Karmesin, page 14
On the way I told him, “Apart from what you get, remember that there is a moral in this. A child could not have fallen for this lay, but that corrupt creature did. It was a child’s trick — which leads me to conclude that, tough as they think they are, a child can lead them.”
“Oh well,” said Karmesin, “the proceeds, as I told you, amounted to £2,530,700 — we will ignore the odd shillings. Every penny of this I gave to the Rehabilitation Fund of Free Europe, deducting for myself only twenty per cent plus out-of-pocket expenses. For my work in this matter I charged nothing.
“And that is why your famous Carfax is now reduced to an endowment policy which, to him, is abject poverty. True, he owns the freehold of his home in Highgate — but he is reduced to the level of a petty rentier and, the cost of living being what it is, he is a poor man.
“Worst of all, as I told you, he dare not lift a finger now, even to get me knocked on the head.”
Karmesin, if not the greatest criminal, at least the greatest and most plausible liar of his time, then added, “Carfax has no influence any more, even among those who used to worship him. And upon what did this worship depend? Upon the fact that Carfax was safe because he was rich. It is not for me to moralise, but riches and respect go together.” Grinding out a twice—rolled butt under the heel of a well-worn shoe, he said, “Do you happen to have a fresh cigarette about you?”
Oalamaoa
In any circumstances my friend Karmesin is rather better than life-size, but when the weather turns chilly and he puts on his winter overcoat, passers-by sometimes run around the block to see him again, advancing in all his outrageous majesty. For in this coat, which is of some moth-eaten blackish—gray fur, with his great red face and his moustache which, like the philosopher Nietzsche’s, hangs down in corkscrew curls, he has the air of a hard-up Jove wrapped in his last leaky thundercloud.
“Oh, let people look,” he said to me, “they will never see a coat like this again. It is the last.”
“Too bad,” I said.
“Yes. It is made of the fur of the Mongolian Syrax. This pelt was taken off an extinct beast found frozen along with the mammoths in the Siberian snows.” He shot his cuffs. “You know, considering it is forty—seven thousand years old, it is not very much the worse for wear.”
Now Karmesin has been described as either the greatest crook or the greatest liar the world has ever known. But how is it possible to reconcile the evident pennilessness of this remarkable man with his accounts of his unfailing success as a master thief? And, if you know Karmesin, you ask yourself, “How is it possible that such a man could condescend to lie?”
Mongolian Syrax, for example! There was no mention of any such beast, extinct or otherwise, in any available reference work. No furrier had ever heard of such a creature. Yet I still feel in my heart that somehow or other the authorities must be wrong. “Look at the Piltdown Skull,” I say to myself. “Oh, surely, there must have been one — just one — Mongolian Syrax!”
Such is the power of the man.
He rolled himself a cigarette fat as a cheroot, and put it between his lips. Under that portentous moustache it looked no bigger than a thermometer. He said, “I once made a little money out of a kind of overcoat. I cannot bother to recall the exact amount. Tens of thousands — there are people nowadays to whom it would be a small fortune, I hear. Offer me a cup of coffee and I will tell you about it.”
In the cafe Karmesin settled himself comfortably, pocketed four lumps of sugar and some tooth picks, and went on:
The overcoats to which I refer (said Karmesin) were, in fact, coats of paint, and the cloth was second-hand canvas. Yes, they were pictures, supposed to be the work of the French artist Paul Gauguin. Even the likes of you, my friend, will have heard of Gauguin, since I am told both Mr. George Sanders and Sir Laurence Olivier portrayed him in The Moon and Sixpence.
As a character, Gauguin cannot miss with the general public: he deserted his family, swindled his friends, thrashed his mistresses, and (to paraphrase Mr. Longfellow) departing left behind him toothmarks in the hands that fed him.
But he painted some quite decorative pictures in the South Seas. They make suburban homes look artistic, especially in light oak frames. And although he was poor in his unsavory lifetime, some time after his death his pictures became immensely valuable. So, since his brushwork is not too difficult to imitate, the faking of Gauguins was, until recently, something like a little industry in itself.
