How strange, she thought. She had loved—truly loved—only three men in her life, and two of them were jailbirds and the third one was a cop. The cop knew about the jailbirds (having helped put one of them away), but the jailbirds knew nothing about the cop.
And therein lay the elephant. For years after the catastrophic debacle of her father’s self-inflicted disaster, she and Geoff had been estranged—admittedly, not by his choice, but by her bitterness—but now she’d grown so close to him again that she couldn’t bear to think of causing him pain. He was aware that his daughter did a little consulting for the FBI’s art squad and he appreciated the irony, often joking about it. But a deeply personal relationship—and how much more personal did relationships get—with its top guy? That couldn’t help but distress him, and from it he had been most carefully shielded.
“So for how long are you planning to keep it a secret?”
“I don’t know. For now you’re the only one I want to know. I’m sort of newsworthy at the moment, thanks to that damn magazine, and if word got around that I was married, it’d be bound to reach him. He has the most amazing pipeline in the universe when it comes to art world gossip.” She thought for a moment. “Well, the second most.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Chris said, then peered at Alix for a long time before delivering her honk of a laugh. “Alix, God bless you, you are really one of a kind. I ask you, who else in the world would blithely walk into a marriage to a man who can’t be reached, and who’s God knows where, doing God knows what, for God knows how long—and, oh, incidentally, just happened to be the man who put her father in the slammer for eight years?”
“He wasn’t the man, just one of the men.”
“Oh, yes, right. Well, I can certainly see how that would make all the difference in the world.”
CHAPTER 6
Good morning, sweetheart.”
Ted. Alix had been sleeping soundly, but she came instantly awake. Sweetheart. The homely, everyday word thrilled and soothed her at the same time. “But aren’t you supposed to be on assignment?”
“I am, yes, so, technically, this is strictly against the rules, but . . . well, I couldn’t help it, just had to hear your voice. Believe me, I’ve taken all kinds of precautions.”
Her maddeningly by-the-book husband flouting the rules, though? Amazing, totally out of character, and wonderfully endearing. She pressed the cell phone against her cheek to be closer to him. “I’m so glad to hear your voice. I was already missing you . . . terribly.”
“Same here,” he said warmly, then laughed. “But my God, look at what a terrible influence you are on me, and we haven’t even been married a week yet. I didn’t wake you, did I? Your voice sounds a little muffled. It is almost eight o’clock there, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ordinarily I’d have been up hours ago, but I had kind of a long night.”
The next twenty-five minutes were given to her telling him about the burglary, the visit from Detective Durando (whose name and number Ted took down), and the earlier call from Ferrante (ditto).
“I can probably find out some more about this Ferrante,” he said. “I’ll check with Durando and see if he has any objection to my horning in at the Italian end.”
“I already mentioned it to him as a possibility. He’s all for it.”
“That’s good. I’ll get going on it as soon as we’re done. Uh, Alix, you are okay, aren’t you? I know how traumatic something like this can be. You’d tell me, wouldn’t—”
“I’m fine, Ted. Honestly. It’s just the mirror that has me a little down.”
“Okay, I believe you. But do me a favor and get that window taken care of right away, will you? Today. And make sure the others are secure. And the door too. And—”
“Sir, yes sir!” Alix barked into the phone and heard a forbearing sigh from his end of the line.
“Now. Let’s talk about the mirror,” he said, cooling things down a bit. “There’s something that’s got me wondering.” He then asked the same question Durando had. Was it possible that it was worth more than she thought?
“I really don’t think so, but Ferrante might have thought it was.”
“An art dealer make a mistake like that? Pretty doubtful.”
“I don’t see that that necessarily follows, Ted. You know as well as I do that you don’t exactly have to take an exam and get a license to call yourself an art dealer. All you have to do is put a sign in your window, and voila, you’re an art dealer.”
“Well, sure, but then how do you explain the burglary any other way than somebody thinks it’s valuable?”
