Under the Hammer

by John Mortimer

  ‘No. Don wouldn’t tell me who he was. He wouldn’t say much about it, as a matter of fact. Except ...’

  ‘Except what?’

  Peter went to the paint table and opened the drawer in it. ‘His caller left this behind. For roll-ups, I guess.’

  And he handed Ben an expensive-looking tobacco pouch made of red and green striped leather.

  ‘Roll-ups? Oh, I don’t think so. That wouldn’t be his style at all.’ He opened the pouch, sniffed and looked at the maker’s name. ‘This is really rather upper-class, anglophile pipe tobacco.’

  Maggie was in Chuck’s office looking at the painting and thinking that Ben was probably right, but that Titian had had a marvellous influence on his followers. Chuck was restless, pacing the room. Anger and irritation, she thought, had aged him overnight. There was no trace of the cool, would-be lover of the evening before, only an anguished man in a good suit who asked, ‘He’s not in the office! He’s not in the hotel! For God’s sake, where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’d gone out before I left.’

  ‘Has he gone mad?’

  ‘I don’t honestly think so.’

  ‘What did he mean by telling the Flecknows that nonsense?’

  ‘I suppose he thought he was right.’

  ‘He thought he was right! He wasn’t right. Let me tell you, he’s utterly and entirely wrong. That Titian was approved by Berenson.’

  ‘Is it on one of the Berenson lists?’ Maggie was interested.

  ‘No.’ Chuck hesitated. ‘Well, no. Not exactly. But years ago, many years ago, Berenson saw that picture. The greatest art expert in the world, the man we travelled to Italy to worship, whose word was accepted as gospel by all the dealers of his day, saw that picture and said it was undoubtedly Titian. Isn’t that enough for you?’

  ‘Is it enough for the Flecknows?’ Maggie asked, as innocently as possible.

  ‘It would have been, if JT hadn’t got that crazy idea about Scottish experts. And if Ben hadn’t let us down.’ Chuck stopped pacing. ‘Do you think Ben did it out of spite?’

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘Because you and I got kind of friendly. You said he wouldn’t have liked it if we had?’

  ‘But we haven’t.’

  ‘Hell, no! I haven’t even got that consolation.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Chuck.’ She smiled at him. ‘Our visit to New York hasn’t been a wild success for you.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘My clients in England are going to be disappointed too. They sent me over to bid for a Titian.’

  ‘What are you going to tell them?’

  ‘The truth.’

  ‘And not Ben Glazier’s crazy ideas!’ Maggie found he was very near to her, gripping her arm and desperately serious. ‘You keep quiet about what Ben said. You don’t work for him. You work for Klinsky’s! That’s what it’ll pay you to remember.’

  ‘What’s that mean exactly?’ Before he had a chance to tell her, the door opened and Ben was with them.

  ‘Ben! Where did you get to?’

  ‘I woke up early. Had breakfast at a deli. Made a call. Rather an interesting call, actually.’

  ‘Have you sobered up?’ Chuck asked him. ‘Considerably.’

  ‘You admit it. You were drunk out of your skull when you talked all that rubbish about Paris – Whatever his damn name was.’

  ‘Paris Bordone,’ Ben repeated it with relish. ‘I’ve got a lot of time for him. A considerable second-class talent and lover of women.’

  ‘Chuck says Berenson saw the picture and said it was tight,’ Maggie felt she ought to put the case.

  ‘So that proves it!’ Chuck was cheerful again.

  ‘Proves what?’ Ben asked. ‘That Berenson liked a good Paris Bordone?’

  ‘Ben. Look. My old friend.’ Chuck put out a hand and kneaded Ben’s shoulder. ‘Will you call and tell the Flecknows the truth?’

  ‘The whole truth? I don’t think you’d want me to do that, would you, Chuck?’

  ‘I don’t know what the hell you mean.’

  ‘You told us you didn’t remember Donald Estover. You said the name meant absolutely nothing to you. It did mean something, didn’t it?’

  ‘Meant what?’

  ‘An old expert who objected to your over-optimistic attributions. Objected so much that he was going to stand up and denounce them in public. And you called on him to persuade him not to do it.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous! Who said I called on Don –?’

