Page 54 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
The doors of the terminal silently parted, the evening air still warm outside. Patrick pointed out a battered Jeep, parked at a sloppy angle in what was clearly marked as a no parking zone. “I was sort of expecting the MG,” I said.
Patrick laughed. “Not very elegant, I know. But it does mean you can just chuck whatever you need in the back—camping stuff, kitesurfing gear.”
“That must be very convenient,” I said with a laugh, assuming that he was joking.
Patrick looked a bit hurt.
“Sorry. I just never had you down as the outdoorsy type.”
I’ll say this for his new lifestyle: he looked a lot healthier than the pale, puffy Patrick I had run into a few times back in London. He was tanned. He was toned. He was slender.
Some things never changed, though. No sooner had I clicked my seat belt than we were off, Patrick pulling out with barely a glance over his shoulder into a solid stream of taxis. The main difference from being in a car with Patrick in England was that in Dubai everyone else seemed to be driving in a similar fashion.
He glanced over at me. “Someone knows, you said?” he asked, before suddenly swerving across three lanes of traffic so we didn’t miss our exit. I told him about the photographs, the note. He looked as mystified as I had been and I could see him working through the same panicked sequence of suspicions I had done.
“This could ruin me professionally, you know that, don’t you, Patrick?”
“Of course I understand what’s at stake, for both of us. It’s my car you’re stashing your stolen goods in.”
We turned off the highway. We turned again.
“This is the DIFC, the financial district. My gallery is here, as is your hotel.”
On either side of us rose office buildings, black and glittering. The cars we were gliding among were shinier here too. Every so often I could feel Patrick’s eyes on me, a sidelong glance, trying to read my expression. How I was reacting. Whether I was impressed. I was, despite myself, strangely touched that he cared.
There was an attendant in a booth at the entrance to the parking garage. Recognizing us, or the car, he pressed a button to raise the barrier. Patrick led me to the elevator. From it, we emerged into a shopping precinct. The Lambert Gallery occupied the bottom two floors of an office building, its windows shuttered. Patrick typed a code, and after a moment the door beeped unlocked.
“So the idea was that for tomorrow night’s private view we’d re-create Dalí’s Rainy Taxi right here outside. Just like the 1938 exhibition: a whole car, trailed with ivy, with a shark-headed mannequin chauffeur and a mannequin in evening dress in it, fixed up so it’s raining inside the vehicle, snails crawling over everything. Which I think would have been even more dramatic in this climate. We managed to find an actual 1933 Rolls-Royce, the mannequins, got in contact with a guy who breeds snails, but when we looked into how many permits we’d need...”
He stepped into the gallery, reached into his pocket, and brought out his phone. He pressed the flashlight button and handed it to me. “My gosh, Patrick,” I said.
“You’ll get the idea, I think. We did our best.”
It was like stepping back in time, to what I knew of that first night of the International Surrealist exhibition in Paris. From the ceiling of the gallery hung sacks, hundreds of sacks. More sacks blocked out any light from the windows. A lot of effort had gone into this. For just a moment, one strange moment, I did wonder if all this was for my benefit, some sort of weird romantic gesture.
“Oh, hold on,” said Patrick. He pressed a button and a soundtrack of vintage street noise came on—a few shouted French swear words, a car horn honking, a dog insistently barking. As I stepped tentatively into the room, the phone’s flashlight picked out the mannequins arranged around it, copies of the originals—by Dalí, Man Ray, Éluard, Erlich, Willoughby—each one designed to startle and unsettle the viewer. Here was one gagged and bound with a single flower on her mouth. Another was naked save a chain mail headdress.
“Are they going to let you get away with this here?” I asked him. “Not big on nudity, surely, are they?”
“I guess we’ll find out tomorrow,” he said. “We’ve got some pretty important people coming, so I can’t imagine we’re going to get raided. It’s going to be a bit of a Cambridge reunion, too. Giles Pemberton is coming over, for the Sunday Times. Dave White—you might remember him better as Next-Door Terry—has been invited. Harry, of course. Oh, and I suppose I better warn you, Athena Galanis is going to be here too. She’s an art consultant in Dubai now. I only found out recently. And that’s not all...”
Patrick saw my expression and stopped himself. I had often wondered how I would react if I crossed paths with Athena one day—had imagined what I wanted to say to her, what I wanted to ask. Given everything else that was going on, this really didn’t feel like the time. It had been hard enough bracing myself to see Patrick.
Flashlight in one hand, I began making my way through the darkness.
“You’ll find a door at the far end of the room,” Patrick told me. “Careful not to trip over anything. I hope you’re not too disappointed that the sacks aren’t actually dripping coal dust, but you can take authenticity too far. I can’t afford the dry cleaning for everyone’s sooty Dior.”
I shuffled forward until my flashlight picked out the metallic glint of a door handle. There was another keypad next to the door, faintly glowing orange. Patrick typed in a code. It beeped.
“There you go. All yours. You can spend some time here first with the painting, if you’d like, then I’ll drive you to the hotel, get you checked in.”
Despite his best efforts to conceal it, Patrick sounded nervous. How much all this had cost him I dreaded to think, and besides that was precisely the sort of thing—like those photographs, the implications of the message that had accompanied them—I could not allow to influence my opinion. I had a responsibility to get this right. A responsibility to history, to Juliette.
I took a deep breath and reached for the door handle.
PATRICK, DUBAI, 2023, TWO DAYS BEFORE HARRY’S DEATH
“Patrick, you know I won’t necessarily be able to give you an answer this evening, don’t you? That there may be things I need to read up on, or think about,” said Caroline, before she stepped into the room that held the painting.
