by L. S. Hilton
So Guiche had just run out of time. I wondered how it had gone. Had Yury simply shoved him out into the air above the quai, or had Guiche been allowed the dignity of stepping to his death? Maybe suicide was more tax-efficient than murder. Kazbich in the crowd, ready to report the job done. Where was Yury now? Looking for me, undoubtedly. But I was safe here, for the moment. I shook off the paranoia and continued reading, and as I leafed through the provenances I couldn’t help smiling. I hadn’t been the only one hard at work in the archives. The provenances Kazbich had produced for the Caravaggio were practically a novel.
Perhaps it was the Palermo bank’s Venetian holdings which had given Kazbich the idea. While most scholars were at least uncertain that Caravaggio had ever visited the city, some were convinced that he had. His first teacher, Peterzano, had been a pupil of Titian, and in turn Titian had been taught by Giorgione, whose influence was agreed to be strong in Caravaggio’s works. Like Caravaggio, Giorgione had disdained under-drawing, emphasising colour over design. The extremities of Caravaggio’s palette, the crackle of supernatural illumination he burned across his canvases, were attributed to the influence of Venice. In Kazbich’s version, the young painter had spent time in Venice en route to Rome in 1592. There was a rumour, cited from several academic papers, that one of Caravaggio’s many lost portraits was of a ‘woman who had given him lodging’ – from which the creative doctor had spun a version of the classic story of the impoverished artist paying his bills with work. The photograph Elena had shown me in Venice was reproduced, along with a convincing-looking inventory for a removal in the eighteenth century in which the picture was described, but not attributed. After this the picture had apparently remained in the same place, sold on as a job lot with the building’s contents as it changed hands over the years. For the attribution, Kazbich had gone to town. There was a letter from a ‘nineteenth-century traveller’, an American art-fancier, in which he speculated to his correspondent that the picture on his hotel room wall could be a Caravaggio. There were then two reports from the International Foundation for Art Research, which provides an authentication service. IFAR reports don’t technically constitute a certificate of authenticity, but they are often respected as definitive by eager buyers. However, the foundation is not incorruptible. Experts engaged by the service can choose to remain anonymous, which means that they can create a dubious report without damaging their public reputation – if the price is right. Kazbich claimed that he had been pursuing the picture for years, had obtained it finally through a conveniently deceased relative of the pensione’s owner and had then offered it to IFAR.
Ever since I’d first seen the Caravaggio, I’d known it couldn’t possibly be real. But this was stupendous. The sheer audacity of it. And yet, such things had happened. Old Masters did occasionally turn up in attics. A ‘Vermeer’ made by a faker named Han van Meegeren had famously fooled that well-known connoisseur Hermann Goering. I helped myself to a Coke, took a slug of the viscous sugar syrup and wished I hadn’t. What Kazbich, like all art frauds, was clearly counting on was the desire of his marks to believe. The need to possess which ineluctably binds fraudster and defrauded, the victim sealing his faith with money. The more money, the stronger the desire to believe – the very need as priceless as the work itself. Had Kazbich set his price lower, I doubted that a collector as discerning as Yermolov would have been taken in. And yet he had, and, having been thwarted, had already killed two people in the attempt to recover his heart’s desire.
So, time to choose. I still hadn’t discovered the identity of whoever it was who had traced Gentileschi back to Judith Rashleigh and given Yermolov such power over me. The pieces of the one person who could have confirmed it were being reassembled in the Paris morgue. A bullet in Timothy immediately? And then . . . then what? Kazbich was probably still in Paris – I’d seen him only this morning, so I could leave the picture somewhere it could be safely recovered, take a chance on using my bank accounts and spend the rest of my life waiting for the mysterious witness to knock on the door. Or I could take Elena up on her bargain, hand the Caravaggio over and trust her. But I’d seen enough of Yermolov’s methods to think that even if she could be relied on to protect me, she’d be hopeless in the face of her husband’s opposition. Or maybe I should just take the Caracal, walk out now and find somewhere peaceful to put the barrel in my mouth.
