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I took another sip of water.
“The third and final factor on which an institution like the Tate relies is expert opinion—which is where someone like me comes in. Someone who has spent their life studying an artist and their work. Someone who is prepared to put a professional reputation they have spent years accumulating on the line. It is a big responsibility, and there can be millions of pounds at stake. But when I was asked my professional verdict on this painting, I did not experience a moment’s doubt. The subject and the composition of the various scenes playing out across the canvas. Both fit closely with the fragmentary studies preserved in Juliette’s journal. When you take all the evidence together, there can be little reasonable doubt that the work you see behind me is the same remarkable painting that was exhibited by Juliette Willoughby at the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition.”
It was after the lecture, after the audience questions, after the book signing, when I was left to my own devices and the chairs were being packed up, that my phone rang, and I answered it, and once again my life changed forever.
It was Patrick, calling to tell me that a second Self-Portrait as Sphinx had been discovered.
PATRICK, DUBAI, 2023, SIX DAYS BEFORE HARRY’S DEATH
I checked my watch. I am always early for meetings with potential buyers, to ensure the stage is correctly set, to check that everything is perfectly arranged.
Dave White was late. This did not surprise me. Dave White was a very rich man indeed, with a string of supermodel girlfriends and an astronomically valuable modern art collection. I was a man with a very expensive piece of modern art to sell. What was worthy of remark was not that Dave White was late but that he was having lunch with me at all.
For years, I had been attempting to sell art to him. Contacting his offices in New York, Dubai, and London whenever we had a piece—he was a collector of Surrealist paintings from the 1920s and 1930s—that I thought might interest him. I had never yet received a single response.
Yesterday at six in the evening, Dubai time, I emailed his people to let them know I had a painting by Juliette Willoughby for sale. Fifteen minutes later Dave White called me personally to suggest we meet for lunch. I asked where he wanted to go. Without clarifying who would be paying, he suggested a ninety-seventh-floor sushi restaurant where a meal for two cost the same as a small car. For a moment, I thought he was joking. Then he named a time, told me to book a table, and hung up.
I resisted the urge to check my watch again. He would be here. If only to hear how I had come into possession of an impossible painting, he would be here. I forced myself to ignore the menu—more precisely, the prices on the menu—and to gaze out instead across a sea of white tablecloths through floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows at the desert in the distance.
I had gone to some effort to make a good impression. My watch was a Rolex, not fake. I was in a new Favourbrook suit. One piece of advice my father always gave me was that no one buys anything valuable from a man who looks poor or seems desperate. This being especially true when you were as poor and desperate as I was.
Dave White was almost at the table before I noticed him. He offered me a hand, I offered him mine. He glanced at my watch and a faint smirk appeared on his face. The smirk did not really fade as we sat down.
“Hello, Patrick,” he said in a distinctly Brummie accent. He was wearing boardshorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and flip-flops. All around the restaurant I could see people pretending—in their bespoke suits and spotless white kanduras—not to have noticed this. In a corner, I could see two waiters discreetly conferring, probably trying to work out if they recognized him as a regular, to decide whether this man was rich or powerful enough to get away with walking in here as if he had just wandered off the beach.
One of the waiters got his phone out, perhaps attempting to google Dave—a fruitless endeavor, because even if his name had been on the booking, it would not have helped. Like all extremely rich people, Dave White takes great care to ensure that none of his personal information, even his image, ever appears online—which is somewhat ironic, given that most of his fortune was made in facial recognition tech. There are no newspaper or magazine profiles. No Rich List position in the Sunday Times. Just one brief mention, in a two-line paragraph of personal information on the website of Vision Corp, the company he founded and still runs.
We exchanged pleasantries. He asked about my gallery and how long I had been based in Dubai, failing to offer any explanation for his delayed arrival. Had he flown in for this occasion specially, I wondered, or just been driven from the villa he was rumored to own on the Palm? I asked if he had made any interesting art acquisitions lately—my sources had told me he already owned two Picassos, six Dalís, a handful of Kahlos, a Delvaux, and a Man Ray, plus at least a dozen Erlichs, including Three Figures in a Landscape.
A waiter appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Dave ordered first—an omakase platter, a mineral water. I resisted the urge to cross-reference his order with the prices, and asked for the sea bass, the second-cheapest item on the menu. I suggested wine and, to my relief, he shook his head.
“Is it true, then?” he asked.
It was true, I said. I had in my possession, and through my gallery was offering for sale, what I believed to be an authentic painting by Juliette Willoughby.
“Self-Portrait as Sphinx,” he said.
“A second Self-Portrait as Sphinx.”
He shook his head. “That’s impossible.”
“We have done a full analysis and the results are compelling. The stretchers. The canvas. All dated to the 1930s. Samples of paint match the color notes in Juliette’s journal. The signature is a match for the passport and there are thumbprints too. We are also speaking to the world’s leading expert on Juliette—”
Dave White cleared his throat. “You don’t remember me, do you, Patrick?”
I smiled, a little confused. Remember him from where? He looked like a lot of people I had met in my career, although someone this rich you’d think might stick in memory. Had we been briefly introduced at a biennale? Crossed paths at a private view?
“We were in the same college, Patrick. At Cambridge.”
He named the year. He named our college. “Oh, right,” I said, although I had no memory of anyone called Dave White. “I’m sure we’ve all changed a lot since then.”
“You used to call me Terry,” he said flatly. “You and your friends. People I had never met thought my name really was Terry.”
“But your name isn’t Terry,” I said. I must have looked as baffled as I now felt.
I found myself wondering if this whole situation was some sort of setup. What had he studied? Mathematics? Computer science? Something nerdy, no doubt, given how he had made his cash. Perhaps this was the comeuppance he had dreamed of every time I swept past him on the stairs, off to some party; every time he saw me cross a quad with my beautiful girlfriend. Every time I called him Terry—for whatever fucking reason I used to do that.
“Perhaps I misheard your name when we first met?”