Headlong (26 page)

There’s no such parking space in Pall Mall, however. Nor in St James’s Street nor King Street. I go round again. As I wait in traffic outside Christie’s their charming young man in the bow tie emerges from the door. At the sight of the
Land-Rover, and the great black plastic parcel in the trailer, he stops and smiles more welcomingly than ever. So, I’ve been to Sotheby’s and I haven’t liked what they had to say. I’ve come crawling back, just as he foresaw. He beckons me into my old place on the yellow line. But the traffic loosens, and I drive straight past him, with a gesture that may mean I’ve a wealthy Belgian impatient to pay everything that Christie’s are estimating and more, or may mean simply that I’m on my way back to St James’s Square.

Which I am. On the corner of York Street a young woman stands laughing, I assume at me until I observe, the next time I pass her, that she’s sharing the joke with a mobile phone. I feel a bitter pang of jealousy. I might have some faint chance in life if I had the basic equipment like a mobile phone that everyone else takes for granted …

I
do
have a mobile phone, though! This is the one thing I
have
got! One more trip round the square and I’ve found it. One more again and I’ve found Tony Churt’s number. Another two and I’ve discovered how to get the latter into the former.

‘Hello?’ says Laura tensely, and I realize at once that she’s hoping it’s me. ‘I
knew
it was!’ she cries, as soon as I confirm it. ‘Where are you? Are you still in London? How’s it all going? I tried to ring you! When are you coming back? What’s the weather like? Everything here’s ghastly beyond belief! Have you got shot of that great fat tart yet? I’ll scratch her eyes out!’

‘I’m in St James’s Square,’ I tell her. ‘The weather’s OK. Is Tony there?’

‘Does it sound like it?’ she laughs. ‘No, it’s all right – he’s out in his beastly little workshop place. I’m all on my own. Now – sound of trumpets! – I’m still not smoking! Not a single one since you left! Are you proud of me?’

‘Very good,’ I say. ‘Listen.’ Because I might as well tell her the whole story before she fetches Tony. I’d be interested to know if he’s told
her
what kind of money was involved. At that moment, though, I catch sight of a blue four-wheel-drive in the mirror. It’s following me slowly round the square.

‘Go on,’ she says impatiently.

It’s still right behind me. It’s been there for some time, it occurs to me. I think this is our second go round together.

‘What’s happening?’ says Laura. ‘You’ve gone all quiet. Are you still there?’

The four-wheel-drive turns off into a parking space in the centre of the square, nose first, that I might perhaps have got into if I hadn’t been watching it instead of parking spaces. Damn. Not Georgie, though, presumably. Might be sensible not to hang around waiting for him, though.

‘Did you say Tony’s in his workshop?’ I ask.

‘Yes! Don’t worry!’

‘No, I mean, could you fetch him for me?’

A brief but wounded silence. ‘I see,’ she says in a rather different tone of voice. ‘It’s
Tony
you want to talk to?’

I realize I haven’t handled this as well as I might.

‘I’ll tell him to call you.’ she says coolly, before I can explain, and hangs up. Well, all right – but I can’t do
every
thing
! I can’t drive round and round St James’s Square, and look for parking places,
and
watch in my mirror,
and
calculate five and a half per cent of some vast sum of money,
and
tiptoe around people’s feelings …

Now there’s a police car behind me. I drive down into Pall Mall, up St James’s Street, along King Street again, and I’m just getting back into St James’s Square when Tony calls.

‘So what do Sotheby’s say?’ he demands. ‘How much?’

I resist the short-term satisfaction of telling him that I
went to Christie’s, not Sotheby’s, so I know that he knows already, and stand out for the longer-term benefits of getting credit for my honesty. ‘You’re going to be amazed,’ I tell him. ‘A hundred to a hundred and twenty.’

He’s not amazed, though. ‘So tell your Belgian a hundred and forty,’ he says.

Of course. I should have seen it coming. I’ve been pushed far enough, though. I’m not going to let myself be pushed any further.

‘I’ll tell him a hundred and twenty,’ I inform him flatly, ‘since that’s what they said.’

‘Don’t be a fool! You’re saving him the buyer’s commission! That’s ten per cent, for a start! Plus half the seller’s commission!’

Oh yes. I’d forgotten the commissions.

‘All right,’ I concede. ‘A hundred and thirty.’

