A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery)

by Aaron Elkins

  "What did he do?" Calvin asked with a marketing man's transparent approval. "Besides charge for the finished product, I mean."

  "It depended. He had a sliding price scale. So much for the ones he painted all by himself, so much for the ones his assistants did some of the work on, so much for the ones he simply approved. Of course, when you have people like Van Dyck and Jordaens in your workshop, your quality isn't going to be too awful."

  "I love it. So you're telling me Rubens wasn't one of those poor bastards who died penniless."

  "Not by a long shot. Anyhow, nowadays it's next to impossible to prove beyond doubt which is which, since most of them have his signature. I'd say two-thirds of the 'genuine' Rubenses—even the ones in museums—are arguable."

  "But that still doesn't make them forgeries, does it? Not technically."

  "No, but it makes it awfully easy for other people to fake them. You see, the most convincing Rubens forgery—or any other Old Master forgery—isn't something that was baked in an oven last week. It's . . . I'm not telling you something you already know, am I?"

  "No, this is news to me. So what's the most convincing Rubens forgery?"

  "A painting by a reasonably competent but unknown artist from Rubens' time and place. There are plenty of them that have been lying around in basements or hanging in little churches somewhere in Europe for three hundred years. The age would be right, the type of pigments, the kind of canvas, the varnish, the frame, even the style—all perfectly valid Flemish Baroque. All that's needed is a fake Rubens signature, and a five-thousand-dollar painting is suddenly worth five hundred thousand, with any luck."

  We had pulled to a stop just off First Avenue South. Behind us was a huge shed of corrugated steel with "Pacific Sheet Metaling" painted boldly on it. On the building across the street was a mystifying sign saying BUFFALO SANITARY WIPERS. But the one we'd stopped in front of said nothing at all; just a grimy, plain, brown brick warehouse. No, on second glance there was a faded message on the small steel door next to the rolled-down freight entrance: VENEZIA.

  "What's the other painting?" I asked Calvin as we climbed out of the car.

  "A portrait by Jan van Eyck."

  My eyebrows rose. Van Eyck, often but inaccurately called the inventor of oil painting, lived 200 years before Rembrandt and Vermeer, and his technique was so forbiddingly accomplished that few forgers have had the nerve to palm off their own paintings, or anybody else's, as van Eycks. Why bother, when forging Rubens, or Hals , or El Greco, or Corot is so much easier and brings just as much profit?

  The upper half of the steel door swung open as we walked toward it. A cool-eyed black man in an olive uniform with AETNA SECURITY on the sleeve impassively watched us approach. I could see the butt of a holstered pistol on his hip. Michael Blusher was taking his Rubens and van Eyck seriously.

  "Can I help you gentlemen?"

  "I'm Calvin Boyer and this is Dr. Norgren. We're from the art museum. Mr. Blusher is expecting us."

  He nodded and unhooked the lower portion of the door, then carefully barred both sections again once we were inside the dreary little vestibule: no furniture; concrete floor with a worn, narrow carpet runner the original color of which was impossible to tell; nothing on the walls but a couple of flyblown certificates from the building department or the health department, or some such. There was a dank, depressing smell of raw concrete and mold.

  "If you gentlemen will follow me." He led us through a door and onto the runner, where it continued along the wall of a cavernous unloading area. The big room was filled with open crates, their contents scattered about the place: not the usual little Davids on pedestals, but eighteenth-century gilt inkstands and candelabra, Regency torchères, Sheffield urns. And paintings, perhaps three hundred of them: Titians, Michelangelos, Raphaels, Rembrandts, Watteaus, Fragonards, most of them crackled and darkened and burnished with bogus age. Some of the pieces had a certain slapdash flair to them, but they were far from the first-class fakes I'd been led to expect. I was relieved; nobody with any kind of eye would ever confuse them with the real thing.

  We followed the guard up a narrow flight of steps at the end of the corridor.

  "Off-duty PD?" Calvin asked him casually.

  "You got it."

