A Cruise to Die For (An Alix London Mystery)

by Elkins, Aaron

  You don’t get to be the two-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eighty-fifth richest man in the world by being stupid, and Panos Papadakis was anything but. It also helps if you don’t mind bending the law a little, or even tweaking it, or even breaking it. He had, in fact, done a little of all three in relation to the auction.

  For one thing, he had known full well from the beginning that there was a forgery among the twenty-four paintings. He knew because he’d put it there himself. Like several other fakes that he owned, he had commissioned it. As with the others, he had paid the forger $30,000 for it, an outrageous price, but he fully anticipated seeing it go for five hundred times that at the auction. And the original? That, he had other plans for.

  The possibility of detection hadn’t worried him. The forger was probably the best in the world at his craft, and he had justified his extraordinary fees by coming up with a clever and original means of making it virtually impossible for even the most stringent scientific tests to spot his fakes. And he had proven it; not one of the earlier ones had raised the least shadow of suspicion. Thus, Panos had been deeply shaken to learn that the Laboratoire Forensique had somehow spotted this one.

  But that shock, unnerving as it was, paled to nothing when it turned out that they had not identified it. His forged Manet? That had indeed passed muster. The picture that had not passed muster was the Monet, a painting that he’d owned for more than ten years, that he’d paid a lot of money for, and in the authenticity of which he’d had absolute confidence.

  How could this be? Was it a fake? What was going on? And the most important questions of all: If his painting was a fake, then where was his Monet, the real Monet? And… his eyes narrowed, his brain focused… who had it?

  “Am I all right?” he said to Edward. “Yes, sure I’m all right, you just gave me a little shock, that’s all. I’m fine.” And he was telling the truth. Among the attributes that had gotten him where he was, was the ability to recover quickly from setbacks and disasters, to regroup his resources and go back on offense. He’d come up with no answers to his questions, but at least he knew where to start.

  “Well, you just seem a little—”

  But Panos had had enough of Reed for the time being; of his too-perfect manners, his fake concern, his barely disguised condescension, his stupid little mustache that he probably groomed with tweezers. “Edward, look, I got a lot of stuff to do. I need to talk to the insurance people about this, I need to get hold of Sotheby’s, I need to… well, a lot of things. Do you got anything else we need to talk about right now that can’t wait?”

  “Well, you remember you were looking for someone who might serve as a sort of lecturer on the cruise? Someone who could speak knowledgeably about not merely the pictures, but the artists as well; someone the guests could come to with questions they might—”

  Papadakis motioned with his hand: Get to the point.

  “Well, I think I may have the perfect candidate for you. A young woman—”

  Papadakis nodded. “ ‘Young woman’ is good.”

  “Quite pretty—”

  “ ‘Pretty’ is good.”

  “Her name is Alix London. She’s developed quite a reputation—”

  “Wait a minute, this is the daughter of that Met crook? Went to jail for twenty years?”

  “Yes, Geoffrey London. It was eight years, actually. But none of that reflects on her.”

  Papadakis frowned. “Wasn’t she involved in a murder or something herself, not so long ago?”

  “Yes, she was involved, but her own record is spotless, absolutely clean. That’s what makes her so perfect. That murder got her a lot of publicity, you see, and my thought was that when that Culture Guru swine and the rest of the paparazzi get wind that she’ll be aboard, it will provide a lovely dollop of excitement… cachet.…” He waved his hand expressively, seeking the word he was after.

  “Frisson,” said Papadakis and Reed laughed. “Okay, good idea, you see if she’s available, but I’m not paying her nothing. She gets airfare and a free cruise, and she gets to meet a lot of important people. If that’s not enough for her, forget it.”

  Reed stood up. “I’ll see what I can do, Panos.”

  Two minutes after being dropped off at St. Barts’ tiny Gustaf III airstrip, Reed was on his phone to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C.

  “May I speak to Ted Ellesworth, please?”

  “Special Agent Ellesworth isn’t available at the moment.” The woman spoke with a twangy New England accent. “My name is Jamie Wozniak. I’m the operations specialist for the Art Crime Team. Can I help you?”

