A Deceptive Clarity (21 page)

"It's conceivable. But let me find out what's what in my own simpleminded way, OK? I mean, as much as I value your help—"

"All right," I said, smiling, "I won't get in your way."

"And don't look so gloomy. One of the things you learn in this business is that people spend a hell of a lot of time sneaking around and lying, and if you assume that the particular lie you just found out about has something to do with the case you're working on, you're gonna be wrong ninety-five percent of the time. People just act that way out of habit."

He stood up and began the lengthy process of gathering up his clothes. "So don't assume anybody killed anybody until we know a lot more."

"I'll remember that," I said, and got up too. "But you know, on second thought I think I was happier not knowing what was going on."

"So next time don't ask. See you in a couple of days; I'm gonna spend some time in Frankfurt." He shambled off to the elevator, engulfed by a mountain of clothing and trailing a six-foot-long striped scarf.

Upstairs in my living room I sat by the telephone looking glumly at the other message that had been in the box with Harry's. It was from Rita Dooling.
Pls. call,
it said.
Bev will take 40% on house. You keep Murphy. Other devels.

I sighed. It was 9:30 p.m.; 1:30 in the afternoon in San Francisco. Little chance of getting Rita, who took late and leisurely lunches. Ah well, too bad, maybe tomorrow. No, that was Saturday. Well, next week sometime.

Whistling, thinking about the afternoon at the zoo, I went to bed.

Chapter 14

I woke up at a little after six the next morning, itching to get back into my forgery-hunting. Because it was Saturday, I would very probably have two days entirely to myself in the Clipper Room, which suited me fine. When the restaurant opened at seven I was there, already missing the Augustus's
caffè latte,
but willing to console myself with ham and eggs, potatoes, toast, grapefruit juice, and American coffee. And at ten to eight I was at the door of the Clipper Room, Bolzano's certificates of guarantee under my arm, eager to dig into The Plundered Past.

This was easier said than done. I got through the two-man guard outside the door, all right, but getting the alarms turned off so that I could have the pictures taken down required the written approval of a grumpy, sleepy Harry, and the detailing of two more guards to help with the tricky attachment system. Still, by ten o'clock the paintings were off the walls, and a long ten hours later I had completed the first phase of the investigation: I had satisfied myself that each picture matched the description and photograph on its certificate in every particular.

If any of them hadn't, that would have been it right there, but the lack of variance didn't prove a thing. I already knew, after all, that Bolzano had scores of exact copies that would also match the "certificates of guarantee" of the originals—except for two differences: the provenances on their backs and the micropatterns on their fronts. By now I knew that none of the backs proclaimed themselves as fakes, but that was hardly a surprise; altering the backs would be no problem for a competent forger or, for that matter, a competent restorer or conservator.

Such as Flittner, for example. But that was getting off the track. My concern was
what. Who
and
why
were Harry's affair.

After a late dinner I got on to the next step—an examination of each painting with the ten-power lens and a pen-light, to see if I could find a tiny, shield-shaped design in the upper left corner of the canvas, eighty-two millimeters from the top and sixty-six millimeters from the left edge, the entire design tilted clockwise one millimeter from the vertical: Bolzano's delicate micropattem of fifty-one tiny holes, which no one else connected with the show was even aware of. Find it and I would find a masterpiece of a reproduction masquerading as a masterpiece of an Old Master.

I began with the Vermeer, which was an act of bravery. Not long before, right there in Berlin, neutron photography had proved that
The Man With the Golden Helmet,
among the most beloved of Rembrandt's paintings, wasn't a Rembrandt at all. When asked to comment at the time, my statement to the
San Francisco Examiner
had been to the effect that it was no less a masterpiece than ever, and who had or hadn't painted it didn't affect its power or its intrinsic worth.

I had lied. It mattered a lot to me that Rembrandt had never stood before that lovely portrait, considering, adding a touch of red ocher to deepen the shadows of the sad face, a tiny blob of stiff impasto to highlight the glowing helmet. A lot of the magic was gone, and even some of its power and intrinsic worth, whatever I had meant by that.

