by Alex Connor
Philip smiled and stood up.
‘You and Georgia were made for each other.’ He put out his hand, and he and Marshall shook. ‘Parker-Ross was insane. Unfortunately, he had the personality and the money to back up his obsession.’
‘Meaning?’
‘That from now on, you’ll always be persona non grata in the art world.’
Marshall nodded. ‘That’s fine. I’m going to sell the gallery anyway.’
‘Going back to translating?’
‘I don’t think so, I don’t think that would be enough anymore. I can’t see myself getting passionate about any more dead poets. Can’t see myself sitting day after day, staring at books.’ He glanced at Philip. ‘I can get up and walk through that door now. Just walk through it and I’m back into the world. Geertje Dircx couldn’t do that. She couldn’t escape, could only hear her life being chipped away, piece by piece, and do nothing about it.’
‘Everyone’s reading her letters, talking about them,’ Philip said. ‘The originals are now at the Rijksmuseum, as you requested.’
‘Good.’ Marshall meant it sincerely. ‘Geertje was Dutch, the letters should be in her country, read in her language.’
‘Will you translate them? Publish them in English?’
Shaking his head, Marshall put up his hands.
‘No, not me. That’s a job for someone else. For me her words will always be as she wrote them, in Dutch. I memorised every word of those letters and the list that went with them. Every word Geertje wrote, I remember. Every part of her life, her unhappiness, I will always remember.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘It went in, and stuck. I saw what she saw, felt what she felt. I don’t need to write any of it down.’
‘She got her revenge in the end, didn’t she?’ Philip said, walking to the door with Philip. ‘Got her own back on Rembrandt. And ruined his reputation in the process.’
‘You can’t ruin genius.’
‘Just taint it.’
‘You know who I wonder about?’ Marshall said, his tone curious. ‘Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt’s bastard, his monkey. And if I know the art world at all I think that after a while – when the dust’s settled – the dealers will look at Fabritius and decide that he was a very gifted painter, who was underestimated in his lifetime.’ Marshall smiled ruefully. ‘I doubt we’ll live long enough to see it, but with publicity, enough money, and the need to fill a leaky gap in the market, Carel Fabritius might supersede Rembrandt one day. That would be the best revenge.’
House of Corrections,
Gouda, 1556
The guard who watched me from the first day I was brought here died last night. They told me that later, when they brought a younger man along, with a beard like froth and a tooth missing at the front. His eyes were quick, and full of malice, and when he passed by later he hissed through the door hatch and jiggled his keys to taunt me.
The flesh fell from me when Carel died. It fell from my arms and legs. And the muscles that had worked so hard, for so long, emptied into folds of dry skin … Weak, I itched from the bed bugs which bit around my private parts and the fleas which nest in the hair under my arms, smelling frailty. They say insects scent death …
I ate and threw back my food onto the sawdust and stared from under my eyelids that were often dry. I aged as I watched my hands, the veins rising blue, the liver spots making brown islands of colour against the livid skin … I tried to stop living, but in spring the cows began lowing as they bore their calves, and a rook, wings open to sunlight, made for the resting trees. Something about that day, that first bird, chimed like the church clock calling for prayer. And hope moved in my ribcage and fluttered under my slowing heart …
And then I remembered … I felt for the coins I had carried against me for so long and counted them, and knew there were more than enough. When my friends came I told them to talk to the guard.
‘Go to the new man, he’s greedy …’
I knew greed, could sense it like heat on my skin.
‘Go to the guard and bribe him …’
I wanted to buy the door in the wall. Wanted to see that bird over my free head and walk towards my home town.
‘Go to the guard,’ I said again, and pressed half of the coins in their hands.
When the guard came to tell me he would report me for trying to bribe him, I slid my hand through the grill on the door and held out another coin to him. He paused, the church clock rang seven, my friends gone, over the fields, pitying the mad slut grown old in the asylum.
‘Take it,’ I told the guard, and his eyes fixed on mine and I knew him. That sly greed which counts nothing as precious …
He slid the bolt, opened the door, took the coin I offered.
