by Aaron Elkins
That had taken two hours, I went out, had a couple of cups of coffee, and returned to begin again with the Piero della Francesca and work my way through to the 1881 Manet, this time concentrating on the signatures. By now I was relatively sure that I wasn't dealing with a modern fake but an old one. And as I'd told Harry, most of the old forgeries still around had begun as honest works of art by honest artists, which were later transformed into other things. Sometimes the original painting was left pretty much as it was; sometimes it was altered in one way or another to make the fraud more credible. One change, however, was mandatory: A counterfeit signature had to be added. Not all genuine paintings are signed, but all forgeries are, for obvious reasons.
What I was searching for was some sign of signature-tampering. Sometimes a forger will paint out an existing signature and then simply paint a new one over it. This is easy to detect, and more clever crooks will erase the signature down to the ground, then reprime the damaged spot, build up the paint layer by layer, and install a new signature with a new coat of varnish (appropriately crackled) over it. There are other techniques too, and to my pleasure I spotted one, but it didn't bring me any closer to what I was looking for.
It was on the Vermeer, of course; the one with the fake de Hooch signature. The false signature itself was beautifully done. I have to admit that I probably wouldn't have recognized the few signs of overpainting if I hadn't known that they had to be there. What did catch my eye, however, was an inconspicuous low cabinet in the background, seen through the triangle formed by the clavichord, the woman's extended left arm, and her side.
On the face of the cabinet was an odd crownlike design, vaguely oriental, which closer examination very satisfyingly revealed to be the original Vermeer monogram—IVM— deftly transformed with only four curving strokes into a meaningless geometrical decoration. Naturally, this resoundingly confirmed Young Woman at the Clavichord as an authentic Vermeer.
Or did it? There was always the possibility that some particularly cunning forger had done this so that I, or somebody like me, would come proudly to the conclusion I'd just reached. It wouldn't have been the first time.
It was starting to look as if I might need some scientific help before I was done. Fortunately, I was sure it would be available from Berlin's Technische Universitat, where Max Kohler ran one of the world's major art laboratories. Kohler and I had worked together before, and he could do what I couldn't—chemically analyze the material in the craquelure, for example. All forgers must fill in their artificial cracks with black or gray matter—ink, paint, soot—or they won't look real. But three centuries of accumulated dust and grime are impossible to duplicate chemically. Fooling my eye was one thing; fooling Max's mass spectrometer was another.
Why, then, didn't I ship the whole batch over to Kohler's lab right off instead of messing with my Neanderthal techniques? First, because you just don't send thirty-five million dollars' worth of art treasures across the city to your nearest lab; it doesn't work that way. It creates insurance problems and logistics problems, it's risky for the paintings, it overloads the lab, and it makes everybody nervous. It's also wildly expensive.
Second, even good laboratories often produce ambiguous results. Psychiatrists and art experts aren't the only ones who sometimes disagree; chemists looking at the same computerized pigment analysis will reach different conclusions more often than they'd like laymen to know. Besides that, legitimate underpainting, overpainting, and a lot of technicalities too boring to go into confuse things enough to give any competent and resourceful forger a decent chance of getting by.
And third, I wanted the satisfaction of finding it myself, or at least the excitement of looking for it. Matching wits against a really fine forger, even if he's been dead a few hundred years, is pure pleasure, an engrossing detective game, and it promised more fun than I'd had in months.
Which gives you a pretty good idea of the state of my life.
But another hour produced nothing, not even much in the way of fun, and I decided to quit for the day. Tomorrow, fresher and stronger after another good night's sleep, I'd start again.
On my way through the lobby I saw a message in my box at the reception desk: Pls call Capt. Greene, 4141.
I used the desk telephone. "Anne? This is Chris Norgren."
"Oh, thank you for calling, Dr. Norgren." The formality was not lost on me. "Can I talk to you about something? Colonel Robey would have discussed it with you, but he's had to go to Heidelberg. He specifically asked me to see to it instead."
