A Deceptive Clarity (16 page)

"So you oversaw the actual packing?" I asked Lorenzo.

"Of course. I was in the gallery for two entire days."

"Who did the crating? Your own workmen?"

"No, yours. Signor Flittner's."

"Then Earl was here?"

"Naturally. Also signor van Cortlandt."

"The entire time?"

"Do you mean the entire time of the packing? Yes, as he should have been," He was looking at me with a puzzled frown.

"And did you actually see the crates closed up?"
 

He slowly nodded his head.

Bolzano, tucked into his corner of the couch, had been studying me for some moments. "Signore, what are all these questions?"

I had decided a while back that I was going to tell him about the forgery. Peter's idea that the revelation might be more of a shock than he could stand I dismissed. Bolzano had obviously come a long way since his operation. More than that, he was clearly not the sort of man to shock easily.

"Sir, I think there's a forgery in The Plundered Past."

"Christopher!" Lorenzo murmured reprovingly, and turned with an anxious look toward his father.

But Bolzano lived up to my expectations. He sat motionless, still studying me, his right hand slowly stroking the left side of his jaw, his dark eyes luminous and steady.

"Explain yourself," he said calmly.

"Peter told me the day he died." And for what seemed like the tenth time in the last few days I described the conversation at Kranzler's.

Bolzano listened, stone still. Then he picked up his snifter, drank once, twice, and placed it firmly on the white plastic table in front of him. "It doesn't sound like Peter," he said slowly. "Like signor van Cortlandt. Do you realize the significance of a forgery in the Bolzano collection? Why would he keep it to himself? Why not tell you which one? Why not tell me?"

"Father!" Lorenzo exclaimed. "You don't mean to say you give credence—"

Bolzano waved him down with a flap of the hand. "Credence? To Peter?
 
Of course I do."

"But—but how—"

"I don't know how, Lorenzo. I think that's what your friend is trying to establish with his not-so-subtle questions."

"Yes," I said.

"And what have you established?"

"That Lorenzo and Peter were both there when the paintings were crated and neither apparently saw anything wrong at the time."

Bolzano looked at me without expression, then smiled. "Yes, I see."

"What do you see?" Lorenzo asked. "I don't understand."

"I see why signor Norgren was asking his questions. He now can assume that since no apparent forgery caught signor van Cortlandt's attention at that time, there was no apparent forgery. At that time."

"You mean," Lorenzo said, "that there was a ... a substitution after the paintings left? Someone has ... has stolen a picture and replaced it with another? Is that what you mean?"

The dog was half-asleep at Bolzano's feet, its head between its paws. With his toe, Bolzano rubbed its belly. "So it would seem. Do I read your mind correctly, signor Norgren?"

"Not entirely. There are also the three paintings from Hallstatt: the Rubens, the Vermeer, and the Titian."

Lorenzo put a hand to his heart. "My God, not the Tiziano."

"Signor Bolzano, how much time have you spent with those pictures since they turned up again? Have you had a chance to really study them?"

"No," he said with some bitterness. "They've never been out of your government's hands. We went to Hallstatt when they were found—it was before my attack—but we had no time alone with them. None."

"All right, then; neither of you had seen those paintings in forty years. Lorenzo, you were a baby in 1944. How can you be certain the ones in Hallstatt were genuine?"

"I'm sure," Lorenzo proclaimed, "because when I see a Tiziano, I swoon."

"I didn't notice you swooning," Bolzano grumbled. "But then, who could tell?" He drained his brandy. "So, signore, you think it may be an old forgery we are discussing, from the time of the Nazis?"

"Impossible," Lorenzo said stubbornly. "The unassailable provenances ... the inarguable testimony of their sheer beauty—"

Bolzano cut in irritatedly. "What unassailable provenances? They've been out of sight, no one knows where, for forty years. And as to their 'sheer beauty,' haven't you already told us there's no difference between a genuine painting and a forgery?"

"No difference
...I
told you ... ?"

