The Forger

by Paul Watkins

I felt powerless to argue. If Pankratov believed it, he who seemed to care nothing about the order of the world outside the bone box of his skull, then maybe it was true.

  He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes, as if he had not slept in a long time. “You once said you owed me a great debt for bringing you to Paris. You said you didn’t know how you’d ever repay me. Well, now you can. And you’ll be doing a lot more than that. You’ll see why it’s so important that we work together on this.”

  There was a long time of silence. I did owe him a debt, it was true. But it was what he said about us working together that started rattling around in my head. This would be my only chance to know him as an equal. If I didn’t take this offer, I would spend the rest of my life in search of his grudging admiration. It wasn’t something he had done to me. I had done this to myself.

  I wondered if, somewhere out on the frozen tundra, he had left behind his own unwilling master.

  “You’re not exactly giving me a choice, are you?”

  “Not exactly,” he replied.

  “Then I might as well volunteer.”

  Pankratov nodded, saying nothing.

  Before I left, Tombeau walked me from the room and down the corridor. “They’re letting you go now because the Russian persuaded them that you wouldn’t cross us. Personally, I have my doubts. If you let us down, it’s going to be my job to come and get you. And when I find you, I’m going to blow your damned head off.” Tombeau smiled again, to show how insincere his smiling had been all along. “And then I’m coming for the Russian, because I’ll be holding him responsible. Until the day I say you’re free, I’ll be watching you. You can count on that.” He gave me one last slap on the back and walked away down the corridor, ducking the green-shaded lights.

  * * *

  PANKRATOV AND I REACHED the street and began to walk.

  “Even if I have agreed to do the work,” I told him, “you know damned well I’m not skilled enough to make copies and for the fakes to go unnoticed.”

  “It is precisely that kind of thinking that makes the art of forgery possible,” said Pankratov. “We are not talking about creating a masterpiece. We are talking about creating the illusion of a masterpiece. In our work, the painting or the drawing itself is only a part of the puzzle. You are right that someone can’t just pick up a paintbrush and start churning out Caravaggios. The great forgers, the proof of whose greatness is the fact that we’ll never know their names, study the materials that go into the work of art, and after that, methods of aging. I am not saying you are a forger now. But those sketches of yours are proof that you have the makings of a forger.”

  I had no way to disagree with him.

  “You won’t be making direct copies,” continued Pankratov. “That’s too risky. You’ll do work in the style of certain artists. Previously unknown paintings and drawings are always turning up out of private collections, or they could be works that were wrongly attributed.”

  “What good will that do, anyway? How will it save the originals?”

  “They’ll be looking for people like Titian, Botticelli, Vermeer. They’re not going to set fire to every Degas, Manet or Van Gogh they get their hands on. Those paintings will be used for trade.”

  “And we’ll be giving them fakes?” I asked.

  “For originals. Exactly.”

  I found myself dodging cracks on the sidewalk, which I often did when I was preoccupied. “And you think this is going to work?”

  “With enough of a head start, and enough skill, yes.”

  “What was the rush back there?” I asked.

  “If the Germans come in,” he said, “they’ll take over the police and security services before they do anything else. Some people will get dragged off to prison camps and others will be promoted because they’ll agree to collaborate with the Germans.”

  That was the first time I heard the word “collaborate.”

  “That man back there,” continued Pankratov. “Tombeau. He wanted to make sure you were brought in as part of a regular arrest. He wanted people to see that. But what happened once you got inside that room was something he didn’t want anyone else to see. He doesn’t know who to trust. That’s why he wanted you out of there so fast.”

  “But why pick me? There must be a hundred other people in Paris who could do a better job.”

  “There are other people, most with criminal records. But the Germans know their names. They won’t be able to make a move without the Germans knowing. They needed someone without a record. That’s why they picked you.”

  “And what about Fleury?”

  “They picked Fleury precisely because he is known. He’s suspected of being unscrupulous. They need someone like him because when he starts showing up with paintings that the Germans don’t know about, they’ll need to believe the work was stolen out of some private collection. If Fleury’s the man doing the selling, they’ll have no trouble believing it.”

  “Who’s Tombeau working for?” I asked.

  “I expect you’ll meet them very soon.”

  “Are we the only ones?”

  “No. I don’t know how many others there are. We’ve been split up into cell groups. That way if the Germans get one group, they can’t get to the others.”

  “How are the Germans going to know the locations of all these paintings, anyway?”

  “They sent in people as art students, all through the thirties. They called themselves the East European Commission. They catalogued paintings in galleries. When the war started, these students all disappeared. We’ll see them again, I expect, but next time they’ll be wearing army uniforms. Valya fell in love with one of them. I think she left when he did. I believe she’s been working for them.” He shook his head to show his helplessness.

  I began to see a little more clearly why he had set aside his stubbornness.

  We walked all the way to Café Dimitri and sat down together at a table. We drank his drink, a demitasse with steamed milk on the side, and each of us ate a medjool date to sweeten the coffee’s harshness. It was real coffee, too, for a change, and the last Ivan would serve for several years to come.

