Priceless (28 page)

After lunch, Randon announced that it was time to go inside. The visitors followed him. Nat lagged behind. He had hoped that being on the bigger boat would somewhat attenuate the symptoms of nausea, but alas, that didn’t seem to be the case. Lunch had not helped. But he couldn’t stay on deck until the feelings passed, so he took a deep breath and followed the others into the former smoking room, now Randon’s office, which thankfully had the modern addition of air-conditioning.

“I think it’s time for a tour,” said Randon.

A tour of
The Grand Cru
was a real history lesson. Every room had a story to tell.

The boat had been built in the late 1920s for an American steel millionaire called Arthur Crew, who had also been, as would delight Mathieu Randon more than fifty years on, a big fan of fine wines and quite the Francophile. When
The Grand Cru
was finished, she was the largest yacht in the world at that time. A veritable floating mansion house at almost two hundred seventy feet long, with staterooms for twenty guests who were waited on by
sixty crew. Her state-of-the-art steam engines could propel her at a speed of fifteen knots over a range of seven thousand miles.

In the heady days between the wars,
The Grand Cru
had seen high jinks galore as the most popular party venue on the seven seas. Her owner had been a very well-connected man, who’d invested some of his great wealth in film. As a result, all the big movie stars of the day had walked up the gangplank and danced on the deck beneath the stars.

The party came to an abrupt end, however, at the start of the Second World War. Like many other private yachts,
The Grand Cru
was requisitioned by the United States Navy. She was painted in camouflage colors and became SS
Regardless
.

After the war came many years of ignominy, several of which she spent in dry dock. Until the 1980s when Mathieu Randon bought her on a whim. Her name marked her out as his, he told his bankers. He had to have her.

Randon restored the boat to its original glory, updated the engine room, and made it the envy of the Côte d’Azur once more. There was something so elegant about
The Grand Cru
compared to the enormous gin palaces that the newly minted billionaires of Russia and China were buying by the dozen. Its classical lines spoke of a taste and style that new money simply could not buy. And history too.
The Grand Cru
had plenty of that.

“After the Second World War, Eisenhower held a meeting of his great admirals in this room,” Randon told them.

He spoke enthusiastically also of the lengths to which he had gone to return the boat to its original state.

“Are there still sixty staff on board?” Lizzy asked.

“Fifty-five,” said Randon.

But no guests
, Carrie thought. Not anymore. All the young men and women in uniform who went about their work so silently were there for the convenience and comfort of only one man.

Carrie admired the decoration. “So many yachts have interiors like trailers,” she said.

“I tried to remain true to the spirit of the boat as she was,” said Randon. “But you must have been wondering exactly what it is I would like you to sell for me.”

Carrie and Nat both hoped that he was planning to off-load some of the paintings that adorned the walls of the yacht’s staterooms. Lizzy couldn’t help but gawk when she saw a van Gogh that had recently sold at Christie’s for fifty million. It couldn’t be the same painting, surely. It had to be a reproduction.
I mean
, thought Lizzy,
it can’t possibly be a good idea to keep a van Gogh on a boat, no matter how beautiful and well-finished the boat is
.

“You’re admiring my van Gogh,” said Randon. “Quite a little beauty, isn’t it?”

Lizzy didn’t dare ask the question that was hovering on her lips.

“It is the real thing, in case you’re wondering. I can’t think of a safer place to keep it, can you? But this, ladies and gentleman, is the work that I want to consign to you.” He paused outside a door that was in itself a work of art, inlaid with delicate veneers. “I should warn you that the collection I have in this room is not for the narrow-minded. I spent many years gathering the items that I have here. There is more of a similar nature at my villa in Capri. Should we come to any kind of agreement today, then the items at Capri would have to be sold as well.”

Carrie and Lizzy glanced at each other, wondering what on earth they would find beyond the door. Nat was getting impatient for other reasons. Truthfully, he wanted
to be off the boat as soon as possible. He was not getting those sea legs.

“It’s time,” said Randon. “Apart from my assistant Bellette, you are the first people to see inside this room in a decade. For many years this has been my private domain. Absolutely for my eyes only. It’s the only place you’ll ever find me doing the cleaning,” he added. The flash of humor relaxed his visitors, but only a little.

Randon pressed a code into the keypad on the wall. There was the sound of an extremely complicated locking mechanism grinding and opening with a clunk. Then, after a pause as if to allow everyone to take a deep breath, the door slid back.

“My onetime pride and joy,” said Randon, ushering them into the room. “Now my greatest shame.”

The first thing the visitors laid eyes on was a six-foot-tall marble penis.

CHAPTER 40

T
he girls both gasped. Nat gave a small cough to prevent himself from saying something stupid in a knee-jerk reaction to the astonishing sight. The marble penis was truly something to behold. Absurdly outsize it may have been, but it had been skillfully rendered in astonishing anatomical detail. Though they were carved from cold stone, the veins that ran the entire length of the enormous phallus seemed to be pulsing with life. Carrie
put her hand over her mouth and hoped that no one would ask her to touch it. She felt quite ill.

“Now, that is what I call a big boy,” Nat whispered to Lizzy as Randon invited them farther into the room. Lizzy couldn’t even look at Nat, so frightened was she that if she met anyone’s eye—especially Nat’s—she would immediately burst out laughing.

“I can see you’re all shocked,” said Randon.

Carrie nodded, lips pressed tightly together to stifle a shriek of hilarity.

Randon waved a hand toward the cock.

“This particular piece was rescued from the sea just west of the island of Ischia,” he said. “It’s thought that it may have belonged to a statue commissioned by Caligula himself, God forgive him.”

