Evie sat on the side of the bed and wept. Two days had passed since Annie’s triumphal dinner, but since then her daughter had avoided her. She wanted to share in Annie’s triumph, not to take any credit for her success, merely to insert one small positive memory into the bank of their shared experience. The last few weeks attending AA meetings had helped Evie understand how the child Annie had been forced to live in the vortex of her compulsive world, a hapless victim of Evie’s chemically enhanced or withdrawn moods. Returning from school, the child would never know which Evie was waiting behind the door. Would it be the happy-go-lucky-just-had-a-drink mother, or the nervous, fidgety let’s-try-not-to-have-a-drink person? The angry withdrawing Evie, or the flat-out black-out mother? Sometimes Evie wasn’t there—it would be days, occasionally weeks, before she returned, offering no explanations. No wonder Annie learned to cook; she had had to.
This morning, the weight of guilt was almost unbearable. Evie did not know how to forgive herself. Without her daughter’s love what was the point in living? Evie looked back at her life, the shipwreck of dreams; it added up to so little. Half-started careers, messy relationships and a river of alcohol. Perhaps a little drink would help ease the pain of this moment? After all, booze was her friend, her constant companion. They’d had some fun together, hadn’t they, her and Billy Bottle—at least she had lived, had a bit of fun. Where was the fun in Annie’s sterile, lonely life? Work, work, work. Get up at the crack, slave for someone else’s benefit, come home and sleep. And as for the cooking, I mean, that just proves it, doesn’t it—make something that is eaten and shat out. Who says that’s a more worthwhile existence? Who’s judging whom now?
Evie felt the fire returning to her spirit. She got up and looked at herself in the mirror and laughed; she did look awful. She splashed cold water on her face. Surely one drink wouldn’t hurt? One is too many and a thousand never enough, the mirror mocked back. Evie scrubbed at the mascara stains under her eyes, took off her clothes and ran a damp cloth under her armpits and between her legs. Never know, she said to herself, Mr. Right might come a-poking today. She looked at herself naked in the bathroom mirror. Not bad, really. Not like some of those smug bitches you see with their semi-detacheds and their second-hand sports cars. They might have a bank account but they couldn’t even pull their own husbands. Evie could, mind you. She could get those titties up and out, and in a good light you couldn’t see the crepey surface at all. She was only forty-seven and her stomach was flat and her legs firm. Most men said she could pass for a thirty-five-year-old. Mind you, men said just about anything at closing time.
Evie did her hair carefully, backcombing it into a springy, fluffy helmet, hiding the worst of the roots under a little gold clip. She took Annie’s diamanté earrings—nothing like a bit of paste to lift the face. She made up her eyes carefully, dabbing concealer to cover the bags and a light dust of reflective powder. Then she took Annie’s “best” dress and her pair of black heels. Looking at herself in the glass, Evie decided she was “outside world” ready.
Evie stopped. She had forgotten one important thing—the most important thing, perhaps. She had no money. Not even a pound. She felt a sense of rising panic. Now that the decision to drink had been taken, nothing could get in the way. She needed money. She opened the drawers and cupboards hoping to find a roll of cash; only take ten, maybe twenty, she didn’t need much. Evie could not find anything—not even a handful of pennies. She felt a faint sweat rising on her temples and under her armpits.
Sitting down at the kitchen table, she tried to breathe slowly and even thought of calling her sponsor. Maybe her higher power was looking after her. Then she saw the picture—that was worth something, wasn’t it? It’s not like Annie even wanted it—she had told her often enough that she regretted buying the thing. If Evie took it she’d be doing her daughter a favour, wouldn’t she? But where would she sell it? The pawnshop? What would they want with an old picture? Evie remembered a pub in the East End, a place where young artists went to drink—maybe she could take it there and leave it behind the bar as collateral. Kind of a brilliant idea, she thought; she wasn’t selling her daughter’s picture, just getting it to earn its keep. Wrapping the painting in an old jumper, Evie put it into a Sainsbury’s bag, and grabbing her coat, hurried out of the flat, down the stairs. It was 11 a.m.: opening time.
