A Deceptive Clarity

Chapter 17

London is the one city where I do splurge on accommodations, whether I'm traveling on my own money, the museum's, or the Defense Department's. I used to stay in Bloomsbury, in a pleasant little hotel on Bedford Street, just off Russell Square ("in the shadow of the British Museum," as they like to say in those parts). Every self-respecting person with intellectual pretensions has a favorite small hotel in Bloomsbury, especially self-respecting intellectuals who are traveling on a budget. After a few years, however, I admitted to myself that most of Bloomsbury was pretty grungy, that its literary gloss was long-dulled, and that it was a long way from the places most of my business took me-Christie's, Sotheby's, the Wallace Collection, the National Gallery, the Witt Library.

So I willingly waived my intellectual pretensions, and on my last few visits I'd stayed in Mayfair, surely the most civilized section of the most civilized city in the world. And, happily, within easy walking distance of Christie's, Sotheby's, and the Witt.

I didn't quite have the nerve to check in at Claridge's or the Dorchester on taxpayers' money (not that I doubted what Robey's reaction would be: "Good, fine, no problem"), so I went instead to the Britannia on Grosvenor Square, hardly a major sacrifice on my part. In any case I deserved it, to make up for my rather slowly progressing love life.

It was 5:00 p.m. when I got there, and I called Harry in Berlin as soon as I'd washed up and poured myself a Scotch.

"Hey, Chris, where are you? I tried to get you in Berchtesgaden."

"I'm in London, at the Britannia. Harry, listen, I've been talking to people, and there are a few things you need to know. In the first place, I know what Robey was doing on that flight to Frankfurt. He's got a girlfriend in Sachsenhausen."

"How do you know that?"

"Jessick told me."

"And how does Jessick know?"

"Don't ask me. Jessick's the kind of guy that knows those things. This means Mark's in the clear, doesn't it?"

"Maybe, or maybe he just made up this girlfriend bit and told Jessick, knowing good old Conrad would pass it on to you. And even if it's true, that doesn't mean he couldn't have arranged the whole thing as an alibi, to make it look as if he had some reason for being in Frankfurt that night just in case someone found out he was there. Or-"

"Harry, I think you've been a cop too long."

"You and me both. Well, I'll check it out."

"Here's something else to check out. The Heinrich-Schliemann-Grundung is one man. And that man…" I paused dramatically.

"Is Earl Flittner," Harry said offhandedly.

"You knew?"

"Well, sure."

"Why didn't you ever tell me?"

"I just figured you already knew. Jesus Christ, isn't it obvious?"

It was, now that I thought about it. "You don't think it's important?"

"Why important?"

"Because maybe Peter knew even though Earl says he didn't, and maybe he was killed to keep him from talking."

"You really believe that?"

"Well-"

"Because if it's true, there goes your forgery theory again. How's your investigation going, anyway?"

No worse than yours, I thought meanly. "So-so," I said. "Incidentally, I found Peter's calendar."

That got a rise out of him, especially when I told him it was waiting for him in the Columbia House safe.

"Great! I'm on my way."

"Wait, there's something else." I sipped the Scotch, looking out over Grosvenor Square, which looked more gray than green in the dismal light of a wintry, misty London evening; at Roosevelt's statue on the lawn, so arresting and odd because he is standing unsupported on his feet; at Saarinen's jarringly modern American embassy with its tangle of metal barricades across the front; at the sedate, symmetrical red-brick buildings that border the rest of the square.

It was Christmas, and strange to see London without automobiles. Ordinarily, no city in Europe is noisier and more crowded with cars than London, and it is a mark of just how civilized it is that people don't go around shooting or even shouting at each other out of sheer frustration. That much traffic in Rome, or Madrid, or Paris, and the streets would be war zones.

"You still there?" Harry said.

"Harry, can an unloaded gun hurt you when it's fired? Not just powder burns, but… well, could it put a hole through a few layers of clothing?"

"If what you mean by 'unloaded' is that it's shooting blanks, you're damn right it could. It could put a hole through you."

"It could? But how? What is there to make a hole?"

"Oh, well." He cleared his throat. "Well now. A lot more comes out of the end of a gun than a bullet, you know. There's always some gas-which comes out real fast and real hot-and there can be some primer fragments. And even the wad can do a hell of a lot of damage."

"What's the wad?"

"What's the wad? Boy, you don't know anything about firearms, do you?"

