The Collector's Apprentice

by B. A. Shapiro

  Once you and a mark suffer a joint failure, especially when the mark believes that failure is partially his—or in this case, hers—a sense of attachment develops. A spirit of “we’re in this together.” When that connection is made, the mark will assume all your subsequent decisions are in her best interests, and after that it’s smooth sailing. Which is exactly how the “robbery” had gone.

  The night was cloudy and starless, the crickets causing a racket. He wore dark clothes and gloves, approached the building from behind a little after one o’clock, a crowbar at his side. Just as planned, the door was unlocked. He twisted the knob, pushed it in a few inches, inserted his gloved hand, locked it from the inside, and closed the door again.

  Then he began smashing it with the crowbar. As loudly as he could. He hacked at the doorknob, scratching metal against metal. He thrust the curved edge into the wood, hacked some more. He kicked the door with his boot a few times just for luck and then disappeared into the darkness. From a neighbor’s yard he watched a few lights come on, and then, chuckling, he made his way to his car.

  After the entire brouhaha, the sirens and the lights and all those cops running around like a gaggle of Mad Hatters, no one will be lifting any paintings from Edwin Bradley’s little fiefdom anytime soon. Which, once again, is just fine with him.

  The best part, the reason for the entire escapade, is that Paulien will now believe he tried his damnedest to get her precious paintings. And because she’ll also feel responsible for the failure, she’ll agree to his next, infinitely more profitable suggestion.

  When Vivienne arrives at the Bradley the next day, it’s as if the turmoil of the last twenty-four hours never occurred. Edwin is in his office meeting with his bankers, and Sally McDonald, his new secretary, is busy typing. There’s no sign of the police.

  Vivienne sits down at her desk and pulls out the materials for a course she’s been developing, but her eyes refuse to remain on the page, straying toward the window, the bookshelf, the ceiling. Just a few days earlier, she was consumed with ideas for a class on Renoir, which dovetails nicely with the book she and Edwin are writing—not to mention the over one hundred Renoirs in the collection. Now she can’t work up any enthusiasm for figuring out the best way for the students to discover Renoir’s groundbreaking insight that shadows aren’t black or brown but the reflected color of the things around them.

  She stares at her notes, but they look like a swarm of bugs rather than words. If the situation stays as it is, there’s no hope of returning the colonnade seven to her father; Edwin will surely hire guards, and the trust agreement fixes the paintings in place as securely as the ensembles do. Her only hope is to convince Edwin that the benefits of terminating the trust are worth the money.

  After he escorts the bankers out, Edwin comes to find her. “The Bradley is bleeding money.” He lights two cigarettes, offers one to her. “The endowment is shrinking.”

  “Bleeding and shrinking,” she says, taking the cigarette. “You make it sound like the Bradley is on its deathbed.”

  His mouth is a straight line, his voice gravelly. “It’s not good.”

  “Bankers like to worry,” she reminds him. “It’s their job.” How critical can this be? Edwin is a millionaire many times over, and the collection’s value is mind boggling—and growing every day.

  He stares at a spot over her shoulder and doesn’t respond.

  “Couldn’t you buttress it with some of your own money?”

  Now he focuses on her, and his eyes are cold. “I’m not particularly liquid at the moment.”

  This makes sense, given the amount of artwork he’s been acquiring—and for how long. Bradley and Hagerty, Chemists, is doing well, but Edwin mentioned that sales have been slow lately. And although the stock market is booming, Edwin considers stocks too risky and invests only in bonds.

  “Hermans said that without changes, we’ll run out of cash in the next three to five years.” He starts to cough.

  Vivienne pours him a glass of water from the pitcher on her side table, hands it to him along with her handkerchief, tries to absorb what he’s telling her.

  The monthly bills for an endeavor of this size have to be staggering—for salaries, electricity, maintenance, and so much more. Edwin has begun only a small portion of the conservation effort needed to keep the artwork in decent condition and patched a few holes in the roof. Despite its young age, the building has suffered significant settling, shifting, and cracking—something about cement and the cold winter during construction—plus the collection is showing serious signs of wear as well. All this is going to worsen, necessitating more money for more repairs.

