Restoration (42 page)

A silence fell over the room but for the rattling of the paper in Tommy Smallwood’s thick right hand. “Eight ten,” Rhys said.

“Eight twenty.”

“Eight thirty.”

Smallwood’s left hand went up now, the index finger pointing skyward, as he mouthed the figure he was prepared to pay. “One million dollars,” Rhys said. “I have one million dollars. Thank you, Mr. Smallwood. Do I have—”

“One million ten thousand,” Amanda Howard said.

Smallwood’s left index finger beat twice against the air. “One million one hundred thousand,” Rhys said.

“One million two hundred thousand dollars,” came a bid from the collector in the chair directly behind Smallwood.

“One million three hundred thou—”

“And one million four to Mr. Smallwood,” Rhys said, cutting off Amanda Howard, who lowered her head on her husband’s shoulder. She began to weep silently.

The Howards were out now. Faced with his own end moments later, Taylor Dickel reached for his flask and mumbled a single obscenity under his breath. The last two buyers were Cedric Anderson and Tommy Smallwood, and then it appeared to be only Smallwood.

Rhys raised her gravel in plain sight of everyone in the room. “I have two million and fifty thousand dollars,” she said. “Do I have two million and sixty thousand dollars? Do I have two million and sixty, anyone?
Anyone?
Do I have it, anyone? In that case it’s going once… going
twice
…?”

“Two million sixty,” cried David Howard, to the apparent surprise of his wife, who clutched his arm to keep from falling off her chair.

“Two million seventy thousand,” replied Rhys, on Smallwood’s cue. “I have two million seventy. Do I have—”

“Yes. Two million eighty,” came a voice from the rear of the room. It was Lowenstein, clearing his throat now with a wet cough. He thrust his hand in the air to make sure he had Rhys’s attention. “Did you get that, Miss Goudeau? I bid two million and eighty thousand dollars.”

Smallwood craned his neck for another appraisal of Lowenstein. “Two million ninety,” he said out loud, abandoning his sheet of paper.

“Two million one hundred—nah, I’m out, I’m out.” Lowenstein waved both hands to signal defeat. “I’m out, Miss Goudeau.
Out…”
And so that ended it. The painting was Smallwood’s.

I sat for a while waiting for Rhys’s reaction, but she gave none. She didn’t leap to her feet and pound a fist in the air. She didn’t shout out or come to us for hugs and high-fives. There was no crying jag, either, at the prospect of having to turn over the painting to Smallwood. Instead she took a seat and waited for the room to clear out.

I walked up and put a hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”

She smiled and grabbed one of my fingers and gave it a tug. “Just tired. I have a new respect for my auctioneer friends. I feel like I’ve run a marathon.”

“You did a fine job up there today, Rhys. I’m proud of you.”

“I’m not.” She tugged at my finger again. “I’m not proud at all. All I feel is shame. Overwhelming shame. I can’t breathe for it. I think I’m going to suffocate.”

The Howards came over and pulled her away before I could flesh out an explanation. As they were thanking her for including them in the auction, a loud voice sounded behind me, and I wheeled back in time to see Taylor Dickel attempt to shake Tommy Smallwood’s hand. Smallwood slapped him away. “But Mr. Smallwood?” Dickel was saying. “Mr. Smallwood, will you think of me if ever you change your mind about the—”

“Leave me alone,” Smallwood muttered, and slapped at him again.

“I was only—”

“Leave me alone, Dickel. Do you hear? Leave me alone.”

“But I was—”

Smallwood knocked over chairs as he sidestepped Dickel on his way to the window. He stood staring out at the river below, then put his face in his hands and began to sob. His girlfriend remained seated, watching after him with a pretense of concern. I couldn’t presume to
understand what motivated Tommy Smallwood to do anything, but I thought I knew why he was crying. It had something to do with why the truly rich and the truly beautiful always seem unhappy, if not altogether miserable. When it’s all been given, and it’s all been had, what use is there in dreaming any more? Smallwood had his Asmore now. He might as well be dead.

“But I don’t understand,” Dickel complained, ostensibly to the woman. “He’s won it, the fool has won it. Why the damned hell is he acting as if he’s lost?”

Rhys ushered Dickel into the hall, nearly shoving him out when he tried to resist. “But he won, the bloody fool won…”

After he was gone Rhys joined Smallwood at the window. He nodded when she spoke to him and after a time followed her into the neighboring suite. Having come to feel halfway sorry for his date, I was tempted to sit with the woman and give her company. But on second thought she seemed fine. Maybe Smallwood was paying her by the hour, it occurred to me.

The Howards left, with the bidder whose name I never got fast behind them. Then Sally began to roll Lowenstein toward the door. “Excellent job, sir,” I whispered as they rattled by.

“Excellent, was it?” said Lowenstein.

He looked up at me and I gave him a wink.

“Did you see that, Sally? Mr. Charbonnet just winked at me because I was excellent. I was excellent,” he went on, “although I have no idea what for.”

I dropped to my haunches and checked around to make sure Smallwood and his girlfriend weren’t listening. “It’s called shill bidding, what you did. There’s no way you could afford to buy the painting and yet you drove up the price, presumably to fetch more for the consignor. It’s unethical, Mr. Lowenstein, not that I care. In fact, I was glad to see the bastard have to bleed a little more.”

