The Forgery of Venus (25 page)

And no artistic response at all—no poetry, no art, no dramas.
About the Nazis and the Jews there is plenty, we must never forget and all that, but about the destruction of German urban life not a whisper. We started it, and deserved it, and that was that. But the Americans were innocent, Americans never did anything bad, even to suggest there was a connection between an aggressive foreign policy, a continuous violent interference in the affairs of other nations, and this event, oh, no, that was off the table entirely.

The funny thing about this attitude was that Lotte shared it, despite having been in lower Manhattan when the planes hit the towers and despite having a kid who went blue when there was any dust in the air. Lotte thought that the right response to terror was bravery. You cleaned up the mess, mourned the dead for a particular limited period, and then moved on. I shared this with Krebs and then we talked about art, and how art dealt with the various horrors the world was heir to, and I said that I never felt a need to deal with that aspect of life in what I did, and did that make me some kind of pussy. Easel painting in oils while the world burned? And he asked what was the worst century in European history before the twentieth. It was the fourteenth century. The Black Death, half the population dead, devastating famines, and still they hardly paused the continual wars. Yet they didn’t stop making art—Giotto, van Eyck, van der Goes.

“So we’re saved by beauty?” I said. “I thought beauty was passé. I thought the concept was king now.”

“No, saving or not saving is hardly the point, as I believe I’ve already said. Although I often think that God, if there really is such a being, only holds his hand from destroying us all because we create beauty for his amusement. And also I think submitting ourselves to the terror of beauty, the ravishment of it, prevents us from giving vent to the kind of despair that would lead to the absolute destruction of our kind. Do you know Rilke?”

He recited some German in that portentous way that people
always recite poetry, and then translated, “‘For beauty’s only the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear. And the reason we adore it so is that it serenely disdains to destroy us.’ So, Wilmot, you are a terrorist also, just like your friend Bosco, but more subtle. They don’t riot against you, but maybe they should.”

“Yeah, but the Nazis were supposed to be big art lovers and it didn’t do much for their destructiveness.”

“Not so. The Nazis—we Nazis?—were simple looters by and large. They wanted the things that indicated imperial power, and their taste was uniformly bad.
Kitschmenschen
almost to a man.”

“Although Hitler was a painter,” I said. “That always makes me feel terrific about my profession.”

“A very bad painter,” he said, “and an ignoramus. He went to his grave, I believe, under the impression that Michelangelo Merisi—Caravaggio—and Michelangelo Buonarroti were the same person.”

Okay, fun talking about art, and in fact it did make me feel better a little, mainly because it reminded me of the safe haven I had with Lotte when things went sour with us—we could always talk about art. Maybe
that’s
its true purpose. But I figured I’d take advantage of the casual discussion to mine some information. I said, “So—these people we’re going to see. Since you’re being so mysterious, I’m going to presume they’re your gangster partners. Or sponsors. Cronies?”

“Yes. They are what you might call representatives of the consortium that set up this project.”

“And they’re like the Nazis? Murderers and art lovers in the same package?”

He gave me a stern look for a moment and then grinned. “Wilmot, you persist in being curious. I beg you, please, please do not be curious this afternoon! All right, I understand that you wish to know something about our friends. Very well. In general, only.”

He poured a glass of wine and drank some of it. “We look at the
world today and we see interesting things. We say we are living in a global village, which is true enough, but what is not so often observed is that it is a village of feudal times. Legitimacy—the empire, let us say—has collapsed. Religious fanaticism is widespread, of course. Art is simply loot, with no transcendent purposes or value. On the one hand, in the so-called democracies, we see a political class composed of vapid hypocrites, beauty queens, and thugs, placed in office by propaganda and money. In the other former empire, we observe the expropriation of state property by simple gangsters. The rest of the world is ruled as it always has been, by tribal chieftains. So we observe vast masses of new wealth being seized by people who are largely amoral brutes—on a larger scale, just what happened in the original dark ages or in Germany in the thirties. Essentially, therefore, much of the world is controlled by a kind of condottiere. But unlike the originals, these men like to dwell in the shadows. I am speaking, you understand, not about the figureheads, the leaders we see on the television, but the henchmen—the corrupt company officers, the fixers, Central American and African looters. And this class blends into actual gangsters, the more respectable drug lords and arms dealers, the Asian triads, the yakuzas, and so forth. And because they dwell in the shadows they desire symbols of their status, so they can look every day and know they are somebody, and this is why art is stolen from museums and collections.”

