A Deceptive Clarity (6 page)

"Thanks, Mr. Gadney," I said, "I'll appreciate that. So will the guards."

Gadney took his eyes from the card and lifted them to mine. "Egad," he said.

I waited, but only silence followed. "Pardon?"

"Call me Egad," he said improbably. He removed the glasses and let them hang from his neck, continuing to regard me somewhat uncertainly. "You're rather young to be a curator, aren't you?"

People say that to me a lot. I'm not that young, really; thirty-four isn't an unheard-of age for the job. What surprises them, I think, is that I just don't have a very curatorial look. Art curators, they think—and they're generally right—look and sound like Peter van Cortlandt or Anthony Whitehead: urbane, suave, aristocratic. Many are second- or third-generation collectors or curators. I guess I look like what I am, which is a second-generation hodge-podge of Swedish, German, Russian, and Irish. My father was a machinist with a night-school diploma, fingertips that had black grease permanently ground into the whorls, and an objet-d'art collection consisting of eighteen Indian-head pennies and a dozen dubious fossils from a 1949 trip to Arizona. I got my degrees at San Jose State (night classes, like Dad) and Berkeley, not at Yale (as Peter did) or Harvard (Tony), or even Stanford.

In museum circles I had often seen and quailed under that doubtful look when I was introduced as San Francisco's curator of Renaissance and baroque. And even under Gadney's inoffensive scrutiny, I confess to a small stab of insecurity. Way down deep, you see, I'm not so sure that I really am a bona-fide art curator, and not just a fraud who's picked up the jargon. Art, after all, doesn't have a lot you can hang your hat on, and there are times when I
know
I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. (I'm still waiting for someone to explain neoplastic constructivism to me, for example, and I've lectured on the damn thing!) Never have I heard my self-assured colleagues confess such uncertainties, and in my dark hours I sometimes wonder if they—the Peters, the Tonys—were simply bom to the field and I was not.

I murmured something noncommittal to Gadney as we walked through the lobby, and then asked Robey the question I'd asked Harry Gucci in the hospital.

"Did they get away with anything from the storage room?"

"Nope, everything's accounted for, thanks to you. You broke in on them before they got properly started. The only thing damaged was that picture they heaved through the door. Aside from your nose, of course. But we can repair that." He smiled sympathetically. "The picture, I mean."

I nodded ruefully. "That's good, anyway. But about that drawing ..." I turned to Gadney. "Something has been bothering the hell out of me. Down there, in the basement, when I said that Michelangelo was a forgery, you said—I thought you said—that of course it was."

"Of course I did."

"I don't understand. Why 'of course'? And how did you know about it?"

"How did I—" He stared at me in bland astonishment. "You don't know? I put the entire episode down to your understandably confused state of mind at the time. I assumed you knew all about the copies."

There was a discreet hint of reproach, as if I'd failed to do my homework. "Along with the twenty genuine works of art, signor Bolzano has lent us twelve copies of pieces that were looted from his collection by the Nazis but have never been recovered. The idea is to publicize them, you see, in hopes that they might be recognized, and that information on where they really are might turn up. The Michelangelo sketch is one of them."

I had, as a matter of fact, done my homework, and I knew about the copies. But that didn't explain it. Anyway, I didn't like abandoning the idea that I'd already solved Peter's mysterious puzzle.

"Yes," I said, "but this wasn't just a copy; this was a forgery—an original pencil drawing, with the paper smoked and crisped to look old—all very expertly done." I shook my head firmly. "No, this was a painstaking fake, a forgery—done to mislead."

It was Robey, with his disconcerting tendency to wander abstractedly in and out of conversations, who replied as we turned left down a curving corridor. "I don't know about all that, but I think we can be pretty sure it's not in the show to mislead anyone. Don't you know about Bolzano, Chris?"

I did, of course; quite a bit, although I'd never met him. The venerable Claudio Bolzano was a celebrated art connoisseur, a welcome buyer at Sotheby and Christie's, with a vast collection ofOld Masters and moderns on the walls of his villa in Florence and on loan to the great public galleries of Europe. Why he should have anything to do with a forged Michelangelo I had no idea, and I said so.

