A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery)

by Elkins, Aaron

  “Call it old hat.”

  “—Familiar and beloved,” Lorenzo countered, “like an old and well-loved friend. Your many fans can find pictures of you everywhere, but how many people know what Mirko Koslecki looks like? Ergo, to the muckrakers responsible for keeping filled the ravenous maw of the gossip machines, a photo of Mirko is worth more than a photo of you or Brad Pitt or the president of the United States.”

  What do you know, Alix thought, Lorenzo could actually be not only coherent, but cogent as well.

  “I appreciate the company you’re putting me in, Lorenzo,” Izzy said, “and, yeah, sure, you’re right about pictures of Mirko being a lot harder to find than pictures of yours truly. But…” She paused for a reflective smile. “It’s funny, but, you know, when I say—and I know you’ve both heard me say it—that I really resent the intrusions into what I laughably call my private life, I’m telling the truth. I hate them, I really do, especially the paparazzi, cursed be their DNA.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Alix said. “I’d hate that kind of attention too.”

  “Sure, only if I really mean it, how come I’m sitting here right now, down in the dumps because I didn’t get intruded on?” She shook her head. “It’s pathetic. Story of my life: First third, work like hell to get to be a famous celebrity. Second third, go around wearing sunglasses and a scarf so no one recognizes you as a famous celebrity. Third, get pissed off when they don’t. Go figure.”

  Lorenzo had an answer for her. “Wouldn’t you agree, dear Izzy, that it very likely stems from the necessarily dysfunctional antipathy between codependency and rivalry that surely must exist between the Izzy-you and the Pocahontas-you, especially taking into consideration their inevitable duality of purpose?”

  There, Alix thought, that was more like it. Lorenzo was sounding like Lorenzo again. Whatever the subject, the man seemed to be fluent in incomprehensibility.

  “Absolutely, Lorenzo,” Izzy said. “How could anyone argue with that?”

  17

  The rest of the short drive passed quickly, and as soon as all were escorted to where the tables had been set up below the Propylaeum and everybody headed for the bar, Alix found it easy to peel off by herself. She went up a flight of stone steps to the Central Court, a wide courtyard that had once been the ceremonial center of the palace. The last time she’d been here she and her relatives had waited in line with a few hundred others for half an hour in order to get a peek at the throne room that was just off it, and then it had to be seen from the outside, because entry into the room itself had been closed to the public. Now she had the entire courtyard to herself, and the throne room too, if she cared to look in on the simple stone seat that, according to Arthur Evans, was the throne of King Minos—or to sit on it, for that matter.

  That was exactly what she decided to do, although it took a little arguing with herself. In her heart, Alix disapproved of the government’s opening these normally barred areas of the site, partly because it was such blatant toadying to the superclass, but mostly because they had been closed to entry for good reasons. Like the Parthenon (also off-limits to the public) Knossos was irreplaceable, historically and artistically unique, and its treasures couldn’t take the depredations of thousands of tourists tramping through every day.

  That was what she felt in her heart. But in her heart of hearts, she already knew she was going to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime chance to actually place herself upon the legendary, starkly unadorned alabaster seat of the storied king of the Minoans, the most ancient royal throne in all of Europe. Well, who wouldn’t? Especially because there was the shameful, added little fillip of knowing that almost nobody else in the world could. She smiled, thinking that Lorenzo would be ready with an explanation. He would tell her that her Alix-the-art-lover-you had been warring with her Alix-the-gawking-tourist-you, and the tourist-you had won out. And now that she thought about it, that seemed right to her, so either she was getting nuttier or Lorenzo was starting to make sense.

  So in she went and plopped herself royally down. On the frescoed wall behind her, on either side, were the two stately frescoed griffins that eternally guarded the chair of state, their lion bodies relaxed and elegant, their eagle heads fiercely alert. For a minute or two she simply soaked it in, then got out her phone. At Jamie’s suggestion, she had configured it to its highest security setting. Unlocking it meant letting it approve both her face and her voice, so first she had to hold it in front of her at eye level until it decided that she really did look like the person she claimed to be, after which she was required to say a six-syllable word in a normal speaking voice. Examples had been provided, but she’d chosen one of her own. The word she’d come up with, God knows why, was kleptomaniacal, which the phone now did not recognize as coming from her, so she had to try it again and then again, slowly and then more slowly and clearly, feeling more ridiculous every time. Even the griffins seemed to be snickering.

