The Modigliani Scandal Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART ONE - Priming the Canvas

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  PART TWO - The Landscape

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  PART THREE - Figures in the Foreground

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  PART FOUR - The Varnish

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  The Modigliani Scandal

  A high-speed, high-stakes thriller from Ken Follett,

  the grand master of international action and

  suspense

  A fabulous ''lost masterpiece'' becomes the ultimate prize-for an art historian whose ambition consumes everyone around her, an angry young painter with a plan for revenge on the art establishment, and a desperate gallery owner who may have double-crossed his own life away. Behind the elegance and glamour of the art world, anything goes--theft, forgery, betrayal, and maybe even murder....

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF KEN FOLLETT

  JACKDAWS

  ''[A] celebration of uncommon courage and unlikely heroes.''

  --People

  ''Great entertainment.''

  --The Baltimore Sun

  CODE TO ZERO

  ''Gripping.''

  --The New York Times

  ''This spy thriller is Follett at his best.''

  --People

  THE HAMMER OF EDEN

  ''Hammer will nail readers to their seats.''

  --People

  ''Follett ratchets up the Richter scale of suspense.''

  --USA Today

  THE THIRD TWIN

  ''Follett really knows how to tell a story.''

  --The Atlanta journal-Constitution

  ''His scenes whip along. And his ending is absolutely smashing.''

  --The Virginian-Pilot

  A PLACE CALLED FREEDOM

  ''An altogether entertaining reading experience.''

  --Minneapolis Star Tribune

  A DANGEROUS FORTUNE

  ''A terrific page-turner. Careening thrills ... telling historical detail ... genuine surprises.''

  --Los Angeles Times

  ''Relentlessly suspenseful.''

  --The New York Times

  NIGHT OVER WATER

  ''An excruciatingly taut drama on the aerial equivalent of the Orient Express ... thoroughly satisfying ... his best since Eye of the Needle.''

  --Publishers Weekly

  LIE DOWN WITH LIONS

  ''Sheer suspense.''

  --The Washington Post

  "Vintage Follett.... This is his most ambitious novel and it succeeds admirably.... Tense, vivid, excating ... satisfies on deep levels."

  --USA Today

  ON WINGS OF EAGLES

  ''Absolutely electric with suspense.''

  --San Francisco Chronicle

  ''A marvelous, rare, terrific read.... A superb edge-of-the-seat true story that is as exciting as a novel.''

  --USA Today

  THE MAN FROM ST. PETERSBURG

  ''Ken Follett has done it once more ... goes down with the ease and impact of a well-prepared martini."

  --The New York Time Book Review

  THE KEY TO REBECCA

  ''A top-flight adventure thriller ... violence, intrigue, and exotic passions ... a vivid page-turner.''

  --The Wieshington Post

  ''The most exciting novel in years.''

  --The Cincinnati Enquire

  TRIPLE

  ''One of the liveliest thrillers of the year.... Follett is a master of crafty plot and incredible detail.... A sizzling narrative.''

  --Time

  EYE OF THE NEEDLE

  ''Really thrilling.''

  --The New York Times Book Review

  ''An absolutely terrific thriller, so pulse-pounding, so ingenious in its plotting, and so frighteningly realistic that you simply cannot stop reading.''

  --Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY KEN FOLLETT

  The Modigliani Scandal

  Paper Money

  Eye of the Needle

  Triple

  The Key to Rebecca

  The Man from St. Petersburg

  On Wings of Eagles

  Lie Down with Lions

  The Pillars of the Earth

  Night over Water

  A Dangerous Fortune

  A Place Called Freedom

  The Third Twin

  The Hammer of Eden

  Code to Zero

  Jackdaws

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Pen-

  guin Group (USA) Inc. Published by arrangement with the author.

  First Signet Printing, May 1985

  30

  Copyright @ Zachary Stone, 1976 Introduction copyright @ Holland Copyright Corporation, 1985

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK--MARCAREGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  eISBN : 978-1-10143662-2

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  INTRODUCTION

  IN A MODERN THRILLER the hero generally saves the world. Traditional adventure stories are more modest: The central character merely saves his own life, and perhaps the life
of a faithful friend or a plucky girl. In less sensational novels--the middlebrow, well-told narratives that have been the staple diet of readers for more than a century--there is less at stake, but still a character's efforts, struggles, and choices determine his destiny in a dramatic fashion.