“Yeah, but that has nothing to do with forgery. Why are these guys getting involved in this particular operation?”

“Ordinarily they would not; art forgery, as I’m sure you know, has historically been a petty affair. But in recent years all this has changed. The market value of paintings by the noble dead has increased by orders of magnitude. Hundred-million-dollar auctions are not unknown. And this kind of money can attract the sort of people we are talking about. Now, since I have been selling such people paintings for a while, when they think art they naturally come to Krebs.
They say, Krebs, can this be done? And I say no, at first, the technical foolery we can do, of course, but really, forging a major work by an old master, who could possibly do this?”

Then he smiled broadly and reached over and patted my hand. He said, “And then I found you.”

“You assumed I could do this from looking at magazine covers and ads?”

“Of course not. That is, I was interested in you, but it was not until Mark sent me those paintings, the one of the movie star as Maria of Austria and the incomplete
Los Borrachos,
that I understood what you were capable of. When Mark told me you were hallucinating that you were Velázquez under the influence of some drug, it sounded insane, a fantasy, and yet there were the paintings. So I made my contacts and, as you Americans put it, I pitched the deal, and got the clearance and backing I needed.”

“So that’s why he paid me ten grand for half a copy of a painting.”

“Ten only? He charged me thirty-five for it.” Krebs laughed and added, “And well worth it at any price. And of course it is not a copy in any real sense. You recreated it
as
Velázquez, although I don’t pretend to understand how this can be.”

“Join the club.”

“Yes, but why and wherefore hardly matters at this point.” He clapped his hands briskly, ending that line of conversation. “So—I have described our masters to you. Shortly you will meet them for yourself.” He finished his wine, dabbed his mouth, tossed the napkin on his plate. “We should begin to prepare now. Bathe, shave, wear your best clothes. Do you need anything? Shoes, shirts, whatever?”

“No, I’m fine. So what is this, like a job interview?”

“Not exactly. They wish to personally certify the existence of Charles Wilmot. They wish to see the body.”

A
n hour later Franco drove me and Krebs to a hotel near Barajas Airport, all three of us dressed as for an important funeral, a head of state maybe, and we ascended to the top floor and past a small platoon of gentlemen in dark suits who made sure we weren’t carrying anything lethal, polite but thorough, and then we went into the suite. Three guys were sitting there, an Asian, someone who looked French or Italian, and a bald guy with the ice eyes and high cheekbones of a Slav. I wasn’t introduced and no one used names. The French guy did almost all the talking, and the conversation was in English. I was sitting in a side chair, a little behind the action, which was being conducted around a teak table in the center of the room. I tried not to listen, but I gathered they were talking about particular artworks loose on the secret market. After about twenty minutes of this, Krebs motioned me to come to the table.

All three of the men looked at me, but as you’d expect, given what they did for a living, their faces were perfectly unreadable: I might have been the view out the window of an airplane. The maybe-French guy said, “So you are the artist. We have heard great things about you.”

I said, “Thank you.”

He said, “Let’s see what you can do, then. Draw me.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I want you to draw a portrait of me. Here, use this!”

He slid across the table a single sheet of 150-pound drawing paper, 10 x 14. He assumed, correctly, that I had a drawing implement on me.

I had a pencil, but I figured this guy would be impressed by bravura, and so I used my fountain pen. Interesting face anyway, maybe in his early fifties, that French kind of nose, a long downward-sloping bridge with a little blob on the end, wide mouth with full lips, small dark eyes with generous pouches, oval chin, thick neck, hair dark, coarse like horsehair, a little gray at the sides, the face of a corrupt cardinal in the reign of the Sun King.

So—pen held vertically out at arm’s length, a cliché, but you really use it to transfer the proportions from life to the paper: the general shape of the face, the triangle formed by the eyes, and the mouth has to be perfect or you won’t get a likeness; start with those three dots and then four more to mark the top of the head, the sides, the chin, then the tip of the nose, another dot, and then the edges of the eyes and the mouth. You grow the drawing on the page, the eyes, the mouth, then the shadows formed by the mass of the nose and the lips. I worked for about half an hour, using a wetted finger to smear in the gray tones, and when I reached the point where any further potching around would’ve wrecked it, I slid the paper across the table.

He looked, he showed it to his partners, there was the usual release of tension you get when a likeness works. Magic, a little scary. It looked like him, cool and brutal; I hadn’t made it pretty and I could see he liked it and was irritated by it at the same time. Yes, that’s me, but who are you, you little pisser, to see
me
?

