Read The Forgery of Venus Online
Authors: Michael Gruber
Tags: #Painting - Forgeries, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Painters, #Suspense, #Thrillers, #Art forgers, #Fiction, #Painting, #Extortion, #Espionage
The Forgery of Venus (23 page)
“No. But I’d like to see it now. Maybe it would snap me back or something.”
“It’s not here,” she said. “Baldassare has taken it to the laboratory on Via Portina, an industrial area, you understand? He needs high vacuums and ovens, special equipments for this work, the aging.”
“What’s the painting like?”
“What is it like? It is like Velázquez. It
is
Velázquez, the most astonishing thing I have ever seen. Baldassare says it is a miracle.”
And she told me what I had painted, and I recalled it well, having just finished it a few weeks ago in subjective time, in Rome, in 1650. Painting’s not just in the eye and the head, it’s in the body too, like a dance—the hand, the arm, the back, the way you lean forward and sideways to check out a passage, the standing away and moving close. So when you look at something you’ve done, you have all the intimate body memory, and in this case I had a whole other set of memories, the feel and scent of this particular woman’s skin, the density of Leonora’s living flesh in my hand and under me and on top of me, the squirming damp reality of it. And more than that—this is even harder to explain or even to think about—I had the sense memories of somebody
else,
somebody else doing the painting. The brain fucks with your head, but the body never lies, or so I’d thought.
For the next week I was a complete wreck, afraid to go to sleep, afraid I might wake up again not me. I spent most of these first days after my return wandering along the river, up to Castel Sant’Angelo and down to Ponte Testaccio, exhausting myself, drinking in a bar before returning home. Most of me was still in 1650: I could recall dozens, hundreds of details, more than I could recollect of the last year of my so-called real life. Maybe the seventeenth century made for a denser, more vivid existence: I mean street scenes, talking to cardinals, servants, what I ate at banquets, the talk at diplomatic receptions, being with Leonora.
Yeah, her. My body, my mind, my heart, if you want to call it that, was burdened with a relationship that I never had, with a woman
who died over three hundred years ago. So what was the real story? Obviously, an unprecedented reaction to salvinorin, combined with amnesia, also drug related. My brain was damaged, we already knew that, and since the only deep emotional attachment I’ve ever had was to Lotte, somehow I conflated all that with thinking about Velázquez and came up with this imagined life, and there you had it, an explanation that Shelly Zubkoff would swallow without gagging.
Another reason for staying out of the house was that Sophia started crying nearly every time she looked at me, and it freaked me out, because she’d had a love affair with a ghost, a demon lover, while I’d been making love to Leonora three centuries ago.
One day she wasn’t there and her mother told me she’d gone with the kid to visit friends in Bologna. The
signora
had been crying too, I could see, and through the barrier of language she let me know that I had been a complete shitbag.
You have to understand that part of the problem here was my complete isolation. I’d checked my cell phone after coming out of the past and learned that there were no messages at all on it. Not one. Jackie Moreau was dead; Mark was, well, Mark, not a sympathetic ear; Charlie was God knew where in Africa, and Lotte was incommunicado. It was like I’d been jailed by the secret police.
So I called my ex-wife one evening, and as soon as she heard my voice she said, “The only thing I want to hear from you is that you’re getting psychiatric help.”
I said, “Hey, I’m planning to, honestly, but look—I’ve, um, been painting like mad and Krebs is coming tomorrow to check out the work and if he likes it, that’s a million bucks to me. Lotte, imagine what we’re going to do with—”
But she wouldn’t listen. She said, “You know, it makes no sense to talk to a maniac, and it hurts me to hear you rave like this. Call me when you are getting the medical help you need.”
And she hung up. Isolation complete, then. Yes, good thing I didn’t tell her about what I’d been doing, or imagining I was doing, for the last three months. She might’ve
really
been annoyed. So, okay, I was crazy, but you know, just then I didn’t
feel
crazy. I mean, I was functional as an artist, because apparently I had pulled off this huge coup of a forgery. I felt crazy in New York, but now I didn’t. And frankly I was dazzled by the money and the promise of more. It’s the rule that if you’re rich enough you can’t be that crazy. So I really looked forward to Krebs coming for that reason, and also because, now that I thought about it, he was my only remaining friend.