  "Cops call everybody 'gentlemen,' " Calvin explained to me knowledgeably. "I was once in this bar when there was a drug bust. It was great: 'Which of you gentlemen does this little plastic bag of white powder belong to?' `Charlie, will you take this gentleman's gun?' `Does anybody here happen to know the name of this gentleman on the floor that I've just had to subdue?' "

  The guard was laughing as he tapped on the door at the top of the stairs. OFFICE had once been on it in press-on letters, but they had long ago fallen or been pulled off, leaving pale outlines on the dingy wood.

  "The people from the museum, Mr. Blusher," the guard called.

  "Send 'em right in, Ned." The answering voice was loud, robust; well matched by the man it belonged to.

  Michael Blusher was a broad-beamed, big-boned man in his early forties. Sturdy as he was, he had the puffy, bloated look of someone who had once weighed a great deal more. He jumped up from a wooden swivel chair and came out from behind his cluttered desk, his hand outstretched. I recognized him now. I had seen him once or twice at preview receptions, but we'd never spoken.

  "Thanks for coming, guys," he said, pumping my hand, and then grabbed Calvin's. "Great of you to come, Boyer. Believe me, I'll make my appreciation known the next time I write a check to the museum. And next time I have lunch with Tony, I'll be sure and tell him you two came out on your own time as a special favor to me. You guys are the greatest."

  "That's wonderful, Mike," said Calvin, who did not seem to find any of this offensive. "Chris, I'm sure you remember Mike Blusher. He's one of our most eminent patrons of the arts."

  Blusher shook my hand again and beamed. Then he turned to Calvin with an expression of mock disappointment.

  "Hey, I was hoping you'd bring that li'l gal that sits out front in your office with the skirt split up to the gazoo," said the eminent patron of the arts. "The one with the knockers."

  Calvin tipped back his head and laughed appreciatively. This was part of his job and he was good at it; a lot better than I would have been. "Debbie's an eight-to-fiver, Mike. She gets paid time-and-a-half for overtime."

  "Yeah, what does she get paid for undertime, if you know what I mean?"

  Blusher had an interesting style. When he was saying something crass, which seemed to be most of the time, he underlined it with a husky, ho-ho-ho delivery, like Art Carney's old "Norton" character on The Honeymooners. "This is just a put-on," he seemed to be saying. "You don't think I'd really be this vulgar, do you?"

  As you can probably tell, I did not take an immediate, indiscriminate liking to Mike Blusher. Louis, my friend-cum-therapist, would have been pleased.

  "Well," he said, "Let me show you guys what I have. This'll blow you away." He led us to a gray steel cabinet at the side of the room. The impression of a grossly overweight man slimmed down was reinforced; Blusher walked with the flat-footed waddle of a much fatter man.

  The cabinet had large, shelf-like sliding drawers; the kind of thing that libraries use to store big atlases and some dealers use to store pictures horizontally. Blusher wasted no time. He pulled out the top drawer, and there was the van Eyck; a small, wooden panel no more than twelve inches by ten, with a portrait head of a thin, dour man in a great black hat. The signature written carefully across the entire width of the bottom said Joannes de Eyck fecit Anno MCCCCXXI. 30 Octobris. October 30, 1421.

  I was impressed. This was an extraordinary piece, a world away from the monstrosities in Blusher's chamber of horrors downstairs. The man's hat was a soft deep velvet you could almost feel. The background was shadowed and indistinct, but rich with a sense of depth, and the whole was done with something very close to that remarkable combination of darkness and luminosity characteristic of the early Flem
ish work in oils.

  Very close, but not quite on the mark. For it was a fake, as I'd supposed. Brilliantly, painstakingly executed, but fake. In the huge, under-the-table market of rich, gullible buyers, even buyers who knew their van Eyck, it would be worth a fortune. For without the aid of the cumbersome, expensive, and infrequently used technology of science—mass spectrometers, computerized thermographic sensors, multistratal X-ray photography—almost anybody would accept it as genuine. And wealthy private buyers lusting for genuine Old Masters of their own rarely had the nerve to bring in the mass spectrometers. For the same reason people with toothaches don't go to the dentist: If there's a problem, they'd rather not know.

