The Forgery of Venus

by Michael Gruber

  I looked up at Krebs again and he was talking with Salinas, something about the exact dimensions of the painting, and Krebs assured him that it was right to a tenth of a millimeter and told him to get on with taking his samples, because he had to get back to Madrid as soon as possible so as not to be missed at the museum.

  Salinas opened a briefcase from which he removed a set of binocular goggles, a high-intensity headlamp, and a small black container about the size of an eyeglass case. He put on the goggles and the lamp, switched it on, turning himself into something like ET on a spelunking expedition. He approached the painting and from his little case drew a shiny small tool.

  “He’s taking a core to analyze the paint layers,” Krebs said. “Tiny, and virtually invisible. He’ll check the pigments and the ground for age and anachronism. Which of course he will not find.”

  “I hope not. What was all that about exact dimensions?”

  “Well, obviously whatever connoisseurship and technical analysis may say, the thing is worthless without an impeccable provenance. Now, with a drawing, or some minor Corot, or even a Rubens, this is easily handled, as I’m sure you know. It’s nothing to prepare a seventeenth-century bill of sale-old Baldassare can do it in his sleep-and there are thousands of dusty garrets in Europe and ancient families who will attest, for a consideration, that their ancestor the count bought the thing in sixteen whatever. But for something like this, such dodges will not do, not at all.”

  Salinas seemed to be finished at the painting. He switched off his lamp, removed his goggles, and held up a small vial as if it were the cure for cancer.

  “I have it,” he said, and placed the vial into his little box.

  “Excellent,” said Krebs. “Franco will drive you to the Ciampino airport; the jet you came on is fueled and waiting and you should be back at your desk in Madrid”-he checked his wristwatch-“no more than four hours after you left. A long siesta, but not unknown in Madrid, I believe.”

  Salinas smiled and shook hands with both of us, with the usual assurances of goodwill, not entirely hiding what I saw, close up now, was extreme terror; he packed up his things and departed in something of a rush. I heard the Mercedes start up outside.

  “A useful little man, that,” said Krebs reflectively as the sounds of the car receded. “And a bitter man: well trained, but without the flair needed in a museum director nowadays. He was passed over for promotion as director of collections, and this is his revenge. And his prosperous retirement.”

  “He’s going to buy the painting for the Livia?”

  Krebs gave me an unbelieving look and laughed. “Of course not. His job is to give us a flawless provenance.”

  “How?”

  “That you will see with your own eyes, perhaps as soon as next week, when we go to Madrid.”

  “We?”

  “Yes, of course.” He looked at his watch again. “You know, it’s past one. Aren’t you famished? I am.”

  With that we left the house and walked down the street and across the Piazza San Cosimato to a little restaurant where they apparently knew Krebs and were very glad to see him. They gave us a table by the window, and when we were settled with a plate of dried anchovies and one of whitebait fritters, and a bottle of Krug, he said, “Wilmot, I realize you are an artist and thus not entirely of this world, but I must press upon you that from now until however long it takes you must keep yourself under almost military discipline. No wandering off and no unauthorized calls. When we return I will ask you to surrender your cellular phone. It’s not me who makes these rules.”

  “Who does then?”

  “Our friends. My partners in this venture.”

  “You mean you’re mobbed up?” I said, or rather the wine said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Mobbed up. You’re working for the Mafia.”

  He seemed to find this amusing, and while he was chuckling the waiter came and we ordered food. The waiter said the scampi Casino di Venezia was very good and Krebs said we had to have it in honor of the city where we began our association, so I said, okay, I’ll have that too, and he ordered a bottle of Procanico to go with it. When the man had gone he continued, “Mobbed up-I must remember that expression. But let us not confuse things. The Mafia is about whores and drugs and corrupt contracts for poured concrete. We are talking about an entirely different level of enterprise.”

  “Criminal enterprise. Whatever happened to letting the experts come to their own conclusions? Whatever happened to Giordano Luca? You’re planning a major fraud.”

