The Modigliani Scandal (1976)

by Ken Follett

The taxi dropped him outside a small apartment block, about ten years old, and not very impressive. Lipsey went in and bent his head to the concierge′s window.

  ″Is there anyone at home in number nine?″ he asked with a smile.

  ″They are away,″ the woman said, giving the information begrudgingly.

  ″Oh, good,″ Lipsey said. ″I am an interior decorator from England, and they asked me to give them an estimate for the place. They said I was to ask you for the key, and look over the place while they were away. I was not sure if they would be gone yet.″

  ″I cannot give you the key. Besides, they have no right to redecorate without permission.″

  ″Of course!″ Lipsey gave her his smile again, and turned on a certain middle-aged charm which he knew he was capable of. ″Miss Sleign was most emphatic that I should consult you, to get your advice and opinions.″ As he spoke, he fumbled some notes out of his wallet and into an envelope. ″She asked me to pass this to you, for your trouble.″ He handed the envelope through the window, bending it slightly in his hand to make the money crackle.

  She took the bribe. ″You must not take very long, because I will have to stay there with you all the time,″ she said.

  ″Of course,″ he smiled.

  She hobbled out of her cubbyhole and led him up the stairs, with a good deal of puffing and blowing, holding her back, and pausing for breath.

  The apartment was not very large, and some of the furniture looked secondhand. Lipsey looked around the living room. ″They were talking about emulsion paint for the walls,″ he said.

  The concierge shuddered.

  ″Yes, I think you′re right ″Lipsey said. ″A pleasant flowered wallpaper, perhaps, and a plain dark green carpet.″ He paused in front of a ghastly sideboard. He rapped it with his knuckles. ″Good quality;″ he said. ″Not like this modem rubbish.″ He took out a notebook and scribbled a few meaningless lines in it.

  ″They didn′t tell me where they were going,″ he said conversationally. ″The South, I expect.″

  ″Italy.″ The woman′s face was still stem, but she enjoyed displaying her knowledge.

  ″Ah. Rome, I expect.″

  The woman did not take that bait, and Lipsey assumed she did not know. He looked around the rest of the flat, his sharp eyes taking everything in while he made inane remarks to the concierge.

  In the bedroom there was a telephone on a low bedside table. Lipsey looked closely at the scratch pad beside it. A ballpoint pen lay across the blank sheet. The impression of the words which had been scribbled on the sheet above lay deep in the pad. Lipsey put his body between the table and the concierge, and palmed the notebook.

  He made a few more empty comments about the decor, then said: ″You have been most kind, madame. I will not keep you from your work any longer.″

  She showed him to the door of the block. Outside, he hurried to a stationer′s and bought a very soft pencil. He sat at a sidewalk café, ordered coffee, and got out the stolen pad.

  He rubbed the pencil gently over the impression in the paper. When he had finished, the words were clear. It was the address of a hotel in Livorno, Italy.

  Lipsey arrived at the hotel in the evening of the following day. It was a small, cheap place of about a dozen bedrooms. It had once been the house of a large middle-class family, Lipsey guessed: now that the area was going down, it had been converted into a guesthouse for commercial travelers.

  He waited in the living room of the family′s quarters while the wife went to fetch her husband from the upper regions of the house. He was weary from traveling: his head ached slightly, and he looked forward to dinner and a soft bed. He thought about smoking a cigar, but refrained for the sake of politeness. He glanced at the television from time to time. It was showing a very old English film which he had seen one evening in Chippenham. The sound was turned down.

  The woman returned with the proprietor. He had a cigarette in the comer of his mouth. The handle of a hammer stuck out of one pocket, and there was a bag of nails in his hand.

  He looked annoyed at having been disturbed at his carpentry. Lipsey gave him a fat bribe and began to speak in stumbling, fractured Italian.

  ″I am trying to find a young lady who stayed here recently,″ he said. He took out the picture of Dee Sleign, and gave it to the proprietor. ″This is the woman. Do you remember her?″

  The man looked briefly at the photograph and nodded assent. ″She was alone,″ he said, the inflection in his voice showing the disapproval of a good Catholic father for young girls who stay in hotels alone.

