Rembrandt's Ghost (3 page)

In other words, not the type who’d have a Dutch Master from the seventeenth century under his arm. The tone in Doris’s voice was dismissive. She was passing a nuisance on to Finn.

“He’s American?”

“No, British. He was very insistent. Asked to see Mr. DePanay-Cottrell, but I informed him that you’d have to do, Miss Ryan. Deal with him please.” Doris hung up without giving her a chance to respond. The name of the university on the man’s sweatshirt had sent him in Finn’s direction. She quickly checked the computer inventory to see if Steen’s name appeared. It did. A small scene of villagers dancing around a Maypole had made a hammer price of slightly less than a million pounds sterling, well over a million dollars U.S. Jan Steen had always been a blue-chip artist, even in his own lifetime.

Two minutes later a figure appeared in the doorway of her office. Just as Doris had described:

purple Harvard sweatshirt, bruised Nikes, and a scruffy-looking package under his arm wrapped in brown paper and tied with what a Midwesterner like her would have called binder twine, the stuff you wrapped around bales of hay. As well as the sweatshirt and runners, he wore a pair of stained blue jeans worn at the knees. Definitely not the type to have a Jan Steen or any other masterpiece under his arm.

What Doris had not mentioned was that the man was disturbingly handsome. He had a lean, tanned face under a thatch of sun blond hair and the body of an Olympic swimmer. He also had huge, bright blue eyes blinking pleasantly behind a simple pair of Harry Potter wire rims. Both the man and the package he held were lightly spattered with rain. He wasn’t carrying an umbrella. He looked a little older than she was, mid-thirties or so.

Finn smiled. She didn’t know what else to do. “Can I help you?”

“I’ve got this painting,” he said, taking the package out from under his arm and holding it out to her. His voice was definitely Oxford—the real thing, not the walnut-in-the-cheeks adenoidal version poached by Lady Ron. The parcel was oblong, twelve by sixteen, just about right for a Jan Steen. He laid it carefully on the desk.

“Please sit,” said Finn, gesturing toward the only other chair in the office. “My name is Finn Ryan, by the way.” She smiled again.

“William Pilgrim,” he said. “Billy. You’re an American.”

“Columbus, Ohio.”

“Good-bye, Columbus.”

“Philip Roth.”

“His first book.”

“Ali McGraw and Richard Benjamin for the Hollywood version. My mom made me watch it on TV once.”

“Well,” Billy Pilgrim said smiling, “I think we’ve exhausted that vein of conversation.”

“The painting,” said Finn.

“The painting.” He nodded.

She unwrapped it. Oil on canvas, no frame, the canvas stapled to the stretcher with rusty iron half-moons. It was a representation of another village scene, this one with a half dozen beer swillers sitting on a bench under a tree. Just the kind of thing the artist was famous for. The signature on the bottom was a group of initials: JHS, Jan Havickszoon Steen.

“Very nice,” said Finn. Nice but not right.

“Not by Jan Steen,” said Pilgrim, picking up her tone.

“I don’t think so, no,” agreed Finn.

“Why not? It’s been in the family forever. Dutch ancestors. Everyone always called it a Jan Steen.”

“A Jan Steen of this size probably would have been painted on an oak panel,” Finn explained. “If it
had
been painted on canvas, it would have been tacked or glued to the stretcher, not stapled. It would also almost surely have been restretched and relined over three centuries.”

“Oh dear.”

“And the signature is wrong. He signed his paintings as J. Steen, not with his initials. He hated the name Havickszoon for one thing. It’s not all bad news, though,” she added.

“Oh?”

“If you’re lucky, it might be a Keating.”

“Keating?”

“Tom Keating. A British master forger from after World War Two. His forgeries are worth a lot of money on their own now. He specialized in Dutch Masters.”

“But not as much as a Jan Steen would fetch.”

“Not by a long shot,” said Finn.

“You seem to know a great deal about it,” said Pilgrim. There was nothing accusatory; he just seemed curious.

Finn shrugged. “I did a double major for my BFA. Dutch golden age and Renaissance painters. I had a professor who did his doctoral dissertation on Jan Steen.”

“Steen stuck, so to speak,” said Pilgrim, smiling.

Finn laughed. “So to speak.” Billy Pilgrim seemed to be taking his disappointment well. She started wrapping up the little painting again. “I can give you a number at the Courtauld Institute to call about Tom Keating if you’d like. They’ll give it a look.”

