Anatol was indignant. “OK, I get it, sorry to be the dumb soldier-boy. So what do you test, if not the style?”
“Whatever can’t be faked, or is very hard to fake. The type of canvas, the wood used for the stretcher, things like that.”
“Though there too it’s possible to cheat, by painting the fake on top of a picture from the right era,” said Karol.
“That’s right. That’s why I X-ray the painting, to check each layer, what the foundation is like, and the sketches underneath. But above all the composition of the pigments. Nowadays, you can buy your paints at an art store, but for centuries there was a whole alchemy to it. The carbon for black was made from ivory. Toxic lead produced white. The best yellow was said to be made from lava spat out by Vesuvius. Blue could be produced by powdering cobalt glass. Red was obtained from the roots of madder or from the aphids that feed on cactuses. What were these pigments mixed with to fix them on a wall, a canvas, or a wooden board? Water, glue, or oil perhaps? And if so, what kind? Flax, soy, pistachio? For centuries painters experimented with pigments and ways to apply them. Some sought their own perfect recipes, others had their own specialists, chemists, alchemists, and scientists. The secret recipes that produced the most fabulous colors were very closely guarded. The Old Master painters knew that anyone can imitate a style—any of their pupils could do it, thirsty for fame and greedy for money. But without paints and recipes, even the most brilliant pupil was a nobody—all he could do was sweep the floor and suffer creative torment.”
Anatol nodded. “And how can you tell if it’s aphids or ivory?”
“My pal here will know.” Borg patted a silver machine that looked like a potbellied stove. “My pal PY-2020D, which quickly and efficiently conducts pyrolysis gas chromatography mass spectrometry.”
“Sorry?” blurted Karol.
Zofia was aware that Karol’s knowledge of art was not backed up by technical know-how of the kind men usually like. When they had been together, she had had to change the light bulbs and the tires, because he didn’t know how.
Borg took off his glasses and wiped them again.
“The abridged version, OK?” he said after a pause. “Whether the pigments are artificial or natural, they’re all just chemical compounds, mixed to the right proportions. Sometimes there are a few dozen ingredients, sometimes a few hundred. This machine combines two different ways of identifying those compounds and how many of them there are. How can I explain? A sample of red paint, for example, is vaporized. It changes into a gas but without losing any of the chemical compounds. The gas is pushed through a very long tube, where the individual compounds are separated, as some travel through the tube at a slower rate, others at a faster rate. Depending on that speed, and the manner in which they burn at the end of the tube, we’ll know what’s in there. That’s it in a nutshell.”
“Just because I don’t know about art doesn’t mean I’m an idiot,” said Anatol. “I know what gas retention time is.”
“What what is?” asked Karol.
Borg continued.
“Anyhow, we end up with a graph that shows how many of what substances there are in the sample. The presence of a large amount of ferric oxide indicates that the painter used rust for his reds, in other words natural ochre, just like on the walls of this house, for example. This sort of graph showing the chemical compounds tells us immediately whether the paints used were medieval, nineteenth century, or produced by modern chemistry.”
“But we can’t tell if a crafty forger hasn’t made the paints by hand,” said Zofia.
“We can, if we compare the sample with paint from a picture by the same painter that’s genuine beyond doubt. If they’re similar, the painting must be an original. You can copy paint to make it resemble paint from the era, but it’s impossible to fake the paint from a specific palette. Not to mention the fact that every artist modifies the paints—let’s note that the sample contains more than just paint. It also includes whatever soaked into the palette earlier on, whatever happened to be flying around in the air, or whatever the model sneezed out. It’s a brilliant method, infallible, and it’s quick and inexpensive too. As we’re just about to demonstrate.”
Borg patted the machine again and turned to Lisa. “Have you got the sample?”
She nodded, and took a small string bag from her purse. It looked empty; only by staring hard was it possible to see some flecks at the bottom.
“Is it sterile?” asked Borg, examining the sample under a stationary microscope.
Lisa cleared her throat.
“Yes or no?”
“There wasn’t time. Besides, the security proved better than I’d thought, the picture would have vanished before I’d gotten the sample. I scratched it off with a fingernail.”
“You what?” Borg was astonished.
“I scratched it off with a fingernail.”
“You mean you scratched this sample off,” said Borg, pointing, “dust, varnish, and all, then scraped it out from under your fingernail, with a few crumbs, the pubic hairs of your lover, a bit of dirt, and a touch of gasoline from the station?”
“My idea of hygiene must be very different from yours.”
“Unless you sterilized your fingers in advance, that’s what was under your fingernails, and that’s just the start of the list of hundreds and thousands of chemical compounds we’d find. You can stick your sample up your ass. It wouldn’t contaminate it any more.”
A shadow crossed Lisa’s beautiful face.
“And you can stick your science mania up your ass,” she replied. “If you don’t like it, then go back to Uppsala University and teach the kids the difference between Monet and Manet. Contaminated or not, there it is. And as you can see, more than anything it’s the cadmium green of paint, not the yellow ochre of snot. So get to work.”
Borg wasn’t affected. He took off his glasses and wiped them again with a chamois leather cloth lying beside the microscope.
“All right, show me.” He pointed at the computer on his desk.
Lisa inserted a USB stick, and soon the footage from the camera mounted on her ear during the operation in New Rochelle appeared on the screen. It was the part when she was monitoring the door into the room where Richmond kept his treasures.
Instantly all the emotions of that night came flooding back to Zofia. Her mouth felt dry, her pulse began to race, and her muscles tensed. She had to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t in New York, she was on a quiet Swedish island where it was peaceful and safe.
As soon as the unknown Impressionist filled the computer screen, Lisa paused the video.
“Incredible,” said Borg. “If we can prove it’s not a fake . . . All right, let’s do it.”
“It was in his letters,” said Lisa.
“In his chaotic, tortuous letters that only survived in scraps. He got years, friends, and models mixed up. It’s not a reliable source. Be quiet now.” Borg set about preparing the sample under the microscope, getting it ready for the chromatogram.
“Whose is it?” asked Karol. “I’ve never seen that Impressionist before.”
“Who do you think it looks like?” asked Lisa.
“I’d say Monet, or Renoir from Argenteuil. Greenery, light, the Seine, it all fits.”
“Look at the model’s face,” said Lisa, smiling.
Karol leaned toward the monitor and squinted. Then he suddenly stood up straight.
“That’s impossible. It’s a fake, an artist’s joke.”
“What’s up?” asked Zofia.
“Look at the model and you’ll see. Imagine her with her hair up, in a dress.”
Zofia looked closely and burst out laughing.
“Of course! She’s the girl from the foreground in the Bal du moulin de la Galette, Renoir’s most famous painting. It’s a wonderful thing, one of the best Impressionists of all. A lazy Sunday afternoon in Paris. Dancing, music, wine, straw hats, light filtering through summer foliage. It’s in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.”
“Miles of academic papers have been written on that painting—if only there were a perfect study of one of its characters, like this charming model,” said Karol, pointing at the girl preparing to bathe, “we’d know it by heart. I’m sorry, but there’s no such painting by Renoir.”
“And there never was,” added Zofia. “Not in any collection or museum, not on any list of stolen or missing works, or anywhere at all. And something like the sudden appearance of a lost masterpiece by a leading Impressionist simply doesn’t happen.”
“Why not?” asked Anatol.
“Laws of the market. Those are the most expensive works of art. If you look at a list of the paintings that have achieved the highest prices, Cézanne opens the bidding. And the top ten includes several van Goghs, Munch, and Renoir. There would be more of them, but they’re in various national museums, so they don’t change owners. And as they’re the most expensive, every sale comes with carefully prepared hype to ramp up interest and also the price. I won’t mention the turnover from works resulting from theft. But this one isn’t the result of theft because it never existed. From which it appears that . . .” Zofia stopped.