  I suppose that all this just might raise a question in your mind. I didn't have a mass spectrometer at hand and wouldn't have known what to do with it if I did. So how did I know after a fifteen-second examination that this was spurious? All I can say is, I knew. I have a friend in Italy, an art professor, who was once pressed as to how he could be sure a certain Titian was genuine. His memorable answer: "I know because when I see a Titian I swoon." I wouldn't go as far as that on the van Eyck, but I knew. After you've lovingly submerged yourself in a field long enough, the judgments that at first had to be carefully reasoned become intuitive. It's no different than an experienced breeder's ability to size up a horse instantaneously, or a master cabinetmaker's way of telling at a glance how good a piece of furniture is.

  It's also the reason art authorities often differ so loudly and so publicly over whether such and such a painting is a genuine Degas or Manet or Duccio. But I had no doubts at all on this one.

  "This is a forgery," I said. "An extremely good one."

  Blusher's heavy face sagged. "But—I mean, look at it. I mean . ." His expression changed from shock to resentment, "How the hell do you know? How does he know, Boyer?"

  Calvin spread his hands. "He's the expert, Mike."

  Blusher turned again to me. The flesh around his lips was a dull, mean purple. "I had Jake Panofsky in here looking at these"—Panofsky was the owner of a reputable gallery near Pioneer Square—"and he said they looked like the real thing, that I should call the museum. And now you—I mean, shit, how do you know?"

  When you're dealing with eminent patrons of the arts, especially big, hostile ones, you can't be too careful. I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to get by with "I just knew."

  Fortunately, beneath that first intuitive response there is always a foundation of solid perception, or there ought to be. And by now I'd been peering at the painting long enough to know what bothered me about it.

  "There are several things," I said. "First, the craquelure." Foreign art terms, I have found, usually help establish credibility and cow skeptics.

  Not Blusher. He made a disgusted face, "The which?"

  "This crackling in the paint," explained Calvin, who was beginning to pick up a few things about art in spite of himself. "That's what makes it look so old."

  "One of the things," I said. "It's hard to make craquelure look authentic, and most forgers fall down right there. This is beautifully done, though,"

  Blusher glowered at me. "Then how do you come off—"

  "It's the wrong kind of crackling," I said. "Whoever did this served his apprenticeship on canvases, not wooden panels. Take a look at the cracks on this one. Look at a light area—his cheek. Do you see any kind of pattern?"

  "No," Blusher grunted after a pause. "Well, a little. It's sort of in circles, like a spider web."

  "Exactly. And that's just the way old paint and varnish cracks on canvas. But this is wood, and it's wrong for wood. The surface of a painted wooden panel cracks mainly along the wood fibers, in relatively straight lines, not like this. These cracks are artificially done, Mr. Blusher; I'm sorry."

  He expelled a long, noisy breath through his nose. "Ah, what the hell. It's not your fault, Norgren." Was he mellowing? I hoped so.

  There was more: The picture wasn't painted in van Eyck's style, it was painted to look like his style, and there is a very big difference between the two. Van Eyck's technique was still medieval; each area of a painting was treated like a separate little picture, with no overlapping. And there was no mixing of pigments; each color was applied in a thin, careful coat, one on top of the other, increasing in transparency and saturation. But this panel had been done with easier, quicker techniques that hadn't been invented in the fifteenth century. It was a mark of its excellence that I couldn't be sure whether it had been painted a year ago or a century ago. But definitely not in 1421.

  By now I realized what paintings it had been adapted from, for a convincing forgery is seldom hatched full-blown in the forger's mind; it is borrowed from authentic works of the artist. The face was from A Man in a Red Turban, but turned to the right instead of the left; the hat was from the great Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride.

  Although I tried explaining all this, I don't think I got through to either of them. But Blusher understood enough to walk a few steps away and drop disconsolately onto a frayed sofa, then lower his head and massage his brow with both hands, as if he'd just heard the end of the world was due tomorrow morning.

  There was something going on that I didn't understand. "Mr. Blusher—"

  "Mike, Mike," he corrected absently, continuing to rub his temples.

