by Joseph Hone
‘Why don’t you just take it off him then?’
‘We may have to take it off him, but we want him to do the leg work on this job, lead us to the other paintings. We don’t exist. Remember that. We – and you – we’re here to follow him. So don’t try to give us the slip again.’ He was about to leave, then he turned. ‘Maybe you’ve told him all about us and everything else already?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Well, don’t. If he finds out we’ll kill you, but as long as he fancies you – well, that’ll make things easier for all of us.’ He came towards me. ‘Don’t try to cut us out again. Remember what we did with your father in Dublin, when he wouldn’t cooperate.’
‘Thank God he died before …’
‘No, you’re wrong there. That was a misfortune – for both of you. My friends were overzealous. If your father had lived a bit longer he would have told us where the rest of those paintings are hidden, and you wouldn’t have been involved, but your father also knew that Ben Contini’s father had told his son where the rest of the paintings were hidden before he died last year – we got that out of Bergen at least.’ He gazed at me. ‘So the trouble is, like I said, this Ben Contini – he knows where the paintings are hidden as well. He’s going after them now, over here, which is why we have to keep tabs on him.’ The man was sweating. He looked over the canal basin, the line of boats on either side shimmering in the heat. He tapped the wheel. ‘So don’t think you can disappear again. I have to be off. You get back with Contini. He’s with his American friend Broughton now. And keep your mouth shut about us. We’re everywhere, all around you, and remember what I told you about Contini. Tell him about us, and we’ll get you. Get on the wrong side of him, and he’ll kill you.’
He left. I called Harry’s number from a nearby phone box, as I’d arranged with Ben. I got through to Harry, then to Ben. Ben said he’d pick me up at the boat in half an hour. He was enthusiastic. ‘We’ll have lunch. Lunch in summer, in Paris! What better?’ I liked him again. Ben a killer? Surely not. The little bastard was just trying to frighten me. I was still going to tell Ben everything, so I decided I might as well take the whole journal with me, not just the drawing.
Ben picked me up at the boat half an hour later and we walked down towards the river. He had the Modigliani in its bubble-wrapped parcel under his arm. He was impatient, on a high, as if he’d been drinking, his eyes bright and daring, as I’d remembered them at the funeral party in Dublin.
‘Let’s go straight to the Louvre,’ he said, ‘see if we can get any information on the picture. Then there’s a small restaurant I always go to here, La Tourelle, just off the Boul Mich.’
We arrived at the Louvre and waited in the basement entrance under the glass pyramid in the courtyard. Finally we got to see an archivist of French twentieth-century paintings. A languid young man, tall, rather foppish, in a smart linen summer suit. He had a dismissive air that went with his tailoring until he saw the painting and examined it closely. Then he became animated, spoke as if it belonged to the Louvre and we’d stolen it. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘A legacy,’ Ben told him shortly. ‘It’s genuine, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes, it’s a Modigliani. That winter of 1916 and 17, when he painted so many wonderful nudes.’
‘Any idea who she might be, or where the painting comes from?’
‘No. I’ve never seen this painting before, or heard of it.’ He looked at Ben doubtfully again.
‘Modi gave away many of his paintings,’ Ben said, ‘to girls, to café and restaurant proprietors, for drink and food. Could be one of those.’
‘It could, and most he gave away like that were lost or destroyed afterwards. This one’s survived – that’s what makes it interesting. Astonishing.’ Again the doubtful look.
‘You have my name and address in Dublin – it belongs to me.’ Ben was almost aggressive now. ‘I wouldn’t be here otherwise if it didn’t.’
‘Monsieur, I don’t doubt you. It’s just a surprise. Because you are the second person today to make such enquiries about the provenance of a lost Modigliani masterpiece.’
‘I don’t follow?’
‘A man came to see me this morning asked if I knew anything about an unknown Modigliani nude, which he said might have ended up in Dublin after the war. I knew nothing of this, but I told him he might consult Monsieur Broughton here, the American expert on Modigliani’s work.’
‘What did this man look like?’
‘Small, rather fat, English: and here you are a few hours later with the very picture he might have been referring to. You must forgive me if I seem surprised.’ He looked at Ben gravely.
