by Aaron Elkins
But the other one, thank God, was back in this world, right in front of me, and I stood looking at it for a long time. When you look at a Vermeer, even after a Dürer or a Piero, it's as if you've been seeing things through badly focused binoculars and someone just turned the knob; everything is gemlike, focused, sharper than reality itself.
I knew the painting from photographs, and I'd even devoted several pages to it in my book on Vermeer. Young Woman at the Clavichord, done in Delft in 1665 or 1666. The remarkable, transparent light came, as usual, from a window on the left. The woman was, as always, static, cool, sweetly remote, arranged like a still life with her clavichord in front of simple furniture on a black-and-white-tiled floor.
I checked to make sure Flittner was looking the other way, then stretched out a forefinger, as gently as God reaching to Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and touched her wrist. It was an offense for which I would have mercilessly put before a firing squad any hapless visitor caught doing it in the San Francisco County Museum of Art. I did it judgmentally, thoughtfully, as if I were making an arcane assessment of texture or brushstroke, but this was only in case Flittner should look around. Actually, my reasons were the same as any gawking tourist's: the awed desire to "connect" across the centuries with the great Vermeer. Here, where his brush, possibly his very fingers, touched, I now touched, so that our paths crossed in space if not in time.
I don't do this very often. I certainly don't think it's the sort of thing a curator ought to do, and I never heard another curator confess even to the desire (of course, neither have I), but it gives me a deep, soul-filling pleasure, never more than when it's Vermeer to whom I reach out. I touched the pearls around her throat, like droplets of pure light—
"How's it going, Chris?"
To say I almost jumped out of my skin would be overstating it, so let's just say I gave a guilty start.
"Harry! Whew! Is that why you wear those rubber soles? So you can sneak up on innocent people?"
He cackled delightedly. "What were you doing, anyway?"
"Doing? What was I doing? Well, I was just, uh, moistening my finger and, uh, clearing things up a little." When he didn't laugh in my face, I took courage and went on.
"Wetting old varnish lets you see through it more clearly, and when you're checking the authenticity of the painting, the first thing you want to do is get a good look at the signature. Most of the decent fakes floating around are old, you see, and they weren't painted as forgeries in the first place; they got to be forgeries when someone changed the original signature of some competent but unknown artist of the time and substituted a more famous one; Vermeer's, for example. Sometimes a close look can show you the signs of doctoring."
That was a long answer to a simple question and Harry looked quizzically up at me, a finger curled in the hair behind his ear. "Is that right? That's interesting. But you were rubbing the middle, weren't you? Artists don't sign in the middle of a picture. Or do they?"
"I wasn't rubbing it," I said, to set the record straight. "I was touching it. Very lightiy. Anyway, painters sign anywhere: on an arch, on a piece of furniture, over a doorway, on a bracelet, on a blank wall. Vermeer frequently signed in the middle of a picture." All true enough, generally speaking, but where was the signature on Young Woman at the Clavichord? I hadn't found the damn thing yet.
"Oh, I see. So tell me, did you find anything suspicious?"
Was I being interrogated, or was he just curious? I couldn't tell. He had a self-effacing way of asking questions that was meek but insistent, and a way of listening that was both intense and amicable, as if he might be probing for something but also happened to find what you were saying of genuine and extraordinary interest. A handy manner for a cop.
"No," I said, still trying to find Vermeer's name, "nothing that's caught my eye so far."
Harry studied the painting and chewed on the inside of his cheek. "You know, I don't know much about art—I mean, I know what I like, but that's about it—but now that I look at it, I think I might have been just a little suspicious about this signature."
"Oh? Really?" By now I wished dearly that I'd had the nerve in the first place to admit that I had been pawing the Vermeer for the love of it, but I was in too deep. "Why is that?" I asked. I still didn't even know where the hell the signature was.
"Because," he said blandly, "somebody else signed it."
