The Forgery of Venus (29 page)

He pauses, perhaps lost for a moment in memory. Then he says, “You said you were a painter—do they paint, then, in your future?”

“Yes, after a fashion. Not as you did.”

“No one painted as I did, even in my own time. Tell me, do the kings of Spain still keep my paintings and admire them?”

“Yes, they do, and so does all the world. In a few years from now Luca Giordano will stand before your portrait of the royal family and call it the theology of painting. A thousand painters have gone to school before it.”

A faint smile forms on the dry lips. “That Neapolitan boy—how we laughed about him!” He lets out a long sigh and says, “And now, Sir Phantom, I must, as you say, be about the business of dying, and I wish to turn my thoughts to God and away from things that happened long ago, that I regret.”

“But it was a wonderful painting.”

“Yes, wonderful,” he says, and perhaps he does not mean the painting, or not entirely.

I say, “Farewell, Velázquez,” and he says, “Go with God, Sir Phantom, if you are not a devil.”

W
hat to make of this, I thought, lying in my madhouse bed, later on that long night. A vivid dream is the easiest explanation, a kind of tying up of the whole thing, now that I’m officially on the mend. But I sniffed the sleeves of my bathrobe and got a whiff of cloves. Or did I imagine that too? Like my little game with Rose. Did I imagine her giving the failed artist Chaz’s address when I asked her in the barn? I felt so bad about frightening her in the hall at Krebs’s
house, but only in a vague and distant way, like it had happened long ago to someone else. It was sweet not to have any of it matter under these wonderful drugs.

I slept then, deep and dreamless, and in the morning when I passed my door on the way to the toilet, I happened to look out the little window, and who should I see but Krebs. He was in deep consultation with Dr. Schick and another man, one whose face I knew well, because I’d drawn a portrait of it in Madrid. Dr. Schick seemed to be explaining something to him, and he was nodding. Well, then, as Krebs suggested, he must be some kind of mental health guy. Although he still had the face of a gangster.

About an hour later, after breakfast, Dr. Schick came in and I had a long session with him. I gave him the life story, and how I felt about painting, and especially about the paintings I was doing, the slick nudes, I meant, and why I should imagine myself an impoverished though principled hack, rather than a wealthy and fashionable painter. He had a lot of good things to say about the fragility of the mind, and how it sometimes cracked under the strain of contrary urges and desires. Not at all unusual, he said, even among highly successful people. I told him about the salvinorin, and he wiggled his eyebrows and said, “Well, no wonder!”

I asked him what was in the implant that they removed, and he said they didn’t know. It was empty.

“What could it have been?” I asked.

“I would have to guess there,” he said, “for of course I have no medical records here for you. But people have had good success with such devices for dispensing antipsychotics. You know, many of those suffering from forms of schizophrenia refuse to take their medications, and this is one way to fix that.”

I agreed that this was a possible explanation, and we chatted some more about controlling my symptoms. He gave me a prescription for
more calming drugs and also for Haldol, which he thought I’d do well on, almost an ideal Haldol patient, he said.

I must have been, because a few days later I was discharged. I sat out on a bench in the sun outside the hospital. I was trying to recall painting those Wilmot nudes I’d seen, and the events that went with that life, and you know, it started to come back to me. My shows, mingling with the rich and famous, doing the paintings, and bit by bit I assembled memories of that life. It’s amazing what the mind can do. After a while a Mercedes pulled up on the drive with Franco at the wheel, and I got in and he drove me back to the Krebs establishment.

I did wonder why Lotte hadn’t come to see me at the hospital, but I found that she’d left to bring Milo to his Swiss clinic, taking Rose with her. That was fine by me. It’s embarrassing to be crazy, especially the kind of crazy I was, where you’ve forgotten the life you lived with another person. Were we really still married in this life? I hadn’t asked.

