Eternal Empire

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  The last painting was different. Andrey unwrapped it gently. It was no larger than the icons, perhaps twelve by eighteen inches, but it was painted on canvas, not wood. It depicted a nude woman lying in a field, her head gone, as if the artist had left it deliberately unfinished. Her legs were spread wide, displaying a hairless gash. In one hand, upraised, she held a lamp of tapered glass.

  Andrey studied the painting for a long moment, stirred by feelings that he could not fully explain, then wrapped it up again. Casting about for a hiding place, he finally slid it under the bed, in the narrow gap behind the frame, which was just wide enough to accommodate the slender package. He put the gun back in the box, along with the icons, and went, at last, into the bathroom.

  The shower stall was no larger than a phone booth, and the water took three minutes to grow warm, but by the time he climbed beneath the spray, it was steaming. Closing his eyes, he allowed his thoughts to wander. After the exchange, he would replace his lost cassette and buy ten kilos of the best coffee, five to sell, the rest to bring home. Even his son could have a taste.

  He was still thinking about coffee when he emerged from the shower, naked except for the towel cinched around his waist, and saw the man who was waiting for him in the next room.

  Andrey froze in the doorway, drops of water falling onto the rug. The man, a stranger in a corduroy suit, was seated before the louvered window. He was very thin. Although his age was hard to determine, he seemed to be in his early thirties. Behind his glasses, which gave him a bureaucratic air, his eyes were black, like those of a nomad from a cold and arid land.

  “My name is Ilya Severin,” the stranger said, not rising from his chair. His legs were crossed, the tip of one polished shoe pointing in Andrey’s direction. “Vasylenko wants to know why you’re here so early.”

  Andrey felt beads of condensation rolling down his back. “How did you find me?”

  “We have eyes on the road.” Ilya hummed a few bars of music. Smoke on the water, fire in the sky—

  Andrey thought of the gun in the cardboard box, which lay on a table across the room. “I was going to make the delivery. But—”

  “But someone else wanted to see the icons.” It was not a question, but a statement.

  “Only to look. Not to buy. I was told that I could bring them to you as arranged.” As he spoke, Andrey was intensely aware of his heart, which felt exposed in his bare chest. “He’s from New York. I was never told his name.”

  Ilya’s expression remained fixed. If this information was new to him, he did not show it. “All right,” Ilya said, his voice affectless, as if he were reading off a column of figures. “Show it to me.”

  Unable to believe his luck, Andrey crossed the room, the grit of the carpet adhering to the damp soles of his feet. As he approached the box, he forced himself to concentrate. He had never shot a man in his life, but had no doubt that he could do it. He only had to think of how much he had to lose.

  He reached the table. Deliberately blocking it from view, he undid the flaps. The gun was at the top of the carton. Andrey reached inside, picking up an icon with one hand and the pistol with the other.

  With his back to Ilya, Andrey said, “If you see Vasylenko, tell him that I am sorry.” He turned around, the icon hiding the pistol from sight. “I meant no disrespect to the brotherhood—”

  There was a muffled pop, as if a truck had backfired in the street. Andrey felt something heavy strike his chest. At first, he thought that the stranger had punched him, which made no sense, because Ilya was still seated. Then he saw the gun in the other man’s hand. Looking down, he observed that a hole the size of a small coin had been drilled into the icon that he was holding.

  Andrey fell to the floor, the towel around his waist coming loose. He tried to raise his pistol. When he found that he could no longer move, it seemed deeply unfair. He made an effort to picture his son, feeling dimly that it was only right, but could think of nothing but the painting under the bed, the headless woman lying in the grass. It was the last thing that he remembered.

  As soon as Andrey was dead, Ilya, whose other name was the Scythian, rose from the chair by the window. Kneeling, he pried the icon out of the courier’s hands, looking with displeasure at the damage to the wood. He put the icon back into the box, then left his gun next to the body.

