A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  "That's extremely impressive, Christopher," Lorenzo said, doing his pathetic best to help. "Extremely. Isn't it, Father?"

  "Eh," Bolzano said..

  "And," I went on, "most of it runs on car batteries in case the electricity is cut"

  I hoped that was it for questions. My fund of knowledge was exhausted.

  Bolzano seemed to be weighing things. "And what about this group, these Nazis?"

  "The Heinrich-Schliemann-Gründung?"

  "Yes, those asses. How do I know they won't convince the German government to keep my pictures?" He smiled grimly. "Their forbears did, after all."

  'The police say they have absolutely no support. And in any case, you've lent your paintings to the United States Department of Defense, not Germany. Nobody's going to take them."

  "Ahh," he said gravely, "the United States Department of Defense. That's different." He laughed, not offensively, and leaned back against the white couch, his hand kneading the loose skin at the dog's neck.

  I was certain he was wavering, and pushed home my arguments: Of all the private collections looted by the Nazis, Bolzano's had benefited more from American military efforts than any other private collection except the Rothschilds'—

  "So let Rothschild put on a show."

  Besides that, I pointed out, months of work by many people had gone into the preparations, the catalog, the insurance, the excruciating maneuvering to secure a temporary export license from the Italian government. And the show had been extensively covered in the world press, much to the enhancement of the Bolzano reputation. If he were to pull out now, his credibility would suffer enormously.

  "Ah, my credibility," he murmured.

  "And of course," I said, reluctantly getting down to serious arm-twisting, "there's a signed agreement—"

  His black eyes fixed mine sharply. "Would you really try to hold me to that?"

  "We'd have to," I said, knowing that if it were up to me I wouldn't. "We think The Plundered Past is an extremely—"

  He held up his hand. "Enough. You've worn me out. All right, the show will continue."

  Lorenzo expanded his narrow chest and beamed, as if he had personally engineered this, and I sat back, relieved but not surprised. From the moment he'd grunted hello, I'd had the feeling he wasn't serious about pulling out. Anne, who'd never met him, had read him all wrong. He was no feeble, fearful old shut-in but a man who enjoyed asserting his considerable power, and getting me down to Florence had simply been a way of perking up his life a little.

  The white dog, which had done nothing but gaze enchantedly at Bolzano, suddenly turned its head sideways, snapped at the air, and looked astonished when it didn't come up with anything. One of its baggy ears had flopped inside-out with the effort, so that the pink interior showed.

  Bolzano laughed, a gravelly rasp deep in his throat. "Hey, cane, you look ridiculous. Put your ear back the way it should be." He leaned over and affectionately straightened it with his hand. The dog, an ordinary mutt without visible pretensions, gazed up at him in a tongue-lolling ecstasy of admiration.

  Lorenzo and I laughed, too, and we all relaxed a little.

  "So, signor Norgren," Bolzano said expansively, "you like The Plundered Past? Please, have a cake."

  I bit into one of the dry, anise-flavored biscuits. "I think it's superb. There are paintings in it I've wanted to see for years."

  "And the copies? Tell me, what do you think of exhibiting the copies of the missing pictures?" His bright eyes darted momentarily to glare at Lorenzo, then came back to me.

  Lorenzo's Adam's apple jounced, and the tip of his droopy nose turned a shade bluer. He looked beseechingly at me. I had no idea what was in the air between them, and said something safe.

  "I think there's something to be said for the idea."

  Lorenzo was so relieved his breath whistled, but it wasn't the answer Bolzano wanted.

  "I don't!" he said, so emphatically that the dog started. "I see no purpose in it. It was a childish fancy ever to buy them. I should have disposed of them long ago."

  "I must disagree, Father," Lorenzo ventured in timorous rebellion. I say that if an object is beautiful, why shouldn't it give pleasure for its own sake? From a purely aesthetic point of view, why should it make any difference whether it was painted in 1680 in the throes of divine inspiration—ah-ha-ha—or copied three hundred years later, with every stroke faithfully reproduced?" His shiny eyes brightened. "Not more than thirty minutes ago, even the learned Christopher was deceived by our copy of the young woman at her clavichord."

