A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery) (3 page)

I suppose that all this just might raise a question in your mind. I didn't have a mass spectrometer at hand and wouldn't have known what to do with it if I did. So how did I know after a fifteen-second examination that this was spurious? All I can say is, I knew. I have a friend in Italy, an art professor, who was once pressed as to how he could be sure a certain Titian was genuine. His memorable answer: "I know because when I see a Titian I swoon." I wouldn't go as far as that on the van Eyck, but I knew. After you've lovingly submerged yourself in a field long enough, the judgments that at first had to be carefully reasoned become intuitive. It's no different than an experienced breeder's ability to size up a horse instantaneously, or a master cabinetmaker's way of telling at a glance how good a piece of furniture is.

It's also the reason art authorities often differ so loudly and so publicly over whether such and such a painting is a genuine Degas or Manet or Duccio. But I had no doubts at all on this one.

"This is a forgery," I said. "An extremely good one."

Blusher's heavy face sagged. "But—I mean, look at it. I mean . ." His expression changed from shock to resentment, "How the hell do
you
know? How does he know, Boyer?"

Calvin spread his hands. "He's the expert, Mike."

Blusher turned again to me. The flesh around his lips was a dull, mean purple. "I had Jake Panofsky in here looking at these"—Panofsky was the owner of a reputable gallery near Pioneer Square—"and he said they looked like the real thing, that I should call the museum. And now you—I mean, shit, how do you
know?
"

When you're dealing with eminent patrons of the arts, especially big, hostile ones, you can't be too careful. I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to get by with "I just knew."

Fortunately, beneath that first intuitive response there is always a foundation of solid perception, or there ought to be. And by now I'd been peering at the painting long enough to know what bothered me about it.

"There are several things," I said. "First, the
craquelure
." Foreign art terms, I have found, usually help establish credibility and cow skeptics.

Not Blusher. He made a disgusted face, "The
which?
"

"This crackling in the paint," explained Calvin, who was beginning to pick up a few things about art in spite of himself. "That's what makes it look so old."

"One of the things," I said. "It's hard to make
craquelure
look authentic, and most forgers fall down right there. This is beautifully done, though,"

Blusher glowered at me. "Then how do you come off—"

"It's the wrong
kind
of crackling," I said. "Whoever did this served his apprenticeship on canvases, not wooden panels. Take a look at the cracks on this one. Look at a light area—his cheek. Do you see any kind of pattern?"

"No," Blusher grunted after a pause. "Well, a little. It's sort of in circles, like a spider web."

"Exactly. And that's just the way old paint and varnish cracks on canvas. But this is wood, and it's wrong for wood. The surface of a painted wooden panel cracks mainly along the wood fibers, in relatively straight lines, not like this. These cracks are artificially done, Mr. Blusher; I'm sorry."

He expelled a long, noisy breath through his nose. "Ah, what the hell. It's not your fault, Norgren." Was he mellowing? I hoped so.

There was more: The picture wasn't painted in van Eyck's style, it was painted to look like his style, and there is a very big difference between the two. Van Eyck's technique was still medieval; each area of a painting was treated like a separate little picture, with no overlapping. And there was no mixing of pigments; each color was applied in a thin, careful coat, one on top of the other, increasing in transparency and saturation. But this panel had been done with easier, quicker techniques that hadn't been invented in the fifteenth century. It was a mark of its excellence that I couldn't be sure whether it had been painted a year ago or a century ago. But definitely not in 1421.

By now I realized what paintings it had been adapted from, for a convincing forgery is seldom hatched full-blown in the forger's mind; it is borrowed from authentic works of the artist. The face was from
A Man in a Red Turban
, but turned to the right instead of the left; the hat was from the great
Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride
.

Although I tried explaining all this, I don't think I got through to either of them. But Blusher understood enough to walk a few steps away and drop disconsolately onto a frayed sofa, then lower his head and massage his brow with both hands, as if he'd just heard the end of the world was due tomorrow morning.

There was something going on that I didn't understand. "Mr. Blusher—"

"Mike, Mike," he corrected absently, continuing to rub his temples.

