Masterclass

by Morris West

  ‘It began with Danny. Early one afternoon, about one-thirty, she got a call from Madeleine her to come down to the studio. According to Danny she sounded strange – a little drunk maybe, cajoling, making sex talk. She wanted Danny to model for her, to have a drink, to make love. Danny made excuses. She couldn’t face a long, draining session. Then she began to be worried. She knew Madi was on sedatives; she wondered if she’d taken an overdose. So she went to the studio.

  ‘She found Madi on the bed naked and snoring. She’d obviously had a woman visitor because there were two glasses smeared with lipstick and the dregs of a bottle of champagne. There was an unfinished canvas of a male figure on the easel, but a whole series of nude sketches of the woman visitor – someone she’d never seen before…probably a pick-up from Negroni’s. It was clear that Madi had called Danny to stage an encounter with this woman, but she had passed out and the woman had left. She had obviously gone through Madeleine’s wallet and taken whatever cash was in it.’

  He broke off and took another swallow of water, holding the glass in both hands. Mather waited in silence until Loredon forced himself forward into the narrative.

  ‘Danny was obviously shocked by the whole scene. She said Madi looked like an obscene doll tumbled on the bed. She was shivering and twitching and muttering in her sleep. Danny rolled her in the bedclothes and propped up her head so she wouldn’t choke. She told me that it was at that precise moment she decided to kill her, because she took the pillow away and laid Madi flat on her back. Then she went into the washroom and found a pair of rubber gloves which Madi used to protect her hands from turpentine and etching acids. On Madi’s desk was a present I had given her. It was an antique poignard, a dagger with a basket hilt that she used for a paper-knife. With that weapon she killed Madeleine.

  ‘Then she called me. It was then about a quarter to three. I told her to wipe everything she’d touched, put the weapon in her handbag, get the hell out of there and walk six blocks before taking a taxi back to her apartment.

  ‘I hotfooted it to the studio, parked in the lane and cleared out every incriminating document I could find – diary, sketchbooks, notes, porno pieces and, of course, Madi’s telephone directory. I wore the same gloves Danny had used. Then I went up to Danny’s and talked her down out of shock. I took the dagger from her, washed it carefully and took it home. Later in the year I put it up in an auction of antique arms. The damn thing fetched two thousand dollars!’

  ‘How the hell did the two of you survive twelve months of police investigation?’ asked Mather.

  ‘Because Ed Bayard was the principal suspect and because I’d got rid of a whole slew of embarrassing documents…but most of all because Danny Danziger kept her nerve. That’s one very special woman.’

  ‘So now you’ve told me all this,’ said Mather, ‘what do you expect me to do with it?’

  ‘You’re going to create a myth,’ Loredon stated with sudden fire. ‘The myth of Madeleine Bayard: beautiful woman, soul of fire, great artist cut off in her prime. That legend will establish Anne-Marie’s gallery and make Madeleine Bayard canvases worth more than Rothkos or Pollocks. You’re going to make money out of them, too – and while you’re doing it you’re going to make damn sure Anne-Marie never marries Ed Bayard.’

  Mather stared at him in amazement, then burst out laughing. ‘Hugh, you’re a genius! In a well-ordered society they’d string you up for gallows meat. But, no doubt of it, you’re a genius.’

  ‘You brighten my last dark days,’ Loredon told him with a grin.

  ‘You are also a bloody liar!’

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’

  ‘This is all private talk in a hotel room. In a few days you’ll be dead. So none of it can ever be proved. You’re doing the old disinformation trick – I’m to be your red herring, stinking up the scene of a crime. Danny Danziger did not kill Madi Bayard.’

  ‘Can you prove that?’

  Mather laughed again and got up to pour himself another drink. He said gently, ‘In my business, Hugh, there’s a thing we call internal evidence. You work through a manuscript claimed to be authentic – third, fourth century maybe. You become aware of little things that don’t fit…stylistic usages, notions that were not current at the period in question, glosses and interpolations of other texts. The moment you stumble on one of these interpolations you know you’re dealing with a cooked-up job. Your story’s a cook-up…I’ve seen police photographs of what was found in Madeleine’s studio. The pictures show a whisky bottle half full, a bottle of bourbon full and in the refrigerator coke, soda and white wine. There’s no mention of champagne or glasses with lipstick. Why the fiction, Hugh?’

