Feint of Art: (5 page)

After spending a few minutes chatting about the evils of property ownership, the deplorable lack of rent control in a city that seemed determined to run the hardworking poor out of town, and whether one really could tell the difference between VHS and DVD when viewed on a television set manufactured in 1978, we decided we had all better get to work.

I thought it best not to mention the previous night’s incident at the Brock, since the last thing I needed right now was one Goth and one Bosnian bodyguard. As soon as Pete trotted off to his warehouse to receive a shipment of stained glass from Germany, I called Ernst again and left messages on both his cell phone and his office numbers. I also tried looking Anton up in the phone book; it had been years since I had been in his San Francisco studio. To my surprise, there were several Woznikowiczes in the directory, but none was an Anton. I checked the Yellow Pages. There was no professional listing for him under “Art Restoration,” either.

Impatiently I decided that any further sleuthing would have to wait until after Mary and I finished up a project for Linda Fairbanks, an interior designer who wanted “old, aged, interesting but not crumbly” garden ornaments for a client’s conservatory without—surprise!—paying for real ones. We had spent most of last week beating the mass-produced ornaments with hammers and bunches of keys, dousing them with acid, soaking them in tea baths, rubbing them with leaves, and splattering them with pigment suspended in a translucent oil glaze. The cheap cement garden cherubs and gnomes, a birdbath, and a small fountain now looked old, graceful, and expensive.

It had been a stretch with the gnomes.

Three hours later, Linda arrived on schedule and practically swooned with pleasure at our work. So many of the designers I knew were swooners that I figured it had to be a required course in design school. I wasn’t much of a swooner myself, especially where concrete garden gnomes were concerned. Neither was Mary, who had explained to me, “Norwegians don’t swoon. Swoon in a snowbank and see how long you last.” But Linda was a well-respected designer with a large and affluent clientele, and as such she was my entrée to the kind of people who had a spare $250,000 to decorate the new town house. Best of all, Linda paid her bills on time and without haggling, so I was not above a little pandering.

Mary and I bundled the figures in bubble wrap and carried them, armful by heavy armful, carefully down the stairs. The building had no elevator, and after several trips lugging cement garden ornaments, I cursed my second-floor location. We loaded up Linda’s silver SUV and sent her happily on her way, the gnomes waving bye-bye through the rear window. As Mary and I stood in the sunshine stretching our tired muscles, I made a mental note to cite the lack of an elevator in my negotiations with the new landlord.

Caught up in my strategizing, I almost backed into a dainty, well-dressed man with pronounced frown lines. I recognized him immediately, and not only because of his signature red bow tie. Anthony Brazil was one of San Francisco’s foremost gallery owners, as well as one of my father’s old friends. For a number of reasons, mostly having to do with my grandfather, Brazil had rarely deigned to speak to me over the years and had certainly never sought me out. For the second time that day I was conscious of my less-than-elegant attire. To add to the general louche atmosphere, by now I was sweaty and grimy to boot. I wiped my hands gracelessly on the seat of my overalls and stuck out my right one. He offered his after a moment’s hesitation, shifting a large art portfolio from one hand to the other.

“What brings you to this neighborhood, Mr. Brazil?” I asked, eyeing the portfolio.

“Annie. It has been a while. Might I speak with you”—he glanced at Mary, who was openly eavesdropping—“in private?”

“No sweat, sweet cheeks,” Mary piped up. “I can take a hint.” She turned and loped off toward the bakery on the ground floor of our building.

I had planned to track down Anton after Linda Fairbanks left, but Brazil seemed so agitated that I took pity on him and led the way upstairs.

He followed, puffing slightly, then halted in my doorway and took in the scene: the wide wooden plank floor and exposed brick walls; the inviting sitting area with the faux fireplace I had painted on the wall; the skylights high overhead; the half-dead ficus tree; the jumble of easels, shelves of art supplies, and worktables piled with paintings and pictures and artifacts at various stages of completion; the smell of linseed oil and turpentine. I loved my studio, and most of my clients were thrilled to get a peek at a working artist’s space. Brazil, in contrast, appeared decidedly underwhelmed.

