A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  I looked, through a border of glass shards hanging from the doorframe. Not only at the grotesquely twisted ruin of the chassis, tipped awkwardly onto its wheel-less rear corner, but at the truck-size cavity gouged out beneath it, and the blackened halo scorched onto the concrete all around. For the first time I noticed that the two heavy back doors really had been blown off and now lay, caved in but still locked together, some ten feet away, like a monstrous tortoise shell on its back. There were black metallic chunks and vicious splinters all over the courtyard. Now my knees did go just a littie soft.

  "There were supposed to be two guards in the back," he said. "And you. Maybe the driver would have made it, but there would have been three dead guys for sure, in a whole lot of nasty pieces. You're lucky you're alive."

  "Thanks to you; never mind the luck."

  "You're welcome. What I'm getting at is that blowing up trucks—and throwing people out of sleazy hotel rooms in Frankfurt, for that matter ... Is that the kind of thing you expect from art forgers?" He answered himself with a shake of the head. "Give me a break. They don't go in for that stuff. Besides, it's not worth the risk or the expense. But dope—you're talking big bucks, and you're talking the lousiest, most vicious creeps in the world."

  He was undoubtedly right about drug criminals, but he was off-base about art crimes. Art involved a lot of money too, and the vicious creeps had found out about it. Art crimes were no longer the undisputed province of the well-bred gentleman crook.

  "But why would anyone want to hide drugs on a famous painting going from a major museum to a big U.S. Army show? It's not the most inconspicuous place in the world."

  "I'm only guessing, but the show's going from here to Holland, and then to England, right? Can you figure a better way to smuggle drugs from one country to another? How keen do you think customs inspectors are going to be on fooling around with sealed-up, irreplaceable paintings shipped by DOD and guarded by OSI?"

  "All right," I admitted, "that could be. So why blow it up?"

  "A lot of reasons. Maybe they thought we were onto them, and they needed to destroy it. Maybe it was one gang getting even with another.... Who knows? But this whole thing revolves around dope. I can feel it in my bones."

  I didn't. "All the same, there's a forgery somewhere in The Plundered Past, and I'm willing to bet this is it. So if it's all right with you, I'll stick around while you go over it. There's a lot I can do while you're looking for your drugs."

  "Chris, I'm usually a patient guy, wouldn't you say? Amiable, easygoing?"

  "I'd say so. Usually."

  "Well, I am. But I've got a lot to do here, and your company—delightful as it is—is starting to bug me. No offense? Good. So Abrams here is, going to drive you to Rhein-Main and get you checked out at the hospital—"

  "I don't need a hospital."

  "And then he's going to check you into a room in the BOQ, and tomorrow morning we'll all fly back to Berlin with the painting, and you can look at it when we get there."

  'Tomorrow's the reception," I protested, knowing it was a lost cause.

  "You'll have time before the reception," Harry said, the delicate way he set his teeth together indicating that he was done being amiable and easygoing. "You don't mind waiting until then, do you?"

  I did, but what was there for me to say?

  * * *

  We flew back to Berlin in the cavernous, windowless belly of a C-130 cargo plane, seated on flimsy seats mounted backward on steel rails. Harry was grumpy. He had found no drugs, even with the assistance of Wolf, Frankfurt's famous dope-sniffing beagle. And Knopp had found no explosives. No terrorist organization had claimed responsibility.

  No one knew what was going on.

  "What about insurance?" I asked helpfully. "It was insured for two million dollars."

  Harry shook his head glumly. "Who'd wind up with the money? Bolzano. And he doesn't need it; I checked that out a long time ago."

  "All right, then consider this: If that thing is a forgery, then someone still has the original, and—"

  "Chris, I've got theories coming out of my ears. Why don't you find out first if it is a fake, and then we'll talk." He tilted his head upward and scratched vigorously under his bearded chin. The activity seemed to refresh him. "You know what I keep wondering?" he asked brightly. "I keep wondering if the painting was just incidental. Maybe there was something else they were trying to explode into little pieces."

