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CHAPTER NINETEEN
THERE WERE NO QUEUES OUTSIDE Alicia’s gallery this time, as there had been that day, six years ago, when I had gone to see the Alcestis. A different artist was hanging in the window now, and despite his possible talent, he lacked Alicia’s notoriety and subsequent ability to draw in the crowds.
As I entered the gallery, I shivered; it was even colder in here than on the street. There was something chilly about the atmosphere as well as the temperature; it smelled of exposed steel beams and bare concrete floors. It was soulless, I thought. Empty.
The gallerist was sitting behind his desk. He stood up as I approached.
Jean-Felix Martin was in his early forties, a handsome man with black eyes and hair, and a tight T-shirt with a red skull on it. I told him who I was and why I had come. To my surprise, he seemed perfectly happy to talk about Alicia. He spoke with an accent. I asked if he was French.
“Originally—from Paris. But I’ve been here since I was a student—oh, twenty years at least. I think of myself more as British these days.” He smiled and gestured to a back room. “Come in, we can have a coffee.”
“Thanks.”
Jean-Felix led me into an office that was essentially a storeroom, crowded with stacks of paintings.
“How is Alicia?” he asked, using a complicated-looking coffee machine. “Is she still not talking?”
I shook my head. “No.”
He nodded and sighed. “So sad. Won’t you sit down? What do you want to know? I’ll do my best to answer truthfully.” Jean-Felix gave me a wry smile, tinged with curiosity. “Although I’m not entirely sure why you’ve come to me.”
“You and Alicia were close, weren’t you? Apart from your professional relationship—” “Who told you that?”
“Gabriel’s brother, Max Berenson. He suggested I talk to you.”
Jean-Felix rolled his eyes. “Oh, so you saw Max, did you? What a bore.”
He said it with such contempt I couldn’t help laughing. “You know Max Berenson?”
“Well enough. Better than I’d like.” He handed me a small cup of coffee. “Alicia and I were close. Very close. We knew each other for years—long before she met Gabriel.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“Oh, yes. We were at art school together. And after we graduated, we painted together.”
“You mean you collaborated?”
“Well, not really.” Jean-Felix laughed. “I mean we painted walls together. As housepainters.”
I smiled. “Oh, I see.”
“It turned out I was better at painting walls than paintings. So I gave up, about the same time as
Alicia’s art started to really take off. And when I started running this place, it made sense for me to show Alicia’s work. It was a very natural, organic process.”