Money from Holme

by Michael Innes

  ‘A document?’ Braunkopf’s eyes had narrowed. ‘That is better, yes – much better. The getting down to copper nails, no?’

  ‘Precisely so.’ This one had taken Cheel only a moment. ‘As I explained to you, my instructions don’t allow of my being very specific about the whole course of events that has brought the Wamba paintings, quite unharmed, to England. But this document is another matter. Sebastian Holme, you see, sold the lot. And I have the receipt he gave for the money.’

  There was a pregnant silence. Braunkopf, who was still on his feet, employed them to transport him with an unnerving noiselessness two or three times up and down the room. He had a waddling motion, Cheel decided, that would make the fortune of a simple mechanical toy.

  ‘The plot sickens, my goot Cheel.’ Braunkopf had oscillated to a halt again. ‘To just what person, now, would Holme have sold all those pictures? Or perhaps’ – he spoke with distinguishable irony – ‘that is all confidentials too?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Cheel replied confidently. He was extemporizing now – which was of course hazardous and undesirable. He should have thought out this particular ground more carefully beforehand. It hadn’t occurred to him that Braunkopf, with the prospect of big money before him, would be quite so wary. But his own confidence had ceased to flicker. He had only to go straight ahead. ‘Not at all,’ he repeated. ‘Kabongo is the name. A wealthy citizen.’

  ‘Some puttikler person called Kabongo bought all those pictures?’

  ‘Just so. A supporter of Mbulu and the RIP, I gather. Holme, you remember, had some idea of arranging his work in an exhibition in honour of Ushirombo. Kabongo paid up simply to put a spoke in that wheel, as you might say. And then, of course, there was the false story of their all having been burnt in the hotel, and so on. It’s complicated and obscure – as Mrs Holme would find to her cost if she started an action.’

  ‘You met this Kabongo, Mr Cheel?’

  ‘No, no – nothing of the kind. In fact, Kabongo perished.’

  ‘Perished?’

  ‘When the Wamba State Ballet got a little out of hand. The company was very pro-Ushiombo, you know. To speak quite confidentially, the prima ballerina had been Ushirombo’s mistress. He’s a great favourer of the arts.’

  ‘And this perisher Kabongo, Mr Cheel, conveyed the paintings lawfully to another party?’

  ‘Well, that’s where the record turns obscure – and confidential, as I said. The point is that they passed out of Holme’s estate.’

  ‘It is a point, yes.’ Braunkopf considered. ‘And the moneys? Just what did Mr Kabongo pay?’

  ‘Two hundred pounds.’

  ‘Two hundert pounts!’ Over Braunkopf’s face there passed a fleeting expression of pain. Cheel was uncertain whether this was occasioned by the paucity of the sum named or the indifferent plausibility of his whole recital. And now Braunkopf was stretching out the crudely articulated chunk of dough that served him as a hand. ‘The receipt,’ he said. ‘It requires the careful inspectings, yes? This time, an expertise will be correk. By an authoritarian on handwriting, no?’

  ‘Oh, most certainly.’ Involuntarily, Cheel had backed away. ‘But I don’t carry the thing about with me, of course. It’s much too vital a document for that. Naturally, I’ve lodged it at my bank.’

  ‘We go there now.’ Braunkopf appeared to look round for his hat and coat. ‘At the Da Vinci, my goot Cheel, we strike while the iron is ripe. Always we cut the grass from under our feet damn-quick.’

  ‘The bank will be shut by now.’ This assertion, at least, was unchallengeable, and Cheel was thankful for it. The receipt for £200 given to Mr Kabongo did not, at present, exist – any more than Mr Kabongo, for that matter, had ever existed. But that didn’t signify in the least. He knew just where, within a few hours, he could have a little writing-paper printed with the apparent letter-head of the Wamba Palace Hotel. Moreover at one of those shops where moronic persons buy foreign stamps to stick in albums he could probably pick up something that would lend further verisimilitude to a document. And the late Sebastian Holme, fortunately, was available to sign anything of the sort at any time. ‘You must see it, of course,’ he said lightly. ‘And have it examined by an expert, side by side with known writing of Holme’s, if you think it desirable. Probably you’re right. Yes, I’ll drop in with it some time.’

