The Forgery of Venus

“I’m not copying it at all. I took some salvinorin and I was back in 1628 and I was him. Painting it, I mean, and when I came to this was on the easel. Pretty neat, huh?”

“It’s incredible,” Mark said, and leaned close to the painting, touching it tentatively with a fingertip. “Have you ever seen the radiographs of this thing? I mean the ones published in the literature.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not a scholar like you. Why do you ask?”

“Because what you got here is an early version, without the pentimenti. You know, if it wasn’t fucking insane and impossible, I’d almost believe you were telling me the truth.”

Jackie said, “Can you be other people too? Because if you were Corot or Monet you could have yourself a nice little business with this.”

And we laughed, and then Mark stopped laughing and said, “What’ll you take for it?”

“It’s not finished,” I said, “and it’s not for sale.”

“No, really. What’ll you take for it?”

“Ten grand,” I said, meaning it as a joke, but he whipped a checkbook out of his jacket and wrote a check with a gold Montblanc the size of an antitank round.

I stared at the yellow slip of paper, stunned. “You think there’s a market in unfinished old master copies?”

“There’s a market for everything. All you have to do is create it.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I turned to Jackie, who, like the sweet guy he is, was grinning like a monkey, enjoying my good fortune.

“I thought you were going to Europe,” I said.

“Tomorrow. We were having a bon voyage at L’Orange Bleu when you called. You were invited, but you did not return all these calls.”

I said, “Well, let’s continue the party.”

“Agreed,” said Jackie. “And the drinks are on you.”

There were a lot of drinks, and we closed the place and poured Jackie into a cab after he’d given us more than one Gallic embrace, with kisses. Then Mark hailed a cab of his own and told me he’d have some people come by for the painting in a week or so, when it’d be dry enough to move. I went back home and when I got there I took it off the easel and turned it to the wall. It was starting to freak me out a little.

The next day I was awakened from the sleep of the sot by a pounding on my loft door, and it was Bosco; he wanted to show me something, his latest. Nice to see a guy still excited about art, so I went down to take a look. He’s been talking about doing this for a while, using the barrel of 9/11 dust he collected back then, a major critique of what he called the fascist hysteria that enabled the Iraq war.

In his loft the masturbating girls were gone (sold to some rich creep in Miami, he said), replaced by a huge Plexiglas case that must have measured ten by ten by twenty feet. It was equipped with lights and TV projectors and peopled with his trademark rag dolls. He made me sit down in front of it and switched it on.

A great show, I have to say. He had video loops of Bush and Giuliani playing on the faces of dolls dressed in clown suits, and video loops of the planes striking the twin towers projected on the background. He’d made pneumatic models of the twin towers that expanded upward and collapsed in spastic jerks. At the foot of one tower he’d built a little trackway on which tiny figures made up as Orthodox Jews escaped from the building before each collapse and vanished down a miniature subway entrance. The air compressor that operated the towers also shot gusts of air to blow little Styrofoam dolls dressed as cops and firemen and civilians up into the air to fall down again, these figures suitably charred and blood spattered, complemented with tiny amputated heads and limbs. And he’d filled the whole box with the actual gray 9/11 dust, which made interesting clouds in the space above the yapping dummies as well as ever-shifting drifts on everything in the box. The sound track was a densely layered mix of politicians speaking, newscasters casting, explosions, and screams of anguish; from a separate speaker came hysterical laughter. This speaker was embedded in one of those amusement-park chortling torsos that used to grace penny arcades back in the forties. He’d re-dressed it as a Saudi Arab.

“What do you think?” he asked after I had stared some minutes.

“I think you’ve outdone yourself with respect to sheer offensiveness. It’s as if Duchamp had presented his urinal filled with piss.”

“You think so? Well, thanks, but I really wanted to rig it with gas-you know, for real flames? But I was worried about the dust igniting and also the gallery was freaked about the fire insurance. Maybe I could use colored foils or plastic film-it would flap pretty good in the breeze in there, you know, for a fiery effect.”

“I think it’s perfect as it is, and besides, you have the video projection of the actual flames. Are you really going to show this in a gallery?”

“Yeah, Cameron-Etzler’s giving me the whole of their SoHo space next month. It’s going to be big.”

I told him that I thought it would be and left for my place, trying without much success to keep the envy out of my heart. I looked through my recent sketchbooks and thought about what Chaz would paint if he were going to get big, recalling my recent subway thoughts, that notion of deep analysis of modern faces using traditional techniques. How to generate dignity and keep from descending into kitsch? Man Ordering Pizza. Woman Looking for Metrocard. Is it still possible? Not anything like photorealism, no, everything steel but the breastplates, the bumpers on the cars all phony, a copy of a Kodachrome slide flashed onto the canvas. Structure, weight, authority, the authority of the paint applied on a living surface: sprezzatura. Velázquez’s dwarfs and grotesques, revive the bodegones but with what we’ve experienced in the past centuries added-it has to show on the faces. I smoked half a pack and filled my paper shredder with sketches, but nothing came, and after a while I gave up and went out.

The next three weeks passed in the same state of suspended animation. I did a little job for the Observer, Bush as Pinocchio with the long nose in the manner of Disney, with the other characters as current pols, and passed up a couple of other similarly distinguished jobs, living on the ten grand I’d gotten from Mark, hoping I’d have a breakthrough before I had to leave for Italy to do the fresco. But no dice; everything I did looked like shit, and someone else’s shit at that.

To increase the torment, one Sunday I took the kids to the Metropolitan’s American figurative painting show. Milo waltzed off with his electronic art critic pressed to his ear, trailing his little oxygen tank on wheels, and Rosie breathed God’s own air but had only me to tell her about art. The place was jammed; everyone loves figurative painting in their secret heart, even mediocre pieces, although practically everyone makes the mistake of confusing the mere image with painting as art.

They had big posters up with remarks from the famous artists. Richard Diebenkorn had this to say: “As soon as I started using the figure my whole idea of my painting changed. Maybe not in the most obvious structural sense, but these figures distorted my sense of interior or environment, or the painting itself-in a way that I welcomed. Because you don’t have this in abstract painting… In abstract painting one can’t deal with…an object or person, a concentration of psychology which a person is as opposed to where the figure isn’t in the painting…And that’s the one thing that’s always missing for me in abstract painting, that I don’t have this kind of dialogue between elements that can be…wildly different and can be at war, or in extreme conflict.”

I feel the same way, Dick. And Tom Eakins weighed in with: “The big artist does not sit down monkeylike and copy…but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature and steals her tools. He learns what she does with light, the big tool, and then color, then form, and appropriates them to his own use… But if he ever thinks he can sail another fashion from Nature or make a better-shaped boat, he’ll capsize.”

We small artists capsize anyway. It would be so much easier for me if figurative painting was well and truly dead, dead as epic poetry or verse drama, but it’s not, because it speaks to something deep in the human heart. What I would like is a drug that informs me why I can’t just have a normal career as a modern figurative painter.

Again, I mention all this to show that my life was progressing as it has for years, whiny, discontented, blocked, occasionally suicidal, except the kids kept me from that. This was the life I had, these were all the memories I had, except for the memories of being Diego Velázquez, which, of course, I knew were being induced by a drug.

Anyway, we stared at the wonderful paintings along with the mob, and dear Rose asked me where my paintings were hanging, and I said they weren’t, and she asked why, and I said that museums only hang the very best paintings and that mine weren’t good enough, and she said that you should just try a little harder, Daddy.

Good advice, really, and then we went back to my place, and Milo played with the computer and I tried harder and Rose invented a new art form using shredder waste and a glue stick to make fantastical collages, multilayered weavings of colored strips, just the thing, if they were twenty-five feet long, for the Whitney Biennial. And watching her I thought about Shelly’s theory that creativity sprang from the child self and that returning to that self under salvinorin might jumpstart the process on a higher level, and I found myself looking forward to my next dose. I suppressed the thought that even in the drug state I was a pasticheur, that I wasn’t mining my own past but that of someone else.

Then it was time for my next appointment at the lab, but when I arrived the receptionist, instead of handing me a clipboard, told me again that Dr. Zubkoff wanted to see me in his office.

I went in and he gestured me to a seat and gave me a grave look like there was a bad shadow on my CAT scan, which he probably practiced in med school and hadn’t had much of a chance to use in his career. He said, “Well, Chaz, I have a little bone to pick with you.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. You didn’t tell us you had a history of drug abuse.”

“I wouldn’t call it a history-”

“No? Two commitments to rehab, one court ordered. I’d call that a drug problem.”

“I sold some pills in a saloon, Shelly. It was a horseshit bust. I was doing a favor for a friend of a friend and he turned out to be a narc. That’s why the involuntary-”

“Yeah, whatever, but in any case you can’t stay in the study. It’s a confounding variable.”

“But I’ve been clean for years.”

“So you say, but I can’t be testing you for drugs every time you participate. The other thing is, my staff reports you’re uncooperative and aggressive.”

“Oh, please! Because I didn’t describe a painting in a fantasy?”

“Right, you’re supposed to tell us what you’re experiencing on the drug. The accounts are part of the study.”

And then he talked about the Velázquez stuff, which still disturbed him; that wasn’t supposed to happen on salvinorin.

“So what is it?” I asked.

“Something else. Something confounding.” He seemed to search for a delicate way of saying what he wanted to say. “An underlying psychological issue.”

“Like psychosis?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but clearly something odd is going on with you that is unlikely to be related to salvinorin, and unfortunately we’re not set up to give you the help you need. My advice is to check into the hospital here, run a full battery of tests, complete blood panels, EEG, PET scans, fMRI, the works, and make sure there’s no underlying pathology. I mean, for all we know you could have some kind of endocrine imbalance or an allergic reaction to salvinorin, or, God forbid, a brain tumor.”

I said I’d think about it. Shelly shrugged and we shook hands and that was it, out on my ear.

Then they asked me to sign some releases and I was officially expelled from the study, and I have to say I felt bereft. On the ride downtown I started thinking about where I could get some more of the drug. I recalled that it was one of the few psychoactive drugs that had not yet been made illegal and I figured I could get hold of it somewhere in town. Then I thought to myself, Don’t be crazy, Chaz, that’s all you need; if Lotte found out about it you’d never see the kids again. Thus my subway thoughts.

When I climbed out into daylight my cell phone said I had two messages: one from my sister, and the other from Mark, and he was all about his Italian gangster businessman wanting to get the palazzo ceiling done this fall, before the next rainy season in Venice, he was having the roof fixed and he wanted the work on the fresco to go on simultaneously, and could I possibly see my way clear to going early, he’d negotiated a bonus, 25K if I started the first of the month and another twenty-five if I finished before Christmas, and I called him right away and said fine, since I wasn’t going to be in the drug study anymore.

My sister had left a voice mail saying she’d be out of touch for a period, she’d had an opportunity to go off to Africa to save babies or something, she had to leave instantly and she couldn’t give me any details because she didn’t know them, and also because she suspected that covert entry into an unnamed but nasty African nation was going to be part of the picture.

Then I went over to Lotte’s gallery and told her I had to be out of town for maybe three months and why, and she bitched a little about it, but the money dangling there, maybe two hundred thousand, was an argument she couldn’t really get past. I was real formal, not like last time, just a business relationship now, and she said, “Hey, did you see you got a review?”

In the main room of the gallery my actresses (except Kate) were still up there with the sacred red dots that said they’d sold, and there was a review from the Village Voice, framed and hanging nearby. It was not bad. The guy had actually got it that it wasn’t just a postmodernist appropriation but a genuine effort to use the traditional means of painting to penetrate character, to pry up under the mask of celebrity. And he hoped I’d continue to do work in that vein. Unfortunately he closed with a little riff about how Andy Warhol had started as a commercial artist and look where he’d gone. Yeah, look.

I said, “Very nice. It’s always a treat to be lumped with Warhol.”

Lotte said, “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a great review. I’ve had calls from some very big collectors; do you have any more work to show? This could be a very good thing for you.”

I looked at her and I was about to say something cynical and nasty, which is what I usually did in these situations, but I saw she was really pleased-her face was positively shining with happiness and admiration-so I just nodded and, after an awkward moment of suspension, hugged her, and she hugged me back.

Then I said, “Well, good, but they’re going to have to wait,” meaning I had to do the Italian job first, and she was fine with that and was glad I was at least out of the magazine business for a while. I told her about some ideas I’d had for paintings, and my God, it was nice to talk with Lotte again about painting and real work, just like we were back at the start, and I left her with the hope that my work had turned a corner.

I went home, dreading the solitude that might require me to actually paint something. But as it happened, as I climbed the stairs to my loft I saw that the door to Bosco’s loft was open, and when I looked in I found my neighbor examining himself in the dusty mirror that hangs next to the door. He was wearing an antique tuxedo jacket over jeans and a black Nine Inch Nails tour T-shirt, and I remembered his show and that I had promised to walk over to it with him.

Although Bosco has a perfectly serviceable wife and children, plus an agent, plus a gallery, he likes to have me or some other artist hang out with him when he goes to one of his openings. It’s a tradition I’d always supported with my usual masochism, so we went out and made the short walk up Broadway to Broome. The gallery is west of Broadway and by the time we got to the corner we could see something was up. There were two police cars parked with their lights flashing at the junction of the two streets, blocking traffic, and when we turned the corner we saw that Broome Street was jammed with people, I guessed at least five hundred of them, and maybe twenty cops. A couple of TV vans rumbled and hummed near the gallery entrance and lit it with their glare.

“Man, what a crowd!” said Bosco. “And television. This is great!” He was grinning; his teeth went red then yellow as they alternately glowed in the cop light and the overhead crime-lights. He said, “Hey, let’s get in there before all the champagne’s gone,” and strode off toward the crowd.

Or the mob, as I ought to call it. Even at half a block away I could tell that it wasn’t a crowd of art lovers. I heard the sound of glass breaking and a scream, and then distant sirens. Behind me a large black van appeared from Broadway, halted near the patrol cars, and disgorged a squad of tactical police in black uniforms with helmets, face shields, and long batons. They started to form a line and I spun on my heel and ran away. Then I went calmly to a Chinese restaurant and ordered some take-out. Shameful, yes, but what could I have done?

When I got back to my place I sat down with my lo mein and turned on the TV. There was a woman anchoring the local news with the grave look and lowered voice suitable for portentous matters, and she was talking to someone offscreen; it was a breaking-news moment, and then the scene flashed to a guy with a microphone who was standing not far from where I’d last seen Bosco. Behind him you could see what remained of the gallery, its window smashed, its blackened smoking interior, and firemen walking through the ruins doing their usual after-fire cleanup. The reporter was saying, “No, Karen, we don’t know the condition yet of the artist, Dennis Bosco, but witnesses say he was badly beaten and taken to St. Vincent ’s Hospital. We’ll get back to you as soon as we have any more information.”

Some more questioning back and forth about injuries and arrests, and then they showed some footage of Bosco’s 9/11 piece and a tape taken earlier at the gallery, the stuff I’d seen the start of in real life, Bosco walking into the crowd around the front of the gallery and then being recognized and getting shoved and screamed at by a group of big guys and then going down in a flurry of kicks and blows, and the cops shoving through to rescue him, not very enthusiastically I thought. And then a trash can going through the window, and then the mob pushing through into the gallery and screaming art lovers streaming out and getting their lumps too, some of them, and then there was a blaze of fire that made the video go white and there were shouts and screams. The final shot was the tactical police finally moving in like imperial storm troopers and clearing the street.

I couldn’t stop watching, even through the talking heads and the stupid street interviews, some of which had to have the obscenities bleeped out. Then later there was video of Bosco, his face a pudding of blood, on a gurney being loaded onto an ambulance, from which they cut to more interviews, every one of whom agreed that it was obscene to make fun of 9/11 and especially to use the actual ashes of that day, and that the artist had gotten what he deserved. There was a spokesman from the mayor’s office who said the usual about free speech and our constitutional values and that the culprits would be prosecuted, but he didn’t sound too enthusiastic about it either, and why should he be, since the affray was clearly the doing of off-duty cops and firemen. The whole thing was a work of art.

I tried to call Connie Bosco in Jersey, but the line was busy. Then I called St. Vincent ’s and found that Bosco was in surgery and they were only giving information out to family members. So I went to sleep.

I visited the hospital the next day but they wouldn’t let me in to see him. The floor was guarded by three big cops, two at the nurses’ station and one by Bosco’s room, so I had to use my charm on one of the nurses; she agreed to take a message in to Connie, and after a while Connie came out and told me I could go back in with her. From what I overheard of the police conversation, I gathered that they resented having to guard him and would have liked to add some lumps of their own; ironic postmodernism has obviously not penetrated the consciousness of the police.

Connie Bosco is from Mexico and is a potter of some distinction. She seemed distraught and confused by what had happened to her husband. She understood getting your ass kicked by the cops-that’s what the cops did in her native land-but she didn’t get the part about them doing it for art rather than money. Bosco, however, got it just fine. He was as happy as a man with internal injuries, three busted ribs, and a smashed face could be. It hurt him to grin, he said, but he grinned all the same. This was what he’d wanted all his life-to get a rise out of society with his art. He’d tried pornography, he’d tried absurdity-ho-hum. But he’d finally located a sacred cow in the ashes of 9/11, and at last he was one with Monet, van Gogh, and Marcel Duchamp. A urinal moment, and to be savored.

“Apparently, the thing’s gone,” I said. “You heard there was a fire?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “The memory will live on. Besides, I have a lot more ashes. I could build it again. Maybe I will.”

“You do and I’ll kill you myself,” said his wife.

I left Bosco and took a sharp left onto Eleventh Street and into a sour depression. Okay, he’d found one of the last few sore spots in the culture and stuck his blade in there pretty good and paid the price. He’d literally suffered for art, which was supposed to be part of the deal, but it wasn’t a deal I was ever interested in. What I wanted was…What I wanted was…

It struck me that I didn’t know. That was strange. In the what-I-really-want section of my brain there was a dusty shelf with nothing on it. Instead there was a longing.

Thinking this shit and walking down the via negativa this way, I found myself in Gorman’s, where I drank away the evening under my silly painting of Hillary. I fell into conversation with a fellow who said he was an unemployed philosophy teacher, and we talked about the nature of reality through a serious number of rounds and then staggered out into the glowing dark of the city. He needed a cab and said he’d drop me off at my place and he hailed one and…actually I can’t recall the tail end of the occasion very well. I remember Wittgenstein and “the world is whatever is the case,” and the cab, but I don’t have any memory of getting out of the cab and walking up my stairs, which has often served to burn a lot of alcohol out of my system. I do remember waking up.

I wasn’t in my bed but in a king-size item with sheets far finer and cleaner than mine, looking up at a ceiling higher and cleaner than the one in my loft. I had a brief and ridiculous thought that I’d been seduced by the unemployed philosopher. I called out; nothing. Whereupon I rose carefully, so as not to move the spiked thing in my skull, and cast around for the bathroom.

Someone had spent a lot of money here, all the latest European fixtures and a huge glassed-in shower enclosure, quite a gap between it and my old tin job up on stilts, with its mildewed curtain. I washed my face and opened the medicine cabinet, looking for aspirin; I found a bottle of Advil, took three, and checked out the rest of the stuff there. The usual, and I learned from the high-end makeup and face treatments that a woman also lived in this place, but when I examined the amber drug vials I got a shock: one of them was for amoxicillin, and the name on the label was mine.

