by Susan Daitch
He pointed with his cane to the empty space where the painting had been.
“Once it left my studio, how it got where it needed to be wasn’t my concern. If the crate putatively came from the Prado, the picture, to a certain extent, wouldn’t be questioned. The plan was to steal the original from the Prado, then sell the copies for hundreds of millions of dollars. By the time the fraud was discovered, it would be too late. As with the Mona Lisa story, the dupes couldn’t go to the police. Similar to the Mona Lisa heist, the museum would keep it quiet, at least initially, providing a window of a few days. Claiborne’s behaved in exactly the same way. The painting was gone, but it was kept out of the news. Two paintings stolen—which is the original? Without either of them being available for the moment, who’s to say? Institutional embarrassment is worth its weight in gold. Added to that is the secrecy and snobbery of the auction house, galleries, museums run by crooks who are handmaidens to other crooks. I don’t know how the theft from the Prado was to be arranged. That part of the scheme was, I assumed, carried out by another branch of the organization. They would have to move quickly because of the way information travels around the world in a nanosecond. Once word of the Claiborne theft was made public, the Prado would state that the original had never left Spain. Therefore that theft was supposed to happen a few hours earlier.”
“Something happened to throw the time frame off. There’s been no theft at the Prado.”
“Not my concern.” Masuji spoke calmly, often looking straight ahead at the black mirror that had just been a screen. “I’ve been paid.”
“So you’re done?”
“Look, Stella, I didn’t see it as such a crime. My mother came from a culture where apprentices learn by copying their masters, and so part of me finds the idea of forgery, even for profit, an opaque concept, or maybe it’s just the stories we tell ourselves to absolve us of guilt. I loved the pure theater of the whole operation, and when the con was exposed I imagined it would throw galleries, museums, the self-proclaimed connoisseurs, like your Ashby and Fieldston, into a morass of uncertainty. The hierarchy would be finished. It was a victimless crime until Moonelli was killed, and then it wasn’t anymore. I couldn’t see the whole picture, and I was such a small part of it, it seemed laughable.” But at this point he was no longer smiling.
“You thought one forged painting would cause the whole machine to come to a grinding halt?”
“At first I believed the desire for the painting was about a wealthy man saying, ‘If I can’t have it, no one else can,’ but then I realized how romantic that notion was. The Marqués has little, possibly no, financial interest in the original. It’s all about high-stakes capital to further invest in what? Real estate? More art? WMDs? It’s not my concern. I just did my job and made my bundle.”
“Are there other copies out there?”
“If so, they were painted by others, which, in the interest of time, might be the case. I don’t know how long it took Yves Chaudron to paint six Mona Lisas, but six Las Meninas would take months that the organization didn’t have.”
“If you were the Chaudron, possibly one of many, who is the Marqués?”
“I have no idea. The person who hired me was anonymous. I only met with the intermediary, Andrija. I never knew or cared what her last name was.”
The cat jumped onto my lap, which I mistook for an act of affection, if not curiosity, but then she quickly jumped off and draped herself on top of a cold radiator. Just like her owner—a quick stay, then off to solitude on the ribs of an inoperative heating device.
“She couldn’t take a car to my studio.” He laughed at this. “If even a driver learned my identity or location the operation could unravel, so she had to take the subway, which irked her no end. The walk from the subway station was an indignity, and when she arrived she treated me like a lowly blacksmith following the Asiatic Khan’s Golden Horde who’d wandered into Sarajevo and had the gall to want to be taken seriously. She had no idea what I was actually doing, and treated me like a Xerox machine. She was a peasant.”
“I know you don’t like taking orders.”
He shrugged. “You have to understand how secret the operation was. I couldn’t have any assistants or girlfriends or attachments of any kind. But then I didn’t anyway.”
“Is that why you cut me off?”
“They chose people who can’t go home again” was all he said, but then he began to cough more violently. Finishing the last of a bottle of water, he closed his eyes for a minute because it was getting harder for him to talk. Whether it was water or Smirnoff, from where I sat I couldn’t tell.
