The Claimant Read online

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘Though,’ Marlowe says, improvising rapidly, ‘that’s where the high end of the art market is.’

  ‘True. The high end of the art market is there.’

  ‘I do happen to have seen records,’ Marlowe says – and this is partly true, used to be true – ‘of your business encounters with Saudi princes, army generals, assorted dictators, even African ones. Kenya, Zimbabwe, Guinea. I still can’t quite get my mind around the fact of the president of Equatorial Guinea owning a Degas and two Monets.’

  ‘Weird, isn’t it? What a pity that you squander so much intelligence access.’

  ‘When you meet with these mega-rich thugs,’ Marlowe, genuinely curious, asks, ‘what do you do? What do you talk about?’

  ‘We drink champagne and we talk about art. They all spend vast sums of money buying paintings and reselling them and trading them up. Sotheby’s is the appraiser of choice.’

  ‘And you’re the field worker of choice?’

  ‘Often works out that way.’

  Marlowe raises his glass. ‘To your global status. That’s quite a compliment.’

  ‘Not really.’ Lilith shrugs. ‘We all have a narrow focus of expertise. Mine is French painting and furniture, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not a crowded field. After that, it’s more a case of my being willing to travel at short notice, especially to places considered unwise and unsafe, places where other appraisers in our limited field won’t go.’

  ‘But you will. You’re addicted to risk.’

  ‘Not how I would put it.’

  ‘How would you put it?’

  ‘I’d say I can’t let myself off the hook. I wish I could.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning I’m tethered to the view that we are our brothers’ keepers, like it or not. Probably one of the many penalties of growing up Catholic. It’s a sort of genetic flaw that we can’t outgrow.’

  ‘Bullshit. You want to go out as a martyr, one more fake halo. That’s why you can’t keep away from the Middle East.’

  Lilith smiles (as one might smile indulgently at a child) and refuses to break eye contact. After several seconds, intense ones, Marlowe looks away. He looks into the mirror that reflects the mirror behind the bar. ‘Fuck,’ he says, swiping at least half a dozen glasses from the counter with a sweep of his arm. The sound effects are shattering. ‘No one travels there for legitimate reasons. Not these days. Not as often as you do.’

  ‘Let’s not pretend, Lucifer, that you have a clue anymore as to how often I go or don’t go to the Middle East or to anywhere else. But I do still travel wherever I’m asked to go when the need is acute. Wherever art needs to be appraised.’ To the barman she says: ‘I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. I’m afraid I’ve upset him. I’ll pay for the broken glass.’

  ‘And wherever you go in the Middle East,’ Marlowe says, ‘or Bosnia, Serbia, we have eyes. We know you have secret meetings on the side.’

  ‘I’m sure your kind does, but I doubt that you do. I’ve heard that you’re washed up. Over the hill. And I don’t consider human rights a side issue.’

  ‘Your meetings are being recorded.’ Marlowe does have former colleagues who do this, and he can call in occasional IOUs, but he is ad-libbing, freewheeling, enraged. ‘Your destinations trigger attention.’

  ‘If only I scored as often as I trigger attention. In reality, it’s a lottery. The president of Equatorial Guinea, for example, or rather his son, keeps all his paintings in his pied-à-terre in Paris and does all his art trading there. So sadly I don’t hit paydirt nearly as often as I’d like. I’m not telling you anything that former colleagues of yours don’t already know.’

  ‘You never declare your paydirt at customs.’

  ‘What is there to declare?’ Lilith asks. ‘What am I carrying? Words. Letters and photographs. It’s not contraband.’

  ‘It’s considered contraband by the countries you visit. Don’t pretend you’re not smuggling dynamite.’

  ‘Most of it I carry in here.’ She taps her forehead. ‘And they can’t run that through the scanner. But believe me, I have a few unpleasant souvenirs of being detained at borders.’

  ‘I know; I’ve seen reports. You realise you must be certifiably insane.’

  ‘Genetic inheritance.’ She smiles.

  ‘You’re risk-addicted.’

