by Morris West
He slammed down the receiver and hurried out to the garage. Three minutes later he was on the road and heading for the entrance to the autostrada.
The final weeks of Mather’s bond service to the Palombini passed slowly. The transfer of the archive to the National Library involved him in endless discussions with the director and exasperating phone calls to Palombini. The Library was short of storage space and conservation facilities. For the present the documents would have to remain at Tor Merla. Then came the questions of security, insurance, custodial responsibility and who would foot the bill. The tax benefits to Palombini were less than he had hoped; his lawyers recommended approaches to other institutions. Thus and thus, until Mather wished them all to hell and himself to some tropical retreat.
Niccoló Tolentino was easier to cope with. He padded round the chambers and corridors of the villa with a notepad, measuring canvases, making notes, offering only the briefest of comments on what he was doing. His manner was so brusque that Mather felt it necessary to ask whether he had offended the little man.
Tolentino frowned in puzzlement. ‘Offended! How could you possibly offend me? We’re friends…If you ask why I am irritable, I am always like this when I work. I have to be alone; I cannot distract myself with questions and comments. Later, we discuss things.’
Then it was time for Anne-Marie to leave Florence. Mather staged a big farewell party for her at the Gallodoro. All her friends came – scholars, artisans, painters, sculptors, gallery folk – and the crowd did not disperse until two in the morning. Afterwards Mather walked her home through the sleeping city – an odd nostalgic pilgrimage that, for both of them, marked the end of one life and the beginning of another.
‘That was a wonderful end to a pretty wonderful time,’ Anne-Marie told him. ‘Thank you, Max!’
‘It was my thanks to you for letting me share the good times.’
‘We’ll have more in New York.’
‘I’m sure. How do you feel about going back?’
‘Glad – but scared too. I just hope I’m good enough to survive among the hucksters.’
‘You are. Don’t doubt it. Don’t let fear undermine your convictions about yourself. Here you’ve lived with the best, you’ve drunk in the tradition with your morning coffee. You’re not guessing now. You know! Be strong in the knowledge.’
‘I hear, maestro. I won’t let you down. And what are your plans?’
‘I’m going to Switzerland first. I have business to do in Zurich. Then I’ll give myself a holiday in the snow. I’ll probably do a circuit of the resorts, meet old friends, make some new ones…which I need. I expect to be back in New York about the end of January.’
‘And you will think about our working together?’
‘I’m already mulling over some ideas. I’m sure we can work something out. What stage are you at now?’
‘Interesting things are happening. A realtor has offered me the lease of gallery space in SoHo. It belongs to a man called Ed Bayard; he’s a lawyer who acts for the Art Dealers’ Association of America. His wife was an artist who died in tragic circumstances some time ago and he himself is a well-known collector. Who knows, I might get myself a landlord and a client in one stroke .’
‘It sounds promising.’
‘It is…but what about you? What do you really want to do, Max?’
‘Professionally or personally?’
‘Either…both.’
‘I’ve told you already. I’m sick of dependence. I must take control of my own life. To do that I’ve got to make money – big money if I can. How do I do it? I’m not creative. I’m not like an artist or a writer whose money is in his head; I have to trade on what I’ve got in terms of knowledge and experience. That’s why I’m going to Switzerland, to get some legal and financial advice on where to start.’
‘Will you stay in Europe?’
‘That’s an option I’m considering. I’m a polyglot, I’m comfortable on either side of the duck-pond. Why do you ask?’
‘Because if you were here and I were in New York, we could really set up some good deals together exchange of artists, buying and selling in both directions, import and export of exhibitions. Think about it, Max. Promise me you’ll think about it very carefully?’
‘I promise.’
‘I wonder if you know how much I’m going to miss you?’
He stopped, tilted up her face to the moon and kissed her lightly on the lips.
‘Sure you’ll miss me. I’ll miss you. But let’s be honest, my sweet. The mourning won’t last long in Manhattan – you’ll be knee-deep in eligible males and up to your eyeballs in new ambitions. But you and I will always be friends, because we know how to spell the words and we’ve never needed a dictionary to tell us what they meant. That’s maybe less than we need to make us the world’s greatest lovers, but it’s more than a lot of others find in a lifetime. So let’s hurry home before the cold gets to us and we lose the nice warm glow of the party!’
Max’s own exit from Florence was much less ceremonious. He initialled the final draft of donation of the archive and sent it by courier to Switzerland for Palombini’s signature. Then he took delivery of Tolentino’s inventory and valuation of the art works to lodge with the attorneys for the estate. When he remarked on the number of works which carried the notations ‘attributed to’, ‘school of’, ‘copy by unknown hand’, ‘copy, possibly contemporary’, Tolentino offered a bland explanation.
‘It’s the best I could do, Max, seeing that old Luca paid me to protect his interests in the first place. The notations I’ve made will set red lights flashing in any reputable auction house. After that, it’s up to the buyer to draw his own conclusions.’
‘I understand, Nicki. It wasn’t my business to ask anyway. You’re the expert. It’s your document. But one thing interests me: did you miss many old friends from the collection?’
