The Forger (21 page)

The café man stood looking out the window, as if he expected the German tanks to come rolling down the road at any minute. “We’ll stop them,” he said. “They’ll hit the main French lines tomorrow and then we’ll stop them.”

The Germans were already through the main French lines. That much was clear from the newspaper, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him.

The first turn to the right out of St. Germain took us on a small and arcing road out to the converted abbey, a small fortress of buildings with high walls around it and a huge wooden gate at the entrance. The entrance was set back into the abbey itself, and we had to drive down a narrow alley flanked by high stone walls. The stone was pale and sandy and looked rough, as if it would take the skin from my palms if I ran my hand across it.

There was a small door set into the gate, which opened when I pulled the car up to it. A short man in a heavy wool coat stood in the doorway.

Pankratov got out.

The two men talked for a while.

Fleury and I sat in the truck.

“For a while,” said Fleury, “I actually believed none of this would ever happen.”

Before I could tell him that he hadn’t been the only one, the gates were opened and Pankratov waved us in.

I pulled the van into a large courtyard, which had a fountain in the middle and plants growing in stone pots set against the walls. The courtyard was paved in loose stone, which crackled under the van’s tires. The windows of the abbey were tall and arched. There was a great silence to the place.

The man in the heavy coat had been joined by another. Both men were stocky, with broad foreheads and slightly flattened noses. They looked to be related. They wore waistcoats and had no collars on their shirts. Their thick hair was gray with dust. One had a mustache, which was so caked in grime that it looked as if it had been carved out of chalk and glued to his face. The men shook our hands but didn’t smile. They looked very tired. The man with the mustache introduced himself as Tessel and the other man, who wore the heavy coat, as Cristot.

I knew those weren’t their real names. They were small towns further along the road to Bayeux. I’d seen them on the map.

On Tessel’s orders, I backed the truck up to the main entranceway and we all began to unload the paintings, stacking them against the side of the truck and up against the side of the house.

I counted forty paintings, the largest of which was about two feet by three feet and the smallest maybe only one foot by eight inches.

“Where are the de Boinvilles?” asked Fleury.

“The Count and Countess,” said Tessel, clearly irritated by Fleury’s familiar tone concerning their local nobility, “have gone off to Caen for a few days. They said they didn’t want to know exactly what it was we were hiding. The less they know, the better.”

We moved the paintings inside. In the front hallway was a stained-glass window. It bled watery greens and blues across white sheets that covered the canvases. We carried the paintings up a staircase made of reddish-amber mahogany.

I tried to imagine Marie-Claire in this place, drifting down the stairs in some long gown, but I couldn’t do it. To me, she belonged and would always belong in the smoky air of the Dimitri, or bundled in a coat and sketching the hostile face of Valya.

There were tapestries on the walls, showing knights on horseback, stags and hounds. The place smelled of old fires and polish. We set the paintings down in the dining room, in the center of which was a huge table of the same wood as the stairs. It must have been built in the room, because it would never have fitted through the door. The silver candlesticks and the salt dish had been placed on the sideboard. Overshadowing all the beauty in the room was a large and ragged hole that had been dug into the wall, through the paint and mortar and stones, exposing a narrow area in between.

A housepainter’s cloth had been set on the floor to catch falling debris. Two sledgehammers lay crossed on top of the stones that had been removed. Cracks radiated out from the hole all across the wall, and I wondered how these two men who had made the hole would ever be able to repair it in a way that no one would notice. Even with the cloth set out, there was dust everywhere in the room.

Cristot climbed over the pile of rubble and stood in the gap between the walls. “We figure there’s enough room in here for all of them. You can grab a screwdriver or whatever you want and start taking the paintings off those frames.” He gestured to the table, where a canvas bag sagged open, loaded with tools. “Then we can roll them up and stash them. It shouldn’t take too long.”

“Wait a minute,” said Pankratov.

“What’s the matter?” asked Tessel. He pulled a red handkerchief out of his pocket and began smoothing the dust from his mustache.

“You can’t roll these up,” Pankratov told them.

