Читать книгу The Gravity of Birds - Tracy Guzeman - Страница 11

Stephen Jameson shook the rain from his umbrella, stepped into the ancient elevator, and punched the button for the twenty-second floor with his elbow while carrying a thermos cup of coffee, his briefcase, and several manila folders. The doors closed, and he was enveloped in humid, clotted air, thick with the smells of mold and other people’s body odor and a trace of something sweet and slightly alcoholic, like a rum drink. The car lurched. As it headed up, he gazed wistfully at the button marked ‘57,’ where the executive offices of Murchison & Dunne, Auctioneers and Appraisers of Fine Art and Antiques, were located.

His office—the only one on the twenty-second floor—was directly adjacent to the elevator shaft, which meant the hours of his day were punctuated by the creaks and groans of transportation, as the elevator ferried those individuals more highly prized than himself to higher floors. Clutching his briefcase against his chest, he fumbled with the knob while pushing the warped office door open with a thrust of his hip. He elbowed the light switch on and glanced around the room on the off chance that some miraculous transformation might have happened overnight. No, it was all still there, exactly as he’d left it the night before. A rope of twisted phone wire emerged from a small hole in the upper front corner of the room and exited through a slightly larger hole that had been gouged in the drywall at the upper back corner; popcorn-colored insulation puffed out from one of the acoustic ceiling tiles; and there was the small but constant puddle of stale-smelling water on the floor next to the radiator.

Framed diplomas, awarding him graduate degrees in art history and chemistry, hung on the wall opposite a walnut desk, the varnish of which had peeled off in large patches. There was a catalog wedged beneath one of the desk legs where a ball foot was missing. His attempts at decoration were limited to a ‘Go Wolverines!’ pennant he had pilfered from a neighboring student’s wall following a 42–3 blowout between Michigan and the University of Minnesota’s Golden Gophers, and a crisp philodendron entombed in a pot of cement-like soil, its skeletal leaves papery against the side of the file cabinet.

He dropped the folders on top of the cabinet and plopped himself behind his desk, the leather of the chair cracked and pinching beneath him. The message light on his desk phone blinked frenetically and his cell vibrated in his pocket. He ran the tip of his finger over each button on the desk phone three times, left to right, right to left, then left to right again, but made no attempt to retrieve his messages. Instead he chewed on a hangnail as he opened his bottom drawer. From there he retrieved a bottle of Maker’s Mark, generously dosed his coffee, and loosened his tie before folding his arms on the desk. He buried his head. God, he was miserable.

His eighteen-year-old self had imagined a far different future for the man of thirty-one he was now. There should have been a wife by this point. Some children would have been appropriate, to say nothing of several milestones illuminating the trajectory of his career. He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger to ward off a sneeze. The air ducts delivered a steady stream of dust and other noxious particles into his office, and in the two and a half years he’d been at Murchison & Dunne, he’d developed full-blown allergies as well as occasional migraines. A tickle haunted the back of his throat, giving him a hesitant intonation as he tried not to wheeze.

His desk phone rang, and after glaring at it with an intemperate eye, he mustered what remaining energy he had and raised his head.

‘Stephen?’

‘Speaking.’

‘It’s Sylvia. I left a voice mail for you earlier. Didn’t you get it?’

He sat up in the chair and straightened his tie, as if Cranston’s executive assistant was scrutinizing him from the opposite side of a two-way mirror instead of speaking to him from thirty-five floors above. Sylvia Dillon took a perverse delight in making his already wretched existence more so. She was a small-mouthed, crab-faced, M & D lifer with wispy blond hair that did little to cover her patchy pink scalp. As executive assistant to the president, she controlled all access to Cranston, giving her an unfortunate amount of power and an imagined degree of authority, the latter of which she did not hesitate to exercise. Her typical expression was crafted from suspicion, disdain, and disgust, and she favored Stephen with it often. Unless she was speaking with Cranston, she ended her phone conversations by abruptly hanging up on whomever she was talking to, minus the standard offering of good-bye, thanks, or even ta.

