Priceless

by Olivia Darling

  Lizzy was devastated. How on earth was anyone supposed to take her seriously, let alone listen to her concerns about the fakes, now that it was common knowledge that she’d missed an interdepartmental meeting thanks to overconsumption of alcohol? If she raised her worries now, people would assume she was trying to deflect the heat from her drunkenness. Exactly as Nat had planned.

  CHAPTER 51

  Fortunately, Lizzy was able to keep her head down. There was much to be done in preparation for the sale of Randon’s collection of antique erotica. Randon himself divided his collection into what he believed was two equal halves, based on previous insurance valuations. Neither auction house was allowed to cherry-pick lots. They received news of their consignments as they had received their instructions at the Hotel du Cap, simultaneously via courier, to ensure that neither house had the advantage. Randon was obviously enjoying his little game.

  Carrie clutched her forehead when she found that she had been assigned the enormous marble cock. Nat, meanwhile, was very disappointed when he discovered that the fabulous cock was not on his list.

  “Damn,” he said. “I was going to have that photographed for the cover of the catalog.”

  “Do you think that would have been such a good idea?” asked Lizzy. “I mean, isn’t it a little bit …”

  “Magnificent,” Nat murmured, remembering it with fondness.

  That was the difference between men and women, Lizzy thought. What Nat called “magnificent” was just plain scary in Lizzy’s eyes.

  Carrie dispatched her team to inspect and photograph the items for her auction at once. Jessica, who had listened to Carrie’s description of her trip to the south of France in slack-jawed disbelief, was stunned once more when she received the picture files of the items that Carrie had described.

  “What in God’s name is happening in that photograph?” she asked her boss. “Is that legal? Carrie, you know I think we need to be supercareful about our catalog for this sale. I’m sure you and I could be jailed if some of these pictures get into the hands of a minor in Texas.”

  “You’re right,” said Carrie. “Got to make it subtle.”

  Carrie sorted through the photographs for the least offensive one to make the catalog’s cover. She chose a female nude. A simple headless and armless bust that had once adorned a Roman temple. Or brothel. Randon had claimed he couldn’t remember which.

  The end result from Ehrenpreis was rather lovely and sophisticated. For the cover of his catalog, Nat chose the lithograph of vagina butterflies, which was also abstract enough to appear tasteful at first sight.

  Randon insisted that he be allowed to add a foreword to each catalog. It would be the same for the sales at Ludbrook and Ehrenpreis. Both Carrie and Nat had the same reaction when they read it:

  “Oh God.”

  I have come to realize that no good can come from having this collection in my life, Randon wrote. These so-called “works of art” are nothing but the spewings of diseased and dirty minds that spread hatred and unhappiness to whomsoever they touch.

  Both Carrie and Nat independently came to the same decision about how they would handle Randon’s words.

  “I’ll tell him there was a mix-up and the catalog went to print before we got his letter,” Carrie told Jessica.

  “We’ll print it on a separate piece of paper to add as an inclusion,” said Nat to his team. “Though since I know how much you people love collating mail-outs, I have no doubt that some of those inclusions will go awry.”

  Both were of the opinion that they were saving Randon from himself. His sermon would hardly encourage buyers. And whatever Randon thought of his collection, he did seem to want to make a lot of money from it.

  Carrie was very pleased with the way her catalog turned out. It was as beautiful and tasteful as any other catalog and might, at first glance, have looked as though it were for any ordinary sale of ancient antiquities rather than a world-class haul of filth.

  It was sent out. There were a few complaints, which Carrie dealt with personally. She explained to disgruntled and disgusted customers that Randon’s collection was of vast importance.

  “Many of the lots are museum quality,” she said. “In fact, we fully expect that several museums will bid on that statue of Venus.”

  The extraordinary number of people who requested a copy of an auction house catalog for the very first time more than equaled the complaints. It quickly became Ehrenpreis’s biggest-selling catalog ever. Copies that cost twenty pounds if you bought them from the front desk on New Bond Street were soon changing hands on eBay for five times that amount.

  And Randon had given both houses an absolute gift when it came to generating PR. Ordinarily the women who staffed the PR department at Ludbrook’s had an uphill struggle trying to convince the magazines that auctions could be interesting. This time was completely different. They sent out press packs to everyone. All the papers clamored for an exclusive interview with Randon or a photograph of the giant marble phallus with one of the girls standing next to it for scale (not that any of them would have dared to actually print that).

  Randon’s conversion from the hedonistic head of an international lifestyle brand to the pious born-again Christian bent on creating his own religious colony was the stuff of a feature writer’s dreams. The Sunday Times magazine ran an eight-page profile on the man and his rise to power. The photographs that accompanied the piece were marvelous. Randon had bedded dozens of fabulously beautiful and famous women. Several of the lucky ladies had posed for snapshots that now resurfaced all over the news.

  But all that was behind him, Randon’s staff insisted to anyone who asked. And so the public were able to access a collection that would otherwise have remained utterly private until Mathieu Randon’s death.

