by Bill James
‘True! How true!’ Falldew yelled.
Kate Avis nodded and smiled beautifully.
‘We must act together – a team, sinking absurd, petty enmities,’ Lepage declared. ‘I am confident the Hulliborn can count on you, as I hope and trust it can count on me, to carry everywhere this message of faith in the institution and the values it represents. And to convince those who decide policy for our nation that this museum is a symbol of much that is fine and indispensable; that its continuance as a centre of excellence is not merely merited but will be a boon and splendid asset. Thank you.’
Applause broke in full, thrilling volume. James Pirie, beaming in the front row, reached up to shake Lepage’s hand. ‘Grand, Director,’ he said. ‘Words of a true leader, and disregard any who say you’re not. Words of vision.’
Others pressed forward to congratulate Lepage. Itagaki exclaimed: ‘Top bracket! None of this can be gainsaid.’
Although Lepage shook many more hands, he made sure he kept a watch on Angus Beresford and Nev, especially on Beresford. But Beresford moved away from Falldew now. Yes, he might indeed have been affected by Lepage’s words calling for an end to foolish rifts, despite Beresford’s reasonable anger. Angus was clapping very heartily as he walked and, from his lip movements, Lepage judged he might also have been shouting, ‘Bravo! Well said!’
As Nev turned to leave with Ursula, though, Lepage became aware of another kind of rift. He saw now that the back seam of Falldew’s smart tux had been cleanly severed for its entire length, so as he edged towards the exit, the jacket opened at the rear and flapped gently, trailing cotton strands and some dreary segments of lining. Falldew appeared not to notice, and Ursula, walking ahead, had not seen it. Lepage realized that the damage could have been done by some exceptionally sharp instrument, standard in Beresford’s trade for dissecting. When Nev took the suit back from hire he would have some considerable talking and, most likely, paying to do, unless Urse was hot stuff with a needle. Lepage felt suddenly very down. He had spoken of unity, yet here was glaring division.
Julia came to the edge of the platform. Half-automatically, he put out his hand for her to shake in congratulation, too. She ignored it. ‘I’m going to help Olive get Vince Simberdy home. Penny thinks it will annoy Quentin if she seems too concerned about Vincent. This will be some of that selfless teamwork you were rabbiting about. I can call in at the kiosk, too, and see that Rowena’s managing. Will you be all right alone?’
He dearly hoped it would not come to that: this had been a damn rough and wearing night, and Lepage felt the need of consolation. As the Ball came to an end, he went to the medieval breakfast room, in case Kate had meant what she said about rendezvousing there. He was surprised to find the door unlocked and, half opening it very quietly, became aware of two people on the floor, using the mock straw as mattress, as he had himself. There were no lights on, and for a nonsensical moment he thought the male figure, fully dressed in dark clothes, was the defaced patriarch. Then he saw that the jacket hung open because of its slashed back, and he heard a voice that could be Ursula’s purr from beneath, ‘Just like the old times, Nev.’
‘But what is Time?’ Falldew replied, thrashing about to get his clothes off. ‘What the fuck’s happened to this jacket?’
‘Decide later,’ Ursula answered, ‘about the jacket and Time.’
Lepage thought he could make out on the primitive table, alongside the basic old feast, a diamanté shoe and a pair of rumpled green silk trousers. He closed the door and, just then, saw Kate approaching the tableau room in her fine gown. ‘It’s engaged,’ he said. ‘What happened to Adrian? You seemed very matey.’
‘I paid him off. We can go to your room instead, can’t we, George?’
‘That interfering bloody platypus is there.’
‘Put a cloth over it,’ she replied.
Fifteen
Simberdy recovered pretty fast from his tussle with D.Q. Youde, and so managed to get to this meeting with Wayne Passow – ‘Nothing Known’ – at Wayne’s club, the Blague, late next night. There’d been a phone call to Vince at home first. Wayne said the topic would be money, but wanted a full, detailed discussion face-to-face. ‘This requires mutual presence in discreet surroundings, Fatman.’