I recalled that I’d had the vial for nearly a year, since the cough I picked up last winter, and yeah, it was the same vial, with about the same number of residual pills and the smear of blue paint on the cap. So the little quivers were starting up around the heart, and the higher brain parts were thinking explanations: maybe I lent it to someone and forgot about it, and he lent it to someone else, et cetera, and it ended up here. I put it back and went out into the loft and looked out the window. As I’d expected I was in Tribeca; I could see Greenwich Street and a slice of shining river, so I was probably in one of the elaborately gutted and rebuilt loft buildings catering to media stars and the upper crust of the art world.

Running along under the window was a long painted shelf full of family photographs, and I glanced at them casually, as one does with the photographs of someone else’s family, and then looked at them again, and looked at them again, each one, and now my heart was really pounding, and fat drops of sweat burst out all over my face because it was my family in all the pictures, mine and Lotte’s, my dad in his jaunty cape, and my mother when she was young with her two children in our best white outfits, and Lotte’s parents and her grandparents from old Europe, all photographs I’d seen throughout my married life. And others were strange, for example me and Lotte, somewhat younger, on what was apparently the Great Wall of China, a place we’ve never been. That I can recall.

I went exploring on wobbly legs. Bedrooms for the kids, and in them I recognized a lot of their gear-although Milo had a better computer than he does in real life-and Rose’s room with her stuffed animals and a big corkboard for her drawings.

The huge living room held a good collection of contemporary art on the walls, including one work by Wilmot, Jr., that painting of Lotte and Milo I’d given her for our fifth anniversary, plus comfortable, expensive furniture, a great black piano lurking in the corner, shiny, hideous; the kitchen all à la mode, granite counters, Sub-Zero fridge, with pictures of my kids, their school stuff magneted up there, the Vulcan range, Lotte’s stained and worn cookbook on its stand on the counter.

So then I thought, This must be a drug thing, some strange reaction to the drug, like the Velázquez, but no, it was entirely different because in those I was Velázquez, at ease in himself, and here I was just me, pissing myself in terror.

But I had to see it all, so I followed my nose, chasing the turpentine scent to a door, and when I went through there was the studio, skylighted, spacious, with a big oak Santa Fe easel smack in the middle with the latest by the supposed me on it. I seemed to be doing groups now, a big one, maybe four by six feet. This was of four people, three women and a man, on a rose madder-colored velvet love seat, all slumped to one side, limbs entwined like they’d all stumbled and fallen down in a heap of beautifully painted and glazed pink limbs, slick Barbizon-style surface, invisible brushstrokes, good as Bouguereau any day. The faces were clearly recognizable: Suzanne and Lotte and my mother, all in the full bloom of their youth, and the man was Dad. It was unspeakably more horrible than the family photos. I ran out of there without another look.

Elevator down to the lobby, and this was indeed a fancy building renovation rehab because there was a real lobby, not the usual loft building hallway: it had potted plants and indirect lighting and a little desk for the doorman. Who greeted me cheerfully: “Hi, Mr. Wilmot. Looks like we gonna have a nice day.”

He was a short, dark man in a gray uniform, labeled AHMED on a chromed pin. I approached him and said, “You know me?” and my tone and face must’ve been something else, because his formal smile jelled and he answered, “Sure, I know you. You’re on the top front. Mr. Wilmot.”

“How long have I been living here?”

“I don’t know, sir. I been here six years and you were here when I got hired. Is there something wrong, sir?”

I left without responding to this inane question and took off, and in a little while I was running up Broadway and I didn’t stop until I got to my loft building. The street door was propped open, which was unusual, but people sometimes did it when they were expecting deliveries. I ran up the stairs to my loft and stood in front of my loft door.

Only it wasn’t my door. My door has the original battleship-gray paint with a universe of old chips and stains I know like the palm of my hand, and the door I was gaping at now was new and painted a cheery cerulean blue, and it had a brass cardholder and an engraved card stuck in it bearing an unfamiliar name. It took me a while to push my door key in the hole, my hands were shaking so badly, but in any case the key wouldn’t turn. I pounded on the door until I skinned my knuckles, but there was no answer.

So I went down the stairs to Bosco’s, not running anymore, but slowly, like if I moved fast now the world would shatter. Bosco’s door was painted shiny red. Bosco was still in the hospital, but I knew that Connie had moved in so she could be in town while he was recovering. I knocked. The door opened and there was a tall, athletic black man standing there, looking at me inquiringly.

“Where’s Connie?” I said.

“Who?” said the guy.

“Connie Bosco. This is her husband’s loft.”

“Sorry, there must be some mistake. This is my loft.”

“No, Bosco’s been living here for over twenty years,” I insisted.

“No, you must have the wrong building. This is Forty-nine Walker.”

“I know it’s Forty-nine Walker, goddamnit! I live upstairs on five. I’ve been living there for years. What the fuck is going on here?”

The guy’s face tensed up then, and he started to close the door. He said, “You need to take a break, boss. Patty Constantine lives up there, and I doubt you live with her and Yvonne. I don’t know who you are, but you sure as hell don’t live in this building.”

He slammed the door. I pounded on it and yelled, “I’m Charles Wilmot!” a number of times, until my throat was sore and I heard the man threaten to call the police unless I left.

So I did. When I reached the street I was crying, just blubbering like a little lost kid. I was saying, “Okay, change back! Change back now! Change back!” but it kept on being the same merciless twenty-first-century New York, except that I’d been squeezed out of it like a zit and replaced by a painter who was doing just fine and was still married to the woman he loved and was painting just the kind of stuff I could’ve done and wouldn’t.

Then I had my cell phone in my hand and I was punching Mark’s private number, not Lotte, never Lotte, because she couldn’t see me this way, she couldn’t know about the drug or any of that, and what if she confirmed it, that we all of us lived in that beautiful rich-guy’s loft together and all my memories of the last twenty years were false?

Mark answered and I jabbered, and he said he was with a client and couldn’t talk but he’d try to break away, but for Christ’s sake calm down. In fact, his voice through the tiny earpiece was calming, it was contact with someone who knew me, the real me. I took some deep breaths and felt the sweat start to cool on my face and agreed to meet him at Gorman’s in half an hour.

The lunch rush was just clearing out when I got to the saloon, and I took a seat at the bar. “Where’s Clyde?” I asked the young woman behind the bar. I’d never seen her before, and Clyde has been the day barman at Gorman’s since the Beame administration.

“ Clyde?” she said, clueless, obviously, and my insides started to wobble again and I ordered a martini to make them stop. I drank it and ordered another one and I noticed that my Hillary painting wasn’t up on the wall anymore. It had been replaced by a framed vintage prize-fight poster. I asked the girl what happened to it and she said she didn’t know what I was talking about, and I was about to give her an argument-in fact, I was yelling at her-when Mark came in and dragged me to one of the corner tables and asked me what the fuck was up with me.

I told him. I told him about the fancy loft and my key not working in my door and the guy in Bosco’s place and it added up to…what? Someone had stolen my life and replaced me with someone else? And even as I said the words they seemed the very definition of crazy to me, a short step from conversations with space aliens and the messages from the CIA. But he heard me out and then said, “We got a problem, kid.”

“We?”

“Oh, yeah. I just guaranteed Castelli you’re going to do his ceiling and now you’re having a nervous breakdown on me.”

A little glow of hope here. “So the ceiling is a real job and I, like, wouldn’t have taken a job like that unless I was a starving hack commercial guy, would I?”

“I don’t know, Chaz. Maybe you needed a break. Maybe you’re fascinated by Tiepolo. Who knows what artists will do? Hockney did all those Polaroids for years-”

“Fuck Hockney!” I said, louder than I had intended, and people in the bar looked our way. “And fuck you! What happened to my Clinton painting?”

“What are you talking about, Chaz? What Clinton painting?”

“That one, the one next to the bar that’s been there for years, and the bartender’s wrong-”

“Chaz! Calm yourself the fuck down!”

“Just tell me I’m who I am!” I was shouting now, and he replied, in just the sort of soothing voice that does more than anything else to inflame incipient madness, “What good would that do, man? If you’re as nuts as you say, you could be imagining me saying just what you want to hear. Or the opposite. Look, let’s get out of here, you’re going to get eighty-sixed if you keep screaming like that.”

He threw some money on the table, more than necessary to cover our tab with a generous tip, and hustled me out into the street. There he used his cell to call his black car, and in a few minutes it appeared and we got in. Which was fine with me at that point. Black car, Mark talking on his cell to some client, a normal situation-he wasn’t particularly concerned with what had happened to me, so why should I be? Yes, crazy logic, but just then that was all the logic I had.

We pulled up in front of his gallery and got out. He had some business to transact; I could wait in his office, upstairs from the showroom. I was content to do so; I had no pressing engagements. I sat in Mark’s big leather chair and closed my eyes. Maybe I could go to sleep, I thought, and when I woke up everything would be back to normal. No, that wasn’t going to work, I was wired despite the drinks. Okay, I kept coming back to the idea that this had to be a side effect of salvinorin, something they hadn’t figured on, some delicate system in my brain had collapsed and I was hallucinating an alternate reality as a successful painter of the kind of paintings I happened to despise.

Then I thought, Wait a second, I have a life, with all kinds of physical traces, bank accounts, paper trails, websites, I’ll just check it out right now, and so I turned to Mark’s computer and Googled myself. I had a website, it seemed, a beautiful one, all about my wonderfully slick nudes, and strangely enough it displayed some paintings, early stuff, that I actually recalled doing. The website I remembered, with my magazine illustrations on it, was gone.

I tried to get into my bank account online. My password didn’t work.

I pulled out my cell phone and brought up my phone book. I had the name of every magazine art director in New York in that list, and they were all gone, replaced by a bunch of names I didn’t recognize. But Lotte’s name was there, and almost without volition I found myself ringing the home number associated with her name, a number I didn’t recognize, a Manhattan number. It rang; then a message telling me that I’d reached the home of Lotte Rothschild, Chaz Wilmot, Milo, and Rose, and I could leave a message at the beep. I left no message.

No hope then, the hallucination was complete. The me I remembered no longer existed. Except for Mark. And now I was terrified of Mark. Mark was God now; he could erase me with a word. So I passed the time until he chose to reappear. I played computer solitaire. I cleaned my nails with my Swiss Army knife. While I had the knife out I carved my monogram into the side of his desk drawer, so in case this was a complete hallucination and I was really someplace else, I could come back and check. If I remembered.

It turns out that when you’re going crazy it’s probably better to be with a complete narcissist like Slotsky than with a caring person. Your agony is so trivial to him that in a strange way it stops being so all-consuming to you. Mark came bouncing in with a big smile, talking about some killing he’d just made on a painting. He was in the mood to celebrate and he just happened to have an invitation to a big opening at Claude Demme in Chelsea. Sushi from Mara was promised, and unlimited Taittinger. My little difficulty was apparently forgotten, and I was willing to pretend it was no big deal for the nonce, because I was waiting to wake up. One day at a time, as they say in rehab. It goes for the minutes too.

So I followed him out like a wooden pull-toy and we traveled in the black car to Claude Demme on West Twenty-sixth Street. It was a three-man show by guys who were fifteen years younger than me; their work was about what you’d expect, and the people too, art hags, Eurotrash, dealers, a couple of A-list celebrities. Mark filled a plate with pricey sushi and started his usual schmoozing and air-kissing. I air-kissed not and filled my belly with champagne. After half a dozen flutes I felt the need for air and strolled out down the street toward Eighth Avenue.

All the galleries were lit, and I passed them without much interest until I came to a large storefront with a plaque on the wall that said ENSO GALLERY in artful calligraphy, white on black, and stopped to stare at a large painting in the window. It was of a nude woman unusually well rendered, and she was clutching tenderly to her breast a miniature version of herself, another spasm of irony wrung out of the corpse of surrealism, although the guy could really draw. It took me a couple of seconds to realize it was in exactly the same style as the unfinished piece I’d seen in the fancy loft. I stopped breathing and looked at the window card. It read RECENT WORK BY CHARLES WILMOT, JR., and sure enough, there was my monogram painted in the lower right of the painting.

I went in, shaking all over. There were a few people in the small white space and maybe ten paintings on the walls. All nudes, a few men, mostly women, more than a few young girls. The technique was realistic: flat lighting, concealing nothing, a good deal of crotch hair depicted, a soft-core effect, a little Balthus, a little Ron Mueck, a little Magritte. I recognized some of the models, women I’d known; Lotte and Suzanne were there too. The prices were up in the high five figures and quite a few had been sold. I’d never seen any of them in my life.

I went up to the girl behind the desk, a pretty blue-eyes with extra-large round spectacles and gelled punk-black hair. She looked up and gave me a big smile: “Hello, Mr. Wilmot,” she said, and I said, “What the hell is going on here?”

Her smile faded and she asked, “What do you mean?”

“You know me?” I demanded.

“Uh-huh.” Carefully. “Yeah, you’re the artist. Is something wrong?”

And I snapped.

The poor failed bastard I was in my every memory grew knuckle hair and tusks and shouted, “Is something wrong? Is something wrong? Yeah, I’ll tell you what’s wrong, darling: I never painted any of this shit.”

I gave a yell and took out my knife and attacked the paintings, slashing through the beautiful, oh-so-salable surfaces, and my God, it felt good! The art lovers were screaming and running out and the girl screamed too and called out, “Serge!” and reached for the phone. I ran over to the window display and grabbed the card that had my name on it, and I was trying to slice it up with the knife when I was grabbed from behind by, I imagine, the Serge whom she’d called. The card with the knife still stuck in it fell from my hand as we struggled. I broke free and threw the first serious punch I’d let loose since the schoolyard, and he slipped it with an ease one doesn’t really expect in a gallery manager and connected with a left jab, then a powerful right cross, and I went down and out.

I came to in the back of a patrol car in handcuffs. Dimly, I observed a cop in conversation with Serge and the gallery clerk on the sidewalk, and then they drove me to what I assumed was their precinct and took my ID, watch, belt, and the laces from my sneakers away from me and put me in a cell, where I puked Claude Demme’s expensive champagne and some partly digested Chinese food all over myself.

Now I was officially a crazy person, and a dangerous one too. New York has a system for dealing with such emotionally disturbed people, as we are known, and I was now part of it. They are supposed to notify your next of kin, but when they asked I stayed mute. Many of us EDPs are similarly bereft, so it was no big deal. They shipped me to Bellevue with the vomit still caked on me, and there I was cleaned up, given a gown and a robe and paper slippers, shot full of Haldol, and left tied to a bed.

Some time passed. There was a painful swelling under the injection site on my shoulder, and I complained about it; they said they’d use the other arm if I needed another, but I was a good boy and didn’t make any trouble. A couple of days later, they switched me to pills and then I had my interview, fifteen minutes with an intern half my age. He asked me who I was and I told him I didn’t know. He asked me if I had someplace to go and I said I did. That was the magic answer, for it seemed that the Enso Gallery did not care to press charges. A little artistic misunderstanding, happens all the time. I got a scrip for olanzapine and a boot out the door, back into the world’s largest open-air aftercare facility, the streets of Manhattan.

Once there I fished my cell phone out of the envelope with my personal effects in it and brought up my phone book. It was my old one, with the art directors on it. Oh, good, I thought, the Haldol has kicked in. I called Mark.

He wanted to know where I’d been, and I said the mental ward at Bellevue, and he said, “Well, that was probably for the best. Are you back to being you?”

I said I was.

“You’re going to do my guy’s fresco, right?”

I said I would. In fact, I wanted to leave that very day.

“Not a problem,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

I went back to Walker Street, and my old door was there and my key worked. I looked around at the familiar environment, but it gave me no comfort. It was like I didn’t fit into that life anymore; it’s hard to explain, but I had the feeling that whatever happened I’d never live there again. I took a shower and dressed and packed a small bag. While I was packing, Mark called and told me I could pick up the tickets and the other stuff I’d need at his gallery that evening, and I did, and his black car took me to Kennedy and out of my old life.

They flew me to Venice on Alitalia, in first class. People complain about air travel a lot nowadays, but this was considerably better than being in Bellevue. I had a pint or two of Prosecco to start and the gnocchi alla Romana with a good enough Montepulciano. I was picked up at the airport as promised by a silent and efficient man who introduced himself as Franco, then taken by private launch to a boutique hotel off the Campo San Zaninovo, convenient to the palazzo, which is right on the Zaninovo Canal between the Ponte Storto and the Ponte Corona. I was just settling into my room when my cell phone rang, and it was Lotte calling. A renewed pang of terror and I refused the call. She left an angry message: according to her I should be in a psychiatric hospital and not swanning around Europe. She knew all about my recent craziness because someone at the gallery had used a cell phone camera to snap me being dragged from the gallery with blood all over my face, and it had made the tabloids, and she’d called Mark, who filled her in on the whole story, the rat. I didn’t return the call.

After a day of rest in my lovely room, Franco took me to the palazzo and turned me over to Signor Zuccone, who is the majordomo of the place and responsible to the big cheese for this abortion. Well, you know, it’s real damp in Venice, and the palazzo was built in 1512, and they probably spent fifty bucks on the roof since then, and when I looked up at the dining room ceiling I saw a sagging gray porridge, lightly smeared with angels and clouds. I told Zuccone that the whole thing had to come down. He didn’t blink, and the next day the demolishers were at work. While that was going on I had a look at Tiepolo’s cartoons. This was the actual working set, complete with the tiny holes and the marks of the red chalk pounce he’d used, miraculously preserved. So that was okay as far as the design went, which was an Assumption of the Virgin with angelic choir and saints, lots of lush clouds, no deep feeling, just pure gorgeousness. I loved it, and in a strange way it blew my recent identity problem right out of my skull. A consuming art project will do that sometimes, stifle the little voices of ego-or, in my case, madness-and let you exist in the realms of form and color when nothing’s of concern except the next stroke of the brush.

It was, of course, not a restoration in any real sense. It was a forgery. I still loved it-how cheaply sold my long-protected virginity!

The first thing I had to do was to find someone who knew fresco plaster. I thought about my father and the St. Anthony job, his great fresco fiasco, on which a Mr. Belloto was our plaster guy. He looked about a hundred years old, the last man in America to wear a bowler hat, came to work in a suit and a tie with a diamond stickpin in it, changed into coveralls at the job site, kept the tie on. The deal was that some rich bastard son of the Church had given a dining hall to a seminary in Suffolk County and there was money to do a fresco of the life of the patron saint, and of course immediately Father was Michelangelo revived. This job was his bid for immortality, so the fresco had to be right, had to last for the ages, as long as Pompeii at least. I was the apprentice, so if the quattrocento ever rolled around again, I’d be set to cash in-crazy, of course, but thanks, Dad, it eventually came in real handy.

I spent the better part of that year-I was twenty-two-doing all the things that people do on a fresco besides the actual painting, under the hand mainly of Mr. Belloto. It’s not like plastering the kitchen. The trick is that your slaked lime has to be really old. You don’t want any unslaked lime in your mix because it might slake up on the wall and generate gas that’ll bubble the surface.

Footnote: immortality, in this case, lasted around ten years. There were over a hundred seminarians in there when we started, a number that sank to around six not too long after the Second Vatican Council finished trashing the grand old Tridentine Church. So the diocese sold the barn to a nondenominational retirement home that didn’t want scenes from the life of St. Anthony staring down at the crocks while they ate; they wanted the artworks of the residents up there, flowers and clowns and so forth, so they painted a nice peach color over the fresco. No great loss, as a matter of fact, it was typical Late Dad, beautifully drawn, utterly spiritless. I think even Mr. Belloto knew that; he used to grip my shoulder and sigh while viewing each giornata.

