White Lead

by Susan Daitch

  I picked up a stamp of a filmstrip, complete with sprocket holes, a nice heavy stamp, though what I would do with it I had no idea.

  “Do you know some kids come in here and they don’t even know what a filmstrip is. Vinyl records, okay, typewriter parts, okay, but when I hear ‘What’s that?’ and they don’t know a piece of film stock from highway markings, I want to throw them out of my shop.”

  Some old geezers would say that such an incident was a sign that they should retire, but not Trunk. He would throw acid first. I put down a twenty, and said I would buy the film stamp. He put the twenty in an ancient cash register but gave me no change. That stamp was an expensive icebreaker. I showed him the picture of the back of the Velázquez from my phone. The resolution wasn’t great, but you could clearly make out the close-up of the stamp.

  “Any chance you made this for someone?” I was careful to show Gil Trunk my phone without handing it to him. He peered, frowned, squinted.

  “Nazi shit? I don’t touch that stuff.” He looked permanently bewildered behind large cataracty glasses, though he was anything but confused.

  “Do you know anyone who would?”

  “Could be anyone, but I’m the only craftsman locally with that kind of skill who will do custom work on short notice.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Who are you, lady? I don’t know you. I’ve never seen you before.” Acid crept into Trunk’s voice and he looked at me as if I were new poison, one more thing that entered his shop to make life difficult when all he wanted was to be left alone with his whimsical productions. “Why is my business your business all of a sudden, on what was previously a fine Friday afternoon? I can’t remember every stamp I make.” He paused for a moment to look at his phone. “Take my advice, sweetheart: Get lost.”

  “I’m trying to find the man who did the painting that has this stamp on the back. It’s that simple.”

  “Maybe the man doesn’t want to be found.” He looked up as if to say, “You still here?”

  “I assume that’s the case, but I need to talk to him.”

  Trunk shrugged.

  The display case in front of me, the one he stood behind, held an array of individual letters, mostly Roman, but some Cyrillic, some umlauted vowels, and the B-like shape that signifies the double s in German, which was odd, because I thought this construction was somewhat archaic. Next to the alphabet stamps were pictorial Alice in Wonderland stamps: Alice holding a flamingo in order to play crocket, the Mad Hatter holding a teacup, the Cheshire Cat. Off to the left were stamps of skulls and crossbones—pirate stuff, the kinds of things people might buy for children—but the skulls gave way to stamps of Confederate flags and Sambo caricatures. The latter were nasty, and they looked new. These weren’t kitschy vintage stamps someone might save with the kind of irony with which the designer Patrick Kelly collected Aunt Jemima dolls and lawn jockeys. Trunk saw where I was looking.

  “I’m trying to stay in business. I can’t afford to pick and choose and have to take whatever clients come my way.”

  “But you don’t have to display the stamps. This is a choice.”

  “That stamp, the one you showed me, was an order that was never picked up, so it was a resale. Now you’ve made your purchase, get the hell out of my store.” I didn’t believe him. I suspected that whoever ordered the stamp did pick it up.

  “I could do that, but a little bad publicity could really throw a wet blanket on a faltering business.”

  “Go ahead. What do I care? Facebook and yelp your heart out. I’ve been smeared by all kinds of people, and I’m still here.” He took a swig from a can of Coke and looked as if he was going to throw it at me. I took out my phone and began to photograph the display case.

  “It’s not Germany, where this stuff is outlawed. It’s not illegal to make Nazi stamps.”

  “I’d like to see that stamp so I can get a clear shot of it.” I pointed to a stamp hidden behind one of the Sambos. Though it was only partially visible, it looked like a boy giving a Nazi salute, or it could have been a Boy Scout that got mixed in with Trunk’s scrambled inventory. I really had no idea. “Could you move it so the camera can get a clear image?” Trunk didn’t budge.

  “So you don’t actually have the strength of your convictions. That’s okay. They’re not such great convictions to begin with, you know. You do this work, but you don’t want anyone to know about it. Is that it?”

  “Look, I’m just trying to keep a roof over my head. If someone pays me in cash, I don’t ask any questions.”

  “Can you describe who ordered the stamp?” I put my phone almost under his nose to refresh his memory.

  “The guy looked Asian, no accent. Wore a porkpie hat and sunglasses even though it was raining. It was just a few weeks ago that he picked it up. It was a rush job, very short turnaround time—and this I can do at an extra charge, which he promised to double but didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “He wasn’t satisfied with the result. The lettering was on the small side, and the cut was shallow. The end result smeared a bit, but it happens with small-scale detail. I don’t use lasers or photo techniques. It’s all done by hand, but it’s craftsmanship you can’t find anymore, and for this you have to pay. He wanted me to do it over gratis. Forget that shit. No way.”

  Ordering the stamp must have been one of the last things the forger did to the painting, the icing on the cake, the last gesture. If he used Gil Trunk’s services, there was a good chance he was working somewhere in the city.

  “Asian as in what? Cambodian? Nepalese?”

  “How the hell should I know? Chinese. Let’s say Chinese. A cross between Oddjob and Dr. Fucking No. He left his umbrella here.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “Just a minute.”

  He disappeared into the back, and I could make out the vague outlines of the machinery used to cut the rubber stamps and turn the wooden handles on laths.

  He returned with the umbrella and a gun, which he pointed at me as he threw the umbrella. Those things are hard to throw, but he had good aim, and I ducked, then picked it up.

  “For the last time, get the hell out of my store!”

  The gun, by no means a toy, was convincing, and I departed as requested, almost tripping on some of the inventory left on the floor. Just as no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition, no one ever expects the Brolly Murders, either, and so, back on the street, I checked for a syringe hidden in the handle. No such mechanism. The umbrella was ordinary, except that it had an unfamiliar logo on the nylon covering. He could have picked it up on a bus, for all I knew, and any fingerprints would now be smeared to nothingness. I knew a couple of things about the forger. I’d say my guesses were narrowed down to several million people. I looked up from the umbrella to see a man staring at me from across Court Street. It was evening rush hour, the street was crowded, but he was looking right at me, and I could swear he had tattooed eyes. I jumped into a cab. Garfield could cover the expense.

  Chapter 33

  An officer I’d never seen before delivered the equipment, and stayed with me in the Evidence Room while I worked as per Garfield’s instructions, which was fine with me. Anyone interested in gadgets would love the futuristic-looking Agilent Handheld Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer, and when I started unpacking some of the tools of my trade the fellow assigned to me certainly had his eyestems in a tangle. He wanted to try it out on non-bagged evidence (like one of the sparkly electric guitars) as soon as I was finished. This, of course, was not to be recommended. I was glad to be back at work, sort of back at work. I wasn’t actually conserving anything. The FTIR test was the first I did on the wreck of Las Meninas. It yields fast and accurate results.

  The Agilent’s screen showed the presence of codeine, morphine, and nicotine in minute but detectable amounts. Nicotine occasionally turned up even in paintings from pre-cigarette eras, because there was a time when people could smoke in museums, and lighting u
p a Lucky in front of a Caravaggio wasn’t so strange. I would guess this surface had never been in a museum. My man had respiratory problems but still smoked, and used drugs. Also, there were metal residues, possibly as a result of car exhaust. Either he worked in a garage, which was unlikely given the quality of his work, or his studio was near a street or a parking lot.

  Next, I examined the canvas with the yellow portable X-ray, which looks like a drill without the bits. While I X-ray, I have a ritual in which I listen to another one of my father’s favorite bands, X-Ray Spex. He used to joke that he had wanted to name me Poly Styrene, after the band’s lead singer. Poly Styrene Da Silva had a certain ring to it, but neither he nor my mother was fond of the plain Polly that I would be reduced to when teachers, co-workers, friends dropped the Styrene, so the name was rejected. I sang along, impervious to the expression on the guard’s face, which so clearly spelled “weirdo.”

  And watched the world turn day-glo

  You know you know

  Stranger characters than an evidence-room guard have passed the judgment of weirdo upon me. The results of the X-ray showed high amounts of lead, and assorted other poisons: cadmium, antimony, chromium, and arsenic. If the painter was trying to use seventeenth-century pigments, antimony white and lead white would be present in the faces and hands of all the figures in Las Meninas, as well as in the princess’s white dress. Lead would be present in the Naples yellow, and cadmium in the reds and oranges used for the red decorations on the figures’ wrists. Maribola’s dress contained lead chromate in its Prussian blue, and the background was full of iron oxides in the form of raw and burnt umber. Once dried, the paint was no longer toxic, but in its wet or dry ground form, when poisons are inhaled—well, if Velázquez’s double didn’t wear a mask, he was courting a slow death. The levels of lead alone were very high. The painting couldn’t have been more toxic if it had been painted at a Nevada nuclear test site moments after a detonation.

  Velázquez was a master of glazes, and then there would be varnish made from tree resins and a solvent like turpentine and oil. His slave, Juan de Pareja, would have mixed these. The varnish turns increasingly yellow over time. It looked as if the forger did a good job of replicating it. Patinas are the most difficult of surfaces to replicate. There was also evidence of organic matter, perhaps a slice of onion added to linseed-oil glaze. Though the FTIR results confirmed some modern elements, here the forger may have imagined Velázquez’s hand guiding his. There is a reference to this technique in Primo Levi’s Periodic Table, the chapter called “Chromium,” where he writes about testing the temperature of oil when making varnish. If the onion fries, you’re done—the oil is hot enough, turn off the heat. It’s a very old technique, and one Velázquez may have used.

  When the guard wasn’t looking, I retrieved the chip of paint from its evidence baggy, borrowed from the box cutter. Garfield would take a dim view of defacing or tampering with the canvas, but it had to be done. I placed the paint chip between two thin pieces of glass and positioned it under one of the lenses of the portable microscope Garfield had provided. The fragment looked like a layer cake on one side, and the slide should have been prepared in a way that I had neither the time nor the equipment to do. I wasn’t expecting much that I didn’t already know. Adjusting the upper polarizer and looking through the eyepiece, what I saw was an image that resembled a rendering of the Burgess Shale, a record of prehistoric microbial life, evolutionary dead ends that looked like Christmas-tree ornaments with legs. The shapes I didn’t recognize were spirals, pod- or capsule-like clusters, microbes that looked like horseshoe crabs, and blobs that were probably amoebas. What were these microbes, and what were they doing on the surface of the painting? I asked the guard if there was any way to get a signal in the basement, and he confirmed that the basements of the building—there were several—were in the nineteenth century in terms of Wi-Fi access. I walked up two floors, taking the microscope with me. In my absence, the guard could try out the other gizmos on axes, hatchets, elephant-leg umbrella stands. He must have been bored to death.

  I no longer had Dr. Korenev’s card and had no idea where it could be, but I remembered Aegir Labs and looked up its number. Its logo was Aegir, the Norse sea god, and the forensic marine biologist was still at work. She picked up the phone herself. I imagined the coroner hovering over her, putting his arms around her waist and laughing as she said, “Yes, I remember you,” and repeated my name and my request. In all likelihood, the coroner would be at his mortuary, perhaps even in the same building I was standing in, but I felt oddly embarrassed anyway. I explained what I had seen in the paint, and she asked if I could send her the microphotographs as an attachment. I did so immediately, and held while she opened the email. I could hear her Russian-inflected “Hmm…”

  “To identify these animals is not difficult,” she said. “You are looking at spirochetes, coliform bacteria, giardia. If I didn’t know, I might think, This is what, a water sample from superfund cleanup site?”

  “No, they’re fossilized, so to speak, in a piece of dried paint.”

  “Of course. They are not moving. I can see that.” Dr. Korenev sounded annoyed, as if I was wasting her time. “So very polluted water was used to mix the pigments. This is clear.”

  “Where would such water be found?”

  “Many places. China, Brazil, parts of former Soviet Union.”

  So the forger, a nihilist smoker with respiratory problems, trained as a realist representational painter, who read Primo Levi, a chemist who survived Auschwitz to continue his work as a writer and varnish maker, is slowly self-destructing and may be located anywhere from Calcutta to Rio.

  “When you figure out where this is from, let me know. I am curious where you find this kind of extreme pollution.” With that, I thanked her for her help, and we rang off.

  Garfield wanted answers, but despite my high-tech testing I was coming up close to empty-handed.

  The Metropolitan Museum is open late on Friday, so I went to look at the portrait of Juan de Pareja, the slave who worked for Velázquez. Born in Spain of African, possibly Moroccan, descent, he looks straight out at the viewer, as if to say, “Yes, I’m stuck in a room with grandees, knights, King Philip of Spain himself, folks who treated me like a dog when I was alive, but now I can stare at them as if to say, ‘You don’t like sharing a room with me in Manhattan? Go somewhere else, dickweeds.’ ” Pareja had reason to be angry. It was illegal for slaves to become painters, but he trained under his master nonetheless, and now his pictures, too, hang in the Prado. Both he and Velázquez were descendants of those who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal, Moors and Sephardim. Velázquez was able to pass and did. Pareja was not. The label next to the painting said that Pareja was freed in 1654, when the pair made a trip to Italy, financed by the Crown. While in Rome,Velázquez painted Juan’s portrait to impress his Italian colleagues. It was said of the painting that it “gained such universal applause that in the opinion of all the painters of the different nations everything else seemed like painting but this alone like truth.”

  I stood as close as I could without drawing the attention of the guard, but I could barely make out the brushstrokes, just some gestural traces on his sleeve and collar. Truth, as those seventeenth-century artists understood it to mean, seemed in short supply at the moment, but one fact was staring me in the face. Where would Velázquez acquire his pigments, glazes, and varnishes? Pareja ground, boiled, and mixed for him. Where did the forger create his? Wherever he was in the world, there was a good chance he had ordered his materials from Kronstadt. There was no one else with that kind of access and skill, no Web presence, most transactions made in cash, recorded by hand. Just like Trunk Stamps. All paths led back to a boarded-up shop downtown. I needed to look at Oscar’s files. I knew some were at Leon’s house in Queens, but he hadn’t yet taken everything and others were still at the store, which was padlocked. Though the yellow tape had by now been removed, there was no way I could just st
roll in.

  I sat on the bench in front of the painting and texted Demetrius.

  Can I borrow u & yr crowbar?

  What 4?

  Break into Kronstadt’s. Need to look at files.

  I considered adding a smiley face emoticon here, but then deleted the icon. No one in the history of graphics had ever convinced anyone of doing something illegal by adding a smiley face.

  No way. High risk. My hearing is next week. 4get about it.

  DEM ITS IMPORTANT!!!

  K files in evidence room moron. Probably in same bay as painting.

  It was there, staring me in the face. Demetrius was right. The files were probably just a few feet away in a series of cardboard boxes, clearly labeled and dated.

  The European collections on the second floor of the museum can be a maze, but I knew the entrance was east from where I was standing. I made my way through rooms of Veronese’s interracial Mars and Venus United by Love and Titian’s all-white view of same, but found myself turned around, trapped, not able to find the stairs to the main hall and exit to the street. I missed a turning and ended up farther north, in the gallery of Rembrandts and Frans Halses, a gallery of Dutch painting that should have had more visitors but didn’t. For a moment, I stood in front of the somber portraits of men and women in foamy white lace ruffs, looking as if they’d just emerged from an intense bubble bath, suds sticking to their necks. That kind of clothing takes a lot of time and labor to assemble and to wear, a way of thinking about getting dressed that no one has engaged in since the invention of the sewing machine. There was only one other person in the gallery. I didn’t see his face, but I knew he was just behind me, and he moved around me as if he were waiting for this moment of pure solitude. Very close, smiling, the man with the hawk-eye tattoos: Per Dagbent. Rembrandt’s Man with a Magnifying Glass turned into The Scream.