  “So what did Hermans suggest?”

  Edwin takes a long drink of water. “The usual. Allow paintings to go out on loan, sell color reproductions, open to the public, get rid of the bonds at a loss, and invest in the stock market.” He pauses. “Deaccessioning.”

  Deaccessioning, selling off a portion of the art, is something Edwin will never consider, but perhaps he might accept one of the others. “And?”

  “As you well know, none of it is negotiable.” He scowls at her as if this is her fault. “Which is exactly what I told Hermans. No books. No stocks. No loans. And I refuse to allow random people off the street into my home!” He pounds her desk for emphasis and leaves the room.

  Vivienne stares into the corridor. If Edwin doesn’t have the cash to pay the taxes, the trust cannot be terminated.

  Once a day, sometimes more, she goes into each of the galleries where the colonnade seven hang, visiting the paintings as one might visit incarcerated family members. Touching the frames, murmuring to them if no one’s in earshot, trying to raise their spirits. To raise her own. She wishes George would show up so she could have him arrested. Now that he has nothing to offer her, she might be able to pull a success out of this debacle. But he’s surely aware that this might be on her mind—and it’s probably why he’s staying away.

  Although Henri is racing to finish Dance II, he writes more frequently than ever, but now his letters are less about missing her and more about the mural’s progress. In one he boasts that the new dancers are looser and more lyrical than the earlier ones, and in the next he claims that images of the still-unfinished mural haunt his waking hours and torment his sleep. He grumbles that his willpower is completely depleted and that it’s only his stubbornness that stands between him and abject failure.

  Edwin is constantly bellyaching also: about the money, about Quinton, about the damn bankers, about his damn cough. It’s not that she doesn’t sympathize with both Henri and Edwin, but their peevishness is annoying, and it’s not as if she doesn’t have peeves of her own. This is what comes of being the loyal confidant to two men: two sets of grievances, two sets of placations, two sets of vexations.

  As fall deepens, Vivienne spends as much time outside as she can, kicking up the red and yellow leaves that cover the sidewalks and grassy parks, roaming without destination. She’s at a picnic table in Gladwyne Park one afternoon, finishing off a sandwich and watching a mother teach her little girl to play hopscotch, when she feels someone sit down too close to her on the bench. She twists around, annoyed at the presumption.

  “Paulien,” George says.

  “George.”

  “Sorry about the robbery. The guys screwed up.”

  “You hired them.” She scours the park for a policeman, a ranger, anyone with authority.

  “It wouldn’t have happened if the door hadn’t been locked.”

  Their eyes engage in battle. A tickle at the corner of George’s mouth, a matching one at Vivienne’s. Why does she find it so hard to stay angry with him? Even though he’s the most contemptible man she’s ever met. “Touché,” she says, trying to control her smile. “I guess I should also apologize.”

  “Apology accepted.” He leans back into the bench. “So now we need to come up with an alternate plan to get your paintings.”

  “I thought you always have an alte
rnate plan,” she says dryly. “Or three.”

  “I do know that forcing Bradley to terminate the trust agreement is the way to begin.”

  She stares at him. How on earth could he know this? But George is always a few steps ahead of everyone else. “Do you have any thoughts on how this might be accomplished?”

  “I understand there are some financial issues.”

  “Which is why Edwin will never terminate it. He doesn’t have the money to pay the taxes.”

  George watches a wave of leaves roll along the sidewalk, pushed by the wind. “Is there anything that could happen that would make the termination worth the money to him?”

  “Highly unlikely.”

  “There must be something,” George presses. “What is it that would enrage him the most?”

  Now it’s Vivienne’s turn to watch the twirling leaves, which remind her of Henri’s dancers. “If someone was going to take the collection away from him . . . ,” she says slowly. “Especially if they were going to turn it into a public museum.”