  Bolzano looked at me with something close to disappointment. "Is this true?"

  "Well, momentarily," I admitted.

  "And why should he not be?" Lorenzo said, gaining momentum. "It's a wonderful painting in its own right: every line laid on razor-sharp; the pearl earring a small masterpiece of its own, portrayed with a delicate precision that might fool Vermeer himself."

  "Do you agree, signore?" Bolzano asked me dryly.

  "Not entirely, no." I was still unsure of where I was treading, or on whose toes.

  But he wouldn't be put off. "Do you agree that the painting my son describes so eloquently might fool Vermeer himself?"

  I was being tested, then, and I thought I'd better prove myself, even at the cost of some face for Lorenzo. "No," I said, "not the way he described it. Vermeer's precision is a brilliant illusion. There are no lines, no outlines. Those pearl earrings that seem so perfect and pearl-like—seen up close they're just three or four formless dabs of paint. Everything in a Vermeer is fuzzy—"

  "What?" Lorenzo's eyebrows shot up to the vicinity of where his hairline had once been. "Fuzzy? Vermeer? Christopher, I cannot believe—"

  "Of course fuzzy!" Bolzano snapped. "Vermeer was the most painterly of painters—more so even than Rembrandt, Velazquez—not some mere linear drudge like Bronzino or—"

  "Not linear?" echoed Lorenzo, who seemed stunned a lot of the time. "Vermeer?"

  "The forms themselves are anything but precise, Lorenzo," I said, heading off a less gentle response from his father. "When you look at a Vermeer, it's your mind that sorts things out, not your eye. It's not so different from your own subjectivist—"

  "Ha," Bolzano muttered.

  "But the texture," Lorenzo persisted, "the clarity ..."

  "But that's just what makes him so great," I said. "It's all a magical illusion, a deceptive clarity—"

  "Ah." Bolzano nodded his bullet head with approval. "A magical, deceptive clarity. Well said, Christopher Norgren." He looked sharply at his son and shifted to brisk, rapid Italian. "And this magic, Lorenzo, this magic flourishes only with that 'divine inspiration' you sneer so superiorly at, and which makes a work of art a living thing. An imitation is lifeless, no matter how wonderful it seems at first, and the longer one lives with a bogus painting the more hateful it becomes."

  "Surely, Father, you don't seriously suggest—"

  "Whereas the longer one lives with a work of art conceived and executed in the grip of"—a bristling glance at poor Lorenzo—"'divine inspiration,' the more one can sense in it the vital flame, the genius, that created it." He turned to me. "Do you agree, signore?"

  "Yes, I do. But if you feel this way, why did you include the copies in the show?"

  "Why?" he grumbled, returning to English. "Ask the professor of subjectivist art criticism."

  Lorenzo's Adam's apple jiggled all the way up, down, and back up his neck. "When it came time for the final arrangements, you see, my father was seriously ill—""

  A gallstone operation," Bolzano observed petulantly, "not a mental attack. I had my faculties; you could have consulted me."

  "–and I was acting for him—power of attorney, you call it? And when Colonel Robey suggested it might be an excellent idea to exhibit copies of some of the pictures that are still missing—to publicize them and perhaps lead to their recovery—I agreed with him. I still do." He looked at his father and actually managed to stare him down. "An
ything is possible. Who can tell?"

  "From that standpoint, I think it is a good idea," I said quietly to Bolzano. "It could very well turn up some leads."

  He shrugged and then sighed good-humoredly. "It begins to look as if I am not going to win any battles today. My opposition is too unified. Signor Norgren"—he gestured at my brandy snifter—"do you know what you're drinking?"

  "Cognac?" I said. "It's extremely good."

  This made him clap his hands. "No, and you're not the first to be fooled. It's a good old Italian product: Vecchia Romagna. He tapped his thigh. "You know, I'm going to have some, too."

  "Father!" Lorenzo began, but was silenced by a look.

  "This battle I win."

  When the bowed servant brought us all fresh brandies, Bolzano drank with pleasure, licked his lips, and looked sharply at me. "Something is on your mind?"

