“I could tell right away it wasn’t a real Degas, so, no, it never occurred to me to question it.”
“Do you think that was naive?”
I hesitate. “No. I’m still certain it wasn’t painted by Degas, and I know Aiden was certain of that, also.”
“How can you be so sure what he believed?”
“That’s what he told me, and the man knows his business. Plus, he’s Aiden Markel.”
“We see how far that got him.” The agent scribbles in his notebook, frowns, scribbles again.
I eye him warily. “I, ah, I think I should get a lawyer.”
Lyons and Alana share a glance. “Why?” he asks, looking perplexed. “You’re just reporting a possible incident, aren’t you? We’ve no idea if there’s been any law-breaking here. Or that you’re involved in any kind of criminal activity.”
When I don’t respond, the agent’s body language shifts into nice-guy mode: elbows on knees, torso toward me, smile on face. “So,” he says, “Ms. Roth, you believe Isabella Stewart Gardner was blackmailed by this …” he checks his notes, “this Virgil Rendell. Into hanging his painting instead of Degas’? And then she hid the real one?”
“That’s one theory. It could have happened for many other reasons. The important thing here is that the painting hung last night is the copy I was hired to paint. The copy of Aiden Markel’s copy.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I recognize the craquelure.”
He looks at Alana and raises an eyebrow.
“It’s how paint cracks over time.” She glowers at me. “A way of determining the age of a painting.”
“I know what it means,” Lyons says, and I sense that he may be more open-minded than he seems.
“As I told you before, this isn’t the first time Ms. Roth has made this kind of claim,” Alana says. “Her credibility is more than a little suspect.”
“Ah, Cullion’s 4D.” He smiles at me. “But weren’t there some questions? Didn’t you have support from a number of people at MoMA?”
“Yes there were. A lot actually.” I’m well aware they’re playing good-cop-bad-cop, but the less said about 4D the better. “I know the painting downstairs is mine because I was worried about a particular dark area along the bottom. That I didn’t wipe enough of the ink off before I sealed it. It felt overdone to me. And when I saw it last night, I knew it was.”
“Are you certain of this?” Lyons asks.
“I put a green dot on the back right-hand corner of the painting. On the stretcher. Check and you’ll see it.”
“That doesn’t mean a thing,” Alana argues. “A random spot of paint could have come from anywhere. She could have seen it last night—or know about it because she was involved in the heist.”
“That’s ridicu—”
The agent leans in toward me. “Fair enough, but I still don’t understand how you know this Virgil Rendell forged the painting.”
“I don’t know for sure, but he is an established forger, and I saw his sketchbook. There are drawings in it of both the original and the forgery.”
“Now I’m really confused.”
“I have a book of Degas’ drawings containing preliminary compositional sketches for After the Bath. One set of Rendell’s drawings matches Degas’ preliminaries, and the other matches the painting that was in the Gardner.”
“Couldn’t Rendell have seen these same sketches? Been playing around with them?” Lyons asks.
“It’s unlikely. Although they were contemporaries, Degas was in Europe and Rendell in Boston, and I highly doubt they ever met. My theory is that Rendell saw the original when Belle brought it back here but before it was hung in the museum. Then, for whatever reason, when he forged it, he changed it.”
“How do you know what the original looks like?”
“It looks like Degas’ preliminary sketches.”
“And the one downstairs doesn’t?”
“No. Like I said before, one of the women is different, the configuration is different, and if you look at it closely, it doesn’t look like a Degas.”
“Preliminary sketches are never the same as the finished painting,” Alana snaps. “It’s a Degas. And I’ve looked very closely. As have a number of expert authenticators. People with training and credentials. Not some random certification by some Internet art copying company.”
“So,” Lyons says to me, “you knew it was a forgery when no one else did?”
“I just happened to have the right combination of background and skills to detect it. But mostly, I think I was the first one to really look.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, if we go with the idea that Isabella Gardner hung Rendell’s forgery, even under duress, then the painting would never have been officially authenticated. Everyone would have assumed it was a Degas and never questioned it. And because her will says nothing can be moved, the painting never went out on loan, where the duplicity might have been caught.”