For example, I knew an innkeeper near Arles who made twenty million francs by selling a Gauguin portrait of his grandfather, purported to have been left by the painter in lieu of cash for an unsettled bill. The innkeeper sold two hundred and eighty of these “originals” before he retired — used to buy them by the dozen from a dealer in Marseilles; nail one over a hole in the chicken coop, and wait for a tourist to “discover” it.
You see, even if your sucker can be persuaded that he has been caught, he can generally be relied on to keep his mouth shut. He loathes being revealed as a fool. That is why so few clever fakers of works of art are exposed in their lifetimes.
But by about 1945 mere copies of famous paintings by Paul Gauguin became a drug on the market. By that date, it has been calculated; more than five million dollars had been spent on spurious originals of one canvas alone, the one named Te Po. It was necessary to discover a hitherto unheard—of Gauguin picture.
I gave only a passing thought to the matter, being occupied with more lucrative affairs just then. But as luck would have it, I ran into an impecunious painter named Molosso — and here, if you like, was an extraordinary type! He was, in a way, a little like the Dutch hero, van Meegeren, who painted pictures alleged to be by old Dutch masters with such consummate skill, and such scientific meticulousness, that he fooled all the German experts, and got undisclosed millions out of such collectors as the Reichsmarshal Goering.
Van Meegeren reproduced the same pigments that the old masters had used, ground out of identical earths and jewels in the same kind of mortars with exactly similar pesdes; and he applied his paint with hair-for—hair reconstructions of the old brushes, upon genuine but worthless contemporary canvases, copying the strokes of the great artists to the tiniest capillary, with an exquisite perfection of microscopic skill that has never been equaled.
Or perhaps it has? What van Meegeren did, might not someone else have done? Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, in the Louvre, is alleged by some experts to be a fake. Believe me, my young friend, some strange stories might come out if some of our famous art galleries were carefully examined today!
Well, my little Molosso was a lesser van Meegeren. I really marvel at this kind of man — I am lost in wonder, that one who can paint a new picture as superbly as, say, Vermeer would have painted it if he had chosen the subject, should not elect to be a great genius in his own right. Why didn’t this titanic faker van Meegeren cry, “But I am the master!”
I can only assume that his genius was not strong enough; it had its rotten spot, and poverty found it, so that he argued, “Why should I go hungry as van Meegeren, when I can drink champagne by pretending to be Vermeer?” So he faked, and it was a great joke. But it was also a pitiful tragedy, an Allegory of Genius Strangled by Greed.
Little Molosso started to paint with a high spirit and a light heart. But your true artist must be made of tough stuff, and Molosso wanted heart. A great man can whitewash a barn for a bit of bread without losing the glory and the dream; but when Molosso learned that the world preferred to spend its money on greeting cards rather than canvases, he drifted into the position of a disgruntled mediocrity who enjoyed being what they call “misunderstood.”
He would have gone to the dogs completely but for his wife, a cheerful little woman, who adored him and took his ill-treatment of her as matter of course. And in abusing her Molosso could feel as a hungry genius is romantically supposed to feel — that if he had been a man like Gauguin, with spirit enough to leave her abruptly with a parting punch in the jaw, he might have been recognized as great. As it was, he was kind enough to stay married to her and let her work for him.
For her sake I decided to make Molosso rich.
The idea came to me suddenly one evening after I had walked home with him from the printer’s office at which, I being there on business, he had scraped an acquaintance with me. I was amused by his preposterous virulence — it broke out when we were passing a printseller’s shop. Rembrandt painted with mud, he shouted, Da Vinci was a plumber, van Gogh painted in Braille for the blind, and as for Gauguin — bah! — he, Molosso, had painted better when he was eighteen!
“And if you don’t believe me, come upstairs and I’ll prove it,” he said.
Having time to kill, I went to see what he had to show. And indeed, Molosso really did have a most peculiar talent. Alas, it was a talent without soul! He was so empty of original spirit that he almost frightened me.