Those in the know made efforts to stay in her good graces: obsequious compliments, elaborately wrapped boxes of candy at the holidays, even the occasional potted plant. Stephen had silently mocked them for being stupid and toadying but now wondered if his lack of deference caused her to single him out. Either that, or it was a not-so-subtle reminder that she, like everyone else, knew exactly why he’d left his previous position four years ago.

‘Sylvia. I just walked in. Just now. I stopped to look at a painting. On my way in, that is.’

‘What painting was that?’

Bloody St. Christopher. Why hadn’t he offered up a dental appointment or a traffic delay due to some minor smashup involving a pedestrian? He’d never been a good liar. A good lie called for a degree of calmness, a quality he did not seem to possess. He pictured Sylvia sitting behind her desk, her shoulders pinched toward each other with a military discipline, shaping her nails into talons with calculated strokes of an emery board.

‘Bankruptcy case. I mean, insurance claim. Around a bankruptcy case. I wanted to have another look before putting a final valuation to the piece. Now about your message …’

She sighed loudly, as if their brief interchange had already exhausted her. ‘Mr. Cranston would like to know if you’ve finished the appraisals for the Eaton estate.’

Eaton. Eaton. He rubbed his forehead and worked his way backward as was his habit. Eaton rhymed with Seton. Seton Hall. Seton Hall was in New Jersey. New Jersey was the Garden State. His favorite gardens were at Blenheim Palace. Palace Place—4250 Palace Place. The Eatons’ address! The image he reeled in from the corner of his brain was of a withered eighty-seven-year-old, propelling his wheelchair down a marble-floored gallery, gesturing with a frozen finger at one painting, then another. He remembered the man’s bald pate, the fascinating birthmark in the shape of Brazil that covered most of his head. Unfortunately, this Eaton was the same man foolish enough to believe his twenty-eight-year-old, third wife had married him for love. Now he was gone and she was wasting no time liquidating the estate’s assets.

There was nothing extraordinary about the collection save for some Motherwell lithographs and an acrylic by Mangold that would bring a fair price at auction. Some nice furniture, most of it Louis XIV: a pair of inlaid marquetry side tables, an oak bonnetière, a Boulle-style, burl mahogany bronze clock that might bring fifty thousand. But most of the pieces were of lesser quality, collectibles purchased by a wealthy, bored man whose primary interest was in one-upping his neighbors.

Stephen remembered inventorying and photographing the collection more than eight months ago. The camera flash bouncing off all that blinding white—the walls, the marble floor, the sheer curtains in the gallery’s Palladian windows—had given him a throbbing headache. But when had Cranston asked for the appraisals? And where had he put the file? Nothing had been transferred to his computer yet; a quick glance at his directory showed an empty folder marked ‘Eaton.’ He pushed his chair back and flipped through the folders on top of his desk, on top of the filing cabinet, on top of the bookcase. Nothing. If he couldn’t locate it, he was done for. Cranston wouldn’t be inclined to give him another chance.

‘Stephen?’

‘Yes, Sylvia?’

‘The Eaton estate?’

‘Right. Just finishing up with it.’

‘Good. He wants to see you at four this afternoon to go over the paperwork.’

‘Uh, that would be difficult. I already have an appointment at four.’

‘I checked your online schedule. It doesn’t show you being out today.’

The woman was practically purring. He pictured himself tearing the phone out of the wall and hammering her with it until pieces of her chipped off, then reconstructing her à la Picasso: an ear attached to her hip, an arm shooting out from her head, lips springing from her big toe.

‘In fact, Stephen, I don’t show you with anything on the books for the next several days.’

‘My fault, I suppose,’ he said, sifting through a stack of conservation reports and greasy sandwich wrappers on the corner of his desk. ‘I haven’t synced my calendar. I was planning to do it this morning. So today would be difficult.’

‘He really needs this done.’

