by Aaron Elkins
He beamed tranquilly at Froger.
Talk about horns and dilemmas. It hadn't been five minutes since Froger had made it amply and publicly clear that as far as he was concerned the painting was a fake and Vachey was a charlatan, so what could he do now but turn it down? But what if Vachey had sandbagged him, as had suddenly begun to look highly possible? What if it turned out to be genuine? Refusing it would lose Froger the Léger and make him look like a chowderhead besides. Accepting it would get him the painting, but he'd still look like a chowderhead, and a toad-eating one at that. Assuming Vachey's aim had been to put his old adversary in an impossible situation, which I didn't doubt for a minute, it was a masterful stroke.
Froger started stammering. "It's not—I can't—that is to say, it's not my decision to make. My board of directors, which is to say—"
He sputtered to a stop and just sat there, getting redder and angrier, puffing up before our eyes. His features, dainty for his size in any case, seemed lost in the ample flesh of his head, like a too-small face painted on a balloon.
"As for your commendable concern for its authenticity, Edmond," Vachey continued smoothly, "we are fortunate in having with us one of France's preeminent experts in the oeuvre of this towering twentieth-century French master. Monsieur Charpentier, I'm sure we all look forward to your opinion of the Léger— pardon, the alleged Léger—with breathless anticipation."
Charpentier, loading a second small cup of coffee with sugar, looked up puckishly. "Oho. I see. Is this why I was invited? I must perform for my dinner?"
"You were invited because I couldn't imagine unveiling a major Léger without your presence, Jean-Luc, that's all. But it goes without saying that your opinion would be welcome."
"That's most gratifying," Charpentier said, "but my opinions are my livelihood, such as it is; unfortunately, I can't afford to give them away." After a second he added: "Have I ever asked you for a free painting?"
Vachey laughed. "No, and you wouldn't be likely to get it, either. All right, your professional opinion, then."
Charpentier, who had lit a cigarette, took a drag on it and slowly let the smoke drift from the corners of his mouth, scowling thoughtfully at Vachey all the while. "You are asking my professional opinion?"
"Of course. At your usual exorbitant fee."
"Just a moment," Froger said nervously. "I don't know if I'm empowered to authorize funds to—"
"Which it will be my pleasure to pay," Vachey said. "Naturally."
Froger fell silent, chewing his lip.
"I must say," Charpentier said to Vachey, "I'm surprised to be asked."
"Ah, you above all, Jean-Luc. With you, at least no one is likely to assume you are biased in my favor."
There was some history between them, because several people laughed. Charpentier himself, possibly mellowed by the thought of his unexpected fee, allowed himself a smile. "That's true enough, anyway. Very well, then, why don't we have a look?"
"Indeed." Vachey nodded his thanks. "In fact, ladies and gentlemen, why don't we all have a look? My gallery is at your disposal until midnight. There is cognac, champagne, and coffee." He smiled. "And, if you like, a few pictures to pass the time."
* * *
Most of the guests chose to walk the three blocks from the palace to Vachey's gallery. It was an odd sort of postprandial stroll: a straggling, elegant procession composed of groups of three and four threading slowly through the moon-washed Square des Ducs with its pensive, homely statue of Philip the Good, then turning left along the prettily medieval Rue de la Chouette, and right at the Rue de la Préfecture. We moved in a leisurely, relaxed fug of cigar smoke and winey breath, but the conversation was anything but relaxed. People were vigorously dissecting the events of the evening so far, speculating on what was yet to come, or otherwise discoursing learnedly.
A few yards ahead of me, for example, Calvin was launched on a confident exposition of the difficulties of authenticating art.
"Now take Rembrandt, for example, Nadia," he was telling his admiring new lady friend and her not-quite-so-admiring parents. "Do you have any idea how many brilliant students Rembrandt had? There was, let me see, Hoogstraten, Dou, er, Bol ..."
