• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 557 0

barflies who lied about their war service. Many of the kingdom’s khaki fantasists claimed to have served in the elite Special Air Service (SAS), or as commandos during the Falklands War, or in the bomb-disposal squads in Northern Ireland. Drewe also claimed to have belonged to an elite military unit, one of several in the British Army that operated covertly against the IRA in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, relying on spies, “dirty ops” informers, and army and loyalist death squads. Terry Carroll realized much later that Drewe, who could reel off military commands, ranks, and lists of weapons, probably got most of his information from spy novels and military manuals.

Psychiatrists who treat serial war fibbers and compulsive liars use the term “pseudologia phantastica” to describe this pattern of habitual deceit. The lies often contain some element of truth: A onetime army clerk, for example, might claim to have seen hazardous duty during wartime. Fabricators most often tend to be in search of some internal psychological gain rather than a tangible or monetary reward. They want to be seen as extraordinarily brave, important, or above average, somehow superior to the ordinary citizen. The typical fantasist is not delusional.8

Peter Harris and John Drewe both fit the pattern. They were habitual exaggerators. At the Catch, they loved to talk about their shared passion for all things military, about calibration and cannons, missile velocities and the merits of the old Lee-Enfield rifle. Harris wasn’t making everything up. His service career was as an airman between 1947-1949. He knew about guns, having worked for three years as a security officer for the South African High Commission, and he was still a registered firearms dealer, although the only guns his friends could remember were replicas imported from Spain.

For his part, Drewe never let the facts get in the way of a good story, particularly one that could help him sell more fakes. He needed real names to attach to Myatt’s paintings, and Harris was a fine addition to his roster. The self-described “oldest newspaper delivery boy in Hampstead,” whose only artwork was a framed certificate proclaiming, “I’ve visited every Young’s Pub in London,” was about to morph into a wealthy arms dealer with a large art collection. This new, improved Peter Harris would be based in Israel and would have close ties to an ammunition manufacturer in Serbia.

Piece by piece, document by document, Drewe reinvented Harris. Years after his con had come apart, the police were never certain whether Harris had wittingly posed as an owner of Drewe’s fakes or whether he had been another of his marks. In either case, his name figured large in Drewe’s provenance documents, even after Harris died of cancer. Police suspected that as he lay on his deathbed, barely able to talk, Drewe was feeding him blank documents to sign.

7

WRECKERS OF CIVILIZATION

One night in the late fall of 1989, as Drewe sat at home with his KGB paperbacks and Mossad memoirs, he got a call from one of the auction houses. He had recently gone to the auctioneer with one of Myatt’s Le Corbusier works, a collage pieced together from bits of newspaper from the 1950s. Drewe said it had come from his family’s collection, but the auctioneer had bad news for him: The provenance was insufficient, and the piece had been turned down.

“Are you related to Jane Drew?” the auctioneer asked in passing.

A renowned British architect with close ties to the Swiss-born architect and artist Le Corbusier, Jane Drew had helped design the original premises of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, which was founded in the late 1940s as a cutting-edge art gallery and cultural center. Drewe knew about her design work for the modernist Indian city of Chandigarh and her influence on the Modern Movement, a group of avant-garde architects and painters of the 1940s.

The professor was not one to let an opportunity slip by. He told the auctioneer that Jane Drew was indeed a distant relative. Drewe carried on the conversation long enough to learn that