I did wonder why Lotte hadn’t come to see me at the hospital, but I found that she’d left to bring Milo to his Swiss clinic, taking Rose with her. That was fine by me. It’s embarrassing to be crazy, especially the kind of crazy I was, where you’ve forgotten the life you lived with another person. Were we really still married in this life? I hadn’t asked.
A few days passed. Not a bad existence, I had to admit. Responsibilities were few, one never wanted for company, and I had the run of the place except for Krebs’s office. Time just flowed on by. I did not pick up a brush or a pencil after returning from the nuthouse, but I knew I eventually would, maybe as an outsider artist, like those brilliant schizophrenics who cover acres of paper with their obsessions, or maybe I will cleave more closely to the mainstream and turn my craziness into real money, like van Gogh, and Cornell, and Munch. Or go back to the pricey nudes.
I detected a certain tension in the house. It was because the auction of the Venus had been scheduled in New York. D-day was, I believe, just three days away, and the worlds of art and high finance (is there a difference?) were churning like baskets of eels. I saw a copy of Der Spiegel lying around with the painting spread over the cover, with the blurb stating that the painting would go on the block with a reserve price of a hundred and ten million dollars. I didn’t get a chance to read the article. They restricted my access to media: doctor’s orders.
Later that day, Kellermann handed me a cell phone, and it was Lotte from Geneva. She said the special rich-people clinic had poked Milo and examined his insides and declared that yeah, they can make him good as new for about a million bucks, more or less; a few new organs required, but it turns out that for these we don’t have to go on no stinkin’ list, they’re ready more or less when we are. Milo does look a little less peaky, she says. Maybe it’s the hope.
To her great credit, Lotte asked about the source of the putative organs, and the man didn’t quite get why she was asking. She said she didn’t want them to, like, come from people especially murdered to provide them, and the guy was shocked she would have thought such a thing, this being Switzerland and very correct. No, they have deals with people in high-risk professions, money up front and we get your good parts when the parachute doesn’t open, and also they’ll pay for the education of a cohort of kids, and should they drown some summer, the families let them take a cut, so to speak. Very rational and actuarial, something like dairy farming, ever a Swiss specialty. Whether it’s legal in the strict sense she didn’t ask.
I had a discussion with Krebs about the money end of this plan. It seemed that a million dollars was at that moment sitting in a Swiss account for me, in payment of all the paintings he’d sold from my vast output, which he’d been representing for years. Sorry you don’t recall that, Wilmot, sorry you recall something that didn’t happen and sorry you don’t recall something that did, but, hey, you’re crazy! I took this in calmly, or the Haldol did. The fact is, I can’t help liking him and I think he genuinely likes me.
That evening I wandered into the room Rose had occupied, wondering when I’d get to see the kids again, if ever, and I saw, taped to the wall, one of her shredder-strip pasteups. It was of two fat piggies in a green field. Clearly she’d found a supply of pink. Well, you know, I really have a good eye for color, and a very good memory for color, if not for much else, and something about the strips of pink paper she was using to construct the pigs made a connection in my head: many of her strips had on them small sections of an intense rose madder.
I poked around the room, looking for the source, and after a while I found it, stuck in the back of a bureau drawer, a clear plastic bag full of shredder waste, mainly pink. I took it back to my room and dumped the strips onto the floor. I was lucky that it was a strip shredder and not the confetti kind, because you can do a pretty good job of reconstruction on that kind of strip. After the Iranian students took over the Tehran embassy back in ’79 they had teams of women reconstruct a lot of CIA secrets from the shredder waste, and I sat there all night and did the same thing, using a glue stick. It wasn’t perfect when I got through, but you could see what it was.
When I was done I sat through the dawn and the early morning thinking about what had been done to me, and also about why I wasn’t angrier. I wasn’t really angry at all, just sad. Relieved? A little, but mainly sad. How could she have? But I knew the answer to that.
There was a little stone terrace on the east side of the house, with a table and an umbrella set up on it, and there Krebs liked to take his breakfast alone, read half a dozen newspapers, and, I suppose, plot his next crimes. No one is supposed to interrupt him there, but I figured this was a special occasion.
I walked out into the early sunlight and held my pasteup in front of his face.
He looked at it for a moment, sighed, and said, “That Liesl! Honestly, she has been told a hundred times to attend to the burn bags before she does anything else.”
He gestured to a chair. “Sit down, Wilmot. Tell me, what do you think you have there?”
I said, “I have there a Photoshop printout of an unfinished fake painting I last saw in a loft I was supposedly living in on Greenwich Street in New York. I was so rattled that I didn’t look at it closely enough, or I would have seen it was a huge ink-jet image printed onto canvas, then artfully gone over with a brush, and then glazed. I assume the images in that phony gallery were made in the same way.”
He didn’t say anything, just sat there with an amused look on his face.
I said, “The gallery, and the loft, and changing my door and my locks, and that ringer in Bosco’s place. And you got to Lotte too. It’s…I don’t know what to call it-insane? And how did you know the drug would affect me in that way? I mean the Velázquez connection. You couldn’t have planned it.”
