Maestra

by L. S. Hilton

  I spent a while fantasizing about what I could do with the money, but that didn’t last long: 10K wasn’t much more than dinner for six at Billionaire. On my hoarded fund of Steve-euros I could have a couple nice days in Rome, see some pictures, eat some good food. When I got back to London I could wire a couple hundred quid to my mother, stay in the flat until I could find some work in a contemporary gallery, carefully buy a few pieces on the side, and then see. Maybe in a while I could afford a little studio of my own, once I’d paid off the bank loan. Small beginnings, maybe, but a clean start. I wouldn’t be desperate, and somehow that gave me the courage to face down the prospect of Rupert blacklisting me. It would be okay. Actually, it was going to be a lot bigger than okay.

  As we waited on the tarmac to pull up to the gate at Fiumicino, every Italian on the plane pulled out his or her phone. I did the same and texted Dave. I hadn’t dared to contact him before, in case there had been any fuss over James, but this felt like the right time.

  Hi, it’s Judith. Back in town in a couple of days. Can I take you for a drink? So sorry about that awful scene, hope all okay. Jx.

  He pinged back. I lost my job because of you. Think about that. D.

  Suddenly I was back in the Gstaad Club, poring over some boyfriend’s cramped textual inarticulacy. What did one kiss mean? Two? I knew what no kiss meant. Fury. Why would Rupert have fired Dave? He had been acting on my instructions; it was hardly a sacking offense. I pressed “call sender” immediately.

  “Judith. What do you want?” I could hear a TV in the background, but it didn’t disguise the weary tone of disgust in his voice.

  “Dave, I’m so sorry, I had no idea. I’ll call Rupert, explain it was all my fault—I’d never, ever have asked you if I thought your job was at risk. I knew how much it meant to you. Rupert had no right to sack you,” I finished weakly.

  “He did, though.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t bother. We’ll be fine.” I remembered Dave’s wife and felt even worse, if that was possible.

  “Dave, I’ll make it up to you. I will, I promise. Can’t your friend Mike help you? Maybe I—”

  “Leave it, Judith. Just get on with your life.”

  He hung up. I felt sick, sicker than I’d felt when I’d found James’s corpse. I knew how much the porters earned; I guessed Dave’s army pension would be predictably pathetic. I covered my face with my hands. I’d done this to him with my stupid, conceited meddling. I’d give him half the money as soon as I got back to town. But then I thought of the bank and the rent and the way I’d felt in the water in Sardinia, of the sour milk of James’s cum in my mouth, and what I’d just pulled off in Geneva, and I knew that I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

  PART THREE

  Outside

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE SECOND TIME was much less of an accident. I had thought of a room at the Hassler, overlooking the Spanish Steps, for my last hurrah, but unsurprisingly, and despite my attempt to bribe the concierge with a hundred-euro note and a winning smile, all their rooms with a view were taken. There didn’t seem any point in spending the money to look at a Roman wall, but as the receptionist was checking the register, I saw a name I recognized, Cameron Fitzpatrick. I’d last glimpsed him chatting to Rupert at the gruesome Tentis party. Fitzpatrick was a dealer I had sometimes contacted for the department; he had a poky, old-fashioned gallery in one of the forgotten eighteenth-century closes up by the old Adelphi buildings in London. His generally raffish air and the slight blush of the whiskey in his cheeks made him appear as though only his blarney charm stood between him and the bailiffs, but the manner belied him—he had a good eye for quirky second-rank pieces; thinking on it, I recalled a newspaper piece last year about an impressive price for a self-portrait by Oscar Wilde’s mother. The clock behind the reception desk read 12:05 p.m., just about time for an aperitivo. Maybe it would be worth hanging around to see if I could bump into him? I was keen to know if the Rupert debacle had caused any rumors, not that I had been remotely important enough at the House for that to be likely, but still, he was a potential contact now that it looked like I might actually be in business. Perhaps he’d even have a job going. I asked the receptionist to let me know if Signor Fitzpatrick came in and took myself off to the terrace at the back of the hotel for a glass of prosecco and a spot of people-watching. Half an hour later it didn’t seem as though he was going to appear, and I was walking back to the front door when I heard my name.

