Rembrandt's Ghost

by Paul Christopher

  He picked up the cup resting on the verandah railing and took a swallow of the fiery tuak rice wine it contained, swishing the harsh liquor around in his mouth, then spitting it out over the railing and into the river below. The rain began to slow, the sound of it on the roof above him tempered to the slow drumming of angry fingers.

  Once upon a time, it had seemed that Khan might have traveled on a different path. He was James How Ling Singbat Alaidin Sulaiman Khan back then, the younger son of Sarawak’s minister of health under Stephen Kalong Ningkan, a privileged young man who had attended the prestigious Lodge School, won entry into Phillips Academy Andover in America and then went on to Harvard and a combined degree in business administration and international law.

  During his long time abroad—more than a decade—letters from his family told of change in his homeland, none of it for the better. Corruption set in like a disease, infecting everything it touched. His father had been ousted from his post, his lands and money taken, and finally his dissentingvoice silenced by the swinging blade of an assassin’s parang in a Kuching alley.

  Returning to his native land, he found his mother dying of despair, his older brother now a high-ranking and corrupt civil servant in the Judiciary, and the country committing slow suicide under the self-serving regime of Haji Abdul Taib Mahmud as her natural resources were auctioned off to the highest bidder, her forests and rivers destroyed, and her people abused and slaughtered. Then his mother died and he was alone.

  Taking the few remaining assets that were left to him, James How Ling Khan fled to the upriver jungles of the Rejang, renewing friendships and native family ties, forging a pirate empire that had no allies only enemies, preying on the ships of any nation foolish enough to pass within range of his wrath and his fleet of marauding gunships spread out from Sumatra to Zamboanga in the Sulu Sea, lurking like sea snakes in hidden river bases just like this one.

  There was other business as well; there were endless shipments of North Korean methamphetamines and counterfeit American currency to move, raw opium from Vietnam, slipper orchids from Sabah, sometimes special human cargo quietly left on the lonely beaches along Northern Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, and always, and very profitably, guns and other weapons ferried to the Kumpulan Mujahidin Malaysia terrorists, Darul Islam, Abu Sayyaf, Moro National Liberation Front, Jemaah Islamiya, and anyone else prepared to pay Khan’s exorbitant freight rates.

  Through the beating pulse of the rain Khan heard another, deeper sound that resolved itself into the familiar, lumbering thunder of his personal boat, Black Dragon, one of a half dozen World War Two ‘‘Karo-Tei’’ subchasers he’d discovered, forgotten and derelict in an old camouflaged pen on an uninhabited island in the Sulu Sea. Based on stolen plans for the prewar American ‘‘Six-Bitter’’ Coast Guard ships, the Karo-Tei were sixty-foot-long shallow-draft cutters powered by twin eight-hundred horsepower aircraft engines and capable of speeds up to thirty-eight knots.

  The small ships were heavily armed with twin twenty-millimeter cannons and an aft machine-gun tub. They were completely constructed from wood, which made their radar shadows almost invisible, and they carried a crew of fifteen, more than enough men to capture any unarmed vessel afloat in any weather. They were the deadliest weapons in Khan’s arsenal, and over the years, he had made them even more fearsome with Russian-made RPG rocket launchers, sophisticated navigation electronics as good as or better than those of any ships sent against him, and refurbishedengines that made him fleet as the wind and just as hard to see or catch.

  The narrow, V-hulled boat appeared out of the misty rain, nosing gently through the shallow waters of the estuary, her flat gray and stealthy paint job making her as elusive as smoke. Khan smiled coldly as she approached, powerful engines backing. Black Dragon, more a home to him than anything had been since he’d returned to the South China Sea.

  The engines of the sleek gunboat died and Black Dragon slid the last few dozen yards silently. A seaman appeared on deck, barefoot, picking up the forward line. The boat bumped gently against the floating dock directly below the rumah, and the seaman jumped down and secured the line to a wooden cleat. A short, squat figure stepped out of the wheelhouse, crossed the deck, and stepped down onto the dock. He reached the heavy bamboo ladder at the end of the dock and climbed easily up to the verandah. He was dressed in camouflage greens and combat boots, and there were three official-looking stars on each one of his epaulettes. His skin was dark, burned to the color of old leather by the sun after years of exposure. The man’s hard features were Chinese. His name was Fu Sheng and he was Khan’s second in command. The two men had known each other for almost twenty years.

