Feint of Art: (2 page)

“In that case, I suggest you keep my name out of it when you go to the board. It won’t help your case if I’m associated with this,” I said, turning my attention back to the exquisite fake of Caravaggio’s
The Magi
. I had to bite my tongue to refrain from praising the forger’s skill in capturing the artist’s unique blend of dramatic shading and rich, almost luminous colors. Upstanding art types usually found it hard to appreciate this kind of talent.

And Ernst Pettigrew was as upstanding as they came. The glamour boy of museum curators, Ernst had twinkling blue eyes, a charming European accent, and a sleek BMW convertible. As nurturing of the fine art in his care as he was of the egos of wealthy benefactors, he had won the coveted position of head curator at San Francisco’s Brock Museum last year at the tender age of thirty-five.

Ernst and I enjoyed a brief fling six years ago, when I was happily working as one of the Brock’s lowly, underpaid restoration interns and he had just arrived from Austria to catalogue the museum’s substantial European art collection. He had broken off our nascent affair when I was “outed” by an old rival as having once been accused of art forgery. My assurances that the charges had been settled out of court placated no one at the Brock, including Ernst. Although I’d been upset by Ernst’s lack of faith, what hurt the most was his public denunciation of me over a mediocre Waldorf salad and a watery iced tea at the annual Brock Frock Talk fashion show fund-raiser.

One does not know true humiliation until one has been shunned by the Ladies Who Lunch.

Ernst was now living in a plush condo in the Marina and dating an emaciated model named Quiana. I knew this because in moments of weakness and self-loathing, I read the
San Francisco Chronicle
’s society pages.

Now my damning assessment of the “Caravaggio” resting on the easel before me might well mean that Ernst’s career was finished. No matter how you looked at it, fifteen million dollars was a lot of money to spend on a fake. And knowing the way museums such as the Brock reacted to these kinds of expensive mistakes, I was certain Ernst’s vilification would be even more public than my own. I didn’t wish that kind of professional humiliation on anyone, scummy ex-boyfriend or not.

“You could try to spread the blame,” I suggested. “Didn’t Sebastian run the usual tests to authenticate the age of the canvas and types of paint used?” Dr. Sebastian Pitts was the overrated and undertalented art authenticator who had ruined my chances in the legitimate art restoration field by digging up those old forgery charges. I would happily help Ernst feed Pitts to the Brock lions.

Nodding distractedly, Ernst walked out of the vault, past a long bank of archival storage drawers, and wordlessly smashed his fist through the wall.

I gawked at the gaping hole, impressed by both his temper and his strength.

“Who painted it?” Ernst demanded, the color mounting in his face as he struggled for control.

“How should I know?” I lied again. Of course I knew. How could I not?

Part of learning how to perpetrate fraud is learning how to recognize it. However, just as it takes true artistic talent to be a world-class forger, the ability to identify another artist’s signature style is more inborn than acquired. And to my grandfather’s delight, I had a real flair for aesthetic profiling.

“We should get her outta here.”

I started at the sound of Dupont’s raspy baritone. Under the spell of the fake Caravaggio I had forgotten that after sneaking me into the building, Dupont, the night custodian, had remained in the corridor as a look-out. My heart pounded. The Brock Museum was spooky in the dead of night. It was spooky in the broad of day, too. Belatedly, I wondered why I had agreed to this midnight assignation in the first place.

Ernst nodded curtly at the stooped, balding janitor, then turned back to me. “Let me secure the Caravaggio in the vault,” he said. “We have to talk.”

“What is there to talk about?”

He gave me a pained look.

“Oh, all right,” I said with a sigh. Normally I wouldn’t indulge an ex-boyfriend like this, but Ernst was staring down the barrel of professional suicide. I glanced at the workroom clock, the one with large black numbers and a ticking second hand that always reminded me of elementary school. 12:30 A.M. “I need coffee,” I said. “Meet me at Grounds for Suspicion, on Fillmore. Twenty minutes?”

Ernst nodded distractedly, staring at his pricey but worthless Caravaggio.

