Rembrandt's Ghost (2 page)

Mason-Godwin, which hadn’t had either a Mason or a Godwin 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 wristwatches, 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-Godwin 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 Mason-Godwin 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-Godwin 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 passing 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 assess 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-Godwin 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 asset 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-Godwin 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-Godwin, 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 muffin from the local Prêt-a-Manger shop. Carrying her breakfast she zigzagged through the narrow streets to the discreetly canopied entrance to Mason-Godwin, careful to shake out her umbrella and collapse it before stepping through the brass-and-glass doors and onto the bloodred and black Oriental carpets covering the polished wood floors of the oak-paneled 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 passengers, 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 passed 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 Mason-Godwin.

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 Cleese-Ichabod 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 nose-in-the-air snobbishness of Mason-Godwin 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.

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 Mason-Godwin. 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 pornography.” Finn didn’t know much about the pornography 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 muffin 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 1918-1939,” 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 Cézanne 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 store-rooms upstairs. The scuttlebutt 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.”