The Truth

by Peter James

  ‘Good morning, Susan,’ he said. ‘I thought I should enquire how you were. And, of course, the baby.’

  ‘We’re both fine, thank you,’ Susan said, almost blurting the words, feeling breathless. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I am well, thank you.’

  There was a silence in which Susan flailed around for something to say. There were a million questions she had been wanting to ask him when they next spoke, but all of them eluded her. Finally she came up with: ‘And your wife, how is she?’

  Mr Sarotzini seemed to hesitate, then replied, ‘Yes, thank you, she is well also.’ There was another silence. He said, ‘You must forgive me for not having been in touch sooner. I am aware of promises I made to you about concerts and the opera and art galleries, but I have been detained by business activities. I wondered, perhaps, if tomorrow or Wednesday you were free for lunch, and to come and see a remarkable collection of Impressionist paintings. I recall from our discussions that you care for the Impressionist school very much.’

  Tomorrow was her secretary’s birthday and she and Kate Fox had promised to take her out to lunch. ‘Wednesday would be good,’ she said.

  ‘Perfect, it would suit me better also. I will collect you at twelve forty-five.’

  Chapter Thirty-five

  During the regular Wednesday morning editorial meeting Susan was tense and finding it hard to concentrate. She had arrived late in the office, having changed her mind several times about what she was going to wear for her lunch with Mr Sarotzini, and her hair, with which she normally had no problems, had not come out well after she had shampooed it.

  To make matters worse, John had been in a strange mood last night, almost as if he was jealous that he had not been invited today. He had pranced around the bedroom, mimicking Mr Sarotzini, making crude jokes about the man’s virility and, even though she had not been in the mood, had virtually forced her to make love, as if to establish his superiority – or his territory.

  When reception buzzed her to tell her that Mr Sarotzini was waiting, she put on her navy coat and went downstairs as nervously as if she were going for a job interview. She normally felt confident in her most formal suit, a black two-piece, with a high-collared white blouse, the neck pinned with a silver brooch, but now she felt stiff and awkward.

  Mr Sarotzini stood in the reception area, in a long camel coat with a velvet collar, looking out of place among the racks of new titles. The only other occupant was a ponytailed illustrator, who was awaiting his lunch date. The banker greeted Susan with a polite smile and a stiff, almost absurdly formal handshake.

  ‘How very good to see you, Susan,’ he said, and indicated the door. ‘My car is outside.’

  It was strange to see him again, this tall, debonair man with his fine clothes and his worldly air, and to know that his child – their child – was inside her. She kept trying to look at his face, to try to learn more about it, to lock it into her memory. Her thoughts kept oscillating: one moment this man was the father of her child, the next he was a stranger and she could not connect the baby growing inside her with him.

  As they sat in the back of the Mercedes making small-talk about the weather, Britain’s problems with the EC and the worsening state of London’s traffic, Susan was trying to imagine how the baby might look – which of her features, and which of Mr Sarotzini’s, Bump would inherit. Mr Sarotzini had an assertive nose – it wasn’t overly large but it would look better on a boy than a girl, she thought. But those grey eyes were gorgeous, anyone would be happy to have them.

  She continued to study him over lunch, still trying to put an age on him and finding it impossible. He smiled and he looked fifty. He turned his head to the right and he looked seventy. He angled his head down to concentrate on a quail’s egg and he looked eighty. He turned his head to the left and he was sixty, tops. She searched for the usual telltales of age, but he had no turkey-neck, few liver spots on his hands and just the tiniest one on his face. When he smiled, his eyes were bright and creased with crows’ feet but otherwise not excessively lined. There was energy in his movement, in the animated way in which he spoke, once they had moved on to the topics of art and music, and yet all the time it was there, this aura of old age he wore like a shadow that he could not quite shake off.

  In spite of her earlier nervousness, Susan began to relax a little, finding him as good company and as charming as when she had previously dined here with him and John. He regaled her with anecdotes, privileged insider tittle-tattle about great singers, including Pavarotti and Maria Callas, about great conductors like von Karajan and Previn and Simon Rattle, about the great composers. There seemed to be nothing of the world of classical music that he did not know, and few of the world’s greatest names in this field that he had not met.