Dupont led the way out of the workroom and through the marble-floored galleries of the European art collection, his grim countenance betraying only his customary dissatisfaction with life. The custodian’s crowded key ring clanked loudly as he unlocked a metal maintenance door tucked behind a gleaming white statue of Apollo. This sculpture was also a forgery, and not a very good one at that, but since it had been sculpted in 137 A.D., nobody was complaining. Funny how bad art plus a millennium or two added up to big money.

I followed Dupont into a labyrinth of relentlessly beige and gray utility corridors. We snaked our way past endless banks of archival drawers and storage lockers, our footsteps ringing on the linoleum, the unnatural silence broken by the occasional hiss of steam pipes. Despite the still-tender humiliation of my unceremonious dismissal six years ago, I breathed a sigh of relief that I was no longer trapped here in the Brock’s vast grid of tunnels, just another timid art mouse in a dead-end maze.

At last we reached the exit to the rear employee parking lot. Dupont tapped in a security code and held the door open for me.

“Thanks, Dupont,” I said brightly. “Nice chatting with you!”

He grunted.

The door slammed shut behind me.

I fled.

 

“Yo! Skinny latte, half the moo!” the pierced and tattooed barrista sang out.

Grounds for Suspicion Café was no more than a five-minute drive from the Brock and, open until two in the morning, it was a hangout for serious caffeine addicts. I ordered a nonfat latte easy on the milk, splurged on a chocolate chip cookie, and settled into what used to be my favorite spot by the greasy front window. When I worked at the museum, a group of us would come here to sip expensive coffee and debate the artistic merits of Cubism versus Expressionism. I regularly scandalized my colleagues by disdaining anything painted later than Picasso’s Blue Period. I mean, really—even as a teenager, Picasso had demonstrated the talent of a Rembrandt, yet he became famous for a few squiggled lines and splashes of color. That was art?

Tonight there were five or six people haunting the café, most, by the look of them, angry young artists and angry young students: sleep-deprived, disgruntled, and dressed tip to toe in black.

I, too, was an artist, frequently sleep-deprived, occasionally disgruntled, and—I glanced down at my jeans, T-shirt, and jacket—yup, dressed in black. But I was not angry. I was my own boss, and my decorative painting business, True/Faux Studios, was finally enjoying the patronage of a steady clientele.

It hadn’t been easy. Following my banishment from the Brock, I briefly considered a career as an adult phone sex operator (for eight dollars an hour and no benefits? no way), flirted with returning to a career of crime (with the possibility of ending up in a Parisian jail cell? no thanks), but instead wound up working a series of dead-end office jobs, surfing cable TV, and generally feeling like a loser. On the afternoon of my twenty-eighth birthday I was watching TV in bed, working my way through yet another pint of Double Fudge Chunk ice cream, when I saw an appallingly perky woman named Kitty apply a simple painting technique to a blank wall. Her efforts resulted in a moderately interesting mottled effect, but a wildly pleased studio audience.

Right then and there I had an epiphany: if the art world shunned me, so be it. I would offer my talents to a more appreciative audience, those creative souls seeking to add unique touches to their cookie-cutter homes and businesses.

My studio specialized in fake—sorry, faux—finishes. I was a natural. I made new surfaces look old, wood look like marble, and plaster look like wood. Gradually I branched out into murals, portraits, and even antique reproductions, always taking pains to ensure that they could not possibly be passed off as Old Masters. Now, at the age of thirty-one, I was the owner of a reasonably successful business, meaning that most months I brought in enough to support myself and to pay my assistant, Mary. It wasn’t a lot, but I managed to keep my head above water.

As long as I dog-paddled furiously.

The bell on the café door tinkled. A rumpled, fiftyish man with a bad case of bed head entered, wearing blue-and-white-striped pajamas and clutching a yapping bichon frise under one arm. He ordered hot chocolate for himself and steamed milk for Snowball, “my bestest fwend in the whole world.” The barrista replied, “He want a scone with that?”

No sign of Ernst. I sighed. Patience was not among my virtues.