After asking around a little I found Signor Codognola, also about a hundred years old, and he said he had a trove of plaster from before the war-I think maybe he meant World War I. He was slow but good, worked with a couple of relatives, grandsons or great-grandsons, I don’t know, took them a week to get the trullisatio in, the coat that sticks to the lath, and another week to adhere the brown coat to it, what they call the arricciato. I didn’t even pretend to supervise; mainly I toured the city by foot and vaporetto, checking out all the Tiepolos I could find to pump up my sense of how he handled form and color. One of the great natural draftsmen, yeah, but almost over-slick. The famous comic book illustrators of the golden age were all Tiepoloesques. So I am right at home. But really, beautiful work with the small brush, used like a pen. I spent my time grinding colors and waiting for the brown coat to cure up.

Fresco work fixes your mind on a day at a time; all you think about is how you’re going to handle the next giornata. Obviously it was a lot easier for me because Tiepolo marked his giornata right on the cartoon. You have, let’s say, a section of fluffy cloud and a triangular chunk of blue sky between some clouds, and another lump of darker cloud, and that’s about all you can do in one day’s work-your giornata-on the wet plaster of the intonaco, or surface layer. We had modern scaffolds and lights, so no candle stuck on the head for Chaz. I just mixed my colors with lime water, set up the palette, and up I went. And Marco, or another one of the grandsons, helped pin up the cartoon and I pounced it with red chalk, and then we took off the cartoon and I incised the lines of chalk dust with a wooden stylus, and then they laid the intonaco and I painted on it wet, using the incised lines as guides.

It was like a gigantic paint-by-numbers, only in the style of Tiepolo; it looked clumsy from close up, but from the floor it looked like old Giambattista did it yesterday. It had that don’t-give-a-shit ease in it, true sprezzatura, total authority laying down the paint, like I’d been doing Tiepoloesque frescoes every day of my life. In the center, the Virgin exalted, the most important part; I took the liberty of giving her Lotte’s face, nice Jewish girl after all, or at least the Rothschild half, and why not, I’m sure Tiepolo stuck his honeys on ceilings all over Europe.

About three weeks into the project, say the middle of November, I got a surprise visit from my ex-father-in-law-I mean Lotte’s father, not the side-of-beef one. He was in Venice for a conference. Interesting guy, pushing eighty now but still active, had a long career in the UN diplomatic service, then moved on to art scholarship. Calls himself an amateur, but he’s written a lot, apparently quite respected in European art-history circles. Not one of those Rothschilds, as he likes to say, consequently went through a rough time as a kid, lost his family to the Nazis and survived by being sheltered in a convent in Normandy. Married an Italian woman; she had the one kid and then died, cancer, when Lotte was about twelve. He never remarried. Lotte had told him where I was and I sensed that this visit was in the nature of an inspection tour. I didn’t mind; I kind of wanted to know how I was too.

We had lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall place he likes near the Palazzo Grimani, a slow Venetian meal.

I asked him how Lotte and the kids were. He said, “The children are wonderful as always. They miss you. Rose believes that Big Italy, as she calls it, is on the subway somewhere near Little Italy. She has her own MetroCard now and threatens to come and visit you when she feels like it. Milo…well, what can one say? He is melancholy after this last relapse, but he has a tremendous brightness and courage that keeps breaking through. He said he hopes to live long enough to see you again.”

“Shit!”

“Yes, life is sometimes shit. Lotte is holding up despite…perhaps you haven’t heard. Jackie Moreau is dead.”

“What? Oh, God! How?”

“Murdered, in Rome. Stabbed and dumped in the river. The police believe it was a robbery gone wrong.”

“Christ! She must be devastated.”

“Yes. He must be her oldest friend, you know. As I say, life is sometimes shit, but we are obliged to keep living. Tell me about the work you are doing here.”

I was happy to change the subject, and we talked about Tiepolo for a while; he said it was a shame I’d not had a chance to see the frescoes in the prince-bishop’s palace in Würzburg, which were in his opinion the best things the artist had ever done.

“I suppose your next project will be something by the Guardis,” he said with a smile.

“Why the Guardis?”

“Didn’t you know? Tiepolo married Francesco Guardi’s daughter. His sons, Giovanni Domenico and Lorenzo, both became pretty fair painters. One of the few cases where talent bred true, and isn’t this one of the great conundrums of human existence? From whence it comes. I, for example, have a passionate love of painting, but it would never occur to me to try to paint, or rather it did occur to me, unfortunately. After the war I spent an unhappy year in art school, until it became clear that I would never amount to anything in that line. And Lotte too, as you know, tried her hand, and the antitalent was also inherited, poor child. And you of course are the counterexample.”

“I’d say the counter-counterexample. I inherited a load of talent from a man who never used what he’d been given properly, and guess what? I don’t use it properly either.”

“You are blocked.”

“I am blocked.” At that moment I almost spilled it: the whole horror of what had happened in New York, the fancy loft, the Enso Gallery, the loft door that wouldn’t open, the falsification of memory. Because of anyone I knew, Maurice Rothschild would have been the person most likely to understand it. But I didn’t. Why not, Chaz? Why didn’t you unburden yourself to this enormously charitable and knowledgeable man? Maybe there would have been a great vomiting out of the blockage then, he’d be my magician lifting the curse with a subtle word, but the truth is we love our dark stuff, we hug it to our inner hearts even as it corrodes our vitals. I confess it: just like with Slotsky, I was simply too fucking terrified to ask.

Instead I laughed a fake chuckle and said, “But what can I do? At least I’m making money.”

“Not to be sneezed at,” he said after a decent pause. “Let’s have some coffee and a little grappa and then we’ll go see your ceiling.”

Which we did in due course, and when he saw it, looking up with the spotting scope I use to check the paint from the ground, he laughed and said, “That’s marvelous! A little artistic joke. You have captured precisely my girl.”

“You think she’ll mind?”

“On the contrary, she’ll be delighted.”

“I thought she didn’t like artistic jokes.”

“That would depend on the joke and its context. Artistic jokes are amusing only against a serious background. Mozart wrote a musical joke, but Mozart is easily distinguishable from Spike Jones. This”-here he gestured upward-“is astounding. I see the paint is still fresh, but I would be hard-pressed not to call it the work of the master, and it’s not merely the composition, which of course you had from the cartoons, it’s the colors, that glorious shot-silk effect and the delicacy of the drawing in the details, that marvelous line he has. Or you have. It is a consummate forgery. In fact, I believe it is, all told, the very best artistic forgery I have ever seen. And I have seen a few.”

“Really? When?”

“Oh, it was something I did in my early career. I had the degree in art history, perfectly useless, I thought, for a diplomat-economics, political science far more the thing, and if history, one wants the history of rulers and their elaborate murders, wars and so forth-but someone in the ministry must have examined dossiers because I was picked to participate in the negotiations around returning artworks looted by the Third Reich. This was in, I believe, 1956. Of course, the great troves, the most famous works stolen by Göring and the big gangsters, had already been returned. But the scale of the looting was so vast…I mean, an enormous proportion of the cultured class in Germany and the conquered lands was despoiled, not to mention museums in places like the Netherlands and France and Poland. Not only the Jews, who of course lost everything, but liberals and socialists of every stripe. I mean to say, if you have a regime that is essentially lawless, anyone with a pretension to power can take anything he wants from anyone designated as an enemy of the state.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, the apologetic powers established an office in Paris and there someone would come, let us say a French Jew who survived, and place a claim: I had a Cézanne, I had a Rubens, and the Germans came and they’re gone. And then the police, let us say, locate the Germans who were in this man’s area, and they look, and sure enough former Hauptführer-SS Schultz has a Cézanne stashed away in his attic, the Frenchman’s very Cézanne, or so it seems. But since this was an international body and very correct, it must make sure it is the same painting and that the Frenchman really owned it, and so forth, and for this they need an art-historical diplomat, and this is me. Now, Herr Schultz has done his time in prison, perhaps three years, because after all he only killed a hundred Jews instead of a hundred thousand, and he is participating in the German reconstruction and he wishes very much to hold on to the painting, which he intends to sell at some point to expand his business, and so he cleverly decides to hire some art student to copy it, and someone must be on hand to catch him at his tricks, and again this is me.”

“Gosh, I didn’t know any of this,” I said. “Did this happen a lot?”

“No, because as I’m sure you know, forgery is difficult and these people were no great connoisseurs in the main. The efforts to deceive were generally quite childish.” He smiled and jerked his thumb upward. “I’m grateful you were not in business at that time.”

And now something made me think of the conversation I’d had with Mark about art forgery, maybe the word “business” triggered some neuron too, and I asked him, “Did you ever hear of someone in the art business named Krebs?”

At the mention of this name the familiar genial expression vanished from his face, and for a moment I saw replacing it the mask of the diplomat he’d probably worn to work for thirty years.

“You are referring to Horst Axel Krebs?”

I said, “No, I think his name is Werner.”

“The son, then. Why do you ask?”

So I told him about Slotsky mentioning the connection between this fresco job and Krebs. He listened in silence and then said, “Let’s take a walk. I want to take a look at the San Zaccaria Bellini again.”

We left the palazzo and walked south on Corte Rotta in the chill rain that keeps the tourists scant in Venice’s winter between Christmas and Carnival and makes the uneven streets reflect, canal-like, the colored stonework of the great facades. As we walked, he said, “So-let me tell you about Herr Krebs. First the father, Horst Axel Krebs. Like me and Hitler, a failed artist. He was young enough to miss the first war, and after a bohemian youth in Munich, he set up as an art dealer there in 1923. In 1928 he joined the Nazi party, and after the Nazis took power he was made a curator at the Alte Pinakothek in the place of a removed Jew. By this time he is married and has a son, Werner Horst, born 1933. In 1940, the Nazis organized the Einsatz-stab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. Do you know what that was?”

“No, but I’m guessing it wasn’t devoted to increasing the sum total of human happiness.”

“You would be correct. It was the bureaucracy assigned to loot the collections of France and Western Europe of any artworks of interest to the new rulers, especially the collections of Jews. Our Krebs is assigned to the Paris office, the richest lode of all, and here he specializes in record keeping. He knows what has been looted from whom and where it is kept. So he goes on for four years, and then comes 1944, D-day. The Allies advance and the ERR pulls out of Paris with trainloads and truck convoys of artworks. Some of it was stopped by the French resistance, tons of it were found by the Allies, but a lot of it disappeared and remains lost to this day. In late 1945, Horst Axel Krebs was arrested by the British, tried at Nuremberg, and given a two-year sentence.”

“That seems fairly light,” I said.

“Yes, but at the time, as I suggested earlier, mass murderers were getting ten years or less, and he hadn’t actually killed anyone as far as they knew. Just a thief was Horst Axel. So by 1949 he’s back in Munich contributing to the economic miracle. He has a little gallery on the Kirchenstrasse where he sells harmless landscapes and flowers to burghers refurbishing their war-torn homes. Obviously he’s poison to the legitimate art market; he’s investigated up and down by the Allied occupation authorities, they have a whole dossier on him, but as far as anyone knows, he’s clean, just a businessman. Well, time goes on, the anti-Nazi fervor fades away, everyone is just a good German trying to get by and be a bulwark against communism, et cetera, and meanwhile little Werner is all grown up, with a diplom from the Ludwig-Maximilians University in art history and conservation. He now settles in Frankfurt to get a little distance from the father in Munich, and also because Frankfurt is where all the money is. He’s taking a hand in the family business, of course, but the real business, not the Kirchenstrasse gallery.”

“What was the other business?” I asked.

“Well, you know, the remarkable thing about the Nazi looting is that they kept nearly impeccable records of everything they took. For example, at Nuremberg, at the trial of Alfred Rosenberg, the prosecution presented thirty-nine thick volumes that cataloged everything they’d confiscated, with photographs of the art. There were hundreds of such volumes in all. The Allies seized roomfuls of filing cabinets with tens of thousands of index cards: descriptions of the art, who they took it from, and so on.

“So let’s say it’s the middle of 1944, and you’ve been stealing art and making these very catalogs for four years, and you are a smart person and so you know that the Nazis are finished, and suppose you wanted to feather your nest after the war. You might contrive to search out a selection of valuable pieces, nothing too showy, and neglect to place these pieces in the catalogs, and naturally you would strip out the relevant index cards too. And you would choose just those things that belonged to Jews who had died in the camps and who left no survivors at all. For someone with Horst Krebs’s old Nazi connections that information would be easy to get. And then you would use the excellent forging capabilities of the SS to generate phony bills of sale, so that instead of, say, a nice Pissaro being sold to a Jacques Bernstein of Paris in 1908, it was shown as being sold to a Kurt Langschweile of Geneva, Switzerland, same year. Then, after the war, Herr Langschweile’s heirs supposedly sell the painting to the respectable firm W. H. Krebs, of Frankfurt. Yes, we know that the proprietor is the son of the notorious Horst Axel Krebs, but in the Federal Republic they do not look too closely at what your father did in the war, or else there’d be no business at all. Old Krebs died in his bed in seventy-nine, by the way, a pillar of the community.”

“And he still does this?” I asked. “I mean Werner.”

“Not anymore. And there has never been, to my knowledge, any solid evidence that he ever did it. As I said earlier, the Nazi hoard was so enormous and the artworks went through so many movements and changes of custody, and so many people had access to them during the crazy years, that countless pieces were lost track of. It is just a fact that the younger Krebs made his initial fortune selling small, well-chosen Impressionist and early-twentieth-century pieces he bought in Switzerland. Plenty of Jews shipped stuff out to Switzerland in pawn to raise money after they were stripped of their livelihoods during the thirties. Then they were murdered and the artworks belonged to the people they sold them to. The phony provenances were a nice added touch, a little insulation, and the SS forgers who did them for Krebs are deceased, most of them having been prisoners of various kinds, Jews and so forth. So there is nothing but hearsay against him, but there is a lot of it, and it is consistent.”

By this time we were in the campo in front of the great white elevation of San Zacccaria, and we paused under the shallow portico to get out of the rain.

“Did you ever meet him? Krebs?” I asked.

“Only once. Krebs was offering for sale a Derain landscape that the French authorities spotted as the property of a Paris clothing manufacturer named Kamine. The man and his family had perished during the war, but a son had escaped to England, and it was his heirs who were making the official claim. Well, not to bore you with the details, but Krebs admitted he had made an error, that the provenance he had was a fake, and he handed over the painting with an apology.”

“And…”

“Well, I looked at the painting and I had experts look at the painting. The experts said it was Derain. The paint was good, the canvas and frame…but all they had to go on was a faded black-and-white print. I thought it was a fake, but my opinion wasn’t probative and so the return went through.”

“So what happened to the original? I mean, if you were right. A buyer could never sell it on the open market.”

“True enough, but you realize there’s a substantial closed market for artwork. There are any number of people who want to own old masters and Impressionists, far more than the honest market can supply, because, obviously, most of the works are in museums already, and the old masters are, well, dead-there are no more in the pipeline.”

“Interesting. What did you make of the man himself?”

“Charming. Cultivated. He knew a great deal about pictures, and not just as a dealer. He truly loved the work. One would think that the stories were true, that he had held on to the remainder of the Schloss paintings.”

“Schloss? I never heard of him. Modern?”

“No, he was not a painter. Adolph Schloss was a broker for department stores and purveyor to the Russian imperial court. He was a fabulously wealthy Jew, a French citizen, who assembled what was probably the finest collection of Dutch old masters in private hands, back around the turn of the twentieth century, just the sort of paintings that Hitler and Göring liked best. To make a long story short, the Nazis seized the three-hundred-odd paintings in the collection and shipped them to Munich, and stored them in Nazi party buildings there. Hitler was planning a vast art museum in his hometown of Linz, and this depot was where they stored the things they were going to stock it with.

“In April 1945, the Allies entered Munich, by which time the collections had been thoroughly pillaged by various Germans with access to it, and later the Americans did some light pillaging of their own. The Schloss family eventually recovered one hundred and forty-nine of these paintings, with the rest scattered or lost. Evidence presented at the elder Krebs’s trial showed that he worked at the Munich depository in the winter of 1944 and that he left the city with two vans and a military escort in January of 1945. We have no idea what happened to those vans or what was in them. Old Krebs never talked and young Krebs has always denied knowing anything about any stolen old masters. In fact, he always dealt in more modern pictures when he was becoming established.”

Here he stopped and appeared about to say something else regarding Krebs, but what came out was, “But now let’s look at the Bellini.”

We entered the church and I found, almost without willing it, that I had dipped my finger in the marble stoup of holy water at the door and crossed myself.

We stood in silence in front of the altarpiece for a long time, until Maurice sighed deeply and said, “Quite aside from its quality as a work of art, this makes me feel better about my present decrepit age. He was seventy-five when he painted it, can you imagine? Do you know his Nude with a Mirror?”

“I saw it when I was a kid, in Vienna.”

“His only nude, and he did it when he was eighty-five. Marvelous painting, and at eighty-five!”

“I guess he figured it was safe by then.”

“Indeed. Sadly safe. But now this…how can one do that? To paint the very air around the figures. There is the whole of the Renaissance in one painting. You could with justice say that Giovanni Bellini started the Renaissance in this city, at least in painting, and carried it through decade after decade-incredible! He started painting like Giotto and ended like Titian, who of course was his pupil, as was Giorgione. And always deep, deep thought from a lost age underlying the contemporary style. So he shows us the Virgin and Child all the way back at the rear of the niche, and no one is looking at them. The angel is sawing away at the viola and she and saints Peter and Jerome are facing us, not the Virgin, and saints Lucy and Catherine there in the middle distance are also lost in contemplation. Whatever was he thinking? In nearly every other altarpiece in the world, the Virgin is the center of attention for all the other figures, but not here.”

“Maybe they’re just thinking about her. It’s a study of contemplation, an example to us who can’t see the Virgin at all.”

“Yes, that’s a good reading. And the art-historical subtext is that if you’re a true artist, like Bellini, you must keep at it and keep your spirit open and the art will feed you, if you let it. Lotte tells me you had some trouble in New York.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Oh, no details, but she suggested that you might be wise to seek the services of a psychiatrist.”

“And this is the reason you looked me up? To check out if I was really nuts?”

“Only partially,” he said with a disarming smile. “And I shall be happy to report you seem perfectly sane. Are you doing any of your own painting, by the way?”

“I don’t know, Maurice-sometimes I think, What’s the point? What does work of my own mean anymore? I look at this thing and there’s a whole coherent culture embodied in it. The illusionistic space; the theatricality, like a stage set; the atmosphere…like you said, he’s learned how to paint air, and he can do it because the art and technique are in service of something greater than the artist. But now there’s nothing greater than the artist-the artist is it. And the critics and the investment potential. If I did something like this, except as a parody, it would be called kitsch. And it would be kitsch.

We don’t believe in the Virgin and the saints anymore, or at least not the way Bellini did. Our icons are blank and the only religion we see in the galleries is irony. I can do irony fine, but it makes me sick.”

“Yes, but my dear man, there is a flourishing school of modern figurative painting, what Kitaj called the school of London-himself, Bacon, Lucien Freud, Auerbach. If you want to paint that way, why not do it?”

“But I don’t want to paint that way. Gin up a little individual style and sell it to fools? I want to paint like this, I want to paint in a culture that transcends the art that expresses it. And all that’s gone.”

He nodded gravely. “Yes. I take your point. And I don’t have an answer to your problem. Still, we’re standing here and we are having a certain experience. Neither of us, I think, are believers in the sense that Bellini was, and yet we are at this moment under his spell. Is it only admiration for his bravura? Are we merely worshipping his art?”

“Or we’re being drugged. You know what Duchamp said about art.”