  Something was. "Sir, you said you were ill at the time the final arrangements were made. Does that mean you weren't here when the paintings were crated?"

  "I was in the hospital. Lorenzo was here to attend to it." There was one more disgusted look at his son; Lorenzo might have won the battle of the copies, but he wasn't getting much pleasure from it.

  "So you oversaw the actual packing?" I asked Lorenzo.

  "Of course. I was in the gallery for two entire days."

  "Who did the crating? Your own workmen?"

  "No, yours. Signor Flittner's."

  "Then Earl was here?"

  "Naturally. Also signor van Cortlandt."

  "The entire time?"

  "Do you mean the entire time of the packing? Yes, as he should have been," He was looking at me with a puzzled frown.

  "And did you actually see the crates closed up?"

  He slowly nodded his head.

  Bolzano, tucked into his corner of the couch, had been studying me for some moments. "Signore, what are all these questions?"

  I had decided a while back that I was going to tell him about the forgery. Peter's idea that the revelation might be more of a shock than he could stand I dismissed. Bolzano had obviously come a long way since his operation. More than that, he was clearly not the sort of man to shock easily.

  "Sir, I think there's a forgery in The Plundered Past."

  "Christopher!" Lorenzo murmured reprovingly, and turned with an anxious look toward his father.

  But Bolzano lived up to my expectations. He sat motionless, still studying me, his right hand slowly stroking the left side of his jaw, his dark eyes luminous and steady.

  "Explain yourself," he said calmly.

  "Peter told me the day he died." And for what seemed like the tenth time in the last few days I described the conversation at Kranzler's.

  Bolzano listened, stone still. Then he picked up his snifter, drank once, twice, and placed it firmly on the white plastic table in front of him. "It doesn't sound like Peter," he said slowly. "Like signor van Cortlandt. Do you realize the significance of a forgery in the Bolzano collection? Why would he keep it to himself? Why not tell you which one? Why not tell me?"

  "Father!" Lorenzo exclaimed. "You don't mean to say you give credence—"

  Bolzano waved him down with a flap of the hand. "Credence? To Peter? Of course I do."

  "But—but how—"

  "I don't know how, Lorenzo. I think that's what your friend is trying to establish with his not-so-subtle questions."

  "Yes," I said.

  "And what have you established?"

  "That Lorenzo and Peter were both there when the paintings were crated and neither apparently saw anything wrong at the time."

  Bolzano looked at me without expression, then smiled. "Yes, I see."

  "What do you see?" Lorenzo asked. "I don't understand."

  "I see why signor Norgren was asking his questions. He now can assume that since no apparent forgery caught signor van Cortlandt's attention at that time, there was no apparent forgery. At that time."

  "You mean," Lorenzo said, "that there was a ... a substitution after the paintings left? Someone has ... has stolen a picture and replaced it with another? Is that what you mean?"

  The dog was half-asleep at Bolzano's feet, its head between its paws. With his toe, Bolzano rubbed its belly. "So it would seem. Do I read your mind correctly, signor Norgren?"

  "Not entirely. There are also the three paintings from Hallstatt: the Rubens, the Vermeer, and the Titian."

  Lorenzo put a hand to his heart. "My God, not the Tiziano."

  "Signor Bolzano, how much time have you spent with those pictures since they turned up again? Have you had a chance to really study them?"

  "No," he said with some bitterness. "They've never been out of your government's hands. We went to Hallstatt when they were found—it was before my attack—but we had no time alone with them. None."

  "All right, then; neither of you had seen those paintings in forty years. Lorenzo, you were a baby in 1944. How can you be certain the ones in Hallstatt were genuine?"

  "I'm sure," Lorenzo proclaimed, "because when I see a Tiziano, I swoon."

  "I didn't notice you swooning," Bolzano grumbled. "But then, who could tell?" He drained his brandy. "So, signore, you think it may be an old forgery we are discussing, from the time of the Nazis?"

  "Impossible," Lorenzo said stubbornly. "The unassailable provenances ... the inarguable testimony of their sheer beauty—"

  Bolzano cut in irritatedly. "What unassailable provenances? They've been out of sight, no one knows where, for forty years. And as to their 'sheer beauty,' haven't you already told us there's no difference between a genuine painting and a forgery?"

