Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [22]
One spring evening not long after his visit to the gallery with Myatt to inspect the Bissière, Drewe stepped out of his house in his blue overcoat, briefcase in hand, and turned onto Finchley Road, past Danny Berger’s garage, on his way to the Catch. He looked like any other well-dressed businessman heading for a pint after work. In fact, he was still at work. He was always at work, always on the lookout for a new “legend,” a cover he could use for his game, a thread he could weave into one of his stories. It was part of the con man’s job, and Drewe was a patient sort. If tonight he came across someone whose name or story he could sew into the quilt, all the better.
At the pub, Drewe was greeted by several of his mates. When he’d first arrived a few years earlier, he stood out as something of a loner, but he had since become a familiar face, a little odd perhaps, but an interesting fellow nonetheless, with a background in nuclear physics and an uncle or cousin or some sort of relative who had invented the hovercraft.
Terry Carroll, a Catch regular who lectured in computer technology and digital systems at the University of Westminster, remembered Drewe striding into the bar for the first time. “Instantly you knew someone was in, that the lights were on,” he said. Drewe was six feet tall, intense, and clearly intelligent. He was accompanied by a friend of Carroll’s, Peter Harris, a veteran of the armed forces with wild red hair and an improbable stew of wartime tales. Harris introduced him to Carroll and suggested that the two probably had a lot in common.
Carroll had studied physics and gone on to work in the field of artificial intelligence. Drewe said he had studied abroad, at Kiel University in Germany, and then in Paris, where he had taken to the streets during the May ’68 demonstrations. Subsequently, he had worked at the city-sized atomic energy research complex in Harwell, near Oxford, where he’d made substantial and lasting contacts with the police and with MI5. Those contacts were useful in his current line of work, which included consulting for the Defence Ministry.
Carroll said that he too had worked at Harwell, back when he was a young physicist analyzing various materials with the use of neutron beams. Harwell was so enormous that most employees knew only a small fraction of the layout, but Drewe recalled the place as vividly as if he’d been there the day before.
Whenever Drewe spotted Carroll at the pub after that first night, he greeted him warmly and bought him a beer. Usually he dominated the conversation. He liked to talk about defense technology, and said he was developing a handgun that could fire a thousand rounds a minute. On a good night, he sounded like Ian Fleming on Dexedrine. He told Carroll that once, after a meeting at the Defence Ministry had gone late into the night, he was accidentally locked in the parking garage. Fortunately, he had recently been demonstrating the effects of a powerful explosive called pentrite, and he had a small supply on hand. With it, he had blown the garage door off its hinges.
Carroll found the story amusing and a little strange, but he didn’t ask for details. He knew quite a bit about pentrite from his own army training, and it was obvious that Drewe was well versed in detonators, boosters, and initiators. The man was an all-rounder, he thought.
Drewe never forgot a name or a face, and seemed able to retain every last stray piece of data. He could recite Newton’s laws of motion,