by Lind, Hailey
Mary rolled her eyes at Pete’s outmoded gallantry, but the better socialized Sherri returned his greeting and elbowed Mary in the ribs.
“What’s up?” I asked, ripping open the mail in the vain hope that I’d won the Publisher’s Clearing House sweep-stakes.
“We were just—” Mary’s reply was interrupted by the sound of heavy boots clomping down the hallway. Two young men—one tall and baby-faced, the other short and snickering—ducked through the open door. Their black leather jackets, black jeans, and spiky hair clued me in to their friendship with Mary. The bronze art-nouveau Tiffany lamp bases in Babyface’s arms clued me in to the purpose of their visit.
“We made a bet that you couldn’t tell which was the fake Tiffany and which was the real one,” Mary said, bouncing up from the sofa and staring at me fixedly. “You have ten seconds.”
“Dude, no way she can tell in ten seconds,” Snickers said.
I sighed. I didn’t pay Mary enough to refuse her the occasional moneymaking favor, and besides, I had spotted the fake the second the boys walked in.
I gestured with my pen. “The one on the right’s the reproduction.”
“Dude!” Snickers punched his friend in the arm. “She didn’t even look! Lucky guess!”
“It’s not a guess,” I said, taking the heavy bronze lamp bases and turning them over. “See how the Tiffany Studios New York stamp is raised on this one? On real Tiffany bronzes of this period the maker’s mark is die stamped, which means it’s recessed into the metal. The real one also includes the model number. See there?”
Pete arrived with a tray of espresso drinks, doled out napkins, and joined the impromptu lesson on spotting forged Tiffany bronzes.
“Also, note the patina—see how the fake has some chipping along the edges and at the tip of the nose? That’s a dead giveaway,” I explained. “Real patinas develop over time as the metal slowly oxidizes, but fake patinas are painted on. If you rubbed acetone—that’s just fingernail polish remover—on the fake one, the patina would come right off.”
“But you hardly even looked at them!” Babyface protested in a high, adolescent tenor, and I realized why he was the silent type.
“I didn’t need to. Look at the features on the fake: the hands aren’t fully modeled and the hair is crudely detailed. Tiffany would have melted down such sloppy work. Now look at the eyes. Most reproductions are made in Asia, so the eyes have an Asian cast.”
I handed the bronzes to Snickers, who kept shaking his head and repeating “Dude” while Babyface dug a crumpled twenty-dollar bill out of his jeans pocket.
“Where did you get those, anyway?” I asked, gathering my things to head over to Pascal’s studio. “The real one’s worth a lot of money.”
“It’s my grandma’s,” Babyface squeaked. “She really loves it, so I wanted to get her another one. You know, like a matched set? So I bought one at the Ashby flea market, but Mary said it was probably a fake.” He shook his head in disgust. “I paid fifteen bucks for it, too. Flea market dude said it was hot. He lied to me, man.”
I watched silently as the boys clomped out of the studio.
“Mary?”
“Yes, Annie?”
“Let’s make it a policy not to deal with those who traffic in stolen goods, shall we?”
“Does that policy include your grandfather?” she sassed, delicately sipping her espresso.
“It especially includes my grandfather,” I replied, downing my coffee and setting off to make some easy money courtesy of Janice Hewett.
Chapter 4
Few art thieves are connoisseurs; most might just as well steal a big-screen television as a Titian. Not so the art forger. I am not only an accomplished artist, but a philosopher who challenges the popular definition of “art.”
—Georges LeFleur, in answer to the query, “Are you any different from a common thief?” on the BBC radio program Ask the Experts
“Mr. Pascal! It’s Annie Kincaid! Remember me? Dr. Harold Kincaid’s daughter?”
I had been banging on the door of Robert Pascal’s third-floor studio for ten minutes, with no discernable results. Maybe Pascal didn’t care whose daughter I was. Maybe this was the butler’s day off. Maybe the racket I was making had given Pascal a stroke and he was lying on the floor, cursing my name with his dying breath.
Someone was in there. The sleep-deprived denizens of the Internet start-up company on the first floor told me they had heard the whir of a pneumatic drill all morning. Those sounds ceased abruptly when I knocked.
