Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [68]
He went up the street to a coffee bar and ordered a cappuccino, hoping it would lift his mood. He was thousands of pounds richer now, but he felt miserable, even though things had been going quite well. While the business had never yielded enormous profits for him, there was always plenty of money in the account for his simple needs, and he had developed a solid partnership with Drewe.
Every other Thursday, Myatt would bring some new work down to London in his Rover, Drewe would show up in his Bentley, and they would have a bite together. Their lunches were always enjoyable, a chance for Myatt to break free from the routine of painting and fatherhood. Drewe would order a good bottle of wine and drink copiously, and though he tended to flirt clumsily with the waitresses, he was never unruly. Myatt considered his partner utterly without sexual charm, so he found these flirtations both amusing and sad. He knew Drewe and Goudsmid were on the skids, and guessed that Drewe needed these little stabs at happiness, which inevitably ended in failure. After lunch, Myatt would hand over one or two paintings, and the professor would promise to deliver payment in a fortnight.
Lately, though, there were times when Myatt never got paid, and he had begun to suspect that Drewe was holding out on him. The professor always had an explanation. “Recession, John,” he’d say. “Business is bad. It’s only going to get worse.” Occasionally he’d turn up the next time with a stuffed envelope, and life would be rosy again for a while.
Myatt sat hunched over a second cappuccino. The street outside Christie’s was nearly empty except for a few well-heeled buzzards wandering up toward St. James. The limos were gone. He made a rough calculation: His profits from Drewe’s game—perhaps £100,000 over eight years—amounted to just about what he would have earned if he’d stayed at his part-time teaching job. Drewe had figured out exactly how much Myatt needed to keep himself afloat, and that was exactly what he’d given him.
Meanwhile, Drewe had been raking it in. By now he’d taken half of London out for quail and venison at L’Escargot and Claridge’s, and plied an ever-expanding roster of experts and curators with imported cigars and wines. He was at the top of his game, and his self-confidence seemed never to waver.
Myatt, on the other hand, felt like a petty thief. For most of his life he’d yearned for membership in the society of artists and art lovers, but after tonight’s auction that world seemed as shallow and false as the scam. His skills at the easel had been eclipsed by Drewe’s talent as a provider of fake provenance, and most of his paintings were horrible knockoffs anyway. If he’d signed them himself and rented a showroom, they would have been laughed off the wall. He wondered what kind of life he would be leading five or ten years from now. What would he tell his children? That he was a two-bit criminal who had squandered his talents?
So far he’d managed to lead a comfortably compartmentalized life. He did his job quietly and without bothering anyone. He was a good father, an artist, a sometime musician, an occasionally respectable member of his community. Half the time he sang with the church choir and painted portraits of the vicar. The other half, he forged pictures. The two Myatts coexisted without much fuss, as if one didn’t know that the other existed.
Drewe had at least one Swiss bank account and encouraged Myatt to open one for himself and to deposit £25,000. According to Myatt, Drewe had also suggested that he open additional accounts in Russian banks, which he claimed were the best places to hide money. He’d encouraged Myatt to invest in diamonds, as he himself had, and told his partner that he kept a stash hidden in a pouch behind his lavatory.23
“You can’t go wrong with gems,” he said.
Myatt was grateful for the advice but hadn’t followed it. He wasn’t interested in the high life, and never dreamed