  Braunkopf nodded – rather absently, Cheel discerned with relief. Some further aspect of the situation seemed now to be occupying his mind. He walked over to the Quirico, studied it, and gave a small sad sigh. He might have been reflecting that, after all, Mr Kabongo and Cardinal Borgia (to say nothing of Marchese Lorenzo and Conte Cosimo di Medici) were very much birds of a feather. Then he moved back to Holme’s picture, ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’. He stared at it in a puzzled way for a long time. Once more, Cheel felt uneasy. For a moment he considered the disturbing notion that Braunkopf was one of those legendary dealers of a preternatural acuteness, from whom nothing whatever can be hid. But this was not possible. Braunkopf, after all, was fundamentally absurd.

  ‘I will be fred with you, my dear Cheel.’ Braunkopf had turned back to the visitor and was making one of his expansive two handed gestures.

  ‘You will be what?’

  ‘There must be puffik fredness between us, no? Goot! I divulge, then, that only yesterday I have a most puttikler urgent inquiry one top American collector.’

  ‘For a Sebastian Holme?’

  ‘Exackly that, Mr Cheel.’ Braunkopf nodded solemnly. Then he tapped the stretcher of ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’. ‘It would be a start, yes?’

  ‘Rather a good start, I’d imagine.’

  ‘Fifty-fifty.’

  There was a long silence – chiefly occupied by Cheel in summoning strong reserves of astonishment and outrage.

  ‘Come, come, Braunkopf,’ he said. ‘We mustn’t waste time on unrealistic propositions. But I’m perfectly prepared to let you have 25 per cent. Mind you, there are going to be a lot of these paintings.’ He frowned to himself, wondering whether this had been an unfortunate choice of words. ‘At that commission, you’ll make a small fortune before you’re finished. And it will be the second fortune that Sebastian Holme has brought your way.’

  ‘Fifty-fifty.’

  ‘This is really insulting, Braunkopf. It’s what a shady dealer would suggest in arranging some thoroughly underhand business. I’m afraid I must go elsewhere.’

  Braunkopf hadn’t blinked. But he had turned back to the painting.

  ‘That is shady,’ he said softly.

  ‘We will say no more.’ Cheel was reaching for his gloves. ‘You have made a most outrageous–’

  ‘Such tender shadows, Mr Cheel. A chiaroscuro worthy of Caravaggio. Again I will be fred with you. It is a masterpiece.’

  Cheel was astonished. It was almost as if Braunkopf had achieved some genuinely aesthetic response to Holme’s picture. But this, of course, was impossible. The fellow was a mere tradesman.

  ‘You’ve begun to talk sense,’ Cheel said, pushing his gloves away again. ‘So let’s consider the share-out realistically.’

  ‘The share-out?’ Braunkopf appeared placidly surprised. ‘But that is settled. You will find that it is settled, my goot Cheel. Fifty-fifty.’

  Cheel’s indignation was now genuine. But, equally, his intelligence was at work. And his intelligence told him when he was beaten.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Fifty-fifty. And now to fix it.’ Again Braunkopf looked at ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’. ‘So authentink!’ he murmured. ‘So strange!’

  16

  It was in a mood of tolerable satisfaction that Mervyn Cheel presently left the Da Vinci Gallery. Braunkopf’s terms were, of course, outrageous; Cheel felt that he would never again listen to the words ‘fifty-fifty’ – or even ‘half-and-half’ – without wincing. Nevertheless there were mitigating considerations. The more Braunkopf stood to gain, the likelier he was to proceed vigorously with the project. Being merely a vulgar com
mercial man, he would instinctively balance hazards against profits. The larger the possible profit, the less timorous would the proprietor of the Da Vinci be.