  In all his years in the auction world, Nat Wilde had never seen such a large number of people turn up to view the lots in Ludbrook’s galleries. Never before. Not even when they were selling jewels that had belonged to Liz Taylor or Christina Onassis or, the biggest crowd-pleaser of them all, the late, sainted Princess Diana.

  “Sex really does sell,” he commented to Lizzy.

  Lizzy was kept extremely busy arranging for certain lots to be presented in private to her most highly favored clients. The ones who required her utmost discretion. She had a number of extremely tense moments as she unveiled a particular print in front of various male clients and found that they automatically glanced straight from the painting to her, as if to ask “Can you do that too?”

  Lizzy discussed the issue with Sarah Jane, whose response was that she wasn’t bothered by it at all. In fact she had managed to parlay several such intimate moments into dinner invitations. She wouldn’t have to cook for the following fortnight.… From time to time, Lizzy wished she had Sarah Jane’s chutzpah, but for the most part she was just pleased that her rival was too busy dating to flirt with Nat. Though the collection seemed to have infused the entire auction house with the scent of lust. Lizzy found herself beneath Nat’s desk many times while Randon’s collection was on display downstairs.

  Perhaps Randon was right about the corrupting influence of his terrible artworks. Nat seemed to be obsessed by the rock-hard model members all around him while they awaited the Randon sale. While researching the collection in order to be better able to explain many of the lots to clients, he had come across a book relating to the ancient Egyptian gods, who were widely represented. He told Lizzy the myth of Hathor, wife of Ra, who was the goddess of dance and sexuality. She was given the epithet “Hand of God,” referring to the act of masturbation, a trick she employed to keep her husband happy and the sun in the sky. In fact, some Egyptian priests devoted to Ra believed that the sun wouldn’t rise unless they too greeted the dawn with an ejaculation. They employed priestesses, whose role was modeled on that of Hathor, to help ensure the world kept turning.

  “Can you imagine the pressure,” said Nat wistfully. “A few too many beers the night before and the world might end
. I think perhaps that you should be contractually obliged to be my Hathor and toss me off before every auction,” he added to Lizzy.

  CHAPTER 52

  A part from the security guards, Carrie was, as usual, the very last person in the Ehrenpreis offices that night. She did her customary tour of the building to ensure that everything was in its place and that the cleaners had done their job properly. More than once she’d had to let cleaners go because they couldn’t seem to work to her standards. Yet when she found a good team, it seemed inevitable that she would lose them for some other reason. Pregnancy, visa problems, a partner who just wanted them to stay home. It was hard to find the right staff, and harder still to get them to stay. Carrie had actually ended up scrubbing toilets herself on occasion. She wasn’t too grand for that.

  The Mathieu Randon collection had been on display for almost a week, during which time Ehrenpreis had seen an unprecedented number of interested parties come through the door. Most of them weren’t going to be buying, of course, but no one could ever be turned away, just in case. No matter if they turned up in sneakers rather than Turnbull and Asser. Even the bloke who gave Jessica “the creeps” when she saw him standing in front of one painting with his hands in his pockets had to be treated with politeness and care.

  “Most of the world’s richest people are creeps,” Carrie reminded her.

  But now all the patrons were gone.

  This was the moment in her daily routine that Carrie loved the best. With no one around but security, she was transported back to her childhood fantasies. In those she was locked into the American Museum of Natural History off Central Park after everyone had gone home. With no one to stop her, she could touch whatever she liked. That movie, Night at the Museum, could have been written just for her.

  The galleries at Ehrenpreis weren’t a museum, but they were almost as good. Better in some ways, since the items on display were constantly changing. A few months before, Carrie had spent three hours amusing herself with the lots for the fine jewelry sale, trying on some of the finer pieces, admiring herself in a pair of Jackie Kennedy’s earrings. She decided that they were a little too big and square for her heart-shaped face.

  That night, Carrie wanted to take a last good look at Randon’s collection. By the end of the following day, with the auction done and dusted, this amazing group of pieces would already be dispersing to the four corners of the earth. The Ehrenpreis team was preparing to take phone bids from clients in the United States, Russia, China, and Japan.

  Even as Carrie looked at Randon’s collection, it was hard to imagine the man as he had been before he’d been caught by a falling wine barrel in the San Francisco earthquake and had fallen into a coma. Was it really possible that he had held orgies at his château just outside Paris, attended by supermodels, racing drivers, and Hollywood movie stars? Was there any truth in the rumor that he had close friends in both the Italian and Russian Mafias? The one thing that Carrie knew to be true was that Randon had once employed a serial killer. The former managing director of Maison Randon was serving a life sentence in a French prison for the murder of two prostitutes. One was a British girl, found floating facedown in the Seine, wearing nothing but a shoe.

  There was something very odd about Mathieu Randon. Carrie wasn’t quite convinced that he wouldn’t miss the paintings she studied now. But he wanted to be rid of them, he said time and time again, perhaps trying to convince himself too. It was the best way he could imagine to raise the funds he needed for God’s work, he told Carrie. He had already earmarked the plot of land on which he intended to build his church and his monastery. He had to make amends for a life of hedonism and sin. The way he spoke freaked Carrie out, especially when she remembered how oddly he had behaved on board The Grand Cru, but she wasn’t there to worry about his sincerity. Carrie was simply there to sell Randon’s shame to the highest bidder.

