by Karen Swan
Chapter Four
The moon was high in the sky before Flora put her key in the lock of the vast oak door and stepped into the inner courtyard. Judging by the number of Vespas and bikes propped around the honey-coloured walls, everyone in the building was home – even those who’d been out for the evening. Her travel bag clattered noisily over the scrubbed cobbles as she walked towards the apartments at the far end, her eyes too weary to notice the night-blossoming jasmine climbing the walls, her mind too distracted to hear the distant music that tumbled down into the space and filled it like coloured vapour.
She entered the building code and trudged up the stone stairs, half-hoping that her friends would have retired to bed, leaving her free to march straight to the spare bedroom – hers, by long-standing agreement, whenever she was in the city – and conk out on top of the bed, fully dressed, teeth unbrushed, whatever. She couldn’t remember when she’d last felt so tired and yet she wasn’t convinced she’d be able to sleep either, her entire nervous system feeling wired from the day’s strange and magnificent discoveries.
Angus had left hours ago now, jumping onto the 13.13 Eurostar and heading straight back to London, his entire head glowing magenta with excitement, and she wondered how he had got on with his enquiries at the Art Loss Register, the ALR. It was the absolute first step on this path; nothing else could be decided without the feedback from those records and their wildest hopes and dreams would be dashed in an instant if the Renoir (and the Faucheux, although it wasn’t quite in the same bracket) was registered as lost or stolen. The authorities – perhaps from several countries – would immediately become involved and put intense pressure on their clients to explain how it had come to be in their possession. A Renoir – especially one of this size and beauty – was a world-class fine-art treasure and precious few were left in private collections; most had been sold to museums worldwide. It was a once-in-a-lifetime discovery and the person who had left it in the apartment, positioned away from the others in a separate crate in the dining room, must have known its importance.
Of course, if Angus reported back with good news, then the next imperative would be to ascertain its authenticity; although it was signed, extensive tests would still need to be run, and provenance was paramount to explain how it had ended up here, locked in a forlorn, abandoned apartment with lawyers holding the keys and its existence deliberately kept secret for seventy-plus years.
They couldn’t afford any delays. The new activity in the apartment meant word was bound to get out quickly amongst the neighbours and the sheer scale and value of the recovered haul – if glimpsed or suggested – would become a honeypot, not to the common-or-garden burglar or thief, but the organized crime gangs that traded fine art as collateral in their shady dealings.
Angus had left her with instructions to compile a preliminary inventory – numbers, lists of artists, rough estimates and potential values – before he returned for their meeting scheduled with the family tomorrow afternoon, but she had barely been able to lock the door on it all this evening. Her instinct to call the security firm they worked with, to come out and protect the premises, at least until tomorrow when Angus returned with news and a plan of action, was still ringing loud and clear in her head, but he had been insistent that doing nothing was the best protection. It had survived over seventy years locked up. It could last another night. The less activity around the apartment, the better.
A strip of light escaped under the door of Apartment E and she opened it with the spare key she’d been given, peering down the long bone-white hall. The door to Bruno and Ines’s bedroom was ajar, top notes of a tagine – Ines’s signature dish – still lingering in the air, the soft strum of an out-of-sight guitar telling her that her friends were still awake.
She glanced at her watch – a gift from her father when she’d landed her first job at Christie’s and growing increasingly important to her as all her friends and colleagues switched to finding out the time from their phones and iPads – and saw it was 1.30 a.m. She sagged in the doorway and looked yearningly at her own bedroom door. The light was on in there too, meaning Ines had received her text and was expecting her.
The two women had met in their gap years backpacking around Asia, and in a classic case of opposites attracting, had instantly become firm friends. If Flora was everyone’s perfect Head Girl, Ines had been the rebel, the cool girl who knew all the gossip and didn’t care what anyone thought; Flora found Ines’s curious mix of bohemian languor and international polish, hewn from years at top-notch Swiss school Aiglon, absolutely irresistible and they had made a pact that Flora would live with her friend whenever she was in the city.