20
It was getting dark already. Timothy would wake up soon. The only other food the mini-bar had to offer was a foil pack of mixed nuts, and perhaps that was what made me rain-check the suicide option – it would be a really tragic death-row meal. There had to be something else, something in the connection between Yermolov, Balensky and Kazbich. Timothy stirred, turned in his sleep. My legs tingled with pins and needles as I crawled over to my bag, trying not to disturb him. If I was going to shoot him I’d rather do it while he was unconscious. I opened up the laptop I had bought when I arrived in Paris and ran a search linking Raznatovic and Kazbich, but beyond one minimal website featuring the latter’s gallery in Belgrade, Kazbich’s web presence remained a black hole. No images, no information. Raznatovic, on the other hand, certainly wasn’t shy. In fact, if your thing is Serbian ex-paramilitaries-turned-gangsters, he was basically Mick Jagger. Born in 1967, he had served in the notorious Red Berets under the Milošević regime when the wars began in 1991, but unlike his boss had adapted successfully to the post-Yugoslavian state and set up as a gang leader. The Chetniks, as Raztanovic’s military colleagues were known, had emerged to dominate the collapsed state with their own brand of brutal and anarchic justice. Initiation into the militia, and later into the ranks of the gangs, consisted of the slow throat-slitting of a (preferably Muslim) victim. ‘A little weird the first time,’ Raznatovic was quoted by one journalist, ‘but afterwards you’re happy to go out and celebrate.’ From simple assassinations, going rate fifteen dollars a pop, Raznatovic and his crew had supposedly moved into guns, flogging state-issued AK47s at a basic 200 dollars to rocket-propelled grenade launchers for as much as 2,000 dollars. Serbia was ideally situated for moving military contraband into the Schengen Area of Europe, and once inside, there were no pesky border crossings to worry about.
So here was Raznatovic posing with a famous Russian writer, here with his comrades in a mountain camp-ground, here with cigar and standard-issue bikinied lovely in Saint-Tropez – when it was still safe for him to leave the country. Raznatovic was the subject of earnest profiles in foreign newspapers, indexed in think-tank papers, quoted as a national hero and an international criminal. He even had his own Wikipedia entry in English, which mentioned his wealth, his legitimate business holdings and, conveniently, his interest in Serbian national art, specifically icons. He had been a major contributor to a recently established museum in Belgrade and apparently still lived in the city. I could have spent all morning looking at him had I wished, there was enough material for a dissertation, but it was another kind of matériel that interested me. Namely the kind that had made Balensky’s fortune.
Before he had gone straight by securing his assets in the West, Balensky had been an arms dealer. In the kleptocracy of post-Soviet Russia, where there was no distinction between the gangsters and the state, the military black market had been big business. As Bruce Eakin and his fellow Mafia-theorists earnestly pointed out, the war in Chechnya had essentially been a cover-up for a vast surreptitious arms sale, whereby the state could write off redundant weaponry which had been ‘destroyed’ – that is, sold. Balensky dealt with Raznatovic via Kazbich. Raznatovic, it was claimed, had also risen to his present position via arms dealing. So what if Kazbich was running something other than charming mid-century landscapes? If only old Bruce had tried a bit harder, I reflected, he might have won a Pulitzer.
The question was, where was Kazbich running them to? The only connection I had was Moncada, but then I thought of the bank in Sicily. So I turned to my old friend Renaud, as I sometimes did. Just because you Google someone doesn’t me
an you miss them. I’d learned enough from him to suspect money laundering. Paintings are a fairly untouchable way of holding money – the authorities can devalue a bank account, but in order to devalue a painting they have to possess it. Which might be why, after guns and drugs, the third most important black market asset for Italian organised crime is art. The market was estimated at 8 billion euros annually, while the Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale – the Italian body charged with recovering stolen art – had succeeded in sequestering over 600,000 works in just one year alone. It was quite possible that Kazbich was at the centre of a trade of guns for pictures, with Raznatovic and Moncada as the suppliers of the exchange.
