by John Harvey
‘What do you think?’ Parsons asked of these.
‘Competent. Interchangeable. Pleasant enough.’
‘Easy enough to pull off, then. If you’d a mind.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Although, in some way, he already did.
Parsons indicated a woodland scene, misted over, richly patterned in orange and green. Edward Atkinson Hornel, 1864–1933. ‘I mean, given the right incentive you could produce something like it.’
‘The incentive being?’
Parsons’s smile leaked across his face. ‘There are collectors in faraway places among whom these paintings have become quite prized. And for whom money is little or no object.’ He was studying Sloane’s face carefully. ‘Whereas for those in need …’
Sloane looked at the colour, the brushwork, the composition, imagined the money. Just one, he thought, just the one; to tide me over, to prove that I can.
It was fine while it lasted; five or so years during which Sloane slipped with increasing ease into the shoes of the mid-century dead, collectable if little known. Clausen, David Murray, William Stott of Oldham, the blotched vision of Philip Wilson Steer. Through a network of carefully preserved connections Parsons managed all of the necessary paperwork, proof of previous ownership, the forged accreditation. And he was careful, not greedy. No need to flood the market, draw attention, run unnecessary risks.
With each new commission Sloane found himself relishing more and more the challenge to his eye and his technique; so much so, he could forget what he was doing was in others’ eyes of questionable morality, a crime.
The money helped. Between his work for Parsons he could devote all the time he wanted to his own painting, without having to hawk it round an unresponsive marketplace. Freedom at a price. It couldn’t last.
How did he feel, Parsons asked one particularly sunny July day, about Vuillard? Sloane smiled. Parisian interiors and parks, figures caught unawares between reality and dream. Sloane had always liked his work a lot, preferred him to the better-known Bonnard. But could he capture the richness of the tapestries, the curtains and the lengths of cloth, those purplish reds and rusted browns? Sloane felt he could; knew that he would like to try.
It was one step too far. If the fake Vuillard Sloane had laboured over so lovingly had remained where it was intended, pride of place in the island hideaway of a reclusive Florida property developer, everything would most probably have been fine. But once the man had succumbed to a fatal heart attack only five days after its unveiling, his fourth wife and sundry children set about his estate with the benign indifference of piranha fish coming off hunger strike. When the Vuillard made its way for valuation, in close company with half a dozen other Post-Impressionist masterpieces, it was unlucky enough to catch the eye of an expert on a good day. Luminaries from Boston, Yale and Paris were brought in for consultation and, in the course of the resulting investigation, a hazy line seemed to point via Zurich and Cologne to London. Officers from Scotland Yard’s Arts and Antiques Unit took over. Robert Parsons’s London flat, his Suffolk house, his gallery were all prey to the proverbial fine-tooth comb. When the findings were sifted Sloane’s name shone clear. Paint samples from his studio matched those on the canvas. Parsons himself was charged but never brought to trial: Sloane and one or two lesser links in the chain took all the rap. No matter how much pressure the police put on Sloane to implicate Parsons, drop him royally in it, he kept his mouth firmly shut. ‘I’ll make it up to you’: almost the last words Parsons spoke to Sloane before they took him away.
3
Sloane’s mother, Martha, had been a dressmaker, fulfilling individual commissions in the evenings and at weekends, while working by day as an alteration hand and dreaming of singing with a band. Which was how she came to meet Sloane’s father, Al, an American tap-dancer and singer engaged on a tour of British music halls. Al was also a jazz trumpeter, a former member of the Charlie Barnett and Woody Haut Orchestras, but banned by the Musicians Union from playing officially in Britain. And one night when Al, along with a bunch of other musicians, high on weed and looking for a place to blow, descended on the after-hours Soho drinking club where Martha sometimes persuaded the proprietor to let her sing, there she was by the piano, her small but tuneful voice midway through ‘Lady Be Good’. Before she could finish Al had taken out his horn and was playing along.
After which initial encounter Sloane’s parents – unmarried, married, divorced, married again – proceeded to give him a very particular stance on stability. And home. Chicago? New York? Maybe London was the place he felt most himself. In Deptford, of course, and Kentish Town.
