A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  Had I but known, as Miss Sibley taught us never to say in Creative Writing 201.

  Chapter 2

  "What's this thing supposed to be?"

  The guard at the entrance to Columbia House looked at the card in my wallet, and then up at my face, with equal skepticism.

  "My ID."

  "Take it out of the wallet."

  I handed the flimsy, plastic-encased card to him with sinking confidence. It had been issued the day before, at Rhein-Main Air Base, near Frankfurt, where I'd been instructed to stop on my way to Berlin. The sergeant who gave it to me had assured me that it would get me into any American military installation in Europe, but I had been doubtful even then. It wasn't very official-looking—my name, photograph, and a few details on one side, and on the other a small-print list of twenty-nine varied "privileges," some of which I was shown as entitled to, others not, according to some esoteric and unfathomable guidelines. (Mortuary services, officer-NCO club, and credit union were okay; laundry, dry cleaning, and postal service weren't.) It was about as impressive as my library card.

  That's what the guard thought too. "This ain't no ID."

  "It was issued yesterday at Rhein-Main—"

  He shook his short-cropped, beret-clad head and signaled me to take the card back. "This ain't no ID. I can't let you in. Sorry."

  I set my jaw. "Look, it says GSE-fourteen, right? That's equivalent to a light colonel." I wasn't sure what a light colonel was, but that's what the sergeant had told me, and the sergeant had sounded impressed.

  The guard didn't. "Yeah, well," he said, patient but unyielding, "don't expect nobody to salute."

  "Well, well, Chris, having a little trouble? Nothing we can't work out, I'm sure."

  I turned, and there was Peter van Cortlandt, genteel, smiling, his patrician face as smooth and ruddy as ever, his thrust-out hand as well manicured, his suit as flawlessly and conservatively tailored.

  "Now: What seems to be the difficulty?" Peter addressed himself pleasantly to the guard, and I watched admiringly as he straightened things out within seconds.

  Peter van Cortlandt was one of those people with command presence, but of a quiet, unaggressive sort, and he usually got his way. Although he was nominally my boss at the museum ("nominally" because there was only one functioning boss, and that was Tony), I knew little about him. Peter had that aristocrat's knack of being unfailingly cordial and courteous, yet maintaining a cool, objective distance, physical and psychological, between himself and others. What I did know of him, I liked. Although he accepted deference as his due, he managed to do it in an unassuming and considerate way. Moreover, he was an art historian of great erudition, and he had always shared his knowledge freely—not something you ran into every day in the art world.

  By the time Peter had finished with the guard, the young man was smiling and apologetic, and even saluted me through the doorway.

  "Do you want to go up to your room, Chris?" Peter asked. "Wash up, perhaps?"

  "No, I'm fine." I looked around at a lobby much like that of a hotel, with reception desk, worn but good carpeting, and comfortable-looking armchairs arranged in informal groupings. "Nice place."

  "You sound surprised. Were you expecting something more along the lines of a Quonset hut?"

  I laughed. "I guess I was."

  Peter motioned to a couple of upholstered chairs in a window alcove. I draped my suit bag over the arm of one and sank into it, facing the window and the blustery green plaza outside.

  "The Platz der Luftbrücke," Peter said. "The Germans called it the air bridge, not the air lift, which makes more sense, don't you think?" He sat facing me and rubbed his hands briskly together. Not many people could do it without looking like Uriah Heep, but Peter could.

  "Well, Chris, I'm glad you're here. We can make good use of that sensitive touch of yours that so impresses us all."

  From someone else it would have been banter, but Peter never—absolutely never—poked fun at anyone. Nor, for that matter, was he effusive with his compliments.

  Flattered and caught off guard, I was embarrassed. "Something need a sensitive touch?"

  "It well may. As you know, Bolzano continues to threaten to pull out. I've calmed him down twice this week on the telephone, but I'm not sure I can successfully keep it up. You might be able to do better if push comes to shove."

  But I hadn't known there was any trouble with Bolzano. And if Peter's formidable persuasive powers couldn't resolve it, what was I supposed to be able to pull out of my hat, sensitive touch notwithstanding?