Wishing she could take a running jump towards the bed, she instead dropped her bag and walked down the hallway, past the giant discs covered with turquoise feathers on the walls, her shoes clip-clopping on the old parquet floor. An open bottle of tequila was sitting on the polished concrete worktop in the kitchen and, from experience, she knew to pour herself a shot before heading out to the roof terrace.
Ines saw her before Flora’s eyes could adjust to the darkness – the flickering Moroccan tea lights throwing out about as much light as they did heat – and she reached for Flora with outstretched arms and a scatter of throaty laughter. ‘You are here!’
‘Sorry I’m late,’ Flora replied with characteristic understatement as she walked towards her friend, who was sitting sideways in a fringed linen hammock, and leaned over to kiss her cheeks. Camellia perfume embraced her as much as Ines’s slim brown arms, her riotous and untameable coal-black hair flapping like a pirates’ flag in the night breeze. ‘I hope you didn’t wait for me.’
‘Not likely!’ Ines laughed, indicating for Flora to squeeze in next to her. ‘There would have been mutiny on the ship.’
‘Hello, boys.’ Flora blew air-kisses at Bruno, sitting on the low wall, and Stefan, sprawled in a Missoni chair; Bruno caught his with an extravagant flourish; Stefan merely nodded, his eyes still, the index finger of one hand rubbing across his mouth as he watched her. They’d had a one-night dalliance a year ago that had left her satisfied and him wanting more.
‘Are you hungry?’ Ines asked, affectionately squeezing her thigh. ‘There’s some left, I think.’
‘Thanks but –’ Flora waved the offer away and held up her shot glass briefly before downing it with a smack of her lips. That would have to pass as dinner for tonight.
Ines tutted. ‘No wonder you are skinny.’
‘So tell us, Flora,’ Bruno said, picking up his guitar and propping one foot on Stefan’s chair. ‘What brings you back to Paris?’ He strummed a chord and looked up at her, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners, his smile all the brighter for the beard surrounding it, his washed-out shorts almost falling off his narrow hips. ‘And what – or who – has been keeping you up so late?’
Flora smiled enigmatically. ‘Oh, you know me – people to see, places to be.’
‘Ah,’ he grinned. ‘So it’s someone famous then. Or powerful. Perhaps both?’
Flora shrugged off his teases. ‘It’s not a secret.’ It was true – it wasn’t. The Vermeils hadn’t requested anonymity. They rarely bought or sold, and most of Angus’s work for them, till now, had been curation and preservation management; perhaps they felt that kept them sufficiently below the parapet – unlike the newly minted Russians and Chinese splashing their cash at the auctions? Either way, a request for anonymity hadn’t been specified. ‘Although you’ve probably never heard of them. They are very private.’
‘Try us,’ Stefan said, a challenge in his eyes; as the European editor-at-large of Vanity Fair, there wasn’t anyone he didn’t know and Flora was hoping he could add a bit of colour and perspective. Angus’s background notes had been formal and dry: principal client, Jacques Vermeil, now seventy-five; only child of Magda and François Vermeil; married late to Lilian, fifty-nine; two kids, Xavier, twenty-seven, and Natascha, twenty-one . . .
‘The Vermeils?’
&
nbsp; Bruno snorted as though she’d said something funny. He held a hand up by way of apology.
Ines shot him a look. ‘Ignore Bruno,’ she said with an expression of stretched patience before inclining her head to rest it on Flora’s shoulder, her long legs looking brown as they swung in the candlelight.
‘What’s so funny?’ Flora asked lightly.
‘The idea that they are private,’ Stefan smirked. ‘Jacques and Lilian Vermeil have just funded the extension at the Opéra and she sits on so many charity boards, you would think she was applying for sainthood.’ He paused. ‘Not that that’s likely with their kids.’
‘Their kids?’
‘They’re out of control. The parents keep it out of the papers – God knows how, but they do – but everybody knows they’re cokeheads. Xavier thinks he is God’s gift and Natascha’s a party girl.’
Flora jogged Ines. ‘Is this true?’
