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The sale of Aegean was the first of a string of successes for Belman, who no longer lay awake at night worrying about how he was going to take care of his family. He was selling to dealers in London and New York, calling friends for new leads, dropping hints at parties, and talking up his inventory to his old mates in the gem game. The word had gone out that he had important connections in the art world.

Occasionally, Drewe would dangle transparencies or laser printouts of the syndicate’s more expensive Chagalls, Monets, and Picassos, but he rarely gave Belman the really good stuff. All in due time, he’d say. Belman could hardly complain. He was happy with what he’d been getting, and whenever his friends came by, he’d march them through the collection.

“That’s a Giacometti,” he’d say proudly. “That’s a Ben Nicholson.”

He refined his pitch, read up on the artists, spent time at the museums, and even sat through the occasional lecture. Once, he took the train down to the Cornish seaside town of St. Ives, which had been a haven for Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore, and roamed along the cliffs and down by the coves, soaking in the atmosphere. After all, he was in the art business now.

16

THE BOW TIE

Peter Nahum was a familiar face to the legions of dedicated viewers of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. He wore a bow tie and wire-rimmed glasses, and had an easy manner. He was a natural for television, and had been the Roadshow’s expert in nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings since 1981. It was great fun. On one show, a Scotswoman from Inverness unwrapped a painting she had bought at a yard sale for fifty pence. Nahum quickly identified it as a valuable work by the nineteenth-century “queen of cat painters,” a Dutch artist named Henriëtte Ronner-Knip. The work sold at auction for £22,000. When a banker brought in a collection of twenty-five Filipino watercolors he’d inherited from his grandfather, Nahum knew right away that it was gold, worth £240,000, as it turned out.

Nahum’s favorite was an episode in which an elderly couple brought in a watercolor of a moonlit desert scene. They’d kept it in a cardboard tube since the 1930s, and were on the verge of throwing it out, when they decided to come on the show on a lark. It took Nahum all of ten seconds to recognize a long-lost watercolor by Richard Dadd, a solid mid-Victorian painter who had done much of his work while confined to an asylum after murdering his father. As soon as Nahum laid eyes on the piece, his brain began to spin. It was in perfect condition.

“It can’t be!” he thought. “I’ve never seen anything like it in this condition, it’s too good.”20

The old couple sold the watercolor to the British Museum for £100,000.

A fixture on the lecture circuit, Nahum knew the art world intimately, having spent seventeen years at Sotheby’s working the gavel and the sales floor. It was said that Sotheby’s was filled with dealers fobbing themselves off as gentlemen while Christie’s was a bastion of gentlemen who desperately wanted to be dealers. As a teenager Nahum had aspired to both. He started at Sotheby’s at age eighteen, earning eight pounds a week as a clerk on the bustling auction floor. It was hair-raising, adrenaline-fueled work. A first-rate auctioneer could sell nearly two hundred lots in an hour, and it was Nahum’s job to stay abreast of the bids, convert currencies, and keep the sale ledgers up-to-date while he kept an eye on the room. He memorized the faces of important clients, and was occasionally asked to bid on their behalf. The learning curve was sharp, and he quickly rose in rank to become a senior director and department head.

After nearly two decades of feeding the art machine and pulling paintings off old ladies’ walls, Nahum left Sotheby’s in 1984 and opened the Leicester Galleries on Ryder Street. The timing was good, for the market was soaring. He was as tough as his clients, none of whom were pussycats, and he kept a constant watch on the auction