Stephen tried to visualize Cranston standing in front of her making this plea. I really need this done, Sylvia. Unlikely. Maybe she’d taken it upon herself to put this on Cranston’s agenda in an attempt to undermine his credibility. But Stephen detected a distracted quality in her tone that indicated her attention was flagging. Perhaps another unfortunate had crept into her field of vision. Please, please, please, shit, please. He bit down hard on his lower lip, drawing blood.

‘If there’s no way you can do it today, I suppose I could fit you in tomorrow morning.’

‘Let me just check.’ He flipped through the empty pages of his agenda. ‘Yes, that would be better for me, Sylvia. I’ll plan to see him then. Good-bye.’ He hung up the phone, waiting for a second before taking the receiver off the hook and stuffing it in his top desk drawer. He penciled a brief note on the legal pad on his desk: ‘Buy potted plant.’

Four years paying for a mistake that had taken him less than a minute to make. Stephen had obliterated his oh-so-promising career single-handedly. Perhaps not single-handedly. He hadn’t known Chloe was married; at least, he hadn’t allowed himself to dwell on the possibility. He certainly hadn’t known who she was married to. She hadn’t acted like a married person, though looking back he wasn’t sure how he’d thought a married person would act, aside from the obvious assumption of fidelity. Rather an unhappy omission, he’d told her on his cell phone, standing outside of his ex-office building waiting for a cab, his possessions crammed into a cardboard box.

He’d been in her husband’s office—her husband being the recently appointed head of acquisitions for Foyle’s New York, as well as his new boss—flipping through a portfolio containing photos of the material slated for the coming week’s auction, when he’d looked up from an image of a pair of Sèvres blue-ground vases, circa 1770, to see Chloe’s face regarding him sternly from a framed photo on the credenza.

That’s Chloe, he’d said.

You know her? the man had asked.

She’s my girlfriend, he’d responded automatically, unable to contain the satisfied smile that followed. At the man’s astonished stare, he’d ignored the nagging buzz in the back of his brain and fumbled on, unknowingly digging the trench deeper. He had assumed it was not the image but the frame that was the treasure—a Romantic Revival, circa 1850; brilliant gold leaf over gray bole; an oval of flowers and leaves with a deep scoop and a concave outside edge; in immaculate condition aside from one hairline crack in the scoop. A piece he might covet if not for the fact he already had what lay inside the frame. So he’d opened his mouth and sealed his fate.

Seeing the picture of Chloe had made him understand both the necessity of the superlative and the fateful pride associated with acquiring something of beauty. He could feel the soft swell of her cheek under his thumb, brush a finger over the freckles dotting her nose. He could smell the exotic scent she wore, frangipani, which made him slightly queasy, like being at sea. In Australia, they call it ‘Dead Man’s Finger,’ she’d told him once, before pressing her body against him under the starched hotel sheet that skimmed their shoulders. He’d shivered at the sweep of her dark hair across his chest. How had he defined happiness before her?

He’d watched other men’s eyes follow her when they made their way to a table in a restaurant, had seen the subtle turn of a head on the street, followed by the gaze sizing him up. They were wondering how he’d gotten so lucky. He’d wondered himself. When he’d asked her why she was with him, she’d simply said, ‘You’re smarter.’ If he’d thought to ask, ‘Than whom?’ he’d just as quickly squelched the idea, not caring to know whether the ‘whom’ in question was generic or specific. It was enough to be with her. He became more attractive by proxy.

But when they were apart, the feeling dogging him was a murky stew of incredulity, suspicion, and the numbing sensation of being struck dumb by his good fortune. So struck, or so dumb, his first thought hadn’t been to wonder why Chloe’s picture was on his boss’s credenza.

‘How the hell could you?’ she’d demanded, in a tone that alarmed him.

‘How could I? Can I just remind you, of the two of us, you’re the one who’s evidently married here? The man asked me a question. Was I supposed to lie? Besides, you’re missing the more important point. I’ve been let go. Fired. Three years building my reputation at one of the best auction houses in the country, gone.’

‘No, you’re the one who’s missing the point. Of course you were supposed to lie. Anyone else would have known that. How could you tell him I was your girlfriend?’