"Mike, why is this so important to you? This isn't yours anyway, is it? From what Calvin told me, it's not part of your order. It got included by accident. "

"Of course it got included by accident. You saw the crap downstairs. That's what I order. I already called my shippers about this three times, in Bologna. They don't know how it got included, they don't know where it came from, they don't want anything to do with it."

    
"What's the name of the shipping company?" I asked.
 

"Salvatore, Salvatori, something like that."
 

"Salvatorelli? "

Blusher looked surprised. "Yeah, you know them?"

I nodded, not too pleased that I'd guessed right. "We're arranging a show, Northerners in Italy. Salvatorelli's handling the shipping."

"Nice move, Chris," Calvin said out of the side of his mouth.

"They're an old firm," I said unhappily. "They have a good reputation. The Pinacoteca uses them."

"Yeah, well, you better count your Brueghels all the same."

"Anyway," Blusher continued, "they said to go ahead and keep the paintings, as far as they're concerned. They didn't want to be bothered. I got that in writing." His head came up with a sudden shrewd glance. "Of course, I didn't tell them exactly what we got here." Down went his head again, into his hands. "Ah, what difference does it make, if they're fakes?"

"But even if they were real, you couldn't keep them. You'd have to return them to the owner. And even if nobody knew who the owner was, the Italian government would never sit still and let you have them."

"Yeah, sure," he said impatiently. "I was thinking of the publicity."

"Publicity?"

His head came up again to regard me with dull wonder, as if he couldn't comprehend how anyone could be this dense. "Look. I'm in the art business, right? I sell pictures, right? If I really turned up a genuine van Eyck it'd be news all over the country, right?" This time, apparently, he expected a response. He waited.

"Right," I said.

"Sure, right. And that's what we call publicity. If you were buying art from somebody, wouldn't you want to buy it from the guy that discovered the lost van Eyck?"

"I suppose so," I said doubtfully.

He sighed. "You explain it to him, Boyer."

"It's all a matter of marketing," Calvin said soberly to me. "Very important."

Blusher nodded, satisfied.

"Do you mind if I touch this?" I asked.

Blusher shrugged.

I lifted the panel, turned it over, and put it carefully back on the padded shelf, facedown, so the back was visible.

"Just what I thought," I said after a second. "This is real."

Blusher leaped up. "It's re—"

"Not the painting," I said hurriedly. "The panel."

"The panel? You mean the
wood
?" He gave a croak of laughter. "Who gives a shit about the wood?"

"It's not going to get you much in the way of big-time publicity," I said with a smile, "but it's interesting all the same."

I gestured at the back of the panel; it was made of two broad oak planks joined together, then enclosed in the groove of a sturdy, simple frame. "This black marking—like a V with a wreath around it—that's the logo of the Guild of St. Luke in Utrecht, the painter's guild. These cuts in the wood— they're from the way they sawed oak in those days in Holland. It was cut by a water-driven frame saw. Quarter-sawn, you'll notice. Early seventeenth-century, I'm pretty sure. "

Calvin looked at me, gratifyingly impressed. "You really know your stuff."

"So?" Blusher said. "What difference does it make?"

"Well, it proves we've got a first-rate forger here; somebody who takes his work seriously. Somehow he's gotten hold of one of the genuine old panels that the guild gave to its members." I smiled. "Wrong century, though. Van Eyck painted in the 1400s. And he did most of his work in The Hague and Bruges, not Utrecht."

"Hey," Blusher said with a slow awakening of interest, "could there be a real painting underneath the damn van Eyck? You know, that got covered up, painted over?"

"Could be," I said. "Somebody probably did paint something on it in the seventeenth century, and the chances are good it's still there. If you're going to forge an old picture you get better results painting over an old one than scraping it off and starting fresh."

"Yeah?" He came closer to peer at the panel. "Is that right?"

"If you're thinking there might be a Rembrandt under there, forget it. That doesn't happen. Nobody paints over Rembrandt. Or Rubens, or van Gogh, or—"

"So sue me," Blusher said. "Excuse me for living. I just asked a question, that's all."

