Helena found an afternoon flight to Paris. The night before, she had checked into the Gresham in her own name — in case Attila Fehér or a real policeman came looking for her — and this morning she checked out Marianne Lewis. She packed all the essentials for her trip, including the wigs, the gun, the passports, and left all her toiletries and enough clothes for the maid to ascertain that Ms. Marsh was still in residence. Steinbrunner would not need a change of clothes or a passport to go to Slovakia. And, as she had been dead for some years, she was not on anyone’s list of suspects.
She ordered a taxi for 7 a.m. They crossed the Széchenyi Chain Bridge and ascended the switchback road to the Hilton at breakneck speed. Other than a couple of other taxis, there was no traffic. No sign of any car following them. Then again, she hadn’t noticed Grigoriev’s men (or women) tracking her, so they must blend into the environment. Either that, or she had become sloppy.
Her mother had warned her never to confuse comfort with security, as Simon had done with disastrous results. Besides, Annelise argued, Helena was now cutting her own trail. Since he hadn’t lived with them or ever acknowledged that Helena was his daughter, she didn’t have to carry the burden of guilt for her father’s actions. Yet Helena remembered the times Annelise had screamed at him and the days she spent in tears every time he left. Her mother had never learned to cut her own trail, never even tried to walk away from him. It was always Simon who left.
They whizzed past the Matthias Church, the early vendors were unwrapping their wares, and stopped in front of the Hilton’s grand entrance. She waved off the eager porter and carried her own small bag into the lobby. Despite its unusual surrounding and being built into a castle wall, it was a standard Hilton lobby. Even the house phone was where Hilton always puts its house phones. She asked the operator for Ms. Hoffman.
Sylvie sounded as if she had just been woken up. Muffled, snotty, hoarse. Perhaps the party had gone on too long or she had indulged too much. Helena hoped she had been drowning her sorrows, rather than celebrating prematurely.
“Hullo, Sylvie,” she trilled with exaggerated good cheer. “So happy to catch you in. I’m in the restaurant, should I order you coffee? Juice? A continental? Or would you prefer something more substantial? Eggs?”
Sylvie groaned.
“There is a very tempting buffet with fresh eggs and bacon, Benedict, if you feel like hollandaise or —”
“For God’s sake, who are you?” Sylvie mumbled.
“Helena Marsh, of course.”
“Dear God. What are you . . . why?”
“How silly,” Helena chided, in her over-the-top voice. “We agreed to meet, and here I am. Or would you prefer that I come to your room and we order in? Goodness, Sylvie, you sound a bit under the weather.”
“No,” Sylvie said, suddenly finding her voice. “You said sometime. Today is not good, really. I have a meeting at ten.”
“Perfect,” Helena pounced. “That gives us two hours. Sadly, I have only one hour, this morning. So much to tell you. So little time. In the Icon, then?”
“Okay,” Sylvie said feebly.
Helena took a table by the window overlooking the Fisherman’s Bastion and sat with her back to the wall as she always did.
She made a production of looking at her watch, and when the maître d’ came to offer his help, she asked to be connected with Ms. Hoffman in Room 550. The maître d’ checked his computer and informed her that she had made a mistake. Ms. Hoffman was not in 550, she was in the Turquoise Suite on the third floor. He would immediately connect her. Helena smiled and said she thought she should maybe just wait a little longer. Her friend had enjoyed herself too much the night before. When the maître d’ was no longer watching, she took the elevator to the third floor and waited outside Sylvie’s door.
“Oh,” Sylvie exclaimed when she saw Helena. “You are here.”
She looked considerably less imperious than the day before at the gallery and a great deal less charming than at the party held in her honour. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her shirt was misbuttoned. She was wearing loose grey pants and loafers.
“I thought you might need a little help finding the Icon. We have a table with a lovely view.”
“The what?” Sylvie croaked.