I am too old to be messing around with petrol cans and flame torches, Memling thought as he sloshed the corners of the farmhouse with diesel. Once he could have lifted five-gallon cans on his own, but now he had to struggle with a single litre. Not wanting to arouse suspicion, he had driven an extra thirty kilometres to stop at different stations to buy individual cans. He had never set fire to a building before and had little idea how to ensure that it really burned. Later he would walk through the small orchard to the hillock where the trap door to the disused mine was located. He was almost too old to negotiate the steep steps down into the bunker. He had lost count how many times since the war he had come back—thirty, maybe forty. It was strange how pictures that had been almost worthless in the 1950s had come back into fashion. Once he nearly threw out a pair of late Renoirs, never believing that anyone would really want those sickly sweet rotund bathers. Today both would fetch crazy prices, Memling thought, remembering the sale of Renoir’s Au Moulin de la Galette in 1990 for $78.1 million to the chairman of a Japanese paper manufacturing company. The new owner intended to be cremated with the painting; fortunately his company ran into serious difficulties and the Renoir was sold privately to a collector with less grandiose ideas about funeral pyres.
Memling had grown to love the pictures in the cellar. He allowed himself one last trip into the bowels of the small hillside, one last browse among the stacks. He could remember where most of them came from. That Léger had been in a Jewish collection in Paris; he had carried the Titian out of a small church near Venice; the van Loo came from an attic in Amsterdam where some Jews had tried and failed to hide it above a cupboard; a golden cup, probably by Cellini, had been found in a French château where it had been used to keep a baron’s cufflinks. Memling doubted that any of the original owners had loved these pieces as much as he did. For him, these works of art represented beauty and also escape—they were the magic bridge connecting an impoverished, joyless childhood in Berlin with the luxurious, powerful position as one of the world’s pre-eminent dealers. Once, Memling’s name was likely to appear only on the school register; now it was engraved into the walls and architraves of the great museums of Europe, in rooms and extensions that Memling had paid for. In the Holocaust Museum in Bremen above the entrance hall there was an inscription, each letter a foot high, that read “Opera Memlingi Winklemani in perpetuum admiranda sunt.” The deeds of Memling Winkleman should be admired for ever.
Memling had to crawl through the tangled bushes to reach the entrance to the cellar. These days even sinking down to his knees was a terrible effort. I might never get back up, he thought grimly as he shuffled slowly through the dense thorny undergrowth. Ten feet on he saw the familiar mound covered with brambles and ivy. Luckily he had remembered his heavy rubber gloves and a small crowbar. Clearing the top of the trap door he prised the door open inch by inch until he could raise it and prop it up with the wrench. Then he turned around, still on all fours, and reversed towards the hole. Until even a few years ago Memling could walk up to the trap door, lift it up with two hands and walk down the steps facing forward. Now he didn’t trust either his legs or his balance. It occurred to him that he could save a lot of bother by self-immolating in the cellar and thus doing away with both the evidence and the perpetrator simultaneously. But Memling had always dreamed of a grand funeral. He had pre-booked the Liberal Jewish synagogue but was thinking of the Barry Rooms at the National Gallery or perhaps the Guildhall. He suspected that the Prime Minister would want to say a few words. No doubt the Chief Rabbi would officiate.
Memling took each step carefully—he knew there were thirty before reaching the bottom. Once he had navigated these he felt in the dark, on the brick ledges, for the torches that he left waiting. Once he thought of running a cable from the house to the cellar, but that was too detectable. Taking the flashlight, he turned it on and shone the powerful beam down a narrow corridor. He and his colleagues had chosen well and there was no hint of dampness even after recent heavy rains. After twenty paces, he arrived in the first room. Measuring twenty by twenty foot, it was stacked from floor to ceiling with paintings, each in its own crate marked with the artist; he looked at one row: Donatello, David, Degas, Daumier, Delacroix, Denis, Domenichino, van Dyck and Dürer. To think he had not even opened many of these. It was estimated that more than forty thousand works of art were still missing from Nazi looting—Memling suspected that eighty-four or maybe eighty-five remained here in the cellar; he had, over the years, sold another sixty-five. He walked through to the next room—it was even bigger—Moretti, Matisse, Martini, Matsys, Michelangelo, Nattier, Oudry and Parmigianino. Beyond that was an exquisite treasure, the Amber Room—fifty-five square yards of amber panelling backed with gold and weighing over six tons. Known as the Eighth Wonder of the World, it was made for a Prussian king at the turn of the eighteenth century. Memling had been one of the officers in charge of its freighting and shipping from St. Petersburg. He and his colleagues had worked in silence inspired by sheer wonder. It was a German masterpiece and belonged back in the fatherland. Given to Peter the Great when the two countries had been allies, it should now be taken back to its rightful home.
