by Peter Watson
‘Oh, it has to be a special event, don’t you think?’ said David. ‘Everything points to that. The opposition is actually less fierce than I expected and in fact I think people are already looking forward to the sale. We’ll make it as much of an occasion as we can and sell the Raphael the evening before our regular Old Master auction – black tie, by invitation only, preceded by a champagne reception at which Monsignor Hale and the Earl of Afton will receive the guests. We’ll hold the sale at 7.30, in time for the evening television news and the following morning’s papers. We’re compiling a special catalogue. Most of the people attending the sale with a view to bidding will already know the painting very well but there’s still scope for making the catalogue something of a memento. Photographs and a condition report on the “Madonna” have already gone out to dealers, galleries, collectors – anyone we think is likely to be a contender at the auction. I’ve also got one or two other things up my sleeve.’
Elizabeth Lisle finished her whiting and sat back in her chair, relaxed and smiling. ‘You’re making me a great success in my job, you know. Up to now things haven’t been easy. Can you imagine what it’s like in the Vatican being a woman, the only woman in charge of anything? I tell you, at the start I was about as popular as termites in timber. But things are going well now: the Holy Father’s getting a great reception in the press, I’m in his good books – and I guess we owe a lot of this to you.’ She paused. ‘You were brilliant on television, I hear.’
‘Only lucky,’ said David, grinning. ‘Mulreahy handed it to me on a plate.’
She eyed him thoughtfully. ‘I have to admit I was suspicious of you and the whole plan to begin with. I was suspicious of all art dealer types and auctioneers – too many phonies, too many fat men with striped shirts and chequered pasts. But you sure showed me I was wrong, David Colwyn. And coming from a Mississippi girl that’s quite an admission.’
David inclined his head in a mock bow. ‘I’m pleased you’re pleased,’ he said, and meant it.
Mississippi – he should have realized Elizabeth Lisle was a southerner from the husky eddies in her voice. Here was an opportunity at last to take the conversation away from business. ‘Tell me about the American South,’ he said. ‘I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been there.’
So she told him about her childhood. Her family were French originally, and had lived in Louisiana since before it was an American state. They owned a substantial stretch of the Mississippi river frontage. She told him about the family business, ‘Lisle Liquors’, bourbon especially. She had always wanted to write, so after school and a time in Switzerland, she had gone to Columbia School of Journalism in New York.
‘I started on a couple of small papers in the mid-west, then joined the Boston Times, covering local politics at first, then the Third World.’
‘And how did you come to leave?’
‘I’d always been used to travel. Well, movement anyway. At home we were surrounded by rivers and swamps. Louisiana is one swamp after another. Pa had a plane, one that landed on water. He used to take us children all over the state, skimming the dogwood trees, scooping down on the creeks and bayous, scaring the alligators. You haven’t lived till you’ve landed on water. But as soon as I was old enough I wanted to go beyond the swamps, they were so goddam flat! Later, after I’d been in journalism a few years, I got frustrated, being so close to power but never actually having any. It happens to lots of journalists but usually later in their careers.’
‘And why Rome?’
‘Well, Louisiana was French of course, before it was American. But that also means it’s very Catholic. Near where we lived was the oldest church in the state – so Pa flew us there every Sunday. It was exciting, flying to church – we always wanted to go. What with the church, and the flying, and swamps being so darned flat, I was always hankering after abroad. To a girl abroad seemed more mountainous, more interesting somehow. Then I met Thomas when I was working in Boston. I wrote a piece about him which he saw and liked. I guess it impressed him. Anyway, he told me to look him up if ever I was in Rome – he’d just been made a cardinal at that time. So I did exactly that: bought a plane ticket, called him up out of the blue. We had lunch. Anyone could see the Vatican press office needed beefing up. At that stage they had no one covering the Third World’s press, so I suggested myself. With his South American background Thomas was enthusiastic and, although it took a month or two, he finally got me the perfect job. Living in the old world, dealing with the Third World, in a field I knew, but with some real power at last. And I was only thirty. I had two and a half wonderful years – then he went and got himself elected Pope. The rest, as they say, is history.’
‘And you’re enjoying life?’
‘What do you think? Apart from everything else, I meet people like you.’ She reached for her wine glass. ‘And that’s your cue to do the talking for a while. It’s thirsty work, all this remembering.’
‘What would you like to know?’
‘Why go into art? Why not politics, the law, the church?’
‘Can anyone properly answer such questions? I think one reason must be that, in the arts more than anything else, it’s clear that the people who came before us were just as skilled, just as wise, as we are now. Michelangelo’s sculpture has never been equalled, let alone surpassed. Neither have Shakespeare’s plays or Beethoven’s music. Goya’s insights were as profound as Freud’s. Turner knew how beauty hides just as much as it reveals. There’s been change in art but the very idea of direction or progress, in painting say, is ludicrous. I find that comforting. Another reason could be that I like the way art seeks to find beauty in what is, rather than what might be. Politicians and lawyers, like Americans these days, are so used to putting things right, they think they can do anything. They’re so pleased with themselves.’
‘You don’t like Americans?’
