Under the Hammer

by John Mortimer

‘Well, somebody else then.’

  ‘Nobody else.’ Ben was sure of it. ‘You painted Patti. Not from life, of course. She never knew you were painting Hardcastles. She’d have left you, if she did. But you were thinking about her, her hair, her ear, her goldfish earring.’

  ‘That’s totally ridiculous! I’m not a forger

  There was silence then. Ben looked at him and said, ‘You’re quite right. You’re not a forger.’

  ‘Ben! What do you mean? I thought we agreed.’ Maggie felt lost.

  ‘We agreed Hardcastle didn’t paint that picture when he was alive. He couldn’t have. But we can’t rule out the possibility that he painted it after he was dead.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ Ned laughed at them again. ‘Hold a seance and ask him?’

  ‘I think we should ask him.’ Ben was quite serious. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ben! For heaven’s sake!’ Maggie suspected another joke, but Ben wasn’t smiling when he said, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s just think about Edward Hardcastle. An academic painter, married to a very nice wife, lived at the seaside, sold well. Then he goes off to Toronto in search of adventure. Mainly in search of girls. Girl students, he believes, are going to be swept off their feet by his great talent. And what do they do? They reject him. They laugh at him and his whole way of painting. So he goes home and he can’t lift a brush. He’s bored with his work, bored with himself, bored with his life too, I suspect. So he decides to commit a murder.’

  ‘Murder?’ He’d gone too far, Maggie thought. Now he really is joking.

  ‘Oh, yes. He decided to murder Edward Hardcastle. He arranged to do him in. A death at sea, with the body lost somewhere in the deep. He’d been sailing small yachts since he was a child. Do we really believe he turned his boat over and drowned in a gust of wind? He turned the boat over, yes, somewhere where he could get to the shore and get away to America and become someone else entirely. A different sort of painter who blew paint across the canvas with a hair-dryer. The sort of artist the beautiful young students in Chicago and Los Angeles and Greenwich Village would be likely to fall for. He grew a beard. He wore tinted spectacles. He put on weight over the years. Edward Hardcastle was dead. Long live Ned Nunnelly!’

  ‘Of course you’re bloody joking!’ But Ned Nunnelly wasn’t laughing.

  ‘No, Ned. You’re the jolly joker. It worked out rather well: your wife got the life insurance and you got a new life. The only trouble was that Ned Nunnellys didn’t sell. So you had to keep on painting Hardcastles. All alone. Certainly not in this studio. It was your secret vice. You painted Hardcastles because you are Hardcastle. I don’t suppose that’s any sort of crime at all.’

  There was a longer silence. Ned Nunnelly seemed to shrink. He took off his glasses to wipe his eyes. Then he had one urgent request. ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell Patti!’

  ‘I don’t think I’m bound to tell anyone. Even Liz.’ Ben had made his mind up. ‘I don’t suppose she’d want to live with Ned Nunnelly.’

  The door opened and Patti came in wearing her white bathrobe.

  ‘Hallo. Good to see you. Can I make you some coffee?’ She smiled at the unexpected guests.

  ‘No, really. We just called to congratulate Ned on his exhibition.’

  ‘Isn’t it great?’ Patti was clearly delighted. ‘Pandora’s going to be thrown open to the public!’

  ‘Oh, yes’ – Ben started to move towards the door – ‘just one thing. You got it wrong about Pandora, Ned. You know what she really had in her little box? All the evils and illnesses that afflict the world. The chap who kept the winds in a bag was Aeolus. He invented sailing ships and could always work up a convenient storm at sea. I just thought you’d like to know.’

  Ben was surprised to find that the charitable organization Feeding the Multitude was lavishly housed in a tower block on the South Bank. Piers Frobisher welcomed him with enthusiasm and took him up to the roof garden from which he pointed out the beauties of Somerset House and the dome of St Paul’s. He invited Ben to lunch, an invitation he seemed to forget when Ben told him that he had been visited by a native of that country Klinsky’s wished to benefit. He’d had a disturbing story to tell which Ben had no hesitation in repeating.

  ‘Who was this visitor?’ Frobisher asked. ‘Someone who doesn’t like the government of Neranga?’

  ‘I don’t think the government of Neranga likes him. And he certainly doesn’t like your charity. Don’t you remember the old text: “Charity doth not behave itself unseemly. Rejoiceth not in iniquity. Charity puffeth not itself up.” Haven’t you done just that?’