  After donning a pair of white gloves, Carrie picked up the little Japanese inro box, made to hang from a warrior’s obi, to look more closely at the intricate carving. As she did so, she heard the sound of something sliding around inside. It took her by surprise. The catalog hadn’t mentioned any moving parts. Her first thought was that some idiot must have manhandled the little box while cleaning or showing it, and a piece had broken off and was now making the inro rattle.

  “Damn,” she muttered. She signaled to the night watchman that she was going to remove the piece and take it to her office to save him the bother of turning on all the gallery lights, which were on their red setting, like the nightlights in most great museums, to minimize the amount of light exposure the paintings had while they were in her care.

  Back in her office, Carrie cleared a space on her blotter and placed the little box down upon it. The box was such a beautiful thing. The hours of patience it must have taken to carve the scene on the lid had been well rewarded by the quality of the results. Carrie had seen several inro and netsuke before, but this was by far the best example. Ordinarily, the inro box would be held shut by a string of beads that operated like the string on a blind, but this box was held shut by a complicated mechanism. So complicated that Carrie didn’t have a clue where to start.

  Neither had Randon. There was a note in the file relating to this particular piece that informed Carrie that her expert on such objects had asked Randon for the combination, but he’d been unable to supply it. The catalog duly stated that the box would be sold as locked.

  But no one had ever mentioned that there might be something inside it. Carrie had to find out what it was. There was no way she could let this box go to auction broken or, far worse, with something even more valuable than the box itself hidden inside. She was determined to get the damn thing open.

  The white gloves made the task especially difficult. Though they were particularly fine, they still made it hard for Carrie to know when she might have twisted the right piece into place. But after a determined hour of experimentation, she found the right combination. She pressed on the exposed breast of one of the women carved on the inro, and at last, the lid and the box slid smoothly apart. Holding her breath, Carrie tipped the contents out onto the table.

  “Oh God.” She recoiled as she saw what the box held. Was that hair?

  It was hair. Three locks of dark brown hair, each one bound with a sliver of thin black ribbon. And there was more. The hair must have been what had kept the other contents of the box from rattling against the sides when she’d first held the inro. Using a pencil to separate the curious items from the hair, which made her want to heave, Carrie counted out three pieces of jewelry. A heart-shaped pendant. A thin silver bracelet. And a ring, one of those friendship rings that girls give each other in high school. Clasped hands. A Claddagh, she thought it was called.

  Carrie was confused. Randon claimed he’d had this box since the 1970s—it was one of the first pieces in his collection—and that he had never been able to open it. Yet the contents of this box looked to have been added to the inro more recently than that.

  It was all worthless. Carrie could tell that the moment she laid eyes on the stuff. The locket, the bracelet, and the ring would each have cost around twenty quid new. Secondhand, it was the kind of stuff you gave to little girls for their dressing-up box. Using her tweezers, Carrie picked up the ring and held it under her desk light while she looked at it through a magnifying glass. The hallmark, which was almost rubbed away, suggested that the ring was made in 1985. Likewise, the gold locket looked to be far newer than the 1970s, though it was difficult to tell for sure because the hallmark on this piece had been rubbed away. Carrie imagined a young girl smoothing the surface with nervous fingers, using the locket like worry beads.

  As for the hair … Carrie had no idea how old that was. She’d seen Victorian mourning jewelry plenty of times. It was horrible stuff that always gave Carrie the shivers when she had to handle it. Mourning rings and lockets from that period often contained a piece of the loved one’s hair and Carrie had been surprised to see how fr
esh it could look after almost two hundred years. So the hair might always have been inside the inro. And yet …

  Using a pencil and her tweezers once again, Carrie separated out the three locks so that they were side by side on a piece of white paper. Under her strong desk light, Carrie could see that they weren’t all from the same head. There was quite a difference in color from one lock to the next. One was almost red in tone. Another had strands of shimmering golden blond. None seemed particularly Japanese. A forensic scientist would have been able to tell at once.

  How odd. The items inside the inro box had left Carrie feeling strangely disturbed, as though she had seen something that should have been hidden forever. But it was all such crap! Cheap mass-produced jewelry of the kind that ended up in charity shops and yard sales. Regardless, she knew she had to tell Randon what she had found.

  She pulled out a Ziploc bag from the box she had in a desk drawer, and dropped the hair and the jewelry inside, planning to give Randon a call first thing and ask whether he wanted the stuff back or whether she should just throw it away.

  She didn’t have to wait until morning. Her mobile phone started to vibrate in her jacket pocket.

  “Monsieur Randon, ça va?” she greeted him.

  “Ça va bien,” he confirmed. “I hope you don’t mind me calling you a little late in the day.”

  “Not at all,” said Carrie, which is what she would have said whether she really minded or not.

  “Good. I wanted to talk to you before the sale and give you my best wishes. I want to tell you how grateful I am for all your hard work so far.”

  “Thank you. I hope we’ll get the kind of results you’re looking for.”

  “I have no doubt that you will,” said Randon.