  "But what's the problem, Peter? Does Bolzano really want out?"

  Peter looked startled; that is to say, his right eyebrow rose all of an eighth of an inch for an eighth of a second. "Do you mean to say Tony didn't tell you about it?"

  "Not that I remember. Must have slipped his mind."

  "Hm. Well. Bolzano's quite concerned about security, for one thing. He seems to think we're not taking adequate precautions. And he's worried that we may not be giving proper care to packing and transportation, and he's afraid ... well, just worried. He genuinely loves those old paintings, you know."

  "And is there really anything for him to worry about?"

  "I don't think so. The army has quite a professional operation mounted here, as competent as you'd be likely to find in the United States. And if the Defense Department isn't expert in security, well, who is?"

  I nodded. "What makes you think I'd carry any weight with him? I've never met him."

  "I know that, but he thinks very highly of you. He's read that monograph of yours on the Spanish mannerists in the new edition of Arnoldi, and he was telling me all about a highly complimentary review of your new book in the Bollettino d'arte. He's impressed with your scholarship— told me so very frankly. And of course I agreed with him— very frankly."

  Two compliments from Peter van Cortlandt in one day. Surely a record.

  "But let's not worry about signor Bolzano right now." He smiled at me somewhat mischievously, which was not a typical way for him to smile. "Tell me, what did you say when Tony told you about the, ah, forgery I seem to have uncovered in the midst of The Plundered Past?"

  "The ... ?" I couldn't help laughing. Good old Tony. What was it he'd said? The usual little problems? "That must have slipped his mind, too. You know Tony; he tries not to get too involved in details."

  After a moment Peter laughed, too. "Yes, I know Tony." He looked at his watch. "Well, that can wait, too. Chris, I have to catch a plane in a couple of hours. What do you say to lunch? Do you like Kranzler's?"

  I left my bags at the reception desk, and twenty minutes later we stepped out of a taxi in downtown Berlin in front of the Cafe Kranzler. I hadn't been inside it for four years, not since the last time I'd come to Berlin. It had been at a table on the balcony that I'd tried unsuccessfully to talk Wildenberg into lowering his price on a carved, fifteenth-century Riemenschneider tryptich. I hadn't been sorry I'd failed to get it for the museum, and in fact I hadn't tried as hard as I might have. Riemenschneider was one of those great artists (one of those many great artists) whom I soberly appreciated, but whose work I just plain didn't like. That was true, I'm afraid, for the grim, grotesque German Gothic as a whole. It's not that I don't recognize great art when I see it, you understand; it's just that I know what I like.

  A hell of an attitude for an art curator.

  The Kranzler hadn't changed at all, not a bit. Gaudy in a decorous, old-maidish way, a bit too self-consciously grand and sedate, it was an institution, the only one of the great old cafes on the Kurfurstendamm to have survived the war, and to enter it was to walk into the Berlin of the Twenties.

  It was quite crowded, largely with elderly women in green hats who commanded their tables with a distinct air of de jure possession. One of them, presiding over a kannchen of coffee and a Deutsche Zeitung provided by the cafe, nodded regally as we passed. I returned the gesture respectfully. Probably remembered me, I thought. No doubt she'd been a
t the same table four years ago in 1982. Given reasonable odds, I would have bet she'd been there in 1922.

  "Upstairs?" Peter suggested.

  "Fine."

  We climbed the spiral marble staircase, winding past a central pillar of white and gold mosaic, and found a table at the window. I sat looking east along the Kurfurstendamm, toward Berlin's riveting memorial to the destruction of war: the black, gutted stump of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, cowering so incongruously among angular, modern buildings of glass, like a bewildered dinosaur that had wandered into the twentieth century and didn't know how to get out. Closer, the Ku'damm was lined with chic stores and garish theaters with four- and five-story marquees. (INDIANA JONES UND DER TEMPEL DES TODES! proclaimed twenty-foot-high green letters directly across the street.)

  "Peter," I said, "this forgery you mentioned ..."

  "Yes?" He looked at his watch. "Let's order first, shall we? My flight leaves Tegel at two-fifteen."

