The Rembrandt Secret

by Alex Connor

  Nicolai Kapinski stared out of the window of the flat above the Zeigler Gallery, his thick glasses pushed onto the top of his balding head. Around him were the account books and every other piece of information he had been able to glean about Owen Zeigler’s financial situation. Not the facts he had been given before, but the whole and unabridged version of a man’s imminent ruin. Jesus, he thought for the hundredth time, why hadn’t Owen Zeigler told him how bad the situation had become? Why had he lied, given Nicolai false accounts?

  Pushing the ledgers away, Nicolai Kapinski continued staring out of the window, his pallid Polish gaze fixing on a barley sugar chimney stack in the distance. He had thought himself a friend as well as an accountant. How many times during the previous twenty years had he and Owen worried about money? Discussed plans? Triumphed when the gallery had had a particularly successful year – and there had been a number of those. But from what Nicolai could see now, the previous twenty-four months had seen a dramatic downturn, which had turned into a slide, then into a financial free fall.

  He turned as he heard footsteps behind him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Owen shrugged and sat down. ‘It was not a matter of trust, you know I’ve always trusted you. But I took some risks you wouldn’t have approved of …’

  ‘Is this all of it?’

  Owen blinked slowly, regarding the narrow shouldered, slight man sitting at the incongruously large desk. Nicolai had come to Owen via a friend; was recommended as an astute accountant, originally from Warsaw. There was only one problem. With Nicolai’s business acumen went a long-held manic depression. Medication controlled the condition eighty-five per cent of the time, but there were intermittent staggers of instability, and every time Nicolai slipped into mania he reverted to the same theme – the disappearance of his brother.

  Luther had gone missing when they were children. Rumours had abounded of kidnapping gangs, gypsies, even a local man, who was questioned by the Polish police and then released. Driven out of the town, the man had fled but the mystery had remained. In time Nicolai’s parents grew more accustomed to the loss. His mother retained her sanity by convincing herself that her son was dead and, being religious, accepted his fate. But Nicolai knew that his brother wasn’t dead. All he had wanted to do was to find him.

  In time circumstances forced him to leave Poland, and as his life progressed in London Nicolai married and had a son. His mental condition controlled, he became an agreeable little man, smiling and nodding his greetings to everyone as he arrived and wound his way from the ground floor of the gallery to the top room above the flat. Here, in amongst the scratching and canoodling sounds of London pigeons, he made regimented order out of Owen Zeigler’s accounts, keeping meticulous details of every pound. He had no interest in art – the sale of a Vermeer was irrelevant – all that mattered to Nicolai was the money, and the accounting of it.

  So when the first episode of instability hit, it caught everyone off guard when Nicolai’s sweet control had plummeted into confusion, then a bizarre fury directed at the order of his attic world. And with his loathing of what he usually so admired, came his obsession with his brother. He would find him, he told an astonished Owen the first time he lost control. Luther was still alive. He had to return to Poland, he had to go home … And then the doctor was called, and Nicolai was medicated. Slowly, he became calm, but with the sedation came a helter-skelter fall into depression. His mania gone, Nicolai sat with his muzzled brain, his head in his hands, staring at the London panorama. He saw goblins in the chimney pots, and heard the rain cursing as it flushed out the drainpipes. Clouds slid against his window and made faces at him; a watery opal sun grinning like a demon. In amongst roof tiles and car horns, his brother came calling. Up the stairs and around the cellar corners, he told Nicolai his history and begged to be found.

  When the despair lifted, Luther was gone, and Nicolai was left feeling foolish and embarrassed. For a number of days he would apologise, and blush behind his heavy glasses, making clicking sounds with his tongue as though he disapproved of his own thoughts and wanted to disown them. Kindly, Owen would shrug off the event, realising early on that any invitation to talk could send Nicolai back into his waxy confusion. And so Nicolai Kapinski would put aside his mania, his anger, his confusion – even his brother – and return to his tiny, gentle self.

  That gentle self who was now regarding Owen steadily.