‘Well, there’s no connection. This is my painting and I can prove it.’
‘Of course. Just coincidence.’ A graver look.
‘I’ve seen Monsieur Broughton already, a friend of mine. He knows nothing about it. It there anyone else in Paris who might be able to identify it? Maybe someone still living, from the old days?’
‘Yes, the other man asked me the same question. I told him – Monsieur Martin-Beaumont. He was a young assistant to Madame Weill and worked in her gallery during the Great War. Modigliani had his first and only exhibition there, in 1917.’
‘Is this man still alive?’
‘Yes, he’s an old man.’
‘Can you give me his address?’ The archivist was doubtful again. ‘Look, I’ve given you my name and address. We’re on my boat here, at the Port de Plaisance, the Sorrento. You can check it all out. So you needn’t worry. I’m kosher.’
The archivist seemed reassured. He gave Ben Martin-Beaumont’s address. When we got out Ben whispered urgently. ‘Come on, let’s go round and see Martin-Beaumont straightaway. He’s only just over the river from here.’
Martin-Beaumont lived on the left bank, the Rue-des-Saint-Pères, an eighteenth-century hôtel privé, now converted into flats. We went through an arched gateway, across a courtyard, towards another arched doorway. A closed-circuit TV camera gazed down at us, with a coded entry system. We rang the concierge’s bell. A young Algerian let us into the hallway. He called Martin-Beaumont on an intercom. No reply.
‘Did he go out?’
‘No, he’s in. He had two people come to see him an hour ago. He’s fairly deaf. May not have heard the buzzer.’
‘Do you mind if we go upstairs? It’s rather important. I have this picture for him to look at.’
‘Go ahead. First floor, apartment two, end of the corridor.’
We walked upstairs. The corridor was silent. The apartment door was at the end, and the door ajar. Ben rang the bell. No answer. He pushed the door open slowly. ‘Monsieur Martin-Beaumont?’ No reply. Pushed it further. A dark hallway. Ben went ahead, towards an open door at the end. I followed. The place was airless, with a faint, tart smell, like lime juice. Ben was in the sitting room now. I was right behind. A big room, comfortable, good furniture, Persian carpets, pictures all round the walls. ‘Monsieur Martin-Beaumont?’
There was no sign of the old man. Then we came on him, lying behind the sofa. I thought he was asleep, he looked so comfortable, stretched out on the carpet. He was dead, his tie round his neck, but not in the right place. Tight round his throat. He’d been strangled.
‘Christ!’ Ben was bending over him, holding his pulse, then touching his brow. ‘Still warm. Not long ago.’
‘Who? Who could have …?’
‘We could have. In fact it was those two men here an hour ago who must have killed him. One of them was a man called O’Higgins, I bet. You smell the lime in the air?’ I nodded. ‘Well, O’Higgins is an antiques dealer in Dublin I sold some furniture to last week, and he was doused in some lime aftershave lotion when he came to see me. Upstairs, in a cabinet of my father’s, he saw a list my father had made of pictures that included the Modi nude. So he came over to Paris to find out more about the painting, first from that archivist in the Louvre who told him about Martin-Beaumont, and then on here. B
ut two of them came up here, the concierge said. The other guy was a hit man. O’Higgins must have become involved with some mob in the stolen art business, to help him find the Modi and all those other masterpieces in my father’s inventory. Just like us, he found out that Martin-Beaumont might give them some information on the painting, and put them on the right trail, but the old man failed to cooperate. In any case it’ll mean the police – a lot of questions. Have to get out of here. Take it slowly, we’ll be on that closed-circuit TV on the way out.’
Downstairs Ben thanked the concierge. ‘Yes, we saw the old man. A bit deaf. He didn’t hear the bell when you called him.’
The concierge nodded. ‘I have a parcel for him, just arrived. Looks like another painting. I’ll take it up to him.’
We let ourselves out and walked casually through the courtyard, and once out on the street, we walked fast.
‘Once the concierge gets upstairs and finds the body the police will be right over.’ We turned onto the quay. ‘Come on, we best go see Harry. A safe house.’