  ″Alone?″ said Lipsey, surprised. The concierge in Paris had given the impression the couple had gone away together. He went on: ″I am an English detective, hired by her father to find her and persuade her to come home. She is younger than she looks,″ he added by way of explanation.

  The proprietor nodded. ″The man did not stay here,″ he said with righteousness oozing from him. ″He came along, paid her bill, and took her away.″

  ″Did she tell you what she was doing here?″

  ″She wanted to look at paintings. I told her that many of our art treasures were lost in the bombings.″ He paused, and frowned in the effort to remember. ″She bought a tourist guide—she wanted to know where was the birthplace of Modigliani.″

  ″Ah!″ It was a small gasp of satisfaction from Lipsey.

  ″She booked a phone call to Paris when she was here. I think that is all I can tell you.″

  ″You don′t know just where in the city she went?″

  ″No.″

  ″How many days was she here?″

  ″Only one.″

  ″Did she say anything about where she was going next?″

  ″Ah! Of course,″ the man said. He paused to puff life into the dying cigarette in his mouth and grimaced at the taste of the smoke. ″They came in and asked for a map.″

  Lipsey leaned forward. Another lucky break, so soon, was almost too much to hope for. ″Go on.″

  ″Let me see. They were going to take the autostrada to Firenze, then go across country to the Adriatic coast—somewhere near Rimini. They mentioned the name of a village—Oh! Now I remember. It was Poglio.″

  Lipsey took out his notebook. ″Spell it?″

  The proprietor obliged.

  Lipsey got up. ″I am most grateful to you,″ he said.

  Outside, he stopped at the curb to breathe in the warm evening air. So soon! he thought. He lit a small cigar to celebrate.

  V

  THE NEED TO PAINT was like the smoker′s craving for a cigarette: Peter Usher was reminded of the time he had tried to give it up. There was an elusive irritation, distinctly physical, but unattached to any specific part of his body. He knew, from past experience, that it was there because he had not worked for several days, and that the smell of a studio, the slight drag on his fingers of oils being brushed across canvas, and the sight of a new work taking place, were the only way of scratching it. He felt bad because he had not painted for several days.

  Besides, he was frightened.

  The idea which had struck him and Mitch simultaneously, that drunken evening in Clapham, had burst with all the freshness and glory of a tropical dawn. It had seemed simple, too: they would paint some fakes, sell them at astronomical prices, then tell the world what they had done.

  It would be a gigantic raspberry blown at the art world and its stuffed shirts; a surefire publicity stunt; a historical radical coup.

  In the sobriety of the following days, working out the details of the operation, they had realized that it would not be simple. Nevertheless it came to seem more and more workable as they got down to the mechanics of the fraud.

  But now, when he was about to take the first dishonest step on the way to the art swindle of the century; when he was about to commit himself to a course which would lead him well over the line between protest and crime; when he was alone and nervous in Paris, he sat in an office at Meunier′s and smoked cigarettes which did not g
ive him comfort.

  The graceful old building exacerbated his unease. With its marbled pillars and high, stuccoed ceilings, it was too obviously a part of that confident, superior stratum of the art world—the society which embraced Charles Lampeth and rejected Peter Usher. Meunier′s were agents for half the top French artists of the last 150 years. None of their clients were unknowns.

  A small man in a well-worn dark suit scurried purposefully across the hall and through the open door of the room where Peter sat. He had the deliberately harassed look of those who want the world to know just how overworked they are.

  ″My name is Durand,″ he said.

  Peter stood up. ″Peter Usher. I am a painter from London, looking for a part-time job. Can you help me?″ He spoke only schoolboy French, but his accent was good.

