by Susan Daitch
Arriving in Chelsea, about half an hour late, Demetrius locked the car, and we crossed the street to the Ludwig-Sinclair Gallery. The building was enormous, a brick hulk painted battleship-gray that belied the kind of businesses that rented space in its interior. It might have housed other galleries, or the consortium might have owned the entire property. Just as in the Birdwell recording of years ago, there was no signage indicating that the gallery was there. You had to know about it. I had its information, thanks to my former job, and could pass. Tipping Breakfast at Tiffany’s–size sunglasses down my nose, I looked up at a security camera, and we were in.
There were several layers of security at the Ludwig-Sinclair Gallery, and those were only the ones I could see. There was a guard at the front desk who took our pictures after verifying that we had an appointment, a locked elevator to the top floor, another guard there, and doors that wouldn’t open unless we swiped the timed temporary passes we’d been administered upon entering.
The gallery was a huge white space, with other rooms branching off to the sides and to the back. The receptionist was a dead ringer for Ashby’s assistant, Sheilagh, though her nails were salmon pink and her hair more platinum than yellow-gold. Both were devoted, as far as I could tell, to their employers. It was a kind of loyalty that had no cracks, no matter what the origins of Sheilagh and her double; they found homes in the world of their employers, even if full membership would always elude them. I forgot Sheilagh II’s name as soon as she introduced herself. She did not escort me to the back but rang for a young man, who appeared from one of the side rooms. He spoke with a German accent and wasted no time taking me to the back to look at the Basquiat. This wasn’t the plan, but there was nothing I could do about it. I looked back and mouthed silently to Demetrius, “You must respect ze bear.”
We walked through the exhibition space, where a new show in the very early stages of installation was being prepared. Art handlers have to be physically strong, and there were four of them taking measurements and moving crates. They often look like hockey players, but they also have to know how to move and install very fragile objects. One of them was an extremely tall woman, the antithesis of the receptionist, but we did not exchange smiles. The art handlers here looked more serious than the guys at Claiborne’s, who were mostly freelance and came and went. As I walked past one, I noticed that he had tattoos at the corners of his eyes: panthers.
I spent about thirty minutes with the Basquiats. There were several. One had a stitched area and found objects were glued onto the canvas, a future conservator’s nightmare. On another, the artist had written, “asbestos, radium, priceless art, 400 yen,” among other words and references. A guard stayed with me while I examined it, or pretended to. They were in good condition. Oil stick and acrylic, spray paint, will cause inherent vice problems later on. The drawings made with charcoal and graphite were another matter. These substances are highly friable; they crumble into powdery layers. One drawing, in particularly perilous shape, was light-struck around the edges, which is what happens when paper is exposed to light—it darkens and can crumble at the slightest touch. Poof! It’s gone! At the moment these were not my problems, but I wondered about the exhibit and sale of such damaged works. The gallery was betting that prices for Basquiats were so high you could sell anything, and it was right. I made some notes, or pretended to. When I was done, the guard called the young man with the German accent to escort me back to the front.
Demetrius was leaning on the front desk flirting with the blonde. I should have warned him not to talk to anyone. If she asked him, for example, what was on the block at Claiborne’s, not only would he have no idea but his conception of “going on the block” might have something to do with a series of jail cells, maybe a reference to the guillotine, but nothing to do with the sale of a Courbet or a Hopper. Pantherman was looking at his phone, then back at Demetrius, and also glancing at me. We needed to get out of there immediately.
Speaking an urgent “Yes, we’ll be there right away” into my silent phone, I thanked the German and the woman, who smiled extra nicely at Demetrius. He lingered. More chat. I wanted to kill him. Pantherman was walking in our direction when the woman announced, “The lift is here. I’ve unlocked it for you.” Running was a bad idea, but I walked as quickly and with as large business-like steps as my five-inch heels would allow me to. The German spoke in clipped, hostile tones to the art handler, put his hand on the man’s elbow. Not only should he not be on the phone when he was supposed to be working; he had stacked a sculpture made of movable parts in such a way that the whole thing could fall apart. It was worth millions.
