The Fatal Touch (20 page)

She came over, poured herself a glass, drank it, and spat it straight back out, which I have to say shocked me a bit. Apparently it was “corked.” And so was the next bottle and the next and the one after.

“What a bloody nuisance. I need to get some wine. That means driving all the way down to Dalkey,” she said. She asked me to polish the serving platters while she was gone.

As soon as I saw her car leave the gate, I grabbed the Yeats and rushed with it back down the garden to my mews. I removed the original, and hid it in a book. In my rush, I lost two staples from the back of the frame and tore the backing paper as well. When I came to put my stop-gap sketch into the frame, it was too big. It was also bright white, and the new ink gleamed. It would be noticed immediately. I rushed into the kitchen and pulled out the rubbish from below the sink. I emptied the contents on the floor and scooped up handfuls of old tea leaves and broken eggshells (being practically all I ate or drank back then). I threw them on my overclean drawing. If I had destroyed it, I would just have put the original back and started again. Or I might have abandoned the idea and led a different life and become a better person.

I left the used tea leaves and eggshells for twenty minutes, wetting them slightly, then carefully brushing them off, first with my hand, then with a thick bristle brush that I had yet to use for painting. It worked, at least by the standards I had then. By now Mrs. Heath would have left the shop in Dalkey and was probably already halfway up Killiney Hill Road. The page was no longer pristine white, and seemed magically aged. Even the wetting of the leaves had slightly warped the paper adding to the effect. I spent around ten minutes trimming the edges, which flattened and lowered the sky and ruined what little balance I had managed to achieve. But it was a tiny work, and even at arm’s length it was hard to make out the details. It only had to fill a space for a few days. As long as no one looked at it. I prayed none of the dinner party guests was a connoisseur. I was still tapping in the staples at the back of the frame with the handle of the screwdriver when a crackle of gravel and the sound of a motor told me that Mrs. Heath was back already.

I grabbed the framed drawing and rushed out into the garden, just in time to see her walk into the house. The frame was too large for me to conceal under my shirt. I was convinced that as soon as she walked in she would see it was missing. She called my name. No point in hiding now. “Coming,” I called.

She appeared at the front door and called down the garden. Without seeming to notice that I was carrying anything.

“Fetch the crate of wine from the backseat of the car for me, will you? It’s far too heavy for me.”

In she went again.

I leaned into her car. There was a wooden milk crate containing a dozen bottles of wine in the back. I dropped the picture on the top, and heaved it in my arms. She was right, it weighed a ton.

“In here, Henry. The drawing room.”

I struggled in. She was staring at the half-set table.

“You didn’t do as I asked with the silverware,” she said. “Did you do anything while I was gone?”

I glanced over at the hearth. A bright rectangle of lighter green wallpaper shone where the picture belonged.

“I had to go to the toilet,” I said. I put down the crate, positioning myself between her and the empty space on the wall, and whipped the picture off the top of the crate as she turned to examine the crystal.

“Oh dear. Well, at least you went back to your own place to do that. I say, Henry?” She turned around quickly and I swept the picture behind my back, but as I did so, I realized this was not going to work, so I continued my awkward movement and staggered backwards, kicking at the desk with the two rejected open bottles of wine. One of them fell with a crash on the floor, and Mrs. Heath shrieked something about her Persian rug, and fell to her knees. I hung my false picture on the wall behind, then sank down as if in a dead faint.

Mrs. Heath saved her Persian rug, after which she was full of solicitude for me, convinced the strain of carrying the heavy crate had given me a turn. She told me to go and get some rest. She’d call a friend to help her prepare for the evening.

When Monica arrived that evening, I told her of my adventures and brought her over to show her the purloined original.

“Is that it?” she said, tilting her head sideways to appraise the work. “Can’t say I think much of it.”

“Neither do I,” I remember saying.

“It should be easy then. Why not make a few copies, while you’re at it? We can sell each one as an original. Make far more that way.”

“We don’t have time,” I said. “If anyone looks at the replacement I’ve put on the wall in there, they’ll spot it immediately for a fake. The sooner we get it back the better.”

“Just copy your own copy. Do I have to do all the thinking for the two of us?”

Half an hour later, Monica returned to her earlier idea. “If you make a good enough copy, can’t you just use that to make another and another?”

“I’ve been thinking about this, Monica,” I told her. “We know nothing about the market. There must be all sorts of things they look for that I haven’t done right. The paper, watermarks, records, and so on. The way I see it is we can sell this only once, but if we don’t want to be caught, we have to sell the original, and watch what sort of things they look for. And we’ll need a good story for why we have it, and we need to make sure she won’t have reported it missing.”

I thought Monica was losing interest in the project, but then she did something that was very crass and revealing, but she thought was very clever. After working for a whole week, I had finished, but was not pleased with my handiwork. It looked like a copy of an original. I had solved the problem of the brightness of the paper and the shine of new ink but there was no fluidity to the composition. When I was back in Mrs. Heath’s drawing room, looking at the aged stop-gap work that I so despised, I realized with a shock it was the better work. Bad, but still better, because it had been done with a free hand. These lines drawn from memory somehow made up an original work of art, done in the style of
Yeats. The one I had copied directly was a lifeless replica. It was then I realized that forgery had nothing to do with replication. It was an art form, a getting into the mind of an artist.

When I got back to the mews that evening, Monica was on the settee looking up the cinema listings in Bray. I glanced at my copy of the Jack Yeats and froze, then walked over to the sink to get a cup of buttermilk to hide my face behind and regain my composure. In the upper left corner of the page, she had added a tiny dot of ink. She may have thought it was invisible, but it may as well have been bright red for the way it drew in the eye. She had placed it in one of the best parts of the picture, where I had succeeded in getting the lines to curve and overlap without touching. Quite apart from her display of aesthetic ignorance was the other question of why she had done it, to which I had only one answer: she did not trust me. She wanted to make sure that I really kept the original, that I didn’t give it back to my benefactress.