  Susan listened with interest, but absorbed only part of what he told her, because all the time she was going over the questions she wanted to ask him. She had no appetite, and hardly touched the soup she had ordered; neither did she eat more than a couple of mouthfuls of her liver and bacon.

  Somehow their conversation had moved to paintings. Mr Sarotzini told Susan stories of great art treasures plundered by the Nazis, and sold illegally to private collectors around the world, and he regaled her with case histories of fakes: some of the most famous people in the world had been duped into paying millions for faked old masters or Impressionists, and concealed the fact to this day.

  It was only when coffee was served that Susan, anxious now about time, managed to bring up the subject of the baby’s future. Would his wife look after the baby or a nanny? It was the first of many questions she wanted to ask, and the banker answered it with a glib but evasive, ‘This is under discussion.’

  She got the same response to her questions about where the baby would live, where it would go to school, whether it would be christened or brought up in any religion at all. Everything was, in Mr Sarotzini’s words, ‘Under discussion.’

  It rapidly became clear to Susan that the period beyond the birth of the child was shuttered off, and although she tried not to show it, his attitude angered and disturbed her. It seemed strange that Mr Sarotzini and his wife should so badly want a child, yet be so undecided about the kind of life they proposed for it. Besides, this wasn’t just his baby, it was theirs. She was the mother, however much Mr Sarotzini might have paid, so she had a right to be interested, to be informed, to be consulted even, on their baby’s future.

  Mr Sarotzini rose. ‘Time is short, is it not, Susan? You have a meeting?’

  ‘Yes, three-thirty.’

  ‘You must not worry about the baby. It will have the very best care in the world.’

  ‘Babies need more than care,’ she said, as they walked out of the club’s entrance. ‘They need love.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mr Sarotzini said, as the chauffeur opened the rear door of the Mercedes. ‘Love. Yes, this baby will have so much love, I can assure you of that, Susan.’

  Something chilled her about the way he said this. And as she sank back into the leather upholstery of the car and the door closed with a thud against the bright December sunshine, it felt as if they had entered a smoked-glass vault. She looked at his face, which had hardened, and felt even more chilled.

  Yes, this baby will have so much love, I can assure you of that, Susan.

  Yes, he probably could assure her – he had enough money to fix it, to fix anything. And she thought back to that Sunday in September when she’d read about Zak Danziger’s death and had wondered then whether there might have been any connection. She had dismissed the thought, but looking at that steely hard face now, it had returned, and it was disturbing her. He seemed to switch so effortlessly from being utterly charming to being icily hard. How ruthless was Mr Sarotzini?

  ‘So now, Susan, we are going to visit a dear friend of mine, Esmond Rostoff. You have heard of him, perhaps?’

  She kicked the name around for a few moments but it rang no bells. ‘No, I don’t think so.’


  ‘He was a great polo player, legendary. He has played with them all, and at one time Esmond owned the world’s finest team. Maybe you have not followed polo?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Today he owns a huge string of race-horses, but he keeps a low profile.’ He smiled. ‘But we are not going to look at horses. Esmond is a collector of Impressionist paintings. He is an intensely private man and only permits his close friends to see his collection. It was necessary for me to convince him that you are very special to me.’

  Susan wondered what he had told the man. ‘Thank you,’ she said, dubiously, her curiosity to see the paintings lost in the anxiety raging in her head.

  The Mercedes pulled up outside an imposing white Georgian house just off Belgrave Square. As they walked up the steps to the front door, Mr Sarotzini informed Susan that Esmond Rostoff was a descendant of the last Russian tsar, and that he owned one of the finest – perhaps the finest – collections of early Impressionist paintings in the world, finer than any public gallery. He hinted that some of these had been removed secretly from the Hermitage in St Petersburg in the final days before the revolution and smuggled out of Russia.

