A Week in December (28 page)

Sophie walked through the long downstairs lobby, past the coats, and turned to climb the marble stairs. She spotted Lance halfway up, talking to Vanessa Veals and Amanda Malpasse.

'Glad you could make it, Soph,' said Lance, looking at his watch.

Sophie wasn't listening; she was taking in what clothes the others were wearing. Both had gone to considerable efforts. Vanessa must have spent thousands on her outfit - not that money was of any consequence to the Vealses; but Sophie recognised the couture dress from a page in a fashion magazine and the shoes from a designer whose work she considered too delicate for her own sturdy ankles. The brassy handbag was another three or four thousand pounds' worth that would appear on Vanessa's arm perhaps twice in its life.

A waiter was offering cocktails of a violent blue, and Sophie opted for the safety of champagne. Amanda also had a new dress from the top end of a Knightsbridge rail and her hair had the slightly dry look of the salon about it. Both declined the morsels of food - raw shark, carpaccio of suckling pig or something equally scary-sounding to Sophie - that were offered on a Perspex tray.

The four of them mounted the stairs and entered the main gallery, which was crammed with people. Sophie's eye ran over the organdies and devores, the faux-fur and the fox, the taffeta and cashmere, the demure black cocktail dresses with a confidently simple row of pearls; the carefree pinks and golds with boucle curls and tailored waists; the knee-length slashed satin and two or three instances of carefully ripped denim. The men wore hand-finished suits - some with ties and some without, but none with the shine of chain-store cloth. The only outfits that had cost more than the Savile Row three-pieces, in Sophie's rapid
tour d'horizon
, were the rebel biker outfits with the pre-distressed boots. The guests were packed in so tight that it was hard to see the art. Sophie sighed happily. She felt the investment in her own dress and shoes had been not only justified but had proved essential. Over the lovely, lively throng she could make out a sort of nimbus, where the muted beams from tracked ceiling lights bounced off the gold and diamonds below to form a thin, vapid haze.

Liam Hogg and his studio had, according to the press release, been 'working round the clock' for six months to fill the august space, through which had passed the work of Rembrandt and Turner, Caravaggio and Vermeer. The walls had been stripped of their paper for the occasion and covered with a white distemper. The maroon carpet over which so many Bond Street shoes had slid since the Second World War had been prised up, rolled and stored. The revealed floorboards had been sandblasted by men in masks.

Smoking, at Liam Hogg's insistence, was encouraged by the provision of several free-standing wrought iron ashtrays, in the shape of upright male organs, stationed about the room like collateral damage from an explosion on a porn film. It had been rumoured in the gossip columns that the artist had used his own member to make the first cast from which the blacksmith had,
mutatis mutandis
, manufactured the rest.

'All traces of the gallery's normal atmosphere have been purged', according to the catalogue introduction. Certainly, the walls bore no reminder of the last two money-spinning sales - of brightly cleaned sixteenth-century Flemish flower paintings and of flat, shy abstracts by Peter Lanyon and Ben Nicholson.

Instead, there were the images that had made Liam Hogg the richest English artist of his time. Here was
Anagnorisis V
, his take on consumerism that was made up of repetitive patterns of bar codes, cut from the back of supermarket goods. Here, too, was his famous pink and turquoise silk-screen print of the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston photograph. And at the end of the gallery was the installation
Everything I Know About Life I Learned From Not Listening
, which was a pub table with an empty beer bottle, glasses and a full ashtray.

'I've yet to meet a single person not in finance,' grumbled Lance Topping. 'Half the bloody hedge-fund industry seems to have pottered over from Mayfair after work.'

'Look,' said Sophie, 'there's Nasim al-Rashid. She's not in hedge funds. She's in pickle.'

'I suppose I'd better be nice to her,' said Lance. 'Her old man did bung us fifty grand.'

'Go on, then. And don't forget they're coming to dinner on Saturday.'

Nasim had seen the Toppings and crossed the room to speak to them; she didn't know anyone else there. Knocker had refused to accompany her, so she'd had to come on her own. She wore a sari of an intense indigo that looked more Belgravia than Wembley; she also had a gold necklace of flat, concentric hoops like those in a pharaoh's tomb. It was lovely, Sophie admitted to herself, though Nasim seemed unaware of the impression she made: probably something to do with her religion.