Now came the big day. That morning Baldassare went out and brought my picture back from the secret forgery lab. He set it up on a display easel in the parlor, covered with a black velvet cloth, and he was guarding it like a dragon, wouldn’t let anyone have a peek before Krebs arrived. Franco drove to the airport to meet him, and while he did that I got fed up with the tension in the house and went out to take a long walk, east to the Tiber and along the Ripa and back through the Porta Portese in the ruins of the old walls. It wasn’t quite warm yet but spring was happening in Rome; you could smell the river and the trees on the boulevards were greening up and blossoming, if they were that kind of tree.
When I returned to the house on Santini I saw that the Mercedes was already parked outside and I hurried in. Krebs was there, in the parlor, with Franco and Baldassare and a man I didn’t recognize, a small, stout, olive-skinned guy with dark-rimmed glasses and the air of an academic. They were all standing around drinking Prosecco, and I saw that the drape was still on the painting.
Krebs hailed me as I came in, embraced me warmly, and said that he’d insisted they wait until I came back for the unveiling. He introduced the stranger as Dr. Vicencio de Salinas, a curator from the Palacio de Livia, the private collection of the duchess of Alba, which
kind of puzzled me at the time, because I thought, Hey, isn’t this a little premature, showing the thing to an expert before the boss even had a look?
Then Baldassare pulled the drape off with a flourish and there were gasps all around. All three of us—Krebs, Salinas, and me—surged forward to look at it more closely and bumped shoulders, and I kind of pulled back and let them get the best look. They were the customers. But I’d seen enough to understand that Baldassare had worked a wonder. Oil paint takes years to really cure up and dry, and it changes its appearance during that time; even the things I’d done as a kid still looked like the contemporary objects they in fact were. But this son of a bitch looked
old,
and it had the palpable authority that old things have. It looked cracked and heavy with age, like every painting from the seventeenth century you see in museums, and I had a brief moment of temporal vertigo, as if I’d painted it in the seventeenth century for real.
The Spaniard inspected the painting at various distances for what seemed a long time. At last he turned to Krebs with a small smile, nodding his head—reluctantly, it seemed to me.
“Well? You said it couldn’t be done,” said Krebs. “What do you think now?”
Salinas shrugged and answered, “Frankly, I admit to being astounded. The brushwork, the colors, that glow on the skin are all entirely true to the
Rokeby Venus
. And the…the preparation is also very fine; the craqueleur seems flawless on initial inspection.”
Krebs clapped Baldassare heartily on the back. “Yes! Bravo Signor Baldassare!”
And Salinas went on, “Subject, as I say, to technical examination, the pigments and so forth, I would have no trouble in passing this as genuine.”
I stood there amid the smiles, and no one looked at me or patted me on the back, and I figured it was something like what went down with
Castelli’s faked Tiepolo—they were practicing pretending that it was real. I couldn’t study it closely myself. When I tried to a pain started across my eyes and my vision blurred a little and I had to sit down.
I looked up at Krebs again and he was talking with Salinas, something about the exact dimensions of the painting, and Krebs assured him that it was right to a tenth of a millimeter and told him to get on with taking his samples, because he had to get back to Madrid as soon as possible so as not to be missed at the museum.
Salinas opened a briefcase from which he removed a set of binocular goggles, a high-intensity headlamp, and a small black container about the size of an eyeglass case. He put on the goggles and the lamp, switched it on, turning himself into something like ET on a spelunking expedition. He approached the painting and from his little case drew a shiny small tool.
“He’s taking a core to analyze the paint layers,” Krebs said. “Tiny, and virtually invisible. He’ll check the pigments and the ground for age and anachronism. Which of course he will not find.”
“I hope not. What was all that about exact dimensions?”
“Well, obviously whatever connoisseurship and technical analysis may say, the thing is worthless without an impeccable provenance. Now, with a drawing, or some minor Corot, or even a Rubens, this is easily handled, as I’m sure you know. It’s nothing to prepare a seventeenth-century bill of sale—old Baldassare can do it in his sleep—and there are thousands of dusty garrets in Europe and ancient families who will attest, for a consideration, that their ancestor the count bought the thing in sixteen whatever. But for something like this, such dodges will not do, not at all.”
