Trichcombe Abufel stared out of his kitchen window and on to the communal gardens. He had bought this small attic flat thirty years earlier and watched the neighbourhood change from a diverse multicultural area to a homogenised pool of wealthy white bankers and their families. Looking down into the garden below he could see five almost identical blonde women in black shorts, starved to a pre-pubescent body weight, each Botoxed so their faces resembled smooth marble statues, doing calisthenics with a large and muscled black trainer. It was rather nice, Trichcombe thought as he stared at the dark-skinned man, to see a dab of colour. Trichcombe did not want to move from his home, but unless something changed in his professional life, penury would soon force him out of this apartment and into the suburbs. Maybe he would have to go back to Wales—he shuddered at the thought.
Wrenching himself away from the scene below, Trichcombe turned back to his desk and “the problem.” Since meeting the young woman in the British Museum and catching a glimpse of that sketch, Trichcombe had the certain feeling that “it” had been found. It had taken Trichcombe many years to painstakingly stitch together a provenance for Watteau’s great missing work, The Improbability of Love. Using a combination of printed material, unpublished records, his personal archive and data stored at national and international museums, Trichcombe established an almost unbroken line of ownership. He knew the painting was made in 1703 in Paris and that the subject was most probably a beautiful actress, Charlotte Desmares, who went by the stage name of Colette. Watteau’s undiluted passion for the woman was reported in several contemporary accounts and for a period of seven months her face popped up in nearly every sketch and in many other oil paintings.
After Watteau’s untimely tragic early death from consumption in 1721, the painting was left to his friend Jean de Julienne and thenceforward its provenance was one of the most fascinating Trichcombe had ever uncovered. Was there another picture owned by such a string of illustrious and interesting patrons? Trichcombe was not, however, particularly interested in the painting’s early history or even in the work itself. It was the period between 1929 and the present day that occupied most of his attention. He found out that the painting had disappeared from the Royal Collection during the First World War (possibly stolen) but had reappeared in a saleroom in Berlin in 1929, when a man called Ezra Winkleman had bought it for fifty Marks. Trichcombe did not have to search Google or Who’s Who: he knew that Ezra was Memling Winkleman’s father.
In the last few days, the art world grapevine had started buzzing with news that the Winklemans had “lost” a small Watteau; they had called everyone whom they kept on a retainer and though Trichcombe was perhaps the only expert who wasn’t employed by the family anymore, he had fielded several calls.
Trichcombe thought back to the auburn-haired woman in the British Museum and her sketch. Some sixth sense honed by years of looking and thinking about works of art suggested that the painting was in her possession. He was fairly sure, from her reaction, that she wasn’t an expert and probably didn’t realise how valuable or important it was; he hoped to enlighten her long before anyone else.
Sitting at his desk, Trichcombe looked again at the photocopy of the engraving of The Improbability of Love. The picture was important in many ways: its subject matter, the juxtaposition of hope and despair, encapsulated the feelings of requited and unrequited love. Its lightness of touch, the speed, dexterity and apparent simplicity of its conception pointed to a new style of painting, encouraged generations of later painters to loosen up, let go and express themselves. And of course this work was also the father, mother and mistress of the Rococo movement. But above all, it was also capable of inspiring love.
Trichcombe got up and walked back into the kitchen. Below him the ladies were stretching, their trainer pausing briefly at each body to pull and push their limbs into ever more outlandish shapes. Trichcombe wasn’t really watching them; he was trying to put together everything he knew and those things he couldn’t explain about the Winkleman business. He was hoping that this time he had found the means for revenge.
Scholarship had taught Trichcombe many lessons but perhaps the most important was patience. He had learned to wait for information to unfold and to let clues emerge when he was least expecting them. Learning and discovering were not linear processes but webs of insane matrices, layers of disparate unconnected facts accrued over the years that would suddenly coalesce. His most important discoveries—finding the Cimabue altarpiece in a saleroom in Pewsey, and Raphael’s Madonna of the Camellia in the back passage of a boys’ school—were part happy coincidence (being there) and part knowledge: the years of looking at other works, studying the tiny brushstrokes of each artist and, above all, knowing what was missing and where it was last seen. A scholar, Trichcombe often thought, was just a detective. He was one of the greatest.
Memling had been the first person to spot his particular talent; he retained Trichcombe on a princely salary. It was rare to find someone who combined knowledge with a single-minded passion for painting. For the first seven years, Trichcombe’s apparent lack of a personal life, his willingness to work all hours, to travel at a moment’s notice, was an enormous advantage. Memling sent the young man all over the world to evaluate new purchases and to root around minor salerooms. Together they became the Duveen and Berenson of their era.