  ‘Is this all of it? Nothing else you’re hiding from me?’ Nicolai asked again, his Polish accent evident in the vowels. ‘Mr Zeigler, is this all?’

  Owen nodded. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Why did you hide it from me for so long?’

  ‘I thought …’ Owen sighed. ‘I was wrong, I should have asked for your help a while back, but I thought I could manage. I couldn’t, of course.’

  ‘You’re ruined.’

  ‘I know.’

  Upset, Nicolai gazed at his employer, then looked back to the ledgers, making an indecipherable doodle on the corner of his notepad.

  In silence, Owen watched him, then touched his shoulder. ‘It’s all right—’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t think this is all right at all.’

  ‘It is,’ Owen insisted, passing Nicolai his coat and briefcase. ‘Go home now.’

  Nicolai stood up, hardly reaching Owen’s shoulder, desperate to offer comfort and yet lacking the words.

  ‘We … we …’

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ Owen said quietly. ‘I have an idea, something that might work.’

  ‘You have?’ His tone was pathetically hopeful.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something I should have done a while back.’ Owen looked round the neat room under the eaves. ‘If you need anything, ask Teddy Jack. I may have to go away for a while—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hear me out. The salaries are accounted for, in the safe. I’ve put a little extra aside for you, Nicolai, for your loyalty. You have the keys to the safe, pay everyone. If I do go away, reassure the staff, the porters and the receptionist. I should be able to keep this place going for another two months, maybe three. If you need help, ask Teddy.’ He smiled, almost light-hearted. ‘I like it up here. In fact, it’s the nicest part of the gallery, I’ve always thought so. It’s inviting. When we were living here as a family, I used to think I’d make this into a den.’ He glanced round, taking in the blackened fire grate, the treacle- coloured rafters and the window frames, bellied with age. ‘But it’s too late now … I’ve been here too long, Nicolai. There are too many memories. Too many ghosts.’

  Nicolai nodded. ‘We all have those.’

  A moment of understanding passed between them. ‘But your ghost is real.’

  ‘Every man’s ghost is real to him.’

  Smiling, Nicolai moved towards the narrow stairs, pulling on his coat and then turning.

  ‘If I can help you in any way …’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’ve been a good employer, Mr Zeigler,’ he said gently, putting out his hand and taking Owen’s. ‘And a valued friend.’

  Twenty minutes later Marshall was driving into Albemarle Street. He would pick up his father and together they would leave for Thurstons. The evening had come into play, shaking out the tourists and the collectors alike, pushing the buyers along Piccadilly, into the lure of yellow taxi lights or the white belly of the underground.

  Finally parking across from the Zeigler Gallery, Marshall looked at his father’s achievement. The window was dressed with a Pieter de Hoogh painting, nothing more.

  Never overcrowd, Owen always said, let the painting breathe…

  Slowly Marshall’s gaze moved up to the flat above. He couldn’t imagine the building belonging to anyone else and felt a real dread of being banned from his childhood home. Memories, filled with the dust of poignancy, smoked around him. The sounds of the gallery porters, Gordon Hendrix and Lester Fox, reorganising the picture rai
ls and hanging space, Owen cutting out newspaper shapes of the paintings, which he would hold up against the wall to judge where the originals would look best. Then he would start again, Lester muttering into his moustache, the morose Gordon dying for a cigarette in the backyard, but both men waiting for their employer’s next instructions, knowing that in a couple of weeks it would have to be done all over again.

  Down would come the paintings. Down from the walls, down into the cellar’s belly. Dry down there, because heating had been put in. But unwelcoming nevertheless. The walls had been shelved for picture storage, and at the very back of the cellar was a partition, behind which Lester and Gordon ate their lunch, or played cards if they had a quiet half hour. In other galleries around the area, there were other stalwarts. But in some there had been an influx of young gay men, eager to work in the glamour of the art world, amongst the nearby exclusive shops, with the possibility of meeting powerful, homosexual collectors. Some got lucky, managing to hook a gallery owner and a rapid promotion from lowly gallery assistant to in situ lover. Others were caught out in fellatio delicto in the cellars, storage nooks, and crannies of their subterranean world. And then, when the Aids epidemic struck, a number of the beautiful lily-white boys died …

