Master of Illusion

by Nupur Tustin

  A startling contrast between light and shadow that would give the work a luminescent quality once Simon started working over it with colored pigments. Unlike an artist’s preliminary sketch, the shapes here were defined by negative spaces and the shadows they cast.

  “No lines,” she murmured to herself, peering closely at the canvas.

  Simon nodded but didn’t say anything, watching Celine instead. She had the impression there was some connection he hoped she’d get. The image that had flashed into her mind earlier re-surfaced—a painter in a slashed jacket and balloon-shaped breeches seated before an easel. It took her a moment to recognize it.

  Johannes Vermeer’s enigmatic portrayal of the artist at work.

  “Is that how Vermeer began his compositions?” She looked up at Simon. He was grinning, his cheeks flushed pink.

  “Remember that from your art history classes, do you?”

  Celine shook her head. “We discussed the effect—the fact that all you see is a black-and-white image of the subject—not how Vermeer achieved it. I remember reading about Lawrence Gowing’s X-ray examination of Girl With a Pearl Earring.”

  She turned to Julia, who stood looking at them with a bemused expression on her face. “Vermeer’s underdrawings have been a source of endless speculation for art historians. There are no preliminary sketches or guiding lines, just light and dark shapes, all put down without any hesitation.

  “It’s as though a step is missing and we don’t know how Vermeer began his work. Even if he used a camera obscura to trace his subjects, you’d think there’d be some remnants of the lines he used for his tracings.”

  Julia stared at the canvas, her features expressionless, then scrutinized Simon’s face. “So no art historian has figured this out. But you have? How?”

  “It’s a long story,” Simon said with a smile.

  “I’d like to hear it.” Julia looked at Celine, who nodded. “Sure.”

  But she didn’t understand Julia’s interest. How could knowing Vermeer’s techniques help?

  Simon led the way back into the living room. As he stepped over the threshold, he glanced over his shoulder at Celine.

  “You know, this is how Dirck and John and I met. All those years ago in Boston. We were brought together by our work on this puzzle and our mutual fascination with Vermeer.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “In the mid-eighties,” Simon Underwood said as he walked around his living room, peering at the many prints that hung on the walls, “I was a graduate student in the art history program at Boston University.”

  He’d picked art history because he didn’t think he’d qualify for the studio art program.

  Celine stole a glance at Julia; the former fed seemed riveted by Simon’s remarks. Dirck and John had rarely spoken of their Boston days. Now they were both gone, Celine found herself wanting to know more.

  But she’d have been the first to admit, none of it seemed particularly relevant to either the Gardner case or Dirck’s murder.

  “There was enough focus on painting to satisfy me.” Simon turned briefly to look at Celine and Julia, and then returned to the task of selecting prints to show his visitors. “I was fortunate enough to have an advisor who did more than speculate on the reasons why any particular artist had chosen his subject.”

  A failed artist himself, Professor Francis van Mieris had been fascinated by the techniques artists used to achieve their effects. He’d even encouraged his students to experiment with those techniques and methods in an attempt to replicate—and understand—the effects they produced.

  Dirck must’ve enjoyed that, Celine thought with a smile.

  “It was theory put into practice.” Simon stopped before a panoramic view of what looked like Venice’s Bacino di San Marco. Innumerable vessels crowded the dark, placid waters of the basin.

  “Is that a photograph?” Julia whispered.

  “No, it’s a Canaletto,” Celine whispered back. “An Italian view painter. I recognize it because my father specialized in vedute art.” She didn’t understand what Canaletto, an eighteenth-century painter, had to do with Vermeer, a seventeenth-century Dutch genre painter.

  They watched Simon select three other prints: one a detailed image of a woman playing the clavichord—a genre painting, although Celine wasn’t familiar with the artist; the other two recognizably Vermeer. He brought them over to the coffee table.

  “These are all examples of realistic painting: Canaletto, Vermeer, and a near-contemporary of his, Gerrit Dou,” Simon said. “Look at them closely. See any differences?”

