Beggars Banquet

Herbert in Motion

My choices that day were twofold: kill myself before or after the Prime Minister’s cocktail party? And if after, should I wear my Armani to the party, or the more sober YSL with the chalk stripe?

The invitation was gilt-edged, too big for the inside pocket of my workaday suit. Drinks and canapés, six p.m. till seven. A minion had telephoned to confirm my attendance, and to brief me on protocol. That had been two days ago. He’d explained that among the guests would be an American visiting London, a certain Joseph Hefferwhite. While not quite spelling it out – they never do, do they? – the minion was explaining why I’d been invited, and what my role on the night might be.

‘Joe Hefferwhite,’ I managed to say, clutching the receiver like it was so much straw.

‘I believe you share an interest in modern art,’ the minion continued.

‘We share an interest.’

He misunderstood my tone and laughed. ‘Sorry, “share an interest” was a bit weak, wasn’t it? My apologies.’

He was apologising because art is no mere interest of mine. Art was – is – my whole life. During the rest of our short and one-sided conversation, I stared ahead as though at some startling new design, trying to understand and explain, to make it all right with myself, attempting to wring out each nuance and stroke, each variant and chosen shape or length of line. And in the end there was… nothing. No substance, no revelation; just the bland reality of my situation and the simple framing device of suicide.

And the damnation was, it had been the perfect crime.

A dinner party ten years before. It was in Chelsea, deep in the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s vision of England. There were dissenters at the table – only a couple, and they could afford their little grumble: it wasn’t going to make Margaret Hilda disappear, and their own trappings were safe: the warehouse conversion in Docklands, the BMW, the Cristal champagne and black truffles.

Trappings: the word seems so much more resonant now.

So there we were. The wine had relaxed us, we were all smiling with inner and self-satisfied contentment (and wasn’t that the dream, after all?), and I felt just as at home as any of them. I knew I was there as the Delegate of Culture. Among the merchant bankers and media figures, political jobsworths and ‘somethings’ (and dear God, there was an estate agent there too, if memory serves – that fad didn’t last long), I was there to reassure them that they were composed of something more lasting and nourishing than mere money, that they had some meaning in the wider scheme. I was there as curator to their sensibilities.

In truth, I was and am a Senior Curator at the Tate Gallery, with special interest in twentieth-century North American art (by which I mean paintings: I’m no great enthusiast of modern sculpture, yet less of more radical sideshows – performance art, video art, all that). The guests at the table that evening made the usual noises about artists whose names they couldn’t recall but who did ‘green things’ or ‘you know, that horse and the shadow and everything’. One foolhardy soul (was it the estate agent?) digressed on his fondness for certain wildlife paintings, and trumpeted the news that his wife had once bought a print from Christie’s Contemporary Art.

When another guest begged me to allow that my job was ‘on the cushy side’, I placed knife and fork slowly on plate and did my spiel. I had it down to a fine art – allow the pun, please – and talked fluently about the difficulties my position posed, about the appraisal of trends and talents, the search for major new works and their acquisition.

‘Imagine’, I said, ‘that you are about to spend half a million pounds on a painting. In so doing, you will elevate the status of the artist, turn him or her into a rich and sought-after talent. They may disappoint you thereafter and fail to paint anything else of interest, in which case the resale value of the work will be negligible, and your own reputation will have been tarnished – perhaps even more than tarnished. Every day, every time you are asked for your opinion, your reputation is on the line. Meanwhile, you must propose exhibitions, must plan them – which often means transporting works from all around the world – and must spend your budget wisely.’

‘You mean like, do I buy four paintings at half a mil each, or push the pedal to the floor with one big buy at two mil?’

I allowed my questioner a smile. ‘In crude economic terms, yes.’

‘Do you get to take pictures home?’ our hostess asked.

‘Some works – a few – are loaned out,’ I conceded. ‘But not to staff.’

‘Then to whom?’

‘People in prominence, benefactors, that sort of person.’

