Rembrandt's Ghost Part 1

REMBRANDT'S GHOST.

Paul Christopher.

To Gabriel, an American boy in accordance with whose cla.s.sic taste the following narrative has been designed, Rembrandt's Ghost is now, in return for numerous delightful hours, and with the kindest wishes, dedicated by his affectionate grandfather, the author.

If sailor tales to sailor tunes, Storm and adventure, heat and cold, If schooners, islands, and maroons, And buccaneers, and buried gold, And all the old romance, retold Exactly in the ancient way, Can please, as me they pleased of old, The wiser youngsters of today: -So be it, and fall on! If not,

If studious youth no longer crave, His ancient appet.i.tes forgot, Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave, Or Cooper of the wood and wave:.

So be it, also! And may I.

And all my pirates share the grave Where these and their creations lie!

-Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island.

1.

Fiona Katherine Elizabeth Ryan, late of New York City and, before that, Columbus, Ohio, known as Finn to her friends and loved ones, stood at the window of her little flat above the restaurant on Crouch End Broadway in North London and watched Emir, the tobacconist on the far side of the street, roll up his shutters, opening his shop for the early-morning customers standing dripping and dreary, waiting at the bus stop on the rain-dark sidewalk in front of him.

Of course in England a sidewalk wasn't a sidewalk-it was a pavement. A Broadway wasn't a place where they had theaters-it was a High Street. And the locals weren't the ones with an accent-Finn was. She sighed and swallowed the last of the mug of tea she'd just zapped with her immersion heater. It tasted like burned acorns. It was seven in the morning, it was April, and it was raining. Of course it was raining. In London, if it wasn't snowing, it was probably raining no matter what time of the year it was.

Finn sighed again. London wasn't what she'd expected at all. After her adventures in New York and her fugitive escapades in the Libyan desert and the depths of the Caribbean the year before she'd been ready for some serious work and study in an environment of culture and sophistication. Her job as a client adviser at the prestigious Mason-G.o.dwin Auction House was supposed to take care of the sophistication, and living in the city that was still the center of the art world was supposed to take care of the culture.

Sadly, it hadn't worked out that way. "Client adviser" at Mason-G.o.dwin meant looking good in high heels and a short black c.o.c.ktail dress on Sale Nights, finding out beforehand what a potential buyer's bidding range, alcohol capacity, and net worth were, and fetching coffee, tea, and biscuits during daylight hours for the office's high mucketymucks, like the Ghastly Ronald, managing director of Mason-G.o.dwin.

As far as sophistication went, it appeared to Finn that London had more Starbucks than Seattle, more KFCs than Kentucky, and its own version of American

Daisies.

Idol . A burger and fries at Pick More the self-styled California restaurant directly below her, cost eleven pounds-twenty-five bucks when you added the tax and tip. On top of that, she was paying more for a two-room flat with a hot plate and a bathroom down the hall in Crouch End than she had for her tidy little apartment in Manhattan. In a word, London was a rip-off.

Sighing again Finn slipped on her raincoat, grabbed her telescoping umbrella from the shelf by the door, and went downstairs to join the group of commuters waiting for the number 41 bus and the long ride down the hill toward the distant Thames and the City.

A little more than two thousand years ago, a small village appeared at the intersection of two Roman roads that converged just west of the port town of Londinium. This was the original Mayfair, named for the country market and annual pagan religious festival held there every spring.

Between 1720 and 1740 the entire village was expropriated and developed by the Grosvenor family and the Earl of Chesterfield, who was famous for putting velvet collars on his coats and the invention of the modern upholstered couch. By 1800 it was the most fashionable place to live in London with wall-to-wall stately mansions on its score of elegant cobbled streets.

By the turn of the new millennium, it had gone through a number of transformations, including some random bomb hits during World War Two, inevitable stock market crashes that turned the mansions into flats and apartments, and economic upturns that turned the street frontage into some of the priciest property on the planet, with rents paid by everyone from Fortnum and Masons to Prada and Dolce & Gabbana.

In the middle of it all was Cork Street, a single long block running between Clifford Street and Burlington Gardens, just a stone's throw from Piccadilly and ending at the exit of the Burlington Arcade, where James Bond purchased his Mont Blanc pens and around the corner from the shop where he bought his handmade Morland's cigarettes.

