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-shelfcocaine 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.
“Friends and family said she had never touched a drug in her life and that she was deathly afraid of needles,” Yoshi says with a flourish. “They argued there was no way she ended up on the street like that on her own.”
“So they think she was murdered?”
“They never got proof, but that family is treacherous. Crazier than an episode ofDynasty.”
“Working with them is such a bore,” Sébastien chimes in lazily from a velvet chaise in the corner, where he’s now shirtless and smoking a cigar. “We essentially do nothing when they’re involved. They write the catalogs that define authenticity, run the galleries that sell the works, and hold the archives scholars and museums rely on. They have more power than anyone over both prices and reputations.”
“I heard everyone was placing bets on who would inherit thecompany when Maxwell died,” Colette throws out after Yoshi blows a particularly chunky line of drugs. He whoops with glee as he raises his head.
“I fucking won that bet,” he screams, pumping his fists in the air.
“Who was your money on?” Colette asks.
“Louis always gets what Louis wants. Some people thought it was gonna go to old Stella Swanson, but I said, absolutely fucking not. A bunch of folks thought the old broad would pull it off. Would have been a coup, but Louis got it all locked up before the old man croaked.”
“My money was on Caroline. She’s a baller,” Sébastien drawls. “I thought Louis might just give it all up and cruise the world with the new wifey.”
“Where’s Stella Swanson now?” I ask, as innocently as I can. Do they know she’s dead?
“Probably counting her money in Capri.” Sébastien chuckles.
“I don’t know why she’d want anything to do with the company when she can just enjoy being rich,” Yoshi adds. “I’d give anything to quit and diddle around on a beach all day. I wasn’t meant for this life and all this labor,” he says dreamily, looking around Sébastien’s massive town house as if he can picture himself here on a more permanent and leisurely basis.
With that, Yoshi’s head falls to the table with a thunk. I leap up in alarm but Sébastien merely stands and carries his lover over to the sink and dunks his head under some cold water. Yoshi opens his eyes and immediately starts laughing.
“Time for this puppy to get some sleep,” Sébastien says. “You two want to stay the night? We can brunch at Buddha-Bar when we decide to wake up.”
We shake our heads, ready to get home to process our new information. We’re both kissed and hugged about a dozen times by each man before we’re placed in a stretch limousine back to the périphérique of the city.
“What an insane world they all live in,” I mutter sleepily to Colette, my head on her shoulder.
“I think I’d hate it,” she says. “No one seems happy.”
“They really don’t. I’d be happy, I think…with all that money,” I say, wondering if it’s true.
“So would I. Maybe. But at what point does the happiness give out?”
“When you let it,” I mumble. “It’s a choice. It has to be.”
“Or a curse,” Colette says, staring off into the distance as Paris begins to wake up.
“So can we sell it?”Lucie asks as we stroll over to the Fleas to have brunch and fill her in on our night. “That’s what matters. Not all this shit about the family and their succession plan.”
“That matters too,” Colette says. “They’ve got vertical control over every aspect of the art market. Sébastien confirmed it last night. They can review a painting and authenticate it and sell it and they do that with eighty-five percent of the art that comes through Europe and America. No one ever questions them or fights them because so much of the art world is on their payroll. Which makes selling a Van Gogh nearly impossible without involving the Swanson family.”