  But at last she was given grudging approval to use her own phone. There were five messages for her, but they could hold. She tapped the quick-dial line for Geoff and waited for the call to go through, hoping for the best. Surely this was the first cellular phone call that had ever been placed from the royal throne. But it worked just fine. Geoff picked up on the second ring, sounding as clear as if he were just outside.

  “Ah, good morning, my dear, I was wondering when I might hear from you. How is the cruise progressing? How are you?”

  “The cruise is fine, and so am I.” Only been knocked on the head once so far, and I’ve been on it for over twenty-four hours now.

  “And where exactly are you at the moment?”

  “Exactly? I’m sitting on King Minos’s throne.”

  “Really? What a coincidence. I myself am in the Crimson Drawing Room at Windsor Castle, where, at the request of the Queen, I was having a heart-to-heart chat with young Prince Harry. Trying to straighten the lad out, don’t you know.”

  Alix grinned. Plenty of time to elaborate when she got back. “Geoff, I only have a little time, and there’s something I need to talk to you about. There’s a Manet in the collection that I have some serious reservations about. I’m pretty sure—very sure—the thing’s a fake, but a really excellent one.”

  “Do you now?” She heard the scraping of a chair on Venezia’s concrete floor. He was sitting down, his interest piqued. “Tell.”

  “Well, it’s a picture of what appears to be a family, three people—nice, middle-class Parisians, judging from their dress—having a picnic on the grass beside a lake—”

  “Sounds very Manet.”

  “Yes. Now, what if I told you that it was painted in 1861—”

  “Fairly early. Two years before the other picnic on the grass, the one that dared not speak its name.”

  “Right. And what if I told you that the entire scene—the people in the foreground, the boat, the trees and grass in the background—are all beautifully done; warm and oil rich, lots of deep browns, a softly but convincingly rendered sense of depth. Very much like his Argenteuil paintings…”

  She waited, expecting him to react, but he said nothing for a few seconds, then cleared his throat. “Apparently I am supposed to say something of value at this point, but I’m afraid I have to disappoint you, Alix. I don’t really claim to be much of an expert on Manet. He’s one of the artists whose paintings I’ve never, ah, restored—”

  “One of the few artists you’ve never ‘restored,’ ” she said out of the side of her mouth, away from the phone.

  “I heard that!” Geoff said huffily, but she couldn’t miss the chuckle behind it. Her one-of-a-kind father wasn’t merely unrepentant concerning his past misdeeds; he positively basked in them. Any reference to his prowess as a forger was always met with pleasure. “But listen, child, let me get Tiny in on this. When it comes to Manet, he’s the man for the job. Tiny,” he called, the sound muffled—he probably had the phone against his chest—“pick up, will you? It’s Alix.”


  “Hey, Alix,” she heard a second later, deep and slow and affectionate. “Everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine, Tiny,” Geoff replied for her. “She wants to ask you about a Manet. She thinks it’s a forgery.”

  “Well, I think it might be a forgery,” said Alix. Confronted with these two certified and venerable experts, she was suffering a sudden loss of confidence.

  “Tell him what you were telling me, Alix.”

  Alix did, in even more detail. “The whole scene is exquisitely done,” she finished. “Deep and rich, the colors are heavy and dense, a lot like his—”

  “What do you think, Tiny?” Geoff interceded.

  “First guess? I’d say the label’s wrong. Doesn’t sound like 1861 to me.”

  Alix’s spirits rose. Tiny’s thinking was in line with hers. “Not to me either,” she said, “but it shows up in Venturi’s 1967 Manet catalogue raisonné, and it’s dated 1861 in there. It also says that he exhibited it in that year’s Paris salon, so we know for sure that it couldn’t have been any later than that.”