We were running now, with the painting. Crossing the Pont Neuf, I noticed a youth skating along on roller blades behind us. He seemed to be following us. And he was, still behind us as we came into the Marais quarter. When we reached Harry’s square, Ben stopped. A police car was parked in front of Harry’s house.
‘Christ, that archivist must have told the cops about my being a friend of Harry’s. No future there. Let’s go. The boat.’ We left the square, taking a new direction, through narrow streets we hadn’t been in before, turning left, then right, then stopping. We were lost. ‘It must be that way.’
We turned, walked down an empty, dusty street, the sun casting harsh shadows across old, boarded-up apartment buildings to either side. Then footsteps behind us, two men, the younger one who had been on the boat with me an hour before in baggy tracksuit bottoms, the other in slacks and dark glasses. We started to run, but there was nowhere to run to. A cul-de-sac. The side wall of another apartment building blocked the end of the street, the doors of all the other buildings on both sides firmly boarded up.
But there was another smaller door, further on. No boards across it. Ben threw himself against it. It gave way with a crash, and I was right after him, running fast, along a dark corridor, up some stone steps, through a swing door and into a big open space, a marble-tiled hall, lit by high windows, sunlight streaming down on two empty bathing pools. To either side a score of cubicles, partitioned and fronted by white curtains. We’d made a full circle round the pools. We were in the old Turkish baths, only recently closed, for there were still dirty towels strewn about the floor.
Running round the end of the pools we ran into a cubicle halfway along on the far side, drawing the curtain behind us. Inside was a slatted wooden massage table.
‘Up! Up on the table.’ Ben clambered up and I followed him, crouching on all fours. I saw why now. All the curtains fell an inch or two short of the tiled floor, so that anyone taking a worm’s-eye view along the row of cubicles would see our feet.
We waited. Running footsteps, up the stone stairway. The men were in the building. Silence. Footsteps starting again, softly now, but going in different directions, on the far side of the pool, to both ends of the other row of cubicles. The violent swish of curtains then, every few seconds, the men moving down the row in a pincer movement, hoping to trap us in the middle.
We had to get down the far end of the line, while we had the chance, towards the back door and make a run for it.
Easing ourselves off the table, we ran through the partition curtain into the next cubicle, hitting the massage table, and then into the cubicle beyond. By then they’d heard the racket and were running over towards us, one to either end of the line, blocking off our escape.
We got up on a massage table again. Trapped, waiting for them, helpless. There was a broom against the wall of the cubicle. Ben picked it up, then gestured to me. We both stood up on the table, but right against the wall this time, Ben holding the broom.
The footsteps starting again, softly in the silence, coming towards us from either side. Ben held the broom out, against the partition curtain to our left. The repeated swish of curtains as both men converged on us. Three cubicles away, two, one. Ben stabbed at the curtain viciously with his broom.
The shots rang out, bullets tearing through the curtain on our left, through the other to our right. We heard the second man fall heavily in the cubicle to our right. We ran fast, over the body, in a flurry of curtains, through all the other cubicles, towards the back door, ending up in the last cubicle. This was a larger one, without a massage table. There were cupboards, lockers, old towels, sponges littered about, and a fire hydrant against the end wall. A big canvas hose, flattened and coiled on a drum with a wheel tap above it.
Ben spun the tap. A vague hiss of water. Then, with another turn there was full pressure. He pulled the hose out, hand over hand, the drum spinning furiously, the canvas swelling, writhing about in his hands now, before a great jet of water emerged from the metal nozzle. He let it rip into the curtains ahead of us, tearing some of them clean off their rails.
The other man was still out of sight somewhere behind us along the row of cubicles, hidden by the sheets. Ben moved forward, hosing one sheet after another in a fierce torrent of water. Suddenly the man was in front of Ben, but only his shape, the drenched white curtain pressed against his body like a mould. He started to shoot again, wildly, through the material.
The curtain flew off its rails, enveloping him like a shroud. He stumbled out into the hall, struggling to free himself. It was easy for Ben: he directed the full force of water at the man’s chest. He fell back like a ten-pin into one of the empty pools, six feet to the tiled bottom, a motionless heap, wrapped up in a sheet like a load of old laundry.