  “Judith Rashleigh?” The accent was a soothing bath of Irish bonhomie. Cameron was a big, shambling man with a thick head of coffee-colored hair, attractive for a straight guy who worked in the art world.

  “Cameron—what a nice surprise!” I didn’t think I needed to mention that I’d been lurking about, hoping to see him.

  I stepped up to him and offered my cheek for the now-obligatory metropolitan kiss and we bobbed awkwardly at each other the way Londoners still do.

  “I’m just checking in.”

  “Rome in August? It must be business. How’s the gallery?”

  We chatted for a few moments while he went through the business of handing over his passport and credit card. It was an appointment with a client that brought him to Rome. I got in quickly with the information that I had left British Pictures—I didn’t imagine Rupert & Co. thought enough of me to bother saying anything unpleasant, but it was better not to seem to be hiding anything.

  “You staying here?”

  “No. With some friends, actually. The dei Grecis.”

  I said it as if he ought to know them. There had been a Francesco dei Greci at my college; we’d screwed once. His family had a street named after them in Florence.

  “Lovely.” He seemed taken in. I made as if to leave. “I was just collecting something. So . . . it was nice to see you.”

  I hovered, knowing he would ask me to lunch, and when he did I pretended surprise and looked at my watch and said that would be lovely. While he went up to his room I quickly loaded my bags into a cab and paid the driver to take them to a small hotel I remembered in Trastevere. The dei Grecis, I decided, had a charming old villa up beyond the Borghese.

  “Do you know Rome well?” He still wore his navy suit, though the collar and tie had been replaced with a crumpled white linen shirt. There was a swag of paunch at his waist, but he was a good-looking man, if one liked things on that scale.

  “Hardly at all.” Always better to play the novice.

  So we talked of other places we knew in Italy as he led me down through the gazing crowds. After the thick gold blanket of dusty heat that lay across the open spaces, the small, dim streets felt vicious and secretive. We came out in a small piazza whose dinginess suggested the restaurant would be good. The groups of men eating under the awning spoke with Roman accents—a few beleaguered politicians’ lawyers, I imagined, imprisoned here while the rest of their city’s inhabitants were spread over the beaches of the peninsula. A solitary tourist in a baseball cap and sweat-ringed shirt read a French guidebook. I let Cameron order, saying nothing but an appreciative grazie. I wanted to charm him, to make him feel good. He drank a Negroni Sbagliato; we had razor clams and a delicate fresh pasta with rabbit and candied orange peel. After the first bottle of Ligurian Vermentino he asked for another, though I was still finishing my first glass, topped up with water. He was a good man for talking to women, I had to give him that, full of easy compliments and gossip and taking the trouble to ask for your opinion and look like he was paying attention to it. When I judged he was sufficiently confidential, I asked him who his mysterious client was.

  “Well,” he said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “would you believe I’ve a Stubbs to be selling?”

  “A Stubbs?”

  I practically choked on my makeshift spritzer. Why was Stubbs doing this to me? I’d always rooted for him, the northern boy pushed aside by the London
snobs. Was he my personal chimera, a kind of horse-headed albatross?

  Then Cameron pulled a folded catalog from the breast pocket of his jacket and the razor clams nearly reappeared for an encore. I didn’t need to look at it to recognize it, just the way I didn’t need to look at it to guess immediately what Rupert had been up to, and why he’d fired poor Dave and me for snooping. The only thing that surprised me was how extraordinarily thick I’d been, swotting along, playing the ideal employee, when anyone with real experience would have twigged straightaway that Rupert had been working a scam.

  Cameron hadn’t bothered asking exactly when I had left British Pictures and I hadn’t bothered telling him, so I could exclaim as though I was seeing it for the first time. I scanned the pages, making appreciative noises, noting that Rupert had at least bothered to add my research on the Ursford and Sweet sale to the provenance. Cameron had had it on a tip, he said, wasn’t quite sure until it had been cleaned up and then offered it for auction, until he’d thought better of it and found himself a private buyer. I could hardly believe my own dimness. They were in it together—presumably that was what they had been whispering about at the Tentis party. They had put up the money to buy the picture from the Tigers together, listing it at British Pictures to gloss over any doubts about authenticity, then they would have withdrawn it from the auction and sold it on beyond the eyes of anyone who could say otherwise.