And in my own group, while Charpentier and I walked along in silence, Lorenzo was trying to calm a huffing, chafing Froger by loftily telling him to put aside pride and accept the painting if Charpentier verified it—or even if he didn't, as long as Froger himself found it beautiful. Why should he care whether it was encumbered with such artificial, misleading labels as "real" or "false," which changed nothing whatsoever, being as they were mere perceptual constructs, transitory and equivocal? All one had to do was look at things postexistentially, that was all.
For some reason, Froger did not appear to be soothed.
I wasn't feeling very soothed either. In just a few minutes I was finally going to be seeing the picture, and I was steeling myself for the worst; the worst being that it would turn out to be a colossal dud, nothing more than one of those "Rembrandts" that pop up in the art market every few years with an almost tedious regularity. If they aren't gobbled up by some eager, naïve collector, they are soon denounced, and then hurriedly withdrawn by the profusely apologetic dealers or auction houses that had them up for sale—only to surface again in a year or two, usually through other dealers, sometimes in other countries.
Surprised? You thought that, once a painting was proven to be a fake, that was that? That there must be some legal requirement that it be destroyed, or properly labeled, or something to protect unwary future buyers?
Sorry, but no such thing. Fakes are not illegal. You can copy all the Rembrandts you want. You can sign his name to them, you can crackle and darken them so they look old, you can put bogus seventeenth-century stamps and inscriptions on the backs. All perfectly legal as long as it's all in good fun. You can even go around telling people they're the real thing. What you can't do is try to sell them as such. That's why prudent forgers never sell their own work directly to the public; it's too easy to prove fraudulent intent. But dealers are another matter. They can be duped like anybody else, after all, and they can hardly be routinely charged with intent to deceive if some of their offerings turn out to be bogus. If the Met can make mistakes, why not them?
So where do you think all those exposed fakes that you're always reading about wind up when all the hoopla dies down? Back in circulation is where. After a suitable time, of course. And eventually, many of them end as the proud property of rich, gullible private collectors all around the world. Not that I thought of Vachey as gullible; not by a long shot. If his new Rembrandt was a phony, and if there was any duping going on, René Vachey was the duper.
Guess who that left as the dupee.
At 39 Rue de la Préfecture, a pair of Vachey's minions stood at the door of the house, under Pepin's fussy, darting supervision, to examine our invitations and direct us up to the gallery, or rather to make sure that we didn't stray into Vachey's ground-level private quarters. Upstairs, the folding, linen-covered partitions had been moved back, opening up a sizable reception area in which the guests milled about, sipping brandy or coffee.
Naturally, the only thing I could think about was having my first look at the Rembrandt, but the entry to the main part of the show remained blocked by a table drawn up against the partitions. All that was open was the section on the landing, near Vachey's study: Villon, Duchamp, and the other Cubists. And I didn't have much interest in those. Near the table, Vachey was energetically conferring with his secretary, Marius Pepin, and with a round, fluffy, excited woman in her sixties who Calvin told me was Clotilde Guyot, Vachey's gallery manager. Evidently, the exhibition wasn't quite ready to open.
Restive and eager to get on with it, I snared a balloon glass of cognac from a passing waiter, found a corner by myself, and waited. I'd already prepared myself mentally for being face-to-face with the Rembrandt—the alleged Rembrandt—and I didn't want to have to talk to anyone before I did. The truth is
, I was too jumpy for rational conversation, but that didn't bother Calvin, who located me and rattled happily on for what seemed like half an hour. I think he was generously describing for me the attributes of the young woman he'd dined with, or maybe of some of the other women there, but I couldn't swear to it either way. I gulped at the brandy and waited.
At long last there was a businesslike rapping from the front. The table blocking the entrance was moved to the side. Madame Guyot raised her great, pillowy white arms for silence and turned her sunny pink face on us.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she announced breathlessly, "it is my privilege to welcome you to the Galerie Vachey tonight, and to thank you all for coming, and permit me to invite you in to view the paintings, and—wait, please—kindly do not carry your beverages into the exhibition." This was emitted in fluttery French that lacked discernible pauses (no wonder she was out of breath), after which she stepped hurriedly out of the way and behind the table, just in time to avoid being trampled by the herd.
