Stephen showed his identification again at the second security checkpoint and paused for an iris scan, required to access the room where the painting was kept. It was mildly unsettling that an image of his own personal iris was being housed somewhere for all eternity, but the beauty inherent in the science of biometric authentication thrilled him.
He laid his notebook on the lab table in an empty study room and ran through the list of tests needing to be done. Cranston had been definite about the importance of establishing documentation for the piece that would stand up to extreme scrutiny, so Stephen started at the beginning, with the signature.
The lab had a comprehensive collection of signature and monogram dictionaries. Stephen had photographed Bayber’s signature on the triptych panel earlier in the week and now removed the photo from a manila envelope, examining it with a magnifying glass and comparing it to earlier records of the artist’s signature. He projected scans of the signatures from the painting and from the dictionary onto the wall at an expanded scale, and inspected them side by side. At that size, the dips and curves of letters became roads cutting through a muted landscape. By studying an artist’s signature over time, he could detect changes to the central nervous system and diagnose conditions such as Parkinson’s, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia. He could even make a reasonable judgment in regard to long-term substance abuse. But Bayber’s last documented work had been painted when he was still relatively young, age fifty-two, and his signature gave no indication of any serious degradation of his physical or mental condition.
Stephen took exhaustive notes, thankful no one was interested in examining his handwriting. He went into another room to make arrangements for the X-ray tests with one of the technicians, who possessed the skills required to run the equipment but seemed to lack interest in the specifics of what he was scanning. Stephen and Cranston were concerned any leak regarding the existence of the painting would be disastrous. While Bayber had signed papers giving Murchison & Dunne the right to sell the work, the agreement was contingent on Stephen and Finch finding and retrieving the other two panels. In Stephen’s experience, agreements were ephemeral things, be they between business partners or lovers; a cadre of expensive lawyers could muddy any waters quickly enough, and if word spread that there were two Baybers floating around, Stephen didn’t have nearly so much confidence that he and Finch would be the ones to find them, minus divine intervention.
Which seemed to come a few hours later. After poring over the other test results and taking several more pages of notes, Stephen was summoned by the technician to review the X-ray results. “I think you’re going to want to see this” was what he said.
Stephen looked at the images on the monitor. His heart fluttered in his chest. “This can’t be right.”
“It’s right,” the man said.
“Maybe there’s something on the lens.”
“On both sides of the painting? I don’t think so. Look, you’re good at what you do. I’m good at what I do. It’s there, I’m telling you.”
“Shoot it again, with more kilovoltage. I want to bring up both of these areas.” Stephen pointed to the right and left sides of the screen. “And with a shorter exposure time. We need to go deeper here, and we need to get more detail on the left side.”
“We.” The technician snorted under his breath.
* * *
Finch had assumed the role of Bayber’s gatekeeper, and Stephen was sure he wouldn’t approve of any unannounced visits, which seemed an excellent reason not to tell him. After all, it was a Thursday afternoon, he hadn’t called ahead, and there was no guarantee Mrs. Blankenship would let him past the front door. Bayber’s unexpected trip to the hospital the morning after he’d first shown them the painting had resulted in a week’s worth of tests and second opinions from a variety of specialists, but since Cranston’s expectations had been elevated, Bayber’s lack of finances, as well as the absence of any sort of medical insurance, were rendered immaterial. Once the doctors agreed whatever recuperating there was to be done could be managed at home as well as in the hospital, Cranston had spared no expense, bringing in a hospital bed, a wheelchair, and a private nurse to help Mrs. Blankenship, as well as a host of laborers to address the leaks and overall draftiness of Bayber’s flat. The first and last of those generosities were the only ones that made sense to Stephen, since Bayber had yet to speak, let alone move from his bed, and Mrs. Blankenship seemed peeved by an additional female presence.
She buzzed him up without asking what he wanted and answered the door after the first knock.
“The two of them are driving me to the brink,” she said and pointed a finger toward the bedroom. “Him looking at me like I’m supposed to be a mind reader and that other one . . .” She paused and bit down on her lower lip. “She may be a nurse, but I don’t think that gives her the right to try to reorganize the linen cupboard.”
