The Capitalist

by Peter Steiner

  Hamilton Jones lived in a small, rent-controlled apartment in an old building on East Ninety-third Street. He had some excellent paintings by excellent, but entirely unknown painters hanging on his walls. And where there were not paintings, there were bookshelves filled to overflowing with art books. A small closet contained his meager wardrobe of two suits, a few slacks, two blue blazers, some dress shirts and striped ties.

  Thanks to his expertise, Hamilton regularly got invited to fancy dinner parties. For this he was grateful, since it not only gave him the chance to give a client useful advice about his collection, but it also got him a free meal. He had accepted Louis Morgon’s invitation more for the dinner than for the prospect of having him as a client.

  He had had his doubts about Louis from the beginning. First of all there was the supposed quality of the collection. He would have to have heard of the guy, no matter how secretive and reclusive he was, if he really had a collection half as good as he claimed. Hamilton had asked around, and nobody, but nobody, had ever heard of Louis Morgon. By the time several months had passed, Hamilton Jones had all but forgotten about Louis. Then one day a thick manila envelope arrived in the mail.

  Hamilton sat down by the window. He slit open the end of the envelope and peered inside. There was a letter with some photos attached. He let everything slide out onto his lap and laid the letter aside. “Jesus!” he said looking at the top photo. He lifted his glasses onto his nose. “Holy Christ!” Hamilton turned the photos over one by one—a Cézanne, a Picasso, another Picasso, another Picasso, Matisse, Matisse, Matisse, Derain, Derain—nine paintings in all, none of which he had ever seen before.

  Hamilton switched on the lamp. He leaned toward the window and studied the Cézanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. He reached for his loupe and went over the photo more carefully. It was an amateur photo, but it was good enough to reveal a beautiful if somewhat eccentric Cézanne.

  Hamilton went to the wall of books and pulled down a large volume on Cézanne. He took it back to his chair and leafed through it. He laid the photo beside a similar painting in the book. The color was right—the oranges and greens and lavenders. It looked like a view from the Bibémus quarry. The brushwork was superb. The perspective was odd. An 1897 painting, he thought.

  After two hours studying the photos, leafing through his books, making comparisons to photos, he could only conclude that he had before him evidence of a collection of what looked to be exquisite paintings whose value appeared to be beyond estimation. Of course there was no way to tell without seeing the paintings in person. One of the Picassos looked like a companion to The Lovers, which Sotheby’s had just offered in November for nine million. It hadn’t met the minimum, even with the house’s ringers bidding, but had they set a more reasonable five million, it would have gone right away.

  Hamilton could think of perfect clients for three of the paintings right off the bat. And six percent in commissions—three from the buyer, three from the seller—would be … he simply could not imagine it. The thought made him dizzy. He picked up Louis’s letter. It was handwritten on ordinary paper.

  January 5, 2009

  Dear Mr. Jones,

  You may recall that I spoke with you about your helping me to dispose of my collection of paintings and drawings. But things have intervened—family matters, business—and that is why it has taken me so long to write.

  I have enclosed photos of the best paintings in my collection. I think you will recognize that these are works of the highest quality. It is my impression that they should command excellent prices even in a depressed market such as we are experiencing now.

  I expect to be in the United States again in the near future. I hope we can meet then to discuss exactly how I might best proceed. In the meantime please feel free to call if you have any questions.

  Sincerely,

  Louis Morgon

  That night Hamilton Jones tossed and turned in his bed and dreamed of a life in which money and gorgeous paintings and ruin were inextricably tangled together. He woke up thinking he had no choice but to go to France and then woke up an hour later, being absolutely certain he was being taken for a ride. There was no reason to go to France. The paintings were fakes—good fakes, but fakes nonetheless.

  A good painter had only to study a great painter’s work to come up with a decent facsimile of his methods. Hamilton and Louis Morgon had discussed that very proposition. In fact Hamilton believed that the greats were easier to imitate than the less-than-great because their style and vision came through consistently in all their work, while lesser painters had lapses of style and ability. It was these lapses that were all but impossible to imitate.

  To “do” a good painter, you started by mixing colors, especially the odd and signature combinations your painter used. You used linseed oil or turps as he did. You learned to pick the paint up off the palette or out of cups or however your painter did it and then swing the brush across the canvas or push it or scrub with it the way he did. Then you invented an image in your head and you painted it. If you had internalized your painter’s vocabulary—his use of color, his strokes, his tremors and hesitations, the accidents he fixed, the others he let stand, if you had made all that your own, then the result would be more than satisfactory. It was difficult to do, but by no means impossible.

  It would never look like his best work—nobody but Picasso could do a great Picasso, because his best work contained the rich accumulation of his entire experience. But it would pass easily for a half-baked Picasso, of which there were many, painted in moments of weakness or inattention or laziness or indifference by the master himself—The Lovers, for instance.

  These lesser works sold for extravagant prices, just like the great works did. The differences between the great and the less-than-great—and the fake—were obliterated by the obscurantist noise of the marketplace, as the critics and the experts fumed and fussed and disagreed.

  Hamilton Jones picked up the telephone and called Louis Morgon in France.

