by Trevanian
“Sir?”
The visitor leaned forward, dandruff falling from his matted hair, and enunciated carefully. “Pig shit. If that’s a copy, I’m a glob of whore’s spit.”
“Have it your own way. Now get out.” As he approached the gnomish housebreaker, Jonathan was deterred by a barrier of odor: ancient sweat, body dirt, mildewed clothing.
The old man raised his hand. “Before you set to bashing me about, I’d best introduce myself. I’m MacTaint.”
After a stunned moment, Jonathan laughed and shook MacTaint’s hand. Then, for several hours, they drank and talked about painting. At no time did MacTaint take off the tattered, heel-length overcoat, and Jonathan was to learn that he never did.
MacTaint downed the last of the whiskey, set the bottle on the floor beside his chair, and regarded Jonathan with an evaluative squint from beneath shaggy white eyebrows, the salient characteristic of which was maverick hairs that hooked out like antennae over the glittering eyes. “So! You are Jonathan Hemlock.” He chuckled. “I can tell you, lad, that your appearance on the scene scared the piss out of a lot of us. You could have been a vast nuisance, you know, with that phenomenal eye of yours. My colleagues in the business of reproducing masters might have found it difficult to pursue their vocations with you about. There was even talk of relieving you of the burden of your bleeding life. But then! Then came the happy news that you, like all worthy men, were at heart a larcenous and acquisitive son of a bitch.”
“I’m not very acquisitive anymore.”
“That’s true, come to think of it. You haven’t made a purchase for—how long is it?”
“Four years.”
“And why is that?”
“I parted company with my source of money.”
“Oh, yes. There was rumor of some kind of government association. As I recall, it was the kind of thing no one wanted to know about. Still. You haven’t done half badly. You own these grand paintings, two of which, if I may remind you, came through my own good offices.”
“I’ve never been sure, Mac. What are you? A thief or a handler.”
“A thief, by preference. But I’ll flog another man’s work when times are hard. And you? What are you—other than a frigging enigma?”
“Frigging enigma?”
MacTaint scratched the scruff on his scalp. “You know perfectly well what I mean. My comrades on the Continent shared my curiosity about you at first, and we pooled our fragments of information. Bits and pieces that never seemed to form a whole picture. You had this gift, this eye that made it possible for you to spot a fake at a glance. But the rest didn’t make much sense. University professor. Critic and writer. Collector of black market paintings. Mountain climber. Employed in some kind of nasty government business. Frigging enigma, that’s what you are . . .”
The taxi driver swore under his breath and jerked back the hand brake. They were frozen in a tangle of traffic around Trafalgar Square. Jonathan decided to walk the rest of the way. His eagerness to be away from the people at Tomlinson’s had made him an hour early for his appointment with MacTaint anyway, and he could use the exercise.
To get away from the crowds and the noise for a second, he turned down Craven Street, past the Monk’s Tavern, to Craven Passage and The Arches, where destitute old women were settling in to pass the night on the paving stones, scraps of cardboard beneath them to absorb the damp, their backs against the brick walls, bits of fabric tugged about them for warmth. They drowsed with the help of gin, but never so deep into sleep that they missed the odd passerby whom they begged for coins or fags with droning, liturgical voices.
Swinging London.
He held to the back streets as long as possible. His mind kept returning to the Renaissance man he had met at Tomlinson’s. Five million pounds for a Marini Horse? Impossible. And yet the man had seemed so confident. The event had made Jonathan uncomfortable. It had those qualities of the deadly absurd, of melodramatic hokum and very real threat that he associated with the lethal game players of international espionage, that group of social mutants he had despised when he worked for CII, and whom he had driven from his memory.
He turned back up into the lights and noise of center city. The rain had devolved into a dirty, hanging mist that blurred and blended the stew of neon and noise through which crowds of fun-seekers jostled their way.
Modern young girls took long steps with bony legs under ankle-length skirts, their thin shoulders stooped with poor posture, some with frizzly hair, others with lank. They were the kind who abjured cosmetic artifice and insisted upon being accepted for what they were—antiwar, socially committed, sexually liberated, dull, dull, dull.