  Khan’s old friend clambered onto the porch.

  ‘‘Apa kabar, Dapu Sheng?’’ Khan asked in Tanjong, an ancient dialect spoken by fewer than a hundred people, most of them members of his own Rejang River clan. ‘‘What news?’’ Dapu was Fu Sheng’s nickname: Big Gun.

  ‘‘Kaba baik, tuan,’’ replied Fu Sheng, bowing slightly. ‘‘The news is good, master.’’ He continued. ‘‘I have spoken with our people at the shipping company. They have confirmed the situation. The ship is some way south of us still.’’

  ‘‘And the business in London?’’

  ‘‘It proceeds,’’ said Fu Sheng. He shrugged. London was only a place he’d heard of, never seen, and matters there did not really concern him.

  ‘‘Follow the ship but do nothing yet. As to London, keep me informed.’’

  ‘‘Yes, tuan. Will you remain here?’’

  ‘‘Three days, only, then come for me. Those clowns from the Maritime Enforcement Agency are due for one of their patrols. Let them find nothing.’’

  ‘‘I don’t know why you go to such lengths to hide, tuan,’’ said Fu Sheng. ‘‘Their pencil has no point,’’ he scoffed. ‘‘We have more ships than they do, and more guns.’’

  ‘‘I don’t want to make war, Dapu Sheng. I want to make money. We pay bribes for that reason— to keep their pencil dull.’’

  ‘‘It isn’t the honorable thing, tuan,’’ growled Fu Sheng, refusing to give in, his voice tinged with anger and regret.

  ‘‘Perhaps not, old friend, but it is the prudent thing. We live in a world that holds honor in no esteem. It is extinct, just like the words we speak.’’ He reached out and laid his hand on Fu Sheng’s broad shoulder. ‘‘It is not the time.’’

  ‘‘Will the time ever come?’’

  ‘‘Perhaps sooner than you think, Fu Sheng. Our ancestors are calling. If we heed them we shall have our day.’’

  ‘‘You speak in riddles, tuan.’’

  ‘‘Perhaps.’’ Khan smiled. ‘‘But then again, what are riddles except mysteries waiting to be solved?’’

  6

  ‘‘Very mysterious,’’ said Billy Pilgrim, staring at the painting on its tabletop easel. He and Finn Ryan were standing with James Tulkinghorn in his small, book-lined conference room. The table the easel sat on was oak, dark and very old. It looked as though it belonged in a monastery, and Finn could just imagine silent hooded monks eating their simple meals around it.

  The painting itself was small, no more than a foot square. It showed an almost comical little ship, full sailed and high decked, running through stormy seas. In the background was a clearly defined reef with crashing surf and behind that a jungle landscape. The sky was painted in vivid sunset colors. The famous signature appeared in thick, almost italic letters in the lower right-hand corner: Rembrandt.

  ‘‘According to information given to me by the Boegart archives, the painting is a commissioned portrait of the Vleigende Draeack, or Flying Dragon— the ship with which Willem Van Boegart made his original fortune in the East Indies. It was painted in 1671. The painting disappeared just after the beginning of World War Two and was recently discovered in a Swiss bank vault.’’

  ‘‘It’s a ‘jacht,’ the first of the types of ship used by the Dutch East India Company. It’s where we get the term ‘yac
ht,’ ’’ Billy supplied.

  Tulkinghorn nodded. ‘‘Quite so.’’

  ‘‘It might be a yacht,’’ said Finn, ‘‘but it isn’t a Rembrandt.’’

  ‘‘I beg your pardon?’’ Tulkinghorn said, sounding a little offended. ‘‘It’s signed.’’

  ‘‘That doesn’t mean very much,’’ responded Finn. ‘‘Rembrandt had a workshop and employed dozens of apprentices, all of whom were authorized to sign his name. It’s almost like a rubber stamp. On top of that Rembrandt was well known for signing his own name to paintings that he never put a brush to.’’

  ‘‘But you can’t be sure of that.’’

  ‘‘Sure I can,’’ said Finn with a smile. ‘‘If it was painted in 1671.’’

  ‘‘Why is the date so important?’’ Billy asked.

  ‘‘Because Rembrandt died in 1669,’’ she answered. ‘‘I’m no expert in the subject, but I remember that much from my art history classes.’’ She reached out and tentatively ran her fingers along the ornate gilded frame. ‘‘Interesting, though,’’ she said quietly.

