Hammer

Joe Mungo Reed

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781982121631
• eBook ISBN: 9781982121648
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

An art auction house employee helps a Russian oligarch sell his prized collection, ensnaring himself in a dangerous romance and an even more treacherous political plot.

It’s 2013, and much of the world still reels from the global economic collapse. Yet in the auction rooms of London, artworks are selling for record-breaking prices. Seeking a place in this gilded world is Martin, a junior specialist at a prestigious auction house. Martin spends his days catering to the whims of obscenely wealthy clients and his nights drinking in grubby pubs with his demoralized roommate. However, a chance meeting with Marina, an old university friend, presents Martin with a chance to change everything.

Pursuing distraction from her failing marriage and from a career she doesn’t quite believe in, Marina draws Martin into her circle and that of her husband, Oleg, an art-collecting oligarch. Shaken by the death of his mother and chafing against his diminishing influence in his homeland, Oleg appears primed to change his own life—and perhaps to relinquish his priceless art collection long coveted by London’s auction houses. Martin is determined to secure the sale and transform his career. But his ambitions are threatened by factors he hasn’t reckoned with: a dangerous attraction between himself and Marina, and half-baked political plans through which Oleg aims to redeem himself and Russia but which instead imperil the safety of the oligarch and all those around him.

Hammer is a riveting, ambitious novel—at once a sharp art world exposé, a tense geopolitical thriller, and a brooding romance—that incisively explores the intersection of wealth, power, and desire.

I Autumn 2013

1

OCTOBER LIGHT. Afternoon light. He strides back to work along Mayfair streets with his sandwich in its little triangular piece of packaging.

Summer, when it came, came late, but now the good weather is hanging on into these shortened autumnal days. He walks through Berkeley Square, across the small park in the middle of it. The plane trees rustle with a breeze unfelt at street level, shedding substantial leaves, which descend slowly enough to surprise the eye, as though through liquid. Businessmen out, eating lunches, their ties removed, collars loosened. A woman with her back against the trunk of a tree in her skirt suit, her shoes off, her feet placed together on the dry dirt beneath the spreading roots. A couple cross-legged on the grass, each on a plastic bag rent open to its maximum extent.

It is a wishful performance, Martin thinks, as if Londoners hope that the embrace of these fine days can somehow prolong them, as if the inhabitants of the city think that they can dream it southward.

At the exit of the square, a bustle of pigeons peck at crumbs beneath a bench, brazen, flapping off only as he is almost upon them, and then taking back the space with their Mick Jagger struts as soon as he has passed. He pauses at the road as a taxi accelerates to beat the lights. He crosses, heads for the auction house.

The afternoon trade is picking up in the boutiques and the art shops. He sees the assistants at work. Greeting, straining to not strain. Working to facilitate, to go unnoticed until needed. See-through men and women like him. Chameleons or shades. Some classical category of the damned or forgotten.

---

ONE CAN feel the imminence of the contemporary sale as soon as one is through the doors. Thronging of people taking their last looks at the lots—a few prospective buyers, and then the enthusiasts, the art students, the odd tourist wandered in. The clatter of the end of lunch service in the restaurant. The clip at which the other staff go about their tasks. The phones ringing. The clanking of the freight elevator, audible from the reception area, as tables, chairs, and pieces of camera equipment are moved for tonight’s event.

Martin climbs the crème-carpeted stairs toward the upper galleries. The first time he came to the auction house he was surprised by the homeliness of the décor—not the sterile white finish of the contemporary gallery, but something closer to a decent regional hotel. Part of the house’s ethos is expressed in this choice, Martin supposes: the assertion of its existence before the modern gallery, prior to the reverential emptiness of the contemporary space.

He passes through another door toward the offices, climbs a set of steep stairs. An anxiety has been rising through him all week, as is normal when sales approach. He sits at his desk and eats his sandwich—a damp prawn mayonnaise that clags around his gums. It is the last he will eat until after the auction is done.

He will be bidding on behalf of one of the house’s clients, and he broods on this as the afternoon stretches on. One must simply raise one’s paddle and speak clearly, and yet in such simplicity lie old anxieties: the voiceless cries of bad dreams, the wince of answering a roll call at a new school.

