The Modigliani Scandal

  The stamp and the headed paper would make a suspiciously large package to take past the security men at the door on the way home. And he would have to conceal it from the old man for the rest of the day.

  He had a brainwave. He took a penknife from his pocket and slid its blade under the rubber bottom of the stamp, working the knife from side to side to dislodge the rubber from the wood to which it was glued. His hands, slippery with sweat, could hardly grip the polished wood.

  ''Can you find what you want?'' a girl's voice came from behind his back.

  He froze. ''Thank you, I have them now,'' he said. He did not look around. Footsteps retreated.

  The rubber came away from the bottom of the stamp. Peter found a large envelope on a shelf. He put the notepaper and the thin slice of rubber into the envelope and sealed it. He took a pen from another box and wrote Mitch's name and address on the envelope. Then he closed the steel cupboard door, picked up his ream of forms, and went out.

  At the last minute he remembered the bent paper clip. He went back into the store, found it on the floor, and put it in his pocket.

  He smiled at the typists as he left the office. Instead of going back to the old man, he wandered around the corridors until he met another messenger boy.

  ''Could you tell me where I take this to be posted?'' he asked. ''It's air mail.''

  ''I'll take it for you,'' the messenger said helpfully. He looked at the envelope. ''It should have air mail written on it,'' he said.

  ''Oh dear.''

  ''Don't worry--I'll see to it," the boy said.

  ''Thank you.'' Peter went back to the packing department.

  The old man said: ''You took a long time.''

  ''I lost my way,'' Peter explained.

  Three days later, in the evening at his cheap lodging house, Peter got a phone call from London.

  ''It came,'' said Mitch's voice.

  ''Thank Christ for that,'' Peter replied. ''I'll be home tomorrow.''

  Mad Mitch was sitting on the floor of the studio when Peter arrived, his fuzzy ginger hair laid back against the wall. Three of Peter's canvases were stood in line on the opposite wall. Mitch was studying them, with a frown on his brow and a can of Long Life in his hand.

  Peter dumped his holdall on the floor and went over to stand next to Mitch.

  ''You know, if anyone deserves to make a living out of paint, you do,'' said Mitch.

  ''Thanks. Where's Anne?''

  ''Shopping.'' Mitch heaved himself to his feet and crossed to a paint-smeared table. He picked up an envelope which Peter recognized. ''Clever idea, ripping the rubber off the stamp,'' he said. ''But why did you have to post it?''

  ''No other way to get the stuff out of the building safely.''

  ''You mean the firm posted it?''

  Peter nodded.

  ''Jesus. I hope no one happened to notice the name on the envelope. Did you leave any other giveaway clues?''

  ''Yes.'' Peter took the can from Mitch and drank a long draft of the beer. He wiped his mouth on his forearm and handed the can back. ''I had to give Charles Lampeth's name as a reference.''

  ''Did they check it?''

  ''I think so. Anyway, they insisted on a referee they knew and could telephone.''

  Mitch sat on the edge of the table and scratched his stomach. ''You realize you've left a trail like the bloody M1.''

  ''It's not that bad. It means they probably could trace us, given time. Even then they couldn't prove anything. But what matters is they can't catch up with us before we're finished. After all, we only want a few more days.''

  ''If everything goes to plan.''

  Peter turned away and sat on a low stool. ''How did your end go?''

  ''Great.'' Mitch brightened up suddenly. ''I swung it with Arnaz--he's going to finance us.''

  ''What's in it for him?'' said Peter, curious.

  ''A laugh. He's got a great sense of humor.''

  ''Tell me about him.''

  Mitch swallowed the rest of the beer and threw the can accurately into a bin. ''He's somewhere in his thirties, half-Irish and half-Mexican, brought up in the USA. Started selling original paintings out of the back of a truck in the Midwest when he was about nineteen. Made money hand over fist, opened a gallery, taught himself to appreciate art. Came over to Europe to buy, liked it and stayed.

  ''He's sold his galleries now. He's just a kind of intercontinental art entrepreneur--buys and sells, makes a pile, and laughs at the mugs all the way to the bank. A moderately unscrupulous bloke, but he feels the same about the art scene as we do.''