"No."

"All right, let me start from the beginning. What you probably think of as a bullet is actually a cartridge, okay? Now a cartridge has three parts: the primer-that's what explodes when the hammer hits; and that detonates the propellant; and that explosion shoots the bullet-which is the lead slug in front-along the barrel and out… Hello? Anybody there?"

"I'm with you, sort of."

"All right. Now, what makes a blank cartridge blank is that it doesn't have that lead slug in front-but it's got the powder charge in back. The wad is, like, a cover that holds the charge in place when there isn't any bullet in front. People get killed by blanks all the time. There was this TV actor a couple of years ago, fooling around with a prop pistol between scenes-held it to his head, you know, and pulled the trigger. Killed him. Let me tell you, blanks can be as lethal as live ammo from close up."

"How about thirty or forty feet?"

"Usually no problem, but there's this case where a guy watching a show in the balcony had his hand blown away by some balled-up newspaper they were using as wadding in a little cannon on the stage. Oh, God, then there's this really horrible case-"

"Please, no more cases. I believe you."

"Tell me, Chris, why are we having this particular discussion? No holes in you, are there?"

"No, just a groove," I said, and told him what had happened. "From what you said," I concluded hopefully, "it sounds like it was just an accident."

Harry let that sink in for a few moments. "I don't know," he said soberly. "Could be. See, here we're not talking about cartridges at all, just loose black powder, and that puts out a lot of burning crud. But thirty, forty feet? I don't think so. I think maybe you got shot with an honest-to-God ballistic projectile."

"Ballistic-?"

"A bullet. Maybe somebody ought to go back and look at the place and see if there's a ball, a slug, imbedded in a tree or something."

"I did that this morning, first thing. I didn't find anything. Look, let's say somebody really wanted to kill me. Why get so damn intricate? Why not just shoot me with an ordinary. 38 on a dark street?" I startled myself by breaking into sudden laughter. "I can't believe I'm saying these things." I took a long gulp of Scotch.

Harry wasn't laughing. "You're right; killing somebody is pretty easy. But killing somebody and making it look like an accident-that's harder."

"Shooting me would look like an accident?"

"Yeah, your particular death would look accidental, if you know what I mean-beside the point."

"Oh, beside the point. My particular death. I see."

Now he laughed. "Hey, cheer up, buddy; we're just thinking out loud, right? I don't think there's really any reason to get worried; it probably was an accident, considering all the boozing that was going on."

"I'm glad to hear you say that," I said, somewhat relieved. "Anne told me that there are a few injuries every year, so-"

"On the other hand, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to sort of exercise some caution, you know? Don't go where they're firing guns anymore. Don't fool around on the edges of cliffs. Avoid standing directly underneath glaciers."

"I'm in London, Harry. No glaciers."

"Oh. Well, then, keep your ass the hell out of Soho."

Five minutes later, as I was finishing the drink and trying to remember whether that basement pub with the terrific steak and oyster pie was on Davies or Duke, the telephone rang. Harry again.

"Chris? Who knew you were going to that shooting thing last night?"

"Why? I thought it was an accident."

"I said it was probably an accident. Did anybody know?"

"No, I didn't know it myself until a few hours before- Well, there was a German, Herr Wecker, but he's some kind of Bavarian official; he's worked with the Americans here for years."

"Uh-huh. Nobody else?"

"No, I told you. I hadn't even heard-wait a minute…"

"I'm waiting, I'm waiting. Who?"

I put the glass slowly down on the pad of embossed Britannia notepaper on the desk.

"Jessick," I said. "Conrad Jessick."

The next morning was damp, gray, and cold-London's reputation for awful weather is well earned-but the walk to 20 Portman Square, where the University of London's Witt Library is located, was a pleasure. Portman Square is at the border of Mayfair and Marylebone, in a part of London dotted with little green mini-parks around which are two- and three-story Georgian town houses of mellow brown brick, with white-painted ground-floor exteriors and black wrought-iron balconies one floor up. Whenever I think longingly of London, it's not of the great monuments of Wren or Inigo Jones but of these plain, tasteful, quietly elegant squares, where it's easy to imagine yourself in the eighteenth century. Especially on a foggy Boxing Day morning, with the ferocious traffic still reduced to a purr.