‘My last,’ I said, and I knew he wouldn’t care. Because I was ill and old, and because he had already thought up some cover for my escape …
He let me go, and then relocked the door. He let me go and watched me, I am sure of it, as I crossed the darkening courtyard to the wall. To the wall which was opening with a door, a door which said: follow me, follow me … and I went to the open door and the memory of sea birds and lowing cows and the soft boom of a ship out to sea.
I walked until I could walk no more, then lay on my back in a field, face up to the flat, white palm of the moon. And she smiled at me when I slyly opened my hand and showed her the last coin. The one I had hidden, the coin which my son had once given me.
A while later, I stood up, put the last coin deep into the front of my dress and then felt for the letters against my heart …
Tomorrow I will find the old priest I knew before and give him the letters. He will read them and make of them what he will. I will leave their fate to him, his conscience, and his God … And now, no more. No more … There is no one listening as I write these last words. There is no one to hide the papers from. No one to say ‘Geertje Dircx, the whore of the painter, Rembrandt, gone mad with bitterness’. There is only the moon and the sleeping cows and the day which will come over the flatlands. Only the turn of the windmill and the shaking of new grass. And, on the horizon, the outline of a waterwheel churning over at dawn …
This was the story of me.
48
London.
Six months later.
Folding her arms, Georgia watched her pupils in the playground, all of them bundled up against the December bite of frost in primary colours – red hats, green and yellow scarves, blue coats, clashing like cheap, summer flowers after a sudden storm. And yet it was coming up to Christmas, with white cotton wool pinned around the insides of the windows, and a tree in the entrance hall, a manger underneath. Just as it should be, Georgia thought, turning and moving into the empty schoolroom and sitting at her desk.
It had taken a couple of months but Harry had made a full recovery and returned home. But he didn’t return to the home he had left, not with his pregnant wife. The house was the same, but Georgia had lost the baby at the end of the fourth month. Stress, the doctors said. And to stop her thinking about what should have been, Georgia nursed Harry back to full health and tried to pretend – as he did – that nothing was different. Both of them put the shift of their emotions down to different reasons. Harry thought it was due to his accident and prolonged recovery, which had turned him from a husband into a dependant. The active, healthy man felt hobbled by his condition, and when Georgia lost their baby there was a moment of relief. He felt shame for it, but felt it none the less.
As for Georgia, she hadn’t stopped loving Harry or caring about him – that would have been too easy. What she had lost was their bond, and she put that down to Marshall. Harry never knew that his accident was anything more than a hit and run. The police never found out who did it, and Harry came to terms with the event. It was just one of those random incidents in life, he said: It could have been anyone crossing the road at that moment. That’s what he told Georgia, and she didn’t dissuade him from that belief because she couldn’t. There was no other story to tell – except
the truth – and Georgia had long since decided that it was better for her husband never to know he had been targeted. Otherwise, the questions would start – why had she become involved? Why had she not confided in him? Why risk their life, their unborn child’s life, for her ex-husband?
So Georgia stayed quiet.
When the news of the events in New York came out, Harry asked her if she had known about the letters. She shrugged, and told him no. Owen had always banged on about some documents, but she had never taken it seriously. And in telling him that, she threw in her lot not with Harry, but with Marshall. She might put it down to the grief over the loss of the baby, but she knew it was more. The Marshall Zeigler she had married had been one man; the Marshall Zeigler who had endangered himself for the Rembrandt letters was quite another. Grief may have done it. Certainly the shock of his father’s death and having found Owen’s body had brought about a change in Marshall, but he could have walked away at that point. The fact that he didn’t, that he risked himself so readily, changed him in her eyes forever.
She had asked Marshall about his father’s death, wanted him to talk about it, but he never would. And as her feelings for Harry weakened, Marshall returned to Amsterdam. The rift was unexpected and complete. The heady days of being hunted, being bait, were over. Marshall would return to his old life. And she to hers …
‘I love you.’