  I had been right. It was not a Stubbs and Rupert had never believed it to be so. He would have called Mr. and Mrs. Tiger to ruefully confirm that their “Stubbs” was merely a “school of,” an imitation by a minor artist of the period. Hence the cross-purpose awkwardness of our conversation on the phone. Then Cameron, pretending to be acting independently, would have purchased it. Once it was legally in Cameron’s possession, the painting would have been “cleaned” by a man in from Florence or Amsterdam in an industrial workshop in the East End, and lo and behold, it turns out to be genuine after all. The hoo-ha of the projected sale rendered the provenance impeccable via the stamp of the world’s greatest House; it would all make the buyer feel he was getting a bargain. The two of them had never intended for the painting to reach a public sale. That explained the low reserve—if a seller withdraws a piece too close to the auction, they are required to guarantee the reserve fee as a fine to the house. Eight hundred thousand was a manageable amount for Cameron to produce, assuming he and Rupert were expecting a much higher price from their buyer. What had they paid the Tigers? Mrs. T had sounded pretty pleased when I had called her. Say, 200K, which meant that with the reserve fine, a million all told. Serious money, then, which made me wonder how much they were coming in for from the eventual buyer.

  It was brilliant, and perfectly legal, if the picture was real. Mr. and Mrs. Tiger might have seen their picture offered as a Stubbs and made a noise, but then it was withdrawn before the sale, false alarm. Any inquiries and Rupert could say that they had bought it and thought they’d got lucky, then reverted to the original valuation on investigation. Probably blame the “intern.” And even if it wasn’t genuine, and I was convinced of that, the client could sit it in a vault for a year and then offer it to some even more naïve buyer, new money from China or the Gulf somewhere, with the backup of the catalog I held in my hand, and take the profit.

  If there’s anything that being a woman has taught me, it’s when in doubt, play dumb.

  “That’s wonderful, Cameron,” I breathed. “Go on, how much?”

  “Judith!”

  “Go on. I can keep a secret. Who would I be telling?”

  He held up five fingers with a gleeful grin. Five million. Still low. Stubbs could easily fetch ten. The 1765 canvas Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath had made more than twenty from Piers Davies in New York a couple years ago. But five would be cash, effectively. High enough to be genuine, low enough to make the client feel they’d been brilliant. Clever.

  And then, just for a moment, I felt outside time. I saw myself again, ten years ago, my first time in the Uffizi, standing in front of Artemisia’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. It’s a standard subject, the Jewish heroine murdering the enemy general, but Artemisia makes it raw, almost unpainterly. When you look at the delicately enameled sword at Holofernes’s neck, you see that it’s not laid there ceremonially, suggestively, but caught in the flesh at an inelegant angle, quite the wrong angle for a graceful composition. This is from the hand of a woman who had sliced off the head of fowls in the kitchen, wrung rabbits’ necks for the pot. Judith is butchering him properly, grimly sawing through the sinew, her muscular arms tense with effort. There’s something domestic about it: the plainness of the sheet, the ungainly spurt of the blood, a curious sense of quietness. This is women’s work, Artemisia is saying, impassive. This is what we do. I saw my wrists resting lightly on the edge of the table next to my espresso cup with its twist of lemon as though from far away, yet in the sudden amber stillness of that moment I felt surprised that the jump of my pulse wasn’t rattling the china. I had made her so many promises, that girl in the museum. I owed her. So I knew then that I was going to steal that painting.

  “I don’t suppose you might be good enough to let me see it? I’d so love to.”

  “Sure. Why not right now?”

  I demurred. My friends were waiting for me. But perhaps this evening—for a drink? And then dinner and a whole lot more, I implied, if his etchings were up to scratch. I looked into those smiling Irish eyes and reminded myself that they had lost me and Dave our jobs. I’d been right, Rupert was bent and so was Fitzpatrick.