“I can take you to someone who makes impeccable false driver’s licenses, passports, you name it.”
“Thank you. I’ll take it under advisement.”
I took that as a no. There was no time to sleep on the offer.
“There are no vents or fans in your studio. Using white lead in this space is the ultimate slow-inflicted suicide. I understand the windows had to be blacked out because of the secrecy of your work, but didn’t you use a respirator or a mask?”
“Of course not. Did Velázquez? I pretended to be Velázquez—and look, even Velázquez had a patron, the king of Spain. He couldn’t have survived as a painter without court sponsorship. I had my sponsor in the form of the Marqués, whoever he was, and I never passed on the information that in life Velázquez was only paid the same as court barbers. Velázquez’s paternal grandparents, Diego da Silva and Maria Rodríguez, were Portuguese Jews, an identity that had been forbidden in Spain. Two of my grandparents were Nisei. I thought I could paint in his shoes. That’s what I wanted to try to do, so I inhaled.”
Masuji had a habit of putting his fingers up to his mouth and tapping his lips, which, if you have paint on your hands, is a very efficient way of getting white lead into your system. He sensed my eyes on his fingers.
“Sir Isaac Newton died of lead poisoning and possibly mercury also, which is believed to be why his behavior became so eccentric and led to his eventual nervous collapse. He had become obsessed with transmutation and really believed he could turn lead to gold. I succeeded where he failed. I turned this painting full of lead into a roomful of money. Keynes said of Newton, ‘He was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians.’ In my ghost paintings I wanted to be a magician of color and light, to bring these lost spaces back to life. I failed, but in turning lead into gold I was a success.”
“Velázquez didn’t die of lead poisoning but from a fever, and he was sixty or sixty-one.” Masuji was probably half Velázquez’s age at death. “Your paint is the most toxic I’ve ever seen.”
“I used canal water instead of vinegar to accelerate the lead-corrosion process. The canal was right there—why not access and use some of the water that already had high concentrations of lead, arsenic, cadmium, and other heavy metals, to say nothing of its microbial content. Oil sheen on its surface, bubbling up with gases from who knows what. It’s been dumped into by ExxonMobil, Honeywell, Kraft, Con Edison, Viacom, Coca-Cola. They’ve all shat in it at one time or another. No one really knows what’s in the canal water, and I was right: it worked. Coils of lead soaking in this solution corroded much faster, but the chemical and microbial content of the water was present in the pigment in extremely high amounts. I thought the painting would be looked at closely, but not that closely.”
“What about the rest of the painting’s structure? The wood for the stretchers, the canvas?”
“You’d be amazed at what I could find. Even places you would think would be on a historical register get torn down if someone wants to build on a lot or the structure just can’t be conserved anymore. I used parts of old houses, sometimes eighteenth-century bits and pieces, junk, salvage yards, old carousel horses, as you can see.” He gestured outward to all the antique stuff that had been pilfered for parts and that, if not authentic, were close enough.
“Actually, I wouldn’t be all that surprised.”
“No, you probably wouldn’t.” Masuji took a long drag from his cigarette. “The painting I wanted to X-ray at Claiborne’s was something I found at a flea market, and I really did believe there was something underneath. Now I won’t have time to find out. Take it with you when you leave. My parting gift.”
“If they’re out to get you, why did you leave the door open?”
Masuji shrugged. “What’s the point? They’ll find me. A beagle with a crowbar could get into this old crate.”
“Your bags are packed.”
“For what it’s worth.”
“But you didn’t pack up your whole studio.”
“Why bother?”
He had a point.
“Well, you never know. Perhaps I’ll be able to return one day. Optimism has always been my Achilles’ heel. I always stay too late at parties, the last to leave dinners, everything. My clock is slow, though precise in its way. I couldn’t bear to totally disassemble this place, and I need to travel light.”
An old wooden horse leg, nails sticking out, lay a few inches away. I handed it to him, though he could just as easily have used it against me.