‘Well, clearly I didn’t realize who I was saying it to, for one thing. But now he knows. Is that a terrible thing? I hate to point out the obvious, but you are, after all, my girlfriend.’

The silence before she’d answered provided him horrible clarity. ‘Don’t you understand what you’ve done, Stephen? How could you be so unbelievably thick?’

At least that was explainable. His entire life he’d been blessed with an exceptional gift for misunderstanding, especially when women were involved—their desires, their needs, their way of thinking. Even his mother, on more than one occasion, had given him a studied look, as if he wasn’t her child but an alien species deposited in her house. ‘Why in the world would you think I meant that?’ she’d ask. Those were the times he wished for a sister instead of being an only child, longing for someone who might help him to decode the inexplicable language of women.

He dismissed the whispers that trailed after him, hissed at a decibel just loud enough to be heard—Used him. Knew someone like that would humiliate her husband. She was getting even—and focused on those memories that couldn’t be warped, in hindsight, into calculated, duplicitous acts: Chloe weaving her fingers through his as they walked in Central Park at midnight; Chloe biting down on her lower lip as she straightened his tie, a look that ruined him every time; Chloe stuffing his pockets with throat lozenges before they went into the movie theater, sequestering themselves in the back row, where his hand could wander across the top of her thigh, unseen.

The sacking (as he had come to refer to it) and subsequent breakup were followed by an equally humiliating nine-month period when he looked for work wholeheartedly, then halfheartedly, then not at all. As a patron of the arts, of local politicos and any cause célèbre, Chloe’s husband had no problem calling in favors. Stephen quickly found himself blacklisted from any job, or any future, he might have deemed worthy. There would be no significant curatorial position at a major museum, nor would he be overseeing acquisitions for any Fortune 500 company. There would be no managing of conservation personnel, no addresses delivered to the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. And though he could not picture himself lecturing behind a podium considering his general dislike of people in groups numbering more than five, his academic prospects were equally dim. Worst of all, he no longer worked at the most prestigious auction house in the city, at least, the most prestigious since scandal had tarnished the reputation of both Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

Giving up his apartment, he camped out on the futons of various colleagues, quickly wearing out his welcome and exposing those relationships for what they were—the shallowest of acquaintances, not durable enough to withstand the weight of one party polishing off whatever alcoholic beverage was in the refrigerator, even if it was a wine cooler, leaving chip crumbs to gather in the crevices of the sofa cushions, and bemoaning his future state in a tone that vacillated between whining and suicidal.

When nothing materialized in the way of gainful employment, he took to brooding at his father’s gallery, shuffling invoices from one pile to another to pass the time. He might have worked there—Dylan had offered—but Stephen assumed the offer was motivated more by pity than by any real desire for his company. The gallery was already being managed by someone genial and sincere, with more enthusiasm than Stephen could have summoned, and had he accepted the offer, he would not have been the gallery’s owner, or even co-owner, but an assistant to the manager. If the lack of a title hadn’t been enough to dissuade him, his father’s near-palpable disappointment was.

‘Best get back on the horse, boyo, and stop muckin’ around feeling sorry for yourself. You’re not the first man to make such a colossal blunder.’

‘This is an odd pep talk.’ Stephen sorted through flyers, unable to meet his father’s eye.

‘People forget, son, but you’d make it easier for them if you were just a little less …’

‘A little less what?’

His father only shook his head. ‘Never mind. You’re today’s news, but that won’t last forever. Some other poor unfortunate will take your place soon enough, and he’ll likely have less talent than you have, Stephen. Thank God, talent doesn’t go away just because you got caught with your pants down. Though, geezus, I wish it hadn’t been with somebody else’s wife.’

‘Dad.’

‘I only mean I wish it had been with somebody you could’ve brought home to meet your mother.’ Stephen felt the weight of his father’s hand hovering just above his shoulder. He prayed for it to come down and rest there, but it did not. He looked up, and the pain and disappointment he saw in his father’s face worked on him like a slow-acting poison.

