An Updated Classic
Stuttgart Airport, Germany.
"Fine day for a drive."
Jo Sudeok made the rental counter his first stop.
"I'll need three cars."
"You didn't come alone?"
"I did, actually. I still need three. A Schultz, a B&W, and a Gaudi. One of each."
"I'm sorry—what is that supposed to mean?"
"There's some complicated business involved."
He could hardly roll up to Schultz headquarters in a Gaudi, and the reverse was just as unthinkable. The only sensible course was to reserve all three.
"Small hatchbacks, please. Manual."
"I'm afraid Schultz and Gaudi don't offer a small model."
"Then a compact, at least..."
"We'll have a Schultz ready for you now, and we'll simply reserve the B&W and the Gaudi. Will that do?"
He nodded.
While the clerk went to fetch the car, Jo Sudeok stepped over to the telephone. The first company on his list was Schultz.
Hmm. He was a veteran of storms brewed in clear weather. The romantic notion that a single phone call would settle the matter? He had never once entertained it. Think about it. Some fellow rings up out of nowhere, announces that he is a professor from Korea, and starts babbling about a lost Dürer—would the heads of the world's great companies so much as glance his way?
Not a chance in hell.
The world runs on who you know.
He flipped hurriedly through the notebook where the numbers were kept. Korean professors at the University of Cologne and at Bielefeld. One introduction further along, and he knew someone at the Free University of Berlin as well.
Yes. Far better to be brought in through local contacts than to call in my own name.
He had been thoroughly sour on the whole German trip right up until he landed, but now that a strategy was in place—
Well. Might as well give it a try.
A light came into his eyes: the peculiar hunger for a challenge that belongs to a businessman, if one could call him that. He would have hated to admit it, but perhaps Jo Sudeok had stumbled onto a second vocation.
As if to prove the point, the strategy paid off at once. Schultz contacted him first. If the piece was genuine, they were willing to meet.
Obviously the answer is yes.
Jo Sudeok took the rented C-Class and pointed it toward Schultz headquarters, gathering speed as he went.
He was only a professor from Korea. Even so, he was received with considerable ceremony and shown through to the chief executive's office. The weight of the name Dürer, no doubt.
As he walked the long corridor, he turned the man's profile over slowly in his mind. Berg Demir: Turkish-German, a researcher by training and fluent in automotive engineering, a man who preferred to reinforce what already existed rather than chase abrupt change.
Berg's office was spare, less a businessman's suite than an engineer's laboratory. There was not a photograph of a finished car to be seen—only blueprints, barely legible, strewn across every surface.
Berg sat at the desk, checking papers. A full head of white hair, thin reading glasses, and a face that looked exacting at a glance. Jo Sudeok thought it would not be easy. Even so, he lengthened his stride and crossed the room.
"A pleasure to meet you. I'm Jo Sudeok, from Korea."
Berg kept his eyes on the documents and offered only a slight nod.
"As you will have heard, we have discovered a last work by Albrecht Dürer. We intend to offer it at the New York auction, and I have come in the hope of inviting your participation."
"If the piece is any good, the auction will sell it perfectly well without us, will it not?"
Berg said it without once meeting his eyes.
"And yet you have come all the way to our group. That suggests a lack of confidence in the work. A mere drawing, perhaps. Something that will not bring real money..."
He let the sentence trail, then twitched his lips—the look of a man convinced he held the high ground.
Jo Sudeok was not so easily pushed.
"I would never presume to compare myself with Dürer. Still, as a fellow artist, allow me a word."
Berg nodded for him to go on.
"A last work is exactly that. The final piece. If he died while he was still drawing it, then of course only a drawing remains."
"I have heard your defense of the picture. It does not change the fact that you came to us for the money."
"Not only for the money."
Berg's mouth curled, as if the claim were absurd.
"I am curious to hear what shabby excuse comes next."
"Interpret it however you like. I only want to tell you the truth."
"This truth of yours. Let us hear how grand it is."
He had his opening, at any rate. Jo Sudeok drew a quiet breath, calling up the lines that filled his notebook, and spoke as evenly as he could.
"Whatever I say, I cannot deny that I am trying to trade a work of art for money. But if the price is the same, I would rather place it where it will be valued. That wish, too, is the plain truth."
"Place it where it will be valued?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I am an artist before I am a merchant."
"You are an artist, and so you mean to hand the work to someone who understands its worth?"
"That's right."
Berg shook his head.
"Then you have come to the wrong place entirely."
"...?"
"If that is your aim, you would do better at the Städel Museum. As you know, we are an automobile company. We are not a place that collects art."
He went on, as if he were not finished.
"And you came to us knowing that perfectly well. The reason is obvious. A museum's budget and a corporation's assets are not in the same universe. Am I wrong?"
He might as well have told him to get out. The sudden force in his voice made that plain enough. Worse, Jo Sudeok had not even managed to deliver the lines Park Jihoon had prepared for him. He set his eyes hard, like a man who would not be driven from the room, and spoke.
"The age when museums owned the great works is over. Now private collectors and companies crowd into the auctions."