“So I’m a shill, am I? And what does that make you? A
thief?
Yes, I think it does. If I’m a shill, then you’re a thief. Let’s go, Sally.”

“You can never be nice, can you?” I shot a look at Sally and she
stepped back as if to reject any possibility of being brought into the conversation. “There’s something I feel compelled to tell you, sir. I hope you’ll forgive the sentiment, but I admire you for being here today. I can’t imagine how difficult it must’ve been.”

“How’s that?” He cupped a hand around the back of his ear.

“I said, it must have been very difficult for you, not to say painful, to sit back here this afternoon and watch your friend’s painting being sold. I admire your courage. It came to me during the auction that you’ve come full circle with the mural. It must feel like completing a journey.”

He stared at me. “What did I tell you about making assumptions as far as I’m concerned? Don’t do it, Mr. Charbonnet. You make a mistake.”

He swiveled in his seat and patted Sally’s hand where she gripped the chair. She pushed him out into the hall.

To complete the deal, Tommy Smallwood wired his payment to an offshore bank account in George Town, Grand Cayman, an island in the West Indies south of Cuba. I was sitting in Rhys’s office when a representative with the bank called and spoke to Joe Butler, confirming the deposit. I was also there when, moments later, after Joe had left the room, Rhys reached Smallwood on his cell phone and told him she would drop off the painting within the hour.

“Start over at the beginning,” I said, when she put the phone down. “I’m still not clear about some of the details.”

“Pay attention this time. You’re supposed to be such a great reporter.”

“I never claimed that.”

Only weeks before, Rhys said, she had dispatched Joe to Grand Cayman strictly for the purpose of exploring options that would allow her to conceal a large deposit from the U.S. government. After a few days Joe had called from his hotel room. “You wouldn’t believe this place,” he had said. “They’ve got a total of five, maybe six, traffic lights, and there’s all of twenty-five thousand people living here. But they have more than five hundred banks. I shit you not, boss. They got more banks than New Orleans has daiquiri stores and strip joints put together.”

Later in the conversation Joe had said, “So what you do, you wire the money to this account, okay? And then the bank does two things. First, it gives you Visa platinum cards with basically unlimited credit lines and lets you access the money using these cards. The bank doesn’t inform the IRS that you own the account or that it even exists. The second thing it does, you ever hear of a Dutch corporation? Well, basically, that lets you secretly borrow mortgage funds from the money you deposit. In other words, this Dutch corporation lets you withdraw whatever you want but makes it look like you’re actually
borrowing
the money. You get caught,” Joe had told her, “and that’s our ass. Tax evasion, wire fraud. They’ll fine us, throw us in jail, make us suck our thumbs and say we’re sorry over and over for a very long time. But I don’t think we will get caught.” When Rhys didn’t say anything, Joe Butler had added, “Not any more than I think Tommy Smallwood will catch us.”

I squinted at her now across the piles of paper on the desk. “Repeat that last part again, would you, please?”

“He said the U.S. government wouldn’t catch us any more than Tommy Smallwood would catch us.”

“I thought that’s what you said. Now what do you mean?”

She switched on the episcope, and even before she projected the first image on the wall I felt myself sliding back in my chair, anticipating her next revelation. An image of the mural came up. She gave me time to look at it. She then removed the photo from under the
projector and replaced it with a second photo. What appeared to be the same image flashed against the screen.

“There’s no way I could let that evil sonofabitch have it,” she said.

“So you sold him a fake?”

“I sold him a copy.”

“Which one was at the hotel? Was it the real Asmore or the copy?”

“Both,” she said. “The one Hairy Mary and the others inspected at the preview was the original. I switched them out after you and I had dinner in the room. That meant coming back here to the studio in the U-Haul and picking up Joe and the copy. We didn’t finish getting everything in place until almost five o’clock in the morning. That’s one reason why I was so tired yesterday. When I finally brought the hammer down I thought I’d collapse from exhaustion.”

“Was it Joe who made the copy?”

“Yes, it was. For some reason that’s beyond me Joe has the ability to get inside Levette’s head. It’s uncanny. It’s as though he gets into character, say, as an actor would, and the part he’s playing is Asmore. For the weeks when he was painting the copy he insisted I call him ‘Levette.’ I told him to let me know if ever he had a sudden urge to jump from a bridge.”

“Funny, Rhys.”

“No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t funny at all. But I’ve been going on fumes for weeks. Both of us have. We used an old canvas, circa 1940, that we pulled out of a restaurant that had closed in Mid-City. Joe stripped it, then primed it with gesso. Next we made a tracing to work from. We used slides and a projector and the episcope to get the color and the brushstrokes right and all the subtle variations. If Hairy Mary happens to black-light the copy, she’ll see the same areas of retouch fluoresce that she saw on the original. Making the copy was time-consuming but a lot easier than you might think—easy for a professional conservator. The best fakes in the history of art were made by painting restorers.”

“So if it’s the copy that’s waiting outside in the U-Haul, where’s the original?”

“You’ll have the answer soon enough. Better yet, I’ll show you. Why don’t you drive with me to Prytania Street? I’m sure Tommy Smallwood would love nothing more than an opportunity to collapse in your arms again.”