‘All that money,’ the Docklands woman said, shaking her head, ‘for a bit of paint and canvas. It almost seems like a crime when there are homeless on the streets.’

‘Disgraceful,’ someone else said. ‘Can’t walk along the Embankment without stumbling over them.’

At which point our hostess stumbled into the silence to reveal that she had a surprise. ‘We’ll take coffee and brandy in the morning room, during which you’ll be invited to take part in a murder.’

She didn’t mean it, of course, though more than one pair of eyes strayed to the Docklanders, more in hope than expectation. What she meant was that we’d be participating in a parlour game. There had been a murder (her unsmiling husband the cajoled corpse, miraculously revivified whenever another snifter of brandy was offered), and we were to look for clues in the room. We duly searched, somewhat in the manner of children who wish to please their elders. With half a dozen clues gathered, the Docklands woman surprised us all by deducing that our hostess had committed the crime – as indeed she had.

We collapsed thankfully on to the sofas and had our glasses refilled, after which the conversation came around to crime – real and imagined. It was now that the host became animated for the first time that night. He was a collector of whodunnits and fancied himself an expert.

‘The perfect crime,’ he told us, ‘as everyone knows, is one where no crime has been committed.’

‘But then there is no crime,’ his wife declared.

‘Precisely,’ he said. ‘No crime… and yet a crime. If the body’s never found, damned hard to convict anyone. Or if something’s stolen, but never noticed. See what I’m getting at?’

I did, of course, and perhaps you do, too.

The Tate, like every other gallery I can think of, has considerably less wall-space than it has works in its collection. These days, we do not like to cram our paintings together (though when well done, the effect can be breathtaking). One large canvas may have a whole wall to iself, and praise be that Bacon’s triptychs did not start a revolution, or there’d be precious little work on display in our galleries of modern art. For every display of gigantism, it is blessed relief, is it not, to turn to a miniaturist? Not that there are many miniatures in the Tate’s storerooms. I was there with an acquaintance of mine, the dealer Gregory Jance.

Jance worked out of Zurich for years, for no other reason, according to interviews, than that ‘they couldn’t touch me there’. There had always been rumours about him, rumours which started to make sense when one attempted to balance his few premier-league sales (and therefore commissions) against his lavish lifestyle. These days, he had homes in Belgravia, Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and Moscow, as well as a sprawling compound on the outskirts of Zurich. The Moscow home seemed curious until one recalled stories of ikons smuggled out of the old Soviet Union and of art treasures taken from the Nazis, treasures which had ended up in the hands of Politburo chiefs desperate for such things as hard dollars and new passports.

Yes, if even half the tales were true, then Gregory Jance had sailed pretty close to the wind. I was counting on it.

‘What a waste,’ he said, as I gave him a short tour of the storerooms. The place was cool and hushed, except for the occasional click of the machines which monitored air temperature, light and humidity. On the walls of the Tate proper, paintings such as those we passed now would be pored over, passed by with reverence. Here, they were stacked one against the other, most shrouded in white sheeting like corpses or Hamlet’s ghost in some shoddy student production. Identifier tags hung from the sheets like so many items in a lost property office.

‘Such a waste,’ Jance sighed, with just a touch of melodrama. His dress sense did not lack drama either: crumpled cream linen suit, white brogues, screaming red shirt and white silk cravat. He shuffled along like an old man, running the rim of his panama hat through his fingers. It was a nice performance, but if I knew my man, then beneath it he was like bronze.

Our meeting – en principe – was to discuss his latest crop of ‘world-renowned artists’. Like most other gallery owners – those who act as agents for certain artists – Jance was keen to sell to the Tate, or to any other ‘national’ gallery. He wanted the price hike that came with it, along with the kudos. But mostly the price hike.

