Thierry Lopes contacted me by text one evening in the spring of 2008, a few months after Inigo and I had sold Robert’s Rego in Lisbon. Inigo and I had been scrabbling around for more artworks to sell, with no success. We’d earned a little more than £1500 each (a princely sum for two students, to be sure), but add to this the fun we’d had and the relative ease with which we’d pulled it off and we were both eager for more deals – bigger deals. I had a sense that if I stuck with Inigo there would be no stopping us, that I could learn not only how to ape his weapons-grade confidence, but learn to mimic the instinctive sense he had for dealmaking.

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Thinking about it now, I feel a modicum of guilt for the shamelessly self-interested way in which I regarded our friendship. Perhaps, though, it is really only with the benefit of hindsight that I see my own motivations with such clarity. It all channels into a confusion that I have long harboured: I was clear why I wanted to be friends with Inigo. But why did Inigo want to be friends with me? What was in it for him?

Thierry’s message was long and in French. In it, he explained that he was a Portuguese art dealer, but that he lived in France. He understood (from whom we never found out; Thierry was discreet to the point of spycraft) that neither of us spoke Portuguese, but that we had access to artworks by Paula Rego.

I quickly called Inigo and told him about the message. “God, that’s too funny,” he laughed. “Who is he? Have you googled him? I wonder who gave him your number.”

“It’s a pretty common name,” I replied. “I think it’s unlikely we’ll find him.”

“What have you said to him?”

“I haven’t yet. I mean, we haven’t technically got anything to sell him, do we?”

“That’s not important,” Inigo said flatly. “Find out what he wants. Tell him we have several different works by Rego. Try to get him on the phone. I’ll go and talk to Robert, see what he can rustle up from those west London friends of his. At least one of them will have a church roof to fix or a horse that needs new shoes.”

“Uh, OK. But what if he wants to see images? What if he asks for prices? I’m not even sure my French is up to this.”

“Dude,” Inigo said, exasperated, “just get the man on the phone. Tell him we have Rego works and find out his budget. Figure out where he is. We can work it out from there.”

He could have been a tyre-kicker who had no idea what Rego works sold for or he could have been a major private dealer – we were flying blind.

Back then I was terrified of making phone calls, both of us were. Whenever we had to make a call like this, we would pass the phone back and forth, arguing about who had made the last one. If that failed, we’d resort to rock, paper, scissors. A couple of years later, when I had my first office job, I would sit and wait out the phone on my desk as it rang, silently daring whoever was calling to hang up. After a couple of days a passing colleague picked up my phone and held it to my ear, leaving me no option.

I rang Thierry the following morning and did my best to extract information without giving away my inexperience or the fact that we had nothing to sell him. His rasping voice had a squishy quality to it and I could hear the papery crackle of one of his one-after-another cigarettes as the hot tip made its steady march towards the mouthpiece of his phone. He was blunt and cagey, not telling me who had given him my number; he had many clients for Rego works, he told me. He called me “Monsieur Orlando” and kept asking me, “Mais, qu’est-ce que vous pouvez m’offrir? [But what can you offer me?]”

I managed to get off the phone with a modicum of dignity intact and the promise that I would send him images later that day. Because he hadn’t told me what he was looking for, I was unable to pin down his spending power: he could have been a tyre-kicker who had no idea what Rego works sold for or he could have been a major private dealer – we were flying blind.

Inigo for his part had managed to get himself invited to a Holland Park dinner party with Robert later that week, where he hoped to be introduced to a Rego collector. “It’ll be all tepid salmon and vegetables with the vitamins boiled out of them and I bet you they’ll serve butter with the supermarket cheese,” Inigo told me on the phone as he walked from the tube station to the dinner. “Jesus, I’ll never understand these posh fucking English people.”

A few hours later Inigo called me again, this time walking back to the tube with Robert. “It’s on, playboy,” he said as soon as I picked up. “The old fucker has some school fees to pay so he’s going to give us a big Rego to sell. And get this – he wants to be paid in cash, the tax-dodging bastard!”

Back then, Inigo hardly drank, certainly no more than a beer or two, and even that would get him tipsy. That night, though, I could hear the booze in his voice. I imagined him at the Holland Park dinner party, surrounded by corpse-like upper-crust Londoners, wrapped up in their ageing velvet and frayed tweed, exchanging raised eyebrows between the flower arrangements as this young American, emboldened by wine, held forth on matters dangerously close to that English conversational third rail: money.

“He told me he’s got a couple of big works on paper and he’ll give us one to sell,” Inigo told me excitedly. “Robert told him we were ‘ruthless’ with his Rego. That seemed to impress the old boy. Maybe we’ll become friends and he’ll take me fox murdering at the weekend.”

Moving artworks of that value was definitely something that needed paperwork.

Inigo went back to Holland Park the next day and returned in a taxi with an artwork about the size of a small coffee table. We laid it out on the floor of his basement room, making a clearing in the socks and piles of books scattered about. It was a work in the same style as the one we had sold before – a bright, folkloric scene in brushy watercolour on white paper; women and monsters and children all crammed together in a bustling and colourful dance. We took photographs of it with a hot pink digital camera borrowed from my younger sister and I composed an email to Thierry in my best schoolboy French.

