Masterclass

by Morris West

  Which was exactly how it happened: one cold winter evening, while the night nurse was knitting at the fireside and he was seated on the settee cradling Pia in his arms, she reached up a tiny clawed hand to touch his cheek. Then, as if the effort were too much, she gave a small sigh of weariness, turned her face to his breast and died. He carried her upstairs, watched the nurse settle her decently in the bed, called the doctor and the family and the parish priest and then sat by the dying fire, lonelier than he had ever felt in his life. He had escaped her at last, as he had so long wished to do. The real irony was that she had escaped him . She had been the focus of his life for so long that now there was nowhere to look except inwards at the fragmented image of himself.

  At the funeral he tried to spare the family embarrassment by joining the group of villa staff; but when the coffin had been carried into the vault and the bronze doors were closed and locked, he found himself weeping uncontrollably. Then he felt a protecting arm clasped around his shoulders and heard old Matteo’s voice crooning a litany of comfort.

  ‘There now, professore! You must be happy for her. She has no more pain. She is beautiful again. She wants you to remember her like that.’

  All of which was easy to believe. What he could not understand was the black desolation inside himself. When he had told her months before that he loved her, it was with the conventional reservation that had always attached itself to their relationship. They were in love, they were acknowledged lovers, they were everything else in the dictionary of the act. But love itself was experienced only in agony, in terrible wrenching at the heart-strings.

  Back at the villa, he paid ritual respect to all the members of the family and then, as soon as decency permitted, returned to Tor Merla, poured himself a large brandy and sat in the courtyard, watching the small chill wind stirring the first autumn leaves. There, an hour later, he was visited by Claudio Palombini, the nephew who was the nominated executor of Pia’s will. He was a cool-eyed, handsome Florentine who doled out words as carefully as if they were golden florins. He handed Mather a copy of Pia’s will – a holograph document in the Italian style.

  Then he announced gravely, ‘It seems, Mr Mather, that you have more need of sympathy than my aunt’s family.’

  ‘I feel…’ Max Mather pieced out the phrases very slowly, ‘I feel as though I am locked in the vault and Pia has flown away.’

  Claudio poured himself a brandy and perched on the edge of the rustic table. He offered a formal apology.

  ‘I confess, Mr Mather, that I have come reluctantly to admire you. You made my Aunt Pia very happy. You nursed her with a devotion few husbands would have displayed. We are all most grateful to you.’

  Mather digested the compliment in silence and then told him coolly, ‘You owe me no thanks. I loved your aunt. I shall miss her very much.’

  ‘You know that she has made provision for you in her will?’

  ‘I was not aware of it.’

  ‘You receive two years’ salary, you keep the automobile and any personal gifts. You have your choice of a memento from the archive material on which you have been working. The bequest is reasonable, I believe.’

  ‘It’s more than reasonable.’ Mather’s tone was brusque. ‘I have been generously paid; I expected no other rewards.’

  ‘It would please me – and help me greatly – if you would consider staying here to continue your work on the archive.’

  ‘Thank you, but no. Without Pia the tower would be intolerably lonely. But if you were prepared to entertain a suggestion?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Mather led his visitor into the tower and displayed to him, like a museum guide, the stacks of books and manuscripts and folios ranged about the old vaulted chambers. He said, ‘Unless you see it with your own eyes, you cannot understand how much work is involved in an archive of this dimension.’

  He picked up a bundle of paper tied with rotting tape, blew the dust off it and handed it to Palombini.

  ‘This, for instance. The first document dates it at 1650. I daren’t open the whole package, because most of it will fall apart. There may be valuable things in it, there may not. What it needs is skilled conservation, in the right conditions…What I’m trying to say is that the archive is historically important, but it needs work – constant and expensive work. Even if I stayed, I could not cope with it alone. The classification itself is an enormous task. The conservation is another thing altogether – a job for experts. Why not hand the whole thing over to the National Library? It would be a princely gesture and, at the same time, relieve the family of a heavy financial burden and a big cultural responsibility.’

