The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  ‘More or less, yes. I skipped the beating.’

  I had only begun to think of how much I would tell Julian of the night’s events when it had become apparent that I would emerge from them alive. My instinct was not to tell the truth. We had developed a habit of reticence from the start and I did not want the pain of seeing her concern for Anatoli. I found myself censoring my story, omitting all the violence and leaving only the concession I had wrung from him on the way back to Moscow.

  Once we had reached the opposite bank of the river we were out of range. The loose horses had gradually fallen away from us, dropping to a walk, nosing the snow, uncertain of what to do with the freedom which had been thrust upon them. I had ridden up the steep escarpment ahead of Anatoli aiming to reach the thick wall of trees that I could see above us on the summit. Halfway up the slope we hit a rough track and after a steep climb, which slowed the horses to a walk, we came to an open clearing on the edge of the forest where a derelict church stood, surrounded by wire. Anatoli halted. His horse was breathing heavily and a scum of sweat had formed on its shoulders. He leaned forward to smooth it away and later I remembered that motion of sympathy with the beast, and set it beside the instinctive force with which he had smashed the guard’s head, spattering blood and brains in the snow where he threw down the iron bar.

  I used the respite to straighten myself on the mare’s back, to resettle my huge boots in the stirrups and to gain a new hold on the reins. Then I looked back at the dacha to judge whether we were still being pursued directly, or whether the men had decided to take cars to cut us off by road. The little core of orange had now become a wavering red and gold flower whose perfume rose as smoke. Anatoli was already urging his horse along the track. Awkwardly, I swung my mare round to follow him, turning my head to check what I had seen.

  ‘Is it the dacha?’ I asked stupidly. ‘Is it on fire?’

  Anatoli stopped and looked over his shoulder. ‘No, it’s the stables.’

  ‘How…?’

  ‘There were some cans of fuel, didn’t you see them? Inside the barn. I emptied them into some of the mangers and stalls. Then I went along putting my lighter to the lot.’

  ‘But did you let all the horses out?’

  ‘Of course not. There wasn’t time. And there was no point. They would need to save valuable bloodstock, so to leave the horses inside would delay them. I just wanted a few with us to give us some cover.’

  He nudged his horse onwards. I took a last look at the stud farm. I could imagine the ululation of the burning horses, the suffocating heat, the smell of burning flesh.

  A few hundred yards down the track from the church we came to a metalled road which was evidently regularly cleared by snow ploughs, for it was only lightly covered with snow. Behind picket fences wooden houses, no more than gaily painted shacks, could be made out in the darkness. In one or two of them windows glowed and I realised that people were getting up to start the day.

  ‘All we need,’ I shouted to Anatoli ahead of me, ‘is a house with a telephone.’

  We unharnessed our horses, dumping the tack on the side of the road and putting the animals into an enclosure on the edge of the village. We banged on a cottage door and persuaded an elderly couple to let us come in and use their telephone, with a story about a broken-down car. They did not believe us, and they eyed Anatoli’s beaten face, which, even wrapped in a scarf, was a horrific sight, with terror. It had taken another hour or so for Anatoli’s car to find us, during which time our involuntary hostess had nervously placed tea and bread and home-made jam in front of us, placatory offerings to visiting gods.

  Julian offered me more of the same, though in rather different form, when I emerged from the bathroom, showered, shaved, dressed. I was exhilarated. There is nothing like escaping from death; and the more I thought about it the more certain I became that to have killed us would have been the only solution possible for the Uzbek, had we not evaded our captivity.

  ‘What luck did you have with Anatoli?’ she asked, pouring me a cup of coffee. ‘I hope that all this bonding in the banya led to some results.’

  She still refused to acknowledge the enormity of what she had asked me to do.

  ‘The short answer is yes,’ I said. ‘It’s not exactly what you want, but it’s the best I can do for you. He hasn’t said he’s going to leave Russia, but I have persuaded him to come to London next time he’s in Europe. You can see him there and say anything you have to say. You will be more convincing than I can be.’

