Theft Read Online Free PDF Page B

there. No Le Golem electrique. Oh, never mind.
    Dominique, the daughter of a tax accountant from Marseilles, now had sufficient Leibovitzes, almost-Leibovitzes and unborn- Leibovitzes to live very well for the next fifty years. Also, of course, she inherited the droit moral. That gave her the right to authenticate, which is, incredible as it may seem, the law, but now she chose to give her rather louche reputation a more reliable character and so she set up Le Comite Leibovitz, and installed the esteemed Honore Le Noel as chair.
    It must have seemed perfect from her point of view: they could back up their false assertions with those of greedy dealers and collectors on the Comite. The pair of them could spend the rest of their lives signing unsigned canvases and revising abandoned works.
    The storyteller was pretty, filled with talk, thirsty for more wine.
    I poured her a third glass of Virgin Hills and began to permit myself a few ideas.
    "Now," she said, brushing ash from her lovely ankle, "Dominique discovered Honore in bed with Roger Martin."
    "The English poet." "Exactly. Him. You know him?" "No."
    "Thank God for that." She raised an eyebrow. If I did not know exactly what she meant, I enjoyed the sense of complicity.
    "So they divorced, of course. But no-one knows exactly how their hoard of paintings was finally divided," she said.
    But Dominique, it seems, knew a lot of "partisans", tough guys, and she almost certainly got the lion's share. So by the time Honore had been robbed, circled, outnumbered, and defeated on the Comite, he had become a very dangerous man. Certainly he hated Dominique. Towards her innocent son he displayed an even greater antipathy.
    When, in 1969, one of her lovely partisan pals strangled Dominique in a Nice hotel, Olivier was already in London, losing the last of his French accent at St. Paul's. Knowing less than nothing about his father's work, he inherited the droit moral.
    "You meet my husband," Marlene said, "you think he is so gentle, and he is, but when Honore began a legal action to take away the droit moral, Olivier fought like a tiger. You have seen the photographs? He was a child, so pretty, with lovely eyelashes, seventeen years old, but he loathed Honore. I cannot tell you to what degree. When you think about the court case, this was really the only point for Olivier."
    We are the nation of Henry Lawson and the campfire yarn, but just the same we are very bloody wary of people doing what Marlene was doing now. We are inclined to wonder, Is she a name-dropper? Does she have tickets on herself? At the same time, no-one in this paddock has ever spoken like this, not ever, and I was literally on the edge of my chair, watching with the most particular attention as she blew on her Marlboro so its tip burned evenly.
    "By the time all this was over, Olivier could not so much as touch one of his father's paintings. He hated them. He hates them now. These great works of art make him ill, really, physically ill."
    This was interesting, I didn't say it wasn't. "But why, for Christ's sake, did Dozy hide the painting from me?"
    She shrugged. "Rich people!"
    "He was frightened anyone would know he had something so valuable?" "It's an asset," she said derisively. "That's how it is with them.
    It's there to own, not to see. But if the market believed Honore's story--that this precious painting was somehow doctored--my husband would have been ruined. We would have been exposed for the loss, a million US dollars, probably more." "You and your husband?"
    "Yes." She almost smiled.
    "And of course Honore is just a malicious little shit," she said, "but he must be answered, so I sent up two forensic chemists to do an independent pigment analysis. Indeed, I think one of them met your brother in the pub. He thought he was amazing."
    "Sometimes he is."
    "In any case," she said quickly, "my independent chemists also echoed Honore, fretting about the presence of titanium dioxide in the white. This was not in