The garage faced Finchley Road, which ran straight to the bustling center of Golders Green, a thriving Jewish community since the early 1900s, filled with synagogues, bakeries, delicatessens, and coffeehouses. Berger had installed cheap wall-to-wall carpeting and a battered desk with a phone that was nearly buried by the car parts strewn around. Behind the main room was a bed he could use while he finished renovating a house he’d bought in Greenwich, on the south bank of the Thames.

Quite by accident, he had recently found himself in a whole new line of business. He’d become a “runner,” a mobile art dealer without a gallery or a private collection. Traditionally, runners were part of a small squadron of professional go-betweens who worked to match buyers with sellers. Runners tended to be energetic, refined, and well connected. Part of their job was to scour homes, attics, antique shops, and auction houses in search of pristine and unique works that would appeal to collectors. At any given moment there might be several dozen runners crisscrossing the globe with their little jewels: a small Magritte to Paris, a Hockney to Rome, a Duchamp to Dallas.

Berger didn’t exactly fit the profile. His new sideline had begun unexpectedly one day at the Costa Café, a Golders Green hangout popular with émigrés, where he liked to sit nursing a double espresso, watching the street, and chain-smoking his Time cigarettes, an Israeli brand. Here at the Costa, Berger could chat comfortably with fellow Israelis and read his Haaretz newspaper. The other Britain—characterized by Benny Hill, cricket, and marmalade—sometimes felt like a neighboring republic. The Costa, a chummy and informal place, felt like Tel Aviv. It was filled with a nice mix of entrepreneurs, chatterboxes, and the occasional philosopher, and had served for years as Berger’s de facto office and a place to catch up on local gossip. It was close enough to his garage that he could walk home to follow up on a business lead or take a nap and get back to the café before it closed.

Late one morning in mid-1988, Berger was sitting in the Costa going through some papers when a man wearing a nice brown suit and carrying a leather briefcase introduced himself and asked whether Berger would mind sharing the table. The café was crowded, so Berger moved his stack of papers over and gestured for him to sit.

“Are you Israeli?” asked Drewe, noticing Berger’s accent. “So is my wife.”

Drewe bought espressos for them and started up a conversation about Tel Aviv. Berger told him he had an Israeli girlfriend, and they talked briefly about their work. Drewe said he taught nuclear physics and spent most of his time consulting for the Ministry of Defence. He was developing propulsion systems for nuclear submarines and had an office on Gower Street, near MI6 headquarters.

To an outside observer, the two men would have made a strange pair. Drewe, with his natty suit, starched collar, and trim mustache, looked as if he had just come from a business meeting. Berger, with his stack of newspapers and invoices, untucked shirt, and unkempt hair, looked as if he’d just slept through the matinee and woken up in the back row of the cinema.

But such details did not trouble Drewe. A good judge of character, he was less concerned with appearance than with a person’s vulnerability. Drewe could size up a person quickly, and although his meeting with Berger seemed random, Berger had one obvious weakness—he was too eager for business. Drewe had paintings coming in at a good clip now, and he needed to put together a small sales team. He was sure he could straighten Berger up. Perhaps a believer in reverse psychology, Drewe may have thought that dealers would be disarmed by someone who seemed as far removed from the refinements of the art world as Berger.

Drewe rose from the table and suggested that they meet again. He said Goudsmid could use some new friends. She was working much too hard and would love to meet other expat Israelis.

Soon enough, the two couples were meeting regularly for bridge at Drewe’s home and going out to dinner. The women had both served in the Israeli Defense Force and had plenty to talk about. Drewe always picked up the tab. It was clear to Berger that the professor was doing well for himself. He drove two cars, a blue Bentley and a blue Bristol, and the walls of his home were covered with paintings by Chagall, Le Corbusier, and Braque. Berger knew little about art, but he recognized the signatures.

After dinner one evening, Drewe made Berger a business proposition. He said he had been entrusted with some five hundred works of art by an old fellow named John Catch, whom he held in high regard. Catch had been his boss and mentor when Drewe was a young scientist at the Atomic Energy Authority, and had become like a father to him. Drewe took off his Rolex and showed Berger the inscription on the back: “From John to John.” The watch was a gift from Catch.

“He’s ex-Foreign Office, lives in America now,” Drewe said, adding that Catch had made him a beneficiary in his will, and that he was to inherit the five hundred works, worth about £2 million. “He wants me to start selling them and keep the proceeds,” Drewe told Berger. “Will you help me?”

If Goudsmid had been listening to the conversation, she might have informed Berger then and there that John Catch was a mythical figure as far as she was concerned. Whenever Drewe mentioned his name, Goudsmid bristled. Drewe had told her that Catch held the hereditary title Lord Chelmwood, and that the old man had helped him along over the years. He had given Drewe money, financed his studies, and named him his heir. The inheritance had become a sore point. It was Goudsmid, not Drewe, who had bought the house on Rotherwick Road in early 1986. When the couple moved in, Drewe convinced her to take out a larger mortgage than she had envisioned. Moreover, she had taken it out in both their names. He promised to pay it off as soon as the Catch windfall came in, but the money had never materialized. Goudsmid badgered Drewe about the inheritance, and around the time that she met Myatt, Drewe began to tell Goudsmid that the money would come in the form of earnings from the sale of artworks that Catch owned.

Blissfully unaware of the financial intricacies of the Drewe/ Goudsmid household, Berger accepted Drewe’s proposition that he become his agent in selling some of the paintings. In return, he would receive a 10 to 20 percent commission, depending on the sale price of the work.