Olive came with Vince to the Blague. The three took a table in the bar. ‘You’ll soon see why this isn’t something to be said on the phone. No, no, no,’ Wayne told them. ‘We’ve entered the world of art. It’s a world worth giving respect and attention to. This is not your chicken shit.’ He put his hand through his short, blond hair, a bit bottle-aided, and gave one of those tragic, small smiles he specialized in. As Olive sometimes said, Passow had the face of a saint: long, ungenial, made for suffering, stronger than sin. If he ever did get charged, she reckoned a jury would be won by his looks and not just acquit but award huge costs against the police, then ask Wayne for personal blessings. He whispered: ‘We’re talking millions.’
‘We’re talking what?’ Simberdy screeched.
‘Please, keep the noise down, Fatman,’ Wayne said. ‘Don’t advertise. This club – well, if all the jail time done by members was laid end to end and pointed backwards we’d be with the Pharaohs or that Clementine Attlee.’
Olive said: ‘But how sure of this are you, Wayne?’
‘There’s a great career here for all of us, doubt me not,’ Passow replied. ‘A real load of heavy noughts. I been wasting my time. It’s obvious now. All that mini-activity when this art realm was just asking for yours truly. Well, I’m grateful, so grateful, to you two for pointing me that way and, as you already got evidence of, when he’s grateful Wayne Passow shows it.’ He leaned across the purple, mock-onyx table and squeezed first Olive’s arm, then Simberdy’s. ‘Still partners, still a premier division team.’
Glancing around the glossy, frenziedly décored interior of the Blague, Simberdy could see what Wayne meant about the clientele. There were faces here that Ronnie Acton-Sher might have jibbed at as being too savage and frightening for public display in his Zoology (Mammals) gallery. A couple of men seated not far from them, and exhaustively eye-inventorying Olive’s body, moved their lips in great convulsive surges when chatting, as if taking bites out of a roast. Passow waved to them. ‘Crispin, Redvers, lovely to see you both. I’m with friends prominent in Asian Antiquities, or I’d join you.’
‘I heard they got a lot of antiquities Asia way,’ one of the men said.
‘Unconfirmed, but very, very possible,’ the other said. ‘If Redvers here believes it, it got to be very, very possible.’
‘The thing about antiquities is their age,’ Redvers said. ‘You can’t have antiquities without age. Asia’s been there quite a time.’
‘This is a fact,’ Crispin said.
‘If there hadn’t been an Asia, what would have been in its place?’ Redvers asked. ‘I’ll tell you: the sea, ocean. But oceans already cover one fifth of the world’s surface. So, if there hadn’t been an Asia there, the amount of sea would really be over the top, in my opinion. Right out of proportion. I don’t know if your friends ever considered that.’
‘We go in for the smaller Asian items, not Asia itself, in bulk,’ Simberdy said.
‘Exhibits,’ Passow said.
‘That’s fair enough,’ Crispin said. ‘But if there’d only been sea where Asia is there wouldn’t be no exhibits, so it’s great that Asia is definitely in that area known as Asia. All right, you might get flotsam and jetsam washed up, but this is not the same as exhibits.’
‘And what would the flotsam and jetsam be washed up on if there wasn’t no Asia?’ Redvers said.
‘The thing about exhibits is they go back centuries and centuries,’ Passow answered, ‘therefore proving Asia must of been there.’
Crispin and Redvers nodded. Wayne Passow’s remark seemed to have brought a satisfactory end to this conversation.
Simberdy turned to Wayne and lowered his voice. This was not for Crispin and Redvers: ‘I don’t want to
sound hostile, Nothing Known,’ Simberdy said, ‘but to be frank, Olive and I would prefer no further involvement in the Hulliborn paintings episode. This is how we see it – an episode. An episode that’s over, as far as we are concerned. We’ll put ourselves in the clear and stay in the clear.’
‘“In the clear”? How, Fatman? We’re a unit. Everybody knows it.’
‘Everybody doesn’t fucking know it,’ Simberdy replied.
‘No, but everybody could,’ Passow said.
