Money from Holme (20 page)

But this lasted for no more than seconds. He took a look at the authentic Braunkopf painting of the week, and saw that it was Holme’s ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’. Then he took a look at the only other painting in the room. It had been set up on a similar easel. And it was Holme’s ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’ too.

There was a long, pregnant silence. And in this it came to Cheel that
he
must speak first. If he could just grasp the initiative, establish atone, a note – then all might yet be well.

‘Fascinating!’ he heard himself say. ‘A replica, but not
quite
a replica. One can spot at once a slight change in the balance of the composition, and several passages where he hadn’t quite satisfied himself first time. And the colour, too, has been modified in places. Look at the yellow flower in the right foreground. Or rather, look at the violet in its shadow. It’s not the same violet.’

‘That is goot – that is very goot!’ Braunkopf nodded his head in altogether sinister concurrence. ‘The violet we shall speak about instantly. But first, Cheel, your explainings, yes?’

Cheel was so unnerved (despite his boldness of utterance) that for a moment he almost indulged the preposterous notion of telling the truth. But this unworthy thought he repressed at once.

‘I wonder,’ he asked, ‘if this is something that Holme often did? Since he’s dead, and since so much is destroyed, I suppose we shall never know.’ He went closer to the pictures. ‘I’d say that, if anything, the version that has just turned up on you is the better of the two. Of course, Braunkopf, it sets you a problem from your commercial point of view. One of those puttikier ethical problems that the Da Vinci likes taking in its stride.’

This amiable banter had no apparent mollifying effect upon the Da Vinci’s proprietor.

‘There is the provenances,’ he said. ‘This picture has the goot provenance.’ He tapped the version of ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’ that had just so disastrously turned up. ‘But this picture’ – he tapped the version that Holme had so recently completed – ‘has
not
the goot provenance. For it, there is only the cow and hen story of Mr Kabongo who was trampled by heffalumps.’

‘Not at all,’ Cheel said sharply. He detested inaccuracy. ‘Killed by the Wamba State Ballet.’ He paused, and then laughed easily. ‘But isn’t this,’ he asked, ‘a storm in a tea-cup? Here are two self evidently authentic Sebastian Holmes – the one being a slightly modified replica of the other. There’s nothing out of the way in that. Or do you think one of them is a forgery?’

There was again a silence, but this time it came with a slight effect of bafflement on Braunkopf’s part. Braunkopf, indeed, directed a glance of something like appeal at the stony-faced man. But the stony-faced man made no sign whatever.

‘And now it’s
my
turn to want a little information please.’ Cheel put every ounce of assurance he possessed into this bold
tour de force
. ‘For I must say quite frankly, Braunkopf, that you have some pretty stiff explaining to do. Be so good as to tell me’ – he pointed at the newly appeared Holme – ‘just whom you’ve had this from.’

‘From a puttikler eminent dipsomaniac gentleman–’

‘Diplomatic,’ the stony-faced man said, speaking for the first time since he had entered the Da Vinci.

‘Exackly. A diplomatic gentleman direk from Wamba itself. A Mr Wutherspoon.’

For a moment Cheel simply tried to pretend to himself that he hadn’t heard correctly. Then he made one of his heroic efforts.

‘Ah, yes – I know Wutherspoon. He’s a drunk, and an unreliable rascal. Certainly he spent years in Wamba, but he was run out of the country. It would be fatal to believe a word he says.’

‘Curiosities, Mr Wutherspoon has never heard of Mr Kabongo. Mr Wutherspoon is agreeable two Holmes saved from the hotel. And they were dissipated–’

‘Confiscated,’ the stony-faced man said.

‘They were confiscated by the government of the Herr Professor Ushirombo and donated this Wutherspoon as compensatings for sudden termination his services. So Wutherspoon having fallen into indigestion–’

‘Indigence,’ the stony-faced man said.

‘–is now obliged ask Da Vinci Gallery market these two surviving Holmes. And here’ – Braunkopf again tapped the new painting – ‘the first.’

‘Well, you must just be careful.’ Cheel offered this advice with frank cynicism. ‘Nobody’s going to pay as much for a painting of which there’s an artist’s copy as he is if it’s known to be unique. And then there’s the question of title, you know, of ownership. It seems very probable to me that this fellow Wutherspoon has come by his Holmes through sheer theft.’

