like a wooden liver.

pièce de résistance

Danforth looks a little strange in the blue jumpsuit, his round metal spectacles and pushbroom mustache suggesting a tweed jacket that’s nowhere to be found. We park the semi-trailer in the dirt driveway. It’s one of the trucks with the flat bed and metal supports on the sides you might see carrying lumber. This one’s empty.

The house looks to be a hundred and fifty years old, unmistakable in this countryside of farms and tractors. The window next to the door is cracked, so it’s no big effort for Danforth to wrap his hand in a handkerchief and punch a little opening in the glass to reach in and unbolt the door. He’s a man of many skills.

The house is empty, and we have to be careful to wipe away the footprints our boots leave in the thick dust. To look at this run-down Victorian eyesore you wouldn’t know the owner paid 2.5 million for it at an auction last spring. There are rich people who collect old houses the way kids collect baseball cards. Renaults, Marzinis, a Mennot here and there. Like Baseball cards, it’s about the condition and the name, not about any practical use.

Sometimes the antique furniture in these places is worth more than the house itself. But when a piece of furniture is so rare there’s an article about it in a collector’s magazine, it’s hard to fence.

The banister curves up to the second floor, a spiral that extends to a hallway and runs about 35 feet in length. We start to work with our hacksaws and piles of old blankets, leaving a few inches of each post connected to the main piece. After all, we’re not carpenters and we don’t want to do any irreparable damage.

The difficulty lies in the length and the awkwardness. If we could cut it into sections, it would be an easy job, but that would render it worthless.

It takes maybe two hours, but we’ve removed the banister entirely, and it sits on the sitting room’s expansive hardwood floor like a quilted, lumpy anaconda. The next challenge is to maneuver this heavy monstrosity through the door. It’s deceptively heavy, and the weight and balance are distributed awkwardly. Danforth is sweating from the effort.

I remember the first time I met him; he was standing in front of the Historical Society on the edge of town, sneaking a cigarette. I was delivering a package, so I stopped to burn a square with him and, after a few minutes of talking, he told me about this little venture, and we’ve been doing this ever since.

After some work, we finally get it into the back of the truck, and it coils to fill the entire dimensions of the back. We use a few chains and maybe two dozen bungee cords to get it secured, and we then go back to make sure we didn’t leave anything behind, including fingerprints and footprints.

What struck me about the idea was the sheer boldness of it, to work in daylight and never be suspected. Our go-between is this ratty real estate agent who knows all the key players. He finds the buyers and tells us where to find each house and its pièce de résistance. We get the trucks and tools together, and it’s up to the buyer to find contractors willing to install whatever we bring them.

Most of these houses are famous for one thing, one stunning little innovative twist the architect added as a demonstration of skill. Though the buyers always pass them off as reproductions to their guests, they must get some perverse satisfaction from having the originals, these plundered organs of living historical monuments.

It takes three hours to drive to the estate of the buyer. He’s left open the door to a stand-alone garage and we unchain the swaddled wooden leviathan and put it in there. It seems nobody’s home, so we leave the blankets as a gift.

It’s getting dark when we finally make it to the office where our shady double agent works. We count out the money in stacks on his desk. Danforth and I split the thirty grand between us, never knowing what’s already been deducted as a finder’s fee. In a legitimate market, the banister might’ve gone for a hundred thousand--even two--but we’re willing to settle with what we’ve got.

Not bad for a day’s work.