by Janice Law
“There will be a fee …”
“I have cash,” Edith said. “You don’t need to stay.”
I saw there would be no escape from the Machine from Hell. I thanked the doctor, who grunted in acknowledgment. Out the door, onto the bike, which I must confess was a great deal easier to ride solo. By this time, the rain was pelting down, but I didn’t mind that. Between the water falling from the sky and the puddles splashing up from the road, I was sure any telltale blood would be long gone before I returned the machine.
I was wet and miserable and an accessory to a capital crime. On the plus side, I’d lost a dangerous enemy, leaving only Goldfarber’s “eternal enemies” to worry me.
One of them I would just have to avoid. I took care of the other the next morning, after I got home on the first train after the Underground opened.
I sent a telegram to Richard: Goldfarber dead. Stop. Paintings sold. Stop.
I signed it Jerome Hume.
Chapter Seventeen
For some time, I expected a knock on the door, a not so friendly pair of detectives, and an invitation to assist with police inquiries. I knew that there had been people in the park, and I struggled to remember the dim shapes of drunks on the benches, of lovers under the trees, and of hopefuls along the shrubberies. And cars. Hadn’t there been a couple of cars? They’d passed us at a distance, but still I opened the papers each morning with trepidation and turned to the crime news as eagerly as my old nan used to do.
Naturally, the Hugo Kovar killing was featured. The Telegraph’s article Reclusive Collector Shot after Big Payday will give you a feel of the headlines. The combination of serious money, a mysterious collector, and a violent death on the very night of a big glossy auction was almost irresistible. I was not surprised by the photos, by the police statements, or even by the speculations about Kovar and his relationship to the art market.
What surprised me was what was missing. Every morning and every afternoon and every evening, with every edition of every paper, I expected to read an appeal to “the cyclist seen riding through the park” or to “the man in the leather jacket seen in the vicinity” of Kovar’s body.
So, although not exactly a nervous type, I turned daily to the Kovar story and its follow-up articles, convinced that I was going to be found out. Couple Spotted on Bike Following Regent’s Park Fatal Shooting—that’s the sort of thing I expected. Or Witness Puts Mystery Man in Leather Jacket at Crime Scene. But no. We got a request for information from members of the public who were in Regent’s Park on the night in question, a vague appeal that was not going to bring too many folks out of the groves or from under the rhododendrons.
Indeed, for all intents and purposes, I was now better off, because my own private eye had taken a powder, met a terrible fate, or been called off the case. No more shadow near the end of our street. No more chubby silhouette at Tube entrances, no more footsteps ringing behind me in the night. I was on my own, and I was convinced that Goldfarber had lied. He’d hired the detective, and if I hadn’t been alert and made the first move, I’d have come to grief one dark night. I was sure of it.
Just the same, I practiced a new and unwelcome caution. For weeks afterward, I walked on the inner side of sidewalks and was spooked by large, dark sedans. I even avoided some of my favorite locales at my favorite time of night, lest a large car roll up beside me and stocky, powerful men in bad suits pop out to grab me.
This was not a good frame of mind for yours truly, and I decided on a holiday to Cornwall, of all places. And of all the places in Cornwall, St. Ives, a so-called artists’ colony, full of earnest landscape painters and daubers who traffic in local color and picturesque fishermen. Traffic in actual fishermen, I can quite see, but pictorially, never ever. It was the last place anyone who knew me would expect me to go, combining as it did the countryside, the beach, and a bunch of realists and/or abstractionists. It was, therefore, perfect.
I packed my kit, took some canvases, and promised my dealer that I would return with the goods in time for my show. I rented a cottage with a leaky roof that set off my asthma, and freed of the distraction of extra editions and aggressive newsboys, I buckled down to work. I had Muybridge’s photos for inspiration, but I kept seeing a big, burly man in a good suit, and when I was finished with my wrestling men, I began to paint him. Dark against a midnight-blue ground and wearing a blue suit, he sat in some anonymous place. An airline terminal. A railroad lounge. A half-deserted bar. He had heavy features and black hair, and though I hadn’t a photograph or any reference sketches, I knew that he was Goldfarber. That was all right; he owed me something. Definitely, he did.
