A Nearly Perfect Copy (30 page)

She wondered where Klinman got them. How far back did the forgery go? To the Holocaust survivors? Did they even exist? Had Klinman commissioned the art or was he being manipulated?

She sent Klinman a brief message asking him to call her. Then she was sorry she had done so from the office. That would increase her liability. She made a mental note to buy one of those calling cards next time. She was getting better at this. Pretty soon she’d sleep through the night.

Part Three
Fall 2007

Elm tripped over a cable that hadn’t yet been taped to the carpet. She caught the edge of a chair, banging her elbow in the process.

“Watch out, Mrs. Howells,” one of the facilities guys said. “You okay? We don’t want you to sue.” He laughed; she wouldn’t sue her own family. Still, she heard a little derision in his voice.

“I’m fine. Can’t get rid of me that easy.” She looked at the empty room, numbered chairs at the ready, red carpets vacuumed neatly. In this room her fate would be decided.

She walked to the front to check on the catalogs. “They’re almost all gone,” the receptionist said. “Don’t worry.” She pressed on her earpiece to receive a call.

Elm took a catalog, though she had plenty at her desk. She paced back across the floor and went up to the mezzanine gallery. There they were on display, in a row like solitaire cards: Indira’s
Mercat
and her other treasures, alongside the rest of the items to be sold. Elm felt the old thrill of seeing her pieces come to auction. When she had made her first acquisitions, she felt almost like the artist. The power she had over the drawings was enormous. She decided their reserve, how they’d be listed in the catalog, where they would hang, what part of the mailing list might be interested. Then she waited anxiously in the back of the auction room for the lots to be called, as nervous as a pianist at her first recital.

The day waned, the hour of the auction approaching, Elm’s anxiety mounting. Her first few auctions had been heady, then Elm settled into the routine and began almost to dread them. They seemed to be the
worst part of her job. Procuring and curating works was worthwhile, noble, even. But selling them, and to the highest bidder, no less, seemed lacking in respect. So she had stopped thinking of the auctions as mercenary affairs and instead began to view that part of her job as a necessary evil. She put her head down and did what she was supposed to do. And then Ronan died and it all seemed even more like a shadow puppet show, like something someone else was doing.

The room was filling up, some of the regular characters—George de Marie Bosque, the drawing collector; the man whose name she could never remember who wrote that blog artsnob.com; and a curator from a nascent Impressionist art museum. He’d come in before the auction, explaining that he wanted to add to the already impressive collection donated by its founders, the Lees, wealthy Asian Americans. There were some dealers and art advisers, and a celebrity she recognized as being from one of those forensic television shows. Relay was there too.

Elm stood off in the wings. From there she had a clear view of the mounting platform as well as the audience. She waited until 7:00, then 7:05, when the auctioneer called for attention. The room was about two-thirds filled. Three auction agents were on phones at the side of the room, taking requests from anonymous bidders or those who could not be present at the auction. Usually these were Russians, eager to spend their new wealth. Though they especially liked contemporary pieces, they occasionally spent vast amounts of cash on important older items.

The platform spun slowly, and the first drawing was displayed. A Woodridge that Indira had consigned garnered an appreciative murmur from the crowd. Elm’s bladder clenched. The auctioneer announced the minimum of $120,000, and the bidding began. The curator from the Lee museum raised his paddle. The auctioneer acknowledged him by name. Then a severe-suited woman Elm didn’t recognize pushed the bid to $130,000. An older man, shirt slightly wrinkled and jacket shiny, raised again. Elm saw he had missed a spot shaving, a small patch of dark near his chin. She’d noticed that about older men; they had a neglected air, like the damp pages of an old book. No one to oversee their ablutions.

Elm wasn’t sure how she felt about the auctioneer, Petr Hoosman, a Dutchman who wore patriotic orange ties every day. He had come to the auction house as an accountant, but was quickly encouraged to enroll in the auctioneer education department. Unlike a typical lackadaisical
Tinsley auctioneer, he had his own gregarious, untraditional patter. He recognized important auction attendees, studying pictures of bidders and price lists before the auction, but never let on that he prepared obsessively. His shoes bordered on boat wear, and his sunglasses were eternally in his breast pocket. He had studiously floppy hair in the early Beatles style and was attractive, with high cheekbones and a lopsided dimple. Ian had had an enormous crush on him for a year, though no one was ever able to figure out his sexual preferences. He flirted indiscriminately with young and old, men and women (dogs, even), and after Elm had declared him asexual, Ian had corrected her: “Omnisexual.”

“What’s that?”

“Kind of like pansexual, you know, but instead of having desire for all types of sexual experiences, omnis just use sex, or the threat of it, to get what they want.”

They were having a martini lunch, an occasional ritual on slow Fridays. She leaned over and sipped her full drink. “I guess,” Elm said. She had had a bit of a crush on Petr too, the harmless fluttering she associated with the second decade of marriage. Just enough to make coming to work interesting, but nothing she would ever act on. She called these crushes “ab rollers,” mostly futile exercise to keep the flirt muscle tight.

“Plus, I saw him in the bathroom”—Ian leaned closer, a sign that he was about to make a vulgar statement—“and, shall we say, it’s all bluster.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to look at each other in there.”

“I snuck a peek.”

“Are we talking gherkin, Fruit Roll-Up, or Second Avenue Deli pickle?”

“What’s a Fruit Roll-Up?”

Elm sighed. Sometimes Ian’s youth was tiresome. “A snack.… It doesn’t matter.”