“Could this have happened?” Lyons asks Alana.
“It’s absurd.”
“But possible?”
Alana crosses her arms over her chest. “Pretty much anything is.”
He turns back to me. “But wouldn’t Degas have known it wasn’t his painting? Wouldn’t he have visited the museum? Or seen a photo of it?”
“Degas came to this country only once,” I explain. “To New Orleans, and it was way before the museum opened. Communication wasn’t the way it is now, nor was travel. No phones, no planes. So, no, in all likelihood, he never saw it after he sold it to Belle.”
The agent sets his face in an overly thoughtful expression. “So, no one but you, three years out of graduate school, ever really looked at a painting that hung in a major museum for almost a hundred years? No one but you ever figured out it wasn’t a Degas. Impressive. Very impressive.”
I just stare at him.
“Remind me how you did this,” he asks, again with disingenuous respect. “What were the clues?”
I explain again about the brushstrokes, the colors, the compositional sketches, the symmetry, the secret room in the basement. “It just all started to add up. And when I recognized my painting at the reinstallation last night, well …” I shrug.
Lyons whistles. “Excellent detective work, Ms. Roth. Ever consider a career at the FBI?”
Alana laughs.
Although I feel like planting my fist in both of their faces, I say, “I didn’t have to come forward with this information. I could’ve kept quiet, and everyone would have gone happily on their way. I did this to find out the truth and hopefully return a great masterpiece to the Gardner. I don’t appreciate being treated like some idiot child.”
“You didn’t ‘come forward,’” Alana reminds me. “You were caught trespassing by the Boston police.”
Lyons studies me closely, then says, “If I understand you correctly, then the Rendell forgery is the one that was stolen in the heist, and that’s the one Mr. Markel brought to you.”
“No, no, that’s not what I said.” I give him a hostile look so he’ll understand I’m on to his tricks and won’t be that easily tripped up. “The one Aiden brought me was a copy, a copy of Rendell’s forgery. Or, or it could have been a copy of someone else’s copy, I guess. I don’t really know. How could I know?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Alana points out.
“Do you happen to have these famous sketchbooks with you?” Lyons asks.
“They’re in my studio,” I say, furious with myself for falling into his trap.
“And you also tracked these down with your highly tuned detective skills?”
My first reaction is to tell him to go fuck himself, but instead, I say, “Yes, as a matter of fact, Agent Lyons, that’s exactly what I did.”
I’m rewarded by a quick flash of amusement in his eyes before he asks Alana, “You’ve got the blueprints, right?”
She glares at me before turning to her computer and startin
g to type.
“Perhaps, when you pull it up,” Lyons says, “Ms. Roth here can point out her secret room to us.”
I stand and move around to the side of Alana’s computer.
“You said the basement?” Alana asks without looking at me.
“Sub-basement.”
“Didn’t even know there was one,” she mutters, as she searches for the right page. “Here,” she says and pushes back her chair. “Show us.”
“We found a concrete wall that isn’t on the blueprints,” I explain, as I outline the drawing with my finger. “Just about here. Right in front of these double doors. Which are there, behind the wall.”
“And that’s where you think Degas’ painting is?” Lyons asks.
“If it’s not there,” I say, “it’s somewhere. And we need to find it.”
“This is ridiculous,” Alana barks. “We don’t need to find anything. Degas’ After the Bath is hanging downstairs in the Short Gallery.”
Lyons says they’d like to excuse themselves. Alana tells me to take a seat at her assistant’s desk right outside the office, which I do.
When they close Alana’s door, I stand and press my ear to the wall, but their voices are too low to understand. In a few minutes, they come out, and Alana orders me not to move. I think of Aiden, forced to sit in a cell, at the mercy of someone else’s relentless commands.
