by Clare Clark
‘And what about the Russian, the collector? Isn’t it time he was called to account?’
Julius smoothed his tie, his eyes fixed on the back of the driver’s head. ‘Matthias gave his client certain assurances. Naturally he considers himself bound by their agreement.’
‘And what about you?’ Emmeline demanded. ‘You’ve been his champion right from the start. This isn’t just about him, it’s about you, your reputation—’
‘Which is exactly why he went to Switzerland yesterday and why I will be meeting with the man in question myself in due course. And no, before you ask, she cannot quote me on that.’
Emmeline considered him. Then slowly she climbed out of the car. Julius leaned over, slamming the door. The car swept away, sending up an arc of dirty water from the gutter. Swearing softly, Emmeline looked down at her wet feet. A sodden cigarette card clung to the kerb. Henry VIII, his legs astride, enjoying a Wahr cigarette.
A sharp glance of lightning froze the street like a photographer’s flash. A pause, then thunder, dark and low, and, beneath her feet, in answer, the subterranean rumble of the U-Bahn. The rain began again, this time in earnest. Pushing Julius’s letter into her pocket, Emmeline started for home.
When Emmeline told Dora about Julius, Dora gave a high little cry and flung her arms around her before she remembered herself and backed stiffly away. When she thanked Emmeline for her help she sounded like a lady mayoress opening a new hospital ward.
Two days later the Merkur ran the story. The editor gave it a paragraph on the fifth page. Several other Berlin newspapers picked the story up, in particular the claim that Köhler-Schultz and de Vries had agreed jointly to re-examine all thirty-two of the Rachmann paintings, but when both men refused to comment the story rapidly ran out of steam. When Dora told Toller she had contacts, she might be able to find out more, the editor shook his head. The news desk would take care of things from here, he told her. Summer was over and everyone who was anyone was coming back to Berlin. Dora had work to do.
Work, Dora told Emmeline resentfully, that she could do standing on her head. She had taken once again to dropping by in the evenings, the way she had when they first met. Emmeline wished she would not. Dora was unable to sit still, unable to talk about anything but Rachmann and his van Goghs.
‘The vast majority,’ she said, again and again. ‘That’s what the statement said, that he believes the vast majority to be genuine. Not all. And Köhler-Schultz is on Rachmann’s side.’
She did not care what Toller said, she knew the news desk would not investigate the story, not properly anyway. She had no choice, she told Emmeline, but to do it herself. Her old despondency had evaporated, burned out by a harsh, humming freneticism. In her lunch hours she met Anton’s gallery friends and pumped them for information. In the evenings she grilled Emmeline. What did Emmeline know about Rachmann’s habits, his family? She made her go over every one of her encounters with him, and with Gregor, again and again. She wrote it all down. When at last she went upstairs to her own flat she took the stairs two at a time.
‘Oma’s asking for you,’ she told Emmeline one evening. ‘She wants to know why you don’t visit any more.’
‘And what have you told her?’
Dora shrugged. ‘The truth. That I ask you and you don’t come.’
‘Is that the truth?’
‘Isn’t it?’
The next evening Emmeline went upstairs for supper. Everything was different. Even Oma was smaller somehow, shrunken, her bones like teeth beneath her papery skin. Her voice was rough, as though her coughing had scratched away the varnish. Her laugh was a saw rasping through wood.
She was still stubborn. She scowled as Dora told Emmeline about her refusal to allow Frau Becker to bathe her or get her dressed, her insistence on using the lavatory across the landing even though she did not always make it in time. Dora, always so patient, had grown snappish. She scolded the old woman as she ran water into the sink, demanding to know how she was supposed to take care of her when she would not take care of herself.
‘I can’t do this any more, Oma, not like this!’ she cried, exasperated, crashing together dirty pots and pans.
She apologised later, when Emmeline was leaving, but there was something in the way she spoke, the lines around her mouth, that suggested she did not think she was the only one with something to be sorry for.
Emmeline lay awake for a long time that night. The next day she came back from the studio early, while Dora was still at work. She still had the key Dora had given her in case of emergencies, tied with a green ribbon so that it would not get lost in her bag. It was easy enough to let herself in.
