After lunch, Randon announced that it was time to go inside. The visitors followed him. Nat lagged behind. He had hoped that being on the bigger boat would somewhat attenuate the symptoms of nausea, but alas, that didn’t seem to be the case. Lunch had not helped. But he couldn’t stay on deck until the feelings passed, so he took a deep breath and followed the others into the former smoking room, now Randon’s office, which thankfully had the modern addition of air-conditioning.
“I think it’s time for a tour,” said Randon.
A tour of The Grand Cru was a real history lesson. Every room had a story to tell.
The boat had been built in the late 1920s for an American steel millionaire called Arthur Crew, who had also been, as would delight Mathieu Randon more than fifty years on, a big fan of fine wines and quite the Francophile. When The Grand Cru was finished, she was the largest yacht in the world at that time. A veritable floating mansion house at almost two hundred seventy feet long, with staterooms for twenty guests who were waited on by sixty crew. Her state-of-the-art steam engines could propel her at a speed of fifteen knots over a range of seven thousand miles.
In the heady days between the wars, The Grand Cru had seen high jinks galore as the most popular party venue on the seven seas. Her owner had been a very well-connected man, who’d invested some of his great wealth in film. As a result, all the big movie stars of the day had walked up the gangplank and danced on the deck beneath the stars.
The party came to an abrupt end, however, at the start of the Second World War. Like many other private yachts, The Grand Cru was requisitioned by the United States Navy. She was painted in camouflage colors and became SS Regardless.
After the war came many years of ignominy, several of which she spent in dry dock. Until the 1980s when Mathieu Randon bought her on a whim. Her name marked her out as his, he told his bankers. He had to have her.
Randon restored the boat to its original glory, updated the engine room, and made it the envy of the Côte d’Azur once more. There was something so elegant about The Grand Cru compared to the enormous gin palaces that the newly minted billionaires of Russia and China were buying by the dozen. Its classical lines spoke of a taste and style that new money simply could not buy. And history too. The Grand Cru had plenty of that.
“After the Second World War, Eisenhower held a meeting of his great admirals in this room,” Randon told them.
He spoke enthusiastically also of the lengths to which he had gone to return the boat to its original state.
“Are there still sixty staff on board?” Lizzy asked.
“Fifty-five,” said Randon.
But no guests, Carrie thought. Not anymore. All the young men and women in uniform who went about their work so silently were there for the convenience and comfort of only one man.
Carrie admired the decoration. “So many yachts have interiors like trailers,” she said.
“I tried to remain true to the spirit of the boat as she was,” said Randon. “But you must have been wondering exactly what it is I would like you to sell for me.”
Carrie and Nat both hoped that he was planning to off-load some of the paintings that adorned the walls of the yacht’s staterooms. Lizzy couldn’t help but gawk when she saw a van Gogh that had recently sold at Christie’s for fifty million. It couldn’t be the same painting, surely. It had to be a reproduction. I mean, thought Lizzy, it can’t possibly be a good idea to keep a van Gogh on a boat, no matter how beautiful and well-finished the boat is.
“You’re admiring my van Gogh,” said Randon. “Quite a little beauty, isn’t it?”
Lizzy didn’t dare ask the question that was hovering on her lips.
“It is the real thing, in case you’re wondering. I can’t think of a safer place to keep it, can you? But this, ladies and gentleman, is the work that I want to consign to you.” He paused outside a door that was in itself a work of art, inlaid with delicate veneers. “I should warn you that the collection I have in this room is not for the narrow-minded. I spent many years gathering the items that I have here. There is more of a similar nature at my villa in Capri. Should we come to any kind of agreement today, then the items at Capri would have to be sold as well.”
Carrie and Lizzy glanced at each other, wondering what on earth they would find beyond the door. Nat was getting impatient for other reasons. Truthfully, he wanted to be off the boat as soon as possible. He was not getting those sea legs.