Fortunately, I located the signature just as he mentioned it. It was roughly in the middle, all right, on the rim of an oval mirror. And Harry was right. It was not the usual "IV Meer," or any of the monograms with which Vermeer sometimes signed his work. It read, quite clearly, "Pieter de Hoogh."
Harry was grinning at me, pleased with himself. "Now how about telling me what the hell is going on around here?"
"Going on? Nothing. And as a matter of fact, that signature confirms its being a genuine Vermeer. In a paradoxical .way, of course."
"It does?" The tone wasn't so much one of skepticism as of pleasurable anticipation: Now how the heck is this fast-talking Ph.D. going to con his way through this?
But I was telling the truth. "Well, it's only in the last century or so that Vermeer's been considered one of the great painters. A hundred years ago his name would have been the one you scraped off a painting and replaced with a better-known one if you wanted to get a good price: Peter de Hooch's, for example. Or Terborch's, or Metsu's."
"Is that right? I never heard of those guys."
"Tastes change. As a matter of fact, Vermeer's most famous painting—The Artist in His Studio, in Vienna—still has a faked de Hooch signature on it. Even so, it brought only about ten dollars in the early 1800s."
"No kidding," he said with every indication of authentic interest. "Boy, there's a lot to learn, isn't there?" He had come in wearing a huge quilted parka that engulfed him like a great puffy tent. Now he took it off and tossed it onto a chair. Underneath was the familiar worn cardigan. "You almost made me forget what I came in to ask. What's your impression of Earl Flittner?"
"My impression?"
"You think he could be involved with the break-in?"
I had continued to look absently at the painting. Now I turned slowly to face him. "You're kidding."
"Well, I was just thinking about all those things he said at the meeting the other day—how the show is all propaganda, that stuff. You think the guy is anti-American, a Communist, maybe?"
Well-conditioned liberal that I am, I bristled at this evidence of the narrow, chauvinistic military mind at work. I had come to expect more of Harry. "Just because he expressed some honest opinions doesn't make the guy an enemy of the republic, you know. Why ask me, anyway?"
"Well, I understand you knew him in the States. What about pro-Nazi feelings?"
"Nazi feelings? I can't believe you're serious."
"Well, I'm not, exactiy," he said, unoffended. "I'm just, you know, exploring avenues." He smiled. Under the heavy wool of the sweater his thin shoulders moved in a faint shrug. "So you don't think he has any leanings like that?"
"All I know about him," I said hotly, "is that he's the best—" I stopped. Why in the world was I standing up so righteously for Earl Flittner? I relaxed and laughed. "What he has," I said, "are curmudgeonly leanings. The guy just naturally likes to go against the grain. He's sent in some crank letters to The Artist and Artforum that are classics."
Harry smiled. "But not curmudgeonly enough to steal paintings?"
"Not as far as I know."
"Well, I had a little more than that to go on." His shrewd eyes watched me to see if I had any idea of what he meant. I didn't. "Like what?"
But I wasn't in his confidence yet. "Things. You know." He turned briskly to the Vermeer. "Chris, what made you think this one might not be authentic in the first place?"
"Peter told me; that is, he said one of them is a fake." I told him about the conversation at Kranzler's. Harry listened intently, then made me repeat it while he made desultory notes in his little spiral-bound no
tebook.
"Son of a gun," he said finally. "And he wouldn't tell you which one it is?"
I shook my head.
"So now what? And Chris—" He held up his hands, warning me off. "Don't tell me it takes an art expert to understand. Art experts are like psychiatrists; you can't get two of them to agree on anything."
"Well," I said, having no quarrel with him on that point, "I usually start by looking for three things: Are the materials as old as they're supposed to be? Do they come from the place they're supposed to? And are the techniques the ones that were really in use when the painting's supposed to have been done? If those check out, I get down to individual styles, but that's a lot trickier."
He stood looking at the Vermeer, scrunched up in the bulky sweater, his hands in the pockets. "So take this one, for example. One of the things you'd want to find out is whether the paint on it was really available in Delft in the 1650s or 1660s—are my dates right?"
"On the button."
