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Part One
Craquelure
1
Mason’s Yard
On any other day, Julian would have tossed it straight into the rubbish bin. Or better yet, he would have fed it into Sarah’s professional-grade shredder. During the long, bleak winter of the pandemic, when they had sold but a single painting, she had used the contraption to mercilessly cull the gallery’s swollen archives. Julian, who was traumatized by the project, feared that when Sarah had no more needless sales records and shipping documents to destroy, it would be his turn in the machine. He would leave this world as a tiny parallelogram of yellowed paper, carted off to the recycler with the rest of the week’s debris. In his next life he would return as an environmentally friendly coffee cup. He supposed, not without some justification, there were worse fates.
The letter had arrived at the gallery on a rainy Friday in late March, addressed toM. Julian Isherwood. Sarah had nevertheless opened it; a former clandestine officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, she had no qualms about reading other people’s mail. Intrigued, she had placed it on Julian’s desk along with several inconsequential items from the morning’s post, the only sort of correspondence she typically allowed him to see. He read it for the first time while still clad inhis dripping mackintosh, his plentiful gray locks in windblown disarray. The time was half past eleven, which in itself was noteworthy. These days Julian rarely set foot in the gallery before noon. It gave him just enough time to make a nuisance of himself before embarking on the three-hour period of his day he reserved for his luncheon.
His first impression of the letter was that its author, a certain Madame Valerie Bérrangar, had the most exquisite handwriting he had seen in ages. It seemed she had noticed the recent story inLe Mondeconcerning the multimillion-pound sale by Isherwood Fine Arts ofPortrait of an Unknown Woman, oil on canvas, 115 by 92 centimeters, by the Flemish Baroque painter Anthony van Dyck. Apparently, Madame Bérrangar had concerns about the transaction—concerns she wished to discuss with Julian in person, as they were legal and ethical in nature. She would be waiting at Café Ravel in Bordeaux at four o’clock on Monday afternoon. It was her wish that Julian come alone.
“What do you think?” asked Sarah.
“She’s obviously mad as a hatter.” Julian displayed the handwritten letter, as though it proved his point. “How did it get here? Carrier pigeon?”
“DHL.”
“Was there a return address on the waybill?”
“She used the address of a DHL Express in Saint-Macaire. It’s about fifty kilometers—”
“I know where Saint-Macaire is,” said Julian, and immediately regretted his abrupt tone. “Why do I have this terrible feeling I’m being blackmailed?”
“She doesn’t sound like a blackmailer to me.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, petal. All the blackmailers and extortionists I’ve ever met had impeccable manners.”
“Then perhaps we should ring the Met.”
“Involve the police? Have you taken leave of your senses?”
“At least show it to Ronnie.”
Ronald Sumner-Lloyd was Julian’s pricey Berkeley Square attorney. “I have a better idea,” he said.
It was then, at 11:36 a.m., with Sarah looking on in disapproval, that Julian dangled the letter over his ancient metal dustbin, a relic of the gallery’s glory days, when it was located on stylish New Bond Street—or New Bondstrasse, as it had been known in some quarters of the trade. Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to let the damn thing slip from his fingers. Or perhaps, he thought later, it was Madame Bérrangar’s letter that had clung to him.
He set it aside, reviewed the remainder of the morning post, returned a few phone calls, and interrogated Sarah on the details of a pending sale. Then, having nothing else to do, he headed off to the Dorchester for lunch. He was accompanied by an employee of a venerable London auction house, female, of course, recently divorced, no children, far too young but not inappropriately so. Julian astonished her with his knowledge of Italian and Dutch Renaissance painters and regaled her with tales of acquisitional derring-do. It was a character he had been playing to modest acclaim for longer than he cared to remember. He was the incomparable Julian Isherwood, Julie to his friends, Juicy Julie to his partners in the occasional crime of drink. He was loyal as the day was long, trusting to a fault, and English to the core. English as high tea and bad teeth, as he was fond of saying. And yet, were it not for the war, he would have been someone else entirely.
Returning to the gallery, he found that Sarah had adhered a fuchsia-colored sticky note to Madame Bérrangar’s letter, advising him to reconsider. He read it a second time, slowly. Its tone was as formal as the linenlike stationery upon which it was written. Even Julian had to admit she sounded entirely reasonable and not at all like an extortionist. Surely, he thought, there would be no harm in merely listening to what she had to say. If nothing else, the journey would provide him with a much-needed respite from his crushingworkload at the gallery. Besides, the weather forecast for London called for several days of nearly uninterrupted cold and rain. But in the southwest of France, it was springtime already.
