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?

Monday I spent catching up on "other duties as required." Yes, I actually did have some duties, although in this case they were no more than calling the luminaries of the Berlin art scene to ask them to the spiffy preview reception at Columbia House on the following Saturday. They had already received printed invitations, as had civic and military dignitaries, but Robey had thought, laughably, that my personal touch would add some ton.

At about two o'clock I hung up the telephone, made my final check mark on the list, and stretched, very nearly tipping over the old straight-backed wooden chair at my desk. Carrying my empty coffee mug, I left the bedroom-converted-to-office that had been Peter's and was now mine, and walked into the living room of Suite 2100, which was Corporal Jessick's permanent domain, and also offered workspace for any senior staff members who needed it.

The coffeepot was on a cleared corner of a table otherwise overflowing with lighting plans, flow charts, and critical-path diagrams.

"Conrad—" I said, pouring the dingy fluid.

A respectful sort, he jerked upright. "Sir!"

"There's going to be a Dr. Kohler from the Technical University here tomorrow to look at a painting in the Clipper Room. I won't be here; I'm going to Berchtesgaden and then London for a couple of days. Does he need a pass or something?"

"You know, he'll need a pass, sir. That's going to be hard to get."

"Well, who do I talk to, Harry Gucci?"

"You know who you ought to see about that, sir?"

Let me guess.

"I'd recommend you talk to Major Gucci about it." He smiled, happy to be of service. "He's in Frankfurt. You want me to try to get a, hold of him?"

"Please." I stirred some powdered creamer into the coffee and frowned down at it while it coagulated into a gummy clump. "Conrad, I think you forgot to turn on the pot again."

"I did? Gosh, I'm sorry." Jessick was actually a pretty good clerk, but it made him nervous to leave electrical appliances on while he was at lunch, so he turned the coffee off when he left, and since he didn't drink it himself in the afternoon, he was likely to forget about it. He leaped up to turn on the switch.

"That's OK," I said quickly—the same pot had been on since 8:00 a.m. "Never mind. Kohler's going to have to be paid. What do I do about that?"

"Requisition for consultive services."

"Do I need Robey's signature?"

"You'll have to get Robey's signature, though" was the predictable reply. "He's probably back by now. He was supposed to fly in from Heidelberg this morning."

"That's fine." I went back through my office to the bathroom and dumped the cold coffee into the sink. While I was holding the mug under the tap and swabbing it out with two fingers, I remembered something. I walked quickly back to the outer office.

"Conrad—"

"Sir!"

"Do you remember, a couple of weeks ago, right after I got out of the hospital, you talked to me on the telephone to tell me about the staff meeting that Robey'd called? You said he'd just flown in from somewhere. Where was it?"

If he found anything unusual about the question, he didn't show it. "Heidelberg."

That's what I'd remembered. "Are you sure?"

"Well, sure. I mean, that's where he said he was. He said he had to see somebody at USAREUR headquarters."

Now that was interesting.  Harry had already told me that Robey had flown to Frankfurt the day Peter was killed, and had returned just before the meeting several days later. He'd also told me that Robey hadn't admitted it. But that was after Peter's murder, when he might have been afraid of being implicated in something he didn't do. Now I'd found out he'd lied about it even before the telephone call that brought the shocking news from Frankfurt. Why?

Well, there wasn't anything for me to do about it except pass it on to Harry. His affair, not mine, right?

I ran into Robey himself a few minutes later when I was coming back from the dining-room kitchen with a mug of fresh coffee I'd managed to beg even though it was between mealtimes. The moment I saw that muzzy, amiable countenance, my suspicions evaporated. Surely murderers didn't look like that.

"Why, hello, Chris. Congratulations on your session with Bolzano."

"Thanks, Mark. It wasn't too tough."

"Oh, now, now," he said vaguely. "Everything going along all right?"

"Yes. I've asked Max Kohler to look at one of the paintings, though, and I guess I'll need your signature to get him paid."

"OK, sure. Have Conrad type up the req and I'll sign it."

"Kohler's kind of expensive, but he's the best—"

"No problem. Don't worry about it."

"Great. And there's one other thing. I still have some questions about a few of the paintings, and the only place I'm going to find the answers is the Witt Library, and that's in London. I'd like to spend a day or two in their stacks."

He was nodding in rhythm with my words, his eyes cloudy, Archaic smile comfortably in place. "Fine, sure."

"I know it doesn't really have anything to do with the show, so if the budget can't afford the trip, I'll be glad to—"

"No, no, fine. Whatever you need. I'll take care of it."

"Thanks, Mark." Would life at the San Francisco County Museum of Art ever be the same?

"You'll be back in time for Saturday's reception?"

"Definitely. I thought I'd go down to Berchtesgaden for Christmas Eve"—he was paying more attention than it appeared; I got a surprising, avuncularly lecherous look out of the comer of his eye—"and head to London from there. Then I'll stop off in Frankfurt for the El Greco, and be back with it late Friday." This meant only a single day with Anne in Berchtesgaden, but there was no help for it.

"Good, fine. So how are you doing on the forgery? Are you getting anywhere?"

"Sort of, but no final answers. Maybe after I've been to the Witt."

"Mm." He nodded, and went on nodding, and I watched his customary aura of vague impenetrability resettle about him like a warm, dense cloak. "Well," he said, looking slowly around (wondering where he'd been headed?), "let me know how it goes."

 

* * *

 

When I got back to Suite 2100, Flittner was in the outer room, at one of the tables near Jessick's desk, writing up some forms of his own.

"Hi, Earl. Keeping you busy?"

I was pleased with the way the talk with Robey had gone. I'd managed to bury my lurking suspicions and treat him like the pleasant, sweet-natured man he no doubt was—but at the same time I'd kept to myself the specifics of my progress on the forgery. That was the way I wanted to treat Flittner too, allowing for the obvious and repellent differences in personality.