  ''How much money has he put up?''

  ''A thousand quid. But we can have more if we need it.''

  Peter whistled. ''Nice guy. What else have you pulled off?''

  ''I've opened us a bank account--under false names.''

  ''What names?''

  ''George Hollows and Philip Cox. They're colleagues of mine at the college. For references, I gave the Principal and the College Secretary.''

  ''Isn't that dangerous?''

  ''No. There are over fifty lecturers at the college, so the connection with me is pretty thin. The bank would have written to the referees and asked whether Hollows and Cox were in fact lecturers and lived at the addresses given. They will get told yes.''

  ''Suppose the referees mention it to Hollows or Cox?''

  ''They won't see them. It's four weeks to the new term, and I happen to know that they aren't social friends.''

  Peter smiled. ''You have done well.'' He heard the front door open, and Anne's voice called hello. ''Up here;'' he shouted.

  She came in and kissed him. ''I gather it went off all right;'' she said. There was a sparkle of excitement in her eyes.

  ''Well enough,'' Peter replied. He looked back to Mitch. ''The next step is the grand tour, isn't it?''

  ''Yes. That's down to you, I think.''

  Anne said: ''If you two don't need me, the baby does.'' She went out.

  ''Why me?'' said Peter.

  ''Anne and I mustn't be seen in the galleries before delivery day.''

  Peter nodded. ''Sure. Let's go over it, then.''

  ''I've listed the top ten galleries here. You can get around them all in a day. You look first of all for what they've got plenty of and what they're short of. If we're going to offer them a picture, we might as well be sure it's one they need.

  ''Secondly, the painter has to be easily forgeable. He must be dead, he must have a large body of work, and there can be no complete record of his work anywhere. We're not going to copy masterpieces--we're going to paint our own. You find one painter like that for each gallery, make a note, then go on to the next.''

  ''Yes--we'll also have to exclude anyone who habitually used any specialized kinds of material. You know, everything would be much easier if we limited ourselves to watercolors and drawings.''

  ''We couldn't raise the kind of money we need to make a spectacular splash.''

  ''How much d'you think we'll raise altogether?''

  ''I shall be disappointed if it's less than half a million.''

  An atmosphere of concentration filled the big studio. Through the open windows, the warm August breeze brought distant traffic murmurs. For a long while the three people worked in a silence broken only by the contented gurgling of the baby in a playpen in the middle of the room.

  The baby's name was Vibeke, and she was just a year old. Normally she would have demanded attention from the adults in the room; but today she was playing with a new toy, a plastic box. She found that sometimes the lid would go on, and sometimes it would not; and she was trying to figure out what made the difference. She too was concentrating.

  Her mother sat nearby at a battered table, writing with a fountain pen in meticulous copperplate script on a sheet of Meunier's letterhead. The table was littered with opened books: glamorous coffee table art books, heavy tomes of reference, and small learned articles in paper covers. Occasionally Anne's tongue would stick out of the comer of her mouth as she lab
ored.

  Mitch stood back from his canvas and gave a long sigh. He was working on a fairly large Cubist Picasso of a bullfight; one of the series of paintings which led up to the Guernica. There was a sketch on the floor beside his easel. He looked at it now, and deep frown-lines gouged his forehead. He lifted his right hand and made a series of passes at his canvas, painting a line in the air until he thought he had it right; then with a quick final stroke he put the brush to the canvas.

  Anne heard the sigh, and looked up, first at Mitch and then at the canvas. A kind of stunned admiration came over her face. ''Mitch, it's brilliant,'' she said.

  He smiled gratefully.

  ''Really, could anyone do that?'' she added.

  ''No,'' he said slowly. ''It's a specialized talent. Forgery for artists is a bit like mimicry for actors. Some of the greatest actors are lousy mimics. It's just a trick which some people can do.''

  Peter said: ''How are you getting on with those provenances?''

  ''I've done the Braque and the Munch, and I'm just finishing the Picasso,'' Anne replied. ''What kind of pedigree would your van Gogh have?''