"You could always take it in to have it X-rayed," I volunteered. "We don't do that at the museum, but if you talk to Eleanor Freeman in the radiography department at UW, she'd be able to do it for you."

"Yeah," Blusher said. "Sure. Maybe I'll do that." He smiled good-naturedly, quite mellow now, shook hands with us, and started walking us back across the room. "Well, thanks for coming, big guys. Sorry I dragged you down here for nothing."

He laid his heavy arm around Calvin's slim shoulders. "What I said about that check still goes, buddy. It's not your
 

 
fault."

"Thanks a lot, Mike. We really appreciate that. Hey, can I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"If your goods come from Bologna, how come your firm is called Venezia?"

"It's all a matter of marketing," Blusher said with a grin. "If you were selling quality art products would you name your outfit Bologna?"

We all laughed.

"Hey," said Calvin, "we forgot about the other painting, the Rubens."

Blusher clapped his hand to his forehead. "You're right. What do you say, Norgren, you want to take a look as long as you're here?"

"Sure." If the "Rubens" was as well-done as the "van Eyck," I wanted to see it. And after that authentic old panel, I was curious about what this one was painted on.

We went back to the cabinet. Blusher slid in the drawer with the "van Eyck" and pulled out the one below it. In it was a slightly larger painting, not on wood but canvas, in an ornate, gilded Renaissance frame.

I leaned over to take a closer look at the painting itself. I looked hard, just to be sure, but it took me less time to reach a conclusion on this one than on the other. No more than five seconds.

I looked up from it, first at Calvin, then at Blusher.
 

"It's real," I said. "It's a Rubens."

Not only that, but I knew just which Rubens it was; a loving, exuberant portrait of his second wife, Hélène Fourment, painted in 1630. The pink and pretty Hélène had been sixteen when she'd married the gout-ridden but hearty fifty-three-year-old artist, and some of his most joyous and personal works—no question of student participation here—were portraits of her. This was one of the most charming—all flirty eyes, rosy flesh, and scaffolded bosom.

More important, it was without a doubt the Rubens that had been stolen from Clara Gozzi's neo-Gothic Ferrara townhouse twenty-two months earlier.

Chapter 3

So that was how I'd gotten myself involved in the Bologna thefts, at least from Tony Whitehead's perspective, and I suppose he had a point. I thought about it while he went back to Steamer's counter to get us some more wine, and when he came back I had an answer for him.

"I'll make a deal with you."

He brightened. This was the kind of talk he understood.

"I'll brave the Mafia and act as a conduit to the carabinieri, or whatever I'm supposed to do," I said, "if you put that sixty thousand dollars back in the Renaissance and Baroque budget to buy that Boursse."

"No way, Chris. Can't be done. It's too late to reallocate the budget. Absolutely impossible. I couldn't shake loose a dime."

I was familiar with Tony's style. I waited.

"Maybe twenty thousand," he allowed after a few seconds.

I waited. I sipped my wine and watched the sea gulls. What we were negotiating for was enough money to buy a small domestic painting by Esaias Boursse, a nearly unknown seventeenth-century Dutch painter. Most of his work deserves its obscurity, but occasionally he created paintings of stunning beauty. Some of them were believed for decades to be by Vermeer, which gives you some idea.

The one I had in mind was owned by Ugo Scoccimarro, who was on my list of people to see in Italy, inasmuch as he was lending us four paintings for the exhibition. I had seen the Boursse several years before—an interior domestic scene, exquisitely done—and asked Scoccimarro if he would consider selling it. To my surprise he had said yes, as long as it was to a museum. The price was a nominal $60,000.

This year I had finally gotten Tony to include it in our acquisitions budget, only to have the money snatched away for something else a few weeks later. It was a common enough occurrence; I had merely sighed and put it out of my thoughts. But I was reminded of it when I went to Michael Blusher's warehouse. The panel on which the fake van Eyck had been painted was much like the panel on Scoccimarro's Boursse, which I had previously examined and researched thoroughly. (That was how I happened to know all about the marks made by seventeenth-century water-driven frame saws, etc., not that I'd tell Blusher. Or Calvin, for that matter.)