Bored with people-watching, I picked up one of San Francisco’s many free newspapers and skimmed the cover story about a local art dealer and bon vivant who had suddenly dropped out of sight. Whether his disappearance was the result of design or foul play, no one seemed to know, but the paper hinted broadly that something nefarious was afoot.

I had to smile. People loved to think of the art world as a mysterious and potentially dangerous milieu. The artistic life was fulfilling, rewarding, and a whole lot of fun, but in my experience, at least, it was distinguished less by drama than by long hours, low pay, and plenty of grunt work. Provided, of course, that I stayed away from my grandfather’s world of fakes, frauds, and felons.

Speaking of which . . . I pondered the fake Caravaggio. A number of intriguing questions presented themselves. What had happened to the real one?
Was
there a real one? A fundamental challenge in the art world was establishing a work’s provenance: documenting when it was created, where, by whom, who had owned it, and what had happened to it over the years. A painting without a provenance was a painting whose authenticity was in doubt, precisely because of talented forgers such as my grandfather.

The Brock’s new masterpiece,
The Magi,
painted in 1597 by the eccentric Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, was one such enigma. In 1637 the painting disappeared from the home of a Florentine nobleman and its whereabouts remained unknown for more than three hundred years.
The Magi
’s sudden reappearance last year on the gallery walls of a flamboyant New York City art collector, Roland Yablonski, was little short of miraculous, and had been the talk of the art world. The Italian government initiated a lawsuit to repatriate the masterpiece, but after a lengthy international court battle, Yablonski’s claim was upheld, whereupon he promptly sold
The Magi
to the Brock Museum for an amount rumored to be in excess of fifteen million dollars. With its penchant for understatement, the Brock had immediately announced that its newest masterpiece would be unveiled in March at a gala reception, to which the City’s movers and shakers had already received gilt-edged invitations.

Mine had apparently been lost in the mail.

Thinking about the Brock made my head ache, so I flipped through the paper until I found my favorite column, “Advice from the Sexpert.” I was pondering the existence of what the Sexpert called “furries”—people who liked to have sex while dressed in full-body animal costumes—and trying not to conjure a mental image of that when I heard the barrista call out, “Last round.” Glancing up, I saw that Snowball and his human friend had departed and only two of the Angry Ones remained. The ticking hands of the Elvis clock over the register indicated that forty minutes had passed.

Had I been stood up?

Outside, Fillmore Street was shrouded in darkness. The night was full of the sounds of the city. A faraway garbage truck labored noisily. A diminutive man in a baseball cap shouted what sounded like abuse in an unidentified Asian language. Sirens screamed in the distance. The keening of a car alarm was abruptly silenced.

More sirens.

A lot of sirens.

Where the hell was Ernst?

I fumbled through my bag until I found my tattered address book, an ancient one full of arrows and cross-cuts. My father kept trying to talk me into getting a Personal Data Assistant, but I resisted, believing that the solution to my lack of organization probably involved therapy, not another electronic gadget. Since I could scarcely remember to write numbers down on something that stood a reasonable chance of not being run through the washing machine, I figured the odds of my remembering to input data into a PDA were somewhere between zero and zilch.

Fishing around in my bag some more, I found four quarters, a dime, and a Canadian nickel. I owned a cell phone but usually forgot to bring it with me, or else neglected to recharge it, which meant that most of the time I didn’t have it when I needed it, or if I did have it, it didn’t work. Hoping that Ernst was better about these things, I went to the pay phone and called his cellular. Five rings and voice mail. I dialed the Brock’s switchboard and punched in Ernst’s office extension. Maybe he had decided to finish up some paperwork and fallen asleep at his desk. Or something.

No answer.

The sirens were now so close that the barrista and the remaining Angry Ones were crowding the front window, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on and speculating with poorly concealed delight about what might be happening.

I could join them and speculate. I could waste more money calling Ernst. Or better yet, I could drive back to the museum and investigate.

A few minutes later everything looked peaceful as I approached the Brock’s imposing granite façade. But when I turned the corner to park near the rear employee entrance I counted a dozen police cars, a paramedic unit, two fire trucks, and an ambulance, all with lights flashing. This was not a good sign.