Memling stroked the delicate panels with the tips of his fingers. When he shone his torch on to the amber it glowed like a furnace, light dancing along the panels and bouncing off the delicate gold carving. Rescuing the Amber Room from Königsberg Castle had been the single greatest act of his life. Hearing that the store was likely to be attacked, he led a group of men to take the crates out. They had worked solidly through the night with only a few mules and a rickety cart before requisitioning a train to get the pieces across Germany to Bavaria. When news broke that Königsberg Castle had been bombed and only a few fragments of brick remained, Memling and his team decided not to speak of their successful mission—the fewer who knew, the better. Now my own daughter wants me to destroy the things that I risked my life to save, Memling thought, as he shone his torch around the store. If his life counted for anything, if he had served any purpose, it was to help preserve these great treasures for future generations.
Memling thought about the kindness of Esther Winkleman, who had taken pity on the unloved child even though he was the son of a man who hated her race and her family. She had fed him scraps off her table, had helped him learn and had inadvertently given him a skill that helped him to survive and prosper. Of course this woman could never have known that she would save another man’s child rather than her own. Shining his torch on a Leonardo portrait of a young woman, yet another mistress of his patron the Duke of Milan, he thought about the Watteau, the pictorial embodiment of the few.
His tastes had evolved over the years. He liked to rearrange the works in the mine like a personal mini-museum, pulling particular paintings to the forefront of the stacks, according to his mood or situation. It seemed to Memling that great artists had the power of divination and could predict and translate even the most minor human travail. In the vast panoply of life, there were paintings to suit every predicament. No emotion, however base or delicate, had been considered too petty or panoramic. Artists’ brilliance went further than compassion or empathy; masterpieces could inspire as well as reflect different emotions. As a young man, Memling had been unable to stand anything sentimental and had prized guts and gore above beauty. He had loved Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, recently sold to Mrs. Appledore, as it suggested that violence, if pragmatic, was acceptable. He thought of a Claude landscape whose bucolic scene quieted a troubled mind or the Bronzino statesman whose magisterial looks inspired leadership and fortitude.
After Marty had died, Memling shut himself in the cellar for five days and five nights. He had taken water but no food and intended to die there, but his desperate spirit was rescued by a Duccio Madonna, whose sweetness of expression amid her own suffering had cajoled him back to life. When he had been in love with Marianna, Memling had pulled Renoirs and Del Sartos to the fore; sweetness emanated from those women that suited his mood. But no work ever matched up to his little Watteau—that extraordinary work embodied the agony and ecstasy of love.
By asking him to destroy the constants, the sources of joy and comfort in his life, these tender renderings of the universal human conditions, his daughter was depriving future generations of solace that he had not just enjoyed but depended on.
Looking around the cellar, Memling could not summon up the courage or barbarity to realise Rebecca’s wishes. Taking his torch, he said a last goodbye to his private collection. Heaving himself up the narrow steps and out into the sunshine, he turned and closed the trap door and pulled earth, twigs and other matter over the surface, then, sinking painfully to all fours, he crawled back through the hedge and down the slope to the track.
Reaching the farmhouse, Memling took a match and set fire to a heap of rags and kindling that he piled in the centre of the room. He stood for a while watching the tiny flames lick and flicker through the debris. Going to the next room, he sloshed more petrol on to the old kitchen table and chairs and across the threadbare pre-war curtains. There was, he knew, no point at all in burning an abandoned farmhouse but at least he could pretend to Rebecca that part of her instructions had been completed. No doubt the local police would come to investigate and assume that a group of vandals had taken advantage of an empty site. Looking into the records, they would see that the house and hectares surrounding it belonged to a company registered in Buenos Aires. The police would spend many frustrating hours trying to track down the rightful owner. Memling had set up a series of shell companies, a trail that led from Buenos Aires to the Cayman Islands to Guernsey to Bermuda and back to South America. At some point, long after Memling’s death, the local authorities would give up, requisition the land and sell it off. He hoped that the new owners would be delighted to discover a stash of great masterworks beneath their property. Memling’s only regret was not to be present to hear the speculation regarding how the works came to be lodged in a long-disused underground mine and who, if anyone, knew about their whereabouts. As he always wore gloves to inspect his work, even the cleverest forensic scientist would be unable to match DNA samples.