There are twenty-three art galleries on Cork Street selling everything from old Dutch Masters to Basquiat's little scrawls and Keith Haring's gentle doodles. More than a billion dollars' worth of art on the current market, depending on how gullible you are, representing every major artist in the world, alive or dead, all packed into less than two hundred yards. And in the middle of all that, at 26a28 Cork Street is the firm of Mason-G.o.dwin, fine art auctioneers, which was established in 1710, thirty-two years before Sotheby's had its first little sale of old books for a total take of less than three hundred pounds-a fact that the management of Mason-G.o.dwin was almost sure to impart at the drop of a hat to anyone willing to listen.

The premises had originally belonged to a firm of decorators and furniture makers specializing in clients with t.i.tles in front of their names. That firm eventually went bankrupt due to the unfortunate habit of those t.i.tled clients not paying their bills on time, if at all. After that, the large workrooms and warehouse floors were broken up into flats and apartments for the wealthy, then offices for the not so wealthy. A decade before World War Two, the property was purchased by a pair of closeted gay confectioners, who turned the property into a chocolate factory and showroom manufacturing a particularly popular bittersweet mint concoction known as Turner & Townsend's Minto-Bits.

The two men and their company thrived until war came and knocked the stuffing out of the chocolate business. Sugar was rationed early and people had better things to do between 1939 and 1945 than either making or consuming Minto-Bits or the equally popular Hinto-Minto Collection. Mason-G.o.dwin on the other hand did extremely well before, during, and after the war, buying and selling with equal zeal from both oppressed and oppressor, generally through Swiss intermediaries. In 1946 Mason-G.o.dwin, bloated with cash and unsold inventory and looking to expand, snapped up the building on Cork Street, which was just beginning its paint-spattered climb to fame. The rest was history. All of this information, with the exception of Turner's and Townsend's s.e.xual predilections, and the pre- and post-war art market in Switzerland, was included in the orientation brochure given to Finn when she joined the firm.

Mason-G.o.dwin, which hadn't had either a Mason or a G.o.dwin on its staff for more than a hundred years, wasn't as large as Sotheby's or, heaven forbid, the upstart Christies, but at least its heart was pure. It had always auctioned art and nothing but art, unlike Sotheby's, which sold everything from real estate to old wrist.w.a.tches, or Christies, which had recently stooped to selling off props from old television shows, including Captain Jean-Luc Picard's first-season Star Trek, Next Generation uniform complete with authentic Patrick Stewart sweat stains. According to the Ghastly Ronald, Ars Gratia Artis-Art for the Sake of Art--had been the motto of Mason-G.o.dwin for a hundred years before MGM even existed.

The main floor of the old Georgian-fronted building held a small, elegant reception area furnished with antiques and a rotating series of impressive but relatively unimportant Royal Academy painters from the nineteenth century, meant to show the prospective buyer or seller that MasonG.o.dwin didn't have a frivolous bone in its body and took the job of flogging your pictures seriously. Beyond that was a large preview gallery with white walls, track lighting, and a sprinkling of uniformed guards to show you how secure Mason-G.o.dwin was. At the rear of the building was an immense cavernous room that had once been the actual factory for Turner & Townsend and which Finn could almost swear still smelled faintly of Minto-Bits. This was the actual auction floor or, as a few office wags referred to it, the money room. Phone banks on the left for call-ins, freight elevators, prep rooms on the right, and a giant viewing screen behind the actual auctioneer's podium in the center. In the middle of the room were three hundred fifty very comfortable chairs for the people holding their little paddles and upping the bids-and M-G's commissions- with every pa.s.sing minute on Sale Nights.

On the first floor above was the Research Department, where a score of young men and women worked to establish provenance for art being auctioned, and the small offices where Finn and a dozen other young women like her in Client Advisory worked the phones, making sure prospective buyers were comfortable in their hotels if they were from out of town, or had received their catalogues. Occasionally client advisers would even briefly get to see a work of art being brought in for evaluation, but their job was to quickly a.s.sess and dismiss, or immediately send the person up to one of the experts on the third floor, where everyone seemed to have names like Philoda, Felix, or Alistair or, in one instance, Jemimah, and have degrees from places like St. Edmund Hall at Oxford or Trinity College at Cambridge. The fourth, fifth, and sixth floors were given over to the more mundane part of the business that involved cleaning, restoring, framing, and warehousing of the Mason-G.o.dwin inventory.

