by L. S. Hilton
‘Yes. Rupert asked me to go – well, on a call.’
I knew exactly where Pandora had gone. To a white stuccoed house in St John’s Wood where a valuable collection waited behind heavy closed drapes, and the man who owned it waited for Rupert to send a pretty one. Colonel Morris, who’d tried to rape me and who knew how many others. I nodded, waited for her to give in to the silence.
‘So this bloke – he had a real go at me. Nasty. Not just a bit of touching.’
‘Did you tell Rupert?’
‘Of course! I came straight back and asked him to call the police.’ Pandora belonged to a different world from me, I thought. A world where safety was a right, not a negotiation. At least, she’d believed that.
‘And what did Rupert say?’
‘That I should consider my future seriously before bringing any complaint against Col— against the client.’
‘Ah.’
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be telling you this: it’s completely inappropriate. Please forget I said anything.’
‘He’s right.’
‘What?’
‘Pandora. You seem really smart. Bright, ambitious. I could tell by what you said in the warehouse. This man – he didn’t actually . . . ?’
‘No. His cleaning lady arrived early and I got away.’
‘So you’re fine. Shaken up, but fine. You have to take it. You’re strong enough, I bet you are. And one day you’ll have your own place and that bastard – both those bastards – will be specks. Fleas in your memory. Don’t fuck it all up because you’ve got some righteous ideas about justice. There’s no safe space at the House. I’m sorry, really sorry about what happened, but you have to be practical, love. Of course, you could start a campaign online – get your hashtag viral . . . ’
‘You really think so?’
‘Why not? And then when a million people have written “UgoGurl!” on your page, you’ll still find yourself unemployed.’
‘Oh.’
‘It depends. Do you want some attention, a few days of affirmation, or do you want a career? What’s the best way to win? Lose your job, drag yourself through a court case that you’ll also lose or suck it up and achieve the success you deserve?’
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that. I’m just so angry.’
‘Good. Angry is good. Rage can take you places.’ Didn’t I know?
Pandora sat up a bit straighter. ‘Just – leave it, then?’
‘I didn’t say that. What I meant was, finish your tea, go and wash your face and stay the fuck away from St John’s Wood. It’s a useful maxim in general.’
‘St John’s . . . how did you know?’
At that moment, the tea urn let out a hiss like a dragon’s fart and we both started. Maybe I jumped rather higher than Pandora. I’d never said anything about what happened at Colonel Morris’s flat, but Rupert had sent me there. Pandora had complained to him – if she now let slip that the new client . . . No, just finesse it. Act like you’re on the powerful squad.
I raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s a small place, the art world. Let’s just say gossip gets around. You’ll be fine. Just fine. And if the sale of the Gauguin goes ahead, I’ll put in a word for you.’
‘Really?’ her eyes were bright again, and not with tears.
‘’Course. Now,’ I gathered my things, ‘I have a plane to catch. Good luck.’
I glanced back at her as I left the Victorian alleyway. She was still sitting straight, determined. But that didn’t mean that she wasn’t still vulnerable, or that part of me wasn’t still angry.
15
So, after that, there was nothing to do but return to the farmhouse and wait. The House would treat such a potentially important picture as a priority, but still it would take at least four weeks for the evaluation to come through. As art fraud becomes increasingly sophisticated, so the big sellers use ever more complex technologies to keep pace with them. Li had given me a pretty thorough grounding in the latest laboratory techniques. Emission spectroscopy, which used lasers to break down pigment, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy which could detect and date the oxidation states of metallic compounds used in paint, were able to date materials with extraordinary precision. But we had used nothing that wasn’t from the correct period, no compounds that Gauguin couldn’t have obtained. In that sense, I was pretty confident that Woman with a Fan II would get past Rupert’s ‘boffins’.