‘Why are you here?’ Oma asked suspiciously but Emmeline only smiled and made her a cup of tea. Two days later she went again. Before long she had slipped into the habit of it. They talked, or Emmeline read aloud. Dora still brought books from the library but Oma’s eyes had grown weak and reading tired her. She closed her eyes as she listened. Sometimes she fell asleep. Once, waking confused, she thought Emmeline was Dora. She held Emmeline’s hand and would not let it go.
Emmeline did not tell Dora about her visits. It was not exactly a secret, if Dora had asked Emmeline would have told her, but she never did, not even when she came to Emmeline’s flat after work. She was too busy asking questions, writing the answers down in her notebook. When she stopped asking there was nothing else to say. In the end Emmeline had to ask her to leave. She said she was tired, but the truth was it was too hard to bear, Dora there and not there, their conversation filled with gaps like the delays on a long-distance telephone call.
When Dora banged on the door at almost midnight she was in her party dress. Her eyes were shining and her face was red. ‘Oh my God,’ she said excitedly, pushing her way in. ‘It’s happening, it’s finally happening.’
Two days ago, she told Emmeline, she had met with a friend of a friend of Anton’s, a man called Walther. Another Berlin dealer had grown suspicious about a van Gogh he had acquired from Rachmann. If Walther knew the man’s name he was not saying, but he told Dora that when the dealer tried to return the picture Rachmann had refused to take it. Livid, the dealer had talked to other gallery owners. People were jittery. Since coming to Germany, Rachmann’s pictures had passed through many hands. The sums of money were eye-watering. If buyers lost their nerve and demanded the galleries buy them back, the losses could be ruinous. The only recourse then would be to demand that Rachmann reimbursed them in his turn or, if he would not or could not do so, to threaten legal action. A civil law suit, Walther said, was a matter of public record. There would be no way to keep something like that under wraps.
‘Poor Matthias,’ Emmeline said.
‘Poor Matthias my foot,’ Dora retorted, her eyes shining. That afternoon she had received a telephone call from another contact. A modern art gallery in Hannover famous for its provocations was considering a completely new approach for their van Gogh show in November: they proposed hanging a selection of Rachmann’s paintings alongside a group of undisputed van Goghs so that visitors might compare them directly and decide for themselves if the Rachmanns were fakes. There was even a rumour that de Vries had been invited to discuss his doubts about the pictures at a special event. When Dora contacted them, both de Vries and the gallery responded with emphatic and carefully worded denials.
‘Which means lawyers, which means it’s true, or parts of it anyway. Toller’s dragging his feet, he says it’s not enough, that we’d risk a libel action, too much money and vested interests—which means his own friends, knowing him—but he has to publish now or we’ll lose it. I mean, it’s a huge story. If another newspaper gets hold of it . . .’
Emmeline said nothing. In this mood Dora was like a wind-up toy, she would not stop until she ran herself down. She supposed she should be glad for her, Dora had worked indefatigably, she deserved her scoop, but she just felt very tired. When Dora said that she should go, she had to prepare for the editorial conference, Emmeline nodded.
‘Of course,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘Well, good luck. And congratulations.’ She started to close the door but Dora caught her arm.
‘Wait,’ she said. For a breathless moment Emmeline thought she meant to kiss her.
‘I just wanted to say thank you. You’ve been a brick and I—well, you know. Thank you.’ Pecking a hard, dry kiss towards Emmeline’s ear she clattered away upstairs.
Emmeline sat in the dark on the broken-down sofa, staring up at the ceiling. Dora was right. The scandal was coming. You could almost see it darkening the horizon, thickening like a storm out at sea. Perhaps it would be Dora who broke the story, perhaps it would be someone else, but sooner or later it would hit and there would be nothing Matthias or anyone else could do but endure it. Julius already knew it, it was why he had leaked the investigation to Dora, he was trying to mitigate the damage, but there would be damage. To Julius, to de Vries and all the others who had staked their reputations on Matthias’s van Goghs, and most of all to Matthias. Everything he owned, everything he was, could be destroyed.
