Deceptions

by Anna Porter

  “You’re right, those hands don’t look like they had been bent and cut with twine, though that drawing was done at least a decade later if I remember correctly,” Helena said.

  “Could your painting have been done before the trial?” Andrea asked.

  “No. It looks too accomplished for that. But there is a lot of pent-up rage here. Her late works are much less emotional. Perhaps soon after she arrived in Florence.”

  “Her hands could have healed in a couple of years, and we know she was already presenting her work in Florence two years after she left her father’s house in Rome. Or maybe her lover altered her hands to please her.”

  Andrea suggested Giulio’s for lunch. It was close and usually not too crowded with tourists. At least not in October. “During the summer, Rome has become unbearable. One can’t even move along Ripetta, and I would never venture onto the Corso.”

  She led the way to a door at the back of the building, down a narrow street, past a couple of shoe stores, and into a dead-end alley, then back into the light at a small square. The restaurant had an unassuming exterior, but there were fine white tablecloths, waiters with white aprons, and a pleasantly effusive maître d’. He asked how Andrea’s parents were, whether her father had finally decided to retire and her mother’s famous roses had survived the latest heat. A disadvantage of having one of the old family names in Italy was that everybody thought they knew you, and, indeed, everybody knew just enough about you that they could engage you in cheerful, overly familiar chatter. Andrea was old stock, her family related to one of the popes — way back, but in Rome, ancient credentials counted. “My father will never retire,” Andrea said. She added for Helena’s benefit: “Been too busy for too many years and loves having all those connections. A retired lawyer in his line of law is nobody. No more ‘Signore Avvocato’ this, ‘Signore Avvocato’ that . . .”

  “Didn’t you almost marry a lawyer?” Helena asked.

  “Lucky escape.” The lawyer had followed her to the conference at Mont Blanc that had cemented Helena’s and Andrea’s friendship. He had said he missed her too much, couldn’t be in Rome without her, not even the food tasted the same when she was gone. In the evenings, he was anxious for her company, seemed eager to learn what had been said and who had said it, so eager that Andrea became concerned. It was Helena, always suspicious of men as handsome as Andrea’s lawyer, who had discovered that he had been retained by one of the mafia syndicates to defend a Sicilian boss on murder charges. The chief prosecutor, the pubblico ministero, had been one of the conference speakers, and the lawyer was using Andrea as his ticket in.

  When they had settled at a corner table, both with their backs to a wall, Helena told her friend about her adventure in Strasbourg and the dead man who had been her initial contact with Gizella Vaszary. When she mentioned Vladimir Azarov, Andrea whistled. “Him again. I had him in my sights last year for the Palermo Caravaggio. He offered to pay our boys what they wanted with maybe a little discount since it’s a famous work and impossible to move. This one would be a big score for a man with an oversized ego, but no one owned up to the heist. No one has seen it. I hear Azarov has been buying stuff for his boat in the Adriatic. A couple of old masters and a Giacometti sculpture.”

  “That was for his new place in London. He has moved some of his art into storage at the Luxembourg airport. I am not sure how good his connections are with Volodymyr Zelensky, the new man in Ukraine’s president’s office, but I doubt they’re strong. For one thing, Azarov was friendly with the previous president, the confections king, and Zelensky had choice words, and no time, for that man on his television program.”

  “I heard Azarov is selling some of his Russian shares.”

  “If they let him. Vladimir has always managed to keep his nose out of politics and particularly out of Putin’s way. ‘No sense tangling with the tiger,’ he once told me. ‘I am not interested in politics. Only what I can make out of them.’”

  “He is a dangerous man,” Andrea said, “if you get in his way. But you already know that.”

  They both ordered the vitello tonnato and the green salad. Then Andrea told Helena about a Rembrandt self-portrait that had been taken from the Borghese Gallery a couple of weeks before. It had not been on display, and no one was sure when it had been stolen, but the Carabinieri’s art squad had taken all the employees in for questioning. It turned out that one of the employees had spent a few weeks in Montenegro, working at the seaside restaurant that caters to luxury yachts — like Azarov’s.

