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a couple of cigars, and several cut-and-paste documents, including a booklet with photographs of artworks and some receipts. There was nothing that pointed to the fire, nothing at all that would add to his investigation, but it looked very much like a forger’s kit, and when he set the contents out on his desk, he could see that the material was connected, in some nefarious and convoluted way, to the art world, about which he knew very little. However, his former colleague and good friend Dick Ellis was one of the experts at New Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad, so Higgs asked an assistant to take the briefcase over to him.

He added a brief note: “This may interest you.”

23

THE AUSCHWITZ CONCERT

Peter Nahum sat in the salesroom at Christie’s and watched as his Graham Sutherland Crucifixion panel went on the block. He had lowered his asking price and paid for the color illustration in the catalog, so he was hopeful the piece would do well, but it failed to sell.

A few weeks later another work he had bought from Clive Belman, Ben Nicholson’s colorful Mexican, went up for auction at Sotheby’s in New York. Again the outcome was a disappointment: The painting sold for £5,000 less than Nahum had paid for it.

Two in a row, he thought. Was it a coincidence that both works had come from the same source? Nahum took another look at the Crucifixion panel. The signature had seemed genuine enough, but on closer inspection it looked slightly off-kilter and divorced from the composition. And when he thought twice about Mexican, it suddenly seemed too bright by a half.

In early 1995, Nahum got a call from a man named Hans Meyer, a Sussex horse breeder and art collector who was organizing a memorial concert for the victims of Auschwitz. The concert was to be financed through the sale of donated paintings and manuscripts. The organizers were planning a gala performance by the Auschwitz Memorial Orchestra in August, seven months hence, featuring the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and several well-known singers. Would Nahum be interested in buying some of the donated works?

Nahum asked Meyer to send a list, and a few weeks later he received a long letter from Meyer describing works by the German artists Willi Baumeister and Max Liebermann and the Romanian painter Arthur Segal. All were in excellent condition and had good provenance, Meyer said. In addition, there were three British paintings for sale: a Ben Nicholson entitled Barndance, and two works by the urban landscape painter L. S. Lowry, a secretive man who had a reputation as an eccentric prankster. During his lifetime he had produced thousands of paintings and drawings, many of which depicted “matchstick men” in drab industrial surroundings. He often drew sketches on napkins and the backs of envelopes and gave them away. Dozens of these obscure Lowry pieces scattered around Britain were now worth thousands of pounds.

Meyer’s letter also contained an update on preparations for the Auschwitz concert. Vanessa Redgrave had agreed to perform a spoken prologue entitled “Inherit the Truth,” he said, and the conductor and brass virtuoso David Honeyball had been named musical director.

Nahum asked Meyer for photographs of the Lowry works. When they arrived and he opened the envelope, it was immediately clear that they were wrong. The figures looked mechanical, as if they had been drafted with a ruler. Meyer said they had been restored recently; they were perhaps not the best examples of Lowry’s work, but they were genuine.

When Nahum saw a photograph of Nicholson’s Barndance, he was even more suspicious. The painting was off by a mile. Was the Auschwitz concert a front for passing off fakes? If so, did Meyer know it, or was he being scammed himself?

Several days later Nahum received another letter from Meyer, this one notable for its scatterbrained urgency. “You probably know that February 1995 is the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army,” Meyer wrote. “Our committee has now made the major decision regarding the program of the concert, which