Maestra (23 page)

Immediately, he was tense. If this was the hard sell he would be ready, and no doubt perfectly courteous, but furiously disappointed, perhaps even a little sad. I could let him stew a moment.

‘You see, there’s something I need help with.’

‘
Oui
.’

His tone was flat and discouraging. What was it going to be, I could see him wondering suspiciously – the intractable landlord, the exorbitant college fee? The sick mother? Surely not the sick mother?

‘I would pay, of course. A fee. Maybe a hundred thousand euro?’

‘
You
would pay?’

‘Well, of course. You see, I was thinking . . . remember I told you at dinner about the gallery?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was in Geneva because I have an investor. He’s a serious buyer and he’s prepared to back me. I was seeing to the practicalities. The funds are with Osprey at present.’

He was interested now, beginning to think like a money man, not a john.

‘Osprey? Yes, I know someone there.’

‘But I want to move them. My client is very . . . exacting. He wants to gather an important collection and I’m very conscious that he’s taking a chance on me. But he also needs to be very discreet – you understand? He doesn’t necessarily want the world to know what he’s buying. And I don’t think Switzerland is as quiet as it could be. Not after all that UBS stuff last year.’

‘
Alors?
’

‘So I want to move it. I want to move the money. But I need to do it quickly, because I think my client has a fairly short attention span and if I’m not picking up pieces for him soon he might lose patience. Shanghai Contemporary starts in early September and I need to be ready. And there’s some artists showing at Art Basel Hong Kong in the spring – I just can’t afford bureaucracy. So I thought you could help me,’ I finished simply, looking him as clearly in the eye as the tea lights and the swirling steam would allow.

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘Jean-Christophe, I don’t know you very well. But I feel I can trust you. It’s a fair amount of money – about six million euro. I want you to move it to a corporate account in Panama for me, as quickly as you can. I want to arrange to draw funds and my own salary as a corporate employee from the account. I will pay you a hundred thousand euro, wherever you want the money sent. Nothing more.’

‘Six million?’

‘A cheap Rothko. Not that much, really.’

‘You are quite a surprising young woman.’

‘Yes,’ I answered, before I slid under the water. ‘Quite surprising.’ I was glad I’d got my life-saving certificate. It was true, what the instructor had said: those skills always do come in handy.

So I had a rather strenuous weekend and Jean-Christophe had a very relaxing one, then we took the heli back to Geneva on the Monday morning and a taxi straight to the Osprey building. I told Jean-Christophe I didn’t want to go in, but he said I had to accompany him or they wouldn’t agree to close the account. But it seemed that the benediction of Steve’s billions still hovered over me like a fairy godmother. The contact was if anything more sycophantic and obliging than the manager had been. I handed over the codes and decided in the end to leave the original 10K where it was – you never knew. I planned to send Steve something in about that price range as soon as I was settled and then we’d be quits. If Jean-Christophe’s connection at Osprey was surprised, he didn’t show it, but then that’s the point of Switzerland. If you have the money, you can hide anything there. So when we walked out Jean-Christophe was 100K richer and I was the proud and solitary employee of Gentileschi Ltd, registered with Klein Fenyves, Panama, on a salary of a hundred thousand euro a year with discretionary release options for purchases, funds to be released into the account of my choice. All taxable, all open, all safe, all in my own name. No more connections to the Moncada transfer or to that meagre account in the Cook Islands. It was too early for a celebratory drink, so we shook hands awkwardly on the steps of the bank and I made a few noises about getting in touch next time I was in town, though we both knew I wouldn’t. His driver brought the car round and he disappeared, though I was sort of touched that he bothered to look back out of the window until they turned the corner before reaching for his phone. I wondered if he felt he’d been played for a mug and decided he probably did, though not many mugs are that well paid, in every sense.