We priced the work by its surface area, multiplying what we’d sold the previous work for by the size of the new one, although when Thierry and I spoke the following morning and he readily accepted the price, we wondered whether we’d undercut ourselves.

Still, the owner was happy with the deal even minus our 10 per cent and we set about working out how to get the work to Thierry. We had agreed to meet Thierry in Lisbon at the end of the following week, which meant that, even as we struggled to finish end-of-term essays for Goldsmiths, we needed to work out how to move the Rego. And we needed to avoid the prying eyes of any customs officials at either border. Moving artworks of that value was definitely something that needed paperwork.

Arranging professional art shippers to transport it would not only have demolished our commission and taken too long but we would have been obliged to declare the Rego’s value to customs and face a hefty levy. Thankfully, however, Inigo discovered that certain airlines offered a dispensation which meant that you could book an empty seat for a wedding dress. On the phone to someone at Ryanair (miracles do happen), I overheard Inigo ask languidly, “Oh, that’s fascinating. So, what if I weren’t planning to get married in a dress, but instead I wanted to bring my favourite artwork with me to Lisbon? Could I book it a seat next to me?”

Amazingly, after some more back and forth with the airline, Inigo had booked seats for the Rego and both of us on a dawn flight to Lisbon the following week; it was only fair, then, that I should be in charge of the packing solution. Having made a number of rather haphazard attempts at fashioning a case for the painting (all of which were properly rejected out of hand by Inigo and a cackling Robert) I was stumped until, coming back from class a few days before we were due to fly, I spotted from the top of a bus a shop specialising in board games and puzzles. Dragging Inigo off the bus with me, disgruntled to be pulled away from his copy of The New Yorker, “Come on,” I said, “I know what we can use to pack the Rego.”

As we got off the bus and walked back towards the shop, I explained. “When we were kids my younger sister and I were keen on jigsaw puzzles – it was one of the few shared activities that wouldn’t result in sibling bloodshed.” When the great schism occurred (Inigo and I were both, as we liked to joke, children of divorce and this was for years how I referred to my parents’ separation) my sister and I would sometimes be halfway through a jigsaw at one parent’s house when we were due to go back to the other’s. This not only left us dissatisfied, but also annoyed our father, who then had to rebox the puzzles. Eventually, though, he bought us a jigsaw puzzle folder so that we could safely move our works-in-progress between parents.

“A jigsaw puzzle folder? You had a weird childhood, man,” Inigo retorted.

“Trust me,” I said, “this will work.”

The whole thing suddenly felt rather seedy, preparing to meet a stranger in a foreign hotel room to receive a large amount of cash.

And it did. Later that week we were boarding our flight with the painting secured in an enormous case with a toothy, bespectacled cartoon squirrel emblazoned on the back and a speech bubble that read “I’M JUST NUTS ABOUT PUZZLES!” Despite the terrifying moment when we were asked to put the case through the X-ray scanner for over-size luggage, no one at either airport asked us to open the case and a helpful flight attendant even offered to store the folder in the crew’s area.

We were due to meet Thierry that afternoon at our hotel, the trusty Sheraton Lisbon. As we were checking in, I recognised a man from our flight who seemed to nod at Inigo as he walked past us and went into the bar. We took the Rego up to the room and left the case on the bed ready for the viewing. The whole thing suddenly felt rather seedy, preparing to meet a stranger in a foreign hotel room to receive a large amount of cash.

“I need a drink,” I said. “Shall we go down to the bar? Thierry isn’t due for another few hours and I want to steady my nerves.”

“Let’s go out,” Inigo said. “The bar here is fucking awful.” The remark struck me as odd since it was Inigo who’d so enjoyed the bar’s club sandwiches during our last stay at the Sheraton, but I was in no mood to argue. As we walked through the lobby I looked into the bar and saw the man from the flight sitting with his back to us reading an English newspaper.

We spent a tense hour or so wandering around downtown Lisbon disagreeing about where to eat. Eventually we settled on a sushi restaurant whose chef looked like a Japanese Gary Cooper and who wore heavy eyeliner that had spread like the roots of a tree either side of his wrinkled eyes. No sooner had our food come, however, than Thierry sent me a message to say that he had arrived at the hotel early.

“Shit,” I said, showing Inigo the message. “We’re at least fifteen minutes away, what do we do?” I started to inhale my dragon roll.

“Relax,” Inigo told me. “Take a beat. Then send him a message telling him you’re in a meeting but that you’ll meet him at the time we arranged.”

“But what if he’s in the lobby when we get back…”

“He’s never seen you before. Just walk quickly and tell him the room number when you get back to the room. I’ll wait for you in the bar. Just let me know when it’s done or if there are any problems.”

“Wait, why won’t you be there?”

“Dude, come on, I don’t speak French. And he doesn’t know about me, does he? Trust me, it’ll only complicate matters if there’s someone there he doesn’t know. This way there are no tricky questions.”