Trichcombe’s single-minded mania had certain disadvantages: most of Winkleman’s employees worked for a salary and were happy to go home at night and to turn a blind eye to any inconsistencies. Their jobs were ultimately just the means to the end of the business of living. For Trichcombe, a man with no dependents and no outside hobbies, his job was his life, and while others took pride in their partners or children, he was dedicated to paintings, their study, their history, their provenance.
An increasingly tense situation between employer and employee finally erupted when Memling suddenly unearthed a lost work by Boucher. Memling refused to say where it had come from. For him, it was a simple, highly lucrative transaction. For Trichcombe it was essential to establish the painting’s history. Staying up for seven nights in a row, Trichcombe established a history of ownership that stopped suddenly in 1943 in Berlin with a member of a family later annihilated at Auschwitz. Memling refused to say how he came by the work. Two months later a similar case appeared when Memling returned from a trip to Bavaria with a Canaletto, a Barocci and a Klimt. Again, Memling brushed aside his employee’s demand for paperwork. At that time, few were interested in the morality behind restitution of works stolen during the war. Vendors and buyers were happy with vague chains of ownership. Memling liked to claim that his paintings came from “a nobleman” or “a titled lady.” No one quibbled.
As time went on Trichcombe’s unease grew. How could Memling consistently produce undiscovered great masterpieces from nowhere? Most had good provenances and secure chains of titles, but some had literally appeared from thin air. He was aware of the great fluidity in the art market following the war, the rock-bottom prices as owning art paled into insignificance next to rebuilding lives. But as wealth and stability increased during the 1960s, bargains and rarities were harder to come by. How then did Winkleman keep producing masterpieces?
Memling found Trichcombe’s interrogations increasingly irksome. It came to a head one day in 1972 when Trichcombe saw a small painting by Watteau on Memling’s desk. Measuring eighteen by twenty-four inches, it showed a couple watched over by a clown. Even Trichcombe, who had not been touched by another human being for thirty-seven years, felt the naked power of this painting. There was something so exquisitely moving and heartfelt about the look of the lover lying on the grass looking at the girl, something mournful about the clown’s disposition and his long, languid face, and something so wilful and vivacious about the girl enjoying absolute power over her suitors’ emotions.
Suddenly, Trichcombe had to know about this picture; it tipped his curiosity over the edge. But Memling said it was personal and not for sale, so did not concern his employee. Trichcombe persisted, and insisted on trawling through office records and chains of title. The following morning, he arrived at the office to find all his belongings in a box on the front step. The receptionist handed him an envelope containing £1,000 cash. It was not a simple dismissal: from that day onwards Memling used his considerable power to discredit Trichcombe at every corner and the scholar never succeeded in securing a senior post at a museum or as a private curator or in a gallery. He lived off minuscule earnings from his books and scholarly articles. Occasionally he discovered a drawing or an oil sketch in a provincial saleroom and sold that on but he never earned enough money to buy anything significant. As a young man, his great passion had been a love of art; for the last forty-two years, Trichcombe’s driving ambition was to unmask Memling Winkleman. From the moment that he witnessed Memling with the Watteau, back in 1972, Trichcombe knew that its value to Memling was far above and beyond money and emotion. For reasons he had yet to prove, this picture was the key to his future and to Memling’s downfall.
Trichcombe spent years piecing together the history of the Watteau; all he needed was to find the picture itself. He had almost given up hope until seeing images of the work at the British Museum. There was only one last piece of the jigsaw to put in place: the fate of the last owners, Memling’s parents. The old Berlin sales records of 1929 had an address for the family: Trichcombe decided to go to Schwedenstrasse 14 off Friedrichstadt to see what was left.
In his newly formed office in Holborn, Vlad watched, in real time, money pouring into his current account. There was a spike in tin trades and during the morning, before he had even got out of bed, Vlad had made £67 million, bringing his week’s total to £127 million. According to the terms of his exile, the Office of Central Control was to receive at least 30 per cent of any profit Vlad made. Almost in spite of his best efforts, the price of tin kept rising and Vlad had to constantly stoke the fire of Central Control’s demands. In the last nine days Vlad had had to transfer £24 million anonymously into one of its many accounts. If, for any reason, he did not want to use a bank transfer (and sometimes the Leader disliked this method) or if Vlad had decided that an object was a better proxy, he had to deposit the item at the holding house in Surrey.