Simberdy hadn’t wanted to come to the club, and particularly so late at night. The Blague lay very close to Julia Chakely’s jacket potato kiosk in Bray Square. Vince wouldn’t like the Director’s partner to spot them entering a villainous dump like the Blague at near midnight. But Wayne had insisted the telephone wouldn’t do, and said he couldn’t make it earlier owing to commitments. So, now, they sat in the club, drinking surprisingly excellent champagne and doing their best to get a hold on what Nothing Known might tell them. Simberdy and Olive had arrived by taxi and scuttled fast into the club’s grimy, faded-red, bouncer-dense doorway. Simberdy recognized that his scuttling might be distinctive, but had tried to blur this image by holding his waist in through breath control and quietly repeating to himself over and over a line from a Cary Grant film, ‘Think thin.’
Sighing modestly, Passow leaned across the foul table again and murmured: ‘I got to say this to start – cards on the table; that’s always my way. All right, then: I think maybe I didn’t get the greatest price available for that first sales object.’
‘The Monet?’ Simberdy asked.
‘Values are very subjective,’ Olive said.
‘I listen around,’ Passow replied. He lowered his lowered voice. ‘Thirty grand is very uplifting, but is it uplifting enough? You get what I’m saying?’
‘You’ve had an eye-opener somehow, have you, Wayne?’ Simberdy said.
‘You’ve hit it, Fatman. I was taken for a bit of a ride. Never mind: the lad who advised me – that London dealer – he’s not going to be doing nothing similar for a long time, I can tell you.’
‘What?’ Olive said, obviously troubled. ‘Why not?’
‘I heard he took very sick,’ Wayne said. ‘Not terminal, but disabling for a while. How can he visit customers or galleries in that state?’
‘Oh, God,’ Simberdy said.
‘But don’t you worry, Fatman. I found somebody so much better for us.’
‘Yes?’ Simberdy said. ‘You sure?’
‘This is a different dealer, also from London way, but straight, so straight. Well, he soon gave me inside stuff on that previous one, I can tell you,’ Passow said.
‘How do you know?’ Olive said.
‘Know what?’ Nothing Known replied.
‘That he’s straight,’ Olive said.
‘This one, he’s not just in London. He’s been to Paris, Florence, Madrid, the whole scene,’ Wayne said.
‘Oh, God,’ Simberdy said. ‘Didn’t you say the other one had been to Paris as well?’
Redvers said: ‘Do you know what I hate, Wayne?’
‘Well, you’d hate an ocean if it was where Asia ought to be,’ Passow replied.
‘Yes, but more than that,’ Redvers said.
‘This opens up a big field,’ Wayne said.
‘But it’s obvious,’ Redvers said. ‘I hate to see a party of three – like you and your two friends. It don’t seem to balance right, like things wouldn’t be balanced if we had too much sea because of no Asia. It’s a couple, plus one, and that one is you – a bit spare.’
‘I’m all right with it,’ Wayne said.
‘How to put it right is if that nice piece from the kiosk you’re in here with some nights came in now,’ Redvers said.
‘Red means it would even things out,’ Crispin said.
‘From the kiosk?’ Simberdy said. ‘Which kiosk?’
‘No, she won’t be here tonight,’ Nothing Known said. ‘This is just business. It don’t matter only three.’
‘If you say so,’ Redvers replied.
‘The spud kiosk in Bray Square?’ Simberdy asked. Could this be? Did women move from someone like Lepage to someone like Passow? To that, Simberdy knew the answer was very much yes: women transferred from here to there and maybe back again, or elsewhere. Nobody could tell why, not even other women; maybe not even the woman doing the transferring herself. But, all the same, to Nothing Known, for God’s sake? Mind, he was younger and a lot more refined looking than Lepage.
Passow switched back to the main topic, speaking quietly again, to exclude Redvers and Crispin. ‘What I got to tell you both is gloriously re them other paintings.’
‘The “El Grecos”?’ Olive asked.
‘Now, I hear from the way you say it, Olive, like “El Grecos”, not just El Grecos –’ he got suspicion and sarcasm into his voice for the ‘El Grecos’ – ‘yes, the way you say it makes it clear you think there could be something wrong with them, that right?’
‘Me, I love them,’ Olive answered.
‘No, not much wrong with them,’ Simberdy said, ‘just they’re phoney through and through, and the man who bought them for the Hulliborn is the jerk of jerks, that’s all. You’re hawking a load of rubbish, Wayne.’
Passow gave that pained, saintly smile again. ‘Of course, I knew there was a bit of uncertainty.’
‘A ton,’ Simberdy said.
