A Deceptive Clarity (3 page)

"Peter," I said, "this forgery you mentioned ..."

"Yes?" He looked at his watch. "Let's order first, shall we? My flight leaves Tegel at two-fifteen."

Among Peter's many impressive qualities was his ability to attract the attention of a waiter or waitress when he wanted it. This was difficult enough in the United States; in Europe, where it was a maddening part of the waiter's art not to "intrude," it was near-marvelous. Without moving his calm gaze from my face, he raised a casual, elegant hand.

The sleeve of his dark gray jacket slipped away from his wrist, showing a taintless French cuff of palest ivory. Peter van Cortlandt had the cleanest shirt cuffs of any man I knew. There had been a time when I'd suspected that in the privacy of his office he slipped a pair of accountant's celluloid cuffs over them, but the answer turned out to be much more characteristic of the fastidious Peter: He changed his shirt every day before lunch, and then again when he left the museum at four.

"Bitte?"
The waitresses wore black dresses with frilly little pink aprons and pink bows in their hair, so that they looked like French maids in a play. They did not, however, look silly; for the Kranzler it was just right.

I ordered wiener schnitzel,
pommes frites,
salad, and a large beer.

"Hungry?" Peter asked.

I shrugged apologetically. "No breakfast."

His urbane face wouldn't show it, of course, but I knew he didn't approve of my eating habits. Peter never ate fried foods, and he had once told me without any attempt to be facetious (Peter was rarely facetious) that he had never had a McDonald's hamburger, never had a Hostess Twinkie, never had beer from a can. He thought he had once had a taco, and it hadn't been too bad, but it had been a long time ago and he wasn't really sure.

Without bothering to look at the menu, he ordered Rhine salmon with asparagus and a half-bottle of Riesling. "Now," he said, "while I'm away in Frankfurt you can familiarize yourself with the files. We've got Room 2100 of Columbia House as our office, and Corporal Jessick—he's our clerk—will know who you are."

"All right. What takes you to Frankfurt, by the way?"

"Oh, there's a small problem with a Greco that the Frankfurter Kunstmuseum is lending us."

"The Kunstmuseum? I thought everything in The Plundered Past was from Bolzano's collection."

"It is, but this one had been on loan to the Kunstmuseum for the last four years. So, in effect, we're borrowing it from them, and that's complicated things. The show's opened and closed in Naples without it, and now we open in Berlin in just a few weeks."

"But what's the problem?"

Peter's lips thinned slightly. "Insurance. I'm meeting with them at ten a.m., and I have every hope of bringing the painting back with me when I return."

"Ten tomorrow? But why not fly out in the morning? It can't be more than two hours to Frankfurt."

Peter smiled. "I'm afraid I'm not much of a shuttle diplomat. No, I prefer to arrive the evening before, have a good dinner, relax at a decent hotel—and be fresh and rested when it comes to business the next day. It makes good sense."

So he had told me before. So Tony reminded me whenever I was reluctant to spend too much of the museum's money when traveling. I must be the only person in the world who gets chewed out regularly because his expense account isn't extravagant enough.

"Anyway," Peter said, sipping the wine, which had just been placed before him, and according it a brief nod of acceptance, "I'd like to stay in Frankfurt through Friday and do a little museum-hopping. Can you believe that I've been here five months and I've yet to visit the Städel? Can you manage without me until Saturday?"

"Sure." I took a long swallow of my Schultheiss, rediscovering with pleasure how large a large beer is in Germany. "Now how about telling me about this forgery—"

This time it was the waitress Who interrupted, setting down our lunches.

"Ah," Peter said, "shall we tuck in? I'm hungry myself."

I was happy to. The veal was succulent and tender, like nothing you can get in the States except at restaurants I can't afford. The potatoes were crisp, the
gemischter Salat
aggressively Teutonic—not thrown together willy-nilly, French-style, but with the marinated vegetables set in orderly ranks, each in its place. For a while we were content to attend to our food, chatting easily while Peter filled me in on some of the routine aspects of The Plundered Past.

"Well," he said, leaning back expansively a few minutes after we'd been served coffee, "that was splendid, and I can't tell you how glad I am to have you here with me. It's been wonderful—"
 
.

"Now hold it, Peter. You don't have to leave for half an hour yet. You're being evasive."

