The Last Judgement

However distinguished a purveyor of art the Rue de Rivoli might have been seventy years ago, it was so no longer. Apart from the excessively expensive galeries slipped in where once there had been one of the finest hotels in Europe, the nearest thing to a decent antique you can buy there nowadays is a luminous model of the Eiffel Tower. The broad Imperial thoroughfare has gone down in the world a little in the past century. Rosier Frères had vanished as well. Even on a sunny morning, the tawdry lines of foreign-exchange booths, postcard stands and souvenir shops are less than appealing. Thinking over what to do next, Argyll sipped his coffee — disgusting weak stuff they sold in France compared to the real Italian brew. Flavia had vanished on her errands, he had decided to start on the great picture hunt.

How do you do that? Eliminate the impossible, so the great man had said. Or, to translate that into more acceptable terms, start with the easy bits. Which, in this case, suggested finding out as much as possible about this picture.

There wasn’t much to go on here. Really famous pictures have pedigrees that can be traced back through the generations; with many, you can tell where they were at any moment during the past five hundred years. Frequently you can even say a picture was hanging on this wall, in this room, in this house, on this day, in this year. But that is the élite minority. Most pictures bumble about the world hopping from owner to owner and it is impossible to find out where they’ve been unless you are really lucky.

In the case of Socrates, all he had was the faded label on the back of the frame. The more he thought about it, the more he was certain it was his only real chance. It was impossible to say with any accuracy how old it was, but from the typeface he placed it somewhere in the inter-war period.

Phone book? he thought. A long shot, certainly, but think how pleasant if it worked. So he borrowed an old, dog-eared copy of the phone book and started hunting. And there it was. Family businesses are wonderful things. Rosier Frères still existed. Perhaps not at the same address, but a gallery of that name had an address in the Faubourg St-Honoré, with a little logo saying ‘Established 1882.’ Bingo. He looked at his map, decided it was an easy walk and set off.

A very long street, the Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, about five kilometres long, with galleries stretched out all along it. He should have taken a cab, and he was hot and tired by the time he finally stood outside Rosier Frères, having previously nipped round the corner, straightened his tie, run his fingers through his hair and tried to adopt the air of a successful dealer calling on a colleague in the trade.

He rang the bell, heard the click of the electric lock opening and went in. There were no customers. Really up-market galleries don’t encourage them.

‘Good morning,’ he said to the woman who came forward to greet him with a formal, chilly smile. He handed her his card — he rarely got the chance to do that and generally when someone wanted one he’d left them at home — and asked if the owner was in. He wished to consult him about a picture he’d bought which once passed through their hands.

So far so good. Such a request, if rarely made in person, is not so rare. Art dealers spend quite a lot of their time trying to work out where their pictures have been in the past. Realizing that she was dealing with a colleague and not with a client, the woman became almost welcoming; asked him to wait a moment, disappeared through a curtain at the back then reappeared to ask him to go through.

Despite the name, Rosier Frères was now run by a dapper little fellow called Gentilly, who brushed aside Argyll’s apologies for interrupting with a sweep of the hand. Nonsense. Bored to tears this morning. Glad for the distraction. Who are you?

The aesthetic mating game interrupted business while Argyll laid out his credentials and Gentilly inspected them to see how seriously he should treat the young stranger. This is a standard routine, the artistic equivalent of dogs sniffing each other’s bottom before deciding whether to chase balls together or bury a fang or two into each other’s necks. What makes dogs decide to be friends rather than enemies is unclear; but no more obscure than what makes dealers decide to be co-operative or not to colleagues. In this case it was the former connection with Edward Byrnes that did the trick. Gentilly had, apparently, once done some business with Argyll’s former employer, and got on well with him.

So they talked about Argyll’s old boss awhile, swapped gossip, then commiserated with each other about the parlous state of the market, all by way of building up mutual trust and understanding. Then, all the preliminaries disposed of, they settled down to business. What, exactly, did Argyll want?