  Marshall’s thoughts moved on, his gaze travelling to the window of his old bedroom. He had looked out of that window throughout his childhood, scrutinising the hassle of shoppers, seeing his father’s comings and goings. And at night Marshall would watch the lights make a Christmas card out of the London street. With no other children living nearby Marshall had been forced to make his own amusement. His one friend, Timothy Parker-Ross, was five years older than he, but as much an outcast. Poor Timothy, with his spectacular father, Butler Parker-Ross, one of the most admired – and respected – dealers in London. But he was too much for some, and definitely too much for Timothy. His father’s bullish arrogance was not intentionally unkind, but he terrified his son. For a while Butler had convinced himself that Timothy would be trained up for the business, but his son had no talent or feel for paintings. He wasn’t stupid, but thought in a slow, deliberate manner – a direct contrast to Butler’s adrenalin-spiked behaviour. If asked a question, Timothy would consider his answer for so long his father would lose interest and move on. When Timothy was in his teens, Butler was so anxious about his son’s shyness that he shipped him off to public school, where a reserved child is fair game for bullies. By the time Timothy was fourteen he had a stammer and had grown to six feet in height.

  When he came back in the holidays, Timothy had developed a stoop to disguise his height and a shock of fair hair which fell over his eyes, blocking the world out. By the time he was eighteen, he’d just managed to scrape through his exams and was used to keeping quiet and out of trouble. But once back in London there was only one place he could go – the gallery. And under the kindly but forceful tutelage of his father, Timothy Parker-Ross tried very hard, but learned very little.

  However, Timothy Parker-Ross had one talent – for friendship. He was constant and caring, and for a lonely child like Marshall, he was the ideal ally. Often the boys spent long afternoons at the British Museum, staring at the Egyptian mummies and telling each other stories about how No. 657 had been put away, out of reach. Because it was cursed. Everyone who had ever looked at the female corpse had died … And Marshall had let Timothy tell the story in his own time, responding with a tale of his own, about the soldier ghost in the Zeigler Gallery.

  ‘D’you die if you see it?’ Timothy had asked.

  Bemused, Marshall had thought for a moment. ‘I dunno. I suppose not, otherwise how could you tell anyone you’d seen it? You’d be dead.’

  At other times the boys went to the cinema in Leicester Square, where Marshall developed an addiction to sci-fi and Timothy watched the screen with an expression of bland confusion. And afterwards they would catch the nearest bus, seeing how many stops they could go before the conductor asked them to pay. When they were caught out, they jumped off …

  Marshall’s thoughts slid on. When his father bought the country house and moved his family there, Marshall had missed London. Missed the smell of packing and sawdust. Missed the muttered curses as the delivery men tried to get larger paintings through the gallery doors, or round the back entrance. Missed the plane trees coming into leaf as the Ritz grinned its pillared smile at Piccadilly. Missed the newspaper seller at the end of the street who told him stories about the celebrities who had come to stay in the capital’s finest hotels; told him about how he had been a chauffeur: Oh yeah, I drove them all, when I was a chauffeur … Marshall had even missed the ghost. The lost faint shadow of the unknown soldier who had punctuated his dreams. But most of all he had missed his friend.

  They had kept in touch, but it was never the same. Timothy had started to be trained up in the gallery business and when Marshall’s mother died, life changed irrevocably. It seemed that within one summer Marshall lost most of the little family he had. Weeks after his mother died, his grandfather – the shadowy, slightly frightening Neville – had succumbed to a blood clot on the lung. Suddenly life shifted gear. There had been no more time for looking at mummies, for sci-fi, or dodging buses. He had grown up. Childhood had come to its end.

