Forgery

by Sabina Murray

  I shrugged. “Merchant of Venice?”

  The man nodded in agreement. “What are you really looking for?”

  “Classical stuff. Anything, but it has to be genuine. And I can pay for it.”

  The man shook his head. “I had one piece that might have interested you, but it is already sold.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was like this, a vase, for drinking.” He made a shape the size of a head. “There were figures. One handle missing, but the rest—without a crack. And the color … red figures on black.” He shook his head.

  “It was real?”

  “Yes,” the man said. “Sometimes we are lucky.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “The man who brought it said it came from the south—dug up in the Peloponnesus maybe.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “They all lie. They are all scared, these amateur diggers. But I saw this and it was real. The vase he showed me was small, but he said there was another. I don’t know what the English name is for this, but in Greece it was used for mixing the water with the wine. Big.” He showed a space the size of a beach ball.

  “A bell krater?”

  “Maybe.”

  I took a pencil and did a quick sketch on the corner of something written over in Greek that looked to be a bill of lading. And there was my picture, an amateur but recognizable bell krater with a wide mouth, narrow pedestal base, and handles that poked out at the sides like ears.

  “And the smaller one was similar in shape?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you think there were more?”

  “The man said there was more, but I do not think he had more. I think he probably worked as a digger and managed to hide the smaller piece, bring it to me. He was not educated, but he knew he had something.”

  I took out one of my old business cards from the auction house and wrote the name of my hotel on it. “If any more of this Peloponnesian pottery shows up, do let me know.”

  “Of course,” he said, nodding. “Are you buying the bronze coin?”

  I looked at him eye to eye. “If you show me a vase of the caliber that you have described, I will buy many coins.”

  I had a couple of ideas about the bell krater. I’d heard of a find while still in New York, a burial site, Greek but situated in the heel of Italy’s boot. Italy was still rich with such things. And I had to think about where the bell krater might have come from because, in many ways, that was more my job than merely looking at the style, the materials, and making an educated decision as to whether or not the object was genuine. More important than this arbitrary assessment of authenticity was my ability to provide a past. I had to determine the provenance and the provenience, two seemingly similar words but so much more than that to the dealer in antiques. Provenience spoke to origin; provenance to history. For example, Abraham Lincoln’s pencil was just a pencil from Illinois, approximately a hundred years old. Not that remarkable. The provenance of that pencil—if we could prove that it was Lincoln’s—made the pencil desirable. And if that that same pencil had been used to draft the Gettysburg Address, it would of course be priceless. The pencil would no longer be a pencil, because who would write with it? But it was something you could hold in your hand, a concrete reminder of the significant, historical, and dead.

  The value of an object is whatever it can fetch at auction. I knew this, and as I wandered through the shops of Pandróssou, picking up the various clay lamps and worn daggers, vases chipping yesterday’s paint into my hand, I could see how someone like Kostas, with his gift for palaver, had been able to make himself quite an empire, because provenience requires only some knowledge of regional industry, and provenance a good imagination and a willing customer.

  I worked my way through a few of the other antique shops in a couple of hours and found myself at the edge of the Pláka. It was nearing that time of day when the heat becomes unbearable, but I started wandering up a set of steps in the direction of the Acropolis. My shoes were feeling a bit tight. I wondered how the marble steps would feel beneath my feet. My wingtips, despite being correct, were not comfortable and they were slippery. The sun was bleaching everything. The heat, rather than warming the air, was displacing it. I would not make it to the Acropolis like this and was wondering whether to get a drink, find a cab, or start walking back to the hotel when a familiar voice called out to me.

  “Rupert!”

  I looked over at the terrace of a small café that had insinuated itself into the rise of rock that marked the first ascent to the Acropolis. The tables were small and jammed together, festive with bright blue-and-white checked tablecloths. A waterfall of bougainvillea blanketed one wall and beneath this sat Steve Kelly. There was an extremely striking woman seated across from him, most notable for her ample bosom, who was stubbing out her cigarette. She rose and when she saw me waved me over, pulling her chair out in invitation.

  “Hello, Steve,” I said.

  “What are you up to, Rupert?”

  “Me? I think I’m about to pass out.”

  “Well, come sit and have a drink. Alexandra is about to abandon me to the heat of the day and I’d rather not drink alone.”

  “And I’d rather drink.” I gave Alexandra my best handsome smile and extended my hand, which she took. “Rupert Brigg.”

  She nodded and said nothing. Maybe she thought Rupert Brigg was an unusual American greeting, much like howdy. She kissed Steve goodbye on both cheeks and we watched, a little sadder, as she stepped carefully down to the alleyway and disappeared off to the right.

  “She’s charming,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Steve. “Not much for conversation, though. What have you been up to?”

  “Window shopping.”

  “I passed you on Pandróssou Street,” he said, smiling. “You’re a coin collector.”

  “Am I?”

  “There was a book on your desk, something about coins. I noticed it when I was in your room.”

  “Of course.”

  Steve stuck a cigarette in his mouth, lit it with a match, and waved the match out in my face. “You’re not very forthcoming.”

