A Deceptive Clarity

Chapter 6

"He's dead?" I asked, after a long silence.

Robey nodded. "Uh, yes. Wednesday night."

"Wednesday! But that's impossible! I had lunch with him Wednesday-at the Kranzler…" The odd, irrational way one's mind twists and skitters to reject what it doesn't want to know.

"It's true, Chris." He began to say more, then shook his head back and forth. "My God."

The others at the table stared as if hypnotized while his slowly oscillating head rocked gradually to a stop.

"How well did you know him, Chris?" Harry asked abruptly.

"Not very. Better than most people did, but that isn't saying much." Why had he asked me that? "He was a good man," I added, obscurely driven to defend him. "I liked him."

"I did too," Robey said. Then, reflectively: "I guess I didn't know him very well either. It looks like none of us did."

An uneasy shiver trickled down my neck and settled icily between my shoulder blades. "Mark-what the hell has happened?"

Robey looked down at the table and concentrated on stroking the cold pipe in the ashtray. "That was Frankfurt MP headquarters on the phone. They said he-" His eyes came up and flickered apprehensively in Anne's direction. He shook his head again, this time roughly. "Damn!"

Harry quietly interceded. "You think maybe I ought to explain? I'm kind of used to these things." He smiled gently at us. "I'm afraid it's like the colonel says: pretty bad."

It was. Peter van Cortlandt, genteel, standoffish, the ultimate patrician, had been found dead in the gutter in Frankfurt's raunchy sex district, a few blocks from the railroad station, at 3:30 a.m. He was lying in front of the Hotel Paradies, a ratty little place with a "sex-kino" on the ground floor and rooms that were rented by the half-hour above. He was wearing only a shirt and a pair of socks, and had apparently been killed in a fall. The rest of his clothing- but not his watch, wallet, or Yale class ring-was found in a third-floor room of the Paradies, the window of which was immediately above his body.

The desk clerk had told the German police that he thought he remembered Peter coming in a little after midnight with a blonde he had seen around, but he wasn't sure; there were so many. ("So many blondes or so many gray-haired gentlemen?" the Polizei had asked. "Take your pick," the clerk had answered with a shrug.)

An autopsy had already been performed, the conclusions being that Peter had been killed by a fall from Room 303 of the Hotel Paradies, and that there were drugs and alcohol in his system. It was not possible to determine whether his death had been accidental or if he had been thrown from the window. A search had been instituted for a tall husky blond called Utelinde, or Linda, who was reputed to have the word amour tattooed on her left buttock.

"I hate to say it," Harry said, "but the Polizei have about as much chance of finding her as…" He lifted his shoulders resignedly. "This is a pretty common occurrence around the Kaiserstrasse. There's not a night goes by but some soldier or some businessman on the prowl doesn't wind up like this."

"Now, wait a minute!" I said, my throat tight. "This wasn't some bum, this was Peter van Cortlandt!" Disconcertedly, I shook my head, tried to regroup my muddled thoughts. "It's got to be a mistake."

"I'm afraid not," Robey said. "It's Peter, all right."

There was more. An unopened package of condoms had been found in his trousers pocket; a few of the hairs on the tousled bed in Room 303 had been analyzed as his ("Some of them extracranial," Harry said delicately); and he had been seen drinking in two nearby bars earlier that night.

As these unsavory details came out, the ends of Robey's mouth buried themselves in dry little grooves that hadn't been there before. He was angry, I thought, less at Peter's killer, if there was a killer, than at Peter himself, for the shabby, squalid way he'd permitted himself to die. Not quite angry, maybe, but let down; disappointed in the wretchedly common end of a distinguished man; shamed by proxy.

Me, I didn't feel that way, but what I did feel wasn't any more commendable. I wish I could say that I had refused to believe any of it, and insisted from the beginning that Peter had been set up, but I didn't. I was astonished, of course, because what I knew of him was as contrary to the notion of drunken whoring on Frankfurt's Kaiserstrasse as anything could be.