He slid the sheet into a leather portfolio on the table without the pretense of asking for it, nor did I object. And that was the meeting. A few more minutes, mainly pleasantries of a sort, and we were out of there. Back in the car, I asked Krebs why he’d done that, made me draw.

“Because, as I have told you earlier, they wanted to see you. And they wished to be certain you were really this marvelous artist. If you were really Charles Wilmot.”

“They wouldn’t take your word for it?”

“No. These are men who survive by being sure. Suppose I had brought along an imposter?”

“Why would you’ve done that, for God’s sake?”

“Oh, perhaps to preserve the real Wilmot for my own purposes,” he said casually, “and therefore to identify a valueless person as the artist. A dummy. Now, however, in case they decide to get rid of you, they know who you are.”

S
ome days followed on this event—three, ten? I can’t recall how many; people who don’t have schedules have that problem. Where did the week go? The way we lived cut us off from the rhythms of daily life, plus in my particular case my time sense has been ripped out of my brain, trampled on the ground, and stuck back in my skull upside down and crossways. I had no cell phone anymore, so I was as isolated as a man living in the seventeenth century. I could theoretically have made a call from the hotel phone, but I had been told not to in the strongest terms, and of course they’d know if I did.

The larger conspiracy continued. According to Krebs, Mark had duly “discovered” the hidden Velázquez and quietly summoned experts from Yale, from Berkeley; learned heads were put together, and tests were made. As we’d expected, the forensic tests checked out, the thing was deemed of seventeenth-century origin. The provenance, of course, was flawless. The Palacio Liria cried foul, but what could they do? The painting was bought in good faith as a Bassano, the museum knew it was a fake Bassano, and the fact that there was a real Velázquez hiding under it meant that they’d been hoist by their own petard, the swindler swindled. And the learned heads had looked at the art itself, the brushwork and so on, and concluded that yes, it must be so, this was Velázquez indeed, hooray.

There were objectors, of course, there always are, but mainly because they couldn’t swallow the subject: the dour Don Diego could not have painted so naughty a picture. Such people, we understood,
would be looking for any hint of scandal, any hint of forgery, and so now was the most vulnerable hour, both for the
Venus
and for me. Krebs seemed to want to preserve my life for reasons of his own, and I was more than willing to play along with that, although I was kind of curious why.

One morning Franco and I set out for the Prado, nice day, spring in Madrid, not too hot, flowers blooming in the boulevard planters, pleasant scents abroad in the air from the botanical garden nearby. Stood for a couple of minutes in contemplation by the big blackened bronze statue of my guy that sits in front of the museum, wanted him to get down off his chair, fling his arm over my shoulder, and give me some fatherly advice, and for a second my head got all wobbly, smeared vision, and the bulk of the museum became vague, and I was looking through the park to the palace of Buen Retiro as it’d been in the seventeenth century, just for a second there, and—something I never did before—I kind of put my foot on the brake and came back to now. A new skill? Useful.

I avoided Velázquez’s paintings that day and spent my time on the top floor with the Goyas. Okay, here’s a guy came up the hard way, hustling commissions from crappy little convents and provincial churches, spent years doing cartoons for a tapestry workshop, comes to Madrid, gets named painter to the king, studies Velázquez, figures, oh, this is perfection, the perfect realization of a baroque world still intact—honor, glory, nobility, all that—and so he says, screw it, he’s going to paint the shattered world we see in dreams and also the world in his time, the bleeding subject of the nightmares brought forth by the dreams of reason. Here’s his portrait of the royal family, the polar opposite of
Las Meninas
, silly marionettes in a glass case, no air, their feet barely touch the ground. And his
majas,
they’re dolls, no one ever painted a nude so badly: the arms are wrong, the tits are insane, the head’s skewed on the neck, and yet this doll made up of
spare parts has an incredible erotic authority. The pubic hair helps, the first real crotch in the history of European art. A mystery, but it works.

Franco, discreetly accompanying me, stared long at this one; it’s his favorite, obviously, and why not?

What was I thinking here? Death and madness, my Goyesque period, utter loneliness; about Lotte, she’d save me if she could, if I let her, the realest thing I know, her and the kids; and also about my dad—always when I think about Goya—about what he could’ve been, how he saw the war, why he didn’t harness that rage and bitterness into art, an exact contemporary of Francis Bacon, that’s who he should’ve been. Instead he decided to be almost as famous as Norman Rockwell.