Salinas seemed to be finished at the painting. He switched off his lamp, removed his goggles, and held up a small vial as if it were the cure for cancer.
“I have it,” he said, and placed the vial into his little box.
“Excellent,” said Krebs. “Franco will drive you to the Ciampino airport; the jet you came on is fueled and waiting and you should be back at your desk in Madrid”—he checked his wristwatch—“no more than four hours after you left. A long siesta, but not unknown in Madrid, I believe.”
Salinas smiled and shook hands with both of us, with the usual assurances of goodwill, not entirely hiding what I saw, close up now, was extreme terror; he packed up his things and departed in something of a rush. I heard the Mercedes start up outside.
“A useful little man, that,” said Krebs reflectively as the sounds of the car receded. “And a bitter man: well trained, but without the flair needed in a museum director nowadays. He was passed over for promotion as director of collections, and this is his revenge. And his prosperous retirement.”
“He’s going to buy the painting for the Livia?”
Krebs gave me an unbelieving look and laughed. “Of course not. His job is to give us a flawless provenance.”
“How?”
“That you will see with your own eyes, perhaps as soon as next week, when we go to Madrid.”
“We?”
“Yes, of course.” He looked at his watch again. “You know, it’s past one. Aren’t you famished? I am.”
With that we left the house and walked down the street and across the Piazza San Cosimato to a little restaurant where they apparently knew Krebs and were very glad to see him. They gave us a table by the window, and when we were settled with a plate of dried anchovies and one of whitebait fritters, and a bottle of Krug, he said, “Wilmot, I realize you are an artist and thus not entirely of this world, but I must press upon you that from now until however long it takes you must keep yourself under almost military discipline. No wandering off and
no unauthorized calls. When we return I will ask you to surrender your cellular phone. It’s not me who makes these rules.”
“Who does then?”
“Our friends. My partners in this venture.”
“You mean you’re mobbed up?” I said, or rather the wine said.
“Excuse me?”
“Mobbed up. You’re working for the Mafia.”
He seemed to find this amusing, and while he was chuckling the waiter came and we ordered food. The waiter said the
scampi Casino di Venezia
was very good and Krebs said we had to have it in honor of the city where we began our association, so I said, okay, I’ll have that too, and he ordered a bottle of Procanico to go with it. When the man had gone he continued, “Mobbed up—I must remember that expression. But let us not confuse things. The Mafia is about whores and drugs and corrupt contracts for poured concrete. We are talking about an entirely different level of enterprise.”
“Criminal enterprise. Whatever happened to letting the experts come to their own conclusions? Whatever happened to Giordano Luca? You’re planning a major fraud.”
He looked at me with what seemed like amused pity. “Ah, Wilmot, did you ever actually think it would be anything else? Really?”
And I had to admit to myself that he was right. I do have a habit of believing my own lies. I took a breath, drank some more wine, and asked, “So when do I get my money? Or was that another thing, like those crummy sketches you raved about, that I should have realized was too good to be true?”
“Good God, do you think I intend to cheat you?” he said, with what seemed to be genuine amazement. “That’s the last thing in the world I would ever do. Wilmot, I have been searching most of my life for someone like you, someone with your incredible facility with the styles of the past. You are, to my present knowledge, unique in the
world. I would have to be insane to treat you with anything but the greatest respect.”
“That’s terrific, but on the other hand I have to ask you if I can make a phone call.”
“I told you, I don’t make those rules. But when the operation is complete, and the surveillance is lifted, you may call anyone you like. Always being discreet, of course. Because, you understand me, there is no—how shall I put it?—statutes of limitations on art forgery. That is, until the actual witnesses are deceased, the authenticity of the painting is always at risk. With one careless word an object worth many tens, hundreds, of millions becomes a mere pastiche and worth nothing, and then the buyers look to get their money back. They go to the dealer and of course he talks, and then the cord that holds it all together unravels. Then it is either prison for all of us or a worse fate, if in any way the gentlemen I referred to earlier are in the least implicated. Not a happy prospect. Especially not for you. Or for your family.”