“It does seem presumptuous,” Stephen said.
“Yes, that’s the word for it.” Mrs. Blankenship sighed, clearly disappointed that her efforts in the arranging of linens might be considered subpar. “You might as well go in. I’m sure he’ll be glad to see someone’s face other than mine, although you won’t be having much of a conversation with either of them.”
Stephen nodded and made his way down a dark hall that led to the bedrooms, astonished by the lack of natural light in the apartment of a painter. The heavy curtains in the main room still hung closed, and most of the lights were off. Not that Bayber necessarily did any painting here, but how could the man see anything?
It was a surprise then to enter the airy master bedroom and find himself blinking against the afternoon sun. One of the large windows was cracked open, and the curtains in this room had been pulled back all the way. There was a woman sitting in a small chair in the corner, reading a gossip magazine. Her clothes gave her away as the nurse, even if Mrs. Blankenship hadn’t already made it obvious: a dull maroon top with a pattern that looked as if it had been chosen to hide patient mishaps—the regurgitated remains of partially chewed pills, drools of cherry-colored medications, spills of pudding—paired with white polyester pants and the ubiquitous white shoes. The arrangement of her fingers suggested the keenly felt absence of a longed-for cigarette.
Bayber, paler now than when Stephen had seen him in the hospital, was propped up in bed on an enormous pile of pillows; he looked like something skeletal, half-emerged from a cocoon. The nurse watched as he pulled a folding chair next to the bed but said nothing to him. He took Bayber’s hand, but the man’s eyes remained closed.
“Mr. Bayber, it’s Stephen Jameson. I’ve come to ask you a question.”
Bayber’s eyes jerked open, and he moved imperceptibly toward Stephen, his lips parting to show an even row of teeth, a blue cast to their faint translucence. Stephen watched Bayber swallow and heard the gentle hiss of breath being drawn in. But the only sounds that escaped from the man were formless clicks of trapped air, coming from deep in his throat. He did not blink. Stephen shifted uncomfortably in his chair, a familiar sensation rising in his stomach. Guilt. This was what he had missed with his father, all these last unpleasant bits: the diminishment, the infirmity, the slow fading; he had left all that to his mother. And though he doubted he would have been much consolation to either of them, he was still astonished she did not despise him for his absence.
This reduced version of Bayber had not the strength to lift a finger to his mouth or instruct the nurse to banish him. It hardly seemed possible such a short time ago Stephen had stood next to this man and looked him square in the eye, desperately trying to control his stuttering tongue, his shaking hands, while making impertinent suggestions. But now he knew things, at any rate suspected them, and wanted to voice his suspicions aloud. And there was nothing Bayber could do to stop him.
“Mr. Cranston has allowed me a great deal of latitude in researching the painting in order to authenticate the work. A number of forensic examinations and scientific tests
needed to be done to provide the eventual buyer with the necessary documentation and to establish an irrefutable case.”
He paused, unsure how best to continue, hoping for a response of some sort. His palms turned damp, and he wondered if Bayber was perhaps becoming impatient or disgusted, but since the artist was unable to convey either, it was impossible to tell. Stephen sat back in his chair and looked over his shoulder at the nurse, who appeared engrossed in her reading material.
“I began with the signature. As you can imagine, it was a match. But forensic analysis goes beyond simply detecting patterns, Mr. Bayber. It is more than comparing the smoothness of strokes connecting letters, noting where the artist picked up the brush, or when he put it down.”
Stephen felt the same sense of excitement he had in the lab, dwarfed by its high white walls, examining the giant brushstrokes illuminated on the sterile surface. As he spoke he felt himself slipping out of the room, away from the light streaming in through the window, away from the cool, papery skin of Bayber’s hand, away from the sound of magazine pages being turned with the sticky pad of a thumb. He heard the quiet of the lab pulsing around him and stood in front of Bayber’s enormous signature, studying the curving map of letters that crisscrossed the wall like intersecting paths of a maze.
