Cheyney Fox (27 page)

The following day the court reconvened and Judge Whitfield charged the jury and retired to his chambers.

The verdict made the TV newscasts and all the evening newspapers. Two-inch, heavy-type headlines:

FRAUD CASE: NOTHING FISHY ABOUT SOLE

BARRY SOLE “HERO FOR ART”

But the headline that covered the entire front page of a New York tabloid was the one with letters four inches high. The one with which Barry Sole could flatter himself for life.

BARRY SOLE POP ARTIST
ANOTHER AMERICAN DREAM

There was no man happier in the world that evening than Barry Sole. He loved every word, every letter of every word. His wingless imagination got lift-off. He saw the black ink slip into a dark purple and then a blood red. Then the red dissolved into letters of ink as yellow and hot as the core of a burning sun. The words changed, shifted, and the letters altered shape. They were four inches wide and one inch high. They began to spin around and around on themselves, tiger-stripes chasing their tail, like in
Little Black Sambo
. They all melted into a puddle. No, not butter, slowly they blossomed into an oversized yellow plastic chrysanthemum. The center petals opened out with a blood-curdling, ear-splitting roar and then changed into the Metro Goldwyn lion.

Chapter 26

C
heyney crossed town from Second to Fifth Avenue, walking on Thirty-fourth Street. It was cold. A biting wind sliced through streets between their canyon-like walls. Less than two weeks before Christmas the city was all dressed up for the arrival of Santa Claus, and anyone else in the world who was in the business of buying or selling or giving. Cheyney’s intention was ambitious. Her plan was to window-shop up Fifth Avenue to Fifty-seventh street, meet Della at the Russian Tea Room for lunch, and then do the Fifty-seventh Street galleries. Last stop, Rockefeller Center and Judd Whyatt’s office.

Della was stunned when Cheyney revealed over breakfast her plan for the day. Surprised and thrilled. After the cool reception Cheyney had had from some of the art people who had known her in her gallery days, Della feared she would turn her back on New York and flee.

It was a perfect day — if you didn’t mind the cold wind coming off the East River — for what Della called “the Christmas walk.” The beginning of the week, crowds not too bad, every window at a peak of decorative imagination, each outshining the other in Christmas fantasies. A good day, too, to view exhibitions. The galleries would be very quiet, most everyone waiting to see whether Barry Sole was headed for the slammer, whether the door was going to bang shut on Pop Art.

Not so, Cheyney, who was certain the entire matter, having
opened up a can of art worms, would now close not with a bang but a whimper.

Cheyney walked along the Thirty-fourth Street side of B Altman’s department store. The windows were sensational, all Austrian castles and fairy-tale figures in the snow, glitter, and subdued colors; icy blues and frosty pinks and pearly mauves, all winter-wonderland-like, with magnificent articulated, three-foot-high dolls: Cinderella and her prince, pumpkin coaches and ugly sisters, gleaming Hansels and Gretels. The Old Woman in her shoe, Beauty and her amorous Beast, and, and … Music-box tinklings from hidden speakers. Cheyney felt like a child, wanted to clap her hands with joy, unable to check the smile spreading across her face. The crowds in front of the window were, even at that time of the morning, three-deep.

Cheyney rounded the corner. Her first step on Fifth Avenue for eight years. A street teeming with people dressed in furs and winter woolens, weighed down by multiple shopping bags and packages, struggling against that bone-gnawing wind. The doors of Altman’s swinging constantly in the slipstream of shoppers. Bursts of welcoming warmth escaping every time the door opened tempted even Cheyney to enter. Santa Clauses, in over-the-top woolly white beards, bellowing jolly “Ho, ho, ho’s” on every corner and stamping their feet to keep warm, ringing their bells for the Christmas poor and needy. Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer out-blared Bing’s “White Christmas,” and Como’s “Winter Wonderland.” Salvation Army bands, blind violinists, and young street performers took their chance on the wave of yuletide noise.

For as far as she could see, it was a never ending stream of the same thing on both sides of the street. A Christmas wonderland, a Christmas circus. If there is such a thing as a serious shopper, it was here setting its face against the tide of canned music, commercial merriment, and just plain commerce. A losing battle. Everywhere she looked, the odd, strained face broke into a smile. Someone found time to open a handbag or reach into his pocket to toss something into Santa’s black iron pot swinging on a tripod. New York and its Fifth Avenue Christmas: infectious as an epidemic. Dollars taken and given with a smile. Santa with no claws.

