by Anna Porter
He was still standing by the door, suddenly nervous. What he didn’t need in this assignment was an unwanted flirtation with his client’s wife. “How was your meeting with Ms. Marsh?” he asked.
Gizella lifted one shoulder, either suggestively or in an exaggerated mime of bafflement. Or both. “She didn’t say much.”
“She looked at the painting?”
“Yes, she did, but she gave no opinion.” Gizella fitted a long cigarette into a gold holder, lit it, and inhaled, making a moue with her mouth and looking up at Attila as if he were going to audition her for a starring role in a 1950s movie. “Why don’t you come in and join me?” She continued to stroke the dog.
Oh! “Did you tell her who sold you the painting?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She didn’t ask.”
Attila considered the possibility of sitting down. He was an employee of her husband. Paid for by the Hungarian government, not that that made much difference: he was here to serve Iván Vaszary. A bodyguard. He had already overstepped his responsibilities by recommending Helena to Gizella for a second opinion, and he was only too aware that his interest in asking Helena to come to Strasbourg had underlying reasons, none of them related to either his job or his offer to help Gizella obtain a fair deal in her divorce. There was an old Hungarian poem about not lying to yourself, or being true to yourself, that he recited in his mind as he approached the spacious chair facing the sofa where Gizella had now crossed her legs in a way that displayed her long-muscled thighs to their best advantage.
“Perhaps I could look your friend up when I am in Budapest next week,” he said. He perched on one arm of the overstuffed white chair. Uncomfortable, but not yet compromised.
He was desperate for a cigarette.
“If you like,” Gizella said, taking a lingering drag. “He lives in the castle district. His name is Biro, I think. I thought you used to smoke.”
“I did,” Attila said. “Trying to give it up.”
As soon as he could, he escaped to the street and pulled the red-and-white package of Helikons out of his pocket. They were, his mother had warned, the deadliest brand of Hungarian cigarettes, certain to reduce his life expectancy by at least ten years, but they tasted great.
Chapter Nine
Marianne Lewis drove to Colmar in a rented Renault, a pleasant small car that no one would notice in this pleasant little town not far from Strasbourg, where people could enjoy the feeling of being in the countryside without actually being in the countryside. Colmar seemed to have been built or, more likely, rebuilt as a tourist attraction with half-timbered houses, cobblestone streets, a well-trained, winding little river that offered old-fashioned wooden rowboat rides, bridges with hanging flower baskets, a regular market that sold regular fare you could also buy in supermarkets, and a fancy relais with a well-reviewed restaurant, where Helena planned to dine after she signed up for the archery course just outside the town. There was a modest ad for the place in the local paper, touting itself as a historical attraction, since Strasbourg had once been a famous centre for archery. This place, the ad claimed, had been used by knights training for tournaments and for the wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since it was the only archery range in the area, Helena assumed it was the one Attila had alerted her to.
The plaque that marked the range (Propriété privée, défense d’entrer, with an appropriate Danger! skull-and-crossbones sign) listed a dozen knights who had been here in les temps anciens>. Malhereusement, its heyday of happy archers had ended when the local governor banned the use of bows and arrows in the town. Helena assumed that order must have followed some very bloody altercations between various lordly factions, but she doubted the directive would have been followed by the more aggressive knights.
Crossbowmen had been an essential component of the French army. Under Charles VII, the longbow was added to their arsenal. It was a somewhat late response to the nauseating rout at Agincourt.
Helena was startled by the tall, spindly man who had been strolling along the weedy path, deep in contemplation of his black-and-tan crossbow. “Too little, too late,” she said, in response to the plaque about Agincourt. “They should have had better archers, more longbows, and been a lot less terrified of the English.”
The tall man, not so thin on closer inspection, was wearing full leather overalls and some sort of peaked cap that drooped over his forehead. “You do not read signs,” he said, also in English. “It says ‘private’ and ‘keep out.’” He crossed his arms, the crossbow dangling from his fingers, and stood facing her.
Helena grinned at him.
“No trespassing,” he said.
“I saw that,” she said, “but I am not trespassing. I was interested in your course. The affiche you pasted on the wall outside the market invites students who wish to study the art of archery and suggests favourable prices, starting with nothing for the first lesson if the student is serious. I am serious.”
He relaxed a bit and smiled back at her. “And you are?”
“Marianne,” she said.
“As in the girlfriend of Robin Hood.”
“Exactement,” she said, switching to French.
“Philippe,” he said. “Why archery and when do you wish to start?”
“Today would be good. But first, can you show me the range? I was not impressed with the one in Picardy.”
“Picardy,” he repeated, nodding. “So, you have taken a course already.”
“I didn’t sign up once I saw the range,” she said. “No woods. Only rocks and scrub.” Thank god for Google.
Philippe led the way, explaining as he went that this area was famous for its woods and wildlife, that his students could put their skills to use hunting hare, deer, and even boar, right here without leaving the range.