Why the meticulous explanation? Did she think I might suspect her intentions? Would that I had reason. "Fine," I said.
"Good. Can we meet in the lobby in twenty minutes?" "I was just going down to the bar for a drink. How about there?"
A fractional pause. "All right. Twenty minutes."
The Keller-Bar of Columbia House is, as the name suggests, in the basement, not far from the infamous storage room, though entered by its own flight of steps. To me it made a colorful and exotic scene: crowded and noisy, mostly with fliers, self-consciously casual in their flight suits and satiny flight jackets, their captain's bars prominent on their shoulders. Small men, most of them. Handsome and extremely young, lithe and fit-looking; like a gathering of jockeys or lightweight boxers. There were a few senior officers, too portly and convivial, with individual audiences of respectfully attentive juniors. It might almost have been a scene from the Battle of Britain—many of the fliers were wearing white scarfs tucked into the throats of their jackets.
There were eight or ten scattered tables, and along one wall a row of slot machines, all of them engaged and, from the steady clanking and jingling, all paying off handsomely. Not, of course, that you could tell from the players, who pumped the handles with de-rigueur expressions of joyless drudgery.
Tonight's Special, read a hand-lettered sign propped on the bar; Beefeater Martinis, 75 cents. A long way from San Francisco prices and too good to pass up. The barman poured my drink and nodded his thanks when I dropped a quarter into one of the champagne glasses placed every few feet along the bar. "Snacks over there," he said, recognizing me for a newcomer. "Help yourself."
"Over there" was a table around which pilots were congregated elbow to elbow, chattering and munching. Instantiy hungry at the mention of food, I steered my way through, hoping at least for chips or nuts. They were there, all right, but so were a platter of halved, thick-sliced ham-and-cheese sandwiches; a heaped tray of cold cuts; half a wheel of cheddar cheese; hot German sausages and rolls; and more—the free lunch of yore, alive and thriving in the officers-club bar in Berlin. This much-maligned military life, I was learning, had more going for it than was generally supposed.
I snaked out a plateful of the heartier items and found a table at the back. I meant to wait for Anne before gobbling up the food, but I'd had only one meal in the last two days, and in fifteen minutes I'd wolfed down most of the plateful, along with half the martini. I was so absorbed in the process that I didn't see her come up.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
She sat down. "It's so horrible about Peter. I haven't been able to think about anything else."
"Is that what you want to talk about?"
"Indirectly, yes. Colonel Robey's counting on you now to carry Peter's share of the load, you know."
"Of course. Would you like something to drink?"
She shook her head gloomily.
"Well, you can tell Mark I'll do my best. Peter's already done all the hard work, so I think I can cope."
I was bothered by our formality and distance, and not just for personal reasons. The dynamics of art shows lend themselves to personality problems (something I figured out for myself without Louis's help), and one of my jobs was to defuse them, not create them.
I set down my martini. "Look, Anne—I apologize for cutting you off like that in the meeting."
"Cutting me off?"
"I was acting like a creep."
"No,
you weren't." But her lips tipped upward and those clear violet eyes warmed slightly. "You sure were."
"All right. Now that we agree on something, how about calling me Chris?"
"All right, Chris," she said, and smiled a little less tentatively.
Pleased with this small victory, I sipped my martini and smiled back. Anne, however, quickly drifted unflatteringly off into her private thoughts and sat there looking unhappy and remote.
"What did you want to talk about, exactly?" I asked.
"Oh . . . sorry—I keep thinking about Peter. Look, maybe I will have a drink after all. Could I have a glass of white wine, please?"
When I returned with it, she took one gulp and was all business. "Colonel Robey's had a call from Florence. Apparently, signor Bolzano went to pieces when he heard about what happened in the storage room."
"Hardly surprising."
"No, but he's having another one of his episodes. He's threatening to pull out again. It's the sort of thing Peter would ordinarily deal with, but now, what with, with ..."
I said gently, "Mark would like me to go to Florence and talk to him."
"Yes. He says you may really have to put on the pressure." She smiled slightly. "He said to tell you it's arm-twisting time."