  Palombini pondered the thought for a few minutes, then nodded a vigorous agreement.

  ‘Good, very good! Who knows? There may be some fiscal advantage for the estate as well as a gain to the Province.’

  ‘I can easily establish the fiscal position,’ said Mather. ‘The Custodian of Autographs is a friend of mine.’

  ‘Would you be willing to stay on long enough to set the arrangements in train? There would be no problem if you wanted to have a friend stay with you. You see, there’s another service I need.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘A professional catalogue and a valuation of the art works in the villa. Could you provide that?’

  ‘Arrange it…but not provide it. I would advise you to bring in Niccoló Tolentino from the Pitti.’

  ‘I would accept your recommendation, of course. But these are two most important steps in the settlement of the estate; I would feel very happy if I could entrust them to you.’

  ‘I’ll give you six weeks,’ said Max Mather. ‘After that, I must be gone. I have a whole life to rebuild.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There’s a price,’ Mather added. ‘Double my present salary and the cost of my transfer back to the United States. The legacy to remain untouched and paid before my departure.’

  ‘Done.’ Palombini was suddenly cheerful. ‘You are a good trader. I like that. I regret we didn’t get to know each other sooner.’

  ‘One of life’s ironies,’ said Mather with a humourless grin. ‘One has hardly touched hands when it is time to leave the party. You’ll be keeping the same staff at the villa?’

  ‘For the present, yes. Why do you ask?’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll move into the city and drive out here each day. If I stay here at night, I think I shall go mad.’

  ‘I know how you feel.’ Claudio Palombini was suddenly sombre. ‘It’s an old and bloody land. The vines grow out of the mouths of dead men.’

  That same evening Mather drove into Florence and booked into a small pensione. He did not call Anne-Marie. Their pact specified that his room be available only at weekends; mid-week there might be other visitors and he was in no mood for unfamiliar company or embarrassing situations.

  He telephoned the Custodian of Autographs to tell him of his impending departure and the donation of the Palombini archive. The old man mourned solicitously with his friend for Pia’s death, but was clearly delighted at the thought of acquiring the archive for his institution. He promised to discuss the matter with his directorate and examine the tax advantages to the donor. He warned that this process would take time – as did all official acts – but he would do his best to expedite the matter.

  Mather then telephoned Niccoló Tolentino, who immediately offered to divert him from his troubles with supper at the Gallodoro.

  It was Tolentino’s favourite watering-hole – a big cellar whose whitewashed walls and vaulted ceiling were covered with drawings by Florentine artists. Over the kitchen door was the great golden image of a strutting cock from which the place took its name. Niccoló Tolentino, who had painted it, sat always in the place of honour – a corner table, where an elevated chair and a footstool were provided so that none of commoner breed could look down on the little man who was, in the estimation of his peers, also a great one. When Mather arrived he was already ensconced w
ith a glass of punt e mes, a dish of pistachios and his sketch-block and pencil set before him.

  Their encounter was emotional as always. ‘Eh, Max!’ ‘Eh, Nicki!’ A long embrace, then more exclamatory phrases which ceased only when Mather’s drink was set in front of him. The meal was already decided, the wine decanted – a princely vintage whose maker had endowed the painter with a private cellar. The old man raised his glass in a toast.

  ‘To your lady, Max. Requiescat.’

  ‘May she rest peacefully,’ echoed Mather.

  They drank deeply. The old man set down his glass and talked gently and casually.

  ‘The old ways are still the wise ones. After a death, you eat and drink and remember the good things and try to laugh again. Grief profits no one, least of all the departed, who are quit of it for ever. You are hurting, eh?’

  ‘More than I thought I would, Nicki – much more.’

