Loot

by Aaron Elkins

  "Hello?"?

  "Ben, is that you? Benjamin Revere?"

  "Simeon?"

  "Yes, that's right, Simeon." He sounded pleased at having his voice recognized. If he'd had any idea of the pathetic size of my social circle he wouldn't have been so flattered. Besides, how many of them had Russian accents?

  Simeon Pawlovsky and I had known each other almost two years. Now in his late seventies, he had left Russia in the Sixties, and for the past three decades he had owned a pawnshop on Washington Street, in the grittiest part of Boston's South End. I had first run into him while working on a case for the police department—I'm an art historian by training, an honest-to-God, certifiable expert, and as such I do some consulting, not only for private individuals but once in a while for the police or for the Customs Department. In this particular case, the hunt for a stolen Courbet had led back after many a twist to Simeon's shop. Simeon had been extremely helpful; with his assistance the painting had gotten back to its rightful owner and some of the bad guys had been put away, even if not for very long. The old man had gotten a bang out of it, and since then, whenever a piece of "suspicious" art came into his shop he had called me. The calls had rarely panned out into anything, but we had become friends of a sort, and sometimes, if I happened to be in the neighborhood—his shop was only a five-minute drive from the Museum of Fine Arts—I dropped in to sit on a stool behind the counter with him and pass the time. Sometimes, if it was a nice day, he'd lock up the store and put up one of those little clock-signs showing when he'd be back, and we'd walk around the block. He'd have his face tilted up the whole time, as if he couldn't get enough sun.

  "What am I hearing, baseball?" he asked now. "On a day like this you're sitting in the dark watching a baseball game?"

  "I'm not in the dark, Simeon."

  "Baseball at four o'clock on a Monday afternoon," he said in quiet dismay.

  If he only knew, I thought. I'd watched a ballgame Sunday afternoon too. And Saturday. No, that was wrong; on Saturday it had been golf, a thought that momentarily gave me pause. Baseball was one thing, but does a normal human being watch golf for three-and-a-half hours straight? If I didn't get my act together pretty soon I was going to wind up spending my afternoons in front of beach volley ball or ice-dancing. It could happen.

  "Well, you're in your store, aren't you?" I said lamely. "Is that so much better?"

  "Yes, but I have to be here. I have a business to run. Tell me, what's your excuse?"

  Well, yes, there was the rub.

  I sighed. "Simeon, what can I do for you?"

  "Ben, I took in a painting yesterday. You think you could have a look at it?"

  "What is it?"

  "I—well, I wouldn't want to say. I think it's valuable. I'm ninety percent sure it's stolen."

  "But what is it? I mean, Impressionist, Modern—"

  "It could be seventeenth century, could be early eighteenth," he said. "Spanish would be my guess." Then, too excited to keep still: "Ben, it's a wonderful picture, it should be in a museum. I have it in front of me right now. I think—well, if you want to know, I think it could be by Velazquez. That's my opinion, for what it's worth."

  For what it was worth. The last time it had been a "Giorgione" that turned out to be a murky landscape that was grimy and shellac-encrusted enough to be centuries old, but wasn't.

  "Uh-huh," I said. "And what makes you think that?"

  "For one thing, there's a label on the back that says so."

  "A label? There's no signature?"

  "No, just a label on the back."

  "Simeon, anyone can stick a label—"

  "Benjamin, for God's sake, give me a little credit, I wasn't born yesterday. I'm telling you, it's a real work of art. In my opinion—"

  "And someone walked into your shop and pawned it, just like that."

  "Yes, just like that. What do you think, they make appointments ahead of time to come here? A Russian he was, not in this country very long—"

  "How much did you give him for it?"

  "He wanted a thousand dollars."

  I laughed. "He took a thousand dollars for a genuine Velazquez?"

  "He took a hundred dollars. I'm a businessman. I don't run this place for the entertainment value. Besides, I didn't like his looks. The minute he came in I knew something wasn't right."

  "What's it a picture of, Simeon?"

  He took his time. "A man," he said at last.

  "A man. Well, that’s helpful."

  "Dressed in black."

  "A man dressed in black. That certainly narrows it down—"

  "Listen, Ben, instead of wisecracks, why not just look at it? How about tomorrow, can you come over?"