He held my gaze for a moment longer than I could stand. That look hit me like a fist.

We took a cab back to the hotel and I speed-walked through the lobby trying to scan the space casually, like someone trying not to get caught shoplifting. The man from the plane was still in the bar, but among the faces in the lobby I saw no one that looked like an international art dealer.

Ten minutes later, at the appointed time, I answered the hotel room door and was taken aback. Thierry wore a beige fleece over a dirty white polo shirt, chinos and old boat shoes. He had the physique of a flotation device and bulging, bloodshot eyes surrounded by a rough, pouchy face. His skin was translucent and his front teeth were stained almost sepia with nicotine; I could smell the cigarettes coming off him like smoulder on a battlefield.

“Monsieur Orlando?”

“Yep, that’s me,” I said without thinking. “Pardon. Oui, c’est moi.”

Theirry shuffled into the room. “Voilà!” I said, quickly opening the puzzle case before he could see the squirrel. The Rego was yanked out of place by my too-forceful opening of the case but I managed to get it flat without too much hassle. “Desolé,” I said. Thierry grunted as he leant over the work.

“I can touch it?” he asked me in heavily accented English.

“Bien sûr,” I replied. I felt ridiculous, like a waiter in a Monty Python sketch.

Thierry notified me of his satisfaction with another grunt and reached into the pillowy recesses of his fleece to produce a tatty padded envelope stuffed with Euros. I took it from him and looked inside.

“Please, you must count it,” he said. I sat down at the small desk and began to count. “I can smoke?” he asked. “Ça vous derange? [Does that bother you?]”

“I don’t think it’s allowed in here.” Another grunt. I went back to counting and Thierry went into the bathroom. Just as I was finishing the count I smelled smoke coming from under the bathroom door and then thirty seconds later Thierry came out. “You have counted?” he asked. Smoke was seeping into the room behind him. I looked up at the smoke alarm above me.

“Yes, all here.”

“You have more works by Paula Rego?” he asked me as he closed the Velcro straps on the case.

“Not just now, but soon, j’espère,” I said, holding the door open for him and willing the smoke to dissipate. He grunted one last time as he left the room and I texted Inigo to say it was all done. I separated our commission and left the rest in the envelope.

Inigo came into the room almost bent double with laughter. “Was that the guy?” he asked. “The funny little man by the lift. Jesus, what a weird-looking dude.”

“I know. He kept grunting and then he locked himself in the bathroom to smoke when I told him he couldn’t smoke in the room. Anyway, the money’s all there. I kept our commission separate; the rest is in the envelope. Now I really do need that drink. I’m just going to the bathroom. I’ll meet you in the bar? Then we can go out, I don’t care.”

“OK, fine,” he said. “I’ll see you down there.”

From the bathroom I heard the door of the room close, but when I came out not only was Inigo gone but so too was the envelope of money. I rang him. He didn’t pick up. I ran down the corridor to the lifts and press the down button frantically. As I waited for the lift to come my brain spun through the possibilities: someone (Thierry? We knew nothing about him, after all) had forced their way into the room and taken the money – or had Inigo done a runner with the cash? And if so, why?

As the lift doors opened into the lobby I saw the man from the plane walking through the main doors of the hotel. He was holding the envelope. Inigo stood a little off to the side looking placidly in my direction.

“Who was that guy?” I asked him. “Why has he got the money?”

“That was my client. The seller.”

“What? Wait, I don’t get it. Why was he here? Why didn’t you tell me he was coming?”

“It wasn’t important. You had your side of the deal and I had mine.” He held my gaze for a moment longer than I could stand. That look hit me like a fist.

Thinking about it now, it wasn’t deceit – not exactly – but rather an economy of truth that left me bemused and hurt. I can understand that the buyer might have wanted control of his money as soon as possible (and frankly it was a relief not to have to think of new ways to smuggle cash through customs). But it was also the first example of an instinct I would only much later come to recognise in Inigo – an odd desire on his part always to be in possession of one trump card, a demonstration, perhaps, of his control, his prowess.

What Inigo seemed to understand almost innately was that secrecy meant control. The art market is like a stock market where all the shares and their owners are secret. Holding something back, however small, is therefore a potential source of leverage, of power. This, though, was secrecy as meaning, as both barrier and invitation. I see now that it was a way for Inigo to shift the balance of the partnership, to take possession of a needless amount of power. At the time, however, it felt to me like a form of violence. It filled me with fear, but as usual I did nothing, said nothing. But from that moment we were never equals again. He won because he knew how. I let him because I didn’t.

These early deals – these escapades – were few and far between. While we spent an inordinate amount of time talking about being art dealers (and what we would do with our newfound wealth and cultural capital), our glittering careers were at that time firmly in the realm of fantasy. In those days, Inigo and I would spend long hours, too, holed up in my student digs or in Inigo’s room at GRS discussing art and books, film and theatre, politics, even opera. It was from those conversations, often fuelled as much by cocaine as mutual curiosity, that my real education came about.

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From All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art by Orlando Whitfield. Copyright © 2025 by Orlando Whitfield. Published by Vintage, an imprint of Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.