by Anna Porter
“How do you know that?” Attila asked. “She a former girlfriend? A lover?”
Alexander didn’t rise to the bait. “I met her in St. Petersburg,” he said. “We brought her to the Hermitage to look at some art we classified as war booty. She is tough.”
“But not a killer,” Attila repeated.
“I wouldn’t bet my life on that.” Alexander grinned.
“And what do you mean by ‘disguises’?”
“She can take on a dozen different personalities — old, young, frumpy, dazzling, whatever strikes her fancy. I assume from the look on your face, you saw her young and dazzling. It’s very convincing. She used that look to kill one of my superior officers in Vienna when he came on too strong.”
“Came on?”
“Pushed her a bit on one of her findings. She doesn’t like to be challenged.”
“She killed him for disagreeing with her about a painting?”
“Not as simple as that, Attila. She’d been hired by a Viennese couple to locate a drawing they claimed had been theirs before the war. My superior officer had concluded it belonged to the Russian state. She suggested she would reveal the story to the authorities. He offered to shoot her. She cut his throat.”
“Was she arrested?” Attila was incredulous.
“Arrested? No.” He shrugged. “It isn’t how we do things now. The Viennese police are still listing it as an unsolved. Much the same as you will classify the Bulgarian.”
Attila looked at his watch, hurriedly finished his drink, and told Alexander he had to run. He was picking up the girls early the next day and he needed his sleep.
“Give them my kisses,” Alexander said in faultless Hungarian. “And be careful with that woman. She could eat you for breakfast and not even burp.”
“What about your Russian? Do I have to be careful with him, too?”
“It’s never a good idea to annoy a tiger. Safer to stay far away,” Alexander said, ordering one more vodka. “Besides, as I told you, he is my responsibility. If you bother him, he would no longer talk to me.”
“What are you telling me to do then? The dead Bulgarian was his man, right?”
“I am telling you to stay away. Stick with the woman and try to find out about the Italians.”
Once he was outside the bar, Attila checked his phone. There was a message from Tóth. The dead man was a small-time crook and occasional for-hire bodyguard from Sofia. Name of Ivan Dalchev. Unfortunately, the Bulgarian Embassy was not interested in transporting the body home to Mrs. Dalchev when the autopsy was complete. The deputy minister of foreign affairs had written a formal letter to the ambassador. It was not the policy of the Hungarian government to transport dead nationals of other countries to their homes. If neither the Bulgarian government nor the widow wished to have Dalchev’s body, he would be buried in an unmarked grave outside Budapest city limits. That would be cheaper than shipping him home.
The bullet in the wall across from what had been Helena Marsh’s room was from a Glock 21. The same gun Dalchev had on him when they found him.
CHAPTER 18
Helena had always loved Nice. In defiance of the recent terrorist attack, it has remained an old, charming seaside city with uncomfortable stony beaches packed with thousands of tourists, many of them bare-breasted women and g-stringed men burned to a crimson crisp. She liked the Promenade des Anglais with its garish hotels, daredevil bikers, suicidal rollerbladers, and small panicked children seeking some place safe from them all. Even the carousel on the promenade was deceptive. The painted horses were known to throw their riders, and the operator demanded double the fare if a kid dropped his ice-cream cone in fright.
Helena had no children. It wasn’t a matter of convenience, but of not wishing to commit to a man. Art was self-contained. Men were dependent or unpredictable, and often violent. She had learned the hard way not to rely on them. She had once been tempted to live here with a man who owned a house in La Gaude, a village perched on the hilltop above Cagnes-sur-Mer, with a view of steep mountains from one side of its marble terrace and of the Mediterranean from the other. She had spent a magical spring there, listening to the birds and cicadas and the tree-frogs at night, with a man who had seemed content just to be. She had enjoyed their forays to the markets for fresh fruit, cheeses, mushrooms, and admired his ability to find the perfect cut of beef and a local wine that tasted like Provence. For a while, all parts of her had come together here. She had thought, then, that another life was possible, that she could adjust her dreams to suit someone else’s.
He had been a good lover and an entertaining storyteller with wit and a sense of the silliness of daily life. But as spring turned into summer, he had become clingy, insisting on knowing more about her, listening to her phone conversations. When he discovered she had an office in Paris, he decided to rent a floor in a narrow house on Rue Jacob, a two-minute walk away. She left early one morning, leaving him a note apologizing for having misled him. She was not ready for a permanent relationship.
Simon used to tell her that relationships had a habit of going sour. He had shown her old photographs of him and her mother, looking carefree and much in love. Yet he had left her without a backward glance. He was a man with no regrets and no sense of the hurt he cheerfully doled out. Her father’s example had taught Helena a hard lesson: trust no one.
She had imagined, when she was seven or eight, that he would take her to exotic places all over the world, that they would travel and see art in all the places Simon had visited: Paris, Rome, Florence, London, Barcelona, Madrid. Or closer to home: Washington, New York, Chicago. He showed her books from every major museum featuring the paintings in their collections and explained why each artist painted differently although they all had in common the knowledge and skill to make art.