  ‘This says it.’ Ben threw the red and green tobacco pouch on Chuck’s desk. ‘I don’t think either Don or his boyfriend smoked Dunhill tobacco out of a Dunhill pouch. It doesn’t go with the pony-tail and the red baseball hat and the Van Gogh T-shirt. Or an old man who had problems with his heart. I found it in Estover’s apartment. It’s the pouch you thought you’d lost, wasn’t it, Chuck?’

  The telephone on Chuck’s desk rang then. Instead of answering Ben’s question, Chuck spoke to it in sudden awe and respect. ‘Yes ... Yes, of course. They’re here. I’ll tell them to come at once. Thank you, sir.’ He looked at Maggie and Ben. ‘Emmanuel Klinsky’s sent his car for you. You’d better go down to the entrance hall. We can’t waste time chattering up here. Anyway, Ben, there are still a few smokers in New York. And some of them may even have tobacco pouches.’

  When they had gone, Chuck filled his pipe from the pouch, whoever it belonged to. He sat still and blew out smoke, having a lot to think about.

  There was a stretch limousine with darkened windows waiting outside Klinsky’s and, sinking into the back of it, Ben felt they were being whisked to another country, to some remote area in the past, to meet a potentate they had all heard rumours of but no one, to his knowledge had actually met. The limo moved slowly through the traffic up Fifth Avenue and turned into 66th Street, where it stopped in front of an ornate house, built in a French Renaissance style for a nineteenth-century banker. Inside it was very quiet; the elderly manservant who received them spoke in a whisper and took them up in a silent lift. He opened a pair of doors as though ushering them into the presence of royalty and, at the end of a room furnished with Greek, Chinese and Egyptian vases and statues, a very old man with a scrap of a white beard and a shawl over his shoulders peered at them but didn’t rise from his seat behind a bulbous desk. ‘Mr Glazier, Miss Perowne. Kindly be seated.’

  They sat on the sort of chairs which have silk ropes across them to deter the public in stately homes. Ben admired a medieval wood-carving of a Madonna and Child, and a small Fragonard of a seductive and ridiculously young shepherdess, behind the old man’s head. Emmanuel Klinsky’s fingers were busy, nervously threading paper clips into a long chain, but he spoke in a calm, amused voice and started to give them his guiding principles for success in the art world. ‘My great, greatgrandfather always said to tell a man his Rembrandt is doubtful is like telling him his wife is unfaithful. It is a crime to deprive people of their dreams.’

  ‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,’ Ben allowed.

  ‘You know he came from Vienna, that old Emmanuel Klinsky? On the way to London he bought all the paintings his pocket could afford. Pictures he thought would give pleasure to the dukes and lords. So much more pleasure if he also gave them the names they wanted to hear like Rembrandt, Raphael, Velasquez. That first Emmanual Klinsky was never one to deny pleasure to the customer.’

  ‘Even if it meant telling lies?’

  ‘Lies, Mr Glazier? Such an ugly word! An unnecessary word when we are discussing the happy subject of art. You know, as I know, there is no such thing as truth in our particular business.’

  ‘I can’t agree with that!’ Maggie protested.

  ‘What is art? Colour stains on a bit of wood or canvas, pretending to be a Pope or a beautiful woman, or a storm at sea. Do you call that the truth?’ Old Klinsky smiled at her tolerantly.

  ‘I imagine all this is to persuade me to tell Mr John T. Flecknow he can bid for
a genuine Titian?’ Ben was anxious to get to the point.

  ‘How perceptive you are! I am proud we still employ people of such intelligence at Klinsky’s. And you too, Miss Perowne. Remarkably intelligent, I understand, for one so young and beautiful. What’s your view of the picture Mr Flecknow wishes to buy from us?’

  ‘Ben’s the expert,’ Maggie said loyally. ‘He thinks it was done by a former pupil.’

  ‘Perhaps by a pupil on a very good day, or by Titian when he was, let us say, not quite at his best? Of those possibilities which should we choose?’

  ‘I think I can guess.’ Ben had got the point.

  ‘I would suggest, the one that gives the most pleasure. Many great experts have taken care to assure our customers that they spent their money wisely, when they bought a work of art.’

  ‘Money and art.’ Ben felt stifled in an airless room, surrounded by priceless articles, being the object of an attempted seduction by a very old man wrapped in a shawl. ‘I sometimes wonder if they’ve got anything at all to do with each other? Berenson made that mistake. At the end he was attributing pictures for business reasons.’

