A Nearly Perfect Copy (26 page)

Elm felt such a surge of relief as the wheels lifted off the ground that she sighed more heavily than she meant to and felt her seatmate bristle in annoyance. She loved her family, but escaping from them, even for a couple of days, lifted a tremendous burden. She felt she was never doing enough. When she expressed to Colin, lost in his own anxious space, that she worried about her efforts as a wife and mother, he looked at her as though she were speaking a language he didn’t understand.

“That is so New York, to worry about these things,” he said. “You’re a terrific wife and a fantastic mother and a terrible cook. All my girlfriends say so.” He nuzzled her. “I don’t understand why you worry like this when there’s real stuff to worry about, like aliens and serial killers.” He was being nice, but he wasn’t saying the right words. What were those words? Some form of assurance that she didn’t let her son die, that everyone forgave her for letting her son die.

New York fell away, replaced by a blue that was either ocean or cloud cover. She was flying business class; she reclined and sipped at her not-terrible wine.

It had been a fight to get to go on this trip alone. Ian had wanted to come, even offering to pay his own way, claiming not to have been to Paris in
ages
. She had laughed like he made some ridiculous joke, but she would have been blind not to see the hurt in his eyes. Then Colin had suggested she take Moira with her. “She’s never been to France, Elm.” Elm wondered if he needed a break as much as she did. “I’ll be working too much,” she answered. “I’d have to find a sitter.”

Colette had, if unintentionally, helped Elm out. Needing to see Klinman’s
stock was the perfect excuse to take a trip to Paris. Ordinarily, it was the dealer who came to the auction house, but Elm agreed with the man’s assessment that he didn’t want the works traveling unnecessarily; each minute they spent out of prime archival conditions was a year off their lives. It would be dangerous to ship them to New York. Easier to ship Elm to Paris. No one would ever have to know her real impetus.

But here she was finally, unencumbered. She made it uneventfully through customs, dragging her overnight bag with a few clothes and a couple of reference books. The taxi driver seemed surprised that she was staying on the Left Bank instead of the Champs-Élysées. Klinman too had been surprised, as had the mystery man at the clinic; apparently only backpackers tried to recapture the dirty glamour of the 1960s. She checked into her room; the hotel had no elevator so she climbed the two sets of carpeted stairs with a baggage porter in tow. She tipped him one euro, which he received silently so that she had no clue if she’d tipped him appropriately.

The small room was decorated in a faux Louis XIV style, lots of ormolu and brocade, but the window, when she pulled the curtain, looked out onto the back side of the Luxembourg Gardens. Across the patchy green she could see the busy Boulevard Saint-Michel.

She hadn’t visited Paris since Ronan died. But though he’d never been to Paris, the city reminded her of him; it was the site of Elm’s first solo trip after becoming a mother. He was a little over fourteen months, and she’d insisted that Colin put him on the phone every evening though he didn’t understand that the voice coming through the receiver was hers. “Yes, he misses you,” Colin said. “No, I haven’t fed him refined sugar. Wait—is Guinness refined sugar?”

Paris bustled beneath her, the snarl of traffic heading up the boulevard haphazardly like a group of beetles, the high-pitched claxons of hooting taxis. Here was a city where she knew no one, where no one knew she’d been Ronan’s mother. This feeling was simultaneously thrilling and devastating. She could be free. She was not under examination as a woman who had lost a child. The flipside of being where no one knew about Ronan was the feeling that all traces of him had been erased from the collective unconscious. She wanted to tell people on the street, “I had a son,” just so there would be some recognition of him. She tried to insert him into her memories of Paris: the smoky cabaret where the fat Frenchman stroked the older lady’s hair, some of which fell out in clumps
between his thick fingers; the brushed-clean streets and the whir of the machines as they sprayed water into the gutters. Ronan would have delighted as the fountain went off in front of the Centre Pompidou, or at least, a young version would have. An older version would have enjoyed the Bateaux Mouches, or a tour of the sewers and catacombs. But all these fake memories were like a reel of movie pastiches. She would have to live without Ronan for the weekend, except for the DNA samples she’d brought: the hairbrush she’d kept from Thailand, and a baby tooth retrieved from a plastic box that Ronan had insisted they keep his teeth in once he realized that the Tooth Fairy didn’t exist.