  ‘‘What is?’’ Billy asked.

  ‘‘The frame. I’m almost sure it’s by Foggini.’’

  ‘‘Who?’’ Tulkinghorn asked.

  ‘‘He was a Florentine during the seventeenth century,’’ said Finn. ‘‘I spent a year in Florence before going for my master’s. I got interested in him then. He was an artist in his own right, a sculptor, but he’s most famous now for his picture frames. Frames like this one. Gold, ornate, a lot of decoration.’’

  ‘‘I’m not sure I see the point. Why is the frame important?’’

  ‘‘If the painting is a forgery, or a copy, why would you put such a valuable frame around it?’’

  ‘‘Maybe to make people believe in the authenticity of the painting,’’ said Billy.

  ‘‘But if you’re going to all that trouble,’’ mused Tulkinghorn thoughtfully, ‘‘why would you ascribe a date to the painting that was incorrect, nay, impossible, and, I would think, extremely easy to prove that it was so?’’

  It really was amazing, thought Finn; the man spoke like Sherlock Holmes come to life. But the old lawyer was right.

  ‘‘Can I take a closer look?’’ Finn asked.

  Sir James nodded. ‘‘Of course. The painting after all now belongs to you and His Grace.’’

  Finn picked up the little painting. Given the weight of the ornate frame, the picture itself was quite heavy for its size, which meant that it had been painted on a wood panel, almost certainly oak. One of her night classes at the Courtauld Institute had been about dating wood panels used in painting by dendochronological analysis—counting tree rings. She looked closely at the surface of the painting and immediately saw the weave of canvas in several worn spots near the edges. Canvas over wood? She’d never heard of a painting done that way, and certainly not in the seventeenth century. Frowning, she flipped the painting over. The back of the painting was covered in old, very brittle-looking kraft paper.

  ‘‘Anyone have a penknife?’’

  Sir James nodded and reached into the watch pocket of his waistcoat. He took out an old pearl-handled jackknife and snapped it open. The old man gave it to her. She took the little knife and carefully cut along the kraft paper, keeping well away from the edges of the inner frame, or stretcher. She lifted the paper away, revealing the back of the panel. Dark wood. There were several scratched initials, what appeared to be the chalked number 273 , the 7 struck through in the European fashion, and two labels, one, clearly from the Nazi era, the other a simple paper rectangle reading Kunsthandel J. Goudstikker NV.

  ‘‘Goudstikker was the preeminent gallery in Amsterdam,’’ said Finn. ‘‘The Nazis cheated him out of everything in 1940. The Dutch government only resolved the whole thing a little while ago. It was big news in the art world.’’

  ‘‘This Goudstikker was a person?’’ Billy asked.

  Finn nodded. ‘‘Jacques Goudstikker. If I remember the story right, he inherited the gallery from his father.’’

  ‘‘What happened to him?’’

  ‘‘He fled Holland on a refugee ship for England, but they wouldn’t let him into the country because he was a Jew. He would have been interned. The ship went on to South America with him still aboard. Apparently he had an accident on the ship and died.’’ She stared at the upper edge of the painting. Frayed edges of canvas could be seen, almost glued to the wood with age. ‘‘But Goudstikker’s not the point.’’

  ‘‘What do you mean?’’ Billy asked.

  She pointed to the canvas edging barely visible at the inner edge of the frame. ‘‘Most paintings this old get relined every fifty years or so—the original canvas is bonded to a newer blank canvas to give it strength. It’s usually done with wax or resin. This is different. The canvas with the ship painting is a mask, a ghost image put over the original wood panel.’’

  ‘‘You think there’s something underneath?’’ Sir James said.

  ‘‘The Nazi label probably dates from 1940. The Goudstikker label is much older. I think somebody took an old Rembrandt copy and stuck it on the wood panel to hide the identity of the original painting from Goering’s people.’’

  ‘‘How can you be sure?’’ Billy asked.

  ‘‘I know a man at the Courtauld who can help us.’’

  ‘‘Today?’’ queried Tulkinghorn.

  ‘‘Why the sudden urgency?’’

  ‘‘The Amsterdam house,’’ explained Tulkinghorn.

  ‘‘What about it?’’ asked Billy.

  ‘‘Mr. Boegart’s instructions are quite clear, I’m afraid,’’ the old man replied. ‘‘The house, like the other bequests, must be taken into possession personally and by both of you within fifteen days or the items will revert to the estate.’’