I did several paintings of him. This was during the day. At night, I drank with the other painters, our artistic differences laid aside the minute we crossed the threshold of the local pub. Altogether it was a productive time. After six weeks, I got a carpenter to put together a shipping crate, and I sent my work up to London. My dealer was delighted; my show went well. It looked as if I had laid old demons to rest and was living a grown-up, sensible sort of life.
That couldn’t last, could it? It may be, as Nan used to say, that some people can’t stand prosperity. Maybe I am one of them, but I couldn’t help thinking about Edith Angleford and wondering where she was and what would become of her. I hadn’t heard from her, which was not surprising and smart under the circumstances. I did go past her rented flat one day and noticed a for let sign in the window, so she had gone and prudently, too, although the Hugo Kovar murder had long ceased to occupy the public prints.
But I’d been impressed with her devotion, and her example made me feel a little guilty, a little lacking. And then, I missed David, who rarely answered my letters, and the news I got about him from friends in the Zone was always scanty and never good. The day I got the first sales check from my gallery, I went straight to Thomas Cook’s and bought a ticket to Tangier.
Up the Mountain in the velvet night, spring flowers blooming and a warm Mediterranean breeze. The American poet was leaning out the window of the cab to declaim his famous poem, which is very good in its own hysterical and hyperbolic way, hysterical and hyperbolic considering that most of the twentieth century’s horrors had passed over him, personally, and over his fortunate country, generally. I didn’t mention that, being fully occupied with the equally famous American novelist who is bending my ear about the “end of Tangier,” by which he meant its upcoming incorporation into the Kingdom of Morocco and the end of the glorious Kingdom of Misrule, which had been his home for several years.
We were riding squeezed in beside my pal, the Moroccan painter, who was doing well enough now to import his own canvas and paints. He was with his mentor and patron, an older expat composer. The latter whistled a new tune, while the painter tapped out the rhythm on his knees and added little encouraging shouts and hoots, and everyone was merry except me. I’d gone straight from the airport to see David, a visit that had not gone well. I’d arrived with money in my pocket and thoughts of paying his debts and getting him on a plane for London.
He wanted no part of that plan. In retrospect, I’d been crazy to hope. When we first met, David had been rich and independent, while I had been, if not absolutely poor, subject to all the ups and downs of an irregular artistic income. Now he was relying on the piano bar to keep him in whiskey, while I was making good money off paintings he detested. I’d loved him, loved him still, but he only enjoyed my company when he could be in control and make me suffer.
And at that moment, everything in his life beyond the keyboard was out of control. So he was off to play the night away at the Meridian, and I was bound for the Mountain and a party given by my former acquaintance and maybe present enemy, Richard Alleyn. It should be an interesting evening.
We paid the cabbie and entered the pretty courtyard with lights glowing amid the trees and reflecting in the fountain. Inside the house, we were back in the old Tangier with
most of the old crowd, with champagne and kef and majoun and brandy cocktails, with gossip and flirtation and politics. I kept an eye out for Harry from the consulate and MI6, but there was a different fellow representing Her Majesty. This one was also blond and fit and bland of feature; they must order them in bulk from Oxbridge.
I set up shop near the champagne tray, waved to old friends, and collected congratulations on my show, thus spreading as much cheer as I was able. I had almost reached a good alcohol level when I spotted Edith Angleford, and champagne-cushioned or not, I got a little shock. Sometimes when you are painting you sense that there is something wrong with the design, something you can’t quite put your finger on. You turn the picture upside down or check it in a mirror or a Claude glass, and suddenly with the change in perspective, the error jumps out at you.