“Yes, ‘As a drug it’s probably useful for a number of people, very sedative, but as a religion it’s not even as good as God.’ An interesting man, Duchamp, probably the major influence on the art of the past century, after Cézanne, even though he produced very little work. I met him once, you know.”

“Really?”

“Yes, in New York. I was in Greenwich Village and I wanted a coffee and the shop only had one free chair, so I asked the old man sitting there if I could use it. He had a chessboard in front of him, and he said I could sit there if I would give him a game, so I did. It was only after I sat down that I realized it was Duchamp.”

“Did you win?”

“Of course not. He was an international grand master. We played three games, and he won the last while spotting me two rooks. We did not, unfortunately, discuss art. I talked about what I have just been telling you, my work in the art recovery effort, and when I told him that there were dozens of masterpieces that had gone missing, do you know what he said? ‘They are the fortunate ones.’ Everyone thought he’d given up painting entirely, but when he died they found he’d been working on the same painting, a representational nude, for the last twenty years of his life. One looks at it through a peephole.”

“What did he think of his artistic progeny?”

“I wish I’d thought to ask him, but from what he wrote I gather he didn’t have much use for pop or conceptual art. As I imagine these people, the Virgin and the saints, would not have had much use for what the Catholic Church became after their time. We are a bunch of silly monkeys after all, but what an astounding miracle it is that we can also make and enjoy things like this. After the kind of life I have led…you know, there are people who believe that after what Europe has done to itself in the twentieth century, that vast catastrophe, we can no longer have poetry, have art, that this is all meaningless merde because it leads to the death camps. They have a point, I suppose, but, as I was saying, after the kind of life I have led, here I am, in a church, looking at Bellini. Another kind of miracle, perhaps.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, and after a moment he plucked his sleeve back and looked at his watch.

“And now, unfortunately, I must go. I have a meeting at four-at the Gritti, of all places. It’s part of the perpetual EU pagaille about how to save Venice and its treasures from the rising waters.”

“I hope you succeed,” I said.

“Perhaps we will, or perhaps one day there will be fishes swimming through here nibbling at the painted saints.”

We went outside and found it had stopped raining. Winter sun struggled through the thinning clouds, lighting the facades of the church and the surrounding buildings with dramatic effect. Maurice looked about the campo, beaming in delight.

“Now we are in a Canaletto ourselves,” he said, and we embraced. Then he held me by the shoulders at arm’s length and looked me in the face.

“Chaz, I don’t know the extent of your involvement with Herr Krebs, but I would urge you not to get in any further with him.”

“Why? I thought you said he wasn’t a crook.”

“No, I said he had never been caught. It’s not the same thing. But whatever his legal status at present, he is not a person you wish to know. Please take my word for this.”

I finished the ceiling just before Christmas and Castelli threw a party for the unveiling of the work. My patrono, I found, looked just like one of those cutthroat condottieri who ran Italy in the quattrocento, a shark face in Armani, and came with an entourage of shady remoras and a blond sweetie twenty years younger who wasn’t Mrs. C. Trailing discreetly along, and looking like he fit right in, was my old pal Mark Slotsky.

So, shitloads of champagne, and later a gigantic seven-course meal under my fresco, a couple dozen rich people, jeweled women, politicians, and so on, and business fascist types. Zuccone informed me that the real Venetians had been invited but declined; all those Golden Book families weren’t going to show up to gaze on Castelli’s fake Tiepolo. I wasn’t invited either. They set up a table in a dusty room near the kitchen for the help, of which I was one, because it was a restoration; the artist was Tiepolo, and he was dead. I mean, you wouldn’t expect the plasterers or the scaffold guy to be in there with the fucking patrono.

And you know, I didn’t feel bad about it at all, I felt great, maybe for the first time in my life I felt I was where I belonged. Guys slapped me on the back and kissed me, all like that. We had a great time too, had the same food, and maybe better wine, courtesy of Zuccone, and got drunk and noisy. It was like the Marriage of Figaro: the real life, decency, honesty, was below the stairs.

Toward the end of the evening, Mark came in and went through an elaborate and, I thought, totally phony apology about how it was outrageous I hadn’t been seated in the frescoed hall, and I was like, it’s okay, Mark, I’m having a great time with the paisans, and then he kind of leaned close and said, “Castelli was real impressed with what you did, amazed really, he had no idea anyone could work like that, I mean it’s fucking perfect, that fresco, you can’t tell it from a Tiepolo except it’s so fresh and clean.”

And I said, “Does that mean I’m getting paid?”

He said, “Absolutely, the check’s in my account as we speak. But listen, Chaz, this is just like the very beginning. Two hundred grand is chump change compared to what you could be pulling down with the right connections.”

“Bigger ceilings?” I said.

“No, there’re guys here tonight who-” And then he dropped his voice even lower, like there was anyone in the room who could speak English worth a damn, and he asked me, “How would you like to make a million bucks?”

Well, that got my attention. I said, “Who’s going to pay me a million dollars? And for what?”

“Werner Krebs. He’s here. He loves your work.”

And here I thought about what Maurice had said about the guy, he’s shady but loves art, something different from the usual art hag, and different also from a vulgarian semigangster like Castelli, and I decided that despite what Maurice had said, I did want to know him.

So I said, “Okay, let’s go.”

“No, not now-tomorrow. Have you got some decent clothes?”

I said no and asked again what Werner was going to pay me a million dollars for, but he said, “You’ll talk to the man, we’re on for tomorrow. But we need to get you cleaned up.”

He actually bought me an outfit the next morning; we went down to San Marco, Armani for the clothes, shoes at Bottega Veneta, the works, and a barber near the Danieli Hotel who eyed me carefully, like a fresco guy checking a decayed ceiling, and gave me a haircut, face steam, and shave. Then we took the Hotel Cipriani’s private launch over to Giudecca and Krebs’s suite there. Mark had been doing nervous chatter all morning, but when he got onto the boat he clammed up. I thought he was seasick, but in retrospect I think he was just nervous. Or scared.

I was scared too, but not of Krebs.

While we were on the boat it happened again: I was looking out over the lagoon back to the city, enjoying the feeling of being out on the water again and the terrific if overdone view, and I sort of blinked and saw that the Riva degli Schiavoni was crammed with ships, caravels and cogs and lateen-sailed tartans, and the near distance was full of small craft, and there was black smoke making a smudged cloud over the Arsenale. And there was no engine sound anymore, and I’m on a galley, up on the poop under an embroidered awning, and I’m dressed in black with a ruff; there are other similarly dressed men standing around on the deck, and one of them is speaking to me, Don Gilberto de Peralta, the Spanish ambassador’s majordomo, who is serving as my cicerone on this, my first visit to Venice, and we are not heading away from the city but toward it, toward the Molo in front of San Marco, and he’s telling me about the Tintorettos and Veroneses in the Sala del Gran Consiglio. I am staring past him at the glittering pile I can just see through the masts of the ships, my heart soaring in my breast. I can barely believe I am in the city of Titian and the other masters; my eyes are hungry for the sights promised me. And now the galley touches gently against the quay and our party descends and assembles at the gangway; the smoke from censers burning to cover the stench of the slaves below blows heavily across our faces, but we can still smell them, the wretches. There is a delegation waiting for us, for I am traveling with Don Ambrogio Spinola, Marqués de los Balbases, captain-general of the Catholic armies fighting the heretics in the Low Countries, who has been graciously kind to me throughout our voyage from Barcelona. And he steps off first, of course, and then some of his train, and then me, onto the soil of Venice at last.

And I did step onto a pier, but it was the Danieli Hotel’s, and I staggered like a drunk and would’ve fallen if Mark hadn’t grabbed my arm. He said, “Christ, man, you should’ve told me you got seasick. I would’ve slipped you a Dramamine patch.”

“I never get seasick,” I said.

“Then it’s something. You’re white as a sheet. Are you okay to do this?”

I lied that I was fine. I was the last thing from fine; I was thinking, It’s been weeks since I had any salvinorin and now I have a salvinorin trip, and maybe I’ll wake up in the Gorgeous Loft of Terror again and this whole Venice thing will have proved to be another psychotic break, and it was only with difficulty that I was able to put one foot in front of the other and walk with Mark into the lobby of the hotel.

Krebs had taken the Dogaressa suite. Pale, overstuffed furniture, Oriental carpets on the floor, a view through high, narrow windows of the tower of the Doge’s Palace in St. Mark’s. I’ve heard about this place, probably the most expensive room in Venice, three grand a night in euros or something like that, and here was the man himself, trim, dark suit, handmade shoes, five-hundred-dollar tie, a big cigar. He’s got that tanned, slick, plastic skin you only see on really rich men, like a Kewpie doll, smooth, all the blemishes and sags of old age expertly removed-he was over seventy, I knew, but he looked fifteen years younger. Short, silvery hair in a fringe around a bald dome-he must’ve passed on the hair implants. Gave me a look, like a man buying a dog, up and down.

I looked at him the same way: the impression of power, ruthlessness, something you don’t see in your average bond trader, and which I recognized well, having just been in conversation with Captain-General Spinola, back in the seventeenth century. Our eyes met, and a smile formed on his face. A little shock now-he was genuinely glad to see me.

Introductions by Mark, a gentle, dry handshake, not a macho gripper, doesn’t need to, obviously. I saw my old pal Franco was there; I thought he worked for Castelli, but no, unless it’s a loan, like regular people lend tools: here’s my muscle guy and driver, enjoy! We sat deep into the soft couch, he plopped into the armchair opposite, cigars offered, Mark takes one, a Cuban Cohiba, of course; I choose a glass of Dom P. served by Franco, a man of many skills, it seems. Mark starts a little chatter, pleasantries, how was the trip, what a nice room, etc., silenced by a look. He just wants to talk to me.

So-compliments on the Tiepolo, intelligent questions about how we did it, then the talk moves to art, the old masters, who do I like, their virtues and faults. What have I seen in Venice? Not much except Tiepolos, I’ve been busy. A shame, he says, and tells me what’s worth seeing: the Veroneses in the palace, some things at the Franchetti Gallery in the Ca’ D’oro, Titian’s Venus at Her Mirror, don’t miss the paintings in San Sebastiano, a good place to get away from the tourists. We talk about there being no major museums in Venice, because Venice is a museum, the old Venetians didn’t buy pictures from anyone but the local boys, as a rule, and they kept them in their palazzi. He talked about this for a while and seemed to approve of my responses.

I was still a little rocky from my boat ride as Velázquez, but I was feeling the influence of the wine and the flattery. I don’t have much experience with wealthy collectors praising my work and being interested in my views on art, so I was yakking away. The guy knew traditional painting up the ying-yang, just like Maurice described; he seemed to have seen practically every important painting in the world at least once, not only in museums but in all the major private collections too. Encyclopedic, really; he makes even Slotsky look like he just got out of Art History 101.

After a while he raised the subject of Velázquez. He said no one painted like Velázquez, incomparable, not the images so much, but the technique. So I talked about the technique, the palette, the brushwork. I said I thought it was because he didn’t care, he didn’t care about the painting, it wasn’t work to him, his self-worth wasn’t derived from it.

“How do you know that?” Krebs asked.

I said, “It’s obvious. Look at his life: he spent all his real energy climbing the greasy pole, collecting offices, shouldering his way into the aristocracy. He had a great gift and he used it, but it was like he found a box of treasure somewhere, it flowed through him, but it wasn’t him. And he wasn’t driven, he had a sinecure for life, which was why he did fewer paintings than any artist of comparable stature besides Vermeer.”

I saw something interesting then: his focus on me seemed to increase, his blue eyes got sharper and hotter, and I found I wasn’t just spouting art history stuff, or even my own opinions, I was talking from direct knowledge, like I’d actually felt those feelings about Velázquez’s art. Which, of course, I had, in the drug mania, but it was weird all the same that it came through and that he could spot it.

After I ran down on this theme a little, he stood up and said he’d like to show me something. I got up and so did Mark, but Krebs made it clear by a gesture that only I was invited. I followed him into the bedroom of the suite. There was a display easel set up there with a small painting on it, maybe thirty inches by a little less, and he asked me to take a look at it.

I looked: it was a portrait of a man in black velvet with a small ruff, fleshy face, mustache, and spade beard, his hand playing with a gold chain around his neck, a look of comfortable sensuality. The paint was thin, the fine canvas almost showing through, the brushwork free as a swallow in the skies, the palette simple, not more than five pigments. I’d never seen a Velázquez outside a museum. Nor had I ever seen a reproduction of this painting. It was a fucking unknown Velázquez, propped up on an easel in a guy’s hotel room. Sweat popped out all over me.

So after a while he said, “What do you think?”

I said, “What do I think? I think it’s a Velázquez, it looks contemporary with the ones of Cardinal Pamphili and the Pope, probably from the 1649 trip to Rome.” He seemed to be waiting for something else, so I said, “I never saw it before.”

He nodded and said, “That’s because it’s one of his lost paintings. It’s a portrait of Don Gaspar Méndes de Haro, Marqués de Heliche. An interesting face, wouldn’t you say? A man who gets what he wants.”

I agreed and asked him how he’d gotten the painting. He didn’t answer directly. Instead he asked me, did I like museums? I said I liked them fine, I’d spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours in museums, that’s how you got to look at originals.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s one way, but do you like them, do you enjoy that they’re only open at certain hours, really for the convenience of the bureaucrats and the little stuffed men in their uniforms, do you enjoy the packs of whey-faced tourists shuffling endlessly through the halls, being exposed to art so they can say they saw something they can’t possibly comprehend? Wouldn’t you like to have all day to contemplate a painting, this painting perhaps, at any hour of the day, all by yourself? Like Don Gaspar did with this one, or as he did with Velázquez’s Venus, or as Phillip the Fourth did with the other paintings this man did for him? Wouldn’t that be fine?”

I agreed it would be fine, but that it was like wishing you could swim like a fish or fly like a bird, a useless desire, and then his eyes heated up and he said, “Not at all.”

He pointed to the portrait. “Do you think that man would ever think of allowing his swineherds and scullery maids into his gallery to gawp at his Venus and Cupid?

I laughed and said, “Probably not, but he’s long dead; things have changed.”

“Not as much as you think, perhaps,” he said. “There are still men like that, and I am obviously one of them, because this picture will never hang in a museum. As for the others, let’s say that they are men of great wealth, power, and discrimination, with private collections of which the world knows nothing. These are the men I deal with, Wilmot, and I assure you it is very profitable to do so.”

I didn’t get what he meant, so I said, “You might be right. I wouldn’t know, not being an art dealer.”

“No, you are a painter, and a painter as gifted as Velázquez in your way. I mean to say, if I asked you to paint me, in just that style, I have every confidence that you could do it.”

He gave me an inquiring look, and I said I probably could. He said, “When I saw that ceiling you painted, I was astounded. Because you know, it was better than Tiepolo, lusher, more lively, but still identifiable as his. Do you know, I have been following your work for many years.”

“Really? That’s strange, I haven’t painted for the gallery trade in a long time.”

“No, I meant the pastiches. The advertisements and magazine illustrations. I said to myself, this fellow, whyever is he wasting his time with this garbage? He really knows how to paint in the grand manner, and not the degraded form that has dominated that sort of painting for a hundred and fifty years-Landseer, Bouguereau, and so forth-but as the old masters painted, with penetration and density and passion. You seemed like a man born out of his time.”

I felt a bubble of tension form in my belly and rise into my throat so that I had to swallow a lump, first, because since my breakdown this was the first independent, undeniable confirmation that the miserable life I recalled was real in some objective sense; and second, because for the first time in my adult life I’d found someone who really understood who I was.

I managed to say, “Well, thank you. I’ve often felt that way myself.”

“I’m sure. I also am a man born outside of his time, so we have something in common, you and I. So when Castelli mentioned that he was repairing his palazzo and wished to hire an artist, I naturally thought of you and so he made the offer through Mark Slade.”

“Well, then, thank you, again.”

“Yes, but this is really nothing compared to what you are capable of, isn’t it so? There you were copying an existing design, but of course, you can paint from your own imagination as well, as Velázquez did, as Rubens did, and so forth. Fate has brought us together, yes?” Here a smile, a charming one, we men of the world sharing a moment. Okay, to be honest, I was bowled over a little. Like I say, stuff like this doesn’t happen to me on an average day in New York.

He led me back to the living room of the suite and had lunch served; waiters brought in a table and a whole spread, with wine and everything, and we ate convivially enough. Krebs pulled Mark out of the freezer, to which Mark responded like a toy poodle. I was a little loopy from all the wine and so it took a while for me to pick up that the conversation had swung around to me, that somehow an arrangement had been made that involved me doing something and that a million dollars was involved. Mark had neglected to tell me that I was part of some done deal.

So I said, “Excuse me, guys, I seem to be missing something. What am I supposed to do for my million?”

There fell a silence, and Krebs shot Mark a look that turned him moth-wing green. Krebs said, “I thought you had thoroughly briefed Wilmot on this project.”

Mark spluttered some lame excuse, but Krebs shut him down. He gave me a look like a stainless steel rod, no smiles now. He said, “When Velázquez was in Rome, according to reliable testimony, he made four paintings of women in the nude, in all probability for Don Gaspar himself. As everyone knows, only one of them survives, the so-called Rokeby Venus. You’re going to paint one of the others, in the same style and with the same skill. And, later, who knows? There may be other opportunities in that line.”

Okay, so at first I figured this was the Vanity Fair job again, which was cool, but then I thought, Why so much money? I recalled Mark’s crackpot scheme to sell real-fakes to the masters of the universe, and for a bit I thought this was the same on a larger scale. I asked about that, and he said, “No, I am not interested in decorations for the nouveau riche. I am interested in a painting that is stylistically and physically indistinguishable from a genuine Velázquez-accurate in every respect: the stretchers, the canvas, the pigments, all must be period. And that requires a certain skill, which I am willing to pay for.”

So then-duh!-I got it.

I said, “You’re going to sell it as genuine, aren’t you? You’re paying me a million bucks to forge a Velázquez.”

The F-word, once out in the air, didn’t seem to affect him at all. He said, “Call it what you like. You understand, Wilmot, there is an immense private demand for old masters, not to mention the attraction of the subject matter. Who would not want to have their own Venus by Velázquez? And this sort of thing has been going on for years. You go to a museum and you read the little tags and so you know, this is a Tintoretto, this is a Vermeer, and mostly that attribution is based on people like Duveen or Berenson or even your friend here, whose primary interest is in selling paintings for large sums. But the main thing is the quality of the painting, what it does to the eye and the heart. If the painting speaks to the eye and the heart, who cares if it came from the brush of Titian or from someone just as good?”

I pointed out that it was, like, still illegal, and that I preferred not to go to prison, because when any unknown old master painting showed up at auction, not to mention a Velázquez, people would ask questions, there were forensic tests…but he waved his hand in the air, brushing away flies.

“First of all,” he said, “there is no question of any auctions. This will be a strictly private sale, for cash. And as far as forensics go, I have people who are experts in this, they will advise you. Besides this, there is no illegality without a complaint, and there will be no complaint. The clients will be happy, you will be happy, I will be happy, even Mr. Slade here will be happy. Happiness all around, what could be wrong with that?”

“Nothing, I guess. Look, no offense, but this is a little strange for me. Can I think about it a little before I decide?”

So Krebs kind of leans forward and makes a little tent with his hands, and now he has a different kind of smile.

He said, “My friend, you put me in something of an uncomfortable position. Arrangements have been made with various people on the understanding that you are agreed on this project. Monies have been advanced, and the kind of people who advance monies for such a thing are not the Deutsche Bank. Also, you are now privy to the plan. If I now go back to my people and say, well, Wilmot will not do it, then I am in big trouble and, I am very much afraid, so are you and so is your friend Mark. Here we are in beautiful Venice, the home of the oubliette, you know? The little hole in the floor where you drop the fellow who has become inconvenient? You wait for the right tide, of course, and all your errors are flushed away by the sea. I’m sad to say I have very unforgiving partners.”

