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There were times when Searle brought in a really good piece and it took Myatt a minute or two to recognize it. Some pieces were obvious duds; others were better than he remembered them. Searle worked him so hard that by the end of the day Myatt felt as if he were back on the M6 with his shovel and pick.

30

ALADDIN’S CAVE

Searle’s office had become a repository of letters, memos, receipts, and catalogs piled one on top of another. One particular clue showed up on document after document and appeared to be a leitmotif for Drewe’s operation: “For Private Research Only/Tate Gallery Archive.” To Searle this official stamp was proof that the documents had been stolen from the Tate archives. He called Jennifer Booth to tell her he was bringing over the suspect material.

When he arrived, she immediately took issue with his thesis. “I think your approach is wrong. You have to shift your focus. Drewe isn’t taking archives out. He’s putting them in.”

Booth said the documents were forged. She told Searle about the discrepancies she’d discovered in the records and showed him the Hanover photo albums, which documented the gallery’s acquisitions over the years. These had never been allowed out of the main reading room. Searle opened one of the albums and found beneath each photograph a neatly typed label and reference number. He recognized the paper and format from the documents in Goudsmid’s bags. Many of the paintings were familiar too, particularly two Bissières, Composition 1949 and Composition 1958. Photographs of these pieces, along with handwritten memos that referred to them, were also in Goudsmid’s bags.

Booth opened the Hanover sales ledgers to the two Bissières; the provenances were identical to the ones in the photo albums. She brought out the Hanover daybook and opened it to the date of the supposed sale of Composition 1958. There was no mention of the piece. She moved her finger down the page to the place where Composition 1949 would have been logged. There was an entry, but it was for a work entitled La Fenêtre.

“The books don’t match,” she said.

Searle suddenly realized that the dozens of cryptic handwritten notes he had found in Goudsmid’s bags were memos Drewe had written to himself, a kind of aide-mémoire. He hurried back to the Yard and checked his Bissière section.

“Re-write Bissieres,” one of these scribbled memos read. “Investigate sale of G133/3 La Fenêtre—it should be reference G133/8 in Sales Ledger List.”

For all intents and purposes, Drewe had become an accomplished archivist. For nearly ten years he had spent countless hours studying the dullest aspects of the art business. He had researched archival methods until he could identify and exploit gaps in the firewall designed to protect the art market’s records and reputation. He had gone to infinite trouble to place his fakes next to established masterpieces so as to make them appear to be a part of art history.

Myatt was right about Drewe: The money was a side benefit. Drewe craved admiration and got it by passing himself off as a professor and physicist. When this proved insufficient, he managed to insert himself and his false creations into the heart of the art world. In doing so he was about to make a name for himself as one of the twentieth century’s greatest fakers of art.

As Searle well knew, the art of forgery is as old as civilization. Priests in ancient Babylonia, in order to continue receiving their privileges and revenues, are believed to have faked a cuneiform script to make their temple appear older than it was. “This is not a lie,” one of the forger-priests wrote on the stone tablet. “It is indeed the truth. . . . He who will damage this document let Enki [the god of water] fill up his canals with slime.”26

The motivations behind forgery are as varied as the types of forgeries that have been perpetrated over the centuries, but the most common fuel has always been greed. When demand exceeds supply, the forger is never far behind. In ancient Rome, when classical Greek sculpture became a