'What does this mean?' Nasim was saying. She was pointing to a caption on a large piece behind them. It said '
Arbeit Macht Frei
'.

'It's German, isn't it?' said Sophie.

There were black and white news photographs of people in a concentration camp, possibly Belsen or Auschwitz, on which Liam Hogg had drawn in some additions. One skeletal man on a bare bunk had been given a needle and thread to make him look like a tailor; another had a pickaxe over his shoulder and a miner's lamp drawn on to his skull. A third had been given a lawyer's curly wig, while a naked woman on the ground, who looked as though she might be dead, had a nurse's cap and a stethoscope over her bony ribcage.

At the far end of the room, a queue had formed and was waiting, cocktail in hand, to go behind a screen into a room with a low light, like that reserved for the
Mona Lisa
in the Louvre.

Consulting her catalogue, Sophie saw that it contained something called
Cash Cow, 2007
. 'Arguably the most daring piece undertaken by a contemporary artist,
Cash Cow
is a mixed-media piece made from sterling banknotes and lutetium, the rarest metal in the world (symbol Lu, atomic number 71). The materials alone cost in excess of PS4 million. "I wanted to challenge people's preconceptions about art," says Liam Hogg.

'Please note. Guests may spend no more than thirty seconds each in front of this exhibit.'

Sophie Topping was determined not to miss
Cash Cow
. When she had queued for twenty minutes, Lance told her he was going home and she told him she'd catch a taxi later.

Eventually it was her turn in the pink half-light, and she stood alone at last before the exhibition centrepiece. It was a life-size model of a cow in a glass case. It was coloured pink and had flaky silver-coloured horns and silver eyes, which gave it an odd, blinded look. This was the lutetium, presumably. Sophie peered through the glass and could make out the Queen's face several times on the animal's barrelled flanks. The cow itself, she recognised from a semi-rural childhood, was of a shorthorn dairy breed with painfully full udders.

It didn't seem to do anything, other than stare blindly out. Sophie wondered if she should press a button and get it to moo or poo or chew the cud or something. She turned to her catalogue for help: 'The piece is made from papier mache of which the paper element consists of 60,000 PS50 notes and is coated with new notes of the same denomination.

'The horns and eyes are coated with lutetium, the world's most precious metal, the heaviest and hardest of the rare-earth metals. It is too expensive to obtain in any quantity and therefore has few, if any, commercial uses. Although non-toxic, its dust is a fire and explosion hazard.'

'Time's up, madam,' said the attendant. 'Move on now, please.'

Back in the main gallery, Sophie finished the catalogue entry. '
Cash Cow
was sponsored by Allied Royal Bank, Salzar-Steinberg Securities and Park Vista Capital. It is for sale tonight at PS8 million.'

Sophie went to find Nasim. Perhaps she would be able to explain the point of
Cash Cow
. She understood why it was so expensive, because Liam Hogg had to cover his costs, but she wondered if she was missing something else about it. Unfortunately, Nasim had taken the limousine back to Havering-atte-Bower, leaving Sophie to go down alone into the cold of Dover Street.

As she stepped out to hail a taxi, a bicyclist with no lights on came shooting in the wrong direction up the one-way street and swore at her as she leapt back on to the pavement, her heart thumping.

At 7.45, John Veals had a chance meeting with his son on the stairs of their house in Holland Park. As each shifted from foot to foot, trying to think of something to say, one of Veals's six mobile phones let out a message bleep, and he took it into his study to read. The identity of the sender, according to Veals's personal encryption, was 'Kayad', which spelled 'Dayak' backwards - a reference to a tribe of East Indian headhunters. The number was therefore Stewart Thackeray's and the message said: 'Our Mutual Friend says yes, def.' The question had referred to the debt covenant at ARB. By the time Veals had finished his small but intense celebration, Finn, to his relief, was no longer on the landing, and the awkward moment had passed.