"We do not."
"Which is why I have come with a proposal. I want to give the Schultz brand a story."
"A story?"
"People like to say that German art begins with Dürer. Does that mean there were no pictures on German soil before him? Of course not. There must have been more than enough. And yet—"
"...?"
"German art rose to the level of the world with Dürer. That is why everyone names him the father of German art."
If Dürer was the beginning of German art, then Schultz was the beginning of the German automobile. That was what the two shared.
"Regrettably, I hear the young rich of New York are driving B&Ws these days, as if they mean to resist the old order and raise a new wave. But the young have overlooked something."
Perhaps because a rival had been named, a light flickered in Berg's eyes. Jo Sudeok caught the change and pressed on.
"Whoever else one credits, it is Schultz that has made the new waves. Germany became the home of great cars because Schultz appeared. Just as Dürer became the icon that announced the birth of German art, Schultz must claim that same position. The very name of what is new. An updated classic."
He had laid the stress on the line he had carried all this way. Then he finished.
"That is the image Schultz ought to own."
"This is beginning to feel like a brand consultation."
"A consultation? Hardly. I have only explained, as an artist, what Dürer and Schultz stand for."
Having said that much, Jo Sudeok let out a long, silent breath of relief. He had delivered more than ninety percent of the script his employer had written for him. The die was cast. All that remained was to wait for the other man to choose.
Berg, sunk for a moment in thought, spoke almost to himself.
"A last work, of all things."
"...?"
"You bring it to me, and of all things it is a last work."
What was he driving at? He muttered on alone for several minutes. Then:
"Must you really put it up for auction?"
"Pardon?"
"When the right owner is already obvious, why hold an auction at all?"
"..."
Berg's voice had changed entirely. Jo Sudeok clenched both fists as if a cheer were fighting its way out of him.
The next afternoon, in a laboratory at Northeastern University in Boston, the authentication of a work of art proved an exceedingly static business. You looked at the piece through a microscope. That was all of it. To a layman it might have seemed the examination had ended long ago, and that they were only stretching the hours to pad the travel expenses—if one were uncharitable enough to think so.
Well. They surely know what they're doing.
When the professor bent to the microscope, the students paged through thick books, checked something, and did it all again. They had to keep this up for two weeks? It was true enough, from what he gathered, that an oil painting took two weeks at the soonest, and that even a drawing needed a week at minimum. Fair enough. Tens of billions of won were changing hands. Looking carefully was the only sensible thing.
Which brings me back to Jo Sudeok. Was he managing? It was only the second day. If he had been moving quickly, he might already be nearly done.
Just then the phone shrilled, loud enough to prove the thought. He picked up the receiver.
"Sir! It's me."
A welcome voice rushed down the line.
"I was just thinking about you, Professor."
"You know I was never much of a gentleman."
"Heh heh heh."
"How did it go?"
"Who is Jo Sudeok? A man who handles a job like no one else..."
"It went well?"
"Of course. All three companies were in an uproar. Just as you said, with Schultz I pressed the matter of legitimacy..."
I had told him to play it that way: legitimacy for Schultz, and for Gaudi, the house that led with design, the creative fire of Dürer.
"Whether they looked at me sideways or not, I passed your ideas on exactly as you gave them. I was practically a human tape recorder, I tell you."
"And the reaction?"
"All three told me not to put it in the auction. They want to deal with us directly."
"What did you tell them?"
"What else? I did exactly as you instructed. I declined as politely as I could. 'Thank you for the offer, but might you consider joining the auction as planned?'"
The meaning tucked inside that refusal was obvious enough. I'll just make the rounds of the German Big Three and be on my way. A company of that size would not miss the point. Within a few days, he guessed, the calls would come pouring in on Jo Sudeok—a miniature auction among the three German houses.
"Sir, as it happens, Schultz and B&W have already named specific prices."
"That's faster than I expected."
"Well, you can imagine how oily I was. They got anxious right away."
"So what did they each bid?"
"B&W, fifteen billion won."
Mm.
"Schultz bid eighteen billion."
Mmm.
"Gaudi still hasn't bet, so the price may climb further. There's room left to negotiate."
"Then you'll need to stay on a few more days and keep talking with them."
"...What?"
"You have to be in Germany to negotiate."
"Ah, well, it's only that... since you're in America, I thought I might come and see you. Ha ha."
Sure he did. More likely he simply didn't relish commanding, in person, a negotiation where tens of billions of won were on the move. Perhaps that was why he slipped the next question in so carefully.
"Sir, this may be a presumptuous question, coming so late..."
"...?"
"The Dürer... it is genuine, isn't it? There's no mistake?"
"Of course. They're authenticating it as we speak. You'll have an answer within five days at the latest."
Since the subject had come up, I glanced toward the authentication team. And what was this? Unlike the German side, which went on working in calm order, the British team wore grave faces and murmured together, as if something had gone wrong. Then the words reached me, perfectly clear.
"Is there any point in looking further?"
"No. I'm quite sure it isn't."
It was Oxford, talking with the British Academy.