The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

PROVENANCE by Robert Barnard

Leonid noticed the man when he was on his way to put a new label on a Manet picture on the third floor. The picture was due to be packed and taken away for exhibition in Lyons. The Hermitage, since the collapse of Communism, was readier to lend its treasures for special events such as the Lyons Manet show: sometimes they accepted loans in return, in lieu of payment, but mostly they insisted on payment, preferably in dollars. After all, they had more than enough pictures of their own.

The man Leonid noticed was dressed in a T-shirt and sneakers and was walking up the Grand Staircase, looking neither to left or right. The gilded curlicues decorating the walls, the gods on cloud nine on the ceiling, the sturdy grey pillars with thickly encrusted gilt at their feet went unregarded by him. Leonid had never seen, or never noticed, him before, but as he gained the second floor he showed no hesitation in setting off in the direction of the Large Hermitage. The Grand Staircase could rarely have had so summary a dismissal. The man acted as if he knew the palace too well to notice it, but Leonid felt sure he did not. He knew where he was going because he was well prepared. Leonid shook his head and went about his business.

A quarter of an hour later he descended from the French Impressionists and found himself among the Dutch paintings in the Large Hermitage. Perhaps curiosity about the man had something to do with his destination. Certainly he walked around without apparent goal until he spotted him in front of one of the Rembrandts which were the pride of the Hermitage collection, a jewel even among the palace’s three million items. Leonid stood back and watched. The man put his face close to the bilingual label under the picture, then moved on. It could have been a picture by a teenage art student for all he cared. The next picture he stopped at, by a lesser figure, was considered, evaluated, taken in. Then the man put his head down again close to the label. A second or two later he straightened, a satisfied expression on his face.

He took out a little notebook, then wrote something in it, checking what he wrote against the label under the picture.

When the man had moved out of sight, Leonid went over to the picture, though he knew the description by heart. It was “Spring Landscape” by Cuyp, and it had been acquired by the Hermitage from the Yusupov Collection in 1922.

Leonid was more than intrigued. He was professionally interested. When a Spanish touring group swarmed into the gallery, surrounding a harsh-voiced woman holding a little banner aloft, he joined them as they went to one of the great Rembrandts. Leonid’s quarry had been standing in front of it, but now he moved smartly aside to one of the small pictures hung beside it. Leonid became part of the Spanish group and managed to get the place beside the man with the notebook. In that little book there was a list, ending with the landscape by Cuyp, but headed by two intriguing entries. Leonid saw:

Renoir: Portrait of Mme. Bercy. Acquired from the Spaskov Collection, 1921.

Picasso: Young Girl With Parasol. Acquired from the Berisov-Vernet Collection, 1924.

So he had already done the twenty or thirty rooms on the top floor devoted to the French Impressionists and the moderns. Why had they provided him with so few entries for his notebook?

A possible answer floated into Leonid’s mind, and his heart sank.

He turned his attention to the Rembrandt now being described by the Spanish-speaking guide. It was a painting imprinted on his heart and brain down to the last casual brush-stroke. He tried to estimate the guide’s expertise by the number of words he recognised: Amsterdam, Franz Hals, Saskia, National Gallery. Leonid had no foreign language beyond a rather halting English. When the Spanish group moved on to the next preselected high spot the man he was interested in was gone. Leonid went down the central aisle of the Dutch galleries, looking in every alcove, but the man was nowhere to be seen.

Leonid was troubled. Life had been so easy in the later years of Communist rule, when he had first come to work at the Hermitage. Then he had had a clearly defined specialist area (preservation) in which he worked. He was not thanked if he let his interest stray to any other area, where he would only be trespassing on someone else’s special preserve.

Now it was all so different. True, his salary was now once again (Putin be praised!) paid regularly, but so much more was now expected of him. He was required to have an interest in the whole spectrum of the gallery’s possessions and activities-conservation, display, inter-gallery loans, the education programme, the shop and other commercial enterprises, PR… It was all very bewildering. They even had staff meetings, which ranged over these and myriad other topics. It was possible to make an awful fool of oneself at these meetings, and though Leonid was not aware that he had done that, he did feel he had not shone. How could he shine? He was the product of a different age. How could he talk confidently about the commercial exploitability of a Cuyp landscape or Gauguin’s South Sea Island girls?

