The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  ALSO BY CHARLOTTE AND AARON ELKINS

  THE ALIX LONDON SERIES

  A DANGEROUS TALENT

  A CRUISE TO DIE FOR

  THE LEE OFSTED SERIES

  A WICKED SLICE

  ROTTEN LIES

  NASTY BREAKS

  WHERE HAVE ALL THE BIRDIES GONE?

  ON THE FRINGE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Charlotte and Aaron Elkins

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477824559

  ISBN-10: 1477824553

  Cover design by 4 Eyes Design

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014934575

  CONTENTS

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  Acknowledgments

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  The Conservation of Art: Methods and Aims. A Brief Guide

  By Alix London

  Price: $14.95

  Paperback: 85 pages

  Publisher: International Art Education Institute

  Average Customer Rating: 1.2 out of 5 stars

  Bestsellers Rank: #2,994,796 in Books

  Reader’s Forum Reviews. Newest First

  Worse Than Useless

  By Kathy Maynard

  Why am I giving this book only one star, you want to know? Because there’s nothing lower available. Hey, forum moderator, here’s a suggestion. How about introducing minus-stars? There are worse things than “Poor,” you know . . . and this turkey proves it!

  Don’t Waste Your Money

  By Helga McGhee

  Another derivative, disorganized, incomprehensible, totally unneeded little “guide” that says nothing that fifty other books haven’t said . . . only this one says it worse. If Alix London really learned conservation from her crook of a father, you have to wonder how he got away with all those forgeries. Don’t waste your money.

  Clueless

  By Alicia Lampert

  Art restorers—Do NOT use this book as a resource unless you want to get sued for willful destruction of property. To put it plainly, the author simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about. As a professional restorer myself, I was flabbergasted by some of her “rules” on the use of solvents and the application of heat. Alix London really should have read a book on this subject before trying to write one.

  Shameful and Pathetic

  By Diana Anderson

  So now she’s a writer too. Yet another lame attempt on the part of this “expert” to cash in on the seamy notoriety of her father Geoffrey London. Shameful and pathetic.

  Look Elsewhere

  By Linda Dow

  The idea that a reputable organization like the International Art Education Institute would put its name on this unedifying mishmash from the notorious Family London is enough to—

  That was as much as Alix could take in one sitting, and not for the first time her fingers itched—literally, truly itched—to send in a response of her own, a fiery rejoinder that would blow these captious faultfinders out of the water, but deep down she knew it wasn’t worth the bitterness of getting into a fight with them. It wasn’t worth reading their “reviews” at all, but despite the self-discipline of which she was justifiably proud, she couldn’t seem to stay away. It was like the hole in your gums left after a tooth extraction; it made you wince to stick your tongue in it, but you couldn’t stop doing it. For two days, maybe, three on the outside, she could manage not to check, but then her curiosity would get the better of her and she’d be at it again. And, naturally, get burned again.

  Talk about moths and flames.

  It wasn’t as if these were honest critiques from which she might learn something either. They were all part of a malicious, coordinated vendetta. Surely, anyone could see that (she hoped). After all, how could an obscure, limited-market little book like The Conservation of Art, with its modest objectives, be of enough interest to draw so many reviews, negative or positive? Who were these people (were they all really different people?) who were driven to register such passionate condemnations? Anyway, what kind of people were given to passion when it came to techniques of art conservation? No, it didn’t add up.

  And then, when the book, her first serious try at writing, had come out eight months ago, four reader reviews had come in over the next couple of weeks. All but one rated it four stars or more, the exception being one grumpy correspondent who gave it two stars because “it took two weeks to get here, and when it did it looked like it had been run over by an asphalt paving machine. Intolerable.”

  After that, no ratings at all for six months. Then, when the book was ancient history by bookselling standards, wham!, these personal attacks—that’s what they were, weren’t they, personal attacks?—started pouring in. Since then the deluge had continued, almost thirty now, one or two almost every day, and every single one of them negative—not even a three-star among them. Did that make any sense? And she had more reviews than sales; what kind of sense did that make?

  Not for a minute did she believe that her book was “worse than useless” or “pathetic.” And she damn well did know what she was talking about. The Conservation of Art was a good, solid little guide to the history and practice of art conservation and restoration—okay, not especially original, that wasn’t its aim, but it was well organized and readable, geared not to professionals in the field, but to the lay reader who wanted to know a little more about the subject.

  When she heard a low growling noise and realized she was making it, she knew a time-out was in order. Coffee. She slammed the laptop closed, sorry that she’d ever opened it, and once more promised herself that she’d never, ever, ever look at the damn review page again. She picked up the empty mug on her worktable and stomped off to the break room, muttering to herself.