“What am I going to do with that?” He got out of the chair and offered the cat a pinch of catnip from a jar shaped like Totoro. She didn’t move from the radiator, even for that.
I stared at his bags and wondered, not for the last time, if he had been expecting me.
“Kronstadt,” I whispered.
“Everyone knew Oscar, but you must understand Oscar needed to wet his beak occasionally. How else could he stay in business? Fewer artists use his specialized product, his rent was going through the roof. Oscar made connections, at times, between artists and jobs and didn’t ask questions. Don’t blame him. So he was no saint. Who is?” Masuji said this quietly, as if I were a complete naïf.
Kronstadt is the gate everyone passed through, from Rodney Birdwell to Masuji. How innocent is innocent? Where’s the border, and who mans the checkpoint?
“Everybody’s drunk the same glass of water at some point,” he said.
“Who are you, a Zen master?”
“Who are you? Dick Fucking Tracy? Sit down. I’m not yet finished with what I want to tell you, and I think you have more to ask me.”
“Why did you plant the Göring stamp?”
“I was just having fun.” He shrugged. “It was a joke. People are so greedy, I thought this clue could be planted right under their noses and none of the parties involved would ever bother to learn the actual history of the painting. If there are other Las Meninas out there, the stamp separates my work from them. The chemical authenticity of the stamp wouldn’t be an issue, since the whole point was to be subversive, to signal inauthenticity to anyone who might be listening. I estimated that the number of individuals who would pick up on my sign would be close to zilch.”
He began to cough violently. Lead poisoning attacks the respiratory system, as well as the brain.
“What can I get you? Do you have an inhaler? Any medicine?” I jumped up, stepping on the remaining half of the chicken sandwich.
He couldn’t speak. He coughed till tears pooled from his eyes with the racking from his lungs, and his body went into paroxysms from wheezing and rasping. I ran to the kitchen, opened the fridge to grab a bottle of water—bottled water, labeled and sealed, not canal sludge. In the near-distance, I heard the sound of smooth stones falling to the floor. When I ran back to the pair of chairs facing the black screen, they were empty. Even the gray cat was gone.
Chapter 35
The Evidence Room, back to Oscar’s files, looking for some hint of who the Marqués might have been. People phoned Oscar. He jotted down the details. This time I looked particularly in the files for the jobs he had recommended me for. Just a few hours ago, when I sat on the concrete floor between stacks of bagged wire, guns, and cartridges, these particular files had gone unexamined. I was looking for his records of toxic paint, not the errands he’d almost sent me on. Why bother with odd jobs? Now those were exactly the files I searched, surrounding myself with references to the Japanese foyer, the children’s menagerie, Krazy Kat and Ignatz. Among the orders, receipts, or invoices listing the midtown address for Ilya Grilke and the Grilke Group, all clipped together, I found a note:
Also, new acquisitions coming in, but touch-ups needed.
I turned the note over. Oscar had drawn doodles of a woman in the form of an admiring pornographic comic strip. She struck various poses, bent over, legs spread; speech balloons specifically invited Oscar to join the party he himself had imagined. A cartoon speech balloon emerged from her mouth, and she told Oscar Kronstadt her name: Andrija.
Also, I only had about thirty-nine dollars to my name. I needed the money.
I made the call.
Chapter 36
The outside of the building looked like a celestial waterfall, with blue and silvered glass cascading down from the clouds. The lobby, with a high vaulted ceiling, was gold and green marble, like a silent chapel monitored by a liveried doorman who unlocked a private elevator that went straight to the seventy-fifth floor. He told me that it would open automatically on one of the Grilke floors. There were no buttons marring the brushed-steel interior, not even one for an emergency, and it was an odd sensation to be a vertical tube ascending into the sky, like being sealed in a rocket but without any windows. I also thought of the Chilean miners sealed in the tube that would finally take them to the surface. They were headed to land and sunlight. I was sealed into a box traveling into the clouds and who knows what. It was night, an odd time for a job interview, but the woman had told me there was some urgency in getting the job done immediately. The night shift, whatever the circumstances, always pays more.