So that was the end of the mystery. The auctioneers’ hopes that they had been invited to the south of France to see a lost Leonardo sketch too fragile to face the light of day had been thoroughly and quite incredibly dashed.

Mathieu Randon’s onetime pride and joy was a collection of erotic art and manuscripts dating back to the Roman Empire and beyond. All of Carrie’s and Lizzy’s preparation for this moment had been way off the mark. Both had imagined that they would be viewing a couple of Caravaggios or a Raphael. A dick the size of a man and a selection of antique dildos was not what either of them had envisaged. The walls were covered in sketches and etchings that were little more than porn.

Still, the room was amazing. The insight it gave the auctioneers into Randon’s personality prior to the earthquake that left him in a coma was quite something. This was a collection that had taken many years to amass. It had taken dedication. It wasn’t just tat. Every item in the room had merit. Lizzy drew Nat’s attention to a particularly lurid Picasso sketch, from the period toward the end
of the artist’s life when he seemed to have become obsessed with pudenda.

“I must apologize,” said Randon, “for submitting you to the evidence of my former depravity, but needs must. While this collection is vile, I have good reason to believe that it is probably worth millions. And millions are required to bring to fruition my dream of a religious retreat.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” said Nat as he got closer to one particular painting and saw that it was not in fact a butterfly after all but a carefully drawn collection of vaginas. “Good God,” he muttered as the details became clear. “I think I know that girl.”

Carrie found herself drawn to a small ivory box.

“You know what that is?” asked Randon.

“Of course,” said Carrie, thanking her lucky stars that just the previous year, Ehrenpreis New York had run an Asian sale and several similar items had been consigned to it. “This is an inro,” she said with confidence.

She bent over at the waist to look at it more closely. She didn’t dare pick it up. Inro were relatively common, so the fact that this particular example was in Mathieu Randon’s collection, alongside items she estimated to be worth six figures, suggested that it was rare and precious indeed.

“Pick it up, if you like,” Randon told her. “Tell me what you think of it.”

“It looks like one box,” Carrie continued, “but it’s actually a series of little stacked boxes. They were originally designed to carry things like tobacco or document seals. The Japanese hung them from the obi they wore around the waist because their garments didn’t have pockets. They were made out of all sorts of materials. Wood, tin, precious metals. But this one looks like real ivory. Eighteenth century, I would guess.”

“Well done, Ms. Klein. Exactly right.”

Nat, irritated that Carrie had scored a point he could have gotten himself—who didn’t know about inro?—threw in his own comment. “So it’s basically a Japanese handbag. Or a man-bag, if it belonged to a samurai.”

Lizzy managed a little laugh. Randon and Carrie ignored him.

Carrie marveled at the intricacy of the design. As with everything else in the collection, the subject was fairly explicit. It showed a man and a woman engaged in a variety of sexual positions. Some pretty commonplace. Some quite painful-looking. But it was so delicately carved. The joins between the stacked boxes were almost entirely disguised by careful arrangement of the overlapping pieces. That someone had managed to create something so complicated out of what seemed to be a single piece of ivory was quite remarkable. Carrie would call Ehrenpreis’s Asian expert as soon as she got off the boat to see if her hunch was right. Someone would pay hundreds of thousands for this.

“It’s beautiful,” said Carrie, replacing the inro on its pedestal and straightening up.

“And infuriating,” said Randon. “It’s a puzzle box to me. I haven’t been able to get it open since I bought it back in the 1970s. It was the very first piece in my collection. I bought it while I was in Japan to promote my champagne. It was a reward to myself.”

“Well deserved, I’m sure,” said Nat.

“Wrongheaded,” said Randon, “As was my purchase of the centerpiece to this collection. Though I think you will understand what I was thinking at the time. I have no doubt you’ll agree that it is very special indeed. Step this way.”

They followed Randon into another interconnecting room.

“You mean, the penis isn’t the centerpiece?” Lizzy murmured to Nat.

“Please don’t let it be a giant vulva,” Nat quipped back.

It was not a gigantic vagina. Randon took the party to a case that was covered by a velvet cloth of the kind you often see on cabinets in museums, protecting particularly delicate items from sunlight. Randon removed the cloth carefully if not reverently. He had long given up holding any of these particular artworks in reverence. Inside the cabinet was a very dusty-looking manuscript. As Randon beckoned them forward, Nat, Lizzy, and Carrie crowded over it, jostling for the very best view.

“Oh my God,” said Nat, who then received a sharp dig in the ribs from Lizzy, who had worked out that this wasn’t the place for blasphemy, despite the nature of the things they were seeing. But the tone of Nat’s voice was different this time. Not just shock now, but awe.

“You’ve guessed what it is?”

Nat nodded. “But I can hardly believe it.”

All three auctioneers were astounded. And all three of them set to work translating in their heads the words they saw before them. Carrie was so surprised by what she read, she decided she must have gotten some words wrong, despite her fluent French.

But this wasn’t just a piece of erotica. It was a piece of history.

“These are pages from an early draft of
Justine
,” Randon told them. “In the Marquis de Sade’s own hand. Saved by a prison guard.”

De Sade, the French nobleman born in the eighteenth century, had spent much of his life in prison for his own peculiar brand of erotic philosophy, which gave “sadism” its name.
Justine
was one of his most infamous works, charting as it did the life of an innocent young
woman who falls prey to all sorts of sexual depravity. The work’s subtitle was
Les Infortunes de la Vertu
.

“Good conduct, well chastised,” Nat translated. “A great book. I must reread it.” He earned himself another dig in the ribs from Lizzy.

“It’s the work of a monumental pervert,” said Randon. “Someone whose words should never have been published. The vile spewings of a diseased and dangerous reprobate. Allowing this kind of filth out into the public domain can only cause damage to the hearts and minds of the people who read it.”