Circles of Confusion (17 page)

Her carriage turned out to be a long black limousine, idling at the curb. A uniformed driver leaned against it, wearing a black cap on his short-cropped orange hair. He held the door as Troy handed her inside and then slid next to her on the leather seat. A fine tremble washed over her as the driver got inside.

"Are you cold? I'll ask John to turn up the heat."

Troy leaned forward to tap on the glass, but Claire laid a hand on his arm. "I'm not cold. Just a little nervous."

"Nervous? Why?" His eyes were guileless, as if he really didn't see the incongruity of them sitting side by side.

"This isn't the kind of thing I normally wear." She fingered the slippery fabric of the dress. 'And this isn't the kind of car I normally ride in. If I were at home right now, I would just be finishing work." The state's list of vulgar words, her REJECTED stamp, the day's highlight the peanut butter cup cajoled from the secretary's secret stash—all that seemed to belong to someone else. Outside her tinted window, the muffled world slid by. "My job's so boring. Your work is much more glamorous."

Troy snorted. "Glamorous? All day, every day, I deal with people who treat me with much less respect than they would a waiter. If your family name didn't appear on Mrs. Astor's List of the Four Hundred, or if you can't lay claim to a relative who's a prince or at least a baron, then you simply don't matter to them." In the enfolding darkness of the car, Claire heard the edge of bitterness in his voice. "They'll come into Avery's with something beautiful—or half a dozen somethings—but they have no appreciation for what they have. They want to get rid of a Tintoretto because it no longer matches their loveseat. Or they need a little cash because they've overspent again, so they bring in an ancestral portrait that's been in their family for three hundred years and hope it will fetch a few hundred thousand. Or they gather up everything they have on their walls, from Old Masters to paintings of big-eyed children, and haul it all in. It s all the same to them—a piece of canvas held in a frame."

"I can see where that would be really frustrating," Claire agreed, thinking Troy’s frustrations still sounded glamorous. The limousine pulled up outside the restaurant and Claire waited for someone to open her door as if she had been born to this life.

Everything in Cri du Coeur was white and gold—from the starched white damask tablecloths to the gold-armed chandeliers ending in frosted white glass tulips. Claire was relieved to see that her dress, which had looked so over the top in the hotel lobby, fit right in here. With sidelong glances, Claire appraised the women they passed as the maitre d' escorted them to their table. One woman wore a dark suit with a fluidly draped jacket and a skirt briefer than Claire's running shorts. Another woman sported black leather pants topped with a jacket made of curly white fake fur. A third with cropped red hair wore a floor-length electric blue dress, complete with a small train that she had looped over the back of her chair.

In the center of the room was a table that held a group of laughing people, including an actor famous for his rugged face and turquoise blue eyes. Claire was shocked when he gave her a quick once-over and a smile! It was as if she had stepped onto a movie set or into a particularly vivid dream. She was so befuddled that she didn't notice the maitre d' pulling out her chair and sat down instead in the one opposite. Troy slid into the offered chair as smoothly as if he had expected it. Claire blushed, hoping no one had seen her faux pas. The nearest person, a woman in a green jacket with straight black hair cut in a way that made Claire think of Cleopatra, was completely absorbed in her own conversation.

Troy slid the menu from her hands. "I'll order for us both, if you'd like." What Claire had glimpsed of the prices, even in elaborate calligraphy, had seemed outrageous. A cup of coffee was eleven dollars! For that you should get lifetime refills.

Despite its name, Cri du Coeur didn't serve purely French food, but a range of items that spanned the globe. For starters, they shared a plate of a half-dozen Cajun-style oysters, accompanied by a bottle of white wine. The flavors of sea and spice unfurled in Claire's mouth.

"I've been thinking about your painting," Troy said as he refilled her glass. "Clearly it's a forgery, but who really painted it?"

After her afternoon with Dante, Claire felt on firmer ground challenging Troy's opinion. "How could you tell right away that it was a forgery?"