  A few minutes later, Julia shrugged. “I give up. What am I looking for?”

  But Simon didn’t respond, turning to Celine instead. “Well?” he pressed.

  Celine struggled to put what she saw into words. “Canaletto’s works look the same from a distance as up close—as though they were produced by a professional photographer. Gerrit Dou’s work has the same quality in terms of its details, but the illusion is lost because of the staged, stiff posture of the woman. That poor woman must have had to sit like that for hours.”

  You could tell she was posing for a painting, not actually making music. Vermeer would have captured her in the moment—playing the clavichord, looking up for just a second to see who’d walked in the door. A snapshot of reality.

  “The kind you can only achieve with a digital camera or an iPhone,” Celine said. She’d always been intrigued by this aspect of Vermeer’s art.

  But she’d never realized Dirck and John had found Vermeer just as fascinating. Her eyes roved over the print.

  Then something else caught her eye.

  She turned sharply toward Simon. “Up close, Vermeer doesn’t always offer the level of detail you’d expect.” Her voice reflected her surprise. “Nothing like what you see in the other two works.”

  “Exactly.” Simon beamed. “And that was the question that preoccupied Frank van Mieris—after his wife, an artist, made precisely the same remarks.” He sat down. “There’s no question Vermeer made use of a camera obscura, right?” He paused to look at Julia.

  The former federal agent bobbed her head. “Yes, you can tell from the discs of confusion in his paintings—those white highlights. And the difference in scale between foreground and background objects.” She frowned, hesitating. “And the perspective,” she said. “Philip Steadman.”

  Julia seemed to be reciting facts she hadn’t considered deeply. But it was clearly enough for Simon that she accepted his premise.

  “So Vermeer uses a camera obscura, yet his paintings are only an illusion of reality. Not a precise depiction of it. Frank wanted to know why. Vermeer wasn’t the only Dutch artist to play with lenses. Gerrit Dou used them as well. Nor was Vermeer the only artist interested in realistic painting. But his works have more of a painterly quality than that of most other realistic painters.”

  “Painterly?” Julia asked.

  “Not trying too hard to be photo-realistic,” Simon explained. “Typically, you’ll see dabs and splotches of paint that resolve themselves at a distance into what the artist wants them to represent.”

  Simon held a magnifying glass over the print of Vermeer’s Lady Standing at a Virginal.

  “Even Rembrandt, despite his freer approach, can depict pearls realistically. Take a look at the pearls in his portrait of Maria Trip. You can even see the white string connecting them.”

  He pressed a thick index finger against the pearls worn by Vermeer’s lady. “But look at how Vermeer doesn’t actually paint a string of pearls, he suggests the idea of them—a thin gray line dabbed into the woman’s skin tone, and then globules of paint, overlapping as they round her neck.”

  Julia sat back. “And that means, what exactly?” she asked.

  Simon put the magnifying glass down. “Well, Frank figured taking a look at Vermeer’s underdrawings might reveal something of his method. Perhaps he wasn’t capturing as much detail at the initial stage as you’d expect.” He wave
d his hands. “Maybe the lines were fuzzy. I don’t know what any of us thought we’d see.”

  Celine raised her eyes from her scrutiny of the fourth print, Vermeer’s Lacemaker. Isolated from the rest of the subject, the spool of red and white threads looked like an untidy and entirely accidental splatter of paint. “So you looked at the underpainting and saw what Lawrence Gowing had seen.”

  “Yes, and for the life of us, we couldn’t figure out how he’d done it. How had Vermeer captured an image without putting down any lines?”

  Frank van Mieris had been the type of professor who’d brought his theories and research projects into the classroom. The graduate students in the art history program and the undergraduates taking a mandatory art history unit over at the College of Fine Art had both been treated to Frank’s ideas and invited to participate in his quest for the truth.

  “Dirck and John came up with the idea of a tracing. Vermeer could have traced the image he saw within his camera obscura onto a sheet of paper and then transferred it onto his canvas. The problem was no such papers had been found in Vermeer’s possessions. Frank dismissed the suggestion.”