  Peter was reworking the picture he had done in the Masterpiece Race. He had a book of color plates open beside him, and he frequently flicked over a page. The colors on his canvas were dark, and the lines heavy. The body of the gravedigger was powerful yet weary.

  ''It would have been painted between 1880 and 1886,'' Peter began. ''In his Dutch period. Nobody would have bought it then, I don't suppose. Say it was in his possession--or better, his brother Theo's--for a few years. Then bought by some fictional collector in Brussels. Turned up by a dealer in the 1960s. You can invent the rest.''

  ''Shall I use the name of a real dealer?''

  ''Might as well--only make him an obscure one--German, say.''

  ''Mmm.'' The room became quiet again as the three returned to their work. After a while Mitch took down his canvas and began a new one, a Munch. He put on a pale gray wash over the whole surface, to get the brittle Norwegian light which pervaded so many of Munch's paintings. From time to time he closed his eyes and tried to rid his mind of the warm English sunshine in the studio. He tried to make himself feel cold, and succeeded so well that he shivered.

  Three loud knocks at the front door shattered the silence.

  Peter, Mitch and Anne looked at one another blankly. Anne got up from the desk and went to the window. She turned to the men, her face white.

  ''It's a policeman,'' she said.

  They looked at her with astonished incredulity. Mitch was the first to adjust.

  ''Go to the door, Peter,'' he said. ''Anne, hide those provenances and the notepaper and stamp. I'll turn the canvases with their faces to the walls. Let's go!''

  Peter walked slowly down the stairs, his heart in his mouth. It just did not make sense--mere was no way the law could be on to them already. He opened the front door.

  The policeman was a tall young constable with short hair and a sparse mustache. He said: ''Is that your car outside, sir?''

  ''Yes--I mean no,'' Peter stuttered. ''Which one?''

  ''The blue Mini with things painted all over the wings.''

  ''Ah--it belongs to a friend. He's a guest here at the moment.''

  ''Perhaps you'd like to tell him he's left his sidelights on,'' said the bobby. ''Good day, sir.'' He turned away.

  ''Oh! Thank you!'' Peter said.

  He went back up the stairs. Anne and Mitch looked at him with fear in their eyes.

  Peter said: ''He asked me to tell you that you've left your sidelights on, Mitch.''

  There was a moment of uncomprehending silence. Then all three of them burst out into a loud, almost hysterical laughter.

  In her playpen, Vibeke looked up at the sudden noise. Her startled look dissolved into a smile, and she joined enthusiastically in the laughter, as if she perfectly understood the joke.

  PART THREE

  Figures in the Foreground

  ''You need to think of the role which pictures such as paintings have in our lives. This role is by no means a uniform one.''

  LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN,

  philosopher

  I

  THE MULTISTORY, REINFORCED CONCRETE hotel in Rimini offered English breakfast bacon, eggs, and a pot of tea. Lipsey glimpsed a portion on someone's table as he made his way through the dining room. The egg was fried hard and there was a suspicious green patch on the bacon. He sat down and ordered rolls and coffee.

  He had arrived late last night and chosen his hotel badly. This morning he was still tired. In the foyer he had bought the Sun--the only English paper available. He flicked through it while he waited for his breakfast. He sighed with exasperation: it was not his sort of newspaper.

  The coffee made him feel a little less weary, although a real breakfast--the kind he cooked for himself at home--would have been better. As he buttered his roll, he listened to the voices all around him, picking out accents from Yorkshire, Liverpool, and London. There were one or two German voices, too, but no French or Italian. The Italians had more sense than to stay in hotels they built for tourists; and no Frenchman in his right mind would go to Italy for a holiday.

  He finished his roll, drained his coffee, and postponed his cigar. He asked an English-speaking hotel porter for directions to the nearest car-hire office.

  The Italians were feverishly turning Rimini into a replica of Southend. There were fish-and-chip restaurants, imitation pubs, hamburger bars and souvenir shops everywhere. Every spare plot of land was a building site. The streets were already crowded with holidaymakers: the older ones in open-necked Bermuda shirts with their wives in flowered dresses, and the younger, unmarried couples in bell-bottom jeans, smoking duty-free king-size Embassy.