Working-class girls clopped along in the thick-soled plastic shoes Picasso’s kid had inflicted on mass fashion, their stride already displaying hints of the characteristic gait of adult British women: feet splayed, knees bent, backs rigid—seeming to suffer from some chronic rectal ailment. Substantial legs revealed to the crotch by miniskirts, vast liquid breasts sloshing about within stiff brassieres, chattering voices ravaged by the North London glottal gasp, complexions the victims of the Anglo-Saxon penchant for vitamin-free diets. Doughy bodies, doughy minds. Gastronomic anomalies. Dumpling tarts.
Swinging London.
Jonathan walked close to the buildings where passage was clearest.
“Penny for the Guy, mister?”
The voice had come from behind. He turned to find three leering hooligans in their early twenties, jeans and thick steel-toed boots. One of them pushed a wheelchair in which reclined a Guy Fawkes effigy composed of stuffed old clothes and a comic mask beneath a bowler.
“What do you say, mister?” The biggest hooligan held his sleeve. “A penny for the Guy?”
“Sorry.” Jonathan pulled away. He walked on with the sense of their presence etching his spine, but they didn’t follow.
He turned into New Row with its gaslights, shuttered greengrocers, and bakeries. His pace carried him slowly away from the Mazurka Clubs, Nosh Bars, and Continuous Continental Revues of Piccadilly, and deeper into Covent Garden with its odd mélange of market and theatrical activities. Italian wholesale fruit companies, seedy talent agencies, imported olive oil, and a school of modern dance and ballet—tap a specialty.
Near a streetlamp, a solitary hustler carnivorously watched him approach. She was plump and fortyish, her legs chubby above thick white knee socks. She wore a short dress and a school blazer with emblem, and her stiff platinum hair was done in two long braids that fell on either side of her full cheeks. Obedient to recent police regulations, she did not solicit verbally, but she put one thumb into her mouth and rocked her thick body from side to side, making her eyes round and little girllike. As he passed, Jonathan noticed the scaly cake of her makeup, patched over, but not redone each time she sweated some off in the course of her work.
As he got deeper into the market, the acrid smell of traffic gave way to the high sweet smell of spoiled fruit, and the litter of paper was replaced by a litter of lettuce leaves, slimy and dangerous underfoot.
Down a dark side street, an out-of-tune piano thumped ragged chords as the silhouettes of tired dancers leaped over drawn window shades. Young girls sweating and panting in their damp exercise costumes. Stars in the making.
“Penny for the Guy, mister?”
He spun around, his back against the brick wall, both hands open before his chest.
The two children yelped and ran down the street, abandoning the old pram and its pitiful, floppy effigy wearing a Sneezy the Dwarf mask.
Jonathan called after them, but his shout served only to speed them on. When the street was quiet again, he laughed at himself and tucked a pound note into the Guy’s pocket, hoping the children might sneak back later to retrieve it.
He walked on through the gaggle of lanes, then turned off into a cul-de-sac where there were no streetlamps. The end of a dilapidated court was blocked off by heavy double doors of weathered, splintery wood that swung silently on oiled hinges. The bla
ck within was absolute, but he knew he had found his way because of the rancid, cumin smell of ancient sweat.
“Ah, there you are, lad. I’d just decided to come looking for you. It’s easy enough to get lost if you’ve never been here before. Here, follow me.”
Jonathan stood still until MacTaint had opened the inner door, flooding the inky court with pale yellow light. They entered a large open space that had once been a fruit merchant’s warehouse. Odd litter was piled in the corners, and two potbellied coal stoves radiated cheerful heat, their long chimney pipes stretching up into the shadows of the corrugated steel roof some twenty-five feet overhead. Well spaced from one another, three painters stood in pools of light created by bulbs with flat steel shades suspended on long wires from above. Two of them continued working at their easels, oblivious to the intrusion; the third, a tall cadaverous man with an unkempt beard and wild eyes, turned and stared with fury at the source of the draft.