But you have to remember where I was myself at the time. I had been married for a decade, contentedly and (I thought) securely. I had been faithful to Bev, and, generally speaking, happy to be faithful. And then I was suddenly alone, betrayed, confused, aching for solace, and bursting with healthy young hormones. During the ensuing year I had found myself, sometimes to my considerable surprise, in a few places in which, as it now was for Peter, it would have been damned embarrassing to be found dead.

How did I know what stresses he'd been under? He was aging. Was the job getting to be too much? Was his marriage breaking up? Was he estranged from his children? I had no idea. Who was I to say it was inconceivable or reprehensible that he should lay himself down on a foul bed, rented for half an hour, in the Hotel Paradies.

And so I accepted it as simply one more proof that we never really know anyone else, regretting Peter's death but absorbed in my own life, my own problems. When the meeting drew to a low-spirited close, I went up to my room and called Tony in San Francisco, forgetting that it was four in the morning there, to tell him about Peter. I also asked him what he knew about the forgery.

"Only that Peter thought there was one," Tony said, his voice shocked and dull, "and that it was something in your line. I thought he was having a little private joke." There was a long silence. I heard him breathe twice. "You mean there is one? A forgery?"

This depressing and unhelpful exchange completed, I was downhearted and headachy. I took another couple of codeine, dropped onto the bed, and slept heavily until 7:00 p.m. Down for a groggy bowl of soup, and back to sleep.

The next day was more of the same: codeine, soup, and sleep. But Monday I was better, managing to work for a few hours at learning the ropes with Corporal Jessick, and spending the rest of the morning with Harry, tediously trying to construct pictures of No-neck and Skull-face with Photofit, a jigsaw-puzzle-like set of thousands of photographs of eyebrows, noses, and chins. None of them seemed ugly enough.

The afternoon brought a setback of sorts. While I was dozing after lunch the telephone rang.

"Chris, I've been calling you for days\"

Rita Dooling. Calling with more offers and counteroffers and counter-counteroffers. My head started aching again the moment I heard her voice.

"I know, Rita," I lied, with sinking heart. "I've been trying to get through to you." What traitor had given her my number at Columbia House?

"Sure, I just bet you have. You probably went all the way to Europe just to get away from me. Well, what do you say?"

'To what?"

'To nine-and-three-quarters percent of your book," Rita said mildly. She was used to dealing with me.

"Oh yeah, that's right." I lay down on my back with the telephone cradled against my ear. "Well, I've given it a lot of thought, a lot of thought, and I can't see it. In the first place, I just don't want to be bothered with figuring out nine-and-three-quarters percent on every royalty check-"

"Uh, it's not just the royalty checks. She figures she ought to get nine-and-three-quarters percent of your advance too-the one you got last April. Five hundred, she says it was, so that comes to forty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents."

"Jesus Christ, Rita."

"Look, I'm just passing on what her attorney told me. You know I'm on your side, Chris."

"I know."

"Still, if it was me, I'd give it to her," she said, generous as ever. "And if you don't want to do the figuring, why don't you ask your publisher to send the nine and three quarters directly to her?"

Because I'd be embarrassed to, that's why. "I'll tell you what," I said. "Let's put that aside for the moment-"

"I've been hearing that for a year and a half. If you want my honest opinion, Christopher, you're treading water. You don't want Bev back, but you can't face letting go and admitting ten years of marriage are just time down the drain. You've got mixed-up feelings of loyalty and guilt, and your self-concept has been so traumatized-"

"Rita, I'm going to have to introduce you to my friend Louis one of these days."

"I know your friend Louis. We talk about you a lot."

"Wonderful. Now, I was going to say: About this business of her getting the car and me getting poor old Murphy-"

"Oh, that's past history, forget that. She's mellowed on that one. She says she's happy to see you keep them both."

"If."

"Well, of course 'if'. What she suggests-and I'll tell you honestly, if I were you, I'd go for it-is that you sell the house-"

"Sell the house," I echoed hollowly.