To distract myself, I look at the sepia-toned photographs hanging on the wall. There’s a photo of Belle, wearing a horrible black hat and climbing a ladder during the construction of Fenway Court. A wiry little thing, quite homely without her jewels and fancy dresses, and clearly displeased with what she’s seeing. How did this woman have all those men at her feet? Amass so much power? Everything about Belle Gardner is either improbable or contradictory, and I can only hope I’m on the right track.
“IS THE OVEN still in your studio?” Alana demands, as she walks up to me, Agent Lyons at her heels.
I blink at what seems like a non sequitur, then understand: They found the green dot. “Yeah, I have the oven.”
“And despite what happened with MoMA, you still want to claim the painting downstairs is yours?” Lyons asks.
“That one was mine, and this one is, too.”
“Not exactly what MoMA concluded,” Alana mutters.
“Look, Agent Lyons, Ms. Ward, I may not be sure about a lot of things right now, but I know my own work. I’m sorry to disappoint you. The museum. Everyone. To create this huge hassle. But I thought that in the end, you’d prefer the truth.”
“This is the plan,” Alana says. “Three of us will be at your studio at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ll bring an old canvas and you’ll go through your whole process for us.”
“That’s fine. No problem. I can—”
“I’m not asking your permission, Ms. Roth.”
I look down at my hands.
“I’m going to have to fly a number of experts to Boston to begin the second authentication,” Alana continues, “and order special chemicals and equipment so the process can be done quickly and onsite. This will be expensive and time-consuming. And if, I’m thinking when, we discover this is all a hoax, you’ll be liable for all costs and damages. Including loss of revenue due to our inability to display After the Bath.”
“It’s not a—”
“And if it turns out the painting is a forgery,” Agent Lyons interrupts, “and that you’re the one who forged it, my colleagues from the agency and I will want to sit down with you. In what you might call a more official capacity.”
Forty-four
As promised, Alana shows up at eight a.m. with two academic types: an older man and a young woman who looks as if she’s still in high school. Both wear glasses and pull laptops from their briefcases: his cracked and beat-up, hers pristine and expensive. His name is Mr. Jones, and she’s Ms. Smith. When I smile at this, they just stare at me. Looks to be a fun time.
Not that I’m so jolly this morning either. Yesterday, after I left the Gardner, I went directly to Nashua Street to update Aiden and make sure he was okay. But they wouldn’t let me in. Said he’d already had his allotment of visitors for the day. Later, Kristi texted me: “Markel said 2 tell u 1 week left.”
Needless to say, I spent a long sleepless night pacing, beating up on myself, and talking to Rik on the phone. I told him about Aiden’s deadline, and he told me that Alana was furious at him but that he didn’t think his job was in jeopardy. Some good news. The rest was bad. Alana is on a mission to prove me wrong, to destroy my career and my life, to get me arrested. And if that doesn’t work out, I have Agent Lyons to contend with.
Now, Alana hands me a one-foot square canvas; it’s an oil painting of a waterfall, a bad painting of a waterfall. “Work from this,” she says, her voice crisp and no-nonsense. “Paint one of the After the Bath nudes. Go through the process you claim you used to produce your so-called forgery and—”
“Copy.” I know I have to stay calm, but the parallels to repainting 4D have me on edge. I remind myself that the situation is reversed this time around: Then my object was to be recognized as the painter, now it’s to be recognized as the forger. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t make me feel any better.
Nor do the much higher stakes. I try to cheer myself by noting that the stakes aren’t as high as they were for Han van Meegeren. He’d had to repaint his fake Vermeer to prove he didn’t sell a national treasure to the Nazis, thus avoiding a death sentence. This doesn’t make me feel any better either.
“Explain to us everything you’re doing,” she orders. “Even if you think we already know it.”
I nod. “Can I get anyone coffee? Tea?”
“This isn’t a social visit, Ms. Roth,” Alana reminds me. “The sooner you start, the sooner we’ll be finished.” I’ve got no problem with that.