  ‘‘The boat as well?’’ said Finn. ‘‘That means we have to go to Amsterdam and then Malaysia? All within two weeks?’’

  ‘‘Precisely, Miss Ryan.’’ Sir James cleared his throat. ‘‘And the Batavia Queen is a ship, not a boat.’’

  ‘‘What’s the difference?’’ Finn asked, suddenly irritated with Tulkinghorn’s old-fashioned nit-picking.

  ‘‘The usual definition is that a ship is big enough to carry its own boat,’’ said Billy. ‘‘But this is all madness. Why on earth is Boegart doing it?’’

  ‘‘At a guess, I should venture to say that he is trying to tell you something,’’ offered Tulkinghorn.

  ‘‘He’s trying to get us to follow in his footsteps,’’ Finn said.

  ‘‘But why?’’ Billy asked.

  Finn looked at the ornately framed object on the table in front of them, still bearing the ugly emblem of its violent past and the name of a man long dead. ‘‘I think it starts with the painting,’’ she answered. ‘‘And that means a trip to the Courtauld.’’

  7

  Somerset House is a gigantic neoclassical building a quarter mile long. Its original function in 1775 was to be larger, more imposing, and more important than any other so-called national building in the world. Its secondary function was to provide office space for every government bureaucracy in England anyone could think of, from the tax department and the Naval Office down to the office of the King’s Bargekeeper, the Public Lottery, and the office of Peddlers and Hawkers. Over the years the bureaucracies have come and gone, but the huge building always remains. It occupies a single enormous block of London real estate bounded by the Strand, Lancaster Place, Surrey Street, and the Victoria Embankment.

  When it moved from its old quarters in Portman Square to the Somerset House North Wing on the Strand in 1989, the Courtauld Institute of Art, with all its galleries, laboratories, lecture theaters, and libraries, barely made a ripple at its new home. Few people outside the rarified world of art history would have known the Courtauld even existed if it hadn’t been for the less than illustrious tenure of its onetime director and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, the infamous and disgraced KGB spy, Sir Anthony Blu
nt. The Courtauld, however, managed to survive the revelations about its former director’s seedy past, and over the years it became one of the world’s great postgraduate institutions concerned with art in all its aspects.

  Dr. Alpheus Duff Shneegarten, professor emeritus in the Department of Conservation at the Courtauld, was a very short, very round man in his eighties who might well have been the model for Tolkien’s Hobbit. He had a large head that was ten percent snow-white hair, forty percent hooked patrician nose, and the rest of it jutting chin with an ancient curved briar stuck between large, nicotine-stained teeth and a pair of smiling lips. His intelligent eyes were sparkling blue, and he looked as though he was always on the verge of delivering the punch line of a particularly dirty joke. Shneegarten was invariably dressed in a decades-out-of-date gray Harris tweed three-piece suit no matter what the weather. On his overlarge feet, he wore ancient Birkenstock sandals. He had been born in Germany or Argentina, no one knew for sure which. According to Shneegarten he still lived in England using a student’s visa.

  He was, as he’d once told Finn: ‘‘Entirely unique. Search for Shneegarten on your Giggle or whatever you call it and you will find nothing. Nothing, I tell you! I am unique among men! There is only one Shneegarten and he is me!’’ The old man had been at the institute since before the war and had been friend and adviser to all three founders, industrialist Samuel Courtauld, diplomat and collector Lord Lee of Fareham, and the art historian Sir Robert Witt.

  Shneegarten had been a pioneer in the field of X-ray fluorescence and infrared analysis of paintings. Using these methods he had conceived of and created a database of artists’ fingerprints that had saved more than one museum’s curator from being fooled by clever forgeries.

  Retired from active teaching long ago, Shneegarten now occupied a rabbit warren of lofty attic rooms on the top floor of the institute, which was only accessible by climbing several sets of dusty staircases and one extremely rickety spiral one made out of cast iron that shivered and clanged as Finn Ryan and Billy Pilgrim climbed it. In one of these attic rooms they found the professor bent over an immense canvas that looked like some kind of Turkish or Moroccan street scene. Shneegarten was examining a tiny square of the paintingwith a jeweler’s loupe screwed into the socket of his right eye and he was rubbing a cotton swab delicately over the area. There was a faint odor of ordinary soap.