There were only three other students, all men. They were profoundly engaged with the mechanics of their bows. They all had upright trays of arrows, long scopes, and leather gloves. Though it was a warm day, they all wore camouflage trousers, shirts, and padded vests. They had been practising on a target about twelve metres from their stand of trees and, by the look of the arrows surrounding the target, it had not been their best day.
Helena nodded appreciatively. “It takes time to learn,” she said. “Misha said he had been here a day and was just beginning to understand the best way to address the prey.”
“Misha?”
“A man who mentioned coming here.”
“What man?” Philippe asked, anxiously.
Helena shrugged. “Met him in the relais. I think he left today.”
“Oh.”
“Never learned his last name.”
“Moi, non plus,” Philippe said, “and he was not interested in taking lessons. He was asking questions about other students we have had here, and he was very . . . nasty. Belligerent. Aggressive. Threatening.”
“Other students?” Helena raised her eyebrows in what she hoped was a surprised expression. “Your other students?”
“Yes. It was very unpleasant.”
“What other students?” Same wide-eyed expression.
“He was interested in anyone who was good.”
“I guess anyone good would not be taking lessons,” Helena said.
“Wrong. Everyone needs to practise. No matter how good you are, you have to keep up your skills. And his name wasn’t even Misha.”
“No?”
“It was Piotr. He drove a large SUV with tinted windows. I knew there was something strange about him as soon as I saw him.”
It may have been the large Glock he carried, Helena thought, but she didn’t say anything. She shook her head and hmm-ed sympathetically.
“And the man who would have interested him was already gone,” Philippe said.
“Back to Russia?”
�
�No. Hungary. He was here for only one day.”
“Not long enough, I think.” Helena tsk ed.
“Long enough for him.”
Helena signed up for the archery course, starting the next morning, paid for three lessons in advance, and drove to the restaurant A l’Échevin, where she enjoyed a perfectly prepared breast of duck with champagne sauce, a green salad, and a modest Bordeaux while she read a few pages of her new edition of The Odyssey. She had bought the Emily Wilson translation at Shakespeare & Company a few days before. She had always preferred the Robert Graves, but she couldn’t remember where she had left it, and the Wilson turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable rival.
There were two black SUVs in the parking lot, but neither had tinted windows or a familiar licence plate number. After lunch, she inquired of the maître d’ about an old friend from Ukraine who had recommended the restaurant.
“Monsieur Azarov?” the maître d’ asked with an ingratiating smile. “He has been our guest here plusieurs fois.”
* * *
Marianne Lewis took the 6 a.m. flight to Rome, found a women’s washroom at the airport, and emerged as Helena. She took a taxi to Via Ripetta near Piazza del Popolo and presented herself at Arte Forense’s main reception desk at eight o’clock. It was housed in the rather posh Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, a former palace, reconstituted as an association of artists and a school of art, all under the Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca. The minister himself had an office near the central arch, but, as Andrea had told her, he rarely showed up. He preferred his more spacious offices in the Palazzo Chigi, where Italy’s cabinet meet.
Andrea’s section was in the research area, separated from the main building by a series of long corridors with video cameras and two security screening machines staffed by two tough-looking, broad-beamed women who carried government-issue firearms stuffed down the outside pockets of their dungarees for easy access. Neither offered even a cursory greeting, and both carefully studied the contents of Helena’s pockets and coat as they made their way through the machines. Only one of them patted her down. The other, ignoring Andrea waiting at the other end of security, asked about the nature of her business.
“We’ve had some problems,” Andrea explained. She gave Helena a light hug and two air-kisses. She wore a red linen jacket with rolled-up sleeves, a black knee-length pencil skirt, and red sandals with no stockings. “The Cosa Nostra are sensitive about anyone investigating their major thefts, and they are incensed if they smell a rat in their own cellars.”
“I assume you are still on the trail of the nativity with Saints Lorenzo and Francis of Assisi?”
“Never going to give up,” Andrea answered with a smile.
She led the way down the corridor to the labs. Her own office — a spacious room with a long light table and several large colour reproductions of paintings on the walls — opened from the labs. It had only one door, fluorescent lights, and no windows. “We wouldn’t want anyone to peer over our shoulders,” she explained.
“And no escape route,” Helena said as she made her way to the most prominent photograph. It was huge — at least six feet by six feet — embossed, with a matte finish, and it seemed to be lit from inside the manger. The Virgin’s face, San Lorenzo’s almost garishly bright orange cassock, and the overdressed shepherd’s legs in the foreground all shone with supernatural glow. “Extraordinary! At first glance, I thought . . .”
“No. But it was made by the same people who produced the replica in the church,” Andrea said. “And I don’t need an escape route.” She patted the left side of her stylishly loose red jacket, where a slight bulge betrayed she was carrying a gun. “However, should the need arise . . . It’s best you don’t know. You said this is urgent?” Andrea asked with a little crease appearing between her eyebrows, all business.
Helena showed her the photographs she had taken in the Vaszarys’ living room, a couple from a distance that showed the overall composition and a dozen close-ups of the figures, the faces, Holofernes’s upturned eyes, his gory neck, the spurting blood, Judith’s delicate, long-fingered hand, her face turned slightly away from the man’s head, the lush drapery of her gown. “I have been hired to determine whether this is a real Artemisia Gentileschi, a copy, or a forgery,” she said.