“I can detect certain qualities in a signature, you see. Pride, boredom, humility. Arrogance. I can differentiate between signatures painted quickly, and those put to canvas with a painstaking exactitude, as if the artist hesitated to leave the work behind.” Did he imagine it, or were Bayber’s eyes narrowing? The man’s hand in his remained perfectly still, but Stephen thought he felt a surge of pulse.
“There’s no question the signature on the triptych panel is yours. The degree of pressure applied, the point the brush was lifted from the canvas, the descender on the y—all virtually identical to signatures of record. But one thing wasn’t the same. There was a good deal more paint on the brush, leading me to believe you signed this work slowly, maybe even lingered over it. You were reluctant to be done.”
He dropped Bayber’s hand and stood up to stretch, walking to the end of the bed. Bayber’s eyes followed him, the raspy breaths growing quicker.
“The first time I saw the panel, I noticed substantial overpainting in two areas. It’s possible you were reusing an old canvas. That wouldn’t be unusual. But it did pique my curiosity, so I conducted some tests: UV, visible, infrared images of the painting. Helpful, though not enough to provide us with the whole picture, if you’ll forgive the pun. But X-ray, that’s another story. The lab has a computed radiography system so scans can be displayed on a high-resolution monitor. You shoot onto reusable phosphor imaging plates. There’s no more need for film, which was informative but tedious in terms of process.”
At the word tedious Bayber’s eyes closed and Stephen stopped talking. How was it no one else seemed to appreciate the beauty and genius inherent in such equipment? The mere mention of the word thermoluminescence had the same effect as a sleeping pill on most anyone, but for Stephen, science was magic and majesty. It was science that allowed authenticators to peek beneath the surface of a painting to see its skeletal beginnings as a sketch, science that revealed the age of paintings on oak panels by counting the growth rings of trees back to 5000 B.C., science that determined whether the blue cloak of the Virgin in an illuminated manuscript was painted with ultramarine from precious lapis lazuli or colored by the more affordable azurite.
“Your fatigue is noted, Mr. Bayber. To the point, then. This is what an X-ray tells me. It tells me if there are small tears in the canvas that have been repaired. It tells me if there are holes in the support panel or losses in the ground layers. It lets me see cut-down edges and transfers. But perhaps most important, it tells me what was there before. It tells me what you painted over. Alice’s hand wasn’t resting on the birdcage in your initial painting, was it?”
Now he had Bayber’s attention. The artist’s breathing quickened and his mouth moved, the dry lips struggling to form some word. His face had gone from bone white to livid, and his hand twitched at his side.
“Her arm was stretched out toward the edge of the canvas, at least to what is now the edge of the canvas, and she was holding someone else’s hand. The other person’s fingers are clearly visible in the previous layer. That was interesting. Who was she linked to? Then I noticed something else. In the painting, Alice is wearing a ring on her left index finger—a thin band with a heart in the center. Much of her hand is covered by yours, but that detail is clearly visible. I took a few more scans, decreasing the exposure time to get the clearest possible image. The musculature and the size of the fingers indicate the hand of the person in the underlying composition is that of a woman. Oddly enough, this woman is wearing a similar ring—a thin band with a heart in the center. But she’s wearing it on the little finger, not the index finger. Her joints appear slightly swollen; the angles of the fingers off by a few degrees, as though her hand was somehow disfigured. I enlarged those two sections, the hand of the woman in the hidden painting and Alice’s hand in the surface painting, and compared them side to side. The shapes of the nails, the comparative lengths of the fingers in relation to each other, the closeness of the bones to the skin. Allowing for some minor changes attributable to age or perhaps illness, the hands are virtually the same.”
Stephen went back to the chair beside the bed and sat down again, taking a glass of water with a straw from the bedside table and steering it toward Bayber’s mouth. He watched as Bayber strained to drink; then, apparently exhausted, the man’s head fell back into the deep nest of pillows.