“The restaurant is called the Icon.” Helena said. She took a paper handkerchief from her bag and suggested that Sylvie dab off the mascara that had collected overnight under her eyes. Then she steered her to the elevator. She still had her by the elbow when they arrived at their table. Helena signalled the waiter for coffee and thrust the menu into Sylvie’s hand. “This won’t take long,” she said. “I want to give you some advice about Kis and the painting. You know, I assume, about the murder?”
The local papers and newscasts had been full of Krestin’s death, but Sylvie Hoffman couldn’t understand Hungarian. The English-language Budapest News hadn’t caught up with the story yet. Krestin wasn’t a news item in the U.S. media online. Helena presumed that Kis hadn’t told her, as he wouldn’t have wanted to scare her off.
Sylvie stared at her. So, no, she hadn’t known.
Helena was also the first to tell her that Giorgio had played her for a sucker, and that the Titian was a fake. She showed her Giorgio’s letter.
When Helena finished, Sylvie hadn’t even touched her coffee. She kept looking out the window at the restored fortification, her eyes fixed on the spires. She claimed to have a colossal headache.
“What were you drinking?” Helena asked in the most sympathetic voice she could conjure.
“Wine,” Sylvie muttered, dabbing her damp forehead with her napkin. “And something called palinka. Kis said it was the national drink.” She had begun to take deep breaths while Helena was talking. Then she stood up.
“I need to think about this,” she said and rushed into the lobby.
She needed to throw up, of course. Helena hoped she’d make it to a toilet. Next, Sylvie would call the hedge-fund king for instructions. It was unlikely a man with such an ego would intentionally buy a fake. He had bought a couple of Simon specials back in the day, but experts had certified them. To prove their worth, Simon had sold one to a dealer in Berlin, a Corot landscape with fauns. Hundreds of similar paintings were produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and John Myatt had made a few excellent imitations in the early 1980s.
Simon had been a steadfast supporter of the market in Corot and Cellini fakes. It was difficult to overestimate the gullibility of avid collectors, he had told her, and fakes were, generally, easier to steal than the real thing — unless, of course, they were already masquerading as the real thing, preening on museum walls and protected by elaborate alarm systems.
Myatt’s genius for creating acknowledged fakes had been rewarded with a sale that had netted his dealer about sixty thousand dollars. It had been a small step from there to forging “original” works by Matisse, Giacometti, Chagall, and others. Simon had met Myatt a few times before Myatt was convicted of wholesale fraud. He was convinced that Myatt’s forgeries would one day be so highly valued that the saps who had bought them would stop complaining. He had been prescient. There was going to be an exhibition of Myatt’s works in Prague this summer and next year there would be another, in New York. Myatts had become a valued commodity.
That Simon ended up with a fine collection of Myatts was merely good fortune. He had been able to wait until the furor died down and then slowly trickled the paintings out into the eager art marketplace. Unlike John Drew, who was arrested, charged, and imprisoned, Simon was not caught and discovered. Helena thought there were still hundreds of forgeries in what he had called “safe houses” — watertight metal boxes in which he had hidden the paintings underground. During the last ten years or so of his life, Simon had commissioned high-end forgeries only from Chinese workshops. A few of these had come to light before his death. Most of them had not.
Helena was no longer sure when she realized that Simon was more than an art connoisseur. That he was an expert across several centuries was rare, but not unique. That he was secretive and never flaunted his expertise was more unusual, but Simon had convinced her that his clients were allergic to publicity and that they refused to show off their collections in case of theft or simple envy. They did not want the art world to speculate about how they had acquired their wealth and what they liked to hang on their walls.
That Simon never acknowledged his daughter in public was painful, but since her parents had never married, his vanishing acts were merely irksome. She had never expected him to stay.
Helena was confident Sylvie would be out of her way before she returned from Toronto.
She finished the eggs Benedict and a couple of croissants. They were good and crumbly, but no competition to those at the corner café on Rue Jacob.
She hired a taxi to take her to Bratislava. Two hours on the highway and only $250. She needed the rest.