“Ted, consider: You’re imagining that little mirror is some kind of masterwork by some artist-craftsman like—I don’t know, somebody like Benvenuto Cellini? Worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or maybe millions—”
“I don’t know about Cellini, but yes, that is exactly what I’m thinking.”
Alix was getting tired of having to contend with this line of argument. “A masterpiece,” she said testily. “Worth millions. That Tiny’s just going to blithely leave with some little girl he knows, and forget all about it. Aside from how ridiculous that is, where would he even get something like that?”
She clamped her teeth together, but the words were out, and Ted jumped on them.
“Are you serious?” He had picked up the edge in her voice and was reacting in kind. “Where would Benny Abbatista”—Ted typically referred to Tiny this way when he had something critical to say about him, probably because it sounded more like a gangster’s name—“get hold of a stolen piece of art? How would Benny Abbatista even know somebody he could get one from? I sure can’t imagine. Come on, Alix, I know you love the guy, but you seem to be forgetting that he was once—”
“And don’t you think it’s time to forget?” she snapped. “That was all a lot of years ago.”
“Yes, and a lot of years ago is when he gave it to you!”
Neither of them spoke. The prickly exchange thrummed in their ears.
“Ted?” Alix said meekly after a few seconds. “Are we having our first fight?”
“Is that what that was? Yes, I guess so. Oh, hell, it was my fault for being so snarky, and I apologize.”
“No, I was the snarky one, and I apologize. My fault.”
“No, my fault,” Ted insisted.
“No, my fault. I started it.”
“Alix?” Ted asked. “Are we having our second fight?”
That got them both laughing. “Let’s just hope they never get any worse than that,” Alix said.
“And they never will, not if I can help it,” Ted told her with conviction. “Look, I’d better hang up now. It’s late afternoon in Italy, and if I want to get hold of the carabinieri today I should call right now. I probably shouldn’t call you again, honey, but if I have anything to tell you I’ll pass it on to Jamie and she’ll fill you in.”
They finished with a sweetie-pie, lovey-dovey kind of goodbye that neither of them, only a week ago, could have stomached hearing, let alone actually participating in.
Alix was smiling as she hung up. Boy, love really makes you goofy, she was thinking.
Later that morning Alix drove down to the old warehouse that was headquarters for her father’s primary business enterprise, Venezia Fine Art Imports, “purveyor of imported, high-quality reproductions of fine objets d’art, in quantity and at reasonable prices.” That the main countries from which these high-quality objets were imported were Guyana and Bangladesh, Venezia’s website neglected to mention.
In real-world terms, Venezia was in the business of supplying cut-rate, cost-conscious hotel and motel chains with framed prints and items like ashtrays and soap holders to tone up the rooms of their establishments. Unlike the wares of other such purveyors, each picture from Venezia came with four pre-attached metal eyelets so that it could be screwed to the wall in the event that some guest might mistakenly think he had brought it with him. This inspired innovation had made Geoff one
of the leaders of the pack.
The two-story warehouse, which he now owned, was in Seattle’s forever gentrifying but stubbornly grungy Industrial District, a warren of rail yards, grimy, brown-brick warehouses, and mysterious manufacturing establishments south of downtown. (One of Geoff’s neighbors had an ancient sign on its facade: Buffalo Sanitary Wipers. What exactly these might be, Alix had chosen not to ask.)
Geoff’s living quarters were on the floor above the no-frills ground floor occupied by the company. As Alix pushed her way through the dented steel street door and traversed the ever-dank, raw-concrete corridor toward the packing and storage areas, her heart was in her mouth. This was where Tiny worked, and her throat had dried up at the prospect of telling him his beautiful creation was gone.
