For instance, the year of the blizzard party, Bo and Jane Vornado had donated ten thousand dollars. They were also cochairs of the fund, which is in part why they had such huge Rolodexes. Almost everyone at the party except for me, Vik, and Albert Caldwell had donated that year. Even Shahin and Nelofar Jahanbani had chipped in a thousand.
While I was in the bedroom with Albert Caldwell, my mother was chatting up the Jahanbanis. Sales were not her strong suit, but Neil Ford had been talking her up while she studied the backs of her hands and smiled sideways, and the Iranians were urbane and seemed interested, so she was doing her best to come off as cool but not too cool. She didn’t know that the Jahanbanis were looking to stash money anywhere they could before the U.S. government could get its greasy palms all over it, but to be fair, their motivations were not exclusively financial. Neither were Neil Ford’s. All four of them were, like most people, aswirl with contradiction, their shifting desires constantly reshuffling their intentions. They were, each one of them, cunning, benevolent, fighting back their kindest impulses with guns firing self-interest. They overruled their basest instincts for no reason other than human decency. They were angels, they were selfish pigs. They were just people trying to have a conversation. At the time, my mother’s overriding desire was to do something about the nagging feeling that she wasn’t a very good painter, which, unbeknownst to her, meshed nicely with Neil’s intention to get her into bed. He also intended to help his clients hide their money. He kept calling her a visionary. And he meant it. The Jahanbanis were as interested as people could be in art they’d never seen. They were all trying to do the right thing, up to a point. It was a Mexican standoff where everyone was trying to serve everyone else a cream pie.
When my mother died a few years ago, she and Neil had been living in Salerno, Italy, in a medieval house high on the side of a mountain. From inside she could see the bay and the shipping channels, the small cloister windows having been stretched to accommodate a more modern field of vision, and in every room the light was spectacular, but she had stopped painting, and those beautiful stone walls were not hung with her paintings, or anyone else’s. She had an herb garden, three orange trees. On the east side of the house were neat rows of olive trees. Goats roamed the slopes, their little neck bells clanking. She was bitter, ashamed of her work, unable to separate herself from her most famous painting. Publicly, she had chosen to avail herself of the artist’s credo, which states that once a work leaves the studio, the artist no longer has any claim to its interpretation or use. Thus, if Satellite, purchased by Shahin Jahanbani a week after they met at the party, was later gifted to his partner Salem bin Laden, and if Salem, in turn, made a gift of it to his brother, Osama, she could frown and say, It ceased to be mine long, long ago. But she didn’t believe that. In her estimation, she’d as good as killed her own son-in-law.
Osama was a horse guy, not an art guy, and once in his possession the painting had gone straight to a warehouse in Riyadh, where it stayed until his Saudi citizenship was revoked in 1994, whereupon it was shipped to a warehouse in Dubai, then to Switzerland before being sold.
In the interim, Salem, a passable guitarist who, once they got to know each other, liked to jam with Bo Vornado whenever he was in New York on business, flew his ultralight into a high-voltage wire and that was the end of him. The bin Laden patriarch, Mohammed, had died in a plane crash, too. It’s just a coincidence, a point of intersection, just as it’s a coincidence that at the same time Vik was delivering Albert Caldwell to the room where I was sleeping, my mother was delivering into the stream of commerce a painting that would fund the aeronautical training of Mohamed Atta, who plunged American Airlines flight 11 like a broadsword into Tower One.
Before it was destroyed, Satellite found its way back to the Apelles. It was Bo Vornado who bought it at auction in 1998, a sort of dim-witted gift for Jane, who had for years agonized over whether my mother would have stayed at the party that night trying to sell it to the Jahanbanis if only she’d agreed to buy it instead, friendship be damned. Bo paid two hundred thousand dollars, not including commission and tax, to Sotheby’s, which cut a check to a shell corporation established by François Genoud, the Swiss banker who represented Third Reich interests after the war and later established the Banque Commerciale Arabe in Lausanne, which laundered money for the PLO and other anti-Israel groups. Thus one might argue that it was actually Bo’s money, not the painting, that sent Atta to flight school. When government investigations after 9/11 exposed the painting’s chain of ownership, Bo burned it and dumped the ashes in the Atlantic. He retired not long after, and he and Jane moved permanently to their house in Montauk.
Albert Caldwell would have pointed out that my mother and Bo hadn’t acted with malicious intent, therefore couldn’t possibly have been held responsible, but it was exactly her own passivity that so distressed my mother. By her art, she had been made into an instrument of Vik’s destruction, a dupe, a member of the same club as the flight instructors who’d trained the al-Qaeda crews, the government agents who’d missed clues, the desk agent at the Portland airport who dismissed his suspicions about Atta and