  Tolentino gave him a swift shrewd glance and asked an odd question. ‘Have you ever been in gaol, Max?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Mather laughed in spite of himself. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘They say the hardest time of the sentence is the day when they shove you out into the street again…You were tied to your Pia for a long time. She is released; you have still to accept your own manumission. You will make a new life, with a new woman; not tomorrow or next week, but soon it will be time to begin looking. Be glad you are not like me, when looking is all you can do! Tell me: this girl you visit in Florence…the one who wants to be a dealer, an auctioneer?’

  ‘Anne-Marie Loredon? What about her?’

  ‘That’s my question to you, Max. What about her? I know you play house at weekends. You visit the studios and galleries together. Clearly, you don’t hate each other.’

  ‘We’re good friends. She likes my cooking. She thinks I’m a good tutor.’

  ‘And what do you think about her, Max?’

  ‘I think she has a career on her mind and I don’t figure in the career plan. Now let’s change the subject. Are you free to accept private commissions?’

  ‘Of course. Like every State employee in Italy, I live by them. What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Claudio Palombini wants the pictures in the villa catalogued and valued. I suggested you were the best man to do it.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘I should go ahead and arrange it.’

  Niccoló Tolentino gaped at him in total disbelief, then he burst into high cackling laughter that turned the head of every diner in the place. He laughed until the tears ran down his face and Mather feared he might be having a fit. When he recovered, he called for more wine and announced between new gusts of merriment, ‘That, my friend…that’s the funniest joke I’ve heard in years. You mean Claudio didn’t know who I was?’

  ‘He didn’t seem to.’

  ‘Oh, little brother Max, I made that collection what it is today. I know every piece of junk that’s in it and the few good pieces that hide in the shadows!’

  ‘You’re not proud of it, surely?’

  ‘In a way I am. Did your lady Pia never tell you the story of Luca Palombini – the one they called l’ingannatore – the double-dealer?’

  ‘No. Never.’

  ‘Then…let’s keep it, like proper gentlemen, for the pears and the cheese. The food here is too good to spoil with talk.’

  The food lived up to the promise, but the story told by Niccoló Tolentino was by far the best item on the menu.

  ‘During the Fascist time and right up until the end of the European war, the head of the Palombini dan was a doughty old pirate whom the locals called “Luca l’ingannatore – Luca the Swindler”.’ Niccoló Tolentino wagged a cautionary finger. ‘Don’t be put off by the name. He was not only the perfect mirror of his time; he was the perfect archetype of the Florentine merchant prince. Put him in any century and he would have been the same high man. The Fuggers would have lent him money. Cosimo – and the magnificent Lorenzo himself – would have honoured him. The French, the Romans and the Venetians would have made bargains with him – but always counted their fingers after each handshake. He was ruthless in the pursuit of his ambitions, yet he had a singular charm and always the cool nerve of the gambler.

  ‘For Luca, the marketplace was the natural habitat of the human animal. Every man and woman, every beast, fruit and vegetable had a price. Every price was negotiable and Luca dealt in the past, the present and the future. Art – which meant saleable art – belonged to the past; its value was in its rarity, in the fact that it was patinated, proven durable and listed in the catalogues like the contents of the Uffizi or the Vatican Museum. According to Luca, it was the tourists who made the market in antiquities – the new-rich globetrotters, the steel barons and oil kings who were being stuffed with a late and suspect education by Duveen and Berenson and their like.

  ‘However, unlike natural products, art was a one-time growth. You couldn’t seed it. You could, however, imitate and replicate it. So Luca hired a certain talented young Neapolitan – that was me in those far-off days; I was young, clever and cheap – to copy every major work in the Palombini collection. Then, using the same transports which carried his wines, his fruits, his silks and leather goods across Europe, he began shipping out some of the original master works to safe repositories in Switzerland. He also shipped some of my copies at the same time, calculating – like a good trader – that if the buyer didn’t know the difference between a silk purse and a sow’s ear, he’d get exactly what he thought he was paying for.