He had polaroids and slides with him. In my office, I placed the slides on a lightbox and took my magnifier to them. A pitiful array of semi-talent dulled my eyes and my senses. Huge graffiti-style whorls which had been ‘in’ the previous summer in New York (mainly, in my view, because the practitioners tended to die young). Some neo-cubist stuff by a Swiss artist whose previous work was familiar to me. He had been growing in stature, but this present direction seemed to me an alley with a brick wall at the end, and I told Jance as much. At least he had a nice sense of colour and juxtaposition. But there was worse to come: combine paintings which Rauschenberg could have constructed in kindergarten; some not very clever geometric paintings, too clearly based on Stella’s ‘Protractor’ series; and ‘found’ sculptures which looked like Nam June Paik on a very bad day.

Throughout, Jance was giving me his pitch, though without much enthusiasm. Where did he collect these people? (The unkind said he sought out the least popular exhibits at art school graduation shows.) More to the point, where did he sell them? I hadn’t heard of him making any impact at all as an agent. What money he made, he seemed to make by other means.

Finally, he lifted a handful of polaroids from his pocket. ‘My latest find,’ he confided. ‘Scottish. Great future.’

I looked through them. ‘How old?’

He shrugged. ‘Twenty-six, twenty-seven.’

I deducted five or six years and handed the photos back. ‘Gregory,’ I said, ‘she’s still at college. These are derivative – evidence she’s learning from those who have gone before – and stylised, such as students often produce. She has talent, and I like the humour, even if that too is borrowed from other Scottish artists.’

He seemed to be looking in vain for the humour in the photos.

‘Bruce McLean,’ I said helpfully, ‘Paolozzi, John Bellany’s fish. Look closely and you’ll see.’ I paused. ‘Bring her back in five or ten years, if she’s kept hard at it, if she’s matured, and if she has that nose for the difference between genius and sham…’

He pocketed the photos and gathered up his slides, his eyes glinting as though there might be some moisture there.

‘You’re a hard man,’ he told me.

‘But a fair one, I hope. And to prove it, let me buy you a drink.’

I didn’t put my proposition to him quite then, of course, not over coffee and sticky cakes in the Tate cafeteria. We met a few weeks later – casually as it were. We dined at a small place in a part of town neither of us frequented. I asked him about his young coterie of artists. They seemed, I said, quite skilled in impersonation.

‘Impersonation?’

‘They have studied the greats,’ I explained, ‘and can reproduce them with a fair degree of skill.’

‘Reproduce them,’ he echoed quietly.

‘Reproduce them,’ I said. ‘I mean, the influences are there.’ I paused. ‘I’m not saying they copy.’

‘No, not that.’ Jance looked up from his untouched food. ‘Are you coming to some point?’

I smiled. ‘A lot of paintings in the storerooms, Gregory. They so seldom see the light of day.’

‘Yes, pity, that. Such a waste.’

‘When people could be savouring them.’

He nodded, poured some wine for both of us. ‘I think I begin to see,’ he said. ‘I think I begin to see.’

That was the start of our little enterprise. You know what it was, of course. You have a keen mind. You are shrewd and discerning. Perhaps you pride yourself on these things, on always being one step ahead, on knowing things before those around you have perceived them. Perhaps you, too, think yourself capable of the perfect crime, a crime where there is no crime.

There was no crime, because nothing was missing from the quarterly inventory. First, I would photograph the work. Indeed, on a couple of occasions, I even took one of Jance’s young artists down to the storeroom and showed her the painting she’d be copying. She’d been chosen because she had studied the minimalists, and this was to be a minimalist commission.

Minimalism, interestingly, proved the most difficult style to reproduce faithfully. In a busy picture, there’s so much to look at that one can miss a wrong shade or the fingers of a hand which have failed to curl to the right degree. But with a couple of black lines and some pink waves… well, fakes were easier to spot. So it was that Jance’s artist saw the work she was to replicate face to face. Then we did the measurements, took the polaroids, and she drew some preliminary sketches. Jance was in charge of finding the right quality of canvas, the correct frame. My job was to remove the real canvas, smuggle it from the gallery, and replace it with the copy, reframing the finished work afterwards.

