These were actual drawings? Documented?
Oh, yes. Every one. Documented.
Maybe they should meet after all. What about tomorrow? he asked. That would be fine, she said, and they arranged a meeting late in the afternoon.
So here he was now, balancing a cup of Lapsang souchong and looking out the windows at the brooding day. On the countertop nearby he had propped up the two photographs of the Schiele drawings. For the past two hours he had paced his second-floor showroom, casting a bright eye at the rain one moment and an avaricious eye at the Schieles the next. The previous day he had e-mailed his news of the Schiele discoveries to Wolfram Schrade at a special number reserved for his art business in Berlin. The woman who handled the paperwork for his acquisitions had responded immediately. She was quite excited at his news, but, she said, Mr. Schrade could not be contacted until that evening. She would communicate the news to him as soon as possible. She was sure she could get back to him the next day.
Today. But she hadn’t. Yet.
Knight looked at his watch. Urgency was very important in these situations. It created a fire in the clients. Urgency begat urgency, and the greater the urgency about a particular piece of art, the greater its importance. Therefore urgency was a valuable psychological tool, and once urgency had been introduced, it was a terrible thing to let it subside. It was like an erotic moment. One did not want to be distracted by the plumber or by a delivery from the grocer. Sustained urgency usually could be stoked up to a really satisfying financial climax.
So Knight looked at his watch again. He sipped the smoky tea, which he particularly enjoyed on rainy days. A rich tea for a rich moment.
He was thinking of this as his eyes made regular sweeps from the photographs of the Schiele drawings to the telephone at the end of the library table and down to the rainy street-unlike most Londoners, he relished the rain, liked watching it, always had, and summer rain was the best-when the black Jaguar Vanden Plas pulled up to the curb in Carlos Place and stopped.
After a moment a uniformed driver got out of the front door, put up an umbrella, and opened the back door of the car. For a flicker of a moment two long legs, almost entirely exposed beneath a short black dress, swung out of the car and onto the sidewalk; the chauffeur’s umbrella blocked his line of sight and hid the woman’s face. As she was helped out of the car, Knight saw the drape of an ankle-length raincoat descend to cover her long legs, and then the chauffeur and the woman hurried up the steps to the front door of Carrington, Hartwell amp; Knight.
Knight’s preoccupation was momentarily arrested. What an elegant arrival. He loved it. It was a fine day.
He watched as the chauffeur returned to the car with Jeffrey, Knight’s receptionist/security guard. While the chauffeur held the umbrella, Jeffrey removed a package from the rear seat, and the two of them hurried up the steps and out of the rain. Ms. Paille and her seven drawings had arrived.
Jeffrey had been given instructions to show her up straightaway upon her arrival, so Knight stood beside his library table and waited for the woman who belonged to the long legs to ascend the staircase, her high heels silent on the Persian-carpeted treads.
As she made the last graceful turn of the staircase, she arose slowly from within the winding tracery of the mahogany balustrade like Venus from the sea. Knight’s heart stalled. Ms. Paille, dressed in black, was a most exotic mixture of Asian and European: tall, trim, her beautiful proportions clothed in a short two-piece affair of snug, fine silk. Her jet hair spilled generously over her shoulders, its highlights glistening in the soft spotlights of the showroom. Her dusky eyes were deep enough to swim in-swim naked, Knight thought-and her olive complexion was stunningly set off by rich carmine lips, which, as fate would have it, were the exact color of the scarlet silk walls of the library in front of which she now stood.
“My dear Ms. Paille,” Knight said. The word of endearment surprised even him, but it just seemed so appropriate.
“Mr. Knight…” She extended a long arm, and he took her hand… and kissed it.
By God, if ever a woman wanted to have her hand kissed… The surprised smile she gave him was worth the extravagance of the gesture, and-should he not have guessed? — so was the fragrance of her wrist.
Jeffrey emerged from behind her and put the wrapped package on the library table, then disappeared silently down the staircase.
“I do appreciate your taking the time for this,” she said. “My pleasure, I assure you,” Knight beamed. He turned to the package. “These, apparently, are the drawings?”
“Yes.”
“And these are your own personal drawings?”
“No, I represent the owner, a gentleman from Hong Kong.”
“Hong Kong? Really?”
“I’m Chinese American,” she said, smiling. “Mr. Cao Pei is Hong Kong Chinese. I’ve worked for him for eleven years. Mr. Cao is not an art collector, but he acquired all of these drawings during the last fifteen years from a variety of sources, mostly Englishmen living in Hong Kong. Now he wants to sell them. He believes he can get better prices here than in Hong Kong. That’s my purpose for being here.”
“How interesting.” He looked at her. “Then, your background is not in art?”
“No, not at all.”
“Oh?”
“International economics.”
“Then, uh, this is just an assignment for you. Art is not particularly an interest of yours.”
“Not particularly.”
What, Knight wondered, did impassion her? He couldn’t imagine, but he would love to know. He would love to see her impassioned.
“Well, then, do you have documentation that this belongs to Mr. Cao? That’s a very important part of my business, you know, provenance. A work of art, especially an important work of art, has to have, as it were, a genealogy of ownership.”
“I have that in a bank box.”
“I see.” He looked at her breasts, their contours revealed to him in relief, black upon black, their actual shape apparent beneath the capillary attraction of the watery silk. “Then, let’s take a look at what you have.”
The double entendre was out of his mouth too quickly to stop. He smiled at her. She smiled back. Did they understand each other? He wasn’t sure.
She stepped up to the library table, undid the clasps on the case, which was bound in heavy wheat buckram, and opened it. Inside the case a cover page preceded the actual drawings and was closed with a bow of silk. She untied the bow and folded back the cover leaf.
He was silent.
He leaned over the portfolio and carefully put his fingertips on the edge of the table. The first drawing was a Balthus. A fine, a very, very fine Balthus. My God, he thought. A surprise. He turned the leaf. On both the left and the right were two Delvauxs. Rare Delvauxs. Both deliberate drawings, not studies. Knight’s stomach quivered. He turned the leaf. On the left was an Ingres. On the right, Klimt. Both impeccable. Im- pec — cable. Good God. Either alone would have been a wonderful sale. He turned the last leaf. Maillol, left and right. Mother of God. He steadied himself. He squinted as if to see better, but he saw well enough. He saw damn well. He bent closer and pushed up his eyeglasses to the top of his head.
It was extraordinary.
When you were in the art business a long time, as he had been, you experienced over the years many exciting discoveries, you lived through many exciting deals, near misses, achievements. All of these accumulated in the course of one’s career until, eventually, the best dealers were in possession of a colorful oeuvre of anecdotes, stories of art and artists, dealers and collectors, of happenstance and serendipity, of good luck and bad, stories of people who were eccentric and feckless and passionate and ignorant. By far the best stories of all were those of discovery of great works of art and of serendipity. Carrington Hartwell Knight was staring down at a portfolio that represented a second great opportunity in as many days, which together would make one of the best anecdotes of serendipity and discovery that he would ever have to tell. It was passing odd how incidents of good (and, unfortunately, sometimes bad) luck often came in clusters.