Finn, she'd soon realized, had been hired as a client adviser to take care of American prospects who sometimes felt uncomfortable and off their turf in London and who appreciated her nice, familiar Midwestern drawl. She also had the other central a.s.set of a CA: she was stunningly beautiful. Her model's body, her green-eyed Irish features, and her long red hair seemed far more important than her knowledge of art or her formal education in the subject. The fact that she had a BA in anthropology and a master's in art history from NYU as well as a year's study in Florence barely seemed to matter at all. She was a fluffy part of a well-oiled machine that took roughly twenty percent of the hammer price of a work of art from the seller going in and an equally elastic twenty percent "Buyer's Premium" from the new owner going out.

A Jean Dubuffet for instance, two feet by three feet, oil and enamel on canvas that sold for 111,000.

U.S. dollars would actually cost the buyer $140,000.

since M-G added its commission on the front end, which would in turn cost the seller an extra $28,000 since the sales commission was computed on the total amount going out. The result was that Mason-G.o.dwin made a total of $56,000 for the simple act of introducing the buyer to the seller, or almost half the hammer price. Not to mention the sale of catalogues, the publication of which was a tidy business on its own. It was rather like selling someone his own shopping list with an even heavier black market trade in slipping advance copies to "special clients"-"special" meaning anyone who asked and who was willing to pay a hefty premium to get a catalogue a fortnight before everyone else.

This, then, was the delicate balancing act of the art auctioneer, the slick, ultra-high-end confidence trick of convincing the seller that he no longer needed the item, and the buyer that he must have it at any price. The higher the better.

If both parties were given the impression that their needs had been met they'd probably, eventually, be convinced to switch roles, buyer becoming seller and seller buyer in a dance that could last a lifetime and sometimes longer, a single work of art making its way through the M-G list of contacts and clients, shedding commissions every time.

The Ghastly Ronald boasted that he'd shifted a single Turner sunrise eleven times during his career with Mason-G.o.dwin, making more than a million pounds in commissions for the firm. In other words, it was all a scam. In the past year, Finn had discovered that in the art world, the painter and the painting were nothing more than commodities, like orange juice or sugar beets, and that the art market, like the stock market, was an invention with about as much substance and integrity as a stink in a high wind as her father used to say. Sort of.

Finn took the awkward-looking bright red double-decker bus down to Euston Station, then switched to the Underground riding the Victoria Line down to Green Park. She came above ground into the drizzling rain again, walked to Albemarle Street, then purchased the largest possible container of coffee and a blueberry m.u.f.fin from the local Preet-a-Manger shop. Carrying her breakfast she zigzagged through the narrow streets to the discreetly canopied entrance to Mason-G.o.dwin, careful to shake out her umbrella and collapse it before stepping through the bra.s.s-and-gla.s.s doors and onto the bloodred and black Oriental carpets covering the polished wood floors of the oakpaneled reception area.

It was now eight o'clock in the morning and after an hour on various overheated London Transport vehicles crammed with various overheated pa.s.sengers, Finn Ryan was not in good spirits. Her mood wasn't made any better by the sight of Ghastly Ronald standing at the ornate Louis the Fifteenth escritoire that pa.s.sed as a reception desk, chatting up Doris, the plain-Jane battle-ax who acted as the first line of interference for anyone entering the sacred halls of MasonG.o.dwin.

The Ghastly Ronald's real name was Ronald Adrian DePanay-Cottrell, better known as Ronnie and sometimes behind his back as Lady Ron. According to Ronnie he was somehow related to the queen but he could never quite explain the connection. He had a plumy Oxford accent, a degree in something he never talked about, thinning black hair, wet lips, and intelligent, dark eyes that always seemed to be in motion. He had the kind of lanky loose-boned body that belonged in a Monty Python skit, but the John CleeseaIchabod Crane look was muted by the expensive Crockett & Jones calfskin oxfords, the even more expensive Anderson & Sheppard pin-striped suit, and the creamy silk Dege & Skinner club tie in dark blue with little tiny crowns on it, hinting once again at a royal lineage that Finn was positive the Ghastly Ronald didn't really have any claim to at all.