  Ilya sealed the carton and tucked it under his arm. He glanced around the room, asking himself if he had forgotten anything, and concluded that he had not. Leaving through the door, he was gone at once. Under the bed, the headless woman lay, unseen, at the level of the dead man’s eyes.

  1

  The voice in her earpiece, with its soothing drone of encouragement, reminded Maddy of nothing so much as the sound of her own conscience. “Talk to me,” Reynard said. “What do you see?”

  “It’s packed,” Maddy Blume said, seating herself in the last row of the salesroom. Across the open floor, which was half the length of a soccer field, a temporary wall had been erected, with fifty rows of chairs set before the auctioneer’s rostrum. The seat that she had been assigned was less prestigious than those in front, but it offered the best view of the crowd. “Our friends from Gagosian are here. And that girl who works for Steve Cohen.”

  “How about the skybox?” John Reynard asked through the earpiece. “Who’s there?”

  Maddy looked up at the balcony. “The curtain is drawn aside. Someone’s there, but I can’t see who.”

  She turned back to the crowd on the seventh floor of Sotheby’s, where the chairs were rapidly filling. At the rear of the room, specialists from Christie’s, the other great auction house in New York, were standing to observe the proceedings, while in a far corner, roped off from the rest of the audience, news crews trained their lenses on the ranks of attendees.

  Across from her sat a trim Israeli, a cord running from one ear to the cell phone in his hands. She knew that he was buying on behalf of an investor in Tel Aviv, but at the moment, he seemed more interested in her legs. Maddy, who had blossomed only in her late twenties and, at thirty, sometimes feared that her face had been marked by recent disappointments, took a certain pleasure in this. She was a tall young woman with striking, almost sibylline features, and she always dressed carefully for these events, knowing that she was here to represent the fund.

  As Maddy scanned the crowd, her eye was caught by a man in a navy blazer who was seated near the back of the room. His hair was short, emphasizing the blocky lines of his face, and his build was that of a boxer. “There’s one guy who seems out of place. Cheap suit, bad shoes. He’s on the phone. Maybe it’s nothing, but it sounds like he’s talking in Russian—”

  “I’ll make a note of it,” Reynard said. As she watched the auctioneer mount the rostrum, Maddy knew that there was no need to spell out the rest. Russian money had been a primary driver of the art market for years, so any attendee with a Slavic appearance was automatically a person of interest.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” the auctioneer said, dapper as always, placing a cup of water next to his hourglass gavel. “Welcome to the final auction of the summer season. Before we begin—”

  As the auctioneer ran smoothly through the conditions of sale, Maddy wound up her call with Reynard. “They’re about to get started. I’ll call you back as soon as our lot is announced.”

  “Fine,” Reynard said. “I’ll have Ethan standing by in case there are any surprises.”

  He hung up. Maddy removed the earpiece and turned to a fresh page in her notepad, checking to make sure that her phone was charged. Only then did she look at the canvas hanging at the front of the room. It was a painting of a headless woman lying in a field of grass, a glowing lamp in one raised hand.

  A slide of the first lot of the evening, a nocturnal street scene by Magritte, appeared on a pair of screens. “Lot number one,” the auctioneer said. “And I can start here with the absentee bi
dders. Two hundred and eighty thousand, two hundred and ninety, three hundred thousand. Do I have three hundred and ten?”

  One of the clerks seated behind the counter raised his hand. He was one of only a few men stationed by the phones, with the rest consisting of the young women known as auction babes. Maddy, who had spent an uneasy year working these phones herself, knew the type well.

  “The bid is with Julian at three hundred and ten,” the auctioneer said, calling the clerk by name. “Do I have three hundred and twenty?”

  A woman in the front row gave a slight nod. Bidding continued for another minute, with the woman, a buyer for a major corporate collection, prevailing for five hundred thousand. Maddy took notes on the bidding structure, using the shorthand that she and Reynard had developed. For the next forty minutes, as one lot followed the next, she wrote down paddle numbers and kept an eye on the faces around her, which, with their varying degrees of excitement or indifference, gave her an intuitive sense of each work’s true value.

