Page 122 of Portrait of an Unknown Woman

“I was the daughter of an art dealer. I knew how the business worked.”

The Chelsea art dealer bought two more canvases from Magdalena and immediately sold both works to the same anonymous client. The dealer then informed Magdalena that the anonymous client was a wealthy investor who admired her work greatly and was interested in becoming her patron.

“But only if I stopped dealing cocaine.”

“I assume you agreed.”

“I dropped my pager down a sewer on West Twenty-Fifth Street and never made another delivery.”

And her new patron, she continued, lived up to his end of the deal. Indeed, during the summer of 2008, he purchased four additional paintings through the auspices of the same Chelsea gallery. Magdalena earned more than $100,000 from the sales. Fearful of losing her patron’s financial support, she made no attempt to discover his identity. But on a frigid morning in mid-December, she was awakened by a phone call from a woman claiming to be her patron’s secretary.

“She wanted to know whether I was free for dinner that evening. When I said that I was, she said a limousine would collect me at my apartment at four p.m.”

“Why so early?”

“My anonymous patron was planning to take me to Le Cirque. He wanted to make certain that I had something appropriate to wear.”

The limousine arrived as promised and delivered Magdalena to Bergdorf Goodman, where a personal shopper named Clarissa selected $20,000 worth of clothing and jewelry, including a gold Cartier wristwatch. Then she escorted Magdalena to the store’s exclusive hair salon for a cut and blow-dry.

Le Cirque was located a few blocks away, in the Palace Hotel. Magdalena arrived at eight o’clock and was immediately shown to a table in the center of the iconic dining room. In her mind she had sketched an image of her patron as a well-preserved blazer-wearing septuagenarian from Park Avenue. But the man who awaited her was tall and blond and forty-five at most. Rising, he offered Magdalena his hand and at long last introduced himself.

His name, he said, was Phillip Somerset.