The Modigliani Scandal Read online

  ''They won't pay you much.''

  ''That's true.'' Dee looked thoughtful. ''And I would like to make a fortune, somehow. Still, there's plenty of time. I'm only twenty-five.''

  Mike reached across the table and held her hand. ''Why don't you come work for me? I'll pay you a fortune-you'd be worth it.''

  She shook her head. ''I don't want to ride on your back. I'll make it myself.''

  ''You're quite happy to ride on my front,'' he grinned.

  She put on a leer. ''You betcha,'' she said in imitation of his accent. Then she withdrew her hand. ''No, I'm going to write my thesis. If it gets published I could make some cash.''

  ''What's the topic?''

  ''Well, I've been toying with a couple of things. The most promising is the relationship between art and drugs.''

  ''Trendy.''

  ''And original. I think I could show that drug abuse tends to be good for art and bad for artists.''

  ''A nice paradox. Where will you start?''

  ''Here. In Paris. They used to smoke pot in the artistic community around the first couple of decades of the century. Only they called it hashish''

  Mike nodded. ''Will you take just a little help from me, right at the start?''

  Dee reached for the cigarettes and took one. ''Sure,'' she said.

  He held his lighter across the table. ''There's an old guy you ought to talk to. He was a pal of half a dozen of the masters here before World War One. A couple of times he's put me on the track of pictures.

  ''He was kind of a fringe criminal, but he used to get prostitutes to act as models--and other things sometimes--for the young painters. He's old now--he must be pushing ninety. But he remembers.''

  The tiny bedsitter smelled bad. The odor of the fish shop below pervaded everything, seeping up through the bare floorboards and settling in the battered furniture, the sheets on the single bed in the comer, the faded curtains at the one small window. Smoke from the old man's pipe failed to hide the fishy smell, and underlying it all was the atmosphere of a room that is rarely scrubbed.

  And a fortune in post-Impressionist paintings hung on the walls.

  ''All given to me by the artists,'' the old man explained airily. Dee had to concentrate to understand his thick Parisian French. ''Always, they were unable to pay their debts. I took the paintings because I knew they would never have the money. I never liked the pictures then. Now I see why they paint this way, and I like it. Besides, they bring back memories.''

  The man was completely bald, and the skin of his face was loose and pale. He was short, and walked with difficulty; but his small black eyes flashed with occasional enthusiasm. He was rejuvenated by this pretty English girl who spoke such good French and smiled at him as if he was a young man again.

  ''Don't you get pestered by people wanting to buy them?'' Dee asked.

  ''Not anymore. I am always willing to lend them out, at a fee.'' His eyes twinkled. ''It pays for my tobacco,'' he added, raising his pipe in a gesture like a toast.

  Dee realized what the other element in the smell was: the tobacco in his pipe was mixed with cannabis. She nodded knowingly.

  ''Would you like some? I have some papers,'' he offered.

  ''Thank you.''

  He passed her a tobacco tin, some cigarette papers, and a small block of resin, and she began rolling a joint.

  ''Ah, you young girls,'' the man mused. ''Drugs are bad for you, really. I should not corrupt the youth. There, I have been doing it all my life, and now I am too old to change.''

  ''You've lived a long life on it,'' Dee said.

  ''True, true. I will be eighty-nine this year, I think. For seventy years I have smoked my special tobacco every day, except in prison, of course.''

  Dee licked the gummed paper and completed the reefer. She lit it with a tiny gold lighter and inhaled. ''Did the painters use hashish a great deal?'' she asked.

  ''Oh yes. I made a fortune from the stuff. Some spent all their money on it.'' He looked at a pencil drawing on the wall, a hurried-looking sketch of the head of a woman: an oval face and a long, thin nose. ''Dedo was the worst,'' he added with a faraway smile.

  Dee made out the signature on the drawing. ''Modigliani?''

  ''Yes.'' The man's eyes now saw only the past, and he talked as if to himself. ''He always wore a brown corduroy jacket and a big, floppy felt hat. He used to say that art should be like hashish: it should show people the beauty in things, the beauty they could not normally see. He would drink, too, in order to see the ugliness in things. But he loved the hashish.