  Among Peter's many impressive qualities was his ability to attract the attention of a waiter or waitress when he wanted it. This was difficult enough in the United States; in Europe, where it was a maddening part of the waiter's art not to "intrude," it was near-marvelous. Without moving his calm gaze from my face, he raised a casual, elegant hand.

  The sleeve of his dark gray jacket slipped away from his wrist, showing a taintless French cuff of palest ivory. Peter van Cortlandt had the cleanest shirt cuffs of any man I knew. There had been a time when I'd suspected that in the privacy of his office he slipped a pair of accountant's celluloid cuffs over them, but the answer turned out to be much more characteristic of the fastidious Peter: He changed his shirt every day before lunch, and then again when he left the museum at four.

  "Bitte?" The waitresses wore black dresses with frilly little pink aprons and pink bows in their hair, so that they looked like French maids in a play. They did not, however, look silly; for the Kranzler it was just right.

  I ordered wiener schnitzel, pommes frites, salad, and a large beer.

  "Hungry?" Peter asked.

  I shrugged apologetically. "No breakfast."

  His urbane face wouldn't show it, of course, but I knew he didn't approve of my eating habits. Peter never ate fried foods, and he had once told me without any attempt to be facetious (Peter was rarely facetious) that he had never had a McDonald's hamburger, never had a Hostess Twinkie, never had beer from a can. He thought he had once had a taco, and it hadn't been too bad, but it had been a long time ago and he wasn't really sure.

  Without bothering to look at the menu, he ordered Rhine salmon with asparagus and a half-bottle of Riesling. "Now," he said, "while I'm away in Frankfurt you can familiarize yourself with the files. We've got Room 2100 of Columbia House as our office, and Corporal Jessick—he's our clerk—will know who you are."

  "All right. What takes you to Frankfurt, by the way?"

  "Oh, there's a small problem with a Greco that the Frankfurter Kunstmuseum is lending us."

  "The Kunstmuseum? I thought everything in The Plundered Past was from Bolzano's collection."

  "It is, but this one had been on loan to the Kunstmuseum for the last four years. So, in effect, we're borrowing it from them, and that's complicated things. The show's opened and closed in Naples without it, and now we open in Berlin in just a few weeks."

  "But what's the problem?"

  Peter's lips thinned slightly. "Insurance. I'm meeting with them at ten a.m., and I have every hope of bringing the painting back with me when I return."

  "Ten tomorrow? But why not fly out in the morning? It can't be more than two hours to Frankfurt."

  Peter smiled. "I'm afraid I'm not much of a shuttle diplomat. No, I prefer to arrive the evening before, have a good dinner, relax at a decent hotel—and be fresh and rested when it comes to business the next day. It makes good sense."

  So he had told me before. So Tony reminded me whenever I was reluctant to spend too much of the museum's money when traveling. I must be the only person in the world who gets chewed out regularly because his expense account isn't extravagant enough.

  "Anyway," Peter said, sipping the wine, which had just been placed before him, and according it a brief nod of acceptance, "I'd like to stay in Frankfurt through Friday and do a little museum-hopping. Can you believe that I've been here five months and I've yet to visit the Städel? Can you manage without me until Saturday?"

  "Sure." I took a long swallow of my Schultheiss, rediscovering with pleasure how large a large beer is in Germany. "Now how about telling me about this forgery—"

  This time it was the waitress Who interrupted, setting down our lunches.

  "Ah," Peter said, "shall we tuck in? I'm hungry myself."

  I was happy to. The veal was succulent and tender, like nothing you can get in the States except at restaurants I can't afford. The potatoes were crisp, the gemischter Salat aggressively Teutonic—not thrown together willy-nilly, French-style, but with the marinated vegetables set in orderly ranks, each in its place. For a while we were content to attend to our food, chatting easily while Peter filled me in on some of the routine aspects of The Plundered Past.

  "Well," he said, leaning back expansively a few minutes after we'd been served coffee, "that was splendid, and I can't tell you how glad I am to have you here with me. It's been wonderful—" .

  "Now hold it, Peter. You don't have to leave for half an hour yet. You're being evasive."

