“I was going to drive the last two hundred and fifty miles,” she said sleepily to Karol, who was sitting in the driver’s seat.
“I didn’t want to wake you—you were so fast asleep I could have groped you.”
She didn’t answer. They were alone in the car.
“Where are we, and where are the others?” she asked.
“We’re in a place that I call Södertälje, but when Lisa and Anatol say it, it’s Seeedetel-yer!” He imitated their Swedish pronunciation. “About ten miles outside Stockholm, which we zipped past, just like Copenhagen. It must have been the most boring twelve hundred miles I’ve ever traveled.” Karol made a face. “I don’t know how my stomach’s going to react when I finally eat something other than a gas station hot dog.”
She stretched and got out of the car for some fresh air. The first breath hurt. It was a horribly cold day, like every day that winter, which had started in October and refused to let go—it must have been about five degrees. Just one gust of wind was enough to chill Zofia under her light sweater. She jumped back into the car.
“Turn on the heater,” she said, her teeth chattering. “And fetch my jacket from the trunk, and my small blue bag too—I’ve got a toothbrush in there.”
He looked at her in surprise.
“Please,” she added.
“Pretty please?” He gave her a smile.
She smiled too, got out of the car again, took her jacket from the trunk, put it on and buttoned it up to the neck, pulling the fur-lined hood over her head. Then she grabbed her bag and a bottle of mineral water. The constant movement warmed her a little.
She ran a short stretch back and forth, doing high knees. Then she brushed her teeth, standing with her legs astride and watching the world gradually awaken. She rinsed her mouth with mineral water and spat it onto the Ferrari windshield. Karol smiled again and switched on the wipers.
She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. Though if anyone had asked, she wouldn’t have been able to explain what concession she was making and what satisfaction he wasn’t getting. She set off at a trot around the parking lot; as usual, after a few moments out of breath her body remembered the routine, her breathing calmed down, her pulse stabilized, warmth ran through her and instead of being cold and nasty, the icy air became pleasantly invigorating.
In the time it took her to do a few circuits, the parking lot began to fill up. People tried to park as close as possible to the entrance, then rapidly slink through the revolving doors. A light snow began to fall. At first Zofia didn’t notice the couple who came out of the mall and walked toward their car. And when she did, she didn’t recognize them. Only when they were almost on top of her, breathing fast with her mouth open, did she stop.
She hadn’t asked Karol why Lisa and Anatol had gone into the mall.
Wow, now she knew why.
The woman standing before her didn’t look like Lisa at all. The old Lisa had been a fit, mature Swede, whose practical attire and masculine movements could have caused her to be mistaken for a man, if not for her fabulous, elfin beauty.
This Lisa was a goddess. Panting and sweating with ruddy cheeks, Zofia felt like a chubby-legged girl beside this ethereal princess. Lisa had transformed herself—instead of a turtleneck, jeans, and hiking boots, she was wearing a plain red dress with a slightly scooped neckline, suede knee-high boots with heels, and a black bolero, all of which, thanks to a push-up bra, had succeeded in making her look much more feminine. There wasn’t a flaw on her, and even the black-and-silver headscarf she had put on to cover her bandage gave her an air of mystery.
“You done with the workout, honey?” said Lisa, clapping and rubbing her hands energetically; she must have been cold in that outfit. “If so, let’s get out of here.”
Sweden, a world of contrasts, thought Zofia as she went back to the car.
Zofia volunteered to drive the final stretch. Although the snow was falling more heavily and the road was coated in a thin layer, the car moved as if on runners, gurgling softly, warning Zofia not to go crazy with the accelerator. She drove cautiously down highway 73, which ran from Stockholm to the port at Nynäshamn.
She felt calm, as ever, in Sweden. The cars were all driving at a safe forty miles an hour, keeping their distance, nobody being reckless. In her broken Polish, Lisa explained that the man they were going to see had been her first lover and was still important to her, so she wanted to look nice for him.
