Portrait of a Spy

none other than the great Titian himself. By midday, the phones inside Christie’s were ringing off the hook, and by day’s end, no fewer than forty important museums and collectors had dipped their oars into the water. That evening, the atmosphere in the bar at Green’s Restaurant was electric, though Julian Isherwood was notably not among those present. “Saw him getting into a cab in Duke Street,” Jeremy Crabbe muttered into his gin and bitters. “Looked positively dreadful, poor sod. Said he was planning to spend a quiet evening alone with his cough.”
    It is rare that a painting by an artist like Titian resurfaces, and when one does, it is usually accompanied by a good story. Such was certainly the case with Madonna and Child with Mary Magdalene , though whether it was tragedy, comedy, or morality tale depended entirely on who was doing the telling. Christie’s released an abridged version for the sake of the painting’s official provenance, but in the little West London village of St. James’s, it was immediately written off as well-sanitized hogwash. Eventually, there came to exist an unofficial version of the story that unfolded roughly along the following lines.
    It seemed that at some point the previous August, an unidentified Norfolk nobleman of great title but shrinking resources reluctantly decided to part with a portion of his art collection. This nobleman made contact with a London art dealer, also unidentified, and asked whether he might be willing to accept the assignment. This London art dealer was busy at the time—truth be told, he was sunning himself in the Costa del Sol—and it was late September before he was able to make his way to the nobleman’s estate. The dealer found the collection lackluster, to put it mildly, though he did agree to take several paintings off the nobleman’s hands, including a very dirty work attributed to some hack in the workshop of Palma Vecchio. The amount of money that changed hands was never disclosed. It was said to be quite small.
    For reasons not made clear, the dealer allowed the paintings to languish in his storage rooms before commissioning a hasty cleaning of the aforementioned Palma Vecchio. The identity of the restorer was never revealed, though all agreed he gave a rather good account of himself in a remarkably short period of time. Indeed, the painting was in such fine shape that it managed to catch the wandering eye of one Oliver Dimbleby, the noted Old Master dealer from Bury Street. Oliver acquired it in a trade—the other paintings involved were never disclosed—and promptly hung it in his gallery, viewable by appointment only.
    It would not remain there long, however. In fact, just forty-eight hours later, it was purchased by something called Onyx Innovative Capital, a limited liability investment firm registered in the Swiss city of Lucerne. Oliver didn’t deal directly with OIC, but rather with an agreeable bloke named Samir Abbas of the TransArabian Bank. After thrashing out the final details over tea at the Dorchester Hotel, Abbas presented Oliver with a check for twenty-two thousand pounds. Oliver quickly deposited the money into his account at Lloyds Bank, thus consecrating the sale, and began the messy process of securing the necessary export license.
    It was at this point that the affair took a disastrous turn, at least from Oliver’s point of view. Because on a dismal afternoon in late January there came to Oliver’s gallery a rumpled figure dressed in many layers of clothing, who, with a single offhand question, sent the apples rolling across the proverbial floor. Oliver would never reveal the identity of the man, except to say he was learned in the field of Italian Renaissance art, particularly the Venetian School. As for the question posed by this man, Oliver was willing to repeat it verbatim. In fact, for the price of a good glass of Sancerre, he would act out the entire scene. For Oliver loved nothing more than to tell stories on himself, especially when they were less than flattering, which was almost always the case.
    “I say, Oliver, old chap, but is that Titian spoken for?”
    “Not a Titian, my good man.”
    “Sure about that?”
    “Positive as I can be.”
    “Who is it, then?”
    “Palma.”
    “Really? Rather good for a Palma. Workshop or the man himself?”
    “Workshop, love. Workshop.”
    It was then the rumpled figure leaned precariously forward to have a closer look—a lean that Oliver re-created