We saw the film
Born Free
.

Oh dear God in heaven, how I hated that film and that song. For weeks and weeks Monica hummed it over and over. Even now I can hear Matt Monroe sing “as free as the grass grows.” When the lioness Elsa gets released into the wild, Monica wept. “What elsa were they going to do with her?” I said. Apparently that wasn’t in the slightest bit funny.

Partly owing to the lack of contraception in Ireland then, partly to my own failure of nerve, Monica never stayed over. Usually a cause of regret, this night I was glad to be alone. I had been improving my forgery skills so rapidly that my copy now seemed to me to be a pathetic failure. My attempt at the artist’s signature was not too bad. I had been practicing, and I had discovered for myself a trick. To forge someone’s signature, all you need to do is turn it upside down and copy it that way.

My other elementary mistake had been to make a fresh drawing on a clean sheet of paper, and then try to age it. After my experiment with tea as an ageing agent, I arrived at the solution I was to use for the next few years (until I stopped using anything but original period paper), which was to smoke the sheets over burning green wood. Plane wood can also be used, if you can ever get the plane wood to burn, that is. To put some fox-marks on them to give the impression of the beginning of mold and decay, I had dampened both. On one, I sprinkled a little of the Maxwell House that Monica had bought, on the other I had scraped pieces of rust from one of the old nails sticking out from the walls of my mews. As I took them out now, I could see that the one treated with rust was developing naturally by itself and looked far more natural (though I later discovered that the process can be far too destructive and eat holes in the paper). I took this sheet, and treated it on the back with some glue, which would harden within a few days, giving another sign of authenticity should anyone choose to examine it later.

That night I sat up and copied out the pen and ink wash again, working quickly, getting a far better and far more natural flow to it. When I had finished, it was first light. I put down my pens, flexed my aching hand, sat back, and took off my socks, which smelled a bit. I then dabbed one over the drawing I had just done, very gently, making sure I only rubbed where the ink was dry. The effect was to cause almost invisible smudging and splits in some of the ink lines, as when a stripe of iron filings held in place by a magnet is very slightly pricked by one or two misaligned shavings. The result was almost perfection. My next task was to put Mrs. Heath’s original back without Monica ever knowing. Better to run the risk of being caught than to steal from a woman who had treated me with nothing but kindness. Better to be a forger than a robber.

As it turned out, I had an opportunity to get back into the drawing room that morning when Mrs. Heath, in a fluttering panic, came across to tell me that there was some animal trapped in the chimney of her drawing room. I put a penknife, some glue, and a small screwdriver in my pocket and went up to the big house. When I got there, a filthy pigeon with no tail was lying in the hearth, flapping uselessly. Cleaned up, some of its wing feathers would be serviceable as quills.

I smashed the pigeon’s head with the poker, then pulled the original Jack Yeats from under my shirt, and with great care replaced it in its frame, where I hope it has remained to this day.

On the way down the garden, I crumpled up my first effort in my fist, threw it into the bin without looking at it. A few hours later, Monica was there, peering at my two fakes, her eye roving up to the ugly ink spot she had made.

“They are identical, Henry! Tell me which the original is.”

“Guess.”

She pointed artlessly to the one she had altered. This was supposed to be my big test. Her face was an agony of indecision. One part of her wanted me to nod, saying yes, that was the original, and thus confirm her suspicion that the whole world was as faithless as her. Another part of her wanted to believe in truth and people’s better instincts. I felt embarrassed for her.

“No, no. That’s my copy, Monica. This one here is the original.”

She beamed at me, tears of trust filling her eyes, and said

The doorbell went. Blume put the notebook on top of the refrigerator and went to answer.

Kristin was wearing a turquoise silk top with three buttons undone and a dark skirt that stopped just above her knees. Her hair was loose and seemed far longer and slightly redder than Blume remembered.

She came in, brushed his two cheeks with her own, then, touching his shoulder and very lightly propelling him forward, brought Blume face-to-face with a young man in his early thirties wearing strong fawn pants and a twill cotton shirt with a closed pocket on each breast. “This is Greg,” said Kristin. “Greg, this is Alec.”

Chapter 16

“Really good to meet you, Alec,” said Greg, taking Blume’s hand. He shook it, squeezed it as he let go, and touched Blume on the elbow as he stepped into the living room. “Kristin has told me all about you. Wow. That’s some story.” His cheeks folded symmetrically when he smiled.

“What story?”

Kristin said, “The story of your life, Alec. Or bits of it.”

“You told him that?”

“Just the relevant bits. How an American citizen ends up becoming an Italian police commissioner.”

“Why?” said Blume. “Are you planning a how-to book? Step one, go to Italy; step two, get someone to shoot your parents . . .”

“Hey, Alec. Can I use your bathroom?” said Greg.

While Blume was considering this, Kristin gave Greg directions. Then she and Blume went to the kitchen, which still reeked of smoke.

“Who the fuh-” began Blume, but Greg was already back, his eyebrows wrinkled, a cute-quizzical look all over his face.

“Sorry,” said Greg. “I got lost. I think I went into your bedroom, Alec.”

“You didn’t get lost,” Kristin assured him. “The bedroom leads on to the bathroom. It’s what you might call en suite.”

“I don’t like walking into other people’s bedrooms,” said Greg. “There isn’t, like, another bathroom I could use?”

“No, there isn’t,” said Blume.

“Only one bathroom?”

“Does that bother you?” asked Blume.