  I hesitated, interested but doubtful. There were only a hundred or so authenticated Velazquez paintings still around, mostly in the world's museums, but at least twice that many were known to have been painted by him and then lost at one point or another over the last 350 years. Every now and then one of them really did turn up, although a pawnshop was a pretty unlikely place for it, and Simeon wasn't the art connoisseur he liked to imagine he was. Still, I couldn't call myself much of an art historian if dreams of finding and authenticating one of them weren't already dancing in my head.

  "Yes, okay, sure, I'll come over," I said. "I'll try to get there on the early side."

  "Fine, I'll be here all day."

  In the living room, the announcer was recapping what I'd missed: ". . . so the Red Sox certainly have their work cut out for them in their half of the ninth. With explosive two-run homers by Griffey and Buhner and a five-run Mariner lead . . ."

  In other words, the usual. I turned off the TV, picked up what was left of the lo mein, and went into the study to see what I had on Velazquez.

  Chapter 2

  Where my mornings go is a continuing source of wonderment. Usually I let the sun wake me—one of the genuine pleasures of not having an honest job—then make myself coffee, read the Globe over cold cereal (or eggs over easy if I'm feeling unusually ambitious), take a shower, and then—well, that's the part I'm not sure about; turn on Classics in the Morning on WGBH, catch up on my reading, look at my mail—hell, I don't know what I do.

  In any case, it wasn't until 2:15 in the afternoon that I got out of my car in front of Simeon's shop on Washington Street. On one side of it was a warehouselike discount furniture store, on the other a closed-down Thai take-out restaurant, its windows covered by graffiti-coated plywood boards. Between these two neighbors, Simeon's pawnshop was just what anyone would expect. "Ca$h in a Fla$h!!!" proclaimed the peeling metal sign above the entrance. "Fast, Friendly, Confidential!!! Open 8-5 Mon-Sat. Estab. 1970." Additional encouragements, in red neon tubing, hung in the windows: "Buy*Sell*Trade*Layaway*—Money to Loan—We Sell First Quality Merchandise at Low, Low Prices!!!"

  The window bays were stuffed with every kind of junk imaginable, and then some: a row of ukuleles strung on a rod; electric drills; cameras seemingly from the dawn of photography; VCR's; fishing rods; a signed photograph of Ginger Rogers; a 3-D movie projector; a set of strobe lights ("A once in a lifetime bargain—$39!!!); a pair of white, forlornly elegant women's ice skates, much used; chain saws; rings; pearl necklaces; even a folding electric wheelchair.

  To get into the place I walked through the open metal accordion-gate that folded across the front when the shop was closed, through a vestibule in which a rusting electric generator and a scuzzy-looking moped were chained to the foundation, (as they'd been since the first time I was there), and through a second open folding gate that Simeon pulled across the front door and the rear of the bays when he closed down for the night. The store had been broken into several times in the Eighties, and Simeon had learned to take precautions. In addition to the gates there were a cheesy-looking, red-eyed "video camera" that oscillated back and forth in one corner of the room, surely fooling not even the most gullible thief, and a convex mirror mounted up near the ceiling behind the counter, which gave Simeon a view of t
he shop when his back was turned. And on his skinny hip was the usual Colt revolver (empty) that looked as if it might have been pawned by Wyatt Earp himself.

  When I came in he was methodically counting out five-dollar bills—an old-fashioned thumb-licker, Simeon was—for an aged, birdlike woman in a track suit and Velcro-fastened jogging shoes.

  Simeon wasn't much bigger than she was; maybe five-five and a hundred and twenty pounds, a neatly groomed, small-boned, gray-haired old man, not at all the sort that went with all those exclamation points out front; a bit stiff, even prim, in his movements, and dressed as always in a black suit, a white shirt, and a nondescript, tightly knotted tie; a businesslike outfit except for that six-gun, which he insisted on wearing on a gun belt strapped around his waist on the outside of his jacket. ("If I wear it underneath, no one will see, so what's the point?")

  "Thirty-five . . . forty," he was saying, putting the bills into a used white envelope. His glasses, rimmed in thick black plastic, were hiked up onto his forehead.