It was the kind of situation where you can’t really believe it’s happening to you, and I kind of chuckled, like he was a big kidder, and said, “Who are these partners?”

He kept smiling, as at an idiot child: no, we mustn’t stick the fork in the wall socket, dear.

“They prefer to remain silent partners, very discreet people, these partners. In any case I urge you to reconsider your position. Really, it’s a choice between being rich and happy or else all three of us floating out into the laguna.”

“What about Franco? Is he going to float too?”

I looked at Franco, who was standing in the corner with his arms folded. He gave me a white-toothed smile too. Everyone was happy except Mark, who looked like a piece of old Gorgonzola.

Krebs said, “Oh, Franco! Franco will be fine. Franco doesn’t work for me, you see. He is a representative of the interests I was just discussing. In fact, I believe he would actually participate in the disposals, should they become necessary. With great regret, I’m sure.”

He clapped his hands; Mark jumped an inch off his cushion.

“But…why are we dwelling on hypothetical unpleasantness? You will do the job, yes?”

I nodded. “Now that you put it in those terms…I would be happy to.”

He said, “Excellent!” and extended his hand, and we shook.

“And now you are in the great Venetian tradition of contrafazzione, in which I believe you have already begun with your marvelous Tiepolo. Wilmot, I don’t think you have yet understood that now you have entered a completely different mode of being. Before this you belonged to the world of people who wait in lines like sheep, at the tram, at the airport, and scrabble for a living because there is never enough, and eat shit every day. You have before now wasted yourself making pictures for magazines and have had to wait in the anterooms of men who are not fit to clean your boots. And when you became ill, or your children became ill, then you also had to wait, wait for some doctor to give you a moment of his so valuable time. You have a sick child, yes? You have no idea of what it will now be like for you and this child. The finest care, the finest! Clinics in Switzerland…do you need organs? Expensive drugs? There is no question you will get what you require, and with a smile too, and with no delay.”

I said something stupid about the forgery business having a good health care plan. He ignored me; he was in full flood and went on for quite a while about the difference between the proles and their masters, and all about how the masters deserved the art and the proles didn’t, and how wonderful it was going to be for me, probably not a set of opinions you’d be likely to hear in New York society, but maybe I was wrong, maybe this was how these people talked all the time when people like me weren’t around. It was an interesting change, anyway, from hanging around with rich liberals. And then he said something that really got to me.

He said, “You are a great artist, Wilmot, and now that we have discovered one another you will fulfill your destiny, you will be my Velázquez. This is what you have wanted your whole life-to paint like this and be rewarded for it, am I not right?”

And, you know, he was. That’s what I wanted. That is what I’d always wanted, and never knew until that moment.

I said, “And you’re the king of Spain.”

He nodded and said, “Yes. I am the king of Spain.” No irony. We were in an irony-free zone, which I also found strange and bracing.

And I said, “Okay, Your Majesty. Where do you want this painting done? Here in Venice?”

And he said, “No, in Rome, of course. It’s all arranged.”

Slotsky and I went out to the launch and boarded it, and as soon as we’d cleared the dock I turned to him and said, “Well, Mark, you really know how to show a girl a good time.”

“Jesus Christ, Wilmot! Do you think I knew what that crazy fucker was going to propose? I just thought he was going to give you another restoration job. Do you think I like being threatened with fucking death? I’m an art dealer, for crying out loud! I thought I was going to crap in my pants there.”

“Don’t bullshit me, buddy. I think we’re way the fuck out of the bullshitting regions now. I’ve heard a little about Herr Krebs from another source; he’s not just your everyday old masters dealer, and if I knew it, so did you. You set this whole thing up, but you were too chickenshit to let me in on it before he proposed it and it was too late. Why? Because you knew goddamn well I would never have come if I’d known. So spill!”

He said, “I swear to God I didn’t know he was talking about a forgery. I never would have gotten you into this if-”

I stepped closer to him, put my arm around his shoulders, and grabbed his near arm.

“Let me interrupt you here, Mark,” I said, close to his ear. “I am angry. I’m a mild kind of guy, but like many mild guys, when I blow my top I’m out of control. I’m shaking from the adrenaline and I probably have the superhuman strength you read about, and so, my little man, if you don’t fucking level with me about Krebs and this whole deal, I am going to pick you up and throw you over the side of this vessel.”

And after a little struggle, out it came, because I really would have tossed him in the drink, and he knew it. I think it was the four-thousand-dollar suit and the five-hundred-dollar shoes more than the fear of actually drowning.

“Okay, here’s the whole thing,” he said. “First, what do you know about art theft?”

“Enough to know that ninety-five percent of it is bozos grabbing pictures off the wall and running out the door. Most museum security is a joke.”

“Exactly. But here I’m talking about the other five percent. I’m talking well-known paintings that can never be sold openly. Assuming they’re stolen by halfway smart thieves, what do they get out of it?”

“Ransom?”

“There’s that, but the fact is that when professional thieves lift major works of art, they want them for purposes of collateral. Criminal enterprises need to raise money the same as legitimate ones, and obviously they can’t go to legitimate sources of credit. A twenty-million-dollar painting is light, portable, easily hidden. I give you my painting, and you give me the five mil I need to buy heroin or armaments, and then when I’ve made my pile I pay you back plus your vig and you give me back my work of art. If the deal goes sour, you get to keep the painting. There are paintings we know of that’ve been used this way multiple times. It’s better than drugs or cash because there’s less possibility of pilferage, a little like commercial paper for bad guys.”

“I thought those boys worked by shooting people if they didn’t pay.”

“Oh, they do, they do, but that doesn’t do shit for their cash flow. With the artwork, they’re covered.”

“And where does our friend come into this?”

“I’ll tell you where. Think about it: at any one time there are a couple of dozen major works of art floating around the underworld, and these guys are not usually connoisseurs. They got no use for a Renoir. After the need for collateral is over, or if the party who has it in pawn needs some ready cash, what does he do? He’s got something worth twenty mil and he’s got no fucking idea in the world how to realize it. That’s what Krebs does.”

“He sells stolen artworks for criminals. Terrific. Who does he sell them to?”

“The people he was talking about. Rich fuckers who don’t give a damn.”

“And let me guess-you find the rich fuckers for him.”

“What’re you, nuts? I’m a legitimate dealer, I can’t be associated with the sale of stolen goods.”

“So what’s your end of the deal?”

“I’m a consultant.”

I laughed in his face.

“Seriously,” he said. “No kidding. He needs someone to talk to.”

“Who, Krebs? Mark, with all due respect, Krebs doesn’t need you to advise him about paintings.”

“No, but he does need a legitimate dealer to get him close to the museums. Not that the big houses are above handling dodgy stuff, but Krebs is poison. So when the time comes, it turns out that someone not to be named has offered Mark Slade Associates the stolen Renoir. Does the museum want it back? Of course they do, and so do the insurance companies who paid out. I arrange for the transfer and take a commission. The thief gets something, Krebs is insulated, the insurer cuts their loss, the picture’s back on the wall. Everyone is happy.”

“So you’re a front. A beard.”

“If you want to call it that. As far as the museum is concerned, I’m a hero. And this is all very discreet. I mean, you know me for years and you had no idea.”

“But I’m sort of not surprised. Where do the cops figure in all this?”

“What cops? Some of this isn’t even reported, and what is reported, well, most cops think there are better uses of their time, the guy who holds up liquor stores with a gun, drug gangs, rapists. They could care less, really, if some rich assholes lose a couple of paintings, especially if they get them back. They might get interested if an art theft led to a drug gang, or a big arms dealer, but if not, then not.”

“Not even about forgery?”

“What’re you talking forgery? Forgery is I steal some checks and draw money from your account. Forgery is a fake will, Auntie Agatha’s money goes to the evil nephew and not the old cats’ shelter. There’s an injured party. Here, you’re producing a work of art indistinguishable from an original. Indistinguishable! Where’s the injury? The buyer looks at it and he’s full of exactly the same pride and pleasure as he would be if the work came from some guy who died three hundred years ago. And like Krebs said, how the hell do we know if anything is genuine? Because a so-called scholar who was getting paid by a dealer said so? The whole attribution thing is horseshit from beginning to end.”

“So we might as well get rich off the corruption.”

“Damn straight! Look, you probably don’t know any Wall Street types, bond traders, mergers and acquisitions guys, hedge fund managers, but I do. They’re my best customers. Chaz, believe me, these guys are assholes. They know nothing. When the market’s up they’re geniuses, and when the market’s down it’s not their fault, and they walk away with billions. These are people who run up a fifteen-thousand-dollar bar bill in an evening and they don’t even think about it. And you want me to be scrupulous about the authenticity of some painting I sell them?”

“It’s a point of view.”

“It’s the only one that makes sense, given the world as it is. Look, Chaz, I love painting. That’s something we have in common, me and Krebs. It’s not just commodities or bragging rights for us. It’s the only fucking genuine thing that’s left. And I love your work. You’re a wonderful artist, and over the years every time I’d see one of those things you’d done for some magazine, it’d stab me in the heart; I’d think, What a waste! And okay, you wouldn’t show your work, I don’t even want to ask why, but, honest to God, I always wanted to see you get out of that grungy world, busting your ass for three, four, five grand a pop, living in that shithole you’re in, never having any leisure, none of the respect your work deserves, and when this opportunity came up-”

“How did it come up?”

“Well, like he said, he’s a big fan.”

“That wasn’t bullshit?”

“No, and in fact that’s how I was able to get close to him. I met him at a party at Castelli’s. I’d sold him-I mean Castelli-a nice Correggio red chalk study of St. Mark, and I got introduced. This is like seven, eight years ago. Of course, I’d heard of Krebs, and we got to talking about painting, I mean contemporary stuff, and how we neither of us would hang on our own personal walls the work of anyone who couldn’t draw, and we talked about who could and couldn’t and he brought up your name. He’d seen that poster you did for the AIDS group, the Bosch? He thought it was amazing, and he was blown away when I told him you were like practically my best friend.”

“Former best friend.”

“Oh, come off it, Wilmot! I saw your eyes light up when he started talking about the money. Stop acting like a girl who just lost her cherry.”

I gave him a hard look, or what was meant to be one, but I knew there was no moral force behind it, and so did he.

The boat touched, bounced; the deck man leaped off and secured the prow to a cleat. I said, “Yeah, well, why the hell not?”

Mark grinned and clapped me on the shoulder. We walked into Venice like regular people.

Back at my hotel there was an envelope waiting for me containing instructions for my trip to Rome. Interesting. Were they so sure I would agree, or did Krebs have agents ready to deliver such instructions at a moment’s notice? I found I didn’t care and that I was not offended. So they had my number? So what? In any case, there was a private jet leaving in the morning. I would get on it with Franco, but until then I was free.

Then out of the hotel, walking aimlessly in the direction of San Zaccaria. Man, I was scared to death but full of incredible energy, it was like waking up in Oz, intensified color, little shivers on my skin. I passed the San Zaccaria vaporetto stop, where a boat waited; I wandered aboard and thought it might possibly be my very last trip ever on public transportation. We putt-putted around the lagoon and I got off at San Basilio in the Dorsoduro. I recalled Krebs talking about San Sebastiano, and I thought I’d drop in and take a look. The campo there in front of the church and the Scuola dei Carmini is one of the few places in Venice with any trees, pretty neat, but the Scuola building was closed. I waved a fifty-euro note in the guard’s face because I’m now one of the people who don’t ever have to wait. Inside there were walls and walls and walls of Giambattista Tiepolo’s work, which I liked but thought a bit too heavily influenced by that of Charles P. Wilmot, Jr.

Then I went to the church itself, which is entirely covered by Veronese paintings, except there’s one by Rubens, one of the very few Rubens paintings in Venice, Esther Before Ahasuerus. It was dark in there so I had to peer close, and then I noticed that the painting wasn’t a Rubens at all but a Titian, Danaë Receiving the Golden Rain, and for a strange transitory second I thought, Boy, this is a funny painting for a church, that splayed white body, luscious, and I am in El Escorial and I am caught up in a strange emotion…fear, a little, but mainly joy, elation. It is one of the best days of my life, as great almost as when I was made painter to His Majesty’s household, because next to me, listening respectfully to what I have to say, is Peter Paul Rubens, the greatest man in the whole world, save only His Majesty of Spain and the Pope.

He is telling me that I have to go to Italy, to see the classics and the great Italian painters, and although he is the most diplomatic of men, in fact a professional diplomat, still I am conscious of a tone, a suggestion that Madrid is not the center of the artistic universe, that being the painter to the king of Spain is perhaps not all that a painter can ask for, and I understand that yes, I must travel to Italy, and I begin to think how this can be arranged with the king, and with my lord the Count-Duke Olivares, who is my patron and besides has his hand on the purse.

So we talk about Titian some more and how he obtains his effects, how he can create motion out of controlling the eye of the viewer, and how this is done with color and composition, a technical problem that I wish to solve because he is suggesting that it is one thing I lack, that all Spanish painters of the present time lack: the figures are still, like tombstones; passion, yes, but not this Italian movement.

And then it’s later, or another day, and he’s copying one of His Majesty’s Titians and I’m watching him paint, he’s demonstrating something and just then one of the dwarfs comes trotting along, I can’t recall its name, an ugly squat thing, and when it sees us it begins to tumble and makes faces, and not wishing to be distracted I snap at the thing and tell it to be off. And it goes scuttling away.

Rubens pauses and watches the creature pass. I am surprised when he asks, “What do you think of your king?”

So I make the conventional response, or start to, but he shakes his head, and says, “No, Don Diego, I wish to hear not the courtier but the man. I know he’s been good to you and that you’re a loyal subject, but were Philip not king by God’s grace, then how would you judge him?”

I say, “As a painter he is not much,” and he laughs and says, “Nor as a king, I think. He is a fool, a decent man enough, but not a brain in his head. And your Olivares is as bad. All Europe knows it. You think not?”

He points to the painting he is copying, Titian’s Charles the Fifth on Horseback, and says, “When he ruled Spain, it was out of all question the mightiest realm upon earth, and now eighty years later you cannot beat the Dutch. Or the French, or the English. In that same time, you have brought from the Indies a mountain of gold and silver, a mountain! And gold and silver still land at Cádiz every year. Yet Castille and Aragon are among the poorest lands in Europe, miserable villages, miserable cities, miserable roads, rags and staring bones wherever you go. Flanders is rich, Holland is rich, England is rich, France is richest of all, yet Spain with all its gold is poor. How can this be?”

I say I don’t know, I am ignorant of such things, but also that the magnificence of the palaces in Madrid belies his accusation.

Rubens says, “Yes, gold enough for palaces, if barely. His Majesty still owes me five hundred reales, and I doubt I shall have it before I leave. Now listen to me, sir. You are a fine painter and may be a great one someday. As great as him, perhaps”-he gestures grandly with his brush at the Titian-“or me. I have never seen anyone paint as you do. I devise a painting in my mind, and think it out, and block it in, the bones of the piece, as it were, and perhaps I will do the faces, too, and let my people paint the rest. For as you know, I must earn my bread by my brush: I am not the painter to the king of Spain. But you, while you know little of composition and your figures are arranged anyhow and pressed together like a crowd in a tavern, still you have the gift of a living brush, the painting flies out of you like breath. But you must go to Italy, sir, Italy’s the place to learn how to build a painting. And soon, while the king still has enough to pay your way.”

And he laughed. We both laughed, although my laugh was a little forced.

“And another thing. You are a born painter and have made yourself a good courtier enough, but you will never make a diplomat, sir. It is your face, sir. While I was slighting your king and country just now, you had a look of murder on your face, and that is a look we diplomats can never wear. But you will do well; the king loves you, I have heard him say it. And I will say more, for I have known more kings than you, sir. They love us, yes, but they love us in the way they love their dwarfs and fools, like that little fellow just now, amusing for a moment and then got rid of with a kick and a curse. Never think otherwise, sir, however sweetly His Majesty praises you; they are none of them to be trusted.”

And now I am in a room brightly lit with candles, speaking with my lord the Count-Duke of Olivares, the king’s prime minister, about Italy, and he says they are sending General Spinola there, I can go with him. His Majesty will approve the voyage and will ask you to buy paintings for him, but for the love of God keep down the cost!

Then I am in a different place, walking down a narrow street, and everything is marble, old marble. Faces crumbled with time stare out of the architecture; there is a different smell and a different feel to the air, it is damp, and the women have a different look to them, bolder and more saucy, I think. I’m in Italy, in a crowded street, and I look around for my party, my servants, and there are some artists and officials of this city, I can’t recall which one, Modena, Naples…?

I move to push by some people. There is a bridge of some kind ahead that looks familiar, and someone says, “Mister, can you take a picture of us, please?” and sticks out her hand, and there’s a digital camera in it.

I stared dumbly at her and her husband said, “Honey, he’s a foreigner, he can’t speak English,” but the woman said, “Yes, he can. You’re an American, aren’t you?”

A middle-aged woman with a Midwestern accent, small, tanned, her husband huge by her in a yellow golf jacket; the color hurt my eyes. The bridge was the Rialto, and it took me a half minute or so to understand what the little silvery thing in my hand was. Oh, right, a camera; so I take the picture and give the camera back to her. Now her smile was uncertain; she thought I was some kind of maniac.

I just stood there like I was one of those poles they use to tie up the gondolas while the tourists swarmed around me, thinking, How the hell did I walk blind across half of Venice, from San Sebastiano in Dorsoduro all the way through San Polo and the Rialto without falling into the water?

Then I ducked into a bar and had a grappa, and then another, and then a beer. Watched the tourists for a while, and when a group of seventeenth-century folks strolled by I blinked and swallowed booze until they weren’t there anymore.

Later I looked it up on the Web in an Internet café. It checked out: Velázquez and Rubens met when Rubens came to Madrid on a diplomatic mission and also to paint for the king. He did an equestrian portrait of Philip that got hung up in place of the one Velázquez did, which maybe was just politeness, but in any case the two painters got along okay. Rubens gave him some good advice, and Velázquez, age thirty, went off to Italy the next year. I had lived through his entrance into Venice the other day.

The funny part about this was that I was kind of glad to still be crazy in this way, because in having fantasies about being Velázquez I was still being who I was, if you get what I’m saying. The me Chaz Wilmot. The pasticheur, the coming forger. Not that other guy in New York who I didn’t want to think about. A small plank to cling to in the whirlpool, but it was all I had. I left the café and returned to my hotel, where I packed and drank in a local bar until I was in the mood for sleep, and then slept and woke up.

A pang of terror upon awakening. I checked. Still me.

We took off in a private jet from Nicelli Airport, which is a small airport right on the Lido, just east of the city. A Gulf-stream II, and I was trying to act cool, like I was used to this kind of travel, which I supposed I would have to learn to like from now on, although the only person to impress on the scene was Franco, who ignored me. I was alone with him in the cabin except for a pretty young woman who couldn’t do enough for us. I drank a bottle of perfectly chilled Taittinger, in memory of Dad, and got a little looped, and wondered what would happen if I turned into Velázquez on an airplane. Would I go crazy? More than I am, I mean.

Franco drank only coffee, probably because he was on duty, and read an Italian sports magazine. Not a talkative fellow, Franco. I asked him who he worked for, and he said he worked for Signor Krebs, even though we both knew it wasn’t true. Or maybe Krebs was lying, I thought. Maybe there was no Mr. Big behind all this, maybe he just said that to get me scared. But I wasn’t scared, or at least not of the forgery business. As far as that went, he had me at the million dollars.