“We’ll be careful,” said Cristot. “Now come on.” He snapped his fingers and held his hands out for the first painting.

“First of all”—Pankratov dug his hand into the canvas bag and hauled out a paint-spattered iron file—“you can’t just gouge a canvas off its stretcher with one of these. And secondly, if you want to take an old painting off its stretcher, you need to place it on a wooden roller, which you turn only six inches a month. This is a job for specialists. Nobody’s taking these paintings off their stretchers.”

It seemed to grow very hot and quiet in the room. The floating dust was clogging up my lungs.

Tessel turned to Cristot. “I told you we never should have gotten involved.”

“You’re the one who talked me into it,” said Cristot.

“I have two children and a wife at home…”

“And I’m their godfather, for Christ’s sake!” Cristot interrupted. “Don’t you lecture me, Jean-Paul.”

“Oh, and there you go using my real name!”

“It was only your first name.”

“Well, thanks a lot, anyway. And here I am risking my life with you of all people for a bunch of paintings that I’ve never seen and don’t care about.” His voice rose with indignation as he turned his attention to Pankratov. “I don’t care about your damned museums and…”

He was going on like this when Pankratov lifted up one of the paintings, set it on the table, and with one flip of his hand, undid the bow that held the string in place. He swept away the white sheet wrapping. The painting came into view.

It was a Vermeer. I knew that at once.
The Lacemaker—La dentellière.
It was a small painting, made on canvas laid over wood. It showed a young woman, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, in a yellow dress with a broad white collar. The woman’s hair was braided at the back and curls hung down by her ears. She was hunched over her work, and it was hard to make out what she was doing. Something with pins and tiny spools of thread. Red and white silk spilled out, almost like liquid, from a soft case beside her. She looked tired and busy and the faint cheerfulness on her face seemed strained. Every time I had gone to the Louvre, I had sought out this painting just to look once more at the smile on that woman’s face. Each time I saw it, the smile seemed less and less sincere, as if she were stuck in some purgatory of a job that she knew would make her blind, as many lacemakers went blind. By now, I felt I knew her from some place beyond the confines of that canvas.

To see the painting there in front of us, robbed of its beautiful pale wood frame, beyond the safety of the Louvre, shocked us into silence. We just stared at it.

A long time passed before Cristot sighed noisily. “Oh,” he said, the way all Frenchmen say “oh,” deep-voiced and long.

“Are they all like that?” asked Tessel. The red handkerchief dangled from his hand.

“Just give me the paintings,” said Cristot. “We’ll find a way to get them in.”

We began handing them across the pile. Cristot took each one and shuffled away out of sight, sidestepping down the gap. We heard the rustling of his movements, like a giant rat living in the space between.

It took an hour for the gap to be filled up, by which time it was dark outside.

We sat down for a break. Fleury brought in his satchel and passed out the food and wine. Pankratov went downstairs to the kitchen and brought back cold ham and bread, some Camembert, and three bottles without labels filled with what looked like muddy water.

Tessel took out a small, hook-bladed knife and carved the wax top off the bottle. Then he drew out the cork with a corkscrew attached to the other end of the knife. He ran the bottle under his nose, sniffed once and then took a short sip. He swished it around in his mouth and then swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

I saw on his face the first smile I’d noticed all day. “Calvados,” he said.
“Premier distillation.”
He curled his lips around the words, as if they tasted of the drink itself.

We ate the ham and bread and the chalky-rinded cheese and drank the hard Calvados cider, passing the bottle around.

A plane droned overhead. We all stopped until the sound had faded away, as if the machine might sense our breathing while it scudded through the clouds.

Tessel picked up a piece of bread and laid a slab of ham on top. He chewed at it thoughtfully. “It could be years before anyone comes back for these paintings,” he said. “We might all be long gone by then.”

It was night when we finally pulled out of the abbey, leaving the two men to plaster up the wall, repaint it and remount the tapestry which had hung over the space.

We drove back to Paris, through towns whose street lights had been switched off as a precaution against air raids.