  George beams.

  32

  George/István, 1926

  Once Ada explained that the Bradley was held in a tax-exempt trust, his next steps were plain. Whether the beneficiary is Paulien or Ada, the trust must be terminated. As it stands now, after Bradley’s death, neither woman would actually inherit the collection; they would only gain pseudocontrol of it, their hands tied by a board of trustees. And if they don’t own it, neither will he.

  After the attempted robbery—well, the not-really-attempted robbery—he takes a month-long train ride to California and back. Going west through Chicago, east through Texas. The idea is to let any investigation of the break-in cool down, and for both Vivienne and Ada to heat up. He finds that absence works just as the sages say it does.

  When he gets back to Philadelphia, he continues where he left off. He spends a day at Ker-Feal with Ada, encouraging her to fall even more in love with him than she already is—if that’s possible—and milking her for information on the Bradley. She’s shrewder than he believed at first, but unfortunately she’s got little interest in or knowledge of her husband’s business affairs. “If it were up to me,” she told him, “I’d burn the whole place down—with the girlfriend inside.”

  The next day he follows Paulien to the park. Even after the “bungled” burglary, she’s clearly pleased to see him—and more than pleased to collude with him to get her hands on her colonnade seven. She’s still willing to marry him, even if she claims it’s only for the purposes of their bargain, which it isn’t. It’s because she loves him, has always loved him. He knows how to play her, has always known how to play her. Which is useful because, unlike Ada, she does have a lot of interest in and knowledge of Bradley’s business affairs.

  33

  Vivienne, 1927

  Vivienne is in Edwin’s office trying to find the files he left for her documenting his Renoir purchases. His desk is a mess, and it takes her longer than she expects. She finally finds what she’s looking for under a pile of opened mail and is just about to return to her own office when she catches a glimpse of a letter from Edwin’s physician, Dr. Tauber. She pulls it out.

  It is with great regret that I inform you that Drs. Evarts Graham and J. J. Singer of New Orleans, Louisiana, have refused to take on your case. While they have attempted surgical remedies for carcinoma of the lung in the past, none of these interventions proved successful, and the doctors are reviewing their procedures prior to making another attempt. In the meantime, they recommend, as do I, morphine for the pain and shortness of breath, ginger tea and alfalfa seeds for loss of appetite and fatigue.

  Vivienne allows the doctor’s message to flutter to the desk. Carcinoma of the lung. Edwin has lung cancer. This explains the coughing and wheezing, the cold that never went away. Cancer. The word no one speaks out loud.

  “Edwin must have known about this for a while,” she tells George. “Long enough for the doctor to contact the surgeons. For them to write back. And he’s been sick a lot longer than that.” She thinks back to when she first noticed his coughing fits. “Over a year, I think. Maybe two.” Her eyes widen. “Which is just about when he made me his beneficiary . . .”

  George strokes his chin as if he still had Ashton King’s beard. “Can’t have much time left.”

  “Which means we have to get this done.” It isn’t that she’s completely coldhearted; she’s shed more than a few tears over Edwin’s diagnosis, and she’s concerned about how tough his last days might be. What she and George are doing doesn’t have anything to do with Edwin’s illness. They’d begun moving forward before she found the letter.

  “Building trust takes time,” George says. “Especially with a fish as big as Thomas Quinton. He and I—or to be exact, he and Copper Robinson—have had a number of dinners, cigars, et cetera, but it’s only been a couple of months, not long enough. He has to believe, really believe, not only that Robinson is a highly regarded Australian architect, but that I’m his friend.”

  “What if Edwin dies before—”

  “Trust is key,” George says calmly. “Without it you lose, and I don’t plan to lose.”

  “I understand that,” she protests. “But it’s not only the cancer. The Bradley’s finances are getting worse. We need to move faster if Edwin is ever going to agree.”

  “No, my dear Paulien, we need to move slower if Edwin is ever going to agree.”