“It’s time,” said Randon. “Apart from my assistant Bellette, you are the first people to see inside this room in a decade. For many years this has been my private domain. Absolutely for my eyes only. It’s the only place you’ll ever find me doing the cleaning,” he added. The flash of humor relaxed his visitors, but only a little.
Randon pressed a code into the keypad on the wall. There was the sound of an extremely complicated locking mechanism grinding and opening with a clunk. Then, after a pause as if to allow everyone to take a deep breath, the door slid back.
“My onetime pride and joy,” said Randon, ushering them into the room. “Now my greatest shame.”
The first thing the visitors laid eyes on was a six-foot-tall marble penis.
CHAPTER 40
The girls both gasped. Nat gave a small cough to prevent himself from saying something stupid in a knee-jerk reaction to the astonishing sight. The marble penis was truly something to behold. Absurdly outsize it may have been, but it had been skillfully rendered in astonishing anatomical detail. Though they were carved from cold stone, the veins that ran the entire length of the enormous phallus seemed to be pulsing with life. Carrie put her hand over her mouth and hoped that no one would ask her to touch it. She felt quite ill.
“Now, that is what I call a big boy,” Nat whispered to Lizzy as Randon invited them farther into the room. Lizzy couldn’t even look at Nat, so frightened was she that if she met anyone’s eye—especially Nat’s—she would immediately burst out laughing.
“I can see you’re all shocked,” said Randon.
Carrie nodded, lips pressed tightly together to stifle a shriek of hilarity.
Randon waved a hand toward the cock.
“This particular piece was rescued from the sea just west of the island of Ischia,” he said. “It’s thought that it may have belonged to a statue commissioned by Caligula himself, God forgive him.”
So that was the end of the mystery. The auctioneers’ hopes that they had been invited to the south of France to see a lost Leonardo sketch too fragile to face the light of day had been thoroughly and quite incredibly dashed.
Mathieu Randon’s onetime pride and joy was a collection of erotic art and manuscripts dating back to the Roman Empire and beyond. All of Carrie’s and Lizzy’s preparation for this moment had been way off the mark. Both had imagined that they would be viewing a couple of Caravaggios or a Raphael. A dick the size of a man and a selection of antique dildos was not what either of them had envisaged. The walls were covered in sketches and etchings that were little more than porn.
Still, the room was amazing. The insight it gave the auctioneers into Randon’s personality prior to the earthquake that left him in a coma was quite something. This was a collection that had taken many years to amass. It had taken dedication. It wasn’t just tat. Every item in the room had merit. Lizzy drew Nat’s attention to a particularly lurid Picasso sketch, from the period toward the end of the artist’s life when he seemed to have become obsessed with pudenda.
“I must apologize,” said Randon, “for submitting you to the evidence of my former depravity, but needs must. While this collection is vile, I have good reason to believe that it is probably worth millions. And millions are required to bring to fruition my dream of a religious retreat.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” said Nat as he got closer to one particular painting and saw that it was not in fact a butterfly after all but a carefully drawn collection of vaginas. “Good God,” he muttered as the details became clear. “I think I know that girl.”<
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Carrie found herself drawn to a small ivory box.
“You know what that is?” asked Randon.
“Of course,” said Carrie, thanking her lucky stars that just the previous year, Ehrenpreis New York had run an Asian sale and several similar items had been consigned to it. “This is an inro,” she said with confidence.
She bent over at the waist to look at it more closely. She didn’t dare pick it up. Inro were relatively common, so the fact that this particular example was in Mathieu Randon’s collection, alongside items she estimated to be worth six figures, suggested that it was rare and precious indeed.
“Pick it up, if you like,” Randon told her. “Tell me what you think of it.”
“It looks like one box,” Carrie continued, “but it’s actually a series of little stacked boxes. They were originally designed to carry things like tobacco or document seals. The Japanese hung them from the obi they wore around the waist because their garments didn’t have pockets. They were made out of all sorts of materials. Wood, tin, precious metals. But this one looks like real ivory. Eighteenth century, I would guess.”