  “Can you give a message to Mr. Ellesworth?”

  “Of course.”

  “My name is Edward Reed. I’m a—”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Reed. What is the message?”

  “Tell him…” He peered around to make sure he wasn’t being spied on. “Tell him Panos went for it,” he whispered, feeling delightfully secret-agentish. “She’s in.”

  2

  In Brooklyn’s slowly gentrifying South Williamsburg neighborhood, on South Sixth Street, literally in the afternoon shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, was an old bagel bakery, the loft of which had been outfitted as a four-room apartment. In the largest and airiest of these mostly featureless rooms stood its current renter, a tall man dressed in what would have been the height of fashion in men’s at-home wear in eighteenth-century Paris, London, or Rome. His normally longish hair had been shaved off, as it would have been on a gentleman of that era, to make the decorous wearing of a wig in public more comfortable and convenient, and on his head was a woman’s bouffant shower cap, the closest thing to an eighteenth-century man’s at-home “negligee cap” that was to be found in Williamsburg. He wore a richly textured morning gown—it would have been called a “banyan” then—of green silk damask with gleaming blue lapels over a ruffled white linen shirt and a fussy beige waistcoat. In his left hand, his thumb clamped securely through the thumbhole, was a traditional kidney-shaped artist’s palette covered with daubs of mixed paint, and in his right, a delicate brush. A closer look would have shown that his morning coat bore its share of paint spots as well.

  The shower cap had come from Walmart, the rest of the clothing from a costume store, and the brush and palette were his own, but all in all he’d done a good job making himself look as if he’d stepped out of a self-portrait by some well-to-do court painter of the mid-eighteenth century.

  This was not by accident. The man’s costume was based explicitly on the painter Georges Desmarées’s 1769 Self-Portrait in Old Age. Moreover, the loft was much as Desmarées’s own atelier at the court of Maximilian III in Munich would have been: roughly made wooden easels and low, three-legged stools that were used as tables for equipment and material; dozens of ceramic jugs containing hundreds of brushes, some made from stiff hog bristles, others, like the one in his hand, from soft, pliable sable; crude shelving on which pigs’ bladders filled with pigments were stored; and paintings framed and unframed, finished and unfinished (or more likely abandoned), tacked to the walls or leaning against them. On the splintery wooden floors was the customary artist’s litter of crumpled paper, discarded brushes, old props, and used-up paint receptacles, but the room itself was large and impressive, with beautiful velvet swags hung at the north-facing windows, and a great stone fireplace surmounted by an ornate oak mantel that had once decorated an even bigger stone fireplace in a Fifth Avenue mansion. The fireplace itself, long defunct, had come with the loft. The mantel had been rented for one month from an architectural salvage firm in Queens.

  All these little conceits were helpful to the man who stood in the midst of them, lost in thought before a painting, a second brush clamped between his teeth. Christoph Weisskopf was an art forger, and among those few truly familiar with the profession, he was judged to be a master. He was also thought to be a little crazy, and this was equally true. The eighteenth-century trappings were not mere whimsy; they were nec
essities to him. In order to achieve his remarkable results, Weisskopf’s method was to make himself believe for the time being that he truly was the artist he was imitating. The crazy part was that he generally succeeded.

  His previous commission had been a Warhol, so he’d bought a straw-blond wig, dyed it even paler, and teased and sprayed it into what looked like an exploding haystack. For the month it had taken him to do the painting, he’d dressed in leather jackets, black turtlenecks, jeans, and high-heeled boots. He’d lived on pastries and tomato soup and pretty much convinced himself he was gay. Sometimes his neighbors didn’t recognize him from one month to the next. Sometimes he didn’t recognize himself and would be startled when he caught sight of his reflection in a mirror or a window. To switch personas from twenty-first-century New York to eighteenth-century Munich had taken more mental effort than usual, but for two days now, he had been Georges Desmarées.

