‘Don’t be silly, suppose …’
‘I insured it. This afternoon I insured it to be in our safe until one month after the sale, and all risks for tonight, and for the day of the sale itself. Here’s the cover note, I had them fax it. Just for tonight, Bianca. For us.’
She was terribly tempted to kiss him, but they both knew that this was their last supper and she did not want to blow on the quiet embers of their passion and have it flare up again at the wrong moment. ‘You think of everything. If you ever want a day job, I’ll give you a good reference.’ Her throat was tight and the words came out with difficulty.
‘You’ll miss me, then?’
‘Of course I will. What do you want to do?’ She was about to zip up her dress when he crossly pulled away her arms and fastened it for her.
‘Go back to Leningrad for a while, after that – I don’t know. I can always teach, I’ve had good offers.’
‘There are a few more things you could do for me in Russia, you know. If you’d like to. I could extend your contract six weeks or so.’ She had heard that in Leningrad Lovat had found some more paintings by Konstantin Somov and, despise them as she did, she was in no mood to let him have them.
‘I wouldn’t want you to do anything …’
‘It would be quite proper. And it would be a help, I can’t operate in Leningrad, your uncle decided to award the city to Lovat.’
‘The war continues, then.’ He allowed her to slip the links into his cuffs, even though she was also far clumsier at this task than he.
‘Totally. And I hope you’re on my side.’
‘Naturally. At your service until death.’ He made the most elegant of courtly bows and offered her his arm. ‘He was after the necklace too, you know. I met some dealers who told me he’d been asking about it.’
‘I can’t believe I was married to such a two-faced swine.’ She turned to the mirror to admire the necklace and Alex noticed that her face wore an expression he had never seen before, elated, bright-eyed and confused. There was something girlish in it, suggesting the excitement of the first kiss or the thrill of the first ball. He attributed it to the necklace – jewellery had the power to change a woman’s face, he had remarked it before. It never ocurred to Alex Wolfe that a woman he had loved could be excited about another man.
22. London, 1991
Bianca saw Mr Wyngarde to the door and returned to her office. No hesitation, no second thoughts – if she thought about what she was about to do she would never do it. With her pen, in ink, she approved the proofs of the catalogue for the Russian sale: Kusminskaya’s portrait on the cover, a full-colour page inside and two more pages of description and history of the necklace which she now knew to be false. The reserve was two million pounds. This too she initialled without pausing.
She gave the proofs to her secretary to send to the printer, then called in the marketing director and the public relations executive and talked through plans for massive press coverage and a parallel word-of-mouth campaign.
‘This is going to be the most important sale in the history of the firm. We’ve got to break ground here, and in a big way. I want to know that we gave it our best shot. Don’t hold back on this one, it’s the biggest thrill we’ll ever get.’ After two hours, she sent them away with pages of notes, adding, ‘Nobody can talk up a market the way we can – let’s show them how it’s done.’
It was true, and it was largely her own achievement. When she talked about a sale Bianca had such conviction, such profound confidence in her own judgement, that she could persuade the least interested listener. If Bianca Berrisford – BB, as the whole world of art now knew her – said that Matisse’s Hand of Fatma was a far better painting than Picasso’s Lapin Agile, she was believed, even if she was about to sell the Matisse at the time. BB knew art. That was the whole story.
She had finally come into her birthright as a Berrisford. Upstairs in the marketing office there would soon be a planner with the key people – curators, connoisseurs, dealers – targeted to receive her personal assurance that the Russian avant-garde had been the greatest flowering of talent since the French Impressionists.
It was 7 p.m. Her secretary brought her a spritzer. She telephoned her home and heard her daughter’s account of her basketball match. Then she went up to the top of the building, where the apartment was now empty but for a lingering tang of Vetiver. It was the most erotic smell. Did she miss Alex? Not his poor muddled mind, nor his eggshell confidence, but his body, yes. In fact, at times she craved it. Late at night, when she woke in the morning, her flesh screamed for his.