And there I was in front of Goya’s
Cronus Eating One of His Sons,
the mad glare, bulging eyeballs, as he bites his victim’s head off, nothing else like it in art, the putrid yellow flesh of the titan in a light cast from hell, and then a moment of disembodiment and I’m gone, out of the Prado and back to my father’s studio, age ten or so. I’m not supposed to be back in the racks where he keeps all his old stuff, but I’m at the curious age; I want to know who is this titan controlling my world. Smell of paper and canvas and glue, top note of his cigars and turps from the studio on the other side of the closed door.

On tiptoe I reach and pull down a set of sketchbooks tied with twine. They’re exciting, secret, they have a history, beat up, the covers scored and dirty, one’s been in the water, rippled and stained. I open the twine and there’s his war, Okinawa, planes, ships, tanks, all the beautiful death machines, faces of young marines caught in unmanly terror, landscapes with shell craters, dressing stations lit by battle lanterns, the masked surgeons looking like figures from Bosch as they probe the ruined youths. And page after page of the dead, American and Japanese, lovingly rendered in watercolor, all the wonderful
ways that high explosive, fast-flying metal, and flame can turn mankind into garbage: eviscerated bodies; exposed coils of gut, impossibly long, stretched out on the earth; smashed faces, eyeballs hanging from bloody stalks; the peculiar arty black forms, hideously “modern,” created when human beings incinerate, things I’d never imagined. No one ever sees this stuff, it’s like feces, it can’t be shown in public; you have to be there.

I loved it, of course, nasty little boy that I was, and I swiped the sketchbooks and took them back to my room, my little “studio” with my kid-sized easel and my first-class paints, and I started to copy. Being Goya to Velázquez, I wanted to learn how to do that, stroke, lick, smear, and there was a skinned traumatic amputation, a jawless face, solid, brilliant, puke making. I went through sheet after sheet of expensive Arches paper—never any lack of art supplies, he used to buy it all by the ton—and after a while, it took weeks, I had it down, I could do the glisten of naked bone against riven flesh, and one evening he found me at it, with the sketchbooks strewn around my room and the painting there on the block, and he bit my head off.

It wasn’t just the usual keep your hands off my things; he was enraged, insane, way more than he would’ve been if I’d tried to copy one of his
Post
covers or a corporate portrait; no, he’d buried this and I’d dug it up, and not only that, I’d
seen
it. And I wanted it, not the slick shit, I’d instinctively wanted the real thing, the entombed Goya he was, and not only
that,
I could
do
it too, at eight years old.

He just beat the shit out of me, practically the only time he ever did. I remember the beating and I stuck it away in the slot of don’t touch Daddy’s stuff, but not the rest; the underpainting was wiped away, leaving only the slick and meaningless surface.

I have a photo from around that time, Charlie must’ve snapped it: I’m on the floor of our sunroom with my sketchbook, drawing, and he’s in a wicker easy chair with a drink in his hand, and he’s looking
at me, and he’s got the strangest expression on his face, not paternal pride at all, but doubt and fear, and I just figured that out, there in the Prado. I always thought, Hey, he was a son of a bitch in a lot of ways, and a shit to my mother, but at least he encouraged me as an artist, he was proud of my talent, but now I saw that wasn’t true, the opposite was true, all those drawing lessons, painting lessons—now I can
really
recall them, because I was ten-year-old me just a few minutes ago, and I know what he did, the subtle warping, the criticism. He wanted me to be just like him, a locked box, a successful mediocrity. And I thought again of that gorgeous loft on Hudson Street and the painting in it, and I felt like I’d been socked in the belly; I literally could not breathe for a long minute.

“Are you okay?”

Franco was looking into my face and he was all blurred. I’m going blind now, hysterical blindness, I was thinking, maybe a mercy, and I said, “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?” and he said, “You’re crying.” And I laughed (hysterically) and said, “I’m not crying, it’s the pollen. I have hay fever”—a lie, just like my life. And what the fuck am I supposed to do with it now, this revelation, this understanding? Someone once said understanding was the booby prize, and oh, it’s true.

At that point I couldn’t stand to look at any more pictures, and we exited out to the Paseo, the wide boulevard that runs in front of the museum, and waited in a crowd of tourists at the crosswalk for the light to change—they wait in Madrid, unlike Rome, where no one waits for traffic. I was right by the curb, under a putrid cloud of self-pity, when something slammed me hard in the back and threw me right into the path of a city bus.

