The Erben Ultimatum
A climate-controlled appraisal room at Christie's satellite office in Louisville, Kentucky at 10:15 AM on the following Tuesday, where three Henry Erben cherrywood facade pipes are lying on a felt-lined table under halogen lights and a woman in a charcoal blazer has just slid a contract across the desk.
The $340,000 appraisal has attracted attention. Christie's is offering to broker a private sale to a collector in Geneva for $410,000 — but only if all three pipes ship together within 72 hours, because the buyer is closing his estate catalog on Friday. The catch: the county historical society says the $14,000 relocation fee entitled them to ownership of the organ and everything attached to it, and their lawyer faxed a cease-and-desist to the church board president forty minutes ago. The church board president — the same one who handed Double the cordless drill — is now sitting in the parking lot refusing to answer his phone, and the Christie's rep says if the provenance paperwork isn't clean by noon Thursday, the Geneva buyer walks.
“We saved those pipes from becoming kindling! Nobody gets to fax their way into $410,000 that exists because I own a drill.”
“The man who authorized the extraction is hiding in a Buick, and you want to fight a provenance dispute in 52 hours.”
The church board president finally emerged from the Buick at 4 PM Wednesday — not to sign the provenance paperwork, but to hand-deliver a notarized letter from the historical society's lawyer asserting co-ownership of all extracted materials, which Christie's flagged as a title defect seventeen minutes before the Geneva buyer's deadline. The collector bought a different set of Erben pipes from a church in Albany that had its paperwork in a filing cabinet like normal people.
Those Albany pipes don't even have the original cherrywood — that guy's paying $410,000 for VENEER.
We lost a six-figure sale because our chain of title depended on a man who locked himself in a sedan to avoid responsibility.