‘I’m afraid so. She’s got a real bad-ass reputation – sleeps with anyone, hasn’t eaten for three years, just lives on Diet Coke and jelly babies. I know people who know her and they say she’s seen and done it all. She’s already bored with the world.’ She inspected a teal nail carefully, arched an eyebrow. ‘Someone who knows these things told me she OD’d on cocaine and the lead singer of a very famous band she was partying with had to give her an Adrenalin shot direct to the heart.’
‘Straight from Pulp Fiction?’ Stefan asked, scepticism lacing his words.
‘Exactement,’ Ines said firmly. ‘And you’re not allowed to use that, by the way. It is off the record.’ She pointed a stern foot at him.
Bruno snorted again, setting down his guitar and getting a pack of rolling papers out of his pocket. ‘These rich kids . . . Always it is the same. Too much money – it fucks you up,’ he muttered, shaking his head.
‘Well, some of us did OK,’ Ines said shortly. As the sole heiress to a boutique-hotel empire she was the embodiment of everything that Bruno – wrong side of the tracks, fifth of eight kids, left home at sixteen – railed against. But with the heart of a hippy, she was also his soulmate and it was only occasionally that they found themselves caught in the crossfire of their conflicting childhood politics.
He blew her a kiss – apologetic, whimsical – but their eyes lingered and Flora looked away from the private promises that were communicated between them. They had been together now for four years – moving in together within a weekend of meeting at a party in Ibiza – and were not just settled in any old pedestrian relationship but a sex-on-the-stairs and breathless-abandonment coup de foudre that Ines couldn’t understand wasn’t contagious.
Flora smiled. Was it any wonder she enjoyed hanging out with these guys so much? Their divergent backgrounds, sharp moralities and burning ambitions were refreshing to her and such a break from the circles she moved in professionally.
‘Keep away from them. They’re trouble,’ Stefan said shortly, throwing his hands behind his head and fixing her with a sharp stare.
‘I doubt I’ll be privy to any such histrionics in the course of curating their fine-art collection,’ Flora said ironically.
‘Stefan’s just bitter because he’s lost more than one girl to Xavier Vermeil. Isn’t that right, Stefan?’ Ines laughed.
‘It has nothing to do with that,’ Stefan replied testily.
‘So what, then?’
‘They’re unprofessional and spoilt. They think the world revolves around them.’
‘Oh God,’ Ines groaned. ‘You’re not still going on about that photo shoot, are you? Let it drop!’
‘They pissed off a lot of people that day, not just me. Busy people. Important people.’
Flora dangled her leg idly. ‘Rewind a bit, please. What happened?’
‘They pulled out of an article we were running,’ Stefan said, flexing his foot.
‘On them?’
‘And others. The title was “Young Guns, the hip new scions of old dynasties”.’
‘Oh, hey, I remember that. You were in it,’ Flora smiled, lazily digging Ines in the ribs with her elbow.
‘Only because I was doing my friend here a favour,’ Ines shrugged. ‘My father was furious with me.’
‘Excuse me – I was doing you the favour,’ Stefan replied lightly, earning himself a tatty linen Chanel espadrille that went flying through the air towards his head as Ines swore under her breath in French. ‘You know yourself how much attention that article got. It made your business.’
It was true that Ines’s eponymous erotic-lingerie label had mushroomed from a modest hand-sewn sideline, using leftover lace and ribbons from the Chanel atelier (the head of couture was a friend of her parents) into a cult brand with a flagship store in the Marais. Gaggles of Asian tourists and fashion students already made pilgrimages just to Instagram the boutique which was justly notorious for the handmade Belgian white lace stretched taut across the windows, hiding and revealing what was inside at the same time: alpaca fur rugs on the floors in the changing rooms and velvet on the walls. There was usually at least one paparazzo lurking on a Vespa nearby, ready to snap the latest celebrity or society darling on her way out with a smile on her lips and a bag in her hand.
‘Please,’ Ines said with a roll of her eyes but gently nudging Flora with her arm. Stefan was successful and very good-looking with cropped, almost shaven, hair and a tide of stubble. He was forever appearing on his own magazine’s pages, photographed stepping out with models and actresses in borrowed couture, but he was humourlessly ambitious and that made him an easy target to his old friends. ‘The company is following my business plan perfectly. It was just coincidence that the article came out at the same time.’