I walked back to the Bergues through a surly drizzle. I seemed to have acquired a surprising amount of stuff, looking at the mismatched pile in the luggage room. I could treat myself to a better set now. Matching luggage, dead posh. Somehow that didn’t lift my heart quite the way I thought it would. Wearily, I went to the lounge and ordered a coffee, logged on to the
Corriere della Sera
site. There it was: ‘Brutal killing of British businessman’. I forced myself to read it through slowly, three times. No mention of my name. Just ‘Police have interviewed a colleague of the victim, who confirmed he was meeting an unknown client.’ If it was out in Italy today it would definitely be in the English press tomorrow, especially as August was the slow season. But I was clear, wasn’t I? Rupert would have been frantic, seeing the money had gone to the Swiss account, but now it had simply vanished. Osprey wouldn’t hand out the details of where it had been sent, no matter what strings that fat fuck pulled. I had worked out a story now. Even if he knew I had met Moncada, even if he found me, I could say I had guessed the Stubbs stunt and talked Cameron into letting me in on it for ten grand. The kind of pathetic amount of money someone like Judith Rashleigh would be in need of. And then he didn’t show, and I went alone and saw that the money was transferred to where Cameron had directed me, and that’s all I knew. Rupert could blame Moncada, he could blame Cameron, he could blame whoever he liked, but they had nothing on me. And why had I kept quiet about Rupert’s involvement to the Italian police? Residual loyalty, playing the game, not letting the school down. Again, the kind of doglike fidelity to their values which I had once thought might impress them.

I closed my eyes. How long had it been since I could breathe properly? I should be moving, gathering that bloody luggage, taking a cab to the station, doing the next thing, and the next. But I didn’t. I just sat there, watching the rain.

PART FOUR

OUTSIDE

21

The Stubbs came up at auction that winter. Ten million pounds through a Beijing dealer bidding for a private client. Five million profit to Moncada’s invisible seller and the whole dairy department of Fortnum’s on Rupert’s face. Mr and Mrs Tiger obviously didn’t read the trades, or if they did they were happy to keep their mouths shut. I did try and follow it, just to discover if there was anyone I’d need to avoid, but it vanished from sight. Stashed in a safe somewhere with a few Nazi Chagalls, maybe, ready to emerge in a few decades.

Here are some things that happen when you have murdered someone. You jump at the sound of the radio. You never walk into an empty room. The white noise of your knowledge will never silence, and sometimes there are monsters in your dreams. Yet with the disappearance of the Stubbs, the last link with my own life had gently snapped. Until Rome, I saw that I had been reacting, harried by circumstance; I had believed I had a plan, but it hadn’t really consisted of much except getting the hell out of Dodge, howsoever I could. I wasn’t like that anymore. The incident with Cameron had been regrettable, certainly, and da Silva was something of a fly in the La Prairie face cream, but as time passed, I found that I barely gave either of them a moment’s thought. A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof, after all. I had a new life now.

By the time the picture was sold, I had everything arranged. When I left Switzerland, I had no real doubt as to where I would go. Since I didn’t believe that
Sex and the City
was a documentary, I’d never seen much point to New York, and, besides, America meant paperwork and hassles with green cards. I’d considered the South American classic, Buenos Aires, but my Spanish was schoolgirl; Asia just seemed too distant. I don’t see my mother much, but somehow I still didn’t like the thought of being so far away. I’d posted a card before I left Como, saying I was going travelling for a while. It made me a bit sad that she probably didn’t expect much more. Since I was legitimate, Europe made much more sense, and there was only one city I wanted to live in – Paris. I’d had my gap year there, though it didn’t much resemble the gap years I heard about at college. Endless shitty jobs to make the rent on a horrible studio outside the
Périphérique
, studying French grammar weakly after a 2 a.m. shift, Sunday trips to the Louvre when I’d rather have been sleeping. Poor little me. But the city had got under my skin in a way that nowhere else ever had, and as soon as I could please myself, for the first time in my life, that’s where I went.

While I organised everything, I spent a week or so at the Holiday Inn on the Boulevard Haussmann, in the part of the city I liked least. Those wide streets that always seem dusty, dull with office buildings and windblown, disappointed tourists. I opened two bank accounts, personal and business, and applied for a
carte de séjour
– the long-term residency permit – all correct. I didn’t need a map of the city to know where I did want to live. Over the river in the fifth, above the Pantheon, in the streets running down to the Luxembourg. I used to go there, after those dutiful gallery trawls, to watch the rich men playing tennis in Marie de Medici’s garden, or sit by the fountain where Sartre and de Beauvoir first met. I had loved the quarter then, and it still danced with spells for me, spun on the familiar scents of roast chestnuts and plane trees. The flat I found was in an eighteenth-century building on the Rue de l’Abbé de l’Epée, off the Rue Saint-Jacques, second floor, overlooking a paved courtyard with a proper concierge, squat and waddling in a pussy-bow blouse and leisure slacks, a stiff bright yellow perm and a martyred air. I think I chose it for the concierge, really, but the flat had golden parquet floors, the old kind, laid criss-cross like the famous Caillebotte painting, a huge bathroom, white walls and painted roof beams above the bed, crudely done rinceaux in crimson and turquoise. Rilke had lived on that street, I saw in my guidebook.