  ‘And you’re not? But I’ve got a lucky gene too. Generally speaking, the people buying or selling the artworks have the power to arrange smooth passage. There’s the beauty of it: they don’t lose a blink of sleep over torture but they have a passionate love of fine art. Or at least a passionate love of being perceived as lovers of fine art. Or at least a passionate love of being able to buy fine art as an investment and then trade it up, and it never seems to enter their heads that I don’t share their views.’

  ‘How do you explain your sudden disappearances into the scruffier parts of their cities?’

  ‘I don’t try. I’m a tourist. They love tourists. Hell, even a Hitler-wannabe like Mugabe pushes tourism in Zimbabwe. I publish travel articles on the side and mail copies back to my hosts. I’ve developed a sideline as a photo-journalist. I always include a spread of the warlord in his palace gardens. He has me sign the pages and has them framed. I would have thought you knew all this. You should check in with your kind more often.’

  ‘I’ve collected every travel article you’ve published,’ Marlowe lies smoothly. ‘How do you get the personal letters and photographs out?’

  ‘Am I likely to tell you that?’

  ‘You’re causing complications with governments we need to keep on our side.’

  ‘That’s your problem,’ Lilith says. ‘By the same token, the fact that our government pays fervent lip-service to human rights but gives no backup … that creates problems for me.’

  ‘Have you the slightest idea how often I’ve intervened to save your skin?’

  ‘Are you claiming you have a conscience, Lucifer?’

  ‘Who are you at present?’ Marlowe asks.

  ‘What a question.’

  ‘If you’re here on business with Sotheby’s New York, why are you in the Oyster Bar right now?’

  ‘Interesting question. I was invited. Most mysteriously. Or summonsed, you could say. Or subpoenaed.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘That is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? At first I assumed by you, given that we have a history with this place. Then I realised there were two more probable candidates, clients of mine. But I know it’s possible – just – that neither of us knows the answer to this riddle.’ She smiles. ‘Air tickets supplied and sent by international courier to Sotheby’s in Sydney, signature required, sender identified by nine-digit number. The same courier brought my hotel reservation confirmation. Neither were sent by Sotheby’s New York. I checked. Very probably a wealthy private collector, I realise that. They like to remain anonymous, especially if they’re buying or selling stolen art. There was a message waiting at Reception when I checked into my hotel. The note specified a meeting time here at the Oyster Bar. That’s when I suspected I might be meeting you. Otherwise Celise or one of the Vanderbilt lawyers, but for some reason I suspected you would be the one to show up. So I’d ask why you came here. And I’d ask if Celise knows you are here and if she sent you. And I’d ask what exactly you and Celise are hoping you’ll get out of all this – not that I care very much.’

  ‘Celise didn’t send me, and she hasn’t the faintest idea where I am. As for her plans for the future, that’s Martian territory to me. But I don’t wish to discuss my wife.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t. I assume you do know that she buys stolen art, presumably with your money, but that’s your affair. She fences it in the Middle East.’

  A tremor akin to Parkinson’s disease afflicts Marlowe’s hands which he clenches tightly, keeping them below the intricate moulded overhang of the bar. He projects his inscrutable look.

  ‘But I woul
d like to know why you expected to find me here,’ Lilith says.

  ‘I got a FedEx-delivered message,’ Marlowe says slowly, ‘sender unknown, suggesting you’d be waiting for me in the Oyster Bar. And I came because, well, I wanted it to be true.’

  ‘How touching.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d think so. Did you send it?’

  ‘Sorry. No.’

  ‘Ah. Well … I came because I hoped you did, and because this is where … Remember?’

  Lilith meets his gaze without blinking. ‘Remember what?’

  Marlowe closes his eyes and sighs. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Postscript received. Permit me to indulge in a possibly self-deluding romantic memory for a minute or so.’

  ‘Lucifer,’ Lilith says, pacifying a prone-to-tantrums child, ‘the only kind of romantic passion you’re capable of is the passion for conquest not yet achieved.’

  ‘The only kind of passion you’re capable of,’ Marlowe snaps, ‘is resisting conquest.’

  ‘Is that what you want to believe?’

  ‘No,’ Marlowe says. ‘Actually, no. I want to believe that things might have gone differently. I want to believe that you thought so too.’

  ‘You think you want me, Lucifer, but it’s only because nothing ever happened between us.’

  ‘But it could have, couldn’t it? Can’t you admit that much?’

