A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  "I haven't seen it, but I'll have a look. I have a few of Peter's files in my room."

  "That's fine. Well, I don't know about you, but I'm bushed. Let's figure out how we split the check. Your salad was ten marks, right? My chicken was only nine, so ..."

  * * *

  The night had turned a dry, bitter cold, and on the walk back to Tempelhof Harry humped along with hunched shoulders, buried in his parka like a turtle, so that nothing below his eyes showed over his collar. And everything above was hidden by a thick knit cap, so he seemed to be peering warily out of the slit of a big, soft tank.

  "Oh, by the way, Chris," he said from deep in the coat as we waited to cross the eight-lane Tempelhofer Damm, "did Flittner ever come up in your conversations with van Cortlandt?"

  "No."

  "How he got along with him, that kind of thing?"

  "Harry, maybe if you'd just trust me and come out and tell me why you're so interested in Flittner I'd be able to help you. Since we're on the same side, it'd be nice to know just what the hell is going on."

  He had to swivel the whole thickly encased upper half of his body to look at me. I think I heard him laugh, or he might have grunted; the sound was lost somewhere in the depths of the coat. "You know, you've got a point. All right, did you know that he's not on leave from the National Gallery—that he was canned?"

  "Canned? Why?"

  "Bad PR, lousy attitude, uncooperative behavior—all those curmudgeonly leanings you told me about. Come on, the light's changed."

  Berlin traffic lights do not encourage dawdling. We jogged quickly across the broad street and onto the Platz der Luftbrücke, dark except for the spotlit monument. "I suppose," Harry went on, "you didn't know that Robey's dumping him too, effective the end of the month, for pretty much the same reasons."

  "I didn't have any idea. Poor guy. Does he know?"

  "Yeah, Robey told him a couple of weeks ago."

  "Hm. So why did you want to know if Peter—"

  "Because he's the one who talked Robey into getting rid of him—according to Robey. Let me ask you: Would van Cortlandt do something like that? Go to Robey and ask him to get rid of somebody else?"

  "If he thought the paintings were being endangered or the show was being compromised, yes. Definitely. He'd consider it a matter of honor." I turned to look at him. "Are you saying you think Earl might have killed him—arranged to have him killed—out of … what, revenge?"

  "I don't think anything yet. I'm trying to get my facts in order. Here's the funny part: Robey says van Cortlandt told him he'd had a couple of tough talks with Flittner about it."

  "That sounds like Peter. He'd want to be aboveboard. What's funny about it?"

  "What's funny is that when I asked Flittner about it, he said he didn't know what I was talking about; Peter never talked to him about his behavior or anything else."

  "So somebody is lying."

  "Right. And Flittner's got a pretty good reason. With me poking around asking questions, he's probably scared to admit he had any reason for hating van Cortlandt."

  "Which makes him worried, but not necessarily guilty. Earl's pretty paranoid at the best of times."

  "That's right," Harry said. "I never said he was guilty."

  Once in the lobby at Columbia House, Harry woofed and stamped his feet as if we'd been trudging in three feet of snow. "Sheesh, it's freezing outside! Brr." He began unraveling himself from gloves, hat, scarf, and coat, emerging like an undersize moth from its cocoon. "I gotta get some wool socks."

  "Harry, I was thinking. It's pretty natural for people's guard to be up with you questioning them—"

  "I don't question them; I'm pretty subtle."

  "Yeah, you really had Egad fooled."

  He laughed. "You didn't do any better. He's madder at you than at me."

  "That's true, but with me, anything about the show is a legitimate concern. I might get people mad, but I'm not going to make them suspicious. I thought maybe I might do a little ... well, talking to people—"

  "Forget it," he said firmly. "Here's the deal: You leave the investigation to me, and I'll leave the forgery to you."

  "Look, I didn't mean I was going to confront Earl about Peter. I could do it indirectiy. Maybe if I got a little more information from Robey—"

  He sighed. "Let's go sit down for a couple of minutes."

  We went to the same grouping of chairs that Peter and I had sat in when I'd first arrived in Berlin. Harry heaped his peeled-off garments on the chair next to him, and sighed again. "Flittner's not the only one I've got questions about."

