“The next half page,” said Blume, “has a diagonal line drawn through it. Just one line, which suggests to me he was not convinced that he wanted to cancel these thoughts:
“Angela, I began these memoirs and my handbook on how to emulate the Old Masters with the intention of getting them published, and I would appreciate it if you could get someone to finish and correct them for me if I don’t finish in time, which seems likely. Don’t ever give the only copy to John. In fact, keep that bastard away from this.
“A year at most, the doctor told me the other day. My doctor is a man who likes to hedge his bets. Like all doctors, he knows nothing. The Men Who Guess. All these years, they get away with guessing and then prescribing. Like economists, art critics, but worse. When the patient dies, they shrug. He gave me a year, as if the earth’s circuit of the sun had anything to do with the pace of my body’s self-destruction. I am writing this in the spring. One year later it will be spring again, so I hope he’s wrong. I don’t want to die when everything else is coming into life. I don’t want to die before then either, of course. I really don’t want to die. I need to resolve so many things first. And then, I want to have time to enjoy living with things resolved. Does anyone get to enjoy all that?
“Angela, I’m sorry. I know it sounds self-serving but you need to accept this. You need to forgive people before they die, because being angry with the dead is the most frustrating and useless thing you will ever experience, and I know what I am talking about. Once they are gone, you can’t get at them, you can’t ask, you can’t do anything except rage inside yourself. I’ll tell you something: if there is an afterlife, it’ll be full of the recently deceased picking fights with the earlier dead.
“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.
“Everything I have I leave to you. But I have already given you the most valuable thing I ever had. It is there before you, it is in these words, it is in our hearts and our memories. Remember the parties with Gustav the self-effacing Swedish archaeologist, who also happened to be a king? Remember the day we sat on the bench looking at the fighting putti in the open-air theatre convinced we had the whole garden to ourselves? And you kissed me, and one thing led to another, in there among the yew trees, after I played that trick and suddenly this mad Englishwoman was there, looking at us, asking what we thought we were doing. She would not accept that I lived in the garden, a guest of and friend of Pogson and his wife, Princess Pamphili. ‘Babs’ Johnson. Mad auld bat in a big straw hat. She set her dogs on me. She wrote under a penname. Georgina Masson and wrote the best guide to Rome there ever has been. Remember that?
“Look at that painting. Use your artist’s eye and your lover’s heart. Then you’ll understand. Maybe you’ll want to edit this bit out of the published work.
“There’s a blank page here, which he sized with gesso, as if he was planning to draw on it. The next few pages are blank, too, and then another bit, which I was thinking of reading out to Nightingale this afternoon, because it would have been interesting to see how he reacted.
“The doubters will be legion, A. Trust me.
“John Nightingale and I were successful because we were indirect and invisible. Over the years, the works I did gathered more credibility and provenance, acquiring value and legitimacy like so many snowballs rolling downhill, always building momentum and growing larger the farther they got from us. I have seen my own paintings on display in some of the leading museums of the world. I shall give a list of the museums and the works in the appendix, but do not expect the museums to accept my claims.
“The time lapse between our sending a work out to seek its fortunes in the big bad world of art and its appearance as a completely provenanced and documented Old Master’s work in a top museum is around 20 years. Meanwhile, I have refined my techniques even further, so if you are reading this 20 years hence and a museum has just announced the purchase of a long-lost Italian Old Master, pause to consider and perhaps to smile.
“The prices fetched by some of my own works made us green with envy sometimes, but that is how it worked. The nearer a work was to us, the less it was worth, and the more suspicion attached to it. For, yes, of course, we were suspect. Many dealers knew, the Carabinieri knew, the auction houses, art historians, and museums knew. But they never knew enough, and most of our dealings were in authentic works.
“And here is where the irony begins. In recent years I have become more and more open about what I have done, the artists I have emulated, the paintings and drawings I have invented—and I invent, I do not copy. No more than I steal. But because I have become known, and because I am so good, and because I have been honest enough to talk about these things, I am the last person in the world who can announce the discovery of a long-lost Velázquez and be believed. If experts really were experts, they would know immediately that it is genuine, but they are not, and it is going to take them some time. To be sure, Nightingale could get it on to the market, but at a fraction of its price, and he’d steal the money from you, Angela. There are less than 120 Velázquez works surviving. Adding one to the repertory is big news. I had a painting worth tens of millions sitting in my kitchen, and I couldn’t think of how to sell it.
“Knowing I could not rely on Nightingale, I began to look into the provenance myself, and found it was excellent. The painting had been in the possession of Adam Brookes, a private collector who ran a Chicago commodities brokerage that was doing pretty well until World War II, but went bust. He in turn seemed to have bought the painting from Joseph Duveen in 1918, which, I am afraid, like 1946, is one of those years that raises suspicions. After the European wars, an awful lot of plundered art changed hands, and it is a known favorite trick of people like John to pull up dubious records from just that time, when all was confusion. In any case, it appears that the painting was owned by Count Johann Ludwig von Wallmoden-Gimborn, the illegitimate son of George II of Britain. It stayed in royal hands until George V, that ignorant bollocks who was on the throne when Ireland struck for independence in 1916.
“In finding all this out, I enlisted John’s help without letting him know what I was doing. I simply said I wanted to see how he set about his business and I learned what books to look up, how to consult catalogs, how to make deceptive phone calls and send innocent-sounding letters purporting to be from students, travelers, guidebook authors, heritage groups, art appreciation societies, and the like.
“I would have told John, I would have enlisted his help, and together we would have shared the vast proceeds had he not treated me in the most ignoble fashion. I was still reeling from what I had discovered, certain yet hesitant to utter it aloud, when I learned that John and Angela had betrayed me. If John is reading this someday, he will be surprised to learn that I found out so soon, but I did.