  ‘Have you talked to anyone else?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  The tall, stooping man crossed his arms, lowered his birdlike head and appeared lost in thought. When he looked up again, he was smiling in a friendly fashion which Ben found distinctly unnerving. ‘Of course you understand,’ he said, ‘you can’t get anything done in those sort of countries without greasing a few palms.’

  ‘Including the palm of the Foreign Secretary?’ Ben suggested.

  ‘Christopher M’tatu? I believe he has a terribly expensive tailor. Look here, Ben ...’

  ‘Oh, please, do call me Mr Glazier.’

  ‘I know you’ve put in an enormous amount of work on this charity sale. No doubt Feeding the Multitude would think it right to make you a special payment, in recognition of your services.’

  ‘Can I have that in writing?’

  ‘Perhaps better not. We’ll just shake hands on it.’ Piers Frobisher held out his hand.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I really don’t want to get grease all over my palm.’ Ben left them thinking, for one uneasy moment, that he didn’t want his life to end by toppling off a roof garden before he’d managed to consummate his long-lasting love for Maggie Perowne.

  The Lord Chairman was quite easily persuaded. Ben told him that there was some doubt about the authenticity of the ‘Woman with a Bowl of Flowers’, which caused his Lordship a few days of sustained panic, but when Ben said he had now proved beyond doubt that the Hardcastle was genuine, he agreed to dispense with the services of Feeding the Multitude and hand the whole shooting-match over to Oxfam.

  Ben only saw Liz once again. He got an invitation to her wedding and took Maggie down on the back of the Harley-Davidson to Shenstone-on-Sea. He recognized the bridegroom as the boat person who had invited Liz to the piano, and he did it again at the wedding-party which was held in a packed Sailors’ Rest. Liz obliged:

  ‘The way your smile just beams,

  The way you sing off-key,

  The way you haunt my dreams -

  No, No! They can’t take that away from me!’

  Liz was smiling at Ben as he joined in the chorus. Then Maggie murmured in his ear, ‘You don’t suppose we should drop the slightest hint that she’s committing bigamy?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Ben told her, and took a deep breath to join in ‘Long ago and far away I dreamed a dream one day’ – He sang directly at Maggie Perowne.

  The Virgin of Vitebsk

  This will last out a night in Russia When nights are longest there.

  William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

  ‘We’re not going to like it, you know.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Russia.’ Ben Glazier knew he should have felt more cheerful. He was sitting next to Maggie Perowne on the BA flight. Admittedly they were in the steerage, surrounded by a noisy party of teenaged girls, apparently released from their studies at some posh school to sample the cultural delights of Moscow; but they were escaping together from Klinsky’s auction house and the fatal charm of the head of the Wine department.

  ‘You mean you’re not going to like it?’ Maggie was wearing a raincoat with a fur collar and a round hat which made her look, Ben thought, not much older than the A-level students around them.

  ‘Neither of us,’ he told her. ‘We come from the workers, you and I, Maggie. My
dad was a copper and yours travelled in paper cups.’

  ‘He didn’t! He travelled in frightfully nice soap.’

  ‘All the same. We come from the world of cold front-rooms you never went into, strong tea and ducks on the wall, net curtains over the window, and people having a “blessed release” instead of dying and not wanting to trouble the doctor. We don’t want to go back to that, do we? Not to our roots. Not back to the workers. I bet you that’s what Russia’s like. Only posh people like that sort of thing, only people like Camilla, because it’s all such fun and so different from Daddy’s place in Virginia Water.’

  ‘You know what, Ben?’ Maggie looked at him with a new understanding.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re a terrible old snob.’

  ‘I’m not a snob! I’m an escapologist. All my life I’ve been struggling to get away from strong tea and net curtains and now I’m sailing back to my appalling youth!’

  It had started weeks before when Lord Holloway, Klinsky’s Chairman, summoned them to a meeting in the Epicure Hotel in Piccadilly. Both his wife and his cook were away on holiday, and long service in the food trade had not taught him how to cook his own breakfast, for which meal, he told them, he always took a softly boiled egg, wholewheat toast and a decent quantity of roughage in the form of bran. Ben told him that they got enough roughage as it was in Klinsky’s and ordered a kipper, which he dissected carefully as the Chairman told them that the world had undergone a considerable change. ‘The Russian bear has embraced the free market economy. Now that the Cold War has ended, we’re seriously thinking of opening Klinsky’s in Moscow.’