  "There you are, Mrs. Kapinsky."

  "I thank you, Mr. Pawlovsky."

  It was hard to keep from smiling. I might have been listening to the start of a vaudeville routine.

  "Now don't you forget to come back and redeem it," Simeon told her, dryly playful. "I'd hate to have to sell this beautiful piece of quality jewelry."

  "You better not if you know what’s good for you," she said with a waggle of her finger. This was a routine, I realized; they were old hands at it. She slipped the red cardboard pawn ticket into a zippered pocket. "I'll see you next week for sure, you can count on it." On the way out she gave me a brisk nod, one business client to another.

  "You see this ring?" Simeon said. "Every month when her check runs out she comes in and leaves it here for forty dollars, and every month, like clockwork, when she gets her check the next week she comes back and gets it out for forty-five dollars. Better than borrowing from a bank."

  "Pawlovsky's Loans, the poor people's ATM," I said. "Absolutely," said Simeon earnestly. "You got it exactly right. Not everybody has a big bank account. Not everybody can make it from one check to the next."

  He tied a tag to the ring and put it in a drawer behind the glass-topped counter. "You know, at first she used to show up lugging this big orbital sander—her husband was a roof-framer before he died. It must have weighed thirty pounds, and you saw how skinny she is? So I said to her, look, why not trade the sander for a ring? It weighs next to nothing. So she did, and now she carries it in on her little finger. A wonderful person; for twenty years she's been coming in here. Come, let me show you what I have."

  He grabbed the cane that he kept hooked over the counter—Simeon's right foot was twisted inward, his knee stiff, so that he moved with a rocking, foot-dragging limp—and led the way up two wooden steps to the little foyer between the shop and his living quarters. Beyond was a kitchen, bathroom, and combination bedroom-sitting room, all facing through barred windows onto a shared central courtyard with tired brown grass, a bench, and a few rhododendrons that hadn't been pruned or fed in a decade. Only once before had I been invited back. We'd had tea at the kitchen table, and we'd both been awkward and constrained. To get to the kitchen it had been necessary to walk through the old man's shabby bedroom, with his worn felt slippers beside the bed. It had made me feel like an intruder, as if I were seeing a part of his life that I wasn't meant to. Simeon had been embarrassed too; the invitation hadn't been repeated.

  This time we stopped in the foyer itself, where an ancient monster of a safe sat on a reinforced section of the floor, filling half the cubicle. "The Machinists' Insurance Co.," it said in faded gilt lettering, barely readable against the black metal, "342 Wyona Street, Brooklyn, N.Y." Simeon knelt with difficulty, absentmindedly shoving his rigid leg to one side with his hands, and worked the combination. When the heavy door swung smoothly outward—apparently he kept it oiled—he slid out the only object inside, an unframed picture on a rectangular piece of Formica-coated wood, reverently carried it back to the counter, and stepped aside to let me have a look.

  It was about two feet by three, a dark, sober portrait on a simple, brown background. Across the bottom was a line of spidery, elegant script: "El Conde de Torrijos."

  Simeon looked at me. "Well?"

  I let out my breath. A man, yes. Dressed in black, yes. In the somber fashion of the seventeenth-century Spanish court, as Simeon had implied. But no wonder he'd been moved. The pensive, melancholy face of the balding, aging aristocrat with the white goatee—the Count of Torrijos—gazed at me with an immediacy—a living, real presence—that only a few painters had managed to capture more than once or twice in their lives. You knew at once that, despite the quaintness of costume, or trappings, or pose, this was a real person that you were looking at—or rather, that was looking at you—and you couldn’t help feeling that if you could only look at him long enough, or in the right way, you might make a connection, an actual human connection, over all those years. Rembrandt, above all, had had that magical gift. Rubens. Van Dyck. Vermeer. Holbein. Copley. Hals.

  And Velazquez.

  Now don't jump to conclusions, I told myself, leaning over the picture. There are a lot of things this could be—a painting made by an apprentice in some seventeenth-century artist's workshop—possibly even Velazquez's—or a copy by a talented student, or an outright forgery done in the nineteenth or even twentieth century, smoked, and baked, and crackled to look old.