‘Quite a few, Max; but if you want me to name them, I won’t. Remember there are at least two versions of each one in existence: the original and my copy. It would be a dangerous folly to speculate where each may be now and how it was acquired by the present owner.’
Mather laughed. ‘Aren’t you exaggerating a little?’
‘Not at all.’ The little man was very emphatic. ‘Suppose, as often happens, the owner of a great piece of art pledges it to his bank for a loan. Suppose, by an incautious word, you or I suggest that it may be a forgery. The bank calls in its loan. The borrower’s credit is destroyed or at least damaged…. Suppose a more extreme case. The buyer has paid a lot of money for a dud, so he goes out and shoots the man who sold it to him.…But who could make the final judgment between the original and the copy? A small cadre of experts, using modern laboratory techniques – and, of course, I myself. My private cipher is painted into every copy I make.’
‘May I know what it is?’
‘You may not. It’s a personal mark which only I can identify.’
‘Forgive me, Nicki. Forget I asked.’
‘I’ll forget and forgive – provided you get those damned lawyers to pay me promptly.’
‘I’m going in to collect my legacy from them today. I’ll try to have them write your cheque at the same time.’
‘You’re a good man, Max. We’re going to miss you.’
It was pleasant to hear, but in his heart of hearts he knew the truth that every foreigner in Italy learns sooner or later: family comes first, friends of the blood and heart come next and foreign friends are a disposable luxury, because they subsist outside the intricate web of rights and duties and debts and credits which holds the society together. So…an embrace, a farewell, an exchange of gifts – a pencil sketch from Tolentino, an eighteenth-century edition of Petrarch from Mather – and the ceremony was over.
At the lawyers’ office it was all brusque politeness. Yes, without question the Tolentino cheque would be in the evening’s mail. Here for you, Mr Mather, is a dollar draft for the amount of the legacy, for which we should like a re
ceipt. We understand you will vacate Tor Merla in the morning and hand the keys to Matteo, the major-domo.
‘There is nothing else you need from me?’
‘Nothing else, Mr Mather, except to thank you on behalf of the family for the services you have rendered and to wish you good fortune for the future.’
‘Thank you, gentlemen – and good-day.’
He could hardly believe his good fortune. No one had bothered to ask him to specify whatever memento he had taken from the archive or to sign a receipt for it. He was half-way back to the villa before he worked out the very Latin logic of the omission. To all intents and purposes the archive had passed from the family to the State and it was up to the State to mind its own business. The family was no longer interested; the Palombini had been schooled for centuries to the maxim that whatever didn’t earn a florin – man, woman or olive tree – was not worth a second thought.
Which meant that Max Mather was legally in possession of two putative Raffaello portraits and a complete set of cartoons, all with an impeccable provenance. The only shadow that hung over the portraits was the possibility that they were copies made by Niccoló Tolentino.
As he drove through the gathering dusk towards the dark hump of the Tor Merla, Max Mather burst into laughter. Now there was spice to the game and, with luck and careful planning, there would be a fortune at the end of it.
TWO
On the first anniversary of his wife’s death Edmund Justin Bayard, attorney-at-law, had an appointment at the Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue.
The distance was not great: ten blocks uptown from his Park Avenue apartment, two blocks crosstown on Seventieth Street. The time-span was much greater: twelve months of reclusive existence, a bleak desert of days during which he had functioned like a machine – precise, predictable, in perfect passionless rhythm.
However, on that clear winter day the machine turned into a man suddenly eager for the sight, sound and touch of his fellows. The pilgrimage to the Frick was his compromise with whatever hostile deity ruled the random universe.
A chamber group from the Juilliard was playing Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet in A major. The small formal music matched his mood of elegy. Madeleine had loved this place and all its elegant certainties.
‘It’s so settled,’ she would say in that quiet emphatic way of hers. ‘It’s a snap-frozen dinner party. You could come back this year or next and pick up at any course on the menu.’
In point of fact the whole place was a splendid anachronism: an Italianate villa perched arrogantly on a prime patch of New York real estate, with interiors designed by an Edwardian Englishman, a collection of pictures, sculpture, furniture and ornaments that reflected not the princely lifestyle of its founder but the tastes of the great Duveen, art pedlar extraordinary. Henry Clay Frick, whose bust graced the entrance hall, had made his fortune from coal and steel in Pittsburgh. He had been shot and stabbed as an enemy of the people, yet survived to become their posthumous benefactor with parks, hospitals, educational endowments and this collection of master works.
With a silent salute to the sleek marble image, Bayard walked swiftly through the South Hall and into the Living Hall which for Madeleine had always been the heartland of the collection. It was as if she were beside him now. A painter in her own right, she was as obsessed as the Dutch with interiors and composed little verbal improvisations to fix their quality in her vision.
‘I can imagine what it must have been like sitting in this room on a winter evening with the fire blazing, coffee and brandy served, the servants retired. And there’s Henry Clay Frick himself with St Jerome staring down at him from above the mantel and the two mortal rivals, Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, facing each other across the blaze. There are two Titians looking over his shoulder: Aretino who died laughing at a bawdy joke and a young man in a red cap dreaming a young man’s dreams, while Bellini’s St Francis looks heavenward in ecstasy. There’s not a sound from outside because of the snow; and since the people are so quiet they must be content. Mr Frick is so full of goodwill and philanthropy he can forgive even the anarchist who tried to kill him.…’
For Madeleine there had been no time for absolution. She had been stabbed to death in her own warehouse studio in SoHo. It was a senseless, bloody crime, committed – the police seemed to believe – by an addict desperate for a fix. Neither the assassin nor the weapon he used had ever been found.