‘Whereas the honest Mr Kabongo paid two hundert pounts, no?’ Braunkopf gave Cheel one of his most disagreeable looks. ‘And there is other troublesomes too. There is the suspectings of forgery – as you said, yes?’

‘That sort of thing may be said too.’ Cheel nodded, and then applied himself at leisure to a further study of first the one and then the other ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’. ‘Wouldn’t you say,’ he asked candidly, ‘that forgery just has to be ruled out?’ He turned from Braunkopf and appealed blandly to the stony-faced man, whom he now rather suspected of being a private eye. ‘As an expert, sir,’ he said, ‘would you not be prepared to stake your reputation that both these paintings are entirely the work of Sebastian Holme?’

‘I confess that I should be strongly tempted to do so.’ The stony-faced man, it now occurred to Cheel, had a wholly cultivated – indeed what might be called an academic – accent. ‘Yet my experience, which is tolerably extensive, tells me, Mr Cheel that there is today no limit to the skill with which the forgery of modern paintings can be carried out. No limit at all.’ The stony-faced man in his turn made a further inspection of both ‘Clouded Leopards Playing’. ‘Or almost no limit at all.’

‘But excusings!’ Braunkopf had suddenly remembered something. ‘The formal introduction, yes? Mr Mervyn Cheel, the eminent critic. Dr Quinn, the eminent chemist.’

Dr Quinn inclined his head gravely. It was rather clear that he didn’t terribly like Cheel. And Cheel certainly didn’t like him. He was very well aware of one branch of chemistry in connexion with which the name of Quinn was apt to turn up.

‘The violet,’ Braunkopf went on, with a disagreeable softness. ‘The peautiful modest violet, no? Of course it is there in the shadow cast by anythink yellow, yes? And here’ – he pointed to what must now be called Wutherspoon’s Holme – ‘it is
so
.’ He turned to the second picture. ‘And here,
so
. And your eye is goot, my goot Cheel.
This
violet shadow is not that violet shadow. That is the aestheticals. But I too have the goot eye – and the sciences as well. All my life I make the expertises. And I look at this violet in “Clouded Leopards Playing” – in your “Clouded Leopards Playing”, Cheel–’

‘Mine?’ There had been something that Cheel didn’t at all like in Braunkopf’s tone.

‘Kabongo’s, then.’ Braunkopf again tapped the frame of the relevant picture. ‘And what do I say? I say “My valued freunt Dr Quinn must have one tiny flake this violet pigment”.’

There was another of the horrid silences. And then Dr Quinn himself seemed to feel that things might advantageously be speeded up.

‘In a word,’ he said, ‘I have conducted a micro-analysis of a fragment of paint taken from this picture. And I find that this particular violet comes from a substance first synthesized less than a year ago. It has been available in the colourmen’s shops for three months at the most. Sebastian Holme could not possibly have used it during his lifetime. This painting is therefore a forgery. An amazing forgery, but a forgery beyond any shadow of doubt.’

Cheel managed a laugh that sounded uncomfortably shrill to his own ear.

‘You’ve neglected one obvious possibility,’ he said. ‘And it happens to be the true explanation. When the picture came to me – through confidential channels, I must insist – it proved to be a little damaged. I had to touch it up myself. And I used this paint you are speaking of.’

‘Mr Cheel, that is rubbish.’ Dr Quinn’s face was more granite like than ever. ‘I have also employed radiography, and Mr Braunkopf is now in possession of macrographs of the relevant areas. There has been no damage, and no touching up whatever. Moreover there are the strongest indications that the whole painting has been executed very recently indeed.’

Big men have to be capable of big decisions. Mervyn Cheel was very conscious of this now. What confronted him was, in vulgar parlance, a fair cop. And he had better face up to it at once. Braunkopf, despite his nauseous airs of injured virtue, was already in up to the neck. As for this detestable Quinn, he was clearly a scientist existing on a pittance of a salary, and he was bound, therefore, to have his price.

‘Very well,’ Cheel said. ‘Let us be frank. As you’ve no doubt guessed, Sebastian Holme is still, in fact–’

But Braunkopf had raised a prohibitory hand – and with such authority that the image of Lord Duveen might have been said positively to shine through him.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘we come to the confidentials. Dr Quinn, my goot freund, it will be correck that you overdraw.’

‘Withdraw,’ Quinn said unemotionally, and got to his feet, ‘I am very content to leave Mr Cheel and yourself to confer.’ He paused, gave Cheel a particularly bleak last look (he must be one of those, after all, in whose mind the Nicolaes de Staël affair lingered), and walked out of the room.

