• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Mibus asked for his £32,500 back, fully expecting Drewe to uphold the standard of any legitimate dealer—to refund a client when a work is considered suspect.

Drewe suggested that they discuss the matter over lunch at White’s, a private members’ club near Mibus’s gallery. Mibus assumed they would have a quick, conciliatory meal and wrap up the whole unfortunate affair, but Drewe avoided the subject of the de Staël. He motioned for the waitress and ordered a three-course meal. He spoke quickly, as if he’d downed half a dozen espressos, and when the food came, he made a pass at the waitress, a thin young woman with a boyish haircut. She ignored him. Drewe was unfazed and continued chatting.

Mibus interrupted him. What about the painting?

Not to worry, said Drewe. The work was genuine. Opening his briefcase, he removed two large photographs of another de Staël that had also been signed “Nicholas” and slid them across the table. He explained to Mibus that de Staël was known to have used the English spelling of his name occasionally.

Mibus heard him out. Like any other European or American dealer, he understood that while the droit moral added weight in disputes over authenticity, it was by no means the deciding factor outside France. Why should the opinion of a family member count for more than that of an expert or scholar? True, Jaeger thought the piece was a fake, but hadn’t Christie’s approved it the previous year?

Drewe perhaps noticed the doubt flickering across Mibus’s face and hinted that de Staël had had an affair with the woman in the park, and that the widow was letting jealousy get in the way of good judgment. He told Mibus that the piece had previously belonged to John Catch, a key member of a consortium of military defense contractors that owned a large collection of artworks. Drewe himself was a member of the consortium as well as its official representative delegated to sell the group’s artworks.

He ordered another bottle of wine and began to talk about his own career. Mibus listened politely. Drewe said that his research firm, AceTech Systems Ltd., was developing a machine gun that could fire a thousand rounds per minute. In addition, the company was working on a chemical warfare suit that could be folded up and reduced to the size of a golf ball. Drewe suggested that he was in a position to broker the sale of tanks and F-16s, and jokingly asked whether Mibus knew anyone who wanted to buy a fighter jet. When the dealer tried to steer the conversation back to the business at hand, Drewe dug another channel.

“He was good at making one lose one’s train of thought,” Mibus recalled.

As lunch drew to a close, Drewe pulled from his briefcase a high-resolution transparency of a Picasso titled Trois Femmes à la Fontaine, a $2.7 million oil on canvas that a private collector in New York was willing to sell for just $1.8 million, according to Drewe. The work was represented exclusively through his consortium, and Mibus could get a jump on the competition. Given three days’ notice, Drewe could arrange for a private viewing in New York.

The transparency had the intended effect: The work looked good to Mibus. It was in fact the genuine article, most likely in the hands of a real collector. Mibus told Drewe he was interested, and for now the de Staël was forgotten. Drewe had bought himself some time.

Meanwhile, he was having similar problems on another front: His runner, Danny Berger, was running into trouble selling Myatt’s work in London.

Things had been going well until recently. Through a business contact, Berger had unloaded two Le Corbusiers and a pair of Bissières to an expatriate Fijian financial consultant and property developer who had made a tidy profit by flipping one of the Le Corbusiers at auction. Since then, however, Berger’s luck seemed to have dried up. Gallery owners were beginning to ask for more detailed provenances, documents proving the works’ authenticity beyond any doubt. Berger