‘No, but you’ve got to bargain, you’ve got to fight! For God’s sake! How is it that I always find myself in the hands of some amateur without a grain of business sense? Start high! Try him on a hundred and forty! Tell him you’ll take it elsewhere! And all right – be prepared to settle at a hundred and thirty-five.’

‘I’ll start him on a hundred and thirty-five,’ I say. I’ve got the picture, after all. And I’m very sick of St James’s Square, and the stink of petrol in the car. Also, I need a pee.

‘A hundred and thirty-five?’ he shouts. ‘A hundred and thirty-five is your absolute rock bottom after you’ve tried every trick in the book!’

‘My bottom is a hundred,’ I say calmly. ‘Since that’s what they said.’

‘A hundred? What
is
this? Whose side are you on?’

‘No one’s,’ I say simply. ‘But I’m not going to be a party to cheating Mr Jongelinck just because he’s a Belgian.’

‘In that case bring the thing back and I’ll find my own bloody Belgian!’

‘Bring it back?’ I say calmly. ‘Sure. Delighted to. Save me a great deal of trouble. With any luck I’ll roll up the drive just about the same moment as your brother and his lawyers.’

I switch the phone off. I feel I’ve regained control of my destiny at last. What I’m going to do if he doesn’t back down, I haven’t the slightest idea. But something. With my newly recovered autonomy I break effortlessly out of the loop in which I’ve spent so long. I turn out of St James Square into Charles II Street, as if it was the easiest thing in the world. I don’t know where I’m going, but at least it’s somewhere else.

The phone rings again as I’m driving across Piccadilly Circus.

‘A hundred and twenty,’ he says. ‘And not a penny less.’

At once I feel I can be generous. ‘A hundred and five,’ I counter.

Silence. But now I know where I’m going. There’s a car park in Old Burlington Street with a number of galleries close by. I shan’t be able to stir far, of course, in case the tempting whiff of sheep’s urine on the breeze lures some tearaway into investigating the contents of the trailer.

‘A hundred and ten,’ says Tony at last, pathetically. ‘There’s no point in selling her at all if you go under that.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I tell him noncommittally, and switch the phone off.

I’ve become battle hardened. I can shove the bayonet in now without a second thought.

Koenig Fine Art is the place I decide to try, because it’s the first one I come to, as I run from the underground car park in Old Burlington Street, that seems to deal in Old Masters. There’s a fair-sized
Death of Actaeon
in the window that suggests they may have a taste for the grandiose. I’m attracted by the subject, too. I can’t help feeling a touch of sympathy for someone who’s been changed into a beast and torn to pieces because he happened to catch a glimpse of transcendent beauty. Though in my case I now have renewed hopes of avoiding at any rate the second half of this fate.

The gallery inside is panelled, with period furnishings and a woman sitting at the scrolled table in the corner who appears to be carved out of various highly burnished hardwoods herself, hair included. A concealed mechanism snaps her lips into a brief smile as I approach, but it also flicks her eyes briefly down at what I’m wearing, and almost audibly registers a disposable income too low to allow my adventures in the art market to get much beyond postcard reproductions. This time, however, I’m not the slightest bit disconcerted, because I know
I
have high chips to play with. I fling them down on to the table with complete openness.

‘A Giordano,’ I announce. ‘Valued by Christie’s at £140,000. Is that something you might be interested in making an offer on?’

She doesn’t blink. ‘I’m afraid Mr Koenig’s in a meeting,’ she says. ‘If you’d like to bring it in some time …’

‘I’ve brought it. It’s in the car park round the corner. In its frame it’s about seven feet high by nine feet long. I don’t imagine you want to help me carry it, and I don’t want to leave it for more than a few minutes. When will Mr Koenig be free?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘I’ll wait ten minutes, then I’ll try elsewhere. May I use your lavatory?’

Is there any tonic in the world that bucks you up the way money does?

She hesitates for a fraction of a second. She doesn’t like me. But the days when I cared about being liked are over. I’m as much a beast as poor Actaeon now. She leads the way to an ornate door that opens out of the eighteenth century on to a muddled twentieth-century backstage corridor, separated from an adjoining office by a battered hardboard partition, and lined with files and copiers and stacks of catalogues. She indicates another door at the end. As I pee (and I even pee arrogantly in my current mood), I become aware of a man’s voice on the other side of the partition. ‘Charles,’ it says pleadingly, ‘will you please hold your horses a moment, will you please listen?’ But Charles, who’s presumably at the other end of a telephone, is plainly not inclined to restrain his horses at all. ‘I know that, Charles,’ says the man at my end. ‘I know, you’re right – I should have done, and I didn’t – but, Charles … Charles…!’ There’s a defeated note in the voice. Behind the panelling at Koenig Fine Art, perhaps, all is not as well as it should be.