  Alix London, thirty years old, attractive, capable daughter of a charming and once highly reputed but famously disgraced art conservator, now reformed (she instinctively crossed her fingers or knocked on wood whenever she thought about that), was herself an art consultant and conservator with a growing reputation of her own. Unlike almost every other modern conservator, she had trained in the old-fashioned way, not at a school or institute, but by apprenticing herself for several years to the famed conservator Fabrizio Santullo at his studio in Rome. That had been when Geoffrey London’s sensational conviction and imprisonment for art fraud—serial forgery—was still fresh in the publi
c’s mind, and bearing the name “London” in the American art world was like hauling around a not-so-recently dead, forty-pound albatross. Nobody wanted to get within fifty yards of her. But things were different now; she had proven her merits as a conservator in her own right.

  Her current consulting job with the L. Morgan Brethwaite Museum in Palm Springs was proof of that. The museum had flown Alix down from Seattle a few days earlier for her to look at the twenty-eight pieces that they were planning to auction off, in order to determine what cleaning or restoration might be called for, and for her to present her estimate for doing the work. The Brethwaite was only a mid-sized private museum, but as private museums went it was among the crème de la crème. It was built from the personal collection of the late L. Morgan himself, and housed in the 12,000-square-foot, one-of-a-kind “Palm Springs Modern” home he had designed for himself and his family (but mostly for his art collection) in the foothills of the San Jacinto Mountains in 1969. The museum’s claim to fame was its world-class collection of British and American paintings: two hundred years of the best, from Joshua Reynolds to Jackson Pollock.

  By any definition, it was a plum assignment, and for Alix it was a confirmation that things were truly going her way. Finally.

  And then this.

  When she got back to her workroom with her own coffee, she found a young man fussily arranging coffee fixings, notebooks, and pens on the small conference table in the center of the room.

  “Is there going to be a meeting, Richard?” she asked. Richard Ariano was the secretary of Lillian Brethwaite, the museum’s director.

  “Yes, the curators. This will probably take all morning.”

  “Ah.”

  This was the first time she’d been booted out of her workspace, but hardly a surprise. When she’d first arrived, she’d been given the regular workroom to use, but it was a windowless, cheerless place, and she’d asked if there might be something a little less depressing, and with natural light. Clark Calder, the senior curator, had suggested the conference room—roomy, airy, and blessed with a wide, wonderful view over the city and eastward across the Coachella Valley desert to the picturesque, dun-colored Little San Bernardinos—and she’d jumped at the offer, although it had come with the understanding that staff meetings would take priority.

  “This is the conference room, you know,” Richard said unnecessarily. An oily, prissy young man, he had the proprietary attitude toward his boss and her domain that is not so rarely found among personal secretaries. He had resented Alix from the start, and seemed to think that she had more access to the director and took more liberties with the museum in general than were her due.

  “I know that, Richard. I didn’t ask for it, you know. Clark suggested it.”

  “Clark,” he said. Obviously not one of his favorites, either.

  Well, this business with the reviews had pretty much killed any possibility of meaningful concentration for the next hour or so anyway; the truth was that she appreciated having an excuse to get away from work for a while. “It’s all yours,” she said, and with her coffee she went out to one of the museum’s four broad terraces—one of the two open to the public, not that it made any difference at the moment, since the Brethwaite was temporarily closed while it was undergoing a major renovation of its public galleries.

  She had come out onto this terrace before when she needed to unwind a little, and she could tell almost before she sat on one of the comfortable benches that it was going to do the job this time as well. It was the view that did it, northward rather than eastward, so that it took in the astonishing “wind farm” on the city’s outskirts: almost seven hundred immense, chalk-white wind turbines—windmills—each an incredible forty stories high, arranged in row after parallel row, their giant blades turning slowly, slowly in the soft breeze. It was impossible to look at without thinking of Don Quixote. For Alix they were hypnotic; they would put her to sleep if she’d let them. She could feel her anger over those hateful reviews melting away and she sighed gratefully.

  It didn’t melt away the hurt, however, or the pain she felt on her father’s behalf. Because this campaign wasn’t meant to get at her, but at Geoff; that was obvious. Geoffrey London had been an accomplished and successful forger in his time—even now he claimed to be unrepentant, but that was another story—and there were a lot of people who still had good reason to wish him ill. Geoffrey had left a lot of humiliated “experts” and embittered collectors in his wake, and she was being attacked now because they knew it would hurt him. They were right, too, and it wounded her to see the guilt it caused him to be the reason for these attacks on her, hide it though he tried.

  The possibility that she herself was the object of the attacks, and not Geoff, had naturally occurred to her when the whole thing started, but she soon dismissed that as unlikely.

  Who’d want to hurt me?

