The Trouble with Mirrors (An Alix London Mystery Book 4)

by Charlotte Elkins

  “Good going, Chris, that’s wonderful.” Alix jumped up from the bench. “But let’s get going. We need to find a taxi.”

  “I told you, that’s already taken care of too. Uber Black to the rescue.” She pointed at the ebony town car pulling to a curbside stop, not thirty feet away, at the nearby corner of Columbus and Union.

  “Chris, you’re amazing.”

  Chris mouth-shrugged and waggled her fingers. Nothing to it.

  “Good afternoon, ladies,” said the smiling driver through his open side window. “My name is Harold. The Legion of Honor, is it?”

  “If you please, Harold,” Chris said. “And then I’d appreciate it if you’d wait for us in the lot. We shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

  “My pleasure,” Harold said, starting up.

  “Chris, can I ask you a question?” Alix said as they settled in. “Well, two questions?”

  “Ask away.”

  “Well, I could see that that giant bag of yours has about a zillion pockets, most of them with zippers. Why do you just dump everything in the middle instead of using them? Just curious, that’s all.”

  Chris considered. “You know, that is a very good question,” she said nodding. “Hm. Now, what’s number two?”

  Alix laughed. “I was thinking about that ringtone: ‘Starting Over.’ It really couldn’t be more perfect for my father. I missed the point before.”

  “Thank you, I thought so.”

  “And what’s my ringtone?”

  “Actually, I haven’t settled on the one I want for you so I’m using a temporary one, just for the time being.”

  “Which is?”

  “Wait a minute, I’ll play it for you.” The phone was still in her hand from the earlier calls, so no complicated excavation efforts were required. She hit a couple of buttons and the speaker emitted four notes of a slow, stately melody.

  Alix, who knew opera, recognized it after the first two notes and laughed with pleasure. “I’d say that ought to do until when—or if—something better comes along.”

  It was the “Treulich Geführt” chorus from Wagner’s Lohengrin.

  Or in common parlance: “Here Comes the Bride.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Alix had been to the museum’s curatorial offices in the past, before Norgren had arrived there from Seattle, so she knew where to find them.

  “Good God, what’s down there, the crypt?” Chris exclaimed, looking dubiously at the dimly lit staircase before them. It was tucked into an inconspicuous concrete-block nook near the gift shop, and led uninvitingly down to an even dimmer basement landing. “The dungeons? Is that where they keep the heretics chained to the walls?”

  Alix laughed. “It’s where they keep the curators, but it’s not as bad as it looks. Or at any rate they don’t keep them chained to their desks.”

  But before they could start down, they were hailed by a pint-sized, middle-aged woman pushing a cart loaded with a thermal jug and coffee fixings, a carafe of what looked appealingly like white wine, a glass bowl of mixed nuts, and several mugs and stemless wine glasses. “Ms. LeMay? Ms. London?”

  “That’s us,” Alix said.

  “Dr. Norgren is waiting for you in the boardroom. He thought it would be better. It’s back down at the other end of the hall. Come along, I’ll show you. I’m on the way there myself.”

  “Mm,” said Chris, “those goodies—are they for us?”

  “Unless Dr. Norgren intends them all for himself, I suspect so, yes.”

  The Legion’s boardroom turned out to be small but handsomely furnished, with just enough space for a gleaming, oval, eight-person conference table and big, comfortable-looking executive chairs. Behind the table, Christopher Norgren, fit-looking at fifty or so, with only a few silvery strands glinting through his slightly thinning blond hair, stood up. His trim mustache, which had turned completely white, still looked good on him. “Chris, Alix, it’s great to see you both.” Considering that he was going to be staying beyond the normal working day to help them out, his smile seemed relaxed and genuine. “It’s been too long.”

  “Thanks very much, Mrs. Lesnevich,” he said, taking the tray and setting it down. “This was over and above the call of duty.”

  “You bet it is, and don’t think I’m going to let you forget it.”

