Rembrandt's Ghost (7 page)

“According to information given to me by the Boegart archives, the painting is a commissioned portrait of the
Vleigende Draeack
, or
Flying Dragon
— the ship with which Willem Van Boegart made his original fortune in the East Indies. It was painted in 1671. The painting disappeared just after the beginning of World War Two and was recently discovered in a Swiss bank vault.”

“It’s a ‘jacht,’ the first of the types of ship used by the Dutch East India Company. It’s where we get the term ‘yacht,’ ” Billy supplied.

Tulkinghorn nodded. “Quite so.”

“It might be a yacht,” said Finn, “but it isn’t a Rembrandt.”

“I beg your pardon?” Tulkinghorn said, sounding a little offended. “It’s signed.”

“That doesn’t mean very much,” responded Finn. “Rembrandt had a workshop and employed dozens of apprentices, all of whom were authorized to sign his name. It’s almost like a rubber stamp. On top of that Rembrandt was well known for signing his own name to paintings that he never put a brush to.”

“But you can’t be sure of that.”

“Sure I can,” said Finn with a smile. “If it was painted in 1671.”

“Why is the date so important?” Billy asked.

“Because Rembrandt died in 1669,” she answered. “I’m no expert in the subject, but I remember that much from my art history classes.” She reached out and tentatively ran her fingers along the ornate gilded frame. “Interesting, though,” she said quietly.

“What is?” Billy asked.

“The frame. I’m almost sure it’s by Foggini.”

“Who?” Tulkinghorn asked.

“He was a Florentine during the seventeenth century,” said Finn. “I spent a year in Florence before going for my master’s. I got interested in him then. He was an artist in his own right, a sculptor, but he’s most famous now for his picture frames. Frames like this one. Gold, ornate, a lot of decoration.”

“I’m not sure I see the point. Why is the frame important?”

“If the painting is a forgery, or a copy, why would you put such a valuable frame around it?”

“Maybe to make people believe in the authenticity of the painting,” said Billy.

“But if you’re going to all that trouble,” mused Tulkinghorn thoughtfully, “why would you ascribe a date to the painting that was incorrect, nay, impossible, and, I would think, extremely easy to prove that it was so?”

It really was amazing, thought Finn; the man spoke like Sherlock Holmes come to life. But the old lawyer was right.

“Can I take a closer look?” Finn asked.

Sir James nodded. “Of course. The painting after all now belongs to you and His Grace.”

Finn picked up the little painting. Given the weight of the ornate frame, the picture itself was quite heavy for its size, which meant that it had been painted on a wood panel, almost certainly oak. One of her night classes at the Courtauld Institute had been about dating wood panels used in painting by dendochronological analysis—counting tree rings. She looked closely at the surface of the painting and immediately saw the weave of canvas in several worn spots near the edges. Canvas over wood? She’d never heard of a painting done that way, and certainly not in the seventeenth century. Frowning, she flipped the painting over. The back of the painting was covered in old, very brittle-looking kraft paper.

“Anyone have a penknife?”

Sir James nodded and reached into the watch pocket of his waistcoat. He took out an old pearl-handled jackknife and snapped it open. The old man gave it to her. She took the little knife and carefully cut along the kraft paper, keeping well away from the edges of the inner frame, or stretcher. She lifted the paper away, revealing the back of the panel. Dark wood. There were several scratched initials, what appeared to be the chalked number 273 , the 7 struck through in the European fashion, and two labels, one, clearly from the Nazi era, the other a simple paper rectangle reading
Kunsthandel J. Goudstikker NV.

“Goudstikker was the preeminent gallery in Amsterdam,” said Finn. “The Nazis cheated him out of everything in 1940. The Dutch government only resolved the whole thing a little while ago. It was big news in the art world.”

“This Goudstikker was a person?” Billy asked.

Finn nodded. “Jacques Goudstikker. If I remember the story right, he inherited the gallery from his father.”