On his way back to his office on the ground floor he struck lucky. He was just passing the main cafeteria when he heard an American voice and, turning, he saw the object of his interest. He was standing at the coffee counter expostulating with the woman behind it.

“Chocolate! CHOCOLATE! I always have chocolate with a cappuccino.”

The woman, one of Leonid’s own generation, shrugged. Then, an idea striking her, she grabbed a small bar of chocolate from the display case, slapped it down on the counter, and held out her hand for the money.

Leonid slipped ahead of the tourists, nodded to the woman, and was given his usual minute but powerful coffee.

“You mind if I sit here?” he asked his prey, sitting alone at a table, his red T-shirt, Leonid now saw, bearing the legend KANSAS – WHAT A STATE WE’RE IN! The slogan puzzled Leonid. It seemed to have two meanings. Was it a Western-style joke? The man grunted at him and looked disgustedly at his cup.

“Freakin’ natives,” he muttered. “Wouldn’t know a cappuccino from a milkshake.”

“We like our coffee very strong, and just a little,” said Leonid apologetically. The man seemed surprised to encounter a Russian in Russia. Then an idea seemed to strike him.

“Waterworks problem?” he asked.

“No. Is just how we like it,” said Leonid. The man grunted again. Leonid looked around the cafeteria.

“It’s getting crowded already,” he said in English. “With the tourist season starting. I don’t mean to offend. We in St Petersburg are very glad to see you.”

The man’s face twisted into something that was a sort of amusement.

“I’m no tourist. I’m here on business.”

“Oh really? Something in the art world?”

“No way. All that crap just passes me by. I’m a lawyer.”

Leonid’s heart sank.

“Oh really? I noticed you as I passed through the Rembrandt Gallery. You’re very thorough. That must be legal training.”

“I like to double-check everything. That’s not easy when half the labels on the pictures are in Russian.”

“That’s for the Russian visitors.”

“Well, it doesn’t help. How can I be sure that the English is a true translation?”

“The Russian is likely to be more accurate. It is a very subtle and precise language.” With a faint idea of directing the visitor to other attractions he went on: “We have a church in St Petersburg dedicated to St Cyril, who gave us the Cyrillic alphabet.”

“You should have thrown it back in his face,” said the man, biting into an iced bun. “You’re loaded down with a language no one but Balkan people can understand. I don’t get it at all. Some of the letters are the same as ours. Some of them seem the same but turn out to be something different. Some of them are printed backwards. And some of them are way off the beaten track, never known as letters elsewhere. St Cyril did you no favours.”

“Are you a linguist, then?”

“A linguist? What’s he when he’s at home? I told you, I’m a lawyer.”

“I thought in your spare time.”

“I don’t have spare time. I’m interested in the background of this collection, where the things came from, who owned them before.”

Leonid began to sweat.

“Why should you be interested in that?”

“Well, after ‘Where did it come from?’ I ask myself ‘Should it have come from there?’ Was it legally acquired, and legally lodged in the museum that holds it? Or was it a five-dime government seizing what it had no right to?”

Leonid said in a flat voice: “So you are interested in provenance?”

“Providence? No way. Never give it a thought. I’m interested in seeing justice done. Financial justice.”

“Provenance,” said Leonid, his voice still emotionless. “The history of the piece, who has owned it in the past, how it has passed from one person to another. As one hears the history of a house or a palace.”

“Right. Spot on. You’re on the ball. One of the few people in this godforsaken country who is.”

Fearing he was going to be the object of further attempts to spread international goodwill. Leonid downed his potent brew and – feeling rather daring – said, “Have a good day” and left the café.

But though he had left behind the brash American, the man stayed with him for the rest of the morning. He was interested in provenance, even if he didn’t understand the word. Interested in whence the Hermitage had acquired the pictures it displayed. Mostly that question was quite easily answered. They had been bought by Catherine the Great or her predecessors or successors on the Imperial throne. Or indeed by her Communist successors in the ’twenties, who had acquired many of the Impressionists or twentieth-century paintings in a straightforward manner, buying them in the international market.