“You’ve been praised for your rendering of minute details.” Stephen paused, thinking about the first time he’d seen one of Bayber’s paintings. “It’s like looking at a puzzle, isn’t it? The longer and closer you look, the more you see. And once something is seen, it cannot be unseen. The viewer is never able to take in the piece as he did the first time; the initial impression is gone and can’t be recalled.”
The room was quiet. When Stephen listened for the sound he was not hearing, he realized the absence was of pages being turned. The nurse was listening. He leaned in closer to Bayber and whispered the rest of it in his ear.
“The details told me everything. You gave Alice a sliver of a scar on her index finger, barely visible. It’s like a single strand of spiderweb running from the bottom of her nail to the top of the first knuckle joint. It took me a while to notice it, but now I know that it’s there, it’s all I see, the first thing my eye goes to when I look at the painting, as if it might have vanished, or I’m afraid I might have imagined it.” Stephen was sweating. When had the room become so warm? There was a drop running down between the furrow in his brows, and he felt his shirt pasted to his back. He held his breath, willing Bayber to find his voice, to tell him what it was he really wanted from them.
“That same scar is on the hand Alice is holding in the hidden painting. Which means it’s Alice, or some older version of Alice, in the missing left panel, isn’t it? I haven’t had as much time to analyze the other half of the painting, but since that side has been overpainted as well, it stands to reason some older version of Natalie is in the missing right panel.”
It was saying the word missing out loud that started a chain reaction in his brain. The answer to it all, the thought he needed to catch, skipped and sprinted ahead of him at such a clip he had to grit his teeth in order to focus and keep up, igniting a dull throbbing in his jaw. A few false turns, a detour around flickering synapses, but then the thought was there, trapped in a dark dead end. When he grasped it, everything became illuminated, obvious—exactly what it was Bayber was looking for. The light in the room lanced at his eyes, and Stephen felt the full force of a migraine charging toward him like a rolling ball of furnace air and lightning. He squeezed his eyes shut against it, but it was too late.
“You don’t care so much about the other panels of the painting,” he whispered to Bayber, clutch
ing the sides of his own head to keep his brains from spilling out. “It’s the sisters, isn’t it? You want us to find Alice and Natalie. You’ve wanted us to find them all along.”
* * *
Stephen scarcely remembered the ride back to his apartment, unsure of how he’d ever managed to hail a cab. He drew the blinds shut and fell onto the bed, shivering and nauseous. His upper arm ached, and he touched it gingerly just below the shoulder, anticipating the bruise that would bloom—first inky, then pea green, then an alarming jaundiced sulfur—where Bayber’s nurse had grabbed him and tossed him out of the bedroom. The woman had transformed into a monster the minute her charge was provoked, possessing the enthusiasm and strength of a professional wrestler.
Stephen rubbed his wrist, trying to erase the feel of Bayber’s grip. Bayber had erupted at the mention of the girls’ names. Whatever remained of his vigor was channeled into his fingers, which wrapped around Stephen’s wrist with a stubborn tenacity, firmly locking onto him. Spittle flew from the edge of his mouth as he hissed the same sound over and over—sssssuh, sssssuh—and pawed at the open air between them with his other hand. Stephen, terrified that he’d pushed Bayber past the brink, thought he might be having a second stroke. But if anything, Bayber grew stronger not weaker, and his eyes fixed on Stephen with a single purpose as he struggled to express himself, whether to confirm or to deny what had been suggested, Stephen did not know.
He rolled onto his stomach and pulled the pillow over his head. In the dark, women floated past: Chloe, Alice, Natalie, and Lydia, all interested in ministering to his aching head, their delicate hands fluttering about his face, caressing his cheek, smoothing his hair. They came together in the person of Mrs. Blankenship, not quite as interested in his well-being, grimacing and shaking her head in disappointment. Mrs. Blankenship in turn became the nurse, who gave him a shove so severe he hit his head and saw stars blinkering about until he realized he’d fallen onto his bedroom floor, the pulsing flickers no more than the neon wink of the bar sign across the street. He pulled the blanket down from the bed and tossed it over the half of his body he could easily reach, staying there for the night, one ear pressed against the cold wood floor.
The Gravity of Birds: A Novel Page 17