How shall I put it? If you asked him to depict, for instance, a landscape he had seen, he would stand helpless, paralyzed, while the paint dried on his palette. But if you said, “Molosso, paint me a landscape as Salvator Rosa, or Turner, or Van Gogh might have painted it,” why, then he would go to work at once, with tremendous energy, and the results would have been astonishing — if he had not tired of the game in the middle.
Since we had been talking of Gauguin, he pulled out a half- finished canvas, saying, “There. Painted when I was eighteen. I’d thought of passing it off as genuine to some fat pig of a collector, just to show my disdain for collectors in general, and that leprous charlatan of a Gauguin in particular. But I thought, oh, what the devil, they are beneath my contempt! But look — there’s your precious Gauguin in every stroke, every line, every vulgar splash of eye-catching color. It was to have been a variation on one of that ham-fisted stockbroker’s Polynesian themes. I was going to call it Oalamaoa.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Meaning simply Oalamaoa — men, pigs, women, hibiscus, and bananas. What else is there in the Pacific?”
I looked closely and long. And it was then that my scheme sprouted, swelled, and blossomed to perfection like one of those Japanese paper flowers in warm waters.
Now, as I was about to speak, Molosso’s wife came in, carrying a package of groceries and three bottles of wine. He did not even say “Hello” to her — simply jerked a thumb in her direction and said to me, “That’s Lucille, the cross I have to bear.”
I said, “Madame, I am most impressed by your husband’s work, and propose to offer him a commission worthy of his brush.”
“What does she know?” cried Molosso. “She sews buttons on rich women’s drawers in a lingerie shop in the Rue de Miromesnil. But are you serious, sir? A commission?”
“If you are free,” I said.
“Free! I wish I were!” said Molosso, with a bitter look at his nice little wife. “But sir, I’d do anything in the world rather than continue to paint sickening cherubs and nauseating roses for Minard’s Hand- Painted Greeting Cards.”
“Work for me for six months, then,” I said, “and I will pay you one thousand dollars American every month. All your expenses will be paid. At the end of our association, I will pay you thirty thousand dollars in cash. Well?”
Well! So began what must be the neatest piece of polite skull— duggery that even the rare picture business has ever known. And these, my friend, are very strong words indeed.
So. A few months later I called on no less a person than Mr. Egon Mollock, in his suite at the Crillon. He had come to Paris for his usual annual visit, seeking what he might devour, for he was a multimillionaire and a collector. Of what? Of anything that nobody else had, of anything any other collector would give his ears for.
He was not a lover of beauty; only of rarity. If wart hogs had been scarce he would have collected wart hogs. As it was, he went after original works of art, which he kept locked up in his mansion in Connecticut.
To this loveless jailer of the beautiful, I said, “I have news for you, in confidence, Mr. Mollock. Imogene Grible wants to sell a Gauguin.”
“Very likely,” said he. “But I happen to know that the Gobseck Collection is entailed.”
“Exactly. That is why I am empowered to speak to you — in the strictest confidence.”
I should explain, here, that Lucian Gobseck was one of those mystery men of money whose histories always have to be hushed up. He came up overnight like a toad stool, and helped to finance Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat; had a long, murky career as company promoter, moneylender, and unofficial pawnbroker to the great, and died in 1899, leaving a colossal fortune and an art collection which hardly anyone has ever been allowed to look at.
The collection is entailed — in other words, it is an heirloom; it may be inherited, but never sold. And such an inheritance, nowadays, is the legatee’s nightmare. There is many a proud inheritor who, ruined by death taxes and insurance premiums, prays day and night for a good hot fire fanned by a hard dry wind.
Gobseck’s only child, a girl, reversed the accepted order of things. Generally, it is an American heiress who marries a penniless Frenchman. She married a cowhand out of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, named Boscobel, said to be the most optimistic poker player on earth.
But even so, their daughter Imogene brought a large fortune to her husband, a Bostonian named Gribble, who abhorred gambling and invested only in sure things at twelve—and-a-half per cent. Thus, when he passed on — Bostonians never die, they simply pass on — Imogene was left with only about $25,000 a year, and this incubus of a Gobseck Collection to keep up and pay insurance on.