  “Is he still working at the gallery?”

  “He’s a she, and yes. At least, she was when she was arrested. The alarm bells for me are not just for her time in Montenegro. She’s also connected to an artist’s studio near Dubrovnik that we believe has turned out some excellent fakes and a few forgeries. On the surface it’s just selling local art — very good local art — but that’s not all it’s doing. Ever come across them? Atelier Bukovar?”

  Helena had first heard the name some twenty years ago. Simon, on the phone to a customer in London, had been describing a Van Gogh that would come on the market from a dealer in Dubrovnik. He claimed he could maybe offer a deal on it if his customer was willing to move fast and not ask too many questions. It was Simon at his most charming. His most convincing. Twenty years ago, when Helena thought he was just a family friend.

  “Yes,” she said quietly, “I believe Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiquities Unit had suspected Bukovar in a fraud investigation involving a prestigious London gallery and a client who had decided he had been sold a forgery.” Thank god, not one of her father’s.

  When they said goodbye, Helena promised to let her friend know what she concluded about the Gentileschi. If it was going to be sold, Andrea thought, the Brera should be given a chance to bid. It had risked having a big, splashy Artemisia show before anyone else had thought of it.

  On the way back to the airport, using one of her burner phones, Helena called Attila’s mobile. She told him she would be back in Strasbourg briefly and she needed to find the man who had sold the painting to the Vaszarys. Then she called Gizella, who was eager to find out more about the painting, so eager she would cancel a dinner date with a friend and wait at home.

  Chapter Ten

  Helena arrived at the Strasbourg-Entzheim airport on a cheap, last minute Air France ticket she had booked online. She was using her Marianne Lewis getup, including the uncomfortably tight wig, but she had left as Marianne, and she didn’t want to take any chances with police officers patrolling the airport. She took a taxi to the Vaszarys’. The house was dark, but the outside lights flashed on, and Lucy barked energetically as she approached. A black Mercedes SUV sat two houses away, lights off, two heads in the front seats, both facing the Vaszarys’ driveway. Neither moved when she walked toward the entrance, but both of the faces leaned forward in an effort to see her more clearly.

  Probably the local police, but just as likely a couple of flunkies working for those eager art buyers who needed to know who the competitors would be.

  Hilda opened the door but kept the chain on. It was gratifying that she didn’t recognize Helena. She remained unconvinced when Helena said she had been sent by herself. It was Lucy who solved the problem. She inserted her nose into the narrow opening of the door, sniffed, whined, and wagged her tail. “Lucy, az Isten fáját,” Hilda said, but she removed the chain and let the rottweiler lick Helena’s outstretched hand.

  “Mrs. Vaszary is expecting me,” Helena said. She removed the wig and shook her hair out.

  “Oh,” Hilda said.

  Gizella, her smile in place, was already in the entrance hall. She wore a mid-calf black dress with a cinched waist and a slit up the side, gold choker necklace, and a dozen gold bracelets that jangled as she offered to shake hands. “You have news for me?” she asked.

  “I have done some tests on the samples. They all confirm my initial im
pression that this is not a recent fake or a copy. I still don’t know whether it is painted by Artemisia Gentileschi, but it is certainly of her time — Italian baroque. No recent copier could have matched the contemporary elements in the paints. And why would they? If what they were supplying was a copy, there would have been no need to go to the trouble of recreating the exact paints used. The frame itself dates from the sixteenth century. Now, it would be easy enough to buy an old painting by a second-rate artist and reuse the frame, but why bother if you are making a copy? I would like to take another look at the painting.”

  Helena followed Gizella into the living room. The lights were dim. A trolley with bottles of wine and liquor stood by the white sofa. Two cocktail glasses. One with amber liquid, the other with something colourless. The glass with the amber liquid had a distinct lipstick stain, the other did not. Since the second glass was not meant for Hilda — she didn’t seem to have that kind of relationship with Gizella — there was someone else in the house. Someone, Helena assumed, who had left the room when she arrived, someone who had known to expect her, but who didn’t wish to be seen. Not Iván Vaszary; he would not have stayed out of sight. Not the police. Then one of the potential buyers. Vladimir? Grigoriev? Maybe the Pole?