He shrugged modestly. "Well, I figured if I was going to get involved with this show, I better do some reading. Anyway, am I right?"
"You sure are. Most of the paint formulas used by theOld Masters have been chemically analyzed by now, so it's not hard to check and see if a particular painting has the right pigments—mixed in the right proportions."
"Yeah, but if you can get the formulas, why can't the crooks?"
"They can, but we've still got the edge. They have to be sure every single substance they use is right, but if we can find even one that wasn't available till later, it's got to be a fake. And that goes for everything, not just the paints. If you're looking at what's supposed to be a fifteenth-century Flemish painting, and the stretcher bars turn out to be made of wood that's found only in America ... well, you'd better look a little closer."
"Sure, I see that. But—" He glanced around and pointed to Venus and the Lute Player. "Titian, right? So when was that painted—1540, 1550?"
I nodded.
"Okay, so tell me: Does the frame look authentic to you?"
We walked up to the painting, and I ran my eyes over the curlicues and rosettes of the heavy gilded Renaissance frame.
"Yes."
"Meaning it's from about the right time?"
"Uh-huh."
"All right, say I wanted to push a fake Titian. Why couldn't I go into some little old out-of-the way church and steal some three- or four-hundred-year-old picture of a saint or something—there are millions of them—and then use the frame? Or even buy some old picture that wasn't worth that much, toss the painting, and put in the phony Titian instead?"
"It's not that easy. It's got to be from the right place, not just the right time. You'd need a frame that was made in Venice. One from Germany or Spain—or even Rome or Florence—wouldn't get you past an expert. And I'm not just talking about style; I'm talking about the right joinery techniques, the right nails—"
"OK, OK, but still ..." Harry scowled and chewed his cheek, taking this as a personal challenge. "OK, then, how about this? What's to stop me from finding some old piece of wood—say, a beam from a house built at the right time, or maybe a piece of furniture—and carving the damn frame myself?"
"First of all—"
"I know, I know. I'd have to be some kind of master carpenter, wouldn't I? And I'd need to make the right kind of glue, forge some handmade nails—"
"That'd be the easy part. The hard part would be figuring out how to carve an old piece of wood without making a new skin."
"A new what?"
"When you cut into old wood, you can't help creating a fresh surface—a skin—that's 'young' to someone who knows what to look for."
Harry blew out his lips. "That's interesting." He used "interesting" a lot, drawing it out into four slow, respectful syllables: IN-ter-est-ing. "Look, let me know what you find out. I guess it won't take very long, right?"
When I didn't say anything, he turned his head to look at me. "Not right?"
"I don't know. A modern fake I could certainly spot. But I don't think that's what we have, and the older it gets, the harder it is to be sure."
"Like, the new skin gets to be an old skin?"
"Right. And the scientific techniques get less reliable. And if what we have is one that's so old it's contemporary with the original and done by a first-rate artist to boot—say, a Terborch that's been converted into a 'Vermeer'—we've got problems."
"Huh." Musing, he picked up his coat. "Hey, this has really been IN-ter-est-ing; I learned a lot. Listen, I want to ask you something. How come you didn't mention this forgery stuff before?" "I didn't think of it."
"You didn't think of it?" He chewed over the words slowly.
"No. It didn't seem pertinent. It still doesn't, really. That is, I suppose it could wind up being a police matter, but—"
"It didn't seem pertinent to the break-in?"
"To the break-in?" I looked at him stupidly. "No. How could it—"
"Or van Cortlandt's death?"
'To Peter's death? What could it have to do with his death? Harry, if you're driving at something, you've left me way behind."
"Well, I don't know, but doesn't it seem to you like there are an awful lot of weird things going on?"
"There sure are, but that doesn't mean they're connected, does it?"
"In my line of work, yeah, it usually does. I gotta go." He worked his thin shoulders into the coat and suddenly laughed. "Hey, don't look so worried." He clapped me tightly on the arm and turned to the door. "I'm just thinking like a cop; I can't help it. Forget it."
