Page 100 of The Girl You Left Behind
27
“So your painting disappeared when?”
“Nineteen forty-one. Maybe 1942. It’s difficult, because everyone involved is, you know, dead.” The blond woman laughs mirthlessly.
“Yeah, so you said. And can you give me a full description?”
The woman pushes a folder across the table. “This is everything we have. Most of the facts were in the letter I sent you in November.”
“What do you think it’s worth?”
Paul looks up from his notes. The woman is leaning back in her chair. Her face is beautiful, clear-skinned and defined, not yet revealing the first signs of age. But it is also, he notices now, expressionless, as if she has grown used to hiding her feelings. Or perhaps it’s Botox. He steals a glance at her thick hair, knowing that Liv could detect immediately if it was entirely her own.
“Because a Kandinsky would fetch a lot of money, right? That’s what my husband says.”
Paul picks his words carefully. “Well, yes, if the work can be proven to be yours. But that’s all some way off. Can we just get back to the issue of ownership? Do you have any proof of where the painting was obtained?”
“Well, my grandfather was friends with Kandinsky.”
“Okay.” He takes a sip of his coffee. “Do you have any documentary evidence?”
She looks blank.
“Photographs? Letters? References to the two of them being friends?”
“Oh, no. But my grandmother talked about it often.”
“Is she still alive?”
“No. I said so in the letter.”
“Forgive me. What was your grandfather’s name?”
“Anton Perovsky.” She spells out his surname, pointing at his notes as she does so.
“Any surviving members of the family who might know about it?”
“No.”
“Do you know if the work has ever been exhibited?”
“No.”
He’d known it would be a mistake to start advertising, that it would lead to flaky cases like this. But Janey had insisted. “We need to be proactive,” she had said, her vocabulary skewed by management-speak. “We need to stabilize our market share, consolidate our reputation. We need to be all over this market like a bad suit.” She had compiled a list of all the other tracing-and-recovery companies and suggested they send Miriam to their competitors as a fake client, to see their methods. She had appeared completely unmoved when he told her this was crazy.
“You’ve done any basic searches on its history? Google? Art books?”
“No. I assumed that was what I’d be paying you for. You’re the best in the business, yes? You found this Lefèvre painting.” She crosses her legs, glances at her watch. “How long do these cases take?”
“Well, it’s a piece-of-string question. Some we can resolve fairly swiftly, if we have the documented history and provenance. Others can take years. I’m sure you’ve heard that the legal process itself can be quite expensive. It’s not something I would urge you to embark upon lightly.”
“And you work on commission?”
“It varies, but we take a small percentage of the final settlement, yes. And we have an in-house legal department here.” He flicks through the folder. He is trying to calculate whether it has any merit at all when she speaks again: “I went to see the new firm. Brigg and Sawston’s? They said they’d charge one percent less than you.”
Paul’s hand stills on the paper. “I’m sorry?”
“Commission. They said they’d charge one percent less than you to recover the painting.”