Jonathan followed MacTaint through the warehouse to a door at the far end, and they passed into a totally different cosmos. The inner room was done in lush Victoriana: crystal chandeliers hung from an ornate ceiling; blue-flocked wallpaper stood above eggshell wainscoting; a good wood fire flickered in a wide marble fireplace; mirrors and sconces on all the walls made an even distribution of low-intensity light; and comfortable deep divans and wing chairs in soft blue damask were in cozy constellations around carved and inlaid tables. A full-blown woman in her mid-fifties sat on one of the divans, her flabby arm dangling over the back. The bright orange of her hair contested with the blood-red of her pasty lipstick, and festoons of bold jewelry clattered as she screwed a cigarette into a rhinestone holder.
“Here we are,” MacTaint said as he shuffled in his ragged greatcoat over to the crystal bar. “He wasn’t lost after all. This, good my love, is Jonathan Hemlock, about whom you have heard me say nothing. And this vast cow, Jon, is Lilla—my personal purgatory. Laphroaig, I suppose?”
Lilla twirled her cigarette holder into the air in greeting. “How good of you to pay us a visit. Mr. MacTaint has never mentioned you. While you’re at it, my dear, you might bring me a little drop of gin.”
“Friggin’ lush,” MacTaint muttered under his breath.
“Come. Sit here, Dr. Hemlock.” Lilla thumped dust out of the divan seat beside her. “I take it you’re connected with the theatre?”
Jonathan smiled politely into the drooping, overly made-up eyes. “No. No, I’m not.”
“Ah. A pity. I was for many years associated with the entertainment world. And I must admit that I sometimes miss it. The laughter. The happy times.”
MacTaint shambled over with the drinks. “Her only dealings with theatre were that she used to stand outside and try to hustle blokes too drunk to care what they got into. Here you go, love. Bottoms up, as they used to say in your trade.”
“Don’t be crude, love.” She tossed back the glass of gin and smacked her lips, a motion that jiggled her pendulous cheeks. Then she clapped a ham-sized hand onto Jonathan’s forearm and said, “Of course, I suppose it’s all changed now. The old artists have gone, it’s all youngsters with long hair and loud songs.” She relieved herself of a shuddering sigh.
“It’s worse than you think,” MacTaint said, drooping into a damask chair and hooking another over with his toe so he could put his feet up on it. “The law doesn’t allow you to carry sandwich boards advertising the positions you specialize in. And curb service on rubber mattresses is definitely not in.”
“Fuck you, MacTaint!” Lilla said in a new accent that carried the snarl of the streets in it.
MacTaint instantly responded in kind. “Hop it, you ha’-penny cunt! I’d kick your arse proper for you, if I wasn’t afraid of losing me boot!”
Lilla rose with tottering dignity and offered her hand to Jonathan. “I must leave you gentlemen. I have letters to do before retiring.”
Jonathan rose and bowed slightly. “Good night, Lilla.”
She made her way to the door at the far end of the room, sweeping up a bottle of gin as she passed the bar. She had to tack twice to gain the center of the door, which then gave her some difficulty in opening. In the end she gave it a hinge-loosening kick that knocked it ajar. She turned and waved her cigarette holder at Jonathan before disappearing.
Jonathan looked questioningly at MacTaint, who bared his lower teeth in a grimace of pleasure as he dug his fingernails into the ingrown stubble under his chin. “She drinks, you know,” he said.
“Does she?”
“Oh, yes. I found her out there in the yard fifteen years ago,” he explained, shifting the scratching to under an arm. “Somebody’d beat her up pretty badly.”
“So you took her in?”
“To my eternal regret. Still! An occasional spat is good for the glands. She’s a good old hole, really.”
“What was this number she was doing for me?”
MacTaint shrugged. “Bits of old roles she’s done, I suppose. She’s more than a little mental, you know.”
“She’s not the only one. Cheers.” Jonathan drank off half his whiskey and looked around the room with genuine appreciation. “You live well.”
MacTaint nodded agreement. “I don’t move many paintings anymore. Only one or two a year. But what with no income tax, I do well enough.”
“Who are those painters outside?”