She stood at the window in her room until night fell and it was a decent hour to venture out for dinner. She had with her Pedrocco’s book on Canaletto; with a decent Bordeaux she could try to make the evening pleasant. But even as she thought this she knew she was only going through the motions of a person visiting Paris. She was playing the role of “Elm” and simply waiting until she could shed her cover and visit the clinic. The knowledge simmered underneath her skin. She felt elated; the strange lack of jet lag was like a turbo boost of energy. She remembered a bistro not too far from the hotel. It had changed names, but the decor and the menu remained the same (did bistro menus ever change?), and they sat her at a table by the window so she could watch the people go by. The waiter patiently suffered through her nervous babbling in inferior French, her debate about whether to order steak tartare, and her eventual decision to have the roast chicken, because, she added, no one roasted chicken better than the French. The waiter took the menu and bowed slightly. Elm wondered if she’d said what she thought she’d said. She often made mistakes in French that were hilarious and sexual—commenting on the length of dicks outside the opera, or talking about how her grandfather liked to hunt twats.

She read up on Canaletto by candlelight, having trouble focusing after the carafe of wine. Whenever she caught herself thinking about the clinic, she corralled herself. She was afraid that if she let her guard down everyone in Paris would see the nakedness of her desire. She ordered a decaf coffee and a
tarte tatin
for dessert. Then, like someone had flipped a power switch, her jet lag caught up with her. She paid the bill with a Visa card, which the waiter ran through a handheld machine tableside, printing out her receipt immediately. When he pulled her chair out as she stood up, she had the feeling that, like Ronan, she didn’t exist here,
that she might disappear on the way to her hotel and it would be like she had never been here at all. She checked that the hair and tooth were still where she left them in the room safe before donning her eyeshade and falling asleep.

Augustus Klinman was not the man she supposed he’d be. She was expecting a typical Englishman—thinning hair, scarecrow body stuffed into an ill-fitting, obviously expensive suit. Instead, when the man approached her in the lobby of the George V hotel and extended his hand, she was faced with a hairy-knuckled, hirsute, overweight, well-tailored surprise, though she had the expensive suit right. He shook her hand like an American, forcefully.

“Ms. Howells,” he said.

“Mr. Klinman.” She allowed her arm to be pumped.

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said. “Won’t you come upstairs?”

The elevator attendant looked at his gloved hands discreetly. Oddly, Colette had not asked to accompany her to see the drawings. That saved Elm the trouble of explaining that she wanted to see them on her own, that is, without Colette. The less she saw Colette the better.

Klinman had taken a suite on one of the upper floors. It was decorated in what Elm recognized as an attempt at Empire-style homage to Josephine and Napoleon. Heavy velvet curtains were tied back to offer a view of the Eiffel Tower, or part of it; the city was covered in its typical fog. Some of the
objets
decorating the room, while not fantastic examples, were period-correct, Elm knew. On the coffee table near the sofa, a small, covered urn sat uselessly, throwing shadows from the lamp on the glass. Bronze winged figures perched on marble-plated pedestals, and cherubic babies frolicked on painted canvases.

Klinman offered her a drink. Though it was only noon, Elm accepted a glass of wine. She was nervous and had the paranoid thought that she was being drawn into some sort of trap. She had even left a note in her hotel room saying where she was going. Having Klinman appear opposite her expectations didn’t help. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. The sofa was too deep; she couldn’t get comfortable.

“So,” he said. “I appreciate that you came all the way to Paris to meet with me.”

“My pleasure,” she said. “I had other business, and Colette had such good things to say about you.”