  It had taken a mere four months for the new senior curator of the Palm Springs L. Morgan Brethwaite Museum of Art to inspire the level of hatred from his staff that would have taken most people years to generate. They disliked him because he was newer than they were and younger than they were, because they thought his aims for the museum were crass and commercial, his personal ambitions ruthless, his speech gratuitously jargony, his manner jarringly hip and mocking, and—especially—because of the trust that Lillian Brethwaite, the museum’s longtime director and the chair of its board of trustees, had come to have in his judgment and counsel, and who knew what else.

  Thirty-seven-year-old Clark Calder was aware of all this and was bothered not a bit. He disliked the four staff members as heartily as they disliked him, but with one obvious and happy difference: There was only one driver’s seat, and he was strapped securely into it. As such, he took pleasure in dismantling the elitist attitudes and practices that had gotten the Brethwaite into its current financial mess, and the more these fusty old dinosaurs rumbled, and quibbled, and resisted being dragged into the twenty-first century (straight from the nineteenth), the more fun it was.

  “What we’re talking about here,” he said, leaning over the conference table, “what it has to be all about from now on, is one thing first and foremost: the maximization of monetized eyeballs.”

  He paused to let this sink in, waiting to see which of his subordinate curators would rise to the bait this time. As he’d hoped, it was the venerable and oh-so-dignified curator of Paintings, who was unable to repress a wince. If ever a man had a name that fit him to a T, it was the patrician and elegant Prentice Faversham Vandervere. Of all the old fogeys, Prentice was the oldest and fogeyist, trailing half a century of accolades as a famous Harvard professor and an all-knowing pundit on the nature and functions of the art museum and art itself. As such, his very presence weighed on Clark, cramped his style, even stirred feelings of insecurity, something not many other people could do to him. With Clark, the best defense against this or anything else was a robust offense. As a result, the starchy old prof was his most frequent foil.

  “Uh-oh,” Clark said, “looks as if I offended the delicate sensibilities of Professor Vandervere yet again, am I right, professor?”

  “I said nothing, Clark.” Aloof, reserved, above it all. Arrogant old fart. It was rumored that he was thinking of retiring. He’d had plenty of experience at that, already having retired from Harvard and from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. That would be a big day, a freeing day, in Clark’s life, although he’d probably miss sparring with the old coot a little. Or not.

  “No,” he said pleasantly, “but I spotted a telltale quiver in the right third of your left upper eyelid—a dead giveaway. Do you have a problem with the concept, professor?” He smiled. He had a great smile—a killer smile, one of his girlfriends had called it—and he knew it. Open, friendly, boyish, inviting, it was one of his best features, and he used it unmercifully.

  Vandervere smiled back, politely and noncommittally, hoping now to let the mom
ent pass. This meeting, like all of them, was Clark’s show, and Vandervere had largely given up debating him to no useful end. He might win the debate, but he had yet to win the war or even a single battle. Clark was too slick with words, too quick to jab, too intent on winning.

  And now the senior curator continued to wait, eyebrows raised inquisitively.

  Vandervere emitted an almost inaudible sigh and took up the gauntlet. “It’s not a problem, really, Clark. It’s only that your turns of phrase sometimes take a while for an old traditionalist like myself to accustom himself to. I think you’ll agree that ‘the maximization of monetized eyeballs’ is not an expression that one expects from the mouth of a curator—a senior curator—at a reputable museum of art.”

  Vandervere’s elegant and carefully crafted language, delivered as always courteously and non-combatively, and as smoothly as if it were being read aloud, was enough to give most people pause—especially people less than half his age.

  Not Clark Calder. “But I’m a senior curator, and this is a reputable museum,” he said innocently, “and it just came from my mouth. Ergo: there must be something wrong with your argument.”

  “I intended no argument. You asked me a question, and I answered.”

  But Clark wasn’t about to let it go. “So it’s my choice of terms, Prentice? Is eyeball monetization not part of the museum administration curriculum at Hah-vahd? No? But then, I suppose that monetary considerations aren’t exactly high priority at Hah-vahd, are they?” He continued to smile. The climate in the room, icy to begin with, chilled further.

  It was Madge Temple, the comfortably plump, forty-something curator of Costumes and Furnishings, who put an end to it. “Enough already, Clark. I think we can all agree you’ve made your point: You didn’t have to go to Harvard to get where you are, blah blah blah. Congratulations. So how about getting to the point of the meeting now? Or was that it?”

  Madge reminded Clark of one of those Happy Buddha statuettes: plump-cheeked, with knowing, amused eyes peeking out from under half-closed lids, and a serene smile that indicated how endlessly entertaining she found the foibles of those around her. That in itself would have been only moderately hard to take, but unfortunately, like Buddha himself, she was prone to voicing her observations and dispensing her guidance for the benefit of others. If she was aware that her jokey, side-of-the-mouth comments might offend others, which they frequently did, she gave no sign of knowing. By now, Clark had come to the conclusion that she really didn’t know.