It was noon when finally he turned the corner and took two steps along the street: far enough to see the shattered glass, spiralling graffiti on the walls, the broken padlock on the front door, its woodwork battered and scarred, daubed with names and misspelt filth.
Sloane nudged the door back with his boot and slowly stepped inside.
The stink of piss and human excrement hit him like a warm fist to the face. He coughed and swallowed bile, blinking his eyes to adjust to the low levels of light. All of the furniture, save for the low couch and the bed, had been upended, thrown aside, trashed. Someone with time to spare had found amusement transforming the couch into a sarcophagus of empty bottles and cans; heaped unevenly along the bed was a pile of dark and rotting clothing he couldn’t bring himself to touch. The ashes from a succession of fires covered most of the floor in a soft grey mush that quivered when he walked through it and adhered to his legs. A viscous, yellowing rind lay thick on stale water in the sink. More graffiti on the walls, some startlingly obscene, some beautiful, one piece on the rear wall both at once. Discarded syringes lay in corners, their blunt needlepoints rusted with old blood; used condoms and soiled underwear littered the stairs.
At first he thought the damage in the studio was not as bad as he’d feared. Little of the obvious defilement that lay below. But when he looked closer he realised defilement was exactly what it was. Some canvases had merely been scrawled on, criticism of the most basic kind; others had been amended and revised, though few with understanding or with wit; one batch had simply been smeared with shit.
Sloane felt sick.
Outside, in the dubiously fresh city air, he breathed in deeply, stamped his feet. Two streets away, perched on a narrow corner, the no-name café had been treated to a lick of paint. Breakfast served all day, read the sign in the window, fresh sandwiches; special today, sirloin steak and chips, meat pie and two veg. Two workmen in once white overalls sat at one of the Formica-topped tables, relaxing with a cigarette after what looked like the steak special; a pallid youth with dreadlocks sat with both hands round a mug of tea, browsing through a copy of the local free paper; his dog, a ratty mongrel with green eyes, uncurled itself sufficiently to growl at Sloane as he passed.
The man behind the counter was no one Sloane recognised. ‘Alfred?’ Sloane asked. ‘He around?’
‘No Alfred,’ the man replied. He was the same height as Sloane, maybe taller; of indecipherable age and African descent.
‘Alfred, he used to run this place.’
The African showed him a fine set of teeth. ‘No more. Sell to me, six month.’
‘Six months ago?’
‘Yes.’
The workmen called their thanks and left. Sloane had known Alfred from years back, when he had run a similarly basic place off the Wood Green High Road. Finding him here, so close to his new home, had been a bonus, an omen. Sloane had paid him three hundred in cash to keep an eye on his building, make sure the squatters and the derelicts didn’t gain a toehold.
‘You don’t know where he went?’
‘Home. Home is what he said.’
Wood Green, would that be, Sloane wondered, or Nicosia, which?
‘I’ll have tea and a bacon roll,’ Sloane said. ‘Brown sauce on the roll.’
When he brought Sloane’s order to the table the African leaned towards him. ‘You are Sloa
ne?’
‘Yes.’
‘Alfred said you would be here.’ He held out his hand. ‘Dumar.’
‘Good to meet you.’ Dumar’s grip was strong and firm.
‘Your place,’ Dumar said, ‘how is it?’
Sloane grinned and shook his head. ‘You don’t want to know.’
Armed with black bin bags, a borrowed shovel, a hard-headed broom and wearing thick plastic gloves, Sloane set to work. He worked through most of that night and the following day; arriving unannounced, Dumar pitched in to help with the heavier tasks, lending Sloane his beat-up Ford van to haul load after load to the waste depot near the head of Kentish Town Road. By dusk on the second evening the two men were sitting in Dumar’s closed café, listening to a tape of music from Mali and feasting on a casserole of chicken and olives with rice and sweet potatoes.
In his own country Dumar had lost his home three times to the ravages of civil war; once when, after years of drought, a river burst its banks and flooded the plain. Each time disaster struck you salvaged what could be saved and started to rebuild. That was how it was.
Now the life he was building was here. He had a home, a job, a woman who read her poetry to him in bed. Dumar’s face broke into pleasure at the thought. Sloane was reluctant to leave.
