Domina

by L. S. Hilton

  ‘What is it? Are you OK?’

  He stopped dead and pointed. Then I saw why I hadn’t recognised the sound, because I’d never heard a body hit a pavement from six storeys up before.

  ‘Is that Edouard’s building?’ I hissed.

  He pointed again, his mouth moving in spasm.

  ‘Come. Come now.’

  I dragged him by his sleeve past the huddle of bystanders, all of them talking at once. Someone was holding their phone towards the body, a man was kneeling, trying to cover it with his coat while another held the screaming woman awkwardly in his arms. I saw a dark jacket sleeve, a gold watch fastened around the wrist. Maybe Timothy recognised the watch; he was still pointing, frozen, his mouth still working silently. I don’t know how else he could have known his lover, because Guiche’s head had exploded like a pumpkin on the cobbles.

  A thick stream of blood pulsed towards the gutter. The woman, I realised, must have been passing just at the moment of impact, she was striped with it from her knees to her forehead, as though she had leaned forward over a fountain. Even her neat, morning-ready hair was delicately stippled with magenta. For a moment we were arrested there, all of us, unlucky witnesses to a martyrdom.

  *

  The scene around me was unrolling in slow motion, inversely proportional to the speed of my thoughts. Three things: One, I had been right; Two, we were too late; and three, if Guiche had jumped, odds were his flat would be empty. If he had been pushed, whoever did the pushing was unlikely to be still in there. There was enough chaos to cover us, and the door of the building stood open. I dived for the stairs, pulling Timothy by the wrist, one flight, two.

  ‘Which way? Fifth floor?’ I knew the answer. Timothy had told me about the wonderful view. The treads were carpeted in a thick red fabric set with old-fashioned brass rods. We mounted silently except for Timothy’s strangled breathing. The double door of 5A was slightly ajar. Guiche hadn’t jumped then. I pushed it open slowly, seeing a long parquet hall with doors leading off either side.

  ‘There’s no one here, don’t worry,’ I whispered, though I wasn’t as certain as I tried to imply. Timothy was still staring as though he’d had a stroke. I shook him until his eyes dully found mine.

  ‘You know where the kitchen is? Of course you do. Go and get some water, put some sugar in it and drink it. Then stand by the door. If anyone comes, just say you’re a friend of – just a friend. OK? You can do that?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Good. Edouard has a study, right? Or a place where he has his desk?’

  Another nod. Hopeless. I’d be quicker alone.

  ‘Go on then.’

  He shuffled to the first door on the right. I heard the tap run.

  Timothy had described Edouard’s fantastic double drawing room with the river views. That would be on the left, the front of the apartment. I walked softly down the hall, opened the third door on the left, which was a small dining room, from which I could see into the drawing room on one side and what looked like a library on the other. One of the three long windows was wide open, the white linen drape blooming out into the street. The flat was clean and modern, with just a few real antiques mixed with the contemporary furniture; the desk in the library was a compact walnut keyhole, eighteenth century, with a bright Prampolini chromatic above it on the white-glossed wall. Timothy was right to be impressed by Edouard’s taste. There was an envelope on the desk, with an initial ‘T’. I pocketed that. The room was preternaturally tidy, aside from the painting there was no decoration and the whole back wall was a deep stack of white USM filing cabinets, shelved to the ceiling. I listened. The woman had stopped screaming, but the crowd in the street sounded bigger. The ambulance and the police would be here in minutes. Gingerly I tried the desk drawers. All locked. The mountain of cabinets would be hopeless – there was no time. Secrets? Where would I keep a secret in this ascetic room?

  Tempting as it was to start fiddling beneath the desk with a hairpin, I didn’t have the space for an ingenious Auguste Dupin routine. Plain sight. The best hiding places are often the most obvious. What would Edouard want to hide? His secret life with boys? Hardly – there was his phone for that. I took a step back, gazing at the smooth clean surfaces. In the furthest corner, though, there was a gap between the lip and the shelf above. I dived at it and the filing cabinet glided smoothly open, filled with binders with names and dates. They were arranged alphabetically, A through D. Presumably Guiche had been disturbed while looking for a file. My eyes accelerated over the labels, locating B, filed under the Russian character, the hooked lower-case ‘b’: BALENSKY. I manoeuvred the heavy box file onto the floor and shunted the others along so the gap was less obvious, heaved myself up with it under my arm just as I heard the sirens. Counting swiftly along the shelves, I figured that ‘Y’ was too high to reach, we had to get out.