  When her own lot drew near, she knew that countless eyes were watching her as well. Without particular haste, Maddy donned her earpiece and called Reynard. The fund manager answered at once. “Are we up?”

  “In a minute,” Maddy said, doing her best to sound calm. As she spoke, the previous slide vanished and another took its place, reproducing, on a greater scale, the image of the headless nude hanging at the front of the room.

  “Lot fifty,” the auctioneer said, pausing to take a swallow of water. “Study for Étant Donnés, or Given, by Marcel Duchamp, showing at my left. And I have outside interest here. Nine hundred thousand, one million, one million one hundred thousand, one million two hundred thousand. With the order at one million two hundred. Do I have one million three hundred?”

  An auction babe raised her hand, rising from her chair in her eagerness. “Bidding!”

  “Bid is at one million three hundred thousand. I have one million four hundred.” The auctioneer said this without pausing, indicating that they had not yet reached the absentee bidder’s limit. “Against you, Vicky.”

  The clerk whispered the new bid into the phone, listened to the response, then nodded. Her bidder would go higher.

  “One million five hundred thousand,” the auctioneer said. “I have one million six.”

  The process repeated itself several times. As had been previously arranged, Maddy, with Reynard on the phone, did nothing. She kept an eye on the Israeli seated across from her. His client was rumored to be a likely bidder, but he had yet to signal, which implied that either his price point had been exceeded or he was waiting for the right moment to jump in.

  Maddy held back as the price climbed toward three million dollars, nearly twice the record for a Duchamp. Presale estimates had the study selling for between two and three million, but privately, the fund had calculated that the price might go much higher, given the mystery surrounding the work’s reappearance. Finally, at three million one hundred thousand, the phone bidder exceeded the absentee bid. The auctioneer scanned the floor. “Do I have three million two hundred?”

  Maddy looked over at the Israeli, whose paddle remained in his lap. “Tel Aviv isn’t budging. I think he’s been outbid.”

  “Duly noted,” Reynard said. “This doesn’t change our assumptions. Go for it.”

  Maddy raised her paddle, feeling a slight but pleasurable rush. The auctioneer smiled. “Bid is on my left at three million two hundred thousand. Do I have three million three hundred?”

  The phone clerk checked with her bidder, then nodded. Turning back to Maddy, the auctioneer invited her to raise her bid. Although Maddy was more than ready, she forced herself to count off three seconds before nodding back. It was best to maintain a constant pace. By taking her time now, she would buy herself a few seconds to think as the bidding became more intense.

  For a full minute, Maddy alternated nods with the clerk at the telephone. After every bid, she whispered the current price to Reynard, who did not reply. There was no need for him to issue instructions, at least not yet. According to their pricing model, she was free to go as high as five million dollars.

  The bids reached four million and continued to rise. At four million two hundred thousand, Maddy sensed hesitation in her opponent. The clerk spoke into the phone, then waited. Finally, after a pause in which the crowd maintained an absolute silence, the clerk nodded.

  “With Vicky at four million three hundred,” the auctioneer said. “Against the lady at four million three hundred thousand dollars.” He turned to Maddy, waiting politely for her response.

  Maddy dutifully counted off three seconds, but knew that they were almost done. She was about to nod one last time, raising the bid to the final price, when the Russian at the rear of the room, who had been seated in silence since the auction began, raised his paddle into the air.

  There was a murmur of excitement. The auctioneer was momentarily thrown off his rhythm, but quickly recomposed himself. “On my right at four million four hundred,” the auctioneer said, moving slightly away from the rostrum. He glanced between Maddy and the phone clerk, extending his hands like a symphony conductor. “Do I have four million five?”

  Maddy, flustered in spite of herself, whispered: “The Russian just made a bid.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Reynard said, although he sounded surprised as well. “Take it to five million. We’ll regroup from there.”