Amongthe first actions that Sarah had taken after coming to work at the gallery was to inform Ella, Julian’s stunning but useless receptionist, that her services were no longer required. Sarah had never bothered to hire a replacement. She was more than capable, she said, of answering the phone, returning the emails, keeping the appointment book, and buzzing visitors upstairs when they presented themselves at the perpetually locked door in Mason’s Yard.
She drew a line, however, at making Julian’s travel arrangements, though she consented to peer over his shoulder while he performed the chore himself, if only to make certain he didn’t mistakenly book passage on the Orient Express to Istanbul rather than the Eurostar to Paris. From there, it was a scant two hours and fourteen minutes by TGV to Bordeaux. He successfully purchased a first-class ticket and then reserved a junior suite at the InterContinental—for two nights, just to be on the safe side.
The task complete, he repaired to the bar at Wiltons for a drink with Oliver Dimbleby and Roddy Hutchinson, widely regarded as London’s most disreputable art dealers. One thing led to another, as was usually the case when Oliver and Roddy were involved, and it was after 2:00 a.m. by the time Julian finally toppled into his bed. He spent Saturday tending to his hangover and devoted much of Sunday to packing a bag. Once he would have thought nothing about hopping on the Concorde with only an attaché case and a pretty girl. But suddenly the preparations for a jaunt across the English Channel required all of his powers of concentration. He supposed it was but another unwanted consequence of growing old, like his alarming absentmindedness, or the strange sounds he emitted, or his seeminginability to cross a room without crashing into something. He kept a list of self-deprecating excuses at the ready to explain his humiliating clumsiness. He had never been the athletic type. It was the bloody lamp’s fault. It was the end table that had assaultedhim.
He slept poorly, as was frequently the case the night before an important journey, and awoke with a nagging sensation that he was about to make yet another in a long series of dreadful mistakes. His spirits lifted, however, as the Eurostar emerged from the Channel Tunnel and surged across the gray-green fields of the Pas-de-Calais toward Paris. He rode themétrofrom the Gare du Nord to the Gare Montparnasse and enjoyed a decent lunch in the buffet car of the TGV as the light beyond his window gradually took on the quality of a Cézanne landscape.
He recalled with startling clarity the instant he had seen it for the first time, this dazzling light of the south. Then, as now, he was riding a train bound from Paris. His father, the German Jewish art dealer Samuel Isakowitz, sat on the opposite side of the compartment. He was reading a day-old newspaper, as though nothing were out of the ordinary. Julian’s mother, her hands knotted atop her knees, was staring into space, her face without expression.
Hidden in the luggage above their heads, rolled in protective sheets of paraffin paper, were several paintings. Julian’s father had left a few lesser works behind at his gallery on the rue la Boétie, in the elegant Eighth Arrondissement. The bulk of his remaining inventory was already hidden in the château he had rented east of Bordeaux. Julian remained there until the terrible summer of 1942, when a pair of Basque shepherds smuggled him over the Pyrenees to neutral Spain. His parents were arrested in 1943 and deported to the Nazi extermination center at Sobibor, where they were gassed upon arrival.
Bordeaux’s Saint-Jean station lay hard against the river Garonne, at the end of the Cours de la Marne. The departure board in the refurbished ticket hall was a modern device—gone was the polite applauseof the updates—but the Beaux-Arts exterior, with its two prominent clocks, was as Julian remembered it. So, too, were the honey-colored Louis XV buildings lining the boulevards along which he sped in the back of a taxi. Some of the facades were so bright they seemed to glow with an interior light source. Others were dimmed by grime. It was the porous quality of the local stone, his father had explained. It absorbed soot from the air like a sponge and, like oil paintings, required occasional cleaning.
By some miracle, the hotel hadn’t misplaced his reservation. After pressing an overly generous tip into the palm of the immigrant bellman, he hung up his clothes and withdrew to the bathroom to do something about his ragged appearance. It was gone three o’clock when he capitulated. He locked his valuables in the room safe and debated for a moment whether to bring Madame Bérrangar’s letter to the café. An inner voice—his father’s, he supposed—advised him to leave it behind, concealed within his luggage.