He looked at me benignly. "I, evasive? What a thing to say. What would you like to know?"

"You told me—I think you told me—that there's a forgery in the show." He continued to regard me tranquilly. "Well," I said, "that just isn't possible."

"Is it not?" Peter's occasional and uncharacteristic excursions into archness were not among his most endearing habits. "Then I suppose I must have made a mistake."

'That I doubt."

"But you just said—"

"Never mind what I just said. Which one is it?"

He shifted his coffee to one side with the back of his hand and leaned closer over the table, suddenly excited, his eyes glowing. "I may be wrong, you understand. I'm not a hundred percent certain. In fact, I'd like your opinion before we go any further. It's right down your alley, Chris."

"My alley? Peter, I'm no forgery expert. You know that."

He chose to remain irritatingly silent, merely smiling enigmatically. It was all very much unlike him. I opened the exhibition catalog that Tony had given me to study on the airplane, and began to leaf through it, reading aloud.

"Hals,
Portrait of the Saint George Militia Company,
1633; Reynolds,
Lady Raeburn and Her Son,
1777; Corot,
Quai at Honfleur,
1830.... This doesn't make any sense. Everything here has a provenance a page long."

"Really? Then it looks like I
am
wrong."

"Come on, Peter," I said in a rare flash of annoyance at him, "how can ... Wait a minute! It's got to be from the new cache, doesn't it? They've been out of sight for forty years—the Rubens, the Titian, the Vermeer...."

But he only smiled some more and shook his head, amused. "How unlike you to leap to conclusions, Chris."

I frowned. "But the others—there isn't one of them that hasn't been authenticated a dozen times."

"Surely it isn't necessary for me to point out to you that authenticity and authentication have not been invariably correlated where art is concerned. But that's beside the point."

He poured the last of the coffee from his
kannchen
and turned serious at last. "I apologize; I've been enjoying myself at your expense, haven't I? But what I found last week is so remarkable that ... so fantastic ... so ..." For the first time that I could remember, the suave and articulate Peter was too excited to finish a sentence that he'd started. And if he'd really come upon a fake among the previously uncontested masterpieces of the Bolzano collection, I could hardly blame him.

"You're serious, then?" I said.

"Oh, certainly! And, truly, I haven't been trying to tease you." He collected himself, sipped his coffee, and smiled. "Well, maybe just a little. In any case, here's what I'd like: You'll need the next two days to get oriented, so just go ahead and do that. Then, after I come back, you and I will walk through the collection, and I'd like you simply to look it over and see if something doesn't strike you very, very peculiarly indeed. Really, I'd tell you more, but I want your unbiased opinion before we take it any further. Will you do that?"

"Of course, if that's what you want. Tell me one thing, though. Are you suggesting that Claudio Bolzano himself is aware of this? That he's—"

"Perpetrating a fraud?" Peter looked scandalized. "Definitely not. I should say that of all the people in the world he's the last person likely to know about it. And his son is equally above suspicion—the scholarly Lorenzo, whom I believe you know."

"I'm not sure I understand," I said, understating greatly. "If you think Bolzano has a fake in his collection and he doesn't know it, don't you owe it to him to tell him?"

"Of course, but it isn't as simple as that. He's not very well, you know. He's been having a terrific time of it with gallstones, has finally had them out, and hasn't been having a very smooth recovery. I don't want to excite him until I'm absolutely sure of my facts. With your help, that should be only a few days more."

He finished his coffee reflectively. "You know, I just might call him from Frankfurt, though, and ask a pertinent question or two—in a subtle way, of course." He nodded to himself. "That might be a good idea." He dabbed at his lips with his napkin and tossed it on the table in a way that indicated lunch was over.

I was far from satisfied. "I don't understand why Tony didn't tell me about this."

"Possibly it seemed unimportant."

"Unimportant?"

"But he had nothing to tell, you see. I told him no more than I've told you—quite a bit less, actually, and only in passing. In fact,
no one
has any idea what I've found ... what I think I've found." His eyes flashed briefly with private excitement. "I'll see you when I get back, and we'll go over it at length."

Like it or not, I had to settle for that. Peter left for Tegel Airport, and I took a taxi back to Tempelhof through the intervening miles of gray, blank-faced apartment buildings.