---

AT FIVE, a text from James, his housemate and childhood friend. Have you done your team yet? Martin has forgotten about fantasy football, about the midweek round of Premier League fixtures. Despite all the bustle around him, he logs onto the website for a moment, makes a couple of substitutions. James will have spent hours this morning poring over his selections, and Martin feels he must make some effort of his own.

At six, he changes in the men’s toilets with a couple of other junior specialists. The smell of hair gel and cologne. The plumbing whispering and choking. A collective giddiness as the sale approaches. He puts on a fresh shirt. He likes to dress well, a charge given to this pleasure, he feels, by the way that in the household he grew up in such care over one’s appearance was considered unnecessary, vaguely suspicious.

Martin’s parents are hippies. The home in which he was raised, in which his parents still live, is part of a Jacobean manor divided up in the seventies. Semicommunal living, they call it. “We still have normal day jobs,” Martin’s mother would say to parents of Martin’s friends, as if such a thing should even need underlining. “We still have our own units.” It’s a slightly bashful utopianism: communal garden work, meals together at the weekends, still the smell of lentils about the place, the odd beard or pair of clogs, children running free through the hall and outbuildings, half-clothed on summer days. Residents tend to leave when their kids grow up, but Martin’s mother and father have stayed, the longest-serving tenants, sources of lore, guardians of tradition.

It was a good childhood. Only occasionally embarrassing. They were ahead of the world in their environmentalism (far enough, Martin sometimes thinks, for him to have seen the ineffectiveness of it all). To not reuse a plastic bag was a cardinal sin in his childhood home. After Martin’s dad broke his wrist falling from the roof of a toolshed, Martin took his sandwiches out of his rucksack at school one day and found them wrapped in a polythene bag that read PATIENT’S BELONGINGS.

Perhaps it is reaction against this background that inclined Martin toward the auction house, with its ostentatious neatness, with the daily need to talk calmly of millions of pounds as a butcher talks of kilos of mince.

He takes some time at the mirror applying wax to his hair. Henry, another junior specialist, hums a phrase from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons from one of the toilet stalls.

---

WHEN THE public start to arrive, Martin is up in the offices: fielding calls from clients, fetching documents on behalf of his boss, Julian, who will be conducting the sale tonight.

When he descends toward the reception area, it’s busy. Chatter rises up the stairwell, surging and then ebbing as voices compete to be heard. He pauses on the stairs and watches the crowd in the entranceway: clusters of people, growing and collapsing according to the competing gravities of the powerful and renowned. Client relations staff move between the punters, handing out bidding paddles and catalogues, greeting potential buyers, making their practiced small talk. He is not unable to see the scene as his mother might, to be nauseated by the sheer good taste of the attire, the frivolous timbre of the chatter, the whiteness of the teeth of a man who throws back his head and laughs.

Still, it’s too easy to condemn the art market with reference to its worst participants. There is the work, and then there are the people with the money necessary to buy that work, and the house has no choice in the latter. That is the realm of politics and business and financial markets. Martin is able to induce a sense of vertigo in himself by considering the manner in which money finds its way into the room. Determined by what? By stocks or oil or decisions of the Chinese treasury?

He goes down into the hubbub smiling benignly. Henry, at the foot of the stairs, speaks with a collector, snaking his arm through the air, probably talking about some powder encountered in Courchevel last winter.

Martin moves into the crowd. The smell of dry-cleaned clothes. A woman ahead steps back from a splash of wine, spilled from the glass of the person addressing her. “She sold the beach house,” a man says, “and the cash is going into the collection.”

“Sashimi,” says a woman in another group. “Sashimi is a different matter.”

---

JULIAN IS in conversation with a dealer friend of his, Peter Beaufort. If Julian is in any way nervous about handling the sale, it doesn’t show in his body language. He has a thumb hooked in his waistcoat pocket. He inclines his head to listen to Beaufort, the smaller man, speak. As Martin approaches, Julian laughs at something the dealer has said, ruffles his hand through his own disordered white hair.

Martin hands his boss a couple of pages. The smell of Beaufort’s aftershave is thickly floral, fecund. The dealer looks at Martin without seeming to see him. Julian nods, winks, turns his attention seamlessly back to Beaufort. In seeing this gesture, a familiar wish returns to Martin: that he could carry himself as easily in this world as his colleagues do. And yet, he should be mindful that the appearance of ease does not preclude effort—a thought that should be native to a specialist in contemporary art.