A few days passed. Not a bad existence, I had to admit. Responsibilities were few, one never wanted for company, and I had the run of the place except for Krebs’s office. Time just flowed on by. I did not pick up a brush or a pencil after returning from the nuthouse, but I knew I eventually would, maybe as an outsider artist, like those brilliant schizophrenics who cover acres of paper with their obsessions, or maybe I will cleave more closely to the mainstream and turn my craziness into real money, like van Gogh, and Cornell, and Munch. Or go back to the pricey nudes.

I detected a certain tension in the house. It was because the auction of the
Venus
had been scheduled in New York. D-day was, I believe, just three days away, and the worlds of art and high finance (is there a difference?) were churning like baskets of eels. I saw a copy of
Der Spiegel
lying around with the painting spread over the cover, with the blurb stating that the painting would go on the block with a reserve
price of a hundred and ten million dollars. I didn’t get a chance to read the article. They restricted my access to media: doctor’s orders.

Later that day, Kellermann handed me a cell phone, and it was Lotte from Geneva. She said the special rich-people clinic had poked Milo and examined his insides and declared that yeah, they can make him good as new for about a million bucks, more or less; a few new organs required, but it turns out that for these we don’t have to go on no stinkin’ list, they’re ready more or less when we are. Milo does look a little less peaky, she says. Maybe it’s the hope.

To her great credit, Lotte asked about the source of the putative organs, and the man didn’t quite get why she was asking. She said she didn’t want them to, like, come from people especially murdered to provide them, and the guy was shocked she would have thought such a thing, this being Switzerland and very correct. No, they have deals with people in high-risk professions, money up front and we get your good parts when the parachute doesn’t open, and also they’ll pay for the education of a cohort of kids, and should they drown some summer, the families let them take a cut, so to speak. Very rational and actuarial, something like dairy farming, ever a Swiss specialty. Whether it’s legal in the strict sense she didn’t ask.

I had a discussion with Krebs about the money end of this plan. It seemed that a million dollars was at that moment sitting in a Swiss account for me, in payment of all the paintings he’d sold from my vast output, which he’d been representing for years. Sorry you don’t recall that, Wilmot, sorry you recall something that didn’t happen and sorry you don’t recall something that did, but, hey, you’re crazy! I took this in calmly, or the Haldol did. The fact is, I can’t help liking him and I think he genuinely likes me.

That evening I wandered into the room Rose had occupied, wondering when I’d get to see the kids again, if ever, and I saw, taped to
the wall, one of her shredder-strip pasteups. It was of two fat piggies in a green field. Clearly she’d found a supply of pink. Well, you know, I really have a good eye for color, and a very good memory for color, if not for much else, and something about the strips of pink paper she was using to construct the pigs made a connection in my head: many of her strips had on them small sections of an intense rose madder.

I poked around the room, looking for the source, and after a while I found it, stuck in the back of a bureau drawer, a clear plastic bag full of shredder waste, mainly pink. I took it back to my room and dumped the strips onto the floor. I was lucky that it was a strip shredder and not the confetti kind, because you can do a pretty good job of reconstruction on that kind of strip. After the Iranian students took over the Tehran embassy back in ’79 they had teams of women reconstruct a lot of CIA secrets from the shredder waste, and I sat there all night and did the same thing, using a glue stick. It wasn’t perfect when I got through, but you could see what it was.

When I was done I sat through the dawn and the early morning thinking about what had been done to me, and also about why I wasn’t angrier. I wasn’t really angry at all, just sad. Relieved? A little, but mainly sad. How could she have? But I knew the answer to that.

T
here was a little stone terrace on the east side of the house, with a table and an umbrella set up on it, and there Krebs liked to take his breakfast alone, read half a dozen newspapers, and, I suppose, plot his next crimes. No one is supposed to interrupt him there, but I figured this was a special occasion.

I walked out into the early sunlight and held my pasteup in front of his face.

He looked at it for a moment, sighed, and said, “That Liesl!
Honestly, she has been told a hundred times to attend to the burn bags before she does anything else.”

He gestured to a chair. “Sit down, Wilmot. Tell me, what do you think you have there?”