  ‘Very sensible of him,’ Klinsky nodded with approval.

  ‘We were brought up to worship Berenson,’ Ben told him. ‘We all went to pay court to him, we were young men with a hero. But two of us grew up to find his way of working suspect. The other one was called Donald Estover. Now he’s dead. Killed by Klinsky’s.’

  ‘Ben! You know that’s ridiculous,’ Maggie protested.

  ‘Oh, not by blowpipes or poisoned darts. Of course not. But he had a heart condition. Fibulation. Uneven heart beats. He was taking Digoxin for it. Any sudden excitement might have killed him. The excitement that did it was having to stand up at a sale and denounce the false claims being made for a picture.’

  ‘He didn’t have to do that, Mr Glazier.’ Old Klinsky spoke softly.

  ‘He felt he had to. He felt he had to tell the truth. Klinsky’s had forced it on him.’

  ‘He was taking unnecessary risks. I hope you’re not tempted to do that.’

  ‘It’s a temptation I can’t resist,’ Ben was sorry to say. ‘You see I feel I owe it to Don Estover, as well as to Titian.’

  ‘And you, Miss Perowne?’

  ‘I’ve got too used to working with Ben. He’s probably right.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing more I can say.’ Emmanuel Klinsky raised his hands in an almost comical gesture of despair.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘You’ll be going back to England soon?’

  ‘There seems to be nothing much to keep us here.’

  ‘Or perhaps not much to keep you in London. Who knows? Perhaps in the end you will agree with me. The customer comes first. Good day to you. Oh, Miss Perowne. Just one moment. Don’t let me detain you, Mr Glazier.’

  Ben looked at Maggie. She gave a small shrug and a smile and he left her alone with the old man.

  When Ben got down to the street there was no limo waiting. He stood in the entrance hall until Maggie joined him. He told her the car had gone, so it looked as though their days were numbered, and asked her what old man Klinsky had wanted.

  ‘Me for dinner. Alone in his apartment. He wanted to get to know me. He said he didn’t only give pleasure to customers.’

  ‘Of course you’re going?’

  ‘I think not.’ She gave a small shudder. ‘It’d be like being groped by dead leaves.’

  ‘Maggie. You stood by me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You said I was right. Do you believe that?’

  ‘I suppose I believe in you, Ben. It’s become a sort of habit. See you later. I’m meeting someone.’

  ‘Not Saint Chuck?’

  ‘Don’t worry. See you round the Labour Exchange.’ While Ben and Maggie had been closeted with the father of their firm, Chuck called at Sutton Place and was received by Barbara Flecknow, a woman likely to be disappointed in her hopes of getting a seat on the Board of the Lemberg. Chuck did his best to comfort her, telling her that Berenson had attributed the picture to Titian, ‘Berenson wasn’t a Scot. He was a Lithuanian Jew, brought up in Boston. He was the greatest art expert the world has ever known. But JT would rather listen to Glazier.’

  ‘He seems to think he’s found an honest man.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll be disillusioned.’

  There was a silence between them and then Barbara said, ‘Is that possible?’ He began to tell her how it might be, and, in consequence of what he said, she picked up the telephone and left a message at Ben’s hotel.

  Maggie’s lunchtime date was with Gloria Shallum. They met in a glass-fronted cafe near Klinsky’s, and Maggie felt they were part of the street, close to the traffic jam and the weaving cyclists. Gloria, picking at a Caesar salad, said, ‘You’re going back to England soon?’

  ‘Very soon.’

  ‘I know very well Chuck’s been, well, after you. Hasn’t he?’ And when Maggie didn’t answer she said, as confidently as she could, ‘He’ll get over you.’

  ‘I hope so. I’ll certainly get over him.’

  ‘Level with me, Maggie. Did Chuck achieve significant otherness with you?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure what you mean.’

  ‘Did he screw you, is what I mean?’

  ‘Of course not. Absolutely nothing happened.’

  ‘Not for want of asking?’

  Maggie didn’t answer.

  ‘The bastard. No, he is! He’s all I’ve learned to hate since I went to college and became aware of my responsibility to the environment.’

  ‘You find Chuck environmentally unfriendly?’ Maggie smiled.