What concerned me more was just how good Li’s technique was. The finish we had taken care of with the varnish, the colour choice exactly matched Gauguin’s other Tahitian works, but the danger point was the brushwork. In the past, painters had strived to replicate the methods of the great masters, but by Gauguin’s time a unique manner of laying on paint had become a sign of originality. Brushwork had become like handwriting – individual – and an expert with a good eye would be able to detect the most minute deviation from an artist’s known manner. Making a Gauguin look like a Gauguin was the easy part: it was how precisely the picture had been built up that would be crucial. Practically, I had nothing to fear from the rigour of the House inspections – if they discovered Woman with a Fan II to be a fake, or surmised it to be a copy of a lost picture there was no disgrace in it. I had come to them with a theory and they had proved my theory wrong; it happened frequently. That Raznatovic would kill me if it didn’t pass wasn’t the House’s problem. It was all mine. And after I’d been back in Italy a few weeks, I confirmed that my other problem was that Raznatovic was going to kill me anyway.
The attempt to play hardball with the bank in Palermo had been no more than a feint. Only an idiot would have expected to see a penny of the money from the sale, whatever had been agreed. I was vulnerable, anonymous, dispensable, and moreover I knew far too much, not only about how the picture had been made, but about the business with the refugee boats at Siderno docks, about da Silva, about Raznatovic, about everything. They would see to me, no question. I predicted it would be what the Sicilians call a lupara bianca, a ‘white shotgun’, a corpse that is simply made to disappear. No body, no crime. It wasn’t as though there was anyone who’d be wondering what had happened to me, except maybe Dave. The question was, when? If the House took the Gauguin, I’d be safe until the sale, I reckoned – I was necessary to make sure everything went through correctly. That meant I’d have to go back to London. Perhaps they’d try to lure me back to Italy, some promise of the money being signed off, and then dump me on the Aspromonte. That could be avoided easily enough, but on the other hand Raznatovic’s scare tactics with the photos of my mother had shown me that he had people in England.
After what I had paid for the van Dongen, there would be just under two million remaining in my Gentileschi account with Klein Fenyves in Panama. Plenty of money by most peoples’ standards, but using any of my bank cards would throw up a trail that someone in da Silva’s position would have no trouble following. I would have to open another account, move the funds, get myself yet another set of false papers if I wanted to realise the painting’s value in the future. The flat in Venice was owned outright by Elisabeth Teerlinc, so shifting that would require yet more identity shuffling so long as Raznatovic was looking for me. And then? Continue in the art world? Fuck off to Polynesia? Elope with Li? None of it seemed terribly appealing.
Once I was securely returned after consigning the piece, da Silva went back once more to Rome, taking the envelope of IDs with him. With no next thing, the days dragged. It wouldn’t have been that hard to escape – as it got hotter and I sunbathed in the garden with a book, I went over all the ways I could imagine doing just that. I might as well have been back in the shed. I didn’t have papers, but I had money, enough to buy the time to get them, maybe. I went back and forth on the risks endlessly, but it was more of a diversion from my temporary lassitude than an attempt to construct a serious plan. I wasn’t motivated to run for two reasons. First, I wanted to win. And second, and it took me quite a while to get round to admitting this, I
wanted da Silva to be safe.
*
Four weeks passed, then six. Da Silva still called each day, but our conversations had dwindled to monosyllables. I didn’t care to ask him about his life in Rome. A couple of times I went down to the workshop, but Li was busy on another piece, a legit reproduction of Botticelli’s Primavera to hang in some vile nouveau riche villa. I took to accompanying Fish-Breath on his shopping trips for our daily supplies, just to get away from the farmhouse. As the season turned, the scruffy town beach slowly started to fill up, first with old people down for the summer, then mothers and young children. Sometimes we passed groups of young men from the camp, kicking round bus shelters, smoking joints in the drab heat of the supermarket car park. I asked Fish-Breath what they did all day.
‘Un cazzo. Spend our money.’
They weren’t allowed to work, though some of them volunteered for free to pass the time. Unlike mine, their limbo was endless.