  ‘Timothy?’ I was already moving back down the hall, the unwieldy file crooked awkwardly into my arm. Shit. There were frantic voices coming up the stairs. Timothy was motionless in the kitchen, a full glass of water in his hand.

  ‘You said there was a maid’s room? The chambre de bonne? Where?’

  There was a door next to the fridge, I struggled one-handed with the latch. Beyond, a laundry room and a narrow staircase.

  ‘Up. Now. Bring the glass.’ I closed the door as gently as I could and pushed Timothy up the dark, narrow stairs.

  ‘Keep going.’ The steps to the attic floor were wood, our feet were clattering, but hopefully the neighbours were making enough noise to drown us out as we emerged into the fabled fumoir and I tripped over a cymbal-sized Moroccan tin table, sending it rolling sonorously into a heap of kelim cushions. Timothy crashed into me, spilling the water all over my feet.

  ‘Jesus. Just keep still a minute. Breathe. Breathe slowly.’

  I could hear the voices below us, moving through the rooms, calling out. Random shouts, not the focused attention of the police. We froze as the kitchen door opened.

  ‘Allo? Il y a quelqu’un?’ Then, when there was no answer, ‘Il n’y a personne. Alors, on attend les flics?’ There’s no one here. Should we wait for the cops?

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t touch anything?’

  ‘You’re right. We should wait downstairs. We shouldn’t disturb anything.’ Evidence – everyone knows how to behave at a crime scene these days. Thank you, Netflix. I waited until we heard the door close, the steps retreating. I scooted back down the stairs and found a plastic mop bucket, stuffed the box file in it and handed it to Timothy.

  ‘Take your jacket off. Give it to me. Now go down the service stairs – there’s a door into the courtyard there.’ I pointed through the tiny window, festooned with delicate coloured glass lamps like the ones in the orange trees on Ibiza.

  ‘Walk. Keep your head down. Just keep going the way we came, back to the hotel. I’ll catch you up in a few minutes. Can you do that?’ Another speechless nod.

  I hated to trust him, but if Yury was outside I’d never get away with the file.

  ‘Go on then.’

  In his crumpled T-shirt, with the bucket, he would hopefully look like a cleaner. I pulled the velvet blazer on over my own jacket and nipped down the stairs, rooting in my bag for my sunglasses. The main stairwell was empty, but the crowd by the door had swelled, several more ghouls taking pictures. One woman, phone at the ready, dressed in shorts and a purple gilet, was craning to see the body. Tourist. ‘What happened?’ I asked her in English.

  ‘I think there’s been a suicide,’ she replied greedily, in a heavy Australian accent.

  ‘Oh God, how awful,’ I muttered, moving away.

  At the street corner I turned back to look once more at the crowd. The ambulance had arrived but the bystanders were blocking its path; two paramedics in high-vis vests were struggling to get a stretcher trolley through.

  ‘Please step aside,’ they were yelling irritably. As the group moved, I caught sight of a dapper older man, standing to the edge, looking up
at the open window of Edouard’s drawing room. Kazbich. Not a suicide then. I didn’t stay around to look any further. I backed slowly down the street, crossed the Rue Saint-Louis en I’Île and broke into an awkward jog, the box file clunking painfully against my hipbone. How long before Yury and Kazbich found me? For all I knew, Yermolov could have dozens of goons scouting the city for his precious picture. But the room was booked under Timothy’s name, I could stay there a few hours surely – enough time to go through the papers. With that in mind, I slowed to a hurried walk and took a circuitous route, doubling back a few times, alert for any familiarity in the passers-by, any sign that I was being followed. Inverting my game of cat and mouse with Guiche didn’t feel so much fun now that I was the mouse.

  *

  ‘It wasn’t true, was it?’

  ‘What?’ It was the first time Timothy had spoken since I returned to the hotel.

  ‘That stuff about your boyfriend. The lawyer. It wasn’t true.’

