something she wasn’t sure deserved to be felt about yet.
She shook everyone’s hands. She showed them to the storage building. She had arranged for it to be properly lit overnight. Banks of LED work lights that turned the space from a dark, damp out building into something that resembled a clinical examination room. In that light, the car looked different. Not better. Exactly.
The rust was the same. The damage was the same. But the shape of it, which had caught Ethan’s eye in that first accidental moment, was now fully visible without shadows to soften or confuse. Dr. Voss walked around it three times without speaking. James Puit crouched near the rear quarter panel with a flashlight, then stood up and walked to the front. Dr.
Strauss set up his photoggramometry equipment with the methodical calm of someone performing a surgery. Ethan stood near the wall and watched. Isabella was beside him, her arms crossed, her expression carefully neutral. How long? She asked quietly. The initial assessment, a few hours. The definitive authentication will take longer.
We’ll need to do paint analysis, metal composition work, provenence research. But you’ll know something today. Dr. Voss will know something today, he said. I already think I know. She glanced at him sideways. That confident? I’ve been wrong before, he said, but not about something I’ve thought about this carefully for this long.
She looked back at the car. My father loved old things, she said after a moment. Not warmly, not coldly. It was an observation delivered with the mixed feeling of someone processing a complicated person. He’d go to these auctions in Europe and come back with things that didn’t seem worth the trouble.
Old clocks, furniture, documents, once a whole crate of botanical drawings from the 1800s. He’d spend weeks researching them. Did he know about cars specifically? He knew enough to know what he didn’t know, which is more than most people. She paused. He talked about this car sometimes. He said he’d bought it because something about it felt important, but he couldn’t articulate what. He didn’t have the expertise.
Ethan was quiet. I thought he’d wasted money, she said. I thought it was another one of his projects that was never going to happen. And after he got sick, it just she stopped. It sat. He was right about it, Ethan said. She looked at him. Whatever the formal authentication determines, he said, “Whatever the official conclusion is, your father was right.
He found something. He knew it without being able to prove it.” Isabella Sterling looked back at the car for a long moment, and her face did something complicated that she didn’t quite manage to control. Then Dr. Voss called from across the room. Mr. Walker. Her voice was carefully even. Come here, please.
He crossed the space. She was crouched near the rear wheel arch. Her flashlight directed at a section where the rust had been carefully removed to reveal the aluminum beneath. In the light, faint marks were visible in the metal. The marks of a specific hammer used in a specific way by specific hands. She looked up at him.
I’ve seen these marks twice in my career, she said. Once on a vehicle at the Pinoteka de Brussia. Once on a car that sold at Geneva in 2019 for 4.3 million. The room was very quiet. Both of those were confirmed Stellarini commissions, she said. Ethan crouched down beside her and looked at the marks. He had been carrying this possibility for 3 weeks.
He had held it carefully, the way you hold something fragile, because being wrong would have meant something, not just professionally, but personally, in ways that were harder to name. He looked at the hammer marks in the old aluminum. He wasn’t wrong. Okay, he said softly. From across the room, he heard Isabella Sterling say, “What does that mean?” Dr.
Vos stood up. It means, she said, with the measured precision of someone who had been in this field long enough to know that measured precision was required, that we have a great deal of work still to do, but it also means that your storage building has been keeping a secret for a very long time. Isabella stared at her. What kind of secret? Dr.
Voss looked at Ethan. Ethan looked at the car. The kind, he said, that changes things. The drive home from the estate that Tuesday evening took 40 minutes longer than usual because of a backup on the highway, and Ethan sat in the stopped traffic with his hands on the wheel and the radio off, replaying the last 4 hours in his head. Dr.
