• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 529 0

salesman was out of work and nearly broke, living with his wife and two kids in a house he could barely afford. On this fall afternoon, he tossed aside the want ads and headed down Rotherwick Road to his neighbor John Drewe’s house to pick up his children, who often played with Drewe’s after school. Belman envied Drewe, who was successful—he drove his kids to school in a Bentley—and unburdened by life’s troubles, least of all the next month’s mortgage. Professor Drewe was an accomplished Oxford graduate and nuclear physicist who worked from home. Belman had recently discovered that they shared an acquaintance, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Brian Josephson, whom Belman had known as a child.

When Drewe’s daughter, Atarah, answered the door, Belman could hear Drewe calling him to come upstairs. He walked up to a small, spare room on the second floor and found Drewe crouched on the floor in a business suit, hammer in hand, banging away at a wooden picture frame. There were a dozen or so paintings lined up along the walls, abstract works by painters whose names Belman was unfamiliar with: Jean Dubuffet, Ben Nicholson, Le Corbusier, Alberto Giacometti.

“It’s sort of a hobby of mine,” Drewe said, explaining that the paintings belonged to a syndicate of scientists and businessmen who had been collecting for half a century. He served as the group’s representative and occasionally restored the works and repaired their frames.

“These are quite valuable,” said Drewe, gesturing at two Nicholsons. “That one’s worth about £60,000, and that one”—he pointed to an abstract piece by the window—“that’s about £40,000.”

“I hope they’re insured,” Belman joked.

The collection had been stored away for years in vaults and safe houses all over England, Drewe told Belman, who stood in the doorway listening as Drewe went on to say how much pleasure he got from making the frames and being surrounded by such beauty. If Belman had looked more closely, he might have noticed that the wood Drewe was using for the frames was left over from Goudsmid’s endless home renovations.

On his way home with the children, Belman could barely focus on them. The difference between his situation and Drewe’s was almost too much to bear. The professor lived the easy life, while Belman, at forty-six, could scarcely find the money to fill his car with gas, let alone indulge in hobbies like picture framing. At his age he should be enjoying himself, but his life had begun a dramatic downward trajectory a year earlier, when two thugs in balaclavas burst into his jewelry store, lodged the twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun in his mouth, and cleaned out his shop.

Belman had been robbed before, but this was far worse, and it unnerved him. His business had been losing money steadily, and he had taken out an £80,000 home equity loan to cover the losses. The jewelry trade was a tough proposition, and a dangerous one, and soon after the robbery he decided to close down. He couldn’t help but think about the value of the works in Drewe’s home: One or two of them were worth enough to clear him of debt and stop the bank from foreclosing. As he approached his house he tried to ignore his worries for the children’s sake. Surely, he thought, something would come along.

A week later, Drewe was standing at the door. “What do you know about art?” he said.

“This much,” said Belman, pinching thumb and forefinger together. He had a passion for bridge, not for canvas.

Belman invited his neighbor in, and over the course of the next hour Drewe explained that his syndicate needed £1,000,000 in a hurry to buy a cache of long-hidden Russian archives that would forever put to rest revisionist theories that the Holocaust was a myth. To raise the cash, the syndicate would have to sell a significant portion of its collection of twentieth-century paintings.

Would Belman consider “taking them around”?

Belman couldn’t remember the last time he’d stepped into a museum or a gallery, and he wasn’t exactly sure what “taking them around” meant, but it sounded like a good opportunity. Nevertheless,