"-and split the proceeds fifty-fifty with her, but with a guaranteed fifteen thou up front in cash. Do that and she'll forget about the car."

"And Murph, no doubt."

"Well, no. That is, not exactly. She says that if you want Murphy-"

"Uh, Rita, I have to go now. My beeper just buzzed; I mean beeped."

"You have a beeper?"

"Right. Yes. Can't talk now. Emergency. Gotta run. Call you soon. 'Bye."

I left the telephone off the hook, pulled the blinds, took two more codeine, and went numbly back to bed for the rest of the day.

On Tuesday I woke up late, feeling good again, my trusty subconscious having wedged Rita's call into the furthest, dimmest corner of my mind. Plenty of time to deal with that later. With great pleasure I tossed the remaining codeine tablets into the wastepaper basket and went downstairs for a hefty lunch of hamburger and fries. After that I took care of a few chores in the office and then went to the Clipper Room to see what headway I could make on the "minor problem" of Peter's forgery.

While I'd been on my back, Earl Flittner and crew had been busy. The Plundered Past was very nearly ready for public viewing. Most of the partitions, smelling of glue and freshly sawed wood, were in place, and some of the pictures were already hung. The others were leaning against the walls. Flittner was up on a ladder doing something with the lights, and two men I didn't know-Anne's people, I supposed-were on their knees by the entrance, installing what must have been an intrusion-detection system.

Before I got down to thinking about forgeries, I wandered around the exhibit simply for the pleasure of looking at the paintings. I respectfully admired some I hadn't seen before: a swirling, vertiginous Wind and Snow of Turner's; a serene, early self-portrait by Durer, the first major artist to be fascinated with his own image.

Others I greeted happily, like the old acquaintances they were, either from photographs or from seeing them in museums to which Bolzano had lent them: Piero della Francesca's softly glowing Madonna and Child, with a lively dwarf of a bambino as charmingly repulsive as only a fifteenth-century artist could make an infant; and Gainsborough's sedate Henry Colchester and His Family, who peered coolly out of their frame at me, complacent and incurious, as if they never doubted that they were solid flesh and blood, and blue blood at that, but they weren't quite sure what I might be.

The show wasn't big enough for the conventional arrangement into little bays and rooms (Mannerism and the High Renaissance, Seventeenth-Century Minor Dutch Masters, etc.). Instead they were simply hung chronologically, well separated, each painting with an informational plaque at its side. The only exceptions to this staid progression were an inconspicuous alcove near the exit, where the copies of the twelve still-missing paintings were modestly hung (with the sad exception of the "Michelangelo"), and a dramatic three-sided bay, draped with green silk brocade, which was the centerpiece of the room and of the exhibition. Here three paintings were dramatically displayed: the newly discovered cache from Hallstatt. I had kept this for last on purpose, saving it the way a kid puts off the best part of dinner.

They were superb. A florid, frenzied Rape of the Sabines by Rubens, one of many versions, looked less like a rape than a good party that had gotten a little out of hand, but the composition was awesome, and the flesh tones, with liberal applications of his brightest, blushingest rapine pink, were marvelous. The Titian was sensual and robust too-a sexy Venus and the Lute Player. There are also several versions of this painting, and this was one of the best, broadly painted with a grand and sure-handed disregard for detail.

And then, seemingly from a different universe, the Vermeer. Of all painters, with the possible exception of Rembrandt, it is Vermeer who strikes the deepest chord in me. But Rembrandts are plentiful; there are hundreds of paintings, etchings, drawings. In all the world, however, there are only thirty undisputed Vermeers, with another dozen arguables-forty-two at the outside-and this, of course, was one I had never seen before. Bolzano had actually owned two Vermeers, the only private collector who did. Both had been taken for Hitler's museum in Linz by the fuhrer's designated art-looting unit, the ERR, but the other, A Woman Peeling Apples, had never been recovered. A fine copy hung with the rest of the copies in the cheerless corner by the exit.