Elena was certain that Yermolov had secrets to keep. I’d known about Balensky, but he was old-school, pushing eighty, practically a relic. Yermolov was a new breed, the respectable face of post-Soviet wealth. If he was mixed up in arms smuggling along with his fellow art-fanciers, that might be my point of leverage. Elena wouldn’t be able to protect me, even if she had her damn painting, but that could. But how to work it? How to get to Yermolov in a way that kept me alive long enough to blackmail him?
*
Timothy chose that thrilling moment to awaken. After a few stunned moments before he realised that, no, this wasn’t a nightmare, he started crying again. I felt that way about the Ibis myself. I fetched him some water and made some more soothing noises, then remembered the note I had removed from Guiche’s desk. It was still in the pocket of my discarded jacket. I handed it over and watched Timothy’s face as he unfolded from the single sheet. A sheaf of banknotes, followed by a little shower of coins, tumbled onto the bed. Timothy ignored that, read the paper in silence and handed it over to me.
‘I’m sorry,’ Guiche had written. ‘Thank you for the joy you have given me. Please take this, try to be happy. You should study. Know I believe in you. But please, please, leave Paris. E.’
He had cared for Timothy then, even down to the mawkish tone of his adieu. I gathered the cash and counted it: just under three thousand euro, two thousand in hundreds and the rest in odd notes, as though he had planned it, but had to make up the money hurriedly. Timothy didn’t say a word. I watched him for a while, laid a hand on his arm, but he shrugged me off, folding his hands into his armpits, gazing stolidly out into the dusk.
If I’d returned the picture as soon as I’d tracked it down in England, this wouldn’t have happened. Guiche would be alive. Timothy might have had a future with a man who loved him.
*
‘Judith?’ he said suddenly.
‘I’m here.’
‘You remember that party I told you about, the one in Tangier?’
‘Yes.’
He sat up, earnest, the whites of his eyes gleaming in the dimness.
‘So there was this couple there – straight – a boy and a girl. Just tourists. French. Someone had picked them up in the city and brought them there – to perform.’
‘Perform?’
‘They had sex. In front of everyone. Regular sex. The girl – she seemed quite into it, but you could see it made the boy sad, even though they were getting paid. We all watched them.’
‘And?’
‘They were together, a couple. Both blond. And I was thinking . . .’ His voice thickened, he choked on a sob.
‘What were you thinking, Timothy?’
‘That the thing that was really sick . . . is that what we were watching wasn’t sex. It was love. They were in love. And I was wondering –’ he was speaking rapidly now, trying to get the words out before the tears. He sounded high – ‘whether he wanted to spoil it. Paying them. The Balensky guy. Because they loved each other, you know? He j-just wanted to sp-spoil it.’
I could see where he was going, I really could, but just then the last thing I needed was poignant tales of innocence corrupted. I put my arms around him.
‘Listen. What happened was terrible, horrible. I am so, so sorry that you had to be part of it. But Edouard loved you, he really did. He wanted you to move on with your life. He said so, didn’t he? Because he cared about you. So that’s what we’re going to do. I’ll help you, I promise.’
He sobbed harder, and I rocked him. It wasn’t Edouard he was weeping for, because it never is, and that was what we had known the first time we had laid eyes on each other. His swagger as he emerged from the backroom at that terrible club, his face looking up at me when I’d caught him stealing my things. I’d always known what he was, and somehow that connection had always been there between us, unspoken. Because he knew what I was too. What do you do when you stare into the abyss of another’s soul and the abyss waves right back?
‘It will be OK,’ I whispered eventually. ‘Don’t worry, it will all be OK.’ I held him tightly until his breathing quieted.