Ben climbed down, took the shroud off him and turned him over. I saw the soaking baggy tracksuit bottoms, the matchstick legs. He was unconscious. Ben went through his pockets. Nothing, no labels on his clothes. Nothing to identify him.
Then the other older man, lying in the cubicle. He looked dead. Ben went through his pockets – nothing to identify him. He picked up his gun, pocketed it, went back for the Modi nude where he’d left it on the locker, then looked at the fire hydrant. The hose was still spurting full tilt into the pool. ‘Let it run. It’ll either drown him or wake him.’
‘No, we’re not killers. Turn it off.’ He didn’t. ‘We don’t have time,’ he said. Then we were out the back door and running. ‘The boat!’ he shouted. ‘The boat!’
We got to the Port de Plaisance, crossing the footbridge over the basin, moving towards the Sorrento moored halfway along on the other side. We could see it now, a hundred yards away. Ben stopped. ‘Wait a moment.’ There was a man up by a pay phone beyond the bridge, seemingly waiting to use it, but there was no one using it. ‘A look-out,’ Ben murmured. ‘I bet there’s someone waiting to nab us on the boat. The police. That archivist must have told them about the Sorrento.’ We were still walking towards the boat. ‘Just turn round and walk back over the bridge – easily, slowly.’ We did. Then we heard the footsteps behind us again. We ran.
We crossed the bridge and ran down onto the other quay, losing ourselves among the crowd of tourists and afternoon strollers. Further down there were two big steel refuse skips set above the moored boats. We hid behind them, waiting, breathless. The running footsteps came towards us, paused, then passed us on the other side.
Just behind us, low down in the water, wedged between two smart yachts, we saw an old converted barge, L’Etoile, with a line of washing and two bicycles on the deck, and a sign above the wheelhouse: Bateau à Louer.
Ben went straight down the gangway. I had to follow. He looked into the wheelhouse. No one there. He hammered on the door.
‘Christ! Hold your horses, whoever you are.’ A man shouted in English, rising up from the hold as if from a stage trap door. A big man, seemingly more wide than tall, rings of fat, middle-age
d, white-haired, a stormy beard, deeply lined face, like a crumpled boarding house bed. A Falstaff in grimy shorts and a T-shirt. He’d hardly opened the door before Ben spoke, pushing into the wheelhouse.
‘Hi! Saw your sign. We’re interested in renting your boat.’
‘Come on, come on in then.’
We were in the wheelhouse, hidden from the quay. The place was a mess. Books, papers, dirty mugs and bottles all over the place. I could smell the man’s aniseed breath. The bottle was nearby, a litre of Ricard. Two drunks now, I thought. Just dandy.
‘A drink?’ He picked up the bottle. He might have been expecting us.
‘Thanks, but it’s a bit early for me. Sun’s not yet over the yard arm.’
‘Oh – a sailing man yourself?’
‘Yes, out of Poole harbour. We have a racing five metre. Over in Paris on a break and saw the sign, thought we might hire the boat and take it up one of the canals here.’
‘Yes, why not? You have RYA helmsman’s papers? Need that over here.’
‘Oh, yes, I have all the papers. What do you charge?’
‘Hundred quid a day. I’ll give you 20 per cent off, if you take it for a week. Sleeps eight, most mod cons, and you get the theatre thrown in.’
‘The theatre? What sort of …’
‘All sorts. Straight, farce, commedia dell’arte, cabaret, old-time music hall, conjuring, illusionist’s tricks, and potted Shakespeare: bilingual, French and English. On the deck in summer, below deck in the hold in winter. We cruise the canals, moor in towns and villages. “Les Saltimbanques de Bateau” we’re called. We’re having a break for a week or so, and I need to get back to London for a bit. But any income we can get meanwhile…’
‘Of course.’
The man was enthusiastic now. ‘Take a look below.’ He turned back. ‘I’m Geoff, by the way. Geoff Wakefield.’ Ben took his hand. ‘George Hayward,’ he said at once. ‘This is my friend Isobel.’ I shook his hand. More than a hand. It was a huge paw, to go with the huge everything else.