“So what can I help you with?” I asked, annoyed.

“I spoke with your father recently, Annie. Needless to say, we are all counting on you to stifle your grandfather’s most recent writing project . . .” He trailed off, and I remained silent, not wanting to encourage him in this particular line of thinking. “Anyway, I happened to mention a problem I was having, and your father recommended you, both for your talent and for your discretion.”

I tried to keep the surprise off my face. I loved my father and he loved me, but our relationship was strained by history and temperament. It was hard to imagine him recommending me to anyone, for anything. “Really,” I managed.

“I wonder if I might prevail upon you to examine some drawings that were lent to a—colleague. I’d like your opinion as to whether they are genuine. This is a very delicate matter—”

I held up my hand. When it came to appraising possible forgeries, it was best not to know the particulars. “Let’s see the drawings, shall we?”

I led Anthony to the worktable near the window, cleared a space, and spread out a clean cloth. I opened the portfolio carefully, feeling a familiar tingle of excitement.

There were ten sketches, sepia-toned studies of heads, whole seminude figures, and clouds of drapery. I’d seen thousands of such things. Sketches were to artists what rough drafts were to writers. For every painting executed, there might be dozens or even hundreds of preliminary drawings, careful studies of one aspect of the final painting: a hand, a head, a sleeve. Before the invention of photography, a quick sketch was also the only way to capture the details of a live scene for replication in the studio. Some of the Old Masters were more prolific sketchers than others, but all left at least some drawings. The ravages of fire, humidity, insects, and human carelessness meant, however, that only a small percentage had survived the passage of time.

As I knew only too well, much of the fraud perpetrated in the world of Old Master drawings was not out-and-out copying, for example, a pen-and-ink replica of a known Michelangelo sketch for the Sistine Chapel’s
The Creation of Adam.
Instead, most forgers drew sketches of new subjects in the
style
of a particular artist. This occurred for several reasons. Most important, artists rarely duplicated sketches, so forgery was to be suspected if two identical drawings turned up. Second, it was much easier for a forger to replicate an artist’s technique in a new sketch than it was to copy the exact lengths of lines and flow of ink of a known sketch.

Finally, an artist might draw thousands of sketches in the course of a lifetime, not all of which would have been catalogued by art dealers or art historians. This meant that the discovery of an unknown Leonardo da Vinci drawing in Great-aunt Nellie’s attic, while not likely, was plausible, and the all-important provenance might be credibly established if it were documented that Great-aunt Nellie had once made a trip to Florence, where she’d bought some old drawings.

Sketches were also harder to authenticate than paintings, whose pigments, canvas, and occasional stray brush hairs could be sampled and tested for age. And because sketches were perfunctory by nature, they often revealed less of their creator’s personality than paintings, which were labored over for months or years. Still, to a trained and discerning eye every stroke of an artist’s pen or pencil was as individual as a signature. This is why I felt certain that none of the drawings fanned out before me matched the character of the artists who were supposed to have drawn them.

What’s more, because the sketches were attributed to such well-known artists as Gianfrancesco Penni, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Peter Brueghel the Elder, I had the feeling they were that rarity in the world of art fraud: forgeries of known drawings. If I was right, these drawings were a pile of worthless fakes.

Loath to break the news to Brazil, who was pacing agitatedly behind me, I studied the drawings more closely to confirm my suspicions. At first glance the paper looked old enough, brown and brittle along the edges, with scattered wormholes and a few dark smudges marring the finish. Two of the drawings had been torn and repaired in the traditional manner, with rice paper glued to the back of the original like a patch. The watermarks appeared to be genuine. All in all, the forgeries were good enough to pass a casual inspection.