He had said those words to her on the night before the auction, when he could have been saying goodbye. But instead he had said I love you. If he had died that night Georgia would have clung to the words, and used them as their epitaph. But life is seldom so tender. Instead, when she had spoken to Marshall again, he had been reserved, almost embarrassed.
‘You did well,’ she teased him. ‘There was a cartoon in the paper of you slashing the portrait like a regular lunatic… Are you coming back to London?’
‘Not for a while,’ he had replied. ‘I’m really sorry for all the trouble I caused you. And the baby—’
‘That wasn’t down to you,’ she interjected quietly, changing the subject. ‘I’ve seen you all over the papers, you photograph well. But I never took you for an action hero, Marshall. What will you do now?’
What will you do now? Everyone had asked him the same question. In interviews, on TV, radio. What was he going to do now? Write a book? Translate the letters? Marshall had never answered. He had hesitated instead, made excuses, said he would have to think about his future. In time he would make a decision. In time …
Tracing a pencil line down the spine of her notepad, Georgia stared ahead. In the old days she would have been able to rely on Marshall’s constant friendship and advice, but that had changed. It changed when she realised that Marshall still loved her – as much as she loved him … But she realised that he was not going to come forward. Not yet, at least. Perhaps, when he realised that her marriage was over, perhaps then. Perhaps in another month, another year.
Perhaps when the loss of his father, the trauma of his actions, the whole heady furore of his disrupted life settled – perhaps then. Yes, Georgia thought, perhaps then.
Lighting up a cigarette, Lillian Kauffman stood in her doorway and looked across Albemarle Street to the Zeigler Gallery. The windows were encrusted with grit, the paint on the door was beginning to peel around the handle, and the ‘closed’ notice seemed as final and desolate as a gravestone. Her gaze moved upwards to the flat above, then to the top office where Nicolai Kapinski had once worked. Sighing, Lillian stared at the basement steps and remembered them cordoned off with police tape. She also remembered the porters – the ex-Guardsmen, and Owen. Always Owen …
‘You wanted me?’ Teddy Jack said, walking in.
‘You took your time,’ Lillian replied. She jerked her head towards the Zeigler Gallery. ‘Marshall decided what he’s going to do with it yet?’
‘He can hardly run it, can he?’
‘Not unless he wants cat shit through the letter box every morning,’ she replied. ‘He’d have to get someone in to run it for him.’
‘Like you?’
‘Jesus, are you joking!’ she snorted. ‘I can barely keep this place afloat at the moment. Anyway, those premises are jinxed. My late husband used to say that, and he was right.’
‘So, what did you want to see me about?’
‘To have a little chat, Teddy,’ she replied, pouring him a coffee and sitting down.
The coffee had been percolating for a long time and was bitter; Teddy winced as he took a sip. Seeing his reaction, Lillian offered him a jug of milk, but it had been warmed and a skin had formed on the surface.
‘No, thanks.’
‘Suit yourself,’ she said indifferently. ‘You seen Marshall lately?’
‘No, not for a few weeks. He’s travelling.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I dunno. He’s been involved with the Rijksmuseum because of the letters, but lately he’s not returned my calls.’ Teddy took a wary sip of the coffee. ‘I’m going see him before I go home.’
‘Home?’
‘Up North. I reckon if I’m going to be poor, I might as well be poor at home. I know people there, we can be poor together.’
‘You’ll never stay! You’ll miss London. Miss all those sordid adventures of yours.’ Lillian paused and looked at Teddy, her expression alert. ‘You know, Teddy, something’s still troubling me.’
‘Oh yes. What?’
‘Why did Owen tell everyone about the Rembrandt letters?’
His surprise was genuine. ‘How the hell would I know?’
‘He wasn’t the careless type, not Owen. He was too adept, too cunning to let it slip, so why did he do it? He knew what a hornet’s nest it would stir up. Might even have predicted that it would be dangerous. So why would a clever man act like a fool?’