  As she left he came around the table to greet the newcomers, hugging Chris, who responded with vigor, but correctly reading Alix’s less demonstrative nature from her posture and settling for a friendly handshake. And very friendly it was. She owed him a lot. It was Christopher Norgren who had really launched her career as an art consultant by recommending her to Chris two years earlier, when Alix, living in the off-putting shadow of her father’s notoriety, was having a hard time finding clients.

  Afterward, she had stopped by his office in the Seattle Art Museum to thank him, and they’d wound up going out for gyros at a nearby Greek hole-in-the-wall restaurant. They’d talked for nearly an hour and she’d liked him right away. He’d struck her as perhaps the least self-important art museum curator she’d ever met; this in a profession in which an unassailable sense of self-worth sometimes seemed like a prerequisite. It would have been nice to get to know him better, but within a month he’d left for his current position here at the Legion, so this was the first time she’d seen him since.

  He waved at the tray. “Coffee? White wine?”

  “Wine would be lovely,” Chris said.

  “For me too,” Alix said. “Only half a glass, though. And some coffee would be nice too.”

  “It’s a Riesling,” he said, pouring the wine, including a little for himself.

  “We appreciate your going to so much trouble,” Alix said.

  “Not at all, it’s a special occasion.” He waved them into a couple of the big chocolate-brown leather chairs and handed them their drinks. “Unfortunately, I don’t have that much time. Well, we’d better get down to it.” He sat down across from them with a laptop on the table in front of him and got his fingers going on the keyboard.

  As the usual succession of Microsoft’s desktop followed by a zillion dialogue menus flashed across a screen set in the wall at the head of the table, Chris took her first sip of the wine. “Hey!” she exclaimed. “This is good!”

  He raised his head to look sardonically at her. “And what did you expect? This is a classy joint we got here, lady.”

  “No, I mean really good. It’s Alsatian, that’s obvious . . .” She took another delicate sip and closed her eyes. “Clos Sainte Hune, am I right?”

  “Yes,” Norgren said. “That’s astonishing, Chris.”

  “Astonishing,” Alix agreed.

  Chris grinned at them. “It’s a knack. ‘Connoisseur’s taste buds,’ we call it.”

  By now Norgren had found the image he was looking for and it popped up on the screen: Tiny’s mirror, much enlarged but as clear as could be.

  “Oh!” said Alix.

  “Ah,” said Norgren.

  “What?” said Chris.

  But Alix and Norgren were looking at each other. “So it is old,” Norgren said.

  Alix nodded. “Yes, centuries old.”

  “So Tiny didn’t paint those cherubs?” Chris asked confusedly. “But didn’t Geoff say—”

  “No, the cherubs are new, all right,” Alix explained, “but they were painted on top of an existing painting, a really old one.”

  “Which you two are so sure of, because . . . ?”

  “The craquelure,” said Norgren.

  “Craquelure,” agreed Alix, “right.” Wonderingly, she shook her head. “How strange. I’ve had it all these years and looked at it a million times. But I never really looked at it before. It took this blowup to make me see it.”

  “Um, craquelure,” Chris echoed. “Sorry, what is that again? Is that all those little cracks?”

  Norgren seemed surprised that Chris, as a collector, wouldn’t be more familiar with the term, but Alix understood. At Chris’s request, her a
rt education at Alix’s hands was proceeding backward in time. They were still deep in the Post-Impressionist period at the tail end of the nineteenth century, and not enough time had passed since then for there to be much in the way of serious craquelure to consider.

  “Yes, the cracks,” Alix said. “The paint—or sometimes it can be the varnish—dries and shrinks over time, but the canvas or panel it’s on can’t shrink along with it, or at least not as much. Well, the paint can only shrink so much until eventually it gets to the point where the stress is too much for it, and—”

  “It cracks,” Chris said. “‘Crackles,’ I should say.”

  “Not only does it crackle,” said Norgren, “but it does it in predictable patterns. Paint on canvas crackles differently from paint on wood, for example, and the way it crackles on an oak panel is usually different—subtle but discernible, if you know what you’re looking for—from craquelure on poplar. And this pattern sure looks to me to be typical of poplar, which would indeed be most likely to have been the wood used by the northern Italian Mannerists. It’s not that complicated. The stability and relative permanence of the wood’s medullary rays in the context of atmospheric—”

  Chris politely held up her hand. “That’s okay, I’ll take your word for it.”