But the other one, thank God, was back in this world, right in front of me, and I stood looking at it for a long time. When you look at a Vermeer, even after a Durer or a Piero, it's as if you've been seeing things through badly focused binoculars and someone just turned the knob; everything is gemlike, focused, sharper than reality itself.

I knew the painting from photographs, and I'd even devoted several pages to it in my book on Vermeer. Young Woman at the Clavichord, done in Delft in 1665 or 1666. The remarkable, transparent light came, as usual, from a window on the left. The woman was, as always, static, cool, sweetly remote, arranged like a still life with her clavichord in front of simple furniture on a black-and-white-tiled floor.

I checked to make sure Flittner was looking the other way, then stretched out a forefinger, as gently as God reaching to Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and touched her wrist. It was an offense for which I would have mercilessly put before a firing squad any hapless visitor caught doing it in the San Francisco County Museum of Art. I did it judgmentally, thoughtfully, as if I were making an arcane assessment of texture or brushstroke, but this was only in case Flittner should look around. Actually, my reasons were the same as any gawking tourist's: the awed desire to "connect" across the centuries with the great Vermeer. Here, where his brush, possibly his very fingers, touched, I now touched, so that our paths crossed in space if not in time.

I don't do this very often. I certainly don't think it's the sort of thing a curator ought to do, and I never heard another curator confess even to the desire (of course, neither have I), but it gives me a deep, soul-filling pleasure, never more than when it's Vermeer to whom I reach out. I touched the pearls around her throat, like droplets of pure light-

"How's it going, Chris?"

To say I almost jumped out of my skin would be overstating it, so let's just say I gave a guilty start.

"Harry! Whew! Is that why you wear those rubber soles? So you can sneak up on innocent people?"

He cackled delightedly. "What were you doing, anyway?"

"Doing? What was I doing? Well, I was just, uh, moistening my finger and, uh, clearing things up a little." When he didn't laugh in my face, I took courage and went on.

"Wetting old varnish lets you see through it more clearly, and when you're checking the authenticity of the painting, the first thing you want to do is get a good look at the signature. Most of the decent fakes floating around are old, you see, and they weren't painted as forgeries in the first place; they got to be forgeries when someone changed the original signature of some competent but unknown artist of the time and substituted a more famous one; Vermeer's, for example. Sometimes a close look can show you the signs of doctoring."

That was a long answer to a simple question and Harry looked quizzically up at me, a finger curled in the hair behind his ear. "Is that right? That's interesting. But you were rubbing the middle, weren't you? Artists don't sign in the middle of a picture. Or do they?"

"I wasn't rubbing it," I said, to set the record straight. "I was touching it. Very lightiy. Anyway, painters sign anywhere: on an arch, on a piece of furniture, over a doorway, on a bracelet, on a blank wall. Vermeer frequently signed in the middle of a picture." All true enough, generally speaking, but where was the signature on Young Woman at the Clavichord? I hadn't found the damn thing yet.

"Oh, I see. So tell me, did you find anything suspicious?"

Was I being interrogated, or was he just curious? I couldn't tell. He had a self-effacing way of asking questions that was meek but insistent, and a way of listening that was both intense and amicable, as if he might be probing for something but also happened to find what you were saying of genuine and extraordinary interest. A handy manner for a cop.

"No," I said, still trying to find Vermeer's name, "nothing that's caught my eye so far."

Harry studied the painting and chewed on the inside of his cheek. "You know, I don't know much about art-I mean, I know what I like, but that's about it-but now that I look at it, I think I might have been just a little suspicious about this signature."

"Oh? Really?" By now I wished dearly that I'd had the nerve in the first place to admit that I had been pawing the Vermeer for the love of it, but I was in too deep. "Why is that?" I asked. I still didn't even know where the hell the signature was.

"Because," he said blandly, "somebody else signed it."