Pilgrim thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No, that’s all right, Miss Ryan. I quite like it, and if it’s not worth a great deal of money, I think I’ll keep it. Hang it up in the salon.”

“Salon?” Finn asked. He didn’t look like a hairdresser but maybe he meant something else. In England they spoke English, not American.

“I live on a boat,” the blond man said. “The
Busted Flush
.”

“Funny name,” said Finn, tying the string back around the parcel. “Trouble with the toilet?”

It was Billy Pilgrim’s turn to laugh. “It’s a poker term,” he said.

Finn nodded. “As in royal flush.”

“A busted flush is a flush you fail to complete— ten, jack, queen, king without the ace. In my case it’s a literary term as well. It was the name of Travis McGee’s boat in the John D. MacDonald series. I did my dissertation on MacDonald as a matter of fact.”

“As in doctoral dissertation?”

“That’s right.” Pilgrim blushed apologetically. “I was a bit of a prodigy actually. French literature for my bachelor’s, as you call it, Spanish for the postgraduate, and modern literature for the doctorate.” He made a little snorting sound. “Not good for much, really, when you get right down to it. I thought about teaching, but then I thought about it again and decided I preferred messing about in boats a great deal more, so there you are.”

Finn realized that any business part of the conversation had run out and she wanted to keep on talking with him anyway. “Who’s Travis Magee?”

“Good Lord!” Billy exclaimed. “You’re an American! It’s like saying you never heard of John Wayne.” He paused. “You really don’t know?”

“No idea.”

“Did you ever see a film called
Cape Fear
?”

“Sure. Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte.”

“Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum actually, but that’s another story.” Pilgrim frowned. “The point is the man who wrote the book it was based on was John D. MacDonald. He also wrote twenty-one Travis McGee novels, each one of them with a color in the title.
Darker Than Amber, The Green Ripper, The Deep Blue Good-by
.”

“And McGee lived on his boat, the
Busted Flush
.”

“Yes. A houseboat. Slip F18, Bahia Del Mar, Fort Lauderdale.”

“You live in a houseboat, then?”

“No. Hout Bay 40 with a Marconi Rig. One of the South African designs, before Dix went to Virginia.”

Finn didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about, but she enjoyed listening. “This Travis McGee is a fictional character we’re talking about?”

“Yes.”

“You seem to know all the details.”

“He was an ex-football player with a bad knee who went around ‘salvaging’ stolen property and rescuing damsels in distress. Robin Hood and Mike Hammer combined. The archetype for the lovable rogue in American literature. The man every red-blooded Yankee secretly yearned to be. The
Play-boy
magazine ideal.”

“Just the sort of guy a red-blooded Yankee girl would loathe and despise,” Finn said with a laugh.

“Perhaps so,” Pilgrim sighed. “But he was a man of his time and he had an enormous cultural effect. He was your Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, John Wayne, Huck Finn, and Tom Sawyer all rolled into one. The last great American adventurer, the first great American antihero.” Pilgrim flushed again. “I’ve been lecturing.”

“Maybe you should have been a teacher after all,” said Finn.

“Good Lord, what a horrible suggestion!” said Pilgrim. “All those children with runny noses and Gameboys in their satchels. I’d go mad!” He stood up. “I’m afraid I’ve taken up too much of your time, Miss Ryan. I’m terribly sorry.”

“It was a pleasure, Mr. Pilgrim, the high point of my day, to be honest.” She stood and handed him his rewrapped painting. They shook hands. His grip was warm and strong without being overly masculine. He had calluses. These hands worked for a living. She liked that. She liked Billy Pilgrim. She wondered if it would frighten him off to ask him out for a drink or something. She’d never been very good at that kind of thing.

“Thank you for your time, Miss Ryan. You’ve been most kind.” He stood there looking a little adolescent and awkward.

“No problem, really. And it’s Finn. Miss Ryan sounds like a kindergarten teacher.”

“You could teach the little creatures all about
Menheer
Jan Steen,” said Billy.

“And then wipe their runny noses.”

“Gad.” He looked appropriately horrified and then smiled, his face lighting up and his eyes twinkling.

“Off to the
Busted Flush
?” She was groping now, and beginning to feel like an idiot.

“Not quite yet. I’ve a flat in town. Appointment in the City tomorrow. Solicitors and such. I’ve been trying to sell a little seaside property of mine in Cornwall.” First the painting, now a house. It sounded as though he was going somewhere.