And now, as anxious as I was to find the forgery, I didn't want to lose this "new" Vermeer too; I wanted the beautiful young woman standing at her clavichord to be genuine, and I believed she was—and yet Peter's "Right down your alley" kept bringing me back to her. I leaned over the canvas almost holding my breath, the lens close to the surface, and the penlight a few inches off to the side, to highlight the texture. Ten careful minutes later I straightened up with a creak.

No pattern, thank God. And none on the Rubens or the Titian. Or the Piero or the Dürer or the Hals. There wasn't any on the Giordano either, and at that point it occurred to me that I might not be recognizing the micropattern when I saw it, since I'd never seen it on an actual painting. I went to the alcove where the reproductions hung and, without taking it down, had a close look at the "Cranach" (not one of those flirty little Venuses but one of his ugly, bloat-bellied Eves, painted to please his friend Martin Luther).

The painting, like the other copies, was beautifully executed, but it took only a few seconds to find the telltale pinholes. It was just as easy on the copy of Vermeer's
Woman Peeling Apples
and on the "Poussin." So at least I knew that I knew what I was looking for. I went back to the originals, but without much hope of success. I had already examined the older paintings without finding a micropattern, and Reynolds, Gericault, Monet, Corot, and the rest were simply not "down my alley" by any criterion I could imagine. Nevertheless, I looked.

And found nothing. I called it a day. It was almost two in the morning now, and the guards who helped me put the paintings up again were the same ones who'd taken them down eighteen hours before on their previous shift. They were grouchy about it, and so was I; grouchy, grubby, and bone-tired.

But not disappointed. To find nothing, after all, was to learn something: Whatever I was looking for, it was not one of Bolzano's fakes that had found its way into the authentic collection. The dull, mechanical search for secret markings was over; it was time for some serious, scholarly analysis, to which I looked hungrily forward. But not until I'd gotten some sleep.

Late Sunday morning, strengthened by Columbia House's colossal weekend brunch, I got down to business, with particular attention to the down-my-alley paintings. In addition to the Titian, Vermeer, and Rubens from Hallstatt, there were the Dürer self-portrait; the Piero Madonna; an extremely beautiful
Portrait of the Officers of the Saint George Militia Company
by Frans Hals; and
The Four Apostles,
a pair of matching panels by Luca Giordano. Again I worked until nearly 2:00 a.m., but for a change I came to some real conclusions.

The Dürer and the Hals were genuine. They were just too dazzlingly perfect. Hals is one of the most frequendy forged painters, often successfully so, but it is always the seemingly careless Hals of
The Jolly Toper
or
The Laughing Peasant.
No faker in his right mind would try to ape the brilliant and exacting group portraits.

The Giordano I spent a lot of time on, although on the surface it was an unlikely candidate. Giordano was an excellent craftsman, quite difficult to imitate well. And although he was the leading Neapolitan painter of the late seventeenth century, he has never become popular with collectors. The result is that forgers stay away from him. Why bother, when there are so many less daunting painters whose works, or reasonable approximations of them, bring so much more money?

But there was another side to it. Giordano himself was a celebrated forger. In an age when artists were expected to borrow each other's ideas freely, he had been in a class of his own, figuring in one of art's earliest lawsuits. He was hauled into court over his
Christ Healing the Lame Man,
which he had painted very much in the style of Dürer—so faithfully, in fact, that it included Dürer's monogram. When the angry buyer learned what he'd really bought (the prideful Giordano had put his own name at the edge of the canvas, where it was covered by the frame), he sued the artist. The town council's verdict: Not guilty; no one can blame our Luca for painting as well as the great Dürer. Which goes to prove what I'd tried to tell Lorenzo Bolzano: Attitudes change.

The reason all this is pertinent is that in my wondering about Peter's uncharacteristic playfulness that day in Kranzler's, I had begun to think I might know what his little joke was. And, artistically speaking, it would have been worth smiling about—a forgery of a painting of one of history's great forgers. But there wasn't any joke. In technique and style, it was pure Giordano. The real thing, without question.