  Hugh Loredon shrugged and gave a grin that turned into a grimace of pain.

  ‘Because you’re being thick-headed, Max. You’re not thinking straight. You mustn’t know anything – anything at all – about Madeleine’s murder. You were in Italy, for Christ’s sake, as was Anne-Marie. What’s in the briefcase is evidence from the police point of view. From yours it’s treasure-trove – sketches, notes, studies, diaries, letters which will be worth a fortune very soon.’

  Hugh Loredon heaved himself out of his chair and limped over to the door to admit the waiter with the dinner service.

  They ate lightly. Mather could not face a heavy evening meal. Hugh Loredon had no appetite at all; he was content to nibble at cheese and crackers and turn the talk back to his own imminent departure.

  ‘It’s crazy when you come to think of it. Forty-eight hours from now, I’m paying a perfectly respectable Dutch doctor a very respectable professional fee to kill me. I met him today. He’s very charming, very compassionate. Took a lot of time to make sure I understood what would happen and that I’d put all my affairs in order.’

  ‘And how does he explain what happens, Hugh?’

  ‘Very simply. I’m in bed. He comes in, chats for a moment, wishes me a pleasant journey, gives the injection. It’s quite painless, he says…he compares it with stepping on to an aircraft, strapping yourself in and falling instantly asleep.’

  ‘And then what dreams may come?’

  ‘No dreams, Max. No anything. That’s the beauty of it.’

  ‘But don’t you think Anne-Marie will grieve for you? Don’t you believe your friends will feel your loss?’

  ‘I doubt it, Max. I doubt it very much. On auction days I was king of the castle. I stepped up on the rostrum with my little gavel and the whole room focused on me. But when the last bid was taken and I stepped down, it was as if I’d never been there. The buyers would be inspecting their purchases; the disappointed bidders, the gawkers and the kibitzers would all be on their way home. What I needed most at that time was a woman, just to remind me I was real.’

  ‘Hugh, would you like me to be with you at the end?’

  ‘No.’ He was very emphatic about it. ‘Definitely not. I’d like you to wait in Amsterdam until it’s over. That keeps everything tidy. The doctor’s very punctual. He names a time and that’s when it happens. Go to a bar, have a drink for me. Then call Anne-Marie. Say gentle things. You’ll find the words. She’ll get a letter from me forwarded through the US Consulate. There’ll be one for you too. Now tell me about yourself.’

  ‘You know all there is to know, Hugh. I’m finding a niche for myself in the business. I think I’ll be able to operate quite profitably from Europe.’

  ‘What about the Raphaels?’

  ‘The article will be published at the beginning of April. I imagine there’ll be a flurry of correspondence and whatever activity that provokes. Meantime Seldes and Henri Berchmans have joined forces.’

  ‘That’s a formidable team. And where do you fit, Max?’

  ‘I don’t, I’m the floating particle. I like it that way.’

  ‘Don’t float too long, sonny boy. You get out of the habit of stable living. I always thought I had a good line with women – always a quip or a jest or a compliment that got me a bed for the night. It took me a long time
to realise that all I needed was four words: “Do you? Don’t you?” So that made things a lot easier. But the hard thing – and it got harder every year – was what to say to them afterwards. I was going to take you out on the town tonight, Max, but I’m beat. I’d better call it a day.’

  Next morning they were out early, strolling in the spring sunshine along the Prinsengracht and the Keizersgracht, with their red-brick houses and their high step-gables and the linden trees making dark blotches on the oily water. In a garret studio near the old St Nicholas Church they found the young Cornelis Janzoon, who was working with Hogarthian exuberance to document the new sub-culture that had sprung up in the old city – the addicts, the pimps, the whores, the polyglot peddlers of coke and heroin and every other drug in the underground pharmacopeia.

