Chapter 7
London, one month before the murder
“I can’t believe you kept this a secret from me,” Wesley Walters muttered through gritted teeth.
“But Wes, I’m telling you now, you don’t have to be so worked up,” William Blackwell IV said casually. He swung both his legs to the side of the bed, thrust his feet in his suede slippers and shuffled to the bathroom.
“Worked up? You mean worked hard. We’re partners, we’re supposed to be in this together—for the good of the gallery.”
“You mean your gallery, which I financed.” Blackwell’s sarcasm came through the half-shut bathroom door before the shower squeaked on.
“We agreed the replica should stay true to the original to be an iconic piece for the gallery. But you decided to use a cheap piece of garnet . . .” Walters raised his voice from a grumble, but quickly realized for the moment he might as well be yelling at himself. Blackwell could not have heard him with water splashing in the shower stall. He decided to wait. I’ll give the cheap son of a bitch a piece of my mind when he comes out.
On the bedside table, a pack of Dunhill Menthol was placed next to a vintage gold cigarette lighter. I could definitely use one. As the smooth menthol wound its way down his throat, the smoldering anger in his chest cooled. He’d never been a smoker until Blackwell came into his life two years ago. He remembered it was after the first time they’d had sex. It was in the same bed on which he was currently sitting. He’d groaned that he’d never had more blood-rushing, heart-thumping sex before.
“Good, have one of these, it’s euphoric.” Blackwell had tossed a pack of Dunhill at him after he’d lit one for himself.
“You got to be kidding, Dunhill Menthol? It’s a chick cigarette,” Walters had said incredulously. But in the end, he’d admitted that the effect was blissful, even more so since it was recommended by the man lying next to him—his soul mate.
Recently though, his soul mate seemed to be drifting away, becoming a stranger. William wasn’t a legal partner of the W Gallery, but Walters couldn’t let him pull back his periodic cash infusion to the gallery. Besides, more important than losing money, he couldn’t afford to lose the Blackwell name—the renowned art patron of Her Majesty’s United Kingdom. His gallery’s elite status depended on it. The art world of New York City ate up that kind of hype like Russian Beluga caviar with Moët & Chandon White Gold Champagne, which had been served up lavishly for every event and exhibition at his gallery.
Walters blew out a plume of smoke, watching as it twirled up and faded into the ceiling twelve feet above. But honestly, it’s not just his money and fame I’ve loved. Two years ago, when Blackwell wandered into his gallery in an old walk-up tenement building above a dumpling shop in Chinatown, Walters had no idea he was about to befriend one of London’s most rich and famous. At that time, Walters’s gallery had been open for a little over a year, and he had yet to sell a painting that was in the four-figure range. He’d been hopeful seeing Blackwell standing in front of one of his most expensive paintings, seemingly engrossed— Inferno.
Cautiously approaching his potential client Walters had said, “Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Blackwell agreed, without looking away from the painting.
“It’s Hell on earth. From what I can see, the artist should’ve called it Armageddon. And he picked a very suitable medium for it, watercolor.”
“It’s rather shocking, visually,” Blackwell had said, eyes still scanning the painting which depicted clusters of chaos and devastation—industrial chimneys billowing choking smoke, dead fish floating in a black river, animal carcasses scattered in pools of rusty factory discharge.
“It is, considering the color scheme—black, white, layers of grey with dashes of red and orange, and of course, the watercolor could also be manipulated to render a melt-down effect . . .” Walters had elaborated.
“I see the artist is also saying mankind is the direct cause of all these miseries,” Blackwell said, pointing at the middle of the canvas where naked human bodies jumbled in knots, writhing in pain, their mouths open, gasping for air.
“I believe the artist is saying we humans have rationalized the degradation of the ecosystem for so long that we’re on the verge of sealing our own fate—to be condemned eternally in a pit of darkness.”
“Dramatic, certainly grabs our attention. But personally, I think it’s a great museum piece, not sure I’d like to have it on the wall in my home,” Blackwell said, smiling, looking at Walters directly in the eye. “By the way, I’m William Blackwell.”