The week before, unable to contain his curiosity, Vlad had personally delivered a diamond the size of an eyeball to Crawley Place, Godalming, Surrey. Arriving at the outer perimeter of the estate, Vlad was greeted by three Russian men dressed in black. Asked to get out of the car, he was frisked thoroughly, his car was searched and, with a specially generated password printed on a scrap of paper, he had been allowed to proceed to the second gate. At the next gate, several hundred yards away, he was frisked again and issued with another password. This elaborate procedure was repeated four times before he reached a nondescript red-brick house with highly manicured lawns and a raked gravel drive. The wide wheels of Vlad’s car, a dark blue Maybach, left ugly track marks on the neat patterns.
A disembodied female voice rang out of nowhere instructing Vlad to go to the front door. As Vlad approached it swung open. Nervously he went inside. The outer door looked normal enough but once inside, Vlad realised that he was now in an airtight metal box. I could be crushed like a tin can and no one would know, he thought. The same voice told him to stand completely still. A formation of infrared beams danced around his body. “You are being scanned,” the voice told him unnecessarily. Another door opened. Vlad walked through. “Put your hand on the pad and look up,” the voice instructed. He placed his hand on a sensor and turned his eye to the ceiling. A metal panel slid back and Vlad walked into another box. This one was considerably larger, nearly the size of the whole downstairs of the house.
“The bricks and windows are a shell to make this place resemble a house,” the voice said, apparently reading Vlad’s mind. “The British intelligence know exactly what it is, but they don’t yet know how to break into it. Nor does anyone else.”
“Who are you?” Vlad asked.
“The less we know about each other, the better,” the voice said.
The floor beneath him trembled. Vlad stepped back quickly as a section of it slid back, revealing stairs to a basement.
“Descend.”
No wonder they told me to come alone and switch cars twice on the journey here, Vlad thought. It wasn’t to protect them; it was to make sure that even if my disappearance was registered, my body could never be traced. Knowing he had no choice, he went down the stairs and into a large safe.
“This is your payment box,” the voice said. “Your code is known only to me and you, and it will change with each visit. Think of a series of five numbers, which must not relate to anything personal, such as year of birth, year of your mother’s birth, et cetera.”
Vlad thought for a moment before keying in the day of his brother’s birthday, 61270.
“That corresponds to your dead brother’s birthday. Can you think of another?” the voice said.
Vlad shivered slightly and then put in a random code.
A box the size of a tea crate opened in the wall.
Taking a small pouch out of his pocket, Vlad opened it and placed the diamond in the centre of the box.
“Re-enter your code now,” the voice instructed.
Vlad punched in the digits and the wall safe closed.
“Once it has been verified, you will receive a notification by email. Exit from the passage to your left and find your car.”
“What if I buy a large painting next week? How will it fit in there?”
“You will be given different instructions. If you buy from an auction house, we deal directly with their handlers. Private sales are managed in different ways.”
“Or if I buy a house or an island?”
“We have yet to fail to process anything. That should not be your worry.”
Going out of the building was as complicated as entering. Once reunited with his car, Vlad noticed that the gravel had been raked since his arrival and once again he had the minute but real satisfaction of messing up the perfect patterns.
Leaving the compound, Vlad drove for a few miles and then, pulling into a layby, he put his head on the wheel and succumbed to feelings of utter despair. How could he, week in, week out, find suitable objects to satisfy the Office of Central Control? If they didn’t like the diamond, what then? He had already employed six people to help locate works of art, precious objects, estates, paintings and shares. The problem was second-guessing what his Leader wanted. Last week his leader had rejected a chalet in Gstaad on the grounds that he already owned 40 per cent of the resort. Vlad had offered an emerald through an agent that was returned. If the Leader rejected the diamond then he would be three weeks behind on his payments and saddled with goods that he didn’t actually want. Vlad had no intention of going to Gstaad (he was told Courcheval was the only place to go); he had no girl to give the emerald to (though he lived in hope of capturing Lyudmila). Two weeks earlier he had bought a significant stake in a company that turned out to be already owned by the Office of Central Control. At this rate he would be personally bankrupt and in debt, and if he missed five weeks’ payments, thoroughly dead.
Clutching the steering wheel hard in both hands, Vlad tried to think straight. He had to have a plan, a proper plan about how to meet these payments. He had to corner the market in something, some area that the Office of Central Control did not already own and whose value was irrefutable. He should also try to anticipate payments in advance—by buying something really valuable, Vlad would buy himself time: weeks, maybe months of unbroken sleep. The more he learned about the art world, the more confident Vlad became that he had found the ideal conduit. The problem with contemporary art was that there was an almost limitless supply and it was far too dependent on fashion. Hirst could pump out hundreds and thousands of spots, drown the market in brightly coloured circles. In the brief few days between buying a Richard Prince Nurse and delivering it to his faceless creditors, the artist’s stock had fallen. Old Masters were a safer bet. After all, the painters were dead and this lack of supply to meet potential demand meant that their prices were unlikely to fluctuate by much. Vlad had another thought. I could manipulate the market by buying a few works by one artist, then putting one in an auction, bidding the price up wildly, setting a new benchmark and making all the others worth far more. Why had no one else thought of this? Then he realised that others had, and this probably explained the record prices at auction.
