Priceless (36 page)

By half past ten, Lizzy was rolling. She could no more have questioned Nat coherently about the paintings than she could have driven home.

“Let’s go to Annabel’s,” Nat suggested.

It seemed like a very good idea at the time.

Though it was a Tuesday evening, the little club in
Berkeley Square was jumping. Lizzy felt a buzz of excitement as she stepped beneath the awning that led down into the club. Like Scott’s, this was a place she had always wanted to go to but had never had the opportunity. Sarah Jane was always talking about the place. She had dated a string of investment bankers who were all members. Sarah Jane went to Annabel’s like most of the girls at Ludbrook’s went to the Pitcher and Piano. Lizzy had imagined something entirely different from the place that greeted her as they walked through the tunnel-like entrance hall.

To the right of the first bar was a salon that looked like the sitting room of a Chelsea grandmother. Beyond that was a dining room so dark you couldn’t tell if you were eating steak or chicken, and a dance floor straight out of the seventies, glittering with tiny lights that were echoed in the canopy above.

The clientele was fairly homogeneous. The men were all straight from the city or Mayfair, in their well-cut gray suits, the lighting doing wonders for their half-cut gray faces. The girls were a gaudier bunch. Tall, with model figures and hairdos that looked as though they incorporated the tails of a whole family of recently culled New Forest ponies. The girls all wore Versace and Cavalli, and spoke with Eastern European accents. An alien anthropologist landing at Annabel’s might assume that the female of the species was a foot taller than the male. Standing in the ladies’ room admiring the Amazon reapplying lipstick in the mirror beside her, Lizzy slicked on a little lip gloss in an attempt to keep up, though she still looked like she had come to do an audit rather than to dance.

Nat had already ordered two glasses of champagne. He patted a space on the sofa beside him, and she duly sat down. He covered her with compliments as that first
glass and half of his slipped down her throat. Meanwhile, the DJ played a selection of the cheesiest hits known to mankind. It was the soundtrack of a Home Counties wedding disco. The dance floor was beginning to fill up. A chap who got too hot and took his jacket off was swiftly reminded that stripping down to one’s shirtsleeves simply wasn’t done.

“You know what I’d really like,” Lizzy said when the DJ put on some Earth, Wind and Fire. “I’d like to dance.”

“Your wish is my command,” said Nat, standing up and taking her hand.

Lizzy stood up too, and the room whirled around her for a moment. As she swayed toward him, Nat reached out ineffectually to catch her arm. Seconds later she was on the floor. Not the dance floor, as she had hoped, but flat on her back on the carpet. Unconscious.

Nat somehow got Lizzy back to her flat. He woke up her flatmate, Jools, and ensured that she was put to bed.

“Tell her I won’t expect her to come in for the interdepartmental meeting in the morning,” he said as he parted. “I’ll explain to everyone that she’s been taken ill.”

Lizzy didn’t even wake up until the interdepartmental meeting was long finished. Her hangover definitely disproved the theory that good wine doesn’t affect you so badly.

Lizzy finally made it to the office that afternoon. Sarah Jane smiled knowingly.

“First time at Annabel’s, eh?” She chuckled.

“How do you know?”

“How do you think I know?”

Nat had been about as discreet as Perez Hilton. How many people knew? Now that Sarah Jane did, probably
most of New Bond Street. Lizzy groaned. It was so unprofessional. Out with her boss, getting too drunk to come into work in time for the interdepartmental meeting.

Later that day, Nat took her to one side and told her, “Now, about last night. First things first, I don’t want you to worry about this business of forgeries at all. I’ve had a word with old Ludbrook himself about it. And secondly, I put in a good word for you at the same time. He was quite upset that you didn’t make the meeting, but I told him that it was a one-off. You’re not the kind of girl who can’t control her drinking so far as I know.”

Lizzy was devastated. How on earth was anyone supposed to take her seriously, let alone listen to her concerns about the fakes, now that it was common knowledge that she’d missed an interdepartmental meeting thanks to overconsumption of alcohol? If she raised her worries now, people would assume she was trying to deflect the heat from her drunkenness. Exactly as Nat had planned.

CHAPTER 51

F
ortunately, Lizzy was able to keep her head down. There was much to be done in preparation for the sale of Randon’s collection of antique erotica. Randon himself divided his collection into what he believed was two equal halves, based on previous insurance valuations. Neither auction house was allowed to cherry-pick lots.
They received news of their consignments as they had received their instructions at the Hotel du Cap, simultaneously via courier, to ensure that neither house had the advantage. Randon was obviously enjoying his little game.

Carrie clutched her forehead when she found that she had been assigned the enormous marble cock. Nat, meanwhile, was very disappointed when he discovered that the fabulous cock was not on his list.

“Damn,” he said. “I was going to have that photographed for the cover of the catalog.”

“Do you think that would have been such a good idea?” asked Lizzy. “I mean, isn’t it a little bit …”

“Magnificent,” Nat murmured, remembering it with fondness.

That was the difference between men and women, Lizzy thought. What Nat called “magnificent” was just plain scary in Lizzy’s eyes.

Carrie dispatched her team to inspect and photograph the items for her auction at once. Jessica, who had listened to Carrie’s description of her trip to the south of France in slack-jawed disbelief, was stunned once more when she received the picture files of the items that Carrie had described.