  "Something else? There wasn't anything else on the truck."

  "Sure, there was. You."

  "Me? Me?"

  Abrams and another soldier, seated a few feet in front of us, looked up. I lowered my voice.

  "Harry, this is getting to me. Why do you keep saying things like that? Why would anyone want to explode— kill—me?"

  "Why would anyone want to kill van Cortlandt?"

  "That's a terrific answer."

  "Look," he said with weary patience, "you keep telling me he got killed because he found a forgery, right?"

  "Probably the El Greco."

  "OK, whatever. Well, whoever killed him has to be worried about you finding it, too, since you go around telling everybody in earshot that you're looking for it and you're gonna find it. I mean, it only makes sense."

  I sat back and stared at the plane's stark interior, turning over this unpalatable thought.

  "You're going to have to start being careful, Chris," Harry said gendy. "I mean really careful. From now on, no more trips out of Berlin without talking to me first. I even want to know when you leave Columbia House."

  "OK."

  "I mean it; I'm serious."

  "All right, I promise." After a while I said, "Harry, I just realized: Traben has to be involved, doesn't he? That whole ridiculous transportation scheme was his idea."

  Harry looked over at me and smiled tiredly.

  "No, listen," I said. "Let's assume the El Greco is a forgery. Isn't it possible Traben substituted it after making off with the original—which he could probably sell for thirty or forty thousand dollars—"

  "I thought it was worth two million."

  "It is, but stolen art's no different from stolen anything. You can't sell it for full value. Anyhow," I went on, growing more excited, "blowing up the truck would be a master stroke—it'd destroy the evidence, and it'd also kill me, the only guy around who'd be likely to know it for a fake. His worries would be over.... Harry, are you laughing for any particular reason?"

  "I think you've got a first-rate hypothesis there, Chris. Only one small problem."

  "Which is?"

  "Traben was planning to ride in the truck with you."

  "Oh." I slouched moodily down into the uncomfortably upright chair. "The hell with it. I'm going to have a nap. Maybe everything will be clear when I've looked at the painting."

  "Yeah," Harry said. "Sure."

  Chapter 19

  Purification of the Temple, purportedly by Doménikos Theotokópoulos, called El Greco; the Greek. Painted about 1598 and certified by Major Harry M. Gucci to contain no explosives or contraband.

  At the center stands a red-robed Christ, willowy, ethereal, dispassionately resolute. In his gently upraised hand is a flail, held aloft so languidly that its thongs trail straight down, limp and unthreatening. Nevertheless, there is consternation in the writhing knot of people before him. They fling themselves wildly away to escape the drooping lash, tilting their bodies far to the left, so that everything is disturbingly off balance. The figures are elongated or bizarrely foreshortened, the shifts in perspective violent and unnatural, the colors acid and eerie.

  I stood frowning at it and working the kinks out of my back after a long, meticulous examination. I was feeling rather crabby. I wouldn't argue with El Greco's genius, but, speaking for myself, four hours of staring at those twisty, febrile fanatics was about three hours and fifty minutes too much.

  "The damn thing's genuine," I grumbled. "I'd bet on it." Fortunately, Harry, who had heard my willingness to bet t
he other way not many hours before, was off somewhere else.

  I didn't have much doubt about my conclusion. The painting was quintessential El Greco: thick pigments, tempered with mastic and then vigorously laid on with rough, hatching strokes, not so very different from the way van Gogh would do it three hundred years later. But anyone else painting in 1590 would certainly have used a more fluid medium and laid it on with a soft brush to get the smooth, unbroken glaze that was standard at the time.

  It was even signed in Greek characters, not Roman, which is how El Greco did it until almost the end of his life—a minor detail that many El Greco forgers never bothered to learn, assuming that all they had to do was paint some religious-looking men with long faces and pointy beards and they could get away with it. And a lot of them did, leaving many a red-faced curator in their wake.

  No, it was an El Greco, all right, probably worth more than its two-million-dollar appraisal. So what was going on? Between Harry and me, we'd come up with no answers. Where was there for me to go from here? Tiredly, I rubbed the hot, aching area at the nape of my neck.