He had taken her on a journey of exploration. Ten years of marriage, five pregnancies, and yet her own body had been a country unknown to her until Alex, with all his beauty and tenderness, had shown her its mysteries. Now she was alone; the pain of it was hard to bear, but not for anything would she want to return to the half life she had lived before him. She envied men, who could pick up a telephone, walk out into the street, sit down in a bar, and have all the sex they could pay for.
She turned on the shower and stepped into it, wondering how much fucking it would take to make you forget a two-million-pound fraud. Twenty minutes of Alex at his best; there had only ever been his best, he was a perfectionist. There had been a few others after her divorce, but none of them could have distracted her from a parking fine. And Lovat? Maybe he could have been a contender, if he had ever put his mind to it, given it the priority. Maybe a man couldn’t be a good businessman and a good lover.
Would Lovat have gone ahead and sold the necklace, knowing it was not authentic? Lovat Whitburn, king of the raider-dealers, he deserved the title, even if she had succeeded in snatching the Somov willow-tree series from under his nose. He would have bitched and raged but – yes, he would have done the same thing. But with a worse conscience. Duelling with him in business, she had discovered that Lovat had a severe handicap: there were depths to which he would not sink, a core of morality which would not bend to the shabbier tricks of his trade.
She dried her hair, climbed into the boring little suit she kept for dinners with Japanese clients, and went to Claridge’s to meet Mr Kameyama of the Mountain Tortoise Gallery in Tokyo.
Two weeks later, Lovat and Donald Tuttlingen drove to the Mount Street gallery directly from the airport. The American, suffering electronic withdrawal since his portable telephone had declined to receive signals in Park Lane, quickly began a long series of calls. Lovat picked out the Berrisford’s catalogue from his pile of post.
‘Don’t tell me …’ He looked carefully at the cover, and turned to the centre pages on the necklace. ‘I don’t believe it, God isn’t that good …’ He read the notes as fast as he could without skimming, re-read them to be certain, then threw the catalogue in the air with a rebel yell. ‘Yeee-hah! She fell for it! The dumb bitch fell for it!’
The American turned towards him, eyebrows signalling interest while he listened to the voice from Tokyo in his ear.
‘Is it an eagle? Is it a firebird? No! Its a fucking turkey! We’ve got her, Don. The shareholders will give us her head on a plate after this.’ He rummaged in his desk, an asymmetric neo-surrealist construction chosen by Isabel in which it was impossible to find anything quickly, and pulled out a file containing the picture of the necklace which Mitrokin had offered him and a detailed report from Kusminsky on its provenance.
The American finished his call. ‘Run this by me again …’
‘That’ – he flattened the catalogue with a slap and pointed to the description of the necklace – ‘is a dud. It’s a fake. She hasn’t got the Orlov necklace, it’s a lousy replica one of those Russian dealers botched together for a few dollars more. Mitrokin offered it to me last year, but I passed on it.’
‘So how did Berrisford’s get it? I thought you two had the USSR carved up between you.’
‘You remember that flake who was walking your wife’s widow friend? He came to me, claimed the Orlov necklace was left to him by h
is grandmother, and said he could get it. I knew he was lying. I sent him to Berrisford’s just for devilment. Even I didn’t dream that my dear ex-wife would be so stupid … I bet when he got out to Leningrad, Mitrokin saw him coming.’
‘He was a good-looking boy, the flake you mention.’
‘Maybe he was twenty years ago …’
‘You got green eyes, son.’ Sometimes Tuttlingen’s jocular paternalism annoyed Lovat, but today he enjoyed it. Today, he was ready to enjoy anything.
‘Listen, I hope the fucking she’s getting is gonna be worth the fucking she’s getting. Sincerely. I know what I’m talking about here, my wife is one of those women who never cared to get down and get nasty. Butter wouldn’t melt in her cunt, one of those. If the guy’s hot tamale, if he’s turned her on – I’m glad for her. She needed it.’
‘So out of the pure kindness of your heart you had him stripped, washed and sent to her tent …’
‘You wanted an auction house, I got you an auction house. On a plate. And stuffed.’