  Marshall looked at the Zeigler Gallery, his gaze travelling down from the flat to the ground floor. The light was on in the porch doorway, but the blind was down on the door and he couldn’t see in. If he was honest, he was dreading walking in and talking to his father. The thought shamed him, but it was there nevertheless. Owen had been so distracted, so desperate, and Marshall had never seen his father like that. Never seen the urbane Owen Zeigler out of control … He sighed, opened the car door and got out. His father was getting older and he was in shock. He needed his son. The roles had suddenly shifted. As they did with all children and parents, and in all generations. Now Owen needed help. In the past, it had been Owen offering help to his son. This time, it was his son’s turn to give support.

  As he walked to the gallery door, Marshall considered what Samuel Hemmings had told him. He would ask his father about Rembrandt’s monkey. Samuel was right, it would give them something to talk about, something to take Owen’s mind off his problems. Marshall knocked on the door, listened, but there was no answer and so he unlocked it with his own key and walked in.

  ‘Dad?’ he called out.

  No reply.

  Looking round, he turned on a desk lamp and then flinched. Papers had been pulled out of shelves and files, drawers turned over, the main gallery ledger thrown onto the floor, its white throat of pages gaping open. Surprised, he stepped over the mess, imagining how his father had been panicking, going through the books.

  ‘Dad?’ he called out again.

  Again, there was no response. But the mess was so unlike his father, it unsettled Marshall. Owen enjoyed order; reckless untidiness was uncharacteristic. He prided himself on keeping his papers meticulously. Surely, even in the state he was in, Owen wouldn’t behave so out of character? Moving to the stairs which led up to the flat, he walked upstairs to his parents’ old bedroom. There again, the place was in chaos, drawers pulled out and overturned, the contents scattered. By now seriously worried, Marshall moved out onto the landing and into his old room. That was untouched, as was the sitting room. Puzzled, he walked downstairs again, picking his way through the mess of papers as he headed for the back stairs which led down to the basement.

  The light was off, so his father couldn’t be down there, Marshall thought. But a moment later, he decided to go downstairs after all. He flicked on the light and went down the steep steps into the warren below. As he descended, he could feel the shift in temperature. The cellar wasn’t damp, but it was always a few degrees colder than the gallery above. Dipping his head to avoid a low beam at the bottom of the stairs, Marshall passed into the cellars. He hadn’t been there for a while, in fact not for some years. But when he was a child he had visited Gordon and Lester in the basement, watching as they m
ended the frames or packed up paintings to be shipped abroad. Sometimes he would sit on the steps and listen to their conversation about the old days, when they were Guardsmen, and hear them laugh and talk about some of the customers – many of whom they seemed to despise. They would talk about the dealers too, and Marshall would hear random titbits of gossip, which he knew they had gleaned from other porters and gallery assistants.

  Curious, Marshall moved further into the cellar, past the wooden shelves where the Dutch interiors were stored, and past the segregated selection of church interiors. His gaze trailed over the edges of gilded frames and corners of paintings only half seen. He could remember the winter when a pipe had burst in the cellar and they had all – himself included – joined together in a line, passing painting by painting along the row until Marshall’s mother lifted them to safety on the cellar steps. Afterwards she had made tea with whisky in it for the Guardsmen, and Owen had spent the rest of the night checking each painting for water damage.

  Slowly Marshall moved on, past the old bins and the worktables, towards the partitioned-off portion where Lester and Gordon had their meals and the odd smoke out in the yard. He was just about to reach the partition when he heard a sound overhead.

  He stopped and called out, ‘Dad?’

  Again there was no answer, and all Marshall could hear was the wind rap its knuckles on the back door. About to retreat, he decided he would check the lock before he left the basement. He moved forward to the partition and turned the corner, but in the place where Gordon or Lester would usually be sitting, was his father.

  Owen Zeigler was tied to a cold water pipe, his arms suspended above his head, his body naked apart from his boxer shorts. His back was facing Marshall, the skin ripped from a beating, a piece of bloodied electric flex lying on the floor next to his feet. The wounds were varied; some little more than a scratch, but others were lashes which had torn into the flesh repeatedly, some slicing through the muscle beneath. There was barely an inch of Owen Zeigler’s back that had not been lacerated. The blood had stopped flowing a while since.