Life: A User's Manual (13 page)

Shaw interrupted and proposed the following arrangement. Once the authenticity of the Vase had been proved, Sherwood and Schallaert together would deposit it in a bank safe. They would meet again a day later, Sherwood would give the million dollars to Schallaert, and they would proceed to open the safe.

Schallaert found the idea ingenious, but refused to use a bank, and stipulated a secure and neutral meeting place. Once again Shaw came to their help: he knew the President of Harvard University, Michael Stefensson, and knew he had a safe in his office. Why not ask him to handle this delicate exchange operation? He would be asked to be discreet and anyway there was not even any reason why he should know what would be in the bags to be exchanged. Sherwood and Schallaert accepted. Shaw rang Stefensson on the telephone and got him to agree.

“Don’t do anything you might regret!” Schallaert then said, suddenly. He took a small pistol from his pocket, stepped backwards to the rear of the room, and added, “The vase is under the bed. Look but take care!”

Shaw pulled a little suitcase out from under the bed and opened it. Inside, protected by thick wadding, was the Very Holy Vase. It looked exactly like Berzelius’s drawings of vase BC 1182, and the inscription was clearly marked in red ink inside the base.

That very evening they reached Harvard, where Stefensson awaited them. The four men went into the President’s office, and he opened the safe and placed the case in it.

Next evening the four men met again. Stefensson opened his safe, took out the case, and gave it to Sherwood. The latter handed Schallaert a travelling bag. Schallaert checked the contents quickly – two hundred and fifty bundles of two hundred twenty-dollar bills – then greeted the three men with a little nod of his head and was gone. “Gentlemen,” said Shaw, “I think we’ve earned ourselves a glass of champagne.”

It was getting late and after a few glasses Shaw and Sherwood gratefully accepted the President’s offer of hospitality. But when Sherwood woke in the morning he found the house entirely deserted. The case was on a low table by his bedside, and the Vase was in the case. The rest of the residence, which he’d seen the previous night full of servants, amply lit, richly furnished with
objets d’art
of all kinds, turned out to be a suite of empty dance halls and lounges, and the President’s office was merely a sparsely furnished little room, probably a cloakroom, entirely devoid of books, safe, and pictures. Sherwood later learnt that he had been received in one of those halls which the many alumni associations – Phi Beta Rho, Tau Kappa Pi, etc. – hire for their annual dinners, and that it had been booked two days earlier by a certain Arthur King, on behalf of a supposed
Galahad Society
, of which, of course, no trace could be found anywhere.

He called Michael Stefensson and in the end got a voice on the line that he’d never heard before, and certainly not last night. President Stefensson did, in fact, know Professor Shaw by name, and he was rather surprised that he was already back from directing his excavations in Egypt.

* * *

The massed mammas and the bountiful bambini at Longhi’s house, like the servants at Stefensson’s residence, were hired walk-ons. Longhi and Stefensson were accomplices with specified roles, but knowing only very vaguely the inside story of the coup that Schallaert and Shaw, whose true identities remain unknown, had stage-managed from start to finish. Schallaert, a talented forger, had fabricated Beccaria’s letter, Berzelius’s article, and the cuttings from the
Nieuwe Courant
. From Rotterdam and Utrecht he’d sent the forged letters of Jakob Van Deeckt and the Curator of the Museum van Oudheden, before coming back to New Bedford for the final scene and denouement of the plot. The other items, that is to say Shaw’s articles, the
Vita brevis Helenae
, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau’s catalogue, and the letter from Maurice de Saxe, were authentic, unless the latter two items were forgeries from some much older swindle: the imposter Shaw had found these documents – and that was where it had all started – in the library of the Professor whose absolutely aboveboard tenant he had been since the latter’s departure for the land of the Pharaohs. As for the vase, it was a slightly dissimulated gugglet of sorts, bought at a souk at Nabeul (Tunisia).

James Sherwood is Bartlebooth’s great-uncle, his maternal grandfather’s brother or, equally, his mother’s uncle. When he died, four years after this affair, in 1900 – the year of Bartlebooth’s birth – the remainder of his huge fortune came to his sole heiress, his niece Priscilla, who had married a London businessman, Jonathan Bartlebooth, eighteen months previously. The estates, the greyhounds, horses, and collections were disposed of in Boston, and the “Roman vase with descriptions by Berzelius” went for two thousand dollars all the same: but Priscilla brought some pieces of furniture to England, amongst them a mahogany study set in the purest English Colonial style, comprising a desk, a filing cabinet, an easy chair, a revolving and rocking chair, three straight-backed chairs, and the revolving bookcase beside which Sherwood had been photographed.

This bookcase, like the other furniture and some other items from the same source, including one of the
unica
so passionately sought after by the druggist – the very first cylinder phonograph built by John Kruesi to Edison’s design – is now in Bartlebooth’s apartment. Ursula Sobieski hopes she will be able to examine them and find in them the document that would allow her to conclude her lengthy investigations.