‘With salsa, the way I heard it.’
‘Don’t wind me up unless you want me to fly, Don.’
‘You went supersonic the minute you saw that catalogue, that’s what worries me. Listen, Lovat, I want an auction house, right? The way the art thing is going, in ten years you’ll either be an auctioneer or you’ll be rabbit shit. But you’re emotionally invested here, and you are in way too deep for me to sleep nights. Your evidence is a description in a catalogue, a bad photograph and a painting which isn’t exact. That’s not enough. I don’t want us to move on this until we’re certain and we can prove it.’
It was a reasonable stipulation. Lovat booked a telephone call to Anya; the delay was eight hours: He sent a fax to the hotel, then another to Mitrokin, who sent one back regretting that the Kusminskaya necklace had now been sold and, in addition, he had also taken a better offer for the series of willow-tree studies by Konstantin Somov.
‘The hell he has.’ A cloud of annoyance darkened Lovat’s day. ‘Who from, for fuck’s sake? He won’t tell me, lying’s the oldest sport in the all-Soviet Olympics.’
‘Could be a coincidence.’
‘The moon could be green cheese.’ Lovat reached for the catalogue again and ran his finger down one page after another. ‘But it isn’t. Numbers thirty-five to forty-two. “After the birch tree the willow was a favourite subject with the landscape realists …”’
‘On a plate with butter sauce, boy.’ Lovat screwed up the fax and threw it at the grinning American. ‘We still need proof positive on the necklace.’
‘Wyngarde. They always used him for jewellery.’ Lovat reached for the telephone again.
‘He won’t tell you.’
‘I’ll say I’m worried about her, that I think she’s been conned.’
‘He won’t believe you.’
‘Whose side are you on, Don?’
‘I’m on our side. I say, no selling the bearskin until we shoot the bear.’
Before Lovat could dial, his secretary announced Shona Crawford-Pitt. ‘Shit! Help me out, Don, have lunch with us.’ Imagining that he was doing Joe a favour when the design business was dying, he had asked Shona to redecorate his house, replacing Isabel’s pseudo-aboriginal murals and Balinese batiks with something – anything – more soothing.
He at once discovered what his best friend had not told him, that their marriage was also in a terminal condition. Both husband and wife had misinterpreted his gesture; Joe bitterly accused Lovat of kicking him when he was down. Shona wanted lunch every week and was making amorous advances. Lovat had never found her attractive and considered that his loyalty was with Joe, but he had not had sex for over a year. Not since Anya, and he was not proud of himself for taking advantage of her. He felt vulnerable. His life could get out of control.
‘Thank you for coming so quickly.’ Etienne Sokolov opened the
door of the apartment on the Place des Vosges. There was a strong smell of pine needles, and Bianca noticed a scented candle burning in a silver tub on the console in the hall. Sokolov no longer looked young. He was pale, and his face in his late thirties was settling into very deep lines. As always, he was dressed in black. ‘I was embarrassed to ask you but Kolya absolutely insisted.’
‘Does he know?’
He took her raincoat, holding it awkwardly over his arm. ‘Oh yes. He had quite an argument with the doctor. Last week they wanted to amputate the other leg, and he refused. Then the doctor said he could have gangrene, a stroke, anything, that he would not be responsible …’ He waved his hand, dismissing the doctor as if he were nothing but a hairdresser throwing fits over a tint. ‘And Kolya fired him. He said when he died it would be as a whole man, not a half. I’ve got another doctor, more sympathetic, with more respect, and he found this morning one tiny place where there is gangrene. So Kolya told me to light the candles, because you know it can smell pretty bad. The lawyer came this morning, because he wanted to be sure that his will is all OK. And now he’s waiting for you. I have to give you these.’ He held out three thin steel keys, safe keys, and she took them. ‘He may be a little’ – he searched for tactful words – ‘a little brusque. He has had morphine but there is still a lot of pain.’