  "No difference ...I told you ... ?"

  While the sorely offended Lorenzo groped unsuccessfully for speech, Bolzano looked levelly at me. "Let me tell you what I think. I think you're wrong. For forty years I thought about those paintings, dreamed about them. They were never out of my mind. You think I wouldn't recognize them in an instant? Even the crates the damned Nazis packed them in I recognized. Do you know what was stenciled on them? 'A.H., Linz.'" He pressed his fingertips to his eyelids. "Adolf Hider, Linz."

  He spoke quietly, but with a raw undercurrent of emotion that made me lower my eyes. He exhaled noisily, then went on in a softer tone. "Could I be wrong? It's possible; I'm only human. But I don't think so. Isn't it possible signor van Cortlandt was having a small joke with you?"

  "That's what I told him," Lorenzo said.

  "And something else occurs to me," Bolzano said. "Even if I did not have time to thoroughly examine the Hallstatt paintings, signor van Cortlandt most certainly did. He spent many hours with them last summer. If something wasn't as it should have been, he would surely have noticed it then— not last week."

  "It might have been something technical or complex, something that wouldn't be found right away."

  "And yet he suggested that you would merely glance over the paintings and it would leap out at you? I respect your scholarship, signore, but still—without offense—are you so much more proficient than he was?"

  Not by a long shot, I wasn't. Bolzano had hit on a weakness that undercut every half-baked theory I'd come up with. Why had Peter taken so long to find a forgery that he expected me to spot by simply looking at the paintings and seeing if something caught my eye? It was inconceivable that he'd found a fake months before and kept it to himself. And if, on the other hand, it were something new—if in the last couple of weeks a forgery had been slipped into the show in place of an original, then it was inconceivable that he would have made such a playful, coy production out of it. It would have been nothing to be jocose about, yet that's exactly what Peter had been.

  I sighed. "You're right, signor Bolzano. Nothing seems to make sense."

  He tapped his hands on his thighs. "It's easy enough to settle. I will come to Berlin and look, and in five minutes I will tell you—"

  "Father!" Lorenzo said. "Absolutely not. This time I must put my foot down. Dr. Rovere was quite adamant. You are to do no trav
eling for at least a month. To think of going to Germany in this weather ..."

  Bolzano quieted him with a resigned flap of the hand. "All right, calm yourself. I admit it, you're right." He looked at me. "Perhaps in a month. In the meantime, tell me what you want to do."

  "I'd like to check it out. Right now there's a cloud over your collection, and I'm sure you'd want–"

  "Not what I want; what you want."

  "All right. In the first place, I think one of your own copies may somehow have turned up in place of an original."

  "That's simple enough to settle. Look at the backs. And if that doesn't convince you, compare them to the certificates of guarantee."

  A certificate of guarantee is one of many highly fallible methods of proving authenticity. A detailed photograph of a painting is made, and on the back of the print are the painting's dimensions, a description of any identifying details, and a signed statement by some eminent or not-so-eminent authority that the painting reproduced on the other side is most certainly the long-lost self-portrait of Michelangelo last seen in the collection of the Dukes of Burgundy in 1696.

  The trouble is that art authorities, eminent or otherwise, can be wrong. They can even be bought. The trouble is also that a certificate of guarantee by a deceased authority is not very hard to fake, and many of them have been turned out to match some glorious Old Master that came fresh and hot from the oven the day before. Even the great museums have been bilked many times by spurious certificates, only to wind up carting their new treasures quietly and permanently down to the cellar years later, as the Metropolitan Museum did in 1973 after "reclassifying the authorship" of three hundred paintings from its European collection.

  The upshot is that there is simply no way of proving that the art object at which you are looking is the art object it's supposed to be. When you stand before the Mona Lisa, trying to see it through the thick glass the Louvre protects it with, how do you know it is the very picture painted by da Vinci in 1503? How do you know it's the same picture that was hanging in the Louvre fifty years ago, or fifty days ago? You have faith in the integrity of the Louvre, you say? Would you bet your life that it's the same painting?