Cheel drew a long breath.

‘Will he keep his mouth shut?’ he asked urgently. ‘Can we square him?’

‘Mouth shut? Square him?’ Braunkopf-Duveen repeated these distasteful expressions while turning upon Cheel the coldest of eyes. ‘But you were about to make a communicating, yes?’

‘You can call it that, if you like. But you know very well what I have to say. Sebastian Holme is still alive. He’s alive, and in London, and painting, now.’

‘You make the jokings, Cheel. Always you make the jokings. It is ha-ha-ha, no?’ Braunkopf was, in fact, austerely remote from hilarity. ‘But this is the tall story, my poor Cheel. It will not take you far.’

‘What the devil do you mean?’

‘You are a goot forger, Cheel. Perhaps there has never been so goot a forger before. But a goot liar? No.’

Very naturally Cheel was as much offended as he was alarmed by this judgement. He was far from flattered by the suggestion that he was a superb forger. In his character as an artist, his high sense of dedication to the practice of abstract
pointillism
made intolerable to him the mere thought of working in any other painter’s manner. Conversely, to be denied the highest skill in the craft of prevarication was extremely mortifying to his own just sense of his powers in that direction. What he chiefly felt at the moment, however, was contempt for the gross intellectual incapacity of Braunkopf, whose fixed ideas about the situation were proving invulnerable to the facts of the case. That Sebastian Holme was indeed alive must now be as plain as a pikestaff to any rational intelligence. But here was Braunkopf obstinately pursuing the idiotic notion that Cheel himself could paint, and had been painting, bogus Holmes detectable only through a technical slip.

It was too silly for words. Still, it was evident that the whole grand design must now be reorganized on a drastically different basis. Cheel was about to tell the obtuse proprietor of the Da Vinci Gallery that he was able and willing to produce Holme, active and in the flesh, at half an hour’s notice, when he was prevented by a buzzer sounding on Braunkopf’s table. Braunkopf picked up a telephone.

‘But, yes,’ he said, ‘But if there was an appointment he must be shown in.’ He put down the receiver and turned to Cheel apologetically. ‘A client,’ he explained. ‘A misimportant client. But it would be discourtesies to be longer engaged. You excuse?’

Cheel didn’t excuse. He judged it highly improper and inexpedient that a delicate phase in negotiation should be interrupted in this way. But, before he could protest, the door had opened and Braunkopf’s visitor entered the room. It was Cheel’s former neighbour, the miserable glass-scratcher Binchy.

Once more, coincidence was conceivable. Binchy might be ambitious to follow Rumbelow as an exhibitor in the Da Vinci Gallery. But Cheel doubted it. It wasn’t long before he found his dubiety justified.

‘Dear me,’ Binchy said. ‘If it isn’t friend Cheel.’ He turned to Braunkopf. ‘Cheel and I pig together, more or less. He’s the attic varlet.’

‘But this is interestings.’ Braunkopf adopted the air of one indulging in small-talk. ‘And you have the artistic communions, yes?’

‘Well, we pass the time of day on the stairs. Quite often, I’d say – eh, Cheel ? Only the other day, for instance. Yes, only the other day. How is your new activity going, Cheel, old boy?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have no new activity. And you know very well that it isn’t I who lodges above you any longer.’ Cheel’s mouth had gone disagreeably dry. He had a sense of what was coming at him. It was conspiracy. ‘Everybody in the building must know that.’

‘Must they? It’s the first I’ve heard of it. What a funny chap you are! And turning secretive, one might say.’

‘Secretive?’ Braunkopf repeated softly. ‘This too has the interestingness, no?’

‘When Cheel hasn’t been scribbling rubbish in any rag that would print it, you know, he’s been covering perfectly nice little bits of paper and board with spots. Effect rather like the measles. Don’t ask me what he does with them afterwards. The Seurat of the sewers, we’ve always called him. Haven’t we, Cheel ?’

Cheel was not aware that he had heard this vulgar witticism before. He managed to preserve a dignified silence.

‘But lately he’s been scurrying round with large canvases. And he says that what he’s doing with them is something that nobody will ever
precisely
know. I think those were his words to me quite some time ago. He’s a deep one, is Cheel.’

‘The goot Cheel has a puttikler prestidigious subtle mind.’ Braunkopf produced this with an irony that was highly offensive. ‘And we give it damn-plenty employment now.’