  I was startled by another, gentler touch on the back of my neck, but I recognized it quickly as Anne's. I stood there with my head bowed and my eyes closed, luxuriating in the pleasure of having my shoulders massaged by her soft, firm hands.

  "Poor baby," she murmured, "you've been through a lot lately, haven't you?"

  Earlier we had managed a quick lunch together, and she had warmed me with her concern over the story of my narrow escape from the bombing (made only a little narrower in the telling, purely in the interest of dramatic narrative). Even now, when I turned to look at her, there was a tiny crease of worry between her eyebrows.

  I touched it with my fingertips. "Hey," I said guiltily, "I'm fine. Really."

  The crease smoothed. "But from the look on your face, I gather you still haven't found the forgery."

  "No, this is an El Greco for sure, and I'm ready to give up. There isn't anything else to look at."

  Gadney came in, looking armored and stiff in a tightly buttoned blue suit instead of his usual tweeds. He seemed a little tense, but then he was overseeing the arrangements for the reception, and the usual sorts of things had been going wrong all day.

  "So," he said, without much interest, "is it a forgery? No? Well, that's good. I think that's good. I'm not quite certain just what you hope to find. I'm sure it's none of my affair."

  When this was not contested, he sniffed. "Mark would like us all to avoid saying anything just yet to Bolzano about what happened yesterday."

  "What do you mean?" I asked. "Is Bolzano here?"

  "Of course. Oh, didn't Mark mention it to you? It appears he recovered more quickly than anyone expected, and he flew in for the reception after all. Mark's with him now."

  "Why shouldn't we say anything?" Anne asked.

  "Well, you know how excited he gets. Mark seems to think it might be the last straw; that he might simply explode and call everything off."

  He just might've, and I wouldn't have blamed him, but I thought he had a right to know that someone had very nearly vaporized his El Greco. I said as much.

  "Yes, true," Gadney said. "Exactly what I told Mark."

  "And?"

  "Mark pointed out that it would be better to tell him after the reception. That way, he'll be more publicly committed; he'll have had his ego soothed by some important people—General Shea will be here, after all, and Ambassador Wheeler, and Mayor Grumbacher, and so forth—and he should be in a far more positive mood by then. I must say, I think Mark has a point."

  "What about Mr. Traben from the Kunstmuseum?" Anne said. "He'll be here. He's sure to—"

  Gadney shook his head. "No, Mark's already spoken to him. He thinks it's a good idea to put it off, too."

  "I'm sure he does," I said, smiling. "He's probably afraid Bolzano will strangle him when he hears about it."

  "Be that as it may," Gadney said by way of closing the discussion, "I have to get back downstairs now. The caviar isn't here yet, if you can believe it, and we may have to do without." The thought brought a steely compression to his lips. "By the way, you might want to know that Lorenzo Bolzano is here along with his father."

  "Great," I said. "At least the conversation will be lively."

  * * *

  It was. Lorenzo was in classic form, voluble and opaque. "All of our old constants of 'objective reality,' " he piped, pushing a canape farther into his mouth with one lank forefinger (the caviar had arrived in the nick of time, so that crisis, at least, had been averted), "all of our old constants—space, matter, time—we now recognize as nothing more than constructs of cultural consciousness." He smiled brighdy at the group of six or eight people gathered around him, and gulped some more from the glass of Schloss Johannisberg Riesling wrapped in his other hand. "They are no longer valid."

  "No longer valid," murmured a dazed one-star general, edging surreptitiously backward.

  "No. Reality is, in reality—ah-ha-ha—a multidimensional and, in the end, an ambiguous invention, of no significance to the artist. In my paper 'Rembrandt, Warhol, and the Synthetist Manifesto' ..."

  The reception was a little over two hours old, and Lorenzo, having established a station within arm's reach of one of the food tables, had been going on like that for almost the whole time. Following Robey's instructions to mingle, I had wandered in and out of his ongoing discourse several times, finding myself entertained, as always, by his inexhaustible resources of learned goofiness.