  ‘To do a roaring trade in wooden dolls and fur hats?’

  “You’re a cynic, Ben.’ The Lord Chairman smiled tolerantly. ‘That’s just as well. You’re not gullible. Either of you. You’ve got your heads screwed on. You’ve done Klinsky’s good service and I’m very well aware of that. So that’s why I’m sending you to sniff out the possibilities of our Moscow opening. Just a toe in the water at first. A small organization. A retail outlet. And a point of sale for Russian lines in art output.’

  ‘I’m an art expert, not a supermarket manager. Why send me?’ Ben wondered.

  ‘You’ve grown accustomed to working with Maggie.’

  ‘Working, yes. That’s all I’ve grown accustomed to.’ Ben regretted it.

  ‘Oughtn’t you to send Meredith Bland from Icons?’ Maggie asked the Chairman, who shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid our man in Icons has been refused a visa by the Russian Embassy.’

  ‘Was Merry caught in flagrante with an Orthodox monk behind Lenin’s tomb?’ Ben asked in all innocence.

  ‘I believe it’s some sort of misunderstanding. However, Meredith will give you all his Russian contacts, and Klinsky’s has put its trust in you.’

  ‘And we’re off to Siberia.’ Ben sounded gloomy. ‘Maggie, would you mind passing the roughage? We’d better get used to it.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got another breakfast meeting.’ Holloway was looking at his watch. ‘Work never stops, does it? Well, good luck to both of you!’

  On their way out, Maggie stopped at the newsstand. Gazing round the lobby Ben saw a bright-haired girl, just identifiable as Maggie’s new Number Two, Miss Annabelle Straddling-Smith, get out of the lift and disappear in the general direction of the dining-room. ‘The next business meeting,’ he said, and asked, ‘Wouldn’t you say I had at least as much sexual allure as the Lord Chairman?’

  ‘Considerably more,’ Maggie assured him.

  ‘Then why aren’t I bonking in the Epicure Hotel?’

  Meredith Bland was a ginger-headed man with a swelling stomach and a high, precise voice. He sat in his office among the darkly glowing icons of the Old Russia, and gave Ben and Maggie tips on the Moscow of today. ‘Most important contact is Olga Krupenska, General Krupenski’s widow. She still has an office in the Voynitsky Gallery. Knows everybody. And Ivan Grekov, at the Ministry of Culture. An absolute charmer.’

  ‘Is he a monk, by any chance?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Ivan Grekov, a monk? Quite the reverse! Did a spell at Harvard Business School. Goes on holiday with the Club Med.’

  ‘Are you telling us, Merry, that these people are going to help us to open Klinsky’s, Moscow?’

  ‘They’ll say they will. Perhaps they can. It’s so hard to tell where the power lies. Don’t let it get you down. I’d advise you to take advantage of any incidental pleasures.’

  ‘And is that why you can’t get a visa?’ Ben speculated. ‘Too many incidental pleasures?’

  ‘Oh, that was some bureaucratic nonsense!’

  ‘Secretive sort of people,’ Maggie was looking at the icons. ‘They all have those beautiful almond eyes and you have no idea what they’re thinking.’

  ‘Possibly that they’re worth a hell of a lot of money nowadays. Particularly if they’re by Rublev.’ Meredith Bland was leafing through a book of reproductions. ‘When you’re there, you might find out if anyone’s had any news of “The Virgin of Vitebsk”. This one. Painted around 1425.’ He pushed the open book towards Maggie. She saw a young girl kneeling, holding a flower, before the angel who announced her pregnancy, simple and graceful figures against a gold background. ‘Rublev’s masterpiece,’ Meredith Bland told them, ‘lost before the war. I’ve heard rumours that it’s about to surface. The tragedy for the art world is that even if it does, it can’t be got out of Russia. Export of old icons is absolutely forbidden. They search cars and lorries, X-ray your luggage to make sure. But the law’s not necessarily the most important thing in Moscow.’

  ‘What is?’ Maggie was still looking at the photograph.

  ‘Money. And what money can buy. Now, I faxed Intourist to get you my favourite interpreter-guide, Alyosha. An absolute charmer. But devoutly heterosexual, and I’m afraid it shows.’