“I am sorry that I could not receive you in my office, but it’s undergoing renovations. And the French take their time with these things.”

Elm smiled politely.

“I am originally German, Ms. Howells. My family is Jewish; we narrowly missed Auschwitz.”

“I’m sorry,” Elm said. The wine was too sweet, but she had another sip. Why was he telling her this?

“That is why I am able to do what I do. There are individuals in England and in Germany who will still only do business with those whom they trust.”

“I don’t blame them,” Elm said. “There are a lot of unscrupulous people out there.” She smiled, but Klinman remained deadly serious.

“People have wondered, sometimes. Out of jealousy? Innate suspicion? I don’t know. But I can tell you that these drawings are new to the market.”

Elm’s eyebrows rose in surprise. New to the market? Most deceased artists’ catalogues raisonnés were long complete. It was rare that another drawing would be added to the oeuvre. Several at once would be strange.

“May I take a look?” she asked.

He nodded and took back the wineglass, placing it on the bar. He handed her a pair of gloves, donned a pair himself, and zipped open a case Elm had not noticed behind the chair. She got up and hurriedly drew the gauze undercurtains so the light would not damage the drawings.

She approached the table, the whirr of excitement building. She loved this part of the job, the sense of discovery that accompanied looking at truly fine art. And she wouldn’t lie: she loved the power. She determined what was authentic or fake, important or disposable, decorative or museum-worthy.

He laid the first drawing on the table. A typical Canaletto
veduta
, it showed a palazzo in architectural detail, with some extra flourishes that were clearly added by the artist, who often moved or added obstacles to suit his compositions. She noticed the gently swaying shadows and how the woman who was standing in front of the palazzo holding a basket mimicked that curve. The clouds were in a light wash, slightly sepia-toned, either from age or from original intent. She held it up gingerly.
The watermark was appropriate. She couldn’t remember the firm off the top of her head, but she was sure she’d seen it before. The paper was handmade, the grains haphazard and the remnants of the pulp visible. Occasional wormholes dotted the page, with some mold spots. Period paper, then.

Her heart began to beat quicker. She could hear her own breathing. Maybe she was excited to be holding such an important piece of work. But that couldn’t be it. She had held much more important works, works that held significance for her personally, without such an extreme reaction. Maybe she was anxious about tomorrow.

She studied the lines. The drawing had Canaletto’s sure hand, his talent for perspective that wasn’t exactly as nature (or man) built monuments, but made sense to the naked eye. She took Klinman’s proffered loupe and looked more closely at the wormholes. The ink hadn’t bled into them, meaning that the holes were made after the drawing was complete, not before. Otherwise excellent fakes often had this telltale sign; the forger had drawn over the old paper, but the ink had betrayed him.

Mentally, she classified where in Canaletto’s oeuvre this work might fall. She recognized the street in Rome from her stay there in graduate school. It was not exactly as she remembered it, but that was possibly a fault of her memory, or of Canaletto’s. Sure enough, faintly underneath the ink lines she saw the barest remnants of chalk and red pencil where he had sketched the outlines before returning to his studio.

Elm considered, watching the curtains sway with the forced air blown out beneath them. It could be from one of Canaletto’s atelier. By the end of his life, he had quite a production line going. But the scene was from a
veduta
earlier in his life, when he was still sketching primarily on commission. And it wasn’t a pastiche. Too often, imitators of a master (whether forgers or hobbyists) amalgamated all of a master’s styles into one piece, the visual equivalent of overembellishing a lie. This piece had remarkable restraint. It had to be a Canaletto. And yet …

She put the picture down, willing her face not to betray any emotion. She felt the barest pinch of a headache, the constriction of her lungs. Her head told her that this was an authentic work. She had been trained by both the academy and personal experience to be an expert. She needed four hands to list the reasons this was definitely a Canaletto
original and didn’t have a single reason to doubt herself except that her body seemed to be signaling her to trust instinct over reason.