As she pieced the affair together and studied the accounts of it made by some of the actors (the “real” Professors Shaw and Stefensson, and Sherwood’s private secretary, to whose diary the novelist had had access), Ursula Sobieski often came to wonder whether Sherwood hadn’t guessed from the start that he was being mystified: whether he had paid up not for the vase but for the staging, allowing himself to be hooked by the bait, responding to the programme scripted by the so-called Shaw with an appropriate combination of gullibility, doubt, and enthusiasm, and finding such play-acting a more powerful palliative for his melancholy than the search for a real treasure would have been. This is a tempting theory and would fit Sherwood’s character quite well, but Ursula Sobieski hasn’t yet managed to find solid evidence for it. All there is to vindicate her theory is the fact that James Sherwood doesn’t appear to have minded at all about losing a million dollars, a fact perhaps explained by a news item dated two years after the end of the affair: in 1898, in Argentina, a syndicate of forgers was arrested whilst attempting to pass off huge quantities of twenty-dollar bills.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Moreau, 2

MADAME MOREAU HATED Paris.

In 1940, after her husband’s death, she took over the factory. It was a very small family business which he had inherited after the 1914–18 war and which he’d run in relaxed prosperity with three cheerful woodworkers at his side whilst she kept the books in big, black-cloth-bound registers with ruled paper and pages she had numbered in violet ink. The rest of the time she led an almost peasant-like existence, busy with the backyard chickens and the kitchen garden, making jams and pâtés.

She’d have done better to sell up and go back to the farm where she’d been born. Rabbits and chickens, some tomato plants, and a couple of beds for lettuces and cabbages – what more did she need? She would have sat by her fireside amongst her placid cats, listening to the clock ticking, to the rain falling on the zinc drainpipes, and the seven-o’clock bus passing by in the far distance; she’d have carried on warming her bed with a warming pan before getting into it, warming her face in the sun on her stone bench, cutting recipes out of
La Nouvelle République
and sticking them into her big kitchen book.

Instead of that, she had developed, transmogrified, metamorphosed her little business. She didn’t understand why she’d done so. She had told herself it was out of fidelity to her husband’s memory, but he would not have recognised what had become of his old workroom with its smells and shavings: two thousand people, millers, turners, fitters, mechanics, installers, electricians, testers, draftsmen, roughers-out, model-makers, painters, warehousemen, treatment specialists, packers, drivers, delivery men, foremen, engineers, secretaries, publicity writers, commercial agents, and sales reps, making and marketing every year more than forty million tools of all kinds and calibres.

She was tenacious and tough. She rose at five, went to bed at eleven, dealt with all her business in exemplary fashion, punctually, precisely, firmly. She was authoritarian and paternalistic, trusted nothing and nobody save her own intuitions and her own mind; she wiped out all her competitors and took a share of the market larger than anyone had predicted, as if she were mistress of both supply and demand, as if she knew instinctively, on launching each new product, where the real opportunities lay.

Up until the last few years, until age and illness virtually confined her to her bed, she had divided herself tirelessly between her factories in Paris and Romainville, her offices in Avenue de la Grande Armée, and this luxury flat which was so unlike her. She inspected the shopfloors at a gallop, terrorised accountants and typists, insulted suppliers who didn’t keep delivery dates, and chaired Board Meetings energetically and inflexibly, making all heads bow when she opened her mouth.

She hated it all. Whenever she could tear herself away, even for only a few hours, she went to Saint-Mouezy. But her parents’ old farm had gone to ruin. Weeds grew wild in the orchard and vegetable garden; the fruit trees no longer produced. Damp was eating the walls, unsticking the wallpaper, warping the doorframes.

Madame Trévins would help her to light a fire in the fireplace, open the windows, and air the mattresses. She who had four gardeners at Pantin to tend the lawns, flowerbeds, bushes, and hedges surrounding the works couldn’t even manage to find a local man to keep an eye on the garden. Saint-Mouezy, which used to be a sizable little market town, was now a mere juxtaposition of houses restored as second homes, empty all week and chock-full on Saturdays and Sundays with townsfolk who, as they brandished their Moreau hand-drills, their Moreau circular saws, their Moreau portable workbenches, their Moreau all-purpose ladders, laid bare old beams and old stone, hung coachlamps, and rallied to the attack on barns and cartstalls.

Then she would come back to Paris, don her Chanel two-pieces, and for her wealthy foreign customers would give lavish dinners served in crockery designed especially for her by the greatest of Italian designers.

She was neither a miser nor a spendthrift, but simply indifferent to money. In order to become the businesswoman she’d decided to be, she accepted without any apparent effort a radical transformation of her habits, of her wardrobe, of her style of life.