Fortunately, I located the signature just as he mentioned it. It was roughly in the middle, all right, on the rim of an oval mirror. And Harry was right. It was not the usual "IV Meer," or any of the monograms with which Vermeer sometimes signed his work. It read, quite clearly, "Pieter de Hoogh."

Harry was grinning at me, pleased with himself. "Now how about telling me what the hell is going on around here?"

"Going on? Nothing. And as a matter of fact, that signature confirms its being a genuine Vermeer. In a paradoxical. way, of course."

"It does?" The tone wasn't so much one of skepticism as of pleasurable anticipation: Now how the heck is this fast-talking Ph. D. going to con his way through this?

But I was telling the truth. "Well, it's only in the last century or so that Vermeer's been considered one of the great painters. A hundred years ago his name would have been the one you scraped off a painting and replaced with a better-known one if you wanted to get a good price: Peter de Hooch's, for example. Or Terborch's, or Metsu's."

"Is that right? I never heard of those guys."

"Tastes change. As a matter of fact, Vermeer's most famous painting- The Artist in His Studio, in Vienna-still has a faked de Hooch signature on it. Even so, it brought only about ten dollars in the early 1800s."

"No kidding," he said with every indication of authentic interest. "Boy, there's a lot to learn, isn't there?" He had come in wearing a huge quilted parka that engulfed him like a great puffy tent. Now he took it off and tossed it onto a chair. Underneath was the familiar worn cardigan. "You almost made me forget what I came in to ask. What's your impression of Earl Flittner?"

"My impression?"

"You think he could be involved with the break-in?"

I had continued to look absently at the painting. Now I turned slowly to face him. "You're kidding."

"Well, I was just thinking about all those things he said at the meeting the other day-how the show is all propaganda, that stuff. You think the guy is anti-American, a Communist, maybe?"

Well-conditioned liberal that I am, I bristled at this evidence of the narrow, chauvinistic military mind at work. I had come to expect more of Harry. "Just because he expressed some honest opinions doesn't make the guy an enemy of the republic, you know. Why ask me, anyway?"

"Well, I understand you knew him in the States. What about pro-Nazi feelings?"

"Nazi feelings? I can't believe you're serious."

"Well, I'm not, exactiy," he said, unoffended. "I'm just, you know, exploring avenues." He smiled. Under the heavy wool of the sweater his thin shoulders moved in a faint shrug. "So you don't think he has any leanings like that?"

"All I know about him," I said hotly, "is that he's the best-" I stopped. Why in the world was I standing up so righteously for Earl Flittner? I relaxed and laughed. "What he has," I said, "are curmudgeonly leanings. The guy just naturally likes to go against the grain. He's sent in some crank letters to The Artist and Artforum that are classics."

Harry smiled. "But not curmudgeonly enough to steal paintings?"

"Not as far as I know."

"Well, I had a little more than that to go on." His shrewd eyes watched me to see if I had any idea of what he meant. I didn't. "Like what?"

But I wasn't in his confidence yet. "Things. You know." He turned briskly to the Vermeer. "Chris, what made you think this one might not be authentic in the first place?"

"Peter told me; that is, he said one of them is a fake." I told him about the conversation at Kranzler's. Harry listened intently, then made me repeat it while he made desultory notes in his little spiral-bound notebook.

"Son of a gun," he said finally. "And he wouldn't tell you which one it is?"

I shook my head.

"So now what? And Chris-" He held up his hands, warning me off. "Don't tell me it takes an art expert to understand. Art experts are like psychiatrists; you can't get two of them to agree on anything."

"Well," I said, having no quarrel with him on that point, "I usually start by looking for three things: Are the materials as old as they're supposed to be? Do they come from the place they're supposed to? And are the techniques the ones that were really in use when the painting's supposed to have been done? If those check out, I get down to individual styles, but that's a lot trickier."

He stood looking at the Vermeer, scrunched up in the bulky sweater, his hands in the pockets. "So take this one, for example. One of the things you'd want to find out is whether the paint on it was really available in Delft in the 1650s or 1660s-are my dates right?"

"On the button."

