Billionaire Called Her Driver Into the Auction as a Joke — Then He Raised the Paddle and Everyone Froze
Chapter 10
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Caleb had been sitting in a kitchen in Dutchess County with a cold cup of tea, and he had read it twice, and then he had typed a reply of two words, put on his coat, and gotten into his truck. The reply had said simply:Buy it.Nolan had put the phone back in his coat pocket and had not looked at it again for the rest of the night.When the shape of this reached Preston Blackwood, he understood that he had not been bidding against a servant who had lost his grip on reality, but against the only man in the ballroom who knew what the car was.He made one more attempt to stay standing, and he made it in front of an audience of about 30 people who had drifted toward the alcove the way crowds drift toward noise: he said loudly that none of this changed anything. So the driver had a benefactor and a hobby—they had still just paid $1.5 million for a rotted shell with no engine in it and a title that no insurer in the country would write. He asked whether anybody in the room would like to explain how that was a victory.Nolan opened the folder on the console table beside the fig tree. He was not theatrical about it, and he did not look at Preston while he did it. Among the photocopies near the back of the file, behind the transfer documents, there was a photograph that had been reproduced so many times it had lost most of its midtones: it showed a dark car on a gravel apron outside a low industrial building, three men standing beside it, one of them holding a clipboard. Every serious bidder in the room had flipped past that page on the way to the title history.Nolan put his finger on the rear plate. It was not a road registration; it was a manufacturer test plate issued to shops running unregistered vehicles on closed surfaces. And the number stamped on it corresponded to a series that had been retired in 1969.Caleb leaned over the file, put on a pair of reading glasses that he fished from his breast pocket, looked at it for a long moment, and said that he would be damned. He said that he had heard about that plate series his entire career and had never once seen it in a photograph.What that photograph implied, Nolan explained to the half-circle of people who had gone very quiet, was that the car had operated as a development vehicle for a performance configuration that never carried a production name, and that the surviving documentation for that program was essentially nonexistent. If the chain could be authenticated completely—chassis number, test plate, fabrication records, and the firewall bracket together—the car's value after a correct restoration would sit in a different category entirely from what the room had been laughing at an hour earlier.Somebody near the back said a number out loud; Nolan did not confirm it.