  ‘Really? You’ve really got him to agree? When will he come?’

  ‘In a couple of weeks.’

  ‘That’s brilliant. I won’t ask how you persuaded him. It just shows that his refusal up to now has all been to do with me. I was quite right to ask you to do it for me.’

  Even if she had set out to make me tell her, I would not have recounted my conversations with Anatoli, least of all the last one we had exchanged sitting in the back of his car on the road to Moscow. He had slumped into the corner with his eyes closed, his swollen face blackening now as the bruises developed. We made the journey in exhausted silence. Reaction was setting in. When we reached the outskirts of the city and our speed was reduced by the thick traffic, I made my final attempt to fulfil my mission for Julian.

  ‘After what’s happened tonight, don’t you now think it’s time to leave?’

  His eyes could barely open. He was fumbling in the pocket of the borrowed sheepskin and drew out a boiled sweet wrapped in paper. He folded back its coverings and revealed a sphere of unnatural green which he inserted into his mouth between his swollen lips.

  ‘I’m not going to.’ He was mumbling the sounds. ‘I shall stay and fight it out with the Uzbek. I’m not going to let him take over.’

  Fighting it out was quite literally what it would mean, I thought, and the stakes were not simply control of the Bank and their business empire. His life, as that evening’s episode had shown, was on the line.

  ‘How you solve that problem is your affair,’ I said. ‘But what about Julian? I don’t see why she should be involved in all this.’

  ‘She is involved,’ he said. ‘But I think the heat is off her now. The Uzbek’s dealing with me direct.’ This argument might be valid, but it was not very satisfactory. Then he went on, with appalling frankness, ‘In any case, you have to see it from my point of view. There’s not much I can do about it, and even if I could, would I want to?’

  I realised, with a chill, what he must mean. If Dyadya did not have Julian to focus on, he would look elsewhere: to Anatoli’s wife, his son, Sveta. As far as Anatoli was concerned, Dyadya’s misapprehension had been a useful one. I decided not to tell him that Julian had already seen the Uzbek herself.

  ‘You could see her,’ I said reproachfully. ‘Next time you’re in Europe, go to London, sort out the money, the flat, the whole lot. Make a clean break of it.’

  His eyes opened, slitted between their puffy lids. ‘That would suit you, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It would. I’d prefer it if you could call the Uzbek off, but I can see any disclaimers on your part are likely to renew his interest, so I hope you’ll settle your differences rapidly, and successfully.’

  We had just passed a triumphal arch and were driving up one of the great boulevards towards the centre of the city. Anatoli said, ‘We’ll put you in a taxi somewhere here on Kutuzovsky, so you can make your own way to your hotel. It’s better we don’t turn up there together. Have you any money?’

  I realised that my wallet was still in my jacket pocket; they had not even examined my passport. With luck, they would have had no idea who I was. Anatoli spoke in Russian to the driver, instructing him where to stop and then turned towards me.

  ‘It’s the last thing I’ll do for her. I’ll come to London next month and sort things out. Give me your card. I’ll fax you when I’m coming.’

  It was on this surreal note that our meeting ended, as if it had been a business affair, with an exchange
of cards.

  35

  I made no attempt to join the morning session at the conference and Julian and I only turned up after lunch. In the hall we met Henrik who shook our hands with some relief.

  ‘You weren’t here this morning,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘He wasn’t here this morning,’ he repeated to Julian, as if I had escaped from both of them.

  She smiled dazzlingly. ‘There was no need to worry.’

  ‘I heard that you were going to talk about the Lady in a Pelisse. I thought Minna might have made you nervous.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said coldly. ‘I am going to mention the Vermeer, but I don’t know how anyone else would have known that’

  ‘Because you didn’t circulate your paper, as requested by the organisers,’ Henrik said, ‘we surmised that you had a bombshell for us.’

  ‘It’s a trick,’ Julian interjected. ‘It’s a way to ensure he attracts a big crowd for his paper, which is going to be stupendously dull.’