  He was a scrawny, scraggly youth in his mid-twenties, but his drawing and his composition were as assured as any of his elders and his palette was lively with extraordinary confections of modern colour chemistry that leapt from the classic backgrounds of sea-mist, weathered brick and dun Lowland skies. His first exhibition had been enormously successful, but the critics had made a meal of his second, so he was brusque and defensive.

  ‘They say what I am doing is old-fashioned expressionism. What do they mean? I live here, I express what I experience. What do those bastards know except words? What label do they invent to describe “The Nightwatch”? Take a look at it when you go to the Rijksmuseum this morning. You don’t put labels on a thing like that. You just look…and you listen, too, because you can hear that damned drum beating.’

  He brightened immediately when Mather bought two small canvases and asked for transparencies of some other works to be sent to him in Zurich. Ten minutes away they called on a young woman, born in the tulip lands of Aarlsmeer, who was turning her memories of tulips in bloom into extraordinary optical assaults that made one think of the primal wonders of an emerging creation.

  As they left her and strolled towards the Rijksmuseum, Hugh Loredon said, ‘I’ve been asking myself how much longer I could endure survival – which means, I guess, how much pain I’d be prepared to pay – to use a talent like that. Part of my problem has always been that I never stretched for anything.…Money, yes; a woman, sometimes. But the attainment was always a disappointment. Seems to me the artist is always stretching for something else, something better.’

  “‘Their works drop groundward”,’ Mather quoted softly. ‘ “But themselves, I know, reach many a time a heaven that’s shut to me….” ’

  ‘Browning,’ said Hugh Loredon. ‘Andrea del Sarto, the Perfect Painter. I sold a del Sarto once, in London. Somebody put me on to that poem and I used it in my spiel…I used to say it probably put thirty per cent on the price. I’m getting tired. Do you mind if we take a taxi to the Rijksmuseum?’

  ‘We can go back to the hotel if you want.’

  ‘No, I really want to see the Rembrandts. That’s my going-away present to myself.’

  The which, it seemed to Max Mather, were the saddest words he had heard in his life.

  ELEVEN

  Forty-eight hours later in a clinic on the outskirts of Amsterdam, the life and times of Hugh Loredon were terminated by a lethal injection. The death was certified, quite truthfully, as ‘cardiac arrest’. The news was passed to Max Mather in his room at the Amstel Hotel. Immediately he called Anne-Marie. Their talk was brief and bleak.

  ‘Max – how nice to hear from you. Where are you?’

  ‘In Amsterdam. Listen, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.’

  He heard her sudden intake of breath and then her voice, very small and childlike.

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘The worst. Your father collapsed last night. He’d been suffering from terminal cancer. I got him into a local clinic. He died a few minutes ago. I’m sorry, love, I’m dreadfully sorry.’

  ‘Why wasn’t I told before? Why didn’t he call – or you, Max?’

  ‘He wanted it this way – no farewells, no mourning. He loved you too much to inflict them on you.’

  ‘No, Max.’ There was anger in her voice now. ‘That wasn’t it. He just couldn’t face anything unpleasant…What happens now? The funeral, the…the arrangements?’

  ‘All in hand. Hugh left everything very tidy.’

  ‘Except me, Max. I’m his daughter. I’m not tidy. How the hell did he think I would take this?’

  ‘He loved you, sweetheart. You have to believe that.’

  ‘In his fashion, sure. But not enough to think I might need to kiss him goodbye. Just that, Max – kiss him goodbye. It was you he called, not me.’

  ‘Would you like me to come back to New York? I could be with you in ten hours.’

  ‘No. Stay there. Keep things tidy – above all, keep things tidy. I’m going to hang up now, Max. I need to cry, but I seem to have mislaid my tears.’

  An instant later she was gone and Mather was left to pour a last lonely libation to the pale ghost of Hugh Loredon. Then out of some dark well of folk memory came the conviction that there were other ghosts to be laid and that the most baleful was the ghost of Madeleine Bayard. She was too potent a spirit to be dismissed with spilt wine. She had to be summoned up, confronted, challenged to declare herself good or evil, exorcised with bell, book and candle.

