Picture This

After reading Gabriel’s text, Felix had come as fast as he could but the afternoon traffic was murderous. In the cab he kept thinking about the first day he’d met Gabriel, how the young artist had stood by his work so silently, so entirely without ego that it had been minutes before Felix even noticed him. It was as if all of what he was went into his painting – a pure conduit; Felix knew it then and he knew it now. That’s why he made such a perfect forger: Gabriel had always been an observer, a sponge. It was also why he was vulnerable.

Making sure Chung wasn’t there to see him, he used his own key to let himself into the apartment. The first thing he noticed was the smell – beer, stale cigarette smoke, unwashed clothes. All the lights were off except for that coming from a laptop with the screen half-open. He peered across the room, waiting for his eyes to adjust before navigating through the abandoned clothes, half-used tubes of oil paint, jars of turpentine with brushes soaking in them strewn about the floor.

‘Gabriel?’ Felix’s voice echoed out, sounding strangely pathetic. A sense of loneliness settled on him like fine dust. The very air seemed imbued with it. For the first time ever he wondered about the ethics of what he’d done to the youth. But he was of age, wasn’t he? It wasn’t as if he wasn’t an adult. He could have refused, he found himself rationalising.

He walked over to the laptop and pulled the screen fully open. To his horror, the face of Maxine Doubleday stared out at him, obviously a frozen still from some footage. On the far side the window was wide open, a slight breeze fluttering the old curtain hanging across it. Panicked, he ran to the window. From the ground five floors below Gabriel’s face stared up blindly, his black hair streaked with blood.

Retching, Felix stumbled back. Bending over, he breathed in deeply, trying to collect his wits. When his heart had slowed down, he sat at the kitchen table, trying to think rationally. The first thing was to get rid of all evidence of the Hopper paintings, then remove any connection between himself and Gabriel – letters, phone numbers, cheques that could be traced. The last thing would be to leave a forged suicide note making it clear the artist had killed himself.

He got up and walked over to the easels. To his surprise, on the second easel was a painting he hadn’t seen before, clearly one of Gabriel’s own – it was in a style that was an obvious development from his last, rather mediocre painting. It was a vast improvement, rather good, Felix decided, pacing in front of it; in fact, very good. Inspired, he went over to a group of paintings leaning on their sides against the wall and began to look through them. Every one of them was superb, and there were at least 20 stacked up and more under the bed, he estimated. He wondered why Gabriel had never shown them to him. Already his imagination was beginning to concoct a marvellous backstory to the tragic life of the young artist Gabriel Bandini, whose posthumous fame would be testimony to the callowness and short-sightedness of the contemporary art world.

Just then an eerie hissing sound came from the computer. Felix froze, the hairs on the back of his neck rising as he realised where he’d heard it before: the humming of wires high up on the Brooklyn Bridge. Slowly he turned towards the screen. Maxine seemed to stare out at him, her eyes watching him across the room. Suddenly furious, Felix belted across the room. Lifting the laptop up, he smashed it against the edge of the kitchen table over and over until the cracked image finally disappeared.

Chapter Twenty-Six

There was that sudden whoosh as he shut the door of his secret gallery, sealing out the outside world. Felix leaned against the heavy metal, the crisp shirt he’d put on for the opening cutting into his neck. Twenty-four hours after Gabriel’s death, the apartment and the awfulness of it had finally begun to recede, like a memory that belonged to someone else’s life.

After packing up all evidence of the forgeries and taking them out of the flat, he’d left, again making sure Chung had not seen him. Later he’d fallen into a sleeping-pill-induced stupor. That was yesterday and today was now.

He checked his watch; the gallery was due to open in an hour. Already he knew he should leave, should meet the camera crew and brief them as arranged, but instead he’d found himself at Baum #1 seeking sanctuary, seeking the only way he knew to find peace, the only way to push out the shuddering fear that had hijacked all he knew to be himself.

He looked across at the nine artworks in that sacred circle. Immediately he felt stronger, as if those images of himself were streaming back into him, the living embodiment. All I have to do is survive the opening, then I’ll leave, fly somewhere for a month or so, until things calm down, normalise, he told himself, escape being the mantra he’d clung to over all those questioning, doubting hours.