“What happened to him?”

“He fled Holland on a refugee ship for England, but they wouldn’t let him into the country because he was a Jew. He would have been interned. The ship went on to South America with him still aboard. Apparently he had an accident on the ship and died.” She stared at the upper edge of the painting. Frayed edges of canvas could be seen, almost glued to the wood with age. “But Goudstikker’s not the point.”

“What do you mean?” Billy asked.

She pointed to the canvas edging barely visible at the inner edge of the frame. “Most paintings this old get relined every fifty years or so—the original canvas is bonded to a newer blank canvas to give it strength. It’s usually done with wax or resin. This is different. The canvas with the ship painting is a mask, a ghost image put over the original wood panel.”

“You think there’s something underneath?” Sir James said.

“The Nazi label probably dates from 1940. The Goudstikker label is much older. I think somebody took an old Rembrandt copy and stuck it on the wood panel to hide the identity of the original painting from Goering’s people.”

“How can you be sure?” Billy asked.

“I know a man at the Courtauld who can help us.”

“Today?” queried Tulkinghorn.

“Why the sudden urgency?”

“The Amsterdam house,” explained Tulkinghorn.

“What about it?” asked Billy.

“Mr. Boegart’s instructions are quite clear, I’m afraid,” the old man replied. “The house, like the other bequests, must be taken into possession personally and by both of you within fifteen days or the items will revert to the estate.”

“The boat as well?” said Finn. “That means we have to go to Amsterdam and then Malaysia? All within two weeks?”

“Precisely, Miss Ryan.” Sir James cleared his throat. “And the
Batavia Queen
is a ship, not a boat.”

“What’s the difference?” Finn asked, suddenly irritated with Tulkinghorn’s old-fashioned nit-picking.

“The usual definition is that a ship is big enough to carry its own boat,” said Billy. “But this is all madness. Why on earth is Boegart doing it?”

“At a guess, I should venture to say that he is trying to tell you something,” offered Tulkinghorn.

“He’s trying to get us to follow in his footsteps,” Finn said.

“But why?” Billy asked.

Finn looked at the ornately framed object on the table in front of them, still bearing the ugly emblem of its violent past and the name of a man long dead. “I think it starts with the painting,” she answered. “And that means a trip to the Courtauld.”

Somerset House is a gigantic neoclassical building a quarter mile long. Its original function in 1775 was to be larger, more imposing, and more important than any other so-called national building in the world. Its secondary function was to provide office space for every government bureaucracy in England anyone could think of, from the tax department and the Naval Office down to the office of the King’s Bargekeeper, the Public Lottery, and the office of Peddlers and Hawkers. Over the years the bureaucracies have come and gone, but the huge building always remains. It occupies a single enormous block of London real estate bounded by the Strand, Lancaster Place, Surrey Street, and the Victoria Embankment.

When it moved from its old quarters in Portman Square to the Somerset House North Wing on the Strand in 1989, the Courtauld Institute of Art, with all its galleries, laboratories, lecture theaters, and libraries, barely made a ripple at its new home. Few people outside the rarified world of art history would have known the Courtauld even existed if it hadn’t been for the less than illustrious tenure of its onetime director and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, the infamous and disgraced KGB spy, Sir Anthony Blunt. The Courtauld, however, managed to survive the revelations about its former director’s seedy past, and over the years it became one of the world’s great postgraduate institutions concerned with art in all its aspects.

Dr. Alpheus Duff Shneegarten, professor emeritus in the Department of Conservation at the Courtauld, was a very short, very round man in his eighties who might well have been the model for Tolkien’s Hobbit. He had a large head that was ten percent snow-white hair, forty percent hooked patrician nose, and the rest of it jutting chin with an ancient curved briar stuck between large, nicotine-stained teeth and a pair of smiling lips. His intelligent eyes were sparkling blue, and he looked as though he was always on the verge of delivering the punch line of a particularly dirty joke. Shneegarten was invariably dressed in a decades-out-of-date gray Harris tweed three-piece suit no matter what the weather. On his overlarge feet, he wore ancient Birkenstock sandals. He had been born in Germany or Argentina, no one knew for sure which. According to Shneegarten he still lived in England using a student’s visa.