  "Who else? Not Mark?"

  "Yeah, Mark."

  "What questions?"

  "Two of them. Why he went to Frankfurt with van Cortlandt the day van Cortlandt got killed—"

  "What?" I exclaimed, then lowered my voice at Harry's wince. "But—Peter would have mentioned it. He went alone; I'm sure of it."

  "Not exactly. Robey was on the same plane, sitting twenty rows behind him, in the smoking section."

  "Well .. . why? What did he say?"

  "That's my other question: Why won't he admit he went?"

  "He out-and-out denied it?"

  "No, I wouldn't say that. Didn't I tell you I'm subtle? I just gave him about ten different chances to mention it— you know, 'Been to Frankfurt lately?'—that kind of stuff. He wouldn't bite."

  "Then how do you know he went?"

  "High-class police work, pal. I checked the passenger list of van Cortlandt's plane to see if anything turned up. Robey's name did."

  "Wow, I don't have any idea what to make of that. When did he come back, do you know?"

  "Not till just before that staff meeting. Two days and three nights in Frankfurt, right when van Cortlandt bought it, and it slipped his mind. Funny, huh?"

  I sagged back against the soft chair and thought about all this. "Yes, it's funny. Earl's such a miserable character I don't have any trouble imagining him as a murderer. But I like Mark. I don't like to think ... hey, that gives him a reason for lying, doesn't it? About whether Peter really talked to Earl, I mean. He could have been trying to throw you off, to invent a motive for Earl's killing him." I suddenly knew what Anne had meant about feeling as if she were in a movie.

  "It's conceivable. But let me find out what's what in my own simpleminded way, OK? I mean, as much as I value your help—"

  "All right," I said, smiling, "I won't get in your way."

  "And don't look so gloomy. One of the things you learn in this business is that people spend a hell of a lot of time sneaking around and lying, and if you assume that the particular lie you just found out about has something to do with the case you're working on, you're gonna be wrong ninety-five percent of the time. People just act that way out of habit."

  He stood up and began the lengthy process of gathering up his clothes. "So don't assume anybody killed anybody until we know a lot more."

  "I'll remember that," I said, and got up too. "But you know, on second thought I think I was happier not knowing what was going on."

  "So next time don't ask. See you in a couple of days; I'm gonna spend some time in Frankfurt." He shambled off to the elevator, engulfed by a mountain of clothing and trailing a six-foot-long striped scarf.

  Upstairs in my living room I sat by the telephone looking glumly at the other message that had been in the box with Harry's. It was from Rita Dooling. Pls. call, it said. Bev will take 40% on house. You keep Murphy. Other devels.

  I sighed. It was 9:30 p.m.; 1:30 in the afternoon in San Francisco. Little chance of getting Rita, who took late and leisurely lunches. Ah well, too bad, maybe tomorrow. No, that was Saturday. Well, next week sometime.

  Whistling, thinking about the afternoon at the zoo, I went to bed.

  Chapter 14

  I woke up at a little after six the next morning, itching to get back into my forgery-hunting. Because it was Saturday, I would very probably have two days entirely to myself in the Clipper Room, which suited me fin
e. When the restaurant opened at seven I was there, already missing the Augustus's caffè latte, but willing to console myself with ham and eggs, potatoes, toast, grapefruit juice, and American coffee. And at ten to eight I was at the door of the Clipper Room, Bolzano's certificates of guarantee under my arm, eager to dig into The Plundered Past.

  This was easier said than done. I got through the two-man guard outside the door, all right, but getting the alarms turned off so that I could have the pictures taken down required the written approval of a grumpy, sleepy Harry, and the detailing of two more guards to help with the tricky attachment system. Still, by ten o'clock the paintings were off the walls, and a long ten hours later I had completed the first phase of the investigation: I had satisfied myself that each picture matched the description and photograph on its certificate in every particular.

  If any of them hadn't, that would have been it right there, but the lack of variance didn't prove a thing. I already knew, after all, that Bolzano had scores of exact copies that would also match the "certificates of guarantee" of the originals—except for two differences: the provenances on their backs and the micropatterns on their fronts. By now I knew that none of the backs proclaimed themselves as fakes, but that was hardly a surprise; altering the backs would be no problem for a competent forger or, for that matter, a competent restorer or conservator.