Even reading da Silva’s emails was proving pretty dull. It really ought to have been more difficult to get his password. The only challenge had been getting the battery out of his laptop. After our snarky chat on the Messina ferry, I’d sneaked back into the car and removed it, not the easiest of jobs in a force-six wind. When he couldn’t boot his computer up in the hotel, I’d let him use mine, but it hadn’t occurred to the silly bugger that I’d installed Key Tracker. I’d taken an extra-long time in the shower to allow him to have a snoop, and he’d certainly taken advantage of it, but why didn’t people think? Da Silva had used three accounts that day in Palermo. The first had been a personal one from which he’d sent a message to Franci reminding her to get someone to look at the radiator in the bathroom. Domestic bliss. The second was his official Guardia one, and trawling through that would have been enough to make Gandhi crack out the Doritos. The third had given me a moment’s trouble – an email address ‘rusticosiderno1’ from which he’d apparently sent nothing. Then I had a look in the draft folder. I’d often wondered how da Silva kept Raznatovic up to date on the Gauguin, and they were using a sophisticated, if dated method. Each had the other’s log-in password, but all messages were filed in draft, so they could be read by the other but not intercepted by a third party unless they too had the password. Raznatovic’s was in transliterated Cyrillic, icon lover. Da Silva’s was Italian, custode, but they wrote in English. Their brief correspondence was en clair, that is in innocuously coded language, good old Mafia style. I was referred to as ‘the asset’, the farmhouse as ‘the let’, the picture as ‘the lady’. The last drafts were dated 19 March, when the asset had been sent to London to show the lady, followed that night by a confirmation of the asset’s return. I checked the emails every day, but spying on Franci had somewhat lost its appeal, while Raznatovic was apparently waiting patiently enough. He knew how the art world worked, after all.
I did notice that sometimes, when I got back from my run in the relative cool of the mornings, Fish-Breath wasn’t there. Naturally the first thing I had done was check the car, but wherever he’d gone he’d taken the keys with him. Two days later, I set off as usual, then doubled back to the other side of the house, waiting until I saw him set off up the track I usually took into the trees. Had he been following me after all? I kept about a hundred metres between us as I stalked him into the forest. He climbed for about a kilometre without pause, pretty fit for an old guy, then turned off to the left onto a narrow path I’d never taken. I continued past, further up the hill until the trees broke into rocky ground. I sat on a boulder and listened. Faintly, over the breeze and the sound of birds, I could hear him whistling. I set off straight into the woods towards the sound, wishing I wasn’t wearing my running shorts as twigs and briars snagged at my legs. The whistling stopped. Then I heard a swish and a soft thump, as though he was throwing something. I didn’t get closer; I didn’t want him to know I had followed him. I scrambled back up the hill and jogged to the farm, lingering over my stretches in the courtyard until he came back.
The next day I took the hill in a series of sprints, turning off at the path he had taken. I balanced along the edge of the dry depression in the soil, so as not to leave footprints. After about thirty metres there was a clearing, a cleft in the high rocks where I had waited the day before. It was very green and very quiet. To one side, the rocks closed over a passage, which came out into a narrow, steep-walled space. There was something lying on the ground, wrapped in a tarpaulin. I kicked at it. A shovel. I took another step and I saw a shallow depression about a foot deep, effortfully carved out of the hardening summer ground. Super. Fish-Breath was digging a grave.
And, naturally, that was also the day when Rupert’s second email finally arrived. He wrote that he was delighted to confirm that after extensive research on the part of the House experts, they were pleased to confirm my attribution, and invited me on behalf of my client to include the Gauguin, Woman with a Fan II, in their July sale. If it was convenient, the House would like to invite me to stay as their guest at Claridge’s for several weeks before the sale, in order that I could attend various events they had organised for buyers as well as the auction itself. I called da Silva immediately.
‘I’ll need my passport back. I have to leave for London. It passed.’
‘You don’t sound pleased. I thought you’d be excited?’
‘Yeah, well, six weeks in this fucking dump would knock the joie de vivre out of Pollyanna.’
‘What?’
‘Forget it. How soon can you have it here?’
‘I’ll bring it myself.’
There was no need for him to come all the way south. We’d agreed that if necessary I should go to London alone – it was more discreet – and Fish-Breath could drive me to the airport.
‘Judith? I said, I’ll bring it myself. I can be there tomorrow.’
‘Whatever. I need to see Li now.’ I cut the call without saying ciao. I think what I minded most was how obvious it was. Da Silva didn’t even think I was worth a proper send-off. A bullet in the back in the woods and rolled into the ground without a coffin? The cheek.
