Circles of Confusion (13 page)

"Then if it has all those things, how do you know it isn't a Vermeer?"

"It is good to find parallels. But there are wholesale borrowings here, just changed a bit. Vermeer already painted something very similar to this scene, called Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window. And the way she looks at you is lifted straight from one of his most famous paintings, Girl with a Pearl Earring."

Claire looked down at the woman's liquid eyes. They refused to become a flat dead layer of paint on canvas. "But don't painters have certain mannerisms or ways of doing things that would show up in painting after painting?"

"That's a very good question. And you are absolutely correct. A good forger takes advantage of that. You see, he doesn't copy a work in toto. Instead, he might take tracing paper and sketch out four or five elements of different paintings of, say, Rembrandt, and then mix them together. The result is a copy that looks like the real thing. And that's what our friend has done here. And not that long ago. I'd guess somewhere in the last hundred years, when the market for Vermeers began to improve. Certainly it's not the three hundred and fifty it would need to be to be a real Vermeer."

"But the man I showed it to in Portland said it was very old. He said those tiny cracks only happen in old paintings."

"As paint dries over many years, it does crack like this. But craquelure can be faked fairly easily."

Claire remembered the way a corner of the painting had glowed under a black light. "What about the repainting? Doesn't that mean it has to be old? Why would someone bother to patch up a brand- new painting?"

"An experienced forger knows that a painting doesn't go through three centuries unscathed. So he takes what he has created, finds a place that won't matter much if it's ripped or torn—like the background—damages it and then repairs it. His little sacrifice makes it that much more likely that people will be fooled."

"But how can you just look at it and tell that it's not a real Vermeer?" Claire didn't understand why she was so disappointed, but she was. When she looked at the painting, she had imagined its creator painting his true love, not some back-alley forger out to make a quick buck.

"Do you know why they employ me here?" The question was rhetorical, and Troy's gaze was unfocused, looking at something he saw with his mind's eye. "For my aesthetic sense. I am paid to see, and to communicate to others what I see. It's more than education, more than experience. Sometimes I think you have to be born with it. I know when something is accomplished or merely workmanlike. I can look at a painting and feel who painted it. Was it from the master or an apprentice? Or did a master lay down the main strokes and then leave someone else to fill it in? Or is it simply a daub done by a nobody aping his betters?" He turned his green eyes to Claire again. "Fakes lack soul. Like this painting. It is simply not alive."

Claire dropped her gaze to the painting, to the woman who held unknown words in her hands. Were they a lover's praises or his rejection? Did they bring news of a fortune or the sorrow of a death? "How do you know you're right if all you're going on is a feeling?"

Instead of being offended, Troy looked thoughtful. "It's much more than that. It's difficult to explain to someone who hasn't spent the last fifteen years learning how to truly see." Troy looked intently at the painting, then traced his gloved hand in the air above the woman's body. "Here. Look at the folds of her dress. They're unnaturally stiff. And her hands lack Vermeer's delicacy. The whole thing simply rings false. You could find better examples of Vermeer in Dutch airport souvenir shops."

Claire winced. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sorry to disappoint vou. Frankly, I spend a lot of my time looking at junk. People believe in miracles, that they have priceless items which just happen to be lying around in the attic. They've read about how someone found the draft of George Washington's inaugural address under a sofa, or heard about the million-dollar fourteenth-century wine jug someone was using as an umbrella stand. But of course that's why the media loves those stories— because they are so rare."

Claire turned from Troy's intense green gaze, looked down again at the woman who seemed caught in time. "I really didn't bring her here wanting money. I just wanted know who she was, who painted her, what he was thinking about when he did. She just seemed so, so—so real somehow. Like she could step out of the boundaries of the frame."

Troy gave her a smile that somehow connected them, breaking through the cool reserve he wore every bit as much as his expensive suit. "Very poetically put." He lifted the painting from the table. "This certainly isn't something Avery's would be interested in offering at auction. It's too clearly a knockoff. But if you leave it with me I might be able to get some money for it through a private sale as a curiosity."

The young woman's painted eyes still steadily returned Claire's gaze. "No, that's all right," Claire said, surprising herself. She realized she didn't care who had created the painting or when. Despite what Troy said, the woman was alive to Claire. The secret of her letter still intrigued her. And if the painting ended up over Charlie's fireplace instead of in a museum, would that really matter?

"Are you certain? I'd hate to see you come all the way to New York and then have nothing to show for it. I might"—Troy hesitated—

"I might be able to get as much as five or ten thousand for it."

Given her state salary, five or ten thousand sounded like a lot of money. Claire was tempted until she looked back down at the painting. "No, no, I want to keep it. Even if it's a fake, there's something about it—about her—that I really like."

For the briefest instant, Troy's lips seemed to tighten, but then his face relaxed into a smile and he nodded. "Think about what I've said. Give me the number where you're staying, and I'll ask around a bit before you leave New York. Who knows, there may be heightened interest because of the show last year."

STAY 2ND

In the shelter of Avery's doorway, Claire took the page from the Guide to Manhattan. She was only about two dozen blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Aware of the painting bouncing lightly against her back with each step, she set off.

In some ways, Claire was relieved that she didn't have to deal with all the complications that would have ensued if Troy had said the painting were real. Now it was simply hers to enjoy. When she had first seen it, its beauty had stolen her breath. If it were an imitation of something else, did that make it less beautiful?

And could only an original be beautiful? Were there degrees of falsehood? Was something more or less of a fake—and thus more or less beautiful—if it wasn't an exact copy but made up of familiar elements combined in new ways? Although perhaps to a trained eye her painting wasn't beautiful at all. Troy had talked about a stiffness, a lack of life, a falseness, all things that she had been unable to detect but that he had seen as clearly as he had seen Claire—if not more clearly.