  “Okay,” Maddy said, nodding at the auctioneer. Four million five hundred thousand.

  Without hesitation, the Russian waved his paddle. Four million six hundred thousand.

  The auctioneer, along with the rest of the room, was waiting for her response. Maddy counted to three. Before she could nod, however, the phone clerk raised her hand. Four million seven hundred thousand.

  The Russian bid again. Four million eight hundred thousand. By now, the attendees were craning their necks to get a better look at the bidder, who was waving his paddle as if trying to swat a fly, his phone nowhere in sight.

  “This guy won’t stop at five million,” Maddy whispered, watching as the phone bidder took it up to four million nine hundred thousand, only to have the Russian bid again. “What do you say?”

  When Reynard failed to respond at once, Maddy knew that he was updating the pricing model with the latest information. At last, the fund manager said, “Okay. We can go up to seven million.”

  As soon as she heard this, Maddy caught the auctioneer’s eye. The auctioneer gave her a smile, as if she had paid him a personal compliment. “Five million one hundred thousand,” the auctioneer said, drawing out the syllables. “With the lady at five million one hundred. Do I have five million two hundred?”

  The Russian, implacable, bid again. As Maddy studied his face, it seemed to her that he was bored, as if he felt that they were drawing out a process that had only one possible conclusion. Before she knew it, the price had blown past six million five hundred, more than twice the presale estimate. For the first time, she began to consider the possibility that she might lose.

  She watched as the Russian bid seven million. As the auction babe conferred with her client, the room fell silent. Maddy sat still, heart thumping, waiting for Reynard to update the model.

  Finally, after a long pause, Reynard sighed into the earpiece. “Too high. Let it go.”

  Maddy found herself blushing with shame, keenly aware of the news crews clustered in the far corner. She wondered if coverage of the auction would mention her by name. “All right.”

  “Don’t let it get to you,” Reynard said. “He doesn’t understand the winner’s curse.”

  But the lot wasn’t over yet. As the auctioneer continued to play for time, repeating the current bid, drawing out the words for as long as possible, the clerk finally nodded. Seven million one hundred thousand.

  Without a pause, the Russian raised his paddle in the air. Seven million
two hundred.

  Maddy, reduced to the status of a spectator, watched as the Russian and the clerk took the price even higher. As the bidding passed ten million and headed for eleven, the Russian raised his paddle and held it there, a lighthouse bid, signaling that he was willing to buy the painting at any price. It was a strange gesture, since the rival it was designed to intimidate wasn’t even in the room, but it seemed to work. With the bid at eleven million, the clerk spoke into the phone, listened, and spoke again. The silence deepened, the room watching and waiting.

  Finally, after a hush that seemed endless, although it could have lasted no more than a few seconds, the clerk shook her head.

  “Eleven million dollars with the gentleman on my right,” the auctioneer said, relishing the moment. “At eleven million, are we all through? Fair warning at eleven million. Last chance, fair warning—”

  The auctioneer rapped his gavel against its block. “Yours, sir, at eleven million. And your paddle number is?”

  Before the Russian could read off his number, his voice was drowned out by a burst of applause. Maddy watched, drained, as the Russian was surrounded by members of the Sotheby’s staff, who formed a protective circle as the news crews charged forward for a picture.

  There was a camera in her purse, a piece of paper taped across the bulb to soften the flash. Switching it on, she took a picture of the Russian, who was handing his paddle to a representative of the auction house. It caught him with his face turned toward hers, arm extended, revealing a length of sleeve. When the flash went off, he glanced briefly in her direction. Their eyes locked. Then he looked away.

  As the murmur of the crowd rose to a roar, Reynard shouted into her earpiece. “We need to fix our pricing model. And we need this guy’s name.” The fund manager’s voice, normally so controlled, was cracking with emotion: “Find out who the buyer is. If he’s as big as he looks, he’s going to move the entire market, and we need to be ready for it. You understand?”