“Be careful next time if you want there should be a next time,” I heard as the elevator doors opened, then closed. It was the German speaking, I was pretty sure, but the voice was barely audible from where we stood, and it was also possible that the speaker was the man with the panther eyes, who didn’t give a fuck about a sculpture or the job. Putting me out of the picture was, for his actual bosses, a priority, as he shoved any interference out of the way.
“Moron!” I whispered at Demetrius once we were safely inside the elevator. Of course, he thought I was jealous. I put my finger to my lips. No talking. Kissing was possible. The security cameras wouldn’t care. Like when Eve Kendall kisses Roger Thornhill on the train in North by Northwest to shield his face from his pursuers. To whoever might be chuckling while watching the security footage, our faces would be blocked from view. The Valentine hire could be in the next elevator down. We sprinted across the street into Demetrius’s 1990 Audi, but it wasn’t until the car was zipping down the West Side Highway that I said anything to Demetrius. Otherwise we sat in silence, not sure what to do next.
“So that was useless,” I said, opening and shutting the glove compartment as if I might find answers in there.
“Could you please stop doing that?”
“I’m not even going to ask if you got anything from her desk.”
“There wasn’t much on it. Whatever you’re looking for is probably on the computer. She only left for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, and those characters hanging the show were in my face half the time. But I picked up this.”
He handed me a list of names printed on heavy ivory-colored paper so thick it was almost cardboard, deckle-edged, gold border. It was a private showing for about a dozen choice clients, scheduled just before Art Basel Miami Beach. Neither Valentine, Ashby, nor Fieldston appeared on the list. I was crazy to think that they would have. Valentine was muscle for hire who got some art tips and profits that he didn’t really know what to do with. Ashby and Fieldston were the gilded personal butlers. None of them had the kind of money that the people on the list enjoyed. There was one name that was familiar: Ilya Grilke. It had appeared on the list of jobs that Oscar Kronstadt had left for me.
“You know it wasn’t all contemporary art being trucked back and forth.” Demetrious took a cigarette from a heretofore undisclosed Marlborough soft pack.
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t see them bring shit into the back room?”
“No, Demetrius, I didn’t. There were a number of smaller rooms adjoining the main exhibition space. We figured this out beforehand. I explained the layout to you.”
“So you didn’t see the Three Musketeers clocked in bubble wrap?”
“No, I didn’t.” I ran through a list of Pop artists who may have painted larger-than-life candy bars. To my knowledge, none of them ever painted a 3 Musketeers—or a PayDay or a Mars, for that matter.
“It wasn’t a painting of a chocolate bar, for Christ’s sake. While you were in the back, some guys brought in a painting. It was hard to see through the bubble wrap, but it looked like a picture of a child princess—blond hair, she’s in a big dress, front and center, a female dwarf, and a couple of guys dressed like the Three Musketeers.”
Chapter 31
Garfield motioned for me to follow him, walking down a hall to an elevator that descended to a
subbasement, home of the Evidence Room. The guard at the front nodded at Garfield, but we signed in anyway, and he handed us a box of plastic gloves. The Evidence Room was spectacular, a purgatory of boxy old computers, firearms of all kinds from all nations, Ziploc bags of bullet casings, a couple of prosthetic limbs, broken electric guitars that looked as if they had been used as bludgeons. I half expected to see a brain or two in formaldehyde wired to a Jacob’s Ladder and speaking through a dusty woofer. Lights on motion sensors flicked on and off as we made our way down a central corridor, floor-to-ceiling metal file shelves on either side. The expansive basement warehouse seemed to go on forever, a sort of support structure underneath the actual city, objects marking every crime that had ever been committed since the Lenape traded with the Dutch. I know that wasn’t literally true. It just felt that way.