  I had also talked briefly with his father. Claudio Bolzano, looking happy and healthy, broke away from a circle of generals and diplomats to come and talk with me.

  "So," he said, "here I am, after all." His alert black eyes glittered with life. "You're progressing in your investigations? Why don't I hear from you?"

  "I'm afraid there's been nothing to report, signore."

  "You're afraid?'

  "Well, I only meant—"

  He threw back his head and laughed. "I understand. I should tell you, signore, that as soon as I arrived, before the reception began, I went carefully through the collection, and my conclusion was this: To search for a forgery among these paintings is to waste your time. They are authentic, all of them; I will stake my reputation on it. And the three masterpieces from Hallstatt are even more wonderful than I remember." He smiled suddenly, his whole face alight. "Surely you must agree?"

  I nodded. "I do."

  Bolzano laughed good-humoredly. "I hear a scholar's disappointment. You're sad because you have no earth-shaking discovery to report to the world of art. Well," he said generously, "it's all right; I understand your long face very well."

  But he didn't. I didn't give a damn about earthshaking discoveries. My friend and teacher had been killed because of something he'd found in the show. He had told me about it, and I'd been too dense to understand or even to follow his lead. And so his murderer was still walking around free. There were other compelling things to worry about, too, as Harry had pointed out; since I'd gotten involved I'd been beaten, grazed by a bullet (a doctor at Rhein-Main had confirmed it), and knocked silly by a bomb. And without a doubt I was still on somebody's hit list.

  And I still didn't have a clue. I'd gotten absolutely nowhere at all.

  That's why I had a long face.

  "And so," Lorenzo was saying, "the subjectivist, essentially post-existential viewpoint opens to our minds a third reality, the astructural, nonfunctional, purely relational reality of an interior, many-layered system of reference...."

  I managed to hide a yawn under cover of finishing my Scotch and water, and let my eyes wander over the room looking for Anne. She was musing before the Vermeer, her arms folded, an empty wineglass cradled against her cheek.

  It was the first time I'd seen her that afternoon without some panting male—or two or three—drooling over her. And no wonder. She looked marvelous; tawny-haired and glowing with girl-next-door prettiness. And she was in mess dress uniform, a k
nockout outfit of dark mess jacket, white shirt and cummerbund, and ankle-length skirt slit up to the knee. I hadn't been able to keep my eyes off her.

  I went to her and took the glass from her hand. "I could sure stand a break. Why don't I get us a couple more, and we can find someplace to sit down for ten minutes."

  "I don't know," she whispered. "I have orders to amuse the VIPs. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk to you."

  "Well, couldn't you pretend I'm a VIP?"

  Lorenzo, unfortunately, had noted my absence, and his voice, shrill with wine, cut effectively through the racket of a successful cocktail party well underway.

  "Christopher, come over here and settle a fine point for us! We'll soon see," he said to his circle, "what the eminent Dr. Norgren has to say."

  Anne took the glasses from me. "Duty first. Go be entertaining. I'll get your drink."

  "Make it fast," I said out of the side of my mouth. " I'm going to need it."

  "So, Christopher, ah-ha-ha," Lorenzo said, welcoming me with a comradely and unsteady arm across my shoulder, "tell us: If we accept—and how can we not—the epistemelogical underpinnings of de Chirico's pittura metafisica, must it not follow that an inner reality— that is, the expectations and values which we impose upon our world—is infinitely more persuasive, more real, than the exterior world itself, which we can know only through our senses? How would you answer?"

  "Uh, well." I looked for help to the group around us, but they simply looked back with that expression of stunned astonishment that ten minutes of Lorenzo invariably produced. I cleared my throat. "It's an interesting question. ..."

  Lorenzo rescued me, as I hoped he might. "It is a vital question, and not only for art. Heidegger, Kafka, Proust ..."

  He burbled merrily on, forgetting me again, as Anne came with the drinks.

  "Thanks." I sipped, and then I must have frowned.