  Moreover, Cheel reflected, he himself secured a considerably greater margin of safety by working through Braunkopf. The fellow knew all the tricks and channels of the trade, and it was unlikely that he would be badly caught out. Not indeed, that there was anything illegal, anything that could land you positively in the dock, about the whole affair. The only acts of forgery involved were Sebastian Holme’s upon his brother’s cheques. The pictures to be sold as by Holme were by Holme. It was true that the Director of Public Prosecutions, if through any conceivable misfortune apprised of all the facts, would turn over in his head such terms as False Pretences, Conspiracy, and Fraud. But bringing any such charge would be a tricky business about which that disagreeable personage might well think twice.

  And there was another satisfactory consideration as well. A larger share for Braunkopf didn’t have to mean a smaller share for Cheel. It need only mean a decidedly smaller share for Holme. This was a matter to which Cheel had already given careful thought. And the more he considered it, the less did it seem to him that Holme need receive any appreciable share at all.

  Of course the man must have his keep. It would be injudicious to scant him of reasonably nutritious food. There was no reason why he should not command a regular supply of beer – and even perhaps an occasional bottle of gin. But what more did he need? For that matter, what more had he shown any disposition to ask for? Putting this question to himself as he climbed into the Rolls, Cheel positively felt within himself a gush of warm affection for Holme. For weeks now the man had shown no flicker of interest in anything but standing in that attic and painting all day. The passion with which he had addressed himself to calling back into being ‘Mourning Dance with Torches’ and ‘Fishing Cats at Pool’ was exceeded only by the indifference with which he had then appeared to regard them. It might have been supposed that, convinced as he was that he could paint only as Sebastian Holme and to further the fame of Sebastian Holme, he would at least have wished to hear that these paintings were going where they would be seen and admired by properly informed people. Yet nothing of the sort had seemed to be in his head. As soon as each was finished he had simply tumbled into bed and slept for twenty-four hours. Then he had got up again, sat brooding darkly for a couple of days, and immediately thereafter started furiously on the next job. Nothing – Cheel thought – could be more admirable.

  Nor, for that matter, could Holme be much of a nuisance even if he were minded to turn insubordinate. He was now much too much in Cheel’s power. Driving down Old Bond Street, with an occasional side-glance at opulent shops into which he might now drop confidently at any time, Cheel thought whimsically of those eighteenth-century booksellers who kept in the garrets of Grub Street teams of hack writers compelled to earn their porridge and small beer by turning out a fixed tally of heroic couplets, moral essays, political pamphlets, heroic dramas, by the day, week or month. That was virtually where he had got Sebastian Holme. Holme perhaps didn’t realize it yet, but he would certainly do so at any time that Cheel chose to turn on the heat. The man was, in fact, a slave. Having reduced a painter of genius to such a status tickled Cheel very much. It was amusing. It was so amusing that he felt an appetite for more amusement here and now.

  As a consequence of indulging himself with this mood (one not, perhaps, wholly commendable from a moral point of view, but which yet by no means renders our hero very singular among his fellow-mortals) Cheel found himself once more thinking of Burlington House. It was the time of year (he again reminded himself) at which an amazing diversity of bad and mediocre painting was on view in the rooms of the Royal Academy in that compendious palace of learning and the arts. There would be a certain malicious pleasure to be extracted from a stroll round. And, of course, there was his further campaign against Rumbelow. He remembered his proposal to collect a little more material for that.

  As he had expected, it proved possible to park in the courtyard. He swung in neatly, indeed, just before the President of the Royal Society – but as the President was driving a Mini-Minor it was proper enough that he should be left to edge in where he could. Cheel climbed the steps, showed his ticket, and entered the Exhibition.

  As usual here, it was difficult to decide where to start laughing. There were the inept productions on the walls; there were the extraordinary people who thought to edify themselves by going round looking at them. Before the pictures, Cheel told himself, it was incumbent upon him to exercise, in the last analysis, a charitable restraint. There was such a virtue as compassion, after all. And it was a virtue, as it happened, that could be deployed very effectively in print. The strictly pitiful character of one or another artist’s labours was a theme that had frequently stimulated him to an amusing quarter-column.