The first thing I bought was a hideous Ule Andresson from Paradise Galleries in New York, a dull green canvas with a faecal smear in one corner. I had it shipped to Steve’s office on Guernsey, and sent a text with a smiley face that said ‘Thanks for getting me started.’ I’d been following the results of my little research trip on Balensky’s boat in the
FT
: Steve had done well from it. He’d hidden the trade in the classic manner, building up his fund’s interest in general hospitality along with the Rivoli group, then watching his shares catapult when the Man from the Stan acquired it. Neat, and entirely illegal. But Steve didn’t return my message; he was gone, to New York or Dubai or Sydney, and I was surprised to find I minded, a bit. I wanted to send some money to Dave, my only non-Asperger’s male friend, but I couldn’t work out a way of doing it that wouldn’t seem conspicuous. Also he was pissed at me.

I couldn’t let that sit any longer. I texted him apprehensively, asking how he was doing. He pinged back the word ‘Bonhams’, with an exclamation mark and a smiley face. No x, but what a relief. Bonham’s wasn’t quite up there with the Big Two, but it was a decent house and Dave was working again. When I replied, asking discreetly if there was any way I could help him out, he returned the words ‘Mercenary fees only. X’. He’d used to joke that he would have ended up fighting as private security in somewhere like Somalia, as had many of his former army pals, that it was only his missing leg that had spared him. I was delighted, but not entirely surprised that he had forgiven me. Dave was smart enough to recognise that grudges are not an efficient use of one’s time

So then, I went shopping. First to Hôtel Drouot for an eighteenth-century writing desk, a real
bonheur du jour
with a hidden compartment in the back and a chased strawberry leather lining, then to La Maison du Kilim in Le Marais for a square Anatolian rug in bronze and emerald and turquoise, to Artemide for lamps and Thonet for a sofa, to the
marché aux puces
for a nineteenth-century rosewood
credenza
and an art deco dining table. Gentileschi forked out for a Lucio Fontana, a cool half-million, but I could afford it. I would sell, in time, and my home would be my gallery. I found a ‘school of Orazio Gentileschi’,
Susanna and the Elders
, nothing very special, apprentice work, but it pleased me, the tense silent space between the limbs of the terrified young girl, the evil mass of the two filthy old men whispering over her shoulder. I hung it on my white wall, alongside the Fontana and a Cocteau sketch of a Negroid profile with a fish for the eye. I even insured them.

I thought I would just keep my head down for a year, practise living as I had always dreamed I should. And then, if it seemed safe, I could start to buy seriously. True, London and Paris were very close, but pretty girls with rich indulgent boyfriends play at being gallerists all the time. That would be my story if it got back to the House that Judith Rashleigh was in business. And I did mean to be in business. I intended to gather a few less expensive pieces to show with the Fontana, to visit the European art fairs to build up contacts, then start to deal. I knew how it was done, and if I could hold back on spending the money like a navvy, in time I could start to think about renting a real gallery space, to travel, to find artists of my own. But I needed to wait, give myself time to learn, to become as sure as I ever could be that the old men would stay safely enframed on the wall.

I wasn’t remotely bored. For a start, I never stopped loving my flat. Sometimes I’d spend a creepy little ten minutes just . . .
stroking
it, running my palms over the contours of the wood, tracing the line of the sunlight through my crisp linen blinds along the battlements of the kilim. I loved how it smelled, of beeswax and Trudon candles and tobacco. I loved opening a bottle of wine and pouring it into one of the heavy jade-coloured art nouveau glasses I’d found on a junk stall near the flower market. I loved the heavy clunk of the closed door and the silence inside. Sometimes it made me so happy I’d pirouette naked along the wide hallway from the bathroom to the bedroom. Not that I entertained there. For that, there was what Parisians call
la nuit
.