“Damned if I know. They come and they go. I keep the place warm and light, and there’s always tea and bread and cheese about for them. Sometimes there’s only one or two of them, sometimes half a dozen. That tall one who gave you the evil eye, he’s been around for years and years. Still working on the same canvas. Feels he owns the place—by squatter’s right, I shouldn’t wonder. Complains sometimes if the cheese isn’t to his liking. The others come and go. I suppose they hear about the place from one another.”
“You’re a good man, MacTaint.”
“Ain’t that the bleeding truth. Did I ever tell you that I was once a painter myself?”
“No, never.”
“Oh, yes! More than forty years ago I came down to The Smoke to study art. Full of theories I was, about art and socialism. You didn’t look at my paintings, you read them. Essays, they were. Hungry children, strikers being bashed up by police, that sort of business. Trash. Then finally I discovered that my calling lay in stealing and flogging paintings. It’s fun to do what you’re good at.”
They fell silent for a time, watching the fire loop yellow and blue in the hearth. It settled with a hiss of sparks, and the sound pulled MacTaint from his musings. “Jon? I asked you to drop over this evening for a reason.”
“Not just to drink up your whiskey?”
“No. I’ve got something I want you to see.” He grunted out of his chair and crossed to a painting that had been standing in an ornate old frame, its face to the wall. He carried it back tenderly and set it up on a chair. “What do you think of that?”
Jonathan scanned it and nodded. Then he leaned forward to examine it in detail. After five minutes, he sat back and finished off his Laphroaig. “You’re not thinking of selling it, are you?”
MacTaint’s eyes twinkled beneath his shaggy eyebrows. “And why not?”
“I was thinking of your reputation. You’ve never peddled a fake before.”
“Goddamn your eye!” MacTaint cackled and scratched his scruffy head. “That would pass muster anywhere in the world.”
“I’m not saying it’s not a good copy—in fact, it’s extraordinary. But it is a forgery, and you don’t flog fakes.”
“Don’t bother your head about that. I’ve never sold a piece of shoddy goods before, and I never shall. But slake my curiosity, lad. How can you tell it’s phony?”
Jonathan shrugged. It was difficult to explain the almost automatic processes of mind and eye that constituted his gift. “Oh, a thousand things,” he said.
“For instance?”
He sat back and closed his eyes, dredging up the original of J.-B.-S.
Chardin’s House of Cards from the lagan of his memory and holding it in focus as he studied the mental image. Then he opened his eyes slowly and examined the painting before him. “All right. This was done in Holland. At least, the Van M. technique was used. A relatively valueless painting of the proper age and size was sanded down, and the surface crackle was brought up by successive bakings of layers of paint.”
MacTaint nodded.
“But the crackle was not perfect here.” He touched the white areas around the face of the young man in a three-cornered hat. “And when the crackle didn’t bake through perfectly, your forger rolled the canvas to force it. Basically a good job too. But in these areas it ought to be deeper and more widely spaced. Your man seems to have forgotten that white dries more slowly than other pigments.”
“And that’s the only flaw? Crackle?”
“No, no. Dozens of other errors. Most of them are excessive precision. Forgers tend to be more exact in their draftsmanship than the artist was. Look here, for instance, at the perspective on the boy’s left eye.”
“Looks all right to me.”
“Precisely. On the original, Chardin made a slight error—probably caused by two sittings during the drawing. And look here at the coin. It’s as carefully drawn as the marker there. In the genuine painting, the coin has blurred outlines, as though it were in a different field of focus from the marker.”
MacTaint shook his head in admiration, and a fall of dandruff floated to his lap. “Goddamn those eyes of yours.”
“Even forgetting my eyes, this thing would bounce the minute it hit the market. The original hangs in the National Gallery.”
“Oh, get along with you!”
They laughed, knowing that many forgeries hang bravely and unchallenged in the major galleries of the world, while the originals hang in clandestine splendor in private collections. This was, in fact, the case with all but one of Jonathan’s own Impressionists.
“Would this pass inspection, Jon?”
They both knew that the real skills of major curators were limited to the documentation of ownership patterns, despite their tendencies to report in terms of a genuine knowledge. “With what provenance?” Jonathan asked.