  ''It was sad that he had such a conscience about it. I believe he was brought up quite strictly. Also, his health was a little delicate, so he worried about the drugs. He worried, but he still used them.'' The old man smiled and nodded, as if agreeing with his memories.

  ''He lived at the Impasse Falguiere. He was so poor; he grew haggard. I remember when he went to the Egyptian section in the Louvre--he came back saying it was the only section worth seeing!'' He laughed happily. ''A melancholy man, though,'' he went on, his voice sobering. ''He always had Les Chants de Maldoror in his pocket: he could recite many French verses. The Cubism arrived at the end of his life. It was alien to him. Perhaps it killed him.''

  Dee spoke softly, to guide the old man's memory without dislocating his train of thought. ''Did Dedo ever paint while he was high?''

  The man laughed lightly. ''Oh yes,'' he said. ''While he was high he would paint very fast, shouting all the time that this would be his masterpiece, his chef-d'oeuvre, that now all Paris would see what painting was all about. He would choose the brightest colors and throw them at the canvas. His friends would tell him the work was useless, terrible, and he would tell them to piss off, they were too ignorant to know that this was the painting of the twentieth century. Then, when he came down, he would agree with them, and throw the canvas in the corner.'' He sucked at his pipe, noticed it had gone out, and reached for matches. The spell was broken.

  Dee leaned forward in her hard upright chair, the joint between her fingers forgotten. There was a low intensity in her voice.

  She said: ''What happened to those paintings?''

  He puffed his pipe into life and leaned back, drawing on it rhythmically. The regular suck, puff, suck, puff, drew him gradually back into his reverie. ''Poor Dedo,'' he said. ''He could not pay the rent. He had nowhere to go. His landlord gave him twenty-four hours to get out. He tried to sell some paintings, but the few people who could see how good they were had no more money than he.

  ''He had to move in with one of the others--I forget who. There was hardly room for Dedo, let alone his paintings. The ones he liked, he loaned to close friends.

  ''The rest--'' the old man grunted, as if the memory had given him a twinge of pain. ''I see him now, loading them into a wheelbarrow and pushing them down the street. He comes to a yard, piles them up in the center, and sets fire to them. 'What else is there to do?' he keeps saying. I could have lent him money, I suppose, but he owed too much already. Still, when I saw him watch his paintings burning, I wished I had. There, I was never a saint, in my youth any more than in my old age.''

  ''All the hashish paintings were on that bonfire?'' Dee's voice was almost a whisper.

  ''Yes,'' the old man said. ''Virtually all of them.''

  ''Virtually? He kept some?''

  ''No, he kept none. But he had given some to somebody--I had forgotten, but talking to you brings it back. There was a priest, in his hometown, who took an interest in Oriental drugs. I forget why--their medicinal value, their spiritual properties? Something like that. Dedo confessed his habits to the priest, and was granted absolution. Then the priest asked to see the work he did under the influence of hashish. Dedo sent him a painting--only one, I remember now.''

  The reefer burned Dee's fingers, and she dropped it in an ashtray. The old man lit his pipe again, and Dee stood up.

  ''Thank you very much for talking to me,'' she said.

  ''Mmm.'' Half of the man's m
ind was still in the past. ''I hope it helps you with your thesis,'' he said.

  "It certainly has,'' she said. On impulse she bent over the man's chair and kissed his bald head. ''You've been kind.''

  His eyes twinkled. ''It's a long time since a pretty girl kissed me,'' he said.

  ''Of all the things you've told me, that's the only one I disbelieve,'' replied Dee. She smiled at him again, and went out through the door.

  She controlled her jubilation as she walked along the street. What a break! And before she had even started the new term! She was bursting to tell someone about it. Then she remembered--Mike had gone: flown to London for a couple of days. Who could she tell?

  On impulse, she bought a postcard at a cafe. She sat down with a glass of wine to write it. The picture showed the cafe itself, and a view of the street she was in.

  She sipped her vin ordinaire and wondered whom to write to. She ought to let the family know her results, too. Her mother would be pleased, in her vague kind of way, but she really wanted her daughter to be a member of the dying polite society of ballgoers and dressage-riders. She would not appreciate the triumph of a first-class degree. Who would?

  Then she realized who would be most delighted for her.