  Helena asked for the lights over the painting to be brightened. Even in the soft light, the painting shone, but when the additional lights came on, the severed head actually seemed to bleed. The young woman’s face expressed a strange combination of emotions. Rage, revulsion, triumph. Her hand holding Holofernes’s head was streaked with blood, strong agile fingers, not like Dumonstier le Neveu’s delicate lady’s fingers, but the hand of a woman used to hard work. The knuckles were thickened, and a couple of the fingers were slightly bent. The arm itself was slender but muscular, veins throbbing under the pale skin. The maidservant was still leaning on Holofernes’s chest, holding him down with all her strength.

  Artemisia had boasted that she used a mixture of amber resin and walnut oil mixed in her paints to add shine and translucence. It was a technique she said she had learned from lutemakers; it made the colours glide on. She had studied Caravaggio’s startlingly lifelike painting style, his use of ordinary people as models, painting them with all their physical blemishes, their dirty feet, their lack of refinement. The chiaroscuro effect, also learned from Caravaggio, was masterly, yet not as overwhelming as in some of Caravaggio’s early work. If the young Artemisia had been taking lessons from her father’s infamous friend, she had somehow advanced his style by softening the theatrics.

  But Judith’s face was a great deal more emotional than anything Caravaggio would have painted during the time he had been a guest at Gentileschi’s house. In his early paintings, the women’s faces showed no imperfections.

  The signature remained a puzzle. It was applied over a dark red surface, a wrinkle in Holofernes’s bedsheet, a drop of blood visible to its side and another above, but not under the “Artemesia.” She looked closer with her loupe. Nothing to indicate that another name had appeared under this one, but it was possible, as long as it had been done before the paint completely dried.

  Helena accepted Gizella’s offer of a drink. She noted that the glass that had been there when she arrived was left on the tray.

  “Such a relief,” Gizella said, raising her glass to Helena. “We have worried that you would agree with my husband that the painting is just a copy. I never believed that. . . .”

  “You are jumping to conclusions, Mrs. Vaszary,” Helena said. “All I am telling you is that the painting was not made in the nineteenth or the twentieth century, and that if it is a copy, it’s most likely by a contemporary of Artemisia Gentileschi’s.”

  “We would like to believe that it’s an original,” Gizella said. She gestured to someone in the next room. “Your opinion is good enough for us, we think.”

  “Us?”

  “Please be good enough to join us,” Gizella said, as she patted the white sofa next to her.

  Wearing a black dinner jacket, white dress shirt with long French cuffs, bow tie, and shiny, grey-and-black striped pants, Piotr Denisovich Grigoriev emerged from the shadows of the foyer. “Rad chova vac videt,” he said, meaning lovely to see you again, though his tight smile belied his delight. They had not seen each other since that unpleasant meeting in Budapest when Grigoriev thought he could force Helena to let him buy a painting that belonged to another man. He seemed to have lost more hair in the intervening months. Only little tufts left over the ears; the top was bald.

  “I invited Mr. Grigoriev for a viewing,” Gizella explained. “You came at the best time, Ms. Marsh. Mr. Grigoriev has expressed some doubt about the painting’s — how you say — source. He had met with Iván.” As if that explained everything, Helena thought. Iván Vaszary would stick with the story of a late copy because that was good for his divorce settlement.

  “Proiskhozhdeniye,” Grigoriev said pronouncing each syllable slowly with extra emphasis. “Ms. Marsh can explain.” He didn’t accept Gizella’s invitation to join her on the sofa. He stayed leaning lightly against the doorframe. In contrast to the very black hair on his balding head, his gaping shirt front revealed a few fine grey hairs.

  “Provenance,” Helena said.