That’s what I felt when I saw Edith Angleford. She was out of place, somehow, although she was well known in the Zone, although David had been friends with her late husband, although most of the foreign colony had come to his funeral. Just the same, I saw her, and I was suddenly as sober as I was likely to be. I made my way across the room to where she was standing, momentarily alone, examining one of Richard’s paintings.
It was hung in a lighted alcove, and when she moved her head to see who was approaching, I saw that it was the Marie-Thérèse “Picasso” I’d done in emulsion.
“Hello, Mrs. Angleford.” She was wearing a black cocktail dress with a low-cut neck but half sleeves to conceal what I guessed must be a nasty bullet scar. “How are you?”
“Mr. Bacon.” She extended her hand, brown from the sun. The fingers were strong, but I could not help noticing that her arm was a trifle stiff.
“You have recovered,” I said.
“After a fashion. I’m no longer the best shot in Morocco.”
“I am sorry to hear that.”
“It could have been worse.” She took a sip of her drink. “But I never thanked you. If you didn’t save my life, you certainly saved me from”—she groped for the right term—“real unpleasantness.”
I thought that a murder charge could easily fall under that heading. “Thanks would have been indiscreet. Besides, if you hadn’t come by on the bike, I might well have been skewered.”
“Oh, yes. Goldfarber, Kovar, whatever his name, would surely have killed you. As quick as he killed Jonathan.”
Her face tightened into a tragic mask. Although I was beginning to have my doubts about her, her passion was genuine. When she turned and walked down the hallway, I followed. She did not speak again until we had stepped out into the garden, where the smell of kef mingled with some sweet, night-blooming plant. The moon was big overhead, and we were momentarily alone.
“I only wonder why Goldfarber hadn’t acted sooner. He’d had me followed, you know.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. By a little fat private detective, surprisingly fast on his feet.”
I saw her teeth white in the moonlight as she smiled for the first time. “Homer would be pleased you recognized his turn of foot.”
“Homer? You know him?”
“I hired him.”
“You hired a private detective to spy on me?” This put a different complexion on the whole affair. Goldfarber hadn’t lied, and I guessed that the KGB had forgotten all about Jerome Hume.
“Sometimes the indirect approach is best,” she said. Her voice was calm, without the brittle quality I’d detected inside. “I knew Goldfarber would contact you sooner or later.”
“How did you know that?”
“You’d visited his ‘studio’; you found Jonathan there. And you’re a painter.”
“No,” I said, and I saw a quite different pattern. “The world is full of painters. You knew about Richard’s scheme. You must have. And you must have known that Goldfarber was laundering money from the—”
She interrupted me. “Do not be indiscreet, Mr. Bacon. Not here.”
“Your husband wasn’t a double agent,” I said. “He wasn’t an agent at all.”
“One of life’s little annoyances is how rarely men listen to women. I told you at the start that Jonathan was an idealist. That he believed in Morocco, in Moroccans, in their independence.”
“And you believed in other things and had other contacts.” I understood now how she had gotten out of London, how certain lines of investigation had been neglected. “You were working for Richard all along. Keeping tabs on Moroccan organizations through your husband, I don’t doubt.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“I am responsible for his death,” she said after a moment. Her voice was a mere whisper in the darkness, and for an instant I was unsure if she had really spoken. “They found out about my activities. Past activities, Mr. Bacon, not present. And not anything I can discuss. But Goldfarber and his contacts suspected Jonathan, though he was entirely innocent.”
Entire innocence is not a concept I subscribe to, but allowing for exaggeration, I understood why she had been so distraught and so bent on revenge. “Did your husband know anything about your past ‘activities’?”
“Not really. He didn’t want to know. The war required so many compromises. He got out and wanted life to be straightforward black and white with no shades of gray.”
“Some of us are strictly shades of gray,” I said.
She nodded.
“They protected you in London. MI6 or whatever they’re called there. They saw you got away.”