Behind a rack of cellphones, leaning against a wall, was the disgraced Las Meninas cloaked in bubble wrap. Swaddled in a reinforced wooden crate worthy of the priceless thing it was supposed to be, the painting had arrived in New York with an entourage of private security. Now it was just a piece of canvas evidence, a notch above trash, a curiosity at best, monetary value hovering close to zero. The forgery’s actual origins might not have been foreign at all. The JFK sticker, the bill of lading—all could be phonus balonus, part of the act. The painting could actually have arrived on the No. 6 train. Garfield admitted that I might have some arcane knowledge beyond the chemical analysis that forensic labs would perform. He was going to let me take a crack at it.
“I can’t leave you here alone, but let me know if you need anything and I’ll try to get it for you,” he said.
I unstuck the tape that held the bubble wrap in place and carefully removed all that plastic, tossing it to the floor. The impostor was in sad shape. It had been manhandled and some of the paint had rubbed off, so it looked like a hodgepodge of seventeenth-century-Spaniards peering through a twenty-first-century fog. The new queen was dead; long live the old queen.
“How the mighty have fallen,” said Garfield.
“Are the folks from Ludwig-Sinclair going to jail?”
“What do you think? Maybe someday but not for now; no one is out on bail pending. You know Ludwig-Sinclair isn’t a person or even a pair of people. The owners are out of the country. Lawyers are collecting mountains of documents no one will ever read.”
Las Meninas may have been recovered, but it wasn’t actually Las Meninas. There are many copies of Las Meninas. Goya painted his version of the family of Don Luis de Borbón, the brother of the king of Spain. He’s seen as an old man playing cards while his much younger wife is having her hair fixed, and, as with the original, Goya included himself in the picture, just as Velázquez did. Picasso painted a version—a suite of fifty-eight versions, in fact—and Richard Hamilton did a version of that. None of these, however, would be confused with the original or were intended to be.
Whoever sent the copy to Claiborne’s hacked into the Prado’s email server and impersonated its director and staff. Because all communication had been done electronically and by regular mail or fax, no one at Claiborne’s—not Ashby, not Fieldston, no one—ever had a live conversation with anyone at the museum. None of the arrangements, agreements, or contracts had been made face to face or by phone or Skype. And, because the shipping of the supposed national treasure was controversial, the logical secrecy surrounding its journey worked in the forgers’ favor. What spooked me was the reason Claiborne’s was chosen for the “restoration” that would put the copy into circulation: me. The art hackers specifically requested Stella Da Silva, whom they knew by reputation as “one of the best.” No false modesty intended, but this simply isn’t true. There was a reason I was selected, but it was unknown to me.
That night at Claiborne’s, I was able to look at Las Meninas for only a few minutes before it vanished. Had I been able to do a thorough condition report, I might have discovered that the painting wasn’t the original, though if I assumed that the Nazi stamp was a genuine part of the painting’s story, I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to come to that conclusion, perhaps longer. The assumption was that, coming from the Prado—and no one questioned the delivery, transport, and packing––it had come from Madrid, and was, of course, genuine. In order to pass, the canvas, wood stretchers, lining, frame—everything would have to have been constructed with meticulous attention to art-historical detail. Investigating how an object is made is a window into its history, and the story of its maker as well.
The painting should have undergone X-ray fluorescence to determine what, if anything, was underneath it. Forgers will sometimes buy old paintings at flea markets, then paint over them, so that at least the canvas, stretchers, and frames are original, but finding a seventeenth-century painting this size in a flea market would be close to impossible.
I looked at the nails and hooks. They appeared to be very old, but hundred-year-old nails found at a flea market, say, are old but not that old. They weren’t new in the 1600s, before the concept of a hardware store was invented. At what point does the exact number of years become irrelevant? Two hundred years’ difference is a blink. Who cares if nails are from 1650 or 1850? One probably doesn’t look so very different from the other. But the difference between 1810 and 2010 is a technological gulf the size of the Mariana Trench.
“Without the tools to do a chemical analysis, I have to rely on what I can see with the naked eye,” I said to Garfield.
“Don’t get your eyestems tangled.” He was nose to nose with Maribola’s face.