Frustrated, I slid down the wall and sat cross-legged on the floor, drummed my fingers on the dull linoleum, and told myself I was being paid one fifty an hour to waste my time like this. Besides, I felt a tug of loyalty to a fellow artist. The Hewetts were prepared to sue Pascal, and their pockets were surely deeper than an elderly sculptor’s.
Which reminded me: why wouldn’t Pascal return Head and Torso? Artists were usually delighted to sell their old stuff so they could afford to create new stuff. And if they hated to part with something, well, there was nothing to stop them from making a copy, as long as they were up-front about it. After all, Edvard Munch had painted four versions of his famous Scream. So what was different about this sculpture? I wondered whether there might be a connection between Pascal’s reclusive behavior and Seamus McGraw’s peculiar death. Both had studied at Berkeley and were represented by Anthony Brazil . . .
But so what? The sculpting community was a small one, so it wasn’t surprising their training had overlapped. And many artists aspired to be represented by Brazil, who owned one of the top galleries in northern California. Still, it did seem odd that Pascal had not come to the show last night if only—like me—to curry favor with potential clients. Had he somehow known not to go? Or was he just avoiding the Hewetts?
The answers, if there were any, lay behind his locked studio door.
Maybe if I were quiet for a while he would think I’d gone and come out to investigate. Of course, once he saw me he could just slam the door. I wasn’t a cop or a bounty hunter. I had no idea how to extract the man from his studio, and no legal right to enter. With a decent supply of food and vodka he could hold out for days or even weeks, whereas I was likely to get bored and give up in an hour or two.
Actually, I was kind of bored already. I stood up and wandered down the hall of the uninspired 1940s building. Nothing broke up the monotony of the dull beige walls except a profusion of cracks in the plaster. The only other door led to a janitor’s closet, judging by the mop that nearly beaned me when I poked my head in. A single unadorned window at the end of the hall offered a view of dilapidated docks that had once bustled with longshoremen. The huge container ships from around the Pacific Rim now unloaded their cargo at the port of Oakland, abandoning this one to a handful of dry-docked ships and flocks of noisy seagulls.
I glanced at my watch. Fifteen minutes had passed.
Rats. Patience was not my strong suit.
Remember the money, I chided myself. That was good. Very motivating. Let’s see, half of one fifty was seventy-five, which meant that in the past fifteen minutes I had already earned . . .
Math was not my strong suit, either.
I wandered back down the hall, sat on the floor again, and started sketching in the marble dust that fanned out in silky waves from beneath Pascal’s door. I was putting the finishing touches on a nice rendering of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the cartoonish style of Roy Lichtenstein when my cell phone trilled, startling me. I always forgot I had it with me.
“What’s the deal with the Stand All thingee?” Mary demanded abruptly when I answered.
“Stand all?”
“Yeah, some kind of symptom?”
“You mean the Stendhal Syndrome?” I asked, surprised to be discussing the obscure psychological disorder for the second time in as many days. “It’s a psychological condition where a person faints or loses control in the presence of great art. It was named after—”
&n
bsp; “Oh, good.” Mary, familiar with my tendency to digress, cut me off. “Sherri says everybody’s getting it and I was hoping it wasn’t some new sexually transmitted disease. Okay, bye!”
“Wait! I’m trying to get a sculptor to talk to me but he won’t answer the door. I’m afraid if I go away he’ll leave for good. Got any ideas?”
“Hold on, let me ask Sherri.” Sherri and her husband, Tom, owned a process-serving business. Giving legal papers to people who did not want them had given Sherri unusual insight into human behavior. “She says to wait until he goes out for groceries or a doctor’s appointment or something. She says they always leave eventually.”
“I was afraid of that,” I sighed.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m bored,” I confessed. “And hungry.” I had, as usual, skipped breakfast. A meal of coffee, sticky buns, and toxic solvents was starting to sound appealing.
“Tell you what! We’ll join you! We’ll bring lunch! It’ll be fun!”
“Wait, Mar—”
She hung up. I started to hit redial, but paused. I was bored. And hungry. Pascal didn’t seem to care what I did out here.