Flora knew there was no business plan. Ines was not the type of woman to bother with anything as grey as that; she lived by instinct and passionate conviction.
But Stefan took the bait. ‘Ines, it was our biggest-selling issue of the last three years and the feature syndicated to thirty-six countries.’
‘So? The women coming to my store bring word-of-mouth recommendations from their friends,’ Ines teased him.
‘You pretend—’
‘OK, OK, kids,’ Flora interrupted. It was too late for one-upmanship. ‘Why did it matter so much if they pulled out of that article?’
‘Everything was set up for the shoot, dozens of people waiting – Annie Leibovitz, for Chrissakes! – and then after three hours of waiting, they cancel? Vraiment? Who do they think they are? The Casiraghis?’
A glint of devilment glittered in Ines’s eyes. ‘Well, Xavier does have the same luck with women. And they’re almost as rich.’
Stefan shrugged but with stiff shoulders, reaching out to take the roll-up offered to him by Bruno.
Flora remained quiet, leaning her head back and staring up at the velvet sky as Bruno began to strum again, Stefan’s intermittent smoke trail drifting into her line of sight. They were about to become a whole lot richer, those heirs. More damaged, too? It seemed hard to reconcile Madame Vermeil’s cultivated refinement with the stories being shared here.
Idly, she mused on their reactions if they were to hear about the long-locked apartment opened today after a sleep of over seventy years. She could imagine Bruno’s – he would sneer at the profligacy of owning so many properties that it was even possible to forget about one. Stefan would jump on the family’s surprisingly, and hitherto-unknown, modest background; how had they risen so high, so fast? he would wonder.
But as she closed her eyes, sleep beginning to snap at her heels like a nervy dog, that wasn’t where her thoughts snagged. An apartment with over two hundred valuable paintings and artworks stored within it, deliberately locked up and left to the dust? It wasn’t how the situation could have come to pass that bothered her, it was why.
The cool breath of night made her shiver. She assumed it was that.
Chapter Five
She was back in the dust by dawn. As predicted, she had barely slept, creeping from her artfully tumbled linen sheet
s before five to occupy the abandoned apartment and keep watch over the priceless treasures. The floorboards had creaked beneath her feet as she’d let herself in, the large key solid and weighty in her palm as she’d checked all the rooms, anxious as a mother with her newborn, hoping that the people in the apartment below wouldn’t be disturbed by the unusual movements above. Of course, she knew she would be little use against anyone intent on gaining access but it made her feel better to be there anyway, offering some sort of resistance.
The street was still in shadow, the sun not yet high enough in the sky to illuminate the apartment, and the room slumbered on in hooded gloom. Without any electricity supply, there were no lights, nothing to see by – funnily enough, she didn’t travel with a supply of candles – so she had spent almost an hour stretched out on the faded velvet chaise longue in the bedroom, waiting for the light and just staring at the Renoir. It had felt like keeping vigil. Later today, the picture would be moved to an atmospherically controlled environment where it would be tested for damage and decay and the delicate process of cleaning would begin. It would, in all likelihood, eventually be sold to a leading museum where guards would flank the long marble halls and tourists would stand behind red ropes to gaze at it, but Flora alone would have had the privilege of enjoying it in the intimacy of a domestic setting, this totem of timeless majesty propped up on a rumpled and sagging bed.
She wished her father could have been in here with her. It was because of him that she had fallen in love with art in the first place, holding on to his hand as he walked her through long galleries to show her just one painting or one sculpture, to sit on a bench with her and stare at it for an hour, sometimes playing I Spy with the canvas, other times challenging her to think of twenty different shades of green or blue or yellow.
Yes, he would love this. Art had always been their shared game. When she had been barely five, she had tucked herself into the hollow of his podium, wanting to play hide-and-seek, staring at his highly polished shoes as she heard his voice rebound throughout the room, his trousers flapping faster and faster at his calves as he pointed to one bidder, then another, as excitable as a conductor lost in the music.