William didn’t buy the painting, but it was the beginning of their unusual relationship. Now, recalling that day still made Walters’s heart swell with tenderness.
The shower faucet screeched, the water stopped running. William emerged from the bathroom with only a white Turkish towel around his waist. “I’m sorry, Wes, if I was cross with you. Of course we’re partners, not just for the gallery, you know that.” He leaped into bed with a grin. “Let’s not quarrel anymore and get ready for a splendid evening. The world is waiting for the unveiling of the famous, or the infamous, Empress Seal.”
“Yeah, we planned for this quite well, didn’t we,” Walters said, stroking the top of the wet head now resting on his chest. “Handing the seal back is a small fortune to pay for the fame and notoriety coming your way.”
“I disagree, fame and notoriety are not what I’m after in this particular matter. All this publicity has made the Empress Seal a curse. If it remains under the Blackwell name I might as well be walking around with the word “thief” branded on my forehead. And those ghastly hypocrites of the fine art society, feigning shock and outrage one day and begging for my donation check the next. I think it’s time for me to say good riddance to all of them,” Blackwell said without looking up, his fingers twirling the matted hair on Walters’s chest.
Walters could hear the indignance in his soulmate’s voice and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. The often insecure and sometimes childish William seemed to have become more of his own man.
Walters didn’t like it.
“I hope your good riddance doesn’t apply to me. You know you’re the only man I’ve ever loved,” Walters said softly, but it sounded more like desperation than tenderness. He regretted it the second it came out of his mouth.
“I know, Wes, but you know I love women, too,” William said light-heartedly as he jumped out of the bed. “I need to get ready and pick up Gerel at the hotel. See you later at the Tate?”
“I thought we were going together.” Anger smoldered inside him again.
“Come on, Wes, I invited Gerel as my guest, and I simply cannot let her take a cab to the Tate all by her lonesome. Besides, aren’t you supposed to accompany Simone to the ceremony as a gentleman?” William gave Walters a crooked smile and padded to the closet.
Walters hated that smile—William’s passive-aggressive smile. And he’d been flashing it quite often lately. Walters wanted nothing more than to bite that snotty son-of-a-bitch’s head off, literally, or may be pommeling it would be more satisfying.
Walters circled that image with a puff of cigarette smoke and mumbled his protest, “I believe the ladies could take care of themselves. But I’m warning you, William, don’t have too many ideas about Gerel . . .”
“Why?” William questioned impetuously. “What do you have against her? I think she’s quite intriguing.”
“Precisely, she has that air—unfathomable but dangerous . . .”
“Don’t be so bloody dramatic. How do I look?” William hopped out of the closet sporting a deep blue Gieves & Hawkes velvet shawl-collar evening jacket, a white tuxedo shirt and black bow tie.
“Dapper, a style preferred by both Winston Churchill and David Beckham, you’ll outshine the Empress Seal itself tonight.”
“It’s settled then. See you later,” William said, heading toward the bedroom door.
“I’m saying this one last time, William
, be careful.”
“About what? Gerel’s not a devil, she’s just different, and I like to experiment with something different. If memory serves me correctly, that’s how you and I got together, right?” William said, swinging around to the side of the bed where Walters had propped himself on two giant down pillows, the Dunhill wedged between his fingers, almost burned to the butt. “Now relax. I’ll see you at the party,” William said, hinging forward, brushing his lips lightly on Walters’s forehead.
Walters watched William’s patent black derby shoes spring out of the room, heard him whistle down the stairs. A moment later, the front door clunked open, then shut. Walters sprang out of bed and stepped to the bedroom window, peering down at the street in front of the house. William was climbing into the driver’s side of his black Jaguar sedan. The car pulled away and rounded off a corner seconds later.
He wants to impress that bitch so much he’s picking her up personally. Strangely, the rage William had provoked in Walters seemed to be cooling off. A chill was taking hold in his core and running off to the rest of his body. It’s the feeling of loneliness coloring your heart, bleeding blues into your entire existence.
Walters had never been threatened by William’s collection of women. But it was always temporary. With his old money, boyish charm, and perceived artistic flair, William was used to having women throw themselves at his feet, probably since he was a teenager.
