by Donna Leon
Brunetti didn’t want to bring up the idea of Matsuko’s involvement, at least not yet, and so he merely asked, ‘How?’
‘It’s a simple enough process.’ Her voice changed, taking on the quick certainty of the expert. ‘Do you know anything about pottery or ceramics?’
‘Very little,’ he admitted.
‘The pieces that were stolen were all from the second century before Christ,’ she began by way of explanation, but he interrupted her.
‘Over two thousand years ago?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes. The Chinese had very beautiful pottery, even then, and very sophisticated means of making it. But the pieces that were taken were simple things, at least then, when they were made. They’re unglazed, hand-painted, and they usually have the figures of animals. Primary colours: red and white, often on a black background.’ She pushed herself up from the sofa and walked over to the bookcase, where she stood for a few minutes, considering, turning her head rhythmically as she studied the titles in front of her. Finally she took a book from a shelf directly in front of her and brought it back to Brunetti. She turned to the index, then opened it and flipped through the pages until she found the one she wanted. She passed the open book to Brunetti.
He saw a photo of a gourd-shaped, squat, covered jar, no idea given of its scale. The decoration on the jar was divided up into three horizontal bands: the neck and cover, a broad centre field, and a third band that ran to the bottom. In the broad central field, placed just on the widest part of the vase, he saw a wide view of an open-mouthed animal figure that might have been a stylized wolf, or a fox, even a dog, his white body standing upright and lurching to the left, back legs spread wide and raised forelegs stretched out on either side, The sense of motion created by his limbs was reflected in a series of geometric curves and swirls sketched in a repeated pattern across the front of the vase and, presumably, around to its unpictured back. The rim, he could see, was pitted and chipped, but the central image was intact, and it was very beautiful. The inscription said only that it was Han Dynasty, which meant nothing to Brunetti.
‘Is this the sort of thing you find in Xian?’ he asked.
‘It’s from Western China, yes, but not from Xian. It’s a rare piece; I doubt we’ll find anything like it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because two thousand years have passed.’ That, she seemed to believe, was more than sufficient explanation.
‘Tell me about how you’d copy it,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the photo.
‘First, you’d need an expert potter, someone who had actually had time and opportunity to study the ones that have been found, seen them close up, worked with them, perhaps worked at finding them, or worked at displaying them. That would allow him to have seen actual fragments, so he would have a clear idea of the thickness of the different parts. Then you’d need a very good painter, someone who could copy a style, catch the mood in a vase like this, and then reproduce it so closely that it would appear to be the same piece that had been in the exhibition.’
‘How hard would that be to do?’
‘Very hard. But there are men, and women, who are trained for it and who do it superbly well.’
Brunetti placed the point of his finger just above the central figure. ‘This one looks worn; it looks really old. How do they copy that?’
‘Oh, that’s relatively easy. They bury the piece in the ground; some of them use raw sewage and bury it there.’ Seeing Brunetti’s instinctive disgust, she explained. ‘It corrodes the paint and wears it away faster. Then they chip tiny pieces away, usually from the edges or from the bottom.’ To explain, she pointed to a small chip on the top rim of the vase in the photo, just where it met the cylindrical cover, and on the bottom, where the vase touched the ground.
‘Is it difficult?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, not to make a piece that will fool the layman. It’s much harder to make something that will fool an expert.’
‘Like you?’ he asked.’
‘Yes,’ she said, not bothering with the pretence of false modesty.
‘How can you tell?’ he asked, then expanded the question. ‘What are some of the things that tell you it’s a fake? Things that other people wouldn’t see?’
Before she answered, she flipped through a few pages of the book, pausing now and again to look at a photo. Finally she snapped it closed and looked across at him. ‘There’s the paint, whether the colour is right for the period when the vase was supposed to have been made. And the line, if it shows hesitation in the execution. That suggests that the painter was trying to copy something and had to think about it, pause while drawing to get it right. The original artists didn’t have to meet a standard; they just painted what they pleased, so their line is always fluid. If they didn’t like it, they probably broke the pot.’
He picked up immediately on the use of the casual word. ‘Pot or vase?’
She laughed outright at his question. ‘They’re vases now, two thousand years later, but I think they were just pots to the people who made them and used them.’
‘What did they use them for?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Originally.’
She shrugged. ‘For whatever people ever used pots for: storing rice, carrying water, storing grain. That one with the animal has a top, so they wanted whatever they kept in it to be safe, probably from mice. That suggests rice or wheat.’
‘How valuable are they?’ Brunetti asked.