“That what?” asked Karol.
“. . . we’re wasting time. This fine forgery brings us no closer to anything and explains nothing. There is no larger whole, there are just two dumb Swedes with an Impressionist obsession who are doing something totally absurd. God, what total crap.”
Zofia sighed and sat down. Borg put the sample into the machine and switched it on. Diodes lit up, a compressor began to whirr. Borg said something quietly to Lisa in Swedish, and she answered just as quietly, with a hint of irritation. Borg gave her a reply. Zofia glanced at Anatol, but he was staring into space.
“We’ll have the results in a moment,” said Borg. “We’re analyzing the green paint from a presumed Renoir that must date from just before the Bal, and thus the summer of 1876. We’ll compare it with a sample of green from Girl with a Watering Can, a portrait Renoir painted at Argenteuil that same summer, which hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.”
“But where will we get that sample from?” asked Anatol.
“The chromatogram of that painting is in the database.”
“Seriously? You make holes in paintings all over the world just to get the material for comparisons? If you do a few more tests, there won’t be anything left to look at in the museums.”
“The samples aren’t usually collected with a fingernail,” said Lisa. “And the amount needed for analysis is microscopic. Nobody would notice it anyway, because it’s usually collected from the edge, under the frame.”
The computer began to bleep, and a graph appeared on the screen with lots of peaks and valleys of various widths and heights.
They all went up to the screen. Borg ritually wiped his glasses and set the program to compare the chemical composition of their sample with that of the Girl with a Watering Can. For a while they watched the progress bar, then the two graphs combined into one. Apart from one mighty peak on the graph for their sample, they were almost identical. The program confirmed that their chemical concurrence was at a level of 82 percent.
“Doesn’t that disqualify us?” asked Zofia, pointing at the peak that spoiled the harmony of the two graphs.
“That, my dear, is a compound with the molecular formula C10H16, commonly known as turpentine, which is a basic ingredient of varnish. It’s in our graph because the samples are usually sourced from under the varnish using a special needle, not scratched off the painting with a fingernail. If we remove turpentine from the equation, we get”—Borg’s fingers raced over the keyboard—“this result.”
The computer bleeped and confirmed that the concurrence of the two samples was now at 95 percent.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Borg. “It looks as if the nonexistent Renoir does in fact exist.”
“So it could be true,” whispered Lisa.
They glanced at her.
“Forget the Raphael. The collection might really exist.”
“What collection?” asked Zofia, confused.
“The collection we’ve been trying to find for the past twenty years. The greatest treasure in the history of art,” said Borg. “Treasure that will make all other collections and all other museums mediocre by comparison. Treasure that means the art history books will have to be written all over again. You said the world’s most expensive paintings are done by the Impressionists, correct?”
“Yes,” said Zofia.
“Then imagine a collection of unknown canvases by van Gogh, Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Gauguin, Sisley, Manet, and Renoir. Not portraits painted on commission but innovative, experimental works, bold in terms of theme or technique, hard to sell at the time but nowadays sure to be sacred, as the forerunners of Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, and modern art in general. How much would such a collection be worth?”
“Billions,” replied Karol.
“This,” said Borg, pointing at the computer screen, “testifies to the existence of such a collection.”
“Great!” Zofia said sarcastically. “But is there any . . . not proof, but circumstantial evidence? Other than a mysterious canvas hanging in Richmond’s home?”
“There is,” said Lisa. “Believe me, there is. Sten and I have been researching it for the past twenty years. There isn’t much, but it’s enough to suspect that the Collection, with a capital C, was assembled in the second half of the nineteenth century.”
“By whom?”
Lisa and Borg exchanged confused glances.
“We have no idea,” said Borg after a pause, toying with the cuffs of his old corduroy jacket. “Yes, I know how it sounds, as if we were lunatics in search of the Ark of the Covenant. But we’ve checked everything. First, the collectors who bought Impressionists in their time. There weren’t many, but there were some, fans rather than collectors, but in those days paintings by Monet and Renoir were bought for a song. The artists were starving to death, so some of their buyers thought of the purchase not as an investment but charity. We’ve screened the most important European collections made in the first half of the twentieth century, from Rosenberg, Rothschild, and Wildenstein in France, to Goudstikker in Holland. We’ve checked the dealers and the German records from the Second World War; we’ve checked the archives of the Monuments Men; Ronia . . . I mean Lisa has screened the museums in Russia, where all sorts of world-art treasures are lying in the cellars unnoticed. We’ve checked the sheikhs, the black markets in weapons and drugs where works of art have served as security for decades. We were hoping we’d come across a contemporary clue to the Collection, or at least part of it, and that would give us a lead to follow . . .”
Borg fell silent and leaned against the arm of his chair. Lisa ran up to him and said something in Swedish that sounded caring and tender.
“I’m all right,” replied Borg in English. “I’m sorry, but at my age I’m sometimes overwhelmed by emotion. It’s just that I really have given a lot to the Collection; it’s my lifelong dream. But a few years ago I came to terms with the idea that it’s just a game, an intellectual exercise, and that I’ll never actually find it or any proof of its existence. But now . . . I’m sorry, for a cold-blooded Swede, I’m not good at dealing with my emotions.”
“Maybe I’m being naive,” said Anatol, speaking carefully, “but isn’t the lack of any information whatsoever perhaps proof that this collection doesn’t exist? And we’ve just found a painting that spent a hundred years in someone’s attic?”
Borg pulled himself together and sat up straight.
“There are too many clues,” he said. “For example, in a letter from Renoir to a friend, there’s a sentence saying that his portrait of C. by the river came out very well, but for obvious reasons he couldn’t show it to anyone, and finally sold it to the Count so he wouldn’t be tempted. ‘I’ll have a drink, boast about her, and then there’ll be trouble’—that’s what he wrote.”
“Unfortunately the Masters
didn’t have much time for writing. Drinking, painting, and screwing their models took up most of their time,” said Lisa, continuing for him. “If one of them settled down, like Monet, he had to slog away for his family, so he had even less time. Monet twice mentions a ‘Count’ in his surviving correspondence. Once when he regrets having to stop painting those smokes and mists because no one will buy them from him, but at least the Count took the black locomotive, there was nowhere to keep it anyway, and a second child on the way.”
“Black?” Anatol was surprised. “I thought the Impressionists were nothing but light, sunshine, and spots of color.”
“That’s right. But Monet had a thing about railroads; his trains and stations are on show in several places. If he’d painted an Impressionist railroad in shades of black and on a large scale, it’d be so different from his other paintings that it’d be absolutely priceless.”
Borg leaned over the keyboard. Lisa made a move, as if about to hold him back, but didn’t.
“I’ll show you something. So you’ll see we’re not crazies, looking for some mirage. It’s the only tangible proof, in as much as a photograph can be tangible, that the Collection exists. More than that, it’s an argument that despite appearances, our interests coincide.”
He clicked a few times, and a black-and-white photograph appeared on the screen. Anyone expecting the sinister secrets of history must have felt severely disappointed. The photograph was of a little girl of three or four, in boy’s dungarees, playing with a small beagle, still a puppy. Apart from this playful pair, a bit of wooden floor, a wrought-iron lamp, and part of a white wall, the picture was almost empty. Almost, because the photographer had caught two paintings hanging on the wall in simple, makeshift frames. One showed a black locomotive racing through a black night, pushing a funnel of yellow light ahead, while the moon shone through clouds of steam belching from the chimney. Even in the poor-quality photograph the great force of the Impressionist night scene was apparent, its perfect expression of the power of the engine speeding through the night.
Smiling enigmatically from the other painting was their old friend, the Young Man.
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