  “Yeah, but how sure are we that the painting you been looking at and the one in the catalog are the same one?”

  “I’m not. I don’t think they’re the same. That’s what I’m calling about. Unfortunately, the picture of it in Venturi—and I’m assuming that’s the real one—is just postcard size and it’s in black and white, so I can’t really compare the details, and I couldn’t find any other pictures of it on the Web. The measurements and all the rest in Venturi do match, but I still think it’s a forgery. Extraordinarily well-done… just about faultless, in fact, when it comes to technique… but a forgery all the same.”

  “Yup, I think you’re right, kiddo,” Tiny said bluntly.

  “What?” Geoff exclaimed. “Did I miss something here? You haven’t even seen it, Tiny! Why is it a forgery?”

  “You don’t know?” Tiny said.

  “No, I don’t know,” Geoff said, getting a little grumpy. When it came to art, it wasn’t very often that he got one-upped, but then of course he’d already admitted that he couldn’t claim expertise on Édouard Manet.

  “The old guy’s losing it,” Tiny said happily. “Explain it to him, Alix.”

  “I am not—” Geoff began, but he never could stay miffed for long, and he stopped in midsentence. His voice took on a creaky whine. “Yes, child, explain it to your poor old da. I’ll… I’ll do my best to follow, if I possibly can.”

  “It’s the background that’s the giveaway, Geoff. It’s all wrong.”

  “The background? Is my hearing going too? Did I not hear you say only a moment ago that it was quite Manet-like? Dense, and rich, and all that, very similar to his Argenteuil series?”

  “I did,” Alix said.

  “She did,” Tiny said, clearly relishing this rare opportunity to tell Geoffrey London something he didn’t know.

  “So…?”

  “So when did he do the Argenteuil paintings?” Tiny asked, unable to stay out of it.

  “When he was in Argenteuil, would be my guess,” Geoff said archly.

  “Which was?”

  “In the 1870s, I believe.”

  “And when did—?”

  “And when are you going to stop asking me questions and start giving me answers? Why is the damn thing a forgery?”

  “Well, what did—?”

  But Geoff was getting impatient again and Alix thought she’d better take charge once more and get to the point, although, like Tiny, she too was having fun. “Geoff, Déjeuner au Bord du Lac was painted in 1861. It wasn’t until 1868 that Berthe Morisot convinced Manet to actually go outside and try some plein-air painting. In 1861, he was still strictly a studio painter; he worked inside, and his pictures show it. His foregrounds—his subjects—are fine: rich, and dense, and thickly painted because he was working from live models, but his backgrounds look flat and fake—because they are. They’re more thinly painted, more roughly worked. They look like canvas backdrops, or tapestries, not real, three-dimensional, outdoor scenes.”

  “That’s so,” Geoff allowed. “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe is like that, and that was 1863.”

  “Right.”

  “So… what the two of you are telling me”—he was speaking slowly, thoughtfully—“is that the background of your picture, Alix, your Déjeuner, is too well done, too real, to be by the Manet of 1861. Whoever copied it improved on it—by painting the background in the more finished style that Manet himself didn’t arrive at until years later. Is that about it?”

  That was it, both Tiny and Alix agreed.

  “That’s very clever,” Geoff said, and Alix felt that childish swell of pride that no son or daughter ever got old enough to outgrow.

  “Thank you, Geoff. I knew there was something wrong, but it sure took me a while to figure out what it was. Listen, basically, I’m calling because I wanted to ask you a question—the two of you, really—”

  “It’s interesting,” Geoff said, his tone suggesting that he was off in his own mind. “I can think of only one man in this world who has both the talent and the skills to make a ‘faultless’ copy of the work of a great master—and who has an ego big enough to actually think he can improve on it.”

  Oh, really? Alix thought. That’s funny, I can think of two.

  “Weisskopf,” Tiny declared.

  “Exactly.”

  “Who’s Weisskopf?” Alix asked.