While the sorely offended Lorenzo groped unsuccessfully for speech, Bolzano looked levelly at me. "Let me tell you what I think. I think you're wrong. For forty years I thought about those paintings, dreamed about them. They were never out of my mind. You think I wouldn't recognize them in an instant? Even the crates the damned Nazis packed them in I recognized. Do you know what was stenciled on them? 'A.H., Linz.'" He pressed his fingertips to his eyelids. "Adolf Hider, Linz."

He spoke quietly, but with a raw undercurrent of emotion that made me lower my eyes. He exhaled noisily, then went on in a softer tone. "Could I be wrong? It's possible; I'm only human. But I don't think so. Isn't it possible signor van Cortlandt was having a small joke with you?"

"That's what I told him," Lorenzo said.

"And something else occurs to me," Bolzano said. "Even if I did not have time to thoroughly examine the Hallstatt paintings, signor van Cortlandt most certainly did. He spent many hours with them last summer. If something wasn't as it should have been, he would surely have noticed it then— not last week."

"It might have been something technical or complex, something that wouldn't be found right away."

"And yet he suggested that you would merely glance over the paintings and it would leap out at you? I respect your scholarship, signore, but still—without offense—are you so much more proficient than he was?"

Not by a long shot, I wasn't. Bolzano had hit on a weakness that undercut every half-baked theory I'd come up with. Why had Peter taken so long to find a forgery that he expected me to spot by simply looking at the paintings and seeing if something caught my eye? It was inconceivable that he'd found a fake months before and kept it to himself. And if, on the other hand, it were something new—if in the last couple of weeks a forgery had been slipped into the show in place of an original, then it was inconceivable that he would have made such a playful, coy production out of it. It would have been nothing to be jocose about, yet that's exactly what Peter had been.

I sighed. "You're right, signor Bolzano. Nothing seems to make sense."

He tapped his hands on his thighs. "It's easy enough to settle. I will come to Berlin and look, and in five minutes I will tell you—"

"Father!" Lorenzo said. "Absolutely not. This time I must put my foot down. Dr. Rovere was quite adamant. You are to do no traveling for at least a month. To think of going to Germany in this weather ..."

Bolzano quieted him with a resigned flap of the hand. "All right, calm yourself. I admit it, you're right." He looked at me. "Perhaps in a month.
 
In the meantime, tell me what you want to do."

"I'd like to check it out. Right now there's a cloud over your collection, and I'm sure you'd want–"

"Not what I want; what you want."

"All right. In the first place, I think one of your own copies may somehow have turned up in place of an original."

"That's simple enough to settle. Look at the backs. And if that doesn't convince you, compare them to the certificates of guarantee."

A certificate of guarantee is one of many highly fallible methods of proving authenticity. A detailed photograph of a painting is made, and on the back of the print are the painting's dimensions, a description of any identifying details, and a signed statement by some eminent or not-so-eminent authority that the painting reproduced on the other side is most certainly the long-lost self-portrait of Michelangelo last seen in the collection of the Dukes of Burgundy in 1696.

The trouble is that art authorities, eminent or otherwise, can be wrong. They can even be bought. The trouble is also that a certificate of guarantee by a deceased authority is not very hard to fake, and many of them have been turned out to match some glorious Old Master that came fresh and hot from the oven the day before. Even the great museums have been bilked many times by spurious certificates, only to wind up carting their new treasures quietly and permanently down to the cellar years later, as the Metropolitan Museum did in 1973 after "reclassifying the authorship" of three hundred paintings from its European collection.

The upshot is that there is simply no way of
proving
that the art object at which you are looking is the art object it's supposed to be. When you stand before the Mona Lisa, trying to see it through the thick glass the Louvre protects it with, how do you know it is the very picture painted by da Vinci in 1503? How do you know it's the same picture that was hanging in the Louvre fifty years ago, or fifty days ago? You have faith in the integrity of the Louvre, you say? Would you bet your life that it's the same painting?

Neither would I, and certainly not on the basis of a certificate of guarantee.

"I'd like to do it more directly than that," I said. "Lorenzo told me that all your copies have a secret design drilled through the paint layers. I'd like to know what that design is, and where, so I can be sure it's not on any 'genuine' painting in the show."