"Oh," I said, finishing the martini and putting the glass down.
"Is something wrong?"
"No, it's just that ... the thing is …"
The thing was that whatever my forte is, it isn't twisting arms. No doubt it was among my "other duties as required," and certainly it is something art curators must do from time to time. But back home, Tony Whitehead, resigned to my deficiencies, usually assigned it to others more temperamentally suited. Of whom there were many.
Someone turned on the television set above the bar. "Urghah!" it said. "Bdao! Ooghah!" A martial-arts movie.
"What I'm wondering about," I went on dishonestly, "is just what it is that's worrying Bolzano so much. His paintings are OK, after all, and he must know that the chance of another theft attempt is infinitesimal."
"There's also that little matter of the ruined Michelangelo reproduction, which I understand was a valuable drawing on its own."
"Yes, but he was making things difficult before that happened, wasn't he?"
"From the beginning. The consensus—Earl, Egad, Colonel Robey, even Peter—is that he's just a difficult, contrary kind of person who likes making waves to flaunt his power."
"But you don't think that."
"No, I think ..." She rotated her wineglass slowly on the table, studying the dregs like a fortune-teller reading tea leaves. "Well, they say he's a sick old man now, and he's getting feeble, and I believe he's just ... fearful, apprehensive, you know? Afraid that something will happen to his things, afraid that maybe he won't live to see them back in his villa now that they've turned up again after so long— the ones from the cache, I mean. It doesn't seem so hard to understand. I think he went along with the show in a burst of gratitude, but now he's having second thoughts."
I nodded. Feeble or not, how would I feel about parting, even temporarily, with a Vermeer I hadn't seen in forty
years? I sympathized, although as problems went, I could
imagine worse.
"Ee-ya-AOH!" yawped the movie. "HAI1EEE!" It had been going loquaciously along for a couple of minutes and I still didn't know what language it was in.
"Refill?" I asked, pointing to her glass.
"No.... Yes, please."
I got another glass of wine for her and switched to it myself. I wasn't yet up to coping with two martinis.
"Anne," I said as I sat down, "did Peter ever say anything to you about there being a fake?"
"In the show? No." The violet eyes widened. "Is there one?"
"I think so, yes."
"But—which one?" She leaned forward excitedly. "It's that Corot, isn't it? I knew it!"
I shook my head, smiling. I knew what she meant. Quai at Honfleur was the usually estimable Corot at his gauzy worst; a soft-focus panorama of muzzy fishing boats and gray-green trees done in the "poetical" Salon manner that had made him one of the most popular artists of the late nineteenth century.
"You know what they say about Corot?" I said. "That he has the most prolific posthumous production of any artist in history. That he painted one thousand pictures, of which twenty-five hundred are in Europe, five thousand in America, and the rest unaccounted for. No, Peter wouldn't have been so pleased with himself over just another fake Corot. I think it's another one."
"You think? You don't know which one it is?"
I sat back and told her about the conversation at Kranzler's.
"A forgery .. ." She turned it over in her mind, then looked sharply up at me, her eyes snapping. "Chris! You don't suppose it has anything to do with his death! Of course it does! It must!"
I looked blankly at her.
"The forgery!" she cried. "Peter discovered a forgery, and they killed him to keep him quiet!"
I looked blankly at her some more. Where was everyone getting these ideas? "Who's 'they'?"
"I don't know who they is—are." She made an impatient httle noise. "But it's a clue. What else is there to go on? I told Colonel Robey Peter couldn't have been killed that way."
I put my wineglass down. "Are you saying," I said very slowly, "that you don't accept the police version of how Peter was killed?"
"I don't know what the police think, but I certainly don't believe Peter van Cortlandt was crawling around Frankfurt's red-light district last Wednesday night or any other night—" She stopped. "Well, do you?"