She sat back in the sofa and crossed her legs. ‘I don’t know how to answer that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you have to have a market to have a price.’
‘And?’
‘And there’s no market in these pieces.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because there are so few of them. The one in the book is at the Metropolitan in New York. There might be three or four in other museums in different parts of the world.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, and Brunetti could picture her running through lists and catalogues. When she opened them, she said, ‘I can think of three: two in Taiwan, and one in a private collection.’
‘No others?’ Brunetti asked.
She shook her head. ‘None.’ But then she added, ‘At least none that are on display or in a collection that is known about.’
‘And private collections?’ he asked.
‘Perhaps, but one of us would probably have heard about it, and there’s nothing in the literature that mentions any others. So I think it’s a pretty safe guess there are no more than those.’
‘What would one of the museum pieces be worth?’ he asked, then explained when he saw her begin to shake her head, ‘I know, I know, from what you’ve said, it would be impossible to put an exact price on it, but can you give me some idea of what the value would be?’
It took her a while to think of an answer. When she did, she said, ‘The price would be whatever the seller asked or whatever the buyer was willing to pay. The market prices are in dollars - a hundred thousand? Two? More? But there really are no prices because there are so few pieces of this quality. It would depend entirely on how much the buyer wanted to have the piece, and on how much money he had.’
Brunetti translated her prices into millions of lire: two hundred million, three? Before he could complete this speculation, she continued.
‘But that’s only for the pottery, the vases. To the best of my knowledge, none of the statues of the soldiers has disappeared, but if that were to happen, there really is no price that could be put on it.’
‘But there’s also no way the owner could show it publicly, is there?’ Brunetti asked.
She smiled. ‘I’m afraid there are people who don’t care about showing things publicly. They just want to possess, be sure that a certain piece is theirs. I’ve no idea if they’re prompted by love of beauty or the desire of ownership, but, believe me, there are people who simply want to have a piece in their collection, even if no one ever sees it. Aside from themselves, that is.’ She saw how scept
ical he looked at this, so she added, ‘Remember that Japanese billionaire, the one who wanted to be buried with his Van Gogh?’
Brunetti remembered having read something about it, last year. The man was said to have bought the painting at auction and then had it written in his will that he was to be buried with the painting, or, to put things in the proper order of importance, the painting was to be buried with him. He remembered something about a storm in the art world over this. ‘In the end, he gave up and said he wouldn’t do it, didn’t he?’
‘Well, that’s what was reported,’ she agreed. ‘I never believed the story, but I mention him to give you an idea of how some people feel about their possessions, how they believe that their right of ownership is the absolute measure or the chief purpose of collecting, not the beauty of the object.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid I’m not explaining this very well, but, as I said, it doesn’t make any sense to me.’
Brunetti realized he still didn’t have a sufficient answer to his original question. ‘But I still don’t understand how you know that something is an original or a copy.’ Before she could answer, he added, ‘A friend of mine told me about that sixth sense you get, that something just looks right or wrong to you. But that’s very subjective. What I mean is this: if two experts disagree, one saying the piece is original and another saying it isn’t, how do you resolve the difference? Call in a third expert and take a vote?’ He smiled to show he was joking, but he could think of no other way out of the situation.
Her answering smile showed she got the joke. ‘No, we call in the technicians. There are a number of tests we can perform to prove the age of an object.’ With a change of voice, she asked, ‘Are you sure you want to listen to all of this?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘I’ll try not to be too pedantic about it,’ she said, pulling her feet up under her on the sofa. ‘There are all sorts of tests that we can do on paintings: analysis of the chemical composition of paints to see if they’re right for the time when the picture is said to have been painted, X-rays to see what’s underneath the surface layer of a painting, even Carbon-14 dating.’ He nodded to show that he was familiar with all of these.
‘But we’re not talking about paintings,’ he said.
‘No, we’re not. The Chinese never worked in oils, at least not in the periods covered in the show. Most of the objects were ceramic or metal. I’ve never been interested in the metal pieces, well, not very much, but I do know it’s almost impossible to cheek them scientifically. For them, you need the eye.’
‘But not for ceramic?’
‘Of course you need the expert eye, but, luckily, the techniques for checking authenticity are as sophisticated as they are for painting.’ She paused a moment and asked again, ‘Do you want me to be technical?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he said, finding his pen and, in the doing, feeling very much like a student.