  When Susan asked him whether the rest of the collection had been built legitimately, or from purchases of Nazi loot, he laughed the question aside. ‘Esmond Rostoff is a very proper man, Susan. He is an aristocrat of fine breeding. Such a man has no need to resort to illicit – or distasteful – methods.’

  However, Mr Sarotzini’s expression and the feeling she got on arrival at the house, told her otherwise. The front door was opened by a security guard who looked like a Middle Eastern thug; they were received in a red-carpeted hall, by a butler, who led them through double doors into a large, ornately decorated drawing room.

  Susan had never seen a room decorated like this outside a National Trust property. Magnificent old masters hung from the walls: hunting scenes, portraits, still lifes of game and fruit. The floor was arranged with exquisite antique furniture – armchairs, reading chairs, two settles in front of the fireplace, a chaise longue, a love seat, all upholstered in fine muted grey colourings that toned with the carpet and the swagged drapes. There were beautiful cabinets and display cases, and no rope cordoning anything off, Susan thought. This room was lived in!

  Then Esmond Rostoff came in, and someone who looked less like a Russian nobleman Susan could not imagine. He was several inches shorter than herself, sharp-faced, with a chalky complexion, crinkly blond hair, carefully combed and greased down over the bald patches on his scalp, and an immaculate goatee beard. He wore a blue cardigan, emblazoned with a gilt nautical logo, a monogrammed open-necked shirt and silk cravat, navy slacks and black suede Gucci loafers. His wrists, fingers and neck were dripping with jewellery, and he reeked of a sickly sweet cologne.

  ‘Daaarrrhhhling!’ He greeted Mr Sarotzini in the most affected accent Susan had ever heard, giving him a bear hug, kissing him cheek-to-cheek on both sides and repeating at least half a dozen times. ‘It is just soooo good to see you!’ Then he turned to Susan, ‘I’m just so thrilled to meet you, my deeearrrr,’ and gave her a limp, clammy handshake. ‘I am told you are a greaaat expert on the early Impressionists?’ He stared into her eyes with his own beady little ones, as if communicating a secret shared between her and himself. This sudden intimacy revolted her even more than his handshake.

  He was grotesque.

  She was having the same problem figuring the man’s age as she had with Mr Sarotzini. Her first impression was that he was about sixty, but he was wearing make-up, she could see, and could have been much older. ‘No, I’m not an expert, I just love that period, that’s all.’

  ‘May I offer you a glass of Krug?’

  Susan was mindful of the time – it was already a quarter to three. ‘No, thank you very much. I’d love just a quick look at your paintings, then I must be away.’

  He found her eyes again, and once more transmitted that shared secret, whatever it was. Was he implying that he knew about the baby? She had no idea. Then, suddenly, he leaned forward and touched the silver brooch she had clipped to her neck. ‘How charming, how simmmmppppply charming. Is this a family heirloom?’

  ‘No, it was a birthday present from my husband.’

  It was a simple brooch, plain, curved, beaten silver with a scrolled surround, but he continued to hold it as if he coveted it more than anything on earth. With his face so close to hers, she noticed that both his ears were pierced with tiny diamond studs. He repulsed her even more.

  As he released the brooch, Susan remarked, to be polite, ‘This is a beautiful room.’

  He inclined his head, which almost made him look as though he was bowing. ‘You are just tooooo kind. It is all in need of revitalising, like ourselves.’ He winked at Mr Sarotzini, who returned a modest smile.

  Rostoff led them into a lift, and the smell of his cologne was so strong it made her feel queasy as the slow, antiquated car took its time, descending what seemed to her to be more than just one floor. Was this man typical of Mr Sarotzini’s friends, she wondered. From the easy familiarity between them they were clearly old chums. This presumably was the world in which her child was going to be brought up. A society of rich, ageing and, perhaps, lonely people.

  Something about Esmond Rostoff seemed to mirror a sadness that she had felt in Mr Sarotzini when she had met him previously. But it wasn’t just a sadness, or sense of loneliness about these men, there was something else, a closeness, a bond that she was picking up. It was a feeling, although she could not in any way put her finger on why, of a hidden agenda.