  ‘Who knew what was going on? Who cared in those palmy Fascist days when the Mediterranean was “Mare Nostrum”, our trains ran on time, Calabrian peasants were colonising Eritrea and Hitler had just annexed Austria? Luca knew. Luca cared. Luca had solid holdings in neutral Switzerland, in Portugal and Brazil and Argentina. A Perugino or a Caravaggio was a more bankable commodity in Rio or New York than it was in its homeland. But Luca’s villa and the apartments he furnished for his mistresses looked no different because Niccoló Tolentino, the little hunchback from Naples, was a splendid painter, a genius at reproduction.…

  ‘But, my dear Max,’ Tolentino interrupted the flow of his story to emphasise a point, ‘I was not, and never have been, a forger. I never palmed off a copy as the work of a master. When Luca traded off my copies to the Nazis for big money, for protection, I didn’t care; I hated the bastards anyway. But he was the dealer, not I. I want you to remember that, because it is a matter of honour with me.’

  ‘I’ll remember it, Nicki,’ Mather reassured him, ‘but I can’t wait to hear the rest of the story.’

  ‘The night’s too short to give you all of it, Max. But here’s how it goes. On the outbreak of war in 1939, Luca shipped his wife and two infant sons to Switzerland in the care of his bankers and the directors of his Geneva affiliate . Then he set himself up at the villa with a succession of lively girl-friends. When the war began to go badly, he made accommodations with everyone: the Fascists, the Germans, the Church, the partisans, the Communist underground, Allied agents who popped up all over Tuscany and the Romagna like moles in a lawn. When the Mussolini regime collapsed and the Germans were fighting their long, bloody retreat up the peninsula, Luca Palombini took out an extra insurance policy.

  ‘In three days, with the help of a partisan group, he stripped the villa of its remaining valuables and walled them up in the vaults of the Tor Merla. The new stonework was covered with stucco; the stucco was soiled and aged with mud. The partisans were paid off handsomely with money and the use of the tower as a refuge and a food dump for their groups. When the Germans came in strength, the partisans moved out. The Wehrmacht troops turned the tower into an observation post, while their officers dined in spartan discomfort at the villa with Luca Palombini and his latest girl-friend, Camilla Dandolo – a coloratura from La Scala whose body was much better than her voice.

  ‘After the cease-fire, Luca reopened the vaults and set about trading off most of the remainin
g genuine art works for hard currency to rebuild the family fortunes. The villa walls were hung with my copies of the great works and with third-rate originals that weren’t worth selling, but the Palombini enterprises at home and abroad were flush with capital.

  ‘Then Luca summoned his family from Switzerland; but before they arrived he died – in the middle of a love duet with the soprano. Luca’s wife made a big brouhaha, claiming that many important items were missing – though she was vague about what they were. She swore roundly that the bitch from La Scala had robbed her husband before riding him to death. Then, obviously on the advice of kinfolk, she fell silent. Luca the Double-Dealer had done well by his heirs. If he’d had to make pay-offs along the way – Boh! Florence had always been a traders’ town. So…sta’ zitta Madonna! Cut your losses and count your blessings and keep a still tongue in your head!

  ‘And that’s the end of it, Max. Except it’s not the end. Here we sit, all these decades afterwards, and you’re inviting me back to appraise the dregs of Luca’s collection and be paid for doing it. C’é una pazzia, it’s crazy!’

  ‘A question, Nicki.’

  ‘Ask it, my dear Max.’

  ‘If the collection was as you describe it – a mixture of good and bad, of original and fake – why did Luca take so much trouble to hide it in Tor Merla?’

  The little man chuckled and spread his hands in a series of eloquent gestures.

  ‘Already, you see, you have forgotten his name: Luca the Swindler, the Double-Dealer. With him, nothing was ever the way it looked. The mere fact of walling the stuff up in the vault created a value for it. It had to be precious. If it was betrayed or discovered, he wasn’t losing too much. But if, as happened, it survived and was brought triumphantly to light again – then every item, even my copies became ipso facto a masterpiece. That’s how he financed his family’s post-war empire at home and abroad.…’