  ‘He’s ghastly! That tobacco pipe. He spreads death, throws it around like confetti at a wedding. And his attitude to women! I know you’ve had some experience of this, Maggie. He regards us as receptacles, an ever-open convenience, where he can deposit little bits of Chuck B. Whiteside.’

  ‘I’m afraid I disappointed him.’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t disappoint very easily, or for too long. Also, he eats the corpses of dead animals.’

  Maggie looked down at her hamburger and pushed away her plate.

  ‘He poisons his system with alcohol. He listens to Frank Sinatra tapes and he’s infringed my human rights by telling me I have great tits and I should make more of them.’

  ‘It’s a pretty grisly indictment.’

  ‘Then how come I love the bastard?’

  ‘It does seem terribly unfair.’

  ‘But I do. So naturally I want to help the creep. I figure help from me’s the only hope for him.’

  ‘That’s very noble of you.’

  ‘It means a lot to him, about this Titian.’

  ‘If it’s a Titian.’

  ‘Oh, he’s sure it is. You see, it was bought by someone he knew years ago. Some guy called Ed Bachman picked it up in Italy when they were both young and went to visit Berenson.’

  ‘Berenson seems to get in everywhere.’

  ‘Chuck says he gave the picture the OK and Bachman, who was some kind of rich nut, bought it. Well now, Bachman died in South America and left it to his old friend Chuck.’

  ‘You mean Chuck’s selling his own picture?’ Maggie was astonished.

  ‘Well, not officially, of course. Officially it was entered anonymously and all that. I’m telling you this because I want you to help Chuck.’

  ‘He seems perfectly capable of helping himself.’

  ‘I want you to persuade Ben to change his mind. I guess Chuck could make it worth his while.’

  ‘I’m sure he could. And I’m sure Ben wouldn’t.’

  ‘But you will help me. After all, we’re part of the great sisterhood standing shoulder to shoulder! I guess if you don’t ...’

  ‘What do you think will happen?’ Maggie asked and Gloria looked strangely alarmed: ‘I’m just scared of what Chuck might take into his head to do.’

  While Gloria was confiding in Maggie Perowne, the man who was ca
using her so much anxiety was paying an unusual visit to the Modern Art department at Klinsky’s and having a private and somewhat guarded conversation with its head, Walt Wenzel. Chuck didn’t like Walt, who was aggressively young, regarded New York as the centre of civilization, wore pink-framed glasses and unstructured suits and thought the place for Old Master paintings was on tea-towels and dinner mats. He looked amused when Chuck, after a good deal of elaborate stuff about living life to the full and all experience being an archway to the truth, got round to the request he had to make, believing, as he did, that Walt would know how to help.

  ‘To be honest, Chuck’ – Walt Wenzel looked astonished and then amused – ‘I thought that disgusting pipe of yours was your only vice.’

  ‘Well life is full of surprises.’

  ‘If you like I’ll have a word with my contact. But I’ve got to warn you, old boy. This is going to cost you.’

  The Lemberg is a small but richly endowed gallery with pictures hung in an old New York mansion. It was fairly empty when Ben met Barbara Flecknow and they were able to sit on a couch in the middle of a room full of Dutch Old Masters and talk in private. He had got her message from the hotel and, though he thought she’d try to persuade him to change his mind about the alleged Titian, he didn’t resist the chance of meeting her again. To his surprise, she seemed to have taken his attribution quite calmly. She put her hand on his arm as affectionately as ever and, when he told her he was sorry for what he’d felt he’d had to do, said, ‘Please. Don’t apologize. It’s always best to know the truth. Anyway, JT still thinks you’re marvellous.’

  ‘That’s extremely generous of him.’

  ‘Isn’t this a great gallery?’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll still get on the Board?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m perfectly sure I will. Come on. I’ll show you around.’

  So they saw some of the best that the Lemberg had to offer, and had lunch at an Italian restaurant round the corner, which Ben found an entirely pleasant experience. When they parted Barbara said, in a voice full of regret, ‘You’re going back so soon?’

  ‘I don’t think my services are required here any longer.’

  ‘We’ll meet over there then. We’ll have lots more chances for our feet to get together under tables. Oh, by the way. You wouldn’t do me an enormous favour, would you? Something I want to send to some friends of mine who live in my favourite London hotel.’