A Deceptive Clarity (10 page)

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.

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.