He was, as he’d once told Finn: “Entirely unique. Search for Shneegarten on your Giggle or whatever you call it and you will find nothing. Nothing, I tell you! I am unique among men! There is only one Shneegarten and he is me!” The old man had been at the institute since before the war and had been friend and adviser to all three founders, industrialist Samuel Courtauld, diplomat and collector Lord Lee of Fareham, and the art historian Sir Robert Witt.

Shneegarten had been a pioneer in the field of X-ray fluorescence and infrared analysis of paintings. Using these methods he had conceived of and created a database of artists’ fingerprints that had saved more than one museum’s curator from being fooled by clever forgeries.

Retired from active teaching long ago, Shneegarten now occupied a rabbit warren of lofty attic rooms on the top floor of the institute, which was only accessible by climbing several sets of dusty staircases and one extremely rickety spiral one made out of cast iron that shivered and clanged as Finn Ryan and Billy Pilgrim climbed it. In one of these attic rooms they found the professor bent over an immense canvas that looked like some kind of Turkish or Moroccan street scene. Shneegarten was examining a tiny square of the paintingwith a jeweler’s loupe screwed into the socket of his right eye and he was rubbing a cotton swab delicately over the area. There was a faint odor of ordinary soap.

It was late afternoon now and it had started raining again; drops pattering lightly on the large, soot-grimy skylight overhead. The illumination on the room was an almost magical silver that seemed to fill the atmosphere with a foreshadowing intensity. He stood up as Finn and Billy stepped into the workroom and popped the jeweler’s loupe out of his eye.

“Ah,” he said with a smile. “My American girl-friend!” He winked at Billy. “Believe me, sir, if I was only seventy years younger, I would sweep her off her feet and have my way with her! Depend on it!”

“And I’d probably let you,” said Finn, smiling as she poked the man lightly in his round, protruding belly. He laughed uproariously and poked her back. She introduced Billy.

“Ah yes, the impoverished lord you mentioned. I’m honored, Your Grace.”

“William, or Billy if you’d like. Your Grace makes me sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

Shneegarten smiled.

“What are you working on?” Finn asked.

“A dirty Delacroix,” the old man grunted wearily. “Another one of those dreadful things he painted in Tangier, people rioting, women with improbable breasts being raped in improbable positions, horses underfoot dying awful deaths. A terrible lot of meaningless activity and violence. The Quentin Tarantino of his day!” He nodded toward the package under Billy’s arm. They’d wrapped it in Tulkinghorn’s salmon-pink copy of the
Financial Times
and tied it up with twine. “That is for me?” said Shneegarten.

“Yes,” said Finn. Billy handed the package to the professor. He sliced the string with a scalpel, neatly took off the newspaper, laying it aside on the worktable, and looked at the painting.

He nodded. “The frame is almost certainly Foggini as you said on the telephone.” He screwed the loupe into his eye socket again and bent down. “Brushstrokes are appropriate for Rembrandt’s studio, although I would say the subject matter looks more like Jan van Leiden or Willem van der Velde. Just look at that sky! Those Dutch, they always painted the sky as though the world was about to end.” He flipped the painting over and, using a small, stainless steel tool like a stiff putty knife, he popped the painting easily out of the frame. “Very odd,” he muttered, his white eyebrows rising. “Canvas over a wood panel. I would say that the canvas is from the correct period, perhaps 1660 or so, but the tacks are much newer, definitely twentieth century.”

“Contemporary with the Goudstikker Gallery label?” Finn asked.

“Undoubtedly. And also the Nazi one. That label is from the
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg
, the ERR.”