  They emerged from the lift into a subterranean gallery that left her, momentarily, in awe. It was vast, seemingly far larger than the house would have allowed and, in contrast to the upstairs, the interior design here, all in black and cream marble, was stunningly modern.

  ‘This is the Van Gogh room,’ Esmond Rostoff told her, leading her forward.

  She could barely believe her eyes. There were about thirty paintings, of varying sizes, plus drawings, rough sketches and unfinished canvases, and she had never before seen any of the works.

  Were these fakes? They couldn’t be, no way. ‘How?’ she said, her voice coming out in squeak. ‘How did you build up this collection?’

  Rostoff smiled then, strutting ahead, led her through into the Monet room. ‘I like beautiful things, Susan. They are the trophies that make up for all the bad times one has to endure in life.’ He gave her a long, knowing look. ‘For me, these are my babies.’

  Blushing deeply, Susan followed him. The Monet room was even more spectacular. And, suddenly, she felt frightened being here. All these paintings were fresh to her eyes. She had studied history of art at school and she knew it was impossible, quite impossible, to see so many paintings by these great artists and recognise none, unless they had been kept out of public sight for a very long time. Most private collectors were proud of their works and loaned them to galleries. If they didn’t there was a good chance that the works had at some time been either stolen or looted. So some had been smuggled from the Hermitage in 1917, but the rest?

  Rostoff wasn’t looking at these pictures, he was looking at Susan. He was enjoying her reaction. This was how he got his kicks from this collection, she realised. He probably didn’t care what the paintings were, he got his bang out of the secrecy, out of the fact that he owned them and no one knew. He was like a child who had hoarded tuck under his bed.

  She looked nervously at Mr Sarotzini. Why had he brought her here? To show off the kind of high-powered friends he had? Or because he thought she would genuinely be interested to see the paintings. The trophies.

  And she wondered, with a chill, if that was all her baby meant to him. If, like these paintings, Bump was nothing more than a trophy, proof that if you had enough money, you could buy anything you wanted. Even life itself.

  And as if reading her thoughts again, Bump stroked her, anxiously.

  Don’t you worry, Bump, she thought. You’re no
t going to be anyone’s trophy. I promise you.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  At five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, just when Susan was beginning to panic that their friendly Thai restaurateur had let her down, Lom Kotok arrived, in a vast, rented van filled with an army of waiters and waitresses. Susan had only requested two, but she lost count of the number of people who climbed out of the vehicle and started carrying covered dishes of food into the house.

  Kotok summoned her to the back of the van, raised a conspiratorial finger and lifted a huge cloth. Beneath was an ice sculpture of a leaping salmon. ‘Present,’ he said. ‘Look nice on the table.’

  She kissed him and he looked startled. ‘Thank you, you’re very kind to us and we appreciate it.’

  ‘You nice people,’ he said. ‘No enough nice people in the world.’

  The bartender was a strikingly handsome young Thai, all smiles and dim as a plank. After the third attempt at using John’s ScrewPull corkscrew he broke it, embedding the point in his thumb, and had to be driven off to hospital by Kotok. John opened the rest of the wine himself, using the hopelessly inadequate corkscrew on his Swiss Army penknife, then wandered around sucking his hand which by the time he had finished, was sore and blistered. To Susan’s annoyance, he picked away at all the edible bits of garnish on the food.

  The guests had been asked for eight o’clock. By seven thirty, the furniture had been pushed back against the walls, Mozart was playing on the CD, the ice salmon looked magnificent as the centrepiece on the food table, surrounded by platters of curried seafood starters, and the crew of waiters and waitresses had been briefed, including the substitute bartender.

  Bowls of nuts hotter than raw chillies, another gift from Kotok, had been placed by the smiling staff on every available surface, where they lurked like land mines. Susan did not want to offend Kotok, who was not yet back from the hospital, by telling him that they were seriously, dangerously inedible.