  A displeased look came over Durand′s face. ″You will appreciate, Monsieur Usher, that we get many such requests from young art students in Paris.″

  ″I′m not a student. I graduated from the Slade—″

  ″Be that as it may,″ Durand interrupted with an impatient motion of his hand, ″the company′s policy is to help whenever we can.″ It was plain he did not approve of the policy. ″It depends entirely on whether we have a vacancy at the time. Since almost all our staff require stringent security vetting, clearly there are few jobs for casual callers. However, if you will come with me, I will find out whether we can use you.″

  Peter followed Durand′s brisk steps across the hall to an old elevator. The cage came creaking and grumbling down, and they got in and ascended three flights.

  They went into a small office at the back of the building where a portly, pink-faced man sat behind a desk. Durand spoke to the man in very rapid colloquial French which Peter could not follow. The portly man appeared to have made a suggestion: Durand seemed to be turning it down. Eventually he turned to Peter.

  ″I am afraid I must disappoint you,″ he said. ″We have a vacancy, but the job involves handling paintings, and we require references.″

  ″I can give you a telephone reference, if you don′t mind calling London;″ Peter blurted.

  Durand smiled and shook his head. ″It would have to be someone we know, Monsieur Usher.″

  ″Charles Lampeth? He′s a well-known dealer, and—″

  ″Of course, we know Monsieur Lampeth. Will he vouch for you?″ the portly man cut in.

  ″He will certainly confirm that I am a painter, and an honest man. His gallery handled my pictures for a while.″

  The man behind the desk smiled. ″In that case, I am sure we can give you a job. If you would return tomorrow morning by which time we will have called London—″

  Durand said: ″The cost of the telephone call will have to be deducted from your wages.″

  ″Thatʹs all right,″ Peter replied.

  The portly man nodded in dismissal. Durand said: ″I will show you out.″ He did not bother to hide his disapproval.

  Peter went straight to a bar and ordered a very expensive double whisky. Giving Lampeth′s name had been a foolish impulse. Not that the dealer would refuse to vouch for him: guilty conscience ought to see to that. But it meant that Lampeth would know that Peter had been employed by Meunier′s in Paris around this time—and that knowledge could do fatal damage to the plan. It was unlikely; but it was an added risk.

  Peter tossed off his whisky, cursed under his breath, and ordered another.

  Peter started work the next day in the packing department. He worked under an elderly, bent Parisian who had devoted his life to taking care of pictures. They spent the morning uncrating newly arrived works, and the afternoon wrapping outgoing pictures in layers of cotton wool, polystyrene, cardboard and straw. Peter did the heavy work—withdrawing nails from wood, and lifting heavy frames—while the old man prepared soft beds for the pictures with as much care as if he were lining a cradle for a newborn child.

  They had a big, four-wheeled dolly with pneumatic tires on hydraulic suspension: the aluminum gleamed, and the old man was proud of it. It was used to transport the pictures around the building. The two of them would gingerly lift a work onto its rack, then Peter would push it away, with the old man going ahead to open doors.

  In a corner of the room where they did their packing was a small desk. Late on the first afternoon, while the old man was away at the lavatory, Peter went through all the drawers. They contained very little: the blank forms the old man filled up for each picture handled, a clutch of ballpoint pens, a few forgotten paper clips, and some empty cigarette packets.

  They worked very slowly, and the man talked to Peter about his life, and the pictures. He disliked most of the modern painting, he said, apart from a few primitives and—surprisingly, Peter thought—the superrealists. His appreciation was untutored, but not naive: Peter found it refreshing. He liked the man instantly, and the prospect of deceiving him became unwelcome.

  On their trips around the building Peter saw plenty of the official company letterhead on secretaries′ desks. Unfortunately, the secretaries were always around, and so was the old man. In addition, the letterhead was not enough.

  It was not until the end of the second day that Peter set eyes on the thing he had come to steal.

  Late in the afternoon, a picture arrived by Jan Rep, an elderly Dutch painter living in Paris, for whom Meunier′s were agents. Rep′s work attracted huge sums, and he painted very slowly. A telephone call notified the old man that the painting was coming, and a few moments later he was instructed to take it immediately to the office of M. Alain Meunier, the senior of the three brothers who ran the company.