  No, not a modern forgery; too painstaking and too good for that. Besides, I could spot a few signs of antique restoration here and there; the right cuff and an area near the elbow had been touched up, as well as the region around a small, repaired gash in the background—all three of them exactly the sort of shoddy jobs that had been all too common in the nineteenth century. You just don't see forgers who go to that kind of trouble to make a painting look like the real thing. Not when it’s so much easier and more effective to buy (or steal) a picture by some unknown but reasonably competent seventeenth-century journeyman and simply replace the signature with that of the artist of your choice. That way, assuming that you’d picked your painter with a little care, the materials, the techniques, even the frame, would all be right for the time and place. The only fake part would be the signature.

  This one didn't even have a signature, and in a way that was the most convincing element of all. One thing you could count on with a fake was a nice, legible signature. Without one, even the most beautifully forged Rubens or Rembrandt might wind up being relegated to a generic "School of Rubens" or "Studio of Rembrandt", and what self-respecting forger is going to settle for that when a discreet little "PP Rubens" or "RHL" (Rembrandt Harmenszoon Leidensis) in the lower right corner would increase its selling price a hundred times, say from $20,000 to $2,000,000?

  So whatever it was, Velazquez or otherwise, it was almost certainly old. In good shape, though. Other than the holes and creases around the edges where it had been tacked to its stretcher, a little nearby flaking of the paint, and the repaired gash, the canvas had suffered nothing beyond the normal damage of time. I went over it inch by inch with the lighted magnifying lens I'd brought, gently touching it here and there with a finger, even rubbing a bit of saliva over it in one place to check the varnish, both of which were capital crimes if discovered (but perpetrated all the same by anyone evaluating a work of art—in private, at any rate).

  The more I examined it, the more I leaned toward Velazquez. The dark, dramatic colors, the ochres and earth tones of the deceptively plain background, the detached yet sympathetic way the subject was portrayed—all shouted Velazquez . . . or possibly, to be fair, one of Velazquez's better students. But the technique, the actual application of the paint, was another thing, and it would be an extraordinary student who could match that feathery brushwork, so different from that of his contemporaries and so far ahead of its time. Two hundred years later Manet, himself one of the founders of Impressionism, would credit Velazquez as his o
wn inspiration.

  There was more: the characteristic use of a soft-hair blending brush to tone down outlines, and the expert, patient application of layer upon layer of glazes. Outside of the Venetian school—Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Giorgione—Velazquez was the undisputed master of glazes, sometimes lathering on as many as thirty layers.

  In addition, there were pale vertical streaks, visible through pigment that had become transparent with time, that showed where the artist's brush had been wiped clean on the as-yet-unpainted canvas, a habit for which Velazquez had been criticized in his own time. He was also famous for his pentimenti, his changes of mind as he worked, and these too, probably invisible for the first couple of hundred years, now showed as ghosts through the time-thinned overpainting. The old count's collar had been made smaller, his left hand had been repositioned, a book in the foreground, originally closed, had been opened.

  "Well?" Simeon demanded. He was practically hopping with impatience. "So?"

  I straightened up. "Simeon, this time I think you just might have something here."

  "Ah," he said with deep satisfaction.

  "But I'm not sure yet. Let's look at the back."

  Gingerly, I lifted the stiff canvas by its edges and turned it over, holding it so that the painted surface didn't touch anything. There were the usual things you'd expect to find on the back of an old painting—flyspecks, smudges, cryptic scribbles and randomly placed symbols of one kind or another: R-B, GRA, Osuna 127/6, S2, a star within a circle, and a monogram that said either TC or CT, all in faded ink or pencil, plus a couple of dull, black rubber-stamped markings in pointy, angular Gothic lettering: ERR and ne-2. In addition there were two pale fingerprints (Velazquez's?) in ochre pigment, some scraps of glue where labels had once been pasted on, and two labels still attached, one large, one small.

  The big one, in the center, was a dealer's sticker on expensive paper: Pierre Severac, Paris. 13. Boulevard de la Madeleine. Peintures Françaises et Étrangeres. Turn-of-the- century, from the look of it. The smaller label was made of cheap, thin paper torn from a perforated roll and unevenly typed in faint red ink. Velazquez, Graf Torrijos, it said. Paris, Dez. 1942.