A Masterpiece of Revenge by J.J. Fiechter Page B

and he had heartily despised me his whole life. Why? God knows. It started with some childish resentment and kept growing. He was of that species of humanity constitutionally envious of everyone else. He had become quite a successful stockbroker, but nothing had changed between us. My professional success exasperated him. I enjoyed rubbing his nose in it from time to time. This was an old game between us, going back years. Calmette was basically a good-hearted fellow, and, in his own particular, bilious way, loyal.
    My third suspect was Frederic Silberman. Now here was a piece of work. He was suspected (and rarely prosecuted) of all sorts of thievery, every manner of trickery. Silberman was a professional and highly successful fraud. He was a parasite who fed off the art world, having already fed off other fields and then moved on. The world was his stage and his only pleasure was in acting out every part he could.
    To Silberman, duplicity was the highest form of self-expression. In his way he was quite an artist. He had been, in turn, a lawyer, a psychiatrist, a restaurateur, a management consultant, and a diplomat — changing his name and credentials as the role demanded.
    At one point Silberman was a conman at a casino. He got people to bet against him. He was arrested and banned for life from all casinos and gambling establishments in Europe. No matter: he moved on to other schemes.
    He had sold small swatches of a shirt he maintained had belonged to Rudolph Valentino. For a while he shopped phony Louis XV cabinets, replete with certificates of authenticity, around Geneva. He had gone into publishing, printing late works by known (and deceased) writers, claiming the manuscripts had been discovered in a trunk.
    Lately he had been pretending to be an art dealer, and was involved, I felt sure, in all sorts of dubious deals. He claimed to find masterpieces — not all of them were fakes, actually — and then sold them at the Dompierre Gallery in Paris. He had exhibited three handsome seventeenth-century fakes at the Wright-Hepburn gallery in London. There was talk at the time that they had been painted by a mysterious and highly gifted copier, examples of whose works had not yet fallen into my hands. He was apparently enormously gifted. A Hungarian, I believe.
    You might wonder why a distinguished art historian such as myself had anything at all to do with a shady character like Silberman. The answer, truthfully, is that contact with such people is inevitable — as inevitable as a corrupt clergyman in the Age of Enlightenment. He turned up everywhere — at auctions, openings, exhibits, lectures. Every time he saw me he greeted me like his oldest and dearest friend.
    I confess that I found him amusing and distracting. He knew his pretenses were a joke on the rest of the world. Besides, every time I saw him he had fresh gossip and new information. I took whatever he told me with a grain of salt, of course; everything he said or did was inspired by self-serving motives. Using hidden microphones he taped conversations he had with people.
    â€œI am a voyeur of life,” he told me once. “I love to observe hidden emotions. I love finding weak spots.”
    Weak spots. I wondered about that now. That sort of motivation made him a prime suspect. Perhaps too prime a suspect. The classic red herring?
    Besides, what possible motivation could Silberman have to torture me? To uncover the agonizing truth behind my mask of civility and calm? Did he want me to authenticate something? This I doubted. Blackmailing me would not have been Silberman’s style.
    All these vague suspicions and cloudy motives. No hard proof of anything.
    The entirety of that terrible day was spent trying to establish some kind of basis, however far-fetched, for an investigation. Throughout it, I must say I felt very much alive. Every nerve tingled. In this frame of mind, the least thing can suddenly seem like a mortal threat. Sounds