  “Mr. Jones. I take it you got my package?”

  “I did, Mr. Morgon. It arrived yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to you.”

  “I have to say, Mr. Morgon, it is the most extraordinary collection of paintings I have seen in private hands in quite some time.”

  “Thank you. I am very proud of the collection. I worked hard to put it together.”

  “How did you come to acquire it, may I ask?”

  “Are you asking because you doubt the provenance, Mr. Jones?”

  “I do not doubt it, Mr. Morgon. I simply do not know it.”

  “If you come see the work, Mr. Jones, I will make the provenance quite clear. You will see that it is clean and irrefutable.”

  “I would like nothing better than to come see your paintings, Mr. Morgon. But to be completely honest with you, sir, I am … thanks to the current economic situation … I find myself … in difficult circumstances, so I feel that I need to know more just to reassure myself, you understand, that the trip will be worthwhile.”

  There was silence from Louis’s end.

  Hamilton continued. “I can’t afford to make the trip without knowing a bit more about these paintings and, quite frankly, about you, Mr. Morgon. You have been secretive with me about pretty much everything. With me, and apparently the entire world. I have asked around a good bit and learned nothing. You declined even to tell me how you found me.”

  “If it will help things along,” said Louis, “I’m willing to tell you how I got your name. I got it from St. John Larrimer.”

  Now it was Hamilton Jones’s turn to be silent. And he remained silent for a long time. “Larrimer,” he said finally. “He told you about me?” Hamilton Jones was trying to put things together in his mind and not having an easy time of it.

  “He didn’t exactly tell me about you. Lorraine Usher, his secretary—”

  “Mr. Morgon,” said Hamilton. “This may seem an impudent question, and yet a
s I consider it, it seems like the most important question, in fact the only one, I can ask. Who painted those paintings?”

  Louis hesitated only briefly. “I did.”

  “You did. The Picassos?”

  “Yes. The Picassos.”

  “The Cézanne?”

  “Yes, that was the most difficult one. Except for the Bonnard, which failed altogether and which I didn’t send you.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  “And why did you contact me? Is this your idea of a joke? Yours and Larrimer’s?”

  “It is not a joke, Mr. Jones. I was trying to find a way to Larrimer when I learned he was a collector and that he used your—”

  “That son of a bitch used me to collect paintings and then he stole my life savings,” said Hamilton Jones.

  Louis had been unprepared for this turn. “Your name is not on the list of his clients,” he said.

  “I used … another name—Joseph Hamilton. I had to work it out so that he didn’t know it was me. I thought he would refuse to take me on if he knew. If only he had refused.”

  Louis had not known going in whether there was any use to be made of Jones’s connection to Larrimer, but he had led the man to believe that he, Louis, was a genuine collector of paintings and that there was money to be earned. Louis now regretted having done so; he explained all this to Jones.

  “And have I been of use to you?” said Hamilton Jones.

  “Yes, I am certain you have,” said Louis.

  “What is it you want?” Jones was getting angry all over again.

  “More or less the same thing you want, Mr. Jones, if I understand you correctly: to bring Larrimer to account. To see him brought to trial. To see his assets attached and—”

  “Did you lose money to him?”

  “A small amount,” said Louis. “That’s not my reason.”

  “Not your reason?”

  “No.”

  “I see.” Jones thought for a long moment. “And you have a plan.”

  “One is … evolving.”

  “Using your fake paintings.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Hamilton went silent. “As bait?” he said finally.

  “I had thought of that. To draw him out.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “I have an idea where he is. But it doesn’t matter. If my paintings are interesting to him, I’m thinking he’ll show his face.”

  “Oh, he’ll be interested all right. He’s a big collector who wants to be bigger. It’s not about the art.”

  “Does he know art?”

  “He knows what he should own, but he doesn’t know art. I know art.… That is, I used to know art for him.”

  “He’ll be fooled by my art?”

  “I was,” said Hamilton.

  “But we don’t just need him. We need to find his money. To get to his money, his assets, whatever’s left.”

  “Is there a ‘we’?”

  “I hope so,” said Louis. “It depends on you.”

  Hamilton remained silent for a while and Louis waited. Finally Hamilton said, “Larrimer had an assistant, a young Brit named Jeremy … something.”

  “Jeremy Gutentag,” said Louis. “He’s gone, I don’t know where.”

  “I think he was from London.”

  “He may have been, but he’s disappeared completely. Without a trace, either here or in London, as far as I’ve been able to tell.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “For the moment,” said Louis.

  “For the moment?”

  “I hope we can find him when we need him,” said Louis. “Larrimer also had an accountant.”

  “I met him once,” said Hamilton. “Robert Feather.”

  “If we could find him—”

  “Oh, it’s too late for that,” said Hamilton. “They found him. It was in the papers.”

  “They found him?”

  “Floating in the East River. He had a bullet in the back of his head.”

  XXXI

  THERE WAS NOTHING CONNECTING Jeremy Gutentag, the former Oxford whiz and head of the Larrimer trading desk, to Charanjeet Kapoor of Lahore, Pakistan. Charanjeet had made certain of that. Jeremy Gutentag had been the son of British shopkeepers, had spent his entire life in London and New York, and now he was gone. Charanjeet Kapoor was a Pakistani who lived in Lahore and worked in the family business. Secure in the conviction that he would never be found out, he settled into life in Lahore as though he had never left.