Chapter 3

A driving, sleety rain had begun to fall by the time we reached the Platz der Luftbrücke. I gave the driver a ten-mark note and dashed under the elegant blue canopy that stretched from the curb to the building. Columbia House, U.S. Air Force Open Mess, it said in English, Tempelhof Central Airport.

I threaded my way between staggered rows of waist-high marigold-planters-cum-car-bomb-barriers and approached the bullet-proof sliding glass doors for the second time that day. Fortunately, the same guard was still on duty, and he not only let me in, he saluted. Heady stuff for a mild-mannered thirty-four-year-old museum curator who'd been rejected by the army during Vietnam (heart murmur) and who'd had no dealings with the military since.

I was itching to see the show, of course, and I went directly to the Clipper Room, the big room on the ground floor where it was to be held, but there were no pictures, only a couple of carpenters nailing up partitions. One of them told me that the paintings were still in the storage room, and as far as he knew, they hadn't been uncrated yet, or then again maybe they had. I could find the storage room by taking the elevator to the basement and turning right.

The basement of Columbia House was a long, dreary, curving corridor with concrete-block walls. At its end was a battered but formidable steel door, once beige but now so nicked and dented that the orange undercoat showed rustily through the paint in a thousand places. In front of it a guard leaned casually against the wall. When he saw me, he straightened up, shifted the stubby black rifle slung barrel-down over his shoulder—an M-16 automatic, I've since learned—and watched with half-closed eyes as I came up.

I smiled confidently. "I'm Dr. Christopher Norgren, deputy director of the Plundered Past exhibition. I'd like to have a look inside, please."

This try at a command presence of my own was not wholly successful.

"ID," he said woodenly.

I sighed, doing my best to seem bored with this routine triviality, and held my breath as I handed him my pathetic yellow card.

He stared hard at it, turned it over to see the back, and then examined the front again, as if this were a type of object wholly unknown to him, unlike anything he'd ever seen before.

"Issued yesterday at Rhein-Main," I said. "Department of Defense prerogative."

This, whatever it meant, had its effect.

"Okey-doke," he said. He shifted his rifle a little farther around his shoulder and turned to operate the combination padlock. When it opened with a sharp click, he pushed the handle down with his clumsy farm boy's hand, leaned his shoulder against the metal door, and shoved.

The heavy door groaned over the concrete floor, and a weak shaft of .light from the hallway slanted diagonally into the otherwise dark room. I could see some large picture crates standing on end, and I leaned to one side over his shoulder to get a better look at them as he pushed the door fully open against an inside wall. This was, after all, my first sight of the collection of masterpieces I was going to be responsible for.

It was a good thing I did, because it saved my life.

There was a hoarse, boarlike grunt, then a scraping noise, and from the darkness hurtled something that I thought in momentary confusion was some kind of vehicle rushing out at us. What it was was one of the crates, flung end over end through the doorway, so viciously that it splintered with a wrenching groan against the concrete-block wall of the corridor. Had I not been moving to the side, it would have struck me full in the face; as it was, it caught my right shoulder with enough force to whip me around and slam me face-first into the concrete.

The last time I'd seen stars, I had been fourteen years old, trying out the high-school trampoline. The first bounce had gone beautifully, but on the second I came down on the metal rim, smack on my nose. It broke then, and it broke now. (The crunch is audible.) The first time it happened, I passed out, and this time I came close. There was a sickly, growing dimness at the borders of my vision, like rose-colored ink spreading on a blotter. I felt my jaw go slack, my eyes begin to roll up, my cheek start to scrape down the rough, cold wall. But this time I managed to fight the darkness off. The pain helped—for a relatively insignificant organ, the nose is awfully well supplied with nerve endings.

Tears streaming from my eyes, blood from my nose, I pushed myself away from the wall and turned, blinking and queasy, to see the guard just inside the storage room, his back against the door, struggling with a man in blue workman's clothing. The man was short but frighteningly massive, built more like a gorilla than a human being; virtually neckless, with a huge chest and long arms as thick as thighs. One thick-wristed hand was on the M-16's barrel, the other on its stock, and he was leaning hard, pressing the rifle into the guard's throat. The guard, husky as he was, was helpless. Crimson-faced and gagging, he was flopping about like a Raggedy Ann doll, banging his elbows impotently against the door.