  Norgren laughed. “A wise decision.”

  “And those cherubs haven’t started crackling yet,” Chris said, “so therefore, they’re not old, but the background is.” She nodded to herself and thoughtfully plucked a couple of cashews from the bowl. “Yeah, I get it.”

  “Right,” Norgren said, peering a little more intensely at the image and blinking, “and I can see—I think can see—some irregularities in their surfaces that indicates that the craquelure underneath is starting to come through.”

  “Yes, they’re there, all right,” Alix said numbly. She was still dealing with the fact that she—the Art Whisperer, no less—had lived with a piece of art for two decades without being aware of its most obvious physical features. Not until someone else pointed them out to her—from a photograph. Well, if nothing else, it had taught her a lesson. Never again would there be any incredulous and condescending rolling of her eyes (mental, though it had been) at the amazing obliviousness occasionally displayed by her dimmer clients. She was one of them now.

  All of them sipped a little, ate a little, looked at the image, and pondered.

  “Italian Mannerist, of course,” Norgren said.

  “Absolutely,” said Alix, thinking back to her talk with Geoff about Italian Mannerist clouds and French Rococo cherubs. Studying the image now, she added: “Probably Roman school, or maybe Venetian, but Roman would be my guess. Dr. Norgren?”

  “Yes, Roman. Apparently a fragment cut from a larger panel.”

  “Oh, yes, obviously.”

  “Alix, I can’t help wondering—” He hesitated. “You must have looked at the back of it time and again. Did that not tell you anything that raised questions in your mind? Guild brands? Sale markings? The condition of the wood?”

  “No, I’ve never seen the back. It’s covered with felt, and there was no reason—so I thought—to take it off.”

  “What about the edges of the panel? Could you tell if they were relatively recently cut, or—” When she began to shake her head he stopped and sighed. “No edges. It was already framed when he gave it to you.”

  “I’m afraid so. Hey, now, what do we have here?” she said softly, standing and walking around Chris’s chair to get closer to the screen. “Dr. Norgren, are you able to enlarge the bottom any more without blurring it? Just the area below the mirror?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s give it a try.” He went to his keyboard again and a rectangle appeared enclosing the desired area, a cherub-free section of gray-blue sky and dull, purplish clouds. A little more keyboard prestidigitation and the segment enlarged in quick stages. On the actual mirror, the final area that was included would have been about eight inches wide by three inches tall. On the screen it was four times that and only marginally less crisp.

  Alix studied it. “What do you know,” she murmured inscrutably. “How about that?”

  “Alix—” began Norgren.

  Chris smiled at him and shook her head. “You just have to wait her out. She’ll get around to telling us. Eventually. Maybe.”

  “Take a close look,” Alix said. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing,” said Chris. “You’re standing in front of the screen.”

  Alix moved to one side. Norgren, carrying his coffee, got up and walked nearer, but it obviously didn’t help. He shook his head. “What are we supposed to be looking for?”

  “Look at the clouds,” Alix said. “Look at the one down near the left edge, the one that has kind of a brownish-greenish-orangey cast. It’s quite faded and the craquelure makes it especially hard to pick out, but if you sort of narrow your eyes to—”

  “Why, it’s not a cloud!” Norgren exclaimed. “It’s another cherub, isn’t it? Most of his body. He’s got his little arms raised—”

  “Will someone please clue me in?” Chris said. “I don’t see any little cherubs, I don’t see any little arms, I just see weird clouds.”

  Alix placed a fingertip on the screen. “Here, look. This is the left eye, see? And the right eye here.”

  Chris was shaking her head. “No, I don’t see.”

  Alix moved her finger. “This feathery orange blob here, that’s his hair, now do you see? Painted pretty sketchily, but it’s there. And his arm—”

  “Oh, there it is, I see it, yes!” Chris said. “Wow, it doesn’t exactly jump out at you, does it?”