  Mather sat down at the big buhl desk, pulled out a pile of hotel stationery and began to write.

  I never met Madeleine Bayard. I have encountered her only in her canvases, in conversations with her friends and lovers, in police documents, in the austere landscape of memory which her husband now inhabits. Yet I am haunted by her. She is like a beautiful kestrel, graceful yet sinister, hovering between me and the sun.

  I must summon her down, coax her to perch on my wrist, be still long enough for me to put the jess on her and then have her converse about the high blue kingdom she inhabits. For this is no ordinary wind-hoverer, this is a magical bird, a rider of the storm, a challenger of the Sun-God…

  A surge of energy infused him and the images began forming and re-forming in his mind like flames in a fire. The words poured from his pen and the manuscript piled up beside him, clear as Madeleine Bayard’s own text.

  Three hours later it was done. He did not reread it, but pushed it straight into a manila envelope with a covering note to Leonie Danziger:

  Dear Leonie,

  Hugh Loredon died here in Amsterdam today. It was a peaceful but lonely end for so gregarious a man, but that’s the way he wanted it to be. We had long and intimate talk before he died and you will find echoes of it in the following pages. He spoke of you too; I will tell you about that when we meet again.

  Here written in blood and tears – not all of them mine – is the memorial on Madeleine Bayard. It is, I promise you, as honest and as good as I can make it. I leave it to your absolute discretion to decide whether it should be published or suppressed. If you opt for publication, then you have similar absolute discretion over the editing. When you are satisfied pass copies to Bayard, to Anne-Marie Loredon and to Harmon Seldes.

  I would like you to take up with Seldes the question of whether the piece might not find a better home in the New York Times Review, which has a much shorter lead time than Belvedere. I would like it to have the best impact for Anne-Marie’s show. It would be a kindness to call her. Hugh refused to bring her to Europe for what he called a death watch. Naturally she is very upset. We all need the purging of shared grief…which brings me by a round turn back to Madeleine.

  You knew her. You received at her hands both joy and pain. In my memorial I have tried to respect your privacy and everyone else’s. I hope I have limned a portrait that you and others can accept as authentic. Please call, or write me in Zurich. I leave tomorrow for St Moritz for a few days’ skiing, then I’m off to Italy for a week.

  Affectionate greetings,

  Max

  He walked downstairs and consigned the package to the concierge for transmission by overnight courier to New York. Somehow
it was a terminal act. Enough of other people’s games and the stale taste of other people’s parties. It was time to set himself on the road again, about his own exclusive business. He had still to find an ending to the tale, but he was confident he could devise one. First he needed to clear his head, tone up his body and order his future to sane and simple ends. The best place to do that was on the last snow on the last high pistes before spring came to the Engadine.

  There were good falls that weekend. Badrutts Palace was almost full. This was the time the regulars loved, the last flourish of winter, the first chancy promise of spring when the thaw threatened and great plates of snow were loosened. In the old days Max had come here with Pia. He still held his membership in the Corviglia Club. The hotel staff recognised him and gave him the welcome of an honoured guest. Not that he was alone this time. Still depressed by his experience in Amsterdam, still troubled about Danny Danziger, he had invited Gisela Mundt to join him for the weekend. Skiing, she agreed, was a wholly legal pursuit in St Moritz. The preludes and the postscripts to this act might be marginally objectionable, but certainly not illegal. Therefore, yes, she would be delighted to be with him.

  On the drive up, she began very tentatively to propose a new plan for the disposal of the Raphaels.

  ‘Look at it, if you like, Max, as a worst case solution. Although we are colleagues, I’m not as sure as Alois that you can bring the Raphaels to market without litigation…I’ve told him this. There’s no secret between us. Whatever the price we’re talking about – one hundred million, two hundred – it’s a glittering prize. The best legal brains in the world would be scrambling to work on the case and I swear to you it could go on for years and would certainly bankrupt you if you lost it – which, with appeal after appeal, you might well do.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’

  ‘That you take at least a passing look at the ten per cent solution.’