  ‘Well, you said it. There’s no such thing as coincidence,’ I replied nastily. The files sat between us in the plastic bucket; I was itching to get at them. While we sat here, the police would be going over the flat, questioning witnesses, going over the footage on amateur sleuths’ phones. I really didn’t have time for grief counselling. But then I stopped myself. None of this was his responsibility; he hadn’t done anything. If I’d been quicker off the mark, we might have reached Guiche, warned him. And now he was dead. It’s not your fault, Judith. I spoke as gently as I could:

  ‘Look, you’ve had a terrible, terrible shock. I know I need to explain, and I promise I will. But let’s get you into a hot shower. And then you should rest.’ If I could get a couple of his trusty Diazepam down him before the tears kicked in, I could get on with my research at least. For the immediate present, the terror of what he had seen had rendered him numbly trusting; I didn’t want to think about how it would go if he panicked and tried to leave. I’d have to work out what to do with him once I knew more. When he shuffled into the tiny shower I jacked the window open the regulation six inches and smoked an uncomfortable sideways fag, then found him a brandy in the mini-bar. Checkout was at 11 a.m. I nipped down, still in my bedraggled clothes from last night, and handed over yet more cash to the imperturbable receptionist. I found Timothy hunched and shivering in the duvet. He held out his arms to me and as I embraced him he began to weep, mewling and gasping. Awkwardly, I stroked his hair while I felt for the brandy glass and the pill.

  ‘Come on, come on. It will be all right. Come on now, drink this. Let’s find something to help you sleep, shall we? That’s right, it’s for the shock, come on . . .’ I repeated the meaningless, unfamiliar phrases of comfort as he swallowed, sobbing and choking, then held him against me, feeling his flurried heart slowly settle through my T-shirt. It took so long I almost dozed off, but as soon as his breathing was regular I drew my arm from under his body and hopped into the shower myself, first scalding hot, then freezing cold. I was starving. I crammed a mini-pack of Brittany butter biscuits from the bar messily into my mouth while I hauled on a clean sweater and knickers. I covered Timothy with the quilt, spread out the files on the floor and began to sort through the sheaves of papers.

  *

  They seemed to be arranged by subject, some in quaint legal French, some in Russian. I worked systematically through the lot, scanning for anything to do with paintings. I found nothing, and barely understood what I was reading. The first bundles took me took over two hours. Many contained documents of the property transactions I’d already learned about, along with applications for visas or permits. Then, in a separate folder, I found the provenances. A typed summary in English was provided alongside the original documents in French, Russian or another language that I thought might be Serbo-Croat. The first name that stood out was Kazbich’s. I’d always had difficulty with his initial in Cyrillic. A photocopy of the provenance for a painting by an artist I’d never heard of, the name all j’s and v’s, described as a landscape in oils, signed by the artist in 1929 and sold out of a private collection via a gallery in Belgrade in 1997. Serbia – Kazbich’s gallery was based there. Balensky had purchased the landscape for fifty thousand US dollars, along with about ten further twentieth-century pictures, all from ‘private collections’, in the space of about six months. Each group of papers was clipped together, with a photograph of the painting at the top and the documentation beneath. Serbia was at war in the nineties. Turmoil often gives a boost to the art market. Currencies crash, people need funds to escape, they pop the heirlooms. Some of the pictures had been exhibited; there were copies of gallery catalogues and museum pamphlets, receipts, many of them handwritten, dating back to the paintings’ creation. The standard paper trail which shows a buyer the progress of a painting through the market and authenticates its value. So Kazbich had been in business with Balensky for many years. One name recurred several times, an owner who had dealt through Kazbich. Dejan Raznatovic. Raznatovic had not only sold, he had bought, not twentieth-century pieces, but several valuable Russian icons. There was definitely a law against that. I made a note of the name.

  And then, in the early 2000s, old Dr Kazbich hit the big time. A small Cézanne, another landscape, with Balensky buying at twenty million and then selling the picture on, about a year later, for thirty-five, to one Pavel Yermolov, again with Kazbich as the runner. The same process was repeated with a Giacometti, and a Klimt, perhaps one of the ones I had seen at Yermolov’s French home. So Balensky had been flipping pictures to Yermolov. Had the two oligarchs connected over art, with Kazbich as the go-between? Spreading the provenances out on the mangy Ibis carpet, I scanned them clockwise, pen poised, waiting for something to jump out. Rothko. Kazbich had sold a Rothko to Balensky in 2005, the picture having first passed through the collection of an Italian bank and then the collector in Belgrade, Raznatovic.