  He smoked his belated cigar in the car-hire office, while a couple of officials filled in lengthy forms and checked his passport and his international driving license. The only car they had available at such short notice, they regretted, was a large Fiat in a metallic shade of light green. The car was rather expensive, but as he drove it away Lipsey was thankful for its power and comfort.

  He returned to his hotel and went up to his room. He studied himself in the mirror. In his sober English suit and heavy laced shoes, he looked too much like a policeman, he decided. He took his 35 millimeter camera in its leather case from his luggage, and slung it around his neck by the strap. Then he put a set of darkened shades over the lenses of his spectacles. He studied himself in the mirror again. Now he looked like a German tourist.

  Before starting out, he consulted the maps which the hirers had thoughtfully provided in the glove compartment. Poglio was about twenty miles away along the coast, and a couple of miles inland.

  He drove out of the town and took a narrow, two-lane country road. He settled down to a leisurely 50 m.p.h. driving with the window open and enjoying the fresh air and the flattish, sparse countryside.

  As he approached Poglio the road got even narrower, so that he had to stop and pull onto the shoulder to allow a tractor to pass him. He stopped at a fork with no signpost, and hailed a farmworker in a faded cap and T-shirt, his trousers held up with string. The peasant's words were incomprehensible, but Lipsey memorized the gestures and followed them.

  When he reached the village, there was nothing to indicate that this was Poglio. The small, whitewashed houses were scattered about, some twenty yards from the road, some built right out to the curb, as if they had been put up before there was any well-defined road there. At what Lipsey took to be the center of the place, the road forked around a group of buildings leaning on one another for support. A Coca-Cola sign outside one of the houses marked it as the village bar.

  He drove through the village, and in no time at all found himself in the country again. He did a three-point turn on the narrow road. On his way back he noticed another road off to the west. Three roads into the village, for what it's worth, he thought.

  He stopped again, beside an old woman carrying a basket. She was dr
essed all in black, and her lined face was very white, as if she had spent her life keeping the sun off it.

  ''Is this Poglio?'' said Lipsey.

  She drew her hood back off her face and looked at him suspiciously. ''yet,'' she said. She walked on.

  Lipsey parked near the bar. It was just after ten o'clock, and the morning was beginning to get hot. On the steps outside the bar, an old man in a straw hat was sitting, his walking stick across his knees, taking advantage of the shade.

  Lipsey smiled and bid him good morning, then went past him up the steps and into the bar. The place was dark, and smelled of pipe tobacco. There were two tables, a few chairs, and a small bar with a stool in front of it. The little room was empty.

  Lipsey sat on the stool and called: ''Anybody there?'' There were noises from the back of the place, where the family presumably lived. He lit a cigar and waited.

  Eventually a young man in an open-necked shirt came through the curtain beside the bar. He took in Lipsey's clothes, his camera, and his shaded glasses with a quick, intelligent glance. Then he smiled. ''Good morning, sir,'' he said.

  ''I would like a cold beer, please.''

  The barman opened a small household refrigerator and took out a bottle. Condensation hazed the glass as he poured.

  Lipsey took out his wallet to pay. As he opened it, the photograph of Dee Sleign fell out onto the counter and slipped over to the floor. The barman picked it up.

  There was no glimmer of recognition on the man's face as he looked at the picture, then handed it back to Lipsey. ''A beautiful girl,'' he commented.

  Lipsey smiled and handed over a note. The barman gave him change, then retired to the back of the house. Lipsey sipped his beer.

  It looked as if Miss Sleign, with or without her boyfriend, had not yet arrived at Poglio. It was quite likely: Lipsey had been hurrying, and they had not. They had no idea anyone else was after the Modigliani.

  Once again, he would have preferred to look for the picture rather than for the girl. But he did not know just what had led her to Poglio. She might have been told that the picture was here; or that someone here knew where the picture was; or some more complex clue.

  He finished his beer and decided to look around the village. When he left the bar the old man was still on the steps. There was no one else in sight.