Ronnie and Doris glanced up as Finn came through the doors, both looking at her with mild disapproval as though she'd blundered clumsily into some intimate and important conversation. Finn instantly felt self-conscious, which was the whole point of course, and her self-consciousness instantly turned to resentment. The whole nosein-the-air sn.o.bbishness of Mason-G.o.dwin and a thousand years of English aristocratic arrogance were beginning to wear a little.

"Ah, Miss Ryan," said Ronnie, "arriving for work, I see," as though she were tardy, which she wasn't-not by a full half hour.

"Ah, Mr. DePanay-Cottrell," she responded with some dry ice in her tone, leaning a little heavily on the "Mr." knowing just how much Ronnie yearned for something else like "His Grace" or "Baron" or "my lord"' or even a bare-bones "sir." Not in this lifetime, Finn thought.

"One should eat one's breakfast at home, Miss Ryan, not spread crumbs across one's desk at one's place of employment."

Finn wondered how often Ronnie could use the word "one" in a single sentence. He really was profoundly irritating.

"Not when one has to make allowances for one's ride on London transport that takes an hour, one doesn't," Finn answered.

"Tooting, isn't it? Stepney?"

"Crouch End."

"Crouch End. Indeed." Ronnie of course lived.

in a house in Cheyne Walk once occupied by the American painter James McNeill Whistler and his famous mother.

"Indeed it is," said Finn. She gave Ronnie her most insincere smile and turned away. She'd had enough of him for one morning; he'd probably soured the cream in her cooling coffee.

"No crumbs, Miss Ryan!" Ronnie called as she started to climb the stairs leading up to the floor above.

"Not one!" Finn called back without bothering to turn around. "Twit," she murmured under her breath. She reached the landing and headed down the corridor to her office.

2.

Finn's office was a cubicle among cubicles at the windowless rear of a rabbit warren of rooms and corridors on the second floor of MasonG.o.dwin. Being in England, it wasn't called the second floor; it was the first floor, while the first floor was called the ground floor, which made sense but was still a little annoying. Living in England was sometimes a little like living inside a page from Alice in Wonderland, and that made sense as well, she supposed, since Lewis Carroll wasn't the author's real name and he hadn't really been a writer. He had been an Anglican minister and a mathematics professor at Oxford.

England was a confusing place full of confusing people. According to her mother, dead barely a year ago now, England, like the rest of Europe, suffered from enduring the burden of too much history. As she put it, "It makes them all a little eccentric, dear. As a civilization they tend to make everything as complicated as possible, from people to p.o.r.nography." Finn didn't know much about the p.o.r.nography part of it beyond the flyers for hookers and their various specialties found pasted inside every phone booth, but the eccentric people part certainly was true enough. She reached her office, had her m.u.f.fin and coffee, and tried to forget about Ronnie and everything he stood for, burying herself in work.

For Finn, work that day consisted in poring over old catalogues from past sales, noting trend changes and amounts for repeat clients likely to attend the next sale due at the end of the month. The end of April sale was a bad one; instead of concentrating on a simple theme like, say, "Between the Wars British Contemporary Painters 1918a1939," the sale was a spring-cleaning auction that covered everything from a half dozen "School of Delft" paintings that were part of unsold inventory from the fifties to a small Ce'zanne that Ronnie had been keeping off the market while the prices rose.

Inventory-a dirty word in the auction industry, but an important one. Not many people knew just how speculative the art market was. All of the big houses had been doing it for hundreds of years-buying pictures and other items for themselves, not clients, then slipping lots under the gavel when cash was needed or the market was right, taking full price and not just commissions.