“What in God’s name is happening in that photograph?” she asked her boss. “Is that legal? Carrie, you know I think we need to be supercareful about our catalog for this sale. I’m sure you and I could be jailed if some of these pictures get into the hands of a minor in Texas.”

“You’re right,” said Carrie. “Got to make it subtle.”

Carrie sorted through the photographs for the least offensive one to make the catalog’s cover. She chose a female nude. A simple headless and armless bust that had once adorned a Roman temple. Or brothel. Randon had claimed he couldn’t remember which.

The end result from Ehrenpreis was rather lovely and sophisticated. For the cover of his catalog, Nat chose the lithograph of vagina butterflies, which was also abstract enough to appear tasteful at first sight.

Randon insisted that he be allowed to add a foreword to each catalog. It would be the same for the sales at Ludbrook and Ehrenpreis. Both Carrie and Nat had the same reaction when they read it:

“Oh God.”

I have come to realize that no good can come from having this collection in my life
, Randon wrote.
These so-called “works of art” are nothing but the spewings of diseased and dirty minds that spread hatred and unhappiness to whomsoever they touch
.

Both Carrie and Nat independently came to the same decision about how they would handle Randon’s words.

“I’ll tell him there was a mix-up and the catalog went to print before we got his letter,” Carrie told Jessica.

“We’ll print it on a separate piece of paper to add as an inclusion,” said Nat to his team. “Though since I know how much you people love collating mail-outs, I have no doubt that some of those inclusions will go
awry.”

Both were of the opinion that they were saving Randon from himself. His sermon would hardly encourage buyers. And whatever Randon thought of his collection, he did seem to want to make a lot of money from it.

Carrie was very pleased with the way her catalog turned out. It was as beautiful and tasteful as any other catalog and might, at first glance, have looked as though it were for any ordinary sale of ancient antiquities rather than a world-class haul of filth.

It was sent out. There were a few complaints, which Carrie dealt with personally. She explained to disgruntled
and disgusted customers that Randon’s collection was of vast importance.

“Many of the lots are museum quality,” she said. “In fact, we fully expect that several museums will bid on that statue of Venus.”

The extraordinary number of people who requested a copy of an auction house catalog for the very first time more than equaled the complaints. It quickly became Ehrenpreis’s biggest-selling catalog ever. Copies that cost twenty pounds if you bought them from the front desk on New Bond Street were soon changing hands on eBay for five times that amount.

And Randon had given both houses an absolute gift when it came to generating PR. Ordinarily the women who staffed the PR department at Ludbrook’s had an uphill struggle trying to convince the magazines that auctions could be interesting. This time was completely different. They sent out press packs to everyone. All the papers clamored for an exclusive interview with Randon or a photograph of the giant marble phallus with one of the girls standing next to it for scale (not that any of them would have dared to actually print that).

Randon’s conversion from the hedonistic head of an international lifestyle brand to the pious born-again Christian bent on creating his own religious colony was the stuff of a feature writer’s dreams.
The Sunday Times
magazine ran an eight-page profile on the man and his rise to power. The photographs that accompanied the piece were marvelous. Randon had bedded dozens of fabulously beautiful and famous women. Several of the lucky ladies had posed for snapshots that now resurfaced all over the news.

But all that was behind him, Randon’s staff insisted to anyone who asked. And so the public were able to access
a collection that would otherwise have remained utterly private until Mathieu Randon’s death.

In all his years in the auction world, Nat Wilde had never seen such a large number of people turn up to view the lots in Ludbrook’s galleries. Never before. Not even when they were selling jewels that had belonged to Liz Taylor or Christina Onassis or, the biggest crowd-pleaser of them all, the late, sainted Princess Diana.

“Sex really does sell,” he commented to Lizzy.

Lizzy was kept extremely busy arranging for certain lots to be presented in private to her most highly favored clients. The ones who required her utmost discretion. She had a number of extremely tense moments as she unveiled a particular print in front of various male clients and found that they automatically glanced straight from the painting to her, as if to ask “Can you do that too?”

Lizzy discussed the issue with Sarah Jane, whose response was that she wasn’t bothered by it at all. In fact she had managed to parlay several such intimate moments into dinner invitations. She wouldn’t have to cook for the following fortnight.… From time to time, Lizzy wished she had Sarah Jane’s chutzpah, but for the most part she was just pleased that her rival was too busy dating to flirt with Nat. Though the collection seemed to have infused the entire auction house with the scent of lust. Lizzy found herself beneath Nat’s desk many times while Randon’s collection was on display downstairs.

Perhaps Randon was right about the corrupting influence of his terrible artworks. Nat seemed to be obsessed by the rock-hard model members all around him while they awaited the Randon sale. While researching the collection in order to be better able to explain many of the lots to clients, he had come across a book relating to the ancient Egyptian gods, who were widely represented. He told Lizzy the myth of Hathor, wife of Ra, who was the
goddess of dance and sexuality. She was given the epithet “Hand of God,” referring to the act of masturbation, a trick she employed to keep her husband happy and the sun in the sky. In fact, some Egyptian priests devoted to Ra believed that the sun wouldn’t rise unless they too greeted the dawn with an ejaculation. They employed priestesses, whose role was modeled on that of Hathor, to help ensure the world kept turning.

“Can you imagine the pressure,” said Nat wistfully. “A few too many beers the night before and the world might end. I think perhaps that you should be contractually obliged to be my Hathor and toss me off before every auction,” he added to Lizzy.

CHAPTER 52