Free Snatched by Bill James

Vince.’
    â€˜As long as they’re missing they could be genuine. Robbers don’t bother with duds.’
    â€˜Oh that again,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d decided it didn’t really matter whether they were so-called genuine, or not. Isn’t it … well … isn’t it the inherent worth that matters – what it does to the viewer?’
    â€˜There’s no such thing as inherent worth where art’s concerned. It’s fixed by the opinions of a gang of influential people. Value is belief in value. So, all that shit about provenance and attribution might not signify to you and me, but it signifies to the museums board in London, and to its inspectorate. And it signifies to the insurers: as things stand, they owe the Hulliborn many millions because the “El Grecos” are in the policy as genuine, and authenticity can’t be effectively queried if they are unavailable for re-scrutiny. Above all, the status of the pictures matters to the Japanese. At the moment, they have an equation in their tidy, systematic minds: it says that if the Monet is real and precious, then the “El Grecos” must be, too, because the famous Fatman does not make mistakes. You’ve heard of guilt by association? This is worth by association. The Hulliborn enjoys some of that worth, even though the paintings have been stolen. This is a museum distinguished
enough for their exhibition. But, if the triptych goes back on the wall, and half a dozen El Greco experts fly for a gaze and pronounce Quentin Youde a fool for buying them, then all of us at the Hulliborn – every department, including Asian Antiquities – partake of that foolishness. We’ve failed the pay-your-way test, and this is the only one that counts these days.’

Ten
    Through the massed blades of plastic straw, Kate Avis commanded in his ear with lovely warmth, ‘Give it to me now, Modern-Man. Give it me now, now, now, Now-Man.’
    â€˜Is it what you needed?’ Lepage grunted solicitously.
    â€˜What I needed? What I
need
, for God’s sake. Present tense. Future, too.’
    â€˜I mean, a total therapy.’
    â€˜Everything. You’re bringing me back from limbo to the living. But not too quick, George, OK? Twentieth-century pace is frantic, but, please. Please.’
    Quite a few times tonight he had thought of Julia, though admittedly not at this moment. Obviously, it wasn’t wholly right to be here on the floor of the Hulliborn’s medieval breakfast tableau room with Kate Avis, he naked except for socks, passably comfortable, thanks to the mock straw, and stirred to the marrow, while Julia, in her Bray Square kiosk, struggled to convince half the piss-artists and ragtag boulevardiers of the city that their revelry fell quaintly short if they didn’t buy a scooped-out potato stuffed with Zappy-Tang sauces.
    Kate seemed to get this crude word from him by telepathy: ‘Yes, stuff me, stuff me until there’s no room for pain or dread or poisoned recollections,’ she told him.
    â€˜I love the things you say, Kate, but can you do it quieter, darling?’ he whispered. ‘Additional security since the break-in.’ They had given Keith Jervis and others some extra night duties to go with their part-time portering.
    This was not the first occasion in his museum career that Lepage had noticed the way the words ‘stuff’, ‘stuffed’ could take on very opposed meanings: one so bristling with life and extremely coarse vigour; the other to do only with death and sad imitation. Hadn’t Julia used this distinction the other day when talking about the platypus? Julia could be very harsh, and if Lepage carefully listed all the matters for which she might refuse to show tolerance, having it off with Kate Avis in front of old wax peasants and their brood might come out near the top. She would be unable to accept that what was happening here