  “We numismatists are a private lot,” I said.

  “Numismatist,” repeated Steve. “Sounds like someone who’s into clouds or having sex with mummies.”

  “That’s why we’re so private.”

  A waiter came over and I ordered my drink.

  “When are you heading out to Aspros?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I need a vacation.”

  “From what?”

  “Tell me something about coins.”

  I really didn’t know very much about coins, but if I’d argued it, Steve, who was clearly suspicious of me, would have thought it meant something. “What would you find interesting?”

  “Why coins over, say, women?” he asked.

  “I am recently divorced.”

  “Why coins over, say, politics?”

  “I am interested in politics.”

  “What in particular?”

  “Whose in particular,” I corrected.

  “My politics?” He looked almost bored. “I’m a journalist. I don’t have any. That’s why they pay me.”

  My drink arrived and I took a sip. Steve Kelly looked like one of the people I’d gone to college with, who were ardent athletes but upon finding themselves graduated and purposeless, flocked to Wall Street for the easy money and requisite safe life. Steve Kelly resembled these people, but he wasn’t one at all. I looked across his freckled nose and into his milky green eyes, and they glimmered at me in a way that seemed almost taunting. There was nothing handsome about him, but I knew women liked him and I was beginning to see why. He had a masculine confidence that appealed to women, that made them feel safe.

  “How can you tell if they’re fake?” asked Steve.

  “Who?”

  “Them. The coins.”

  “Oh.” I looked though
tfully at Steve. “Well, in the ancient world coins were struck, not cast. They have a flattened look, and there’s often some sort of split on the edges. Forgeries, ones that are cast, will have a telltale line around the rim. Also, bubbles. Not obvious ones, but a slight roughness to the touch that would make me, for one, suspicious.”

  “What would you say if I told you I’d detected a faint line around your rim?”

  “I’d say you’d passed up a good opportunity,” I said, “and probably needed a second opinion.”

  Steve and I had another drink, but the day was reaching its deadest hour and we decided to head back to the hotel. By the time we began to negotiate the narrow walkways of the Pláka, all the storefronts were sealed against the heat except for a few establishments, door opened, but closed for business, where the employees and proprietors dozed off at desks and counters. Through one door, an upright bartender slept soundly with his face cradled in his hand, his elbow on the bar, as if he were enchanted.

  Steve was from Indiana. His father was an Irishman and his mother from the Ukraine. In addition to Greek, Steve was fluent in Russian and French. He had originally wanted to be a writer of fiction and thought that journalism would be a good way to support his habit.

  “Do you write fiction?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I keep thinking I might start, but I never do.”

  “You’re still young.”

  “I’m twenty-eight.”

  “You look younger.”

  “I feel older.”

  We reached our hotel. Yorgos did not greet us, but I saw his feet in the crack of an open door that I knew led to the broom closet. He must have been asleep. I’d wondered what the chair was doing in there.

  “And what will you do now?” asked Steve.

  “I need a shower, and then a nap seems in order.”

  “I’ll see you later, then.”

  And we parted.

  I spent the next hour reading up on coins. In my time at the auction house, I had been an expert in decorative arts, furniture in particular. I was the hero of Hepplewhite, monarch of the macassar, captain of the late-eighteenth-century commode. I was reputed to distinguish a Sheraton from a Duncan Phyfe at a distance of fifty feet. Was this true? Perhaps. But what was more interesting was the desire that Max Grolsz, then my future father-in-law, had in creating this image. I remember Max introducing me to all his friends when I was merely apprenticed to him, saying, when I didn’t know anything, “This boy knows his furniture!” But I would learn. His was a backward process. Max had hired someone who looked like he would age well—that was the furniture dealer in him—and then trained me superbly. I knew the value of things.

  A part of me missed the auction house. And Max. There is a good deal of detective work that goes along with any involvement in antiques. Rarely did the object announce itself beyond question. Knowing what something was usually involved long encounters with what it wasn’t. I’d enjoyed my communication with the inanimate, duplicitous pieces of furniture and the deranged, specialized conversations that went along with working at Grolsz’s. We had a language of finials, scrollwork, inlay. Wedgwood and Limoges. Lalique and Whitefriars. Sheffield and Windsor. Jugendstil and Biedermeier. All very important. And now, leafing through my book, coins seemed rather dry. Coins: flat, metal, round. Not fascinating at all. I felt like calling up Steve and telling him that I was not a numismatist at all but rather an expert in chairs—a possessor of a soul!

  When the phone started ringing, I was so out of practice that at first I didn’t know what to do. I picked up the receiver.

  “Milaté angliká?” I said. Which meant, Do you speak English?

  “Né,” replied the person. Né meant yes.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Greek,” I replied.

  “Then why are you speaking it?” It was Kostas. “Are you learning Greek?”

  “I picked up a phrase book.”

  “And that is your phrase, Milaté angliká?”

  “There are quite a few phrases in this book.”

  “You are hungry.”

  “Yes. No. I will be later.”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “I’m reading.”