  But Simon had been convinced the young artists were onto something. In another course, he’d been introduced to the fifteenth-century Italian painter Cennino d’Andrea Cennini and his treatise on art.

  “Oil paper,” Simon said. “Cennini recommends it for making tracings. He even has instructions on how to make it. We knew enough about Dutch life to know that oil paper would have been readily available to Vermeer. His wife would’ve had it in her kitchen to wrap food.”

  “And did Vermeer have any oil paper sketches?” Julia asked.

  “I thought no sketches were found in his inventory,” Celine said.

  “You’re right, none were. And if he used oil paper, that would explain why. Oil paper has a very short shelf life. The oil degrades it. It was the only explanation that fit.”

  “And then what?” Celine asked.

  Why hadn’t Dirck and John ever mentioned any of this? It was cutting-edge research; they’d been part of it. And they’d never said a word about it.

  But then again, Simon hadn’t either.

  He grinned now. “Then we tried it. We made our own Vermeer. It wasn’t enough for Frank to just have a plausible theory. He needed to demonstrate that it worked.

  “And he did it in his own spectacular fashion.”

  Blake scarfed down the last of his meatball sub, licked the greasy tomato sauce and cheese off his fingers, and turned back to the fresh pile of passenger manifests Ella had left on his desk. He’d decided to look at some of the other morning flights—those that didn’t have Boston as their final destination.

  He stifled a yawn, sleep deprivation finally catching up with him. Even for a man who enjoyed poring over papers, this was a mind-numbingly monotonous task. And futile.

  He hadn’t come across any Graysons or Gregs among the list of same-day travelers so far. And the more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that Grayson would want to head back to Boston.

  By the mid-nineties, many of the Gardner’s former employees, tired of being constantly questioned about the theft, had moved out of the area. Not Grayson. Grayson had stayed on. At first the agents on the case had suspected Grayson was more closely involved than he’d let on.

  But before long it had become apparent that Grayson simply didn’t have it in him to start a fresh life someplace else.

  Blake rubbed his tired eyes and forced himself to concentrate. It was tedious work but it had to be done, he told himself.

  “You can stop looking at those. You won’t find Grayson there.”

  Ella’s voice startled him out of the stupor into which he’d fallen. Intent upon his papers, he hadn’t heard her step into his office.

  He raised his head, his pen still poised over the manifests he’d been studying.

  “Grayson hasn’t left San Luis Obispo,” Ella informed him, coming into the room. “And I don’t think he plans to in some time to come.”

  “And you know this how?” Blake felt the pen slipping out of his fingers. Too tired to tighten his grip, he let it fall to his desk.

  “Because of the prepaid card he purchased at the Pioneer Market & Newsstand before he left Paso Robles.”

  Ella pulled out the chair on the other side of Blake’s desk and plonked herself into it.

  “That was a stroke of genius, by the way,” she went on, “asking me to check whether he’d bought prepaid cards and phones.”

  Blake blinked. “Grayson used his credit card to buy a prepaid card and phone?” Could the man truly be that dumb?

  “No. No burner phone. Not yet. And he used cash.”

  “Then how—?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Ella smiled, brushing imaginary wrinkles off her lap. “I circulated a composite,” she said. “I remembered you’d said he’d left his toothbrush and shaving kit in his motel room. I figured he might have developed a stubble.”

  The smile widened.

  “So I asked a Boston PD sketch artist to modify the photo we used to create the ID for his code name. And I focused on 24/7 businesses selling the items he’d be interested in.”

  “Boston PD?” Blake wasn’t sure he wanted Boston PD knowing about his lost CI. Not when the CI in question was involved, however tangentially, in a murder case.

  “I figured you wouldn’t want word getting around the FBI office that you’d lost sight of your informant.” She gazed at him, head tilted to one side.

