Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [75]
22
A LOADED BRIEFCASE
Goudsmid wandered through Golders Green in a daze. She looked unkempt and could barely eat. She had lost her children and most of her savings to Drewe, and now he was threatening to take the house on Rotherwick Road. Detective Higgs had been her last hope, and she was close to the breaking point. She went inside her home, got down on all fours in the living room with a Magic Marker, and made a picket sign that accused John Drewe of being a criminal. Then she drove to his country home and stood outside with her sign. A neighbor took pity and brought her a cup of tea. She felt as if she were going mad, but she was determined to fight until the children were back with her and Drewe was behind bars.
It would have been out of character for Goudsmid to back down. She was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust, and her parents were both survivors. At age eighteen, like most Israelis, she was drafted into the army. Outside Tel Aviv, in former British army camps, in hundred-degree heat, she and her fellow conscripts trained to shoot. They went out with their Uzis and practiced on cardboard cutouts, peppering the silhouettes until they were exhausted. When Goudsmid’s mandatory tour of duty was over, she decided to stay on and signed up for the navy. She was focused and ambitious, and by the time she left the Israeli Defense Force she carried her training like a second skin.
Goudsmid had an air of imperviousness that could be misunderstood as intimidating. She had learned to be careful and observant, to question everything she saw. She noticed the most mundane detail, an unusual movement or suspicious package, a telltale accent in a crowd. But she had somehow let her guard down when she met John Drewe at a small get-together in London in 1980. An attentive man, he courted her vigorously. In restrospect, she could never quite explain this blunder, except to say that she was a recent immigrant, lonely, and several weeks pregnant by a former boyfriend at the age of thirty-four. She had no nearby family to speak of, and Drewe was a polite and well-to-do nuclear physicist who offered her his friendship.
On their first date, Drewe picked her up in a chauffered white Rolls. His driver wore a cap and uniform, and Drewe sat in back smiling and holding a bouquet of roses. He was good-looking, with short black hair and an athletic build, and he wore a well-tailored suit and a long coat.
“If you ever turn up in that car again, forget it,” Goudsmid told him. “I’ll never go out with you again.”
He laughed, folded her into the backseat, and took her to a very good restaurant, where they talked for hours. He was an adviser to the Atomic Energy Authority, he said, and served on the boards of several companies, including British Aerospace. His time was his own. He worked in his lab and at home, where he wrote for the specialty journals. She noticed that he had a scar, and he explained that as a young man he’d had a passion for motorcycles, and that he’d hit a patch of ice one winter’s night and slid across the road.
The next time they met she talked about her hometown, and told him how hard it was to grow up in a family that had been shattered by the Holocaust. Her parents had fled Germany and were now living in Holland, but less fortunate relatives had ended up in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. More than three hundred members of her extended family had died in the camps. After the war, her parents received compensation from Germany and passed some of the money on to her. She planned to use it to buy a modest apartment in London.
Drewe was always attentive: He would open the door for her and make her dinner and put his coat over her when it was cold. He phoned her at least once a day and surprised her with flowers and the odd bit of jewelry. It was a relief having him around. One summer day he picked her up and took her to Sussex to hear Mozart at the centuries-old Glyndebourne