  ‘Ah, he’s going to back off.’ Henrik had no sense of humour.

  ‘No, I was joking. I know nothing about it.’

  For whatever reason, or lack of one, I had been assigned to speak in the large hall where the plenary sessions were held and the room was full. Julian seated herself in the front row. I couldn’t see Minna.

  In the way of continental academia, Henrik introduced me, listing my interests and publications, while at the same time emphasising my lack of permanent standing in the university world. I was an outsider, a maverick from whom fireworks could be expected, which solid professors like himself would eschew.

  There is no doubt that what had happened to me in the previous twenty or so hours had its effect on the delivery of my paper. The essence was as I had written it in the calm of my office a week earlier, but the style and so its impact was the result of my adventures. Escape from death puts you on a high. The flow of adrenaline through the body elates you, so you feel invincible.

  In my paper I had given a sizable chunk of time to the Litvak Lady, as an illustration of an argument about aesthetic value and the concept of authenticity. It was the hope of hearing this that had produced such a large audience.

  I began by putting a slide of the Vermeer on the screen.

  ‘This is a detective story,’ I said, ‘of how I found that the Lady in a Pelisse is not what it seems, and not what we have taken it to be for the last seventy years. The process of decoding it was a mixture of intuition and reasoning which I shall trace for you now.’

  The first stage was an examination of the painting as a work of art, pure connoisseurship. I had a series of slides, the first a view of the whole, then a number of blow-ups of the details that first aroused my unease, the clumsy hand, the odd perspective of the chair. The visual is always more convincing that the oral, and these images made a strong impression.

  I went on to the historical sources for the attribution, to show how negligible they were. It was based merely on tradition, going back no further than the 1920s when the painting had been sold to Litvak by Schall.

  ‘Here,’ I said, ‘I thought I had the answer. Let me remind you of three other seventeenth-century Dutch works (among others) that Schall had sold for great sums and which have subsequently been revealed as fakes.’

  I flashed on the screen three paintings, a Rembrandt, a Franz Hals and a Pieter de Hooch which had disappeared, disgraced, from galleries in the post-war period. My audience could see what was coming, just as I had, so there was surprise when I said, ‘But I was wrong. In this case, Schall sold a genuine seventeenth-century masterpiece. The fact that he assigned it to Vermeer, an attribution that Litvak accepted, was an error, but not fraud.’

  I returned to the provenance of the Lady with the sale catalogue of 1696, ‘A Lady in a Fur signed IMEER’. I read out the passage from Minna’s monograph; then a similar claim made for the Berlin Lady with a Pearl Earring. I placed on the screen blow-ups of the signatures, the Litvak J VER MEER, the Berlin I MEER.

  ‘I think we can agree that Berlin has it,’ I said. ‘I hope I have now demonstrated that the Litvak painting stands before us without a history. We have no record of it before the 1920s. So here it is, without baggage, for us to appreciate and evaluate, using all the ancient skills of connoisseurship and the modern techniques of science to validate it. What I am going to demonstrate today is that the work is, in fact, by Pieter van den Bergh, that it was executed in deliberate imitation of Vermeer, and must have been painted around 1690. Van den Bergh was a generation younger than Vermeer. The older man lived in Delft from 1632 to 1675; van den Bergh was born in Amsterdam in 1650 and lived to a great age, dying there in 1735. Van den Bergh was a highly gifted painter, who would paint to demand in the ancient or modern style. We have a contract signed by him, dated 1685, in which he agreed to paint his sitter, an Amsterdam merchant of the Dutch East India Company, who seems to have developed pretensions, “in the style of van Dyke”. Here is the result.’ I put a picture onto the screen. ‘It has never deceived in the way that the Lady has, for though it is a very skilful imitation of van Dyke, the costumes, and indeed the date, set it half a century later than the master. Van den Bergh was also responsible for the decoration of a salon in the country palace of the Princes of Orange, since lost, but which was described in admiring terms for its imitation of the Chinese style.