  As they waited in the departure lounge and Ben checked, once again, that he’d got his passport, boarding-pass and traveller’s cheques, he watched the schoolgirls being marshalled by a plump and anxious mistress, a woman made stouter by layers of warm clothing. She seemed to be in a mild panic at the responsibilities she had taken on and looked, Ben was surprised to notice, with some interest in his direction.

  ‘Schoolgirls going to Russia,’ Ben said. ‘And they don’t seem in the least scared. I feel extremely apprehensive and they look as though they were off on an exciting trip to the Natural History Museum.’

  ‘I think someone else is going to Russia.’ Maggie was staring with dismay at the new arrivals in the departure lounge.

  ‘It can’t be Shrimsley from Accounts!’

  ‘Do you mind!’ Maggie corrected him, ‘Shrimsley, our office manager.’

  ‘He probably set out for Lanzarote and lost his way.’

  ‘Somehow I don’t think he’d set out for Lanzarote wearing a fur hat.’

  ‘Quick! Evasive action!’

  Ben put his head down and led Maggie quickly to the back of the queue, afraid to look when they heard Shrimsley behind them, ‘Welcome, comrades!’

  ‘Oh, Shrimsley,’ Ben asked, ‘going for a sunshine break? You must be in the wrong queue.’

  ‘I’m coming with you fellows,’ the office manager assured them. ‘Didn’t the Lord Chairman tell you? You two are doing all the arty bits. I’m going to do the nuts and bolts of the business side. See you in Club Class.’

  ‘We’re not in Club Class,’ Maggie admitted. ‘We were told Klinsky’s was cutting down on travelling expenses.’

  ‘See you in Moscow, then. Dasveedanya.’ And Shrimsley passed them to board the plane.

  In due course the BA intercom told them to return to their seats, fasten their belts and extinguish their cigarettes as they were about to land at Sheremetyevo Airport. Summoning her charges, who had been gossiping and giggling in the aisles, the schoolmistress gave Ben another strange look of recognition.

  ‘Mr Glazier. Miss Perowne. Welcome to Moscow. My name is Alyosha. The other name is to
o hard to say, so please call me Alyosha. I am here to arrange your programme and to look after you as well. I will be, as you say, your guide, philosopher and, I hope, friend. May I take your luggage from you, Miss Perowne?’ Ben looked at the young man in dismay, disapproving of his large, soulful eyes, his dark, tousled hair and general appearance of a young Romantic poet out of the age of Pushkin, inappropriately dressed in jeans and an anorak, with a job as an Intourist guide. Why couldn’t Merry Bland have arranged a bossy, middle-aged woman against whom he and Maggie could have formed an alliance? He tried to comfort himself with the thought that at least Alyosha had never been to Eton.

  Alyosha’s programme clicked into operation as soon as they had checked into the grand, art deco hotel, where the receptionist was delighted to see Ben’s Visa card. It started on the great open waste of Red Square, among the crowds of Japanese, African and American tourists, by the van selling Coca-Cola and Snickers outside St Basil’s Cathedral. It was afternoon, and the red stars weren’t yet lit up on the steeples behind the Kremlin wall. Lenin, after so many years of shuffling queues paying him their respects, had been moved out of his tomb and put into storage. They walked across to the great glass department store, built on the lines of the old Crystal Palace or the hothouses at Kew. Gumm once sold little but fur hats, overcoats, huge bras and outsized nylon knickers. Now, Ben and Maggie found it housed branches of Benetton, Christian Dior and the Galleries Lafayette. There were queues outside all these smart shops and Maggie asked their guide who could afford to buy there. ‘I think some hard-currency prostitutes,’ Alyosha told them, ‘small-time thieves and the Mafia.’ At which Ben said that sounded rather like the clientele of Klinsky’s auction house. He also said he needed, after so much excitement, a drink.

  They went to a small, Scandinavian-clean bar, past the computer department of Gumm, and sat under a Smirnoff sign by a window which commanded an excellent view of Lenin’s empty tomb. Alyosha, fixing his serious and soft-eyed gaze on Maggie, talked of the state of Russia since the Berlin Wall came crashing down and Communism was defeated. ‘I am worried, quite honestly. I have to tell you this. In the old days we knew where we were.’