The Art Forger (35 page)

He squints his eyes as if this will help him understand.

“But even more,” I plead, “if we find the original, it should be enough to get Aiden out on bail,” I swallow hard, “long enough to save his finger.”

“His finger?”

I steel myself, then look Rik straight in the eye. “They need the print of his right forefinger to get into the gallery’s vault. Where the money is.”

“Oh,” Rik cries, stricken. “No. Oh, Claire . . . No.”

I close my eyes and nod.

“But, but what if the painting isn’t down there?” he asks.

“Then I’ll have to try a different angle.”

“And what if it is there? How are you going to explain how you knew about it?” His face is awash with worry. “What if they decide you were involved in the heist and arrest you?”

“Rik, think about it. What can they arrest me for? Copying a copy? This is what I do for a living.”

He does think about it. “I didn’t even know there was a sub-basement.” His words are slow and thoughtful. “Let alone how to get into it.”

“Like I said, it’s on the blueprints.” I see the first crack and dig into it. “Can’t be that hard.”

He opens a desk drawer, closes it, opens it again, closes it. “You really think an original Degas could be down there?”

“It could be,” I say. “And wouldn’t it be quite the coup if we found it?”

A fleeting smile crosses his face. “It sure would.” He pulls the blueprints up on his computer, finds the basement, and outlines the contours of the sub-basement with his finger.

I clasp my hands together and wait.

“I don’t know, Claire,” he finally says. “Scrounging around in the bowels of the museum without permission—if security will even let us in there.”

“Aren’t you pretty tight with some of the guards?”

“Yeah . . .” His fingers fly over the keyboard. “There are papers here that indicate Belle brought a Degas oil painting back from Paris with her in 1898, and,” he says as he scrolls, “
After the Bath
is listed in the Certificate of Incorporation of the Collection in 1900, so that must be the same one.”

I say nothing as the click of computer keys fills the room, and Rik confirms what I already know.

“It was also featured in the invitation Belle sent out in 1903 for the gala opening of Fenway Court—and it hasn’t been moved since. Until it was stolen.” Rik pushes back in his chair. “Sorry, Bear, but Belle would never have been fooled into buying a forgery. Nor would Bernard Berenson.”

“But my theory is that Belle
did
bring a real Degas home,” I argue. “Then, after she got the original to Boston, either Virgil Rendell blackmailed her into hanging his as the original—in which case it might be downstairs. Or he stole it and kept it for himself—in which case his family might have it. All I know is that Degas’ and Rendell’s sketchbooks prove there were two paintings.”

“It just doesn’t seem like enough . . .”

“Enough for what?” I demand. “To get a pretender out of the Short Gallery? To find an original Degas? To save Aiden?”

“Claire . . .”

“It’s okay, Rik.” I stand. “Really. I’m sorry I got you involved, but I’m getting pretty desperate here.”

“Where are you going?” His voice swells with concern.

“To tell Alana. What else can I do? Someone’s got to go down and look.”

He jumps up and grabs my shoulders. “No, you can’t do that. She’ll freak. Not yet. At least not until we know for sure it’s there.”

“Aiden doesn’t have a lot of time. I can’t—”

“Meet me here first thing in the morning,” he says.

I wrap my arms around him. “Thank you,” I whisper.

He kisses the top of my head. “Now let’s go back to the party and act like we’re having a good time.”

I
STAND IN
the front of the Gardner, watching Rik, umbrella in hand, cross the street. It’s as cold and raw as yesterday, with a freezing drizzle to increase the misery. I’m sweating inside my raincoat.

“Ready?” he asks, as he ushers me through the employee entrance.

“Ready to find it. Scared not to.”

“That about sums it up.” We walk to the cloakroom, our wet shoes squeaking on the stone floor. Rik grabs a flashlight from behind the desk, waves it, and shouts, “Onward!”

I laugh, but it comes out as a snort.

We take the elevator to the basement, which is as far down as it goes. Rik explains that there’s only a little storage down here, that the basement primarily houses mechanical equipment: electrical, heat, AC—and the new security system installed after the heist. Despite this, it’s poorly lit, shadowy, and I’m glad Rik thought to bring the flashlight. The air has that dank, underground mustiness.

I hear the scurrying of little feet and hope they’re the very little feet of mice, not the much larger little feet of rats. I take a step closer to Rik. The walls are exposed brick, uneven and haphazard, obviously original, and although the floor is poured concrete, it, too, is uneven, and laced with cracks large enough to trip over. Rik shines the flashlight on the area directly in front of us as we walk.

I check the blueprints. “Over there,” I say, pointing to the south wall. There was no indication of an entrance to the sub-basement from this level on the plans, which initially made me nervous, and now makes me very nervous. But then I see that there actually is something there.

We kneel at the edge of an opening more or less five-foot square. Rik shines his flashlight into the larger space beneath. The floor is dirt, and instead of brick, rough-hewn boulders form three of the walls. It looks like an afterthought. A poorly and quickly constructed afterthought. A rickety ladder leads down into it.

“Can you see anything?” I ask Rik. “Do you see a door?”

“Can’t tell from here.”

I swing myself onto the ladder. “Keep the flashlight on me, and then, when I get down, throw it to me, and I’ll shine it on you.”

I scramble down and drop to the floor. Rik quickly follows. It’s dark and, even with the flashlight, it takes us a moment to orient ourselves. The space is smaller than it appeared from the blueprints, maybe twenty-by-thirty with a ceiling of less than six feet. But it’s hard to get a real read because it’s filled with junk. Ostensibly, a century of it, dusty and piled high, stuffed into almost every available space: furniture, file cabinets, ledgers, books.