"I knew it from the second you peeled back that—what was that, anyway? Bubble wrap? There are two ways to uncover a forgery. One's scientific. If I were a scientist, I could put your painting under, say, an optical emission spectrograph pigment analyzer, and I'm sure the results would allow me to be able to point to a graph and tell you that your painting couldn't have been painted by Vermeer. But the other way, the way I'm paid to use, is the product of a trained eye. Or maybe it's in the gut. I actually felt nauseous when I first saw your painting."

Claire, the woman with a dozen dictionaries lined up across her desk at work, couldn't resist a chance to show off that she too knew something. "You mean you felt nauseated. If you're nauseous, it means you cause nausea."

Troy narrowed his eyes for a split second, then shook his head and laughed. "All right, I felt nauseated. Whatever. I just knew. And that can't be taught. It's aesthetics. When I look at a painting I evaluate it subconsciously. Every painter has a dozen little personal mannerisms, from the way he loaded his brush with paint to the light he liked to work in. Even if a forgery tries to copy something exactly, he can't. Because he is copying, not creating, whatever he produces lacks the freedom of an original. Five years ago, Avery's went against my advice and bought a painting. It was supposedly a masterpiece, a Botticelli showing an angel hovering over the Madonna and the Christ Child. The first time I saw it I knew it was wrong. But they bought it, and it went under the hammer and sold for a very good price."

"Then what happened?" Claire took a sip of her second glass of wine. Or was it her third?

"A year later, they were forced to buy it back, very quietly. An analysis of the paint had turned up Prussian blue—which wasn't invented until 1704. That's almost three hundred years too late." Troy suddenly shook his head. Then he leaned forward to squeeze her hand. "I'm sorry! I've been lecturing, not having a conversation."

"No, no, I'm really interested." Claire took another sip of wine. It had been years since she had had more than two glasses of anything, but she was finding she liked the way it enhanced what already seemed a waking dream. In a few more days she would be back at work rejecting 6ULDV8 for the umpteenth time, but for now she planned on enjoying herself.

The waiter cleared their plates and brought the next course, a surprisingly delicate white bean soup. After Troy had an animated conversation with the sommelier, all about noses and legs, another bottle of wine was brought to the table, tasted and approved of. The woman at the table opposite Claire unbuttoned yet another inch of her lime-green jacket. She was clearly not wearing anything underneath it, and she laughed and swished her black hair, as shiny as patent leather, while she toyed with the collar.

Troy continued. "So the question is—if Vermeer didn't paint your Vermeer, then who did? And I'm beginning to wonder if you might have a real curiosity on your hands—a 'Vermeer' painted by Han Van Meegeren. Didn't you say that you thought your aunt acquired this painting during World War II?" He pronounced it "awnt" the way only rich people did in Portland.

"As far as I can tell, she got it during the war, put it under her bed, and then left it there. Who was Van Mee—, Van Meeg—?" Her tongue stumbled over the unfamiliar name.

Over the soup, Troy told Claire the story of Han van Meegeren, a 1930s Dutch painter whose own work had fallen out of fashion with the critics. Angry at their inability to recognize his genius, he had turned his talents to forgery—specifically seventeenth-century Dutch masterpieces. He was successful beyond his wildest flights of fancy. The same critics who had once called his own paintings shallow and sentimental now greeted the discovery of one after another of Van Meegeren's newly created "Vermeers" with reverence.

Troy explained the painstaking steps Van Meegeren took to make sure his paintings would meet all academic and scientific tests. First, Van Meegeren needed genuinely old canvases, stretched on old wood stretchers and held in place with 300-year-old tacks. So he bought minor seventeenth-century paintings at second-rate antique stores and then scraped off the images. To ensure the authenticity of the smallest details in the backgrounds of his paintings, he also bought seventeenth-century household objects: pewter plates, candlesticks, fabrics, jugs.

But by choosing Vermeer, Troy explained, Van Meegeren had set himself a puzzle. Vermeer was famous for his blues, yellows and whites. Even Van Gogh had praised Vermeer's use of those colors. Unfortunately for Van Meegeren, they were precisely the three colors whose manufacture had changed the most over three centuries. Van Meegeren knew he couldn't just go out and buy tubes of paint, because tiny samples would be put under a microscope and give the game away immediately. He had to make his own paint the way painters did centuries before—-from plants, resins and minerals. To get one special shade of blue Vermeer was known for, Van Meegeren was forced to spend thousands of dollars on lapis lazuli and then grind the semiprecious stone by hand, as Vermeer had done. If he had ground it mechanically, the microscope would have revealed that all the paint particles were the same size.