  Nevertheless – he mused, as he began to perambulate among the highly varnished ladies, the company directors with their cigars, the dons with their beastly pipes, the red-faced mayors with their hands manufactured out of sausages, the appalling nudes so evidently painted in a hospital for diseases of the skin, the flat and watery English landscapes – nevertheless a brave scorn was incumbent on him as well. For was he not – as well as a distinguished critic – virtually the pioneer of abstract pointillism? Unlike the wretches exhibiting on the walls around him, he had followed the hard, dry light of art to the end, and never made an iota of concession to public taste. That, and that alone, was why nobody had ever paid the slightest attention to his work. But it was there (in packing-cases mostly), and time would vindicate it. It was true that he had been constrained, from time to time, to expedients of dubious dignity in his pursuit of a mere livelihood. He was not without some sense (he told himself) of the dyer’s hand. Yet his heart was pure – as the hearts of all the other really great (and often unacknowledged) artists had been. One day his small masterpieces would be assessed at their true worth – and it would be a day when all this rubbish sprawled around him would have perished utterly.

  Thus did Mervyn Cheel, continuing his stroll through the rooms of the Royal Academy of Arts, commune with himself as a soul apart. It is very possible that the profane vulgar would have regarded him as a shade mad. They might even have called him a humbug. But here – so far as this particular set of persuasions was concerned – they would have been wrong. His vision of himself was something he held on to with tenacious conviction. It would have been very terrible to Cheel, very terrible indeed, to have to succumb to the sort of employment whose fruits he now conceived to be hung around him.

  Nemesis (if Nemesis had any disposition to be bothered with Cheel) might well have thought to bear this in mind.

  And the people in Burlington House (Cheel had frequently remarked this) were quite as absurd as the pictures. In fact you might say that there were two independent series of exhibits. For example, there were the women of a kind that meet each other in tea-shops. Considerable numbers of them seemed to have the habit of meeting here too. They were to be observed working in labour-saving couples, the first of the partners having the job of looking at the paintings and the second doing all the reading aloud from the catalogue. These women muttered. But there were others – rural rather than urban in suggestion – who talked in loud voices, pointing the while at this canvas or at that with the air of stock breeders at an agricultural show; one had to conceive them as walkers in ancient ways, ‘doing’ the Academy as their parents or grandparents had done. Then there were sundry small uniformed unfortunates, part of whose precious half-term holiday (one imagined) was being immolated on the altar of aesthetic indoctrination by stupid mothers or bullying aunts. There were elderly men of lavishly cultivated external distinction who must be (Cheel had always supposed) the RAs and ARAs themselves, snooping jealously round to see if one or another colleague’s exhibits had found a buyer. And there were also (this was really strangest of all) small gangs of art students, attired with a
scruffy flamboyance and characterized by a drifting and jostling gait. Perhaps their attendance was compulsory: indeed, there could be no other rational explanation of it.

  Charitably entertaining himself with such observations and reflections as these, Cheel took his stand at length in front of the exhibits from which he designed that his principal diversion was to be obtained. These, of course, were the offerings perpetrated by the abominable Rumbelow. The old dotard (as, indeed, he had intimated) was still celebrating the British Way of Life – having been commissioned, it appeared, to produce further enormous murals on the theme. It was a couple of sketches (themselves very large) for these, together with a number of studies of detail, which could be inspected now. Consulting his catalogue, Cheel was surprised – and even a little startled – to notice that the country for which these laboured fatuities were destined was none other than Wamba itself. It was a circumstance he must have quite failed to remark or remember upon the occasion of his brush with Rumbelow’s previous offerings in the series. The Palace of Industry for which they were commissioned must presumably have been in existence during the régime of ‘Field-Marshal’ Mbulu, however little that warrior had been interested in the furtherance of the arts. And Professor Ushirombo must be carrying on with it.

  There was something faintly disturbing to Cheel in the coincidence of this tie-up between the activities of Rumbelow and Sebastian Holme. At the same time, there was a certain piquancy in it. Cheel addressed himself with renewed zest to the amusement of finding something really funny to write about Rumbelow’s latest efforts. True (he reminded himself) it would have to be a species of esprit de l’escalier. When dealing with a ruffian who described himself as not a litigant but a duellist, it would be prudent (as he had earlier resolved) to aim his own shafts from beyond a barrier at least as substantial as the English Channel.