He stepped into the centre of the circle and breathed in the atmosphere around him; the silence, the sense of achievement, of omnipotence the secret gallery always gave him. Rotating slowly, he studied each one, finally arriving, reluctantly, at the ninth artwork – Maxine Doubleday’s sketch of him. His eyes scanning across the familiar image were caught by a new black mass of pencil marks around the figure’s left shoulder – that hadn’t been there before. As he focused, he realised he was staring at Maxine’s face, emerging from a thicket of granite shadow, peering from over the left shoulder of the sketch. Terrified, he stared back at the face; she was seeping through into his reality, his world, the living world, staring back at him accusingly. The sound of his mobile ringing broke into his terror. It was Chloe; he was needed at the gallery immediately. When he looked back up at the sketch, Maxine’s face had disappeared.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Susie stood in the centre of the gallery. Stretching her arms out, she shut her eyes and took a deep breath in, then exhaled. She’d been up all night finishing the last photograph and had spent the morning hanging it, but finally, an hour before the doors were due to be opened, the exhibition was ready.

Now they were hung: six massive photographs. She’d spent hours walking along the blank walls of the new gallery, absorbing the ambience of the space, all her senses drawn taut, trying to visualise the order in which she should hang them and how this would change the narrative between each image. Finally, she had settled on placing the Chinese and Japanese re-enactments side by side, then the Awakening of Adonis by Waterhouse, then the Klimt image, then the orgiastic Triumph of Pan. And finally her sixth work, the most controversial, which she’d created in total secrecy, was hanging by itself in a separate gallery that led off the main space so that it would be the final artwork to be experienced by the public and the last Felix himself would see.

In front of the large windows, six male models dressed in Tom Ford suits stood poised in a line waiting for a command from her. She’d had the windows of the gallery covered in brown paper from floor to ceiling. It was to be ritualistically peeled off by the hired models just before the doors opened: part of creating a sense of voyeurism in the audience waiting outside. She’d also insisted that Felix and his staff be allowed to enter the gallery only a moment before the show was declared open and her artworks revealed, thus building suspense and mystery, as well as extreme anticipation.

Outside, the murmur of voices had begun to grow louder. Susie, her heart now racing, grabbed one of the glasses of champagne from a table. Seconds later Alfie burst in.

‘The crowd out there is unbelievable! The queue stretches around the block. Felix is going crazy; he has the whole of the HBO camera crew buzzing around him. I’m telling you, everyone is there! It’s caught fire and we haven’t even opened the doors!’ He waltzed Susie around by the hands, champagne spilling everywhere. Abruptly she stopped him and pulled him close.

‘Alfie,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘whatever happens tonight, I need you and Muriel to stand by me.’

Shocked by her sudden intensity, Alfie nodded, wide-eyed.

*

Felix glanced down the queue, trying to keep a jittery anxiety trapped under his controlled veneer. Everyone who’d ever featured in his career seemed to be there – the critics, the curators, the celebrities, the collectors, the wannabe collectors, art whores, art students, other famous artists – everyone had turned up to see what the English enfant terrible had to offer. He couldn’t remember the last time such a prestigious crowd had been kept waiting that long, yet the ambience was friendly – jovial even.

Behind him the film crew – a cameraman, sound guy and director – were working their way down the line, hoping for sound bites. They were in the middle of interviewing his nemesis, Marty Hoffman, and his

words floated across the top of the crowd.

‘… it’s always interesting to watch how a fellow gallery director, especially one as powerful as Felix Baum, launches a new artist. We have such opposing strategies. I, for example, like to take a more understated approach – for me, it’s all about the art. Notoriety, celebrity and all the other palaver –’ here he gestured toward the blacked-out windows, the impatient crowd ‘– it can evaporate in a day. In the end it’s always the art that’s left speaking.’

Martha, holding the fort at the front, gestured: two minutes to go before the official opening. Felix pushed his way over to her. ‘Find out what’s going on. She has to open exactly on time – any later and we’ll have a riot on our hands.’

‘Felix, you know she’s not letting me or anyone else in before time.’

‘Isn’t it brilliant? She’s conjured up a feeding frenzy even before the doors have opened!’ A feigned enthusiasm; in truth he was trying not to be consumed by fear, the pervading sense that his world was about to implode, while around him the crowd seemed to be growing louder and more restless.

‘I know. Isn’t it wild?’ Martha exclaimed excitedly. ‘Get ready, Felix, we’re on countdown!’