The next day Franco drove me to Munich, and I caught a flight out to London and then to New York. I checked into the midtown Hilton and called Mark, and we had a nice chat, with no mention of the various betrayals he’d engineered, although he did seem a little nervous on the line. He invited me to his celebration and mentioned in passing that you’d be there, and I accepted.
After I stop talking I’m going to download all the sound files you’ve just heard onto a CD and go to Mark’s party and hand this CD to you. Why you? I don’t know, you’ve always seemed a kind of neutral observer to me, and I’m curious about what you make of it. Maybe there’s some clue you could point me at that’ll make more sense of the whole affair than I could. You might want to study the painting too, if you can get close enough. You might find it particularly interesting.
It was four in the morning when I finished playing the last file, and then I fell into bed half dressed and slept until almost noon, slept right through the alarm and the buzzing on my cell phone, my secretary going a little batty trying to reach me. I called the front desk, but no Chaz Wilmot had shown up or called, which I thought odd. I thought the whole point of the CD was to meet and discuss it. When I checked my messages there was one from Mark Slade inviting me to attend the auction that afternoon and asking me if I’d heard anything from Chaz.
I’d planned to go back to Stamford, I had a meeting at one, but I called the office and had it rescheduled-I was still somewhat under the spell of Chaz’s weird tale and didn’t feel up to discussing the details of theme park reinsurance. I screwed around for a few hours, making some calls and trying to do paperwork and e-mails and such, to no great effect, and then I cleaned myself up, dressed, and caught a cab uptown to Sotheby’s.
I wasn’t in the room for more than a few minutes before Mark pulled himself away from a group of prosperous-looking gentlemen and steered me to a corner. He was full of himself that day, and full of the prospect of the killing he was going to make. The billionaire boys’ club was there in strength apparently, from Europe, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America, because this was a unique chance to snag a Velázquez. The last painting by the artist to go on sale had been the Juan de Pareja portrait that the Met had bought at Christie’s in 1970 for four and a half million, and there would not be another in the foreseeable future. I asked him whether the Met would get this one too, and he said not a chance, it’s way out of their range now. Who then? He pointed to a woman wearing a severe gray suit standing in the rear of the room by the phones that off-site bidders used to communicate with their agents at the auction. She had black hair parted in the middle and done up in a bun, scarlet lipstick, and nail polish the same color. Olive skin. Green eyes. That’s Spain, Mark said.
“You mean the Prado?”
“No, I mean the fucking kingdom of Spain. You should watch her on the phone.”
And then he turned the conversation to Chaz and asked me again if I’d spoken to him at the party, and I said I had, and he asked me right out if Chaz had claimed to have painted the Velázquez, and I said yeah, he had. I didn’t mention the CD. Mark said he was afraid of that, poor bastard. You know he had a nervous breakdown? I said I hadn’t heard but that he had seemed a little flaky. A little! Mark said, the guy’s a refugee from the funny farm, I wonder why they let him walk around, and he went on to tell me the story of how he had gotten Chaz this commission in Europe and how he’d gone off the rails there and started accusing people of drugging him, and how he thought he could travel back through time and be Velázquez and paint his works, including this one, and that he’d blanked out big chunks of his real life. I said that was awful, and he said, yeah, but it’s going to do wonders for his sales, if he’d produce something; people love crazy artist stories, look at Pollock, look at Munch, look at van Gogh.
So that was Mark’s tale, and after he’d delivered it, he dropped me in favor of a couple of guys in suits and spade beards who looked like sons of the desert, and I went to sit down. The auction started with half a dozen teaser items, which went quickly, and then the boys in white gloves rolled out the Velázquez, and there was a stir. The auctioneer said this is the Venus with Self-Portrait by Diego Velázquez, also called the Alba Venus, and he said a little about its history and then announced that the bidding would start at one hundred million. There were four serious bidders as the bids raced up the ladder in half-million-dollar jumps, and after each round the auctioneer looked to the back of the room and got a nod from the lady of Spain, and then one by one the others dropped out and the Prado had it for 210 million, the highest price ever recorded for a single painting. Thus the barons of our age learned the lesson that the kings of the age of Velázquez had taught their own barons-it doesn’t matter how rich you are, you can’t compete with the sovereign, and what we were seeing here was Spain herself bringing back her purloined treasure. No one else had ever had a chance.
What was that, two, two and a half years ago? During that time Chaz Wilmot dropped completely out of sight. I’d always thought it would’ve taken a nuclear detonation to get him out of that loft, but apparently he’d cleaned out whatever he wanted and walked away from the rest. This I got from the girl at Lotte Rothschild’s gallery. Lotte was still in business, doing rather better than before, to judge from her prices. I didn’t stick around to see her. Well, I thought then, bye-bye Chaz, not that he was ever a very important part of my life. I figured he was being maintained in some Swiss clinic.
But it happened that I was called to Barcelona for a meeting with a European consortium building a gigantic amusement park near that city. I had one meeting that lasted all day, and the one scheduled for the next day was moved to the following day in Madrid, so I got a free day in the town, which is one of my favorite cities, as lovely as Paris, but without the attitude. The Catalans even like Americans, probably because the Spaniards don’t very much nowadays. It was a pretty day, warm but not hot, with a breeze that blew away the usual smog, so I took a cab up to Parc Güell to wander through the mosaics, sit on the terrace, and ogle the tourists ogling Gaudí.
And there, on the middle path, among the line of Africans selling cheap sunglasses, crafts, and souvenirs, was a fellow with an easel doing aquarelle portraits of tourists at ten euros a pop. I thought that was a pretty good deal, so I waited my turn and sat down on the little chair provided. The artist, in a straw hat and sunglasses, was darkly tanned and wore a bushy gray-flecked beard. He got right to work without a word. It took about ten or twelve minutes and then he snapped it off his easel and handed it to me.
There I was in all my stony glory. He’d put me in the clothing of a Spanish grandee of the seventeenth century, just like Velázquez used to do, and just as good as the one he’d done of me twenty-five years before.
I said, “Let’s get a drink, Chaz,” and he grinned at me, a little sheepishly, I thought, and asked one of the Africans to watch his stuff. We went over to that little café they have there and sat under a beer-company umbrella.
He said, “You weren’t looking for me, by any chance?”
I said, “No, it was just luck. Why, are you in hiding?”
We ordered claras, and when the waiter left he said, “Not really. It’s just I like to stay kind of private.”
“Well, you’ve succeeded,” I said. “So what’ve you been doing all this time? Sidewalk portraits for ten euros?”
“Among other things. What do you think of your portrait?”
I studied it again. “It’s terrific. Full of life. More of me than I like to see revealed, frankly. And incredible that you can work in watercolors instead of pastels like the other sidewalk guys. Do your customers appreciate this kind of work?”