  “He’s—” Tiny began.

  “He’s an old friend,” Geoff said. “Well, more or less. Let me get in touch with him and see what I can learn—”

  “In touch with him?” Alix’s voice shot up a notch. “Geoff, doesn’t your parole prohibit you from consorting with felons?”

  “A,” Geoff said icily, “I am not on parole, and the conditions of my release make no such stipulation; if they did, I couldn’t associate with Tiny here, could I?”

  “Or Frisby either,” said Tiny. “Or—”

  “B, Christoph Weisskopf is not a felon. A fine fellow, he may have been arrested, oh, once or twice, but to my knowledge, he has never been convicted. And C, I can’t say I care for the sound of that word, ‘consort.’ ”

  “Sorry, Dad, I apologize. But what could he tell you anyway? He’s not going to admit he forged it, is he?”

  “Oh, he forged it, all right.”

  “You bet,” Tiny contributed.

  “The thing is, though,” Geoff said, “he’s a bit on the secretive side—”

  “Really? A forger? My, what a surprise.”

  She heard Geoff sigh. “But, employing my celebrated tact and subtlety, I might be able to dig something out for you. I’ll give you a call and we can proceed from there.”

  “Oh, listen, though. Instead of calling, how about e-mailing me? It’d be safer.”

  The pregnant pause told her she’d made a mistake, as indeed she had. “Safer? Why would it be unsafe to call you? Alix, what have you gotten yourself—”

  She resorted to her usual strategy when she got herself in a bind: babbling. “Oh, I don’t mean ‘safe’ as in ‘safe,’ but as in ‘I’m more likely to get it.’ You know how hard it is to get cell service in Europe. And if you’re in a boat in the middle of the ocean, well then—”

  Tiny unintentionally came to her rescue. “Alix, you said you had a question for us, no?”

  “I do, yes. The thing is, this painting has some pretty good backup. Apparently, it’s got at least two credible letters of authentication—”

  That brought bouts of laughter from both of them, deep, genuine guffaws of amusement, and Alix understood why. Boiled down to its essentials, a letter of authentication was an evaluation from an art scholar—or someone reputed to be an art scholar, or someone who claimed to be an art scholar, or someone who someone said was an art scholar—and was based on that person’s judgment as to technique, materials, context, subject matter, style, and skill. Their batting average, as far as getting it right went, was probably somewhere ar
ound .500: great if you’re a baseball player, not so great in this business. In other words, they often got it wrong, as the two men on the other end of the line would be only too happy to prove to her, based on their own extensive experience.

  “Okay, forget that,” she said, “but what about this—the Laboratoire Forensique Pour l’Art has run it through their tests and they say it’s the real thing too. Their seal of approval is stamped right on the back.”

  “That’s all very well, but you must remember—” Geoff began.

  “I know,” Alix said. “You don’t have to tell me. Forensic tests can definitely spot clear-cut fakes. Wrong paint for the time and so on. Or they can say that something—this Manet, for example—checks out; the pigments were indeed the ones used by Manet and his circle, and the backing and the canvas are from the right time and place, and even that the brush strokes are laid on in the way that Manet laid them on. But what they can’t say with certainty is that it was Manet himself who painted it—only that they could find no evidence that it wasn’t Manet.”

  “Exactly,” Geoff said.

  “Yes, but the thing is, they found no such evidence. That means that they determined that the materials and techniques are consistent with Manet’s, and that it was painted over a hundred years ago. That’s my problem, Geoff. I know it’s a fake, a copy of the real thing, but the lab says it was definitely done in the nineteenth century, with the right materials for the time and place. How can that be?”

  “Could have been a student copy,” Tiny suggested. “Or hey, how about an early version that Manet himself made, a study for the final painting?”

  “No,” Geoff said. “We’ve established that it’s more finished than the final painting. Obviously, you wouldn’t find that in a study. So scratch that. We’re dealing with a later copy here.”

  Not so obviously, thought Alix, to whom this helpful perception hadn’t occurred. Tiny was wrong; the old guy was definitely not losing it.