Ken Follett - The Modigliani Scandal (1976)

Dee picked it up and ran up the stairs. It was addressed to her, and she knew what it was.

She entered the apartment, and laid the bread and the telegram on the table in the small kitchen. She poured coffee beans into a grinder and thumbed the button; the machine growled harshly as it pulverized the brown-black nuts.

Mike′s electric shaver whined as if in answer. Sometimes the promise of coffee was the only thing that got him out of bed. Dee made a whole pot and sliced the new bread.

Mike′s flat was small, and furnished with elderly stuff of undistinguished taste. He had wanted something more grand, and he could certainly afford better. But Dee had insisted they stay out of hotels and classy districts. She had wanted to spend summer with the French, not the international jet set; and she had got her way.

The buzz of his shaver died, and Dee poured two cups of coffee.

He came in just as she placed the cups on the round wooden table. He wore his faded, patched Levi′s, and his blue cotton shirt was open at the neck, revealing a tuft of black hair and a medallion on a short silver chain.

″Good morning, darling,″ he said. He came round the table and kissed her. She wound her arms around his waist and hugged his body against her own, and kissed him passionately.

″Wow! That was strong for so early in the morning,″ he said. He gave a wide California grin, and sat down.

Dee looked at the man as he sipped his coffee gratefully, and wondered whether she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Their affair had been going for a year now, and she was getting used to it. She liked his cynicism, his sense of humor, and his buccaneering style. They were both interested in art to the point of obsession, although his interest lay in the money to be made out of it, while she was absorbed by the whys and wherefores of the creative process. They stimulated each other, in bed and out they were a good team.

He got up, poured more coffee, and lit cigarettes for both of them. ″You′re quiet,″ he said, in his low, gravelly American accent. ″Thinking about those results ? It′s about time they came through.″

″They came today,″ she replied. ″I′ve been putting off opening the telegram.″

″What? Hey, c′mon, I want to know how you did.″

″All right.″ She fetched the envelope and sat down again before tearing it open with her thumb. She unfolded the single sheet of thin paper, glanced at it, then looked up at him with a broad smile.

″My God, I got a First,″ she said.

He leaped to his feet excitedly. ″Yippee!″ he yelled. ″I knew it! You′re a genius!″ He broke into a whining, fast imitation of a country-and-western square dance, complete with calls of ″Yee-hah″ and the sounds of a steel guitar, and hopped around the kitchen with an imaginary partner.

Dee laughed helplessly. ″You′re the most juvenile thirty-nine-year-old I′ve ever met,″ she gasped. Mike bowed in acknowledgment of imaginary applause, and sat down again.

He said: ″So. What does this mean, for your future?″

Dee became serious again. ″It means I get to do my Ph.D.″

″What, more degrees? You now have a B.A. in Art History, on top of some kind of Diploma in Fine Art. Isn′t it time you stopped being a professional student?″

″Why should I? Learning is my kick—if they′re willing to pay me to study for the rest of my life, why shouldn′t I do it?″

″They won′t pay you much.″

″That′s true.″ Dee looked thoughtful. ″And I would like to make a fortune, somehow. Still, there′s plenty of time. I′m only twenty-five.″

Mike reached across the table and held her hand. ″Why don′t you come work for me? I′ll pay you a fortune-you′d be worth it.″

She shook her head. ″I don′t want to ride on your back. I′ll make it myself.″

″You′re quite happy to ride on my front,″ he grinned.

She put on a leer. ″You betcha,″ she said in imitation of his accent. Then she withdrew her hand. ″No, I′m going to write my thesis. If it gets published I could make some cash.″

″What′s the topic?″

″Well, I′ve been toying with a couple of things. The most promising is the relationship between art and drugs.″

″Trendy.″

″And original. I think I could show that drug abuse tends to be good for art and bad for artists.″

″A nice paradox. Where will you start?″

″Here. In Paris. They used to smoke pot in the artistic community around the first couple of decades of the century. Only they called it hashish″

Mike nodded. ″Will you take just a little help from me, right at the start?″

Dee reached for the cigarettes and took one. ″Sure,″ she said.

He held his lighter across the table. ″There′s an old guy you ought to talk to. He was a pal of half a dozen of the masters here before World War One. A couple of times he′s put me on the track of pictures.

″He was kind of a fringe criminal, but he used to get prostitutes to act as models—and other things sometimes—for the young painters. He′s old now—he must be pushing ninety. But he remembers.″

The tiny bedsitter smelled bad. The odor of the fish shop below pervaded everything, seeping up through the bare floorboards and settling in the battered furniture, the sheets on the single bed in the comer, the faded curtains at the one small window. Smoke from the old man′s pipe failed to hide the fishy smell, and underlying it all was the atmosphere of a room that is rarely scrubbed.

And a fortune in post-Impressionist paintings hung on the walls.

″All given to me by the artists,″ the old man explained airily. Dee had to concentrate to understand his thick Parisian French. ″Always, they were unable to pay their debts. I took the paintings because I knew they would never have the money. I never liked the pictures then. Now I see why they paint this way, and I like it. Besides, they bring back memories.″

The man was completely bald, and the skin of his face was loose and pale. He was short, and walked with difficulty; but his small black eyes flashed with occasional enthusiasm. He was rejuvenated by this pretty English girl who spoke such good French and smiled at him as if he was a young man again.

″Don′t you get pestered by people wanting to buy them?″ Dee asked.

″Not anymore. I am always willing to lend them out, at a fee.″ His eyes twinkled. ″It pays for my tobacco,″ he added, raising his pipe in a gesture like a toast.

Dee realized what the other element in the smell was: the tobacco in his pipe was mixed with cannabis. She nodded knowingly.

″Would you like some? I have some papers,″ he offered.

″Thank you.″

He passed her a tobacco tin, some cigarette papers, and a small block of resin, and she began rolling a joint.

″Ah, you young girls,″ the man mused. ″Drugs are bad for you, really. I should not corrupt the youth. There, I have been doing it all my life, and now I am too old to change.″

″You′ve lived a long life on it,″ Dee said.

″True, true. I will be eighty-nine this year, I think. For seventy years I have smoked my special tobacco every day, except in prison, of course.″

Dee licked the gummed paper and completed the reefer. She lit it with a tiny gold lighter and inhaled. ″Did the painters use hashish a great deal?″ she asked.

″Oh yes. I made a fortune from the stuff. Some spent all their money on it.″ He looked at a pencil drawing on the wall, a hurried-looking sketch of the head of a woman: an oval face and a long, thin nose. ″Dedo was the worst,″ he added with a faraway smile.

Dee made out the signature on the drawing. ″Modigliani?″

″Yes.″ The man′s eyes now saw only the past, and he talked as if to himself. ″He always wore a brown corduroy jacket and a big, floppy felt hat. He used to say that art should be like hashish: it should show people the beauty in things, the beauty they could not normally see. He would drink, too, in order to see the ugliness in things. But he loved the hashish.