There was no way I could kill Timothy. He was a whole lot more useful to me alive than dead. It appeared that I’d actually made a choice. Yermolov wasn’t going to hurt anybody else. Not that that was my motivation exactly. It was more the pleasure I would have in his knowledge that I could stop him. Liability that he was, I needed Timothy for the plan that was scrambling in my mind. I had been used to acting alone, but now I could see that I needed him. And, maybe, I wanted to make things right for him. Touching, that. Any minute now I’d be selling my blood to keep him in Kit Kats.
‘There’s a lot of money there,’ I prompted. ‘You could use it – go back to Morocco? Do you want to do that?’ I had to let him choose. He had to choose to feel loyal.
He shook his head miserably.
‘Stay in France?’
‘Are you joking?’
‘I have an idea – something we can do. If it works, we can get back at the people who hurt Edouard. Avenge him,’ I added, with only a slight wince. Timothy’s dramatic temperament would appreciate that.
‘OK.’
‘But it will be . . . pretty dangerous.’
‘OK.’
‘And if it works, there’s money in it for you. Lots of money.’
‘I don’t care about money.’
We looked one another in the eye. A wry, venal muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth.
I raised my eyebrows questioningly. ‘Enough money for fashion college. And more.’
‘Edouard did want the best for me,’ he came back, deadpan.
‘In the meantime,’ I said, reaching for the cash, ‘I’m borrowing this. For a bus fare. Start getting your stuff.’
*
With a slightly sinking heart I turned back to the computer and called up the site for the Paris international coach station. There was a bus to Belgrade leaving at eight, we’d miss that, but the later one departed at eleven, I hoped there’d be seats available. Once we were in Serbia, I could let rip with my card, but it was better to be cautious while Kazbich was still close. Then I turned the laptop camera to face the wall of our dowdy bedroom, nothing to give away our location, and placed a Skype call to Jovana, the leader of the Xaoc Collective in Belgrade.
A PhD in Renaissance studies, Jovana cheerfully admitted to being no artist herself – she claimed she could barely sketch a stick-man – but she was extremely tech savvy and market literate. She ran the co-operative like one of the old Italian production-line workshops – she came up with the concepts and the artists in the group executed them and shared the profits. Like a Serbian Damian Hirst, only clever and with interesting facial piercings. We had met in the Macedonian Pavilion at the Biennale, where Xaoc were showing a huge version of one of the collages they later made for me, thirty metres of hand-stitched quilts set with icon cards and tiny pewter tea pots, and I’d admired her straight away. She talked as confidently of leverage margins and threshold resistance as she did about the influence of Flemish art on Eastern European religious fresco, and during our conversation I learned a lot from her. When I’d worked at the House I’d been naively shocked to find priceless masterpieces treated as investment chips, but Jovana’s view was both subtle and unpretentious. She saw the
market for what it was, what it had always been, but believed there was still room for beauty and ideas in new work, even if they had to be sneaked in guerrilla-style, invisible to the clients.
There was no response, so I packed while waiting. I also disassembled the gun, planning to drop the bits piecemeal on our journey. I didn’t plan on needing it again. On my third try Jovana picked up. When her image bloomed on the screen I saw that she had a tiny plastic statue of Michael Jackson, culled from a key ring, dangling from her eyebrow piercing. I explained that I was going to be in Belgrade and asked what Xaoc was working on.
‘Ohhh, Elisabeth ’ I could see her rubbing her hands to show her delight – ‘something . . . juicy. I’ve been thinking about – let me say this right – abjection.’
‘Abject art?’
Vomit, shit, blood, slaughter, mutilation. Works that seek to provoke disgust and hence to challenge our relation with the beautiful. That’s the sales pitch anyway. Or concepts whose vulgar sensationalism are only remarkable for their banality, which is not the sales pitch.
‘Veerrry edgy. I’ve got some footage of some really nasty stuff, tracheotomy patients . . . We’re putting it together with some rapeporn images from the dark web and setting the video in little telescopes.’