Which was why there were few entries from that massive collection on the third floor. They had been disapproved of and hidden away in the decades of Soviet realism, but they had been bought in the early years of the Revolution, when experiment was respectable, and now they were hung in all their glory with their provenance neatly detailed on the label.

In fact, all the pictures had their provenances neatly detailed. Had that been a bad mistake? Because though the upper galleries had yielded meagre results for the American lawyer, he was getting much more food for thought from the Dutch rooms. The Russian aristocrats of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had not been in the vanguard of artistic progress: They had not bought the French Impressionists or Picasso – by and large they had probably thought them artistic frauds and impostors. Some Russians had collected them, though – specialists – and their pictures had been acquired, probably at knockdown prices, in the normal way.

The aristocrats, though, had preferred Dutch landscapes, Flemish portraits, church scenes, domestic vignettes. Also Spanish street scenes, English ladies in silks, Italian classical episodes. When the Yank (Leonid had lots of other words for Americans, and political correctness was a concept quite unknown in the new Russia) had finished with the Low Countries, fertile fields still lay ahead of him.

What had the foreign gangster said?

“A five-dime government seizing what it had no right to.”

And what he had been looking for, Leonid felt quite certain, was pictures acquired during the twenties from the estates of aristocrats – probably all in exile. People whose descendants were still around, most often in the U.S.A., and anxious to reclaim what they still regarded as theirs.

Leonid was a product of the Age of Brezhnev, whose first name had been given him. He was not sorry that Communism had collapsed, but he was quite pleased it had existed. Many good things had happened in those seventy years, he felt: some because of the system, some by circumventing or questioning the system. Since its fall, Leonid had noted all over Eastern Europe the old families coming back, claiming their ancestral homes and acres, their royal status. The King of Bulgaria had been given back his palaces, and then had magnanimously given one of them back to the Bulgarian people. And then had graciously consented to become their Prime Minister. It was a better world, the larger part of Leonid’s brain told him. But there was still a tiny part of it that told him that the world – his world – had gone mad.

What the imperialist gangster was doing, Leonid was quite sure, was identifying pictures that had been confiscated from the old aristocratic families in the early years of Bolshevik rule, so that they could claim them back in a court of law or receive their value today. Millions and millions of dollars! Billions of roubles! The idea was fantastic, repulsive! These pictures belonged to the Russian people.

He began once again prowling around his art gallery. He had no doubt it was the greatest in the world. He looked at his favourites, and at many pictures he had hardly noticed before but now felt he loved, because they were threatened.

What was to be done? Change the labels, for a start. There was no reason why a gallery should trumpet how its treasures had been acquired. But his heart sank. Even in brave new Russia everything took time.

Decisions were made, then passed up the hierarchy before they could be acted upon. Relabelling the collection was no more than a cosmetic change, but it would take months. No, years.

“Not now, I’m busy,” he said when, his office attained, his secretary had thrust letters, requisitions, permits to sign into his hands.

But she noticed before five minutes were out that “busy” meant that he was thinking. He sat, slumped forward, his head in his hands.

He had had no impression from their talk that this man was part of a team, or a larger enterprise. On the contrary, aside from his knowledge of the layout of the Hermitage, he seemed to have come poorly prepared. A familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet would surely have been a sensible piece of preparation, and so would a broad conspectus as to how the collection had been amassed over the centuries. This man seemed to be learning on his feet, coming from a zero position.

A maverick, then. Getting together a file of pictures that could have been confiscated in the early days of the Revolution from the estates of prominent noblemen no longer resident in their native country. Possibly his preparation had been to discover which of the main important families who escaped had descendants living in the States – men and women who could be approached with a view to representing them in a lawsuit. Leonid had heard of the expression “ambulance chaser” for rapacious lawyers eager to profit from accidents. The only stretchers involved in this kind of profiteering were the ones on which the canvases were once prepared. This was a piece of speculative moneymaking of the most blatant kind, and it threatened the collections of all the most important galleries in Eastern Europe.