*
Li had finished his Botticelli. The buyer had wanted it double the size of the original in the Uffizi; it took up the whole of one wall in the workshop.
‘What’s with the colours?’
The delicate tempera of the Primavera had been substituted with glaring acrylics. Li shrugged.
‘It’s what the client wanted.’
‘It’s a crime.’
‘I know.’
‘Li, you know what I said, in Essen? You could do other stuff, you know. You don’t have to rot down here. You’re a brilliant painter. Genius, really. The House just said so.’
Li looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s not as simple as that.’ He looked around warily. Fish-Breath was outside in the car park, there was no one but the assistants to hear us.
‘They won’t let me leave.’ Always with the ‘they’.
‘Li, you’re not a slave, for goodness sake. You have your passport now. Did you look at the date on the Amsterdam ticket?’ I’d bought his flight for 6 July, the day after the Gauguin would come under the hammer. I wondered if Li knew anything about the grave in the woods. Of course he did. That was what he was afraid of.
‘I put down a few useful addresses in Amsterdam. Take a look in the envelope. Think about it. You’ll keep up with the sale?’
‘Of course!’ We hugged goodbye.
*
Da Silva appeared early next morning, crumpled and sweaty. He’d driven through the night. I was waiting for him at the door of the farmhouse, underneath the browning leaves of the hyacinth. I’d packed the best of my Venice clothes, though the first thing I planned to do when I got to London was some serious shopping. Elisabeth Teerlinc was going to have a fantastic wardrobe for her last hurrah.
‘Judith! Isn’t this amazing!’
‘Don’t bother. Shall we go?’
I didn’t say a word all the way to Reggio. Da Silva looked more cr
ushed than ever. We pulled up outside Departures underneath a sign that read ‘Kiss and Fly’.
‘So, I’ll see you for the sale. You can phone me as usual if you want.’
‘Of course I want. And then, er . . . you’ll come back here with me?’
‘I don’t see any reason to. The financial stuff can be done from London.’ Where it would be much more difficult to off me.
‘Of course.’ What else could he say? ‘But I thought, maybe, we could . . . ?’
‘Could what?’
‘Nothing. Have a good flight. Good luck!’
‘Bye, Romero. I wish I could say it’s been nice.’
16
‘It’s Claridge’s then, madam?’
‘Thank you.’
The driver handed me into the car and went round to deal with my bags. By now, I was pretty good at acting as though I didn’t notice these things, as though I accepted them graciously as my due, but for once, as we drove into Mayfair, I let myself experience the secret thrill. We had done something extraordinary, Li and I. Not just the audacity, but the skill to pull it off. We’d really fooled the House. And if I engaged in a fairly strenuous suspension of reality, the spoils felt pretty good too. The soothing creamy lemon walls of the lobby with its black and white marble floor, my second-floor suite, a huge bunch of crisp white roses with a card signed by Rupert, the quiet professional deference of the hotel staff. If only nemesis didn’t arrive on the Louboutined heels of hubris with quite such predictable regularity. I’d barely had time to order a lobster sandwich before the lobby respectfully informed me that there was a Miss Belvoir expecting me downstairs.
So that was seventeen kinds of cunting hell. I only knew one Miss Belvoir – Angelica. Whose time at the House had briefly coincided with my own, but, more importantly, who had led Alvin Spencer to Venice. Most inconveniently, Alvin’s sister had happened to be engaged to Angelica’s brother. Angelica had apparently spotted Elisabeth Teerlinc in the background of a photograph at the Venice Biennale, and remarked on her resemblance to a certain Judith Rashleigh. She had encouraged Alvin to contact me, supposedly in the hope of some work experience in my gallery, or possibly just for snooping. I’d never had the time to ascertain which, as I’d fucked Alvin in my flat in Venice, then strangled him with a Hermès foulard as he tried to snap the moment for posterity. That was the problem which da Silva had so efficiently helped me to dispose of, and I hadn’t counted on seeing Angelica again. She no longer worked at the House. So what was she doing here?