We were judicious, Jance and I. We chose our works with care. One or two a year – we never got greedy. The choice would depend on a combination of factors. We didn’t want artists who were too well known, but we wanted them dead if possible. (I had a fear of an artist coming to inspect his work at the Tate and finding a copy instead.) There had to be a buyer – a private collector, who would keep the work private. We couldn’t have a painting being loaned to some collection or exhibition when it was supposed to be safely tucked away in the vaults of the Tate. Thankfully, as I’d expected, Jance seemed to know his market. We never had any problems on that score. But there was another factor. Every now and then, there would be requests from exhibitions for the loan of a painting – one we’d copied. But as curator, I would find reasons why the work in question had to remain at the Tate, and might offer, by way of consolation, some other work instead.

Then there was the matter of rotation. Now and again – as had to be the case, or suspicion might grow – one of the copies would have to grace the walls of the gallery proper. Those were worrying times, and I was careful to position the works in the least flattering, most shadowy locations, usually with a much more interesting picture nearby, to lure the spectator away. I would watch the browsers. Once or twice, an art student would come along and sketch the copied work. No one ever showed a moment’s doubt, and my confidence grew.

But then… then…

We had loaned works out before, of course – I’d told the dinner party as much. This or that cabinet minister might want something for the office, something to impress visitors. There would be discussions about a suitable work. It was the same with particular benefactors. They could be loaned a painting for weeks or even months. But I was always careful to steer prospective borrowers away from the twenty or so copies. It wasn’t as though there was any lack of choice: for each copy, there were fifty other paintings they could have. The odds, as Jance had assured me more than once, were distinctly in our favour.

Until the day the Prime Minister came to call.

This is a man who knows as much about art as I do about home brewing. There is almost a glee about his studious ignorance – and not merely of art. But he was walking around the Tate, for all the world like a dowager around a department store, and not seeing what he wanted.

‘Voore,’ he said at last. I thought I’d misheard him. ‘Ronny Voore. I thought you had a couple.’

My eyes took in his entourage, not one of whom would know a Ronny Voore if it blackballed them at the Garrick. But my superior was there, nodding slightly, so I nodded with him.

‘They’re not out at the moment,’ I told the PM.

‘You mean they’re in?’ He smiled, provoking a few fawning laughs.

‘In storage,’ I explained, trying out my own smile.

‘I’d like one for Number Ten.’

I tried to form some argument – they were being cleaned, restored, loaned to Philadelphia – but my superior was nodding again. And after all, what did the PM know about art? Besides, only one of our Voores was a fake.

‘Certainly, Prime Minister. I’ll arrange for it to be sent over.’

‘Which one?’

I licked my lips. ‘Did you have one in mind?’

He considered, lips puckered. ‘Maybe I should just have a little look…’

Normally, there were no visitors to the storerooms. But that morning, there were a dozen of us posed in front of Shrew Reclining and Herbert in Motion. Voore was very good with titles. I’ll swear, if you look at them long enough, you really can see – beyond the gobbets of oil, the pasted-on photographs and cinema stubs, the splash of emulsion and explosion of colour – the figures of a large murine creature and a man running.

The Prime Minister gazed at them in something short of thrall. ‘Is it “shrew” as in Shakespeare?’

‘No, sir, I think it’s the rodent.’

He thought about this. ‘Vibrant colours,’ he decided.

‘Extraordinary,’ my superior agreed.

‘One can’t help feeling the influence of pop art,’ one of the minions drawled. I managed not to choke: it was like saying one could see in Beryl Cook the influence of Picasso.

The PM turned to the senior minion. ‘I don’t know, Charles. What do you think?’

‘The shrew, I think.’

My heart leapt. The Prime Minister nodded, then pointed to Herbert in Motion. ‘That one, I think.’

Charles looked put out, while those around him tried to hide smiles. It was a calculated put-down, a piece of politics on the PM’s part. Politics had decided.

A fake Ronny Voore would grace the walls of Number 10 Downing Street.