  When they lifted the picture out of the crate, the old man stared at it with a smile. ″Beautiful,″ he said eventually. ″Do you agree?″

  ″It doesn′t appeal to me,″ Peter said ruefully.

  The old man nodded. ″Rep is an old man′s painter, I think.″

  They loaded it onto their dolly and wheeled it through the building, up in the lift, and into M. Meunier′s office. There they placed it on a steel easel and stood back.

  Alain Meunier was a gray, jowly man in a dark suit, with—Peter thought—a glint of greed in his small blue eyes. He looked at the new picture from a distance, and then walked close to study the brush-work; then he viewed it from either side.

  Peter stood near Meunier′s huge leather-inlaid desk. It bore three telephones, a cut-glass ashtray, a cigar box, an executive penholder made of red plastic (a present from the children?), a photograph of a woman—and a small rubber stamp.

  Peter′s eyes fastened on the stamp. It was stained with red ink at its rubber base, and the knob was of polished wood. He tried to read the back-to-front words of the stamp, but could only make out the name of the firm.

  It was almost certain to be what he wanted.

  His fingers itched to snatch it up and stuff it into his pocket, but he was certain to be seen. Even if he did it while the backs of the others were turned, the stamp might be missed immediately afterward. There had to be a better way.

  When Meunier spoke Peter gave a guilty start. ″You may leave this here,″ the man said. His nod was dismissive.

  Peter wheeled the dolly out through the door, and the two of them returned to their packing room.

  He spent two more days trying to figure out a way to get at the stamp on Meunier′s desk. Then a better idea was handed to him on a plate.

  The old man was sitting at his desk, filling out one of the forms, while Peter sipped a cup of coffee. The old man looked up from his work to say: ″Do you know where the stationery supplies are?″

  Peter thought fast. ″Yes,″ he lied.

  The old man handed him a small key. ″Fetch me some more forms—I have almost run out.″

  Peter took the key and went. In the corridor he asked a passing messenger boy where the supply room was. The boy directed him to the floor below.

  He found it in an office which seemed to be a typing pool. He had not been there before. One of the typists sh
owed him a walk-in cupboard in a corner. Peter opened the door, switched on the light, and went in.

  He found a ream of the forms he wanted straightaway. His eye roamed the shelves and lit on a stack of headed notepaper. He broke a packet and took out thirty or forty sheets.

  He could not see any rubber stamps.

  There was a green steel cabinet in the far end of the little room. Peter tried the door and found it locked. He opened a box of paper clips, took one, and bent it. Inserting it in the keyhole, he twisted it this way and that. He began to perspire. In a moment the typists would wonder what was taking him so long.

  With a click that sounded like a thunderclap the door opened. The first thing Peter saw was an opened cardboard box containing six rubber stamps. He turned one over and read the impression underneath.

  He translated: ″Certified at Meunier, Paris.″

  He suppressed his elation. How could he get the thing out of the building?

  The stamp and the headed paper would make a suspiciously large package to take past the security men at the door on the way home. And he would have to conceal it from the old man for the rest of the day.

  He had a brainwave. He took a penknife from his pocket and slid its blade under the rubber bottom of the stamp, working the knife from side to side to dislodge the rubber from the wood to which it was glued. His hands, slippery with sweat, could hardly grip the polished wood.

  ″Can you find what you want?″ a girl′s voice came from behind his back.

  He froze. ″Thank you, I have them now,″ he said. He did not look around. Footsteps retreated.

  The rubber came away from the bottom of the stamp. Peter found a large envelope on a shelf. He put the notepaper and the thin slice of rubber into the envelope and sealed it. He took a pen from another box and wrote Mitch′s name and address on the envelope. Then he closed the steel cupboard door, picked up his ream of forms, and went out.

  At the last minute he remembered the bent paper clip. He went back into the store, found it on the floor, and put it in his pocket.

  He smiled at the typists as he left the office. Instead of going back to the old man, he wandered around the corridors until he met another messenger boy.