  “And those two darker little peaks on either side of his head? Those would be the tops of his wings,” Alix said.

  Chris got up to join them nearer the screen. “But it’s completely different from the other ones.”

  “That’s right,” Alix said, “and that’s what makes it important. For the Mannerists, the cherubs—putti is probably a better term—they weren’t meant to jump out at you. They weren’t solid, living bodies, but something between clouds and fleshly beings.”

  “A lot of historians think they weren’t meant to be consciously seen,” Norgren put in.

  “Well, they sure succeeded with this one,” Chris observed.

  “What’s more,” Alix said, “it’s not at all the kind of cherub that Tiny painted, the kind that didn’t show up for another couple of centuries—the cute, rosy Cupids with the rosebud lips, those fat, naughty little messengers of love with their little bows and arrows.”

  Chris nodded. “You’re right about that. No one would call this one rosy.”

  “Or naughty,” Norgren said. “Nothing mischievous about this little guy. Look at his eyes.”

  Chris was puzzled. “Okay. So he’s looking up at something that we can’t see, something above him and off to the side. So?”

  Alix explained: “Those raised eyes, that’s a classic sixteenth-century expression of adoration, Chris, or ecstasy—religious ecstasy. From Donatello in the 1400s right through the Renaissance, and the Mannerists, and the Baroque, right up until the Rococo itself, cherubs were strictly religious figures, the cherubim of the Bible—the third order of angels, I believe.”

  “Second order, if I’m not mistaken,” Norgren gently corrected.

  Alix went back to her chair with a hangdog smile. “Rats, that’s what I get for showing off. I should have quit while I was ahead. All right, I admit it, Mannerism and the Baroque are not my fortes.”

  “If they’re not,” said Norgren, “I would love to hear you talk about your fortes sometime.” Eyeing the image, he crossed his arms, then raised one hand to tap his lip with the side of a finger. “And so we have to ask: Even if we were to assume that Tiny somehow did paint the background—that he came up with some terrific new way of successfully faking those cracks—then you still have to wonder: Why would he have put in that particular cherub, which doesn’t go with any of the others?”

  “A
nd the answer,” Alix said, “has to be that he didn’t. Didn’t put in that one cherub, any more than he painted the clouds and the sky. They were all already there, and apparently even he didn’t spot that old, faded one.”

  Chris returned to her chair too. “’Nough said. I’m convinced.”

  Norgren was slowly shaking his head. “You are something, Alix. I could have stared at that ‘cloud’ for two solid hours and never realized what it really was.”

  Alix laughed. “Don’t feel bad. I’ve been looking at it for twenty years and didn’t spot it until today.”

  When she saw him steal a furtive glance at his watch, she jumped to her feet. “Thank you so much for everything. We’ve taken a lot of your time, and I know you’ve got someplace else you have to be.”

  “Yes, a dinner session with our advisory board’s subcommittee on acquisition spending limits.” He winced as he said it. “Chris, I wish you’d called me last week. I’d have saved tonight to take the two of you to dinner. I’d sure rather be doing that instead.”

  Chris too had arisen. “I’m really sorry about that too. Dinner would have been on us, though. Look, any time either of us can help you out in any way . . .”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that. I really do need to get going now. Come on, I’ll walk you out and over to the parking lot.”

  “Let me ask you one more question,” Alix said to Norgren as they went down the now-deserted corridor, heels echoing off the floor. “You’ve agreed that it’s sixteenth-century Italian, early Mannerist, and Roman school. I don’t suppose you’d care to try to pin it down any more than that? Any particular artist, for instance?”

  “Sheesh,” Chris said. “You don’t want much, do you? All he had to work from was one photograph on a magazine cover, which he got to see for all of twenty minutes. Give the guy a break.”

  “But it was a really good photograph to work from,” Norgren said, “and, actually, it did give me some ideas, but . . . well, it’d be awfully presumptuous of me to come up with the name of the artist. I mean, really, I’d be on pretty thin ice, wouldn’t I, to—”