I supervised the packing and transportation. It was a busy week for me: I was negotiating the loan of several Rothkos for an exhibition of early works. Faxes and insurance appraisals were flying. American institutions were very touchy about lending stuff. I’d had to promise a Braque to one museum – and for three months at that – in exchange for one of Rothko’s less inspired creations. Anyway, despite headaches, when the Voore went to its new home, I went with it.

I’d discussed the loan with Jance. He’d told me to switch the copy for some other painting, persisting that ‘no one would know’.

‘He’ll know,’ I’d said. ‘He wanted a Voore. He knew what he wanted.’

‘But why?’

Good question, and I’d yet to find the answer. I’d hoped for a first-floor landing or some nook or cranny out of the general view, but the staff seemed to know exactly where the painting was to hang – something else had been removed so that it could take pride of place in the dining-room. (Or one of the dining-rooms, I couldn’t be sure how many there were. I’d thought I’d be entering a house, but Number 10 was a warren, a veritable Tardis, with more passageways and offices than I could count.)

I was asked if I wanted a tour of the premises, so as to view the other works of art, but by that time my head really did ache, and I decided to walk back to the Tate, making it as far as Millbank before I had to rest beside the river, staring down at its sludgy flow. The question had yet to be answered: why did the PM want a Ronny Voore? Who in their right mind wanted a Ronny Voore these days?

The answer, of course, came with the telephone call.

Joe Hefferwhite was an important man. He had been a senator at one time. He was now regarded as a ‘senior statesman’, and the American President sent him on the occasional high-profile, high-publicity spot of troubleshooting and conscience-salving. At one point in his life, he’d been mooted for president himself, but of course his personal history had counted against him. In younger days, Hefferwhite had been a bohemian. He’d spent time in Paris, trying to be a poet. He’d walked a railway line with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. Then he’d come into enough money to buy his way into politics, and had prospered there.

I knew a bit about him from some background reading I’d done in the recent past. Not that I’d been interested in Joseph Hefferwhite… but I’d been very interested in Ronny Voore.

The two men had met at Stanford initially, then later on had met again in Paris. They’d kept in touch thereafter, drifting apart only after ‘Heff ’ had decided on a political career. There had been arguments about the hippie culture, dropping out, Vietnam, radical chic – the usual sixties US issues. Then in 1974 Ronny Voore had laid down on a fresh white canvas, stuck a gun in his mouth, and gifted the world his final work. His reputation, which had vacillated in life, had been given a boost by the manner of his suicide. I wondered if I could make the same dramatic exit. But no, I was not the dramatic type. I foresaw sleeping pills and a bottle of decent brandy.

After the party.

I was wearing my green Armani, hoping it would disguise the condemned look in my eyes. Joe Hefferwhite had known Voore, had seen his style and working practice at first hand. That was why the PM had wanted a Voore: to impress the American. Or perhaps to honour his presence in some way. A political move, as far from aesthetics as one could wander. The situation was not without irony: a man with no artistic sensibility, a man who couldn’t tell his Warhol from his Whistler… this man was to be my downfall.

I hadn’t dared tell Jance. Let him find out for himself afterwards, once I’d made my exit. I’d left a letter. It was sealed, marked Personal, and addressed to my superior. I didn’t owe Gregory Jance anything, but hadn’t mentioned him in the letter. I hadn’t even listed the copied works – let them set other experts on them. It would be interesting to see if any other fakes had found their way into the permanent collection.

Only of course I wouldn’t be around for that.

Number 10 sparkled. Every surface was gleaming, and the place seemed nicely undersized for the scale of the event. The PM moved amongst his guests, dispensing a word here and there, guided by the man he’d called Charles. Charles would whisper a brief to the PM as they approached a group, so the PM would know who was who and how to treat them. I was way down the list apparently, standing on my own (though a minion had attempted to engage me in conversation: it seemed a rule that no guest was to be allowed solitude), pretending to examine a work by someone eighteenth-century and Flemish – not my sort of thing at all.

The PM shook my hand. ‘I’ve someone I’d like you to meet,’ he said, looking back over his shoulder to where Joe Hefferwhite was standing, rocking back on his heels as he told some apparently hilarious story to two grinning civil servants who had doubtless been given their doting orders.