But when I placed the sketches on the light table and examined them under a magnifying glass, I confirmed that they were recent forgeries. Modern paper, made from wood pulp by machines, has an obvious “grain,” which means that the paper fibers bend in a single direction. Paper made from linen in the traditional manner—the method in use before the nineteenth century—was shaken in the mold, causing the fibers to bend in many directions. Smart forgers got around this problem by scavenging paper from the endplates of antiquarian books, the backs of print mounts, or by drawing over bad—but genuinely old—sketches.

I also studied the watermarks. True watermarks exhibited fine, hatched lines caused when a wire was pressed into the paper as it was shaped by the mold. Fake watermarks—such as the ones I saw before me—mimicked this process with an application of colorless oil or were scratched into the paper with a sharp blade.

I sat back. These were the mistakes of an amateur—or those of a pro in a great big hurry. I was surprised that Brazil had not known how to verify this for himself. If all art dealers were schooled in the basics of forgery, it would save the art world a lot of grief.

What bothered me most, though, was not that these sketches were forgeries. What really troubled me was that all these sketches had been drawn by the same hand.

And, for the second time in two days, I was pretty sure I recognized that hand.

“Who did you say you lent these drawings to?” I asked Brazil, who was now lurking on the other side of the light table.

He hesitated. I raised an eyebrow.

“Harlan Coombs,” he muttered.

“
The
Harlan Coombs?”

“Is there more than one?” Brazil replied tartly.

Harlan Coombs was the dealer I had read about last night at the café. The one who was missing. According to the article, he was the perfect San Francisco art dealer: open and friendly, laid-back yet knowledgeable. In the past few years he had made himself and his vendors a pile of money selling expensive artwork to newly minted computer millionaires.

“I thought he’d disappeared,” I said stupidly, before realizing what this meant. Coombs must have fled with the original drawings and sent Brazil these forgeries in their place.

In brief: Brazil had been royally screwed.

He must have read my mind, because he looked even more constipated than when he’d arrived. “Yes,” he said stiffly. “He has indeed . . . disappeared.”

In many ways, the art world was a throwback to the olden days when a dealer’s reputation was all-important and a gentleman’s word was a point of pride. Brazil would not have asked for collateral from Coombs; it would not have been considered necessary. But, as a result, Brazil was now out big money and his reputation was going to take a hit. He was probably keeping the whole thing quiet, hoping to find a solution before anyone realized he’d been duped.

“I’m sorry, Anthony,” I said. I didn’t like the man, but he was obviously suffering. “These are, indeed, forgeries. Not even very good ones. Not that it matters,” I added hastily.

“I see,” he murmured, and moved to sit heavily on my velvet sofa. His face had lost its customary pink hue.

I switched off the light table and carefully replaced the forged drawings in the portfolio before going to the kitchen area and pouring two glasses of an inexpensive Merlot from my emergency wine stash. Anthony’s natty self-assurance seemed to have deserted him, and he sagged as if he’d lost his stuffing. I sat in silence, savoring the warmth of the wine while I waited for him to gather himself.

Brazil took a sip and grimaced. Here in wine-soaked California, I always insisted, it was possible to find bottles of wine under seven dollars that were still drinkable. Apparently Brazil disagreed.

He set his nearly full glass on the wicker trunk, where it wobbled ominously. “I had no reason to doubt him, you know,” Anthony said, wiping his face with a manicured hand. “Harlan and I have done business for years. Years! All of us sell to him. My God! This is unprecedented, calamitous, ruinous!” He tossed his silvered head melodramatically.

I felt for him, but after last night’s events my sympathy was muted. We were talking forged drawings here, not life and death. On the other hand, I had just identified two major forgery jobs in as many days, which seemed more than a little coincidental. “I would like your help, Annie,” he said confidentially. “This is your world. Perhaps you could find Harlan Coombs or the drawings.”

My world indeed,
I thought waspishly. Geez, make a little splash in the world of art forgery at the age of sixteen, and people couldn’t stop bringing it up.

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that world anymore,” I began. “I—”

“I am not insinuating that you are in any way still involved with your grandfather’s, shall we say, special occupation?” he said with an air of sincerity. I wasn’t buying it. “But you
are
in contact with him, and perhaps some of his friends, yes?”