I wonder, with my brutal new-found realism, if it’s really worth waiting even ten minutes for this broken reed. But then the same realism even more brutally prompts me to
wonder whether a little desperation on Mr Koenig’s part might not prove helpful in the negotiations.

Let’s see how desperate he really is. Now I’ve got the pressure in my bladder back to normal I’m even more insolent in my power.

‘On second thoughts,’ I tell the woman when I re-emerge, ‘I think I’ll wait in the car park.’

‘I don’t think Mr Koenig would want to …’

‘Luca Giordano.
The Rape of Helen
. From the Churt collection at Upwood. I’m on Level Three.’

I stroll up the street until I’m out of the woman’s sight, then I run all the rest of the way, suddenly overcome with the certainty that the importance of my cargo, projecting ostentatiously out of its parking bay, will already have attracted a gang of international art thieves – or Georgie – or the police. As soon as
she’s
out of
my
sight, no doubt, she goes running to Mr Koenig.

He keeps me waiting twenty minutes, none the less. Quite nicely judged, I have to say. It’s very quiet and peaceful down in the clean white underworld of Level Three, and by far the most congenial place I’ve been in all morning. I’m within a couple of minutes of giving up on him, all the same, by the time he comes sauntering across from the lift, his offhand buyer’s manner and ironic condescension visible at a range of a hundred feet, and I’m not feeling quite as cocky as I did. If I hadn’t heard him pleading on the phone I should start cutting my price.

‘Maybe I should move the business down here,’ he says, shaking my hand. ‘Rather nice ambience.’

He looks like Gustav Mahler: high bony forehead, a bush of dark hair on either side, small gold-rimmed spectacles. Crumpled shirt, tie half an inch off centre. Not a dealer at all – an academic; a version of myself. Perhaps this is his problem.

I say nothing. I’m not going to make a social occasion of this, however much like me he is. I’ve got the goods; he needs them. He can take it or leave it. I undo the twine, and we slide the huge package out. He sniffs.

‘Sheep’s urine,’ I explain briefly.

Once again Helen steps out of her drapes and shows her charms. But now I know that I’m pimping for a very high-class girl indeed, an international
poule de luxe
. He pushes his spectacles up on to his forehead and gazes at her for some time.

‘What’s the documentation?’ he says.

I unfold my crumpled photocopy from the Witt. He examines it in the way that an immigration officer might examine an out-of-date Nigerian driving licence offered in place of a passport. It doesn’t worry me in the least. I know what I know.

‘And Christie’s told you …?’

‘A hundred and forty.’

He laughs. Let him. I’ve heard him in another mode.

‘What about Sotheby’s?’

‘I haven’t tried Sotheby’s.’

‘Why not? They might say a hundred and fifty.’

He’s as rude as I am. Would he be less cocky if he realized I’d overheard him?

‘Why have you brought it to
me
?’ he asks.

‘I don’t want to pay the premiums, and you were the nearest gallery to the car park.’

He pulls the spectacles back on to his nose and transfers his scrutiny to me. Pictures he can see unaided. It’s the rest of the world he has difficulty in focusing.

‘Also, you want cash,’ he says.

I say nothing, because of course I do. I’d intended to demand it boldly, though, not to confess it meekly. He goes
on looking at me for a moment. He can see tax avoidance written in my soul just as I can see bankruptcy written in his. Or perhaps what he sees is more than mere tax avoidance. I realize he hasn’t asked me my name, and it occurs to me that this isn’t because he thinks I’m Mr Churt – it’s because he knows I’m not. He suspects that my title to the picture won’t bear too much examination.

He goes on gazing at me. My confidence ebbs a little. I’m beginning to feel a little like the wretched Nigerian with the driving licence.

‘Family situation,’ I say. ‘I won’t bore you with the details.’

‘You
are
the owner?’

I nod, after the briefest pause for thought. What the pause means to me is that I shall have become the owner retrospectively, in a sense, after I hand the money over to Tony. What the pause means to Mr Koenig, I imagine, is confirmation of his hypothesis.

‘You’ll put something in writing?’ he demands. I nod again.

‘Very well, then,’ he says decisively, handing me back my piece of paper. ‘I’ll give you £70,000 for it. In cash. Tomorrow.’