His father took a step back. ‘You think I’m being hard on you?’

The distance between them seemed cavernous. ‘Was it my fault Chloe kept her marriage a secret? No. Am I to blame for the unhappiness in their relationship? Hardly. Yet I’m the one who’s being punished here.’

His father studied his knuckles. ‘Really? And what about her husband? You think he’s not been punished?’

The way his father asked gave Stephen a twinge of panic. He sensed Dylan knew more about such a situation than Stephen wanted to imagine.

‘She should have left him,’ Stephen said. Meaning she shouldn’t have left me.

‘People who are married learn to make accommodations,’ his father said. ‘That’s the only way they manage to stay married.’

Stephen looked squarely at him, suddenly seeing an old man. Age had turned his father’s face into a study in tectonics—deep valleys and soft folds of skin butting up against each other, shallow divots, old scars, a peppering of brown spots; the tallies of crosshatched skin at the corners of his eyes, his frizzled, electric brows; the mouth that had become thin and pickled, losing some of its enthusiasm as well as its definition.

‘Honestly, I don’t care about his feelings.’

‘I hope you don’t mean that.’

Stephen turned away. He couldn’t stand to think of the situation any longer, or his part in it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I really do.’ Stephen tipped more whiskey into what was left of his coffee and reached for a tissue as he sneezed, then blotted at the papers strewn across the top of his desk. It had been a comeuppance of near-biblical proportions. When he was still a rising star at Foyle’s, his days had been spent traveling across Europe on the company’s dime, and oh, what days! He visited auction houses, private homes, and museums. He marveled at Old Masters and contemporary giants, advised on the restoration project at Lascaux, skimmed his fingers across Aubusson tapestries from the hands of Flemish weavers, examined expertly crafted furniture, even humbly proffered his opinion as to the value of a Meissen thimble decorated with the coat of arms of an Irish aristocrat. Now, four years later, he was trapped at Murchison & Dunne, occupying the lowest rung on the ladder, doing nothing but appraisals while interest piled up on his credit cards, his rent crept steadily upward, and his position grew increasingly precarious.

It was no coincidence they’d stuck him here, on the twenty-second floor. Simon Hapsend, the employee who’d previously had the office, was responsible for developing the company’s website and promoting the firm’s capabilities for forensic valuation work, an assortment of services running the gamut from expert witness testimony and valuations for insurance purposes to prenuptial assessments, bankruptcies, and trust and estate work.

But Simon had been abruptly fired when an FBI task force traced attempts to hack into the systems of several major financial institutions back to his computer. That the task force’s computer evidence had itself been hacked and could not be located was the only thing that kept Simon from an orange jumpsuit and a new address at Rikers. So Stephen inherited the office, along with the odd remnants of Simon he stumbled across: lists of passwords and user names stuffed into a gap at the back of a drawer, e-mails from an unknown sender requesting that Stephen delete the files that mysteriously appeared on his computer, and an olive drab T-shirt, the source of a rank smell, with a picture of a snake and the word Python in black script that was finally, and fortunately, discovered wadded up behind the file cabinet.

Stephen stared at the wall, wondering how long he could subsist on ramen noodles and beer. His confidence regarding his talent was receding at the same rate as his bank account. He studied his wavering reflection in the stainless-steel thermos. It seemed unlikely he’d age well. His black hair was already dashed with white around the temples. At six-three he’d been blessed with height in spite of having two parents of less than average stature, but a doughy paunch hugged his middle, the gym membership having been one of the first things to go. His eyes were bloodshot from a lack of sleep and an excess of bourbon; his skin had acquired the grayish tinge of a soiled dishrag. And he was sadly aware the primary reason he was kept on was his father’s reputation.