And yet he kept his word and refused to divulge the identity of the Russian. Dora believed they were lovers. She suspected blackmail but what did Matthias have to hide? Surely nothing as ordinary as a male lover, not in unshockable Berlin where police turned a blind eye to the scores of openly queer bars and clubs and left the rouged-and-powdered boys on Friedrichstrasse to go about their business. Maybe if Matthias were married or a politician, but he was an art dealer. Homosexuality was almost a job requirement. Matthias would have to fuck his Russian on the front steps of the Reichstag before anyone in Berlin would be roused to arrest him.
The light from the streetlamp spilled its sulphurous glow across the floor. Amidst the jetsam of books and shoes and dirty cups was a drawing Emmeline had been working on, a sketch for a linocut. Black ink, a few lines, no more. An old woman, her head tucked into the curve of a young woman’s neck. Emmeline turned away, her throat burning, scrubbing angrily at her eyes with the heels of her hands.
Love. It was the only possible explanation. Matthias was doing it for love.
11
The news that the Nationalgalerie had bought their first van Gogh made headlines across Germany. That the work was unquestionably a masterpiece attracted less interest than the quarter of a million marks they paid for it, more than the gallery’s acquisition budget for the entire year.
Toller summoned Dora. He could not run her story, he said, not as it was. Rumour was another word for libel. He needed facts, names, statements, people willing to go on the record. ‘Talk to Stubbig on the news desk,’ he said. ‘Tell him everything.’
Stubbig was short and bald with a stomach like a coal sack and fingers stained with nicotine. He sucked his yellow teeth while Dora told him what she had and scrawled a single word on a piece of paper. He pushed it across the desk to Dora. SOURCES, the paper said. Go back, he told her. Push harder. Sooner or later, something will give. When it does, we’ll talk.
Dora pushed. She went to the office before it was light and returned again after the parties were over. She arranged for the caretaker to bring her grandmother a hot supper at night. Frau Schmidt’s rates were exorbitant, Dora could barely afford her, but she did not care. What mattered was Oma—and the story.
The caretaker was slapdash and always in a hurry. She came late or much too early, slopping down a stew of fat and gristle, potatoes radish-raw or boiled to floury glue. She forgot to stoke the stove, to refill Oma’s water jug, to take her to the lavatory. Dora did not notice but Emmeline did. She saw how rough she was, yanking and pulling at Oma as if she were a rag doll.
Oma told Emmeline not to fuss. Frau Schmidt was a little rough around the edges but she was not unkind, she said firmly, and she pulled her sleeves down over her wrists, hiding the marks that stained her skin.
‘You’re not to say anything to Dora, do you hear? I won’t have her worrying over nothing.’
And so Emmeline bit her tongue, she knew anyway which one of them Dora would choose to believe, but she tried to be in the flat when the caretaker came. With a witness present Frau Schmidt was obliged to be more careful.
‘You should be working, not up here with me,’ Oma said sometimes but Emmeline pretended not to hear. She was glad to be away from the studio, away from the paintings she was making. There was something false about them, something sugary and shallow. They laboured for simplicity, for sincerity, and managed only mawkishness.
She preferred to sit with the old woman, drinking tea. Without Dora there to hush her Oma told stories, stories about Dora as a girl, about Dora’s mother, about her own long-ago childhood. They bled into one another until it was hard to know where one ended and the next began, but in all of them the girl was funny and fidgety and fierce. Emmeline drew as she listened, Oma laughing, thoughtful, exhausted, asleep. She drew herself also, over and over, a mirror propped in her lap. She seemed to be seeing herself for the first time.
One night, returning late to her own flat, she wrote to Matthias. We never knew each other well, she wrote, but I want you to know that even after all this time I think of that evening when you danced with me and, for a few minutes at least, I believed I could do anything. She almost added a line from one of van Gogh’s letters, what’s done in love is done well, but there was too much of Vincent the preacher in it and she did not want to preach. She wished him happiness and signed the letter with a handshake. She sent it to the gallery, it would reach him that afternoon, but as she slipped it through the slot of the post box she felt like a child dropping a corked bottle into the sea, dispatching a declaration of friendship to whoever might chance to pick it up.