Back at Sloane’s building the smell of disinfectant, acid and sharp, overwhelmed almost everything. Until he could arrange for the electricity supply to be restored, candles, here and there in threes and fours, provided wavering, smoky light. A sleeping bag lay unrolled on the floor. A chair from Dumar’s café. A thermos of bitter coffee laced with rum. He was bundling up a pile of junk mail and old newspapers when he noticed the airmail envelope squashed down among the rest; his old Deptford address had been scribbled out and the new one written in its place; the stamps were Italian, the postmark a little over two months old. The sender’s name, barely decipherable on the back of the envelope, was one he had scarcely seen in twenty years, had not spoken aloud for almost twenty more.
Jane Graham.
The last time Sloane had seen her, her face had been one of many, pale along the upper deck of the Ile de France, one hand raised to wave, the other clutching the rail. The kiss she had given him neither warmer nor longer than those bestowed on a dozen others who had come to wish her raucously well and bon voyage. ‘Who knows? Perhaps you’ll be in Paris soon yourself. You’ll come and look me up.’ And then she had been lost in the final clamour of goodbyes that echoed round her till she disappeared from sight, re-emerging for that all-purpose wave and smile. Just months before she had been featured as one of six exceptional young American artists in Time magazine. Faces to watch. Sloane watched hers until it was indistinguishable from those to either side. He was eighteen and she was twenty-nine. The first time she had made love to him he had come close to crying.
The envelope was light across his palm: how easy to have held it, forefinger and thumb, above the candle flame, waited till it caught. He slid the tip of one finger inside the flap and tore it back. The writing, blue-black on white paper, spidered haphazardly across the page: an old woman’s hand.
I wonder if you can imagine how difficult a letter this is for me to write? … Although I can’t expect you to believe this, I have thought of you a great deal over the years, always kindly and often with sadness and regret … I have been unwell now for some time … the doctors say the chances of recovery are slight … I realise you may think I have little or no right to ask, but there are things I want to say while there is still time, things that should only be said face to face …
He read it fast, then more slowly, scanning it for more than he could find. Little or no right. He gathered together all the change he could find and walked to the phone box near the station. The connection was almost instantaneous, the line remarkably clear. Sloane’s nerve endings anticipated the worst. In over-precise, heavily accented English, a woman, who introduced herself as Valentina, told him Jane was sleeping and could talk to no one. She was very weak, her condition serious. Critical. Sloane explained his delay in replying to the letter and said that he would catch a flight out the following day. After some hesitation Valentina, her voice abrupt and grudging, told him to fly to Pisa; if he let her know the time of his arrival she would meet him there.
As Sloane stepped away from the telephone, a train was passing over the bridge, gathering speed on its way west. A group of five or six Asian youths had gathered outside the late-night shop opposite, pushing one another and swearing loudly, shouting into their mobile phones. Sloane closed his hand round the coins in his pocket and opened it again beneath the street light: he had one pound, seventy-nine pence to his name.
4
Sloane lay down warily, anticipating uneasy dreams, yet when he awoke more than eight hours later he felt rested and refreshed, his mind untroubled. Cold water on his face. Dumar put the price of breakfast on his slate. No sense in arriving earlier than eleven, he read the paper pretty much from cover to cover, had a second cup of tea and then a third. A short stroll through the back doubles and he came out on to Malden Road. In earlier times there’d been a cinema here, tatty and cheap, and afternoons Sloane had bunked off school and spent his dinner money on third-rate double bills: ‘Wild Bill’ Elliott in The Last Bandit, Dan Duryea and Lizabeth Scott in Too Late for Tears. Between shows the usherettes would walk slowly down the aisles, spraying pesticide. When the 24 bus came, Sloane climbed on and bought a ticket to Trafalgar Square. Another brief walk, past the students already massing outside the National Gallery, took him south of Piccadilly Circus and into Cork Street. First right and he was there.
One of Parsons’s chinless assistants was manoeuvring a large canvas inch by inch towards the centre of the window. An elderly couple, grey-haired, stood holding hands and staring at an oil painting of somewhere like Deauville, admiring the bleached boardwalk and sandy beach, and speculating on the price. Parsons was sitting behind his highly polished desk, flanked on one side by a pale green vase of flowers, on the other by a Giacometti bronze – a girl with outstretched arms.