“Well done, Ms. Klein. Exactly right.”
Nat, irritated that Carrie had scored a point he could have gotten himself—who didn’t know about inro?—threw in his own comment. “So it’s basically a Japanese handbag. Or a man-bag, if it belonged to a samurai.”
Lizzy managed a little laugh. Randon and Carrie ignored him.
Carrie marveled at the intricacy of the design. As with everything else in the collection, the subject was fairly explicit. It showed a man and a woman engaged in a variety of sexual positions. Some pretty commonplace. Some quite painful-looking. But it was so delicately carved. The joins between the stacked boxes were almost entirely disguised by careful arrangement of the overlapping pieces. That someone had managed to create something so complicated out of what seemed to be a single piece of ivory was quite remarkable. Carrie would call Ehrenpreis’s Asian expert as soon as she got off the boat to see if her hunch was right. Someone would pay hundreds of thousands for this.
“It’s beautiful,” said Carrie, replacing the inro on its pedestal and straightening up.
“And infuriating,” said Randon. “It’s a puzzle box to me. I haven’t been able to get it open since I bought it back in the 1970s. It was the very first piece in my collection. I bought it while I was in Japan to promote my champagne. It was a reward to myself.”
“Well deserved, I’m sure,” said Nat.
“Wrongheaded,” said Randon, “As was my purchase of the centerpiece to this collection. Though I think you will understand what I was thinking at the time. I have no doubt you’ll agree that it is very special indeed. Step this way.”
They followed Randon into another interconnecting room.
“You mean, the penis isn’t the centerpiece?” Lizzy murmured to Nat.
“Please don’t let it be a giant vulva,” Nat quipped back.
It was not a gigantic vagina. Randon took the party to a case that was covered by a velvet cloth of the kind you often see on cabinets in museums, protecting particularly delicate items from sunlight. Randon removed the cloth carefully if not reverently. He had long given up holding any of these particular artworks in reverence. Inside the cabinet was a very dusty-looking manuscript. As Randon beckoned them forward, Nat, Lizzy, and Carrie crowded over it, jostling for the very best view.
“Oh my God,” said Nat, who then received a sharp dig in the ribs from Lizzy, who had worked out that this wasn’t the place for blasphemy, despite the nature of the things they were seeing. But the tone of Nat’s voice was different this time. Not just shock now, but awe.
“You’ve guessed what it is?”
Nat nodded. “But I can hardly believe it.”
All three auctioneers were astounded. And all three of them set to work translating in their heads the words they saw before them. Carrie was so surprised by what she read, she decided she must have gotten some words wrong, despite her fluent French.
But this wasn’t just a piece of erotica. It was a piece of history.
“These are pages from an early draft of Justine,” Randon told them. “In the Marquis de Sade’s own hand. Saved by a prison guard.”
De Sade, the French nobleman born in the eighteenth century, had spent much of his life in prison for his own peculiar brand of erotic philosophy, which gave “sadism” its name. Justine was one of his most infamous works, charting as it did the life of an innocent young woman who falls prey to all sorts of sexual depravity. The work’s subtitle was Les Infortunes de la Vertu.
“Good conduct, well chastised,” Nat translated. “A great book. I must reread it.” He earned himself another dig in the ribs from Lizzy.
“It’s the work of a monumental pervert,” said Randon. “Someone whose words should never have been published. The vile spewings of a diseased and dangerous reprobate. Allowing this kind of filth out into the public domain can only cause damage to the hearts and minds of the people who read it.”
“You could burn it,” suggested Nat.
“But it’s important from a sociological point of view,” Carrie jumped in, filled with horror at the thought of such a rare and precious manuscript going up in flames in the smoking room of The Grand Cru.
“I won’t burn it. I understand it has its worth. But the sooner it is not in my possession, the better,” said Randon. “I only hope that de Sade’s soul will benefit in some way from the good I am able to do with the money I raise with the sale of this, this … horror …”
Randon dropped the velvet cover back onto the cabinet as though the sight of the Marquis de Sade’s feverish handwriting were actually hurting his eyes.