Dylan Jameson had owned the small gallery in SoHo for most of his life. Stephen’s childhood was spent running through those beautifully lit rooms, hiding behind oversize canvases; his playthings had been panel clips and L brackets, and exhibition catalogs that he stacked like pillars. He learned about perspective sitting astride Dylan’s shoulders as his father walked closer to, then farther away from the paintings in the gallery, introducing Stephen to a mathematical vocabulary: vanishing points and horizon lines, degrees and axes and curvilinear variants. His fingertips followed the flat sections of paint on a canvas, the channels where firm brushstrokes had tongued out the heavy oil, lipping it to one side or the other. He peered through a magnifying glass as his father quizzed him: glazing or scumbling? Alla prima or underpainting? Wet into wet or fat over lean?

But in spite of his father’s offer, working at the gallery, regardless of the lack of title, would have been a mistake. The airy rooms were colored with disillusion, the cheerful demeanor of the gallery manager an insidious reminder of his own lacking personality. Instead, at the beginning of the summer, Stephen had taken his meager savings and fled to Europe in a state of disgrace, slumming his way across the Continent, staying in fleabag hotels and cheap pensions, scooping the hard rolls and bits of sausage remaining from his breakfast into his knapsack for lunch, drinking cheap wine that gave him a headache, and smoking cigarettes that stained the tips of his fingers yellow. Everywhere, he imagined Chloe beside him. The steady pressure of her fingernails against his palm when she wanted him to stop talking and kiss her. The sound of her heels, pacing, as he studied Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love in the Galleria Borghese. Her fleeting look of disappointment once she’d drained the last from a glass of pinot in a sidewalk café. And the rare expression he caught before she had the chance to substitute it with one more pleasing—a calculating hardness that froze him in his place.

In Rome, he hadn’t bothered answering the call from his mother when he’d seen the number displayed, certain she was calling with her wheedling voice, attempting to lure him back. He’d turned his phone off. Four months in Europe and there were still plenty of wounds to be licked. Then, days later, he’d turned his phone back on and seen the number of messages that had accumulated. It was late autumn, everything already skeletal and bleak, when he flew home for his father’s funeral. There he was, back in New York, more miserable than when he’d left; a pair of his father’s cuff links his most concrete evidence of ever having been Dylan Jameson’s son.

His father’s knowledge had been coupled with a poet’s soul, a deep appreciation for beauty in all its guises. Dylan’s understanding of what an artist hoped to convey, matched by a genuine desire for that artist’s success, won him legions of fans—new artists whose work had yet to be seen, established artists coming off a bad show or hammered by negative press, auctioneers who knew his father would have the inside track, appraisers who valued a second opinion.

Stephen, on the other hand, was intrigued only by methodology. What drove someone to create didn’t interest him, but the techniques used, and the idea that skill could be taught and passed on, did. How to distinguish between teacher and exacting pupil, to tell the true from the false? Establishing a work’s provenance was crucial to authentication, and often difficult to achieve. When absolute provenance could not be established, there were other avenues available, and this was where Stephen’s talent lay. He had the broad knowledge of an art historian combined with the hunger of an authenticator to prove the unprovable.

He was happiest engaged in solitary activities: studying pigments, performing Wood’s lamp tests, conducting graphology analyses. Hours sped away from him while he hunched over the signature on a painting, relishing the beauty in the pattern of ascenders and descenders; scrutinizing bold, heavy strokes as carefully as faint, trailing meanderings; deciphering that final touch of brush to canvas. Had it meant pride? Triumph? Or, as he often suspected, merely relief at having finally finished?

It was nothing more than coincidence that he’d been standing next to Cranston at an estate sale two and a half years ago; nothing beyond a fluke that they’d both been staring at the same unattributed painting. And when Stephen started talking, the words that came forth were meant for no one but himself; it was a habit too difficult to break, this reciting of facts as he divined them. The work always gave the artist away, no different than the tell of a gambler. But when the call came from Cranston with the offer of a job, Stephen knew it was not providence but the hand of his father, prodding him to pick up the pieces of his life and move on.

The phone buzzed from where he’d hidden it in the desk drawer. He hesitated, imagining Sylvia’s abrasive voice again insulting his eardrum. But when he looked at the display, he saw the call wasn’t internal. It was Professor Finch.