The first painting Drewe brought to Danny Berger’s garage was a canvas by the British artist Ben Nicholson. Berger put on his best suit and took the tube down to Cork Street, a stretch of London that was home to some two dozen galleries and private dealers. He walked the picture from one shop to the next but found no takers. Dejected, he tucked the canvas under his arm, went home, and called Drewe to give him the bad news and ask for an explanation. Was there something wrong with the painting? Something lacking in his salesmanship?

No, Drewe said. The piece was solid. Berger needn’t worry. There would be other works to sell very soon.

A week later, Drewe called to say that he had sold the piece to the dealer Leslie Waddington for £135,000. Waddington was one of the most prestigious dealers in London, an irrepressible man with a large staff and three blue-chip galleries on Cork Street. He was also a Nicholson expert who had once worked closely with the painter. The news of the sale renewed Berger’s confidence in Drewe. He knew enough of the market by now to know the dealer’s reputation. If it was good enough for Waddington, it was good enough for Danny Berger.

Within days, Drewe was back at the garage with two abstract works by Roger Bissière. This time Berger was determined to make a sale. He called on every business acquaintance and distant relative, every former partner and friend. A private dealer he knew agreed to show photographs of the paintings to Adrian Mibus, an Australian gallerist on Duke Street, and Mibus agreed to come by and see the works.

At the garage, Drewe let Berger do most of the talking. Mibus did not seem put off by the grubby surroundings. “It’s not all that common to meet in a place like that, but not unusual if the buyer or seller wants to be private,” Mibus later recalled.⁶

Mibus looked closely at the two Bissières. Though they were hardly extraordinary, the price was right. Berger and Drewe wanted to make a quick sale and were prepared to accept a price well below market value. If Mibus paid cash, they would take £15,000 for the pair.

Cash deals were common, and were a good way to lighten the tax burden. Mibus agreed to the terms and almost immediately sold one of the paintings to a French dealer for a good profit. He decided to hold on to the second and show it at an upcoming art fair.

Several weeks later he returned to Berger’s garage to see another Bissière, as well as a work by Nicolas de Staël. The Bissière, titled Composition 1958, was a colorful oil with a red border and several red, yellow, blue, and white squares. The de Staël was equally vibrant, with the artist’s characteristic use of thick layers of paint laid down with a knife. On its reverse was a brief dedication to a Mrs. Richardson: “To the memory of our walk in the park this afternoon.”

A nice detail, Mibus thought, wondering who the handsome artist’s companion had been.

He struck another cash deal with Berger: £32,500 for the de Staël and £7,500 for the Bissière. Then he took the de Staël to Christie’s for a “flyby,” an informal estimate of what the work might bring at auction. One of the Christie’s experts quoted a figure much higher than the sum Mibus had paid and encouraged him to put it on the block. He said he would think about it.

Mibus’s was a labor-intensive business. For all the glamour and spark it provided, and for all that he could be physically close to paintings he loved, art was a very tough market, one that operated in a narrow universe whose inhabitants could be as petty and vicious one day as they were generous the next. Competition was fierce: Of the several hundred active art dealers in London, New York, and Paris—three of the major art markets—only a handful were successful on a grand scale. Galleries went out of business every year. Mibus had held on through the bad times and remained a respected midlevel dealer.

Most gallerists earned the lion’s share of their income from commissions, taking a third to two thirds of the selling price of works by the artists they represented. These were high fees indeed, but the risks were high too. The art market was stormy at best, and an artist on whom a dealer had bet heavily might fail to generate the buzz necessary to command top dollar. And the overhead for a gallery was huge. A successful gallery needed a respectable address, as well as a staff that included secretaries, accountants, and stock handlers. A top-notch gallery had to install a new show once every few months to maintain credibility, and to try to make a profit on pieces in inventory. The shows were not cheap: There were costs for promotion, advertising, crating, trucking, insurance, installation. After a splashy opening night, the whole thing could run to as much as fifty thousand dollars. It was not unusual for a dealer to break even or report a loss, even if the show sold out.

In a good year, a midlevel dealer might move a dozen works by a handful of new artists at $5,000 to $20,000 apiece, but that was hardly enough to keep a business going. The dealer also had to make a few top-drawer sales of $200,000 and up, and sell a few paintings from other dealers or collectors on consignment, which could net 10 percent of the selling price.

Dealers had to keep an eye on rival gallerists as well, and maintain a solid list of contacts and a full social calendar. Gossip was an important element of the art business. Deals were often struck in back rooms, with only the dealer and the buyer knowing exactly how much money had changed hands. Even at auction, and even for experienced paddle raisers, it wasn’t always clear when a work had been sold and at what price, leaving dealers to rely on their best guess to price their own holdings accordingly.

They also had to worry about antagonizing their clients, who were often among the richest people in the world: industrialists and financiers and attorneys who could easily put a gallery out of business with a single lawsuit. Not only that, but selling to a wealthy collector did not necessarily guarantee payment. Stories abounded of collectors buying a work on credit, enjoying it for a year, then returning it without having paid a penny. Others had been known to buy a picture on credit and then sell it at auction before paying the debt. Police in London and New York knew of collectors who had skipped town with “borrowed” paintings. In a world where transactions were often sealed over a nice meal or by oral agreement, there wasn’t much a stiffed dealer could do but weep.

Mibus took the de Staël home and hung it in his living room. It was filled with color, an abstract landscape of optimism created by a man who had suffered from insomnia and severe depression, and had eventually flung himself from his eleventh-story studio. It had been a while since Mibus enjoyed the luxury of an acquisition like the de Staël, but circumstances were such that he could now afford to keep it for a while. Instead of consigning it to Christie’s, he would allow himself to savor the painting.