The Witt Library, housed in a fine old Robert Adam building, is the largest collection of photographs of paintings, drawings, and engravings in the world-a million and a half black-and-white copies, all annotated, in thick green file boxes stacked ceiling-high in every available inch of space. In the basement is the Dutch section, and it was there I went first, where "J. Vermeer of Delft" is given a four-foot shelf along the wall of a long, narrow corridor. This may seem rather a lot for a painter with forty works at most, but the Witt, as its director once told me with admirable British nonchalance, "is uncritical as to attribution." What that means is that the files include many copies-a great many copies-of paintings of doubtful authenticity or outright fakery.

And that is what makes it so useful. "We provide," Dr. Rowlande had further explained, "not so much a catalogue raisonne of an artist's work as a quarry of information to be discriminatingly mined, so to speak."

At the Witt, and nowhere else in the world, it is possible to look at most of the dubious paintings that have been successfully put forward as Vermeers at one time or another, and to compare them with the entire small body of unquestioned Vermeers. It is also possible to mine the quarry for factual information-provenances, cuttings, sales records-that is impossible to get anywhere else.

I probably ought to explain that the three paintings from the cache required a different approach than the one I'd used on the others. That is, my initial premise for the pictures from Florence had been that the forgery, if there was a forgery, was an old copy of an already existing painting; that there were two identical Durer self-portraits for example, one fake and one real, and that the fake was masquerading as the original. That avenue had turned out to be a blind alley.

But for the cache there were other possibilities. They had been purchased by Bolzano's father between 1930 and 1939-when only the most primitive scientific techniques for assuring the authenticity of paintings were available, and they had been out of sight since 1944. If one of them was a fake, it was not going to be a copy of an actual Vermeer, Rubens, or Titian, but a centuries-old painting in the style of one of them. Possibly it hadn't been intended as a forgery (what would be the point of forging the unknown Vermeer in the seventeenth century?) but had been altered later on. In any case, it had gotten by the experts of the 1930s.

If one of them was a fake. And if I couldn't find that out in the Witt, I wasn't going to be able to find out anywhere.

It always takes me a while to get used to the filing system. The materials under an artist's name are not arranged chronologically, or artistically, or by "period," but in the way that's most helpful to the people who use the place. Most of those who come are on errands like mine: They have an old painting whose authorship they doubt, so they want to look at every picture they can find with a similar composition, to see what it might be-other than what it's purported to be.

So Vermeer's pictures, for example, are organized under headings such as "Single Figures, Male, Full Length, Turned to Left" and "Males, Less Than Full Length, Without Hands." I found Young Woman at the Clavichord under "Single Figures and Portraits, Women, Less Than Full Length, With Hands, Turned to Right."

There was only one version, and it was identified as Bolzano's, and it matched the one in the exhibition perfectly. I turned over the large gray card to which the photograph was attached, hoping to find a provenance, and I did:

Young Woman at the Clavichord was perhaps in the collection of Diego Duarte, Antwerp, 1682, or in an anonymous sale (Jacobus Abrahamsz, Dissius of Delft?), Amsterdam, 16 May 1696, or in an anonymous sale, Amsterdam, 11 July 1714 (Lot 12). It was apparently in the collection of Graf von Schonborn at Pommerfelden near Bamberg, allegedly by 1746, and passed with the greater part of his collection to the Lacroix family, Paris. After several anonymous sales, apparently purchased by Charles Sedelmeyer in 1892 and sold by him to Lawrie and Co. in London in February 1893. Lent by T. Humphrey Ward to the Royal Academy, 1896. Acquired by the Bolzano family, Florence, in 1933. Expropriated by German government in 1944, present whereabouts unknown.

Also attributed to G. ter Borch, q.v. Also attributed to J. van Cost, q.v. Also attributed to K. Dujardin, q.v. Also attributed to P. de Hooch, q.v.

I'm not sure what I'd expected to find, but I'd hoped for something more useful. But this is a pretty typical provenance for an Old Master, and as you can see, it raises more questions than it answers, with lengthy gaps, and "apparently," "allegedly," "anonymous," and "perhaps" sprinkled throughout. And then there was that mess of "Also attributed's," all of which except the de Hooch were news to me.

I looked in the files of the other three painters as instructed by the q.v.'s, but came away with no reason to think that any of them had anything to do with it. No surprise.