Calvin and I, caught near the entrance with nothing to duck behind, were less fortunate. We were borne helplessly into the gallery, where more partitions necessitated an immediate choice; either go right, into the French wing, which had the Léger, or left into the Dutch wing, where the Rembrandt alcove was. Calvin was swept off to the right with the greater part of the crowd, bobbing along in the flow like a plastic cup in the surf, but I managed to fight my way to the left, where I found myself in a corridorlike space about ten feet by thirty, low-ceilinged and lined on both walls with an orderly procession of seventeenth-century paintings by Dutch masters.
I caught glimpses of a Honthorst, a Bloemaert, a Cuyp, all superb and more than enough to capture my attention under ordinary circumstances, but at the moment they couldn't have interested me less. Like most of the others, I made singlemindedly toward an alcove at the end of the corridor, where the partitions were draped with lush, green velveteen; obviously the place of honor, although its main wall was out of sight, around the corner of the corridor.
But at the last second, I got cold feet. Slipping into a nook just before the alcove, I let the others push by. Now that it had come down to it, I found that I didn't want to look at it, not yet. The moment of truth was at hand, and I wasn't quite ready to face it. For despite the reservations I'd been expressing to Tony and Calvin, and despite the distressing doubts currently being raised about the entire Rembrandt oeuvre, I knew I wasn't really going to need a whole day of analysis, or even an hour. All it was going to take for me to know if the picture on that wall was the real thing was one good, hard look.
I'm not saying that was always the case—not by a long shot, it wasn't—but when it was a painter that I knew as well as I did Rembrandt, and when I'd just done some heavy boning up, as indeed I had before I left Seattle, then I wasn't going to need very much time—or laser microanalysis or thermoluminescent discrimination, for that matter—to tell me what was what.
Sure, I'd want them for confirmation, but if it took more than three minutes to reach a conclusion, my own conclusion, for myself, I would be extremely surprised. If there was a Rembrandt in that alcove, I would know. If there wasn't, I would know that too.
I let the hubbub in the alcove die down a little, waited for a few people to come out, then took a breath and pushed around the corner. The painting leaped out at me, three feet from my face, brilliant and vivid from its recent cleaning, a handsome portrait of an elderly man. I peered at it, eyes narrowed, mind cleansed of everything else, focusing every ounce of concentration, everything I'd learned from fifteen years of scholarly absorption in Baroque art. I put the buzzing around me out of my mind. I scrutinized the brushwork, the palette, the thousand nuances of style and technique.
After a couple of minutes, I let out my breath and stepped back.
I didn't know whether the hell it was a Rembrandt or not.
Chapter 7
Well, it wasn't that simple. Not that it didn't look enough like a Rembrandt; the problem was, it looked too much like a Rembrandt—but it was the wrong Rembrandt. Not the wrong person, I mean, but the wrong style.
In the seventeenth century it had been a famous witticism that Rembrandt's paints were so thick that you could pick his portraits up by the nose. (His grumpy response had been that he was a painter, not some damned dyer.) Ever since, those clotted gobbets of color had been hallmarks of his work, along with the astonishingly free, incredibly sure brush strokes, the somber, reflective atmosphere, the pensive subjects emerging from dim, vague scrubs of shadow into pools of golden light.
When you hear the words "Rembrandt portrait," that's what comes to mind, right? Well, that's what I was expecting too. Reasonably enough. That's what every newly discovered Rembrandt portrait of the last fifty years had looked like, and every phony one too. That was the Rembrandt I'd spent three entire days boning up on.
But this was different, this was in the style of the artist's youth, before he'd become the Rembrandt most of us know, the most famous painter in the world. No fat globs of paint, no looping, spontaneous brushwork. This was early seventeenth-century Dutch painting—in effect, Dutch painting before the mature Rembrandt changed it forever—at its best: clean-lined, highly finished, crisply realistic. And that's what made it so intensely surprising.