“There is some equipment I could use.” I was thinking about large, room-size machines that could be accessed only by moving the painting to the science department of a museum equipped with gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers that would tell me the exact chemical composition of the pigments used. Garfield wouldn’t hear of the painting’s leaving the premises.
“If these folks could talk”—he pointed at the dwarf, the princess, the painter himself—“we would have all the answers.”
“In some ways, they can talk. If you can get me a portable polarizing microscope, a portable fluorescent X-ray for identifying pigments, and a portable FTIR spectrometer—Fourier Transform Infrared,” I said, explaining, what FTIR stood for—“for identifying compounds, proteins derived from animals, varnishes, that would be a start.”
“Done.” Garfield wrote down my directions and the sources of the apparatus I would need, then pulled out his phone. There was no signal in the basement, so he let me know that he would step outside for a few minutes.
“It can take time to identify elements,” I warned him.
“Time is something you don’t have.”
I believed him. Lights flicked on and off as he made his way down the corridor of shelving.
While Garfield was out of the way, I looked around for something to slice off a section of paint, a chip that wouldn’t be noticed. There was a shelf of bagged box cutters, many still streaked with dried blood. Taking off one of my gloves, I quickly grabbed a cutter, opened the bag, and sliced off a half inch or so of paint. No one would notice, but now my prints were on the knife and the baggy, so, in lieu of contamination galore, I pocketed the whole shebang, hoping there were no security cameras or exit metal detectors in operation. Then I turned the painting around and photographed the stamp. Looking at it more closely, I saw that there was a yellowish outline, a sort of halo, to the ink that looked as if it had been applied by hand to give the appearance of black ink that had bled out and faded over time. This kind of yellowed halo surrounding black ink, known as iron-gall ink, was part of the controversy surrounding the Vinland Map from the 1500s (maybe), showing Viking exploration and cartography skills. Even though the ink was analyzed, camps have remained deeply divided as to the authenticity of the map, in part based on the chemical composition of the iron-gall ink and its yellow outline. I was less concerned with the ink than I was with the stamp itself.
“It’s going to take a
few hours,” Garfield yelled back down the aisle, his voice echoing.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be back.”
Chapter 32
The fellow, an older man, had a shiny pockmarked nose that brought to mind the word vermiculite. Plugs extended his earlobes several inches, so if you thought he was too old for that look you’d be mistaken. Gillespie “Gil” Trunk was the only remaining rubber- stamp maker in the city, and he had a shop in downtown Brooklyn. Had there been others at one time? Probably, but I can’t imagine the production of small rubber stamps was ever a gold mine, with its own district visited by tourists and the curious. Still, I had to hand it to anyone who kept his store going while wrecking balls and towers loomed overhead. Trunk’s was a sliver of an establishment sandwiched between a Dunkin’ Donuts and a store that sold legal documents, forms, and office supplies to Court Street lawyers. It, too, was dying. Most forms can now be printed on the Internet, and few people, apart from grade-school teachers, had any need or desire for rubber stamps for fun or for business. If the general population rarely used paper anymore, manufacturers of paper clips, staples, rubber stamps, all that kind of ancillary stuff: their days were numbered, just like any other small storefront business.
I had guessed that the forger, if he worked out of New York and wanted a Nazi stamp, would come here to have it made. There was no place else. He could have gotten an original online, but that would have been expensive and not necessary. The stamp was a signal; it didn’t need to be the real deal.
Trunk Stamps was filled from top to bottom with arrays of stamps. Boxes commissioned from businesses that were never picked up lay sadly covered with dust. You could tell they were old, because the address stamps requested (the label was on the box lid) bore only seven-digit phone numbers, no Web address or nine-digit ZIP code. This was some old-ass merch, but there was some good stuff if anyone cared to dig. There were novelty stamps of pointing fingers, coffee cups with steam coming out of them, guns, smiley faces and frowning faces, high heels, bicycles ridden by men with mustaches, the face of the Coney Island laughing boy in a variety of sizes, as well as his offspring, Alfred E. Neuman from Mad magazine, a whole bin of DENIED, which I could read backward. Stamps were custom-made in the back.