Chapter 7
I forgot it.
As much as I'd love to say that I didn't, that I mulled over his words, turned them over in my mind, realized at last how dense I'd been not to put things together myself, that isn't what happened. I forgot it. Almost the minute he was gone.
Flittner had finished up the lighting and came over to me as Harry left.
'The exhibition looks great, Earl," I said honestly. "The lighting's magnificent."
He grunted. "Something I can do for you?" The implication was that this was his domain, not mine.
"No thanks."
"Just want to look at the pretty pictures?"
"Yes." I'm not sure why it didn't seem like a good idea to tell him about the forgery. Mainly, I think, I just didn't want to explain again. But perhaps something in me felt it was better if he didn't know. Or maybe I just didn't want to talk to him any longer than I had to.
He grunted again, shrugged, and headed morosely for the door, already reaching for one of the Camels that he deprived himself of while working around the paintings.
Alone, I got on with my reason for coming to the Clipper Room in the first place, not that I had much of an idea of what I was looking for. Peter had told me that the forgery was down my alley, which might mean something as specific as the Vermeer, or possibly anything from the Renaissance through the Baroque; let's say from the fifteenth century to 1750—Piero through Luca Giordano. Seven pictures, all told. Not so bad, really.
But it was also possible that "down your alley" might have meant something else entirely—Peter had been in a whimsical frame of mind—so to be on the safe side I went through the entire collection.
I began by looking for the technical inconsistencies of place and time that I'd mentioned to Harry. You might think that an odd place to start; if, after all, I am the expert on Baroque and Renaissance art that I keep (ever so subtly) hinting I am, why would I not immediately get down to examining each painting from a stylistic perspective? Did the Venus and the Lute Player show Titian's characteristic use of fingers more than brush in the final stages? Did the Hals demonstrate his singular ability to fool the viewer into thinking he is looking at a dazzling bravura display of reckless spontaneity when in fact each stroke had been laid on with the slowest, most meticulous care? Was the Vermeer illuminated with pointilles, those tiny, mysterious dabs of paint that seem to drench the canvas with light?
Intuitively
, those are the kinds of judgments I trust the most, but they are matters of degree, subjective and therefore arguable—and, in any case, tricky to make. Easier to begin with a simpler yes/no question: Did any of the materials show outward signs of having come from some time or some place other than they should have?
They didn't. That didn't mean they weren't faked, only that there weren't any obvious signs. Later, I'd want to take them off the walls and turn them around, to see what the backs had to say for themselves. (At the moment I didn't care to challenge our formidable new intrusion-detection system.) In the meantime there was more I could do right now. I could haul out my ten-power battery-lit lens and have a good, hard look at the craquelure.
Craquelure means "crackling"—the network of fine, black lines that covers the surface of any old oil painting as a result of shrinkages in the paint film and varnish. There is almost no such thing as an old painting without craquelure, so forgers must create it, and they have come up with a lot of clever ways to do it, from wrapping the painted canvas around a roller (which has been done by fakers since the 1600s) to putting it in a 120-degree oven for a couple of days, to using a special "restorer's varnish" that contracts while it dries and is guaranteed thus to crackle the surface of any painting to which it's applied.
But fooling a knowledgeable eye is difficult. There are all sorts of esoterica for a crook to worry about: Paint on canvas shrinks differently from paint on panels (the former cracks in a spiderweb pattern, the latter along the grain of the wood); the extent of craquelure varies less with age than with media (the deepest cracks are found in early-nineteenth-century pictures that were painted with crack-prone materials); and there is a big difference between a painting that cracks from the surface down and one that cracks from the ground up (both occur naturally, but under different circumstances).
All very handy to know, but of course, high-class forgers know it at least as well as anyone else and have devised ways of meeting the challenge. At this point, however, I was still hoping—with diminishing confidence—that I was dealing with something less than a first-class forgery, and so might find something quickly. I looked at them all, not just the seven likely ones, and found nothing. Round one to the forger.