  “Do you think that’s better than eating?” Kostas laughed. “We’ll meet for dinner, not now, later, when you are hungry. Who eats now? Only American farmers. There’s a restaurant. …”

  I wrote down the address and the directions, confused and nervous, wishing that Nikos wasn’t gallivanting around with his English girlfriends—wondering on which street the cabdriver would abandon me and how long it would take his cousins to show up and rob me—when Kostas said, “I will pick you up at nine-thirty.”

  I should have been relieved but I was momentarily annoyed at having had my adventure taken from me.

  He hung up without saying goodbye.

  Kostas was thoughtful in the car. I told him about the rumor of the bell krater and he listened, rubbing his chin.

  “You say red with black?”

  “I didn’t see it myself, but that is what the man told me.”

  “And you think this is from Italy?”

  “I have heard from reliable sources that certain items of classical pottery have been unearthed from burial sites in and around Puglia.”

  “Where is that?”

  “In the heel of the boot.”

  “How do you know it’s not fake?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Rupert, I am not always this suspicious, but I have learned from a certain man that I know, one who has great interest in this classical pottery, that there is a way of making that red pottery with the black. This method was lost hundreds of years ago, but he has figured out how to do it. And convincingly.”

  “And this forger—”

  “Forger? Is it all so simple for you?” interrupted Kostas. “This man is an artist. A Greek! What is the difference between this artist and the man who made the bell krater five thousand years ago?”

  I paused. “Five thousand years?”

  “Exactly. Five thousand years.” Kostas, who was driving poorly, pulled suddenly to the left, sweeping across oncoming traffic, and came to rest abruptly on the opposite sidewalk. Thus beached, we got out of the car. “We are all children of Pheidias!”

  “Kostas,” I said. “I’m an antiques dealer. It’s possible that we don’t have the same approach.”

  Kostas burst out laughing. “Don’t worry. We still have some old things lying around. Faces staring up from the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes they come up in the nets.”

  He opened the door to the restaurant and ushered me inside.

  “Things with the fishes. Heads of marble. Jewelry.”

  “Really?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  We both sat down at a table. “Where is this?”

  “Aspros.”

  It was exactly what I thought he was going to say.

  Kostas ordered all the food. I was delighted to start with octopus, a glossy, purple, suckered monstrosity, but I was not prepared for it to taste exactly as its appearance suggested. Kostas and I must have looked like two old cats, chewing and chewing in silent concentration. At some arbitrary point I decided to wash it down with wine. There was a salad topped off with sheep cheese and capers, and some little balls flavored with dill that looked like crab cakes but weren’t.

  “You like that?” asked Kostas.

  I took another bite and nodded.

  “You will eat a lot of that in Aspros.”

  “What is it?”

  “Why?”

  “So I can order it.”

  Kostas cocked his head to one side. “It is revithekeftedes.”

  I nodded at the small appetizer of the large name.

  “Much of the food here is Asprian. The chef is from Aspros. Usually, the best chefs are. They are good at stifado, any stew. …” Kostas looked at me. He seemed dissatisfied.

  “I’m sure their stews are marvelous.”<
br />
  “So agreeable. I expected you to argue with me over everything, like your uncle. How I miss him!”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said. “I’m starting to miss him too.”

  Kostas glanced over to see if I was being ironic. I was not. “Is it all right for you to leave Monday for Aspros?” he asked.

  “No problem,” I said. “What is the day today?”

  Kostas laughed. “It is Wednesday.”

  The main courses arrived and I found myself discussing the particulars of my education, my involvement at the auction house, old Grolsz, whom I missed, my wife, whom I didn’t. “She and I,” I said, consciously holding Kostas’s eyes, “grew apart.” I’d almost added something about growing apart being an American phenomenon but had grown tired of blaming my culture for everything wrong with my character.

  “Your voice changes when you talk about this wife you had, this job, as if you are making it up.”

  “I’m not,” I said. I did not feel defensive. He was reacting to the reticence in my voice.

  Kostas chewed his food, studying me. I shrugged, a man with no answers, and he set down his fork.

  “What did I say?” asked Kostas.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You are sad all of a sudden, quiet.”

  “It is the jet lag Kostas, and this wonderful food and the brilliant wine.” I raised my glass and drank.

  “I asked you about your wife,” he said. “How are you supposed to enjoy your food?”

  I smiled. “It must be very exhausting for you, being that perceptive.”

  “And you are always hiding, which is also tiring.” Kostas topped up my wine. “If Nikos were here, he would be angry.”

  “Why?”

  “He thinks I am nosy.” Kostas considered this. “I am nosy.”

  I laughed.

  “And where is my son anyway? He comes into the kitchen reeking like a Turkish whore. I am trying to enjoy my coffee. I say, ‘Nikos, what is that smell?’ and you know what he says? ‘Papa, it’s French.’ So I say, ‘What is that French smell?’ And you know what he says to me? ‘Papa, it is cologne. Sometimes you are so unsophisticated.’ Do you wear this?”

  “Cologne? No.” I did occasionally wear cologne, but knew this would be a difficult position to defend. “Sometimes I use aftershave, but it’s mostly alcohol, so it evaporates.”