The memory of that day had brought Bayard to the edge of madness many times, but today he could contemplate it with a strange detachment, like an illustration in a history book far outside the context of his personal life. The drama had gone out of it – played and replayed to extinction. He had been too long absent from the workaday world. It was time to set about the business of living again.
‘Mr Bayard? Mr Edmund Bayard?’
He swung round to face the questioner. At first glance she bore an odd resemblance to the Whistler portrait of Lady Meux in the Oval Room. He answered brusquely, ‘Yes, I’m Bayard.’
‘Anne-Marie Loredon. You were kind enough to suggest we might meet here.’
‘Hugh Loredon’s girl – of course! I haven’t seen him in a long time.’ He gave a small deprecating shrug. ‘I’ve dropped out of things since my wife died. Today is the anniversary of her death.’
‘It’s kind of you to see me.’
For the first time he smiled and the smile made him look ten years younger. ‘Not at all; I’m very glad of your company. Shall we do the tour?’
By the time they reached the Oval Room he was relaxed enough to stand her against the portrait of Valerie, Lady Meux, to see if there really was a resemblance.
Anne-Marie protested. ‘She’s much prettier than I am.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of pretty,’ said Bayard with a grin. ‘She was a wild one, as I think you could be. She came from nowhere, married a beer baron and raised happy hell wherever she went. I’m told she once appeared at a county fox-hunt riding an elephant.’
‘And you think I could do that?’
‘You might,’ said Bayard judiciously. ‘I think you just might.’
‘And you can read all that in the portrait?’
‘Not really, I’m just showing off my rag-bag of useless information.’ The smile disappeared and he drew her back to stand beside him while they studied the painting. ‘I’m not sure how much is left of what Whistler really put there. Some of his materials were unstable and some of his techniques were questionable. Time hasn’t dealt kindly with all his pictures. Look at the Montesquiou, for instance — ’ He broke off, suddenly embarrassed by his own pedantry.
Anne-Marie prompted him. ‘Go on, please. I’m really interested.’
He shrugged and declined. ‘My wife was the painter; I’m just a collector. She lent me her eyes and her intuitions. We built our collection together.’
‘I’d love to see it.’
‘You shall, I promise. Let’s leave Whistler and go talk to some of the big boys in the West Gallery. You can tell me as we walk what you need from me.’
‘It’s very simple. You own a studio building in SoHo.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘The realtor with whom I’m dealing told me. I’d like to lease the place from you.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘To set up a gallery of my own.’
‘That’s an ambitious project.’
‘I’m ready for it, I think. I’ve spent all my postgraduate life in the art business; I trained with Sotheby’s, I worked at Agnew’s and the Marlborough and took summer courses sponsored by the Belle Arti in Rome and Florence. I’m still a novice, but I figure I’m more qualified than a lot of people with brass nameplates on Fifty-Seventh Street. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘I don’t have enough information to offer an opinion.’
His tone was dry and detached. When she looked up in some surprise, she caught a glimpse of the other Edmund Bayard: the cool-eyed attorney, third on the partners’ l
ist of a prestigious mercantile practice, whose opinions commanded high fees and deep respect.
Anne-Marie challenged him: ‘You’re hedging, counsellor. Why shouldn’t I make a good dealer?’
‘No reason at all. I was just pointing out that an education in the fine arts is only the first step, just as a law degree is only a beginning in my profession. There’s a fiduciary element in both, you see. You’re the matchmaker between buyer and seller. Both have to trust you. “Let the buyer beware” is a bad motto in the art business. There have been too many fakes, too many phoney attributions and too many hucksters peddling sows’ ears as silk purses. They’ve inflated the prices and debased the currency.’
‘That’s quite a speech, Mr Bayard. Do you care so much?’
‘I have to care. Your father must have told you that our firm represents the Art Dealers’ Association of America. We have to go at least part way to keeping them honest.’
‘I’m impressed.’
‘No need to be. Let’s talk about this gallery of yours – I’m sure you realise that it takes quite a time to build a client list and the kind of reputation that gets you serious notice from the press and the big buyers.’
‘My father has promised to help me. He’s putting up some cash to secure a lease on gallery premises.’
He gave her a swift sidelong glance. ‘Has your father looked at the premises?’
‘No. This is my business. He won’t meddle in it. Money will be tight, but what the hell? I’ll be doing what I want and having fun.’
Bayard nodded approval. ‘That’s the key to it – having fun. So long as you enjoy what you do, the odds are that you’ll be good at it. I’m afraid there’s been very little fun in my life since my wife was killed.’
‘I heard about that while I was in Italy. I grieve for you.’
‘Don’t distress yourself. It’s history now. I mentioned it because I find it hard to be in company under false pretences.’