Free Forbidden by Roberta Latow Page B

table again and sat back and closed her eyes, remembering the real painting and the collection in Geneva. She had gone twice to see it. The first time at her client’s request, the second of her own volition. She had had to confirm several things about it. Both she and her client were thrilled by what she had so far discovered. The painting was an extremely rare Soutine, probably the only one of its kind that he had ever painted.
    Chaim Soutine had been a Lithuanian Jew who had emigrated to Paris in 1913. Amy’s client’s father met him a year after he arrived at the time Soutine was being influenced by Expressionism. The client’s father, a doctor, was at the time collecting the then new Expressionist painters. He attended several of the poor Montparnasse artists who respected him as a physician but even more as a friend who never sent a bill. When he was called in to attend Chaim Soutine, the doctor had been appalled at the poverty and filth the man lived and painted in, and had befriended him. Not an easy task. Soutine was a difficult and suspicious man who had been twisted by gruelling poverty, near starvation, a darkness of the heart and soul. The painter finally achieved recognition in the 1920s despite his reluctance to exhibit his work. Amy’s client’s father was rewarded by him when, one day arriving at Soutine’s studio, he found the painter in acute distress with an Americandealer and his client pressing him for a large canvas Soutine did not want to sell.
    The arrival of the doctor settled the problem. Soutine sold it to his friend for the equivalent of fifty dollars in French francs, a pittance compared to the dealer’s offer but a fortune in the 1920s to the artist and the doctor. There were accounts in diaries and letters to verify the story.
    Amy had studied the life of Chaim Soutine and could almost visualise it: the tortured, unhappy soul, the squalor of his life, the Paris art world of the 1920s. The painting itself? A masterpiece. Amy was thinking about that scene. How humiliating for him to have to bargain for his life’s blood, for that indeed was what he painted with. What price could one put on such an elemental struggle, and the great painting which was its result? She conjured up a vision of the artist working on this glorious canvas. Chaim Soutine painted with his guts and his soul, and with thickly applied paint, intense colour, distorted, writhing forms. He was, with Chagall, the leading representative of French Expressionism. Amy remained lost in that painting and thoughts of the artist, the agony and ecstasy of art. She was snapped back to reality by the ringing of the telephone. The interference annoyed her. She was quite happy lost in the Paris art world of the 1920s. The telephone was incessant, ringing several more times before she finally answered.
    ‘Hello.’
    ‘You sound grumpy. I hope I didn’t wake you?’ It was Pete Smith.
    She hesitated for a few seconds before she answered him. Her voice softened. ‘No, you didn’t wake me. Did I really sound grumpy?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I suppose I was. I was lost in my work and the ringing of the telephone yanked me back to the here and now.’
    ‘I’m disturbing you. I’ll call back another time.’
    ‘No, don’t hang up. I’m really pleased you’re calling.’
    ‘You are?’
    ‘Why are you so surprised?’
    He changed the subject rather than answer her question. ‘The children want a steam boat like yours.’
    That amused Amy. She felt a surge of tenderness towards him. ‘
Arcadia
was built in 1901.’ They were skirting around the real reason for his call and they both knew it.
    ‘How are you? I think about you often,’ he told her.
    ‘I’m glad about that.’
    ‘That’s encouraging.’
    ‘It was meant to be.’
    ‘That last sight of you driving away into the night all alone – I hated that.’
    ‘Pete, I left with a great deal to think about.’
    ‘You called me Pete, and you hate nicknames!’
    ‘They