Bolzano's gray eyebrows slowly climbed. "You want me to tell you ... ?"

"I explained that was impossible, Christopher," Lorenzo said sternly.

Bolzano's dog now had its head on his knee. His blunt fingers slowly worked the loose skin of its neck. "All right," he said simply. "Lorenzo, you'll make a copy of the key and give it to signor Norgren. Signore, I know you'll treat this information with discretion."

Lorenzo stared mutely at him, his eyes popping with surprise.

"I want this settled," Bolzano said. "Signore, will that relieve your mind?"

I hesitated. There was something else, but I didn't look forward to Bolzano's reaction. "There is one more thing," I said warily. "I'd like your permission to have some of the paintings scientifically analyzed if need be." I held my breath.

So did Bolzano. I thought for a moment that it was all over, that he was going to renege on The Plundered Past and have me thrown out of the house as well. The dog's eyes popped open as his hand inadvertently tightened on its fur. Then the hand loosened and the bullet head nodded once, firmly. "You have it."

Tony Whitehead has told me that I've fouled up a lot of deals by an overinsistence on clarity, that there are a lot of things better left open to interpretation. I suppose he's right; I'm uncomfortable when things aren't out on the table. "You understand," I said, "some tests might require the removal of material: a sliver of stretcher-bar for radio-carbon dating, a tiny cylinder of pigment—no more than a few hundredths of a gram—for microscopic core analysis—"

It was too much for Lorenzo, who leaped gawkily to his feet, toppling a white plastic table lamp off a white plastic end table. "Can you be serious? Destruction of the painted surface? Of a Rubens, a Hals? A 'mere' few hundredths of a gram from a Vermeer?" He looked down at me with a choked, incredulous laugh.

Bolzano, very somber, let him finish. "If you have to make physical tests, make them," he said quietly to me.

We both stared at him, Lorenzo not much more surprised than I was. It wasn't the sort of thing a collector willingly submitted to. When Lorenzo finally got his mouth working to protest, Bolzano talked over him.

"I want this settled," he said again, more harshly. "I don't want gossip, whispers, insinuations. I trust you, signor Norgren. I know you'll treat the pictures with the respect they deserve."

"Of course I will."

"One thing I ask—I demand. Should you find something you believe to be inauthentic—"

"Father!" poor Lorenzo cried disbelievingly.
 

"—then I hope I will hear before anyone else."
 

"I promise."

He nodded, sighing.
"Bene.
Now. Would you like some more
Vecchia Romagna
?
A little more coffee?"

"No thank you," I said. It was time to go. I was beginning to feel a little guilty, wondering if I'd put too much strain on him after all. I'd won all the battles, as he'd said, and over the last few minutes the energy seemed to have drained out of him.

"You've seen the gallery?" he asked as I rose.

"Yes, Lorenzo took me over it."

"You liked it?"

"It's magnificent."

"And this room?" he said. His look was slyly challenging.

I looked at the immense Rothko behind him: three formless, immense, dark dabs on a red background. Next to it was an even larger Twombly, looking like nothing so much as a big blackboard covered with a child's orderly twirls in chalk.

"It's, uh, quite interesting—"

He laughed. "You don't like postpainterly abstractionism?"

I didn't even know that's what it was called. "Well—"

"Neither does Lorenzo. But let me tell you something: The paintings you saw upstairs, the objects in the other rooms—those are my reason to live. Every time I buy a work of art I train myself, I commit myself, intellectually and spiritually, to its essence. My involvement with my paintings is total, total. I converse with them, I
become
them. They are my life."

It is an indication of Bolzano's rough charisma that he could deliver even a speech like that in a credible way.

"So my days are full of intensity, full of unattainable strivings, you see. And then I come here." He gestured at the walls. "I look at a de Corolli, at a Klos, and it's wonderful; I can relax. They don't mean a damned thing."

I burst out laughing. "Guggenheim once said the same thing about his Kandinskys."

"Well, then, I'm in good company. You'll tell me what you find?"

"Definitely."

"Maybe you'll have nothing to tell."
 

"I hope so. Sincerely." But I doubted it.