But his own relationship with William was different, special.
On that day, in his dingy gallery in Chinatown, something else other than their like-minded appreciation for art had attracted them to each other. When their friendship was still budding, they’d felt quite comfortable revealing their sexual quirks and fantasies to each other. He’d openly admitted to William that the love from the deepest corner of his heart was reserved for men, though the search for that particular man—a soulmate—had proven quite a challenge. At the same time, he had occasionally bent to his carnal desire with a less deserving fellow, or even one of the opposite sex. Walters remembered he and William were sitting at an outdoor table of a mid-town bistro, enjoying a glass of wine on a sunny spring afternoon as he revealed the secret to his new friend. Walters found William easy to be around. He was a kindred spirit on so many levels. Judging by the way William had held his gaze at that moment, he knew the feeling was mutual.
“Wes,” William had said affectionately, reaching across the table, laying one hand on top of his friend’s. “I understand exactly what you’re saying. Women are the objects of my affection but so far not a single one could fit into that special corner of my heart.” He patted his chest, giving Walters a smile, the smile of a naïve young boy. “But who’s to say the deepest love is only the kind between a man and a woman? There’s also brotherly love, the kind not forged by blood or the same surname alone.”
What followed that day had exceeded Walters’s wildest dreams. William’s deep pockets carried his gallery to one of the most prestigious addresses in mid-town Manhattan. The W Gallery quickly expanded its inventory to include paintings by Chinese artists. The gallery had adopted a clever theme for the collection—documentation of the rapid development of Chinese urban life in which everything seemed to be temporary. Critics labelled the paintings odd, schizophrenic. Yet they’d been selling at a rather brisk pace, at prices that sometimes made Walters feel guilty. But hey, give the customers what they want, was William’s take on it. Though William had considered those paintings dreadful, he was open to experimenting with this new genre.
But contemporary Chinese paintings were not the only new thing with which William experimented. The kindred spirit between them soon crossed the platonic line. To Walters, the union of their souls had been cemented by the union of their flesh. And yet, William’s experiment kept going. They included Simone, and occasionally other high-priced female companionship. Those nights included the opposite sex when they began, but it was only he and William that woke up in bed together the morning after. Soon, Walters was pretty sure he never had to worry about the women William chose to be with. They were there to satisfy William’s vanity and wanton desire. But the bond between him and William was above human primeval instincts. He’d thought William knew that, too.
But it seemed different with that conniving bitch Gerel Garnier. As usual, William was smitten the first time he saw Gerel. Walters wasn’t surprised. Her refined yet exotic look, that continental accent, definitely William’s type. Give him a few weeks, he may have a fling with her, but this one shall also pass. Once the original seal leaves for China, he may not even remember her name, Walters told himself.
But it had been over a month now and William’s interest in Gerel showed no sign of abating. In fact, William practically drooled at the mere mention of Gerel’s name like a dog over a piece of meat, so close but beyond reach.
Walters wanted to puke.
Since William’s first meeting with Gerel in London when she’d delivered the replicated seal to his townhome, he had not spent a single day in New York. Yet he’d been to Paris twice, presumably seeking Gerel’s expert advice regarding his nineteenth century Qing Dynasty art collection. Walters wished William could be more frank with him—stop bullshitting me, just tell me you want to fuck her.
Then William dropped a bomb. He’d not only invited Gerel as his guest to the ceremony at Tate, he’d also wanted her to accompany him to the seal’s homecoming ceremony in Beijing. A siren had been shrieking in Walters’s head ever since. Last night when he and Simone had dinner at the Riz with Gerel and William, Walters had caught the way William looked at Gerel. It was not just lust, it was the look of a silly starry-eyed schoolboy gazing at his crush across the playground.
It was horrifying.
Walters sighed heavily. An old yet familiar sensation crept up in his chest, the haunting feeling of loneliness, a twinge that nipped at his heart in the small hours of night.
Gerel Garnier would steal William’s love and affection and, if she hadn’t already, his money.
Why? God made me gay, but did He have to make women my enemies? Women had been the cause of so much unhappiness and misery in his life.