  Lilith studies her champagne flute. ‘We’re talking ancient history.’ A pleasurable fog of nostalgia takes her by surprise: the carefree sixties, that brief moment in time between the pill and AIDS when sex was as thick in the air as mould spores and risk-free, or so everyone thought. They all believed they could end a war and change the world. ‘We were so naive.’

  ‘So young,’ Marlowe says. ‘So happy. And we could have, couldn’t we? Become involved?’

  ‘There might have been brief moments,’ she confesses. ‘That summer. There were directions we might have gone. A dazzling intellect has always turned me on. The mind is the sexiest organ and yours was seductive. So was your style.’

  ‘What exactly about my style?’

  ‘Your elegance. I suppose it comes with your Southern Old-Money genes. Your absolute certainty that you only had to crook your little finger and the world would fall over itself to do your bidding.’

  Marlowe raises her hand to his lips. ‘That has usually been the case.’

  ‘My point exactly. I’m unfinished business – which is the only reason you think you want me.’

  ‘Not true. I do want you. All the time and on whatever terms you choose.’ Marlowe keeps her hand in his, he keeps it pressed against his lips, he can see himself reflected in her eyes. His gaze is intense and he is baffled. ‘Why are you so immune?’ he asks wistfully.

  ‘I got to know you too well.’

  ‘What did I do wrong?’

  ‘It’s not what you did, it’s what you are. For a while I tried to convince myself, I actually wanted to convince myself, that you did have a moral compass. Never saw any trace of it, I’m afraid. All I saw was an unearned sense of entitlement and malignant narcissism. Not appealing.’

  ‘Ditto for self-righteousness and hypocrisy. Not appealing. Fucking repulsive, to be honest. You know, one thing I never figured out about you and McVie: most of us are in the game for the money and the lifestyle, no apologies, no pretences, no hypocrisy, no remorse. And some of us have put our skills to higher use even while we indulge ourselves. I’ve never been quite sure what was in it for you two, but I’m willing to swear it was something you got high on, something sleazy, something that gave you subversive trips with an underside as kinky as Puritan porn. Virtual virtue stinks to high heaven. I’m getting fumes of it off you now.’

  ‘My goodness, such a passionate confessional spill!’ Lilith lays a mocking hand over her heart. ‘You find me completely unprepared.’ She raises her glass, apparently to someone behind him, but when he turns he sees them both in the mirror across the room.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But you can’t fool a fellow player. When it comes to others, we’re a sceptical mob, we narcissists and Masters of the Game. If it’s not money, it’s power of one kind or another. Or else it’s some ideological thing. People don’t play hopscotch with their names and identities unless there’s some murky reason.’

  ‘There are other reasons, Lucifer, which don’t seem to have occurred to you. But I suppose it’s fair to call them murky.’

  ‘Are you actually hoping McVie is still alive?’

  Lilith meets his eyes, her expression unreadable, until he finds himself studying his coaster. ‘He is dead,’ Marlowe says. ‘We both know he’s been dead for more than twenty-five years, but denial is a powerful thing.’

  Lilith says nothing.

  ‘And denial is a dead end in every sense.’ Marlowe has not intended to shout, but every head in the Oyster Bar is turned in his direction. He lowers his voice. ‘And it’s ultimately a sick and self-punishing end, witness the hysterical hope of la comtesse, that pathetic and desperate woman. That’s what killed her.’

  Lilith seems deep in thought and far away. ‘I was with her when she died,’ she says. ‘She was as close to a mother as I had.’

  ‘What? I know you went with her in the ambulance but she was discharged in a matter of days. She had round-the-clock nursing care in her penthouse and you went back to Australia.’

  ‘Not immediately. I stayed with her until the end. I assumed you knew.’

  ‘You were there in the penthouse when she died?’

  ‘At her bedside. I was holding her hand. Celise dropped by, so I took for granted that you knew.’

  ‘You saw my wife?! Six months ago?’

  ‘Seven months ago, yes. When I say Celise dropped by, I really mean she barged in. She tricked the doorman. It was completely inappropriate. The doorman had her removed. I find it hard to believe she didn’t tell you.’

  Marlowe cannot conceal his agitation. ‘I’ll be back,’ he says. He rises and heads for the men’s bathroom.