Memling drove away from the house, occasionally glancing in his rear-view mirror at the plume of black smoke curling in the distance behind him. On the main road he checked to see if any other cars were coming, and once sure that no one saw his Fiat Panda pull out from the track, he turned into the road and headed back to the airport. In less than four hours he would be home. On his return, he expected to hear that the joint problems of the missing picture and that pest Trichcombe Abufel had been properly dealt with. Then he would have a large Scotch and an early night.
Though Trichcombe had not seen his nephew for nearly twenty years, he would occasionally post copies of his manuscripts to Maurice at his terraced house in Mold. It made the art historian feel better that there was a hard copy of his work safely stored in a small attic in his native Wales. He doubted that Maurice bothered to open the envelopes, but at least his nephew was kind enough to acknowledge safe receipt with a postcard. Some of Trichcombe’s students laughed at these Luddite impulses, urging him to use the Cloud or a hard drive. Trichcombe would smile and ignore their suggestions.
Today he mailed a copy of the document to Maurice by registered mail. He even telephoned Maurice to ask him to watch out for the postman. Maurice’s wife Della (or was it Delia? Trichcombe could never remember) had sounded irritated. “Will I have to go out of my way to sign for it?” she asked. Trichcombe could hear her breathless tones; she had been fat on her wedding day and was probably obese by now. He imagined her struggling up the lane, pausing to catch her breath at the crossroads before heading up to the local post office, thighs chafing, droplets of sweat collecting between moist rolls of fat, bunions aching slightly.
“I would not normally ask such a humungous favour, dear Della,” he said unctuously.
“Delia,” she corrected.
“Delia. This is the most important document I have ever written. If something happens to me, make sure it gets to the police, my dear.”
Delia nearly laughed; what would the local police force make of an ageing art historian’s thoughts on a long-dead artist? She would certainly not be trying their patience with any of Trichcombe’s words. Her husband’s uncle was an anomaly in their family—an academic—those four short dry syllables made Delia reach for a cigarette—what kind of life was that? Buried deep in books and in the past. Life was for living—you only got one shot, as Maurice often said.
“Dahlia, dear—are you still there?” Trichcombe asked querulously.
“It’s Delia. Don’t worry—I’ll get your package,” she replied, drawing deeply on her cigarette.
Trichcombe waited until the post office van arrived and watched his copy disappear into a large grey sack. He stayed till the van had disappeared around the corner before heading back to his flat. He had waited forty-two years to wreak revenge on Memling Winkleman—forty-two long years. And now, finally, after all that painstaking and meticulous research, he had him. The fish was truly hooked. Later that day Trichcombe was meeting the editor of Apollo—the magazine might not have the biggest circulation, but it would get to everyone who was anyone in the art world and after that it would seep out into the wider press. Again Trichcombe decided not to send his precious research over the Internet. Better to hand it over in person.
I will probably be on the news, Trichcombe thought. Almost certainly. They were bound to give him some hackneyed sobriquet like “Nazi Hunter” rather than “Art Historian.” He wondered if Delia would see it—whether she would adopt that condescending “do hurry up, old man” tone when he next called. Maybe there would be a film or even a book by him that sold more than a few hundred copies. His last work, Les Trois Crayons d’ Antoine Watteau, had performed disappointingly, shifting only 124. Trichcombe wondered what to call this book—The Improbability of Love, maybe, after the painting itself. Or A Question of Attribution? Provenance, or what about Nice and Nazi—Trichcombe was so lost in thought that he didn’t notice the two men waiting near the entrance to his building. Putting the key into the lock and turning it to the right, he pushed on the door and felt, to his surprise, a sharp prick in his neck. Turning, he saw a man, short, burly and dark with a hat pulled over most of his face, holding a large syringe. Trichcombe tried to cry out but from somewhere else another hand appeared with a thick cloth. Trichcombe felt strangely fuzzy, his legs gave way and the stairs came up to meet him. His last thought was of a Piero Della Francesca altarpiece, The Flagellation of Christ, seen in Urbino when he was twenty-one.