the grounds of the old Bicentennial Park—old because the Bicentennial had been almost forty years ago, an eternity in Miami time—twenty-nine acres in downtown Miami with a view and a half. It overlooked Biscayne Bay. The fund-raising began in earnest. The museum alone would cost $220 million, 40 percent in government bonds and 60 percent in private donations. A pair of world-class Swiss architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, would design the museum, and the world-class New York firm Cooper, Robertson would design the lavish landscaping. But there was a problem in seeking private donations. This world-class cultural destination would lead to a museum full of… next to nothing… the meager, third-rate art collection, several hundred contemporary paintings and objets, from the existing Miami Art Musuem, not founded until 1984, when all “great” art had long since inflated to prices that were out of sight.
But then—a miracle. Four years ago a Russian oligarch nobody had ever heard of arrived in Miami from out of nowhere and offered to give the museum, now called the “New Miami Art Museum,” seventy million dollars’ worth of paintings by big-name Russian Modernists of the early twentieth century—Kandinskys and Maleviches and the rest. From that moment on, construction began pell-mell. They hadn’t quite finished by the time of the dinner last year, but one thing they had completed. After the dessert course, a team of eight union elves rolled a massive object, about fourteen feet high and eight feet wide—enormous—and covered by a mauve mantle of velvet, out onto the stage. The president of the now-named New Miami Art Museum said a few purposely vague words and then pulled a velvet rope. The rope was connected to a pulley mechanism, and the velvet mantle flew off, just like that. Before le tout Miami was a tremendous limestone rectangle incised with huge capital letters reading, THE KOROLYOV MUSEUM OF ART. Le tout Miami rose like a single colonial animal in a deafening paroxysm of applause. The board had renamed the museum in his honor. The massive slab of limestone, with incisions so deep the letters disappeared in shadow if you tried to look all the way to the incisions’ bottoms. The president of the board announced that the ornamental ten-ton sign would be hung from the girders above the entrance in the middle of a huge hanging garden.
Ed never got over the ecstatic sight of those huge letters carved so deeply—for all eternity!—in ten tons of stone tablet. Explicitly they honored Korolyov, those letters that would endure across the ages, but implicitly they honored Korolyov’s great herald and champion—I, me, Edward T. Topping IV.
::::::And this too-tall little boy here right in front of me is, in effect, telling me I’ve let myself be used, duped, gulled, diddled with, in the most humiliating and yokel-headed fashion.:::::: The thought made him furious.
John Smith probably wondered why Ed’s voice was seething so when he grimaced and glared at him and snapped. “Okay, fun’s over. Anybody can accuse anybody of anything. It’s time to get serious. What makes you think anybody should believe anything in the tale you’ve just told me? You’re making some”—he started to say “libelous”—“some ugly charges against a highly respected man.”
“I got a tip, Mr. Topping. It was about the painter who forged the Kandinskys and the Maleviches. Apparently he can’t resist bragging about it to everybody. He’s fooled the experts.”
“Who’s everybody?”
“The hip art crowd, I guess you’d call them, sir, in Wynwood and South Beach.”
“The hip art crowd in Wynwood and South Beach…” said Ed. “Who exactly in the hip art crowd in Wynwood and South Beach told you about all this?”
“An artist I know who has a studio near the artist who did the forgeries.”
“And he has the forger’s admissions on tape or in writing, I hope?”
“No, sir, and the forger—his name is Igor Drukovich—he’s a Russian, like Korolyov—he hasn’t admitted it in so many words, exactly, but he doesn’t think of it as an ‘admission.’ He’s eager to have people know about it, sir. I gather he has a real drinking problem, and the hints get broader and broader.”
“The hints get broader and broader,” Ed said as ironically as he could. No question mark.
“Yes, sir.”
“Did it ever occur to you that everything you’ve just told me is hearsay?”
“Yes, sir,” said John Smith. “I know I have a lot of work to do. But I trust my sources.”
“He trusts his sources,” Ed said with maximum sarcasm right to John Smith’s face.