‘The chief technique we use — and the most reliable - is called thermoluminescence. All we have to do is extract about thirty miligrams of ceramic from any piece we want to test.’ She anticipated his question by explaining, ‘It’s easy. We take it from the back of a plate or from the underside of a vase or a statue. The amount we need is barely noticeable, just enough to get a sample. Then a photo multiplier will tell us, with an accuracy of about ten to fifteen per cent, the age of the material.’
‘How does it work?’ Brunetti asked. ‘I mean, on what principle?’
‘When clay is fired, well, if it’s fired above about 300 degrees centigrade, then all the electrons in the material it’s made out of will be - I suppose there’s no better word for it — they’ll be erased. The heat destroys their electric charges. Then, from that point on, they begin to pick up new electrical charges. That’s what the photo multiplier measures, how much energy they’ve absorbed. The older the material is, the brighter it glows.’
‘And this is accurate?’
‘As I said, to about fifteen per cent. That means, with a piece that’s supposed to be two thousand years old, we can get a reading that will tell us, to within about three hundred years, when it was made - well, when it was last fired.’
‘And did you do this test on the pieces while you were in China?’
She shook her head. ‘No, there’s no equipment like that in Xian.’
‘So how can you be sure?’
She smiled when she answered him. ‘The eye. I looked at them, and I was fairly sure they were fake.’
‘But to be sure? Did you ask anyone else?’
‘I told you. I wrote to Semenzato. And when I didn’t get an answer, I came back here.’ She saved him the question. ‘Yes, I brought samples with me, samples from the three pieces I was most suspicious of and from the other two that I think might be false.’
‘Did Semenzato know you had these samples?’
‘No. I never mentioned it to him.’
‘Where are they?’
‘I stopped in California on the way here and left one set with a friend of mine who’s a curator at the Getty. They have the equipment, so I asked him to run them through for me.’
‘And did he?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘I called him when I got home from the hospital. All three of the pieces that I thought were fake were made within the last few years.’
‘And the other two?’
‘One of them is genuine. The other is a fake.’
‘Is one test enough?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes.’
Even if it weren’t sufficient proof, Brunetti realized, what had happened to her and Semenzato was.
After a moment, Brett asked, ‘Now what?’
‘We try to find out who killed Semenzato and who the two men who came here were.’
Her look was level and very sceptical. Finally, she asked, ‘And what are the chances of that?’
He pulled from his inner pocket the police photos of Salvatore La Capra and passed them over to Brett. ‘Was this one of them?’
She took the photos and studied them for a minute. ‘No,’ she said simply and handed them back to Brunetti.
‘They’re Sicilian,’ she said. ‘They’re probably back home now, paid off and happy with the wife and kids. Their trip was a success; they did both things they were sent to do, scare me and kill Semenzato.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense, does it?’ he asked.
‘What doesn’t make any sense?’
‘I’ve been talking to people who knew him and knew about him, and it seems that Semenzato was mixed up in a number of things that a museum director shouldn’t have had anything to do with.’
‘Like what?’
‘He was a silent partner in an antique business. Other people have told me his professional opinion was for sale.’ Brett apparently needed no explanation of what the second meant.
‘Why is that important?’
‘If their intention had been to kill him, they would have done that first, then warned you to keep quiet or the same thing would happen to you. But they didn’t do that; they went to you first. And if that had worked, then Semenzato would never have known, at least not officially, about the substitution.’
‘You’re still assuming that he was part of this,’ Brett said. When Brunetti nodded his agreement, she added, ‘I think that’s a big assumption.’
‘It doesn’t make sense any other way,’ Brunetti explained. ‘How else would they have known to come to you, known about the appointment?’
‘And if I had still told him, even after they did this to me?’ He was surprised that she wouldn’t have seen this and was reluctant to explain it to her now. He didn’t answer.
‘Well?’ she insisted.
‘If Semenzato was a part of this, it’s pretty clear what would have happened if you spoke to him,’ Brunetti said, still reluctant to be the one to give it voice.
‘I still don’t understand.’
‘They would have killed you, not him,’ he said
simply.
He watched her face as he spoke, saw it reach her eyes, first as shock and disbelief. After a moment, she understood, and her expression stiffened, her lips compressing and drawing her mouth tight.
Luckily, Flavia chose that time to come into the living room, bringing with her the flowery scent of soap or shampoo or one of those things women use to make themselves smell wonderful at the wrong time of the day. Why the morning and not the night?
She was wearing a simple brown woollen dress tied by a bright orange scarf wrapped around her waist a few times and knotted at her side, its end hanging below her knees and swinging as she walked. She wore no make-up and, seeing her without it, Brunetti wondered why she ever bothered with it.