Martin is liked well enough in this world, but this is a liking he has no control over. His raw earnestness earns him some credit, yet he is not nimble in his flattery. He leaves too much of himself exposed.

---

HE MOVES again, past caterers, past a woman weighing a bidding paddle in her hand like a tennis racket. He seeks clients he knows, faces open to greeting, to blandishments and reassurance. People are pressed so close he can smell their dinners on their breath, make out the marks of combs across scalps, the layering of foundation on cheeks. Martin keeps a green Moleskine upstairs on his desk with details of those he has dealt with—their interests, their purchases, their jobs and children. This work is not unlike matchmaking, finding a piece for a client, a client for a piece. A caterer moves past carrying glasses above her head.

He stops to talk with Alex Philpot, an executive at a pharmaceutical company (which Martin’s mother once picketed). He is tall, blond. He looks German, even though he is not. Martin enjoys talking with Philpot, who is acute in what he likes, mannerly and considerate: no doubt once a boy considered a credit to his school and family. Tonight, Philpot wants to talk about the Ed Ruscha in the catalogue. “He’s mastered the vernacular of the commercial culture,” he says to Martin.

“Certainly.”

“He is playing with the question of whether we may be charmed by this vernacular. The issue is not is it compelling, but is it permissible. There is a meta question of judgment in the pieces that is open, I think. Which is actually, to my mind, generous.”

Behind Philpot’s shoulder Martin catches sight of a client, Mrs. Dempsey, making her slow way through the crowd. With reluctance, Martin excuses himself.

Mrs. Dempsey walks with a stick. She is wearing a neck brace and, under that, pearls. “How wonderful that you are here tonight,” says Martin.

She looks up sharply, studies him. He wonders whether there is a genuine recognition there. “You can’t just give up at my age,” she says. “You can’t just lie down and wait to die.”

“Yes.” He tries to think of something agreeable to say. Or not agreeable, exactly, because Mrs. Dempsey is not the kind of woman who tolerates agreeableness.

She grips her stick with knobbly hands. “Hot in here,” she says.

“It’s a busy night,” says Martin. “It’s all the body heat of this crowd.”

Mrs. Dempsey frowns. “I’d have thought you’d have accounted for that and not run the heaters earlier in the day.”

“Yes,” says Martin. “I suppose we should have.”

Martin wonders what else to say. He looks at the people around, sees a profile that he knows, waits for the resemblance to break, for a turn of mouth or eye to betray the fact that he is watching a stranger. Yet it is Marina, a friend from university, the ex-girlfriend of Martin’s housemate James. She’s married to a rich Russian, a collector, and Martin has expected her at auctions before, has seen this expectation disappointed enough that now her presence here is a surprise.

She sees him and grins. He feels a slight jolt at this confirmation. He smiles back, or he is smiling already (because a slightly idiotic beam is his default expression on nights like these), and then she is moving toward Martin, making space with an arm held out ahead of her.

He says, “So nice to see you,” to Mrs. Dempsey, in a way that he hopes conveys his need to move on.

“If you say so,” says Mrs. Dempsey.

He steps toward Marina’s approach, away from the old lady. Not the best practice, of course, to leave her so abruptly. Marina slips past a group of dealers. They haven’t had direct contact since university. Martin read about her marriage to Oleg Gorelov in the papers. The house invites the man to each auction they hold, but since Martin has been working here Gorelov has never come.

Martin is struck newly by Marina’s tallness. She has a long forehead, a slightly snub nose. Hers is an odd kind of prettiness, he has thought before, that seems on the edge of something else. She hasn’t changed, he thinks, and finds himself wondering with concern whether she will think the same of him. The last time he saw her he was still an immature student: a boy, really, with a helix ear piercing and a Penguin introduction to Nietzsche. There is an ironic sort of smile on her lips, but she was always like that. She was tolerant, he thinks, was more kind and patient than she ever needed to be. She embraces him when she arrives, says, “How long?”

They do the calculations together, settle on sometime in summer nine years bef...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Part I: Autumn 2013
• Part II: Autumn/Winter 2013/2014
• Part III: Spring/Summer 2014
• Sources & Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright