The Forger

by Paul Watkins

  We followed him downstairs. On our way out of the building, Dietrich stopped to look down at the body of Grimm. Then he kept walking, out to a metal storage shed in the courtyard at the back. Inside was a large Zundapp motorcycle. He rolled it off its kickstand and out into the courtyard. Then he straddled it and fired up the motor, revving hard.

  “Where’s Valya?” Pankratov shouted over the rumble of the engine.

  “She left me two days ago,” he said. “I expect she’ll turn up at your place before long.” Dietrich smiled his old confident smile. “I never should have doubted you. I’m ashamed to say that I did. My mistake,” he said. “Gentlemen, I will see you on the other side.” He gunned the Zundapp’s engine, roared out into the street and sped away.

  When the sound of his engine had become indistinguishable among the other sounds of the city, I turned to Pankratov. “What did he mean when he said he’d see us on the other side?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Pankratov.

  “I thought we were finished,” I told him.

  Pankratov breathed out, composing himself. He held up the key. “Shall we take a look?”

  The narrow stone staircase spiraled down to the basement. High, gloss-white walls rose up on either side of us. The stairs ended abruptly at a door, which had a large bolt across it, held in place by a bronze padlock. Pankratov fumbled with the key, then opened the padlock and slid back the bolt. He set his shoulder against the door and pushed it open.

  The first thing I saw when the door swung wide was Fleury. He was hanging from a hemp-rope noose, his feet only a few inches above the floor. The rope was attached to the iron railings that spanned the ceiling. A chair lay on its side underneath him. Fleury’s head was slumped over onto one shoulder. His lips were blue and his eyelids puffy and red. He wore the armor of his smoking jacket.

  I ran across the room and grabbed his legs, holding him up, while Pankratov set up the chair, climbed up onto it and cut through the rope with his penknife. By the time we got him down to the floor, I already knew he was dead.

  It was only then that I took in the walls of the room. Filling almost every inch of space were the paintings of the Gottheim Collection. My eyes fixed on one small painting on the back wall. It showed a little girl in a dark blue dress, holding a basket of flowers. It was Pankratov’s painting of Valya.

  I sat down beside Fleury. Everything around me slipped in and out of focus. The colors of the paintings seemed to shimmer.

  Fleury’s glasses were in his top pocket, where he always put them. I took them out and held them.

  Pankratov was standing over me. He was looking down at Fleury. His eyes were filled with tears.

  I thought about what Dietrich had said—that he had been sure we weren’t coming. This was Fleury’s punishment for having failed him. I knew he would have done the same to me and Pankratov if we had been there at the time.

  Pankratov went over to his painting and took it off the wall, where it had been hung on a nail. He held it close to his face. Behind where the picture had hung, on a nail driven into the soft wall, were the same ghostly handprints I had seen the time before.

  We were startled by the sound of footsteps and shouting up at street level. Then someone came running down the stairs.

  We stayed frozen. There was no place to go.

  The man was so shocked when he saw us that he fell over backwards in an attempt to get out of the way. He was also carrying a Schmeisser, and the gun fell back hard against his chest. The man pressed himself against the wall, but there was no cover.

  I recognized him. It was Tombeau.

  His teeth were bared and his heavy leather coat was torn from the fall. He aimed the gun into the room. It was a second before he realized it was us. “Where’s Dietrich?” he shouted.

  “Gone,” I said.

  “How long ago?”

  “Ten minutes,” I told him.

  “On foot?”

  “Motorcycle.”

  Tombeau gritted his teeth, then kicked a hole in the wall. “Damn!” he shouted. Then he noticed Fleury. He walked over to the body, bent down and took Fleury’s jaw in his hand. The rope was still around Fleury’s neck. Tombeau turned Fleury’s head from side to side, then let him go and rose back to his feet. “Madame Pontier just found out what you did with The Astronomer. You’d better know exactly where it is or you’re all going to end up like your friend here.”

  “The Astronomer,” said Pankratov slowly, “is in my warehouse. Dietrich left with a forgery.”

  Tombeau paused. “You actually forged it?”

  “We did,” Pankratov told him.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Madame Pontier said you didn’t have the guts.”

  There was the sound of footsteps. Someone was coming down the stairs.

  Tombeau walked over to Pankratov. He jerked his head at the stairs. “You’re coming with me to the warehouse, and the original had damn well better be there.”

  “Fine,” replied Pankratov.

  Another man appeared in the doorway. He was tall, with a beer belly and a scrub-brush mustache. He wore a leather coat like Tombeau and carried a Luger. He glanced at us, then turned to Tombeau. “No sign of Dietrich.”

  “Doesn’t matter now,” said Tombeau.

  The man scanned the walls and whistled through his teeth. “Not bad,” he said. “This should make up for some of the money we’re owed.”

  “I expect it will,” replied Tombeau.

  The man jerked his head toward us. “What are you going to do with this lot?”