John Veals fired up the screens in his study and checked a variety of prices around the world. Everything was in order; everything was behaving in the way that it should, and he felt the satisfaction of an engineer who has carefully tested all the parts of a moving system. And yet, he thought, there was only one thing so mournful as a battle lost, and that was a battle won ... The planning, the precision, the sheer skill of his and Duffy's trades seemed to be bringing Veals the overwhelming victory he had craved; but when he thought about Ryman's part in it, the rumour that had been necessary to inflate the price of Allied Royal, he felt ... Not guilty, exactly; but, well ... It was, as a matter of simple fact, the first time since his days of front-running as a young futures trader that he had done anything that contravened the guidelines of the regulatory bodies. He had thought himself better than that; he had believed so much in his own superior ability that he had not deigned to do the kind of thing that others in the Bank did almost every day. It was a pity that this trade had needed a preliminary fluffing up before it could be placed; it was just a small manoeuvre necessitated by the complex nature of the quite legitimate trade he had envisaged; it was no big deal, but still when he thought about it, John Veals felt ... What was the word? he wondered. Wistful, perhaps. A little wistful.

Upstairs, Finn was watching a football match on his flat-screen television, propped in his favourite position against the end of the bed. It was between his own team, whom he'd supported since he was seven years old, and the club which, like Finn himself in Dream Team, had just signed Spike Borowski.

Open on his thighs with their skinny jeans was a laptop where the latest stats and news from Dream Team were unfolding. Three of Finn's fantasy eleven were in real-life action, so it was a big night.

'And I see the new signing Spike Borowski warming up, Frank,' said the commentator about an hour later. 'Do you think we might get a look at him in the last twenty minutes?'

'Aye, it looks like it, John. I think he'll take off the big Bulgarian. He's run his socks off but he's not had much change out of their defence. Borowski could be the man to break the deadlock.'

'Yes-s-s-s,' Finn heard himself hiss, and his fist made a piston movement in the air.

Spike, now fully stripped off, was bending down and touching his toes, jogging on the spot and getting an earful of instructions from Mehmet Kundak. The manager was wearing an ankle-length sheepskin coat that made him look like an Anatolian shepherd, and his transitional lenses had turned to black under the floodlights. Spike nodded at intervals, though Finn wondered how much he really understood. Kundak made emphatic movements with his arm, then quick rotations of the wrist. Finally he tapped his temple with his finger. It looked a complicated way, Finn thought, of telling Spike to score a bloody goal. Then the official - the man who apparently did this job at every football match, seeming to pop up at places 200 miles apart within minutes - held up the illuminated board where the bulbs formed a number 9; and off trotted Vlad the Inhaler, head down, straight past Spike without a look or a handshake. Kundak gave Spike a good-luck slap on the rump, and his English career began.

Finn was rattling between websites and television stations in order to keep abreast of the progress in the games that would affect his fantasy team's progress. What he really needed, he thought, was a third resource: double-screening didn't really give him all the information he required.

During a temporary lull for treatment to Ali al-Asraf, Finn rolled a small joint with the Aurora/Super Skunk Two mixture. He had secreted Simon Tindle's outsize stash in a suitcase deep within his fitted closets and transferred a manageable amount into a zipped sandwich bag for immediate use. There was no risk in lighting up. He'd checked his mother was watching a costume drama -
Shropshire Towers
by Alfred Huntley Edgerton, 'adapted' to include scenes of oral sex - on television in the sitting room, her hand clamped round a bottle of Leoville Barton 1990, and his father never came upstairs.

He sucked deeply and settled back against the bed. The smoke made his throat constrict for a moment as it rasped its way down into his lungs; but, as Tindle has predicted, the effect was almost instantaneous. His eyes watered for a moment, and a tear ran out of the corner.

There was a free kick that Danny Bective was lining up at the edge of the penalty area. Finn could see Spike being heavily marked on the far post by the centre half, who had a handful of shirt to keep his man from jumping too high.

If Spike should score and lead his team to a victory, then the result would push Finn's own club down into the relegation zone. On the other hand, given that the other three players from his fantasy team had all done well for their respective real-life clubs that night (a goal and an assist from the forwards, a clean sheet from the full back), it was possible that his fantasy eleven would go top of the league-within-a-league that he and his school friends were running.