  "Mike, why is this so important to you? This isn't yours anyway, is it? From what Calvin told me, it's not part of your order. It got included by accident. "

  "Of course it got included by accident. You saw the crap downstairs. That's what I order. I already called my shippers about this three times, in Bologna. They don't know how it got included, they don't know where it came from, they don't want anything to do with it."

  "What's the name of the shipping company?" I asked.

  "Salvatore, Salvatori, something like that."

  "Salvatorelli? "

  Blusher looked surprised. "Yeah, you know them?"

  I nodded, not too pleased that I'd guessed right. "We're arranging a show, Northerners in Italy. Salvatorelli's handling the shipping."

  "Nice move, Chris," Calvin said out of the side of his mouth.

  "They're an old firm," I said unhappily. "They have a good reputation. The Pinacoteca uses them."

  "Yeah, well, you better count your Brueghels all the same."

  "Anyway," Blusher continued, "they said to go ahead and keep the paintings, as far as they're concerned. They didn't want to be bothered. I got that in writing." His head came up with a sudden shrewd glance. "Of course, I didn't tell them exactly what we got here." Down went his head again, into his hands. "Ah, what difference does it make, if they're fakes?"

  "But even if they were real, you couldn't keep them. You'd have to return them to the owner. And even if nobody knew who the owner was, the Italian government would never sit still and let you have them."

  "Yeah, sure," he said impatiently. "I was thinking of the publicity."

  "Publicity?"

  His head came up again to regard me with dull wonder, as if he couldn't comprehend how anyone could be this dense. "Look. I'm in the art business, right? I sell pictures, right? If I really turned up a genuine van Eyck it'd be news all over the country, right?" This time, apparently, he expected a response. He waited.

  "Right," I said.

  "Sure, right. And that's what we call publicity. If you were buying art from somebody, wouldn't you want to buy it from the guy that discovered the lost van Eyck?"

  "I suppose so," I said doubtfully.

  He sighed. "You explain it to him, Boyer."

  "It's all a matter of marketing," Calvin said soberly to me. "Very important."

  Blusher nodded, satisfied.

  "Do you mind if I touch this?" I asked.

  Blusher shrugged.

  I lifted the panel, turned it over, and put it carefully back on the padded shelf, facedown, so the back was visible.

  "Just what I thought," I said after a second. "This is real."

  Blusher l
eaped up. "It's re—"

  "Not the painting," I said hurriedly. "The panel."

  "The panel? You mean the wood?" He gave a croak of laughter. "Who gives a shit about the wood?"

  "It's not going to get you much in the way of big-time publicity," I said with a smile, "but it's interesting all the same."

  I gestured at the back of the panel; it was made of two broad oak planks joined together, then enclosed in the groove of a sturdy, simple frame. "This black marking—like a V with a wreath around it—that's the logo of the Guild of St. Luke in Utrecht, the painter's guild. These cuts in the wood— they're from the way they sawed oak in those days in Holland. It was cut by a water-driven frame saw. Quarter-sawn, you'll notice. Early seventeenth-century, I'm pretty sure. "

  Calvin looked at me, gratifyingly impressed. "You really know your stuff."

  "So?" Blusher said. "What difference does it make?"

  "Well, it proves we've got a first-rate forger here; somebody who takes his work seriously. Somehow he's gotten hold of one of the genuine old panels that the guild gave to its members." I smiled. "Wrong century, though. Van Eyck painted in the 1400s. And he did most of his work in The Hague and Bruges, not Utrecht."

  "Hey," Blusher said with a slow awakening of interest, "could there be a real painting underneath the damn van Eyck? You know, that got covered up, painted over?"

  "Could be," I said. "Somebody probably did paint something on it in the seventeenth century, and the chances are good it's still there. If you're going to forge an old picture you get better results painting over an old one than scraping it off and starting fresh."

  "Yeah?" He came closer to peer at the panel. "Is that right?"

  "If you're thinking there might be a Rembrandt under there, forget it. That doesn't happen. Nobody paints over Rembrandt. Or Rubens, or van Gogh, or—"

  "So sue me," Blusher said. "Excuse me for living. I just asked a question, that's all."