  He looked at me benignly. "I, evasive? What a thing to say. What would you like to know?"

  "You told me—I think you told me—that there's a forgery in the show." He continued to regard me tranquilly. "Well," I said, "that just isn't possible."

  "Is it not?" Peter's occasional and uncharacteristic excursions into archness were not among his most endearing habits. "Then I suppose I must have made a mistake."

  'That I doubt."

  "But you just said—"

  "Never mind what I just said. Which one is it?"

  He shifted his coffee to one side with the back of his hand and leaned closer over the table, suddenly excited, his eyes glowing. "I may be wrong, you understand. I'm not a hundred percent certain. In fact, I'd like your opinion before we go any further. It's right down your alley, Chris."

  "My alley? Peter, I'm no forgery expert. You know that."

  He chose to remain irritatingly silent, merely smiling enigmatically. It was all very much unlike him. I opened the exhibition catalog that Tony had given me to study on the airplane, and began to leaf through it, reading aloud.

  "Hals, Portrait of the Saint George Militia Company, 1633; Reynolds, Lady Raeburn and Her Son, 1777; Corot, Quai at Honfleur, 1830.... This doesn't make any sense. Everything here has a provenance a page long."

  "Really? Then it looks like I am wrong."

  "Come on, Peter," I said in a rare flash of annoyance at him, "how can ... Wait a minute! It's got to be from the new cache, doesn't it? They've been out of sight for forty years—the Rubens, the Titian, the Vermeer...."

  But he only smiled some more and shook his head, amused. "How unlike you to leap to conclusions, Chris."

  I frowned. "But the others—there isn't one of them that hasn't been authenticated a dozen times."

  "Surely it isn't necessary for me to point out to you that authenticity and authentication have not been invariably correlated where art is concerned. But that's beside the point."

  He poured the last of the coffee from his kannchen and turned serious at last. "I apologize; I've been enjoying myself at your expense, haven't I? But what I found last week is so remarkable that ... so fantastic ... so ..." For the first time that I could remember, the suave and articulate Peter was too excited to finish a sentence that he'd started. And if he'd really come upon a fake among the previously uncontested masterpieces of the Bolzano collection, I could hardly blame him.

  "You're serious, then?" I said.

  "Oh, certainly! And, truly, I haven't been trying to tease you." He collected himself,
sipped his coffee, and smiled. "Well, maybe just a little. In any case, here's what I'd like: You'll need the next two days to get oriented, so just go ahead and do that. Then, after I come back, you and I will walk through the collection, and I'd like you simply to look it over and see if something doesn't strike you very, very peculiarly indeed. Really, I'd tell you more, but I want your unbiased opinion before we take it any further. Will you do that?"

  "Of course, if that's what you want. Tell me one thing, though. Are you suggesting that Claudio Bolzano himself is aware of this? That he's—"

  "Perpetrating a fraud?" Peter looked scandalized. "Definitely not. I should say that of all the people in the world he's the last person likely to know about it. And his son is equally above suspicion—the scholarly Lorenzo, whom I believe you know."

  "I'm not sure I understand," I said, understating greatly. "If you think Bolzano has a fake in his collection and he doesn't know it, don't you owe it to him to tell him?"

  "Of course, but it isn't as simple as that. He's not very well, you know. He's been having a terrific time of it with gallstones, has finally had them out, and hasn't been having a very smooth recovery. I don't want to excite him until I'm absolutely sure of my facts. With your help, that should be only a few days more."

  He finished his coffee reflectively. "You know, I just might call him from Frankfurt, though, and ask a pertinent question or two—in a subtle way, of course." He nodded to himself. "That might be a good idea." He dabbed at his lips with his napkin and tossed it on the table in a way that indicated lunch was over.

  I was far from satisfied. "I don't understand why Tony didn't tell me about this."

  "Possibly it seemed unimportant."

  "Unimportant?"

  "But he had nothing to tell, you see. I told him no more than I've told you—quite a bit less, actually, and only in passing. In fact, no one has any idea what I've found ... what I think I've found." His eyes flashed briefly with private excitement. "I'll see you when I get back, and we'll go over it at length."