  Such as Flittner, for example. But that was getting off the track. My concern was what. Who and why were Harry's affair.

  After a late dinner I got on to the next step—an examination of each painting with the ten-power lens and a pen-light, to see if I could find a tiny, shield-shaped design in the upper left corner of the canvas, eighty-two millimeters from the top and sixty-six millimeters from the left edge, the entire design tilted clockwise one millimeter from the vertical: Bolzano's delicate micropattem of fifty-one tiny holes, which no one else connected with the show was even aware of. Find it and I would find a masterpiece of a reproduction masquerading as a masterpiece of an Old Master.

  I began with the Vermeer, which was an act of bravery. Not long before, right there in Berlin, neutron photography had proved that The Man With the Golden Helmet, among the most beloved of Rembrandt's paintings, wasn't a Rembrandt at all. When asked to comment at the time, my statement to the San Francisco Examiner had been to the effect that it was no less a masterpiece than ever, and who had or hadn't painted it didn't affect its power or its intrinsic worth.

  I had lied. It mattered a lot to me that Rembrandt had never stood before that lovely portrait, considering, adding a touch of red ocher to deepen the shadows of the sad face, a tiny blob of stiff impasto to highlight the glowing helmet. A lot of the magic was gone, and even some of its power and intrinsic worth, whatever I had meant by that.

  And now, as anxious as I was to find the forgery, I didn't want to lose this "new" Vermeer too; I wanted the beautiful young woman standing at her clavichord to be genuine, and I believed she was—and yet Peter's "Right down your alley" kept bringing me back to her. I leaned over the canvas almost holding my breath, the lens close to the surface, and the penlight a few inches off to the side, to highlight the texture. Ten careful minutes later I straightened up with a creak.

  No pattern, thank God. And none on the Rubens or the Titian. Or the Piero or the Dürer or the Hals. There wasn't any on the Giordano either, and at that point it occurred to me that I might not be recognizing the micropattern when I saw it, since I'd never seen it on an actual painting. I went to the alcove where the reproductions hung and, without taking it down, had a close look at the "Cranach" (not one of those flirty little Venuses but one of his ugly, bloat-bellied Eves, painted to please his friend Martin Luther).

  The painting, like the other copies, was beautifully executed, but it took only a few seconds to find the telltale pinholes. It was just as easy on the copy of Vermeer's Woman Peeling Apples and on the "Poussin." So at least I knew that I knew what I was looking for. I went back to the originals, but without much hope of success. I had already examined the older paintings without finding a micropattern, and Reynolds, Gericault, Monet, Corot, and the rest were simply not "down my alley" by any criterion I could imagine. Nevertheless, I looked.

  And found nothing. I called it a day. It was almost two in the morning now, and the guards who helped me put the paintings up again were the same ones who'd taken them down eighteen hours before on their previous shift. They were grouchy about it, and so was I; grouchy, grubby, and bone-tired.

  But not disappointed. To find nothing, after all, was to learn something: Whatever I was looking for, it was not one of Bolzano's fakes that had found its way into the authentic collection. The dull, mechanical search for secret markings was over; it was time for some serious, scholarly analysis, to which I looked hungrily forward. But not until I'd gotten some sleep.

  Late Sunday morning, strengthened by Columbia House's colossal weekend brunch, I got down to business, with particular attention to the down-my-alley paintings. In addition to the Titian, Vermeer, and Rubens from Hallstatt, there were the Dürer self-portrait; the Piero Madonna; an extremely beautiful Portrait of the Officers of the Saint George Militia Company by Frans Hals; and The Four Apostles, a pair of matching panels by Luca Giordano. Again I worked until nearly 2:00 a.m., but for a change I came to some real conclusions.

  The Dürer and the Hals were genuine. They were just too dazzlingly perfect. Hals is one of the most frequendy forged painters, often successfully so, but it is always the seemingly careless Hals of The Jolly Toper or The Laughing Peasant. No faker in his right mind would try to ape the brilliant and exacting group portraits.