Time. That was what was needed. Time. Time to prepare for the threat. To prepare in minor ways, like labels which said nothing about the provenance of the paintings. But, more important, preparing government for the threat, perhaps so it could pass special legislation, retrospective legislation, legalising the state’s takeover of the property of émigré nobles decades before, and giving it democratic respectability.

He thought of how he would make these suggestions at next week’s staff meeting, and what a furore his revelations about the threat to the collection would make.

Time… A maverick speculator working on his own.

He got up from his desk and, brushing aside his secretary, again went back into the body of the museum.

So many people. Crowds milling to and fro, almost like a revolution in the making. A people’s uprising, an assertion of ownership in the great artworks of all countries and centuries that had found their home in the Hermitage. He wandered around the ground floor – the shops, the cafeteria, the children’s assembly area, the cloakrooms. A city in itself.

And there he was again.

Walking purposefully towards the cafe again, but five minutes away from it, potbelly thrust forward, the legend KANSAS – WHAT A STATE WE’RE IN blazoned across the chest of his red T-shirt. His eyes were staring from left to right. Looking for somebody? An accomplice?

No, looking for a lavatory. Suddenly he swerved aside and went into the Gentleman’s just outside Room 99.

Leonid waited, loosening his belt – the only weapon he had. Then he went into the small convenience and bolted the door, as the cleaner always did when she was at work inside. Then he disappeared into one of the cubicles.

The Yank was into serious business. Eventually, after sounds that made Leonid feel quite queasy, paper was torn, a flush was pulled, a door unlocked, and The Threat was out into the main part of the lavatory and running water into the basin. Leonid went out.

“Hi! You’re the guy I was talking to in the cafe, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Hey, I got an idea after you left. You’re one of the gang – guys, I mean, who run this place, aren’t you?”

His hands were all soapy, and he put his head down towards the water – Leonid noticed for the first time how nasty he found the little moustache, reminiscent of the last great threat to the Hermitage collection in 1941 – and washed his fat cheeks.

“Er – yes, I am.”

“Seems to me we could be useful to each other. What I need is information, background, maybe classified stuff. I could pay well – in dollars, of course. Always in dollars.”

He’d at least learnt something about the new Russia, Leonid thought.

“So what do you say? Mutually advantageous, that’s what it would be. Is it a deal?”

He was tugging down the paper towel. Leonid slipped his belt from round his waist, quickly slipped it around the man’s neck, and tightened it around his throat.

“No,” he said. “No, I won’t. No.”

So much time it took! And so much strength. The capitalist pirate at least made a struggle of it, his face going first red and then purple, his eyes popping, his wet soapy hands flailing. At last, when Leonid’s own face was red with the struggle, the man started to fail, the movements became feebler, and finally his body slumped down onto the tiled floor. For a minute or two Leonid held the belt tight around his neck, resisting the temptation to pull up his trousers, which were around his ankles. At last he straightened up, and secured them with his belt.

He looked around him. The Threat’s cubicle, smelly and dirty, was the place to put him. He picked him up by his shoulders, dragged him in, and shut the door. He couldn’t lock it, but he pushed the feet well inside. Then he went and looked at himself in the mirror. Quite presentable, really. Quite normal. He slipped back the bolt on the door and went out into the thronged, pulsating gallery.

He was too excited to go straight back to the office. He must go around the great artistic domain that he had saved. He walked with his head high, his heart throbbing with pride. He was on cloud nine with the gods on the Grand Staircase, and he knew it. Never had he been so prompt in decision, so effective in action. He felt like God himself, almost like the Museum Director.

So taken up was he with his new status as the man who saved the Hermitage that he did not notice in the Spanish Gallery the man with the off-white T-shirt with the barely legible slogan which read KERRY TO WIN. Or the man in the French seventeenth-century gallery in the green T-shirt with the slogan which read HANG NELSON MANDELA. Both were peering closely at the labels under the pictures, and both were clutching small notebooks and ballpoint pens. Both were purposeful, efficient, and smiling.