The conversion of her flat was carried out with this aim in mind. She kept just one room for herself, her bedroom, had it completely sound-proofed, and brought up from the farm a high, deep Empire bed and the wing chair in which her father had listened to the wireless. All the rest she entrusted to an interior designer whom she briefed in four sentences: it was to be the Paris residence of the head of a company; a spacious, luxurious, opulent, high-class, and even lavish interior; designed to make a good impression on Bavarian industrialists, Swiss bankers, Japanese buyers, and Italian engineers, as well as on university professors, junior trade and industry ministers of state, and mail-order business managers. She gave him no other advice, expressed no specific wishes, and laid down no budget limit. He would have to do everything and would answer for everything: the choice of glassware, the lighting, kitchen appliances, knickknacks, table linen, colour schemes, door furniture, curtains, curtain linings, etc.

The designer, Henry Fleury, did more than just carry out his brief. He realised what a unique opportunity he’d been given to effect his masterwork: usually, kitting out a space for living always ends up being a sometimes tricky compromise between the contractor’s ideas and the often self-contradictory demands of his client, but here, with this prestigious decoration of an initially anonymous space, he could give an unmediated and true image of his gifts, an exemplary demonstration of his theories of interior architecture: the reshaping of spatial volumes, the theatrical redistribution of light, and the mixture of styles.

The room we are now in – a smoking room-cum-library – is fairly representative of his work. It was originally a rectangular space, twenty feet by twelve. Fleury began by making it into an oval room with eight dark, carved wooden panels on the walls: he went to Spain to get them; apparently they come from the Prado. In between the panels he placed tall brass-inlaid Brazilian rosewood bookcases, bearing on their shelves a great number of books all bound in the same tan-brown leather, mostly artbooks, in alphabetical order. Huge, chestnut-brown button-leathered sofas are placed beneath the shelves and fit the curves precisely. Between the sofas stand dainty kingwood low tables, whilst in the middle of the room there looms a heavy, four-leafed, centre-pillar table heaped with newspapers and reviews. The woodblock floor is almost entirely masked by a dark red woollen carpet with triangular motifs in an even darker red. In front of one of the bookcases there is a set of library steps, in oak with brass fittings, which allows access to the upper shelves, and one of the risers of which is studded all over with gold coins.

In several places, the bookshelves have been made into glass-fronted display cases. That is how some old calendars, almanacs, and Second Empire diaries are shown off in the first case, on the left, together with some small posters, including Cassandre’s
Normandy
and Paul Colin’s
Grand Prix of the Arc de Triomphe
; in the second display case – the only reminder of the activities of the mistress of the house – there are a few old tools: three planes, two adzes, a twibill, six cold chisels, two files, three hammers, three gimlets, two augers, all bearing the monogram of the Suez Canal Company and all used during the cutting of the canal, as well as a magnificent Sheffield
Multum in parvo
looking like an ordinary pocketknife (wider, of course) but containing not just blades of various sizes but a screwdriver, a corkscrew, pincers, pen nibs, nailfiles, and punches; in the third case, various objects which had belonged to Flourens, the physiologist, and in particular the skeleton, red through and through, of the young pig whose mother the scientist had fed for the last 84 days of her pregnancy on food mixed with madder to prove experimentally the direct relationship of mother and foetus; and in the fourth case, a doll’s house, parallelepipedal, three feet high, two feet nine inches wide, and two feet deep, dating from the late nineteenth century and representing a typical English cottage down to the smallest detail: 1 drawing room with bay windows (2 lancets), thermometer affixed, 1 sitting room, 4 bedrooms, 2 servants’ rooms, tiled kitchen with close range and scullery, lounge hall fitted with linen wallpresses, fumed oak sectional bookcase containing the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and the
New Century Dictionary
, transverse obsolete medieval and oriental weapons, dinner gong, alabaster lamp, bowl pendant, vulcanite automatic telephone receiver with adjacent directory, hand-tufted Axminster carpet with cream ground and trellis border, loo table with pillar-and-claw legs, hearth with massive firebrasses and ormolu mantel chronometer clock, guaranteed timekeeper with cathedral chime, barometer with hygrographic chart, comfortable lounge settees and corner fitments, upholstered in ruby plush with good springing and sunk centre, three-banner Japanese screen and pyramidically prismatic central chandelier lustre, a bentwood perch with its tame parrot, and hundreds of everyday objects, baubles, crockery, clothes, all reproduced almost microscopically with manic accuracy: stools, lithos, cheap champagne bottles, capes on coat hangers, socks and stockings drying in the scullery, and even two minute copper pot-holders, tinier than thimbles, with greenery sprouting from them; and lastly, in the fifth set of bookcases, on raked stands, there are several open musical scores, amongst them the title page of Haydn’s Symphony No. 70 in D as printed in London by William Forster in 1782: