by Susan Daitch
“So very nice to find a fellow art lover,” he said. “I followed you many places. You’ve been very busy.”
Gun in my back, he marched me through empty, or near-empty, galleries. The crowds—tourists, school groups—tended to cluster in the special exhibits. European paintings—the battles no one remembers, the portraits of aristocracy, scenes from mythology and the Bible draw, at certain hours, almost no one. Galleries of minimalist and abstract art tend to be even more vacant. In front of a Rothko, I’m sorry to say, he could have shot me on the spot and no one would have found me until closing time, and maybe not even then. Could I therefore have consoled myself with the thought that it could have been worse? Not really. At least then it would have been quick. Retirees listening to headphones, a couple arguing in front Majas on a Balcony, two women in light, shadowy men behind them, attributed to Goya. No one paid any attention to us. They were all in their art bubbles. I couldn’t see Per’s face, but he whispered in my ear as if we were having a conversation and told me to smile so we would look like some kind of couple. He led me to the long balcony that overlooked the patio of the sixteenth-century Castle of Vélez Blanco. It was made of two thousand blocks of marble that had been transported from Spain to the home of a wealthy New Yorker. When he died, and his house was about to be torn down, the courtyard was donated to the museum. Its original Andalusian owner had been very active in ridding Spain of the Moors and other undesirables, and the castle had been his reward, and now a part of it was here, thousands of nautical miles away. Per informed me that this would be the site of my suicide.
“Over to the balustrade.” In his careful pronunciation there was a hint of pride that he knew a precise three-syllable word, as if with that display he was not only separating himself from the uneducated riffraff but challenging what I surely thought of him as well. With balustrade, pronounced so carefully, he was letting me know that he was not what I thought he was but I was going over the edge regardless.
The mezzanine overlooked a colonnade, and directly across were shuttered balconies that gave the impression opera singers would appear any minute.
“Just think of the stories the guards will tell when they get home tonight. ‘It was an ordinary day. She looked like any other visitor. How was anyone to know she was so depressed? What a cleanup job for someone!’ ” He said this in a high voice meant to mimic a female guard.
Before he could push me, I put one leg over the railing so that I was balanced on the ledge. It wasn’t that far down, though it wasn’t nothing, either. I crouched, planning to cling to the ledge, then drop to the floor, but my right hand was still so weak that it was in no way able to bear my weight.
“Thank you for being so cooperative, for going over the edge without my having to push you,” Per said. He put one leg over the railing and began to stomp on my other hand.
Cardinal Scipone Borgia commissioned two marble statues from the sculptor Pietro Bernini to be placed at the entrance of the Villa Borghese—one of Priapus, the other of Flora. They are larger than life, seven and a half feet tall, and positioned on pedestals that are themselves more than three feet high. Though the statues were never at any time part of the Vélez patio, the museum positioned them in the courtyard, and the two figures looked as if they belonged there, exchanging flirtatious glances. My feet dangled a few inches just above the wreath that encircled Flora’s head. For a minute, Per stopped kicking my hand. Someone had looked into the balcony from the gallery and could see him but not me, so he needed to appear as if he were just leaning out, enjoying the view. From the wreath, I put one foot on Flora’s shoulder, testing my balance—she could have toppled over altogether when my feet touched her head—and began to transfer my weight to the top of the statue.
The respite from the stomping didn’t last long. Per started again on my good hand, his heel crunching thin finger bones. It didn’t take much pressure. I let go and crumpled into smiling oblivious Flora’s armful of marble flowers. Somewhere in the records of Bernini’s studio from that period, there might be structural directions detailing how the stone was hewed and carved, against or with what grain, how to detect flaws in the stone. I’m now assuming that the statue was one solid piece. Had the arms and the basket been carved separately and attached, my fall might have caused them to snap off. I guess I should be grateful that I wasn’t dangling over Priapus. That would have been a nasty landing.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing! Get the hell off of there!” The sound of leather shoes, like angry tap dancing, echoed across the patio floor.
“What the fuck!” The language of the American street entered the Vélez Courtyard.
“Why did you climb up there? What the hell!” Five other guards, a couple of guys from security, tourists flashing their cellphones surrounded me, yelling and screaming. The courtyard, which had been quiet and empty to the point of contemplative, now swarmed with a sense of emergency.
“I climbed down, not up.” I held my injured hand with the bandaged one. “Before you call the police, could I have some ice for my hand?”
After hours, years, of having little more to do than give directions to the restroom and tell people they couldn’t use their phones, for the guards a woman clinging to the bountiful statue of Flora looked, at best, like a deliberate prank. No one would believe my story that I had been forced over the balcony, and, of course, Per had vanished. Someone said he would call the bomb squad. I knew I looked ratty and disheveled, but a bomber? Really? What I wouldn’t give to be able to show them my Claiborne’s ID.
After angry questioning and a lecture about the possibility of priceless art being destroyed, the head of security turned to the guards and in a tone of voice I hope never to hear again in this lifetime, asked who was supposed to be in the Vélez Gallery at that time? I explained for the third time that a man had attacked me with a gun. Don’t fire anyone, please. Didn’t anyone see anything?
The man, in his blue uniform and red clip-on tie, decided, not for the first time that day, that I was a lone weirdo, and told me I could go, I would be escorted from the museum. Bad idea. I wasn’t interested in venturing alone from the main entrance to the museum, going down the front steps, where Per Dagbent could be cooling his heels in the fountain. What did I have to do to get this man to call the police?
No one had a gun that I could grab. I couldn’t summon a monologue of rambling diatribe. So I started to take my clothes off. I dropped my jacket on the floor, began to unbutton my shirt, then switched to the zipper of my jeans. A guard grabbed my arms while the head of security had called 911. At least they didn’t send an ambulance.
A patrolman arrived, recognized me, and drove me to the Nineteenth Precinct, where Garfield rolled his eyes and sent me back to the Evidence Room. For once I was glad that all this had transpired in the same precinct as Claiborne’s. This part of the city, this precinct house, as much as I felt like a fish out of water here, was exactly where I needed to be.
Sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor, my shadow guard a few feet away, I saw that there were several boxes of files from Kronstadt’s labeled by year, going back the past five years. Anything earlier was either still at the store or in Leon’s basement. Starting with the current year, the files were divided by month, and within a given month or year files were color-coded according to function. Invoices were in blue files, orders in red, insurance in orange, lease and landlord correspondences in green, store repairs in yellow, and so on.
I was looking for the signature in the poison book. Eleanor Marx Aveling, youngest daughter of Karl, translator of Madame Bovary, killed herself or was poisoned by her dissolute common-law husband, Edward Aveling. The arsenic used in her death was bought at a chemist’s, signature required, penned as “EA.” Who had signed, husband or wife? To this day, no one knows. Emma Bovary met her end via the same route. I dug into Kronstadt’s files looking for a red flag, an “EA,” the person or company who ordered paint that would have contained the chemicals as e
videnced by the X-ray.
Not every customer could just walk in off the street, and for those who did there were no useful records, but because Oscar refused to have a website, orders for those clients had to be done by mail, and it looked as if all kinds of people ordered toxic pigments from him. His customers came from all over the world. Oscar had led me to believe that he sold only minute amounts of dangerous substances, if at all, but his files told a different story. Cobalts and cadmiums were sold in large quantities to some but not others. Why had he lied to me? I was stunned.
Why would he sell to some people—mostly, but not exclusively, well-known artists who made large orders but not to others? Perhaps the question answered itself. Invitations to art openings and museum retrospectives, biennials, and blockbuster shows, were clipped to histories of correspondences. These were people, artists, who provided social connections, who spoke of Oscar in interviews. For them, he doubled or tripled his prices, and they were happy to pay him.
There was a big order for arsenious oxide, which is used to make Scheele’s green, but it didn’t look as if Oscar had been making large quantities of the color the year before he died. He was shipping the compound used to make the pigment elsewhere. Someone else was making the pigment, either for him, because it was so dangerous, or for themselves. I looked up orders for Scheele’s green. Everyone on that list for the past two years was an artist whose name I recognized, and I doubted that any of them had the time, interest, or skill to forge Las Meninas. One company, not an individual, had put in a few orders for actual pigments, but it had used Oscar as a kind of middleman to acquire certain chemicals. Arsenious oxide, a restricted substance that had to be ordered from Blue Hills Chemical, in New Jersey, was one of them. Arsenious oxide is a rare and dangerous compound. The invoice was stamped “All Sales Final.” I wondered if Oscar had gotten his stamps from Gillespie Trunk. The address the powder was sent to: a location in Gowanus, around the corner from Marnie’s. The name of the company was Meegeren & Associates. I would have remembered a sign for a company with that name. It was possible there never was signage for it, and, with that name, I would be surprised if there had been.
Hans Van Meegeren was an art dealer who sold a Vermeer to Göring. At his trial as a Nazi collaborator, he said, “Well but no, it was a forgery, not a real Vermeer at all. I painted it myself. I saved a piece of our Lowcountry heritage. Give me enough alcohol and morphine, and I’ll paint you another even better one.” Van Meegeren served one year in jail and was considered a Dutch hero by some. A postage stamp was printed in his honor.
Chapter 34
I heard the sound of Japanese and saw the back of a large black armchair. Whoever was sitting in it was watching Kurosawi’s Hidden Fortress. I recognized the movie and the scene. Two greedy clowns, Tahei and Matashichi, were making their way, barely upright, through an endless landscape of sticks and stones, trying to find rods of gold hidden in an infinity of kindling.
The door had been unlocked. I walked right in, as if Meegeren & Associates had been expecting me. As I expected, there was no signage, just an address, a small building, a carriage house positioned behind a boarded-up aluminum-sided three-family dwelling. A number of the buildings on the block had been boarded up and abandoned. Despite the extreme pollution in and near the canal, much of the land had been bought by a developer and construction on luxury condo towers was due to begin at some point, as was happening all over the city. A few of the old sherbet-colored houses remained, and you could easily miss the narrow walkway that led between two of them to the carriage house, evidence of an even earlier era. Once inside, I looked up. There was no ceiling, so the effect was of one big room, but it wasn’t exactly airy. The lower windows were blacked out, but otherwise it looked like an artist’s studio. A couple of packed bags stood near the door. Paints, canvases, stretcher bars, various props, including parts of old carousel horses, lay scattered haphazardly around. Partially desilvered mirrors leaned against shelves of paint and pigment. A kitchen was visible in a back alcove. An arrangement of smooth stones lay on a windowsill, and the open window allowed the stench of the canal in, but, also, the place had a vile concentrated smell of its own. It appeared that the sole occupant was sitting in front of a screen watching the two men in patched clothing desperately examining and snapping every twig on a mountainside in Japan. An arm swung out from the chair holding half a sandwich.
“Grilled chicken, extra spicy, with shredded carrots and mint from the Vietnamese joint on Bergen. Can I offer you the other half? I can only eat half, and I hate for it to go to waste.”
“No, but thank you anyway.”
He leaned around, then, with the help of a cane, stood and turned off the TV. He looked nothing like Oddjob or Dr. No, and he’d gotten much sicker since the last time I saw him. Masuji lit a cigarette and motioned to a chair.
“So this is why we never went to your place, only my apartment.” I hadn’t even known his exact address. I’d only seen his paintings online, not in person, though he talked about his work incessantly.
He laughed, and it wasn’t a sinister laugh. It was as if we were old friends who still had a lot in common, which was entirely true. “You know I recommended you to work on the Las Meninas at Claiborne’s.”
“Why?”
“You’re well known in conservation science, though not as well known as the fellow who hacked into the Prado’s computer led the staff at Claiborne’s to believe. The Prado wanted the girl from the Providence junkyard to touch up a seventeenth-century Spanish master?” He smiled. “You are good, just not that good. You probably would have figured out my painting was a copy, but it only had to pass for a few hours—a day at most—before the scheduled theft.”
“I never considered myself to be in that league, to be able to work on a Velázquez.”
“There were others who did think so, and that institutional endorsement, combined with a curator who put his own indulgences before considerations of security, made for an atmosphere just waiting to be exploited.”
“Who was the main man in charge of the exploiting? Not you, I’m guessing.”
He played with the remote, not answering for a few minutes.
“How fragile paint and canvas are, how flimsy and prone to disintegration. You think this Rembrandt, this Goya will be around for hundreds of years, thousands, forever. But in fact the thin canvas, and the even thinner skin of paint, is terribly finite and will have a very limited life span. Even stars and suns explode and fizzle out. Copies keep the paintings going, it could be argued. Not the original, no, but then what is? Endless reincarnation.” Masuji inhaled his cigarette, followed by a short cough. “Not a bad deal. Do you know the story of Vincenzo Peruggia?”
“Can’t say I’ve heard of him. Was that who engineered the forgery and theft?”
A dappled gray cat jumped through the window and settled on his lap, knocking the remote to the floor. “Destructive beast,” he said as he stroked her behind the ears.
“On the morning of August 21, 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa. He had hidden in a storage closet in the Louvre overnight. Like everyone who worked in the museum, he wore a baggy smock, and so he blended in seamlessly with spectators and those employed by the Louvre as small rivulets of people ebbed and flowed during the day. He had, in fact, worked in the Louvre. He was one of the workers who installed the glass box that was meant to protect the Mona Lisa. No one gave him a second thought when he strolled into the Salon Carré, put the painting under his work clothes, and disappeared into the city. Poof! Gone! And where to? The castle of Ludwig of Bavaria or a palace in Monte Carlo? Hardly. Peruggia kept the painting in a box under his stove, and for his trouble he received no payment. Allegedly, the heist was planned by a man who called himself the Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno, an Argentine con man whose partner was a French forger, Yves Chaudron. Together they sold fake Vermeers, Holbeins, and so on to wealthy patrons, both the newly wealthy and the recently slightly less wealthy who wante
d to keep up appearances. So they arrive in Paris. They didn’t need the original Mona Lisa, only for it to be known to have been stolen. Chaudron painted six copies of the da Vinci portrait, and six buyers were easily found. Each paid what would now be the equivalent of six million dollars for what they thought was the original Mona Lisa. When one owner discovered that he had been duped into buying a fake, he was too embarrassed to go to the police. Not only was he a dupe but he had agreed to buy what he thought was a stolen original, so he couldn’t go to the police even if he wanted to. Valfierno had vanished.”
Masuji turned to face me, carefully blowing smoke in the other direction.
“No one ever found him. Penniless, Peruggia tried to sell the original to an art dealer in Florence and was subsequently arrested, of course. He was an amateur, a little man out of his depth. At his trial, he claimed he had only wanted to return da Vinci’s most famous painting to Italy, where it belonged. People considered him a hero, and he only served seven months in jail.”
“So you’re the Marqués of Gowanus?”
“No, I was Chaudron. Isn’t that obvious? The Marqués, in this case, planned to have the original stolen, then have a copy at hand to pass as the original. The copy needed to be planted in such a way that it would appear to be the original, therefore it was planted at Claiborne’s. I was given an all-expenses-paid trip to Madrid, and spent a week studying the picture, though one could study it for years and not even scratch the surface. When I returned, I set up a system so that Las Meninas was projected against a stretched canvas in perfect one-to-one scale. I ground very exactly aged colors, which I matched and filled in.”