  Vivienne hesitates. It goes without saying that George has more experience conning people than she does, but she knows Edwin better. “He’s a stubborn old coot, and once he’s made a decision, he feels it’s a sign of weakness to change it.”

  “Which is exactly why this setup is so important.” George’s voice is confident. “If done correctly, once the new information is added into the equation, he’ll convince himself that changing his mind will make his position stronger. Or he’ll fail to recall he ever made the first decision.”

  “This is making me nervous.”

  The laugh is full of warmth and affection. “Okay, okay. Fine. Let’s gather all the information Robinson is going to need to persuade his good pal Thomas Quinton to help us, then I’ll see what I can do to speed up the action.”

  The next night, Vivienne brings George to the Bradley after hours. They walk into the main room. “The engineers told Edwin the building itself is structurally sound,” she says. “But because of problems when the footings were poured, there’s been a lot of settling.” She points to cracks that run down the west wall. “And the roof leaks.”

  George strolls around the room, a notebook and pen held behind his back. He looks carefully at a picture of three nudes by Seurat. “Is this warped?”

  She looks at the tiny ripples he’s pointing to with the back of his pen. “I’m afraid it is.”

  He writes this down, and they continue into Room 2. A water-damaged wooden German chest, a Manet stained in one corner, Van Gogh’s Postman covered with a visible layer of dust. She brings him to the utility closet and shows him the dozen pails they use when it rains.

  “There hasn’t been nearly enough conservation work, so some of the undamaged pieces need repair—and almost all of them need cleaning.” Vivienne points to a Renoir. “See how the varnish is darkening here?” Then to another Seurat. “And all that along the bottom there? It’s dirt. Varnished paintings collect it like a magnet.”

  George follows her, scribbling in his notebook. “I’m going to have my work cut out for me after we close this deal. It’s going to take a hell of a lot more know-how and money than I thought to get this place in shape.”

  She stops abruptly and eyes him warily. Is he going to change his mind?

  He laughs. “Don’t worry. You’ve got plenty of know-how, and after this is over, I’ll have plenty of money.”

  They walk into Room 19, stand in front of The Music Lesson. “I remember this in your colonnade,” George says reverently.

  “My favorite, my father’s, too,” sh
e says wistfully. “It’s this very painting that brought us together when I was a little girl.” The very painting George stole from them, tearing them apart.

  “I’m sorry, Paulien.” George reaches out to pull her to him. “I’ll get them back for you. For Aldric, who I always liked. I promise I will.”

  For Aldric, who I always liked. She wants to spit at him, but instead she points to the next gallery. When the robbery failed, she lost her stick; there’s nothing to hold over his head if he goes for a double-cross. It occurs to her that he might have planned it this way. But even George can’t be playing that many moves ahead. Ultimately it doesn’t matter; she’ll destroy him in the end. And if this all works as she hopes, she’ll get the collection, too.

  She begins explaining how canvases and wood panels need strengthening, how injuries from age or transportation or inattention pile up. “And the restoration process can also be complex. Come see this.”

  She brings him to a large painting in Room 6. “Some artists use different materials in a single painting. This one is made from oil, glue tempera, pastels, and a bit of gold leaf. Each of these elements ages and degrades at a different rate, and each requires a different technique to recondition it.”

  He inspects the picture. “Fascinating.”

  “It gets worse,” she says. “The collection contains artworks made with all kinds of substances: egg, wax, house paint, even chocolate. And they’re on all kinds of backings: canvas, wood, linen, paper, metal. So again, different rates of decay and different techniques for restoration.”

  He raises his head from his notebook and beams at her with admiration. “We’re going to make a great team.”

  Vivienne begins spending time with George, who claims he’s a new man and that they can now have the life they planned six years ago, live happily ever after with the Bradley collection as their family. Although this is not her vision of the future—where he rots in prison for eternity—she’s lonesome. So she lays out the ground rules: they’ll see each other no more than once a week, they’ll be circumspect, and there will be no physical contact.