  ‘It is one thing to say van den Bergh had the skill to imitate Vermeer and to paint the Litvak Lady, quite another to prove that he did so. But there are a number of links connecting him with the painting. The first is merely indicative. We have a very interesting entry in the diary of an English traveller who visited Delft in 1691, hoping to see some of the works of Vermeer, now dead for sixteen years. None were available for him to admire, and he writes that he was recommended to visit the atelier of Heer van den Bergh in Amsterdam, who had recently executed works in that style. Unfortunately for us, Mr Timothy Morrison did not follow up this advice, but we can legitimately deduce that van den Bergh was known to produce paintings in the style of Vermeer, or perhaps, since we know of none, apart, I would suggest, from the Lady, he had recently produced a single example.

  “We can get even closer to the Litvak painting by examining the circumstances of van den Bergh’s life, which was the subject of a masterly French doctorat d’etat in 1970. Considerable documentation exists on this painter for several reasons: he made a good marriage; he was litigious and his will and inventory on death have been preserved. He was also peripherally involved in a notorious murder case in 1692, for which records have survived. The victim was a prostitute, named Elizabeta Vrielynk, who was his favourite model. Once we have been given this information, we can look for her among his works of this period. The first candidate is the most obvious one: it has always been entitled Courtesan.’

  A close up of the Courtesan’s face appeared on the screen.

  ‘Then there is the View of a Courtyard, now in Dresden.’

  I showed the whole painting and then a close-up of the woman, seated with a basket of fruit in her lap, placing the images side by side.

  ‘What I am doing here,’ I commented, ‘is the contrary of all art criticism. I am not looking at technique or skill or style. I am looking for the real thing: the woman who is here represented. Is the courtesan the woman in the courtyard? I think that in these two cases we can see the same distinctive and attractive features. Here is another example I have found. It is a work in a private collection which was lent to the exhibition of Dutch genre painters at the Met four years ago. It is an interior scene, a vanitas picture, which is dated 1688. She, I think, makes the clearest link between the two other works and the Lady.’

  The three close-ups of the woman’s head were joined on screen by the Litvak head. The resemblance was remarkable.

  ‘I now want to leave the work of art as an identity document and return to more familiar territory.’ Here I took details from these paintings to illustrate van den Bergh’s style and techniques. I showed ho
w the brush strokes of the Lady, the characteristic loose dabs of paint, could be paralleled with similar techniques in van den Bergh’s works. The slides flashed in a rapid exchange from Vermeer to van den Bergh and back.

  So even at its inception, I argued, the painting was meant to look like what it was not. At that stage it was an honest fake in financial terms, as its value was set as a painting in the style of Vermeer, and may have fetched far more than an original. Later, as I went on to show, different intentions captured the work. It was retouched in the nineteenth century after Vermeer had become fashionable. These additions were made, almost certainly, with the purpose of deceiving, of emphasising the Vermeerian elements, particularly in the yellow tones. It was at this time that the false signature was added, I argued, as van den Bergh never used false signatures. I won’t go here into my analysis of the social changes that produce an evolution in taste which selects certain painters of the past to make their works the icons of a later time. I refer you to my paper published in a collection with the trickily unacademic title The Arts of Deception, by the Yale University Press. I went on to show that the financial motivation for the ‘improvements’ of the work was reinforced by the even more powerful factor of pride of possession.

  In support of my thesis, I turned to the evidence of science. ‘Those of you who are experts on this period will be aware that until now no scientific tests are recorded in the literature about the Litvak Vermeer. This is not because the picture has been above question. Many of the points that I have brought to your attention today were first raised in a series of articles in the ’sixties. It is rather because the Foundation which owned the painting was resistant to the running of such tests. However, I can now reveal that in fact the work has been subjected to scientific analysis over the years. I was alerted to the existence of such material by an article by the Director of the Litvak Foundation which affirmed that all such tests supported a mid-seventeenth-century date for the work. But where were they? By various means, not dissimilar to those employed by investigative journalists, I managed to obtain copies.’