  My earlier cynicism was starting to fade. We would be equals now, Pankratov and I. We would do the work, not for the reasons they gave us, not because of intimidation, but for reasons they might never understand. I thought about what Pankratov had said earlier—how sometimes you have to wait a lifetime before a chance like this comes along.

  Pankratov sat back in his chair. “Do you trust Fleury?” he asked. “I mean, trust him completely?”

  It would have been complicated for me to explain that I didn’t, not completely, but that he was still my friend. Pankratov didn’t force me to say it. He understood my answer by the silence.

  “He could get us killed,” said Pankratov.

  “We could get him killed, too,” I replied, “if we don’t get it right.”

  “Yes,” admitted Pankratov. “That much is true.”

  I realized it had not occurred to me to question whether or not I could trust Pankratov. I knew instinctively that I could. The same qualities that made him difficult to be around had also earned my confidence in him. Pankratov could not be intimidated by the threat of physical pain. One glance at him, and anyone could tell. He could not be beaten into submission by the threat of having his possessions confiscated. He owned nothing that anyone else was likely to value. Pankratov could not be bribed with money or tokens of social acceptance. He didn’t care enough about himself to be tempted. This was why I trust Pankratov. It was why I pitied him, too.

  * * *

  WHEN I RETURNED TO the apartment, Fleury was waiting outside my door. His face was pale.

  We went inside and I filled two coffee cups with wine. We sat down at my kitchen table.

  “Well,” he said. “What did you tell them?”

  I sipped at the wine. “I agreed to do the work.”

  Fleury’s shoulder slumped with relief. “Thank God,” he said
. “They said they’d throw us both in prison if you refused.” He set the mug against his teeth and drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed twice as the wine went down his throat. “I felt sure you’d tell them all to go to hell.”

  “It was Pankratov who convinced me,” I said.

  “As long as somebody did.” Fleury finished the wine and helped himself to some more. Then he brought out his red tin of Craven A’s and lit one. Those weren’t Craven A’s he was smoking, not any more. He bought whatever he could get, and just kept using that red tin. “I can’t say I’m looking forward to working for this thug of a man, Tombeau, but I’d rather do that than end up in a French prison. Strange how your life can be moving along in one direction, and you even start to take that direction for granted, and you give yourself all these little matters to worry about, and then something comes along and changes everything. And it can happen”—he clapped his hands together; the ash from the cigarette floated onto the tabletop, like the downy feathers of a bird—“it can happen like that.”

  I walked over to my bed and lay down, hearing the old springs squawk under my weight. I rested the heels of my shoes on the bed rail and tucked my hands behind my head. The bed was right beneath the windowsill, and I saw the silhouettes of pigeons on the roof of the Postillon warehouse. I was thinking that, all my life, I had been fighting against a current. Like water. Water deep under the ground that I struggled through even though I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t beat it and I knew I couldn’t beat it, but I didn’t know what else to do except keep struggling against it. Today was the first time that I felt as if I’d quit struggling.

  Fleury pinched the burning end off his cigarette and then put the stub in his pocket. He was saving his tobacco these days. “Do you think we can do what they want us to do?”

  “Do I think you can sell paintings to the Germans? Yes. Do I think Pankratov knows enough to teach me? If he says so, yes. But do I think I can learn it? Do I think I have enough talent to begin with?” I shook my head, feeling the pillow rustle. “I seriously doubt that.”

  “If Pankratov says you can do it,” Fleury told me, “then you can.”

  For the first time, I allowed myself to consider the possibility that Pankratov’s faith in me might not have been misplaced, after all. I closed my eyes and felt the current pulling me, smoothly and gently, down fast-running rivers, out toward the rolling of the jade green sea. I did not fight it. I would not fight it again.

  Chapter Seven

  “I’M GOING TO TELL you everything I know,” said Pankratov.

  We were back in the atelier. The stools were piled into a corner. The stage looked huge and empty without Valya scowling down from it.

  Pankratov had set up a painting. It was very old, without a frame, the paint spider-webbed with tiny cracks. The subject was an old man with a froth of gray beard, looking up from writing in a thick book. A quill was in his right hand. His clothes were velvety red like the curtains in my apartment and a wide-brimmed red hat hung on the wall in the right-hand corner of the picture. The man looked good-natured and intelligent, but a little sad, as if growing old had caught him by surprise.

  “As much as we can,” he explained, “we’ll be using old materials. For paintings, the canvas is the most important thing. It’s the first place they’ll look. The best kind is linen. It’s easiest to work with when it comes to aging a piece. Some canvases are made from cotton or hemp, but they aren’t as good.” He picked the painting from the easel and flipped it around so that we were looking at the back. It was peppered with gray blotches. “Canvas can be spoiled by moisture, especially at the back, where it hasn’t been treated.” He scraped his fingernail across it, popping the fine threads, which sent tiny puffs of white dust into the air. “This kind of damage devalues the work, but it also serves as proof that the materials are old. When a dealer handles a painting, he looks at the way the paint has aged. The cracking, fading, darkening. He looks at the frame. All this before he has even studied the quality of the work itself. He has a checklist in his head. It’s our job to make sure he can go down that checklist without getting suspicious.”

  I sat down dejectedly on the stage. It seemed too much to learn.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.” From his satchel, he pulled out one of my sketches which Fleury had sold. He must have gotten it from Tombeau. “And this,” he said, “is why I need you.”

  There was a noise on the stairs. Both of us tensed. We turned toward the rippled glass pane in the door to the atelier. Seconds went by. We didn’t move. There was no more sound.

  Slowly, Pankratov put my sketch back in his satchel. He walked toward the door, trying not to creak the floorboards. He opened it and peered out onto the landing. When he saw there was no danger, he turned and walked back inside.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, I found a note in Pankratov’s handwriting at the foot of the stairs. It said, WAIT FOR ME HERE.

  “What’s this about?” I asked him when he showed up, the leathery smokiness of just-drunk Café National on his breath.

  We climbed up four flights of stairs and then he put his arm in front of me to stop me going any further. He walked up two of the twelve steps of the fifth flight and then stopped. “When you get here,” he said. “I want you to count the steps. When you reach the third step, don’t tread on it.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  Pankratov placed his foot on the step and pressed down gently. The step collapsed, the ends folding up around his calves. “It’ll snap your leg,” he said. Pankratov had broken the board and repaired it so that the break didn’t show. “After yesterday,” he said. “That noise on the stairs.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “Are you afraid?” he asked.

  “I guess,” I said. “Are you?”

  “It used to be the damned Communists who were after me. This time it will be the damned Fascists.”

  We went into the studio and locked the door behind us.

  “What happened when the Communists came for you?” I asked. “All I know is what Valya told me.”

  Pankratov didn’t answer. He busied himself with hanging up his coat.

  “You said you’d tell me everything you knew.”

  He paused. “I suppose I did.” He went across to his sacred chair and sat down. His hands closed around the armrests. “The locals had told us they were coming. There were no telephones, but news passes from village to village almost as quickly. We were just there to guard that outpost, but guard it against what I never understood. The population were mostly Laplanders, about five hundred of them. They followed the reindeer and were gone half of the year. They never gave us any trouble. When the Lapps were gone, the population of the town dropped to fewer than fifty.

  “There were only two of us. I was a lieutenant because I had done one year of university. The other man was a sergeant named Rokossovsky. We had been sent to a village called Alakiemi, to act as military representatives for that region. We took over one of the little shops on the main street, which was only a hundred yards long and made of dirt. This became our headquarters. We also lived there, Rokossovsky and I. We grew our own potatoes. We had a cow and some sheep. Even before the Revolution, our wages stopped coming in, so we had to fend for ourselves. We knew there had been a revolution. We just weren’t sure who had won. We heard so many different stories in the beginning that after a while we stopped believing any of them. My uniform became so ragged that I had to throw it away. After that, the only thing to show I was a soldier of the Tsar’s army was this belt”—he tapped his finger against the plate of brass with its double-headed eagle—“and that was only for holding my trousers up.

  “After two years, Rokossovsky got married to a woman from the village. Her name was Ainu. She was half Lapp, what she called Sami, and half Finnish. She wasn’t very healthy. She’d had some disease in her lungs when she was little and she wasn’t suited to the migratory life of the people in the village. Her fam
ily were glad that she could stay behind. After Rokossovsky got married, he set himself up as a blacksmith, which had been his trade before he joined the army. A while later, they had a daughter. That was Valya.”

  “What did you do?” I asked, seeing that Pankratov had wandered away so far into his head that soon words would fail him.

  Pankratov shrugged. “I moved across the road. Had a one-room place. Not so bad. Made my own furniture out of spruce.”

  “What did you do for a job?”

  “I painted,” said Pankratov. “I painted the inside of the Alakiemi church. Top to bottom. Saints and angels and God knows what else. People came from all over to look at it. That was where I learned to paint, you know. That church was my first big project. When I finished that, I painted a mural on the wall of the headquarters. I did paintings for people in the town. I painted Valya. Each time I sent off for materials, it took two seasons to arrive. Two seasons. You couldn’t even measure it in months. I used to make my own paints and my own canvases, too. I couldn’t just sit around waiting. The winters. Jesus, the winters,” he said. Then he stopped talking.

  “The Communists,” I reminded him.

  He breathed in suddenly, as if his heart had stopped and restarted. “We knew about a week in advance that they were coming. We knew there was only one way they would approach us. They would circle around the town and strike at us from the back, across a frozen lake. It was the only way that made sense. The only direction in which they wouldn’t risk an ambush. It was the middle of January when they came, the darkest and the coldest part of winter.

  “It was a company of horsemen. They had a platoon of infantry as escort, but the foot soldiers had been left behind about three towns back. Half the men had frostbite. They had been told there were fifty of us holding out in Alakiemi. But as they got closer, they found it was only the two of us, and that we weren’t holding out. The authorities had just forgotten about us. By the time they remembered, we had become the enemy.”

  “When they came for you,” I said, reminding him gently.