I did, but I wasn't going to say so. She obviously wanted very much to believe—did believe—that Peter was above anything so sordid, and I had no great desire to disenchant her. Or to differ with her, for that matter. Actually, I was grateful to her for wanting to think the best of Peter. I wanted to think the best of him, too, but the difference between us was that she was an innocent, happily unaware of the essential baseness of men, while I, more seasoned and more tolerant, knew that all men were pretty much alike when it got down to essential baseness.
So I thought, in the full radiance of my ignorance and condescension. Anne was a naive young female, Harry was a typically paranoid cop, and I alone was worldly-wise enough to accept things for what they were.
"I'm not sure what I believe," I temporized cleverly. "What did Mark say when you talked to him?"
"You know Colonel Robey," she said wryly. "You're never sure what wave length he's on. He listened, nodded very gravely, said 'Hmm, yes, well, I can see where you're coming from,' but his mind was somewhere else. I could tell he thought the same thing you do: that Peter was out—playing around—and got mixed up with a rough crowd, and ... that's what happened."
"Anne, I didn't say I believed that."
"But you do." She shook her head, a jerk of frustration. "You do, don't you?"
"Well, I don't rule it out."
"But how can you think that? Peter was so decent, so clean. You knew him better than any of us; do you really believe he could ... a prostitute with a tattoo on her behind ... a horrible, filthy hotel room?" She shivered.
"Anne, listen. I really liked Peter, and I respected him. But deep down I didn't know him any better than you did. Look, just because a man seems to be decent—is decent— doesn't mean that there aren't some pretty dark things going on below the surface. It's not something a man can help, you know—"
Understandably, she laughed at this vapid pedantry. "That's what Colonel Robey said, and that's just the way he said it. Chris, do you really think I'm that wet behind the ears?" She laughed again, this time with exasperation. "I've been in the U.S. Air Force for six years, you know."
As a matter of fact, it was exactly what I thought, but I warmed to her on account of it; because she liked Peter, because she thought more of him than I did. Nevertheless, it seemed like a good time to change the subject.
"Well, maybe you're right," I said. "Anyway, will you let Mark
know I'll get a plane to Florence as early as I can tomorrow?"
"Sure. And thanks again." She glanced at the Dortmunder Bier wall clock above us. "Seven o'clock. No wonder my stomach's growling."
Invite her to dinner, dope, I told myself. She practically asked you to. Instead I said, "I've stuffed myself with hors d'oeuvres from the bar, so I think I'll pass up dinner tonight. I'm still catching up on my sleep."
"Oh."
"Maybe we can have dinner one night when I get back."
"Mm-hm," she said noncommittally. Which was all the answer I deserved. She pushed her chair back from the table. "Good luck with Bolzano. And thank you for the wine."
I watched her go with conflicting feelings. One part of me wanted to chase after her and tell her I really wasn't the jerk I seemed to be, that jet lag, concussion, and codeine had combined to throw me off form, and would she like to go to Kranzler's, or the Cafe Wintergarten, or maybe go for a schnitzel at nearest Wienerwald after all?
The other part of me won. I sat awhile in morbid solitude, finished my wine, and got up to leave. I really wasn't hungry, and I really was tired. And thinking again about Peter's wretched ending had gotten me down; no question about that. On my way out I passed directly beneath the television set.
"But what can it awr mean, mahstah?" a sloe-eyed young man was asking earnestly. So it was English. Of a sort, anyway; the mushily orientalized version dear to the dubbers of Oriental films. I paused to hear the response.
"It means, my impetuous young flen," a sagacious robed figure replied, "that you may be heading for gleat . . . difficurty."
I took the elevator up and went to bed.
Chapter 8
I called Florence from my room the next morning and spoke with Lorenzo Bolzano, the collector's son. The elder Bolzano, Claudio, was in the hospital for a twenty-four-hour checkup, so I arranged with Lorenzo to come the following day. Thus, with a free day I flew to Frankfurt to talk to the Kunstmuseum's director for administration, to see if I could resolve the insurance question that had come up on the El Greco. That was the matter that had taken Peter to Frankfurt in the first place, but of course he hadn't lived to make his appointment.