We both sneeze and turn toward the place where the doors fronting the narrow chamber should be. Rik raises the flashlight. But even with all the debris, it’s immediately apparent there are no doors. The light falls on a solid wall of concrete.

“Damn,” Rik says.

I’m almost knocked over by the depth of disappointment that floods me. I kneel down and inspect the edge of the wall where it meets the uneven boulders. There are lots of gaps. When I find an especially large one, Rik points the flashlight into the space beyond the wall.

I twist until I can see in without blocking the light. There, maybe a foot or two beyond the concrete, is a set of double doors. “They’re there!” I cry, not quite believing what I’m seeing.

“What?” Rik presses his eye to another hole in the concrete. “What’s there?”

My hands are trembling as I take the flashlight and allow him to look in.

“Holy shit.” He turns, looks at me, then turns quickly back to the hole. “You’re right. You’re right. The doors. They’ve got to be hiding—”

Suddenly, there’s a burst of light from above. I look up, but I’m blinded by the brightness.

“Hey!” a gruff voice bounces off the walls. “Stop where you are!”

I freeze, raise my hands.

“It’s Richard Gramont,” Rik calls out. “I’m one of the assistant curators.” He turns to me. “You can put your hands down now.”

“No!” commands the voice. “Keep them up. Both of you.”

“It’s just the museum guards,” Rik whispers to me, and pulls his ID card away from his chest. “I work here. It’s cool.”

“I don’t care where the fuck you work. Boston Police. Now climb up that ladder nice and slowlike—and keep your hands where I can see them. Ladies first.”

Forty-three

One policeman has a grip on my upper arm, one has Rik in a similar hold, and the third, the voice, watches us suspiciously. Three Boston cops, signaled by the beefed-up silent alarm installed for the party last night.

“Call Alana Ward,” Rik says. “She’s the director, probably in her office upstairs right now, she’ll vouch for us.”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing down here?”

“This is my friend, Claire Roth,” Rik explains. “She’s researching a book about Isabella Stewart Gardner and her circle of artists. I was told there were materials down here that might help her. So we came down to check it out.” He’s one quick-thinking man.

The cop is far less impressed than I am. “Researching a book this early Sunday morning?” But he calls Alana, who tells him to bring us to her office.

As the cops lead us across the basement and up to the main floor, Rik gives me a look that clearly says, “Don’t say a word.”

We head for the stairs to the second floor, and I take in the majesty of the courtyard in its stillness, the flukes of the Gardner that often annoy me, yet make it so exceptional, matchless actually. At the second-floor landing, I look through the open arches into the Early Italian Room, the Raphael Room. There’s no view from here of the Short Gallery, but I can visualize
Bath II
hanging there, feel her, like a ghost floating in the air. A shiver runs through me. Degas’
After the Bath
should be on that wall. Not some imitation of an imitation.

The first cop opens the roped-off stairwell to the fourth floor, lets us through, closes it behind him, and leads us to Alana Ward’s office. She comes out from behind her desk, and says, “I’ll take it from here, officers.”

The cops don’t move.

“Really,” she adds. “I’d like to talk to them alone.”

“We’ll be right outside the door if you need us, ma’am.”

When the cops leave, she orders us to sit in the two chairs in front of her desk and glares at Rik. “What the hell’s going on?”

“I’m sorry, Alana,” Rik says. “It’s really no big deal. Claire’s a friend of mine from the museum school, and she’s working on a book about Belle and her personal relationships with a number of artists. We were just looking for materials that might help her.”

“At eight o’clock on a Sunday morning?”

“You’re here,” Rik says, with a wry smile.

“In the basement?”

“There’s a room down there that’s full of stuff. Lots of files and books. I didn’t think there would be any—”

“You aren’t authorized,” she snaps, and turns to me. “What artists?”

“Well, the obvious, of course. Whistler, Singer Sargent, and Ralph Curtis. But I’m also interested in some of the more obscure artists she befriended, like Smith, Cram, or Martin Mower, Virgil Rendell.”

Rik looks at me in surprise, and Alana watches him closely. “This is a serious violation, Rik,” she says. “You can’t—”

“It’s not his fault.”

“It most certainly is,” she snaps.

“He didn’t want to take me down there,” I say. “But I talked him—”

“She may have asked me if I could help her find materials,” Rik interrupts, “but I suggested we look in the basement.”

“Why would you do such a thing?” Alana demands. “And why would you sneak around like that?”

“We weren’t sneaking. Or at least I didn’t think of it as sneaking. It just seemed, like, you know, like a natural thing to do.”

As I listen to Rik struggle to come up with an answer, the pros and cons of my next step flash through my mind like they claim your life does right before you die. Although less than thrilled with this analogy, I say, “I told him an original Degas may be hidden down there.”

“What?”

“Claire,” Rik says. “You don’t—”

“The
After the Bath
you hung last night is a forgery,” I tell Alana. “I think the real one, the one Edgar Degas painted, may be in the basement.”

“That’s absurd,” Alana says with disdain. “It was authenticated by a team of international specialists. Certified as Degas’ work by some of the most respected experts in the field.”

“I know,” I say. “But they’re wrong.”

“And just how do you know this?”

I swallow hard. “Because I painted it.”

Alana looks at Rik.

“I know it sounds weird,” he says, shifting in his seat. “But Claire works for Reproductions.com. She’s a certified Degas copyist, and—”

“A certified Degas copyist?” Alana explodes. “What the hell is that? Are you telling me I’m supposed to believe some ‘certified Degas copyist’ over our experts? That I’m supposed to buy that she painted that masterpiece?”

Before Rik can answer, I interject, “There’s a long history of art experts seeing what they want to see. What they expect to see.”