“No, Mr. Bacon. You saw that I got away. And I’m grateful. Had we been stopped, you’d have been in serious trouble. And I suspect the only defense you could have mounted would have ruined your career.”
“I only got you as far as the doctor’s, and here you are, safe in Tangier with no sign of prosecution and in good odor with Her Majesty’s spy corps.”
“Our interests were momentarily aligned,” she said calmly. “That does sometimes happen. They wanted Goldfarber.”
“Why? Why did they want him?”
“You probably know that better than I do.”
“But dead? If your husband was not working for MI6, revenge didn’t come into it, did it?”
“You’d have to ask Richard. But wasn’t Goldfarber already of interest to the police?”
Too right, which brought us to the murder of an earlier forger, my predecessor, the “Spanish boy,” who was neither a boy nor Spanish. Though our acquaintance was limited to a couple of black-and-white police photos, he was the reason that I’d become entangled in Zone police matters and with not one, but two spy services. Possibly he, rather than Jonathan Angleford, had been working both sides, and it was his death, instead of Angleford’s, that was crucial.
“You understand,” she added in a more reflective tone, “a murder trial would not have been in anyone’s interest. Grieving widows are effective on the stand and inclined to be reckless. I wouldn’t have worried overmuch about the Official Secrets Act if I were on my way to the gallows.”
“Gallows! Dear lady, don’t speak of such things!” Richard exclaimed. He was standing silhouetted against the lights of the hallway with only the red tip of his cheroot lighting his face. For a large man, he was surprisingly soft-footed, and though his bantering tone suggested full party mode, I wondered how much of our conversation he’d overheard.
“And Francis, too.” His voice chilled by several degrees.
I thought that he might throw me out, but Edith said, “I have reason to be grateful to Mr. Bacon. How strange life is, Richard. You know, I once threatened to shoot him.” She raised her left undamaged arm to pat him on the shoulder, then walked into the house leaving us alone.
Richard drew on his cigar and blew out a cloud of smoke. We watched it eddy over the palms and mimosas and dissolve into the moonlight. “What are you doing here?” he asked in what I thought of as his official voice.
“Why, sampling the delights of Tangier.”
“This is not a healthy place for you.”
“Yet I have been impressed with the care you’ve taken of Mrs. Angleford. Even an amateur can see that someone fixed the case in London.”
“Edith Angleford has deserved Her Majesty’s gratitude.”
“I feel slighted, Richard. I truly do. Surely Her Majesty hasn’t been informed of my contributions.”
“Some things, dear boy, are best left unsaid.” He was silent for a moment. “Those paintings made some price in London.”
“I was in the auction room. In spite of myself, I thought they looked impressive.”
Richard gave a reflective, “Hmmm,” and I remembered rumors that even his inheritance was hard-pressed to sustain these lavish parties.
“Don’t even think about the one in the hallway. You don’t have Goldfarber’s skill. The provenances were ironclad. He had everything but Picasso’s prints on the canvas, and if he’d been able to cut off one of the old man’s fingers, he’d have had that, too. And he’d removed my initials. Yes, yes, I’d thought to protect myself, but he spotted them.”
“There were two paintings in the auction,” Richard said, almost too casually. “What happened to the other two?”
“Don’t know. Goldfarber took three. One was left behind—unfinished and too wet to move. If Tony Coates, Mrs. Angleford’s yachtsman, survived, maybe he took it. That’s why he was there—he was going to sic Edith on me if he didn’t get one. If he didn’t make it or didn’t get off the floor soon enough, there are other possibilities.” I waited a beat and added, “I don’t see Harry here tonight—or is that just a coincidence?”
“Officers are rotated regularly,” Richard said stiffly. I thought there was a good chance that either Harry or Elena had made off with the almost finished Picasso. Too bad for Tony; he’d have to think of another way to pay off his debts on The Aurora.