“Cottage?” Finn asked.

Billy nodded. “Something like that.”

“Going on vacation?”

“I thought I’d take a bit of a cruise.”

“Away from the rain?”

“Hopefully.”

“Any particular destination?”

“I haven’t given it much thought.”

“What would Travis McGee do under the circumstances?”

“Make himself a Boodles martini and talk to Meyer about it.”

“Meyer?”

“His philosophical friend a few slips over at Bahia del Mar. He had a boat called the
John Maynard Keynes
.”

“He must have been an economist.”

“Something like that. It’s never really made clear in the books.”

“A Wall Street type?”

“Yes, a retired one.”

Now they’d really reached the end of the conversation.

“Well…” he said.

“Well…” she answered. “It was great fun meeting you. Perhaps I’ll see you again.” Last chance. If he didn’t pick up the hint it would all end right here, a road not traveled at all.

“I do hope so.” A polite smile, a little shy, and then he turned and he was gone. Finn dropped back into her chair. The English Travis Magee had just ridden off into the rainy sunset. To top things off Ronnie appeared in her office doorway ten minutes later. He looked like her grade school nerd friend Arthur Beandocker having one of his asthma attacks. His face was tomato red above the knot of his expensive tie, his eyes were bulging, and a vein on his temple was throbbing like a kettledrum.

“His Grace was here and I wasn’t informed.” His voice was as choked as the look on his face.

Finn stared. “Who?”

“His Grace, the duke, of course!”

Finn had a sudden image of Ronnie greeting John Wayne at the entrance to Mason-Godwin. “There hasn’t been any duke here.”

“Doris sent someone to you named William Pilgrim, correct?”

“Billy. A boat bum according to him.”

“Billy, as you call him,” said Ronnie with a shiver, “is Lord William Wilmot Pilgrim, Baron of Neath, Earl of Pendennis, Duke of Kernow.”

“He said his name was Billy. He never mentioned being all of that.”

“What did he want?”

“He had a painting he wanted evaluated.”

“What did you tell him?”

“He thought it was a Jan Steen. It wasn’t. It was a reasonably good fake.”

“You aren’t qualified to tell a Jan Steen from a forgery, Miss Ryan. That is why we employ experts in the field.”

“It was fixed to the stretcher with staples, Ron.”

“That doesn’t mean anything! It would have been relined!”

“But it wasn’t,” Finn answered calmly, biting her tongue. “It was on the original canvas. A dead giveaway, as you know. An original Steen canvas would be three hundred years old. Unlined it would have rotted away decades ago. It was a fake. There was no question about it. The signature was wrong as well. It might have been a Tom Keating done on a bad day, but that’s it.”

“You told him this?”

“Of course. Why would I lie?”

“It was not your place to tell him anything. I should have been informed. His Grace the duke is potentially a very valuable customer and not to be dealt with by a lesser employee of the firm.”

“A lesser employee?” Finn said coldly.

“His Lordship requires a certain level of deference and respect you are unable to provide, I’m afraid,” said Ronnie with a sniff. Finn resisted the urge to kick the pompous idiot where it would do the most good. Instead she stood up from behind her desk and shrugged into her raincoat.

“I’m going home,” she said. “Back to my lesser flat in Crouch End.” She picked up her umbrella.

“You’ll do no such thing!” stormed Ronnie. He moved to stand directly in her way. He glanced at the expensive, wafer-thin Patek Philippe that glittered on his wrist like a large gold coin. “It’s not gone five yet.”

“I’m going home,” repeated Finn. “And if you don’t get out of the way, I’m going to do exactly what my self-defense coach at school told me to do to people like you.”

The tomato look deepened on Ronnie’s face, but he stood aside. “I’ll have you sacked!” he hissed as she pushed by him.

“Sack you,” she muttered, heading down the stairs. She’d had enough of Ronald DePanay-Cottrell, enough of Mason-Godwin, and enough of the whole damn country.

True to his word, there was a message from Doris on her answering machine by the time she got back to her flat. She’d been summarily fired. A final paycheck would be mailed to her and the Home Office notified of her unemployment status in regard to her work visa. All very cold and efficient. There was also an envelope put through her letterbox from a London lawyer. The perfect end to a perfect day. To console herself she went down to the restaurant below and splurged on a twelve-ounce Daisy Cheese Daddy with coleslaw, chili fries, and a side of guacamole. To hell with the South Beach Diet and to hell with bloody England.