Her father had brought her to Paris for the first time when she was ten. He had said Paris was “his city” and a perfect place for a girl her age. They had walked along the Seine, the Pont Neuf to Île de la Cité, lingered at Sainte-Chapelle and the Conciergerie, where, he said, it would have been all right to be a prisoner. Then he showed her the Notre Dame’s chimera and gargoyles and told her stories about them, their past sins and present tasks defending the cathedral. He took her inside to see the magnificent rose window.
They had spent the second day at the Louvre. Her father had pointed out which paintings were the best and which were the most overrated. It was there that she had first seen original paintings by Titian, David, Chardin, and Raphael. Every hour, they stopped “to rest her eyes,” so she could still appreciate the best. “You can skip the Mona Lisa,” he had said. “It is the most overrated painting in the whole collection.” Later, he showed her the two Delacroix paintings in Saint-Sulpice, and when she could no longer see the art because she had seen too much, they climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower to take in the whole vista of Paris. That was the day she decided she wanted to spend the rest of her life looking at art.
Back then, she had assumed that it was his interest in her health and fitness that prompted the expensive lessons with a master of martial arts. When she was walking home from school one day, a man wearing a mask had grabbed her and tried to drag her into the bushes. At first she had fought back like a child, screaming and whimpering, then all those hours of martial-arts training came back to her with an adrenalin rush and she elbowed him in the stomach, turned and whacked him on the nose with the side of her hand, then, as he struggled to hold on, she kicked him in the balls. He fell as she ran, not once looking back.
Years later, Simon told her that he had hired her assailant to test how well she had learned self-defence.
***
There was something about the quality of the light in Nice that made sense of its artists’ work. She admired their ability to reflect sun without shadows, windows of pure white and blue. These were not the artists whose work she had chosen to study, but their sparkling vision struck
her every time she saw their paintings.
It was hard not to feel nostalgic about the months she had lived here.
She drove into the underground parking garage of le Palais de Justice, with its narrow, winding entrance and backlit announcements of how many spots there were at each level. She chose the third, less for convenience than because it was almost empty. She didn’t want to meet anyone yet. One fact she knew about the Riviera was its irresistible attraction for Russians with money, the kind of people Helena was planning to avoid. She had done business here with Russians assembling art collections — that was how she had met the man she lived with in La Gaude. Most of them would recognize her undisguised self, and she was too weary to deal with the Grigoriev problem. There would be time enough for that when she was back in Budapest.
She emerged from the parking garage onto the pedestrian square in front of the Palais de Justice and made her way to the back of the Negresco, easily the most garish of the local hotels, with its green-and-pink dome and the juggling ceramic clown outside its main entrance. The hotel held enough movie magic to draw visitors who had left their sense of decorum at home. Giorgio Matamoros was one of them.
He seemed perfectly at ease in the Le Relais bar, occupying one of the burnished-wood and leather banquettes near the windows. He wore a beige suit with a light-blue tie and a matching silk square in his breast pocket. It was not a look he would ever have tried in London or Venice, but here, just like the Negresco itself, it fitted in. Helena, wearing a brown-and-gold dress, golden sandals, and an unobtrusive hat, all picked up at the Nice airport, barely rated a glance from the afternoon crowd. The hat kept her face in shadow and hid her short hair.
“Lovely,” he said when he spotted her, “and great to see you here.”
“You chose the place,” she said, leaning down for a peck on the cheek. His face was more lined than she remembered, perhaps accentuated by the tan. His hair had receded, but its light-brown colour suited him. The last time she saw him, he had seemed ready to embrace the grey.
“We could repair to my place, once you’ve told me what you came for,” he said. “I couldn’t remember whether you favoured this bar or not, but it’s where I usually come in the late afternoons for a little pick-me-up. Marco has never heard of a drink he cannot mix, and I enjoy giving him a challenge. What will you have? And don’t make it easy, please.” Giorgio spoke with a plummy English accent left over from attending a public school that took education seriously.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” she told him.
“A Negroni, then? Classic, Florentine, much favoured by the intelligentsia.”
Helena nodded to the hovering waiter.
“So, not a lot of time, but enough to come all this way to see me.” He flashed her a deceptively self-deprecating smile, looked down at the polished tabletop, then back up at Helena, his head tilted sideways, his small brown eyes focused. “So tell me.”
“It’s about a painting,” she said.
“As usual.” He was still smiling but his eyes were not. “I assume it’s of some value.”
“Yes, some value,” she said. “I am buying it for a client and have to get it out of a country that is not keen to part with its Old Masters. They don’t have many.”
“Since you are here, I assume Italian. Giorgione? Veronese? Tintoretto?”
“Titian.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Il maestro. An early work?”
“No. I am sure it’s a late work. A lot of finger dabbing. But it is strong. A big canvas of Christ entering Jerusalem.” She took out her camera and showed him the detail of the donkey’s hoof. The paint was thick, dark, with a dab of yellow and a scratch of white. Next, the flash of blue next to Mary’s face. Then Christ’s face, a sketch in close-up with ochre highlights, strings of hair on the forehead. One of a dark spot where a tree stump edged a house. “He was painting a series of religious themes between 1570 and 1575. The Crowning of Thorns in the Alte Pinakothek was one of them.”