‘Joseph Hefferwhite,’ the PM said.

As if I didn’t know; as if I hadn’t been avoiding the man for the past twenty-eight minutes. I knew I couldn’t leave – would be reminded of that should I try – until the PM had said hello. It was a question of protocol. This was all that had kept me from going. But now I was determined to escape. The PM, however, had other plans. He waved to Joe Hefferwhite like they were old friends, and Hefferwhite broke short his story – not noticing the relief on his listeners’ faces – and swaggered towards us. The PM was leading me by the shoulder – gently, though it seemed to me that his grip burned – over towards where the Voore hung. A table separated us from it, but it was an occasional table, and we weren’t too far from the canvas. Serving staff moved around with salvers of canapés and bottles of fizz, and I took a refill as Hefferwhite approached.

‘Joe, this is our man from the Tate.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Hefferwhite said, pumping my free hand. He winked at the PM. ‘Don’t think I hadn’t noticed the painting. It’s a nice touch.’

‘We have to make our guests feel welcome. The Tate has another Voore, you know.’

‘Is that so?’

Charles was whispering in the PM’s ear. ‘Sorry, have to go,’ the PM said. ‘I’ll leave you two to it then.’ And with a smile he was gone, drifting towards his next encounter.

Joe Hefferwhite smiled at me. He was in his seventies, but extraordinarily well preserved, with thick dark hair that could have been a weave or a transplant. I wondered if anyone had ever mentioned to him his resemblance to Blake Carrington…

He leaned towards me. ‘This place bugged?’

I blinked, decided I’d heard him correctly, and said I wouldn’t know.

‘Well, hell, doesn’t matter to me if it is. Listen,’ he nodded towards the painting, ‘that is some kind of sick joke, don’t you think?’

I swallowed. ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

Hefferwhite took my arm and led me around the table, so we were directly in front of the painting. ‘Ronny was my friend. He blew his brains out. Your Prime Minister thinks I want to be reminded of that? I think this is supposed to tell me something.’

‘What?’

‘I’m not sure. It’ll take some thinking. You British are devious bastards.’

‘I feel I should object to that.’

Hefferwhite ignored me. ‘Ronny painted the first version of Herbert in Paris, ’forty-nine or ’fifty.’ He frowned. ‘Must’ve been ’fifty. Know who Herbert was?’ He was studying the painting now. At first, his eyes flicked over it. Then he stared a little harder, picking out that section and this, concentrating.

‘Who?’ The champagne flute shook in my hand. Death, I thought, would come as some relief. And not a moment too soon.

‘Some guy we shared rooms with, never knew his second name. He said second names were shackles. Not like Malcolm X and all that, Herbert was white, nicely brought-up. Wanted to study Sartre, wanted to write plays and films and I don’t know what. Jesus, I’ve often wondered what happened to him. I know Ronny did, too.’ He sniffed, lifted a canapé from a passing tray and shoved it into his mouth. ‘Anyway,’ he said through the crumbs, ‘Herbert – he didn’t like us calling him Herb – he used to go out running. Healthy body, healthy mind, that was his creed. He’d go out before dawn, usually just as we were going to bed. Always wanted us to go with him, said we’d see the world differently after a run.’ He smiled at the memory, looked at the painting again. ‘That’s him running along the Seine, only the river’s filled with philosophers and their books, all drowning.’

He kept looking at the painting, and I could feel the memories welling in him. I let him look. I wanted him to look. It was more his painting than anyone’s. I could see that now. I knew I should say something… like, ‘that’s very interesting’, or ‘that explains so much’. But I didn’t. I stared at the painting, too, and it was as though we were alone in that crowded, noisy room. We might have been on a desert island, or in a time machine. I saw Herbert running, saw his hunger. I saw his passion for questions and the seeking out of answers. I saw why philosophers always failed, and why they went on trying despite the fact. I saw the whole bloody story. And the colours: they were elemental, but they were of the city, too. They were Paris, not long after the war, the recuperating city. Blood and sweat and the simple, feral need to go on living.