  Reverting to Russian, Grigoriev said he had been suspicious that this was another little hoax cooked up by someone looking for a get-rich-quick scheme. Art was perfect for money laundering and those less than scrupulous people in the former satellites had managed to hide any number of pieces when the glorious Soviet army approached their borders. Vengerski, meaning Hungarians — stretching his mouth wide, he made the word longer and nastier than it needed to be — had been particularly eager to bury their treasures. Moreover, he said, he was concerned about the killing of the lawyer acting for this pretty little Hungarian lady. What, he asked, could he have known that warranted killing him?

  “What is that?” Gizella asked. “What is provenance?”

  “The biography of a painting from as early as possible to as recently as how it landed in your house,” Helena explained, though it was fairly obvious that Gizella was not interested “Sometimes,” she continued, “there are mentions of an artist working on a particular painting, letters, records of commissions, payments. All that adds up to provide some basis for assessing a painting’s authenticity.”

  “Authenticity?” Gizella poured herself another glass of Scotch and offered Grigoriev another shot of vodka. “It’s not Russian,” she said, “but Finland makes an excellent substitute, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t,” Grigoriev said. “Finland makes smoked salmon, and that’s about it.” He screwed up his face again but accepted his glass from the hovering Hilda. Lucy gave a growl of warning but sat down when Gizella raised her hand.

  “She did one of these paintings already,” Grigoriev said in Russian, “so why would she do another?”

  Helena shrugged. One was at the Capodimonte in Naples, the other at the Uffizi. Like other artists of her time, Artemisia painted the same scenes several times. If a painting was praised and sold, another wealthy collector would want one for himself and commission it. She had painted several versions of Susanna for the Borghese court. Same model. Same scene. But Helena did not owe the Russian any answers. Her client, if she was still her client, may have been in a hurry to sell the painting — although how she could do that without the husband’s agreement was a mystery — but Helena did not have to be in a hurry to lend her name to the authentication. And she was not yet sure what this painting was. “Mr. Vaszary would agree to sell the painting and split the proceeds with you now?” she asked.

  “I think he would, if the price was right and if he knew that I have had your opinion and an offer in hand. I mean, he could not then still insist that the painting is not worth much.” She beamed at Grigoriev.

  “I am going to the concert,” he said. “We can talk tomorrow.” Turning to Helena, he
continued in Russian: “I am still your friend, Ms. Marsh,” he said, “and I would cut you in on the deal if you are ready to tell me what I am buying. . . .”

  Gizella rose from the sofa and hurried to accompany him to the door. “You said you would name your price, Mr. Grigoriev,” she said.

  “And I will, madam, I will. In the next couple of days . . . all depends on what I believe I am buying. Ms. Marsh, would you like me to drive you back to the hotel?”

  “I will stay a while and study the painting,” Helena said.

  “This authenticity,” Gizella began, after Grigoriev’s car picked him up, “how do you make it?”

  “You don’t. You can only find it. I could maybe try if you remembered who sold the painting to your husband.”

  Gizella went to a box on a table that had not been there the last time Helena visited and opened it to reveal some papers. She started to rummage through the contents. “It has to be here somewhere,” she said.

  “Perhaps you remember the name of your friend? The one who sold your husband the painting.”

  Gizella looked up, hesitated for a minute or two, then she said, “You mean Biro? He lives somewhere in Buda. But I doubt he will be able to tell you much.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he got — he bought — this one from someone else. He had it only for a short time before he decided he had to sell.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Attila had been afraid to postpone his prearranged pickup of the girls. It was as if every delay or change of plans weighed against him on some set of scales that the ex kept in one of her brand new brilliant yellow closets (which matched the yellow brocade cover of what had once been Gustav’s favourite chair). It was not as if there had been much more she could do to him, having left his life in tatters, taken the children, the curtains, all their furniture, the bookcases, and some of his favourite books. Her shelves contained a range of classics, from Aristotle to Tolstoy, but Attila doubted that she read them, though she had claimed that the purpose of books was to improve your mind. The dog-eared books in easy reach of her passing hands were about “leaning in,” improving your mental retention, and practising extreme yoga.