When he said that I almost lost a mouthful of whitebait, but I managed to get it down and asked him, “What’re you talking about? My family?”
“Well, only as a means of controlling you. While you remain alive.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes, well, I speak loosely of witnesses, but in affairs like this one, there is only one witness who counts. I mean, Baldassare knows, and Franco, and that girl who posed, but no one cares about them. Anyone can cry forgery and the interests that wish for the painting to be original can always shout them down. It happens all the time. But one witness can never be shouted down.” He paused and inclined his head toward me and snapped a bit of fish from his fork.
“The forger himself,” I said.
“Just so. Now don’t be downhearted, Wilmot, I beg you. As I keep saying, this is a new life you are in now. Danger, yes, but when has real art not been associated with a certain danger? Quattrocento Florence was a violent place, and art’s greatest patrons have always been violent men.”
“Like the Nazis?” A little dig there, but he didn’t blink.
“I was thinking of the robber barons of America or the aristocrats of Europe. And the artists themselves have always been freebooters, living on the edges of society. When art becomes domesticated into a branch of show business, it becomes flaccid and dull, as now.”
“Sorry, but that’s nonsense, like Harry Lime’s remark about Switzerland and the cuckoo clock in
The Third Man.
Velázquez had a steady job—”
“Yes, and in his lifetime he did fewer than one hundred fifty paintings. Rembrandt, living on the edge of life, did over five hundred.”
“And Vermeer, who was even more on the edge, did forty. I’m sorry, it won’t wash, Krebs. You can’t generalize about what kind of temperament and what social conditions produce great painting. It’s a mystery.”
I could see he was starting to get a little steamed to have his pet theories exploded like this, but it’s always gotten
me
steamed to hear theories about how art happens dumped on my head by people who never handled a brush. But then he shrugged, and smiled, and said, “Well, perhaps you’re right. It is a life I am used to, and we all tell ourselves stories to justify ourselves to ourselves and others, because we wish to have some company in these little scenarios. But I see it is not to be, you have a head as hard as mine. And really, it does not matter in the least, as long as you do not forget that the sword that hangs over us is harder than both our heads. Ah, good, here is our meal.”
The food was excellent, but I had acid on my tongue and could hardly taste it. I drank more than my share of the wine, however, and
got enough of a buzz to keep me in my seat instead of running out of the place screaming hysterically. Krebs chewed away on his scampi and I wondered how he’d ever gotten used to this kind of life. I mean, he seemed like an ordinary guy, no more ruthless—in fact, maybe less ruthless—than the typical high-end New York gallery magnate.
I wanted to jab him some more, though, so I said, “Is it true, by the way, that you got your start selling pictures stolen from murdered Jews?”
“Yes,” he said blandly, “perfectly true. But as I’m sure you know, there was no question of returning these things to the rightful owners. It would be like trying to return a carving to an Assyrian or an Aztec. They were dead. I sincerely wish they hadn’t died, but I didn’t kill them. I was thirteen when the war ended. So what was I supposed to do, leave them in a Swiss vault forever?”
“An interesting moral point.”
“Yes, and I’ll tell you another one, as long as you’ve brought up the subject. My father was a Nazi and I was raised as a Nazi. Everyone of my generation was. As a boy I could not wait to be old enough to join the forces and fight for the Reich. I believed every lie they told me, as I imagine you believed the lies your country told you. Tell me, were you in Vietnam?”
“No, I was exempt. I had a kid.”
“Lucky you. According to the Vietnamese your country killed three million of their people, most of them civilians. I’m not excusing what the Nazis did, of course, just pointing out that Germany is not alone in slaughtering innocents, and for a long time the Americans supported that war. Now I will tell you an amusing story. In December of 1944 my whole family was back in Munich and the city was being bombed day and night. My father was naturally concerned for the safety of his family, and so he pulled strings and got us out of there, to a place that had never been bombed and which was consid
ered quite safe. Do you know where this was? It was Dresden. We were there in February when the Allies burnt the city to the ground. I survived; my mother did not. I hid in the sewers.”