I go through the now second-nature motions, explaining as I proceed. Smith and Jones are mostly quiet, except for a few respectful questions, but Alana can’t contain her irritation. She shrugs derisively at my comments, rolls her eyes, mutters under her breath. I do my best to ignore her, but her every response, her every movement, reminds me how much she holds in her hands.
It’s growing dark by the time I’ve gone through three rounds, and Alana says, “Let’s call it a day.” No one objects. She turns to me. “I’m going to take this painting with me to make sure it isn’t altered in our absence. We’ll be back with it first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Sure,” I say, too exhausted to take offense at her not-so-veiled aspersion on my character.
“And,” Alana adds, “I’ll need Degas’ and Rendell’s sketchbooks. Agent Lyons and I want to examine them.”
Although the sketchbooks corroborate my hypothesis, I’m reluctant to part with them. Alana takes the books from my hands. “Thank you,” she says, in an overly polite tone that indicates she’s not thankful at all. Of course she isn’t. Nor should she be.
They return the next morning with the painting and their phones and computers. Last night, Rik told me that he got news on the hush-hush from his buddy who’s a security guard, who has a buddy, another security guard, who went into the sub-basement with Alana and Lyons. Although Alana was completely against it, Lyons plans to bring ultrasound equipment in to determine if anything is behind the concrete wall. The guard thought he heard Alana mutter, “Fucking bitch.”
Alana, Jones, Smith, and I take our places. I paint and bake. They watch. It’s a lot less interesting today as I’m not doing anything they haven’t seen before. I have nothing to explain, and they have no questions. After two more rounds, the painting is actually starting to look pretty good. Even with only five layers, the colors are growing deep and luminescent; Jacqueline’s arm holding the towel glows. I stare at her, think about my own work, my windows. Kristi texted yesterday to remind me we’re going to start hanging my show on Thursday. It almost seems trivial.
“Are there other steps you do at the end to make it look old?” Ala
na demands.
“It has to be inked.”
“Can it be done now?”
“Sure,” I say, more than glad to comply. “We just need the craquelure to show through the last layer of varnish. Then it’ll be good to go.”
“Do it,” she says.
I glance up and notice the dark circles under her eyes, the wrinkles I hadn’t seen before, and feel a stab of sympathy. Also a stab of guilt. I’ve been nothing but a complete pain in the ass to this woman who only wanted to enjoy her museum’s moment of glory. Driven by my own hubris to right a wrong that may be better left unaddressed. But it’s a bit late for these regrets now. Especially when I know that there’s more pain to come.
When the craquelure has risen, the India ink applied and dried, I begin cleaning the ink off with a soapy rag. They watch, transfixed, as I wipe away the top layer of varnish, which leaves a hair-thin web of fine lines on the painting. I then add a touch of brown paint to the original varnish, explaining that the tint mirrors aging, and cover the canvas with it. When I’m done I hold the canvas up for their inspection.
Alana gasps.
FIRST THING THE next morning, I call Kristi at Markel G. “I’m back.”
“Great,” she says, but I hear annoyance in her voice.
“I’m really sorry about screwing this up. You think it’ll be possible to reschedule any of the interviews?” A half-dozen interviews had to be canceled because I was painting for the Gardner. I told Kristi it was a family emergency, age-old excuse yet always reliable, and guaranteed to keep questions to a minimum.
“Some. I hope.”
Although I never wanted to play the publicity game, the distraction is now welcome. I don’t have anything to do while I wait for the Gardner but look for Virgil Rendell’s family. And that’s not going well. “What did I miss?”
“Arts reporters for the Globe, the Phoenix, and Boston Magazine,” she says testily. “Newbury Street Gallerie. Metro.”
“Do you have the names and numbers? I’ll call them and set up new ones.”
“They don’t like dealing directly with the talent. I’ll see if I can get any of them to come by the gallery when you’re here doing the installation. Today you’ve got radio interviews all day. You’ve got the list I e-mailed you?”
The Art Forger Page 26