I suppose I should laugh in my turn. £120,000 … £150,000 … £70,000 … The figures balloon and shrivel as arbitrarily as one’s fingers in a fever. I don’t laugh, though; I think. Because of course it probably
is
stolen, though not by me, and the longer I negotiate and wait for my money the more likely it is that the efforts of brother Georgie and his lawyers will make it unsaleable. This is the weakness of my position. I pluck another figure out of the great emptiness of the car park.

‘A hundred and ten.’ What I’m holding on to is the fact
that he’s prepared to deal at all, even though he thinks there’s something dodgy about it. This is the measure of his desperation. This is the weakness of
his
position.

He smiles, and starts to wrap the picture up again for me. What he’s indicating is that we’re not within signalling range of each other. If this is really what he means he ought simply to walk out of the car park. He’s found an excuse to linger in case I soften. What
I
ought to do, obviously, is to walk out of the car park myself, and find a few more dealers. It’s manifestly worth a great deal more than he’s offering, or he wouldn’t be offering it. But of course the advantage of overhearing any more moments of defeat and weakness is unlikely to recur. And in any case, at the thought of running back and forth to the car park, of dressing and undressing
Helen
, of laying out further stocks of aggression and cunning, all the energy drains out of me.

‘A hundred,’ I say, ignominiously.

He’s got me on the run, and he knows it. ‘Seventy-five,’ he says at once.

Now
he’s
made a mistake. If he could only have brought himself to say ninety, I’d have said ninety-five and been on my way home. But for him to go up five when I’ve come down ten is insulting. I find the twine, and he puts his finger on the first half-hitch for me as I tie the second. We glance up at each other at the same moment, and catch each other’s eye. This is ludicrous! Two nicely brought up, well-educated mother’s sons, and here we are, me trying to sell a picture that’s not mine, him trying to buy it with money that’s almost certainly not his. How have we got into this situation?

And we’re both at the end of our tether. He’s got to go back and wearily cajole a lot more money out of someone who doesn’t want to let it go. I’ve got to go back and find
some way to make that money up to … I don’t know. The figures balloon and shrivel again … I can’t even remember what I told Tony. Was it a hundred or a hundred and five?

We’re both the creatures of unseen proprietors. Two old boxers at the point of collapse, holding each other up.

Yes, if he said £95,000 I could persuade myself. Obviously I’m not going to get anything like the full auction price from a dealer. I have to accept that. In any case, it’s a question of perspective: £95,000 standing as close as the merrymakers in the foreground looks bigger than £110,00 standing way off among the mountain blue.

‘Ninety-five,’ I say. Yes, ninety-five plus the fifteen from the bank might just about do it. If I told Tony a hundred and five, then I’d still have a few thousands left over towards the other three pictures.

‘Eighty,’ he says. ‘And that’s absolutely final.’

‘All right,’ I say. ‘Ninety.’

Ninety? What am I saying ninety for? I can’t settle for ninety! It would leave me at least five thousand still to find!

‘Eighty,’ he says again.

‘Eighty-five,’ I hear myself saying, to my despair. Because this is madness! I must go elsewhere! I must try at least half a dozen places before I even think of going below ninety-five!

‘Eighty,’ he repeats blankly.

‘Eighty-five,’ I repeat, no less blankly. Madness, madness! But I can’t go through this again!

‘Eighty.’

‘Eighty-five!’ And here I have to stand, whatever the outcome.

Silence. He gazes into the distance, waiting for me to weaken. I don’t weaken. At eighty-five I finally stick. I say nothing. I wait for him.

And in the end he breaks.

‘Eighty-one,’ he says flatly.

‘Eighty-one,’ I agree.

Because I can’t go through it again, I really can’t.

Together we tie the tailgate half-closed. We avoid each other’s eye. We both know we’ve made a terrible mistake.

‘And you’ll have the money tomorrow?’ I say with insulting sternness, to compensate for my humiliation. ‘In cash? By what time?’

‘By midday,’ he says.

‘Midday. Right. And you’ll be there to help me unload it if I stop outside the gallery?’

‘No need to bring it to the gallery,’ he says. He takes a little notebook out of his pocket, writes something, and tears the page out for me. It’s the address of a forwarding company, in a unit on an industrial estate in Rotherhithe.

The deal’s not going through his books, any more than it is through mine. He has a Belgian of his own.

‘Fifties all right?’ he says. ‘You don’t want it in fives and tens?’