Here he drank some wine and let loose a small sigh.
“After the bombing I went back to where our house had been and there was nothing but ash. My mother had turned into a little black manikin one meter long. We scraped her off the cellar wall with pieces of a smashed toilet. And then the war was over and we learned the full story of our shame, and so we were not allowed to voice the suffering we had experienced. This destruction, this slaughter of children, these thousands of rapes we endured could not be acknowledged. It was our just recompense, our nemesis. And so most of my generation picked ourselves up and went on with life and rebuilt our country.”
He paused and I said, “What does that have to do with—”
He held up his fork. “Wait, be patient, I will get to that. So we all participated in rebuilding the country, but there were scars that could never be mentioned. Some of us never recovered from the disillusion, this massive betrayal, this nursery of lies in which we were raised. We were forever cut off from our fellow citizens, because any idea of a shared culture, our
heimat,
had been poisoned. The Nazis were very clever: they understood that to create a great evil you must pervert a great good, and this was our love of nation and family and culture.
“And when I asked my father what he had done in the war, he answered me honestly, and when I heard of it, I was not shocked, I did not reject him, because I knew in my heart I was no better than him, and I did not join the self-righteous of my generation, the ones who supposed they would have behaved so much more nobly than their parents in the same situation. So I became the person I am today. After my art studies were complete, I went to Switzerland and forged provenances and sold the paintings of the dead Jews without a single qualm. I said to myself that I was returning beauty to the
world. Perhaps a self-serving lie, but, as I have suggested already, who does not tell themselves such lies? Yet the beauty is real, perhaps the only real thing there is. It does not save us, but it is better, I think, for there to be beauty than not. You have created a thing of great beauty, deep beauty, a thing that will last for as long as there are men to see it, and they will love it the more if they think it came from the hand of Diego Velázquez. This is foolishness, of course—the thing is the thing—yet who shall blame us if we profit from this foolishness? What legitimate business does not?”
“Well, gosh, you convinced me,” I said. “Now I can’t wait to forge again,” and he laughed and slapped the table.
“That is why I like you, Wilmot. One needs a sense of humor in this business, and also a certain cynicism. I tell you the most painful moments of my life, with Germanic seriousness and
weltschmerz,
and you make a joke of it. But one thing I cannot let slip, and that is the accusation that I am not a patron of your own work. In fact, I am. I believe that once you are freed from the necessity of whoring for the galleries and the commercial arts you will truly blossom as a painter. Those two little drawings prove it, and it will give me a great deal of personal satisfaction to see you do this.”
“You don’t think it’s too late?”
“Of course not! Who knew of Joseph Cornell until he was older than you? Even Cézanne sold hardly a painting until he was your age. And nowadays, with enough resources, one can secure a reputation. You would be surprised at how entirely corruptible is the world of art criticism. And you are good besides. I could make reputations for painters who do not have the talent that is in your little finger.”
He put down his fork and looked at the empty scampi shells with satisfaction. Mine remained half finished, and when the waiter came by I told him to take it away.
Krebs said, “I hope what I have been saying has not affected
your appetite. No? Good, then perhaps we might now speak of this drug you have taken and the illusion that you are living the life of Velázquez.”
Well, obviously he’d gotten the story from Mark, I mean the early experiences in New York, and I told him the rest, about how I’d spent 1650 in Rome, while we enjoyed dishes of wild strawberries
capriccio dio Wanda,
cups of espresso, and a finale of grappa. The bottle was left at the table, and I had several.
When I’d finished talking, he said, “Well, I wouldn’t have believed it if I had not heard it from your own lips.”
“I still don’t believe it, and it happened to me.”
“Yes, and let me say, better you than me, Wilmot. I would not take such a drug for any consideration.”
“Why not? You could end up Holbein.”
“Yes, or Bosch. Or standing up to my nose in shit in a Dresden sewer for ten hours. Again.” He shuddered. “In any case, an interesting phenomenon. You ingest a drug and you experience events outside the bounds of rational explanation. Tell me, are you familiar with the theory that we have five bodies?”