He shrugged modestly. "Well, I figured if I was going to get involved with this show, I better do some reading. Anyway, am I right?"

"You sure are. Most of the paint formulas used by theOld Masters have been chemically analyzed by now, so it's not hard to check and see if a particular painting has the right pigments-mixed in the right proportions."

"Yeah, but if you can get the formulas, why can't the crooks?"

"They can, but we've still got the edge. They have to be sure every single substance they use is right, but if we can find even one that wasn't available till later, it's got to be a fake. And that goes for everything, not just the paints. If you're looking at what's supposed to be a fifteenth-century Flemish painting, and the stretcher bars turn out to be made of wood that's found only in America… well, you'd better look a little closer."

"Sure, I see that. But-" He glanced around and pointed to Venus and the Lute Player. "Titian, right? So when was that painted-1540, 1550?"

I nodded.

"Okay, so tell me: Does the frame look authentic to you?"

We walked up to the painting, and I ran my eyes over the curlicues and rosettes of the heavy gilded Renaissance frame.

"Yes."

"Meaning it's from about the right time?"

"Uh-huh."

"All right, say I wanted to push a fake Titian. Why couldn't I go into some little old out-of-the way church and steal some three- or four-hundred-year-old picture of a saint or something-there are millions of them-and then use the frame? Or even buy some old picture that wasn't worth that much, toss the painting, and put in the phony Titian instead?"

"It's not that easy. It's got to be from the right place, not just the right time. You'd need a frame that was made in Venice. One from Germany or Spain-or even Rome or Florence-wouldn't get you past an expert. And I'm not just talking about style; I'm talking about the right joinery techniques, the right nails-"

"OK, OK, but still…" Harry scowled and chewed his cheek, taking this as a personal challenge. "OK, then, how about this? What's to stop me from finding some old piece of wood-say, a beam from a house built at the right time, or maybe a piece of furniture-and carving the damn frame myself?"

"First of all-"

"I know, I know. I'd have to be some kind of master carpenter, wouldn't I? And I'd need to make the right kind of glue, forge some handmade nails-"

"That'd be the easy part. The hard part would be figuring out how to carve an old piece of wood without making a new skin."

"A new what?"

"When you cut into old wood, you can't help creating a fresh surface-a skin-that's 'young' to someone who knows what to look for."

Harry blew out his lips. "That's interesting." He used "interesting" a lot, drawing it out into four slow, respectful syllables: IN-ter-est-ing. "Look, let me know what you find out. I guess it won't take very long, right?"

When I didn't say anything, he turned his head to look at me. "Not right?"

"I don't know. A modern fake I could certainly spot. But I don't think that's what we have, and the older it gets, the harder it is to be sure."

"Like, the new skin gets to be an old skin?"

"Right. And the scientific techniques get less reliable. And if what we have is one that's so old it's contemporary with the original and done by a first-rate artist to boot-say, a Terborch that's been converted into a 'Vermeer'-we've got problems."

"Huh." Musing, he picked up his coat. "Hey, this has really been IN-ter-est-ing; I learned a lot. Listen, I want to ask you something. How come you didn't mention this forgery stuff before?" "I didn't think of it."

"You didn't think of it?" He chewed over the words slowly.

"No. It didn't seem pertinent. It still doesn't, really. That is, I suppose it could wind up being a police matter, but-"

"It didn't seem pertinent to the break-in?"

"To the break-in?" I looked at him stupidly. "No. How could it-"

"Or van Cortlandt's death?"

'To Peter's death? What could it have to do with his death? Harry, if you're driving at something, you've left me way behind."

"Well, I don't know, but doesn't it seem to you like there are an awful lot of weird things going on?"

"There sure are, but that doesn't mean they're connected, does it?"

"In my line of work, yeah, it usually does. I gotta go." He worked his thin shoulders into the coat and suddenly laughed. "Hey, don't look so worried." He clapped me tightly on the arm and turned to the door. "I'm just thinking like a cop; I can't help it. Forget it."