Then I went rapidly through all the Vermeer files, glancing at each picture. I was searching for parts of Young Woman at the Clavichord that might show up in other pictures. There is a common kind of fake, of a Vermeer, say, in which the forger borrows a pair of hands from The Music Lesson, a mouth from The Geographer, eyes from The Love Letter, and so on, and weaves them into a single picture that thus has many Vermeer touches, even if it lacks the unity of a Vermeer whole. The great artists, on the other hand, while they repeated themes or entire paintings, rarely cannibalized little pieces of their own work.

As expected, I found nothing to suggest that Young Woman at the Clavichord was anything but an original and thoughtfully integrated composition. And I was more than ever convinced-almost certain now-that whatever Peter meant by "Down your alley," he didn't mean that anyone but J. Vermeer of Delft had painted this one.

That left Titian's Venus and the Lute Player and Rubens's Rape of the Sabines, and although the Rubens files were only a few yards from Vermeer's, I was freezing down there in the stony cellar, so I climbed up two flights to where the Italian collection is, and where the temperature is kept almost livable. (Years ago I complained to Dr. Rowlande about the Witt's heating, and was given a lecture on the pitiful American dependence on central heating instead of sensible underwear.)

The bright oval room in which Titian's files are stored was once the house's dining room, and in its center is an elegant twenty-foot-long Adam table, probably the original one, now just a comfortably worn worktable. On it I spread the contents of a folder labeled Venus With Musicians. Bolzano's Venus was there, along with a lengthy provenance and an envelope full of cuttings. The provenance told me nothing, but one of the cuttings quickly solved the riddle I'd come with: Why was this relatively early Titian painted in a style not associated with the artist for another forty years?

The cutting was from a 1951 paper by a Yale professor:

The Firenze Venus has long been ascribed to the year 1583. Clever biographical extrapolations by Sabrioli, however, now suggest that the correct date may be 1538, with the earlier ascription being attributable to an accidental transposition of digits in the seventeenth century. The current observer, though no art historian, finds Sabrioli's ingenious deductions thoroughly convincing.

Well, this observer didn't. With no disrespect intended to Sabrioli's biographical extrapolations, they were wrong. And the fact that all the post-1951 cuttings used the 1538 date merely meant that they were wrong, too. On stylistic grounds, Venus and the Lute Player was 1583, not 1538, and that was that. Sabrioli made a mistake. Case closed.

But the Titian had other problems, the main one being that there were six different versions: the one from Bolzano's collection, the well-known one in the Fitzwilliam Museum, one in Dresden with a doubtful provenance, one in Berlin with a black organist substituting for the lute player, and two in the Prado, also with organists, but white instead of black, with one of the two lacking the customary Cupid smirking nearby.

All different, but all very much the same. So much for Norgren's dictum about great artists never repeating themselves. I made photocopies of the other five versions to take back to Berlin, but I can't say that I expected much to come from them.

By this time it was one o'clock, and I was bleary-eyed from staring at photographs. I went out to eat in a fish-and-chips restaurant on Oxford Street, marveling as every foreigner does at how it is that the British can fry their haddock so deliciously and their potatoes so wretchedly. A Liverpudlian once told me that they like them that way, and I suppose it must be true. Reasonably fortified by the fish if not by the chips, I returned to the basement of the Witt to tackle Peter Paul Rubens.

But the Rubens situation was hopeless. There was not just a folder but an entire file box devoted to "Rapes of the Sabines and Reconciliations of the Romans and Sabines" (with very little to tell them apart). Lest you think that Rubens was obsessed with this subject matter, I will tell you that the man has 114 file boxes devoted to him-and these are sizable containers a foot and a half high and three inches thick; fifty-seven linear feet of densely filled shelf space.

By five o'clock I had gone through almost half the boxes, although the last ten had been a blur. The attendant was wandering around nearby, straightening things, coughing politely, and looking pointedly at the clock. I capitulated, closing the box before me with a peevish snap and giving up for the day. And since I was due in Frankfurt the next morning to play my part in the Byzantine plot to get the El Greco out of Frankfurt, I would not be back.

Not that I wanted to come back; fifty file boxes was enough. The Rubens, I decided, would just have to be given to Kohler to look at, if need be. But truthfully, I couldn't see spending the money. There were a few touches on our Rape of the Sabines that were questionable, but there are a few touches on most Rubenses that are questionable, and I would have bet that we had something which was at least ninety percent by Peter Paul's own hand. By my definition, it was authentic.

And so, I was more and more certain, were the Vermeer and the Titian.

Whatever came before square one, that's where I was.