"Because," Gadney said, "after the war he began to despair of ever recovering all that the Nazis had taken, and he replaced many of them with copies. In some cases he bought existing copies, some of them several hundred years old—"

"And very possibly painted as forgeries," I persisted.

"Originally, possibly so, but now openly acknowledged as copies. He also commissioned a number of modem copies, I believe. There were photographs available, of course, so it wasn't difficult. What he wanted, naturally, were
good
copies, as near to the originals as possible. And that's just what he has."

"All right, but I still don't get the point."

"Neither do I," murmured Robey, ambling along beside us, "when it comes right down to it."

"You don't?" Gadney said to both of us. He lifted his tweedy shoulders in a faint shrug as we stopped before a closed door. "I believe I do. It's simply that he wanted to be surrounded by his beloved art pieces. If he couldn't have the real ones, he wanted to have the next best thing. I think I can understand his motivation."

I wasn't sure that I did. Knowledgeable art collectors do not generally go out and buy copies of
The Night Watch
or
View of Toledo,
no matter how much they covet the originals. For a serious collector to surround himself with copies would be like a serious dog lover surrounding himself with the stuffed carcasses of his pets. Superficially they might look the same, but they aren't very satisfying in the long run.

"Well, Chris," Robey said, reaching for the door handle, "time for you to meet the rest of the team."

"Gird thy loins," I thought I heard Gadney mutter as we went in.

Chapter 5

Whatever else he might be, Mark Robey was a calm and orderly man who took things as they came.
 
"I know the break-in is on everyone's mind," he announced dreamily, seated at the head of a folding table and gazing through the tall French doors at the bare trees and wintry courtyard behind Columbia House, "but let's just start with our agenda as Egad prepared it. Someone from OSI should be along in a while and we can talk about the break-in then. What's the first item, Egad?"

"Reception protocol," Gadney said promptly.

And so, under Robey's equable, absentminded leadership, we spent an hour on who should and who shouldn't be invited to the preview reception two weeks away, much as we might have done at the San Francisco County Museum under similar circumstances. There was little for me to contribute, so I spent the time sipping strong, fragrant German coffee and learning about my new colleagues.

There were two of them besides Robey and Gadney, and I would be lying if I didn't admit that one of them got most of my attention. This was a vibrant, extremely attractive woman of twenty-eight or twenty-nine who had something cogent or interesting—usually both—to say whenever she opened her mouth, which is not easy when the subject is reception protocol. She also had lovely, intelligent eyes that were as close to violet as eyes can be, glorious honey-colored hair, a healthy toothpaste-ad smile, and a pair of silver captain's bars on each blue-clad shoulder.

I had no ready stereotype for female air-force captains, but if I had, it wouldn't have been anything like Anne Greene. Robey had introduced her as having been lent by the Air Force to serve as "my adjutant and our intra-command liaison," and I had said, "Ah," as if I'd known what it meant.

The other person was Earl Flittner, a large, untidy civilian who was the show's technical director. With a small staff to assist him, he was responsible for physical details— exhibition layout, lighting, temperature and humidity, and so on—and for packing and unpacking. This may sound like semiskilled labor, but it isn't. It's esoteric, highly technical work. Crating and shipping thirty-five million dollars' worth of fragile, irreplaceable works of art is not the same thing as wrapping a box of brownies to send to Aunt Vivian. Moreover, the skill and taste of the technical director have made or broken many a show.

Flittner was one of the best, on loan from the National Gallery. I had met him a couple of years before when he had accompanied a show of High Renaissance wood sculpture to San Francisco, but he'd been surly and contentious from the start, and I had stayed out of his way. Now, when Robey introduced us, he said bluntly that he didn't remember me at all (which didn't make me like him a whole lot more), and he sat restlessly through the meeting, smoking cigarette after cigarette, not saying much, merely twisting his long mouth from time to time in a sour expression that sometimes seemed to indicate impatience with Robey's running of the meeting, sometimes dissatisfaction with the exhibition as a whole, and sometimes a universal and undiscriminating misanthropy.

We were still deep in the intricacies of protocol when the door opened and closed, snapping me out of a near-doze.

"Ah," Robey said, looking up from some woolgathering of his own, "come in. Let's see, I think some of you have met Major, uh ..."

"Gucci. Like the shoes."

"Did you say, er, 'Major'?" Gadney asked.