  Blake shook his head. No, he wouldn’t. That would be even worse. But still—

  “Don’t worry,” Ella reassured him. “As far as the sketch artist is concerned, we’re looking for a Greg Peters, not a Grayson Pike.”

  “Okay.” Blake gripped his temple.

  Lack of sleep was making him lightheaded.

  His fingers kneaded his forehead. “So Grayson has a prepaid card, but not a phone. And this tells us he’s going to remain in San Luis Obispo County because . . .” He let his voice trail off and gazed expectantly at his assistant.

  Ella leaned forward.

  “Remember, we were wondering why Grayson had taken the Amtrak bus to the LOVR stop at Laguna Village?”

  She paused—for dramatic effect, Blake supposed.

  “Turns out it’s an eleven-minute walk from the bus stop to Costco.”

  “He got himself a Costco membership?”

  “Sounds like it. He bought clothes, shoes, toilette items.”—All stuff he would need, Blake thought to himself—“And a ton of food. All with his prepaid card. Pretty clever strategy.”

  Blake had to agree. He wouldn’t have considered checking any Costco warehouses to see if Grayson had made an appearance. Men on the lam didn’t shop at Costco, which required all its shoppers to be members and insisted upon seeing some form of ID before issuing a membership card.

  Moreover, what single man needed to buy items in bulk? Blake had let his own membership lapse years ago when a former girlfriend had left him. She’d been Indian—it was inevitable that she would.

  Not that he was bitter about it. It was what it was. And there’d been plenty of other women since then.

  He picked up his pen and tapped it against the sheaf of papers that littered his desk. “Good work, Ella.”

  She looked up at him, surprised. He pretended not to notice. He rapped the pen against his desk again.

  “Keep monitoring that prepaid card. The places it’s being used in should help us narrow down Grayson’s location.”

  “I had no idea academics were so unforgiving,” Julia commented as she climbed into Celine’s Honda Pilot. “What Frank van Mieris did wasn’t illegal. Unconventional and in-your-face certainly, but not illegal.”

  Celine nodded, waving good-bye to Simon as she settled in behind the wheel and pulled away. “Frank was thumbing his nose at the experts; and academics, more than anyone else, don’t take kindly to that kind of thing. But, yes, it was harsh,
what happened to him.”

  The professor had seen an opportunity to prove his point when, shortly after their breakthrough, Boston University agreed to host an exhibition of Dutch painters, including several by Vermeer. Girl With a Pearl Earring was to be the main attraction of the show.

  Frank, Simon said, had persuaded his students to replace Vermeer’s original with their reproduction, created using the methods they’d uncovered.

  If the reproduction could fool all eyes, the team’s theory would be conclusively proven. It was a magnificent, dramatic stunt. But in successfully pulling it off, Frank had caused a furor in the Boston art world and at the University.

  As a tenured professor, Frank couldn’t be fired. But his career was all but over. He’d lost most of his research funding and the Dean of Faculties kept a close eye on his teaching. “Making sure he wasn’t leading students astray by encouraging them to create forgeries,” Simon had recounted with a wry smile.

  Understandably, neither he nor his friends had ever spoken of their involvement with van Mieris.

  “Are you still convinced Simon Underwood is Simon Duarte?” Celine wanted to know as she made a right onto South Street and cruised down to Main Street. She was more than ever certain now that Simon Duarte was dead.

  And that Simon Underwood, one of Morro Bay’s most prominent painters, was in danger.

  Just as they’d left his house, she’d glimpsed the Lady. The vision had made her turn around to ask if he still kept in touch with friends in Boston. “Yes, my friend, Bella,” Simon had said. “Annabelle.”

  Simon had been a close friend of Bella’s younger brother. “Bella nearly came apart when he died; he was so young.” She’d looked to Simon for support, needing him to take her brother’s place.

  As soon as Simon mentioned the name, Celine had recalled the wine baskets the Delft regularly sent on behalf of the painter to an Annabelle Curtis in Boston. Because Simon was an old friend, Dirck had never charged for the shipments. He’d been generous like that, Celine thought.