I said, “I have there a Photoshop printout of an unfinished fake painting I last saw in a loft I was supposedly living in on Greenwich Street in New York. I was so rattled that I didn’t look at it closely enough, or I would have seen it was a huge ink-jet image printed onto canvas, then artfully gone over with a brush, and then glazed. I assume the images in that phony gallery were made in the same way.”

He didn’t say anything, just sat there with an amused look on his face.

I said, “The gallery, and the loft, and changing my door and my locks, and that ringer in Bosco’s place. And you got to Lotte too. It’s…I don’t know what to call it—insane? And how did you know the drug would affect me in that way? I mean the Velázquez connection. You couldn’t have planned it.”

He said nothing.

“No, of course not,” I continued. “It was just taking advantage of a preexisting fact. I was hallucinating Velázquez, and those paintings I did proved I had the skill. So of course, you had to forge a Velázquez.”

“Go on. This is fascinating.”

“And you implanted that slow-release thing in me so I’d keep having the experience even after I wasn’t getting the drug from Shelly.”

“It could certainly have been done that way, yes. Low-level American health care personnel are shockingly ill paid. It could have been done in that mental hospital in New York.”

“Zubkoff was in on it too.”

“I think you will find him perfectly innocent. If such a series of events actually transpired, then Mark Slade would have had to have
been the instigator of the whole New York endeavor. You should be more careful about your confidantes in future.”

“But
why
? Why did you go through all that incredible trouble and expense?”

“Well, if I were to humor you in this conjecture,” he said, “I would have to say it was because of what happened to Jackie Moreau.”

The name came as a shock. “He’s dead,” I said inanely.

“Yes. Murdered. He did a very nice Pissarro for us, and a Monet. And he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. I tried to protect him, but I was overruled. So I was not going to take a chance with you. Because in something like this, as I have tried to explain to you, the forger always talks in the end, forgers can’t help it. And the people who deal in forgeries at this level understand that. But no one listens to a madman. I believe your madness has saved your life.”

“And you thought driving me crazy was the solution? Why in hell didn’t you come to me like a man and tell me the straight story and ask me to pretend to be crazy?”

He shook his head. “Assuming for a moment that you are right, no such imposture would have worked. You are an artist, not an actor. Do you imagine that the gentleman who asked you to draw him that day in Madrid would be taken in for a moment by an imposture? No, you had to be genuinely mad, mad before witnesses, certified mad by doctors of unimpeachable reputation. And mad you must remain for all your days, if you want to live.”

“That was why that guy was talking to Schick in the hospital,” I said. “He was checking up that I was really around the bend.”

He shrugged. “If you like.”

“So you’re agreeing I’m not a succesful gallery painter and that I did paint that fake Velázquez?”

“I’m not agreeing to anything of the sort. Wait here a moment and I’ll show you something.”

He got up and left me staring at his empty chair. After a short while he returned, holding what looked like a leather-bound photo album. He handed it to me and I opened it. Every right-hand page held a color photograph of a painting affixed to the thick black paper with old-fashioned corner mounts, and on each facing page was pasted a typed provenance, in German. There were twenty-eight in all: several Rembrandts, a Vermeer, two Franz Hals, and the rest good-quality Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, with two exceptions. One was a Breughel of a skating party on a canal, and the other was the van der Goes altarpiece I’d seen in Krebs’s office that time. Besides that, all of them were unfamiliar to me.

“What is this?” I asked him.

“Well, you’ll recall the story I told you of the van that was consumed in Dresden. These were the paintings in that van.”

“Except for the van der Goes.”

“Yes, that had been removed and placed in the other van for reasons now obscure. But these paintings in the album are assuredly gone. Now, you may have noticed during your tour of this house a small door in the cellar that is always locked. Behind it is a bricked-up well. It was bricked up in 1948. Now, suppose I wished to remove the bricks for some reason and hired a respectable firm of builders to do the job, and suppose that behind the bricks we found all these paintings. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”

It took me a few seconds to get it, and it was so absurd that I had to laugh. “You want me to forge twenty-seven paintings.”

He laughed too. “Yes. Marvelous, isn’t it?”