  I don't actually believe that life is like that. In reality, circumstances quite beyond our control usually determine whether we live or die, become happy or miserable, strike it rich or lose everything. For example: Most rich people inherit their money. Most well-fed people simply had the luck to be bom in an af fluent country. Most happy people were born into loving families, and most miserable people had crazy parents.

  I'm not a fatalist, nor do I believe that everything in life is blind chance. We do not control our lives the way a chess player controls his pieces, but life is not roulette either. As usual, the truth is complicated. Mechanisms beyond our control--and sometimes beyond our understanding--debermine a person's fate, yet the choices he makes have consequences, if not the consequences he anticipated.

  In The Modigliani Scandal I tried to write a new kind of novel, one that would reflect the subtle subordination of individual freedom to more powerful machinery. In this immodest project I failed. It may be that such a novel cannot be written: Even if Life is not about individual choice, perhaps Literature is.

  What I wrote, in the end, was a lighthearted crime story in which an assortment of people, mostly young, get up to a variety of capers, none of which turns out quite as expected. The critics praised it as sprightly, ebullient, light, bright, cheery, light (again), and fizzy. I was disappointed that they had not noted my serious intentions.

  Now I no longer look on the book as a failure. It is fizzy, and none the worse for that. The fact that it is so different from the book I intended to write should not have surprised me. After all, it rather proves my point.

  --KEN FOLLETT, 1985

  PART ONE

  Priming the Canvas

  ''One does not marry art. One ravishes it.''

  EDGAR DEGAS,

  Impressionist painter

  I

  THE BAKER SCRATCHED HIS black mustache with a floury finger, turning the hair gray and unintentionally making himself look ten years older. Around him the shelves and counters were full of long loaves of fresh, crusty bread, and the familiar smell filled his nostrils and swelled his chest with a quietly satisfied pride. The bread was a new batch, the second that morning: business was good because the weather was fine. He could always rely on a little sunshine to bring the housewives of Paris out into the streets to shop for his good bread.

  He looked out of the shop window, narrowing his eyes against the brightness outside. A pretty girl was crossing the street. The baker listened, and heard the sound of his wife's voice, out in the back, arguing shrilly with an employee. The row would go on for several minutes--they always did. Satisfied that he was safe, the baker permitted himself to gaze at the girl lustfully.

  Her summer dress was thin and sleeveless, and the baker thought it looked rather expensive, although he was no expert in such things. The flared skirt swung gracefully at midthigh, emphasizing her slim bare legs, promising--but never quite delivering--delightful glimpses of feminine underwear.

  She was too slender for his taste, he decided as she came closer. Her breasts were very small--they did not even jiggle with her long, confident stride. Twenty years of marriage to Jeanne-Marie had not made the baker tire of plump, pendulous breasts.

  The girl came into the shop, and the baker realized she was no beauty. Her face was long and thin, her mouth small and ungenerous, with slightly protruding upper teeth. Her hair was brown under a layer of sun-bleached blonde.

  She selected a loaf from the counter, testing its crust with her long hands, and nodding in satisfaction. No beauty, but definitely desirable, the baker thought.

  Her complexion was red-and-white, and her skin looked soft and smooth. But it was her carriage that turned heads. It was confident, self-possessed; it told the world that this girl did precisely what she wanted to do, and nothing else. The baker told himself to stop playing with words: she was sexy, and that was that.

  He flexed his shoulders, to loosen the shirt which was sticking to his perspiring back. ''Chaud, hein?" he said.

  The girl took coins from her purse and paid for her bread. She smiled at his remark, and suddenly she was beautiful. ''Le soleil? le l'aime,'' she said. She closed her purse and opened the shop door. "Merci!" she flung over her shoulder as she left.

  There had been a trace of accent in her French--an English accent, the baker fancied. But perhaps he had just imagined it to go with her complexion. He stared at her bottom as she crossed the street, mesmerized by the shift of the muscles under the cotton. She was probably returning to the flat of some young, hairy musician, who would still be in bed after a night of debauchery.

  The shrill voice of Jeanne-Marie approached, shattering the baker's fantasy. He sighed heavily, and threw the girl's coins into the till.