I said, “The Tonkin Necklace has been broken up and replaced with a paste replica these five years. So has the Isabella Tiara. Morally, Imogene Gribble is justified; in law, she is culpable. I feel that I am no more a purveyor of stolen property in offering Oalamaoa, than you would be a receiver of it if you bought it. This kind of technically illicit deal is less reprehensive than, say, smuggling a bottle of cognac. Nobody is the loser, but everyone gains. A copy of Oalamaoa molders in the dark instead of the beautiful original; Mrs. Gribble has some money, which she needs; I draw my commission; and you have the joy of possession —”
“— Oalamaoa? I never heard of it,” he said.
“Neither had I until I first saw it,” I told him. “It is possible that old Gobseck foresaw Gauguin’s value, and bought some unheard-of canvases. Who knows?”
“I have met Imogene Gribble,” said Mollock, looking at me with that unpleasant smile of his, which has been so aptly likened to a tired earthworm trying to bite its other end. “What is to prevent my dealing with her directly?”
“If the lady chose to deal directly, I imagine she would not have employed me as a go-between,” I said with some coldness. “Mrs. Gribble mentioned three of her acquaintances whom I might approach in this matter: Karyatidis the ship-owner, Gregor Dreidl the theatrical man, and your good self.”
“Why did you come to me first — if you did come to me first?” “Because,” I said with a shrug, “Karyatidis is on his yacht, Dreidl is in New York, and you happen to be in Paris.”
“Well,” he said, grudgingly, “I’ll look at the picture.”
I had it with me. Mollock, who had done so much under-the- counter buying in his time, remarked on the fact that the canvas was still stretched in its framework. He had rather expected it to be rolled up in a cardboard tube.
I reminded him, “This is not a stolen canvas, my dear sir, cut from its framework with a razor blade. Why mar it even that little, therefore?”
“This is no Nineteenth Century canvas,” he said.
“Of course not. It is very much older. The art dealer, Pere Tanguy, from whom most Parisian artists of Gauguin’s time got their supplies, had a considerable stock of perfectly good canvases painted by unheard-of mediocrities of every century. The pictures were worthless; the canvases were excellent. So impecunious painters often bought them for a few francs, cleaned them, and painted over them. This you must know. Ah ...” I said with a sigh, whoever sold Gauguin that bit of canvas is still whistling for his money, I’ll wager, wherever he is!”
“But what a blaze of color!” he exclaimed.
So it was. There was something stunning in the impact of the color of Oalamaoa as it hit your eye. Little Molosso, in his vanity and his spite, had out—Gauguined Gauguin, so to speak.
The central figure was a golden-skinned woman, nude, walking as if under a spell, followed by a group of young men wearing lava—lavas of different tints but all marked with the same meandering tantalizing design. They were coming out of a jungle flaring with flowers. To the right, in the foreground, a black-and-white pig rooted among the shrubs.
I said, “He must have enjoyed himself, that man, painting this picture.”
Mollock nodded. “I wonder what that pattern means, there on the cloth.”
“Some Polynesian ideograph, no doubt,” I said.
“And how much does Imogene Gribble want for this?” he asked.
“One hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” I said.
“Like hell she does,” said he. “Do you realize that if I don’t buy, a word dropped by me will make the sale of this picture to anybody else absolutely impossible?”
“Sir,” said I, “in naming you, Karyatidis, and Dreidl, Mrs. Imogene Gribble referred only to the three most respectable of her list of potential buyers.”
I will not bore you with an account of the negotiations that followed. They started before lunch, and ended at cocktail-time. Mollock wheedled me. Mollock tempted me, and at last I fell. With an air of shame I accepted $105,000 as the “official” price paid for Oalamaoa in this highly unofficial deal, and an extra fifteen thousand dollars strictly off the record as my price for underselling my employer.
Mollock was very good at figures.
He put it to me, “Say I pay a hundred and thirty—five thousand for Oalamaoa. Your dealer’s commission, twenty per cent, amounts to twenty—seven thousand dollars, and that is that. But say I pay only a hundred and five thousand, and give you a private honorarium of fifteen thousand, you make thirty six thousand and I save fifteen.”