That left four paintings, including the ones from the cache, and I had doubts about them all. Under ordinary circumstances they wouldn't have been very grave, but circumstances being what they were, I wasn't quite ready to give any of them a clean bill of health. One of them, I was sure, had to be a fake.

The
Madonna
of Piero, our earliest painting, was the best bet, at least on technical grounds. It was a canvas, and that was extremely unusual for 1460, when frescoes and wooden panels were the norm. Canvases didn't become popular until Titian's time, almost half a century later, when it was learned that they would hold up better in moist air. The artists of the day, who were given to sudden departures, also found it quite an advantage that they could quickly be rolled up and stuffed in a trunk. Try that with a wooden triptych or a ceiling fresco.

And there was something else. In 1460, tempera was still the primary binding medium, although people were beginning to experiment with oils. For the Madonna to be painted in either medium would have raised no suspicions, but it was painted in both, and that was unusual.

Unusual, but not unknown. Piero himself had used the two media in another painting,
The Baptism of Christ.
And as for the use of canvas, Uccello, painting at about the same time, had used it for his
Saint George and the Dragon,
the famous painting now in London's National Gallery. So what I had were two unlikely features in the same piece, and they were enough to make me wonder. The tempera-oils issue was more complicated than it might seem on the surface: the Madonna had probably been restored a dozen times.
 
For all I knew Piero himself had done it completely in tempera, only to have it retouched in oils three or four hundred years later.

Fortunately, old paint fluoresces differently from newer paint, so this was an issue with which Max Kohler of the Technische Universität could help me. Max tends toward the hysterical, and when I telephoned him, he practically wept. It was impossible, his lab was overflowing with work, he was laboring twenty hours a day. But finally he agreed to come the following Tuesday and to bring his ultraviolet lamp and some other equipment with him. This was on my solemn promise to ask nothing else of him for at least a month. That didn't present a problem; my questions about the remaining three paintings weren't technical, and they were for me to answer, not Dr. Max and his mysterious machines.

First, the Titian:
Venus and the Lute Player,
a lush, reclining nude being serenaded by a black lutenist, the earliest of several versions. It wasn't that it was a bad painting by any means. And it wasn't that it was uncharacteristic of Titian; it wasn't—but it was the wrong Titian, the Titian of his seventies or eighties, done with quick, slashing thrusts of color, intuitive and unrestrained.

It is a piece of conventional wisdom that you can't verify a late Titian by comparing it with early ones, or vice versa, because his approach changed so radically.
Venus
was supposed to have been painted in 1538, when he was in his late forties, still using a careful, linear style. (Some authorities think that his later approach was less a matter of artistic growth than of an old man's farsightedness.) But perhaps the painting had been misdated some time in the last 450 years. Or perhaps he was experimenting with the style he would later adopt. Either could easily be true. Still, it was something to think about.

And then there was the Vermeer. The more I looked at it, the more I liked it. I could find nothing questionable— nothing except Peter's "down-your-alley" remark. On that basis alone, I held off final judgment. I had some research I wanted to do, and I was probably going to have to go to London to do it.

Finally, the last of the three from the cache, Rubens's fleshy
Rape of the Sabines.
Once again, there was nothing particularly wrong with it. But any sensible curator is queasy about giving his unqualified blessing to a Rubens. Lorenzo had remarked that Rubens ran a workshop. "Factory" was more like it. Not only did he sign works that had been painted mainly by his students, but he (or they) executed signed copies of the originals to order, and the number of canvases and panels issuing from the beautiful house just off Antwerp's Meir (it's still there) was prodigious.

What this adds up to is that telling a mostly real Rubens from a hardly real Rubens from a good fake Rubens isn't easy. On this one too, there was some research I would have to do.

So, for the first time, I felt as if I were really getting someplace; not twenty possibles anymore, but four: Rubens, Vermeer, Titian, and Piero. That was fine. But what was taking me so long to pin it down to one? Peter had clearly expected it to jump out at me as soon as I had a casual look at the paintings. Well, I'd had a lot more than a casual look, and nothing was jumping. What was I missing?