The Getty Villa, Malibu, California 17th March – 10.52 a.m.

Verity Bruce had been looking forward to this day for a while. For nearly three years, to be precise. That’s how long it had been since she had first been shown the dog-eared Polaroid in a smoky Viennese café, first been winded by the adrenaline punch of excitement at what was on offer and chilled by the fear of possibly losing out.

She’d shaken on the deal there and then, knowing that the director would back her judgement. The trustees had taken a little more convincing, of course, but then they didn’t know the period like she did. Besides, once they’d understood the magnitude of the find, they’d bitten and bitten hard, sharing her mounting frustration at the years lost to the scientists as test upon test had heaped delay upon deferral until she was sure they must have finished and started all over again. And then, of course, the lumbering and self-perpetuating wheels of international bureaucracy had begun to turn, a merry-go-round of sworn affidavits, authentication letters, legal contracts, bank statements, money transfer forms, export and import licences and Customs declarations that had added months to the process. Still, what was done was done. Today, finally, the waiting ended.

She positioned herself in front of the fulllength mirror she’d had bolted to the back of her office door. Had the intervening years between that first breathless, absinthe-fuelled encounter and today’s unveiling aged her? A little, perhaps, around her fern-green eyes and in the tiny fissures that had begun to fleck her top lip like faint animal tracks across the snow. Ever since she’d turned forty-five, the years seemed to weigh a little heavier on her face, as if they were invisibly swinging from grappling hooks sunk into her skin. She could have had surgery, of course – God knows everyone else her age in LA seemed to have had work done – but she hated anything fake or forced like that. Highlights in her long, coiled copper hair were one thing, but needles and knives…Sometimes, nature had to be allowed to run its course.

Besides, she reminded herself as she put the finishing touches to her makeup, it wasn’t as if she’d lost her looks. How else to explain the fact that that gorgeous thirty-two-year-old speech writer she’d met at a White House fund-raiser the other month was pestering her to travel up to his place in Martha’s Vineyard next fall? And she still had great legs, too. Always had. Hopefully always would.

‘They’re ready for you.’

One of the Getty PR girls had edged tentatively into the room. Verity couldn’t remember her name, but then all these girls looked the same to her – blonde, smiley, skinny, jutting tits that would hold firm in a 6.1 – as if the city was ground zero in some freakish cloning experiment. Even so, the girl’s legs still weren’t as good as hers.

‘Let’s do it,’ she said, grabbing her leather jacket off the chair and slipping it over a black couture Chanel dress that she’d bought in Paris last year. It was an unlikely combination, but one deliberately chosen to further fuel the quirky image that she’d so carefully cultivated over the years. It was simple really. If you wanted to get ahead in the hushed and dusty corridors of curatorial academia without waiting to be as old as the exhibits themselves, it paid to get noticed. She certainly wasn’t about to tone things down now, despite the occasion, although she had at least upgraded from flats to a vertiginous pair of scarlet Manolos that matched her lipstick. After all, this was a ten-million-dollar acquisition and the Los Angeles Times would be taking pictures.

The small group of donors, experts and journalists that she and the director had hand-picked for this private viewing to guarantee maximum pre-launch coverage was already gathered expectantly in the auditorium. The figure had been draped, rather melodramatically she thought, in a black cloth and then placed in the middle of the floor so that people had to circle, brows furrowed in speculation, around it. Snatching up a glass of Laurent-Perrier Rosé from a tray at the door, Verity swept inside and began to work the room, shaking the hands of some, kissing the cheeks of others, swapping an amusing anecdote here and clutching at a shared memory there. But she was barely aware of what she was saying or what was being said to her, her excitement slowly building as the minutes counted down until she could hear only the pregnant thud of her heart.

‘Ladies and gentlemen…’ The director had stepped into the middle of the room. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention please,’ he called, ushering the audience closer. The lights dimmed. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, today marks the culmination of a remarkable journey,’ he began, reading from a small card and then pausing for effect. ‘It is a journey that began over 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece. And it is a journey that ends, here, in Malibu. Because today, I am delighted to unveil the Getty Villa’s latest acquisition and, in my opinion, one of the most important works of art to enter the United States since the Second World War.’

With a flourish, the cloth slipped to the floor. Under a lone spotlight stood a seven foot tall marble sculpture of a young boy, his left foot forward, arms at his sides, head and eyes looking straight ahead. There was a ripple of appreciative, even shocked recognition. Verity stepped forward.

‘This uniquely preserved example of a Greek kouros has been dated to around 540 BC,’ Verity began, standing on the other side of the statue to the director and speaking without notes. ‘As many of you will undoubtedly know, although inspired by the god Apollo, a kouros was not intended to represent any one individual youth but the idea of youth itself, and was used in Ancient Greece both as a dedication to the gods in sanctuaries and as a funerary monument. Our tests show that this example has been hewn from dolomite marble from the ancient Cape Vathy quarry on the island of Thassos.’

Talking in her usual measured and authoritative style, she continued her description of the statue, enjoying herself more and more as she got into her stride: its provenance from the private collection of a Swiss physician whose grandfather had bought it in Athens in the late 1800s; the exhaustive scientific tests that had revealed a thin film of calcite coating its surface resulting from hundreds, if not thousands of years of natural lichen growth; the stylistic features linking it to the Anavysos Youth in the National Museum in Athens. In short, a masterpiece that was yet further evidence of the Getty’s determination to build the pre-eminent American collection of classical antiquities.

Her speech drew to a close. Acknowledging the applause with a nod, she retreated to allow people forward for a closer look, anxiously watching over the figure like a parent supervising a child in a busy playground.

At first all went well, a few people nodding appreciatively at the sculpture’s elegant lines, others seeking her out to offer muted words of congratulations. But then, without warning, she sensed the mood darkening, a few of the guests eyeing the statue with a strange look and whispering excitedly to each other.

Thierry Normand from the Ecole Française d’Athène was the first to break ranks.

‘Doesn’t the use of Thassian marble strike you as rather… anomalous?’

‘And what about the absence of paint?’ Eleanor Grant from the University of Chicago immediately added. ‘As far as I know, all other kouroi, with the possible exception of the Melos kouros, show traces of paint?’

‘Well, of course we considered…’ Verity began with a weak smile, forcing herself not to sound defensive even though she could hardly not feel insulted by what they were implying.

‘I’m sorry, Verity,’ Sir John Sykes, the highly respected Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford University interrupted with an apologetic cough. ‘It just isn’t right. The hair is pure early sixth-century BC, as you say, but the face and abdomen are clearly much later. And while you can find similarly muscular thighs in Corinth, I’ve only seen feet and a base like that in Boeotia. The science can only tell you so much. You have to rely on the aesthetics, on what you can see. To me, this is almost verging on the pastiche.’