Taking his telephone, he punched Barty’s number into the dial.
“Forty minutes—Chester Square,” he said.
When Vlad rang, Barty was lying on a massage table having a treatment to keep any potential cellulite at bay. That cellulite was unlikely to strike a slim, sixty-nine-year-old man was irrelevant. Barty had an absolute terror of imperfection—just because it hadn’t happened so far didn’t mean that it could not sneak up behind him. Rolling off the table, Barty left the treatment room and padded down the corridor to the club’s changing rooms. He had a lifetime free membership to this place and treatments to the value of £5,000 per annum, payment for providing introductions to his best clients.
Standing under the hot shower, Barty thought about Vlad and how their relationship was developing. He had known enough Russian émigrés to understand what they needed. He remembered the old White Russians, summarily expelled following the revolution in 1917, who had escaped to London to live out their days in genteel poverty, forever mourning the motherland. The new generation was equally wistful but hugely wealthy, providing they could stay alive. Letting the hot water pour over his head, washing away the massage oil, Barty thought compassionately about Vlad’s situation. The great lummox had more money than most could even dream of spending, but he was a haunted, hunted figure. Being thousands of miles away from Central Control no longer offered safety. Wherever he was, Vlad was beholden: emotionally, financially and physically. His prison was luxurious and apparently without walls or boundaries, but he wasn’t free. Barty suspected that Central Control could trace an errant employee to the furthest Tahitian island and eradicate them in a matter of seconds. Their operatives had doubtless secreted microchips under his skin while he slept, tracking devices inserted by prostitutes trained in many dark arts.
Barty would never swap places with the wealthy Russian, but he was happy to conjure up interesting ways for Vlad to spend his money.
Recently he had advised another Russian how to manage his billions. Boris Slatonov had bought an ailing football club and revived its fortunes by spending millions on new players, coaches and facilities. Luckily the team began to win and Boris found out that there was nothing that the Leader loved more than international success. Boris’s next move, again with Barty’s help, was to found a museum in Moscow and fill it with modern paintings. Soon the Leader was using Boris as one of his personal bankers, channelling money through him by means of the sports fields and the art world.
Looking at himself in the mirror, Barty drew a comb through his hair. Thick and silky, his tresses remained one of his best assets and were now dyed a strawberry blond. Barty thought the new hairdresser was probably his best ever, a man who resisted Barty’s occasional pleas to cut it or coxcomb or Mohican or shave it. “If you want to change your style, get a wig, darling.” Picking up the hairdryer, Barty began to rough-dry it—there wasn’t time to do much more. Taking up his make-up pouch, he applied a touch of blusher to both cheeks before getting back into his three-piece suit (he was Steed from The Avengers today).
Fifteen minutes later, Barty was in a cab on his way to meet Vlad. In his left pocket was a list of all the football clubs currently on the market. In his right was a litany of forthcoming auctions. Barty had also decided that Vlad shouldn’t look at contemporary works of art; although the Old Masters were rarer, more elusive and less sexy, Vlad should concentrate his efforts on the more recherché—in fact, Barty had decided to finally reward his friend Delores and steer Vlad towards French eighteenth century. The three of them would identify a charming little “maison” in St. Petersburg (far nicer than the horrid and deeply masculine Moscow). They would create a Musée des Beaux Arts de l’École du Dix-Huitième. Barty could see it now—it would be a mass of brocade, damask, ormolu, gilt, gold and other utter fabulousness. Unlike those great bastions of monumental concrete and neon whiteness known as modern museums, their little palace would be a place where the eye would never be allowed to rest, even for one split second. It would be a cacophony of colour and texture, it would be contra contemporary, a fashion insult; Barty and Vlad’s museum would put the controversial back into culture.
Barty arrived seconds before Vlad’s car glided into view. The enormous Russian looked even more disconsolate and depressed than usual. Barty slid into the seat next to him, feeling the soft sharkskin under his fingers and admiring his own reflection in the highly polished walnut dashboard for a second before he turned to Vlad.
“Cheer up, my little buttercup. I have a plan. A simply wonderful marvellous plan.”