False Impression

ANNA JOGGED WEST along West Fifty-fourth Street, past the Museum of Modern Art, crossing Sixth Avenue before taking a right on Seventh. She barely glanced at the familiar landmarks of the massive sculpture that dominated the corner of West Fifty-fifth Street or Carnegie Hall as she crossed West Fifty-seventh. Most of her energy and concentration was taken up with trying to avoid the early morning commuters as they hurried toward her or blocked her progress. Anna considered the jog to Central Park nothing more than a warm-up and didn’t start the stopwatch on her left wrist until she passed through Artisans’ Gate and ran into the park.

Once Anna had settled into her regular rhythm, she tried to focus on the meeting scheduled with the chairman for eight o’clock that morning.

Anna had been both surprised and somewhat relieved when Bryce Fenston had offered her a job at Fenston Finance only days after she’d left her position as the number two in Sotheby’s Impressionist department.

Her immediate boss had made it only too clear that any thought of progress would be blocked for some time after she’d admitted to being responsible for losing the sale of a major collection to their main rival, Christie’s. Anna had spent months nurturing, flattering, and cajoling this particular customer into selecting Sotheby’s for the disposal of their family’s estate, and had naïvely assumed when she shared the secret with her lover that he would be discreet. After all, he was a lawyer.

When the name of the client was revealed in the arts section of The New York Times, Anna lost both her lover and her job. It didn’t help when a few days later the same paper reported that Dr. Anna Petrescu had left Sotheby’s “under a cloud”—a euphemism for fired—and the columnist helpfully added that she needn’t bother to apply for a job at Christie’s.

Bryce Fenston was a regular attendee at all the major Impressionist sales, and he couldn’t have missed Anna standing by the side of the auctioneer’s podium taking notes and acting as a spotter. She resented any suggestion that her striking good looks and athletic figure were the reason Sotheby’s regularly placed her in so prominent a position, rather than at the side of the auction room along with the other spotters.

Anna checked her watch as she ran across Playmates Arch: two minutes eighteen seconds. She always aimed to complete the loop in twelve minutes. She knew that wasn’t fast, but it still annoyed her whenever she was overtaken, and it made her particularly mad if it was by a woman. Anna had come in ninety-seventh in last year’s New York Marathon, so on her morning jog in Central Park she was rarely passed by anything on two legs.

Her thoughts returned to Bryce Fenston. It had been known for some time by those closely involved in the art world—auction houses, leading galleries, and private dealers—that Fenston was amassing one of the great Impressionist collections. He, along with Steve Wynn, Leonard Lauder, Anne Dias, and Takashi Nakamura, were regularly among the final bidders for any major new acquisition. For such collectors, what often begins as an innocent hobby can quickly become an addiction, every bit as demanding as any drug. For Fenston, who owned an example of all the major Impressionists except Van Gogh, even the thought of possessing a work by the Dutch master was an injection of pure heroin, and once purchased he quickly craved another fix, like a shaking addict in search of a dealer. His dealer was Anna Petrescu.

When Fenston read in The New York Times that Anna was leaving Sotheby’s, he immediately offered her a place on his board with a salary that reflected how serious he was about continuing to build his collection. What tipped the balance for Anna was the discovery that Fenston also originated from Romania. He continually reminded Anna that, like her, he had escaped the oppressive Ceausescu regime to find refuge in America.

Within days of her joining the bank, Fenston quickly put Anna’s expertise to the test. Most of the questions he asked her at their first meeting, over lunch, concerned Anna’s knowledge of any large collections still in the hands of second- or third-generation families. After six years at Sotheby’s, there was barely a major Impressionist work that came under the hammer that hadn’t passed through Anna’s hands or at least been viewed by her and then added to her database.

One of the first lessons Anna learned after joining Sotheby’s was that old money was more likely to be the seller and new money the buyer, which was how she originally came into contact with Lady Victoria Wentworth, elder daughter of the Seventh Earl of Wentworth—old, old money—on behalf of Bryce Fenston—nouveau, nouveau riche.

Anna was puzzled by Fenston’s obsession with other people’s collections, until she discovered that it was company policy to advance large loans against works of art. Few banks are willing to consider “art,” no matter what form, as collateral. Property, shares, bonds, land, even jewelery, but rarely art. Bankers do not understand the market and are reluctant to reclaim the assets from their customers, not least because storing the works, insuring them, and often ending up having to sell them is not only time-consuming but impractical. Fenston Finance was the rare exception. It didn’t take Anna long to discover that Fenston had no real love, or particular knowledge, of art. He fulfilled Oscar Wilde’s dictum: A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But it was some time before Anna discovered his real motive.

One of Anna’s first assignments was to take a trip to England and value the estate of Lady Victoria Wentworth, a potential customer, who had applied for a large loan from Fenston Finance. The Wentworth collection turned out to be a typically English one, built up by the second earl, an eccentric aristocrat with a great deal of money, considerable taste, and a good enough eye for later generations to describe him as a gifted amateur. From his own countrymen he acquired Romney, West, Constable, Stubbs, and Morland, as well as a magnificent example of a Turner, Sunset over Plymouth.