I recall studying Franco’s head, a look like one of Masaccio’s Romans, that handsome brutality without any hint of sadism. A button man, as they say, a professional. Would he kill me, if he were ordered to? No question. I found then that I didn’t mind it as much as I probably would have if it had been presented to me beforehand as an option. Most of the great painters before the nineteenth century passed their lives rubbing shoulders with people who would’ve cut throats for a handful of coins. There was actually something terrifically baroque about it, the farthest thing from the art hags of Manhattan, invigorating as pure oxygen.

We landed in Rome and drove in a Mercedes to a house on the Via L. Santini, one of the little streets that run off the Piazza di S. Cosimato in Trastevere. We had the whole house. There was a furniture shop on the ground floor selling antiques they fake in the back; I had the piano nobile upstairs, a nice three-bedroom apartment, and my studio was one flight up. When we arrived, Franco turned me over to an old guy named Baldassare Tasso, who was going to help me with the work. Apparently he was the head forger. He showed me the studio where I was to paint and explained that the entire surface of the room, floors, ceiling, walls, had been stripped back to the seventeenth century or prior, the debris vacuumed and washed and vacuumed again. The windows were sealed shut and all the air intake came from a vent that led to a heat pump and a HEPA filtration system designed to catch and trap anything from the twenty-first century. I was supposed to enter the studio through an anteroom, in which I had to remove any clothing except for that made of leather, cotton, linen, and wool. I had to work in a natural fiber zone, for what a shame if after all my work there were fragments of nylon or polyethylene stuck to the paint! The room was furnished with an antique wooden easel, some old tables and chairs, and a couch, all vetted for period. The top floor was where the cook, Signora Daniello, and her daughter and her daughter’s kid lived. Me and Franco and Tasso were in residence in the apartment. Everything was as jolly as hell, smiles all around.

After we moved in, Franco handed me an envelope containing a black Deutsche Bank MasterCard and an ATM card for my account, which I was not aware that I had ever applied for, but that’s apparently how things got done in my new life. We had a lunch, which was a really terrific risotto; Sra. Daniello’s daughter, whose name I didn’t get, was the housemaid and waitress, and I think Franco had something going there or wanted to. After lunch and a small traditional nap I took a walk down the Viale di Trastevere until I found a bank, stuck my new card in the slot, got five hundred euros for walking-around money, and learned that I had an available balance of a hundred thousand euros.

I went back to the house sort of floating over the quaint cobblestones. Franco was standing outside the house looking anxious; he asked me where I’d been, and I told him and asked him whether there’d been a mistake in my account, so much money in it, and he said, no, Signor Krebs was very generous to those who work for him. And now a big smile. I got the sense that he was glad I was back, that he was supposed to watch me all the time.

So I figured I better get right to work, yes indeedy, and went up to the studio, where I found Baldassare taking the paper off a flat package. After he unwrapped it he set it on the easel. It was about fifty by seventy inches, a Flight to Egypt so dark and dirty you could just about make out what a talentless piece of shit it was, some Caravaggio wannabe who could barely draw.

“What do you think, signor?” he asked. I made the Italian choking gesture and he laughed. “Who’s it by?” I asked him, and he said,

“A name lost to art history, but it dates from around 1650, it was painted in Rome, and he used the same very-fine-weave linen canvas that Velázquez liked. So we will clean this shit off and you will paint on his good seventeenth-century glue-size primer.”

“And the stretchers will be period perfect too,” I added, and he got a funny, sneaky look on his face and said, “Yes, eventually.” I had no idea what he meant until a good while later.

He spoke slowly in a mixture of Italian and English, and I could understand him pretty well. A scrawny bald guy, he must’ve been around seventy, little gold-framed glasses, a bald dome with liver spots all over his scalp and a fringe of white curls. He looked like Gepetto in the cartoon Pinocchio, complete to the bib apron and the rolled-up sleeves and the neck-cloth.

I asked him about paints and brushes and he led me over to one of the tables, where a group of bottles and jars was neatly arranged along with what looked like a bunch of used bristle brushes. With some pride in his voice he told me what I was looking at.

“Ground pigments, all exactly similar to the ones Velázquez used in 1650; we have calcite to add transparency to the glazes, naturally. For yellow, tin oxide; for the reds, vermillion of mercury, red lake, red iron oxide; for the blues you have smalt and azurite. We’ve oxidized the smalt so it’s grayer than it would have been when it was supposedly painted on, so you’ll have to take that into consideration when you use it. Then the browns-brown iron oxide, ochre, manganese oxide. No greens-he always made his greens, as I’m sure you know.”

“Yeah, but what about the red lake? That’s organic. It can be dated.”

He grinned and nodded like he was acknowledging a dull but willing pupil. “Yes, that’s true, and he used a lot of it. We were able to locate a store of very old red cloth, and we extracted the dyestuffs with alkali. Spectrographically they’re from cochineal and lac, which is consistent with what your man used, and the carbon isotopes should give us no worries. The same for the blacks. We used charcoal from archaeological sites. They burned a lot of buildings in the Thirty Years’ War, and a lot of people too. And they can date white too, you know.”

I didn’t know, except that you had to use lead, not zinc or titanium, I knew that much, and he said, “Yes, of course, we use lead white, the so-called flake white, but now they can analyze the ratio of various radioisotopes in the lead and can date when the lead was smelted from the galena ore. Therefore we have to make our flake white from seventeenth-century lead, which we have done. The museums of Europe are full of old bullets and the churches are roofed with old lead. It is not so difficult. In the cellar there is an earthenware vat where we corrode the lead with acetic acid to make lead carbonate. We use electric heaters instead of burying the vat in dung, but that should not affect the authenticity. The pigment is a little coarse, but you can use that to good effect, as Velázquez did. Extremely poisonous, of course, signor, you must not point your brushes in your mouth. And as for these brushes, I think you’ll agree we have done well.”

He held up a jar with a dozen or so brushes of all sizes. I’d never seen any like them before; the handles were heavy, dark wood, and the hairs were tied into the ferule with fine brass wire.

Baldassare said, “These are on loan from a museum in Munich. Genuine seventeenth century, in case a tiny hair should slip out into the painting-we don’t want someone to say, oh, this badger died in 1994.”

“On loan?” I said.

“In a manner of speaking, signor. They will be returned when we are done with them.”

“Who did they belong to?”

“Attributed to Rubens, but who knows? Perhaps they are forgeries too.” A big smile, just like Franco’s, but with fewer teeth. Smiles all around this place, and it made me nervous.

He showed me the divan where I was going to pose my model, with the velvet draperies and bedclothes in the approximate Velázquez colors: red, a greeny gray, and white, all as naturally fibrous as could be. A heavy wood-framed rectangular mirror was standing against the wall.

“You have the model too,” I said.

He shrugged. “We have Sophia. And her boy. We can get another, but we would prefer to keep all of this work in the house, as a matter of security.”

So I asked, “Who’s Sophia?” and he looked surprised and said, “She served you your risotto this afternoon.”

“Oh, the waitress,” I said, and I honestly couldn’t recall what she looked like.

“Yes, she helps her mother, but she’s an artist. Like you.”

I said, “You mean a forger.”

A nod, a smile, an Italian gesture of the hand. “A forger is an artist. She does antiquities and drawings, small things, very good quality. The boy will pose too, you know, with the mirror. The Cupid. Naturally, in the faces you will use your imagination, we don’t want someone to say, you know, I saw that woman with that little boy on the Number Fourteen bus.”

I agreed that would be embarrassing, and then for the rest of the afternoon I watched him rub out the crappy Flight into Egypt.

He used flame and turpentine-and not just any turps, he used the kind I’d be using for the painting, real Strasbourg turpentine made from the resin of the Tyrolian silver fir. Terrific smell, a little Pavlov in there; when it hit my nose I couldn’t wait to get back to work. Fresco is neat but there’s nothing like oil, just the feel of it down the brush to your hand and the way it shines, rich and sweaty, and of course that smell. Baldassare was talking about varnish, how we’d use real mastic from Pistaccia trees, the finest Chios grade, prepared with that same turpentine.

“How are we going to age it?” I asked him, and he stopped cleaning and made that gesture of the finger to the side of the nose, indicating a secret.

“You will see, but first we do the painting, okay?”

The cleaning and the drying of the canvas took a couple of days, during which I wandered around the city, on foot and by public transportation. Franco offered to drive me anyplace I wanted to go, but I preferred to mooch around the city myself. I hadn’t been in Rome since I came with Dad at age ten. Obviously, it’s changed, becoming more like everywhere else.

I looked at a lot of pictures but I kept coming back to the Doria Pamphili and Velázquez’s Pope. Joshua Reynolds thought it was one of the best portraits in the world. Second that. The first time I ever saw it I was terrified and had nightmares about it for weeks afterward. “Innocent, my ass!” is what my father said, before giving me his usual close reading of the work. He was always going on about the inherent superiority of an oil portrait to a photograph, especially when the image was literally as large as life, as here. You don’t see many life-size photographs, and even when you see actors on the screen, larger than life, as the saying goes, it’s still not the same. There’s something about the human scale that finds a trigger in our brains, and this painting has the usual legends attached to it, of servants coming into a room where it was hanging and mistaking it for the actual man, bowing and so forth.

But its power comes from a lot more than scale, because a life-size Kodachrome print would be a joke. It’s not mere illusion, has nothing to do with those fussy little nature mort or trompe l’oeil paintings you see in the side rooms of museums, it’s its own thing, the life of two men, artist and subject interpenetrated, coming alive, the vital loom of a life in a moment of time-no wonder the servants bowed. And technically, the handling of the satin of the camauro and the manteletta and the dense fall of the rochetta, white but made of every color but white, and the rendering of the damp flesh of a living man-you can look at it for hours and digitize the fucking brushstrokes and penetrate it with X-rays, yet still at its heart there’s a mystery. All the balls he had to keep in the air at once, every brushstroke in balance with every other-and what strokes, exactly right, each one, and all perfectly free, loose, and graceful. I must be insane to pretend I can do this, is what I was thinking, to be absolutely honest, raving mad. And for gangsters too! I was starting to feel like the queen in Rumpelstiltskin: oh, sure, king, honey, I can spin straw into gold…

And at that point it struck me that the obscure names for his ecclesiastic garments had popped into my head as I studied them, and I was sure I had no idea what a rochetta was when I walked into the museum. I felt the hair stand up on my neck, and I left in a hurry, with a funny sense that something was on my heels.

I needed a drink after that and I found a café in the Corso and had a grappa. As I was drinking a beer to wash away the taste, I called Mark in New York and asked him to send the money from Castelli, minus commission and expenses, to Lotte. He said he would and he wanted to talk about what I was doing and how the you-know-what was turning out, but I didn’t want to talk to Mark and I got off the phone as soon as I could.

Then I made the call I’d been putting off, my guilt call to Lotte at home. It was nine or so in the evening there and she sounded sleepy and irritable.

“So you finally decided to call us,” she said. “Honestly, Chaz, what are you thinking?”

“I’m sorry,” I said lamely. “I’ve been working really hard.”

“Yes, that’s always been your excuse. You think you can treat people any way you like and it will be all fine because you are being productive.”

“I said I was sorry, Lotte.”

“That’s not enough. I have been worried sick about you. You have some kind of psychotic break, you are arrested and sent to Bellevue, and then, instead of getting help, you run away to Europe-”

“How are the kids?” I said, hoping to change the subject to the safer one of our mutual parenthood, a ploy that had often worked in the past.

“Oh, yes, the kids! Their father has disappeared without a word of good-bye, after they saw him with a bloody face in the Post being taken by the police-how do you think they are?”

And more in this line, and I listened without fighting back or interrupting, and at last she wore it out and I smoothed things over with the lie that I would seek psychiatric help in Europe. We eased back into our usual conversational mode and I asked about the children again, and this time she said, “Oh, well, we had a small crisis the other day. Rudolf is no more.”

“Finally. He was old for a hamster. What did he die of?”

“Of death, as Rose says with great solemnity. She took it very well, I must say. We all dressed in black and had a funeral in the back garden. Milo played the march from Saul on his flutophone and Rose did a eulogy that would have made a cat laugh. It was amazing that Milo could keep playing. She described hamster heaven in some detail. Apparently Baby Jesus visits it every day, before his bedtime. She’s constructed a shrine, with one of her shredder collages-Rudolf escorted into said heaven by St. Peter and the angels, with an altar cloth made of shredder waste. It’s killingly funny, and Milo is under strict orders not to mock.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Fine, except the new drug makes him itch and he says he has no energy. I wish I trusted them more, but what can we do? At the end of the day our boy is a guinea pig, and that’s what we must put up with to keep him alive.”

I said, “You don’t have to worry about money for a while anyway, because I just told Slotsky to send you the proceeds from my restoration job. It should come to a little under two hundred grand.”

A small silence while she absorbed this, and then she said, “But, Chaz, what will you live on if you give us all of it?”

“Oh, that’s what I’m calling about, really. It sounds funny when you actually say it, but I have a patron.”

“A patron?”

“Yeah, like in the old days. A rich guy, a pal of the man I did the restoration for, he saw it and we got to talking and I sort of told him my sad story, and he said something like there’s no reason for an artist of your ability to have to grub in the marketplace, and he had a studio I could use rent-free and he’s promised to pay me a regular stipend and take everything I paint.”

“Who is this man?” she asked me, suspicion in her voice, warranted obviously; can she really tell a porker over the telephone? But not really a lie when you think about it; Krebs really is a patron and possibly less of a gangster than the old kings of Europe, considering the kind of shit they pulled as a matter of course-Krebs never sent his boys to burn a city and rape its women and burn people at the stake.

“His name’s Krebs,” I said. “He’s a German art dealer and collector. Mark set it up, but I’m not working through Mark. This is all directly for the collector.”

“That’s ridiculous. No one sells paintings like that. What will happen when your work is sold? Will you share in the proceeds?”

“Not clear, and I don’t care. I’m getting paid top dollar to please a single connoisseur who loves my work. Every artist in Europe had that arrangement before the modern period. Lotte, I’ve been looking for this all my life. And you’ve been yelling at me for years to do the best work I can, not jokes, Lotte, no more jokes. And the money…the money is fantastic. It means a completely new life for us.”

“As for example…”

“He’s going to give me a million for the painting I’m doing now.”

A longer pause here and a long, sad sigh. “Oh, Chaz,” she said,

“why do I even talk to you? I don’t know what to do.”

“What?”

“You are out of your mind, you are still in some kind of fantasy world. I’m sorry, I cannot do this-”

“Listen, it’s not a fantasy, Krebs is real. Ask Mark.”

“I don’t trust Mark. He’s perfectly capable of encouraging your insanity for his own purposes, and in any case, what you describe is impossible! No one could realize that much on your work in the market-”

“Lotte, there’s no market. That’s the point. He’s an eccentric zillionaire. He’s got private jets, private yachts, he can afford to have a private artist, just like Lorenzo the Magnificent and Ludovico Sforza and the rest of those guys.”

A long silence, and at last she said, “Well. Then I congratulate you. Honestly…I’m sorry if I sound doubtful, but it all seems like…I don’t know, some impossible and grandiose fantasy. You used to have them all the time when you were taking drugs, if you recall, so perhaps you’ll forgive me if I am not just now breaking out the champagne. By the way, my father rang and said he’d seen you and that you looked well.”

“So you know I’m not doping,” I said, maybe a little acerbic tone there, because she said, “I didn’t mean to imply any such thing. But, you know, it is my business-everyone is suspicious, the artists think they’re being cheated, the customers think the same, haggling, always haggling. No one comes in the door and says, I love this work and here is a check for what it says on the card. It’s always, if I buy two can I have twenty percent off? And I sell a work and then the artist sees it at auction and it sells for twice what he got, and he yells at me for undervaluing his work.”

“So quit. We don’t need the money for the gallery anymore.”

“Yes, your new fortune. I tell you, Chaz, I would like to meet this man and see with my own eyes what you have gotten into. Then maybe I’ll believe it.”

“Blessed are those who have not seen and believed.”

That got a laugh. “Well, if you quote the Bible I suppose I must become a little excited.” She sighed. “Ah, if only it were true! There are clinics in Switzerland that have had wonderful successes with children like Milo, where a month costs what I take in, gross, in my best year.”

“It’s covered. I’m telling you, Lotte, it’s a new world. Look, the other reason I called-I want you to come over here.”

“What, to Venice?”

“No, I’m in Rome. That’s where the studio is. I’ll send you first-class tickets, you’ll come, we’ll stay in a swanky hotel. When was the last time we did something like that? Never is when.”

“But the gallery. And the children-”

“The girl can handle the gallery for a few days and the kids’ll be fine with Ewa. Come on, Lotte, you can spare four, five days.”

And she agreed right away, which I thought was a little odd. Lotte’s response to poverty is the classic French one of bitterness, self-denial, and also resenting the pleasure others get in expending money. We used to fight about that a lot: we couldn’t ever go out for a nice meal, and when I did drag her out she always ordered the least expensive thing on the menu and drank a single glass of wine and sat like the chief mourner at a provincial funeral. She wasn’t like that when I met her; no, she knew how to let the good times roll. It was the kid getting sick. Or me. Maybe I have a special charism for making women bitter.

Two days later Franco and I picked her up at the airport and drove to the San Francesco, which is not quite the Danieli in Venice but is the best hotel in Trastevere. She was quiet, a little withdrawn, which I guess I had to expect, and when we got out of the Merc at the hotel, she gave me a look. Lotte, being a diplomatic brat, is used to the top end of things-or was before she married me-and the look said, can you really afford a place like this? And so I whipped out my magic black card and handed it to the desk clerk.

Who took it with both hands and made a little bow and was all smiles. He was about to check us into the room I’d reserved when Lotte put a hand on my arm and drew me aside.

“I want my own room,” she said.

“Why, you think I’m going to attack you in a frenzy of lust?”

“No, but I’m not here for a cozy holiday. A few months ago you were a raving maniac who pulled a knife on a gallery owner, and I would like to have at least one door between us if this maniac should happen to return.”

“Fine. So what is this, a tour of inspection, like a sanitary commission?”

Now she was standing in combat position, with her arms folded across her breasts and her jaw thrust out, and at that moment more than anything I wanted to tell her the whole thing. But I did not. I was terrified that if I spilled it her face would take on a certain look, one I was more than familiar with from the terminal stages of our marriage, in which shock, pain, and bone-deep disappointment each played a part. The suspicious and canny face she was now showing was not a natural part of her expressive repertoire, I knew. It was me that put it there, as surely as if I’d painted it on with oils. My mom used to wear it often, as a matter of fact, and now I’d given it to my beloved forever. Life is just so wonderful.

“If you like,” she said. “You say you have all this money, and I’ve seen some of it, but I want to be sure you are not in some insane delusion about the rest of it. It’s about our child, Chaz, and about his future. You see why it’s hard for me to trust you-”

“Sure. Okay, no problem. Two rooms. Can they be adjoining or do you have to be heavily isolated from the maniac?”

“Adjoining is fine,” she said coolly, and I turned again to the desk.

An elderly porter with the manners of an ambassador ushered us up to our rooms and got a tip commensurate with his mien. When he’d gone, we agreed to meet in an hour and go out to dinner. I tossed my bag onto what would be my lonely bed and left for the bar on the roof of the hotel, where I drank a couple of Camparis and watched the sky go dark and the shadows creep up the ochre walls of the little convent across the street until they vanished into blackness.