  Weisskopf was an exception to the general truth that the art forger’s lot is not a happy one. The less able ones are constantly either in trouble with the law or one step ahead of it; their earnings are small, sporadic, and undependable; and the nature of the game requires them to associate with devious, unappetizing, and often dangerous types. Those with greater competence usually make better-than-good livings, stay out of trouble, and deal with an all-around better class of crooks. But they tend to be even more miserable, for they, almost to a one, are frustrated artists, angry with the prejudiced, know-nothing critics and dealers who dismiss or scorn the work they do under their own names, but are ever-ready to swoon over their “newly discovered” “Cezannes,” “Chagalls,” or “Picassos.”

  Not Weisskopf. Weisskopf was happy in his work. The fact that he had seen some of his own paintings, none of which bore his own signature, on the walls of the world’s great museums didn’t bother him. For one thing, he earned top-dollar at his trade, being one of the very few with the talent and discipline to turn out—and get away with—exact copies of existing paintings, rather than the usual less demanding, less risky pastiches “in the style of” one artist or another. And unlike most of his ilk, he wasn’t limited to one particular school or another; it made no difference, he could do them all. Donatello? Botticelli? Rubens? Miró? Kandinsky? Dalí? You name it; if you could pay his price he’d paint you one that’d fool any expert. His fee scale ran from $5,000 to $30,000 per picture, up to $1,000 of which was allocated to outfitting himself and his studio in the manner appropriate to the time, the place, and the painter. Each picture took a month to paint, usually followed by another month or so to properly age and dry it. He could easily work on two or three at a time and sometimes did, switching getups and altering his studio to put him in the appropriate frame of mind. His remarkable gifts meant that he didn’t have to work on spec. His paintings were done on commission with fifty percent up front, no exceptions. Last year his twenty-two commissions from thirteen clients had earned him $380,000 (tax-free, it need hardly be said), and things were looking even better this year.

  The commission he was currently in the process of fulfilling was a 1760 portrait by Desmarées of Princess Maria Anna von Pfalz-Sulzbach of Bavaria. Desmarées was far from the most collectible of Rococo artists, but the person who had commissioned it claimed to be the husband of a woman who believed herself to be one of Maria Anna’s descendants, and this was to be a present to her for their twentieth anniversary. As to whether this or any part of it was true, or whether some less innocent plan was behind it, Weisskopf had not inquired, as he never inquired. Unfamiliar with the monetary value of Desmarées’s work, he had checked the auction prices for the artist’s name before agreeing to take on the job and had found that a Desmarées portrait had recently gone under the hammer for $14,360 at Christie’s in New York. Weisskopf, who enjoyed a healthy sense of irony, had set his price for the fake at $15,000.

  The painting itself was done. Now he was about to apply the final touches of his peculiar craft, which in this case required creating the appearance of craquelure, the network of cracks that appears on the surface of almost every old oil painting. Most forgers accomplish this by rolling up the finished canvas, tying a rubber band around it, and sticking it in a warm oven for a few hours. Weisskopf, being Weisskopf, preferred the more delicate, elegant technique of applying two layers of varnish, the underlying one slow drying and the upper one fast drying. The upper layer thus contracts and hardens more quickly, forming a rigid skin at the surface. Then, when the lower layer eventually contracts in its turn, the by-now inflexible surface skin splits and fissures. The result, if properly done: an utterly convincing craquelure, at least to the naked eye.

  He had just dipped his brush in the varnish when his phone (kept in the kitchen during his workdays) chirped. He grunted his annoyance and let it continue to ring away while he carefully made the first gingerly application of varnish. When the answering machine clicked on, all he heard at first was an unintelligible male rumble, but then it picked up in volume, a blast that couldn’t be tuned out.

  “You son of a bitch, Weisskopf, pick up the phone, you son of a bitch! I know you’re there; you think you’re fooling me? Pick up the phone!”

  Papadakis, dammit. He gritted his teeth and continued to slide the varnish-laden brush over the painting.

  “I’m waiting!”

  That did it. The bastard wasn’t going away. Anyway, the trance was shattered, probably for the rest of the day. With a resigned, lingering look at that first glistening swath, he laid his brush across the rim of the can (the can was one of his few nods to modernity) and went to the room that served as his kitchen, while Panos continued raving.