  When he returns, Lilith says: ‘I can see I must have internalised your surveillance. I assume you’re getting information even when you aren’t. I did think you sent Celise to file a deathbed report. Not that I was thinking about either of you when the countess died.’

  ‘Okay,’ Marlowe says. ‘Okay.’ He orders a whiskey and broods over it. ‘Okay. So I’ve figured it out. The only way this makes sense. You went to Australia on this wild-goose chase for the countess, looking for McVie, in case he was alive after all. You didn’t find him because he wasn’t, but you found a usable substitute. You and the claimant cooked up this elaborate scam. You’ve coached him. You’ve given him the family history so he has all the answers to the lawyers’ trick questions.’

  ‘I would like to point out,’ Lilith says – she speaks patiently and gently, as she might to some slow student she is tutoring – ‘though it’s a detail the media has completely and inexplicably ignored, that the claimant has never claimed anything.’

  ‘If he wins,’ Marlowe says, ‘I mean if you pull this scam off, you get your hands on a big chunk of Vanderbilt real estate and stock.’

  ‘You know something, Lucifer? You’ve lost your ferret capacity for inquisitorial focus. Do try to remember that the actual claimant in the legal sense of this case was the countess herself, the recently deceased mother of the Vanderbilt heir, and that the present claimant is the estate of his mother.’

  Marlowe feels winded, he feels as though all the air has been punched out of his lungs by one swing of a four-hundred-pound weight. ‘Go to hell,’ he says, but in truth he is stunned. He is shocked by the sudden realisation that he has been as blindsided as any other reader of tabloid headlines. The disturbing fact is – and he does acknowledge it to himself – that the ‘claimant’ has never actually been the claimant.

  After Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt died in 1994, the Vanderbilt family took his widow to court for refusing to have her son declared dead. The widow had returned from her chateau in
France to the Vanderbilt penthouse on Fifth Avenue in 1968, not long before her son was shipped to Vietnam. She had come for his Harvard graduation which she was, in fact, prevented from attending. She stayed on in New York because she was so shocked – as was every single relative and acquaintance of the heir – by his enlistment. She tried to dissuade him, by letters and phone calls which he did not answer. She begged. She left messages with his training officers at Fort Bragg. She offered to buy his way out.

  He went.

  His platoon was ambushed. His body was never recovered.

  An army officer in full dress uniform hand-delivered official condolences and the embossed Missing-in-Action letter. On the stroke of that first dire death knell – which had tolled in the summer of 1969 – la comtesse had collapsed with grief and had sunk into a state of clinical depression, sometimes involving hospitalisation, for seven years.

  And then, almost overnight it seemed, she rallied.

  She engaged in a frenzy of letter-writing to the families of soldiers who were Missing in Action or who were known to be Prisoners of War. She received many letters in reply.

  After the death in 1994 of her estranged husband (who had promptly moved to his summer place on Long Island the day after his wife returned to New York in ’68), she claimed she had proof that her son was alive, a stance which stonewalled probate proceedings. When she was sued by the Vanderbilt family, her lawyers produced a photocopy of a letter, dated 1976.

  Decatur, Georgia

  September 2, 1976

  Dear Mrs. Vanderbilt,

  I don’t know how to reach you but I hope this letter will be sent on by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I saw an article about Vietnam MIAs that are still unaccounted for. There were photographs of the missing and one was your son, Gwynne Patrice Vanderbilt, officially declared MIA, presumed dead, in July 1969. I recognized him from the photograph. I wanted to tell you that I was in the same platoon, the same squad, as your son. We called him McVie because that’s what he wanted to be called, in honor of a close friend killed in combat in ’65, but our squad leader called him Vanderbilt. To be honest, it was confusing, because he had two sets of dog tags, one set with McVie’s name, the other with Vanderbilt’s. We knew, because he talked about it in his sleep, that he felt he had to atone for the death of McVie. We also knew that the last thing he wanted was for anyone to think he was one of the fat cats who shipped us out to be killed. He talked a lot in his sleep. He shouted and argued. Sometimes he was Vanderbilt paying for the death of McVie. Other times he was McVie promising Vanderbilt that he would show up for a cross-country run.