‘You’re asking another fool. And two fools don’t make one wise man.’
‘Fuck you, Teddy,’ she said dismissively, ‘you’re no fool. You knew everything about Owen Zeigler. You knew about the letters, about Samuel Hemmings’ involvement, about Nicolai Kapinski’s brother … You hired Dimitri Kapinski, for God’s sake.’
‘To keep an eye on him. It was better he was on our side.’
‘Whose side is he on now, hey?’ Lillian asked. ‘Do you know? Or did you pay Kapinski to disappear?’
‘With what? Milk bottle tops?’
‘I gave you money, Teddy, money to help Marshall.’
‘I used it.’
‘I bet you did.’ She walked into the back and then returned with some more coffee. ‘I won’t offer you a refill, I can see you don’t like it.’
‘Well, it could kill a tree stump.’
She laughed, fiddling with one of her earrings, the pearl ostentatious in her finger tips. ‘Why don’t you come and work for me,’ she said.
‘Doing what?’
‘The art world’s all stirred up, people are panicking. The French think the business will go back to them, but it won’t. Some will go the United Emirates, some the Far East, but some will stay here, in London.’ She looked directly at Teddy, her manner blunt. ‘I’ve been hearing some interesting things. Without anyone knowing, Tobar Manners came back and tried to empty what was left in his bank account, but Rosella had got there first. He’s a broken man, a busted flush. And his gallery’s been taken over by the bank.’
‘Manners always was a furtive little bastard.’
‘Well, you should know, you worked for him before you worked for Owen, didn’t you?’
‘Not for long. He fired me.’
‘Did you do any little jobs for him, like the little jobs you did for Owen?’ she asked, raising an eyebrow questioningly. ‘I mean, this is a business that prides itself on being furtive. People around here have as many faces as church clocks. They make a virtue of deceit.’
His expression was unreadable. ‘Where’s all this leading?’
‘A clever man – with a lot of patience – could set up a major coup. Like the Rembrandt
letters.’ Lillian paused, picking the skin off her milk. ‘A person could have had those letters for a long time and waited for the perfect moment to release them.’
‘Timothy Parker-Ross wasn’t that smart.’
‘Owen Zeigler was.’
Taken aback, Teddy stared at her. She was composed, her eyes bright with intelligence and perception, her back ramrod straight as she perched on the edge of a gilt chair. The gallery was very quiet, as were most of them. There were no idling customers, no collectors from the USA or Europe looking to buy. Instead the street and most of its galleries were empty, desperate for trade. Which didn’t come. Now few trusted the provenance of any of the Old Masters, and the ones which were proven to be genuine were not being traded. Contemporary art had already drawn the coffin lid over itself, but now the previously unassailable artistic Titans were also under doubt.
‘I’m a simple man, Mrs Kauffman, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
‘Think about it,’ Lillian replied, unfazed. ‘Just imagine this scenario: Owen Zeigler had a theory. For years he’d talked about it – it was no secret that Owen believed Rembrandt had a secret – but with the letters he had the means to prove it.’
‘Much good it did him. He was killed—’
She sighed extravagantly.
‘Let me finish. Owen was a complex man, who loved his secrets. He could tell a wonderful tale and give a wonderful ending. Then tell you the same tale a year later, with a different outcome … Now, just say that he planned all of this—’
‘Are you joking?’
‘No. Perhaps Owen had had the letters for a long while and was waiting for the perfect time to make them public.’
‘In a recession?’
‘Releasing them in a recession would cause the most damage.’
‘But he loved the art world.’
‘He did,’ Lillian agreed, ‘until it turned against him. Owen got into debt, he couldn’t trade as he used to. His status and his reputation – the things he most valued – were being questioned. People heard he was struggling and turned their backs on him. Then Tobar Manners cheated him with the sale of the Rembrandt, swore blind it was a fake – and that made Owen realise what the business was really like. He knew that painting was genuine, but he was so desperate to pay off his creditors that he let Manners cheat him.’