  “You heard me, Weisskopf, I’m not—”

  He picked up the phone. “Panos, no offense, but can this possibly wait half an hour? I promise to call you right back.”

  “No, it can’t wait, you crook, you bum, you two-bit faker!”

  “Look, Panos, I’m right in the middle of a delicate—”

  “Don’t give me delicate, you goddamn Nazi! How did your lousy Monet get in my collection?”

  Weisskopf’s jaw dropped. “What?”

  “You heard what I said. How did—”

  “Panos, I have no idea what you’re talking about. How about—”

  “What I’m talking about? I’m talking about my Monet isn’t my Monet anymore. It’s one of your fakes. You think I don’t know your lousy style when I see it? How did it get in my collection? And where the hell is my Monet?”

  “Panos… Panos, please—” Weisskopf, holding the phone a few inches from his ear to spare his hearing, was fumbling for words.

  “You don’t work for nothing. Somebody paid you to do it. Who?” There was a tiny pause, as if for thought, and then the gravelly voice came down eight or ten decibels, so that Weisskopf had to put the phone up to his ear again to hear the menacing growl that ensued. “Or do you have it? If I find out—”

  “Panos, listen to me. I swear to you on the life of my mother, if you’ve got a fake Monet in your collection, it’s not my work. I’ve only done two Monets in my life, and that was years ago, and one is in a museum in Antwerp, and the other—”

  “Christoph, you listen to me, and listen good. I don’t give a damn about your other fakes, or your mother either. You can have this one back too, and I don’t care what you do with it. But I want my Monet, you understand me? And I want it back now. I don’t care what you have to do to get it. Otherwise—”

  “Panos, will you please stop threatening me and listen to reason? Just think about it for a minute. How could I possibly—”

  “You want reason? Okay, here’s reason. If I don’t have my own painting back inside of one week—one week—I’ll have you put in jail for the next twenty years.”

  “But I’m telling you I had nothing to do with—”

  “I’m not talking about the Monet now, I’m talking about a few other little things I happen to know about you.”

  Weisskopf was beginning to get a little hot un
der the collar, or rather under the shiny blue lapels of his banyan. “I don’t like what you’re insinuating,” he said. “You’re barking up the wrong tree now. I have never—never—knowingly participated in anything that was against the law. I take every—”

  He was interrupted by a bark of derisive laughter. “Oh, really? That Hogarth in Gutterman’s collection in Montreal? Tell me; you think he knows it’s not a Hogarth?”

  “Well, I admit, that’s the way it turned out, but it was certainly no fault of my—”

  “And that little so-called Pissarro of Mulas’s, down in Lima? That wasn’t your fault either?”

  “I… I…”

  “One week,” snarled Papadakis and hung up.

  Weisskopf put the phone down and stared at it for half a minute, the varnish forgotten.

  Then, slowly, he picked it up again and dialed a number. It was answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

  Weisskopf took a deep breath. “We’ve got trouble,” he said.

  3

  Ted (Theodore Mark) Ellesworth was not your average FBI agent, and his work cubicle showed it. Where others might have criminal codes on their bookshelves and crime scene photos or Most Wanted posters on their walls, Ted’s shelves were more likely to hold books on Titian, Rodin, or the Post-Impressionist painters, and the pushpins stuck into the partitions that served as walls held up museum posters of works by Rubens, Goya, Gustav Klimt, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

  These fittings, which were a continuing source of ribbing from his friends in violent-crimes units, were there as much for work as for pleasure. Ted was a member of the FBI’s seventeen-person Art Crime Team—three attorneys, an operations specialist, and thirteen agents, of which Ted was one of only two who specialized in undercover work. During his nine years on the team—generally referred to simply as the art squad, even by its members—he had posed as “bent” dealers, secretive or greedy collectors, and gullible, newly rich bourgeoisie looking to spend a million bucks, maybe two, on some culture they can flaunt. As undercover work went, it had a lot going for it—stays in expensive hotels, dinners in fine restaurants, sometimes a Ferrari or a Porsche to tool around in. And it certainly held none of the extreme physical hazards or other unpleasantnesses faced by undercover agents working drugs or organized crime. And most important, it was interesting.