She needn’t have worried; he wasn’t there. Instead, Alix was greeted by another of Geoff’s rehabilitation projects, one Frisby Macdowell, ex-professor of art history and, according to Geoff, an astonishingly good forger of early twentieth-century Neoplastic and Constructivist art, an ability it had taken him years to perfect. It had then come as quite a blow to him to find that no one since the 1960s had any interest in buying even a real Neoplastic or Constructivist painting. Concluding that a career change was called for, Frisby had turned to faking Marcel Duchamp and George Grosz instead, both of whom were still in vogue. The problem was that he didn’t have quite the same knack with these two artists, and he’d wound up in prison for four years on multiple charges of fraud. On his release, a job from Geoff had been waiting for him. Like Tiny, he had taken it up with sincere gratitude and he had now been there for almost a year. And he had seemingly taken to the straight and narrow path.
He looked up from the partitioned carton he was loading with Venezia’s “Aztec-style faux onyx soap dishes” (made at a family sweatshop in the Bangladeshi village of Jhara Barsha). They were Geoff’s biggest seller, being extremely popular with departing motel guests but cheap enough to be reordered by the gross. “Hello there, Alix. Looking for your pater? He’s upstairs in his lair.”
“Thanks, Frisby.”
She walked through the work area to the waiting freight elevator, pulled the gate closed behind her, and punched Up. After a creaking, grinding ride of twenty feet or so there was another depressing concrete corridor, lit, like the one below, with two bare sixty-watt bulbs that hung from the stained ceiling. Then there was another forbidding steel door, the kind you’d see leading to the death chamber in an old prison movie, except that this one had a modern keypad on the wall next to it.
Only two people other than Geoff himself had the code: Alix and Tiny. Even Frisby and the part-time workers couldn’t get in without being invited. Geoff wasn’t hiding anything or especially worried about intruders, he just valued having a space to himself—merely one of his many contradictions. He was a thoroughly outgoing, friendly, sociable man who also loved his privacy. Or maybe it wasn’t such a contradiction. After eight years in a ten-by-twelve cell shared with another prisoner, she supposed, anyone would long for a space that was his alone.
She punched in the code, the lock clicked, the door swung open, and she stepped into another world, as up-to-date—and even trendy—as the rest of the warehouse was tired and antiquated. Geoff’s living quarters were sunlit and airy, took up the entire upper floor, and consisted of a high-ceilinged, three-thousand-square-foot loft, brightened by big arched windows and more than a dozen skylights, and broken into “rooms” by handsome, movable fabric partitions.
Only one corner, with its truly gargantuan window facing the northern sky—for centuries the artist’s preferred source of light—was a real room, with actual lath-and-plaster walls and a door, and that was Geoff’s studio, recently constructed and outfitted to accommodate his newest venture. Genuine Fakes by Geoffrey London had begun as a lark, but was now a profitable business of its own. And an enjoyable one. Geoff relished the delicious fact that he had come up with a way to capitalize on his unique attributes: he had been both a distinguished and sought-after restorer and (far more famously) an internationally known forger, in both of which he took great pride. It was the best of all worlds. He was painting his meticulous fakes, which he loved to do; he got to sign his own name to them, which he loved even more; and he was getting paid for them ($5,000 to $15,000), which he really loved. And it was all perfectly legal. Which absolutely took the cake.
She rapped on the inside of the door and yelled “Hello, Geoff, it’s me!”
No answer. He was in his studio, then, at work on another masterpiece and oblivious to the world. The familiar, pungent, oily smells of paints and solvents verified that, and she headed directly there. Even before he came into view through the open studio door she could tell what the current project was from the many enlarged, high-definition detail-photos that were taped to the walls: the Arnolfini Marriage, painted by Jan van Eyck in 1434 and generally credited with being not only the foundation of the Flemish school, but also the first major Western artwork to use oil paints as its medium, egg tempera having ruled since Egyptian times. Alix had stood before the original in London’s National Gallery many times, bowled over by its luminosity and translucence after almost six centuries. A heck of a technique, never surpassed, but if anyone could come close, it was Geoffrey London.
Once through the studio doorway, she found Geoff himself at his easel, studying his fake-in-progress with great intensity, the handle of a slender brush clenched between his teeth. She rapped on the doorjamb. “Good morning, Geoff.”