‘I like their enthusiasm; it’s their overconfidence I’m not so sure about.’
She let that pass. ‘But you’re a scholar and an auctioneer. Why both? Why not one or the other?’
‘Scholarship is wonderfully satisfying. It’s all about solving mysteries. At the moment, for instance, I’m trying to discover which of two paintings allegedly by Leonardo is genuine and which is the copy. There ought to be a clean answer, if only I could find the right documents. Auctions, on the other hand, are about people and therefore untidy. There are no clean answers in the art market: what is true one minute is not true the next. And the uncertainties are as gripping as the straightforward, clean answers of scholarship. Some people find only the one or the other attractive. I like them both. So far, I’ve been lucky – I can have them both. It may not last.’
‘You sound as if you’re as much married to your job as I am to mine.’
‘Never been properly married?’
She shook her head.
He hesitated. ‘I was. Still am, in fact, but it’s over. And a real mess. I’m a Catholic, but my wife is not. So she can get divorced and remarry, of course, but I can’t. Not if I take my religion seriously. Which leaves me beached, stranded. I try not to think about it.’
Elizabeth Lisle looked at him. Her brown eyes caught the light. ‘I shouldn’t really tell you this. But the Holy Father has plans for the Church which will revolutionize Catholic marriages – and Catholic divorces. Your situation may not be so bleak as you think. You may not be beached at all. But –’ she bent down and picked up her napkin from the floor where it had fallen ‘– it all depends on how this sale of the “Madonna” goes. It’s the Holy Father’s first attempt to do something new, to shake up the old traditions. If it succeeds, Mr Colwyn, you may have done yourself a favour in more ways than one. But it must succeed.’
*
The date of the sale approached. David had told Elizabeth Lisle over dinner at Wiltons that he had ‘one or two things up his sleeve’. The first of these related to the catalogue. Instead of showing the ‘Madonna’ on its cover, as would have been expected,
Hamilton’s had commissioned Fulvio Cippolini, a leading Italian photographer, to take pictures of Foligno in the aftermath of its agony. The cover of the catalogue showed the ruins of the cathedral and inside there was a selection of Cippolini’s views, including one of the tattered copy of the Vatican Raphael that had hung in the cathedral transept. The tactic succeeded gloriously: Cippolini’s pictures were works of art in themselves, and David made a much-publicized round-the-world flight, taking with him copies of the catalogue for all those gallery directors and collectors who might be interested in the ‘Madonna’.
David’s second revolutionary notion was to charge the public for admission to view the picture before the sale. The charge was to be flexible, whatever people could afford, and would then be passed on to the Foligno fund. Some board members said this ran the risk of being misunderstood, that people might think Hamilton’s themselves were profiting from the charge. They also claimed it would keep away large numbers and in that case would create the impression that there was less interest in the picture than there actually was. That could affect the sale.
David argued vigorously. He believed that the Pope had judged the public’s enthusiasm accurately and that charging would actually increase the attendance, since the object of going would no longer be simply ‘arty’ but also charitable.
David’s proposal, passed by the board only narrowly, with the Averne faction against him as always, was triumphantly vindicated. People came in droves to see the painting. The queues at Hamilton’s stretched all the way down to Pall Mall, around the corner and, ironically enough, past the main door of Steele’s. Meanwhile the rescue work and reconstruction was still continuing at Foligno, so the two stories fed on one another, making each more newsworthy.
Even so the sale might have passed off very differently had not Nature suddenly intervened, and in such a horrifyingly dramatic way.
*
The Waitara Chief was a 29,000 ton refrigerator vessel out of Christchurch, New Zealand. At 4.03 on the morning of 5th July, laden with a cargo of frozen lamb and bound for Manzanillo in Mexico, she was steaming due east at fifteen knots about fifty miles west of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Isles in the south-east corner of the Pacific. Not many people at that moment could have pointed to the Marquesas Isles on the map, but before the day was out countless millions would know exactly where latitude 9° south, longitude 140° west was.
First officer Ross Napier was on the Waitara Chief’s bridge. At that hour only he and four others were needed to man her: she was hardly the last word in ships but she was modern enough. The rest of the crew was below decks sleeping. Nuku Hiva, the main island of the Marquesas, was too far away to be visible even in full sunshine, let alone then, in the faint grey wash of dawn. But Motu Iti, a smaller island but much closer, might just be seen, depending on the visibility. Napier brought his binoculars up to his eyes to check, and in so doing missed the enormous eruption of water that suddenly rose from nowhere out to his right. He felt it soon enough, though. The ship heaved and he turned rapidly as a huge wall of grey-green water approached, towering over him. It must have been twenty metres high. He stared, horrified. ‘Oh my god!’ he gasped. Almost immediately another mass of water appeared to the left and the ship was thrown violently back on itself. Napier’s first thought was that the ship had run into a family of huge whales – but the sonar should have picked that up. He turned to the screen. It had gone hyperactive now, but it wasn’t the kind of pattern you got with whales. What in heaven’s name was happening?
Then the whole ocean boiled.