“Normal, I guess, small size.” Ian cast his eyes about the room, looking for a comparable object. “Um, like if you rolled up that cell phone.”

Elm nodded, though she had no idea what this would look like. After that discussion, though, her ardor for Petr had waned to a trickle then dried up completely.

Now, though, she could see Petr’s appeal, and the way both sexes responded to him. The attendees were beginning to relax: shoulders
slumped, legs slack. There were genuine smiles appearing on the faces of bidders, not just grimaces of concentration. Petr had been a good hire, had shaken up the image of staid Tinsley’s and injected it with a bit of youth and iconoclasm.

The bidding reached its estimated $135,000. Lee’s representative bid again, and the bidding stalled at $140,000. Then a new bidder at the back of the room raised her paddle, and Petr squinted into the lights to see her. He must not have known who she was, a certain blow to his ego. A dark horse, bidding the price up to $145,000. Petr acknowledged her as the “woman in the blue suit toward the back.”

Then Relay raised her paddle for $150,000. This was a bit uncouth. No one liked a buyer to sweep in at the end of a bid. Elm found herself silently critiquing Relay’s outfit—Ann Taylor Petites for sure, pearls as accessories. Were you allowed to wear pearls without irony anymore?

Apparently, Petr knew her, because he supplied her name on the first bid. But Elm guessed that as a Lacker, Relay had been around art royalty since she could be relied on not to drool on it.

Between volleys, Relay hunched over, leaning on her elbows. She bid by raising the paddle high, like a cat springing to action. When Petr awarded her the drawing, at $207,500, Relay looked estatic, beaming like a child who finally got the pony she’d been begging for.

Then Indira’s
Mercat
, the crown of Elm’s contribution to the auction, made its appearance. The audience gasped. It was indeed beautiful; the texture of the pastel glinted in the stage lights. The woman’s eye, the dog’s tail, the blue sky, the scales of the fish for sale glistening. It was a magnificent lighting display and Elm was proud at having orchestrated the arrangement with facilities. If she’d left it up to them, they’d have just shined a fluorescent bulb straight at it like they were interrogating a prisoner.

The woman in the blue suit who bid on the first sketch raised her paddle, and now Petr, who had learned her name in the interim (his staff was nothing if not competent and swift, delivering updates into his earpiece), called her Mrs. Kostlestein and then shortened it to Mrs. K in subsequent acknowledgments like he’d known her for years.

The piece, which had been on reserve for $750,000 and expected to fetch as much as $850,000, managed to reach $900,000 before being awarded to the woman in the blue suit. Elm let herself hope, near the end, that it would reach seven digits, that magical threshold that would
really make people stand up and take notice. But bidding had petered out, and Elm tried to remember that it had done well, better than she’d expected.

Elm smiled. Finally, she let herself relax, and realized she had been worrying a hangnail on her index finger and a bright spot of blood had formed. She stuck her finger in her mouth to stanch it. She looked up and could see Greer staring down at the proceedings from the private room. Ian winked at her from across the room, smiling widely. It was his victory too.

Other lots came up and were purchased. Two mediocre Callebaut sketches didn’t make their reserve. Indira’s esoteric postcard oils sold to a miniature fetishist. Then, though it seemed that no time at all had passed, all the lots had been presented. The auction was over.

Elm called Indira as soon as she got back to her desk. “Good news!”

“It sold well, then?” Indira tried to rein herself in, but the anxiety sounded in her voice, which rose squeakily at the end of the sentence. Elm wondered what she needed the money for. Medical bills? A debt?

“Very … $900,000.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” Indira sounded, like Elm, more relieved than happy.

“You’ll collect about $550,000 when all is said and done,” Elm half-apologized, though she had been careful to explain the terms to Indira in front of her lawyer to make sure she understood. Though Indira was a famous artist, she was still an Attic and had to be treated like one. “Plus the Woodridge and the oils.”

Elm went back to her office to shut down her computer and collect her purse. An e-mail had arrived from Greer, asking her to lunch the following day. Elm sneered at it.
Now
he wanted to be a relative, now that she’d had some success. She left it in her in-box. Let him sweat it a little.

Ian stood in her doorway. “Grab a drink?” he asked.

“Can’t,” Elm answered. “I haven’t been home in years, it feels like.”

Ian smiled, the ends of his mouth turning up disingenuously. “All right. We’ll celebrate another time. It was smashing, wasn’t it?”

“Smashing?”

“I’m trying it out,” Ian said. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Elm said, standing and reaching for her purse.

“Gnarly auction, dude.” Ian led the way to the elevator.

“Did I see your friend there?”

“Who, Relay? Yeah. We had a chance to catch up. It was nice.” Ian leaned over and pushed the elevator call button, then looked at something down the hall.

“What?” Elm asked.

“Hmmm? I didn’t say anything.” Ian flashed her the same smile he gave the really dumb cashier at Starbucks who always charged him for an au lait instead of a latte. The smile that actually meant its opposite.

“What’s wrong?” Elm asked.

“Not a thing.” Ian put his arm in front of the elevator door, making sure it stayed open for Elm. “Have a lovely evening.”

For two weeks Elm had been giving herself shots of Lupron and estradiol/progesterone in the bathroom after Colin left for work. She hid the medication with the stinky cheese in the refrigerator, one place she felt confident Colin would not look, as he hated any kind of blue cheese, claimed its smell of decay upset him and that it made no sense to eat anything rotten. He was irritable. He wouldn’t tell Elm what was going on at work, which would have worried her in the past. But she wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to her husband, occupied instead with deceiving him.