Claire's thoughts kept coming back to Troy. She had never met anyone like him before—smart, sophisticated, beautiful in away that was entirely masculine. Mis kind couldn't exist in Portland, or probably anywhere outside New York City. Everything, from the way Troy made his living to the way he dressed, was in sharp contrast to Evan. Evan cared little for art. The walls of his house were nearly bare. His state-of-the-art security system was there to protect his computer and stereo system, and because it was statistically cost-effective.

She rounded the corner onto 81st Street. Ahead of her lay the sprawling stone edifice of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each entrance door was bracketed by pairs of fluted pillars that dwarfed the people clustered on the sweeping outdoor staircase. Claire's heart gave a little bounce, reminding her that despite the disappointment of the painting, she was here in New York City, doing just fine on her own, thank you, and about to enter a place she had been reading about for years.

Inside the magnificent openness of the Great Hall a grade school class in blue plaid uniforms raced around her, testing the acoustics. The space was big enough to muffle even their squeals. After checking her jacket and backpack, she climbed the broad central stairway that led to the rooms of European paintings. She walked quickly past the canvases, her eyes skimming over portraits, allegories, religious subjects. Troy had mentioned that the Met had several Vermeers and she wanted to see what the person who had painted—or copied—her painting had been trying to imitate. His careful way of seeing things must have rubbed off, for Claire found herself noticing the colors in each painting and how the paint itself had been applied, sometimes in tiny dabs, sometimes in broad daubs a quarter-inch thick.

The rooms of the gallery flowed from one to the next, each with white painted walls and pale hardwood floors that showed no sign of the thousands of feet that must have scuffed over them. Claire passed couples and an occasional knot of people speaking softly in what she guessed was Japanese, German, French, Italian. For the most part, though, the Met was relatively uncrowded on a Thursday afternoon in October.

Then she saw it. A painting, only a little more than a foot square, nearly lost amid the much larger ones that surrounded it.

In the painting, a young woman, evidently asleep, sat at a table. Her eyes were closed and her head rested on one hand. Her black hair was drawn back, emphasizing the widow's peak that accented her pale oval face. Claire's heart skidded. The table in front of the woman was covered with a bunched oriental carpet in deep shades of red and blue and cream. On top of the carpet rested a bowl of fruit and a white curving jug with a brass top. She had seen both the carpet and the jug before. They were identical to the ones in the little painting in the backpack she had checked downstairs.

Claire moved closer. On the right side of the painting, part of a chair was visible, with brass buttons on its dark back and lions' heads at the tops of the posts. The chair, too, was a mate to the one in Aunt Cady's painting.

Her gaze dropped to the inscription under the painting. "Girl Asleep at a Table," c. 1657, oil on canvas, Jan Vermeer, Dutch, 1632—1675. Bequest of Benjamin Altman. She was a foot away from the real thing, but still, despite what Troy had said, she couldn't tell the difference between this painting and the one she had checked downstairs.

"Hmmm." It wasn't until the man walking by her stopped that Claire realized she had made a sound in the back of her throat. Before turning his dark eyes to the painting, he offered her a smile. One of his teeth had been broken and then mended with a flash of white. With his dark curly hair and a gold hoop in one ear, he looked like a pirate, only one dressed in an old Pendleton instead of a white ruffled shirt. When he spoke, he had the flattened vowels of a native New Yorker.

"Some people say she's a still life masquerading as a portrait. That she's simply an excuse for painting light and color."

Claire considered the woman in the painting. Even in repose, her face contained an inner radiance. "Are you saying she doesn't seem real? To me she looks like she could open her eyes at any second." Claire could almost see the dark blue eyes (somehow she knew they were blue) regarding them calmly.

"Maybe you're right. Maybe I've seen her too often to really see her." His dark eyes were level with Claire's. He shook her hand with one that was cool and slightly callused. "Dante Bonner."

"Claire. Claire Montrose. Are you an artist?"

"Not in the same class as Vermeer. But I majored in art history at college."

Which meant she had glibly offered her opinion to a man who had spent years studying painters. "I'm really interested in Vermeer, but I don't know much about him."

"There's not a lot to know. He died young and penniless in Delft, leaving eleven children. He owed such a huge bill to the baker that after his death it had to be paid in paintings. That's about it. Did he always live in Delft? Where did he learn to paint? Nobody knows. Nobody even knows what this painting means. Some experts think this woman is drunk, others that she's sleeping. Some people insist that she is the lady of the house. Or no, that she's a maid stealing a siesta. And some people say the woman is depressed because she has lost at love."

"Sometimes a cigar is simply a cigar," Claire said, happy that she had thought of something halfway intelligent to say. "You do know a lot about Vermeer."

"Unfortunately, I've just told you about everything there is to know. No one even knows how many paintings he painted."

"Does the Met have any more?" She felt sophisticated, casually referring to the museum in the diminutive.

"Four more, which is an amazing number when you consider we know of fewer than forty that he painted. Would you like me to show them to you?"

She nodded, then allowed herself a small private smile. For the second time in as many hours, Claire was following a gorgeous man.

Dante's first stop was a much larger painting. It showed a woman in a white dress posed theatrically, her foot resting on a globe. Behind her was a painting of Christ on the cross. Claire saw nothing in this painting that reminded her of the one she had in her backpack downstairs, which pointed out just how little she knew about art.

Dante said, "I'll start with the Vermeer I like the least. It's called Allegory of the Faith, and was probably a commissioned painting. Pretty much everything in the painting is a symbol."