In no time, a matter of seconds, the night’s calm sea was transformed: huge mountains of water were punched up into the air as if by some hidden fist. The ship rolled steeply, first this way, then that. Vainly the helmsman spun the wheel. Napier grabbed for the intercom, stabbed a button. The captain needed no rousing. Everyone on the ship was awake; no one could sleep in this turmoil.
‘You’d better come and see for yourself, Tom. The sea’s gone mad.’
The captain was never to make it. By now, among the enormous cliffs of water, stinking, sulphurous gases were escaping into the morning air, with a dreadful, high-pitched hiss, and bringing with them stones, rocks, gigantic boulders that were hurled into the air by some huge hidden force deep down below the surface. Napier noticed, the way one does in a crisis, something irrelevant: Motu Iti was, after all, visible to port. He grabbed the phone again and jabbed another button.
‘Mitchell! Mitchell – are you there?’
The radio officer came on the line. ‘Sir. What in god’s –?’
‘Send out a Mayday! D’you hear? We’ll never make it!’
At that moment a boulder half as big as a bus landed on the bridge, crushing it. Both Napier and the helmsman died instantly. Mitchell, in his radio shack, still lived, but by the time he had sent off the Mayday call it was too late. As Captain Thomas Boswell climbed hand-over-hand up the last few stairs to the main deck, the Waitara suddenly rolled and pitched back, the sea beneath her bow swelling up with all the force of the devil himself. Boswell lost his grip and fell. The ship checked with a deadening jolt and a loud cracking scream as her back was broken. A black gash appeared across her decks forward of the bridge, and with one final, terrible, screech, the stern section separated. No one had any time to take to the boats. Those crew members who managed to get on deck jumped for it. They were the first to perish. As they hit the water their screams of agony were added to the uproar around them. For, in addition to everything else that morning, the sea about the Waitara Chief was boiling hot. The seamen were scalded to death before they could drown.
Moments later the ship herself disappeared as the full force of the erupting underwater volcano was felt. An area of sea hundreds of yards across rose into the air as if a new country was being born below it. Immense boulders were thrown into the air, and hissing, steaming lava, only to fall back, leaving just the escaping gases and a gathering tidal wave as evidence of the cataclysm.
The Waitara’s Mayday call was picked up in Pitcairn Island but it was academic. It took the tidal wave caused by the eruption barely twenty minutes to reach Nuku Hiva so it was shortly after 4.30 that a wall of water about sixty feet high swept across the island. Nothing below the one hundred feet line was left intact and whole villages and towns, including Hakamui on Ua Pu, were obliterated. But, with the mountains there reaching 11,000 feet and more, the radio masts and telephone aerials were left intact so that the world knew about the Marquesas Isles disaster in a matter of minutes. Survivors would later describe in vivid terms the moment they first spotted the monster wave, miles out to sea, like a huge silver band upon the horizon. The silver band had got larger. Then a terrible hissing had been heard as the wave rushed everything before it. Already there had been widespread panic. Now the water slammed into areas that were still largely asleep so that hundreds – the death toll was put at six hundred next day – were drowned almost instantly.
The retreat of a tidal wave does almost as much damage as its advance. Whole families were sucked back into the sea and never seen again. But the eeriest event of that black day was the fate of Ross Napier. Pulled from the battered bridge of the Waitara Chief as she went down, Napier’s body must have been borne high on the crest of the tidal wave, for it was eventually flung to rest on a hillside on Nuku Hiva, fifty miles away. His dead hand still gripped the intercom phone.
*
‘He wants to do what?’
David listened incredulously as Elizabeth Lisle on the other end of the line in her office in Vatican City, gave him the news again. He pushed his hand through his hair. ‘I don’t believe it. I mean I do believe it – what I mean is, if I can just pick myself up off the ground, this boss of yours is brilliant. It’s a fantastic idea.’
Elizabeth began speaking again and now David took notes. It was late, after six. Sally Middleton, his secretary, had gone home, and he had poured himself a small whisky in the office. He sipped it now as Elizabeth Li
sle continued to talk. More notes. Then, he said: ‘Ten probably, eight certainly, five I can do right away, as before. And we’ll need photographs. How will you get it to us – the same way as last time?’
He jotted down the details. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘It’s a marvellous idea, stunning. But there’s a lot of work to do. I must get started right away. I’ll talk to you again very soon.’
He hung up, then immediately made an internal call. ‘Jack? You’re still there, good. Can you come down here, straight away please? I’ve got some news that will curl your hair.’
Jack Pringle arrived. A tall, handsome, balding Canadian, Pringle was Hamilton’s press and publicity officer. ‘Here,’ said David, holding out a glass. ‘You’re going to need this.’
He waved Pringle to a seat. ‘I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, Jack, but, to save time, I’m going to dictate a press release to you. We haven’t much leeway. With the “Madonna” sale only a week off we’ve got to contact all the news boys right away.’
‘Nothing wrong, is there?’ said Pringle anxiously.
‘On the contrary.’ David grinned. ‘Sharpen your ballpoint and pin back your ears.’ He picked up a large yellow legal notepad on which he had been scribbling while he waited for the other man. ‘This isn’t very polished, Jack, but I’ll leave that to you. It gets across the essentials. Are you ready?’
Pringle nodded.