The third earl showed no interest in anything artistic, so the collection gathered dust until his son, the fourth earl, inherited the estate and with it his grandfather’s discriminating eye.

Jamie Wentworth spent nearly a year exiled from his native land taking what used to be known as the Grand Tour. He visited Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Venice, and St. Petersburg before returning to Wentworth Hall in possession of a Raphael, Tintoretto, Titian, Rubens, Holbein, and Van Dyck, not to mention an Italian wife. However, it was Charles, the fifth earl, who, for all the wrong reasons, trumped his ancestors. Charlie was also a collector, not of paintings, but of mistresses. After an energetic weekend spent in Paris—mainly on the racecourse at Longchamp but partly in a bedroom at the Crillon—his latest filly convinced him to purchase from her doctor a painting by an unknown artist. Charlie Wentworth returned to England having discarded his paramour but stuck with a painting that he relegated to a guest bedroom, although many aficionados now consider Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear to be among Van Gogh’s finest works.

Anna had already warned Fenston to be wary when it came to purchasing a Van Gogh, because attributions were often more dubious than Wall Street bankers—a simile Fenston didn’t care for. She told him that there were several fakes hanging in private collections and even one or two in major museums, including the national museum of Oslo. However, after Anna had studied the paperwork that accompanied the Van Gogh Self-Portrait, which included a reference to Charles Wentworth in one of Dr. Gachet’s letters, a receipt for eight hundred francs from the original sale and a certificate of authentication from Louis van Tilborgh, curator of paintings at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, she felt confident enough to advise the chairman that the magnificent portrait was indeed by the hand of the master.

For Van Gogh addicts, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear was the ultimate high. Although the maestro painted thirty-five self-portraits during his lifetime, he attempted only two after cutting off his left ear. What made this particular work so desirable for any serious collector was that the other one was on display at the Courtauld Institute in London. Anna was becoming more and more anxious about just how far Fenston would be willing to go in order to possess the only other example.

Anna spent a pleasant ten days at Wentworth Hall cataloguing and valuing the family’s collection. When she returned to New York, she advised the board—mainly made up of Fenston’s cronies or politicians who were only too happy to accept a handout—that should a sale ever prove necessary, the assets would more than cover the bank’s loan of thirty million dollars.

Although Anna had no interest in Victoria Wentworth’s reasons for needing such a large sum of money, she often heard Victoria speak of the sadness of “dear Papa’s” premature death, the retirement of their trusted estates manager, and t

he iniquity of 40 percent death duties during her stay at Wentworth Hall. “If only Arabella had been born a few moments earlier . . .” was one of Victoria’s favourite mantras.

Once she was back in New York, Anna could recall every painting and sculpture in Victoria’s collection without having to refer to any paperwork. The one gift that set her apart from her contemporaries at Penn, and her colleagues at Sotheby’s, was a photographic memory. Once Anna had seen a painting, she would never forget the image, its provenance, or its location. Every Sunday she would idly put her skill to the test by visiting a new gallery or a room at the Met, or simply by studying the latest catalogue raisonné. On returning to her apartment, she would write down the name of every painting she had seen before checking it against the different catalogues. Since leaving university, Anna had added the Louvre, the Prado, and the Uffizi, as well as the National Gallery in Washington, the Phillips Collection, and the Getty Museum, to her memory bank. Thirty-seven private collections and countless catalogues were also stored in the database of her brain, an asset Fenston had proved willing to pay over the odds for.

Anna’s responsibility did not go beyond valuing the collections of potential clients and then submitting written reports for the board’s consideration. She never became involved in the drawing up of any contract. That was exclusively in the hands of the bank’s in-house lawyer, Karl Leapman. However, Victoria did let slip on one occasion that the bank was charging her 16 percent compound interest. Anna had quickly become aware that a combination of debt, naïveté, and a lack of any financial, expertise were the ingredients on which Fenston Finance thrived. This was a bank that seemed to relish its customers’ inability to repay their debts.

Anna lengthened her stride as she passed by the carousel. She checked her watch—off twelve seconds. She frowned, but at least no one had overtaken her. Her thoughts returned to the Wentworth collection and the recommendation she would be making to Fenston that morning. Anna had decided she would have to resign if the chairman felt unable to accept her advice, despite the fact that she had worked for the company for less than a year and was painfully aware that she still couldn’t hope to get a job at Sotheby’s or Christie’s.

During the past year, she had learnt to live with Fenston’s vanity and even tolerate the occasional outburst when he didn’t get his own way, but she could not condone misleading a client, especially one as naïve as Victoria Wentworth. Leaving Fenston Finance after such a short time might not look good on her résumé, but an ongoing fraud investigation would look a lot worse.

5

“WHEN WILL WE find out if she’s dead?” asked Leapman, as he sipped his coffee.

“I’m expecting confirmation this morning,” Fenston replied.

“Good, because I’ll need to be in touch with her lawyer to remind him—” he paused “—that in the case of a suspicious death—” he paused a second time “—any settlement reverts to the jurisdiction of the New York State Bar.”

“Strange that none of them ever query that clause in the contract,” said Fenston, buttering another muffin.

“Why should they?” asked Leapman. “After all, they have no way of knowing that they’re about to die.”