What the hell.
The phone rang again.
“Where the heck are you, anyway?”
I gave her directions, and while the phone was out I decided to follow up on Bryan’s situation. With a little digging, I might be able to find out who had stolen the Chagall. Agnes Brock wasn’t the only one who knew people.
I began with the one person at the Brock Museum who might still talk to me: Naomi Gregorian. Naomi and I had been semi-rivals in college and semi-colleagues when we were interns at the Brock, at least until I’d been outed as a former art forger. I hadn’t spoken to her since the museum gala last spring, when she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up locked in a closet with a killer. Odds were good she’d hang up on me, but what did I have to lose? I was earning $37.50 every fifteen minutes. I’d finally figured it out.
“Naomi Chadwick Gregorian,” she answered in a newly acquired and ever-so-slightly British accent.
“Naomi!” I blustered. “It’s Annie Kincaid! How the heck are you?”
My greeting was met with silence, but since this was par for the course for Naomi and me, I forged ahead. “I heard there was a ruckus at the Brock the other day. Something about a Stendhal Syndrome faint-in and a stolen Chagall?” The silence on the phone was replaced by sputtering. “Naomi? You still there?”
“Yes, Ann,” she choked, calling me, as always, by the wrong name because she was just that petty. “I am here. What could you possibly have to say to me?”
“Well hey, old friends and all that. And after all, I did save The Magi, remember?”
The Brock Museum’s Caravaggio masterpiece was actually an exquisite fake painted by my grandfather, Georges LeFleur. But if Agnes Brock was happy with it, who was I to enlighten her?
“You ruined the gala, is what you did!” Naomi screeched, and I winced. “The Diamond Circle gala! The most important, most exclusive event of the year!”
“Be fair, Naomi,” I coaxed. “I didn’t ruin the gala; the bad guys ruined the gala.”
“You locked me in a closet!”
“Colin Brooks locked you in that closet because he was trying to protect you. You know how crazy he was about you. He told me so.”
I lied. Colin Brooks, also known as Michael X. Johnson, sexy art thief extraordinaire, had locked Naomi in the closet to keep her out of our hair.
“Colin said that?” Naomi asked, more subdued.
“Yes indeed. He also said that it was too hard to be with you when he knew he couldn’t have you.” I should take up creative writing, I thought.
“Why couldn’t he have me?”
Oops. Cancel the career change. “Well, because . . . because he’s already married.”
“What?”
“Six kids, too.”
“Six?”
“You did the right thing by letting him go,” I continued. “You know what they say, if you love something you have to, um, get rid of it.”
“That’s true . . .”
“Trust me. Anyhoo, about that Stendhal situation . . .”
“I can’t talk about the museum’s internal affairs,” she said primly.
“I appreciate that, Naomi, I truly do,” I said. “But you know how much I rely on you to keep me abreast of what’s going on in the art world.” Naomi could never resist juicy gossip, especially if it meant reminding me that she was a professional art restorer and I was a lowly faux finisher.
“Well . . .” Her voice lowered and she forgot the British accent. “There was a group here. Adult Education types, so I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised.”
I bit my tongue to keep from reminding Naomi that her father, a gifted auto mechanic in Modesto, had gotten his GED at adult night school.
“They’d been touring the galleries when suddenly they got all worked up and fainted in a heap on the floor. It was just awful, so tacky. Afterwards, Carlos in Security noticed a Chagall was missing. But you would know all this if you read the newspaper, Ann.”
In college Naomi had fancied herself a policy wonk and hung out in cafés ostentatiously reading the New York Times. Just to annoy her I had started hanging out at the next table, reading Le Monde. Naomi had a tin ear for languages, and it drove her nuts that I could outsnob her. Too bad I always stopped reading as soon as she stomped out.
“Why do the police think the faintings and the theft were related?” I asked. “Maybe someone noticed that Security was preoccupied, grabbed the Chagall, and took off?”
“It wasn’t that simple. The Brock installed an electronic sensor system last year, which should have triggered the alarm when the Chagall was removed from the gallery. But the system had been disabled. Whoever committed the theft knew what he was doing.”