To go on living.

My eyes were filling with water. I was about to say something crass, something like ‘thank you’, but Hefferwhite beat me to it, leaned towards me so his voice could drop to a whisper.

‘It’s a hell of a fake.’

And with that, and a pat on my shoulder, he drifted back into the party.

‘I could have died,’ I told Jance. It was straight afterwards. I was still wearing the Armani, pacing the floor of my flat. It’s not much – third floor, two bedrooms, Maida Vale – but I was happy to see it. I could hardly get the tears out of my eyes. The telephone was in my hand… I just had to tell some body, and who could I tell but Jance?

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ve never asked about the client.’

‘I didn’t want to know. Jance, I swear to God, I nearly died.’

He chuckled, not really understanding. He was in Zurich, sounded further away still. ‘I knew Joe already had a couple of Voores,’ he said. ‘He’s got some other stuff too – but he doesn’t broadcast the fact. That’s why he was perfect for Herbert in Motion.’

‘But he was talking about not wanting to be reminded of the suicide.’

‘He was talking about why the painting was there.’

‘He thought it must be a message.’

Jance sighed. ‘Politics. Who understands politics?’

I sighed with him. ‘I can’t do this any more.’

‘Don’t blame you. I never understood why you started in the first place.’

‘Let’s say I lost faith.’

‘Me, I never had much to start with. Listen, you haven’t told anyone else?’

‘Who would I tell?’ My mouth dropped open. ‘But I left a note.’

‘A note?’

‘For my boss.’

‘Might I suggest you go retrieve it?’

Beginning to tremble all over again, I went out in search of a taxi.

The night security people knew who I was, and let me into the building. I’d worked there before at night – it was the only time I could strip and replace the canvases.

‘Busy tonight, eh?’ the guard said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Busy tonight,’ he repeated. ‘Your boss is already in.’

‘When did he arrive?’

‘Not five minutes ago. He was running.’

‘Running?’

‘Said he needed a pee.’

I ran too, ran as fast as I could through the galleries and towards the offices, the paintings a blur either side of me. Running like Herbert, I thought. There was a light in my superior’s office, and the door was ajar. But the room itself was empty. I walked to the desk and saw my note there, still in its sealed envelope. I picked it up and stuffed it into my jacket, just as my superior came into the room.

‘Oh, good man,’ he said, rubbing his hands to dry them. ‘You got the message.’

‘Yes,’ I said, trying to still my breathing. Message: I hadn’t checked my machine.

‘Thought if we did a couple of evenings it would sort out the Rothko.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘No need to be so formal though.’

I stared at him.

‘The suit,’ he said.

‘Drinks at Number Ten,’ I explained.

‘How did it go?’

‘Fine.’

‘PM happy with his Voore?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘You know he only wanted it to impress some American? One of his aides told me.’

‘Joseph Hefferwhite,’ I said.

‘And was he impressed?’

‘I think so.’

‘Well, it keeps us sweet with the PM, and we all know who holds the purse-strings.’ My superior made himself comfortable in his chair and looked at his desk. ‘Where’s that envelope?’

‘What?’

‘There was an envelope here.’ He looked down at the floor.

I swallowed, dry-mouthed. ‘I’ve got it,’ I said. He looked startled, but I managed a smile. ‘It was from me, proposing we spend an evening or two on Rothko.’

My superior beamed. ‘Great minds, eh?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Sit down then, let’s get started.’ I pulled over a chair. ‘Can I let you into a secret? I detest Rothko.’

I smiled again. ‘I’m not too keen myself.’

‘Sometimes I think a student could do his stuff just as well, maybe even better.’

‘But then it wouldn’t be his, would it?’

‘Ah, there’s the rub.’

But I thought of the Voore fake, and Joe Hefferwhite’s story, and my own reactions to the painting – to what was, when all’s said and done, a copy – and I began to wonder…