Paradoxically, you see, it is the later, greater Rembrandt who is most frequently and most successfully faked. Many a second-rate painting has passed as a Rembrandt if the ochers, browns, and yellows have been slapped on gluily enough, the outlines adequately blurred, and the whole thing done with moody flair. But to imitate the precision of the early Rembrandt takes discipline, not to mention well-honed skills, and those have always been in shorter supply than flair.
So all the prepping I'd done involved Rembrandt's mature style. It had simply never occurred to me that I might be dealing with a spurious early Rembrandt. Naturally, I was thrown for a loop. Who wouldn't be?
And okay, all right, I admit it. Possibly I was—um, er—just a wee bit overconfident going in.
The picture before me was of a weathered, dissipated-looking man in his sixties, with a long nose and a scant, grizzled beard. He gazed sadly out from under a capacious black hat with an enormous plume held on by a glittery gold chain, and a dull-metal gorget over a black tunic. Seedy and stoic, and a little cunning too, his face was the kind you might see today in an inner-city grocery store at eight in the morning, picking over a grimy handful of dimes and quarters to make sure there was enough for a quart of tawny port.
Once believed to be Rembrandt's father, this particular old derelict shows up in at least a couple of dozen oils and etchings done around 1630, not only by Rembrandt, but by many of the Leiden painters, trumped up in sham finery of one kind or another—turbans and fancy helmets, caftans and pseudo-Biblical armor. In this one, according to the white title card beside the picture, he was supposed to be Un Officier—a military officer.
As always, he was grave, introspective, and vaguely dazed by all the frippery. Rembrandt had put him in so many pictures that I'd never gotten them all straight. And I'd forgotten which of them had fallen into the "doubtful" category over the years, and which were still believed to be by Rembrandt. They vary hugely in quality, from clumsy sketches to highly finished pieces. And this one, which I didn't remember having seen in the standard catalogue raisonné of Rembrandt's works, seemed to me to be right up there with the best of them.
Was it possible that I was really looking at a Rembrandt, then? An unknown Rembrandt? Could something like this have survived unrecognized for almost four hundred years? I realized with a shock that I was half-convinced, maybe more. If Vachey hadn't laid down his prohibition on testing, then I think I might have been wholly convinced.
No, not quite. Those earlier, unsettling "philosophical" remarks of his about forgery and art kept flitting through my mind, which didn't do anything to ease it. Nor did his sticking it to poor Froger earlier, not that Froger didn't have it coming. I couldn't see where
I or SAM had it coming, but who could tell with a quirky guy like Vachey?
The thing was, just because it was good enough to be a Rembrandt, that didn't make it a Rembrandt. At the very top of their form, some of his finest contemporaries or best students might conceivably have done something as good as this too. Gerrit Dou, say, or Rembrandt's own teacher Pieter Lastman.
Searching for the signature, I found a simple monogram near the top right margin, where the dull, stony green of the background lightened to an oily yellow: RHL, with no date. That would stand for Rembrandt Harmenszoon Leidensis, which was the way he signed his paintings in the early 1630s, while he was working in Leiden. It was not until 1633 that the name "Rembrandt" first appears on his paintings in the artist's elegant, familiar script.
So the use of the youthful monogram was right on target; there was nothing about it to make me doubt. On the other hand, there wasn't anything there to make me believe, either.
The problem was that the first thing a crook does when he wants to push some handsome old painting by a lesser-known artist as a handsome old painting by a famous Old Master is to get rid of the original signature and put on a false one. All such fakes have signatures. Without them, they have an almost unwinnable battle to be accepted as anything better than "School of X," and crooks don't go to all this trouble to settle for that.
No matter if the painter in question didn't usually sign his name, or if the forger had no idea what the artist's signature looked like. There are, for example, pictures in several private collections, and even one that used to be in a museum, that bear the proud signature El Greco—despite the established fact that the painter invariably signed his pictures with his real name, Domenikos Theotokópoulos. In Greek.