As a young boy, Walters had adored his father, a college art professor. He didn’t understand why his mother constantly called her husband a degenerate. Walters didn’t know what it meant but it sounded bad. It had to be a bad word because Dad often had that look, the look of shame and guilt. Young Wesley didn’t understand why. To him, his dad was beautiful, he’d introduced his son to the most beautiful art man had created—paintings by the master impressionists. To this day, Walters could still recall that moment vividly when he’d first seen a master painting. He and his dad in front of Monet’s Sunrise at the Metropolitan Museum. How Dad explained that the artist’s brush strokes were short and broken, the bright and varied use of color expressing the play of light, capturing the fleeting moment of nature’s beauty. Dad was a man who loved beauty. A man who loved beauty shouldn’t have lived in shame and guilt. But Dad died of a bad heart when Wesley was only seventeen. Walters had always thought it was because his heart couldn’t bear the burden anymore.
In time, Walters came to know what a degenerate was, and the shame and guilt that came along with it. He could see the way his own mother looked at him: horror, disgust, revulsion. But was it his fault? Was it Dad’s fault?
Wesley Walters was his dad’s son, art touched him, made him think, feel alive. When his dad died, though, he seemed to have taken the bright moments in Wesley’s life with him, those fleeting, light-infused moments captured on canvas. Wesley was never able to see them again. In art and in life, Wesley Walters was drawn to darker themes of man’s struggle when facing the menacing force of something he couldn’t control. But he would not be like his dad, he would not be destroyed without fighting back.
But did he? Did he truly fight back and come out a winner?
The sad truth was that in the process of building his carefully planned life, he’d locked his sex
uality in his physical body—that prized image of male virility.
Then came William. For the first time, Walters felt he could shake off his bondage. He’d welcomed the idea—Wesley Walters, the lover of Britain’s famed William Blackwell. He’d imagined the publicity and what it could do to his life. Nothing but elevate it. But William seemed to want to keep the amorous aspect of their relationship under wraps, limiting their rendezvous to the confines of his Manhattan condo or London townhome. Not what Walters had wanted exactly, but William’s checkbook made up for the difference.
But now, that French slut . . .
The grandfather clock downstairs chimed solemnly, five times. Perhaps there’s something I can do to salvage the situation. But right now, he had another place to go and one person—maybe an important person—to see. After that, he’d pick up Simone and together they’d set their feet on the polished marble floors of the Tate Museum.
Chapter 8
London, two weeks before the murder
In her Ritz-Carlton suite in London’s vibrant Piccadilly, Madam Jin stood by a large window, the oasis of the Royal Green Park stretching in front of her into the distant dusky sky. She was a statuesque woman of about fifty years old. She’d just donned a floor-length red Alexander McQueen evening gown with imposing square shoulders, a V-neckline, and crystal diamanté embroidery on the cuffs. The dress, created by Britain’s celebrated late designer Alexander McQueen, was a last-minute decision. Madam Jin would have preferred the classic ball gown of China—the qipao, a form-fitting silk dress with side slits and a high mandarin collar. After all, she’d be the face of China at the fanfare about to take place a few kilometers away, reclaiming yet another long-lost Chinese treasure—the Empress Seal. She had put the qipao on but changed her mind. Regardless of how the Empress Seal had ended up in Britain, the fact that William Blackwell IV had agreed to return it to China was admirable. She was not a politician, just a private Chinese citizen, though a very wealthy one, who’d secretly made recovering lost or plundered Chinese treasures her mission. To her closest friends, she was Madam 寻宝,Madam Treasure Scout. To the general public she was the patron of China’s blossoming art world who had a penchant for collecting fine art. In a way, she was the William Blackwell IV of China. But at this evening’s ceremony, she would be accepting the Empress Seal as a distinguished private citizen on behalf of the people of China. She would not be making grandiose speeches like a bureaucrat trying to score political points. She was there to witness a historical event. Wearing an Alexander McQueen gown would be a classy gesture, a token of her personal commitment to the cultural exchange between the two countries.
The Face of the Seal Page 8