When I returned and knocked on the door of Lotte’s room, I found her ready to go, wearing a dress of just the rose pink that Fra Angelico used to clothe his angels in and a worn velvet jacket colored a sort of verdigris, very quattrocento. It suited her coloring, the dark blond hair, the dark eyes, an unusual combo, but one you see often in paintings from that period. From her Italian mother. And it’s a habit of Lotte’s to dress in colors, when everyone in her circles in New York wears black, as a sign, she says, of mourning for the death of art.

We walked down to the river and north and went to a restaurant I liked off the Piazza di Sta. Cecilia in Trastevere. Both of us had decided to forget about the big issues and the tension of the afternoon, and we had our usual out-of-marriage good time. After dinner we walked back slowly, arm in arm, and talked about light matters or were companionably silent for long stretches on the dark streets. In the hotel, we both went to our separate rooms, after a set of Euro-style cheek kisses, very civilized.

I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep; I paced and watched Italian TV with the sound off for a while, and then found myself waggling the knob of the door to the next room. It was unlocked. Meaning what? She’d neglected to lock her side? Or maybe this is how they did it in Italian hotels when a couple opted for adjoining rooms.

I walked in and sat at the little desk and watched her sleep, and after a while I took a couple of sheets of hotel stationery and the short pencil they supplied for taking phone messages and made a drawing of Lotte as she slept, the rich spill of hair, her ear, the lovely strong lines of neck, jaw, cheekbone. Then I went and retrieved one of the boxes of Staedtler pens I’d bought as presents for the kids and added color, and I was soon caught up in the technical problem of how to get interesting effects with the unsubtle chemical tones they put in these things, and I found myself cruising down the old expressionist highway, pushing the color with lots of overlayering, and it got to be kind of fun.

After that I went back to my room and did a portrait from memory of the two of us sitting up in bed, kind of Kirchneresque, but with the anatomy correct and more detailed, stronger drawing, a Wilmot, in fact, and this made me feel good, although I kept slipping into those strange dreamlike states you fall into at such times and then jerking awake.

And thinking, I have not been sleeping well; I wake from unpleasant dreams in which there are roaring monsters on the canals and half-naked women riding on their backs. And almost every night, even when I do manage to sleep, I am awakened by shouts and gunfire. During my time here there have been outbursts throughout the city, day and night, some affray between the great families of Venice, and the ambassador gives me to understand that it is ever thus. Yet also, Venice plays a dangerous game between the Pope and the power of Spain and the Empire; it was explained to me, but I cannot understand it, something to do with the principality of Montferrat. Assassins prowl the streets; yesterday I saw them fish a body from the canal. My copy of the Crucifixion of Our Lord by Tintoretto is almost done, and after that I will copy his Christ Giving Communion to the Disciples. Now that I have seen the paintings that are here, I am ashamed of how I have composed my own, but I count it ignorance rather than lack of skill. Once you have seen it done scores of times, you say, of course, this is how to arrange figures.

I think the best thing I have seen is the altarpiece that Titian did for the Pesaro family; there is nothing like it in Spain. He commands your eye with masses of color, so that you see the different parts of the work in the order he prescribes. It is like a Mass in itself, one thing following another, and each wonderful-St. Peter and the Virgin and Child, and the banner and the captive Turk and St. Francis and the family of Pesaro, with that remarkable boy staring at an onlooker from out of the picture-that face alone would make a masterpiece, and the audacity of it! But I can do this as well.

Now I hear shots and cries from the direction of San Marco. I think I will leave as soon as I am done with my copies and go on to Rome.

Then I was wide awake, sweating, my heart going fast. I’d come to out in the street; somehow I’d pulled my pants and shoes on and got out there. Terrific! That must’ve been his first visit to Venice in 1629. I always liked that Pesaro Titian myself. Strangely, my memories of this hallucination include memories of dreams he’d been having, and it appeared that he was dreaming my twenty-first-century life. Or I was somehow recalling my life while I was being him. The whole thing was unspeakably terrifying and wonderful at the same time, if you can imagine that, like I suppose skydiving is, or would be if you dove through time rather than space, and the experience began all by itself.

Anyway, this little excursion into woo-woo knocked me out pretty good, and I went back into the hotel, getting an interested look from the night man, and returned to my own room. I slipped the drawings I’d done under the door to Lotte’s room, fell into bed, and was instantly asleep. I woke up late the next morning, a little past ten. I cleaned up and dressed and tapped on the adjoining door. No answer. Then I noticed one of the drawings had been slid back onto my side. She’d folded a note onto the double portrait, on which she’d written: “!!!” and a heart with little electric lines around it, and “At breakfast, L.”

I went up to the roof café and found Lotte. She was sitting at a table talking to Werner Krebs.

I was so startled that I froze at the entrance to the café and just watched them for a while. They seemed to be the best of friends, chatting away in French. Lotte had the look she has on whenever she’s speaking her native tongue, a certain relaxed formal look, if that makes sense, as if it’s taken her some effort to conform to the sloppy way that Americans hold their bodies and their faces and now she’s snapped back into a persona that was, paradoxically, more natural.

It wasn’t just surprise; it was like being knocked down by an unexpected wave at the beach, disorienting, you don’t know which way is up, you can’t breathe.

While I was standing there paralyzed, a waiter approached and asked whether I wanted a table. This caught their attention, and Lotte looked up and waved. I went to their table; Krebs rose, gave a little bow, and shook my hand. I was thinking about how he’d arranged this, about how he must be having me watched, and also dying to know what they’d been talking about.

I sat down at their table. It was a little chilly and the buildings across the street wore pale banners of mist, but the hotel had set up tall steel heaters, far more efficient than the pitch-soaked flaming Christians that Nero had used in his own wintry Rome for the same purpose.

Krebs said, “This charming lady was just telling me that you spent the night drawing, with wonderful results.”

Here he indicated the drawing of Lotte lying on the table before him. “This is quite remarkable, for a drawing on cheap paper with a hotel pencil and children’s markers. No, actually, it would be remarkable in any medium-the energy of the lines and the colors combine to give a real sense of mass and living presence.”

Lotte said, “He did another one that’s even better.”

“Really? I would like to see it.”

“I’ll go and get it, if you like,” she said. “If you give me your key, Chaz.”

Like a zombie I handed her the key and she walked off.

“What are you doing here?” I said, trying, perhaps unsuccessfully, to keep the hostility out of my voice.

“You seem surprised. I have a good deal of business in Rome and this hotel is convenient to the studio. Why should I not be here?”

“Having breakfast with my wife?”

A dismissive gesture. “Your ex-wife, I believe, was looking at your drawing, and I expressed appreciation, and then the whole coincidence emerged. And not only that: it is also the case that I know her father slightly, in the way of business.”

“He was investigating you.”

“That is a harsh way of putting it, I think. He was engaged in an official international investigatory commission, and I was happy to help with my expertise. A charming woman, if I may say so.”

“Did you tell her about the forgery?”

“What forgery?”

“Oh, don’t be cute! The Velázquez I’m faking down the road there.”

“Wilmot, this becomes tedious. You seem to believe that I am some kind of criminal, but I am simply an art dealer who has hired a painter, you, to produce an artwork in the manner of Velázquez, using antique materials. If someone, some expert, wishes to identify it as an authentic Velázquez, that is none of my concern.”

“Just like Luca Giordano.”

He laughed and his face was transformed by delight. “In a manner of speaking, although given modern techniques of analysis, I think we must dispense with the signature under a layer of paint.” He laughed again, and the situation was so crazy that I laughed too. I had no idea if it was self-deception on his part or if he was playing with me. It’s a forgery, it’s not a forgery-whatever you say, Majesty…

Then his faced changed, grew serious, a little menacing. “On the other hand, it would be extremely unfortunate if what you are doing became generally known. As I believe I have already stated, I am in business with people who don’t share our sense of humor about these things. Do you understand me? We exist in parallel worlds, the world of artistic achievement and the world of tradable commodities and money. We consort with the new condottieri, like the painters of the quattrocento. They wish to realize their investment in this project, and anyone who might stand in their way, let us say a principled person who heard about the provenance of this supposed Velázquez from an unimpeachable source and talked about it in public, might be in considerable danger. Your ex-wife, for example. So, let us be very, very discreet, Wilmot. Am I perfectly clear?”

I nodded, because my throat had become too dry to generate speech, terrified, but also, strangely, glad that he was not going to spill any beans about what I was doing.

At this point Lotte reappeared, and she must have seen my face, because she asked, “What’s the matter?”

Krebs said, “We were just discussing the discontents of the current art scene, a lamentable and depressing subject. But now let us turn to art itself.” He took the drawing from Lotte and studied it. I took a drink of water.

“You’re correct,” said Krebs, “it’s even better than the other, I think because of the energy flowing between the figures. Just wonderful! Tell me, Wilmot, have you been working in this style for long?”

“Yes, for about twenty minutes,” I said. “It’s known as my Magic Marker period.”

He and Lotte shared a look, the kind parents wear when the indulged child has done something embarrassing; it made me want to throttle both of them.

“I would like to take these with me and have them matted and framed,” he said.

I shrugged. “That’s up to Lotte. I made them for her.”

There was a heavy moment, which Krebs ended by saying, “Well, not to stand on a technicality, but as I was explaining to Lotte just before you arrived, I believe that our arrangement is that all your work is mine to dispose of.”

“Even doodles?” I said, as in my head amazement struggled with relief, relief because he’d somehow gone with the patronage story I’d sold to Lotte, and so the happy fiction had been confirmed.

“Pardon me, but these are not doodles, and as I’m sure Lotte will tell you, the market price of works on paper has gone like a rocket in these past few years. I would be embarrassed to tell you what scrawls on napkins by Picasso fetch nowadays.”

“But I’m not Picasso.”

“Not yet, you’re not. But you are certainly going to be rich, and I am a long-term investor.” With that, he lifted a worn leather briefcase, opened it, removed a folder, slipped in the two drawings, and snapped it shut again. “I’m sorry to be so unforgivably crass,” he said. “But, you know, when I see a beautiful thing, I want to snatch, snatch…”

He illustrated this tendency with a grabbing motion of his right hand and contorted his face into a mime of feral avarice that I thought was rather more often its resting state than the avuncular one he had foisted off on my ex.

But we were all pals now, and so we both laughed politely at this display, and I had the waiter bring me biscotti and cappuccino, and the rest of the hour passed pleasantly enough in talk about painting and markets and what to see in Rome. Then Krebs had to leave for an appointment and avowed he was desolated that he could not ask us out to dinner, but he had to be in Stuttgart that evening. Another time, perhaps. He actually kissed Lotte’s hand as he left.

“So what did you think?” I asked when he was gone.

“Well, what I think is that if his checks continue to clear at the banks, you are the luckiest painter of this age. He is in love with you. I have seen it before: a rich collector is ravished by an artist, he cannot do enough for this person, he courts, he buys…and it is wonderful for the artist while it lasts.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t last?”

“Sadly, yes. Artists change their styles, they explore new themes, and in these the lover is perhaps not so interested. But I think that your Herr Krebs will be faithful, as long as you produce. I think he will be impatient with, let us say, a low rate of production, just as, to extend the metaphor, a rich man with a beautiful mistress would become annoyed if this mistress did not allow him the freedom of her body.”

“Gee, you make me sound like an old whore.”

“Not at all. If you have truly begun to paint as you should, there is no question of your success, either with Krebs or without. I have told you this a thousand thousand times before, but me you don’t believe and Krebs you do, only because he has the money. If he throws you out, for whatever reason, you will be very successful on the open market, especially if it becomes known that Herr Krebs is an important collector of your work.”

There was something cold in the way she said this, and now that I was looking there was something odd about her expression as well. Lotte has a frank, fearless look-it’s one of her signal features-but now it was hooded, the dark eyes sliding away from mine.

“You don’t approve?”

“I have no right to approve or not. But if you really want to know, I resent you for giving the fucking commissions to Krebs and not to me!”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not in the least sorry. But I have no intention of fighting about it. We’re in Rome. Take me to look at pictures!”

So we got up and went out. I have to say that even in our roughest periods, when we could barely get through a meal without fighting, we could always go and look at paintings. When a big show came to the Met or the Modern, that was a signal for a truce, and we would stroll through the crowded halls, and look, and be ravished, and be transported to the higher realms before returning to the heartbreak. And so it proved now, in a somewhat different context, because I thought there was a chance that we could return to something else, that I could convert the lie into solid ground.

I took her to the Doria Pamphili, and after we’d seen Memling take Christ down from the cross and Caravaggio show the repentant Magdalene, and the Breughels and the Raphael marvelous double portrait and the yards upon yards of filler, all those mannerist and Caravaggist patzers who make up the bulk of museum collections worldwide, we came to the Pope.

I wanted to stand next to it with Lotte, I can’t really say why, maybe for some good juju, so that her faith in me might flow into my head and revive my spirit, and in fact I did start to feel better and thought, Yeah, I can do that, I might not have invented how to do it, but now that it’s done I know how he did it, I can even sort of smell the turps off the surface of the thing, and then I’m standing there with a brush in my hand loaded with a flake-white mixture, and I’m painting the Pope’s white rochetta and there’s the high crimson silk camauro against the draperies and the throne, and there’s the actual face, turned slightly away just now as a lackey delivers a message, and then the terrible eyes are turned back on me.

And I am frightened and also excited; this is the most important painting I’ve ever done, because if he likes it he will do for me what no one else in the world can do, ensure the accomplishment of what I chiefly desire.

The brush is flying almost without conscious thought as I lay in the shadows on the white cloth-not white in the painting, of course, because white is never white, only fools paint it so with actual white paint-and I have to lean hard on the stick in my left hand to keep my brush from trembling. Another man comes in and hands the Pope a paper; he reads, says a few words, shifts in his chair. He is getting restless. I put my palette aside, bow, anticipate him: Holiness, I can finish this without your presence. It is almost done.

He rises, walks around, and considers the painting on the easel.

“You are no flatterer, Don Diego.”

“No, Holiness, I paint the truth as I see it. Truth is of God.”

And I think, almost before the words slip out, Jesus Maria, I am ruined, did I dare instruct the Pope on religion?

For an instant there is a sharp look, and then, thank Christ, a small cat smile forms on his hideous face.

“It is too true,” he says, “but still, it pleases me. And what is that paper I am holding?”

“It is my fancy, Holiness. A letter from myself, a petition.”

“Yes? What sort of petition?”

“For your support, Holiness. I wish to make casts of the Belvedere statues and other sculptures belonging to the Holy See. It would please my master.”

The Pope nods. “I will speak of this to the camerlengo. Your king is a well-beloved servant of the Holy Church.”

He turns to go, and with my heart in my throat I say, “And Holiness, a petition on my own behalf, with your permission.”

He turns, a little impatiently. “Yes?”

“I wish to become a knight of the military order of Santiago. In Spain, they still believe that painters, however noble their birth, cannot aspire to such honors. My family is of pure blood back to the most ancient times, and yet I fear my profession will undo me in this effort.”

A pause. That sly smile again. “Then we must inform them that in our Italy such is not the case.”

For a second I’m looking at the painting on the wall and the throne is empty, and then there’s the portrait again and a guard is holding my elbow, asking me what I’m doing, not amused. Lotte is standing next to him, white faced.

I could barely stand. I asked him what was up and he told me I had been mumbling to myself and trotting around the museum bumping into people. He advised me to go home and sleep it off.

I faced Lotte and she was frantic, she said I’d started talking to myself, that I’d walked off like I was going somewhere without a word to her, and that the guard had been right, I’d been acting like a crazy person, and what was going on?

Stupidly, I said it was nothing, when it clearly wasn’t, like that tired joke about the guy in bed with another woman and his wife’s standing there and he goes, “Who’re you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” And then she went into a whole thing about she couldn’t stand it, I was sick, and I was going to screw up this new opportunity with Krebs, just like I’d screwed up the rest of my painting career, but she wasn’t going to be an enabler, she was done with that, and I had to get professional help, I’d always been crazy, I’d destroyed myself because of my damned narcissism about my precious work, and how I’d let it destroy our marriage, oh, no, every great artist in the world had sold their work in galleries, but Chaz Wilmot was too good for that, I’d rather see our son dead, and she pitied me, and she swore she’d never speak to me again or let me see the kids until I was in a damned mental hospital where I belonged.

Nor was I silent while this was going on; I called her a money-grubbing bitch, I seem to recall, and we had a screaming match right there with the silly mannerist Virgins looking down on us, and the guards came and told us we had to leave. She ran out and I walked out, and when I got to the street she was gone. I hailed a cab of my own. The cabbie figured I was a rich tourist and took me on the scenic route back to the hotel, north and down through the crazy Vatican-area traffic, and I was too miserable to bitch. She’d left the hotel too, no note. I called her cell phone, but she declined to answer. When the message tone came on I couldn’t think of anything to say.

So after that I checked out of the hotel and returned to the forger’s nest. Sophia greeted me cheerfully when I passed her in the hall, as if I’d never left, but I suspected they knew pretty much what had gone down. I’m not paranoid or anything, but I do a lot of people-watching myself and I know that when you concentrate your attention on people they sooner or later get hip to it. I had been conscious of eyes on me for the past couple of days.

The odd thing was that I didn’t sink into an orgy of self-contempt the way I would have previously when something like that happened. It was like my real life-Lotte and the kids and New York-had become just another alternative life, one of several now available, and so the rejection didn’t sting the way it once had. Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about, as the Beatles used to say. And the money, that universal balm. People also used to say love will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no love, but that’s only partially true. Money’s not everything, sure, but neither is it nothing.

And the other thing was I really liked being Velázquez. I remembered vividly what it was like to paint like him, I’d actually done that portrait, and I thought if they could put that experience into powder form, no one would ever look at crack cocaine.

I spent the next morning staring at the cleaned canvas on the easel. Baldassare had changed the size a little, a couple of inches off each dimension, but I didn’t bother to ask him why. Nor did I touch a brush; I just stared at the white. I’d been studying the radiographs published in Brown and Garrido and in various mono-graphs to get some idea of what his underpainting was like. The problem with Velázquez in his mature period was that he was so good he barely did any preliminary work. Aside from a few question-able sketches of the Pope’s portrait, there are no Velázquez sketches at all. None. The bastard just painted. He laid in the ground with a big brush or a palette knife in flake white and grays made with ochre and azurite, varying it according to the composition of the painting. When he had that right he drew in the figures directly, what they call alla prima painting, and then used diluted pigments to color them, so that the light ground and sometimes even the grain of the canvas showed through, a totally bravura technique, which is why nobody but an idiot tries to forge Velázquez.

All the confidence I’d felt briefly at the Doria in front of Innocent X had vanished with Lotte, as did my pleasure in my new wealth. Because in order to get that wealth, of course, I had to put paint on canvas, which just now I seemed disinclined to do. And as the good light faded I had plenty of time to consider the cowardice of Charles Wilmot, Jr., the Chaz of all my memories, the real reason why he wasn’t really a million-dollars-a-painting guy, not the market, not the art appreciation business at all, just the pure funk, because now, when it really counted, the big leagues, an actual million-dollar commission, Chaz doesn’t show up.

I blew a couple of days like that, just looking at the damned canvas. Baldassare came in once and told me he’d sized the old canvas with a secret water-soluble compound. The point of this was to fill the cracks in the seventeenth-century ground I’d be painting on, so that the new paint wouldn’t sink into it. After the forgery was done and dried, he’d dip the whole thing in water and the sizing would dissolve out; with a little bending and shaking the surface would conform to the old cracks, and bingo! Instant craqueleur.