He glanced over his shoulder. Then he extricated the brush so that his fixed expression could relax into the happy smile her appearance invariably brought.
“Good morning, my darling, how lovely to see you. I didn’t know when to expect you back. Welcome home!”
Somehow, the old scandal and all those years in jail that had followed it had failed to dull the crisp, bright edge of the English accent that had never left him despite his forty-year stay in America. It had shrunken him, though, so that where once he’d looked like a merry, youthful Santa Claus with a prematurely gray beard, now he looked like what he was, a bent old man with a white beard, who looked a decade older than his actual early seventies. As usual her first sight of him after she hadn’t seen him for a while made her heart sink, but the moment he spoke the twinkling, cheery, old Geoff was back.
He stepped to the side of the easel so she could see it, revealing that the new painting had hardly any paint on it yet, just a few tentative dabs of malachite and russet on the wife’s dress. The intricate pencil sketch, however, was extraordinarily thorough.
“The underdrawing’s wonderful,” Alix said. “I didn’t think you usually did such a detailed one.”
“I don’t, but van Eyck did. And you know me, when I say ‘genuine fake,’ I mean genuine. Tell me what you think about it.”
“Well, let’s see.” She came closer. “I do notice a few little deviations from the original. Their faces—”
“Are the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Schulte of Hamburg, Germany, drawn from photographs of thirty years ago”—he gestured at a grouping of black and white photos among the pictures on the wall—“in accordance with the Schultes’ wishes. Does your eagle-eye detect any other differences?”
“Well, the new bride seems to be not quite so pregnant as the old one.”
“Yes, also in accord with their wishes. Understandably so.”
Whether the new Mrs. Arnolfini of 1434 had actually been pregnant or was showing off a stylish, high-waisted fashion of the times was still a bone of contention among art scholars, enough so that, in an apparent bow to propriety, the National Gallery itself was no longer calling it the Arnolfini Marriage; it was now simply the Arnolfini Portrait. Whatever the lady’s marital status, she certainly looked pregnant—about seven months’ worth, would have been Alix’s guess. About the fashion theory Alix had her doubts.
Geoff seemed to be waiting for her to say something more, but when she didn’t, he cleared his throat. “Ah
, nothing else?”
She shook her head. “No . . .”
“Nothing different about any of the other faces?”
“What? There are no other faces . . . Wait . . .” She focused on the small, convex mirror that hung on the wall behind the couple and reflected not only their backs, but beyond them several little figures, one of whom was generally thought to be the painter, van Eyck himself. But in Geoff’s version the tiny face was nothing like that of the lean, somber, clean-shaven van Eyck, but a rounder one, somehow made to look merry, with a small, neat beard drawn in. It was all done with a few pencil strokes, but there was no mistaking who it was supposed to be.
Alix burst out laughing. “Did the Schultes request that too?”
“No, that was my own contribution, made, may I point out, at no additional charge.”
“How generous of you. And I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with your ego, it’s just a clever way of ensuring that no future crook ever gets away with erasing your signature and putting in van Eyck’s in its place. Correct?”
“Exactly! The thought of that slacker van Eyck getting credit for my own brilliant work would be intolerable.”
She had continued to look at the drawing while he spoke. “You know, Geoff, I really am impressed. Not many . . . people”—she’d almost said “forgers”—“would take on a van Eyck. I had no idea you could do him.”
He drew himself up. “My dear girl, have you forgotten? You are looking at the most celebrated forger of the decade.”
“Am I mistaken, or wasn’t the usual word of choice ‘notorious’?” She knew that he would regard it as a compliment, unlike almost anybody else in the world.
He replied with a shrug. “Six of one, half-dozen of the other. In any case, of course I can do van Eyck.” He hmphed. “Really.”
And now, still smiling, he finally came forward to hug her. “Enough about my poor efforts. I want to know how things went in Washington. I’ll put up some coffee or pour some orange juice if you like, and you can tell me everything that happened.”
The Trouble with Mirrors (An Alix London Mystery Book 4) Page 4