  *

  Timothy slept on. I stretched, paced what there was of the room. So many variables, so many potentialities to consider. Go slow.

  There was nothing at all unusual about corporations or banks owning paintings. Art was a commodity like any other, serviced by investment funds – pensioners in Dorking might own a square inch of Francis Bacon without ever knowing. I knew from my time at the House that huge warehouses of pictures existed, aureate masterpieces throbbing for years in temperature-controlled darkness, emerging for a few weeks into a sale room only to disappear again – Yermolov’s Botticellis being a case in point. Dealers could stack works indefinitely, until the market was ready. But there was something off about the Rothko. I knew it because, back in Paris, as part of his pose as a bounty hunter, Renaud Cleret had told me he was on the trail of a fake Rothko for a client. That had been his cover for blackmailing me into seeking out Moncada. As a consequence, I knew the contents of the Rothko catalogue raisonné, the authorised compendium of an artist’s works, back to front. I’d needed to check that Renaud was lying. And this Rothko – a two-metre-high panel in tones of black and silver, quartered into overlapping parallelograms – had never been near a catalogue. I looked through the provenances. An Italian bank – the Societa Mutuale di Palermo – had supposedly acquired the picture soon after its exhibition in New York back in the sixties. The name of the Chelsea gallerist was appended, along with a shot of the exhibition notes. The bank had sat on its asset for twenty-five years before Raznatovic acquired it, with Kazbich as the broker, and it had then been sold on to Balensky.

  As I had explained to Elena back in Venice, provenance could be faked. Photographs, receipts typed up on old typewriters and the paper aged in an oven, false pages re-clipped into archives, a dud canvas inserted into a job lot of authentic pieces and sold through an auctioneer so it would appear in the daybook – there were hundreds of ways to con the market, because, unlike other commodities, the value of a picture ultimately rested on the perceptions of its buyers. If the provenance is good enough, dealers will often overlook obvious flaws, in good faith or bad. So I kn
ew that Kazbich had shifted a dodgy Rothko, via Italy and then Serbia, into Balensky’s private collection.

  The next sale was another Italian acquisition, with the same chain of provenance, this time in 2008, the year of the worldwide financial crash. The Palermo bank was obviously propping up its holdings, because this time it had flogged off a work by the Venetian baroque painter Antonio Bacci, for the extraordinary but plausible sum of four million. Raznatovic was clearly a man of impressive means. My hands started working faster through the papers, as though my fingertips knew what they were going to find.

  *

  A siren on the street below. I held my breath as its whine receded. I’d paid up the room at the hearse in advance and my abandoned clothes were still scattered about there – I doubted the maid would even notice I’d left. Would the police be looking for the mysterious young couple who’d been spotted at the scene of the distinguished lawyer’s tragic fall? I doubted that too. Back to the papers.

  *

  And there it was, my old friend. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, portrait of a woman, on linen. Kazbich was the runner, Balensky and Yermolov joint buyers for a cool 200 million euros. Half the money through a fund in the Turks and Caicos in advance, the other half payable on receipt by the courier. The receipt prepared in three languages, official as you like, ready to be signed by the receiver and the courier. Guiche had already filled in his name, signing in ink with a flourish. The deliverer’s signature was blank. Unsurprising, since the picture was zipped securely into its case about a foot from where I was sitting.

  *

  Guiche had known they were coming for him. Timothy had said his lover had been distracted and anxious for several months, avoiding him, keeping him away from his apartment. I considered the timings. I leave Paris with the picture last November. Guiche is unable to produce it, naturally. Yermolov believes I have it, waits for me to surface. I open Gentileschi in Venice in spring – that bloody text message – but there’s no real publicity for the gallery, on or offline, until early summer, when I start producing the Xaoc show. Bingo, Kazbich appears. He and Yermolov fail to trap me. I evade them for a few days. Yermolov has Guiche watched, suspicious of him; I could see how his mind must have worked. I arrive in Paris, apparently with the picture, where I meet Guiche. Guiche continues to protest he knows nothing, but they assume he and I are in cahoots. A 200-million Caravaggio might have corrupted anyone.