The last thing he wanted was an evening out with Finch, though Stephen’s options for companionship were few. Finch had limited contacts outside the world of academia, but he made up for it with his general knowledge of art history, and his very specific knowledge on one particular subject: Thomas Bayber. In addition to heading the committee who had authored Bayber’s catalogue raisonné, the professor had written two volumes on Bayber’s work, both lauded and favorably received. Stephen had met him years ago, at one of his father’s gallery parties. No one else at Murchison & Dunne was willing to parcel out the time to listen to Finch’s stories or take him out for the occasional Bushmills, to endure the pipe smoke and the dribble of brown spittle that inevitably formed in the corner of the professor’s mouth. But Stephen had to admit he found the professor’s company enjoyable.

‘Stephen Jameson.’

‘Stephen, it’s Dennis Finch.’

‘Professor Finch, I can’t talk just now. On my way out the door to a meeting. An appointment. An appointment for a meeting, I mean. Another time?’

‘Of course, Stephen. Although, if you could get back to me at your earliest convenience, I’d appreciate it. I wanted to speak with you about another Bayber.’

The air around him grew heavy. Stephen no longer heard the elevator as it groaned past his office, or the hiss of the radiator. Everything was still.

‘You said another Bayber?’

‘I did. I was wondering if you might be interested in authenticating the piece.’

Thomas Bayber was a recluse who had stopped painting twenty years ago and one of the most brilliant artists alive. One hundred and fifty-eight cataloged works, all in museums except for three in a private collection in Spain, one in Russia, and four others privately owned by parties in the United States. The possibility he might be the one to authenticate another caused Stephen’s hands to tremble. A find like this would all but erase any past mistakes. There would be interviews and promotions, expensive restaurants; he’d be taking the elevator to the top floor, if only to offer his resignation. The myriad possibilities caused him to break out in a sweat, and his nose ran. Then doubt began swirling in his head. Of all people, Finch would know whether a Bayber was authentic; he’d devoted his life to studying the artist’s work. Why not call Christie’s or Sotheby’s? A sour germ of suspicion curdled Stephen’s insides. Someone was setting him up. His tattered reputation would not survive a second humiliation.

‘Why me?’ he asked flatly.

‘Thomas asked for you, specifically. Since I’ve already compiled the catalogue raisonné and this is a piece unknown to me, he feels it would be better for someone less—shall we say, prejudiced?—to examine the work.’

‘He’s afraid you’d be inclined to denounce it, since it wasn’t included earlier?’

There was a pause. ‘I’m not certain of his reasoning, Stephen, but I agree with him. Having someone other than myself look at the piece would be best.’ The professor’s voice sounded strained. ‘There’s something else. Assuming you confirm the work as Bayber’s, Thomas wants it put up for auction immediately. He wants Murchison & Dunne to handle the sale. You may need to bring Cranston along.’

Stephen didn’t relish the idea of involving the president of Murchison & Dunne without first knowing the situation. On the other hand, if Cranston found out he’d examined the work on his own, he’d suspect Stephen of acting as his own agent instead of in the best interests of the firm. Better to talk to Cranston right away. If they both saw the piece at the same time and it was a fake, Stephen could expose it as such, saving Murchison & Dunne any humiliation. If the piece was a Bayber, it would not be lost on Cranston that Thomas Bayber himself had asked Stephen to authenticate it.

‘When?’

‘I was hoping tomorrow afternoon. If you can make yourself available, that is.’

Stephen ignored Finch’s rather pointed dig. ‘We can be available.’ They set a time, and Stephen copied the address on a scrap of paper before hanging up the phone. His hands shook as he punched in the numbers of Sylvia’s extension, and he wiped his palms on his trousers while waiting for her to pick up the phone.

‘Sylvia.’ His voice reverberated with strange authority. ‘I will meet with Cranston this afternoon, but not in regards to the Eaton estate. We’ll be discussing something else. Something confidential. Book a conference room.’ He hung up without saying anything more, and pictured Sylvia’s shocked expression, her mouth like that of a beached fish, opening and closing in a stunned, breathless sort of O.