Sloane took up a position at an angle to the desk and waited. It was less than a minute before Parsons realised he was there and when he did he scarcely missed a beat. A quick smile of recognition across the top of his spectacles and he blotted what he’d been writing, screwed the cap back on his Mont Blanc pen. ‘Dear fellow,’ Parsons said, holding out his hand. ‘Welcome. Welcome back to the land of the free. But you should have called ahead, some advance warning. A celebration. Champagne, at least.’
Sloane shook his head. ‘The money will do fine.’
Behind his glasses Parsons blinked. ‘Of course, of course, but all in good time.’
‘Now,’ Sloane said, stepping closer. ‘Now’s a good time.’
‘I know, but lunch … Let me buy you a decent lunch and then …’
Sloane reached down and his hand covered Parsons’s as it touched the telephone. ‘You do remember?’
‘I think so.’
‘Remember what was said.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then, Robert, I don’t understand the fucking problem.’
The elderly couple turned their heads, alarmed. The assistant hovered closer and Parsons waved him away. What Parsons had said, the very last thing he had said, after ‘I’ll make it up to you’, was, ‘If you can keep me out of this, totally out of it, there’s twenty thousand waiting for you when you’re released.’
With a small sigh, Parsons sat down and opened a drawer, took out a chequebook, uncapped his pen.
‘Make it out to cash,’ Sloane said.
Just the faint sound of nib on paper, the amount, then Parsons signing with a flourish. ‘Here.’
Sloane took the cheque, read it twice in case he was the one who’d made the mistake. ‘What’s this?’
‘Five thousand. On account.’
‘On account of what?’
Parsons glanced past Sloane, lowered his voice. ‘There’s a proposition
, in the pipeline, I know you’ll be interested. Just your kind of thing. No risk. None at all. I should have the details in a matter of days, a week at the outside. Once we’ve discussed them, when you’re signed up, fully on board, I’ll give you another five. The rest will come along with your fee.’
Sloane picked up the Giacometti sculpture and struck Parsons full in the face, breaking his nose.
Parsons screamed and stumbled backwards, hands raised. The couple scuttled through the door. Moving towards the alarm, the assistant was stopped by Sloane’s stare. Blood ran between Parsons’s fingers. One of the bronze’s slender arms lay on the floor.
‘The safe,’ Sloane said. ‘I know there’s a safe. I need as much cash as you’ve got. Make a cheque out for the rest. All of it. Do it now.’
The front of Parsons’s shirt and the surface of his desk were speckled red. ‘You bastard,’ he said, but the words came out in a spluttered blur. ‘You lousy bastard.’
‘Just be careful,’ Sloane said, ‘you don’t get blood all over that cheque.’
At the door he stopped and turned. Parsons was dabbing at himself with a handkerchief, wincing at the anticipated pain. ‘You know,’ Sloane said, ‘I’d never have shopped you to the police, no matter what.’
5
Delaney waited. The leather upholstery of the Lexus GS was smooth and cool along the armrest where his fingers drummed a tight little figure – di-dat, di-dat, di-dat – over and over. Manicured fingers. Delaney wearing his second-best blue suit, a shade off navy, pale blue shirt, pearl tie, gold links at the cuffs – a little old-fashioned, he knew, the links and maybe even the tie, but hey! Delaney glancing at himself in the mirror, fifty-three last birthday and not a grey hair on his head, not a line on his face, laugh lines round his eyes aside. Vincent Anthony Delaney.
The alley ran the length of the entire block, opening out on to a parking lot which served the Irish bar and the Tex-Mex diner as well as the Manhattan Lounge. Which was where Diane was singing, two sets nightly, Mondays excluded, eleven and one. Standards, mostly – Gershwin, Jerome Kern – her voice wispy enough to get mistaken for Peggy Lee, she’d feature ‘Fever’, ‘Black Coffee’ – a couple in celebrating their silver wedding, ‘The Folks Who Live on the Hill’. Diane working with a nice little three-piece band: keyboard, bass, electric guitar. Forget the drums.