He said nothing.
“No, of course not,” I continued. “It was just taking advantage of a preexisting fact. I was hallucinating Velázquez, and those paintings I did proved I had the skill. So of course, you had to forge a Velázquez.”
“Go on. This is fascinating.”
“And you implanted that slow-release thing in me so I’d keep having the experience even after I wasn’t getting the drug from Shelly.”
“It could certainly have been done that way, yes. Low-level American health care personnel are shockingly ill paid. It could have been done in that mental hospital in New York.”
“Zubkoff was in on it too.”
“I think you will find him perfectly innocent. If such a series of events actually transpired, then Mark Slade would have had to have been the instigator of the whole New York endeavor. You should be more careful about your confidantes in future.”
“But why? Why did you go through all that incredible trouble and expense?”
“Well, if I were to humor you in this conjecture,” he said, “I would have to say it was because of what happened to Jackie Moreau.”
The name came as a shock. “He’s dead,” I said inanely.
“Yes. Murdered. He did a very nice Pissarro for us, and a Monet. And he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. I tried to protect him, but I was overruled. So I was not going to take a chance with you. Because in something like this, as I have tried to explain to you, the forger always talks in the end, forgers can’t help it. And the people who deal in forgeries at this level understand that. But no one listens to a madman. I believe your madness has saved your life.”
“And you thought driving me crazy was the solution? Why in hell didn’t you come to me like a man and tell me the straight story and ask me to pretend to be crazy?”
He shook his head. “Assuming for a moment that you are right, no such imposture would have worked. You are an artist, not an actor. Do you imagine that the gentleman who asked you to draw him that day in Madrid would be taken in for a moment by an imposture? No, you had to be genuinely mad, mad before witnesses, certified mad by doctors of unimpeachable reputation. And mad you must remain for all your days, if you want to live.
”
“That was why that guy was talking to Schick in the hospital,” I said. “He was checking up that I was really around the bend.”
He shrugged. “If you like.”
“So you’re agreeing I’m not a succesful gallery painter and that I did paint that fake Velázquez?”
“I’m not agreeing to anything of the sort. Wait here a moment and I’ll show you something.”
He got up and left me staring at his empty chair. After a short while he returned, holding what looked like a leather-bound photo album. He handed it to me and I opened it. Every right-hand page held a color photograph of a painting affixed to the thick black paper with old-fashioned corner mounts, and on each facing page was pasted a typed provenance, in German. There were twenty-eight in all: several Rembrandts, a Vermeer, two Franz Hals, and the rest good-quality Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, with two exceptions. One was a Breughel of a skating party on a canal, and the other was the van der Goes altarpiece I’d seen in Krebs’s office that time. Besides that, all of them were unfamiliar to me.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“Well, you’ll recall the story I told you of the van that was consumed in Dresden. These were the paintings in that van.”
“Except for the van der Goes.”
“Yes, that had been removed and placed in the other van for reasons now obscure. But these paintings in the album are assuredly gone. Now, you may have noticed during your tour of this house a small door in the cellar that is always locked. Behind it is a bricked-up well. It was bricked up in 1948. Now, suppose I wished to remove the bricks for some reason and hired a respectable firm of builders to do the job, and suppose that behind the bricks we found all these paintings. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!”
It took me a few seconds to get it, and it was so absurd that I had to laugh. “You want me to forge twenty-seven paintings.”
He laughed too. “Yes. Marvelous, isn’t it?”
“But you’d never be able to sell them. The Schloss family and the international authorities-”
He waved his hand. “No, no, not a public sale. I’ve explained this to you. There is an immense private market for high-value paintings. To dispose of these would be quite easy, once news of the discovery was made available to a particular subset of the market. People have been wondering about the lost Schloss paintings since the war, and of course it is known that my father had access to them. They would sell like pancakes.”
“That’s an interesting offer,” I said.
“Isn’t it? And of course it would more than fund your own work and any expenses you might have in connection with your son’s treatment.”
“Yes, that,” I said, and thought of Lotte and my old pal Mark, and how they’d both contributed to the plot. I said, “I’m curious. How did you rope Mark and Lotte into this thing?”
“Speaking hypothetically, you mean?”
“If it makes you happy.”
“Then it was money, of course. Mark will realize a colossal commission from the Velázquez. And he does not seem to like you very much. He was quite gleeful to be, as he put it, fucking with your head.”
“And Lotte. Doesn’t she like me either?”
“On the contrary, she loves you very much. She agreed to help us so as to blast you forever out of your ridiculous and miserable existence as a commercial artist and also to obtain adequate medical care for your son, which you were never going to be able to do. There is no deeper love than this, you know, than to surrender the loved one so that he can become what he was meant to be.”
“I was meant to be an insane forger?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, Wilmot. Yes, you are insane, as planned. I mean to say, you imagine you are Diego Velázquez! What could be more clear evidence of madness than that? It is textbook diagnosis. You have long fits of amnesia during which you believe you have painted old masters. And so forth.”