  Dee Sleign smiled to herself as she walked along the sidewalk away from the shop. The myth was true: Frenchmen were more sensual than Englishmen. The baker's gaze had been candidly lascivious, and his eyes had homed in accurately on her pelvis. An English baker would have looked furtively at her breasts from behind his spectacles.

  She slanted her head back and brushed her hair behind her ears to let the hot sun shine on her face. It was wonderful, this life, this summer in Paris. No work, no exams, no essays, no lectures. Sleeping with Mike, getting up late; good coffee and fresh bread for breakfast; days spent with the books she had always wanted to read and the pictures she liked to see; evenings with interesting, eccentric people.

  Soon it would be over. Before long she would have to decide what to do with the rest of her life. But for now she was in a personal limbo, simply enjoying the things she liked, with no rigid purpose dictating the way she spent every minute.

  She turned a comer and entered a small, unpretentious apartment block. As she passed the booth with its tiny window, there was a high-pitched cry from the concierge.

  ''Mademoiselle!''

  The gray-haired woman pronounced each syllable of the word, and managed to give it an accusatory inflection, emphasizing the scandalous fact that Dee was not married to the man who rented the apartment Dee smiled again; an affair in Paris would hardly be complete without a disapproving concierge.

  ''Telegramme,'' the woman said. She laid the envelope on the sill and retired into the cat-smelling gloom of her booth, as if to dissociate herself entirely from loose-moraled young girls and their telegrams.

  Dee picked it up and ran up the stairs. It was addressed to her, and she knew what it was.

  She entered the apartment, and laid the bread and the telegram on the table in the small kitchen. She poured coffee beans into a grinder and thumbed the button; the machine growled harshly as it pulverized the brown-black nuts.

  Mike's electric shaver whined as if in answer. Sometimes the promise of coffee was the only thing that got him out of bed. Dee made a whole pot and sliced the new bread.

  Mike's flat was small, and furnished with elderly stuff of undistinguished taste. He had wanted something more grand, and he could certainly afford better. But Dee had insisted they stay out of hotels and classy districts. She had wanted to spend summer with the French, not the international jet set; and she had got her way.

  The buzz of his shaver died, and Dee poured two cups of coffee.

  He came in just as she placed the cups on the round wooden table. He wore his faded, patched Levi's, and his blue cotton shirt was open at the neck, revealing a tuft of black hair and a medallion on a short silver chain.

  ''Good morning, darling,'' he said. He came round the table and kissed her. She wound her arms around his waist and hugged his body against her own, and kissed him passionately.

  ''Wow! That was strong for so early in the morning,'' he said. He gave a wide California grin, and sat down.

 
Dee looked at the man as he sipped his coffee gratefully, and wondered whether she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Their affair had been going for a year now, and she was getting used to it. She liked his cynicism, his sense of humor, and his buccaneering style. They were both interested in art to the point of obsession, although his interest lay in the money to be made out of it, while she was absorbed by the whys and wherefores of the creative process. They stimulated each other, in bed and out they were a good team.

  He got up, poured more coffee, and lit cigarettes for both of them. ''You're quiet,'' he said, in his low, gravelly American accent. ''Thinking about those results ? It's about time they came through.''

  ''They came today,'' she replied. ''I've been putting off opening the telegram.''

  ''What? Hey, c'mon, I want to know how you did.''

  ''All right.'' She fetched the envelope and sat down again before tearing it open with her thumb. She unfolded the single sheet of thin paper, glanced at it, then looked up at him with a broad smile.

  ''My God, I got a First,'' she said.

  He leaped to his feet excitedly. ''Yippee!'' he yelled. ''I knew it! You're a genius!'' He broke into a whining, fast imitation of a country-and-western square dance, complete with calls of ''Yee-hah'' and the sounds of a steel guitar, and hopped around the kitchen with an imaginary partner.

  Dee laughed helplessly. ''You're the most juvenile thirty-nine-year-old I've ever met,'' she gasped. Mike bowed in acknowledgment of imaginary applause, and sat down again.

  He said: ''So. What does this mean, for your future?''

  Dee became serious again. ''It means I get to do my Ph.D.''

  ''What, more degrees? You now have a B.A. in Art History, on top of some kind of Diploma in Fine Art. Isn't it time you stopped being a professional student?''

  ''Why should I? Learning is my kick--if they're willing to pay me to study for the rest of my life, why shouldn't I do it?''