The main course arrived—veal in some kind of brown sauce the waiter had called a reduction, accompanied by garlic-infused potatoes. It tasted a lot like potatoes and gravy to Claire. Troy barely touched it before he put his fork down and continued his explanation of Van Meegeren's clever approach to forgery.

Van Meegeren knew that an occasional bristle from his paintbrush would be left in the paint and thus might be lifted out and examined. So he made his own paintbrushes from badger hair shaving brushes, because Vermeer painted only with badger hair brushes.

All these measures were only just the beginning. Van Meegeren also had to find a way to make the paint prematurely hard, because oil paint normally took a century to dry completely. New synthetic chemicals were just coming on the market, and he found one that would make the paint dry quickly—but would still soften at the touch of mineral alcohol, the standard test to reveal a true Old Master.

Van Meegeren spent months painting his first "Vermeer," and then when he finished he baked it in a specially constructed oven to help dry and crack the paint. He knew it was impossible for a 300- year-old painting to be in perfect condition, so as a final step, he damaged the canvas with a number of unimportant abrasions and one small tear. Then he carried out some deliberately bumbling repairs before tacking the canvas onto the wood of the old stretcher, using the same old tacks. His last step was to plant the painting where it could be "discovered" by an eager critic.

Claire tried to imagine this man, this Van Meegeren, painting the face of the woman in her painting, not 350 years ago but 50. She said, "All that must have taken him years. There must have been a lot of trial and error and starting over again. How or why did he invest so much time and money when he had no idea if in the end people would believe they were really Vermeers?"

"He'd had some experience, though. When he was in art school, one of his professors believed the only good ways were the old ways, so he had taught all his students to paint using the same methods the Old Masters had. And when Van Meegeren first began to create his forgeries, he sold some of the less believable forgeries to unscrupulous dealers who didn't mind looking the other way."

"So you think the painting I have is a Van—fake by this man?" The waiter had brought their fourth course and a third bottle of wine, and Claire's lips were going numb. With great care, she sank her fork into the thin sheet of Parmesan cheese that lay on top of her artichoke and avocado salad. The woman at the next table got up to answer a tiny cell phone she drew from her purse. The entire dining room took notice, their eyes on the leopardskin shorts and the legs that unfolded endlessly from beneath the table.

Troy nodded. "There's a good chance it could be. His early Vermeer forgeries were genre paintings, paintings of—"

"—the upper middle class's daily life," Claire interrupted, remembering what Dante had told her.

Troy shot her a curious look before continuing. "Like your painting, Van Meegeren's first forgeries were clearly based on other well- known works by Vermeer. But then he took a gamble. He knew that if it paid off he would not only get revenge against those critics who had rejected him, but that he would also become very, very rich."

Troy explained that art historians had long speculated that in his youth Vermeer might have spent some time painting in Italy. So Van Meegeren set out to create a Vermeer like no one had seen before— a religious Vermeer with Italian overtones.

"Ironically, twenty years later a religious painting that everyone had thought was Italian turned out to be a Vermeer. And it's nearly an exact copy of a painting by a Florentine artist. So does that make Vermeer a forger? The only difference between what Van Meegeren and Vermeer did is that Vermeer signed the imitation with his own name." Troy seemed completely alive, green eyes snapping, hands cutting through the air. Claire could tell he admired the forger's cleverness. "Now all Van Meegeren needed to do was to completely take in one critic—in this case a half-blind old guy in his eighties. Once he had reeled him in, the critic did all the work to convince the rest of the world. An unknown masterwork by Vermeer had been found—by his one and only connoisseur's eye. A Dutch museum bought it for an incredible sum, and hundreds of thousands of people lined up in the streets to see it. All this time, Van Meegeren was busy making more paintings while living the high life on the Riviera—and developing a taste for cocaine."