Zofia drove down a small road toward Dalarö. The road was empty, magical, with a white forest of snow-coated pine trees on one side and some snow-powdered rust-red rocks on the other. Half an hour later they reached the surprisingly built-up shoreline of the Swedish Baltic coast, known as the Stockholm Archipelago. Over a stretch of nearly forty miles, nature had pushed up thirty thousand larger and smaller rocky islets, and innumerable peninsulas, promontories, and small bays.
The biggest islands were popular tourist destinations, lined with hundreds of stugor, or wooden summer cottages, all painted the statutory “falu red,” which contrasted with the white woodwork of the door and window frames. This color was used out of practicality—for centuries cheap falu-red paint made with iron oxide, copper, and tin had provided the wood with the best protection against the harsh northern climate, in which it had to withstand blazing hot summers, ice-cold winters, and salty winds.
Located on the edge of the archipelago, Dalarö was one of the suburban resorts, noisy and bustling in summer, but at this time of year it was dark, quiet, depopulated, and deeply depressing, like anywhere out of season. Zofia drove past rows of boarded-up cottages and after a few hundred yards reached the town center, though “town center” was a major exaggeration. It was simply that there were some slightly bigger houses here. A small ferry, with room for about a dozen cars, was moored by the shore, and Zofia slowly drove on board across a rattling gangway. The Ferrari’s tire tracks were the first to cross the virgin snow, and so it would remain until they departed. Nobody else was heading for the island of Ornö.
For forty-five minutes, the ferry sailed along a channel carved out of the ice, and when the gangway on the other side touched the shore, it looked as if it had been lowered by mistake before reaching its destination. There were no lighthouses in sight, no roads, trees, rocks, or buildings, not even a closed ice cream booth. Nothing—just snowflakes swirling in the lights of the ferry and the car. Beyond them stretched pitch-dark oblivion.
The fair-haired young woman driving the ferry waved to them. It was hard to tell if she was saying goodbye, urging them to get going, or advising them to abandon all hope before plunging into the abyss. Zofia couldn’t bring herself to put the car into first gear and drive off the ferry into the void.
“I can’t believe it’s already dark; it’s not even four yet,” muttered Karol.
“Välkommen till Sverige,” replied Lisa, and urged Zofia onward. “Go, go, go, we’re nearly there.”
Zofia took a deep breath and drove forward, exhaling with relief when the front wheels touched the ground. And suddenly they were crossing the silent black-and-white of the island, past trees, rocks, and abandoned buildings.
Nine miles long and two miles wide, Ornö was one of the largest islands in the archipelago, yet in the course of the half-hour drive they didn’t see a single light in any of the buildings, nor did they pass a single car, not to mention a person. There were no tire marks on the snow-scattered road ahead, and it was hard to believe that less than twenty-five miles away, Stockholm was buzzing with life.
Finally the road ended, and there was a wall of forest ahead.
“We must have taken a wrong turn,” said Zofia to Lisa.
“We’re getting out,” replied Lisa, pulling a down coat over her bolero.
Zofia didn’t want to go out there, but she dutifully switched off the engine, put on her coat, and five minutes later was walking through the forest with the others. She felt uneasy. Soon after, they emerged into what seemed to be a meadow.
>
“Look!” cried Karol, pointing at the windows shining with yellow light a hundred yards ahead. Then he waved his arms and fell to the ground.
“Watch out or you’ll smash a hole in the ice with your butt,” Anatol warned, and Zofia realized they were on a frozen stretch of sea, separating Ornö from Skalkaren, Sten Borg’s small private island.
Sten Borg, who—Zofia hoped—would not just open their eyes to the mysteries of art and help them to solve the riddles that had brought them halfway across Europe, but also give them something normal to eat and a glass of glögg, Swedish mulled wine.
8
Everything was far better than they could have imagined. The frozen, exhausted travelers found themselves in the main hall of a solid wooden cabin, where it was finally warm. Through a large window they could see the wind driving snowflakes across the frozen sea. Inside, the house smelled of wood, the fire of smoke and juniper, the glögg of cloves, the oven of roasted meat, and the sweet buns of cinnamon. Hansel and Gretel couldn’t have been as happy to see the witch’s cottage as they were to see Sten Borg’s hermitage.
Sten Borg was a small man of seventy with a kind, friendly face hidden behind round glasses with thick frames and lenses. In a corduroy jacket, he looked more like an old Woody Allen than a tough Swede who spent his winters alone in the wilderness. Zofia was wondering how this elderly man could possibly have been Lisa Tolgfors’s boyfriend when Lisa ran up and gave him a passionate kiss. The kiss went on and on, and when Borg grabbed Lisa’s butt and squeezed, Zofia blushed.
Once they’d stopped kissing, Lisa turned and said in English, “Sten used to be my lover. Well, not just my lover, but my first one too, and my most important. I was eighteen, he was forty-three, and he was great. Well read, brilliant, sophisticated, courageous in his views and his choice of friends, outgoing, respected, and adored. I fell madly in love.” She leaned forward, raised the old man’s head, and kissed him on the lips.
“And to be clear: admit that nobody has ever loved, adored, and worshipped you so much in return,” said Borg in very good English but with a strong, harsh, Swedish accent. It had a certain charm; he sounded like a Scandinavian baddie from a Hollywood movie.
“It’s true,” said Lisa, who snorted with laughter. “A pity it was only six months before he found himself a new princess.”
Borg adjusted his glasses.
“Have you ever seen a decent art gallery with just one painting?” he asked.
Once Lisa had introduced them, stressing in Anatol’s case that he also spoke fluent Swedish—probably a discreet way of warning Borg not to gossip in front of him—they sat down to a simple Swedish supper of roast meat in gravy, porcini mushrooms, mashed potatoes, and salad with olive oil. Zofia hadn’t tasted anything this good in ages.
Over supper they described their adventures to Borg. How the photographs had turned up in Poland, how the special team had been assembled, the expedition to get the Raphael, and the incident in New Rochelle that had almost ended in disaster. And which proved firstly that the Raphael was a fake, and secondly that none of it had happened by accident. It was a carefully prepared frame job, designed to prevent the discovery of the real Raphael. Or at least that was their theory. Though they couldn’t explain what anyone would have to gain from setting up such a complicated fraud.
“Have you gone crazy?” said Borg. “Do you really think a superpower is after you to stop you from finding a five-hundred-year-old painting? Superpowers don’t give a shit about things like that. If they had the Raphael and figured that its discovery might do them harm, they’d destroy it and forget the whole thing. It must have to do with something else, something your search for the painting could lead you to.”
That sounded logical.
“You must let go of thinking about the Young Man, because it’s blinding you. You’ve taken him and his Renaissance beauty out of context; you think he knows all the answers, because it all revolves around him. But that’s idiotic. The Young Man is the most unsellable painting in the world—nobody knows what it’s worth, or if it was truly painted by Raphael, because it’s not signed and has never been subjected to modern expert analysis.”
Borg started gathering the plates. Anatol quickly got up to help, and it occurred to Zofia that he must have been married for many years.
“The only reason why your mistake is forgivable is that, paradoxically, art is so hellishly national. Even the greatest cosmopolitans regard it from the perspective of nation. A painting is ‘ours’ because this is where the painter came from. Or a painting is ‘ours’ because this is where it used to hang. Or it’s ‘ours’ because it’s hanging here now, testifying to the glory and greatness of the community. In the art world, national identification matters more than beauty. But that’s by way of a digression.”
Borg fell silent, waved scornfully, took off his glasses, and wiped them with a small cloth.
“Your Raphael fixation has made you behave like savages. Full of wonder, totally dazzled, you fail to understand. Since it’s you that’s been robbed of a piece of art, it must be the most important one in the world. So it never occurs to you to look wider, to seek a larger whole.”
“That Impressionist at Richmond’s house,” Zofia said. “Is that your ‘larger whole’?”