“A few days later, I revisited our gallery, and John asked me about the painting.
“ ‘Oh that,’ I said. ‘Nothing. It was a good frame. I washed the entire thing clean with solvent. I’ll make good use of the empty canvas.’
“ ‘Wasn’t that a bit expensive for a worn canvas and frame?’
“Oh no, not at all, John.”
“Fuck you, John. John Bull.”
“What does that mean: bull?” asked Caterina.
“Bull?” said Blume. “It’s short for bullshit.
Frottole, panzane, cazzate
.”
“They didn’t like each other much,” she said.
“No,” said Blume.
She pushed her feet farther under the cushions, and wished she could follow with her whole body. Tiredness rang in her ears, and for a moment a mistimed inhalation of air through her nose caused the back of her throat to make a snore, and she jerked her head up. Blume still sat there in the armchair. What was the etiquette for telling her commanding officer to go home, to let her sleep? It wasn’t just a question of etiquette. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings, either. But still he sat there, like a big dog. Maybe if she threw a stick out the window, he’d go bounding enthusiastically down the stairs. But she wanted him there, too, protecting her and Elia as they slept. If only he’d send her to bed, tell her he would be keeping vigil.
“I’ll be going in a minute,” said Blume. “I am meeting someone, but I don’t know where until he phones me.”
Caterina swung her feet onto the floor and shivered and yawned. She was too tired to be disappointed or even worried.
“Who?”
“Paoloni. You said you remembered him. He’s surprised everyone, himself included, by becoming a successful ‘security consultant.’ I’m going to give him the notebooks for safekeeping, and then maybe we’ll throw out your photocopies, too, put this behind us.”
“Paoloni’s the person to trust?”
“Yes,” said Blume. “He is. Also, I think he can help me make sure the Colonel doesn’t bother you again.”
Caterina forgot to be tired for a moment. “How will he do that?”
“I don’t know. We shall see,” said Blume. “Also, I think he might be able to speed up the resolution of the murder of Krishnamachari and his son.”
Blume’s phone went, and she shivered again. Blume spoke a few words and stood up to go. She forced herself to stand up too.
After he had left, she gathered up the pile of Treacy’s notes, her eye falling on the scrawled “
Fuck you, John
.” And yet they must have been friends once. She flipped back to the beginning, past the days in Ireland, which she had read. There was the arrival in London with Monica. John’s name appeared for the first time in the next pages. She took them to bed, undressed, got into red cotton pajamas that were the most comfortable things in the world, switched on her bedside lamp. The dictionary was in the next room, where it could stay. She could look up any unknown words tomorrow.
Monica and I arrived in London and I managed to sell my poor forgery to a failing dealer ready to try anything. He gave me twelve pounds for it, which got us into a squalid bedsit on Queensway. I had brought some but not enough of my painting tools with me, but could not afford to buy any more. The dole kept us going, just. After a month, Monica found a job at the cosmetics department of Selfridges. After one week in the job, she had been asked out eight times. She accepted the eighth invitation. I found out and raged at her, and told her she had a choice: Forget about going out with customers, or forget about me. She interpreted this quite literally, so that six months later, when our paths happened to cross on Hampstead Heath, she was unable to remember me at all, and therefore saw no reason to stop and introduce me to the buck-toothed haw-haw Englishman in the chalk-stripe business suit, who was recounting what must have been one of the most amusing stories ever told for the way it made her laugh.
After Monica had left me, I was lonelier but freer, and without her pressure to find a job, I was able to wander as much as I liked through the city streets. This is how I discovered Ramsauer’s art shop in Cecil Court. Nowadays, London is all spruced up and stressfully tidy (a risk that Rome does not run), but back then, streets were dirtier and rents affordable. The shop now is an ordinary rectangular place with minimalist furnishings and pointless books of utter bollocks (mostly “art photography” as if such a thing existed) for the perennially bored. Then the rectangular plan was divided into a grid of tight corridors whose walls were made of antiques, easels, army surplus stocks, paintings, vases ready to topple over. I wandered through the place, free to steal any of the tiny silver, china, and polished wood ornaments that I chose, or perhaps an eighteenth-century letter-writing set. But I am not a thief. Only when I had explored every corridor, though not every object, did the owner appear from a basement area. He nodded to me, asked me if I needed any help and, when I said I was just looking, disappeared again.
On my third visit, I spotted an interesting painting that looked to me like a work by Coello. Of course it was not, but it almost might have been. The subject was a Spanish nobleman. Mold had eaten away at the painting so much that the face seemed to have decayed and exploded outwards in a burst of gray and green, like something from the
Night of the Living Dead
.
Interested also in the monogram on the back of the canvas, which seemed to suggest the painting had belonged to Lord Mountbatten, I brought it up to the end of the shop, waited patiently for Ramsauer to appear, and asked him how much he wanted for it. Two guineas, he said. “But see this chalk mark? That means it has already been sold.”
“Who to?” It seems like an impertinent question, but so far I was the only person I had ever seen enter the shop, and I wondered why the buyer had left a chalk mark on it rather than take it home, since it was not a very large painting. Ramsauer explained that the buyer had not had the money on him at the time, but was coming back.
“When?” I asked defiantly. I was conceiving a dislike for this buyer already.
“Later today, sometime tomorrow, or by next Thursday at the latest.” The old bastard didn’t have a clue, of course, but he didn’t really care. The only thing that mattered was honoring his own chalk mark. I wanted to offer more for the painting, but Ramsauer would not have accepted and I did not have it anyhow. Besides, it was not all that great a bargain considering the state of the work.