Something gave. A little after eleven on a bright autumn morning Dora received a telephone call from Walther. The proprietor of the gallery where he worked had received a letter from de Vries in The Hague. After months of re-evaluation, de Vries wished to inform him that he was to excise a number of paintings from his catalogue raisonné. The excisions would be listed in a supplement to the catalogue, to be published on 10 November: a complimentary copy would be provided to all those who had purchased the original. He did not apologise.
Dora went to Stubbig. Within the hour the Merkur had a copy of the letter. Within two they had confirmation from de Vries’s office. More than thirty paintings included in the original van Gogh catalogue raisonné were no longer judged to be genuine. No further details were given but, when pressed, the office was unable to deny that the discredited pictures might include the four Rachmann paintings rejected by the Cornelius Gallery and the self-portrait acquired from Rachmann by the Stransky Gallery in New York.
VAN GOGH PAINTINGS ARE FAKES! the Merkur blared the next day. They were not alone. Three other newspapers led with the same story. News, it seemed, travelled even faster than delivery boys. Dora was furious. If Toller had only published when she first brought him the story, she raged, but no, he had to wait, had to sit there swinging his legs until the rest of the country caught up with him, until her scoop was no longer a scoop at all. His lack of nerve was contemptible.
Worse still, he flatly refused to authorise her to go to The Hague to interview de Vries. He had a man in Holland, he said, who was more than capable of handling the story. The way he shook his head, Dora raged to Emmeline, she might have been a child wheedling a sip of her father’s whisky. Three days later, with the press in Paris and London and Amsterdam gleefully seizing on the scandal, de Vries granted an exclusive interview to a prestigious Dutch newspaper. The dubious canvases, he said, had been released on to the market through a dealer in Berlin, Matthias Rachmann, who claimed to represent a Russian collector. He now considered all thirty-two of Rachmann’s pictures to be fakes.
Rachmann himself had gone to ground. Dora talked to everyone she knew but no one seemed to know where he was. The story was almost a week old when his lawyers finally issued a statement to the press. The claims made by Pieter de Vries were baseless and malicious. Steps were be
ing taken to block their publication. In the meantime, any iteration of his libels would result in punitive legal action.
The refutation only fanned the flames. Outside the Rachmann Gallery reporters crowded the pavement, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Newsreel crews brought vans that blocked the street. The boutique proprietors called the police and the fur-swaddled ladies let their little dogs lift their legs on their boxes of equipment, but they still came back. The story was irresistible, an intoxicating cocktail of money, celebrity, chicanery, humiliation and homosexual intrigue. According to Moscow’s Museum of Artistic Culture, none of the Rachmann van Goghs had ever been in Russia.
Toller sent Stubbig. Dora had made a valiant start, he said, but it was time for the big guns. Klaus Stubbig had thirty years’ experience. He was a heavyweight.
‘Oh, he’s a heavyweight,’ Dora seethed to Emmeline. ‘A bloated old hack who’s never sober after noon. The most inventive writer at the paper? For Christ’s sake. The only inventive pieces of writing that bastard’s come up with in the last decade are his bloody expense claims.’
An apprenticeship, that was all she asked, but Toller would not listen. Stubbig’s story meant Stubbig’s way and Stubbig was adamant. Apprentices were a millstone around a reporter’s neck, that was Stubbig’s view. Toller’s hands were tied.
‘Then he dares to tell me journalism’s no career for a girl like me, as though I’m a child in petticoats, as though it wasn’t me who broke the story in the first place! He’s insisting I give everything I’ve got to that bastard Stubbig so the two of them can take all the glory. I swear to God, I’d rather burn every last page . . .’
Emmeline said nothing. She sat in silence as Dora raged, shouting at phantoms like the drunk in his ragged greatcoat on Bülowplatz.
‘It’s my story, Em,’ she ranted, again and again. ‘Mine.’
‘Except it’s not, is it?’ Emmeline said at last. ‘Not any more. She was not sure why she said it, except that she was exhausted and it happened to be true.