‘I didn’t try to hide this rumour from the new contact of mine – the second dealer,’ Passow said. ‘In any case, he’d heard it. Something like that gets all round the art world, only natural.’
‘But?’ Olive asked, excited.
‘Yes, “but”,’ Nothing Known said, chuckling. ‘But we – that’s you, Olive, you, Fatman, my dealer and me – yes, we got a buyer. That’s the message. Why we’re here tonight. Fruitful talks are in progress.’
‘Who? Where?’ Simberdy asked.
Another patient smile. ‘Always questions, Fatman. But why not? Who? Someone with the real stuff. Where? Let’s say abroad, shall we? Who, again? Someone who knows about art and money and who knows about El Greco, and who is sure these are real with what’s known in the art game as “provenance”, meaning OKness, and to hell with what anybody says against. Someone who knows it so strong and who is into that provenance so deep, he’s willing to pay a very jolly price. He thinks they’re worth millions and will come across.’
‘Yes, Wayne?’ Olive said. ‘How many millions?’
‘Under particular discussion, as you’d expect,’ Passow replied. ‘Detail. The Vision is smaller than the other two, but that don’t necessarily mean cheaper. It’s not the amount of paint or the space on a wall it could fill. Other matters to consider in the price. Of course. This is the mystery of art.’
‘That ponce Youde got it right?’ Simberdy cried. ‘Is this what you’re asking us to believe, Wayne? How the hell do you know this middleman, this dealer, is straighter than the last?’
‘Quieter, Fatman. They’ll think you’re a headbanger and have you chucked out. This place got a reputation to think of now and then.’ Passow looked about slowly, smiling non-stop to signal everything was serenity despite appearances and the din moments. The man behind the gilt and glass bar seemed to accept Passow’s unspoken assurance. Wayne gave Redvers and Crispin a thumbs-up and special, personal smile. ‘How do I know he’s better, straighter, and that the El Grecos are for real? I feel it, that’s all. Wayne Passow feels it.’
‘Oh, God,’ Simberdy replied.
‘You’re poisoned by jealousy of Quentin Youde, Vincent,’ Olive said. ‘Haven’t I told you this whole value thing is so arbitrary?’
‘Now you’ve hit it, Olive,’ Passow said. ‘Exactly. Arbitrary. Does that mean millions? And then that other word you came out with, “subjective”. What’s that one about?’
‘It can mean anything,’ Olive said. ‘That’s the whole point.’
‘A word and a half, yes?’ Passow replied.
In the tax
i on their way home, Olive said: ‘Wayne is banging George Lepage’s Julia?’
‘There might be other kiosks,’ Simberdy said.
‘Yes?’
Sixteen
In the house this time, rather than the gym, Penelope was having one of her talks to Butler-Minton. Kneeling on a seedy old bit of Persian rug, her head stretched forward, Penny chatted into a cupboard under the stairs. A photograph of Eric hung on its rear wall, and whenever she opened the doors and switched on the little interior light, she chewed over a Hulliborn topic or two: the kind of things she knew would have interested him. She felt a kind of duty to keep a photo of Eric, but didn’t want it in an open, prominent part of the house where she’d have to see it every day; see it perhaps unintentionally, and with an unpleasant shock at times, when looking for something else. She liked to make a conscious, planned decision to gaze at the photograph, and to have in mind a very precise duration. By keeping the snap in this hidden-away recess she could carry out her obligations to the memory of Eric, without making over much of them. The other advantage was that people calling would not see the photo in one of the rooms and feel obliged to talk about him. She would have gone to the cupboard occasionally anyway, because it was where she stored old copies of Sporting Life. She worked a horse-race betting system that required a lot of reference back. On account of Eric in there, though, she went to the cupboard more often than her punter research demanded.
The picture showed Butler-Minton receiving an honorary doctorate at Ibadan University, Nigeria, in about 1982, and trying his hardest to look wholesome under that big, academic pancake hat, the mark of a bite she’d given him lately very evident high on the cheek, like a mange patch. Rainbow-robed black professors surrounded him, most of them offering warm, brotherly smiles, though a few gave signs of galloping panic, as if just starting to wonder what the hell they were doing letting someone like Flounce get more deeply associated with the institution.