I was down on my knees and the bus was almost on top of me—I saw a band of red paint and above it the reflecting windshield of the monster—and then I was heaved into the air with a force that nearly yanked my arm from its socket, and the edge of the bus’s bumper
smacked into my heel, ripping my sneaker from my foot as the air brakes screeched.

I found myself lying face-up on top of Franco, who also lay face-up on the sidewalk, the pair of us like a couple of lounge chairs stacked poolside. He’d pulled me so hard he’d fallen down on his back. He scooted out from under me and stood scanning the crowd, but whoever had done it had vanished. He helped me to my feet, or foot, because the left one was out of action. According to Franco, the guy had snaked in through the crowd and hit me from the right. Neither of us thought it’d been an accident or a maniac.

We hobbled back to the hotel, which fortunately was only about a hundred yards distant. I thanked him for saving my life, and he shrugged and said, “No problem.”

When we got back to the suite he tended me like a mommy, fetching ice for my wounded heel, ordering new sneakers from the concierge, pouring me a scotch. Yeah, he was just doing his job, but it was nice anyway, a sere form of human contact, but better than the howling waste of isolation into which I had fallen. Somebody just tried to kill me, but I was more terrified of life than of imminent death; it left me strangely, unnaturally calm. I have a feeling that’s what my dad was like on Okinawa, or he wouldn’t have been able to see what he saw and make it into art.

Krebs had been out somewhere with Kellermann, but when he came back and got the story of the attempted murder he immediately turned our lazy and louche little ménage into the Afrika Korps: orders snapped out, scurrying of the foot soldiers. Within an hour of his return, we were en route to the airport.

“Where are we going?” I asked him when we were in the car. I’d asked before but no one had bothered to answer me.

“We’ll fly to Munich,” he said. “I’ve arranged a jet.”

“What’s in Munich?”

“Many cultural wonders, but we’re not going to stay in Munich. It’s the nearest major airport to my home.”

“You’re taking me home?”

“Yes. I believe it’s the only place I can guarantee your safety until this thing is finished and the picture has been sold and my associates are paid off.”

“Your associates just tried to kill me,” I said. I guess I was a little irritated that he hadn’t made more of a fuss, oh, my dear Chaz, can you forgive me, I’m sorry, are you all right? And like that, but nothing: he listened to Franco’s report of the incident and barely looked at me while we were getting ready to leave.

He patted my leg and said, “Cheer up, Wilmot. Imagine that you are Caravaggio, fleeing a charge of murder, or Michelangelo defying the Pope, or Veronese under the thumb of the Inquisition.”

“I never wanted to be any of those guys.”

“No, you wanted to be Velázquez, with an honorable sinecure in the royal household, a liveried coat, and a bag of golden reales every quarter.”

“Yeah, and I thought that’s what I was getting.”

“So you shall, but you know even Velázquez had to go to dangerous Italy twice in his life, and not only to look at pictures. And didn’t he plunge into a risky affair with that woman, as you yourself have recounted, and didn’t he paint those wonderful nudes?”

I stared at him. “That was a fantasy. That was the drug screwing with my head.”

And now he turned and looked at me, and it was uncanny, like he’d turned into a different person or like I was seeing him properly for the first time. The slightly manic air he usually had was gone, and he looked tired, and older, and somehow more caring. I have no idea how he did it. He looked at me this way for what seemed like a long time. Then he said, “Was it really? You spend a good deal of
time in a fantasy world, don’t you? Perhaps this idea that you forged a Velázquez accepted by the whole world as genuine was also a fantasy. Perhaps it really is genuine after all. How could you tell?”

“What do you mean, how could I tell? I remember every fucking brushstroke on that thing.”

“Yes, and your memory is full of things that did not in fact happen to you, as you yourself confess. So this is not an impressive claim.”

“But the painting is real. I saw it. I saw Salinas test it. I saw you phony it up with that Bassano fake.”

“Did you? Tell me, do you actually know who I am?”

“Yes, of course I know who you are. You’re Werner Krebs, art dealer and criminal mastermind, and for some reason you’re trying to fuck with my brain.”

“My friend, your brain is, as you put it, fucked up beyond my poor power to add or reduce. And why would I do that, if I am such a criminal? Perhaps I am actually trying to bring a brilliant but psychotic artist back to reality. Perhaps I am a psychiatrist hired by your family to take you to my clinic in rural Bavaria.”

“Oh, right. But I don’t have the kind of family that shells out for Bavarian clinics, remember? Lotte can barely pay her rent, I have a sick kid, and my son from my first marriage wouldn’t pay a nickel to save my life.”