I asked him to give me a couple of new stretched canvases in the same dimensions and texture, because I figured I’d be better off easing into it, do a test run, as it were, get comfortable with the paint and the style. And the model. So I started looking at Sophia and she started looking at me, you know, a little discreet flirting around dinnertime, smiles, increasingly warmer, little jokes. It turned out Franco wasn’t that interested, not that he would’ve kicked her out of bed-nor would I have-but not interested. That was all I needed now, given the thing with Lotte. I’d called her cell phone half a dozen times but she never called back.

Which pissed me off, and so I asked Sophia out for a drink after dinner, and she took me to a bar, Guido’s, over by Santa Maria, full of local people now in winter with most of the tourists gone. She was known there, she chatted with friends in the Roman dialect that I could barely follow. We spoke to each other in English, mainly, and I got her story. She’d done art at La Sapienza; there was a guy, an Australian she’d gotten involved with; then she became pregnant and he split, and there she was with little Enrico, dropped out of school with no degree and no prospects for a job. She was working as a madonnaro, drawing holy pictures on the sidewalk in front of churches for tips. Then her mother had called Baldassare, a cugine, it turned out, and he’d brought her into the family business.

She did mainly seventeenth-century drawings-Cortona, the Caracci, Domenichino-and helped out with paintings on fake Italian provincial antiques. I asked her whether it bothered her, the faking, and she said no, why should it? Romans had been faking art for bàbbioni tourists since BC. She was good at it, used only the best materials, genuine paper from old books and the right inks, and she had the style down. She’d done a Cortona Christ on the Cross that’d fetched thirty thousand euros at a German auction, and that kind of wage certainly beat some low-end curatorial job at a provincial museum.

A little defensive there, I thought, but it turned out that she wasn’t abashed at all, but envious. I was the big-time gunslinger brought in for this gigantic coup. Baldassare had told her all about it, but, she said, he doesn’t think you can do it. I asked her if he’d actually told her that, and she said yeah, he said you don’t have le palle sfaccettate. That’s what you need in this business. You know what that means? I didn’t. It means balls with hard edges, like a crystal.

I said, we’ll see, and then I asked her if she ever modeled, and she said not really, but Baldassare thought that she’d be right for this picture and asked her if she’d do it, and of course, what could she say? And the boy too, he said they’d need a child. I said that was right and asked her why she thought she’d do for the figure, and she said, you want someone like the Rokeby Venus, don’t you? With which she got up and walked slowly away and then back again and into her chair, grinning like a cat. Bellesponde, as they say. A narrow waist and a pear-shaped bottom, longish legs. Her face was what they call “interesting,” the features a little over-large for real beauty, nose too long, chin a little small, but she had a mass of thick, dark hair with coppery highlights, and in any case I was going to make up the face, for obvious reasons.

We drank some more and then some friends of hers came by and started in with the Romano chatter, and I got my pad out and started futzing around, and then as usual they saw what I was doing and I made drawings of each of them. Everyone was impressed, as usual. If this didn’t work out, I thought, I could always become a madonnaro myself.

We stayed late and got pretty oiled, and we walked back home through sleeping Trastevere in a light rain. When we got to the house it was clear that she was available, but I begged off, and that raised her eyebrow and produced a shrug. Whatever, signor. In fact, it was not Lotte mainly, but that whole thing seemed a little too planned, another way to inveigle me deeper into the circle of Krebs.

I told her I wanted to start in the morning; she said okay and went off to bed, and I did too. I woke up at first light. Or someone woke up, but it wasn’t in the bed I’d gone to sleep in and it wasn’t me.

I awaken in a different bed, a huge thing with four posts and heavy velvet hangings. I smell cooking and a kind of incense, and underneath a sweet, unpleasant smell, maybe sewage-that’s what the world smells like. I have to piss, and I use the chamber pot I pull out of a little box by the bedside. I’m wearing a white embroidered night-shirt and a cap. I push the curtains aside.

A huge room with high, coffered ceilings and wall paintings, Zucchis mainly, the usual Roman unclothed nymphs; they make me irritable every time I see them. I have not slept well. I’ve dreamed again of being in hell, vast cliffs with eyes, iron streets populated with gargoyles, half-dressed harpies, and in the streets chariots going of themselves, spitting the stench of pitch and sulphur.

Servants attend me while I wash and dress. Pareja is sullen as usual, although I have permitted him to paint, in contravention to the codes, and why not? This is Rome, where everything is permitted, especially that which is prohibited.

I eat something-I forget what-in a large room overlooking the famous gardens. This is the Villa Medici. The duke allows me to stay here, as he did during my first visit, although as an honorary ambassador to His Holiness I should be lodged at the Vatican. I cannot bear to stay there, however; the food does not suit me-far too rich-and the meals formal and at set times. Here I can eat what I want, when I want, and I can work.

After my meal, I go down to the Trinitá to hear Mass, then return to my studio and work on a view I have made of a gate to the gardens. It is a small thing, but it gives me a particular pleasure, as it has no connection with a patron but is for myself alone, a landscape in the French manner, or the Dutch. I have never done such a thing before, and it makes a kind of cleansing after the Pope’s portrait.

At noon I eat again, this time at a table with some of the other guests, all people of rank, and none of them think it disgraceful to dine with a painter.

Now I command Juan Pareja to call for a carriage, and we leave the villa for our appointment at the house of my lord Don Gaspar de Haro, Marqués de Heliche, a great man among the Spanish in Rome, who favors me above all others of my profession. During the journey I am much engaged with my pocket book, where I list all the worrying arrangements I must make to fulfill His Majesty’s commission: gaining permission to make casts of famous sculptures, supervising the artisans making the casts, making sure they are properly crated, paying for the shipment, making sure the carters do not steal everything, viewing paintings for sale, making appointments for portraits of the notables who favor me and whose friendship is desired by His Majesty-never enough time and never, never enough money, the Titians alone cost over a thousand ducats and the majordomo at the embassy says there is no money. There is no money in all of Spain, it seems, or so I am told. Although it is the king’s will that these treasures be bought, every petty clerk defies me. As they say, too much meat on to roast and some will be burnt.

At the palazzo I am announced and led to a hall full of paintings. The paintings are very fine, but I have no chance to study them, for here is my lord of Heliche and his train. They are merry and an odor of wine and perfume floats above them. They are Romans in the main, and of a type that my lord’s father, far less his uncle the count-duke, would never have thought to entertain. I am introduced, I bow, they bow, the marqués takes my arm, and we go off privily to tour his gallery. We talk of paintings: he is passing knowledgeable, for one so young, and avid for more treasures; he condemns me for driving up the market by my visit and my gold from Madrid, although there is hardly any. We stop before a Venus with a Mirror, a copy after the Titian that hangs in the Alcázar. He says, I want one like that. A copy, my lord? No, a painting, a new painting. But we will speak of this further. First I wish to show you a prodigy. You will hardly believe this, Don Diego, there is nothing like it in Spain.

We move up a stair and down a hallway. There is a room from which issues a familiar odor. He signs to the footman to open the door without sound, and we stand in the doorway. Inside there is an easel and a man in a long smock and turban painting at it, and a model, a woman, sits holding a swaddled plaster baby. The man is painting rapidly, placing a blue glaze. A Venetian, I think, or one trained in their style.

My lord speaks low: “What do you think, Don Diego?”

I answer: “It is well enough done. The forms have some strength at least; the colors are clear and harmonious. A young man, I think, with little experience. The composition is not all it could be.”

In the same low voice he says, slyly now, “You are entirely mistaken in this, I fear.”

I say, “Then I bow to your superior knowledge of the painter’s art, my lord.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” he says. “I meant it is not a young man. It is not a man at all!”

With that he cries out, “Leonora!” And the painter turns around, and I see it is a young woman. She stands frozen a moment, startled, brush in hand. The marqués strides into the room and embraces the woman in a most lascivious way, although he is married, and recently too, to a girl reputed to be the beauty of Italy, and rich. Still holding her to his body, he calls to me, “Is this not a prodigy, Don Diego, a woman who paints! Can you imagine what they would say in Spain? My treasure, this is Don Diego de Velázquez, the king’s painter, come to Rome to buy every painting that can be bought and impoverish all us poor collectors. Don Diego, it is said that you allow your slave to paint, but I think I have you bested in this one: I have the honor to present to you Leonora di Cortona di Fortunati.”

The woman smiles indulgently. The marqués bends to kiss her neck, and his hand slips between the buttons of her smock. The model looks away and blushes. I am thunderstruck myself.

The woman pushes him away; he resists, laughing; she taps him on the nose with her brush tip and his nose becomes bright lapis blue. He touches his nose, goggles at his hand. A look of anger starts on his face, but he turns it into a toothed grin like a carter’s and lets free a bellow of laughter.

“Clean me!” he orders, and she does, with a rag dipped in turpentine.

“Pah!” he cries. “I will stink like a damned painter all day. Look here, Don Diego, this is what I want you to paint.” He pointed at the woman.

“A Madonna and child, my lord?”

“No, of course not, God blast you! What would I do with yet another Madonna and child? No, her, Leonora, I want you to paint her as Venus with her mirror.”

I look at the woman with the paint rag still in her hand, and she looks back at me. Her eyes are sea-gray; the wisp of hair that has escaped from her turban is auburn. She has a blunt, oval face with a high forehead, snub nose, and strong chin, the face of a sharp market woman, not a beauty; but there is the disturbing way she’s staring into my eyes, slightly mocking, but also with a deeper complicity, as if we alone in that room understood some important secret. I have never been looked at like that by a woman, not my wife, not the women of the court. It unnerves me and even makes my voice shake a little when I say, “A Venus, my lord; do you mean unclothed?”

“Of course, unclothed! Nude. Naked, whatever you call it. There’s a woman under that tent, you’ll see. And, my man-you’ll make haste, will you? I have other things I want you to do as well.” With that he claps me on the shoulder and departs the room.

As soon as the door closes she dismisses the model, who takes her plaster baby and rushes out, and then my lady removes her smock right before me, not bothering to retire. Beneath is a dress of fine russet silk with a falling collar, good lace; a stomacher strung with gold cords; lace at the sleeves, but not much, and not cut as low at the bosom as some Roman ladies wear. They do not wear the guardinfante in Rome, preferring to round out their hips with petticoats. A remarkably thin waist. Off comes the turban and she shakes her ringlets out, they have red lights in them. Some bracelets of amber, some of gilt, no jewels that I can see. I think of what the marqués said of her body; I have never heard a woman spoken to so, except a whore, and this is no whore. These Romans are blind to honor. In this city I have heard men use words and make gestures to one another that would have earned a fight in Seville, perhaps a coffin too.

She moves to her painting and speaks.

“Alas, you are entirely correct about my work, Don Diego. I can draw well enough, I can mix colors, and my perspective is true, but I cannot find the balance of the forms, or not very well. It is something that must be taught, I think, and no one will teach me.”

“No one taught me,” I say. “When I was your age I knew as little as you. Don Pedro Rubens advised me to go to Italy and look at paintings, and I did, and so learned the art of composition and how to make solid forms appear on a flat plane.”

“Yes,” she says with a laugh, “but unfortunately I am in Italy already, and I am not Velázquez. So, tell me, do you too think it scandalous that a woman paints?”

“Not scandalous,” I say. “Futile, maybe, as if you were learning to fight with a sword. I am surprised your husband permits it.”

A sour face, and she says, “My husband is a Roman count with a great deal of money and no chin. He collects enamels and boys, and if he does not mind that I lie in the bed of the marqués de Heliche, do you think he cares spit about my painting, as long as I don’t publicly acknowledge my sad little commissions and drag down his ancient name? Or piss on the altar at St. Peter’s during the Pope’s Mass-that would be nearly as scandalous. I am sorry, sir, I have shocked you, a fine Spanish gentleman such as yourself, but this is how we Roman courtesans learn to speak. Anyway, no one bothers to stop me from painting. Heliche thinks it amusing, like a monkey taught to dance for a grape.”

I ask, “Then why do you do it?”

“Because I love it. It gives me pleasure to make a world appear upon a white canvas, which I can order as I will. You must understand this.”

“Must I?”

“Of course. Painting as you do, you must love to paint.”

I said, “I love my honor, my kin, my king and my church, and as for painting, I paint as I breathe and eat. It is how I live and make my place in the world. Had I been born a marqués, I might never have lifted a brush.”

She stared at me as if I had said something coarse.

“That is remarkable. I know many painters and sculptors. Bernini, Poussin, Gentileschi-”

“I know Gentileschi’s work,” I said. “The best of the Caravaggisti, I think.”

“That is the father. I was speaking of the daughter, also a painter, quite aged now, but I knew her when I was a girl. She helped corrupt my mind, as my husband tells me. In any case, it is common for painters to seek to outdo one another. They bring passion to their desire to excel in their art, to confound their rivals. And have you none of this passion, Don Diego?”

“I have no rivals,” I say, and she laughs and says, “Forgive me, sir, I forgot for a moment you are Spanish. Don’t we in Italy send our perfumers to Spain to collect your night soil? It would not dare to stink of anything but violets.”

“The señora will have her joke,” I say, “but I do not care to be the butt of it. I wish you good day, señora.” I make to bow out, but she gives a little “oh!” and dashes forward and places her hand on my sleeve. I can feel the warmth of it through the cloth.

“Please, please,” she cries out, “let us not part so. Of all the men now in Rome, you are the one I most wished to meet, and now I have spoiled all. Oh, Madonna! You have no idea, sir. When your painting of the black man was on display at the Pantheon I went every day. I wished to fall on my knees and worship it, as they did in ancient times when the Pantheon was a temple of the pagans. It is the greatest portrait ever seen, sir, every painter who saw it desired to cut your throat, and you just brought it into being out of…what? Pure spirit? Any cardinal in Rome would have weighed you out in gold for such a promise of immortal fame, and you did it for a slave? It is the greatest stroke of bravura this age.”

Her hand still on my arm, and I wish to go now, but I also wish her to leave her hand there. And now I recall what the marqués has demanded and I almost tremble. I do tremble as I say, “You are kind, señora, but we have arrangements to make, I believe.”

“Yes,” she says, “my painting. Obviously, my face cannot be seen, or it must be disguised. Is Venus ever masked?”

“I have never seen her so depicted, but we will arrange something, I am sure.”

“Certainly. You are at the Villa Medici, are you not? Perhaps the second hour after noon would be the most discreet. All Rome is sleeping then. Let us start tomorrow.”

I think of my pocket book and all my tasks and appointments. Impossible! “Not tomorrow, señora, nor the next day, I’m afraid. A week from tomorrow, perhaps?”

“No, it must be now,” she says. “Heliche is like a great baby, and now his mind is set on this Venus of me. He is dismissing me, or will in the next few weeks; as you will observe when we descend to the salon in a moment, he is besotted with the Contessa Emilia Odescalchi, who is more beautiful than I am and more stupid, both desirable traits in a mistress. He will palm me off on one of his train, to salve his conscience, but before that he wishes a souvenir of our liaison, and this is your painting. And don’t imagine that it will be just one painting. So you must begin now, nor should you suppose he will accept excuses. Heliche is vicious, but he is not a fool, and you will not want to displease him, for you are not a fool either. You do not need his enmity in the courts of Madrid.”

I cannot recall the remainder of that day. I attended my lord for some time at his palazzo and drank more wine than I am used to. I returned to my rooms and slept badly, more dreams of Rome transformed into hell. Thank God I can remember little of it but the roaring and the stench, or else I would paint like that Flamenco the late king favored, Geronimo Bosco, who they say was driven mad by his visions of eternal torment.

The next day I send boys out with letters to those I cannot see at the time I have appointed, yet I must go out myself to the foundry shop where they are casting my Laocoön, such begging I did to gain permission from His Holiness and the camerlengo, the bribes dispensed…I must be there to ensure it is done correctly, and then I must rush to return in time to meet this accursed woman, driving as fast as we dare through a cold rain; this Roman winter makes my bones ache. The bells are striking twice as I enter the villa; the place is silent as a tomb for the siesta.

I set up my easel and prepare my paints; there is no time to fetch a proper gilt mirror, so I have Pareja bring the plain one from the room the servants use and then dismiss him and the other boys, arrange a red drape behind the couch, and cover it with a linen sheet. There is a canvas already primed that I was going to use for another view of the gardens, but it will do. When all is ready I wait, for of course the woman is late-who can count on a woman to be anywhere at the hour!

Then a knock and she is here, dressed in a heavy black velvet cloak to the floor, hooded and masked, a silk scarf of pale green about her neck. She removes the mask, throws back her hood. She has tied up her hair on top of her head in imitation of the Venuses of Titian and Caracci and of the Medici Venus, I mean the famous statue that is the root of all art devoted to the female form. We speak a little, the weather, the cold; she apologizes for her lateness and then we stand dumb. I have never painted a woman of rank, nude, from the life. There is no precedent, manners are no guide.

She gestures to the couch. “Shall I be a reclining Venus, there?”

“If you please, señora,” I say, “and there is your mirror.”

She walks over and looks at it. “Not a mirror for a goddess, I think. And it is a wall mirror. How am I to gaze at my beauty while reclining on your couch?”

I am ashamed I have not thought of this and I am mute with embarrassment.

She says, “If you had a cupid holding it at her feet, propped up on the couch, she could lie on her back and gaze. You could paint in the child later.”

I agree this is worth trying; I croak, in fact, my throat is so dry. I say, “You may undress behind that screen.”

“I don’t need your screen,” she says, and takes off her cloak. Beneath it she is all alabaster skin, not a stitch on her.

“May I spread my cloak and lie on it? It is cold in this room. Will it spoil your colors?”

“No, please,” I say, stammering. I turn my back to take up my palette and brushes, and when I again look to the couch she is lying on her back, relaxed, her thighs lolling open, revealing the dark curls at her groin and a tiny sliver of pink sex.

“How shall I arrange my limbs, Don Diego? Shall I have my hand here like Titian’s Venus, covering myself modestly? And the other behind my head, like this?”

“Yes,” I say, “that’s good. Turn your head a little, toward the mirror.”

Some adjustments of that damned mirror follow; leaning over her I can smell her, some dense perfume. I am sweating like a Seville porter. When I pick up brush and palette my hand shakes. I begin to block in the forms in gray-ochre; I can see her looking at me in the mirror, amusement in her eyes, the mocking whore!

I stop and put down the palette.

“What is wrong, Don Diego?”

“The pose. It’s awkward with you on your back like that, the line of your neck is clumsy…” And similar nonsense, but the fact is that I can neither bear to stare at her sex nor ask her to close her legs, and so I say, “Roll on your right side.”

“You wish to take me from the back, then?”

I ignore the coarse wit and say, “Yes, there is a statue I like, an antique hermaphrodite at the Villa Borghese-I am having it cast in bronze for His Majesty-which shows the back very well, and there is Annibale Caracci’s Venus with Satyrs, which shows the woman from the back as well. I think it would suit in this case…”

And similar babble, until she rolls slowly over and I adjust the black cloak, and the white linen showing through on both sides of this, and also a wisp of her green chiffon scarf. And now I need not stare at her breasts and their brown buds stiff with the chill, and the darker pink of her clam, and I can paint the line of her back, with just a little more adjustment. If it were a boy or a man I would simply shift the limbs or head with my hands, but now it is like painting the king, I must ask for small, important movements, the lower leg thrust a little forward so the mass of her upper ham falls naturally and the lower is compressed, and between them the light just striking that thin fold of flesh; yes, my lord the marqués will like that, I’ll make sure that shows, a tiny carmine lamp at the gates to paradise.