  The Giordano I spent a lot of time on, although on the surface it was an unlikely candidate. Giordano was an excellent craftsman, quite difficult to imitate well. And although he was the leading Neapolitan painter of the late seventeenth century, he has never become popular with collectors. The result is that forgers stay away from him. Why bother, when there are so many less daunting painters whose works, or reasonable approximations of them, bring so much more money?

  But there was another side to it. Giordano himself was a celebrated forger. In an age when artists were expected to borrow each other's ideas freely, he had been in a class of his own, figuring in one of art's earliest lawsuits. He was hauled into court over his Christ Healing the Lame Man, which he had painted very much in the style of Dürer—so faithfully, in fact, that it included Dürer's monogram. When the angry buyer learned what he'd really bought (the prideful Giordano had put his own name at the edge of the canvas, where it was covered by the frame), he sued the artist. The town council's verdict: Not guilty; no one can blame our Luca for painting as well as the great Dürer. Which goes to prove what I'd tried to tell Lorenzo Bolzano: Attitudes change.

  The reason all this is pertinent is that in my wondering about Peter's uncharacteristic playfulness that day in Kranzler's, I had begun to think I might know what his little joke was. And, artistically speaking, it would have been worth smiling about—a forgery of a painting of one of history's great forgers. But there wasn't any joke. In technique and style, it was pure Giordano. The real thing, without question.

  That left four paintings, including the ones from the cache, and I had doubts about them all. Under ordinary circumstances they wouldn't have been very grave, but circumstances being what they were, I wasn't quite ready to give any of them a clean bill of health. One of them, I was sure, had to be a fake.

  The Madonna of Piero, our earliest painting, was the best bet, at least on technical grounds. It was a canvas, and that was extremely unusual for 1460, when frescoes and wooden panels were the norm. Canvases didn't become popular until Titian's time, almost half a century later, when it was learned that they would hold up better in moist air. The artists of the day, who were given to sudden departures, also found it quite an advantage that they could quickly be rolled up and stuffed in a trunk. Try that with a wooden triptych or a ceiling fresco.

  And there was something el
se. In 1460, tempera was still the primary binding medium, although people were beginning to experiment with oils. For the Madonna to be painted in either medium would have raised no suspicions, but it was painted in both, and that was unusual.

  Unusual, but not unknown. Piero himself had used the two media in another painting, The Baptism of Christ. And as for the use of canvas, Uccello, painting at about the same time, had used it for his Saint George and the Dragon, the famous painting now in London's National Gallery. So what I had were two unlikely features in the same piece, and they were enough to make me wonder. The tempera-oils issue was more complicated than it might seem on the surface: the Madonna had probably been restored a dozen times. For all I knew Piero himself had done it completely in tempera, only to have it retouched in oils three or four hundred years later.

  Fortunately, old paint fluoresces differently from newer paint, so this was an issue with which Max Kohler of the Technische Universität could help me. Max tends toward the hysterical, and when I telephoned him, he practically wept. It was impossible, his lab was overflowing with work, he was laboring twenty hours a day. But finally he agreed to come the following Tuesday and to bring his ultraviolet lamp and some other equipment with him. This was on my solemn promise to ask nothing else of him for at least a month. That didn't present a problem; my questions about the remaining three paintings weren't technical, and they were for me to answer, not Dr. Max and his mysterious machines.

  First, the Titian: Venus and the Lute Player, a lush, reclining nude being serenaded by a black lutenist, the earliest of several versions. It wasn't that it was a bad painting by any means. And it wasn't that it was uncharacteristic of Titian; it wasn't—but it was the wrong Titian, the Titian of his seventies or eighties, done with quick, slashing thrusts of color, intuitive and unrestrained.

  It is a piece of conventional wisdom that you can't verify a late Titian by comparing it with early ones, or vice versa, because his approach changed so radically. Venus was supposed to have been painted in 1538, when he was in his late forties, still using a careful, linear style. (Some authorities think that his later approach was less a matter of artistic growth than of an old man's farsightedness.) But perhaps the painting had been misdated some time in the last 450 years. Or perhaps he was experimenting with the style he would later adopt. Either could easily be true. Still, it was something to think about.