Chapter 15
Emma
I see the entire circle of life. He combined all stages of a sunflower’s life in a single vase from bud to wilting petals. We are all in there, from the newborn baby to the invisible older woman.
I hear Stella’s voice clear as day as I squint at the masterpiece propped up against my bedroom wall.
Her insurance policy. Never cashed in.
I didn’t go to the hospital with Matthew the other night after he got the news. It wasn’t my place, and he didn’t invite me anyway, just hastily said he would call and update me, but death doesn’t allow for many updates.
It’s late. I know I should sleep, but it won’t come.
I keep thinking about the last time I held Stella’s hand, her final twitch of the lips that I was convinced was a smile.
So when Colette strides into my room without knocking it’s a welcome distraction.
It’s after eleven and she’s clearly ready to hit the town in a very un-Colette sequined tube top, leather pants, and platform Doc Martens that add three inches to her willowy six-foot frame.
Her long red hair cascades down her back.
“Why are you wearing Lucie’s clothes?”
“We’re going out.”
“Not in the mood, girl.”
“Don’t care. We’re clubbing.”
Colette does not use the word club as a verb. None of us do.
I shake my head side to side like a damp dog. “No way.”
“Yes way.” She affects a Valley girl twang that sounds like John Wayne testing out a French accent. “We’re gonna get to the bottom of what the hell was going on with the Swanson family. It’s the only way we can start to figure out what to do with the painting. I have a plan. Come on.”
I want to stay in bed and mourn Stella, a woman I barely knew, which makes it impossible to know how to feel or grieve, but Colette’s crackling energy is contagious, though I have no idea what she’s talking about until I throw on the one slip dress in my closet that could be considered club-worthy and get into a taxi with her.
“Les Bains,” she tells the driver, adding the address, though everyone knows the location of the former bathhouse turned into Paris’s most decadent venue.
Regulars include the likes of David Bowie, Naomi Campbell, Liam Gallagher, Karl Lagerfeld, Johnny Depp, and Mick Jagger.
It’s the nexus of nightlife, art, and fashion, and we’ve never once set foot inside.
“Sébastien put us on the list,” Colette explains as we whiz through the streets.
Sébastien was Colette’s boss when she interned at Sotheby’s and she quickly became his little pet because she was both brilliant and gorgeous and a bit of a sycophant.
He’s done a zillion deals with the Swansons, and he loves gossip.
Both behind and in front of his back the office calls him Sexy Lurch because he stands over six foot six, but he’s handsome as all hell and wears a cape made of actual monkey fur most of the time.
He’s got a penchant for very petite men half his size and acquires a new handsome boyfriend every six months.
They’re almost always someone up-and-coming in the art world, save for his fling with the designer Jean Paul Gaultier.
“Is this about selling the painting to Sotheby’s?” I’m so confused.
“Not yet. I didn’t tell Sébastien anything about it.
But his new boy toy works at Swanson Enterprises and he’s real chatty, so I figured we could get some intel that I can’t find in the library.
I’ve been digging through journals and articles on the family for the past forty-eight hours and the real dirt isn’t there. ”
Colette with a new curiosity is relentless—like a dog with a bone. Even in the dark of the back seat her eyes gleam with the thrill of fresh information.
“What did you find out in the library?” We’ve hit a bit of a traffic jam as we get closer to the city center, plenty of time for her to fill me in.
“So much. Let me start with the family backstory, or the lore that they feed the press. Henrik Swanson was the family patriarch. Born in the second half of the nineteenth century in Alsace, right after France lost the area to the Prussians. His family were low-level antique dealers, but since the region was such a mess after the war he was able to get access to a fair number of wealthy families looking to unload their eighteenth-century French and Dutch paintings for a low price so they could downsize in the cities. In his travels, Henrik met and married a wealthy heiress named Willa. He pretty much leveraged her family fortune for his business and began focusing on the Parisian avant-garde, snapping up early Impressionist works for pennies. He convinced many of the American industrialists that filling their Newport summer homes and Fifth Avenue mansions with European art, even by complete unknowns, would help ingratiate them with old American money. He essentially invented art collecting as social climbing. Willa and Henrik had two sons, Philippe and Maxwell, who as you all know was Stella’s husband.