  He looked at me with what seemed like amused pity. “Ah, Wilmot, did you ever actually think it would be anything else? Really?”

  And I had to admit to myself that he was right. I do have a habit of believing my own lies. I took a breath, drank some more wine, and asked, “So when do I get my money? Or was that another thing, like those crummy sketches you raved about, that I should have realized was too good to be true?”

  “Good God, do you think I intend to cheat you?” he said, with what seemed to be genuine amazement. “That’s the last thing in the world I would ever do. Wilmot, I have been searching most of my life for someone like you, someone with your incredible facility with the styles of the past. You are, to my present knowledge, unique in the world. I would have to be insane to treat you with anything but the greatest respect.”

  “That’s terrific, but on the other hand I have to ask you if I can make a phone call.”

  “I told you, I don’t make those rules. But when the operation is complete, and the surveillance is lifted, you may call anyone you like. Always being discreet, of course. Because, you understand me, there is no-how shall I put it?-statutes of limitations on art forgery. That is, until the actual witnesses are deceased, the authenticity of the painting is always at risk. With one careless word an object worth many tens, hundreds, of millions becomes a mere pastiche and worth nothing, and then the buyers look to get their money back. They go to the dealer and of course he talks, and then the cord that holds it all together unravels. Then it is either prison for all of us or a worse fate, if in any way the gentlemen I referred to earlier are in the least implicated. Not a happy prospect. Especially not for you. Or for your family.”

  When he said that I almost lost a mouthful of whitebait, but I managed to get it down and asked him, “What’re you talking about? My family?”

  “Well, only as a means of controlling you. While you remain alive.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes, well, I speak loosely of witnesses, but in affairs like this one, there is only one witness who counts. I mean, Baldassare knows, and Franco, and that girl who posed, but no one cares about them. Anyone can cry forgery and the interests that wish for the painting to be original can always shout them down. It happens all the time. But one witness can never be shouted down.” He paused and inclined his head toward me and snapped a bit of fish from his fork.

  “The forger himself,” I said.

  “Just so. Now don’t be downhearted, Wilmot, I beg you. As I keep saying, this is a new life you are in now. Danger, yes, but when has real art not been associated with a certain danger? Quattrocento Florence was a violent place, and art’s greatest patrons have always been violent men.”

  “Like the Nazis?” A little dig there, but he didn’t blink.

  “I was thinking of the robber barons of America or the aristocrats of Europe. And the artists themselves have always been freebooters, living on the edges of society. When art becomes domesticated into a branch of show business, it becomes flaccid and dull, as now.”

  “Sorry, but that’s nonsense, like Harry Lime’s remark about Switzerland and the cuckoo clock in The Third Man. Velázquez had a steady job-”

  “Yes, and in his lifetime he did fewer than one hundred fifty paintings. Rembrandt, living on the edge of life, did over five hundred.”

  “And Vermeer, who was even more on the edge, did forty. I’m sorry, it won’t wash, Krebs. You can’t generalize ab
out what kind of temperament and what social conditions produce great painting. It’s a mystery.”

  I could see he was starting to get a little steamed to have his pet theories exploded like this, but it’s always gotten me steamed to hear theories about how art happens dumped on my head by people who never handled a brush. But then he shrugged, and smiled, and said, “Well, perhaps you’re right. It is a life I am used to, and we all tell ourselves stories to justify ourselves to ourselves and others, because we wish to have some company in these little scenarios. But I see it is not to be, you have a head as hard as mine. And really, it does not matter in the least, as long as you do not forget that the sword that hangs over us is harder than both our heads. Ah, good, here is our meal.”

  The food was excellent, but I had acid on my tongue and could hardly taste it. I drank more than my share of the wine, however, and got enough of a buzz to keep me in my seat instead of running out of the place screaming hysterically. Krebs chewed away on his scampi and I wondered how he’d ever gotten used to this kind of life. I mean, he seemed like an ordinary guy, no more ruthless-in fact, maybe less ruthless-than the typical high-end New York gallery magnate.