Cheyney laughed, just threw her head back and laughed,
thinking, Oh, Fifth Avenue, how I’ve missed you, it’s good to be back. She allowed herself a twinge of self-pity that she would not have Grant on her arm to share this walk with. That they would not spend this Christmas together. And how long would it be before she was to feel his hot stream of sperm caressing her womb, the delicious taste of him in her mouth. Cheyney felt dizzy with desire for Grant Madigan and once again laughed, this time at herself, for carnal thoughts in the middle of Fifth Avenue and dropped them. He was too divine, it had been so sublime being with him, and there had been love and she had no intention of spoiling that, even if the price to have it always was to let him go. Miraculously she was happy with or without him on her arm.

She started her slow window walk up the avenue, crisscrossing the street for the more spectacular of the windows. Lord and Taylor, a dream of silver gauze and ribbon, silver everything — she stood there for five minutes. Saks Fifth Avenue, not to be outdone, was all shimmering gold displays of chic. Could there be anywhere in the world a Christmas tree more spectacular than Rockefeller Center’s? Aglitter with luminous Christmas balls swinging to the wind. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, adapted French Gothic in unyielding granite with flying buttresses and sky-high twin towers, a richly carved counterfoil to the Rockefeller Center up the street; an oasis of conservatism shrouded in green spruce and red ribbon. She almost went in. Best and Company, she stood against the wall where she had stood in a rainstorm years ago, just before she was all but knocked down by Grant Madigan. It drew from her an inward smile. She resumed her walk.

Mark Cross grudgingly dressed in red. Tiffany’s windows were jewels themselves, the diamonds displayed like hunks of stars. Bonwit Teller’s, and she felt she had come home. She wondered if they still had a B Wragge department in Ladies Sports. Bendel’s all-white window displays that glittered, Bergdorf’s all black, with showers of silver snowflakes. She thought about long white kid gloves with pearl buttons, and evening dresses and lovely hats and handbags and perfume. It was an adult’s Disneyland, a wonderland that was wonderful. It triggered memories of the good times, without quite erasing those terrible years when she couldn’t bring herself to walk up the
Avenue. Dimmed them, yes. But still not enough to induce Cheyney to penetrate any of those gaudy temples for a Christmas shopping spree.

Lunch at the Russian Tea Room had not changed. Maybe it was more like a dining club than before. Everyone knowing everyone else, or wanting to. Diners table hopped, drumming up “good relations” with a not-too-discreet “do a little business” attitude. In between, conspicuous consumption.

Della and Cheyney parted on the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, Della going downtown, Cheyney going crosstown. Her first stop was the Sidney Janis Gallery. On entering the exhibition rooms, a strange thing happened to Cheyney. It was something like déjà vu. Her bad times in the art world faded, as if they had never existed at all. She had that same enthusiasm, felt a familiar excitement, enjoyed that same feeling of exhilaration she had gotten at every exhibition of worthwhile paintings. She visited four other exhibitions in the building. As she descended in the elevator, the other gallery experiences of the past crept up on her. None more vivid than that of the first exhibition of De Kooning’s, Women.

Cheyney spent three hours in some of the city’s finest art galleries. During that time, not one dealer had come forward to speak to her. Not even a dealer’s assistant. The occasional nod from one or two, but that was all. They had forgotten her and her failure, the gossip, the rumors and the lies. Either that or they were practicing that well-known New York indifference. She simply didn’t exist for them. Was she offended? Not in the least. She just saw how foolish she had been for far too long. She could have returned sooner. It had been crushing guilt and a shattered ego that kept her away, not the art world. That realization was a hard pill to swallow.

Cheyney arrived at Judd Whyatt’s office on time. She was impressed by the sophisticated, bookish elegance of the penthouse suite of rooms at the top of Rockefeller Center. He did not keep her waiting, she was shown into his office immediately on her arrival.

At their first meeting at Acton Pace’s house on the dunes, Whyatt had appeared attractive and extremely competent in the legalities of the transaction. He had been a calming influence. His mind simply snapped shut against anything irrelevant to
the deal. Impressive. The Paces and Cheyney had been grateful to have him there. Any other lawyer might have dragged his feet, turned it into a long-drawn-out, complex emotional haggle. But although his many assets registered with Cheyney, she had been completely absorbed in Acton, his paintings, and the buying of a Pace collection. In the courtroom she had seen him as just part of an overall process. He had impressed her with the role he was playing, but it was David who had held her attention.

She had not expected to hear from Whyatt again, since he was the lawyer for Roberto and Lala’s then mystery client. So she had been surprised when, on her return from Egypt to Athens, she had found a letter asking her to please call him on a matter to do with Acton Pace and his paintings.