  I told Cameron that I had to run, but I waited while he keyed my number into his snazzy fingerprint-recognition phone, bent to kiss him good-bye, letting my mouth hover just a moment too long at the very corner of his own, so that my hair fell across his face in a dappled curtain of Roman shadow.

  I was already working it out as I strolled away. I could do this. I could really do this. But I had to be calm now, to think of the next thing and nothing else. I had to be sure of the connection between Cameron and Rupert. Cameron had said he had had the painting on a “tip,” but that didn’t necessarily prove it had come from Rupert. I had to confirm the mystery buyer whose name Mrs. Tiger hadn’t been able to recall. I found a cab back to my bland modern hotel on the other side of the Tiber, and after finding my room asked for the business center. While I waited for the slow Italian dial-up to connect, I made a shopping list on the back of a napkin. I Googled Cameron first, then a couple previous pieces he’d sold, then the Stubbs picture, the Goodwood fake. If I was going for a job interview it was only reasonable I’d do a bit of research. The sale of the Goodwood picture was indeed no longer due to proceed. I looked at my watch; it was after four Italian time, so there was a good chance Frankie would be in the department. I still had her mobile number.

  She answered and we exchanged a few rather awkward remarks about our summers before I asked her.

  “Listen, I need a favor. The Stubbs—the one that was withdrawn. Can you find me the name of the seller? The one who bought it from the original owners?”

  “I don’t know, Judith. I mean, the way you left like that—Rupert said—”

  “I don’t want to embarrass you, Frankie. I understand. I can get it for myself if it feels difficult.”

  A pause on the line.

  “Okay, then,” she answered hesitantly. I could hear rummaging and then she read out from what was obviously the catalog.

  “It just says ‘Property of a Gentleman.’”

  “No, I know that. You’ll have to go to accounts—they’ll have it because they’ll have issued a scrip for the reserve and then the withdrawal fee. It won’t take a minute.”

  “I really shouldn’t do this, Judith.”

  I felt a horrible stab of guilt. I’d already lost Dave his job. But I knew I could make it right. Consequences can be a form of cowardice. I’d been a coward when Rupert confronted me, but after
all that had happened I knew I just wasn’t like that anymore. While Frankie hesitated, I considered the trajectory that had brought me here. All I needed were a few more breaks and I’d be ready to unfurl my new iridescent wings in the sun. Poetic, really.

  “I know, but I’d really, really appreciate it.” I tried to make my voice both embarrassed and pleading.

  “I would help, but really—I don’t want to do anything wrong.”

  Good old Frankie. She wasn’t bent. But then, she could afford not to be.

  “There’s a chance of a job and I need to look good. You know, Frankie . . . I’m really short.”

  Mentioning actual poverty to someone like Frankie had the same effect as the word period on the gym teacher at school. I heard her making up her mind.

  “All right, then. I’ll try. I’ll text it to you. But you mustn’t ever, ever tell.”

  “Honor bright.”

  I had a good look at a map of Rome and bought an open train ticket to Como from the Trenitalia site. Just rehearsals. I might not do anything at all. My phone pinged.

  Cameron Fitzpatrick x

  Thanks a million!! xxxx I pinged back. Or maybe five.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  LATER, I HAD a lot of time to think about when I’d made the decision. Had it been swelling inside me all along, waiting, like a tumor? Was it the moment when Rupert packed me off like a servant without a reference, or when I heard the drained resignation in Dave’s voice? Was it when I agreed to work at the Gstaad Club or to Leanne’s stupid plan to have ourselves a night out, or when I closed the door on James’s body and took the Ventimiglia train? If I was being romantic, I could argue to myself that the decision was made for me long ago, by Artemisia, another young woman who understood hate, who had left her no-mark husband and come to these very streets to paint a living for her family. But none of that would be true. It happened when I went upstairs to my room and quietly changed my teetering cork-heeled wedges for flat sandals. My hands shook as I fastened each buckle. I stood up slowly and set off straightaway for the Corso Italia.