  Charanjeet had a suite of rooms in one wing of his parents’ villa, looking out on the wonderful gardens that surrounded the complex. He awoke each morning to the sound of birds singing and splashing in the fountain beneath his bedroom window. He had breakfast most mornings with his father before accompanying him on his ten-minute walk to the office.

  There Mohan introduced Charanjeet to the arcane culture of running a business enterprise in Lahore, Pakistan. He enrolled him in the Chamber of Commerce, and they went to meetings together, where Charanjeet met other businessmen. Mohan also introduced him to suppliers and shippers and accountants as they came through the office.

  He made sure Charanjeet met the civil servants he needed to know, the health and safety inspectors, the tax assessors, those who issued the various permits and licenses necessary to run a thriving enterprise and to whom baksheesh would be owed at the appropriate moment. “These are the people we most depend upon,” said Mohan. “They are lowly bureaucrats, but without their help and permission, we could not be in business. I’m certain it is not how things are done in New York or London, but in Lahore it is necessary.” In general, though, there was no better training for running a business in Lahore than a stint in one of the top New York investment banks. Charanjeet took to it like a duck to water.

  Mohan and Charanjeet walked to the office together most mornings. One day a little rain had fallen and they had run a few steps. Mohan sighed and sat down heavily at his desk. He was sixty and overweight. “I am getting old,” he said.

  “No, Daddy,” Charanjeet protested. “Not you.” But he had already noticed a slight hesitation in his father’s step.

  “Yes. Oh, yes, I am. Anyway,” said Mohan, “I have built this business for you. And for your children, when they come along, God willing.” He rose with difficulty, just to show that he was not dead yet, and kissed Charanjeet’s cheek.

  “Thank you, Daddy. I want nothing more than to live up to your expectations.”

  “I have no doubt that you will, my boy.” Mohan made him the head of the Fine Fabric Works. FFW was a small operation with a long-serving and loyal staff, so that the transition from Mohan to Charanjeet should come about with a minimum of disruption. Mohan assigned Hashinur Chakmani to guide Charanjeet through the process.

  Hashinur was a tiny, wizened man of indeterminate age. He had dark, shriveled skin, a pointed white beard, and large black eyes that swam behind thick glasses. He wore the same thing, day in and day out—a white turban, a short-sleeve shirt with a pocket full of yellow pencils, a lungi (the traditional wraparound skirt), and large, battered leather sandals.

  Hashinur had been at the Fine Fabric Works since even before Mohan had bought the company, longer than anyone could remember. When he had arrived, the muslin that was their specialty had been manufactured on a dozen ancient hand looms by weavers passing a shuttle back and forth, working the clacking treadles with their bare feet. As Mohan modernized and expanded the company, Hashinur rose through the ranks from sweeper to weaver to carter to supervisor and finally to senior foreman in charge of the entire FFW manufacturing operation.

  If Hashinur had stood erect, which he did not, the top of his turban might have reached Charanjeet’s chest. “The first time I saw him,” said Mohan, “he looked pretty much as he does now.” On Charanjeet’s first day, Hashinur bowed deeply. Then he took Charanjeet by the hand and led him out of the office and onto the factory floor. They stopped in front of one of the new
electronic looms and watched while the operator performed the regular maintenance. He did so with great concentration and care, removing, disassembling, and cleaning the bobbins, using a fine brush to remove the lint from beneath the bobbin posts and behind the shuttles. He used electronic gauges to check the alignment of this part and that one and made fine adjustments on the control console. Hashinur had not let go of Charanjeet’s hand the entire time, and he now used his own hand to raise Charanjeet’s and aim it in this and that direction like a pointer as he explained what they were watching in a high, nasal voice.

  Hashinur had come to Lahore as a young boy from a village in the farthest northwest corner of the country, and his Punjabi was heavily colored by his native dialect. It was also delivered with great rapidity, so that it was all but incomprehensible. Hashinur did not speak either English or Urdu. He spoke only his version of Punjabi and some words and phrases of a peculiar language no one could identify and everyone thought must be of his own devising. And since he often fell back on these strange gurglings and warblings, which had come to be known as “Hashinurian,” those he worked with had little choice but to learn this language too.

  At first Charanjeet could hardly understand Hashinur. And yet, after being led around by the hand for a number of days and pointed in this direction or that, he found that he was learning the fine fabric manufacturing business from the ground up. And he was learning Hashinurian at the same time.

  One day a delegation of customers arrived at the Fine Fabric Works from Stockholm. They were the first customers who had ever come from Sweden. Charanjeet was by then sufficiently versed in the factory’s operations that he could show them around the floor, pointing out the particular operational details that made FFW fabrics the finest in the world.

  The Swedes spoke excellent English. But they were exacting in their inquiries, and at one point a question arose about production methods that Charanjeet could not quite grasp. He could comprehend their words, but not the operation being referred to. The Swedes conferred in Swedish among themselves, searching presumably for another way to phrase the question.