It hurt to talk to anyone of Acton so soon after his death: the paint still so colorfully alive, the artist simply extinguished. So she had postponed the call until she was in New York, and even until Grant had left for the wars. She had felt no urgency. Whyatt’s letter had been more than a month old by the time she had received it.

Until she entered his offices, she had not given much thought to Judd Whyatt. Here he was, though, sitting with his back to a glass wall and French doors that led out onto a balcony planted with Japanese pines, hemlocks, and cypresses in large wooden tubs of wood and bronze, among old weatherworn bamboo chairs and tables. This was where he sat on not-too-windy days to read his briefs. It was like seeing the man for the first time.

She stood before him, looking through the window, past the balcony of trees bending to the wind, and onto the cityscape of steel-and-glass skyscrapers, “What a wonderful place to work,” she said as she shook his hand. She added, “Hello, I’m sorry about yesterday. I simply couldn’t stick it out in that courtroom one more minute.”

“Believe me, I can understand that. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve felt the same way. Forensic claustrophobia, I guess. Please take a seat.”

On top of the long Chinese-Chippendale table he used as a desk was an imposing Arab box of inlaid ivory and silver. It had drawers of various sizes, in which Judd kept all his personal papers, pens, pencils. The remainder of the huge highly polished,
mahogany surface was neatly arranged with stacks of his current work papers.

He saw that she was riveted by the Arab box. “Lovely, isn’t it? A gift form a client, an Arab prince whom I was able to oblige.”

“Yes, I can see you like beautiful things. Mind if I ask why you took on the unbeautiful Barry Sole? You must have known he would be acquitted.”

“No, I didn’t know that. I only assumed he would be. And fought against it the best way I could. I doubt that any other lawyer could have mounted a better case against Barry Sole.”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking anything like that. Just that you had an impossible case to win. If you had won, it would have been such a blow to every creative artist.”

Suddenly Cheyney looked ill-at-ease. “Oh, dear, it’s very tactless of me to go on about it like this. Losing, after all you have put into the case, cannot be easy to swallow. I know that from experience, myself. I feel such a fool.”

“No need,” he said, sliding gracefully off the end of the desk. Walking between a pair of oval-backed French cane-armchairs with black patent-leather cushions on the seats, part of a crescent of four around his desk, he proceeded to a large, round, pedestaled table in one corner of the mahogany-paneled room. A bowl of red poinsettias almost covered it. He picked up a folder and brought it back to his desk. He sat down in a French Directoire chair, impressive for its rounded back and swan-carved arms. He looked at Cheyney and gave her a conciliatory smile.

“Oh, come now. No need to feel uncomfortable. I have lost cases before, you know. Not many, granted. If it will make you feel easier, I will tell you that I didn’t want to take this one on. I did so only because of an obligation to two of my clients. As you may know, we are a firm of international lawyers. Corporate law specialists. We are also the lawyers for several individuals, major stockholders and owners of some of those corporations and companies we represent.

“Two of our clients, men who spend not millions but tens of millions of dollars funding museums of contemporary art in this country, determined that the case should be settled in a
court of law. They wanted our firm involved. A folly they could not be talked out of.”

“Your clients can’t be too unhappy, even if they have lost. The trial was lengthy. It may have created a great deal of dissension among the various people involved in art. For better or worse, it’ll have shown the seamier side of art in big business. But it has probably quadrupled the value of your clients’ collections.”

Judd Whyatt was impressed. She was no slouch, understanding that prices were about to go through the roof for all contemporary art. He almost raised an eyebrow. Kurt Walbrook had taste, spotting her potential and grasping it with both hands.

“Well, if it hasn’t, it will.”

Now that he had agreed, Cheyney felt better. She smiled at Judd and said, “So you’ve lost your battle and your war, but still come out the victor.”

He was even more impressed. “Yes,” he answered, “I suppose you could say that. You make it sound as if we should celebrate. How about a glass of champagne?”

“What will we be celebrating?”

“Your good fortune.”

He flicked a switch on his intercom to ask his secretary to bring in a chilled bottle of Roederer Cristal and two champagne glasses. He flicked the system off, and added, “
Fortune
being the operative word.”

“Mr. Whyatt, what is this all about? I’ve no idea what you’re hinting at, but I can sure feel a hint coming my way.”

“Acton Pace chose three paintings for you and had them placed in a repository in Boston. They were to be given to you upon his death. A legacy, so to speak, because you would not accept them while you were acting on behalf of someone else.”

A knock on the door. He rose from his chair to open it. Passing Cheyney, he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder and said, “The wine has come at just the right moment. You look like you could use a drink. Compose yourself, it’s a legacy, not a writ.”