“What do the surveillance tapes show?”
Silence.
“Naomi?”
“The, uh, the cameras weren’t exactly hooked up.”
“Not hooked up?” For an art museum to disable its video monitoring system was an appalling breach of security that, unfortunately, was only too common. “What moron decided that?”
“Mrs. Brock thought, and the curators concurred, that the video system cost too much to maintain. It just didn’t seem necessary. The cameras themselves should have been enough of a deterrence.”
“So the museum has cameras but no videotape?”
“The gift shop and entry cameras are still monitored. And an eyewitness reported a man wearing a brown leather bomber jacket, a hat, and glasses coming out of the gallery about that time. But the painting was small enough not to be obvious in all the confusion.”
“Surely the Brocks don’t think the people who fainted were in on the theft? They’re a bunch of folks taking an Adult Ed class, for heaven’s sake.”
“I’m just an art restorer, Ann. It’s not up to me,” she pointed out. “And speaking of which, if we’re done with our little chat I need to get back to work.”
“One more thing. Who was the Adult Ed tour guide?”
“That sort of thing is handled by Community Outreach. Art restorers are far too busy in the workrooms to attend to all that.”
I gritted my teeth, thanked her, and hung up. I wouldn’t trade places with Naomi for all the art in Florence, but the constant references to her flourishing career at the Brock rankled nonetheless. Naomi had a respected role in the fine-art world, as well as health insurance and a pension plan. I had squat. Every once in a while I was tempted to cave in to my grandfather’s pleas to join him in creating brilliant forgeries and making fools of the establishment.
Too bad I hated prison so much.
According to Naomi, someone had disabled the Brock’s security system and taken the Chagall in the confusion surrounding the Stendhal faintings. I had once been told by a highly impeachable but thoroughly knowledgeable source that many electronic sens
or systems could be turned off remotely by someone with the technical know-how. But to stroll out of a museum in broad daylight with a painting tucked inside one’s bomber jacket took a cool head and an abundance of self-confidence.
The very qualities possessed by a certain art thief I knew only too well. An art thief who once told me that a criminal’s cardinal rule was to keep things simple. An art thief who habitually wore a brown leather bomber jacket.
Along with half the men in San Francisco, I chided myself. Besides, the missing Chagall was small potatoes. Michael X. Johnson hunted bigger game.
Not that he needed to worry about money after the Caravaggio heist last spring. Most likely Michael was lounging by the sea in Saint-Tropez, tanning himself in an indecent swimsuit. Or gambling his ill-gotten gains at the craps table in Monte Carlo. Or ensconced in a Prague penthouse, rolling around naked on satin sheets with a Czech chorus girl.
Not that I cared.
Still not a peep from Pascal’s studio.
My stomach growled.
I gazed in vain at the elevator, hoping Mary and Sherri were on their way up. I banged on Pascal’s door. Nothing.
Stretching my arms over my head, I tried some isometric exercises that a ridiculously fit friend had shown me. I closed my eyes, took a deep cleansing breath, found my center, started flexing, felt something pull, and quit.
One thing was clear: I would not be applying to the Police Academy anytime soon. I was not cut out for the stakeout kind of life.
Might as well delve into the Chagall theft a little more. I flipped open my cell phone and dialed Anton Woznikowicz, an aging art forger and my grandfather’s protégé. Anton had a studio in the City and knew Michael X. Johnson. I would feel better if I could cross Michael off my list of suspects.
“Why, Annie! How nice to hear from you!” Anton answered. “How is your dear old grandpapa these days?”
“Last I heard, he’s enjoying his book tour.” My grandfather, Georges LeFleur, had recently published a book detailing his long and illustrious career as an art forger—and naming names. Interpol salivated and the art world was furious, forcing the old reprobate farther underground than usual. He was having a high old time being interviewed for the BBC while in silhouette and using a voice-altering machine like a Mafia don, wearing elaborate disguises for impromptu book readings in Berlin, and granting interviews to Reuters reporters, Deep Throat style, from behind the Doric columns of the Parthenon. Part of me admired his panache, while another part wondered if it was possible to disown one’s grandfather.