This April was no exception; more than half of the items in this year's sale were from the storerooms upstairs. The scuttleb.u.t.t was that Ronnie had spent far too much over the past year acquiring paintings of questionable provenance or even authenticity. Finn knew for a fact that Lady Ron had recently picked up a fifteenth-century bust of Piero de' Medici supposedly done by the Leonardo contemporary Mino da Fiesole that turned out to be a very well-made forgery by Giovanni Bastianini sometime in the 1850s. The difference between the two sculptors was the difference between platinum and pig iron. The cost of Ronnie's mistake was going to have to be made up one way or the other. He wouldn't dare sell the fake as a real Fiesole, so he'd probably wind up attributing it to "Renaissance School," but he'd take an enormous loss.

By twelve-thirty she'd finished the Ds on the computerized client files, then broke for lunch. She went for a slice of pizza at the Europa since she couldn't afford the upscale Irish stew at Mulligan's down the street, then came back to her desk and started on the Es. By four she was wishing she smoked just as an excuse to get outside for some air, rain or not. She was saved by a call from Doris downstairs. As usual, the receptionist's whining voice grated on her nerves.

"We've got a walk-in with a parcel wrapped in string. I told him we didn't do spot evaluations but he insists it's a Jan Steen. I thought I'd send him on to you. Can't miss him, dear, he's wearing one of those silly sweatshirts with Harvard across the front. Purple. And he's wearing scruffy-looking trainers as well."

In other words, not the type who'd have a Dutch Master from the seventeenth century under his arm. The tone in Doris's voice was dismissive. She was pa.s.sing a nuisance on to Finn.

"He's American?"

"No, British. He was very insistent. Asked to see Mr. DePanay-Cottrell, but I informed him that you'd have to do, Miss Ryan. Deal with him please." Doris hung up without giving her a chance to respond. The name of the university on the man's sweatshirt had sent him in Finn's direction. She quickly checked the computer inventory to see if Steen's name appeared. It did. A small scene of villagers dancing around a Maypole had made a hammer price of slightly less than a million pounds sterling, well over a million dollars U.S. Jan Steen had always been a blue-chip artist, even in his own lifetime.

Two minutes later a figure appeared in the doorway of her office. Just as Doris had described: purple Harvard sweatshirt, bruised Nikes, and a scruffy-looking package under his arm wrapped in brown paper and tied with what a Midwesterner like her would have called binder twine, the stuff you wrapped around bales of hay. As well as the sweatshirt and runners, he wore a pair of stained blue jeans worn at the knees. Definitely not the type to have a Jan Steen or any other masterpiece under his arm.

What Doris had not mentioned was that the man was disturbingly handsome. He had a lean, tanned face under a thatch of sun blond hair and the body of an Olympic swimmer. He also had huge, bright blue eyes blinking pleasantly behind a simple pair of Harry Potter wire rims. Both the man and the package he held were lightly spattered with rain. He wasn't carrying an umbrella. He looked a little older than she was, mid-thirties or so.

Finn smiled. She didn't know what else to do. "Can I help you?"

"I've got this painting," he said, taking the package out from under his arm and holding it out to her. His voice was definitely Oxford-the real thing, not the walnut-in-the-cheeks adenoidal version poached by Lady Ron. The parcel was oblong, twelve by sixteen, just about right for a Jan Steen. He laid it carefully on the desk.

"Please sit," said Finn, gesturing toward the only other chair in the office. "My name is Finn Ryan, by the way." She smiled again.

"William Pilgrim," he said. "Billy. You're an American."

"Columbus, Ohio."

"Good-bye, Columbus."

"Philip Roth."

"His first book."

"Ali McGraw and Richard Benjamin for the Hollywood version. My mom made me watch it on TV once."

"Well," Billy Pilgrim said smiling, "I think we've exhausted that vein of conversation."

"The painting," said Finn.

"The painting." He nodded.

She unwrapped it. Oil on canvas, no frame, the canvas stapled to the stretcher with rusty iron half-moons. It was a representation of another village scene, this one with a half dozen beer swillers sitting on a bench under a tree. Just the kind of thing the artist was famous for. The signature on the bottom was a group of initials: JHS, Jan Havickszoon Steen.

"Very nice," said Finn. Nice but not right.

"Not by Jan Steen," said Pilgrim, picking up her tone.

"I don't think so, no," agreed Finn.

"Why not? It's been in the family forever. Dutch ancestors. Everyone always called it a Jan Steen."