"Busier than you," he mumbled around a cigarette, not bothering to look up.

"You're probably right," I said with a smile, and went into my office.

"I goddamn well know I'm right," I heard him mutter to Jessick, or to himself, or maybe to me.

He did have a point; as Tony had predicted, I was not overloaded with responsibility. Mildly stung, I decided to save the harried Jessick some work by typing up the consultive-services form myself on the venerable Remington beside my desk. I got out the folder labeled Administrative Forms and Procedures, and while I searched through it for a blank form I found something else.

The moment I saw it, I knew what it was, and I took it out with growing excitement: a slim blue leather booklet with the initials PVC in gold in the lower right comer of the cover.

Peter's appointment calendar, the one Harry had been looking for. Of course it was Harry's concern, but of course I went through it anyway. For December 11, the day he was killed, there were two notations: Lv Fkft 2:15 and CN arr. In his simple shorthand they referred to his flight to Frankfurt and to my arrival in Berlin. No surprises there.

No surprises elsewhere either, and only one entry that got me to thinking. It wasn't in the square for any particular date, but in the lower margin of the two pages allowed for November.

Tk F re HS! it read. I thought for a moment.

'Talk to Flittner about HS," I said aloud. "Exclamation point." Who or what was HS? And why the emphasis?

"HS," I repeated. "HS." After five minutes of that I could come up with only one possibility: the Heinrich-Schleimann-Gründung, the organization that was so hostile to the show. I walked thoughtfully to the outer office. Flittner was still there.

"Earl, could I talk to you?"

Having just given Jessick some things to type, he was on his way out. He turned to look at me over his shoulder and was, I think, about to inform me that he didn't work for me (which he didn't), when he appeared to read something in my face that made him change his mind. He followed me back into my office and sat down heavily in the chair beside the desk.

"What do you want to talk about?" he demanded, relentlessly surly. He glanced around for someplace to put the remaining half-inch of his cigarette.

I found a small aluminum-foil pie plate I'd remembered seeing in a bottom drawer and placed it at his elbow. "I want to talk to you about the Heinrich-Schliemann-Gründung."

He looked sharply up from grinding the butt into a stale-smelling mess. "So talk."

Belatedly, it occurred to me that I might have given this conversation a little more thought before starting. "No," I said, fishing blindly, "you talk. What's it all about?"

He stared at me, his hand still over the ashtray, his long gray face not more than two feet from mine.

"Peter told me everything," I said when he didn't speak.

He snorted. "Peter didn't know everything." I could see he wanted to take it back as soon as he'd said it.

"But he did, Earl," I said, wondering what the hell we were talking about. "And what little he didn't, I figured out."

"What did you figure out?" He said it with a sneer that didn't quite come off. I was onto something.

"About the Schliemann group ... about where they're located ..." I watched his face to see if I was getting closer, but he merely reached for his pack of cigarettes with no expression other than his usual resigned disdain.

"What they're after ... who's behind them—who they really are ..."

Bingo. The pack spurted from his hands. He fumbled with it convulsively and managed to catch it, but one cigarette fell out onto the table like a sign of guilt in some primitive trial by ordeal.

I'd hit it, but what had I hit? "Yes," I said quietly, "I know." And then I had the good sense to shut up and wait.

It didn't take him long to recover. He picked up the cigarette, lit it, sucked in, and noisily blew out twin ropes of smoke through his nostrils. "What does it matter anymore? All right, what the hell, so I wrote those letters."

If I'd had a pack of cigarettes to drop, I'd have done it.

"So," he went on, "the horrible, bloodcurdling gang that makes Egad piss in his pants was just poor old harmless Earl Flittner stating a few painful truths." He laughed, or sneered. "It was damn salutary, if you ask me. What harm did it do?"

"For one thing, it got Harry Gucci off on a false lead on the storage-room break-in—or was it a false lead? I don't suppose your one-man Gründung had anything to do with that?"

He sat straight up, spilling ash into the files in my open bottom drawer. "Are you out of your fucking mind?"

"Egad thought it was a possibility."

"Egad! Jesus Christ ... now you listen to me. I stopped writing those letters a week before that ever happened, and that was that. I figured the point was made." He gestured at me with the cigarette. "Don't try to hang any of this other crap on me."

"But what was the point, Earl?"

"The point? The point?" He jumped up from the chair, a ponderous, pear-shaped man with wide hips and a long torso that tapered to sloping, fleshy shoulders. "The point is that everybody was so goddamn smug and self-satisfied they needed a boot in the ass, that was the point. This show was supposed to be God's gift to the human race. I just wanted them to know that not everyone saw it that way."

He had gone to the window to look down onto the plaza, and now strode back to the desk. "You don't need to look at me like that. I did my job, didn't I?"

"Yes, extremely well."

"All right, then. As long as nobody can complain about my work, I'm entitled to my personal opinions." He slumped back into the chair. "I suppose you're going to run to your pal with this earthshaking information?"

"My pal?"

"Gucci."

I nodded, and then on second thought I said, "I've already told him." On the one hand, I was inclined to accept what he'd told me as nothing more sinister than another example of his nasty quirkiness. On the other, he just might be a killer, and I didn't want to put myself in the precarious situation of those people in novels and movies who blithely announce to the villain that they will shortly go to the police with the damning evidence of which they and they alone are aware.

"I figured as much," he said with a shrug. "Big deal. Tell me something, will you?" He pulled in another of his ferocious drags and let the smoke dribble out as he spoke. "I know van Cortlandt thought I was helping the Gründung, but he never figured out I was it, and don't tell me he did. How the hell did you?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you that," I answered mysteriously.