“There’s a great deal of interest in her since Lucretia was auctioned,” Andrea said. “Even more with the National Gallery’s retrospective.”
“This painting is about four times the size of Lucretia.”
“It looks like her, doesn’t it?” Andrea said. “That tendency she had to put her own face on her heroines’ necks. A bit pudgy for our times, but a beauty for the seventeenth century. And that orange with blue dashes and those reds — her colours, I think.”
“She had beautiful hands,” Andrea said, looking at Judith’s bloodied fingers.
“Maybe,” Helena said, “but I’ve always been skeptical of the hands being hers. Remember, her fingers had been bound and twisted when the court tried to extract a confession from her that she had lied about Tassi’s rape and that she had lured him into her bed in hopes of marrying him. Tassi and her father’s housekeeper both testified that she was offering her body to all comers in exchange for small favours, including hard-to-get paints. The lawyers believed that excruciating pain would induce her to confess that she was a ‘harlot,’ as Tassi claimed. It hadn’t worked. Her hands bled for days. Still, if you’re the artist, you can give yourself whatever hands you wish for.”
“But I remember a drawing of her hands by another artist. It should be in one of our books. We have a big library in back — but that’s not why you came to my lab.”
Helena opened the small plastic bags with the three tiny samples she had taken from the painting. “I need your spectroscopic machinery to date these. I’ll need it for no more than a couple of hours. I should be able to identify the pigments, the binding agents, the varnish in that time. And I am also interested in the signature. Only one of her names is on the painting, and it is misspelled. Some of her letters to her friend Galileo Galilei attest to her considerable literacy, as you know. So this could be the work of a clever fraudster, someone who tried to overpaint another signature.”
One of the two Dutch artists Simon had hired for his forgeries had intentionally created spelling errors in two of his Pietro della Vecchias because the painter had been a notoriously bad speller, illiterate according to a biographer. Simon had been greatly amused by the controversy. But Andrea knew nothing of Simon, and Helena was determined to keep it that way.
“Whatever the conclusion, it is an extraordinary work,” Helena said.
“Could you see the brushstrokes?”
“Yes. Not a line wasted. But that does not necessarily mean they were her brushstrokes. Some forgers do magnificent work.”
“I assume you are not bringing the painting here?”
“The owner thinks she can sell it with just an unconfirmed opinion.”
“Yours?”
“Apparently.”
“And, of course, you will be very guarded in what you put in writing?”
“Of course.”
Andrea showed Helena to the array of machinery and left to track down the books she had mentioned.
Paint and what has been used to produce it is harder to fake than brushwork. Wolfgang Beltracchi, for example, had boasted once that he could paint anything Vermeer had painted, and no one would be able to tell the difference. He was tripped up by his use of titanium dioxide white, a pigment not available until the 1940s.
In the seventeenth century, most of the pigments used today had not yet been manufactured. To get the ultramarine blue used by artists at that time, you would have had to buy lapis lazuli pebbles — more expensive, then, than gold. Once you had your lapis, you would have to grind it and use a binding agent to turn it into usable paint. Helena had been
puzzled about how Artemisia could have afforded the radiant blue in Judith’s dress if she painted this in her late teens. Later, once she had become successful, buying lapis would not have been a problem. The yellow and red ochre and the copper resinate were all easy to identify. She could also see a touch of saffron, white lead, and alabaster in the speck she had of Judith’s skin tone. And there was the cochineal red she had identified before in a canvas of Caravaggio. Made from cochineal insects found on cacti in Mexico, it is known today as carmine and is more vibrant than the reds some other baroque artists used. Caravaggio had been a contemporary of Orazio and a visitor to his studio. Artemisia might even have been introduced to this red by him. She had certainly used it in some of her known work.
After two hours with Arte Forense’s powerful microscopes and chemical scanners, its multispectral imaging and dual-laser Raman spectroscopy, Helena found nothing that indicated pigments not known in Artemisia’s time. One puzzle remained unsolved: the signature. While it, too, used contemporary pigments, it was not applied at the same time as the rest of the painting. Its positioning suggested that it had been added some time after the other paints had dried, possibly much later. She would have to study the surface under the signature again.
Andrea had returned with the book she’d been seeking and had been hovering at Helena’s elbow for a while, not wanting to interrupt her friend’s work but ready to help if needed.
“She used a lot more blues and reds early on than I remembered. This book has some of her letters to the Duke of Alcalá demanding more funds for her paints. I think many assume that she would have been penniless when she left Rome after the trial, hurriedly married off to a third-rate artist she would barely have known.” She offered to copy the letters to and from Alcalá. “And look at her hands,” she opened the book to a drawing of a very delicate hand with long tapered fingers, holding a thin brush. “It’s by Pierre Dumonstier le Neveu. An admirer and perhaps a lover. He certainly put a lot of effort into this drawing.”