The gossip is that Henrik turned the boys against one another, believing they would work harder if they worked in opposition.
He didn’t want either of his sons to marry young and kept paying off the women they dated to break up with them.
He thought wives would be a distraction until the boys were at least forty.
Except only Maxwell made it to forty. Philippe died in a sailing accident trying to cross the Pacific alone, or at least he disappeared.
They never found a body. Over the years there’ve been rumors that he faked his death just to escape his wretched family.
That left only Maxwell’s children as the family’s heirs.
Maxwell had one son, Louis, who had two children with his first wife.
Matthew, who you snogged in the Louvre.”
“Thanks for the reminder.”
“Of course, you filthy bitch. Love you for it.”
Hearing Matthew’s name sends a shiver of longing through me, the desire both to console him and to finish what we began in the museum.
“Matthew also has a sister, Caroline, who is the chief operating officer of the company.”
“I’ve met her,” I chime in. “She’s terrifying.”
“That’s what I’ve heard. Rumor has it she once told the British prime minister that his taste in art was entirely pedestrian and embarrassing, that he shouldn’t even be allowed in the National Gallery.”
“He let her talk to him like that?” I gasp.
“He was so cowed he bought a de Kooning from her. Then Matthew’s dad, Louis, had twin boys with his second wife, a model from Siberia, nicknamed the Ice Princess around their offices.
She doesn’t work for the company, but her kids do.
They deal with the Middle East. They’re identical and apparently impossible to tell apart.
From what Sébastien told me, everyone thinks they do it on purpose so they can seem like they’re both everywhere all at once. ”
We’ve finally arrived, and I can already see the line of eager partiers looped around the block, the door gated by a gorgeous drag queen who looks completely disinterested in actually opening the door.
“How are we pulling this off?”
Colette just grabs my hand and yanks me out of the taxi, strolls right up to the bouncer, and straightens to her full height.
“We’re here with Sébastien Durand,” she says. The shiny red door is opened for us without another word.
“I want to be Sébastien when I grow up,” I whisper as we make our way into the pulsing crowd.
“I don’t think you do,” Colette replies. “Beneath all the fur capes and the sexy boys I think he’s existentially sad. But that’s not our problem to solve tonight.”
Sébastien and his latest arm candy, a little thing named Yoshi, are dancing on top of a banquette when we arrive in the VIP section. I avert my gaze from two women at the next table over who I am certain are Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss sharing a long, thin cigarette.
Sébastien leaps down with a thunk and smooches Colette hard on the lips before surveying me and finding me acceptable. His boyfriend quickly pours us both drinks. “Now we try to fit in,” Colette whisper-screams at me.
“How will we ever talk in here?” I say back, my lips nearly inside of her ear to be heard.
She just gives me a low thumbs-up to show she has it covered.
But having it covered involves pretending to drink many drinks and grinding on the dance floor with boys, girls, supermodels, and the art world elite before we all finally decamp to Sébastien’s after-party at four in the morning.
Colette and I are the only ones vaguely sober, the perfect position to be in to extract information from the intensely inebriated Sébastien and little Yoshi.
Before we know it, we’re all crowded around Sébastien’s glass dining room table, where he’s lining up columns of top-shelf cocaine with his platinum card.
Yoshi has been complaining about the Swansons now for more than an hour.
Apparently he’s been working on their Dubai acquisitions, which means he reports directly to the Swanson twins, Anton and Artem.
“It’s hard to look directly at them. They’re so pale they’re practically transparent, with this white hair and ice-blue eyes. Sometimes I look at them and I think I’m seeing a pair of very handsome ghosts,” Yoshi says ominously. “But the whole family is full of creeps.”
“Really?” Colette leans toward him. “Tell us everything.”
“There was apparently a case a few years ago when one of their employees alleged that a painting heading to auction was actually a reproduction. She reached out to the authorities, claiming she had proof that the Swansons knew the piece wasn’t real and falsified documents proving its provenance.
None of this ever made it to court and the whistle-blower was found dead in a New York City alley weeks later of an apparent heroin overdose. ”
“She was lying because she was a drug addict?” I ask.