Borg put on his glasses. “I think it’s time we went to my workshop. You can bring your coffee with you.”
Upstairs the house didn’t look like a hundred-year-old Swedish dacha anymore, an old fisherman’s abode preserved to impress the guests. A solid door led into a study, furnished in the modern style, bright, ascetic, and unadorned. Just a desk and a comfortable office chair, adjustable in every way, a small table, four ordinary chairs, and a bookshelf filled with specialized literature. Zofia’s eagle eye caught familiar art history books, as well as catalogues of art that had been looted from all over Europe, Polish ones alongside Russian. Sten Borg’s work involved expert analysis to confirm the authenticity and legality of paintings that appeared on the market. He was as famous for that as for the fact that he rarely sold his services, and only if he regarded the case as interesting. Never had his expert opinion been called into question.
Zofia thought they were going to talk here, in the study, but Borg led them through a plain white door into a room he called his workshop, which was really a well-equipped laboratory.
Zofia recognized several pieces of equipment that would enable undisputable identification of whether a work of art was fake or not. There was a portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) machine, a brilliant device for analyzing samples in a noninvasive way and for identifying the chemical elements within. This one piece sufficed to weed out the most primitive forgers, who chose not to play chemist and instead used modern paints; as a result, they left traces of anachronistic dyes, chemically synthesized rather than made by patiently mixing natural ingredients. Artificial pigments proliferated at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and with the correct knowledge of their composition, you only had to analyze a spot of red or green in the painting to confirm whether it was produced in the twentieth century or earlier. Another perfect test was foundation white. Nowadays most artists use a pigment based on titanium dioxide; in the mid-nineteenth century zinc-based white was introduced, but earlier on—since the dawn of the history of painting—everyone had used lead. Now, apart from forgers and screwballs obsessed with “authenticity,” nobody used lead white because of its toxicity, but for centuries nobody thought twice about its harmfulness. Especially as it was the only substance that guaranteed a white foundation.
Apart from the XRF, Borg also had a machine for producing radiographs, which exposed a lack of lead in an instant. Under X-ray, lead white (which was also used to lighten other colors) shone very brightly. So did traces of the other heavy metals that were used in olden days by painters and their pupils, unaware of the danger. The X-ray images of old paintings look spectral, as the traces of lead magically appear on the canvas like phantoms.
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sp; There were also some infrared lamps, proof that Borg was more than just a chemist in the service of art. Near-infrared radiography allowed him to expose traces of carbon in photographs of a painting, which was present in black dyes as well as the charcoal or pencil used for sketching. Zofia had seen several paintings examined in this way, and the effect was incredible—it was like looking at a person and seeing not just their present form but also the child they’d been, and the teenager as well. If you knew whether the artist in question sketched an outline and how he did it, this method provided an easy way to confirm a forgery, even if the forger had made the paints just as they were in the past.
“What sort of lab is this?” asked Anatol, strangely taciturn until now.
Zofia remembered his odd behavior during the radio program about people fundraising on the internet. Maybe he was sick, or maybe someone close to him was. Perhaps that was why he reacted so badly to the equipment, which looked like medical apparatus.
“An expert’s workshop,” replied Borg proudly. “This is where I verify whether paintings are authentic. They bring them to me from all over the world. Unless they refuse to have their treasures transported by motorboat,” he said.
“Aha. I thought it would look different.”
“What did you imagine?” asked Borg, amused.
“An old guy—no offense—sitting in an office, staring at a picture, examining it through a magnifying glass, checking the signature and the little trees in the background. Eventually he gets up and says, ‘It’s a fake!’”
“Analyzing the style is pointless,” explained Borg. “If a forger wants to copy a painting or create a nonexistent painting by a famous artist, what does he copy? The style. He applies the paint in the same way, paints the little trees the same way, the nude’s buttocks, the apples in a still life, not to mention the signature. If the forger is good, no expert will recognize it purely by analyzing the style.”
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