"That's right," Harry said with a smile. "I'm just lucky. They don't make me wear a monkey suit."

Gadney's surprise was understandable. Harry looked about as much like a major as I did a curator. He was wearing the same baggy, gray, shawl-collared cardigan he'd had on at the hospital, shapeless brown pants, and loafers that had never seen polish. With pennies in them. The bulky sweater made him look not bigger but smaller than he was, and shabby besides; and a slight stoop made him seem frail and scholarly. His short, gray-splotched beard was neatly trimmed at the neck but grew unchecked up his cheeks, giving him a gaunt, rabbinical air.

"I hadn't known one could have a beard in the army," Flittner muttered rudely to the tabletop.

"Sure," Harry said pleasantly, "if it's for medical reasons. I got shot in the face a couple of years ago in Athens and I couldn't shave for a while. I forgot to tell 'em when it healed, and they forgot to tell me to shave."

There was a thick silence as he shambled across the room. Even Flittner had the decency to look embarrassed.

Harry flopped down in the chair next to Robey. "No thanks," he replied to the offer of coffee. "I don't drink it. Wouldn't mind some of that mineral water, though."

Robey passed him a small green bottle of Appolinaris. Harry poured it into a glass and took a long drink while he looked from face to face around the table with sharp, smiling eyes.

"Hey, Chris, glad to see you up. How's the old schnozz?"

"The old schnozz is fine, thanks. The old head's still a little fuzzy."

He laughed, emptied the rest of the bottle into his glass, and wiped a drop of moisture from his beard with the back of a finger. "Well, let me set your minds at ease. First, as some of you know, we found the'truck they used. It was on base, in the pool lot behind the education center. The four missing crates were all in it." His eyes lit on me again. "What's so surprising, Chris?"

"I didn't realize they'd gotten away with anything."

"Oh yeah. None of the originals; only four of the copies." He took out his bulging little notebook and snapped the rubber band off it, letting it roll up around his wrist. "Let's see ..." He began to read aloud: "One van Gogh—"

A corner of Flittner's unkempt mustache lifted in a faint sneer.
"Van Gukh."

"Really?" Harry said.

"V'n
Khakh"
Gadney corrected mildly, eliciting a glare from Flittner. "I believe that's closer to the Dutch." With a finger, he delicately brushed at his own tidy, pale mustache.

"Well, thanks," Harry said brightly. "Thanks a lot. I'll remember that. Van Hah."

"Also a Cranach, a Vermeer, and a Poussin," Gadney said, pronouncing carefully, no doubt for Flittner's benefit. "All of them having considerable value, copies or not. Are any of them damaged?"

"We haven't looked at them yet, but the crates are all OK."

"Then don't worry about the paintings," Flittner said.

"What about the two men?" Anne Greene asked. "Have they been caught?"

"No," Harry said, "and to be honest we don't have a clue. Obviously, they got on base without any problem, so it looks like they had forged IDs."

Robey smiled. "Maybe that's what you ought to try, Chris."

"Not at all," Gadney said primly. "I'll have a proper card for him before the day is out."

"Why did they want to get on the base in the first place?" I asked Harry. "And why leave the truck there? Why didn't they just drive away with it?"

It was Anne who answered. "Maybe you don't understand the layout here yet, Dr. Norgren. Columbia House fronts on the street, but it forms part of the perimeter of Tempelhof. The only way to get a truck around to the back of the building, where the storage room is, is to drive onto the base."

"That's exactly right," Harry said, "and that's exactly what they did. They got hold of a beer truck authorized to deliver on base, drove it around to the courtyard behind this building, knocked out the outside guard with what we think was an electronic stun gun, then chloroformed him, and finally cut through the door with some kind of laser tool. The back door's down in the stairwell, so there wasn't anybody to see."

"Stun gun, laser tool," Robey said in his vague, musing way. "Seems like pretty up-to-date technology. They must be professionals."

"Oh yeah, for sure." Harry drank some more mineral water, tossing it into his mouth like a slug of whiskey. "When Chris scared them off, they didn't dare go tearing back out through the gate in a Schultheiss beer truck. So they left it in a protected corner of the lot, with the paintings, and as far as we know they just walked out the gate." He held out his hands, palms up. "That's all we know."