  I wanted to jab him some more, though, so I said, “Is it true, by the way, that you got your start selling pictures stolen from murdered Jews?”

  “Yes,” he said blandly, “perfectly true. But as I’m sure you know, there was no question of returning these things to the rightful owners. It would be like trying to return a carving to an Assyrian or an Aztec. They were dead. I sincerely wish they hadn’t died, but I didn’t kill them. I was thirteen when the war ended. So what was I supposed to do, leave them in a Swiss vault forever?”

  “An interesting moral point.”

  “Yes, and I’ll tell you another one, as long as you’ve brought up the subject. My father was a Nazi and I was raised as a Nazi. Everyone of my generation was. As a boy I could not wait to be old enough to join the forces and fight for the Reich. I believed every lie they told me, as I imagine you believed the lies your country told you. Tell me, were you in Vietnam?”

  “No, I was exempt. I had a kid.”

  “Lucky you. According to the Vietnamese your country killed three million of their people, most of them civilians. I’m not excusing what the Nazis did, of course, just pointing out that Germany is not alone in slaughtering innocents, and for a long time the Americans supported that war. Now I will tell you an amusing story. In December of 1944 my whole family was back in Munich and the city was being bombed day and night. My father was naturally concerned for the safety of his family, and so he pulled strings and got us out of there, to a place that had never been bombed and which was considered quite safe. Do you know where this was? It was Dresden. We were there in February when the Allies burnt the city to the ground. I survived; my mother did not. I hid in the sewers.”

  Here he drank some wine and let loose a small sigh.

  “After the bombing I went back to where our house had been and there was nothing but ash. My mother had turned into a little black manikin one meter long. We scraped her off the cellar wall with pieces of a smashed toilet. And then the war was over and we learned the full story of our shame, and so we were not allowed to voice the suffering we had experienced. This destruction, this slaughter of children, these thousands of rapes we endured could not be acknowledged. It was our just recompense, our nemesis. And so most of my generation picked ourselves up and went on with life and rebuilt our country.”

  He paused and I said, “What does that have to do with-”

  He held up his fork. “Wait, be patient, I will get to that. So we all participated in rebuilding the country, but there were scars that could never be mentioned. Some of us never recovered from the disillusion, this massive betrayal, this nursery of lies in which we were raised. We were forever cut off from our fellow citizens, because any idea of a shared culture, our heimat, had been poisoned. The Nazis were very clever: they understood that to create a great evil you must pervert a great good, and this was our love of nation and family and culture.

  “And when I asked my father what he had done in the war, he answered me honestly, and when I heard of it, I was not shocked, I did not reject him, because I knew in my heart I was no better than him, and I did not join the self-righteous of my generation, the ones who supposed they would have behaved so much more nobly than their parents in the same situation. So I became the person I am today. After my art studies were complete, I went to Switzerland and forged provenances and sold the paintings of the dead Jews without a single qualm. I said to myself that I was returning beauty to the world. Perhaps a self-serving lie, but, as I have suggested already, who does not tell themselves such lies? Yet the beauty is real, perhaps the only real thing there is. It does not save us, but it is better, I think, for there to be beauty than not. You have created a thing of great beauty, deep beauty, a thing that will last for as long as there are men to see it, and they will love it the more if they think it came from the hand of Diego Velázquez. This is foolishness, of course-the thing is the thing-yet who shall blame us if we profit from this foolishness? What legitimate business does not?”

  “Well, gosh, you convinced me,” I said. “Now I can’t wait to forge again,” and he laughed and slapped the table.

  “That is why I like you, Wilmot. One needs a sense of humor in this business, and also a certain cynicism. I tell you the most painful moments of my life, with Germanic seriousness and weltschmerz, and you make a joke of it. But one thing I cannot let slip, and that is the accusation that I am not a patron of your own work. In fact, I am. I believe that once you are freed from the necessity of whoring for the galleries and the commercial arts you will truly blossom as a painter. Those two little drawings prove it, and it will give me a great deal of personal satisfaction to see you do this.”