The bedroom looked fit for Napoleon, with dark blue wool drapes held back in gold ropes over the massive mahogany lit-bateau. Kusminsky was propped against fresh linen pillows, his thin hair washed, his silk dressing gown perfectly arranged over his thin chest. With a stab of foreboding, Bianca saw the Berrisford’s catalogue beside him, under the crooked fingers of his right hand.
‘You are a stupid girl.’ His voice was faint, but how like her father he sounded. She prepared herself to be patient with a dying man. Undoubtedly he knew about the necklace, but if he had not told anyone else then she was safe.
‘You don’t have the Orlov necklace, so why do you advertise it?’
‘The necklace I have was attributed wrongly.’
‘Of course it was. But you know. So why?’ He was too weak to speak with much expression, but his voice was clear.
‘It was too late when we found out.’ If she pretended that the catalogue was to be withdrawn perhaps he would drop the subject.
‘Your husband says you are in trouble.’
‘Yes, we are. Everyone knows that.’
‘And you need a big sale.’
‘Yes, we do.’
‘So you don’t need a big scandal?’ Surely he was not going to betray her? Not in the very last days of his life?
‘Of course not.’
He raised his right hand to point, and she saw that it took all the strength he had. ‘The safe is there, open it please.’
Another blue wool drape, edged with gold key-pattern brocade, covered half the opposite wall, and it had been pulled back so that the wall safe was exposed. It was quite a simple design, three locks for the three keys, and she opened it without difficulty. Inside were a number of birch wood boxes, some bearing the Fabergé stamp, and a red morocco case.
‘Bring everything to me.’ He had an invalid’s writing table beside the bed, which she folded out. There were twelve identical tall boxes, one flat case and the other in leather. ‘Now open everything.’
She noticed that her fingers were shaking. Excitement was simmering in her stomach, the excitement of a child at Christmas. An instinct for drama made her begin with the red morocco case. It contained a thin gold bangle, bent slightly out of shape.
‘From the Tsar’s own casket. That was her first gift. Don’t do anything with that.’ He nodded at her, impatient for her to continue.
One after another, she opened the twelve vertical boxes, which contained Fabergé botanical studies, gold twigs in crystal vases with leaves and fruit in precious stones, each one a tiny masterpiece of artistry and imagination. They all represented trees – a birch, a willow, an alder, a horse chestnut with red jasper kernels, mistletoe with moonstone berries, beech, oak, pine, cherry, blue spruce, apple and rowan.
‘The most beautiful, the most delicate, and the most rare. They never made another set like this. Not even for the Tsarina. Go on.’ He was not looking at her as she opened the flat case. His hand fell on the edge of the table, inched forward on to it, and he touched the birch twig and made the catkins shake on their tiny gold hinges.
The flat case contained the Orlov necklace. When she saw it, exquisite and brilliant even in the subdued light of the sick room, she reproached her own judgement. How could she ever have considered that the feeble thing Alex had brought her could be passed off in place of this?
‘That is …’ He spat the word, and his left hand, which held a folded handkerchief, stirred on the quilt beside him. She saw tissues on the night stand, pulled one out and dried his sunken mouth. ‘That is the Orlov necklace.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Yes. Take it, take these’ – his forefinger indicated the twigs – ‘and sell them, in this sale. Not the bracelet, it’s not worth much. I will probably not be here when you sell them. There is a case, there, by the wall, and in it all the papers you need. Get the best price, and give the money to Etienne. He is my heir in any case.’
She stood like a statue, frozen with amazement. He seemed to register her astonished expression. ‘Etienne could never sell them, just as I could never sell them before now. Twenty years ago a dealer brought me these from Moscow – except the birch, I always had that. These things are part of me, of my life. But Etienne has given his life to me. I am his profession, really. It is right that I should reward him. Keep your mouth shut until it is done.’
‘I am profoundly grateful, Kolya. You must know that you have saved my business, my family. My grandmother …’
‘It’s not for her. I’m not doing this because you have been stupid, either. I know you will get the best price, that’s all. I’m tired. Go away.’ He shut his eyes and his hand slipped from the table.
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