“Retouched?”
“Doesn’t seem to be. But I have seen it only once and not in ideal circumstances — no direct lighting, no chance to analyze chips. But it seems to be in good condition. If it has been retouched, it was done by someone who knew what she was doing.”
“She?”
“The best have always been women.”
He lifted his glass to her. “Provenance?” he asked.
“Perhaps. But incomplete.”
“There may be a few undiscovered Titians, but none that haven’t been referred to in correspondence. Have you seen a reference somewhere in the archives?”
“There is mention of a large biblical painting of this subject in one of Aretino’s letters. And Titian wrote about it to Philip II, the same year he offered Philip The Entombment. As you know, there is also that letter in the Prado from Nicolò Stoppio to Max Fugger saying that Titian had trouble seeing, that he used his thumb to create some of his figures, and that others were just sketched, perhaps with the handle of his palette knife or brush. He was getting old and using more of his students to finish his work.”
“But he kept going.”
“He speeded up, as if the approach of his own death made him want immortality more.”
“Any mention in Vasari?”
“No, but it was assumed the painting was burned with the others.”
“And you think it wasn’t.”
She nodded. “I think it may be the real thing. Dark background, strong colours in the people, striking blues for the Madonna, Mary Magdalene’s flowing green robe, like he painted in the Pieta, the movement of bodies —”
“Stolen, then,” he said. His eyes were soft, almost unfocused, as if he were taking in the whole room behind her.
“I am not sure. It may have been stolen sometime since the last war, but the new owner says he bought it. Still, he has not shown me his proof of purchase. I represent the man who used to own it. He claims he met the new owner in a Soviet forced-labour mine camp. He says it was stolen in the heyday of Communist Party rule, but he can’t prove it, and the guy who now owns the painting may never have been in a Soviet prison camp.”
“Are you trying to steal it or buy it?”
“We have offered a fair price.”
“So, why do you need me?”
“There are other buyers, and a couple of them seem to be overly determined. Quite aggressive. They have too much money to care how they spend it, and they are not used to failure.”
“Is one of them a Ukrainian, by any chance?” Giorgio asked. He smiled but his eyes stayed round and unsmiling.
“Russian.”
“I’m surprised your Ukrainian friend isn’t bidding.” His smile spread as he raised his glass. “Azarov, isn’t it?”
“I am not concerned about him.”
“You’re not. Why?”
“I offered him another Titian. One without complications.”
“Where did you find another Titian? There hasn’t been a Titian on the market for a decade and suddenly you come up with two at once. Am I right to assume I wouldn’t know this one either?”
“It’s in Poland,” she lied. “It’s been there for decades, in the home of a former collector. Jewish. His whole family was wiped out. The guy who owns it now has no idea what it is.”
“Early or late?”
“Looks to be early 1540s,” she said. “Last seen about 1800. The Prado tried to buy it but the man who owns it wouldn’t sell. He thought the price was too low. He was right. The Prado assumed he was an ignorant Slav. It’s a mistake they have often made.”
“Does the Jewish owner have descendants?”
“They were wiped out.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
“How convenient,” Giorgio said, shaking his head. “I assume you are not trying to have
a bidding war among your client, Azarov, and the Accademia?”
“That’s right.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“I would like you to write me a formal letter, saying that Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem is most likely a forgery.”
“But I haven’t seen the painting,” Giorgio protested.
“I know. So you can’t be sure it is not a forgery.”
He rose from the table, slowly. She could tell that despite his lovely suit and brave pocket square, he was feeling his age. That was sad. He had always been such a dandy, and dandies too often grow old without grace.
“What I need is for you to say you have serious doubts about its authenticity.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because you owe me.”
“Hmm.”
“And because it’s a debt that hasn’t been wiped clean.”
“You wouldn’t use it against me?”
She followed him out of the bar and out the front doors of the Negresco. They stopped by the clown sculpture and waited a moment for Giorgio’s chauffeur to spring to attention, jump up the two steps to the door, and lead him to the waiting Mercedes.
A few years ago, Giorgio would have leaped down those steps to hand her into the car himself.
“I think you’ll like what I have done with the apartment,” he said by way of invitation.
It was the top floor of a faded beige building above the pedestrian streets, with a solid wrought-iron gate that swung open slowly when Giorgio entered his entry code. They crossed a marble courtyard and a glass elevator took them up to his apartment. The apartment had tall windows that gave onto the street, blue-and-white mosaic floors, and whitewashed walls designed to display the Picasso in its simple frame, the tall black Giacometti sculpture, and the two Rembrandt drawings. There was a rolltop French writing desk by the windows, a white chaise longue, two spindly Louis XIV chairs, and a white sofa containing a small white dog that was almost invisible among the cushions until it noticed Helena. Then it made a reasonable attempt at a high-pitched bark.