I tried to imagine the paintings staying hidden, not just for years but for centuries, and what it would be like for those who found them far into the future, whether the people who found them would even know what they were, or how much the world had valued them. I wondered what precious objects in the past had been hidden by people whose civilizations were being overwhelmed. Perhaps they felt the way I felt now as they hurried their treasures into hiding, too tired to think straight, too frightened for their own lives to envision the death of whole nations. I thought of the great tribes that had vanished—the Minoans, the Etruscans, the Vandals and the Easter Islanders—becoming first legends, then rumors, then finally nothing at all, while somewhere deep inside caves in the shuddering earth lay the relics of their sacred lives and the bones of those whose stories had died with them.

Chapter Eight

P
ANKRATOV DECIDED TO MOVE.

From now on, he decreed, we would work at what he called his warehouse. In fact, this was a cramped little space, formerly a stable, in a section of an old brick viaduct. It stood between the Père Lachaise cemetery and the Rue des Pyrénées. The viaduct had once been used for a railway, but new tracks for the Chemin de fer de Ceinture had been laid down beyond it. There were dozens of these little warehouses all along the base of the viaduct. Each one had its own arched door, painted with thick coats of glossy green paint.

On Pankratov’s door, in stylish orange letters, was
A Pankratov. Réparation d’Antiquités.
Each word was underlaid with a shadow effect in red paint.

“It’s too risky at the atelier,” he told me, as he rummaged through his keys for one that would unlock the door. “Besides, all my supplies are here.” He swung the doors wide and a smell of dank air wafted out.

The ceiling inside was high and vaulted. Several electric bulbs hung on cords from the ceiling. When Pankratov switched them on, they threw out a sinewy glare. Piles of junk clogged the shadows, consisting mostly of ruined paintings. Proud faces glared from white-flaking canvases of old portraits, as if emerging from a snowstorm. There were also frames, jars of old nails, various pots of powder for mixing paints and bottles of dirty linseed oil, bins of rags and so many jars of brushes that they looked like strange plants that had learned to grow in the damp darkness of the warehouse.

“Where do you work exactly?” I asked. The stone space echoed with my voice.

“Eh?” said Pankratov. “Work? Well, wherever I feel like it.”

“Do you know where we are, Pankratov?” I told him. “We’re not in a warehouse. We’re inside your brain. All this junk…”

“Stop!” He raised his hand like a traffic conductor. “You can stop right there. From this junk, in a couple of weeks, I can conjure up a Caravaggio, all with a trick of the dust.”

“Poof,” I said, and waggled my fingers as if I were casting a spell.

“Forgery,” said Pankratov, “isn’t just about painting a good copy of something. In fact, it isn’t really about copying at all.”

“Then what is it about?” A train clattered past on the tracks beyond the viaduct. It was a steady, comforting sound.

Pankratov scuttled into the gloom. His shadow lumbered after him, huge and crippled against the sloping walls. He emerged a moment later with the remnants of a frame. “It’s about this!” He held the frame in front of him as if he were a talking portrait of himself. “Look at this frame. Come here and look at it.”

Obediently I went across. “It smells in here,” I said.

“It’s the smell of authenticity,” he replied.

I stood in front of him, the two of us on either side of the frame.

“Look here,” he said, nodding down at one corner, since he had no hands free. “What do you see?”

Tiny holes peppered the wood and the old gilded plaster. “Looks like wormholes,” I said.

“Exactly! Do you have any idea how long it takes to get worms to eat holes in wood?”

“To
get
them to?”

“Yes! It takes years and years. Which we don’t have. Do you know what inexperienced forgers sometimes do to fake wormholes? They put the frame against a tree and fire buckshot at it. It makes little holes like these. The trouble is, worms don’t make straight holes when they burrow, the way shotgun pellets do. Besides that, you have to dig the buckshot out again. And that’s the sort of thing they’ll be looking for, these experts. If you really want to fool someone, you start off with something old. You don’t get new stuff and then kick it around or pour all kinds of solvents on it. You need as much authenticity as you can get.” The frame shook in Pankratov’s hands as he laid out the laws of his obsession. “Now do you understand?” he asked.