“Well. I think that’s enough for now, don’t you? I don’t want to subject you to this a moment longer than I have to. Let’s go back into the boardroom and discuss the business of having this collection dispersed.”
It was time at last for the auctioneers to make their presentations. Nat flipped a coin and Carrie found herself having to go first. It wasn’t ideal. Especially when she realized that Randon really was going to have her present her case in front of Nat and Lizzy. She opened her laptop and connected it up so that her slides would appear on the enormous digital screen that hung where a movie screen had hung in The Grand Cru’s years as a party ship. It went without a hitch, but Carrie was infuriated by Nat’s patronizing nods when she described the service that Ehrenpreis could provide a man like Randon.
“Our London office is small,” she concluded. “Just the size of the Old Masters department at Ludbrook’s, as I’m sure Mr. Wilde will tell you. But I believe that a very personal level of service is what is required here. Though, of course, if we need to, we are able to call on experts all over the world to help create the exact strategy needed for each individual item in the collection.”
It was Lizzy, not Nat, who set up Ludbrook’s IT arrangement, but Nat delivered the spiel. He focused heavily on the history of the house. Ludbrook’s had been in existence for many hundreds of years. They had disposed of property belonging to some of the most famous people in world history. When people thought of an auction house, Ludbrook’s was the name that sprang to their lips. They had an international reach. They were trusted. Nat reeled off some of their recent sales results as Lizzy flashed up graphs showing prices expected and prices achieved.
Carrie was both impressed and depressed by the expertise with which Nat made Ludbrook’s case.
He finished by letting Randon know, “You can be sure that your collection will have my personal attention, of course. I would be delighted to be a hands-on part of the team that takes care of this project.”
Randon laughed gamely at the reference to “hands on.”
“Any questions?” Nat asked.
“I don’t think so. Thank you all,” said Randon. “You have given me plenty to think about. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do this afternoon. I will instruct my captain to arrange for y
our return to the mainland forthwith.”
Without shaking anybody’s hand, Randon left the room.
That was it. The end of the audience with the great man. Carrie, Lizzy, and Nat remained. Not knowing what they were supposed to do next.
Nat studied the glass of fizzing water handed to him by a stewardess as they waited for the tender to be prepared. “The man owns a champagne house. You’d think he could do better than this. Get me a slice of lemon, would you, Lizzy?” said Nat. “I’d get up for it myself, but this boat is moving way too much for me.”
Lizzy jumped at his command.
Carrie rolled her eyes.
CHAPTER 41
Nat did not get his sea legs even by the time Randon was ready to send his visitors back to the Cap d’Antibes in the Riva. If anything, the return journey was harder. The sea was choppier than it had been when the party had ventured out in the morning. Despite his conviction that he and Lizzy had swung the deal for Ludbrook’s, Nat was gray-faced as he climbed into the small boat, and was positively green again by the time they had been at sea for five minutes.
“Look at the horizon,” Lizzy advised again, while rubbing his back.
Nat pushed her hand away.
Carrie, sitting on the other side of the deck and rather enjoying the sea breeze, couldn’t disguise a smile. Seeing Nat Wilde laid so low was the only high point of her day so far. She gazed out on the approaching land, grateful also that Nat was too busy puking over the side to gloat over how much more positively Randon had seemed to react to the Ludbrook’s presentation. Carrie still couldn’t quite believe that Randon had made them pitch head-to-head.
At last the boat arrived at the jetty for the Hotel du Cap. Randon’s man jumped out and offered Carrie his hand. She rested her own hand lightly upon it and stepped down onto the jetty with the grace that suggested a lifetime of sailing holidays in Nantucket. (In reality, there had been just three since she’d moved to Manhattan and reinvented herself.) Then she sashayed up the jetty to the steps, as though she were on a catwalk. She might as well have been. She knew that the people in the restaurant above would be watching eagerly to see who was arriving. She didn’t want to disappoint.
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