  “Do what I have to,” said Tombeau.

  The man looked at us for a second, then nodded and looked away.

  “Go tell the others what’s down here,” Tombeau told the man. Then he waved a hand at us. “Move!” he shouted.

  “What about Fleury?” I asked, still not getting up. I couldn’t stand to leave him here.

  Tombeau crouched down beside me and whispered, his lips so close to my ear I could feel them touching me, “If we don’t leave immediately, these people are going to find out who you are. And if they do, you’ll never get out of here. Do you understand?”

  “David,” said Pankratov.

  His voice knocked me out of my shock. I got up and shuffled toward the door.

  Pankratov was carrying his painting of Valya.

  “You leave that,” said the man at the door. “That’s ours.”

  Pankratov hesitated.

  “Leave it!” shouted Tombeau, and his voice sank dull and echoless into the torture chamber walls.

  Pankratov put down the painting and we filed up the stairs with Tombeau, just as a dozen Fabry-Georges were walking down. Each of us pressed our backs to the walls to make room. The men held their guns to their chests. We eyed each other curiously. I smelled tobacco, alcohol and sweat.

  Out in the street, two black Renault cars belonging to the Fabry-Georges were pulled up on the curb. One had bulletholes in the windshield. Tombeau glanced back to see if any of the Fabry-Georges were behind him. Then he turned to us. “You,” he said to me, “you have to get out of here. Out of Paris. Until I can clear up this mess, there’s about five hundred people who’ll shoot you on sight.”

  “What about me?” asked Pankratov.

  “You’re staying with me until we get the Vermeer. When Madame Pontier gets that back, you’ll be all right with her.”

  “What about the Gottheim paintings?” I asked.

  “As soon as I get back here, I’ll take care of them.” Tombeau set his hand on my shoulder. “I told you I’d set you free one day and now you are free. Get out of here while you still can.”

  I looked at Pankratov.

  “Do as he says,” said Pankratov.

  I shook Pankratov’s hand.

  “No time for this,” hissed Tombeau and bundled Pankratov into one of the Renaults. He flicked his hand at the other car, the one with the holes in its windshield. “Take it,” he said to me. “The keys are i
nside. There are two cans of fuel in the back.”

  Then Tombeau climbed behind the wheel of his other car. He started the engine, clanking it into gear, and sped off down the road. Pankratov watched me through the rear window until the car turned sharply at the corner, tires squealing, and disappeared.

  I found myself suddenly alone on the Avenue d’Iéna. The smell of extinguished fires blew lazily into the street from the charred window frames of Dietrich’s building.

  I got in the car and drove.

  One hour later, I was heading through fields west of the city. Flowers were stuck under my windshield wipers from a street party I had passed through on my way out. My eyes watered from wind blowing in through the holes in the windshield. The August sun was hot on my knuckles as they gripped the steering wheel. Convoys of American trucks passed us, heading in the other direction. Large white stars were painted on their hoods.

  I didn’t know where I was going. I just kept heading west. Late in the day, I was stopped at a military checkpoint near Carpiquet. An American military policeman walked over to my car and leaned in. The green paint on the rim of his helmet had been worn away, showing the bare steel underneath. Behind him, an old farmhouse was burning by the side of the road. Milky smoke poured like an inverted waterfall from the upstairs windows. “Taking a roadtrip?”

  “Yes, I am,” I answered him in English.

  He raised his eyebrows when he heard my accent. “Where you from?” he asked.

  “Paris,” I told him.

  “No.” He laughed quietly. “Where you from really?”

  We talked for a few minutes. Then he told me I was free to go.

  I continued on through the twilight and into the night, toward the coast of Normandy. Across the moonlit fields, I saw the lights of distant towns out in the dark, where streetlamps pooled their glow on empty roads.

  * * *

  THAT WAS MORE THAN half a century ago.

  I returned to America on a hospital ship in September 1944.

  In 1946, I took a job teaching art at a school in Narragansett, just down the road from where I grew up. I taught for the next thirty years. In 1950, I got married to a woman named Catherine, who was another teacher at the school. Over the next five years, we had two children. I continued to paint, and if my life’s work was more complicated than those around me knew, I kept it to myself.

  The only souvenir I had from my time in Paris was Fleury’s glasses. Sometimes, when no one was looking, I would put them on and feel the pull in my eyes as they tried to focus into Fleury’s blurry world.

  I never found out what happened to the forgery. I often wondered where it was and what had become of Thomas Dietrich.

  Madame Pontier became a national hero in France. For many years after the war, I often saw her still-unsmiling face in the gray haze of newspaper pictures.

  I kept in touch with Pankratov. I last saw him in Paris in the late fifties. He and Valya were still running his atelier, although Valya didn’t model any more. They used to joke that they were the only people who could put up with each other, and they were probably right. Valya managed the books and made sure he didn’t chase away all his students by acting crazy. He still went down to Ivan’s every morning, and the two of them carried on much as they had before the war. Pankratov and Ivan both died in 1960, within a few months of each other.

  The Gottheim Collection never surfaced. By the time Tombeau returned from Pankratov’s warehouse with the Vermeer, the Fabry-Georges had taken everything and disappeared. Over the years, a few of the works appeared at auctions, their sources listed as anonymous. The authenticity of the paintings were often disputed, since few people believed that the collection had in fact survived.

  Last year, I saw Pankratov’s Valya pictured in a Christie’s auction catalogue. It was unsigned and the catalogue listed the painter as unknown. I attended the auction, bid on the painting, and acquired it. The bidding went high. I found myself in competition with one other unidentified bidder who participated by closed-circuit TV. During the auction, I turned to look at a camera through which this bidder was viewing the proceedings. Immediately after, the other person dropped out. At the end of the sale, I inquired whether I might be able to know the name of the other bidder, but was told that would not be possible. I think it was Dietrich. I remembered what he had said about seeing me on the other side and thought how, in a strange way, he might have been right after all.

  Until the auction, I’d never had a chance to study the work up close. In it, Valya was sitting on a plain wood bench in a room with white-painted walls, wearing a blue dress. Her red-brown hair was pony-tailed and her little buckle shoes had geometric patterns cut into the leather of the toes. The colors were bright, seeming almost to vibrate. It was strange to see such beauty from a man as gruff and coarse as Pankratov.

  My wife and I donated the painting to the Musée Duarte, with a plaque on the frame that read: “Valya, by Alexander Pankratov. In Memory of Guillaume Fleury.” We had a very small ceremony at the Duarte, with the museum director, Valya, Cath and me.

  “I never really knew Fleury,” Valya said to Cath. “He was always just that funny little man.” She had brought along Pankratov’s canvas chair. The museum director allowed it to be placed beside a viewing bench that faced Pankratov’s painting.

  As we left, I watched a group of students fanning out through the museum, paper in hand, ready to draw their assignments. A young woman settled into Pankratov’s chair and began a sketch of Valya.

  We said our good-byes.

  That evening, I took a walk alone in the honeyed sunset light. I went as far as the Gare St. Lazarre and stood at the end of the main platform, watching the trains pull in and out. I felt the hot breath of the engines passing by.

  I won’t be coming back again. Until this day, those few years I spent in Paris had always been my great unfinished business, scattered amongst unconsummated loves and half-grasped revelations. I have lived in quiet, patient hope for the moment to arrive that would mark the end and the beginning of this dream I had when I was young.

  Now it is time to go home.

  A NOTE ON TWO OF THE PAINTINGS IN THE TEXT

  Portrait of a Young Girl, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder, possibly as early as 1520, was acquired by the Louvre in 1910. Although it is widely believed to be a painting of the daughter of Martin Luther, who was born in 1529, the style of the painting is closer to Cranach’s work in the early 1520s, so the identity of the subject remains in question.*

  The Astronomer, painted by Johannes Vermeer c. 1668, became part of the collection of the Baron Alphonse de Rothschild in 1907. At the time of the German invasion, the painting was in the collection of Baron Edouard de Rothschild in France, where it was seized by the ERR. It was taken to the Jeu de Paume, declared to be the property of the Third Reich, and was then transported by train to Germany in a crate marked H13, indicating that it was designated to be part of Hitler’s private collection. On November 13, 1940, Alfred Rosenberg, head of the ERR, wrote a letter to Martin Bormann, Hitler’s financial secretary, announcing the find and mentioning Hitler’s special interest in the painting. The painting was returned to France at the end of the war and was shown in the Exhibition of Masterpieces from French Collections Recovered from Germany, held at the Orangerie in Paris in 1946.†

  Although many of the other paintings and drawings mentioned in this book do exist, their roles are entirely fictitious. Any correspondence with their actual history during the time period of the novel is accidental and unintentional.

  *Source: Max Friedlander and Jakob Rosenberg, Lucas Cranach (New York: Tabard Press, 1978).

  †Sources: Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum (New York: HarperCollins/Basic Books, 1997). Ludwig Goldscheider, Johannes Vermeer, Gemalde Gesamtausgabe (Cologne: Phaidon Verlag, 1958).

  ALSO BY PAUL WATKINS

  Night Over Day Over Night

  Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn

  In the Blue Light of African Dre
ams

  The Promise of Light

  Stand Before Your God

  Archangel

  The Story of My Disappearance

  THE FORGER. Copyright © 2000 by Paul Watkins. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited.

  FRONTISPIECE:

  The Astronomer, 1668 (oil on canvas) by Jan Vermeer (1632–75)

  The Louvre, Paris, France/RMN/Bulloz/Bridgeman Art Library

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  First Edition: November 2000

  eISBN 9781466887671

  First eBook edition: November 2014