When the doors opened, a female voice, human, not android—though I couldn’t tell where it was coming from—instructed me to make my way down a hall and wait in a sort of living room, windows on two sides. On the fourth side was a glass-bottomed swimming pool cantilevered over Fifty-seventh Street, so the feeling, if you swam in it, would be like swimming in the clouds, high above the earth, looking down at ant people and cars. No one could see in, the apartment was so high. You could walk around naked. Dive in. You could do whatever you wanted to. No voyeur armed with camera or binoculars lounged on a wisp of a cirrus cloud just outside.
“You must be Star Hammersmith, referred by Oscar Kronstadt.” A woman walked toward me from a doorway I hadn’t noticed. I’m Andrija, Mr. Grilke’s personal assistant and property manager. Ilya is sorry he couldn’t introduce himself to you personally, but I’m authorized to meet with contract workers in his absence. The Grilkes are in Switzerland.” Diamonds swung from her ears as she spoke and looped around her neck in an asymmetrical spray of stars.
It was the woman from Oscar’s doodles. The only difference was that the real Andrija was thin and athletic, while the Andrija of the drawings had a Marilyn Monroe–like body. I can imagine Andrija’s deep voice, her slight accent. She probably flirted with the old man, played on his vanity. Little did she know what he was drawing on the other end of the phone.
We sat opposite each other in the pure-white room. Outside, a construction crane loomed like an apatosaurus, a Godzilla, even at this height. It was the kind of crane that had been damaged during the hurricane, at which time, even at the peak of the storm, seven city blocks had to be evacuated. Andrija registered my gaze.
“Grilke has an interest in the construction next door, therefore the crane access steps on no one’s toes. It’s operated by remote.” She pointed at the crane. “It’s actually safer that way. After Sandy, Mr. Grilke insisted that he have access to the remote control, here in the apartment. Should there be another hurricane, he or whoever is present in the apartment can move the crane out of harm’s way. A brilliant safeguard.” Andrija had a crisp, confident tone, as if even subjects as unpredictable as violent storms and machines of monstrous size could be contained in neat grids of final decisions: snap, problem solved. Let�
��s move on now, shall we? The remote-control device looked like a gray-and-black box camera, a little bigger than a lunchbox, sitting on a glass table. The neck strap was coiled next to it.
While she opened a computer I stared at the pool, trying not to appear nervous. I had sent her a résumé as Star Hammersmith, stating that my work as a painter had been shown in group shows at a half-dozen galleries that don’t exist. If she looked any of them up, I’d be out of a job before it even began. She appeared to be studying the screen but said nothing more than a few hmms….
“Such a tragedy about Oscar. He was a dear man, and he thought very highly of you.”
This was not possible, or she would have known me as Stella Da Silva. Also, there were many ways to describe Oscar, but “a dear man” wasn’t one of them. Somewhere along the chain of command in the palace, someone, an art adviser or dealer, told her that Oscar could find an artist for her. I wanted to believe that, for Oscar, the job was just a name and a description of a job given over the telephone, that he didn’t have a stake in Las Meninas, though it wasn’t completely looking that way. His horrific death had been in the papers. Andrija knew what she needed to know in order to conduct polite conversation, nothing more or less.
“I can show you the task at hand, and we’ll see how you feel about it,” she said. “I need you to sign this release form.” She handed me a piece of paper. “It’s just a formality. No photographing the work you’ll be doing for Grilke Properties or the wholly owned Grilke Group, a limited-liability corporation and its subsidiaries. That’s about all it amounts to.” Andrija was over six feet tall, and her straight hair was the texture and color of straw—an intentional high-priced effect. The hem of her tailored, close-fitting black suit had an expensive bitten-off look.
“Also, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you for your phone. It’s just a precaution. Though people sign the form, we really can’t have any photographs, and I understand this can happen unintentionally.”