  She wrote: Dear Uncle Charles,

  Believe it or not, I got a First! ! ! Even more incredibly, I am now on the track of a lost Modigliani! ! !

  Love,

  D.

  She bought a stamp for the card and posted it on her way back to Mike's apartment.

  II

  THE GLAMOUR HAD GONE out of life, Charles Lampeth reflected as he relaxed in his Queen Anne dining chair. This place, the house of his friend, had once seen the kind of parties and balls which now happened only in high-budget historical movies. At least two Prime Ministers had dined in this very room, with its long oak table and matching paneled walls. But the room, the house, and their owner, Lord Cardwell, belonged to a dying race.

  Lampeth selected a cigar from the box proffered by the butler, and allowed the servant to light it. A sip of remarkably old brandy completed his sense of well-being. The food had been splendid, the wives of the two men had retired in the old-fashioned way, and now they would talk.

  The butler lit Cardwell's cigar and glided out. The two men puffed contentedly for a while. They had been friends for too long for silence to be an embarrassment between them. Eventually Cardwell spoke.

  ''How is the art market?'' he said.

  Lampeth gave a satisfied smile. ''Booming, as it has been for years,'' he said.

  ''I've never understood the economics of it,'' Cardwell replied. ''Why is it so buoyant?''

  ''It's complex, as you would expect,'' Lampeth replied. ''I suppose it started when the Americans became art-conscious, just before the Second World War. It's the old supply-and-demand mechanism: the prices of the Old Masters went through the roof.

  ''There weren't enough Old Masters to go around, so people started turning to the moderns.''

  Cardwell interrupted: ''And that's where you came in.''

  Lampeth nodded, and sipped appreciatively at his brandy. ''When I opened my first gallery, just after the war, it was a struggle to sell anything painted after 1900. But we persisted. A few people liked them, prices rose gradually, and then the investors moved in. That was when the Impressionists went through the roof.''

  ''A lot of people made a pile,'' Cardwell commented.

  ''Fewer than you think,'' said Lampeth. He loosened his bow tie under his double chin. ''It's rather like buying shares or backing horses. Bet on a near-certainty, and you find everyone else has backed it, so the odds are low. If you want a blue-chip share, you pay a high price for it, so your gain when you sell is marginal.

  ''So with paintings: buy a Velazquez, and you are bound to make money. But you pay so much for it, that you have to wait several years for a fifty percent gain. The only people who have made fortunes are the ones who bought the pictures they liked, and found that they had good taste when the value of their collections rocketed. People like yourself.''

  Cardwell nodded, and the few strands of white hair on his head waved in the slight breeze caused by the movement. He pulled at the end of his long nose. ''What do you think my collection is worth now?''

  ''Lord.'' Lampeth frowned, drawing his black brows together at the bridge of his nose. ''It would depend on how it was sold, for one thing. For another, an accurate valuation would be a week's work for an expert.''

  ''I'll settle for an inaccurate one. You know the pictures--you bought most of them yourself for me.''

  ''Yes.'' Lampeth pictured in his mind the twenty or thirty paintings in the house, and assigned rough values to them. He closed his eyes and added up the sums.

  ''It must be a million pounds,'' he said eventually. Cardwell nodded again. ''That's the figure I arrived at,'' he said. ''Charlie, I need a million pounds.''

  ''Good Lord!'' Lampeth sat upright in his chair. ''You can't think of selling your collection.''

  ''I'm afraid it has come to that,'' Cardwell said sadly. ''I had hoped to leave it to the nation, but the realities of business life come first. The company is overstretched; there must be a big capital injection within twelve months or it goes to the wall. You know I've been selling off bits of the estate for years, to keep me in this stuff.'' He raised his brandy balloon and drank.

  ''The young blades have caught up with me at last,'' he went on. ''New brooms sweeping through the financial world. Our methods are outdated. I shall get out as soon as the company is strong enough to hand over. Let a young blade take it on.''

  The note of weary despair in his friend's voice angered Lampeth. ''Young blades,'' he said contemptuously. ''Their time of reckoning will come.''