  “You don’t think it’s too late?”

  “Of course not! Who knew of Joseph Cornell until he was older than you? Even Cézanne sold hardly a painting until he was your age. And nowadays, with enough resources, one can secure a reputation. You would be surprised at how entirely corruptible is the world of art criticism. And you are good besides. I could make reputations for painters who do not have the talent that is in your little finger.”

  He put down his fork and looked at the empty scampi shells with satisfaction. Mine remained half finished, and when the waiter came by I told him to take it away.

  Krebs said, “I hope what I have been saying has not affected your appetite. No? Good, then perhaps we might now speak of this drug you have taken and the illusion that you are living the life of Velázquez.”

  Well, obviously he’d gotten the story from Mark, I mean the early experiences in New York, and I told him the rest, about how I’d spent 1650 in Rome, while we enjoyed dishes of wild strawberries capriccio dio Wanda, cups of espresso, and a finale of grappa. The bottle was left at the table, and I had several.

  When I’d finished talking, he said, “Well, I wouldn’t have believed it if I had not heard it from your own lips.”

  “I still don’t believe it, and it happened to me.”

  “Yes, and let me say, better you than me, Wilmot. I would not take such a drug for any consideration.”

  “Why not? You could end up Holbein.”

  “Yes, or Bosch. Or standing up to my nose in shit in a Dresden sewer for ten hours. Again.” He shuddered. “In any case, an interesting phenomenon. You ingest a drug and you experience events outside the bounds of rational explanation. Tell me, are you familiar with the theory that we have five bodies?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’m not sure I want to know about it, if it’s going to scare me worse than I am already.”

  He smiled like the mad scientist in a bad movie, mock sadistically, or maybe not that mock. “Yes, so first we have the body that science and medicine deal with, the meat, the nerves and chemicals and so on. Then we have the second, the representation of the body in the mind, which does not always match
the reality of the first-phantom limbs and so on-plus the sense of ourselves and the recognition that this thing also exists in others, as when we feel the loom of another person close to us or look into another’s eyes.”

  He looked into my eyes and grinned.

  “Third we have the unconscious body, the source of dreams and, we think, also of creativity. It is the task of the mystics to merge the second with the third body to find the soul, as they would put it. Those who accomplish this are the only ones who are truly awake-everyone else is a robot enslaved to the mass mind, as pumped out by the media or established by social norms. Then fourth is the magical body, by which adepts can be in two places at once or walk through walls or heal the sick or curse their enemies. Finally there is the spiritual body, which Hegel called the zeitgeist. The one who can control all the other bodies and also controls history.”

  “You believe all this?”

  He shrugged. “It’s just a theory. But it does explain some things. It explains how you could become Velázquez. It helps to explain why the most cultivated and educated nation in Europe should have submitted itself happily and enthusiastically to the absolute power of an ill-bred corporal. I can tell you, Wilmot, I was there, just a boy perhaps, but I was there. I felt the power. For my first years of conscious life I was living entirely in someone else’s dream, and my father, who is no fool, was the same. Even now, it is hard for me to believe that such power was entirely of this world. And when it was over, as soon as he blew out his brains, I felt a sense of release, of waking out of a long dream, and every German who was conscious at the time will tell you the same story. We looked around at the ruins and asked ourselves, how did this happen? How did ordinary Germans do such terrible things? Some people have argued that Germans are naturally brutal and undemocratic, at your knees or at your throat, as they say, but this is unsatisfying. The French terrified Europe for far longer than the Germans ever did, and they are always held up as the model of civilization, and the Scandinavians were monsters of destruction for three centuries and are all lambs up there now and don’t hurt a fly. And besides that, if we are naturally so awful, how come we are today the least militaristic nation on earth? So my point is that, if such a mysterious and unexpected thing could happen to a whole nation, I think that when a man tells me he is living for periods in a different time and having the thoughts of a man long dead, I say, why not?”