For a long moment I stared at him, literally gaping. It was like a movie, a bad melodrama in which the villain explains to the helpless James Bond how he’s going to blow up the city. But Krebs wasn’t looking villainous at all, no malicious glee, just a concerned and paternal expression like Dad has when he breaks it to little Virginia that there’s no Santa.
There was no juice of outrage in me. I managed to say, “That’s pretty fucking arrogant, Krebs, to do that to someone, don’t you think?”
“Well, yes, I am an arrogant bastard. It is my nature and of course our national vice as well. But consider, Wilmot, that you have always been crazy, and with no help from me. When we started this you were a neurotically constricted artist incapable of doing decent work and slaving for workman’s wages producing shit for advertising or whatever. For an artist of your capability, that is the true insanity. Now, on the other hand, you have money and freedom to do what you like.”
“As long as what I like is forging paintings for you.”
“It will not take up too much of your time, I think. You no longer have the excuse of having to struggle to support your family, and you will have to face the white canvas without that crutch. You can paint for yourself. Perhaps you will flourish as never before, and perhaps not. I hope for the former, of course. Maybe you will be the one to rescue easel painting for another thousand years.”
“Oh, yeah, lay that on me!” I said, and then we both smiled. I couldn’t help it.
“And another thing,” he said. “I think that also in your heart of hearts you do not despise this idea of forgery. You wished to add beauty to the world, and the art establishment has no taste for it anymore; this is a way to do it and also to give them one in the eye. And this is my desire too. The Schloss paintings, which were destroyed through my father’s doing and the wickedness of my country, will live again. And no one will ever know the difference.”
“You could give them back to the Schloss family.”
“I could. And perhaps I will-some of them. But, you know, I have my expenses, and patronage is a costly proposition. I must keep Charles Wilmot happy, after all.”
“You must. I notice you’ve abandoned the pretense that I was a successful figurative painter with a Whitney retrospective.”
“I haven’t abandoned anything,” he said. “It’s you who are unfortunately incapable of keeping your story straight, or even of recalling what has been said to you from one minute to the next. For example, I have no idea what you think we have just been discussing. I myself recall a conversation about the watercolors of Winslow Homer.”
I stared at him for a second, and then I had to laugh; it just came bubbling up from inside me and it went on for a long time. He was absolutely right. We might have been discussing anything. My clever pasteup might not even exist. In fact, after I had finished wiping my eyes and caught my breath, I found that it had somehow vanished from the table. And where was that tiny implant? Who knew?
“I am happy you are amused,” he said, and I thought he was just a little uneasy when he said it. I mean, he wanted me crazy, but not that crazy.
“Yeah, now I know why they always depict madmen as laughing. You know, Werner, this is a pleasant spot, but I think I’ll take my lunatic ass back to New York. Unless I’m still a prisoner.”
“You’ve never been a prisoner, except of yourself. What will you do in New York?”
“Oh, you know, tie up my affairs. Take a look at that painting you say I didn’t do.”
“You didn’t. Salinas discovered the lost Velázquez in the bowels of the Alba’s vast holdings, don’t ask me how. All of Mark’s machinations with it were merely to help Salinas smuggle it out of Spain. It truly had a fake Bassano painted on top of it. Perhaps Leonora Fortunati herself had this done to protect herself and her famous lover. As you have yourself described to me.”
“It makes a good story anyway. Werner, don’t you ever tell the truth?”
“I always tell the truth, after a fashion,” he said, and stood and shook my hand. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, and wal
ked back into the house.
The next day Franco drove me to Munich, and I caught a flight out to London and then to New York. I checked into the midtown Hilton and called Mark, and we had a nice chat, with no mention of the various betrayals he’d engineered, although he did seem a little nervous on the line. He invited me to his celebration and mentioned in passing that you’d be there, and I accepted.
After I stop talking I’m going to download all the sound files you’ve just heard onto a CD and go to Mark’s party and hand this CD to you. Why you? I don’t know, you’ve always seemed a kind of neutral observer to me, and I’m curious about what you make of it. Maybe there’s some clue you could point me at that’ll make more sense of the whole affair than I could. You might want to study the painting too, if you can get close enough. You might find it particularly interesting.
It was four in the morning when I finished playing the last file, and then I fell into bed half dressed and slept until almost noon, slept right through the alarm and the buzzing on my cell phone, my secretary going a little batty trying to reach me. I called the front desk, but no Chaz Wilmot had shown up or called, which I thought odd. I thought the whole point of the CD was to meet and discuss it. When I checked my messages there was one from Mark Slade inviting me to attend the auction that afternoon and asking me if I’d heard anything from Chaz.
I’d planned to go back to Stamford, I had a meeting at one, but I called the office and had it rescheduled-I was still somewhat under the spell of Chaz’s weird tale and didn’t feel up to discussing the details of theme park reinsurance. I screwed around for a few hours, making some calls and trying to do paperwork and e-mails and such, to no great effect, and then I cleaned myself up, dressed, and caught a cab uptown to Sotheby’s.
The Forgery of Venus Page 29