  Cardwell laughed lightly. ''Now, now, Charlie. My father was horrified when I announced my intention of going into the City. I remember him telling me: 'But you're going to inherit the title!' as if that precluded any notion of my touching real money. And you--what did your father say when you opened an art gallery?''

  Lampeth acknowledged the point with a reluctant smile. ''He thought it was a namby-pamby occupation for a soldier's son.''

  ''So, you see, the world belongs to the young blades. So, sell my pictures, Charlie.''

  ''The collection will have to be broken up, to get the best price.''

  ''You're the expert. No point in my being sentimental about it.''

  ''Still, some of it ought to be kept together for an exhibition. Let's see: a Renoir, two Degas, some Pissarro, three Modiglianis ... I'll have to think about it. The Cezanne will have to go to auction, of course.''

  Cardwell stood up, revealing himself to be very tall, an inch or two over six feet. ''Well, let's not linger over the corpse. Shall we join the ladies?''

  The Belgrave Art Gallery had the air of a rather superior provincial museum. The hush was almost tangible as Lampeth entered, his black toecapped shoes treading silently on the plain, olive-green carpet. At ten o'clock the gallery had only just opened, and there were no customers. Nevertheless, three assistants in black-and-stripes hovered attentively around the reception area.

  Lampeth nodded to them and walked through the ground-floor gallery, his expert eye surveying the pictures on the walls as he passed. Someone had hung a modern abstract incongruously next to a primitive, and he made a mental note to get it moved. There were no prices on the works: a deliberate policy. People had the feeling that any mention of cash would be greeted with a disapproving frown from one of the elegantly dressed assistants. In order to maintain their self-esteem, patrons would tell themselves that they, too, were part of this world where money was a mere detail, as insignificant as the date on the check. So they spent more. Charles Lampeth was a businessman first, and an art lover second.

  He walked up the broad staircase to the first floor, and caught sight of his reflection in the glass of a frame. His tie-knot was small, his collar crisp, his Savile Row suit a perfect fit. It was a pity he was overweight, but he still cu
t an attractive figure for his age. He straightened his shoulders reflectively.

  He made another mental note: the glass in that frame ought to be nonreflective. There was a pen drawing underneath it--whoever hung it had made a mistake.

  He walked to his office, where he hooked his umbrella on the coat-stand. He walked to the window and looked out onto Regent Street while he lit his first cigar of the day. He watched the traffic, making a list in his mind of the things he would have to attend to between now and the first gin and tonic at five o'clock.

  He turned around as his junior partner, Stephen Willow, walked in. ''Morning, Willow,'' he said, and sat down at his desk.

  Willow said: ''Morning, Lampeth.'' They stuck to the habit of surnames, despite the six or seven years they had been together. Lampeth had brought Willow in to extend the Belgrave's range: Willow had built up a small gallery of his own by nurturing relationships with half-a-dozen young artists who had turned out to be winners. Lampeth had seen the Belgrave lagging slightly behind the market at the time, and Willow had offered a quick way to catch up with the contemporary scene. The partnership worked well: although there was a good ten or fifteen years between the two men, Willow had the same basic qualities of artistic taste and business sense as Lampeth.

  The younger man laid a folder on the table and refused a cigar. ''We must talk about Peter Usher,'' he said.

  ''Ah, yes. There's something wrong there, and I don't know what it is.''

  ''We took him over when the Sixty-Nine Gallery went broke,'' Willow began. ''He had done well there for a year--one canvas went for a thousand. Most of them were selling for upwards of five hundred. Since he came to us, he's only sold a couple.''

  ''How are we pricing?''

  ''The same range as the Sixty-Nine."

  ''They may have been doing naughty things, mind,'' said Lampeth.

  ''I think they were. A suspicious number of highly priced pictures reappeared shortly after they had been sold.''

  Lampeth nodded. It was the art world's worst-kept secret that dealers sometimes bought their own pictures in order to stimulate demand for a young artist.

  Lampeth said: ''And then again, you know, we're not the right gallery for Usher.'' He saw his partner's raised eyebrows and added: ''No criticism intended, Willow--at the time he appeared to be a scoop. But he is very avant-garde, and it probably did him a little damage to become associated with such a respectable gallery as ours. However, that's all in the past. I still think he's a remarkably good young painter, and we owe him our best efforts.''