Not quite believing her ears, Latisha glanced at Susie, then at Hector. ‘You mean we have him? We have the devil by the tail?’
Hector sat back and pushed his glasses to the top of his bald pate. ‘You have the beginning of a good case – faked provenance, synthetic hairs on the painting itself – and you haven’t even examined the back of the painting yet. When you do, I suspect you’ll find that the weave of the canvas is wrong too. Maybe not the placement of the tacks, but th
e canvas itself.’
‘What I don’t understand is why he would go to all that trouble to make the painting so real, then make one stupid lazy mistake like using the wrong brushes?’ Susie wondered out loud.
‘There comes a time in an art forger’s life when he begins to think of himself as untouchable, undetectable, maybe even better than the original artist himself. That’s when he starts making mistakes.’
‘Or else there’s a part of him that wants to get caught,’ Latisha added, grinning.
Susie stood up. ‘Can I have a look?’
‘Sure.’ Hector stepped away from the microscope and she leaned over the machine, peering down into the viewfinder. The magnified fibres were both the same – even and tubular in structure. ‘I guess if they were natural fibres they would all be different to each other?’ she asked Hector, still staring down at the slide.
‘Only machines can reproduce fibres so exactly.’
She thought about Maxine’s hair, the beauty of it, the way she used to wind it around her finger, each blonde strand individual, irreplaceable, how her death left so much of her life unlived, so much of her talent unexplored, how it was a crime against nature. ‘Could you imagine killing someone to hide a forgery?’
Hector sighed, then reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a half-smoked cigar. Flicking open a gold lighter, he lit it. ‘That would depend on how much I stood to lose,’ he said philosophically. ‘Your friend, I think, had everything to lose.’
‘Has everything to lose,’ Latisha interjected grimly.
*
Later that afternoon Susie went back to her studio. The space, emptied of staff, extras and props, still had a trailing anarchy that hung in the air. She’d only finished shooting the fifth image two days earlier and now she had them all printed out and spread across a large light box. All she was lacking was a final image to draw all her experiences of the last three months together.
She turned back to her computer screen and pulled up a photograph of Girl in a Yellow Square of Light. She stared at the image, wondering why it resonated so powerfully with her. Then, sifting through her files, she discovered a photograph she’d taken of Maxine, half-naked, her face in three-quarter profile, her expression characteristically pensive, her long hair loose to her shoulders. Looking down at it she was suddenly overwhelmed by a great sense of loss and her own mortality. ‘I might have lost you, but I will live for you, for the rest of my life, Maxine, I promise,’ she whispered.
*
Felix waited until Susie’s phone clicked over to voicemail. He hadn’t heard from her since they’d driven back from the Hamptons.
The show was opening in a week and, apart from his secret appearance in The Triumph of Pan, he’d seen nothing of the other photographed scenarios, nor officially been allowed into the studio. Nevertheless, determined to exploit this unusual arrangement, he’d instructed Martha, the publicist, to spin it into a fantastic publicity hook: the all-powerful Felix Baum being forced to blindly trust an artist right up until the day of delivery. The ruse had worked brilliantly – Martha had even managed to ‘auction’ the rights to Felix’s live reaction to the exhibition, the winning bidder being HBO, who planned to have camera coverage on the night.
Chloe was already fielding dozens of calls a day from interested members of the public. Every significant collector this side of the Atlantic was harassing Felix for committed sales. It was going to be huge – he felt it in his bones – and yet he’d sensed a change in the way Susie related to him.
Leaning against his desk, staring at the driving rain outside, he remembered their last lovemaking session. She’d been somewhere else, he’d known it. It was as if she’d been trying to obliterate any kind of intimacy through sex, perhaps even obliterate him in some way. After they’d finished he’d been left trussed up, blindfolded and spent, alone and spiralling into an emotional darkness, until the housemaid freed him, much to his humiliation. So many things he did – the cocaine, the amphetamines, the frenetic pace of his career – were means of avoiding introspection, running from moral responsibility, from his past and the possibility of forming a committed relationship. There on the bed, his chafed ankles and wrists beginning to ache, it had felt like he’d reached the nadir of loneliness, forced to face up to a very real and profound isolation. Worst of all, he realised there in the darkness, he’d engineered it all himself.
And then there was the phone call he’d received earlier that day. A friend – an art journalist who liked to think of himself as a celebrity watcher – had rung to smugly inform him that Susie Thomas had been seen coming out of the Whitney the night before with a physically striking (in that she was massive) African-American woman in her sixties. As the woman was not recognisably part of the art community, the critic surmised she must have something to do with the upcoming artworks, the contents of which were still subject to a complete embargo. Could Felix confirm this? he’d asked, hoping for a lead.
The woman fitted the description of Latisha Johnson and the conversation had left Felix panicked. Was it possible Susie had been contacted by her, or had learnt something of his relationship with Maxine Doubleday? He didn’t know if that troubled him more, or less, than the fact that they were seen coming out of the Whitney, where Girl in a Yellow Square of Light was being exhibited.
He picked up his phone again and keyed in Susie’s number but her mobile was switched off. It was not a good omen.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was raining heavily, long raindrops that seemed to hit Susie at an angle and with a hiss. Vindictive rain: a ridiculous concept, she told herself. She stood on the pavement, reflecting on the past few months and her time in New York as the pedestrians rushed by, blurry arrows of humanity, each individual oblivious to everything except the pouring rain and their own fate. The show was due to open the next evening and the media interest had been intense, ratcheting up in the days before they were due to open. The publicity department of the gallery had fed the frenzy with tantalising snippets about Susie’s previous record of shocking the art world, the possibility that this new work – inspired and made specifically about New York and America – would hit new heights of transgressive sensationalism. The rumour that Susie and Felix Baum might be lovers was also encouraged with overly emphatic denials by Martha, who had simultaneously fed the scandal sheets details of photo ops where the two could be found together, something Susie neither discouraged nor encouraged, instead surrendering herself to acting out what she felt were the last days of their affair.
In reality they had not spent a night together since the bondage session. Over the past week Felix had withdrawn and there was a new formality to their relationship. For the first time he seemed a little fearful, although publicly he continued to play the excited impresario. But by now Susie couldn’t bear for him to touch her, and it was difficult not to see everything he said as disingenuous. He still hadn’t guessed she was pregnant, and she had no intention of telling him. The pregnancy had become a growing secret that pervaded her dreams. There was a poignant logic, she’d concluded, to her having been drawn to New York to exorcise a death, only to find months later that she would be leaving filled with a new life.
Gathering her courage, she walked up to the small entrance, sandwiched between a laundry and a Korean barbecue restaurant, that led to the apartments above. She paused for a moment, resting against a lamppost, the umbrella holding off the tumbling sky. Looking up at the building, she steeled herself, then pressed the buzzer.
*
The diminutive Korean narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
‘So let me guess, you another aunt?’ Chung, Gabriel’s super, asked, as he blocked her entry into the building.